The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746-1829 0198843445, 9780198843443

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T H E OX F O R D H I S T O RY O F B R I T I S H A N D  I R I S H  C AT H O L I C I S M , VO LU M E I I I

T H E OX F O R D H I S T O RY O F B R I T I S H A N D I R I S H C AT H O L I C I S M General Editors: James E. Kelly and John McCafferty The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume I Endings and New Beginnings, 1530–1640 Edited by James E. Kelly and John McCafferty The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745 Edited by John Morrill and Liam Temple The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829 Edited by Liam Chambers The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume IV Building Identity, 1830–1913 Edited by Carmen M. Mangion and Susan O’Brien The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume V Recapturing the Apostolate of the Laity, 1914–2021 Edited by Alana Harris

The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829 Edited by

L IA M C HA M B E R S General Editors

JA M E S  E .  K E L LY A N D J O H N Mc C A F F E RT Y

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2023 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948812 ISBN 978–0–19–884344–3 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843443.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books Limited Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank James E. Kelly and John McCafferty, the general editors of the series, for the invitation to edit this volume. They provided support and wise counsel throughout the writing, editing, and publication process. I am particu­ larly grateful for their advice at various critical moments in the volume’s prep­ar­ ation. Much of the work for this book was undertaken during the Covid-­19 pandemic and it is a tribute to the general editors that the series progressed towards publication despite the many challenges faced by all of us who were working to bring it to completion. It was a pleasure to work with the other volume editors, and I am particularly grateful to Carmen Mangion and Susan O’Brien for responding to a number of queries. James Kelly, Liesbeth Corens, and Ulrich Lehner offered thoughtful advice and important suggestions in the early phases of the publication process. Thomas O’Connor did so too, and I am also grateful for the many other ways in which he has encouraged me over the years. A number of scholars responded to queries about specific subjects and particular thanks go to Charles Ivar McGrath, who kindly shared work in progress on the penal laws, as well as to Hannah Thomas, James January McCann, and Patricia Coulthard (Wales and the Marches Catholic Historical Society), who provided advice and material on the history of Welsh Catholicism. I am especially grateful to Hannah, who allowed me to read work ahead of publication. Marie Rowlands also kindly provided me with some of her unpublished work. Most importantly, I must thank all of the contributors to this volume. It has been an enormous privilege to work with such a distinguished group of scholars. I am very grateful not only for their work, but also for their willingness to respond to my (sometimes many) queries in the course of the editorial process. I am all the more grateful given the trying circumstances in which we found ourselves. I would like to record particular thanks to two contributors who agreed to write chapters for the volume at a late stage, after the original authors had to withdraw for entirely understandable ­reasons related to the Covid-­19 pandemic. I would also like to thank those who shepherded the volume towards publication: Cathryn Steele at OUP; Ethiraju Saraswathi, who oversaw the production process; Joy Mellor, who copy-edited the text; and Cormac Begadon, who prepared the index. My colleagues in the Department of History at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick—­past and present—­have ensured that I work in an environment which is congenial to research. For their help and support in so many ways, my thanks go to Liam Irwin, Maura Cronin, Deirdre McMahon, Úna Ní Bhroiméil, Clodagh Tait, Cathy Swift, Brian Hughes, and Richard Mc Mahon. My family provided

vi Acknowledgements support of a different kind. My thanks to my mum and dad, Kathleen and James Chambers, and to Paul, Cerian, and Caoimhe. Cillian and Senan did not read drafts or offer advice on this book, but they remind me continually of  what is important in life. My greatest debt is to Deirdre for her patience, encouragement, and love.

Contents List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations List of Contributors Series Introduction

James E. Kelly and John McCafferty

ix xi xiii xvii

Introduction 1 Liam Chambers 1. Jacobitism, Loyalty, and the State, 1746–1766 Carys Brown 2. Breakthrough: The First Phase of Catholic Relief in Britain and Ireland, 1766–1789 James Kelly

12

31

3. British and Irish Catholics in the Era of the French Revolution, 1789–1800 49 Marianne Elliott 4. Catholics in the United Kingdom, 1800–1820 Michael Mullett

67

5. ‘The Abominable Cath. Quest.’: Catholic Emancipation, 1820–1830 Thomas Bartlett

85

6. The Infrastructure of Catholicism Cormac Begadon

104

7. Catholic Belief and Practice Peter Phillips

123

8. Anti-­Catholicism and Protestant Relations with Catholics Colin Haydon

142

9. Convents and Women Religious Tonya J. Moutray

162

10. Colleges, Seminaries, and Male Religious Houses Liam Chambers

182

11. ‘Every Quarter of the World’: Catholics in the British Empire Dominic Aidan Bellenger

204

viii Contents

12. Catholic Literature and Print Culture in English Michael Tomko 13. Catholic Literature and Literary Culture in Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh

224

243

14. This Side of the Alps: Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland Shaun Blanchard

264

15. Church Music: A Barometer of Social-­Religious Change Thomas Muir

286

16. Feeble References: Catholic Material Culture Carol M. Richardson

306

Index

327

List of Illustrations 15.1 Example 1: Opening line of Adeste Fideles from John Francis Wade, Cantus Diversi, 1760

296

15.2 Example 2(a): Original opening line of the Stonyhurst version of Adeste Fideles297 15.3 Example 2(b): Modern ‘translation’ of the original opening line of the Stonyhurst version of Adeste Fideles297 16.1 William Hogarth, The Battle of the Pictures, 1745

312

16.2 Johann Zoffany, A Nobleman and his Collection, 1782‒98315 16.3 Biddlestone Hall and Chapel, pre-­1950

323

16.4 Biddlestone Chapel today

324

List of Abbreviations AAW Archives of Archbishop of Westminster, London Anstruther, Seminary Priests Godfrey Anstruther, The Seminary Priests: A Dictionary of the Secular Clergy of England and Wales 1558–1850, 4 vols. (Ware, Durham, and Great Wakering, [1968]–77) BL British Library CRS Catholic Record Society DDA Dublin Diocesan Archives HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission IBVM Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary NA National Archives (UK) ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), https:// www.oxforddnb.com/ OSB Benedictine RORD Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama SCH Studies in Church History WWTN Who Were the Nuns? database, https://wwtn.history.qmul. ac.uk/

List of Contributors Thomas Bartlett, MRIA, is Professor Emeritus of Irish History, University of Aberdeen. He has published widely on Irish history, notably The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690–1830 (Dublin, 1992) and Ireland: A History (Cambridge, 2010). His co-­edited works include A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996) and 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective (Dublin, 2003). He was the general editor of the landmark, four-­volume Cambridge History of Ireland (Cambridge, 2018) of which he edited the final volume, covering the period from 1880 to the present. Cormac Begadon  is the Sepulchrine Fellow in the History of Catholicism, based at the Centre for Catholic Studies at Durham University. His PhD was awarded by Maynooth University for the thesis ‘Clergy and Laity in the Catholic Renewal of Dublin c.1750–1830’. He was a member of the AHRC-­funded ‘Monks in Motion’ project, based at Durham University, before returning to Durham, where his current research examines the history of the Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre and their engagement with Enlightenment and Catholic reform movements in the eighteenth century. He co-­edited British and Irish Religious Orders in Europe, 1560–1800: Conventuals, Mendicants and Monastics in Motion (Woodbridge, 2022), and has published on confraternities and devotional practices, and on the wider subject of Catholic renewal before emancipation in Ireland, as well as essays on the history of the English Benedictine monks and their interaction with Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Dominic Aidan Bellenger is based at the University of Cambridge where he is a Senior Research Associate at the Von Hugel Institute and an associate member of the Faculty of History. A graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge, he is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries. For more than thirty years he was a Benedictine monk and was Abbot of Downside from 2006 to 2014. He specializes in monastic history, the British Catholic community and its outreach, and the French exiles in Britain follow­ ing the French Revolution. He is the author or co-­author of some twenty books. Shaun Blanchard  is Lecturer in Theology at the University of Notre Dame Australia in Fremantle, Western Australia. A graduate of North Carolina, Oxford, and Marquette Universities, Shaun writes on a variety of topics in early modern and modern Catholicism. He is the author of The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II (Oxford, 2020). With Ulrich L. Lehner, he co-edited The Catholic Enlightenment: A Global Anthology (Washington, DC, 2021), and, with Stephen Bullivant, he co-authored Vatican II: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2023). An anthology of Jansenist sources in translation (co-edited with Richard T. Yoder) is forthcoming. Carys Brown is a Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Prior to this, she was a Research Associate on the AHRC-­funded project ‘Faith in the Town, 1740–1830’, based at the University of Manchester. Her research interests include the social and cultural history

xiv  List of Contributors of religion, the history of children and childhood, and the historical development and impact of stereotypes. Her monograph, Friends, Neighbours, Sinners: Religious Difference and English Society, 1689–1750, was published with Cambridge University Press in 2022. Liam Chambers  is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of History at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. His research examines eighteenth-­century Irish history and the history of Irish migration to early modern Europe, particularly Irish students, clergy, and colleges in France. His publications include College Communities Abroad: Education, Migration and Catholicism in Early Modern Europe (Manchester, 2017; co-­ edited with Professor Thomas O’Connor). He was joint editor of Irish Historical Studies between 2016 and 2021, and is a member of the Irish Manuscripts Commission. Marianne Elliott  is Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool. She has published widely on Irish history, including Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (London, 1982), Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence (London, 1989), The Catholics of Ulster: A History (London, 2000), Robert Emmet: The Making of a Legend (London, 2003), When God Took Sides: Religion and Identity in Ireland—­Unfinished History (Oxford, 2009), and Hearthlands: A Memoir of the White City Housing Estate in Belfast (Belfast, 2017). Colin Haydon studied as an undergraduate and graduate student at Jesus College, Oxford. He is Emeritus Reader in Early Modern History at the University of Winchester and Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes University. He has published many studies of religion in England during the period c.1660–c.1830, including Anti-­Catholicism in Eighteenth-­Century England c.1714–80 (Manchester, 1994) and John Henry Williams (1747–1829): ‘Political Clergyman’ (Woodbridge, 2007). He delivered the annual John Wesley Lecture at Oxford in 2019—his subject was ‘John Wesley, Roman Catholicism, and “No Popery!” ’. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and of the Royal Historical Society. James Kelly, MRIA, is Professor of History at Dublin City University. His main research interests lie in the areas of Irish political and social history in the period 1660–1860. His recent publications include Food Rioting in Ireland in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Dublin, 2017), volume three of the Cambridge History of Ireland: 1730–1880 (Cambridge, 2018; as editor), and Climate and Society in Ireland: From Prehistory to the Present (co-­edited with Tomas Ó Carragáin; Dublin, 2021). Tonya J. Moutray is a Professor of English at Russell Sage College in Troy, New York. Her research interests include Irish and British women religious, the history of nursing, and monastic contexts in the writings of Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Barker, and others. Her monograph, Refugee Nuns, The French Revolution, and British Literature and Culture (Abingdon, 2016), juxtaposes the experiences of English nuns with representations of them in British literature before, during, and after the French Revolution. Recently, she published ‘Religious Views: English Abbeys in Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Emma’ in Art and Artifact in Austen (2020). Thomas Muir  was educated at Eton, Dartington College of Arts, and Oxford. He then taught history and politics at Stonyhurst, for whom he wrote the definitive history, Stonyhurst College 1593–1993 (1992). He read music at the Universities of York and

List of Contributors  xv Durham, including carrying out doctoral research on Catholic Church music in England, 1850–1962. He has published several specialist articles and the ground-­breaking Roman Catholic Church Music in England, 1791–1914: A Handmaid of the Liturgy? (Aldershot, 2008), still the only major academic survey of this field. Since then he has concentrated on composition, especially chamber, concert wind band, and Catholic parish music. Michael Mullett is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Religious History at the University of Lancaster, where he taught and supervised in early modern British and European his­ tory for forty years before retirement in 2008. He is the author of Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (Basingstoke, 1998) and The Catholic Reformation (London, 1999). He edited the six-­volume collection English Catholicism, 1680–1830 (London, 2006). He has authored a number of articles on post-­Reformation English Catholic history and a six-­ volume history of Penrith, Cumbria. He has recently published a book-length study of Carlisle, Cumbria, in the period 1649–88. Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh  is Senior Lecturer in Celtic Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He has previously taught at Aberystwyth University and has held fellowships at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and in Den Arnamagnæanske Samling at the University of Copenhagen. He has published on various aspects of the lit­ erature and literary history of the Gaelic world during the long eighteenth century. Peter Phillips is a Roman Catholic priest of the diocese of Shrewsbury in north-west England. He has written widely on eighteenth and nineteenth century British Catholicism and is the author of a major study of the priest and historian, John Lingard. He currently holds an honorary ­fellowship in the Centre for Catholic Studies at Durham University, England. Carol  M.  Richardson  is Professor of Early Modern Art History at the University of Edinburgh where her teaching focuses on papal Rome. Her most recent publications ­concern cardinals’ tomb portraits and Bernini’s Baldacchino. She is currently completing a book on the 1580s artistic programme at the Venerable English College in Rome and the deployment and dissemination of visual and material culture by the English and Welsh community. Michael Tomko  is Professor and Chair of Humanities at Villanova University, USA. He teaches and writes on religion and literature, British Romanticism, and Catholic cultural history in Britain. He is the author of British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778–1829 (Basingstoke, 2011) and co-­editor of Firmly I Believe and Truly: The Spiritual Tradition of Catholic England, 1483–1999 (Oxford, 2011). His most recent book, Beyond the Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith from Coleridge to Tolkien (London, 2016), received the Conference on Christianity and Literature book of the year award.

Series Introduction

James E. Kelly and John McCafferty

During the 1530s Henry VIII broke with Rome, initiating a series of events that would become known as the British and Irish Reformations. In England and Wales, Tudor reform was given impetus by Edward VI and Elizabeth I, while in Scotland civil war led to a split from Rome in 1560. Ireland, meanwhile, was subject to English reform. In each of the kingdoms there were those who chose to  remain loyal to the papacy. Hand in hand with emergent official State Protestantism and deliberate fomenting of anti-­Catholic prejudice went the birth of a United Kingdom through the events of 1603, 1707, and 1801. Shortly after the completion of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, civil dis­abil­ ities against those who had remained in communion with Rome were lifted by the 1829 Emancipation Act. By the start of the twenty-­first century, according to some statistics, weekly attendance at Catholic services was set to overtake attend­ ance at Anglican and Presbyterian services in Britain. At the same time, the Catholic population of Northern Ireland was nearing parity with that of the Protestant, and in the Republic of Ireland the vast majority identified themselves as Catholic in census returns. In other words, despite its own rhetoric and the resulting dominant historio­ graphical view of several centuries, Tudor reform did not consign Catholicism to historical oblivion. Instead, perceptions of papists and the enduring presence of British and Irish Catholics turned out to be a serious engine of identity and State formation across both islands from 1534 to the Good Friday Agreement. Catholics and Catholicism—­directly or indirectly—­affected the lives of every single inhabitant of both islands from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. This multi-­volume series charts, analyses, and interprets this story, covering the whole period of post-­Reformation Catholicism from the sixteenth-­century reformations to the present day. The series’ volumes are ordered chronologically, in order to trace the movement from official proscription and persecution, to tol­ eration, to strong public presence. The opening volume explores the period 1530–1640, from the start of the Reformation to the outbreak of the civil wars. It analyses the efforts to create a Catholic community after the officially imple­ mented change in religion, as well as the start of initiatives that would set the course of British and Irish Catholicism, such as the beginning of the missionary enterprise and the formation of institutions in exile. The second volume covers the period 1641–1745, incorporating the civil wars, the restoration of the ­mon­archy, the Glorious Revolution, and the final attempt at a Jacobite restoration.

xviii  Series Introduction It examines the experience of Catholics in Britain and Ireland during this period of national conflict, the hopes for toleration under the later Stuarts, as well as the religious interpretation of potential Jacobite regime change. This is followed by a volume dedicated to the period 1746–1829, which marks the end of a serious Catholic threat to the established Protestant State of Britain and Ireland. Taking in international factors, particularly the French Revolution and the subsequent wars with France, the volume explores the move towards Catholic emancipation and its final achievement through legal rather than insurrectionary means. The fourth volume, looking at the period 1830–1913, examines the methods adopted to rebuild a church and lead a community emerging from 300 years of official State proscription. It considers how these visions could frequently be at odds, embodying as they did positions then engulfing the global Catholic Church through debates over, for example, papal infallibility and accommodation to modernity. The series ends with a volume that covers 1914 to the present day. It opens with the impact of World War I and the growth of nationalism, taking account of the creation of a Free State in Ireland dominated by the Church, as well as the construction of a sectarianized Northern Ireland. Including the Second World War, the volume also interprets the effect of the major changes wrought by Vatican II on British and Irish Catholicism, exploring how the impact of this monumental international moment affected the local Church into the new millennium. Before outlining the motivations for such a series and the themes that run through the volumes, it is necessary to explain definitions and to set some param­ eters. Perhaps the most pressing of these is the decision to use the term ‘Catholic’ rather than ‘Roman Catholic’. By Catholic, the editors of the volumes and the con­ tributors have understood the term to indicate those individuals who saw them­ selves as in communion with the pope, and were understood to be so by those based in Rome. This communion or spiritual loyalty was, to varying degrees of strength, a fundamental demarcation across the centuries covered in this series, something of a bare minimum requirement for classification as Catholic. This was at least partly recognized by their contemporaries in their being given the deliber­ ately othering term ‘papist’ in the early modern period, as battles over the word Catholic ensued in the wake of Henry VIII’s separation from the papacy.1 Moreover, Catholics were fully aware what was being implied by the use of such terms: as one English Catholic writer noted in the eighteenth century, ‘I am no Papist, nor is my religion Popery. [Whereas] Catholic is an old family name, which we have never forfeited, the word Roman has been given to us to indicate

1  Peter Marshall, ‘Is the Pope Catholic? Henry VIII and the Semantics of Schism’, in Ethan Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005), pp. 22–48.

Series Introduction  xix some undue attachment to the See of Rome.’2 Additionally, all editors were unanimous in their opposition to the term ‘Roman Catholic’ for some more nuanced, historiographical reasons. Apart from meaning little outside a very specific Anglocentric world, and itself being a continuation of that othering that sought to portray Catholics as foreign or not fully English, Scottish, or Welsh, the term also causes problems in terms of understanding within a wider Catholic context. If Catholics are removed from the Anglosphere that is the immediate context of these volumes and placed into a wider, transnational Catholic one, then the term ‘Roman Catholic’ implies and even denotes something very different, conjuring notions of a strong papalist or ultramontane Catholicism as opposed to a Gallican or conciliar one. In other words, it implies something about the Catholics of Britain and Ireland that is not necessarily true, or at least certainly is not true for all of them across the whole chronological period covered. Of course, the emer­ gence, or arguable rediscovery, of Anglo-­Catholicism in the nineteenth century by members of the Church of England, features in the relevant volume but, out of communion with the papacy, it does not fall within the parameters of this series. Another point to stress regarding terminology: the application of modern secu­lar terms, such as conservative and liberal, make little sense when applied to much of the history of Catholicism. One example will suffice of the inadequacy of such terms: in the nineteenth century, Cardinal Manning of England and Wales was amongst the most traditional in terms of morality, liturgy, and theology, yet amongst the most ground-­breaking in his social justice ideas and agenda, even advocating working with other Christian denominations to promote and protect certain Christian values in society. Modern secular terms serve no purpose apart from to mislead when applied to such an individual. Another issue concerning terminology is the growing use of the term ‘post-­Tridentine’ by historians and literary scholars to denote the period immediately following the Council of Trent in the mid-­sixteenth century. Yet from a theological or liturgical aspect, the term means something very different: after all, with adaptation, the Tridentine rite of the Mass remained the ordinary form until well into the twentieth century. In reality, a more accurate term to help universal understanding across the different disciplines would be ‘post-­Trent’ or something along those lines. This may sound like nit-­picking, but such slippage in terminology has masked a phenomenon that is evident across all five volumes of the History: following emancipation in 1829, British and Irish Catholics sought to fully implement the Tridentine reforms, as they now had the notional freedom and structures to do so. This was in no sense a ‘post-­Tridentine’ church or century. Such attempts were witnessed in, for ex­ample, the music of the Mass or the founding of seminaries for particular dioceses. The latter may have been an unrealistic goal, as evidenced by the closures in the

2  Quoted in volume 3 of this series, p. 281.

xx  Series Introduction twentieth century and, in Scotland, the collapse of clerical training in the country, but it did bring things full circle: Scottish Catholic clerical training once more happened abroad, in mainland Europe, as in penal times. This brings us to geographical boundaries. The series is about British and Irish Catholicism, but this creates challenges brought about by the region’s history and the different trajectories of the constituent parts. Most pertinently, there is the issue of Empire, and British and Irish Catholic involvement in this enterprise. The decision has been taken to include British and Irish Catholic presence in, for example, America or Australia, but only to cover such regions as long as they were jurisdictionally allied to the English Church, which is in line with the policy of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In other words, once they are operating with their own, independent, ecclesiastical hierarchy, then, despite the presence of numerous lay and clerical Catholics from Britain and Ireland, their continuing story is not included here. For all that, the History deliberately seeks to analyse the countries together, at first through a three kingdoms approach, which by the end of the final volume has become the five jurisdictions. Too frequently in general historiography, Britain and Ireland are treated completely separately, ignoring the influences and impacts they had on each other. This issue becomes, arguably, even more pointed in the study of Catholicism within these islands. By its very nature, Catholicism is transnational and pays little heed to geographical boundaries. That is not to say it is the same everywhere—­quite the opposite is in fact the case—­but it is a vital and oft-­neglected fact about these islands that not only, for periods, shared similar political systems, but also witnessed the movement of people between them quite freely. This raises complicated questions throughout the volumes over the ‘Britishness’ or ‘Irishness’ of Catholicism across these islands and in the dias­poras. Moreover, it is a tricky task to give due attention to the ‘four nations’—England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales—­as well as their various languages, cultures, and as­pir­ ations, especially as some areas have been far more heavily researched than ­others. It is certainly evident where more research needs to be done, with Scottish and Welsh Catholicism deserving of much more work. Nevertheless, each volume and each individual author has a different take on these questions. This, in turn, leads to the reason for why such a series is not just possible but also needed. For too long, the study of Catholicism in Britain operated in a ghetto or silo, by something of a mutual understanding. As indicated above, there was a strong historiographical tradition that held that Catholics simply disappeared at the Reformation, only popping up every now and again to be executed, before re-appearing in the nineteenth century because of migration from elsewhere, to become, by the mid-­twentieth century, a distinct but peculiar branch on the weird fringes of life that it was still safe to mock, albeit not in quite so strong terms as previously. On the other side, at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth century, confessionally motivated Catholics began digging away at

Series Introduction  xxi their history, content for it to be separate from the mainstream in their ghettoized ‘recusant’ approach. In contrast, the opposite holds true for Irish historiography. Catholicism is so mainstream to Irish history-­writing that its specificities and dynamics have often been lost or occluded. The separating off of the history of Catholicism in Britain, or its being ­swallowed-­up in Ireland, are exactly what these volumes wish to avoid. This approach ties to scholarly trends that increasingly recognize the importance of Catholicism to British and Irish history as a whole, and these volumes bring about fresh and critical thinking to the Catholic experience since 1530. Though popular perceptions of Catholicism’s premature death may still endure, the last decades have seen major upheavals in the academic study of Catholicism in these islands, as a growing number of scholars have recognized the importance of the subject to both national and global history. This burgeoning interest is indicated by the renaming of the journal Recusant History as British Catholic History, and the start of the biennial Early Modern British and Irish Catholicism Conference organized by Durham University and the University of Notre Dame. Moreover, the archival riches of Church bodies, especially religious orders, have stimulated multiple research projects based on Catholic sources written in a non-­confessional manner.3 This means that, whereas towards the start of the millennium Ethan Shagan could lament that early modern English Catholicism remained marginalized as ‘a historiographical sub-­field or occasionally a ghetto’, only a decade later, Alexandra Walsham could note that ‘Catholicism in the British Isles has emerged from the shadows and become one of the liveliest arenas of scholarly enquiry at the current time’.4 The History builds on these recent historiographical trends, but also extends them, pointing to areas where there has been a lack of research. As well as some more specific themes, there are four main factors that run throughout the vol­ umes. The first of these is the relevance of Catholicism within different spheres of national and international life, particularly its political significance. This is not to downplay other approaches to the topic: this series seeks to cover the full gamut 3  For example, two digital projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Who Were the Nuns? (https://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/) and the Monks in Motion (https://www.dur. ac.uk/mim/) projects, as well as the Visible Divinity: Money and Irish Catholicism, 1850–1921 pro­ ject funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. The AHRC-­funded Cwm Jesuit Library project was a joint venture between Hereford Cathedral and Swansea University, which recreated a Jesuit mission library in Wales. In Ireland, the Clericus digital project seeks to track Irish-­born clergy (https://clericus.ie), while the Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550–1700 project featured women religious as one of the main research strands (https://recirc.nuigalway.ie). Further afield, at Tischner European University in Krakow, the Subversive Publishing in Modern England and Poland: A Comparative Study Project, funded by the National Science Center of Poland, unearthed significant findings about the influence of English Jesuits in central Europe. 4 Ethan Shagan, ‘Introduction: English Catholic History in Context,’ in Ethan Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005), p. 1; Alexandra Walsham, Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (Farnham, 2015), p. 2.

xxii  Series Introduction of research that has been, and is being, undertaken, including those working on musicology and material culture. Indeed, the shift from institutional history towards greater awareness of gender, cultural, social, and economic factors are vital constituents of the story tracked across the volumes. Moreover, it would be remiss not to recognize that literary scholars have been at the forefront of pi­on­ eer­ing research into at least early modern British and Irish Catholicism. In short, scholarship on the topic has been truly interdisciplinary. However, there is a dan­ ger that a dominant cultural approach could, and sometimes has, led to a slight undervaluing of the political. Thus, the volumes consider the role of British and Irish Catholicism from the perspective of each of the changing polities of the two islands, recognizing similarities of experience across Britain and Ireland, as well as differences. The History examines how Catholicism interacted with the growth of the nation state but also how international Catholicism was translated in, and transferred to, Britain and Ireland. Mirroring that, it places British and Irish Catholicism within a European and global context, whether that be the Catholic Reformation in the earlier volumes, or Empire and mission in the later volumes. The second factor is very much entwined with the first: the importance of Catholicism within the wider narratives of Britain and Ireland. This is somewhat self-­explanatory but to give one example: populist suspicion of popery and the enduring presence of Catholics acted as serious engines of identity and State for­ mation in England5 during the time of the faith’s official proscription, from the reign of Elizabeth I to Catholic emancipation in 1829. Equally, as mentioned earl­ier, Catholicism’s role within the wider narrative of Irish history in the nineteenth and, especially, twentieth century, is so obvious that any distinction has been lost. Put simply, the history of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland does not belong in its own distinct silo. The third factor running throughout the volumes is the internationality of British and Irish Catholicism. There has been a tendency to look inwards as far as British and Irish Catholicism is concerned and, even when mentioned, to neglect the importance of the role played by the various nations’ Catholic diasporas. Until the French Revolution it was here, at these institutions in mainland Europe, that Catholic children were educated, where women religious lived their lives, where the clergy were formed. That international element is no less prevalent in the modern period; from debates about ultramontanism in the nineteenth century, to the impact of Vatican II in the twentieth century, British and Irish Catholicism did not exist in a void, separated from the rest of the world, whether Catholic or secular. It fitted into, and was influenced by, global trends, whether that be the missionary impulse or global expansionism starting in the early modern period, or the ‘second spring’ of the nineteenth century that was part of a wider 5  See, for example, Peter Lake, ‘Anti-­Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603‒1642 (London, 1989), pp. 72‒106.

Series Introduction  xxiii movement of Christian revivalism throughout Europe, and saw increased religious volunteerism and preaching missions by male orders not far removed from initiatives more commonly associated with Protestant evangelicals. As well as the outward, exile movement in the early modern period, a constant feature throughout is migration between and into the islands, not only in terms of Irish movement, but, in more recent times, Polish immigration and even the creation of a Syro-­Malibar rite cathedral influencing the Church in these islands. Equally, as a global Church, Catholicism has increasingly become a pathway to assimilation for migrants in the modern period and an important cog within community cohesion. This very much links to the fourth major factor running through the volumes. It may seem a somewhat strange element to highlight, but these volumes stress the importance of bearing in mind the theological, spiritual, and juridical under­ pinnings of Catholicism as a Christian denomination. Picking up on the ex­amples given above, those individuals—­both male and female—­at the exile foundations in mainland Europe were fully exposed to Catholic Reformation ideas and, by the eighteenth century, the growing Catholic Enlightenment, not to mention in par­ ticular exile pockets the influence of Jansenism. In other words, these people were not only English, Irish, Scottish, or Welsh exiles; they were members of the global Church Militant, exposed to the ideas circulating in those arenas. This is no less true in the modern period: the impact of Vatican II, as wide-­ranging as it was, was ultimately rooted in broader Catholic theological and spiritual currents. In  an earlier period, the ultramontane movement—­that placed emphasis on a strong papalist and Roman authority—­meant the loyalty of English, Welsh, and Scottish Catholics was judged as suspect, raising once again the anti-­Catholic idea of their split loyalties. Meanwhile, British and Irish Catholics were themselves caught-­up in the global Church’s modernism crisis, with some leading Catholics in the islands chafing against what they saw as being driven back into the Catholic segregated ghetto from which they had just been given secular permission to leave following emancipation in 1829. Yet, the centrality of an Englishman in the  form of Merry del Val to the Church’s stance against modernism cannot be underplayed. In addition to the four overarching, broader themes, this last point is a gateway to one of the more specific ones running throughout the volumes, in this case the cyclical relationship between the global Church and Britain and Ireland. It was not simply a case of British and Irish Catholics receiving dictation from a central­ ized body, but they too fed into it, whether it be Reginald Pole co-­chairing the first session of the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, martyrs from the islands being held up as exemplars for the seventeenth-­century global Church, nineteenth-­century Marian devotions such as at Knock in Ireland or hymns from Britain spreading elsewhere, or Irish Franciscans playing a vital role in the pro­ motion of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception—­given formal approval

xxiv  Series Introduction during the ultramontane years of the later period—­Catholics in these islands were helping shape the global Church as much as they were shaped by it. Such agency often counters popular narratives that have sprung-­up. As is made clear in Volume IV, despite current popular wisdom, the Irish bishops in the nineteenth century were serial ignorers of advice or rulings from Rome. This put them in complete opposition to, for example, positions adopted in England and Wales by the likes of Cardinal Manning in his support for universal education. Apart from underlining how, post-­emancipation, British Catholics sought a wider impact on society towards a common improvement while, if anything, the Irish bishops looked inwards, it also laid the foundations for the serious repercussions within the Irish Church in the twentieth century. Having noted that hierarchical role, the frequently limited influence of bishops is apparent across the volumes. Where a traditional, liberal historiographical approach to history led confessionalized historians tended to follow, leading to  emphasis being placed on important figures and their impact. Yet for all those bishops frequently get blamed for everything, it is clear that they were just as regularly not listened to, whether that be Richard Smith trying to stamp his authority on England’s Catholics in the first half of the seventeenth century or religious orders ignoring the ecclesiastical hierarchy in Ireland. The often-­fraught relationship between bishops and religious orders is a constant feature across the volumes. It also links to the growing scholarly recognition of the importance of those very orders, whether that be in the immediate post-­Reformation period when many were active Tridentine reformers and, in the Observant Franciscans, sources of major resistance, particularly in Ireland to Henrician and Edwardian policies, to their prominence in education in the nineteenth century, or in social justice matters in the twentieth century. Moreover, what becomes clear across the five volumes is that the strong clericalist presence of the nineteenth century was in fact an aberration. Just as the influence of what is frequently referred to as the Victorian period still impacts traditions or cultural assumptions more widely, the same is true in assumptions about the Catholic Church. Clear in these volumes is that before—­and increasingly after—­that period, the laity had a far more signifi­ cant role than is usually assumed. Another very notable feature is the prominent role of women throughout. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, women played a vital part in the survival of Catholicism, running safe houses for missionary clergy, turning the authorities’ misogyny to their advantage as they practised recusancy and raised their children secretly Catholic. Moreover, further up society’s class hierarchy, there was a series of female Catholic regents throughout the seventeenth century. Into the nine­ teenth and then the twentieth century, women led popular devotional trends and, frequently, played an increasingly important role in the running of parishes. Indeed, the importance of this domestic environment is another theme running through the volumes, whether it be in the enforced domestic setting of the penal

Series Introduction  xxv period or the devotional learning of the modern era. In itself, this domesticity links to ideas of inculturation and accommodation, more commonly associated with global Catholic enterprises in, for example, Asia, but just as evident here. Once again, this brings us back to the connection between the local, national, and global identities at play, and the pull between international influences and local needs, contexts, and reality. This is even evident where least assumed, such as the Gothic revival movement in architecture during the nineteenth century. As much as it was about reclaiming the past and what was deemed broken at the Reformation, it also had a global influence, the likes of Augustus Welby Pugin designing churches in, for example, Australia. Equally, in this neo-­gothic revivalism can be seen the religious and the secular influencing and pushing each other. That is not to say that the two realms mixed easily throughout: as is already obvious from what has been outlined, the sparring between the secular and the spiritual is a constant theme, each regularly accusing the other of venturing into a sphere of influence upon which it had no claim. The mention of the neo-­Gothic movement also raises another specific theme; Catholic grappling with ideas of continuity and discontinuity. This is not simply in terms of looking for links to the pre-­Reformation period or a recovery of the Catholic past, but is evident in the events that define each chronological period covered in the volumes. So, as well as pre- and post-­Reformation, it becomes clear there are other markers in the British and Irish Catholic mindset, such as pre- and post-­civil war and Glorious Revolution; pre- and post-­French Revolution; preand post-­creation of the Irish Free State in 1922; pre- and post-­Vatican II. This is just a sample of the defining markers that become clear across the History and it is notable how many could also apply to the non-­Catholic story. In other words, it underlines just how entangled Catholicism was with wider events in Britain and Ireland. The history of Catholicism in these islands was not, and never has been, alone in a hermetically sealed silo. Even taking something as wide-­reaching as national identity, it is evident that for much of the period under consideration here, Catholicism was seen as anathema to true national identity in England, Scotland, and Wales, while the reverse was true in Ireland from as early as the seventeenth century. Despite that difference, what remains true is the role played by Catholicism in those nation’s psyches. Having said all that, there is one almost reassuring continuity. Whatever period may now be reminisced about as the golden time for Catholics in Britain and Ireland, those living through it never saw it as such. If there is one constant throughout the volumes, it is that, even at the heights of nineteenth-­century sec­ ond spring rhetoric and twentieth-­century outward signs of growth, Catholics still complained and worried about non- or low Mass attendance and knowledge of the faith. Plus ça change.

Introduction Liam Chambers

This volume is bookended by two seminal events in British and Irish history: the defeat of the Jacobite army at the Battle of Culloden on 16 April 1746 and the granting of Catholic emancipation by the Westminster parliament in 1829. Culloden resulted in a period of intense repression of Scottish Catholics. Bishop John Geddes, vicar apostolic of the Lowland District, later reflected that before 1745 ‘the penal laws against them were indeed always hanging over their heads’ but that ‘they were allowed to live in peace, and in many places of the kingdom they had the exercise of their religion public enough’, an assessment that was equally valid for England, Wales, and Ireland. The defeat of the Jacobite army precipitated a violent repression in the Scottish Highlands, one of particular menace to Catholics. Geddes recalled that ‘orders were issued for demolishing all the Catholic chapels, and for the apprehending the priests’. He went on to provide numerous examples, even if he was keen to find in the dispiriting events signs of God’s continuing favour.1 In England and Ireland, Catholic support for the Jacobite cause remained strong, but circumstances ensured that public expressions of solidarity were few in number which helps to explain why the fears among Catholics of an extensive post-­Culloden clampdown outside Scotland were not realized. At the other end of the period covered by this volume, the place of Catholics in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland had been transformed. On 14 April 1829, Daniel O’Connell headed a well-­known letter to a friend ‘The first day of freedom!’ George IV had formally assented to the emancipation legislation the previous day and O’Connell was understandably jubilant: ‘It is one of the greatest triumphs recorded in history—­a bloodless revolution more extensive in its operation than any other political change that could take place.’2 From Culloden to emancipation, the story covered in these pages appears amen­ able to a straightforward narrative, from persecution and apprehension to tol­er­ ation and celebration. In reality, the experiences of British and Irish Catholics in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were more complex. The 1  Cited in W. Forbes Leith, Memoirs of Scottish Catholics during the XVIIth and XVIIth Centuries, 2 vols. (London, 1909), II, pp. 332, 336. For context, see Peter F. Anson, Underground Catholicism in Scotland, 1622–1878 (Montrose, 1970), pp. 144–50. 2 Daniel O’Connell to Edward Dwyer, 14 April 1829, in Maurice O’Connell (ed.), The Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell, 8 vols. (Dublin, 1972–80), IV, p. 45. Liam Chambers, Introduction In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829. Edited by: Liam Chambers, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843443.003.0001

2  Liam Chambers Jacobite defeat of 1746 impacted seriously on Scottish Catholics, but it resonated in a variety of ways across Britain and Ireland, as did emancipation, which was driven mainly by events in Ireland. Indeed, the terminal dates for the volume did not necessarily have the contemporary resonance ascribed to them by later ­his­tor­ians. For all its significance, Culloden did not mark the final defeat of Jacobitism. Emancipation made little difference to the daily lives of most Catholics; in many respects, other events, such as the Irish Famine of the 1840s or the restoration of the hierarchy in England and Wales (1850), and Scotland (1878), made more appreciable impacts on the lived experience of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland. While we should be careful not to ascribe a singular story to the period treated in this volume, it is fair to argue that it witnessed the Catholic question take a central place in political life. Culloden was not the end of Jacobitism, but it suggested the weakness of the Jacobite threat and it permitted—­tentatively, at first—­a more open debate on the repeal of the penal laws. The majority of the penal laws affecting Catholics in England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland were repealed by the London and Dublin parliaments in two flurries of legislation, the first in 1778–82 and the second in 1791–3. This dismantling of the penal laws occurred in the face of substantial resistance: it is now clear that the motivations which animated the Gordon Riots of 1780 were complex, but anti-­Catholicism was a key factor and the destruction of Catholic chapels which attended them would have chilled those who remembered events in the Highlands after Culloden. Opposition to Catholic relief was even more pronounced in Scotland, as the successful Scottish ‘no popery’ disturbances of 1778–9 attested. The Irish parliament passed four major Catholic Relief Acts between 1778 and 1793, but apart from a brief moment of interdenominational harmony in the early 1780s, opposition to the relaxation of the penal laws was pronounced and found a rallying point in the defence of the ‘Protestant ascendancy’. This ensured that while Irish Catholics could vote as a result of the Relief Act of 1793, the ultimate step of admitting them to parliament did not materialize. The Catholic question remained prom­in­ ent, especially after the Act of Union (1800). By the 1820s, the Catholic question was the predominant issue in British and Irish politics. As Charles Lloyd, the Anglican bishop of Oxford, put it to Robert Peel, in 1827, it was ‘mixed up with every thing we eat or drink or say or think’.3 In Ireland, the Catholic Association, led by Daniel O’Connell, drove the campaign for Catholic emancipation and his victory in the 1828 Clare by-­election provided the final impetus for legislation the following year. The long delay had, however, resulted in irreparable damage to the Irish Catholic relationship with the Union.

3 Cited in G.  I.  T.  Machin, The Catholic Question in English Politics, 1820 to 1830 (Oxford, 1964), p. 1.

Introduction  3 O’Connell’s campaign was crucial to emancipation, but Catholic relief must be understood in a broader context. The history of British and Irish Catholicism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was part of an international story, which explains why relief was granted with such alacrity between 1778 and 1793, and why emancipation was withheld for almost four more decades. British and Irish Catholicism faced many of the challenges that confronted Catholics, indeed all Christians, across Europe between the 1740s and the 1820s.4 ‘Reform Catholicism’, Catholic Enlightenment, and the suppression of the Society of Jesus  caused extensive rethinking and reorganization which impacted on Catholics in Britain and Ireland, and influenced the debates about the penal laws, Catholic relief, and how Catholics could accommodate themselves within a Protestant State. International political events transformed the position of British and Irish Catholics. The decline of Jacobitism is of particular relevance. The Rising of 1745 suggested the potential of Jacobitism; Culloden underlined its weakness. After 1746, despite the continued optimism of British and Irish Jacobites at home and abroad, the threat receded, especially after the death of James III in Rome in 1766. Of more significance still were war and revolution. Britain and Ireland were at war for a substantial portion of the period covered by this volume. The Seven Years’ War (1756–63), the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic wars reshaped British and Irish society. Conflict also recast the Catholic question, propelling the military and imperial need to accommodate Catholics to the centre of political debate. The result was extensive Catholic relief at moments of political crisis: the disastrous war in America and the looming threat of conflict with Revolutionary France. Indeed, the French Revolution changed British and Irish Catholicism, as it did so much else. The political impact on British and Irish Catholics was considerable enough, but the Revolution also forced a great movement of people and institutions as the vast English, Scottish, and Irish Catholic infrastructure on the Continent—­ convents, colleges, friaries, and monasteries in France, Spain, Portugal, the Austrian Netherlands, Rome, and elsewhere—­closed, and successor or new institutions opened at home. Along with the students, clergy, and female religious who ‘returned’ to Britain and Ireland came thousands of French émigrés, including a large number of priests. The long-­term impact of the émigrés was muted, but the reorganization caused by the Revolution formed part of a broader revival of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland that was evident throughout the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and which—­in the early nineteenth century, at least—­ reflected a sense, however qualified, of religious revival in post-­ Napoleonic Europe.

4  Nigel Aston, Christianity and Revolution Europe, c.1750–1830 (Cambridge, 2002).

4  Liam Chambers The broad outlines of the history of British and Irish Catholicism between 1746 and 1829 are clear, but telling the story undoubtedly involves challenges. The experiences of Catholics varied across the ‘four nations’ of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, as well as within them. Britain and Ireland were mission territories for the Catholic Church and remained under the superintendence of the Congregation of Propaganda Fide. In Ireland, however, every diocese had a resident bishop by 1750, as well as a functioning parish system, while the Church in England, Scotland, and Wales was divided into sprawling apostolic vicariates led by titular bishops and administered as missions not parishes. The administrative differences reflected the realities on the ground: in Ireland, Catholics were the large majority of the population, while Catholics in England formed a minority population, and an even smaller proportion in Scotland and Wales. Structures and demographics, as well as many other factors, including history and memory, ensured that the experience of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland was not singular. National, regional, class, gender, and status (religious and laity) differences were all important too. While this must be borne in mind, the volume attempts to demonstrate the value of writing the history of British and Irish Catholicism together. The devotional literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provides a good example of the close connections between Catholics in the four nations. Richard Challoner, the influential vicar apostolic of the London District between 1739 (initially as coadjutor) and 1781 produced a series of enduring devotional works over the course of his career which went through numerous editions. Scholars have long noted the significance of his output. John Bossy even suggested that ‘Almost everything we need to know about the private devotion of English Catholics during these decades [1740–1850] can be dis­ covered by consulting Challoner’s Garden of the Soul.’5 Challoner’s extensive corpus was published and read widely in Ireland and Scotland, as well as England. Indeed, it crossed linguistic boundaries through the translation of some of his work—­notably his Think Well On’t, which first appeared in 1728—into Irish and Welsh. It is significant that Challoner drew fruitfully on another devotional staple of the period, Francis de Sales’s early-­seventeenth-­century Introduction to the Devout Life, which was published repeatedly in London and Dublin from the 1740s. The London Catholic printer James Peter Coghlan produced editions in 1770, 1787, and 1794. Indeed, Coghlan’s print network is further evidence for the connections running between Catholics in the four nations, and not only in English, but in Scottish Gaelic and Welsh too.6 The challenge of writing a history of British and Irish Catholicism reflects the  nature of scholarship on the subject. English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh 5  John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975), p. 364. 6  Frans Blom, Jos Blom, Frans Korsten, and Geoffrey Scott (eds.), The Correspondence of James Peter Coghlan (1731–1800) (Woodbridge, 2007).

Introduction  5 Catholicism each have their own rich historiography, but these have generally been developed without reference to each other.7 As the general editors comment in their Series Introduction, English Catholicism has moved into the mainstream of historical research in recent decades, so it is an opportune moment to pursue a ‘four nations’ approach to the study of British and Irish Catholicism, while retaining a sense of the importance of national as well as regional and local differences. The development of Catholicism in the mid-­nineteenth century cast a shadow on the period covered by this volume. John Henry Newman’s famous ‘second spring’ sermon, preached in 1852, presented English Catholics of the later eighteenth century in an unflattering light: found in corners, and alleys, and cellars, and the housetops, or in the recesses of the country; cut off from the populous world around them, and dimly seen, as if through a mist or in twilight, as ghosts flitting to and fro, by the high Protestants, the lords of the earth.8

Newman’s interpretation has long been rejected by historians of the period, even if his evocation of the ‘second spring’ retains some currency. More than a century ago, the work of Edwin  H.  Burtin and Bernard Ward, published between 1909 and 1912 and written in the style of so much ecclesiastical history of the period, presented a more confident history running from the career of Richard Challoner to emancipation.9 When Eamon Duffy assembled a collection of essays in 1981 to coincide with the bicentenary of Challoner’s death, he was keen to contextualize Challoner not as a ‘solitary giant struggling against impossible odds’ but as ‘firmly located within the context of a small but vigorous and expanding community tolerated, for the most part, by its Protestant fellow countrymen’.10 This approach reflected a general reappraisal of later-­eighteenth-­century English Catholicism that aligned with John Bossy’s influential The English Catholic Community, 1770–1850, which rejected outright Newman’s ‘second spring’ reading of the earl­ ier period and argued that a transformation of English Catholic community occurred before mass Irish immigration.11 Bossy’s work was complemented by research illustrating the richness of the debates attending Cisalpinism.12 At the 7  For a four nations approach, see Michael Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (New York, 1998), pp. 138–96. 8  John Henry Newman, Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, 2nd edn (London, 1858), p. 234. 9 Edwin H. Burtin, The Life and Times of Bishop Challoner (1691–1781), 2 vols. (London, 1909); Bernard Ward, The Dawn of the Catholic Revival in England, 1781–1803, 2 vols. (London, 1909); Bernard Ward, The Eve of Catholic Emancipation, being the History of the English Catholics during the First Thirty Years of the Nineteenth Century, 3 vols. (London, 1911–12). 10  Eamon Duffy, ‘Introduction’, in Eamon Duffy (ed.), Challoner and His Church: A Catholic Bishop in Georgian England (London, 1981), p. xiii. 11 Bossy, The English Catholic Community, pp. 295–9. 12  Eamon Duffy, ‘Ecclesiastical Democracy Detected: I (1779–1787)’, Recusant History, 10 (1970), pp. 193–209; Eamon Duffy, ‘Ecclesiastical Democracy Detected: II (1787–1796), Recusant History, 10 (1970), pp. 309–31; Eamon Duffy, ‘Ecclesiastical Democracy Detected: III (1796–1803)’, Recusant

6  Liam Chambers same time, the new wave of scholarship recognized the strength of anti-­ Catholicism, as demonstrated by Colin Haydon and, more recently, in renewed interest in the Gordon Riots.13 In the early twenty-­first century, research on female religious, pioneered by Caroline Bowden, James E. Kelly, and others has transformed the subject, and has underlined the fact that it is now inconceivable that the history of British and Irish Catholicism could be written without taking careful account of its European and international dimensions.14 Like their English counterparts, historians of Irish Catholics and Catholicism have generally operated within a national framework. The key difference is that the history of Irish Catholics has been afforded a central place in the national story since the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, a transformation occurred from the mid-­ twentieth century, as historians of Irish Catholicism increasingly acknowledged that the impact of the post-­1691 penal laws was much less severe than some earlier scholars had concluded. The shift in emphasis from W. P. Burke in the early twentieth century to Patrick Corish and, perhaps above all, Maureen Wall, from the mid-­twentieth century onwards is illustrative.15 This change was followed by the publication of innovative research on late-­eighteenth-­and early-­ nineteenth-­century Irish Catholicism, including Hugh Fenning’s brilliant studies of the Irish regulars and S.  J.  Connolly’s ground-­breaking Priests and People in Pre-­Famine Ireland, 1780–1845, which brought a new level of sophistication to the social history of the subject, as did Kevin Whelan’s pioneering work on the historical geography and cultural history of Irish Catholicism, and Rosemary Raughter’s important studies of female activism and philanthropy.16 Historians have also developed new political histories of Irish Catholics and Catholicism in our period. The work of Thomas Bartlett and Ambrose Macaulay on the Catholic question is especially important, for both authors demonstrate the significant interplay between Ireland and England on the issue.17 The pastoral history of the Irish Catholic Church in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has History, 13 (1975), pp. 123–48; Joseph Chinnici, The English Catholic Enlightenment: John Lingard and the Cisalpine Movement, 1780–1850 (Shepherdstown, WV, 1980). 13  Colin Haydon, Anti-­Catholicism in Eighteenth-­Century England c.1714–80 (Manchester, 1994); Ian Haywood and John Seed (eds.), The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Cambridge, 2012). 14  The ‘Who Were the Nuns?’ and ‘Monks in Motion’ projects are key examples of these trends. 15 W. P. Burke, The Irish Priests in the Penal Times (1660–1760) (Waterford, 1914); Patrick J. Corish, The Catholic Community in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Dublin, 1981); Maureen Wall, Catholic Ireland in the Eighteenth Century: Collected Essays of Maureen Wall, ed. Gerard O’Brien (Dublin, 1989). 16  Hugh Fenning, The Undoing of the Friars: A Study of the Novitiate Question in the Eighteenth Century (Louvain, 1972); S. J. Connolly, Priests and People in Pre-­Famine Ireland, 1780–1845 (Dublin, 1982); Kevin Whelan, Religion, Landscape and Settlement in Ireland: From Patrick to Present (Dublin, 2018), pp. 174–204, for a recent example of Whelan’s extensive corpus; among Rosemary Raughter’s important contributions is ‘A Discreet Benevolence: Female Philanthropy and the Catholic Resurgence in Eighteenth-­Century Ireland’, Women’s History Review, 6 (1997), pp. 461–84. 17  Thomas Bartlett, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690–1830 (Dublin, 1992); Ambrose Macaulay, The Catholic Church and the Campaign for Emancipation in England and

Introduction  7 attracted less attention, but Nigel Yates and Emmet Larkin have offered valuable assessments.18 In a sense Larkin’s ‘devotional revolution’ thesis—­which argued that ‘The great mass of the Irish people became practicing Catholics’ in the quarter century after 1850—continues to cast as formidable a shadow over our period as Newman’s ‘second spring’.19 While Larkin’s analysis has a firmer basis in reality, the author readily acknowledged that the changes he identified were evident earl­ ier than his influential article initially suggested.20 Rather like Newman’s ‘second spring’ and Larkin’s ‘devotional revolution’, the transformation attendant on mass Irish migration into Scotland and Wales in the nineteenth century, and especially after 1829, has coloured how the story of the earlier period has been told. In comparison with the burgeoning congregations of the mid-­nineteenth century, boosted by the influx of Irish migrants, the Scottish Catholic community was small and the Welsh one tiny. Historians of Scottish Catholic history have worked within a similar national framework to their Irish and English counterparts. From the mid-­ twentieth century, a new wave of im­port­ant work emerged to demonstrate the struggles and the vitality of Scottish Catholicism before emancipation. Peter F. Anson’s The Catholic Church in Modern Scotland, published in 1937, was revised as Underground Catholicism in Scotland, 1622–1878, which appeared in 1970. Christine Johnson’s Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, 1789–1829 provided a focused overview of a crucial period. Significantly, Johnson sought to illustrate that Scottish Catholicism ‘continued to be involved in developments which took place in Scotland as a whole’.21 At the same time, the strength of ‘no popery’ was especially acute in Scotland as the work of Robert Kent Donovan, Ian Muirhead, and Clotilde Prunier demonstrates.22 Paul O’Leary has illustrated that anti-­Catholicism was also strong in Wales, where ‘anti-­emancipation agitation reached its crescendo in  1829’.23 The historiography of the small community of Welsh Catholics in  the  later  eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is still underdeveloped. Ireland (Dublin, 2016); see also Edward Norman, The English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1984), pp. 29–68. 18  Emmet Larkin, The Pastoral Role of the Roman Catholic Church in Pre-­Famine Ireland, 1750–1850 (Dublin, 2006); Nigel Yates, The Religious Condition in Ireland, 1770–1850 (Oxford, 2006). 19  Emmet Larkin, ‘The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850–75’, American Historical Review, 77 (1972), pp. 625–52, quotation from p. 625; cf. Mary Heinman, ‘Catholic Revivalism in Worship and  Devotion’, in Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley (eds.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, viii: World Christianities, c.1815–c.1914 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 70–83. 20  Douglas Kanter, ‘The Devotional Revolution at Fifty’, New Hibernia Review, 24 (2020), pp. 51–61. 21 Christine Johnson, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, 1789–1829 (Edinburgh, 1983), p. 3. 22  Ian A. Muirhead, ‘Catholic Emancipation: Scottish Reactions in 1829’, Innes Review, 24 (1973), pp. 26–42; Ian A. Muirhead, ‘Catholic Emancipation in Scotland: The Debate and Aftermath’, Innes Review, 24 (1973), pp. 103–20; Robert Kent Donovan, No Popery and Radicalism: Opposition to Roman Catholic Relief in Scotland, 1778–1782 (New York, 1987); Clotilde Prunier, Anti-­Catholic Strategies in Eighteenth-­Century Scotland (Frankfurt am Main, 2004). 23  Paul O’Leary, ‘When Was Anti-­Catholicism? The Case of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-­Century Wales’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 56 (2005), pp. 308–12, quotation from p. 311.

8  Liam Chambers A  handful of important regional studies have appeared and Nicholas Lee has ­provided an overview of the Welsh mission from the perspective of the vicars apostolic of the Western District, which took in Wales.24 As Paul O’Leary has shown, Irish immigration in the nineteenth century, already evident in the early 1800s, would transform the Catholic population of Wales.25 This volume draws on the existing scholarship to present a multifaceted history of British and Irish Catholicism from Culloden to emancipation. The volume begins by presenting a chronological assessment of the political significance of British and Irish Catholicism through a series of five chapters. These engage with familiar themes, as well as the fruits of recent research. Carys Brown’s opening chapter examines the period from Culloden to the death of James III in 1766. Her chapter reflects the incredible scholarly re-­engagements with Jacobitism, especially since the 1990s, but she also traces the tentative early campaigns for repeal of the penal laws and the changing nature of the Catholic communities in Britain and Ireland. Following James III’s death, the possibility of Catholic relief became a reality and James Kelly tracks the breakthrough, as he puts it, and the first phase of legislative change, taking the story to the eve of the French Revolution. As Kelly argues, the reasons for relief were complex and the inability of Catholics to press for further relief after 1782 underlines the limits of their position. Indeed, Scottish Catholics did not benefit from the relief extended to their English, Welsh, and Irish counterparts until 1793. The French Revolution transformed the Catholic question anew and Marianne Elliott explores not just the advent of further measures of Catholic relief, but also the dramatic impact of French radicalism on Catholic politics and society, culminating in the 1798 Rebellion. The events of the Rebellion not only precipitated the Act of Union two years later, they cast a long shadow over the debate about whether to permit Catholics to sit in parliament. The promise of emancipation had been extended to Catholics during the debates on the Union in Ireland and the failure of the British government to deliver had profound consequences. Michael Mullett examines the place of Catholics in the first two decades of the new United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. He recounts the long-­running debates about further Catholic relief, which accentuated deep divisions between sections of the British and Irish Catholic communities, mainly over how to accommodate themselves to the Protestant State, while the communities developed significantly as a result of social and economic change. Thomas Bartlett picks up the story in 1820 and illustrates how the 24 Phillip Jenkins, ‘A Welsh Lancashire? Monmouthshire Catholics in the Eighteenth Century’, Recusant History, 15 (1980), pp. 176–88; John R. Guy, ‘Eighteenth-­Century Gwent Catholics’, Recusant History, 16 (1982), pp. 78–87; Daniel Mullins, ‘Catholicism in Wales in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Welsh Ecclesiastical History, 2 (1985), pp. 1–6; Nicholas Lee, ‘No Easy Heritage: The Vicars Apostolic and the Welsh Mission, 1780–1850’, Downside Review, 133 (2015), pp. 414–53; Hannah Thomas, ‘Catholics in Wales’, in Robert E. Scully (ed.), A Companion to Catholicism and Recusancy in Britain and Ireland: From Reformation to Emancipation (Leiden, 2022), pp. 339–68. 25  Paul O’Leary, Immigration and Integration: The Irish in Wales, 1798–1922 (Cardiff, 2000).

Introduction  9 campaigns led by lay Irish Catholics threatened the stability of the British State through mass mobilization, leading ultimately to the concession of emancipation in 1829. The political history of British and Irish Catholicism can only be properly understood with reference to the broader transformations that occurred in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Cormac Begadon’s chapter, on ‘The Infrastructure of Catholicism’, points to a range of the key developments. The chapter addresses pastoral structures and underlines the pressure they faced as the Catholic population grew in all four nations but the bishops struggled to maintain a sufficient level of clergy. Indeed, the regular clergy, and the Jesuits in particular, faced acute challenges which changed the nature of the British and Irish churches. The demographic shifts, coupled with the growing confidence of toleration, did encourage transformation despite the difficulties, and Begadon shows how this occurred in chapel-­building, elementary education, and fi­nan­ cing. The infrastructure permitted the elaboration of Catholic belief and practice and Peter Phillip’s chapter charts developments over the period. He lays out the settings within which the liturgies and sacraments took place, and assesses preaching and prayer, devotional life, fasting, and charity. In doing so, he demonstrates the level of devotional change in the later eighteenth century, in advance of the better known wave of change in the mid-­nineteenth century. The growing infrastructure and more public profession of Catholicism occurred in a society where anti-­Catholicism remained a force, as Colin Haydon’s chapter illustrates. The Gordon Riots provided the most explosive example, but anti-­Catholicism was a more pernicious, low-­level reality across Britain and Ireland. At the same time, while Haydon does not explain anti-­Catholicism away, his work illustrates the complex nature of Catholic relationships with Protestants, and the accommodations and interactions that attended day-­to-­day life. The transformation of British and Irish Catholicism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was international, as well as national. By the 1740s, English, Scottish, and Irish Catholics had constructed an impressive ecclesiastical infrastructure, stretching across much of Catholic Europe. This provided a means of education, clerical formation, and migration for thousands of students, clergy, and female religious, and it operated within broader migrant communities, although these were dwindling by mid-­century. This infrastructure—­convents and colleges, friaries and monasteries—­was under pressure before the French Revolution resulted in the closure of almost all of these institutions, forcing an incredible move to domestic institutions and a belated attempt to re-­establish Continental structures when the dust had settled on the Napoleonic wars. The history of female religious has been one of the most vibrant subjects of historical research in recent decades. Tonya Moutray traces the manner in which British and Irish female religious grappled with the changes of the period, but she also illustrates how new communities of female religious responded to the novel

10  Liam Chambers challenges of late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, creating the basis for the dramatic increase in their number in the 1800s. Liam Chambers looks in turn at the male institutions, tracing their status before 1789, their response to Revolution, the construction of a domestic alternative, and the modest reorganizing on the Continent after 1815. It is tempting to argue that the period witnessed a withdrawal from the Continent, but that would be to underplay the continuing significance of Continental influence, as a well as the restoration of British and Irish colleges and convents abroad, even if they were much reduced. The international dimensions of British and Irish Catholicism extended beyond Europe too as the British Empire expanded globally. As Aidan Bellenger’s chapter shows, the vicars apostolic of the London District, who had responsibility for Catholics in the British Empire, played a crucial role in the development of the Church overseas. This was already evident in the eighteenth century and became even more pronounced under Bishop William Poynter in the early nineteenth century, taking in vast territories in Europe, the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, involving English, Scottish, and Irish men and women. Irish and British Catholics also participated in the imperial expansion of other European powers, especially the French and Spanish, although this falls outside the scope of the volume.26 In all cases, the participation of Catholics from the four nations in empire-­building raises fundamental questions about their relationship with the exploitative structures of eighteenth- and nineteenth-­century European colonialism. This volume also addresses the literary, intellectual, and cultural expressions of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland. Michael Tomko’s chapter examines English-­ language literature, emphasizing the influence of Gother and Challoner, but also assessing how Catholicism was ‘reimagined’ in prose from the 1780s in particular. While English-­language Catholic literature found a wider audience in the ‘four nations’ (and, indeed, across the empire), English was not spoken by, or was at most a second language for, millions of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh Catholics. Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh offers a rich examination of Catholic literature, manuscript and printed, in Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh, reflecting on the disparities in provision. One of the most significant developments in recent Catholic historiography has been a renewed interest in Catholic Enlightenment evident in the work of Ulrich Lehner, Michael Printy, Jeffrey Burson, and many others. Historians and other scholars have also excavated Catholic Enlightenments in England and Scotland, and more tentatively in Ireland.27 Shaun Blanchard’s chapter draws on 26  For an example, see Brendan Hoban, A Melancholy Truth: The Travels and Travails of Fr Charles Bourke, c.1765–1820 (Dublin, 2008), pp. 40–59. 27  Ulrich Lehner and Michael Printy (eds.), A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe (Leiden, 2010); Ulrich Lehner and Jeffrey Burson (eds.), Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History (Notre Dame, IN, 2014); Ulrich Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement (Oxford, 2016).

Introduction  11 this scholarship and brings his own insights to bear on the ‘pluriform’ nature of Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland, encompassing key figures like Joseph Berington, Alexander Geddes, and Charles O’Conor. As Blanchard illustrates, Catholics in Britain and Ireland not only engaged with the Enlightenment, they participated in enlightened discourse while also grappling with the challenges of accommodation to a Protestant constitution. The debate about the place of Catholics in Britain and Ireland continued throughout the period covered by this volume. One consequence was that the public expression of Catholicism varied greatly with respect to time and place. Music occupied an important place in British and Irish society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but the nature of Catholic church music varied greatly from the rich liturgies on offer in the embassy chapels in London to simple musical accompaniments in more modest chapels in England and Ireland, to the comparative musical dearth in many situ­ations, especially in Scotland. Thomas Muir’s chapter charts the range of Catholic church music in Britain and Ireland, as well as the change over time. The final chapter, by Carol M. Richardson, examines the material culture, artistic and architectural, of British and Irish Catholicism, with a strong focus on England. While the chapters on literature, Enlightenment, and church music reflect on the transformations of the period, Richardson draws readers back to the parallel significance of continuity. It is indeed fitting that the final chapter reminds us that in a period of dramatic transformation—­with the rupture of the French Revolution at its heart—­a key feature of British and Irish Catholicism is ‘the continuity of tradition, memory and identity embodied in art, architecture and artefacts’. The chapters in this volume do not attempt to tell the story of a straightforward ‘age of emancipation’. While the Catholic question is at the heart of the history presented here, the chapters seek to chart the manifold continuities, transformations—­indeed ‘radical transformations’—and ruptures of a crucial period in the development of British and Irish Catholicism.28

28  Cf. Bossy, The English Catholic Community, pp. 295–6.

1

Jacobitism, Loyalty, and the State, 1746–1766 Carys Brown

On 16 April 1746, a substantial uprising by Jacobite supporters of the exiled Stuart monarchy ended with defeat at the Battle of Culloden. In the immediate aftermath of this rebellion, which had begun in the Scottish Highlands in 1745, the prospects of British and Irish Catholics did not look promising. The State assumed that Catholicism and Jacobitism went hand in hand, and measures against Jacobites included a crackdown on Catholics. These difficulties were, however, temporary and in 1778 limited moves towards relief for Catholics were passed by both the British and Irish parliaments. This chapter explores important adjustments during the period 1746–66 which in part facilitated this measure. Beginning with the changing nature of the Jacobite threat and its association with Catholicism, it then discusses Catholic initiatives to demonstrate loyalty, before highlighting how war made some contemporaries more receptive to such arguments. It also examines the demographic changes and developments in trading prospects that aided some Catholic communities. However, caution is needed in suggesting improvement in the position of Catholics in this period. Viewed within a longer narrative of the gradual extension of Catholic relief, the years 1746–66 can be seen as significant. To many contemporary Catholics, however, the prospect of an accommodation with the British State would have looked unlikely.

The Diminishing Jacobite Threat After 1745 British and Irish Catholics continued to face significant difficulties. This was particularly the case in the Scottish Highlands where, in the summer of 1746, the duke of Cumberland and his officers deployed forces to repress areas involved in Jacobite activity. Catholic and Episcopalian priests were arrested, and troops burned down Catholic places of worship.1 This included Scalan, a 1 Geoffrey Plank, Rebellion and Savagery: The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the British Empire (Philadelphia, PA, 2006), p. 72. Carys Brown, Jacobitism, Loyalty, and the State, 1746–1766 In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829. Edited by: Liam Chambers, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843443.003.0002

Jacobitism, Loyalty, and the State, 1746–1766  13 seminary for the training of Catholic priests in Scotland, which was ‘laid in ashes’ in May of that year.2 As part of a broader plan to gain control over the clan-­led Highlands, the British government also tightened restrictions on religious worship, reiterating that preachers at ‘the allowed meeting Houses’ should ‘be Persons ordained by English Bishops and who shall have Certificates from the Bishops of their Principles with respect to the Government as well as Religion’.3 The ease with which Catholics could worship was significantly threatened by these measures, as was the ability of priests to serve them. The result of this, combined with land forfeitures and emigration, was that in the Highlands and Islands the number of Catholics was reduced by as much as 8,000 after 1745.4 The State’s reaction to the events of 1745–6 was harshest in the most rebellious areas of Scotland. Catholics in England and Wales did, however, still suffer significantly. Existing penal legislation was more strictly enforced, and bolstered by some new measures. The effective reinstitution of a £100 reward (first introduced by the Popery Act of 1698) for the discovery of Catholic priests in November 1745, for instance, encouraged citizens to be especially zealous in seeking out suspected Catholics. Not all prosecutions were successful, and some were malicious or at least pecuniary in motivation: in the trial of Thomas Sockwell at the Old Bailey in January 1746 the judge was suspicious that ‘the Prosecutor, had known of these Things for a considerable Time: [but] Makes no Discovery of it, ‘till the Proclamation is publish’d, of 100l. Reward’.5 Nevertheless, the price tag placed on priests during this period, and the more rigorous enforcement of penal laws, cannot have aided their pastoral duties. Furthermore, in areas of England particularly suspected of Jacobite activity, such as parts of the north, even those Catholics who had no apparent Jacobite loyalty were subject to harsher treatment after 1745. In Stokesley in the North Riding of Yorkshire, for instance, justices had shown a great reluctance to execute laws against Catholics in 1744, as ‘upon the striktest inquiry as well upon Oaths of the Several Constables . . . all of them seem to us to be very peaceable & without Arms or horses . . . & not likely to disturb the Government’.6 However, by 1746 local attitudes had seemingly changed significantly, and there were reports that the Mass house at Stokesley was pulled down

2  John Geddes, ‘A Brief Historical Account of the Seminary of Scalan [1777]’, in William James Anderson (ed.), ‘The College for the Lowland District at Scalan and Aquhorties: Registers and Documents’, Innes Review, 14 (1963), p. 99. 3  Sketch of regulations proposed to be made in Scotland, 28 June 1746, National Archives (NA), SP 54/32/24. 4 James Darragh, ‘The Catholic Population of Scotland since the Year 1680’, Innes Review, 4 (1953), p. 54. 5  Trial of Thomas Sockwell, January 1746, Old Bailey Proceedings Online, www.oldbaileyonline.org (accessed 16 August 2019). 6  Draft letter to Lord Middleton, Custos Rotulorum of North Riding, 30 March 1744, Hull History Centre (HHC), U DDCB/x1/24/1.

14  Carys Brown by rioters.7 In the tense aftermath of rebellion, Catholics could be subject to ­persecution even within communities where they were previously tolerated. Irish Catholics too were still regarded as suspicious and potentially seditious after 1745, and faced the continuation of penal legislation across this period. During the Rebellion, the lord lieutenant, the earl of Chesterfield, avoided overplaying the extent of the Jacobite threat posed by Irish Catholics. For example, he did not order Catholics to surrender arms as had been the norm during other invasion scares, but this failed to prevent panic among the country’s Protestants that a Catholic-­Jacobite takeover in Ireland was imminent.8 After the Rebellion was over, sermons preached by Irish Protestants celebrated the intervention of providence against the Catholic threat.9 This contributed to a heightened anti-­ Catholic atmosphere in the years following the Rebellion, one which encouraged some Catholics to become more vocal in declaring loyalty to the Hanoverian monarchy.10 The difficulties that Jacobitism created for Catholics did not stop there. Whereas once the Rebellion of 1745–6 was regarded by historians as the end of the period of active Jacobitism, some scholars have emphasized its longevity well into the 1750s. The optimistic interpretation of Doron Zimmermann that ‘the Jacobites after Culloden were . . . active’, and a viable threat up to 1759, struggles to explain why Jacobitism diminished so quickly thereafter, but other scholars have also noted a resilience in Jacobitism in this period.11 Neil Guthrie’s study of Jacobite material culture, for instance, finds that the late 1740s and 1750s ‘actually saw something of a renewal . . . of Jacobite hopes’, with a substantial output of Jacobite material such as medals.12 No Jacobite uprisings occurred after 1745, but plots continued. These included the abortive Elibank Plot of 1752–3, which would have included the abduction of the royal family, uprisings in London and Scotland, and a planned French invasion, including a possible Jacobite landing in Ireland, in 1759.13 In hindsight, Jacobitism had little chance of success after the ’45, but it was far from over by this point.

7  Lieutenant General Wentworth to Newcastle, 2 February 1746, NA, SP 36/31/1/24, fols. 24–5. 8 Plank, Rebellion and Savagery, pp. 85–6; James Kelly, ‘ “Disappointing the Boundless Ambition of France”: Irish Protestants and the Fear of Invasion, 1661–1815’, Studia Hibernica, 37 (2011), pp. 69–70. 9 Raymond Gillespie, ‘Preaching History, 1749: The Belfast Sermons of Gilbert Kennedy and James Saurin’, in Jacqueline Hill and Mary Ann Lyons (eds.), Representing Irish Religious Histories: Historiography, Ideology, and Practice (Cham, 2017), pp. 130–1. 10  John Gibney, ‘ “Facts Newly Stated”: John Curry, the 1641 Rebellion, and Catholic Revisionism in Eighteenth-­Century Ireland, 1747–80’, Éire-­Ireland, 44 (2009), p. 251. 11  Doron Zimmerman, The Jacobite Movement in Scotland and in Exile, 1746–1759 (Basingstoke, 2003), p. 2. See also the review by Daniel Szechi in English Historical Review, 119 (2004), pp. 1352–4. 12  Neil Guthrie, The Material Culture of the Jacobites (Cambridge, 2013), p. 136. 13  See Charles Petrie, ‘The Elibank Plot, 1752–3’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 14 (1931), pp. 175–96; Jonathan  R.  Dull, The French Navy and the Seven Years’ War (Lincoln and London, 2005), pp. 134–5.

Jacobitism, Loyalty, and the State, 1746–1766  15 Furthermore, inaction did not signal an end to sympathy for the Stuart cause. Gabriel Glickman has found that in the case of many English Catholics, Jacobite loyalties faded only gradually.14 On the Continent, the Stuart Court in Rome went into a slow decline after 1745, but in the late 1740s and early 1750s it was still a thriving social and cultural centre, with an important role as a ‘surrogate embassy’ for British travellers to Italy and an influence over the appointment of Catholic bishops in Ireland.15 In Ireland in particular, lack of military action was far from indicative of decaying loyalty to the Stuarts. Indeed, as scholarship that focuses on Irish language sources has demonstrated, there remained a vibrant Jacobite culture, and this was particularly evident in contemporary Gaelic Irish poetry.16 Lines penned after the Rebellion by authors such as Aindrias Mac Craith expressed confidence that the Stuart cause would eventually triumph, and ‘beidh Carolus feasta ina rígh againn’ (Charles will be our king).17 Unlike Scottish Jacobite literature of the period, popular Irish Jacobitism maintained a strong association between the Stuart cause and hopes of the re-­ establishment of Catholicism.18 In the context of this Jacobite undercurrent, protestations of loyalty among the Irish Catholic elite represented a significant divergence from the views of many of the Catholic population.19 Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, the attitude of the State towards Catholics across Britain and Ireland reflected suspicions of a lively Jacobite core after 1745. Penalties for suspected Jacobitism continued to be based on an association between Catholicism and the Jacobite threat. At Scalan, from the time of the Rebellion until 1756, there were reportedly ‘almost always two parties of Soldiers stationed . . . who had express orders to seize the Priests wherever they could find them and they expected a reward for apprehending them’.20 In Monmouthshire, the ‘heartland’ of a much diminished Welsh Catholicism, the Catholic town clerk of Monmouth, Charles Halfpenny, recalled in 1754 the earlier prosecution of a Catholic schoolmaster, remarking that ‘such was the virulence of those times: and I don’t think them a bit unended here’.21 Even those who lived in areas with high

14  Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745 (Woodbridge, 2009), p. 253. 15  Edward Corp, The Stuarts in Italy, 1719–1766: A Royal Court in Permanent Exile (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 7, 259–60, 270–3; Vincent Morley, ‘Irish Jacobitism, 1691–1790’, in James Kelly (ed.), The Cambridge History of Ireland, iii: 1730–1880 (Cambridge, 2018), p. 34. 16  Éamonn Ó Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685–1766: A Fatal Attachment (Dublin, 2004), pp. 272–4; Vincent Morley, Irish Opinion and the American Revolution, 1760–1783 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 2–3, 8–9. 17  Ó Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, p. 282. 18  Morley, ‘Irish Jacobitism, 1691–1790’, pp. 39–41. 19 Morley, Irish Opinion and the American Revolution, pp. 47, 96. 20  Geddes, ‘A Brief Historical Account of the Seminary of Scalan [1777]’, p. 100. 21  Charles Halfpenny to Jane Huddleston, 14 August 1754, Cambridgeshire Archives (CA), 488/ JH84. On Monmouthshire Catholicism, see Michael  A.  Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 98–100; Philip Jenkins, ‘ “A Welsh Lancashire”? Monmouthshire Catholics in the Eighteenth Century’, Recusant History, 15 (1979), pp 176–88.

16  Carys Brown numbers of Catholics such as Monmouthshire, which was not without its Jacobite adherents in 1745, continued to feel vulnerable to prosecution into the 1750s.22 Protestants continued to justify suspicion of Catholics in print across Britain and Ireland in this period, with particular reference to the relationship between Catholicism and Jacobitism. In Ireland, local economic and political tensions were framed through this lens. A pamphlet discussing the Whiteboy disturbances in Munster in 1762, for instance, complained that ‘in that unhappy country the  terms Papist and Jacobite are become almost synonymous’.23 Similarly, one Whig pamphlet written in the context of elections in England in 1753 declared firmly that ‘it may be observed, that the Jacobites and Papists are upon principle attached to the interest of the Pretender, and enemies to our happy establishment in general’.24 This view was equally resonant in Scotland, despite the fact that many of the rebellious clans in 1745 had been Episcopalian rather than Catholic.25 A Collection of Loyal Songs, published in Edinburgh in 1748, contained numerous references to Jacobitism that assumed it was inherently Catholic in motivation. One song, entitled ‘The Roman-­Catholick Ballad’, opened with the lines ‘Since Popery of late / Is so much in debate, / And great strivings have been to restore it’, thereby stressing an intimate connection between the 1745 Rebellion and Catholicism.26 The contemporary perception that Jacobites, and by association Catholics, were a threat to the integrity of the Protestant establishment and the stability of the State continued to have purchase. However, there was a gradual change in perceptions. Contemporary print cannot be taken as reflecting the full spectrum of opinion, but there is evidence that by the 1760s Jacobitism was less widely regarded as a serious threat. In 1766, the year in which James III died, one author of ambiguous political persuasion emphasized that the Whigs were no longer republicans and the Tories were no longer Jacobites: ‘the very term Jacobite is obliviated with the person whose name and cause were signified by that term’.27 Added to this view of Jacobite decline was an increased mental separation of Jacobitism from Catholicism. Another author, who claimed to be a member of the Established Church courteous to both Catholics and Protestant Dissenters, emphasized in a 1762 discussion of England’s war with Spain that ‘a Papist and a Jacobite are far from being synonymous terms. 22  ‘Morgan’s Papers, Taken from Jacobite Prisoner David Morgan, 1745’, NA, SP 36/79/1/154–191; The History of the Rebellion in 1745 and 1746 (Aberdeen, 1755), p. 290. 23  The Late Tumults in Ireland Considered, and the True Causes of them Impartially Pointed Out, with their Respective Remedies (London, 1762), pp. 1–2. 24  The Balance: Or the Merits of Whig and Tory, Exactly Weigh’d and Fairly Determin’d (London, 1753), p. 10. 25  F.  J.  McLynn, ‘Issues and Motives in the Jacobite Rising of 1745’, The Eighteenth Century, 23 (1982), p. 106. 26  A Collection of Loyal Songs. For the use of the Revolution Club, Some of Which Never Before Printed (Edinburgh, 1748), p. 33. 27  An Address to the People of England; Shewing the Advantages arising from the Frequent Changes of Ministers; with an Address to the Next Administration (London, 1766), p. 40.

Jacobitism, Loyalty, and the State, 1746–1766  17 A Papist may be loyal as well as honest’.28 Similarly one apparently English—­and Protestant—­author, who argued for some relaxation of penal measures against Catholics in Ireland, suggested that although ‘there are some Jacobites still left in Ireland . . . there are not fewer to be found among the Protestants than among the Papists there’.29 The author of this pamphlet may not have been as English as they claimed. As David Dickson has highlighted, their remarkably in-­depth know­ ledge of the political dynamics of rural Munster makes a ‘Munster rather than an English author seem likely’. Nevertheless, the fact that sections of this publication were reprinted in London newspapers suggests that it had some English support.30 While there were those who still maintained intense prejudice against Catholics on the grounds of their supposed Jacobite associations, the strength of this accusation was waning in this period. This was also reflected in the relaxation of practical measures against Catholics. In Scotland in particular, the perceived demise of the Jacobite threat allowed greater freedom for priests and worshippers as the century wore on.31 From about 1756, Catholics exiled after the 1745 Rebellion were returning, and the withdrawal of troops from the Highlands and Islands in the early 1760s relieved the pressure on the Catholic mission there.32 At Scalan, troops were no longer consistently present from 1756 onwards, and the Protestant parsons who were sent by the General Assembly of the Kirk in 1760 to observe activity there seemed little concerned with the threat that the seminary might pose.33 In England, the earl of Mansfield, lord chief justice from 1756, showed a distinct leniency towards Catholics, emphasizing that the penal statutes should not be enforced unless circumstance necessitated it.34 In Ireland the arrest of Michael O’Reilly, the archbishop of Armagh, who was suspected of collecting funds to support James III, was met not with the paranoid repression of the late 1740s, but rather with a ‘perfunctory’ interrogation and a ‘rapid release without charge’.35 While the stereotype of Catholics as bloodthirsty Jacobites was eroded only slowly and unevenly, the reduction in the Jacobite threat in this period does seem to have brought some benefits to the position of Catholics. By 1766 James III was dead, and Pope 28  The Constitutional Querist, Containing the Sentiments of an Impartial Englishman on the Present Rupture with Spain (London, 1762), p. 26. 29  The Late Tumults in Ireland Considered, p. 3. 30  David Dickson, ‘Novel Spectacle? The Birth of the Whiteboys, 1761–2’, in D.  W.  Hayton and Andrew R. Holmes (eds.), Ourselves Alone? Religion, Society, and Politics in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-­ Century Ireland (Dublin, 2016), p. 72. 31 Mark Goldie, ‘The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment’, Journal of British Studies, 30 (1991), pp. 25–6. 32  Val Smith, ‘The Survival of the Catholic Church in the Highlands’, Journal of the Sydney Society for Scottish History, 11 (2007), p. 8. 33  Geddes, ‘A Brief Historical Account of the Seminary of Scalan [1777]’, pp. 100–1. 34 Colin Haydon, ‘Parliament and Popery in England, 1700–1780’, Parliamentary History, 19 (2008), p. 51. 35  Thomas O’Connor, ‘O’Reilly, Michael (c.1690–1758)’, in Dictionary of Irish Biography, https:// www.dib.ie/biography/oreilly-michael-a6997 (accessed 13 February 2023).

18  Carys Brown Clement XIII refused to recognize the legitimacy of James’s son, Charles Edward Stuart. With a secure Protestant succession and a lack of papal backing for the Stuart cause, the risks of State leniency towards Catholics were perceived by some Protestants to be much diminished.36

Catholic Assertions of Loyalty Against the backdrop of concerns about Jacobitism, some Catholics were eager to assert their loyalty towards the Hanoverian monarchy. Scholars have particularly drawn attention to this period as one in which the Irish Catholic elite made efforts to engage with Protestant authorities.37 Between 1745 and 1759 a new generation of Irish Catholic writers and loyalists made unprecedented declarations of their loyalty.38 In particular, leading Irish Catholic activists such as Charles O’Conor and John Curry put together arguments that drew on emerging ideas about pol­it­ ical economy and Enlightenment attitudes to religious difference.39 Their commitment to the cause was demonstrated through the foundation of the Catholic Association (1756), followed by the more permanent Catholic Committee (1760), which sought relief from the penal laws. These organizations were not wholeheartedly supported by the Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy, but they did make an important contribution to politicization among the laity.40 This was further aided by the fact that wealthier Irish Catholics sought increasingly to accommodate themselves to the existing regime and expand their influence in public affairs, including through the establishment of Catholic publications such as the highly successful Corke Journal.41 Set against Enlightenment ideas that ‘accepted the ideal of toleration’, these arguments were more powerful than ever.42 Reassertions of Catholic loyalty were also made in the printed works of English authors during this period. Notably, a number of late-­seventeenth-­century works that had emphasized Catholic loyalty were reprinted after 1745, presumably with the aim of illustrating not just the loyalty of Catholics in the present, but the longevity of their commitment to their native country. The declaration of Catholic doctrine and loyalty first made by the English Benedictine Maurus Corker in his 36 Jacqueline Hill, ‘Religious Toleration and the Relaxation of the Penal Laws: An Imperial Perspective, 1763–1780’, Archivium Hibernicum, 44 (1989), p. 106. 37  Stephen Conway, ‘Christians, Catholics, Protestants: The Religious Links of Britain and Ireland with Continental Europe, c.1689–1800’, English Historical Review, 124 (2009), p. 843. 38  Liam Chambers, ‘Catholic Loyalty and Toleration in Ireland, 1745–1789’, unpublished article. I am grateful to the author for generously sharing this work with me. 39  Chambers, ‘Catholic Loyalty’, p. 8. 40  Thomas Bartlett, Ireland: A History (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 167–8. 41  David Dickson, ‘Jacobitism in Eighteenth-­Century Ireland: A Munster Perspective’, Éire-­Ireland, 39 (2004), pp. 93–4. 42  Juan Pablo Domínguez, ‘Introduction: Religious Toleration in the Age of Enlightenment’, History of European Ideas, 43 (2017), p. 287.

Jacobitism, Loyalty, and the State, 1746–1766  19 1680 treatise Roman Catholick Principles in Reference to God and the King was reprinted in 1748 and in several editions thereafter. This work emphasized that no part of Catholic doctrine demanded the deposition of kings, declaring that ‘it is a fundamental truth in our religion, that no power on earth can license men to lie, to forswear or perjure themselves, to massacre their neighbours, or destroy their native country, on pretence of promoting the Catholic cause’.43 The Pastoral Letter from the Four Catholic Bishops to the Lay-­Catholics of England, first printed in 1688 and reprinted in 1747, called on Catholics to love other Christians and to ‘evidence your Love towards these, by an inoffensiveness in your Behaviour’, even though the religious persuasion of ‘a great Part of the Nation . . . doth differ most from yours’.44 The reprint of the letter, in very different circumstances from its first publication in the aftermath of James II’s Declaration of Indulgence, sim­ul­ tan­eous­ly suggested the peaceable and loving nature of Catholics, and asserted their belonging in the nation. The chances that such declarations of the loyalty would receive a favourable reception were further facilitated by other developments. Britain’s involvement in international trade and warfare increasingly opened up opportunities for Catholics. The Seven Years’ War (1756–63), for instance, put immense pressure on British military resources, facilitating moves towards a more pragmatic approach to Catholic involvement in the fiscal-­ military State. Catholics—­ presumed to be fundamentally untrustworthy—­were officially excluded from military service by the penal laws, forcing them to look elsewhere for military employment.45 In the first years of the war, the British government remained sceptical that Catholics would make loyal troops, and undertook extensive measures to ensure that Irish recruits were indeed Protestant. Writing to William Pitt in August 1758, the duke of Bedford was concerned that Ireland be protected from French troops who might land in the south-­west of Ireland and ‘in those popish and disaffected counties . . . make a place of arms’. He was reluctant to remove infantry from Ireland that might protect the Protestant population, but reported that Lord Forbes had nevertheless raised a regiment of 1,200 men ‘under the strongest restrictions that could possibly be given that none but Protestants should be enlisted’.46

43  James Maurus Corker, Roman Catholic Principles, in Reference to God and the Country (London, 1760), p. 6. 44  A Pastoral Letter from the Four Catholic Bishops to the Lay-­Catholics of England (London, 1747), pp. 3, 5. 45  Colm James Ó Conaill, ‘The Irish Regiments in France: An Overview of the Presence of Irish Soldiers in French Service, 1716–1791’, in Eamon Maher and Grace Neville (eds.), France-­Ireland: Anatomy of a Relationship (Frankfurt am Main, 2004), pp. 334–5; Stephen Conway, ‘War and National Identity in the Mid-­Eighteenth-­Century British Isles’, English Historical Review, 116 (2001), pp. 870–1. 46  Duke of Bedford to William Pitt, 29 August 1758, in Lord John Russell (ed.), Correspondence of John, Fourth Duke of Bedford, 3 vols. (London, 1843), II, pp. 362, 364.

20  Carys Brown However, as the conflict progressed the use of Catholics as recruits in the British military began, out of necessity, to look more attractive.47 In 1762, an anonymous pamphlet entitled The Constitutional Querist, Containing the Sentiments of an Impartial Englishman on the Present Rupture with Spain emphasized the merits of recruiting Catholics into the army, thereby both preventing the employment of Catholics in Scottish and Irish regiments by the French and Spanish, and supplying ‘the want we are in of men’.48 The author suggested raising regiments that consisted ‘of nothing but Papists’, whose loyalty he was confident could be guaranteed by an oath.49 Few Protestants would have shared the author’s ideas, but the possibility of mobilizing Catholics for Britain’s cause was increasingly considered by Britain’s military commanders. In that same year, Dublin and London approved the proposal of Robert Barnewall, twelfth Baron Trimbleston, to raise 3,000 Irish Catholic soldiers to fight in the war. The proposals were eventually quashed by Protestant opposition, but it was evident that those in government were at least in principle willing to accept Irish Catholic loyalty under these circumstances.50 Furthermore, despite the continued hostility of many Protestants to the idea of Catholic troops, regulations were unofficially relaxed as the war went on, and both Irish and Scottish Catholics appear to have fought in the conflict.51 The stereotype of Catholics as untrustworthy and disloyal remained highly resilient throughout this period, but the Seven Years’ War illustrated that, out of necessity, this attitude was in some quarters beginning to soften. The political and military logic of easing penalties against Catholics was further suggested in the terms of the Treaty of Paris that concluded the war in 1763. British victory over France in Canada resulted in the incorporation of c.80,000 new Catholic subjects into the empire.52 The treaty stipulated that His Britannick Majesty, on his side, agrees to grant the liberty of the Catholick religion to the inhabitants of Canada . . . his new Roman Catholic subjects may profess the worship of their religion according to the rites of the Romish church, as far as the laws of Great Britain permit.53

As Jacqueline Hill has pointed out, this did not signify an acceptance of the Catholicism of Canadian subjects: there was a longer term (although ultimately abortive) aim to Anglicize religion there, and Canadian Catholics remained 47  Thomas Bartlett, ‘ “A Weapon of War yet Untried”: Irish Catholics and the Armed Forces of the Crown, 1760–1830’, in T.  G.  Fraser and Keith Jeffery (eds.), Men, Women, and War (Dublin, 1993), p. 67. 48  The Constitutional Querist, p. 25. 49  The Constitutional Querist, p. 26. 50  Chambers, ‘Catholic Loyalty’, pp. 17–18. 51  Conway, ‘War and National Identity’, p. 879. 52  Jessica L. Harland-­Jacobs, ‘Incorporating the King’s New Subjects: Accommodation and Anti-­ Catholicism in the British Empire, 1763–1815’, Journal of Religious History 39 (2015), p. 208. 53  Treaty of Paris, 10 February 1768, Art. IV, in ‘The Avalon Project’ (2008), https://avalon.law.yale. edu/18th_century/paris763.asp (accessed 23 March 2020).

Jacobitism, Loyalty, and the State, 1746–1766  21 excluded from public office.54 However, the toleration of worship for Catholic subjects in Canada was significant, because it created a disparity in State policy towards Catholics across British territories. If Catholics were trustworthy enough to be tolerated in Canada, then it was, as Charles O’Conor argued, difficult to justify the different treatment of Catholics elsewhere, for ‘what have such men done, or what civil guilt can be produced against them, to distinguish their case, from that of their brethren in Canada?’.55 This argument had not produced any concrete benefits for Catholics in Britain and Ireland by 1766, but it certainly ­contributed to the removal of some elements of the penal laws in 1778.

Urbanization, Trade, and Catholicism It was not just external influences that shaped the fortunes of British and Irish Catholicism in this period. Economic and demographic developments were also significant influences on the relative resilience of the faith across Britain and Ireland. In England for much of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Catholicism had been centred on the households of Catholic gentry. However, in the second half of the eighteenth century rapid urbanization facilitated the development of independent town-­based Catholic communities.56 This was particularly the case in the north of England. In Manchester, for instance, the Catholic population grew from approximately seventeen in 1744, to 287 in 1767 (a mixture of English and Irish).57 In Liverpool, too, the number of Catholics had grown significantly by 1767, making it the provincial town with the largest Catholic population.58 Beyond the north-­west, urban Catholic populations were in general becoming better established. Marie Rowlands’s detailed analysis of the 1767 Returns of Papists shows that by this date nearly a third of all English county towns had public Mass houses, and almost a quarter more had resident priests who said Mass in their homes.59 The concentration of Catholics in urban areas had several potential benefits for English Catholicism. First, urban Catholics and the missions that served them were less dependent on the gentry. This was positive, given that the Catholic

54  Hill, ‘Religious Toleration and the Relaxation of the Penal Laws’, pp. 101, 107. 55  Nicholas Lord Viscount Taaffe [Charles O’Conor], Observations on Affairs in Ireland from the Settlement in 1691 to the Present Time (Dublin, 1766), pp. 28–9. 56 Sally Jordan, ‘Paternalism and Roman Catholicism: The English Catholic Elite in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory (eds.), Elite and Popular Religion, SCH 42 (2006), p. 281. 57 Mervyn Busteed, The Irish in Manchester, c.1750–1921: Resistance, Adaptation, and Identity (Manchester, 2016), p. 76. 58  Marie Rowlands, ‘1767—The New People’, in Marie R. Rowlands (ed.), English Catholics of Parish and Town, 1558–1778, CRS Monograph 5 (London, 1999), p. 322. 59  Rowlands, ‘1767—The New People’, p. 307.

22  Carys Brown gentry converted to the Established Church on a large scale in the eighteenth ­century.60 Congregations that were more independent of gentry patronage were less vulnerable, particularly if they had effective pastoral leadership, which was, in some areas, well provided. Richard Challoner, vicar apostolic of the London District, for instance, proved dedicated in his ministry to the urban poor and determined to tackle laxity in the clergy through measures such as weekly clerical conferences. He also took advantage of the thriving print trade, producing numerous pastoral works, including the devotional manual The Garden of the Soul, which became a staple of Catholic households during this period.61 Second, the Catholics that made up congregations in towns with large numbers of working people tended not to rely on land ownership for income. The penal laws had particularly targeted land owners; their impact was felt less keenly by those in towns.62 Lastly, in increasingly p ­ opulous and diverse towns and cities such as London, Catholics were ‘less conspicuous’ than they might have been elsewhere, reducing the likelihood of their harassment by the authorities.63 The demographic shifts in English Catholicism therefore contributed to the security and confidence of Catholics beyond a ‘decaying gentry’; the number of Catholics in England and Wales grew over the second half of the eighteenth century.64 The effects of decay in the Catholic gentry population in Ireland were also more limited than might be expected. There was a significant increase in the conformity of landed Irish Catholics to the Church of Ireland in the 1750s and 1760s. In West Waterford, for instance, there were eight conformities between 1704 and 1744, but seventy between 1745 and 1774.65 This surge may have been associated with electoral interests, and reaction to the Whiteboy disturbances, but conformity could also more broadly reflect concerns about land disputes and family settle­ments.66 Whatever the cause, the conformity of Catholic gentry to State-­ sponsored Protestantism represented a threat to the political power of Catholics, and there was a genuine contemporary belief that conversions of gentry would be followed by those of lower social status.67 However, conformity may not have been as 60  Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott, ‘Introduction: The Catholic Gentry in English Society’, in Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott (eds.), Catholic Gentry in English Society (Farnham, 2009), pp. 18–19. 61  Eamon Duffy, ‘Richard Challoner 1691–1781: A Memoir’, in Eamon Duffy (ed.), Challoner and His Church: A Catholic Bishop in Georgian England (London, 1981), pp. 10–11, 16–17, 25. 62  Rowlands, ‘1767—The New People’, p. 347. 63  John Bergin, ‘Irish Catholics and Their Networks in Eighteenth-­Century London’, Eighteenth-­ Century Life, 39 (2015), p. 84. 64 Leo Gooch, ‘ “Chiefly of Low Rank”: The Catholics of North-­East England, 1705–1814’, in Rowlands (ed.), English Catholics of Parish and Town, p. 256; Clive  D.  Field, ‘Counting Religion in England and Wales: The Long Eighteenth Century, c.1680–c.1840’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 63 (2012), p. 710. 65  Dickson, ‘Jacobitism in Eighteenth-­Century Ireland’, p. 88. 66  Dickson, ‘Jacobitism in Eighteenth-­Century Ireland’, pp. 87, 89. 67  Louis Cullen, ‘Catholics under the Penal Laws’, Eighteenth-­Century Ireland, 1 (1986), p. 25. See also David A. Fleming, ‘Conversion, Family, and Mentality’, in Michael Brown, Charles Iver McGrath, and Thomas P. Power (eds.), Converts and Conversion in Ireland, 1650–1850 (Dublin, 2005), pp. 292, 301–2, 311.

Jacobitism, Loyalty, and the State, 1746–1766  23 damaging to the Catholic cause as contemporaries feared. Converts tended to remain sympathetic to Catholics, and retained family connections to those who continued to adhere to the religion, to the extent that they could in fact be still counted as part of the ‘Catholic interest’.68 The exception to this was in Ulster, where Catholics were generally poor, and were insufficiently supplied with schooling and clergy.69 As a whole, however, the ostensible loss of gentry from the ranks of Catholics did not necessarily lead to a loss of political leverage for Catholics. In Scotland, the social and demographic pattern of Catholicism in this period was substantially different. Highland clearances had displaced many tenant farmers, with some moving to the Lowlands to find work, but there remained a substantial population of poorer Catholics, spread over large areas. The ‘Description of the Missionary Stations in the Vicariate of the Bishop of Diana, Vicar Apostolic in the Highlands of Scotland’, written by Bishop Hugh MacDonald in 1764, illuminates the many difficulties that missionary priests faced in Scotland. He described how the Outer Hebrides, Moidart, Arisaig, and South Morar were all overwhelmingly Catholic, but woefully underserviced by a mission: through all these areas there is no-­one to serve the faithful people except Mr William Harrison . . . he scarcely ever spends two consecutive nights in one place, but must go travelling through those rugged mountains, although he is already worn out with toil and advancing age; for he came to the mission from our college in Rome in 1737.70

The story the bishop told was replicated elsewhere in the Highlands. Missionaries in the Highland District faced an uphill struggle (literally, in many cases) to serve the faithful across vast areas of inhospitable landscape. Nonetheless, the tone of the bishop’s report may be misleading—­it was certainly in his interests to stress the difficulties faced by those under his care. Indeed, it seems that despite these difficulties, Highland Catholicism was doing well. MacDonald recorded 13,166 Catholics in the region, a figure that correlates roughly with estimates made by a Presbyterian organization, the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, between 1759 and 1772, which also estimated a further c.4,000 Catholics in the mountainous areas of the Lowland District.71 The missions did face severe difficulties, and in many ways produced disappointing results from their labours, but it seems that Scottish

68  Cullen, ‘Catholics under the Penal Laws’, p. 29. 69  Cullen, ‘Catholics under the Penal Laws’, p. 34. 70  ‘Description of the Missionary Stations in the Vicariate of the Bishop of Diana, Vicar Apostolic in the Highlands of Scotland [1764]’, in Roderick MacDonald (ed. and trans.), ‘The Highland District in 1764’, Innes Review 15 (1964), pp. 147–8. 71  ‘Description of the Missionary Stations in the Vicariate of the Bishop of Diana’, p. 150; Roderick MacDonald, ‘Catholics in the Highlands in the 1760s’, Innes Review, 16 (1965), p. 219.

24  Carys Brown Catholicism remained resilient, having increased in number across the first half of the eighteenth century, albeit only to a modest 2 per cent of the Scottish population.72 Whereas the resilience of Catholicism in England may have been increasingly aided by urbanization, in Scotland the very remoteness of many Catholic areas secured its survival. In Moidart, for instance, Bishop MacDonald reported that the ‘whole region is Catholic, and no-­one of any sect ever set foot in it until last year’.73 However, this did not mean that Scottish Catholicism existed in a silo. Wealthier Scottish Catholics, including some of those who had been involved in Jacobite intrigue, found ways to maintain both their religion and their estates while engaging with wider British society. The work of Alistair Mutch on the Gordons of Letterfourie, Banffshire, shows the areas in which ‘there were opportunities for Catholics in the construction of the British Empire’.74 While in the case of the Gordons, their Catholicism and former Jacobitism may have pushed them into trade as a necessity for survival, their religion gave them an advantage when trading with Portuguese merchants.75 While involvement in British trading networks did not automatically signal an acceptance of ‘British’ identity, it did suggest a greater orientation towards the commercial opportunities that as­so­ci­ ation with Protestant England offered.76 More generally, after Culloden the British government’s anxiety to gain control of Scottish Jacobite strongholds was manifested in the extension of patronage, including within the East India Company, to former Jacobites to such a degree that ‘Commerce seemed to overcome principles’, and ‘Scots with a Jacobite taint were just as fortunate as their brethren in returning with great wealth’.77 Whether or not this patronage was extended to Catholics, it is suggestive of the fact that trade opportunities were not restricted to loyal supporters of the Whig establishment. Catholic merchants based in Ireland were also taking advantage of rapidly growing overseas trade in this period. The penal laws aimed to keep Catholics out of the legal profession and limit their landownership, but did not prevent engagement in commercial activity.78 Irish Catholic merchants had also been present in

72 Daniel Szechi, ‘Defending the True Faith: Kirk, State, and Catholic Missioners in Scotland, 1653–1755’, Catholic Historical Review, 82 (July 1996), pp. 399, 401. 73  ‘Description of the Missionary Stations in the Vicariate of the Bishop of Diana’, p. 148. 74  Alistair Mutch, ‘Europe, the British Empire and the Madeira Trade: Catholicism, Commerce and the Gordon of Letterfourie Network, c.1730–c.1800’, Northern Scotland, 7 (2016), p. 38. 75  Mutch, ‘Europe, the British Empire and the Madeira Trade’, pp. 37–8. 76 Colin Kidd, ‘North Britishness and the Nature of Eighteenth-­Century British Patriotisms’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), pp. 362–3. 77 George  K.  McGilvary, ‘John Drummond of Quarrel: East India Patronage and Jacobite Assimilation, 1720–80’, in Allan I. Macinnes and Douglas J. Hamilton (eds.), Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, 1680–1820 (Abingdon and New York, 2016), pp. 189–90, 195 (pagination from electronic legal deposit). 78  Thomas Bartlett, ‘The Emergence of the Irish Catholic Nation, 1750–1850’, in Alvin Jackson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History (Oxford, 2014), p. 520.

Jacobitism, Loyalty, and the State, 1746–1766  25 London from the end of the seventeenth century, and Catholic owned merchant houses saw significant success up to the early 1770s.79 As part of a wider merchant community, these wealthy Catholics were integrated with their peers.80 Like their Scottish counterparts, many of them appear to have been highly successful in exploiting commercial opportunities, particularly through connections on the Continent. Britain’s growing trade networks were also used by English Catholics. David Pope’s extensive study of Liverpool’s Catholic merchants and maritime business has shown that there were numerous Catholics involved in the mercantile ac­tiv­ ities of Liverpool in the second half of the eighteenth century, including ten heavily involved in the slave trade.81 The social origins of the Catholic merchants and maritime traders in Liverpool demonstrate an interesting mix—­some were of gentry origin, some from a tenant farming background, some from a direct trade background—­suggesting that trade prospects in Liverpool not only provided opportunities for Catholics who already had a background in trade, but also encouraged Catholics from more rural backgrounds to engage in mercantile and maritime activities.82 This is unsurprising, given that maritime trades were in general growing very rapidly in Liverpool and that ‘the socio-­economic structure of the northern Catholic community was similar to that of the population as a whole’.83 However, the extensive involvement of Catholics in wider British and Irish social and economic developments is important. Approaches to the social and economic history of the eighteenth century until relatively recently gave little attention to Catholics, or indeed religion more broadly.84 Research on Catholic involvement in mercantile networks underlines the contributions of this group to the development of Britain’s economy and empire. Indeed, this was a period in which Catholics were not merely surviving, or holding out hope for the return of a more favourable regime, but rather were exploiting rapidly developing economic opportunities. This was further reflected in the substantial Irish Catholic communities living in Continental Europe. Catholicism might have had economic disadvantages at home, but abroad it could confer significant benefits. The major trading port of Cádiz, for example, housed a substantial number of Irish merchants, encouraged by the advantageous legal

79  Bergin, ‘Irish Catholics and Their Networks’, pp. 77, 84. 80  Bergin, ‘Irish Catholics and Their Networks’, p. 85. 81  David J. Pope, ‘Liverpool’s Catholic Mercantile and Maritime Business in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century’, Recusant History, 27 (2005), pp. 244, 251. 82  Pope, ‘Liverpool’s Catholic Mercantile and Maritime Business’, pp. 397–8. 83  Gooch, ‘ “Chiefly of Low Rank” ’, p. 253. 84  Jeremy Gregory, ‘Introduction: Transforming “the Age of Reason” into “an Age of Faiths”: or, Putting Religions and Beliefs (Back) into the Eighteenth Century’, Journal for Eighteenth-­Century Studies, 32 (2009), pp. 289–90. Greater attention to the role of Catholicism in British history has been partly facilitated by the increasingly outward-­facing work of historians of Catholicism. See John Bossy, ‘Recusant History and After’, British Catholic History, 32 (2015), pp. 271–9.

26  Carys Brown status that Irish Catholics had enjoyed in Spain since 1701, and by 1773 24 per cent of ships arriving at the city were Irish.85 Irish merchants (both Catholic and Protestant) were also numerous in other ports, such as Bordeaux, where a substantial community was matched by no other foreign community except Germans.86 In addition to trade, Catholic Jacobites who fled Britain after the Rebellion of 1745 became involved in Continental industry. Mancunian Catholic and industrialist John Holker, for instance, ended up as inspector general of manufactures in France and, using his knowledge of the British textile industry’s technological in­nov­ ations, significantly improved the productivity of its French counterpart. Holker was clearly remarkable, but he was not the only British Catholic industrialist to succeed in France.87 The Continent provided substantial economic opportunities for Catholics who were no longer welcome in their native land. British and Irish Catholic residency on the Continent was not solely a matter of trade or exile, and this was apparent in the changing nature of education. Whereas, for example, Continental education for English Catholics had previously been focused on fostering religious and devotional life, with a view to defending the faith and maintaining pious separation in England, this was becoming less true in the second half of the eighteenth century. Alexander Lock’s study of the life of Sir Thomas Gascoigne, who was born and brought up on the Continent but nevertheless identified as an English Catholic, highlights how Gascoigne’s education was designed to prepare him for full participation in genteel society: ‘the notion of a religious retreat was no longer part of the plans for a recusant’s life’.88 In fact, the education of British and Irish Catholics on the Continent was in numerous instances crucial in exposing Catholics to Enlightenment ideas that allowed them a more liberal approach to their faith.89 Catholicism in this period should be understood as ambitious and, in many ways, optimistic.

Continuing Disability and Discrimination This optimistic picture does, however, require qualification. Although Jacobitism had waned, allowing Catholic protestations of loyalty to fall on more sympathetic

85  Maria del Carmen Lario, ‘The Irish Traders of Eighteenth-­Century Cádiz’, in David Dickson, Jan Parmentier, and Jane Ohmeyer (eds.), Irish and Scottish Mercantile Networks in Europe and Overseas in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Ghent, 2006), pp. 215, 221, 224. 86  L. M. Cullen, John Shovlin, and Thomas M. Truxes (eds.), The Bordeaux-­Dublin Letters, 1757: Correspondence of an Irish Community Abroad (Oxford, 2013), p. 32. 87  Patrick Clarke de Dromantin, ‘The Influence of the Jacobites on the Economic Development of France in the Era of the Enlightenment’, in Paul Monod, Murray Pittock, and Daniel Szechi (eds.), Loyalty and Identity: Jacobites at Home and Abroad (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 235–7. 88  Alexander Lock, Catholicism, Identity and Politics in the Age of Enlightenment: The Life and Career of Sir Thomas Gascoigne, 1745–1810 (Woodbridge, 2016), pp. 33–4. 89 Lock, Catholicism, Identity and Politics, pp. 3, 5.

Jacobitism, Loyalty, and the State, 1746–1766  27 ears, and the position and security of Catholics did seem to be improving, those living through the 1750s and 1760s did not have the benefit of hindsight. Stereotypes of Catholics were deeply enmeshed in contemporary discourse, and it  would have been far from obvious that a degree of relief for Catholics was soon to come. In some areas Catholic missions had insufficient resources to provide pastoral care, or were faced with a hostile environment that made their task extremely difficult. We have already observed that this was the case in some of the remoter parts of the Scottish Highlands, but it was also a problem in England and Wales. While new missions saw considerable success in English towns, and many rural missions were maintained, by 1767 missions in the Welsh Marches and southern England were in decline.90 Even in some rural areas where a mission was maintained, Catholicism struggled to thrive for other reasons, including in some cases a literal dying out of the faith. In Cumberland, for instance, many of the leading Catholic gentry families found themselves without male heirs, at which point their estates passed into Protestant hands.91 Where new Protestant landlords were particularly hostile—­as in Egton, North Riding, in the 1750s—­both Catholic tenants and local priests faced considerable challenges to maintaining the faith.92 While on the one hand the existence of a Catholic landlord could encourage the conversion of tenants to Catholicism, on the other, the lapse of gentry support could also cause problems for the survival of Catholic communities. Irish Catholicism faced different problems. In a country that was between 70 and 80 per cent Catholic, the Catholic Church in Ireland was thriving despite the penal laws.93 However, while a number of prominent figures may have been very willing to assert their loyalty, the majority of Ireland’s Catholics were poorer tenant farmers and labourers who were far more reluctant to do so.94 This allowed many Protestants who were all too conscious of their minority status in Ireland, and who opposed any form of relief for Catholics, to retain the view that the majority of Irish Catholics were liable to rebel if not kept under tight control.95 This was seen particularly during the Whiteboy disturbances in Munster, which broke out in the early 1760s, peaking (in the first instance) in March 1762. While the Whiteboys—­so called because of their white smocks—­were largely Catholic, and indeed included some Catholic priests, the targets of their violent protests were the lands and property of those who sought to enclose commonage or

90  Rowlands, ‘1767—The New People’, p. 301. 91  J. A. Hilton, ‘The Cumbrian Catholics’, Northern History, 16 (1980), p. 55. 92 W.  J.  Sheils, ‘Catholics and Their Neighbours in a Rural Community: Egton Chapelry, 1590–1780’, Northern History, 34 (1998), p. 125. 93  Bartlett, ‘The Emergence of the Irish Catholic Nation’, pp. 521–2. 94  Conway, ‘War and National Identity’, p. 870. 95  Thomas Bartlett, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690–1830 (Dublin, 1992), p. 88.

28  Carys Brown impose rack-­rents and tithes.96 The immediate aims of this protest were economic. However, contemporary reactions to the disturbances showed that the actions of the Whiteboys were read through the lens of religious difference. Catholic activists such as John Curry railed against ‘the present humour of giving the formidable name of a popish rebellion to these disturbances’, and emphasized the  economic motivations for the riots.97 Another author sympathetic to the Catholic cause similarly stated that ‘the cause that has been in general assigned’ for the disturbances ‘is a general spirit of discontent and rebellion in the Papists of that island’.98 It suited these authors to highlight prejudice against Catholics, but their comments did have some basis. The association of the disturbances with Catholic rebelliousness saw magistrates in Cork city searching the houses of leading Catholics for firearms in April 1762, as well as arresting a large number of Catholics from across Munster.99 The continuing resonance of such views, both among Irish Protestants and in Britain, and the continued poverty of large parts of the Catholic population of Ireland, meant that the prospects of most of Ireland’s Catholics did not look particularly hopeful in the 1760s. This was perhaps most infamously demonstrated by the execution of Fr Nicholas Sheehy in 1766 on the grounds of his supposed involvement in the murder of John Bridge, a government informer. Sheehy’s arrest, trial, and execution followed clashes with prom­in­ ent local Protestants over his support of those involved in the Whiteboy disturbances, and was widely considered (at least among Catholics) to be on the basis of fabricated evidence.100 Where the dynamics of local power were against them, Catholics remained vulnerable. More generally, as Colin Haydon discusses in detail in Chapter 8 of this volume, anti-­Catholicism remained widespread among most of the Protestant populations of Britain and Ireland. The apparent increasing sympathy among prominent Protestants for the cause of Catholic relief can be misleading—­in the period after 1745 there was ‘a widening divide between increasingly enlightened patricians and intolerant opinion “out of doors” ’.101 Although in general the penal laws were enforced more lightly as this period went on, in their daily lives Catholics remained vulnerable to verbal and physical attacks. This has been illustrated by studies of local coexistence which, while emphasizing peaceful relations

96 James  S.  Donnelly, ‘The Whiteboy Movement, 1761–5’, Irish Historical Studies, 21 (1978), pp. 20–1. 97  A Candid Enquiry into the Causes and Motives of the Late Riots in the Province of Munster; Together with a Brief Narrative of the Proceedings Against these Rioters, 2nd edn (London, 1766), pp. 5–6. 98  The Late Tumults in Ireland Considered, p. 34. 99  Dickson, ‘Jacobitism in Eighteenth-­Century Ireland’, p. 97. 100  Thomas Power, ‘Father Nicholas Sheehy (c.1728–1766)’, in Gerard Moran (ed.) Radical Irish Priests, 1660–1970 (Dublin, 1998), pp. 67–75. 101 Colin Haydon, Anti-­Catholicism in Eighteenth-­Century England, c.1714–80: A Political and Social Study (Manchester, 1993), p. 187.

Jacobitism, Loyalty, and the State, 1746–1766  29 between Catholic and Protestant on an everyday basis, demonstrate that latent anti-­Catholicism could be quick to surface. In Bristol, for example, Madge Dresser has found that anti-­Catholic sentiment continued to inform local attitudes after 1745, with only the social elite willing to turn a blind eye to Catholicism, and then only if it was non-­proselytizing.102 The idea that Catholics were dangerous and socially threatening evidently still had a degree of resonance in daily life.

Conclusion In 1766, James III died in Rome, leaving behind a son who lacked papal support. Jacobitism had ceased to be a serious threat, and Catholicism was no longer un­equivo­cal­ly associated with loyalty to the Stuart monarchy. In the two decades since the end of the 1745–6 Rising, there had been considerable signs that the relationship between Catholics and the British State was improving. Catholic reassurances of their loyalty, the dynamics of overseas conflict, urbanization, and the involvement of Catholics in Britain’s expanding trade networks all contributed to gradually changing views about the place of Catholics. Ultimately, these shifting perceptions and the pressure of expediency led to the first major re­lax­ ation of the penal laws in England and Wales, as well as in Ireland, in 1778. Nevertheless, this was still a long way off in 1766. Even moderate moves for Catholic relief failed to gain parliamentary support in Britain or Ireland in this period, and Catholics faced substantial challenges, including persistent anti-­ Catholicism, economic disability, a declining gentry, and, in places, an insufficient missionary presence. In hindsight we can see that the State was beginning to consider the advantages of a degree of Catholic relief, but it would be some time before the wider Protestant populations of Britain and Ireland would do so.

Select Bibliography Bartlett, Thomas, ‘The Emergence of the Irish Catholic Nation, 1750–1850’, in Alvin Jackson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History (Oxford, 2014), pp. 517–43. Bergin, John, ‘Irish Catholics and Their Networks in Eighteenth-Century London’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 39 (2015), pp. 66–102. Conway, Stephen, ‘Christians, Catholics, Protestants: The Religious Links of Britain and Ireland with Continental Europe, c.1689–1800’, English Historical Review, 124 (2009), pp. 833–62. 102  Madge Dresser, ‘Protestants, Catholics and Jews: Religious Difference and Political Status in Bristol, 1750–1850’, in Madge Dresser and Philip Ollerenshaw (eds.), The Making of Modern Bristol (Tiverton, 1996), p. 102.

30  Carys Brown Haydon, Colin, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c.1714–80: A Political and Social Study (Manchester, 1993). Hill, Jacqueline, ‘Religious Toleration and the Relaxation of the Penal Laws: An Imperial Perspective, 1763–1780’, Archivium Hibernicum, 44 (1989), pp. 98–109. Lock, Alexander, Catholicism, Identity and Politics in the Age of Enlightenment: The Life and Career of Sir Thomas Gascoigne, 1745–1810 (Woodbridge, 2016). Mutch, Alistair, ‘Europe, the British Empire and the Madeira Trade: Catholicism, Commerce and the Gordon of Letterfourie Network, c.1730–c.1800’, Northern Scotland, 7 (2016), pp. 21–42. Rowlands, Marie  R., ‘1767—The New People’ in Marie  R.  Rowlands (ed.), English Catholics of Parish and Town, 1558–1778, CRS Monograph 5 (London, 1999), pp. 286–356. Scott, Geoffrey, ‘The Throckmortons at Home and Abroad, 1680–1800’, in Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott (eds.), Catholic Gentry in English Society (Farnham, 2009), pp. 171–211. Zimmerman, Doron, The Jacobite Movement in Scotland and in Exile, 1746–1759 (Basingstoke, 2003).

2

Breakthrough The First Phase of Catholic Relief in Britain and Ireland, 1766–1789 James Kelly

James Francis Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender, died in the Palazzo Muti, Rome, on 1 January 1766. Saliently, news of his passing excited surprisingly little comment in Britain or Ireland, for though reports of the ‘great funeral pomp’ with which James III was laid to rest in Rome in mid-­January hinted at the significance of the moment, Jacobitism was no longer presented as a major threat to the prevailing Protestant political order.1 This perception was reinforced by an awareness that his son and heir, Charles Edward, was persona non grata with the papacy because he had, the public was reminded, ‘renounced the principles of the Church of Rome, and actually become a heretic’.2 It set the stage for the announcement, carried in the Scots Magazine in March, that Pope Clement XIII had ‘refused to grant the young Chevalier the honours [of royal recognition] which his father lately enjoyed’.3 The fact that it was followed in April by news that ‘the Courts of Versailles and Madrid’ had done likewise, dealt Jacobite aspirations a further blow.4 By contrast, it opened up the possibility, earnestly wished for by an expanding cohort of well-­placed Catholics in Britain and Ireland who were willing to affirm loyalty to the Protestant House of Hanover, that the complex corpus of anti-­Catholic regulation (the penal laws) that lay on the statute books of both kingdoms could now safely be repealed. The issue was how this was to be achieved as, having been deprived for so long of the means and opportunity of ­representing  their position, Catholics in both kingdoms were almost wholly dependent on the goodwill of those in power. Encouragingly, there were signs that some persons of influence were well disposed to reach out; the problem was that mainstream Protestantism took the opposite position, and could see no merit in removing the existing legal restraints.

1  Stamford Mercury, 6 February 1766; Oxford Journal, 8 February 1766. 2  Derby Mercury, 28 February 1766. 3  Scot’s Magazine, 28 (February 1766), p. 101 (citing a report from London dated 27 February 1766). 4  Dublin Courier, 4 April 1766; Derby Mercury, 4 April 1766.

James Kelly, Breakthrough: The First Phase of Catholic Relief in Britain and Ireland, 1766–1789 In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829. Edited by: Liam Chambers, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843443.003.0003

32  James Kelly

Frustration and Progress, 1766–1774 There is a longstanding historiographical view that Pope Clement XIII’s refusal in 1766 to extend papal recognition of the Stuarts’ claim to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland was a precondition for the embarkation in both kingdoms in the 1770s on the repeal of the penal laws. This interpretation is supported by the fact that the sundering of the longstanding Jacobite-­Catholic nexus, which provided the advocates of legally restricting Catholics with a justification for the penal code, undermined, if it did not invalidate, one of the key reasons invoked in their favour. However, though it was understood at the time that Pope Clement was guided in his decision by the realization that he had ‘too many measures to keep with England, on account of the Roman Catholics in the British territories in Europe and America, to acknowledge him [Charles Edward] as King of Great Britain’, the limited public consideration of its implications for Catholics in Britain and Ireland suggests it was a less crucial matter than traditionally supposed.5 A comparable caveat can be entered with respect to the argument that Catholic relief was a logical outcome of the gradual amelioration in religious antipathy that is attributed to the impact of the principles of toleration that are identified with the Enlightenment.6 The problem, Thomas Bartlett has pointed out, with respect to these and other explanations that ‘have merit’ is that they do not provide an ‘overarching explanation for the emergence of the Catholic question’ in the 1760s. The factor that Bartlett points to in his search for an ‘explanation’ is ‘military necessity’, specifically ‘the manpower requirements of the British army’, which was highlighted in British military and strategic thinking during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63).7 This was a vital matter, obviously, for those at the political helm for whom the challenge of maintaining the expanded empire was a priority. But it is important that it too is contextualized, and that due consideration is accorded the fact that, compelling as it was to some to admit Catholics to the army, ministers were hesitant. Indicatively, they backed down in the face of strong resistance in 1762 to an attempt to recruit Irish Catholics for service abroad.8 Moreover, the concerns that informed this response were not easily overcome, which cautions against prioritizing military need or, indeed, any single factor when it comes to offering an ‘explanation’ for the repeal of the penal laws.

5  Caledonian Mercury, 22 February 1766; Oxford Journal, 22 February 1766. 6  See, for example, J.  C.  H.  Aveling, The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation (London, 1976). 7  Thomas Bartlett, ‘ “A Weapon of War Yet Untried”: Irish Catholics and the Armed Forces of the Crown, 1760–1830’, in T. G. Fraser and Keith Jeffery (eds.), Men, Women and War: Historical Studies XVIII (Dublin, 1993), pp. 66–7. 8 Stephen Conway, ‘War, Imperial Expansion and Religious Developments in Mid-­Eighteenth-­ Century Britain and Ireland’, War in History, 11 (2005), p. 134.

Catholic Relief in Britain and Ireland, 1766–1789  33 There is little to suggest certainly that the readiness of some Catholics to ­ rofess allegiance to the Protestant succession registered sufficiently with what p Bishop Richard Challoner, vicar apostolic of the London District and the effective leader of the Catholic Church in England, termed ‘the general prejudice of the [Protestant] people’ to anticipate reciprocation in the form of Catholic relief.9 The frustrations to which this gave rise were more visible in Ireland, where the select body of lay Catholics willing to arrive at an accommodation with the State had formed a Catholic Committee in keeping with Charles O’Conor’s contention that because the ‘causes’ of ‘disturbances’ were ‘no more’, there was no reason for the maintenance of the penal laws.10 Differences within Catholic ranks, between those (clergy in the main) for whom doctrinal fealty to the papacy took precedence over civil and political rights and those (laity in the main) for whom relief from the penal laws was the priority, diminished their effectiveness as an emer­ ging political lobby, but it did not prevent them from making their intentions known. Indeed, the fact that 600 Catholics tendered ‘unfeigned loyalty’ to the recently crowned George III in 1761 and made it known that it was their wish to contribute to ‘the general welfare and prosperity’ of the kingdom of Ireland seemed as if it might produce an early dividend. Indeed, an attempt was made, beginning in the early 1760s, to identify a number of economic issues—­the provision of legal protection to Catholics who lent money on mortgage, most not­ably—­on which concessions might be forthcoming, but the efforts that were made to progress these foundered on the rocks of Protestant intransigence.11 Indeed, the Catholic Committee was obliged to assume a defensive posture in  the mid-­1760s to resist the repeated efforts of Protestant corporations to secure statutory recognition of the customary levy (quarterage) required of Catholics who wished to trade within their jurisdictions. The best it seemed that Irish Catholics could hope for in the 1760s was to frustrate the true believers whose commitment to ‘preventing the further growth of popery’ remained undiluted.12 This is not to suggest that there were no voices raised in the public sphere which maintained that Catholics deserved better. It is not difficult to locate such interventions, but they have been accorded disproportionate attention by a 9  Quoted in Michael Tomko, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778–1829 (Basingstoke, 2010), p 17. 10 [Charles O’Conor], The Case of the Roman Catholicks of Ireland wherein the Principles and Conduct of that Party are fully explored and vindicated (Dublin, 1755; 5th edn, Dublin 1766); Eric Selzer, ‘The Triumph of the Catholic Committee: The Irish Catholic Campaign, 1790–1793’ (PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2007), pp. 26–7, 29–30. 11  ‘Address of the Roman Catholics of the Kingdom of Ireland’, Scots Magazine, 23 (April 1761), pp. 179–80; James Kelly, ‘Repealing the Penal Laws, 1760–95’, in Kevin Costello and Niamh Howlin (eds.), Law and Religion in Ireland, 1700–1900 (Cham, 2021), pp. 85–8. 12  Maureen Wall, ‘The Catholics of the Towns and the Quarterage Dispute in Eighteenth-­Century Ireland’, in Catholic Ireland in the Eighteenth Century: Collected Essays of Maureen Wall, ed. Gerard O’Brien (Dublin, 1989), pp. 61–72.

34  James Kelly historiography that has been more receptive to reformist sentiment than the ­contrary opinions of the more numerous supporters of the status quo. Attention in Ireland has focused on the import of the publication in Cork in 1766 of new editions of John Temple’s history of the 1641 rebellion, and in 1768 of William King’s The State of the Protestants, which offered a comparable account of events in 1688–91, but readers in both kingdoms could choose from a rich diet of illustrations—­past and present—­of ‘the persecuting spirit’ of Catholicism.13 Thus the publication by the Dublin bookseller John Potts in 1763 of an updated version of John Lockman’s A History of the Cruel Sufferings of the Protestants included an account of the cause célèbre of the day—­the trial and brutal execution in 1762 of Jean Calas at Toulouse.14 Complemented by newspaper reports of the same event, accounts of the targeting of Protestants in Poland and Spain, and of an egregious auto-­da-­fé in Portugal in 1765, the order of the perceived Catholic threat was reinforced by the appearance in London in 1766 of the first printing of Matthew Taylor’s England’s Blood Tribunal, which presented ‘a compleat account’ of the lives of ‘English Protestant martyrs’, augmented by ‘a faithful narrative of the many horrid cruelties practised by the Inquisition’.15 More immediately, the perception in both kingdoms that the Whiteboys, a body of agrarian protesters then active in Munster, ‘acted from an unconquerable hatred to a Protestant government and religion’ supported the conclusion ‘that a rebellion, and a massacre of the Protestants, was to have been the conclusion of those nightly meetings and revellings’.16 These were troubling inferences for Catholic moderates, but they were still less indicative of the size of the barrier in the way of Catholic relief than the manifestations of anti-­Catholic sentiment in London in the late 1760s, which negated the impact of the decision of the English Catholic clergy in 1766 to pray at Mass for George III.17 As the place of residence of c.10 per cent of Britain’s Catholic community of c.100,000 (68,000 of whom were located in England and Wales and, perhaps, 30,000 in Scotland), London’s Catholics enjoyed a higher visibility than their ­co-­religionists elsewhere on the island outside of the Church of England diocese of Chester.18 This was helpful during the 1750s and early 1760s when, 13  John Temple, The History of the General Rebellion in Ireland, raised upon the three and twentieth day of October 1641 (Cork, 1766); William King, The State of the Protestants of Ireland under the late King James’s Government (Cork, 1768); Aberdeen Press, 25 August 1760. 14 John Lockman, A History of the Cruel Sufferings of the Protestants, and others, by Popish Persecutions in Various Countries (Dublin, 1763). 15  Dublin Courier, 18 April 1764; Caledonian Mercury, 22 April 1765, 6 September 1766, 17 November 1766; Scot’s Magazine, 28 (February 1766), p. 60; Leeds’ Intelligencer, 22 September 1767, 30 June 1772; Freeman’s Journal, 21 April 1767; Matthew Taylor, England’s Bloody Tribunal, or Popish Cruelty Displayed (London, 1769). 16  Leeds’ Intelligencer, 29 April 1766; Derby Mercury, 11 April 1766. 17 Aveling, The Handle and the Axe, p. 254. 18  E. S. Worrall (ed.), Return of Papists, 1767, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1980–9), II, pp. viii–­ix; Joanna Innes, ‘The Protestant Carpenter: William Payne of Bellyard (c.1718–82): The Life and Times of a London

Catholic Relief in Britain and Ireland, 1766–1789  35 Stephen  Conway observes, the ‘fevered anti-­popery rhetoric’ of the 1740s ‘had become more muted’.19 But it was disadvantageous during the late 1760s when popular anti-­Catholic fears were agitated by ‘the open saying of the Mass’, and the city’s ‘civil and religious authorities’ sought, beginning in November 1765, to prosecute priests ministering illegally.20 Since the law (11 William III, c. 4) provided for the life imprisonment of priests who were found guilty of this offence, the city authorities’ actions proved seriously disruptive; priests ‘absconded’ and churches were ‘shut up’.21 It might have been worse as ‘at least thirty’ indictments for ‘attending’ and ‘celebrating mass contrary to law’ were entered against priests, but only one, John Baptist Maloney, who was ‘taken up’ in March 1767, was sentenced to ‘perpetual imprisonment’ for ‘unlawfully and voluntarily exercising the office and function of a Popish priest’.22 Since this was so manifestly contrary to the expectations of those lawyers and politicians, who were ‘perfectly persuaded of the impolicy and inhumanity of the law’, and who contrived successfully to ensure the majority of those who were prosecuted were subject to the lesser ­sanction, which was ‘to enter into recognizances not to exercise . . . their functions’, there were urgent calls for Maloney’s release. The fact that four years elapsed before this took place, and that his release was conditional on his ‘leaving England’, was perceived by a minority within the English Catholic community as an indictment of Richard Challoner’s ‘timorous’ approach, whereas a fairer interpretation might be that it accurately mirrored their continuing vulnerability so long as the penal laws remained, unaltered, on the statute book.23 Though it was not on the scale of what transpired in London, the decision of several hundred Catholic Hebrideans on South Uist to emigrate to North America to escape an attempt in 1770 to bring about their forcible conversion illustrated that the antipathy to Catholicism that informed such activity was not an exclusively metropolitan phenomenon.24 There was nothing equivalent to either episode in Ireland, but an attempt by the Protestant authorities of Clonmel in 1765 to ‘summon’ the ‘principal papists’ of the town ‘to swear the oath of abjuration’, and when they refused ‘they were fined, according to law, 40s. a man’ manifested

Informing Constable’, in Joanna Innes, Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Oxford, 2009), p. 321; Clotilde Prunier, ‘Anti-­Popery in Eighteenth-­ Century Scotland: A Scottish Catholic Perspective’, in Claire Gheeraert-­Graffeville and Geraldine Vaughan (eds.), Anti-­Catholicism in Britain and Ireland, 1600–2000 (Basingstoke, 2020), p. 38. 19  Conway, ‘War, Imperial Expansion and Religious Developments’, p. 128. 20  Innes, ‘The Protestant Carpenter’, p. 327; Ipswich Journal, 30 November 1765. 21  Bath Chronicle, 28 November 1765; Oxford Journal, 28 December 1765. 22  Innes, ‘The Protestant Carpenter’, pp. 326–32; Dublin Courier, 5 March 1766; Chester Courant, 24 March 1767; Bath Chronicle, 27 August 1767. 23  Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England, 36 vols. (London, 1812–20), XIX, col. 1145; Northampton Mercury, 15 January 1770. Maloney was eventually awarded a ‘free pardon’ in 1773: Bath Chronicle, 18 March 1733; Frans Blom, Jos Blom, Frans Korsten, and Geoffrey Scott (eds.), The Correspondence of James Peter Coghlan (1731–1800), CRS 80 (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 25. 24  Prunier, ‘Anti-­Popery in Eighteenth-­Century Scotland’, p. 48.

36  James Kelly that, for all their organizational precocity, Irish Catholics too were not permitted to live their lives free from sanction.25 This was underlined by the pro­secu­tions that continued to be entered against ‘unlicensed and unregistered’ priests and lay Catholics who were identified ‘carrying arms’ without a licence.26 While it is apparent from these incidents that local officials continued during the 1760s and early 1770s to invoke the penal laws against Catholics on occasion, the declining frequency with which this occurred echoed the views of politicians for whom ‘the cruelty of our laws against Papists’ was not only personally embarrassing but was also not in the national interest.27 This sentiment was felt most keenly in political and military realms where the merits of empowering Catholics to participate in the governance of the expanded empire was reinforced by the desirability of authorizing their recruitment into the military. Ministers were understandably reluctant to take the initiative for fear of exacerbating their already strained relationship with the public, but they provided a visible pointer of the direction in which they aspired to travel in September 1768 when an order in council was issued allocating a proportion of seats on the island of Grenada’s assembly and council to Catholics who swore an Oath of Allegiance.28 A further significant decision was made in 1771 when they authorized the recruitment of Irish Catholics into the army. Prompted by the wish, articulated by the secretary of state, Lord Rochford, ‘that means were found to make the Roman Catholics of Ireland of use to the King’s service on urgent occasions’, orders were issued ‘to  beat up in the three provinces of Leinster, Munster and Connaught’ in the certain knowledge that a majority of those who enlisted would be Catholic.29 Followed soon after by the authorization of the recruitment of 800 Catholics for the East India service, it is apparent that what Joanna Innes terms ‘the contingent balance’ of ‘elite opinion’ on the subject of accommodating Catholics was prepared, no longer, to defer to mainstream Protestantism which remained fixed in its perception of Catholicism as a tyrannical and ‘persecuting religion’.30 This was a product not of a single ‘overarching’ cause, but the consequence of the convergence of the winds of toleration wafting from the Enlightenment, the eclipse of militant Jacobitism, the impact of Catholic 25  Ipswich Journal, 2 March 1765. 26  Limerick Chronicle, 1 July 1771; Freeman’s Journal, 3 March 1774; Finn’s Leinster Journal, 29 August 1767, 30 August 1775, 7 August 1776; Pue’s Occurrences, 3 September 1768; Tuckey’s Cork Remembrancer (Cork, 1837), p. 167. 27  Colin Haydon, Anti-­Catholicism in Eighteenth-­Century England (Manchester, 1993), pp. 162–72. 28 P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires, Britain, India and America, c.1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 61–2, 160–1, 185–7, 188, 205–6; Newcastle Courant, 3, 10 June 1769; Haydon, Anti-­Catholicism, pp. 192–3. 29  Smith to Townshend, [1 December 1770], Yale University, Beinecke Library, Osborn Collection, Smith letters, c. 41, no. 62; Rochford to Townshend, 11 January 1771, National Archives of Ireland, Irish Correspondence, MS 2447 fol. 252. 30 Smith to Townshend, 5 March 1771, Yale University, Beinecke Library, Osborn Collection, Smith letters, c. 41, no. 45; Innes, ‘The Protestant Carpenter’, pp. 326, 341.

Catholic Relief in Britain and Ireland, 1766–1789  37 ­ rofessions of loyalty, and the demands of running a far-­flung empire. It was p the  latter, P.  J.  Marshall has pointed out, that obliged ministers ‘to consider ­religion . . . from a “political” point of view’, which in practice meant ‘tolerating the religious life of Catholics’.31 Having arrived at and acted on this realization in 1768 and again in 1771, other initiatives advantageous to Catholics followed in quick succession. In 1772 the Irish parliament acceded to the first legislative qualification of the Irish penal laws by ratifying a measure permitting Catholics to lease poor quality land (boglands specifically) for terms longer than previously provided for.32 This was as modest a concession to Irish Catholics as it was possible to make, but a precedent had been set and two years later, in 1774, the Irish legislature took the bolder step of approving an Oath of Allegiance empowering Catholics to profess their loyalty to the State.33 Though the Catholic Committee was little involved in the discussions that brought it over the line, the ratification of the measure was a vindication of the strategy they had promoted since their foundation, and Catholics were emboldened by the achievement to call explicitly on those in power to use their ‘influence in causing the . . . Penal Laws to be repealed’.34 If, as this suggests, some were hopeful that substantive relief would soon follow, others were less confident. They had cause, for though Catholics could and did take heart from the decision (also in 1774) of the Westminster parliament to permit Catholics in Quebec to participate in the government of the province and to ‘enjoy the free exercise’ of their religion, the fact that it was deemed ‘entirely subversive of the fundamental principles of the constitution’ by Protestants fearful of Catholics did not augur well for future concession.35 It is unlikely, therefore, that further reliefs would have been granted by both parliaments within four years had the American War of Independence not transformed the political context.

Years of Progress, 1775–1782 The outbreak of war in North America in 1775 opened up opportunities, ­previously denied to them, to the Catholic leadership in Britain and Ireland to press their case for relief. They did not have direct access to the corridors of power but their endorsement of the government’s war efforts contrasted sharply with that of the nexus of patriots and political radicals which was encouraged by its antipathy to the tone and direction of government to ‘make the cause of America their 31 Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires, pp. 170–2. 32  11 and 12 Geo. III, c. 21. 33  13 and 14 Geo. III, c. 35. 34 Selzer, ‘The Triumph of the Catholic Committee’, pp. 33–6; Address of Roman Catholics of Dublin to Lord Townshend, 10 November 1772: Freeman’s Journal, 12 November 1772. 35  P. J. Marshall, ‘British North America 1760–1815’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), pp. 378–80; Kentish Gazette, 25 June 1774.

38  James Kelly own’.36 This was not without potentially negative implications, of course. Charles Young, who was an informed observer of affairs, remarked from Dublin in July 1775 that the stance risked ‘drag[ging] down the ill will, hate and malice of every  Presbyterian under the crown on the Catholic community’.37 Since the Irish  Catholic Committee all but ceased to function between 1775 and 1778 because of differences within Catholic ranks over the Oath of Allegiance, Young’s caution seemed justified, but he misjudged the mood, in Ireland at least, in one important respect.38 He underestimated the positive impact on Protestant opinion of loyal addresses from Catholics, and the cumulative register of the reports of Catholics subscribing to the Oath of Allegiance. It would be misleading to suggest that this had an ameliorating impact on those for whom opposition to Catholic relief was an idée fixe, but the visible increase in the volume of published commentary challenging the longstanding portrayal of Catholics as disloyal was indicative of a palpable shift in attitude that may, to extend Innes’ analysis to Ireland, have tipped the ‘contingent balance’ of opinion on the question of Catholic relief by, for example, increasing the number of MPs returned in the 1776 election that were disposed to favour concession.39 Given its weak record in this respect, it is unlikely that the diminution in religious ‘prejudice’ that Catholics in Ireland observed in the late 1770s would, on its own, have induced the Irish parliament to approve a major measure of Catholic relief. Expectations were encouraged by the positive response in official circles to the responsiveness of Catholics to the army’s efforts to secure recruits, for while the mere mention in 1775 of a ‘plan of raising a few popish regiments’ was condemned by those who remained fixedly of the view that ‘our liberty and prosperity . . . can only be had . . . under the protection of a real Protestant army’, the fact that recruitment proceeded successfully registered strongly in Catholic favour.40 This did not result in the reduction in volume of anti-­Catholic commentary, but there were contrary voices, notably that of Arthur O’Leary, a Capuchin priest, whose accessible and reasoned advocacy of religious toleration struck a chord with Protestants as well as Catholics.41 It would be an exaggeration to suggest that O’Leary’s letters to Calvinus, published in late 1777, were the difference between success and failure in 1778, but they helped set a positive tone.42 They also dovetailed 36 Haydon, Anti-­Catholicism, pp. 192–6; Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires, pp. 333–4. 37  Charles Young to John Young, 1 July 1775, in David Bracken (ed.), ‘Catalogue of the Papers of Dr Denis Conway (1722–96) in Limerick Diocesan Archives’, Archivium Hibernicum, 69 (2016), p. 296. 38  Eamon O’Flaherty, ‘Ecclesiastical Politics and the Dismantling of the Penal Laws in Ireland, 1774–1782’, Irish Historical Studies 26 (1988–9), pp. 33–50. 39  Freeman’s Journal, 19 October 1775; Kelly, ‘Repealing the Penal Laws’, p. 93. 40 Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires, pp. 339–41; Freeman’s Journal, 19 January, 2 September 1775, 5 August, 29 December 1777; Finn’s Leinster Journal, 13 January 1776. 41  James Kelly, ‘ “A Wild Capuchin of Cork”: Arthur O’Leary (1729–1802)’, in Gerard Moran (ed.), Radical Irish Priests (Dublin, 1998), pp. 39–61. 42  Freeman’s Journal, 30 October, 8, 10 November 1777.

Catholic Relief in Britain and Ireland, 1766–1789  39 with efforts that were being made, behind the scenes, to encourage parliament ‘to take the whole Penal Laws into consideration’.43 Had Luke Gardiner MP, who was to play a crucial part as the parliamentary champion of Catholic relief, had his way, it is likely that he would have presented a bill that repealed or otherwise nullified a large part of the corpus of the Irish penal laws. But developments in London were to have a crucial impact on the way he was to proceed, and, by implication, on the manner in which the repeal of the penal laws was to evolve. By comparison with Ireland, the issue of Catholic relief had a lower profile in England in the mid-­1770s. This can be attributed, in part at least, to the absence of an English equivalent of the (Irish) Catholic Committee, though the inactivity of the latter through the mid-­1770s justifies the conclusion of Jacqueline Hill and Robert Donovan that the British government was crucial to its advancement.44 It is clear also that the Scottish politician John Dalrymple encouraged office-­holders such as the earl of Rochford, who were already persuaded of its merits, ‘to procure a repeal of the penal laws against Roman Catholics’ because of the military dividend he anticipated must accrue.45 It is not apparent, if it was left to ministers alone, that legislation would have resulted, but the instruction to the lord lieutenant of Ireland late in 1777 ‘to consider a measure to satisfy Irish Catholics’ demonstrated that they were well disposed.46 It was certainly sufficient to convince Sir George Saville, who had been an active critic of the Quebec Act, to introduce a bill at Westminster that, consistent with the reservations he harboured on the subject, was specific in its focus. The key provision, following the precedent set in Ireland in 1774, was the authorization of an Oath of Allegiance for Catholics, for though the bill also included clauses repealing the controversial provisions of 11 William 3 c. 4, which authorized the prosecution of priests for saying Mass and keeping school, English Catholics could only avail themselves of the rights it conferred on them to join the army and to purchase land if they subscribed to the Oath.47 Significantly, the progress of Saville’s bill was assisted by the support it received in the public arena by the actions of the newly constituted English Catholic Committee.48 It would be an oversimplification to conclude that English Catholics took their lead in this respect from Ireland, but the parallels are too close to be merely coincidental, and they are reinforced by the fact that one of the 43  Luke Gardiner, MP, in the House of Commons: Freeman’s Journal, 18 June 1778. 44 Jacqueline Hill, ‘Religious Toleration and the Relaxation of the Penal Laws: An Imperial Perspective, 1763–1780’, Archivium Hibernicum, 44 (1989), pp. 98–109; Robert Kent Donovan, ‘The Military Origins of the Roman Catholic Relief Programme of 1778’, Historical Journal, 28 (1985), pp. 79–102. 45  Sir John Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland, 4 vols. (Dublin, 1773–88), IV, appendix 2, part 1, pp. 67–9; Robert Kent Donovan, ‘Sir John Dalrymple and the Origins of Roman Catholic Relief, 1775–1778’, Recusant History, 17 (1984), pp. 188–96. 46  Selzer, ‘The Triumph of the Catholic Committee’, p. 39. 47  18 Geo. III, c. 60; Bernard Ward, The Dawn of the Catholic Revival in England, 1781–1803, 2 vols. (London, 1909), I, pp. 1–2. 48  John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975), p. 330.

40  James Kelly most helpful actions of the English Committee was to prepare an ‘address’ to George III, comparable to those presented by Irish Catholics to successive lords lieutenant in Ireland. It was an important intervention for though the address made it clear that English Catholics resented their ‘exclusion from many of the benefits of . . . the civil constitution of their country’, their accompanying avowal of their ‘unreserved affection to . . . government, [and] our unalterable attachment to the cause and welfare of this our common country’ struck a chord with those who had concluded that it was time to remove the embarrassing penal provisions that corralled Catholics. Significantly, it was commended in the House of Commons, and its impact was reinforced by its widespread circulation in the regional press.49 As the bill was ushered safely onto the statute book, the Committee can be said to have judged the mood of the moment appropriately. There was little they could do, however, to allay the fears of diehards, for whom any concession to Catholicism was ‘dangerous’ to the well-­being of ‘the Protestant religion in this country’. This sentiment resonated particularly strongly in Scotland where popular antipathy to the spectre of ‘Catholics and Jesuits being allowed to teach schools publicly and make proselytes’, which is what was anticipated would happen if (as promised) legislation was forthcoming extending the English law to Scotland, was compounded by its political mishandling.50 The die was cast in May 1778 when the ‘moderates’ in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, who generally deferred to their parliamentary representatives on political matters, failed to allay fears that the legislation was incompatible with the responsibility of all Presbyterians ‘to maintain and defend the religion presently established by law’. The result was a surge in ‘no popery’ sentiment.51 The opposition was best organized in Edinburgh where ‘a great number of inhabitants’ came together ‘to oppose the Roman Catholic bill . . . under the denomination of friends to the Protestant interest’, though ‘anti-­Popery’ riots in Glasgow in November 1778 and in Edinburgh on 2–3 February 1779 were more influential in convincing not only those in politics but also the leadership of the Catholic Church that it was prudent to defer the matter for the present.52 The negative implications of this turn of events was not lost on ‘peaceable and loyal Roman Catholics’ or on well-­inclined MPs. By contrast, it energized those for whom opposition to Catholic relief was an idée fixe, and, having seized the initiative, they determined to press on in order to secure the ‘repeal’ of ‘the late act . . . in favour of the Papists’. This set popular Protestantism and parliament on a collision course, but invigorated by the establishment in London of a ‘Protestant Association’, and by the appointment of Lord George Gordon, who had 49  For the text and its 206 signatories, see Scots Magazine, 40 (1778), pp. 264–5. 50  Freeman’s Journal, 21 November 1778; Robert Kent Donovan, No Popery and Radicalism: Opposition to Roman Catholic Relief in Scotland, 1778–1782 (London, 1987), pp. 50–75. 51  Newcastle Chronicle, 30 May 1778. 52  Freeman’s Journal, 16 January, 13, 18 February 1779; Caledonian Mercury, 27 January 1779.

Catholic Relief in Britain and Ireland, 1766–1789  41 ‘distinguished himself in the House of Commons as an ardent critic of both ­government and the mainstream opposition’ as its president, the opponents of Catholic relief soon had the structures in place to take their campaign forward.53 Having been rebuffed by Lord North, the prime minister, when they appealed to him ‘to present and support the petition of the Association’ in parliament, they sought to generate momentum by inviting ‘their Protestant brethren in Scotland to unite’ with them in a national campaign. Support was also forthcoming from a handful of regional centres—­Newcastle, for example—­but the efforts that were made there and elsewhere to persuade the public to ‘give their testimony against Popery and in support of the Protestant religion’ were dwarfed by the response that was forthcoming in London, where 44,000 signatories, or one in five adult males in the city, supported the call.54 These were anxious times for Catholics on both sides of the Irish Sea. But even the more alarmist did not anticipate what was to follow when, having encouraged an immense crowd (the contemporary estimates of 50,000 and 100,000 offer a guide to its magnitude) to march on the houses of parliament to support the presentation of the London petition on 2 June, Gordon contrived not to calm but to excite the crowd, as it emerged that peers and MPs were not only unwilling to revisit the issue but also that they took exception to what they conceived of as a blatant attempt to challenge the authority of the legislature. Given what had preceded in Scotland in 1778–9, violent protest was to be expected but the scale of the destruction that ensued when the crowd took matters into its own hands and over five days stripped and demolished churches, embassies, and business and domestic premises that were owned by Catholics or identified with Catholicism was unprecedented, and it was only brought to a close by a bloody demonstration of military force.55 The Gordon Riots were unlike anything London had experienced in generations, and it exposed the depth of the chasm that divided public and political opinion on the subject of Catholic relief. It was a lesson that was not lost on a majority of politicians. The position of Catholics in Ireland was more positive by comparison, though the relief bill presented by Luke Gardiner in June 1778 employed the same approach as Lord George Saville’s and focused on specific matters of concern—­in this instance on easing the restrictions on Catholics’ ability to purchase and lease land. Significantly, it did not ease the anxieties of many MPs and the debate that ensued was more passionate and prolonged than was the case at Westminster. 53  Innes, ‘The Protestant Carpenter’, p. 334; Caledonian Mercury, 20 November 1779, 5 January 1780; Norfolk Chronicle, 18 January 1780. 54 Haydon, Anti-­Catholicism, pp. 207–10; Caledonian Mercury, 12 January 1780; Newcastle Chronicle, 1 April 1780; Innes, ‘The Protestant Carpenter’, p. 33 and n. 259. 55  ‘An Account of the Rise and Progress of the Late Tumults in London’, Scots Magazine, 42 (June 1780), pp. 281–9, 42 (July 1780), pp. 351–62; Haydon, Anti-­Catholicism, pp. 213–44; Ian Haywood and John Seed (eds.), The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Cambridge, 2012).

42  James Kelly While this can be attributed to the fact that the ownership of land was more ­crucial to the security of the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland than it was in England, strong opposition was also expressed by those who were affronted by the fact that Catholics were being prioritized over Presbyterians.56 Neither reservation was sufficient to derail the legislation, to the immense satisfaction of the Catholic Committee, which did not hesitate to let it be known once the bill had been approved that they harboured ‘hopes that our religious restraints will be in great measure removed at the next meeting of parliament’.57 This was, it soon became clear, untenably optimistic but whereas Catholics in Great Britain were put firmly on the back foot by events in Scotland, Catholics in Ireland were heartened by the strong contrary signs as even those who opposed relief accepted the outcome and emphasized how ‘salutary it will be for all parties to become conciliated to one another in affection and good neighbourhood’.58 Catholic bishops encouraged this response by authorizing their priests to swear the Oath of Allegiance and by issuing public letters calling on their flocks to eschew disorder.59 The Catholic Committee, meanwhile, played its part by offering their ‘unfeigned assurance of inviolable attachment to your majesty’s royal person and government’.60 But the most impactful intervention was by Arthur O’Leary whose ‘address . . . to the common people of the Roman Catholic religion’, published in the wake of the ‘alarm’ caused in June 1779 by rumours of an impending French invasion, fundamentally challenged the perception that Catholics were disloyal.61 Though ostensibly a warning to his co-­religionists against looking to France for succour, O’Leary’s primary achievement was to persuade the large number of Protestants that religious toleration represented a better way forward, and insofar as he contributed to the decline in ‘prejudice against the Catholic religion’ that Catholics observed in the late 1770s he can be said to have achieved his purpose.62 There are any number of indicators of this, over and above the surge in print forecasting the social benefits that would ensue from a ‘further relaxation of the Penal Laws’, but the most significant, and most consequential, because it paved the way for further relief in 1782, was the readiness of Volunteer corps to admit Catholics into their ranks. This was not unanimous. There were corps for whom the pro­hib­ ition on Catholics bearing arms was a core conviction, but they were a minority. Moreover, it proved increasingly difficult to justify in the aftermath of the Gordon 56  James Kelly, ‘1780 Revisited: The Politics of the Repeal of the Test Act’, in Kevin Herlihy (ed.), The Politics of Irish Dissent, 1660–1800 (Dublin, 1997), pp. 74–92. 57  Moylan to Butler, 2 May 1779, in Evelyn Bolster (ed.), ‘The Moylan Correspondence’, Collectanea Hibernica, 14 (1971), p. 92. 58  Finn’s Leinster Journal, 4 July 1778. 59  Freeman’s Journal, 6 October, 7 November 1778; Hibernian Chronicle, 3 September 1778. 60  Freeman’s Journal, 11 August 1779. 61  ‘An address of Revd. Arthur O’Leary to the common people of the Roman Catholic religion concerning the apprehended French invasion’, Freeman’s Journal, 26 August 1779. 62  Tomás Ó Fiaich (ed.), ‘Letters on Armagh Parish’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 12 (1987), p. 58.

Catholic Relief in Britain and Ireland, 1766–1789  43 Riots, when John Carpenter, the archbishop of Dublin, called publicly on Catholics to maintain ‘the most regular and peaceful conduct’ and the Catholic Committee dissuaded a ‘mob’ which ‘had an intention of destroying the Presbyterian meeting houses . . . in revenge’ for what had transpired in London.63 The net effect of this was to intensify what Bartlett has termed ‘the race for the Catholic’ as the leaders of the Patriot interest in the House of Commons and the Irish administration competed to earn their favour. It was a situation from which Catholics could not but profit, and the benefits were manifested in 1782 when two further relief measures were approved that, inter alia, extended legal recognition to secular clergy, allowed Catholics to establish schools, and expanded their rights to acquire land.64 It did not amount to the ‘perfect emancipation’ aspired to by one contemporary. Yet the contrast between the optimism in Ireland then that more might soon be achieved and the pessimism generated by the ‘wretched and illiberal prejudices’ so recently on display in London and Scotland suggested that Ireland was on the eve of a new era and that the impetus was with those who, when faced with the alternatives presented by Henry Grattan as to ‘whether we shall be a Protestant settlement or an Irish Nation’ identified the latter as the more inspiring aspiration.65

Treading Water, 1782–1790 The readiness with which ‘the Catholics of Ireland’, in May 1782, publicly commended ‘the wise and beneficent legislature, which hath recently granted to them stability of property and toleration of religion in their native land’ encouraged them to conclude that they would soon be ‘recommended . . . to further indulgent and favourable consideration’.66 They did not prioritize a specific reform, preferring (as they had done to date) to leave this to others, but they were confident that ‘the benign spirit of toleration’ to which they made reference in a subsequent address would bring an early dividend.67 They were certainly encouraged in this conclusion in 1783 by the willingness of the Volunteers who called for the reform of the electoral and representative system to recommend the extension of the franchise to Catholics.68 Since this would mean, if it was proceeded with, that Catholics would not only be released from one of the signature exclusions provided for by the penal laws but also be granted access to the political process, it 63  Hibernian Chronicle, 22 June 1780; R. D. Edwards (ed.), ‘Minute Book of the Catholic Committee, 1773–92’, Archivium Hibernicum, 9 (1942), pp. 47–8. 64  Kelly, ‘Repealing the Penal Laws’, pp. 98–100. 65  Saunders’s News Letter, 18 January 1782; Freeman’s Journal, 23 February 1782. 66  Freeman’s Journal, 18 May 1782; Hibernian Chronicle (Cork), 14 November 1782. 67  Hibernian Journal, 16 May 1783. 68  James Kelly, ‘The Parliamentary Reform Movement of the 1780s and the Catholic Question’, Archivium Hibernicum, 44 (1988), pp. 95–117.

44  James Kelly was a step too far for the many Protestants for whom the Protestantism of the constitution was sacrosanct. It was an issue upon which the Catholic Committee, now the acknowledged voice of the Catholic community, prudently refrained from commenting until obliged by the publication of what was presented as the views of Lord Kenmare, the leading Catholic peer, that Catholics ‘were satisfied with what they had already obtained’ and did not seek ‘the right of suffrage’.69 This was not an accurate representation of Kenmare’s position. In common with all Catholics active in the Catholic Committee, he looked forward expectantly to the repeal of the laws that continued to exclude Catholics from the professions and from advancing in the army, and that impacted them in the pursuit of their religion. He was ill at ease with the idea of parliamentary reform, however, and still more with the manner in which those who promoted it sought to prevail on parliament to accede to their demands, which exposed a fault-­line in the Catholic Committee that had remained concealed until then. Eager to mitigate the damage it did their cause, and anxious not to antagonize either government or the Volunteers, the Catholic Committee pronounced that they would ‘receive with gratitude every indulgence that may be extended’, but it was too late. The decisive rejection by parliament of the plan of reform (shorn of any provision in favour of Catholics) agreed by the Grand National Convention not only set back the prospect of the early admission of Catholics to the political process, it also dealt a disabling blow to the aspiration expressed two years previously of creating a society in which ‘the Protestant, the Presbyterian and the Roman Catholic [were] all united as citizens’.70 It took some time for this to become clear, but once the admission of Catholics to the franchise was prioritized by those of a more radical outlook who assumed the leadership of the campaign for parliamentary reform in 1784 old arguments in support of the maintenance intact of the ‘Protestant constitution in Church and state’ were quickly resuscitated.71 They had never entirely disappeared, of course, but their reanimation in 1784 was informed by the realization that if Catholics were admitted to the political process it was not only incompatible with the ‘Protestant constitution’ put in place in the wake of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, it must, one commentator pointed out, ‘put an end to the Protestant ascendancy’.72 Since this was not a concept that was accorded a wide airing at this point, its invocation did not provoke the response from Catholic circles it warranted, but it was fundamentally at odds with the call for a ‘repeal of the whole . . . of [the] penal

69  Freeman’s Journal, 15 November 1783; Volunteer Journal, 14 November 1783. 70  Freeman’s Journal, 16 October 1781. 71  James Kelly, ‘Parliamentary Reform in Irish Politics, 1760–90’, in David Dickson, Dáire Keogh, and Kevin Whelan (eds.), The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism and Rebellion (Dublin, 1993), pp. 74–87. 72  Marcus to Lord Kenmare, Freeman’s Journal, 20 November 1783.

Catholic Relief in Britain and Ireland, 1766–1789  45 law[s]’ if Catholics were to be afforded ‘their emancipation’.73 There was, most Catholic activists were soon to recognize, no prospect of this happening once the direction of the Irish administration was assumed in 1783–4 by individuals for whom any such development was perceived as politically deleterious.74 To compound matters, differences within the Catholic Committee between those (mercantile and professional activists) who supported the efforts of the parliamentary reform movement and those who adhered to the tried and trusted (but now tired) strategy of awaiting on government proved so debilitating that the Committee was inactive for most of the remainder of the decade. It was an acutely disappointing outcome to a phase in activity that had promised so much. Moreover, it was not as if there was anything to which Irish Catholics could look to in anticipation that  their fortunes would improve. On the contrary, the outbreak of a new phase of agrarian protest in the mid-­1780s aroused concerns ‘of the Protestant ascendancy being in danger’ as a consequence of the targeting of the tithe paid to the clergy of the Church of Ireland.75 It was an egregious misreading of the aims of agrarian protesters, but it resonated with those in both kingdoms, for whom the preservation of an exclusively Protestant constitution was a sine qua non. This was a source, inevitably, of acute disappointment for Catholics whose hopes had been raised by events earlier in the decade, and it encouraged some to rethink their approach. The establishment by the Catholic Committee in 1788 of a permanent sub-­committee ‘to watch over . . . and act for the body’ meant that the decade ended, if not on a positive note, at the least on one that meant they were better prepared to respond to the opportunities that were to emerge in the 1790s.76 The 1780s were hardly more encouraging for Catholics in England, though Bernard Ward exaggerates when he describes them as years of ‘apathetic ­hopelessness’.77 Ward’s negative assessment was shaped by his antipathy to the efforts of Fr Joseph Berington to promote ‘a programme of accommodation and reform which would bring the English Catholic Church nearer to the norms of the Established Church’. Labelled Cisalpinism, the intellectual origins of this tendency antedated the demoralizing impact upon English Catholics of the attempt, spearheaded by the Protestant Association, to secure the repeal of the 1778 Relief Act, and the ‘no popery’ riots of 1778–9 and 1780. It appealed to progressives within the Catholic community for whom the lesson of the Gordon Riots was that they must do more to allay the deeply anchored suspicion with which they were regarded if they were ever ‘take what they considered to be their rightful place 73  Freeman’s Journal, 10 February 1784. 74  James Kelly, Prelude to Union: Anglo-­Irish Politics in the 1780s (Cork, 1992), ch. 2. 75  Volunteer Journal (Dublin), 20 March 1786; James Kelly, ‘The Genesis of Protestant Ascendancy: The Rightboy Disturbances of the 1780s and their Impact upon Protestant Opinion’, in Gerard O’Brien (ed.), Parliament, Politics and People: Essays in Eighteenth Century Irish History (Dublin, 1989), pp. 93–127. 76  Edwards (ed.), ‘Minute Book of the Catholic Committee, 1773–92’, p. 110. 77 Ward, The Dawn of the Catholic Revival, I, p. 1.

46  James Kelly among the natural leaders of society’.78 The difficulty with this, of course, was that it collided with the more traditional and deferential respect for ecclesiastical authority that was one of the characteristics of English Catholicism during ‘the days of persecution’, and it set Cisalpinism on a collision course with an episcopal party, led by the vicars apostolic, which assumed recognizable form in the later 1780s. Meantime, while these differences coalesced and the Church in London devoted its energies to restoring its material infrastructure of the early 1780s, a small number of laymen reconstituted the Catholic Committee in 1782. Their stated object was to plot a way forward, but they were wanting in confidence and a strategy to galvanize the Catholic community or to persuade ministers to join with them in identifying ‘measures’ to address ‘the disagreeable situation in which they now find themselves’.79 The Committee was convinced that ‘the Roman Catholics of England are as good subjects as those of Ireland’, and that, in keeping with Cisalpine thinking, it was incumbent upon English Catholics to demonstrate this. They recommended that the status of the Catholic hierarchy could be regularized if, instead of vicars apostolic, those exercising the episcopal function were appointed as bishops in ordinary. Though the intentions that prompted this proposal were well motivated, they did not overcome ‘the languid’ manner with which (its critics observed) the Committee conducted its business or its ‘lame policy of no connection with Scotland or Ireland’. To those, like James Peter Coghlan, the Catholic printer, it seemed that the Committee’s preoccupation with Lord George Gordon got in the way of their providing the vigorous leadership Catholics needed, whereas it reflected the reality of their position as they saw it.80 Moreover, there was no obvious alternative, for when the Committee was reconstituted in 1787–8, it persisted with the same strategy. This worsened their relationship with the vicars apostolic, and they deteriorated further when, as a result of queries put to a delegation which met with the prime minister, William Pitt, in 1788 on the hoary old chestnuts of the pope’s power to depose heretic princes and to dispense with oaths, the Catholic community was precipitated into a divisive internal debate on Catholic ‘principles’, which hardened the differences between the Cisalpine and episcopal factions. It did not prompt a disabling split but it was a major distraction from what ought to have been the priority, traditionalists argued—­the ‘erasure . . . from the statute book’ of ‘the Penal Laws remaining in force against us’.81 This conclusion was ill-­calculated to impress those who had concluded that they could not ignore the prime minister if they were ‘to obtain a

78 Eamon Duffy, ‘Ecclesiastical Democracy Detected I (1779–87)’, Recusant History, 10 (1970), pp. 195, 197. 79  Memorial to marquis of Rockingham, 13 June 1782, in Ward, The Dawn of the Catholic Revival, II, pp. 257–9. 80  Blom, Blom, Korsten, and Scott (eds.), The Correspondence of James Peter Coghlan, pp. 126–7. 81 Ward, The Dawn of the Catholic Revival, I, p. 120.

Catholic Relief in Britain and Ireland, 1766–1789  47 redress of grievances’, and they persisted with their efforts.82 As a result, a huge amount of time and energy was expended in the late 1780s by both sides in ­debating the oath they anticipated would be included in the relief legislation then being contemplated, but which would not be presented to parliament until 1791.

Conclusion The quarter century following the death of James III witnessed the partial disassembly of the edifice of legal proscription that had bound Catholics in a state of what, in the final decades of the eighteenth century, they were increasingly disposed to refer to as their enslavement. This was a misrepresentation of the nature and impact of the restraints that circumscribed their liberties, but the intensification of the language that was used, and the significance that Catholics attached to the reduced resort in Ireland in the 1770s of the term ‘papist’ to describe them, points to the emotions that the subject of Catholic relief generated. The most striking manifestations of this are to be found in the ‘no popery’ riots that occurred in Great Britain in 1778–80; but it was equally in evidence, prior to this troubling episode, in the manner in which priests were pursued in London in the late 1760s, in the emotional language to which Protestants in Ireland resorted in 1778 when the Irish legislature embarked on repealing the penal laws, and in the optimism expressed in the early 1780s that a new, more tolerant and inclusive era was dawning. This was not the case of course, but even those who were disappointed at the slow pace of progress could take some satisfaction from the fact that the position of Catholics in both kingdoms on the eve of the French Revolution had improved from what it had been in 1766. Whether it would have been still better if Catholics in both jurisdictions had coordinated and concerted their activities is unclear. But the fact that they did not do so, and instead pursuing separate campaigns with only occasional reference to the other, certainly acted as an additional obstacle to the achievement of the legal recognition that both pursued during this transitional phase in the histories of both communities.

Select Bibliography Bartlett, Thomas, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690–1830 (Dublin, 1992). Bartlett, Thomas, ‘ “A Weapon of War Yet Untried”: Irish Catholics and the Armed Forces of the Crown, 1760–1830’, in T.G.  Fraser and Keith Jeffery (eds.), Men, Women and War: Historical Studies XVIII (Dublin, 1993), pp. 66–85. 82 Ward, The Dawn of the Catholic Revival, I, p. 127.

48  James Kelly Donovan, Robert Kent, No Popery and Radicalism: Opposition to Roman Catholic Relief in Scotland, 1778–1782 (London, 1987). Haydon, Colin, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester, 1993). Hill, Jacqueline, ‘Religious Toleration and the Relaxation of the Penal Laws: An Imperial Perspective, 1763–1780’, Archivium Hibernicum, 44 (1989), pp. 98–109. Innes, Joanna, ‘The Protestant Carpenter: William Payne of Bellyard (c.1718–82): The Life and Times of a London Informing Constable’, in Joanna Innes, Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2009), pp. 279–342. Kelly, James, ‘The Parliamentary Reform Movement of the 1780s and the Catholic Question’, Archivium Hibernicum, 44 (1988), pp. 95–117. Kelly, James, ‘Repealing the Penal Laws, 1760–95’, in Kevin Costello and Niamh Howlin (eds.), Law and Religion in Ireland, 1700–1900 (Cham, 2021), pp. 77–108. Marshall, P.  J., The Making and Unmaking of Empires, Britain, India and America, c.1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005). Wall, Maureen, Catholic Ireland in the Eighteenth Century: Collected Essays of Maureen Wall, ed. Gerard O’Brien (Dublin, 1989).

3

British and Irish Catholics in the Era of the French Revolution, 1789–1800 Marianne Elliott

The French Revolution seemed to mark the triumph of Enlightenment thinking, in religious as in political life. The Catholic Enlightenment was shedding all those ‘superstitions’ so maligned by Protestant States and moving away from papal domination to accept more local situations and closer alliances with the State.1 Dublin became the centre of a thriving Catholic publishing industry. Some British Catholics were strongly Gallican and, like their French counterparts, they were establishing alliances with political reformers. Religious persecution was against the spirit of the times and full Catholic emancipation was on the cards. However, the Revolution’s progressive attack on religion, the horrors of the Terror, the war crisis after 1793, and signs of subversion throughout Ireland and Britain stopped Catholic relief in its tracks, with particularly serious consequences in Ireland. Perversely, such developments also accelerated the revival of the Catholic Church as an institution, particularly in Britain, where French émigrés and increasing numbers of Irish Catholics nourished and changed a religion that had become something of an endangered species.

Campaign for Catholic Relief—­Early Stages It is sometimes argued that Catholic relief—­the progressive repeal of the penal laws—­came from the problem of governing Ireland. One can see why. By the late eighteenth century, Catholics were a substantial majority of the population in Ireland but a small proportion of the population in England, Scotland, and Wales.2 Wales had become the most Methodist part of Britain, with Catholicism largely confined to tiny pockets in Monmouthshire and Flintshire and, alike with England, dependent on surviving gentry patronage. In Scotland the majority of Catholics lived in the Highlands and Islands and had all but lost such gentry 1 Ulrich  L.  Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement (Oxford, 2019), pp. 125–53, 214–15. 2  On demographics, see Chapter 6 by Begadon, in this volume. Marianne Elliott, British and Irish Catholics in the Era of the French Revolution, 1789–1800 In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829. Edited by: Liam Chambers, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843443.003.0004

50  Marianne Elliott leadership by the 1790s. Catholic Church structures were also very different. Ireland’s was a Church with normal bishoprics, whatever their legal status; Britain lacked a diocesan episcopate. However, the population surge in Ireland in the late eighteenth century, the collapse of its domestic textile industry, and rapid in­dus­ tri­al­iza­tion in Britain were drawing large numbers of Irish to British cities. An assessment of roughly 40,000 Irish immigrants on the eve of the French Revolution had grown to 580,000 by the time of the 1831 census.3 They would fuel and further urbanize the Catholic revival in Britain, helping to make Glasgow Scotland’s most Catholic city, reviving Catholicism from near-­extinction in Wales and hibernicizing urban Lancashire, which saw a fivefold increase between the 1780s and 1810.4 In Ireland, the knowledge that their property and status may have derived from politico-­religious confiscation of Catholic land made a parliament dominated by Protestant landowners far more anti-­Catholic than their equivalent in London. Even in Britain, whatever such numerical insignificance, any signs of Catholic relief risked inflaming ‘no popery’ feeling. In Scotland, despite the tiny numbers, Evangelicals talked of the threat of a tidal wave of ‘popery’ as if Catholics were another species entirely.5 From the late sixteenth century, Protestant national identity was based on what David Hempton calls an ‘apocalyptic ideology’. This opposed ‘a sinister and monolithic Catholic Church’ to Protestant liberty, with Catholicism seen as ‘foreign, violent, morally corrupt, doctrinally erroneous, magical, devious . . . led by a standing army of Popes, Jesuits and priests’.6 Linda Colley’s classic association of British identity with Protestantism still holds, despite some criticism. The penal laws were products of a frame of mind about Catholics which affected every class of Protestant and continued long after they were repealed. Every Catholic Relief Act retained petty insults from earlier laws.7 For much of the eighteenth century Catholics were tolerated, provided they were submissive and posed no political threat. Wars and political crises reactivated laws preventing them from carrying arms. However, despite residual popular Jacobitism among Catholics in Ireland and Scotland, leading Catholics wanted to join the system rather than overthrow it and would have had no difficulty

3  Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London, 1992), p. 329. 4  Sheridan Gilley, ‘The Roman Catholic Church in England, 1780–1940’, in Sheridan Gilley and W. J. Shiels (eds.), A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre-­Roman Times to the Present (Oxford, 1994), p. 251; Christine Johnson, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, 1789–1829 (Edinburgh, 1981), pp. 136–7, 249; Nicholas Schofield and Gerard Skinner, The English Vicars Apostolic, 1688–1850 (Oxford, 2009), p. 217. 5 Clotilde Prunier, ‘Aliens and Outlaws Rather than Subjects and Citizens? (The Image and Identity) of Catholics in Eighteenth-­Century Scotland’, Scottish Studies Review, 1 (2000), pp. 40–1. 6  David Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), p. 144. I discuss this at length in Marianne Elliott, When God Took Sides: Religion and Identity in Ireland—­ Unfinished History (Oxford, 2009), pp. 51–92. 7  Marianne Elliott, The Catholics of Ulster: A History (London, 2000), pp. 164–7.

The Era of the French Revolution, 1789–1800  51 swearing allegiance to a Protestant monarch, had the papacy not continued to support the exiled Stuarts until the death of James III in 1766. In this context, the French Revolution was crucial because it challenged ­existing stereotypes of Catholics, particularly in its religious toleration and its ­dis­mant­ling of the powers of the Catholic Church. France had been seen as the most absolute and persecutory of the Catholic powers. Now Church property had been nationalized, and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790 effectively made the Catholic Church another department of the State. French bishops and pastors were to be elected by taxpayers, including non-­Catholics, and all clergy were to be salaried by the State, to which they would swear allegiance. Many lay Catholic leaders in Britain and Ireland—­the so-­called Gallicans—­would have accepted this. However, as things deteriorated in France and large numbers of French Catholic clergy were massacred, it was an awful example, which made the British and Irish hierarchies hostile to regular suggestions of State payment of the clergy or a veto over Church appointments, especially in the later 1790s and early 1800s. Events in France also accelerated the replacement of old gentry influence on the Catholic Committees of both England and Ireland. The landed families had largely preserved British Catholicism since the Reformation. Although, as in Ireland, their numbers were in decline, estimated to have halved over the eight­ eenth century, they dominated the English Catholic Committee (established in 1778).8 In Ireland a Catholic Committee had come into being in 1760, also dom­ in­ated by the gentry, though often crippled by divisions between the high aristo­ crats and those who once had land, but who now were better described as middle class. The English Committee was far more radical and anti-­clerical than the Irish, supporting a document in 1788 denying the temporal powers of the papacy. It prefaced a period of tension with clerical leaders, only resolved by the grant of Catholic relief in 1791 (Mitford’s Act for England and Wales).9 By 1791 the English Catholic hierarchy was confident enough to counter the gentry on the Committee and dispose of its attempt to introduce the election of bishops. They were content with the Relief Act, which removed all restrictions on the practice of the Catholic religion, as well as the double land tax, at once placing English and Welsh Catholics in a better position than Irish Catholics. Bishop John Douglass, vicar apostolic of the London District, hailed the Act as marking the end of the penal era: ‘At length the day is arrived when I may congratulate you on the great­ est of blessings—­the free exercise of our holy Religion . . . our emancipation from

8  Edward Norman, Roman Catholicism in England from the Elizabethan Settlement to the Second Vatican Council (Oxford, 1986), p. 60. 9  The disputes between the lay and clerical leaders were largely over the terms of a loyalty oath to accompany relief and other issues concerning papal authority. See Ambrose Macaulay, The Catholic Church and the Campaign for Emancipation in England and Ireland (Dublin, 2016), pp. 78–85, 110–11. For similar problems in Ireland, see Patrick Fagan, Divided Loyalties: The Question of an Oath for Irish Catholics in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1997), particularly chs. 6–7.

52  Marianne Elliott the pressure of the penal laws’.10 The sentiment speaks volumes for the hierarchy’s distance from the secular members of the Committee, for it would take another generation for them to gain further civil and political rights. The English Committee then dissolved itself and another was not established until 1808, by which time the clergy had re-­established themselves as the leaders of the Catholic community in both England and Ireland, having successfully seen off attempts for the State to have a veto over episcopal appointments. This more Gallican approach to the position of the Catholic Church had been part of relief campaigns in both countries, and in England it continued into the Cisalpine Club, established by leading members of the dissolved Committee in 1792. Key to their argument was loyalty to the Protestant State.11 They had already started to associate their campaign with that of the Dissenters against the Test and Corporation Acts. Government considered the Dissenters far more dangerous than the Catholics, and in Ireland the threat of an alliance between the two was used by the Irish Catholic leaders to nudge government towards concession. Lord Westmorland, the lord lieutenant of Ireland between 1789 and 1794, had warned London of a possible alliance of discontent, but he did not support further relief and urged the government to consider the consequences in Ireland of granting any Catholic relief in Britain. In Ireland the Catholic Committee had had some success in securing the relaxation of the penal laws in 1778 and 1782. But the concessions were far short of what London had been prepared to grant and no further relief was attained after the 1782 Acts. Indeed, the Dublin government had successfully played on the Protestant reformers’ fear of ‘popery’ to stem the parliamentary reform campaign. However, the defeat of reform bills in the British and Irish parliaments prefaced a reconsideration by the advanced Protestant reformers of their stand on Catholic relief. Future United Irish leader, Archibald Hamilton Rowan, was advised by his old tutor at Cambridge, the prominent Unitarian and radical, John Jebb, that parliamentary reform would be lost unless ‘the worthy of all persuasions’ were included: ‘no reform can be justly founded which does not admit the Roman Catholics’. In this he meant Catholics of substance, and along with other reformers he believed that giving them their place in society would cause the more objectionable elem­ ents of the religion ‘to decay’.12

10  Bernard Ward, The Dawn of The Catholic Revival in England 1781–1803, 2 vols. (London, 1909), II, p. 297; Schofield and Skinner, The English Vicars Apostolic, pp. 50–6; John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London, 1975), pp. 330–2. 11  See Elliott, Catholics of Ulster, pp. 216–17, for the loyalty oaths attached to the Catholic Relief Acts; also Schofield and Skinner, The English Vicars Apostolic, pp. 52, 110–12, 214–15, for the divisions over the proposed Oath of Allegiance and the 1791 Catholic relief bill. 12  Jebb’s letters of 5 March and 29 September 1785, cited in William Hamilton Drummond (ed.), The Autobiography of Archibald Hamilton Rowan (1840; repr. Shannon, 1972), pp. 127–33.

The Era of the French Revolution, 1789–1800  53

Developing War Crisis and the Irish Relief Acts, 1792–1793 Theobald Wolfe Tone, widely regarded as the father of Irish republicanism, but then a struggling barrister and political pamphleteer, would develop similar ­arguments in his influential An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, published in August 1791. He had been invited to send reform resolutions to Belfast for the planned Bastille Day celebrations. However, because he called for ‘a complete internal union of all Irishmen’, Tone’s document was seen as ‘an alarming Catholic paper’ and rejected. Tone later claimed that this had turned him into ‘a red hot Catholic’ and An Argument was the result. In An argument he dispensed with all the common Protestant fears of ‘popery’ and argued from the French example that ‘popery’ was no more. The pope was burnt in effigy and Catholics and Protestants sat together in France’s Legislative Assembly. Moreover, it was only ‘the respectable part of the Catholic community’ that was to be admitted to parliament. As long as the reformers excluded the Catholics from their reform campaign, government played upon their terrors and kept the nation divided. An Argument was an immediate bestseller, second only to Paine’s Rights of Man as the most read work in Ireland in the 1790s. It did—­at least for the moment—­calm Presbyterian fears and the foundation of the Society of United Irishmen in October 1791 was one of the outcomes. The middle-­class Catholic leaders also took note. By the early 1790s the character of the Irish Catholic Committee had been transformed. New elections in 1790–1 brought in more urban middle-­ class Catholics and they soon showed their impatience. The penal laws had left trade largely unaffected and some Catholics had amassed vast fortunes. John Keogh and Richard McCormick were wealthy Dublin merchants, while Edward Byrne was reputed to be the highest taxpayer in Ireland. Here was a new breed of Catholic leader, no longer willing to adopt the submissive attitude required by the authorities. They had also been following developments within the English Catholic Committee, as had Archbishop John Thomas Troy of Dublin—­the ef­fect­ive ecclesiastical leader of Irish Catholicism—­who was anxious about the Cisalpines in England and feared the Irish campaign was about to go the same way. In December 1791 a group of the more conservative members of the Committee seceded after a row over a decision to petition parliament. In fact, they had misjudged the mood of Catholics at large and their attempt to organize peti­ tions of loyalty misfired. In Dáire Keogh’s assessment, the dispute had highlighted ‘the hierarchy’s delicate claim on the loyalty of their flock . . . The implication was simple, either the clergy joined with the people, or the people would act alone.’13

13  Dáire Keogh, ‘The French Disease’: The Catholic Church and Irish Radicalism, 1790–1800 (Dublin, 1993), p. 53.

54  Marianne Elliott Whatever the growing overtures from the radical Presbyterians, the Catholics had little reason to trust them and they held back from any real alliance. Pitt’s government had proved itself a better friend and, against the Dublin govern­ ment’s protests, argued that the Irish Catholics could hardly be denied the same terms as Mitford’s. In the event, the Irish Catholic Relief Act of 1792 fell far short of the concessions to the English Catholics. What had happened? Lobbying within Whitehall by the Catholics’ friends—­including Edmund Burke, and his son Richard (engaged as agent by the Irish Catholics early in 1792)—was coun­ tered by that of the Irish government, deeply influenced by the so-­called Irish cabinet, not least the formidable lord chancellor, John Fitzgibbon. Given his ­loyalty to George III during the recent regency crisis, Pitt’s gratitude gave him particular influence with the otherwise pro-­emancipist premier and his home secretary, Henry Dundas. The result was that Ireland’s Catholic Relief Act of 1792 was shorn of a number of concessions, notably the grant of a limited county fran­ chise to propertied Catholics and the right to carry arms. Even more damaging was the insulting tone used by the Irish MPs towards the Catholics, proclaiming, in no uncertain terms, their resistance to Catholic relief, whatever the London government may have wanted. The wealthy and influential middle-­class Catholic leaders were dismissed as ‘shopkeepers and shoplifters’ who did not know their place. Ireland could only be ruled through ‘Protestant Ascendancy’. The bill which the Irish parliament eventually passed in February 1792—granting admission to the bar, the right to intermarry with Protestants, and the right to employ apprentices—­was robbed of the conciliatory effect Pitt had sought and further pushed the middle-­class Catholic leaders towards the radicals in the Society of United Irishmen. However, not before they had achieved an extraordinary feat: the organization of Catholic elections throughout the country and the formation of a representative Catholic Convention. In a move which threw down the gauntlet to government, the Catholic Committee had dispensed with the services of Richard Burke (at least in Ireland) and appointed Tone as their agent and secretary. It is not always recognized that this Protestant founder of Irish republicanism was actually more successful and disliked by politicians for his work with the Catholics. In the summer of 1792, he acted in support of John Keogh to bring the various Catholic factions together. Given the longstanding reluctance of the hierarchy to get involved in politics, his account of their meetings with the bishops is revealing in how far even they had recognized the changing mood among the Catholic people. The upshot was the utilization of the Catholic parish structure to organize an election of delegates to a Catholic Convention, with the specific aim of petitioning for further relief. A sub­ sequent refusal by the Irish administration to submit the petition to London emboldened delegates, who then decided to go over their heads and straight to the King.

The Era of the French Revolution, 1789–1800  55 They were well received in London. However, the manner in which the final Irish Catholic Relief Act of the century was passed caused a parliamentary crisis in Ireland, for it was forced on a reluctant parliament, in clear breach of the spirit of the Irish ‘constitution’ of 1782. Government supporters lined up to proclaim their opposition. Even government ministers joined the storm, raking up all the old accusations against ‘popery’ and again arguing that Catholics could not be loyal to a Protestant king. The outcome was the addition to the bill of a clause requiring Catholics to deny papal infallibility and to clarify their understanding of absolution in the confessional, as well as to vow to recognize the landed estab­ lishment and Protestant government. The Irish Catholic Relief Act of 1793 opened up civil and military offices, with some exceptions, and restored the vote to Catholics—­though limited to 40s.-freeholders, which it was estimated would limit admission to no more than 30,000 new voters. Catholics could now endow colleges and schools, and take degrees at Trinity College, Dublin. Most controver­ sial of all, it finally permitted Catholics to carry arms, subject to a property quali­ fication. Although theoretically these rights placed Irish Catholics in a more advantageous position than English Catholics, in practice they were largely per­ missive and frequently withheld, well into the nineteenth century. Most im­port­ ant­ly, the Act withheld full Catholic emancipation, particularly the right to sit in parliament, a right the delegates to London had particularly requested. Even so, very large numbers took the oath necessary to benefit from the provisions of the Act, significantly more than had after the 1778 Relief Act.14 The Irish Catholic Committee dissolved itself in April 1793, even voting to raise £2,000 for the erec­ tion of a statue to George III, and the Catholic hierarchy and gentry largely returned to their previous positions of moderate supplication and conspicuous loyalty. In the same month, a belated Scottish relief bill was read in the House of Commons for the first time. The quiet lobbying of Bishops George Hay of the Lowland District and his coadjutor, John Geddes, proved influential and the bill passed through the Lords without incident in June 1793. The Act provided for freedom of worship and repealed restrictions relating to property. As Christine Johnson has noted: ‘In practical terms, the Relief Bill, although it removed, at last, fears of persecution and disinheritance, provoked surprisingly little immediate change in the Scottish Mission itself.’15 In Ireland, the parliamentary crisis of 1793 introduced a new ferocity into the way the Protestant Ascendancy dealt with the voicing of discontent. The same parliamentary session that witnessed the passage of the Catholic Relief Act also saw

14  Index to the Catholic Qualification Rolls, National Library of Ireland, p. 1899 (microfilm). 15 Johnson, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, 1789–1829, p. 31. Subject to an oath of loyalty, the Act removed most of the ‘disabilities’ against Catholics, bar their exclusion from a number of public offices.

56  Marianne Elliott the introduction of a series of laws to prevent any future conventions such as that of the Catholics. A crack-­down began on the Society of United Irishmen, without whose campaigning the Catholics might not have progressed quite so far, and in the emergency measures progressively introduced following the outbreak of war between France and Britain in early February 1793 there was a clear attempt to associate the Catholic leaders with rising sedition. Until 1795 such accusations were largely unjustified. Despite the events of 1792–3—bringing radicals and moderate Catholics together—­only thirty-­three of the 233 Convention members belonged to the United Irishmen. Pitt’s government flirted with the idea of actually paying the Catholic clergy, much as the State had paid the Presbyterian clergy. Indeed, in 1794 more State involvement seemed imminent after the formation of a wartime coalition govern­ ment in London, bringing in the Portland Whigs. They were known to want the Irish lord lieutenancy, and William Wentworth, second Earl Fitzwilliam, was duly appointed. Fitzwilliam was an emancipist and already an important benefactor of the French émigré clergy in England. He arrived in Ireland to take up his post in February 1795, preceded by a feverish surge of expectation that he was to grant the concessions withheld in 1793, notably the admission of Catholics to parlia­ ment. Fitzwilliam dismissed the Irish cabinet, thereby removing the Catholics’ main opponents and brought in the Irish Whigs. However, Pitt had already decided not to agitate the question again at this time of war and had accepted Ascendancy arguments that they were needed to control the country. How Fitzwilliam had not known this remains a topic of debate among historians. The upshot was his immediate recall, the reinstatement of the dismissed Irish cabinet, and the defeat of Henry Grattan’s relief bill by 155 to eighty-­four votes. Moreover, the leading reformers in the reconstituted Irish Catholic Committee received a brusque reception when they again took their petition to London in March 1795. They already had been moving closer to a full alliance with the now illegal Society of United Irishmen and the presence of Tone in the London delegation, when he was already suspected of treason, reinforced the message. A huge meeting of Catholics, said to have been attended by over 4,000, took place in Dublin. ‘The Catholics of Ireland, refused this time, would never again seek the favour of the British Cabinet’, Keogh told them: ‘The present was the last time the Catholics would ever assemble in a distinct body’. They would join with ‘our Protestant brethren in Belfast and Dublin’ in the ‘common cause of Ireland’.16 The middle-­ class Catholic leaders had kept the advanced radicals at a distance, as long as they expected further Catholic relief. The Fitzwilliam crisis was the turning point which delivered Catholic disaffection into the hands of the republicans. In May 1795 it was with the blessing of John Keogh and other leading Catholics that Tone was delegated to seek French military assistance against English rule in Ireland. 16  Printed account of the meeting, 29 March 1795, National Archives of Ireland, Rebellion Papers, 620/22/3.

The Era of the French Revolution, 1789–1800  57

The French Attack on Religion and the Émigré Clergy The Irish bishops had never been comfortable with the radicals and they now had a much more pressing issue to worry about, one which also impacted on their British counterparts: the crisis caused by the closure of Irish, English, and Scots Colleges in Revolutionary France and, later, elsewhere on the Continent. There was an acute shortage of priests in Ireland because of the rapid growth in popula­ tion in the later decades of the eighteenth century. The Continental colleges were already failing to meet the needs of the expanding population and their closure would soon make this a crisis.17 In Britain too there had been a decline in the numbers of clergy trained, so that in England the 400 noted in 1820 was little more than the numbers trained fifty years earlier.18 As the Revolution became more extreme and anti-­religious, increasing num­ bers of clergy in France refused to take the civic oath and were replaced. Only seven of the 136 bishops complied. With the intensification of this attack, follow­ ing the overthrow of Louis XVI in August 1792 and the September Massacres in Paris—­in which three bishops and over 200 priests were assassinated—­the levels of emigrating French clergy rose to a flood. Some 7,000 émigré clergy found their way to England, including thirty French bishops and fifty vicars general, around 200 moving on to Scotland and 300 to Ireland.19 Expelled clergy flooded into the southern counties of England, some 800 passing through Lewes in Sussex, 1,500 arriving in London. Edmund Burke argued their plight in his Case of the Suffering Clergy of France (1792) and remained their chief advocate in parliament. The gov­ ernment set up an Emigrant Relief Committee and subscriptions reveal a very wide range of sympathizers. The horrors of the Terror and the battle of Christianity against the perceived rise of atheism had struck a chord. The late eighteenth century witnessed a much-­ weakened papacy, and Rome viewed England as a potential protector against French aggression. The French exiles had shown themselves advocates of rightful government, it was argued—­notably in an influential sermon delivered on 30 January 1793 in Westminster Abbey by the Anglican Bishop Samuel Horsley—­proponents of the link between throne and altar, a bulwark against infidelity, atheism, and dissent. Certainly, the émigré clergy’s effective leader and the first of the French bishops to arrive, Jean-­François de la Marche, bishop of Saint-­Pol-­de-­Léon, instructed them ‘to observe the laws

17  Liam Chambers, ‘Revolutionary and Refractory? The Irish Colleges in Paris and the French Revolution’, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, 2 (2008), p. 35. 18 Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 356, also p. 219, which notes 650 priests in 1700; Tom McInally, The Sixth Scottish University: The Scots Colleges Abroad, 1575–1799 (Leiden, 2012), pp. 156–7. 19  Dominic Aidan Bellenger, The French Exiled Clergy in the British Isles after 1789 (Bath, 1986), pp.  1–7; Stephen Conway, ‘Christians, Catholics, Protestants: The Religious Links of Britain and Ireland with Continental Europe, c.1689–1800’, English Historical Review, 124 (2009), p. 858; Stephen Conway, ‘Note on French Catholics in London after 1789’, in Debra Kelly and Martyn Cornick (eds.), A History of the French in London: Liberty, Equality, Opportunity (London, 2013), p. 91.

58  Marianne Elliott and to respect the constitution’.20 That the bulk of the émigré clergy came from the intensely royalist west and north-­west of France, Brittany, and Normandy—­ where England would soon be funding the Counter-­Revolution—­also gave rise to a hope that they might act as Counter-­Revolutionary agents, something the émi­ gré hierarchy firmly rejected. But the détente only went so far. Even in the early days when their obvious impoverishment made them objects of pity in some quarters, in others they were considered architects of their own downfall and unpopular with the general popu­lace. Anti-­Catholicism resurfaced regularly. Fears of their impact on educa­ tion and a re-­establishment of ‘monastic institutions’ was behind Sir Henry Mildmay’s bill in 1800 to review the relaxation of restrictions on Catholics. It was passed in the Commons by fifty-­five to twenty-­four votes, but was defeated in the Lords, largely through arguments put forward again by Bishop Horsley. Even so, as Aidan Bellenger concludes, ‘traditional anti-­Catholicism was concealed but not forgotten. The exiled clergy were to be tolerated but not given freedom. They were to keep their place.’21 The old penal era understanding of basic tolerance in return for submissiveness remained. Nor were English Catholics—­long accustomed to keeping a low profile and sharing the anti-­French stance of their Protestant fellow countrymen—­ particularly enamoured of the new arrivals. English Catholics shared the nation’s dislike of the French. When they succeeded in setting up new educational establishments, the English bishops, unlike those in Ireland, were reluctant to involve the émigré clergy. French Catholicism was far too showy and indiscreet, and carried a whiff of the Gallicanism which the English Church lead­ ers so disliked in their own Catholic Committee. Necessity alone eventually led the Catholic vicars apostolic to appoint French clergy to English parishes, and then to poorer parishes which would not normally have had a priest. Archbishop Troy had initially hoped that affairs in France might change, but by 1793 he had accepted they would not. Moreover, there were signs that some of the recent French-­trained clerics had been infected by Revolutionary ideas. In Paris, some Irish College students supported the Revolution and several acted as French secret agents to Ireland and England. In January 1794 the Irish Catholic prelates petitioned Lord Lieutenant Westmorland for the establishment of a seminary in Ireland and had already distanced themselves from members of the Catholic Committee in presenting the lord lieutenant with an address of loyalty. The ­bishops feared that such a college would be affiliated to Trinity College, Dublin, and open to lay as well as clerical students, a situation which members of the for­ mer Catholic Committee favoured and which was planned for colleges established in England.22 In Ireland, by contrast, the concession was finally granted with the establishment of Maynooth College in 1795, largely staffed by émigré priests 20 Bellenger, The French Exiled Clergy, p. 99. 22  See, Chapter 6 by Begadon, in this volume.

21 Bellenger, The French Exiled Clergy, p. 43.

The Era of the French Revolution, 1789–1800  59 (Irish as well as French), several of whom had been professors in Paris.23 Thus, while Aidan Bellenger concludes that the impact of the émigré clergy on British Catholicism amounted to little more than ‘a ripple’, that of the early professors at Maynooth left a mark on its curriculum that lasted well into the nineteenth century. The arrival of émigré regulars, such sinister figures in both Enlightenment writings and Protestant propaganda, posed a particular problem. Among the regulars from France, Trappists came to Dorset and Carthusians to Wiltshire. The openness with which they practised their faith, with ringing of bells to announce divine office, worried the locals, including Catholics, who were unaccustomed to drawing attention to themselves.24 The arrival of English and Irish religious—­ male and female—­as a result of the closure of their monasteries, friaries, and con­ vents on the Continent also created challenges. In Ireland, where there was a special affection for the friars, the number and significance of the regular clergy was greatly diminished by the 1790s.25 Troy could afford, therefore, to be critical of the way the issue was being handled by his British counterparts. The authority of the British hierarchy, however, was more fragile. Considerable power remained in the hands of the Catholic gentry, who in turn supported a ‘disproportionate number’ of regular priests, over whom the hierarchy had little authority.26 In some senses, the female religious fared rather better than their male counterparts. For example, the English Benedictine nuns fleeing from Paris and welcomed by the prince of Wales on their arrival in Sussex in 1792, found influential patrons in the already Catholic part of Norfolk. They raised necessary funds through teach­ ing and sensitively avoided accepting Protestants as students. Even campaigners for Catholic relief like Tone believed that nuns were Catholicism’s victims, their convents imprisoning them against their will. Of course, we know that such a stereotype was very far from the truth and nuns were particularly important as Catholic Enlighteners in their own right, notably in the field of female education. Unlike the male orders, they were welcomed as such by the hierarchy and they were able to facilitate the expansion of Catholic female education in the nine­ teenth century.27 It was the return of the former Jesuits which caused the greatest problems. They accounted for some 30 per cent of the English clergy at the time of the papal abolition of the society in 1773. Having had the power, at their college in Liège to ordain and move their clergy to anywhere on the Jesuit mission, even after their

23  Biographies of the clerics in Patrick  J.  Corish, Maynooth College, 1795–1995 (Dublin, 1995), pp. 5–28, 439–87. 24 Bellenger, The French Exiled Clergy, pp. 83–98. 25  Hugh Fenning, The Undoing of the Friars of Ireland: A Study of the Novitiate Question in the Eighteenth Century (Louvain, 1972), pp. vi–­ix, 156, 178–9, 195. 26  Gilley, ‘The Roman Catholic Church in England’, pp. 347–50. 27  See, Chapter 9 by Moutray, in this volume.

60  Marianne Elliott suppression, their subsequent conflict over authority with the English hierarchy would divide the Church until 1829, when the 1814 papal bull restoring the Jesuits was applied to England. Central to their eventual victory was the support of Douai-­educated John Milner, who served the London and Winchester mis­ sions from his ordination in 1777 and became vicar apostolic of the Midland District in 1803. He had represented the Irish hierarchy in London during the Catholic relief debates, was as ultramontane as Troy—­to whom he was close—­ and as critical of the lay members of the English Catholic Committee. It was Milner who swayed the argument in favour of the Jesuits against the bishops. However, the dispute divided Church leadership for twenty years, weakening its ability to act in concert.28 Ultimately it took a long time to recover from the loss of the Continental colleges and the challenges faced by the regular clergy. Some of the regulars, moreover, had been more imbued with Enlightenment thinking than the secular clergy. Their reduction in numbers and reduced freedom of operation projected a far more conservative Church into the future.

Disaffection and the Catholic Poor Much of the impetus behind the Catholic relief measures had come from the gov­ ernment’s military needs. Constitutionally Britain had no standing army. But it effectively had one stored away in Ireland, some 12,000 soldiers, representing a third of its peacetime force. Irish Catholics were legally debarred by the penal laws, forbidding them from carrying arms, although even before the removal of restric­ tions they were in fact being enlisted, with official connivance.29 Government attitudes were changing because of imperial expansion and the need to develop a modus operandi for ruling over Catholic peoples.30 The 1778 Catholic Relief Acts in England and Ireland had come from the government’s need to recruit Catholics in the war against America. After 1793 the needs of the French war placed an unprecedented burden on Britain’s resources. By the end of the war the army had increased sixfold—­the navy even more, from 16,000 to 140,000—supplemented by increasing numbers of militia, fencibles, volunteers, and yeomanry. Milner told Troy in 1805 that there were some 200,000 Irish Catholic soldiers in Britain’s 28  Joan Connell, The Roman Catholic Church in England, 1780–1850: A Study in Internal Politics (Michigan, 1984), pp. 122–51; Thomas M. McCoog, ‘Libera nos Domine?’ The Vicars Apostolic and the Suppressed/Restored English Province of the Society of Jesus’, in James E. Kelly and Susan Royal (eds.), Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-­Reformation (Leiden, 2017), pp. 81–102. 29 Vincent Morley, Irish Opinion and the American Revolution, 1760–1783 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 137–44; Peter Way, ‘ “The Scum of Every County, the Refuse of Mankind”: Recruiting the British Army in the Eighteenth Century’, in Erik-­Jan Zürcher (ed.), Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Labour, 1500–2000 (Amsterdam, 2013), p. 314. 30  Conway, ‘Christians, Catholics, Protestants’, pp. 854–5.

The Era of the French Revolution, 1789–1800  61 armed forces.31 This surge in Irish Catholic recruits during the French war would lead to a revival of Catholicism in Britain’s garrison towns, Sheerness and Portsmouth, for example, securing new chapels to accommodate them. The first known Catholic chaplain was appointed to a British regiment in 1794, though it was an entirely Catholic regiment of Highlander Scottish fencibles, raised on the suggestion of a parish priest and deployed out of the country, including in Ireland during the 1798 Rebellion.32 As England increasingly withdrew regular forces for war duty elsewhere, Britain and Ireland became dependent on such irregular forces. In Ireland after 1796 it was the largely Protestant (and increasingly Orange) yeomanry which came to fulfil this role. In truth, the Dublin government was alarmed at the state of the country and London’s seeming indifference to the plight of the loyalists. Such alarm, as well as the existing sectarianism and under­ lying anti-­Catholicism, lies behind the ferocity with which the 1798 Rebellion was suppressed. The Irish militia was largely Catholic and suspected of being disaffected by government. Indeed, London’s approval of an effective Catholic chaplain to the armed forces in Ireland was part of its strategy to combat any disaffection. This chaplain was the Irish Bishop Thomas Hussey. Hussey was more of a European diplomat than the average Irish bishop. Educated in Spain, he was one of the chaplains to the Spanish embassy in London and there he moved in high society. He was particularly close to Edmund Burke and was considered safely conserva­ tive by government ministers. In Ireland, however, he aroused controversy while drawing attention to the grievances of Catholic soldiers being forced to attend Protestant services. This was also a grievance in Britain. Indeed, Catholic officers serving in Ireland lost their commissions when transferred to Britain, where the terms of the 1793 Irish Relief Act did not apply. Hussey also complained vocifer­ ously of past and continuing laws against Catholics, when Troy and most of the other bishops were more anxious to stay on the right side of the authorities. Certainly, embarrassment at the storm caused by his controversial 1797 pas­tor­al— in which he raked up all the ‘old oppressions’ against Catholics, attacking the Established Church and the ruling politicians among others—­was a factor in their reticence during the 1798 Rebellion. In Ireland, the Catholic hierarchy faced a crisis quite different from that of the Church in Britain. By 1798 the Irish Catholic populace as a whole was indeed disaffected, despite Catholic leaders having spent much of the previous century trying to prove their loyalty. Whatever the proclaimed loyalty of elite Catholics, 31  Thomas Bartlett, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690–1830 (Dublin, 1992), pp. 323, 398; Peter Karsten, ‘Irish Soldiers in the British Army, 1792–1922: Suborned or Subordinate?’, Journal of Social History, 17 (1983), pp. 36–37, estimates some 159,000 generally poor Irish Catholics served in English regiments between 1793 and 1815; Clive Emsley, British Society and the French Wars, 1793–1815 (London, 1979), pp. 33, 94, 133. 32 Michael A. Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 148–9.

62  Marianne Elliott Jacobitism had survived in popular culture and in the 1790s shaded into Jacobinism in the Catholic Defenders. They had emerged from sectarian troubles in County Armagh and its hinterland in the 1780s and recruited from Catholics involved in rural industry, as well as among skilled and unskilled workers in the towns. They had a crude political philosophy which included the overthrow of the existing Protestant establishment. The vigorous campaigning of reformers and most particularly the Catholic Committee had further politicized them. At first the middle-­class Catholic leaders, as well as most of the key figures in the United Irishmen, had kept their distance from the Defenders, knowing that Ascendancy politicians would intensify their efforts to portray the Catholic emancipation campaign as treasonous. However, this had all been changed by the fast-­developing war crisis, and by 1795 there was a coming together of the more radical Catholic leaders, the United Irishmen, and the Defenders. The wave of lawlessness in the country that summer may have had largely economic causes, but the Defenders convicted at the autumn assizes showed their utter contempt for the law, proving unbending even when refused the last rites. That does not mean that they were all ready to join armed rebellion in 1798 and many did so out of fear and the terrors of martial law. As martial law was rolled out to the whole country, it was the plumes of smoke visible in neighbouring counties which often dictated the timing of the Rebellion. By sheer demographics the Irish Rebellion of 1798 was largely a Catholic one and though Catholics also accounted for the bulk of the casualties, there were enough incidents of Catholic brutality towards Protestants to cause the withdrawal of former radicals. Throughout the crisis that exploded into rebellion in Ireland, the Catholic hier­ archy remained on the side of government and orchestrated declarations of loy­ alty among their flocks. However, it is difficult to draw conclusions from the numbers of Catholics signing such declarations, for the United Irishmen had urged supporters to do so to avoid reprisals. There were signs of lower-­class Catholics losing trust in their priests as early as 1793, because of the latter’s involvement in drawing up lists for recruitment into the militia. Troy had to be placed under government protection after excommunicating the rebels of 1798. With clear signs of many lower-­class Catholics ignoring their priests, United Irish leaders presumed this to be an indication that what had happened in France was coming to Ireland. However, no such clear deduction can be made from this, for throughout the centuries priests who did not act with their community were regu­lar­ly ignored. Moreover, although loyalists flagged up the numbers of priests involved in the Rebellion, the actual number was small: seventy out of 1,800.33 Only six of these were active in Ulster, the most Protestant part of the country and the province where keeping one’s head down had been particularly

33 Keogh, ‘French Disease’, p. 199.

The Era of the French Revolution, 1789–1800  63 pronounced. In the aftermath of the Rebellion, the possibility of State support for the clergy re-­emerged. For a short period, between 1799 and 1805, Scottish priests received a government payment, but it aroused considerable resentment and was quietly dropped. A similar fate awaited connected payment and veto proposals in Ireland in 1799. They were to be attached to the emancipation which Lord Castlereagh was certain would accompany the Act of Union. But they were opposed by the Pope, and the King’s resistance to emancipation meant that they did not materialize, releasing Archbishop Troy from an uncomfortable dilemma of either going against Rome in accepting them or appearing too close to the political radicals in rejecting them.34 The crisis in Ireland impacted on existing prejudices in Britain. Rebel killings of Protestants were flagged up in the loyalist press, reprising the old idea of the link between Irish ‘popery’ and persecution so fundamental to British Protestantism’s foundational texts. One cannot say conclusively that the Irish in Britain were any more prone to subversion than others. However, in the 1790s, particularly as the security situation in Ireland worsened, local magistrates expressed their concerns at increasing numbers of Irish arriving in Britain. As early as 1793 the Defenders were in London buying arms, suggesting an existing network. French agents regu­ larly travelled to England throughout the war and increasingly they were former Irish clerical students from France. There were worries about the ‘swarms’ of Irish arriving in western Scotland; Irish soldiers were taunted as ‘croppies’; a chapel being built for the marines in Chatham was pulled down; Irish Catholic clergy arriving in south Wales caused alarmed reports to the Home Office.35 Of course, anti-­Irishness in Britain can be traced back at least to Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century and the question is: did the events of the 1790s revive British anti-­ Catholicism or had it simply never gone away? There was a noticeable increase in Irish-­inspired seditious activities in Britain in 1798, targeted at areas where there was a significant Irish workforce, notably in Scotland, Lancashire, Cheshire, and London. The names United English, Britons, and Scotsmen began to emerge, with a reported centralizing committee in London. There had been a steady stream of rebel fugitives from Ireland and offi­ cial raids into the city’s Irish areas revealed a build-­up of arms. Recent historians have rightly drawn attention to elite Irish (Catholic and Protestant alike) in Britain, challenging the stereotype of the poor Irish Catholic.36

34 Macaulay, The Catholic Church, pp. 116–28. 35  London Chronicle, 9 August, 18 September 1798; Emsley, British Society and the French Wars, p.  333; Pembrokeshire Magistrates, July 1798, NA, HO 100/77/212; Ward, Dawn of the Catholic Revival, I, p. 310 for Chatham; A.  L.  Wold, Scotland and the French Revolutionary War, 1792–1802 (Edinburgh, 2015), p. 35. 36  Craig Bailey, Irish London: Middle-­Class Migration in the Global Eighteenth Century (Liverpool, 2013); John Bergin, ‘The Irish Catholic Interest at the London Inns of Court, 1674–1800’, Eighteenth-­ Century Ireland, 24 (2009), pp. 36–61.

64  Marianne Elliott However, most Irish Catholics in Britain were indeed lower-­class and we know very little about them in this period. In London, the chapels and social structures of the foreign embassies served upper and middle-­class Catholics, with chapels also in Moorfields and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. French émigré clergy had established eight chapels in the English capital by 1800.37 Lower-­class London Catholics were largely Irish and had been very neglected by the English Catholic Church. They congregated in areas like St Giles near Holborn and were notoriously clannish, having long experienced anti-­Irish treatment. The Gordon rioters had particularly targeted the Irish areas. The arrests and trials surrounding the Despard Conspiracy of 1802 would also show very large numbers of working-­class Irish in riverside par­ ishes from the Strand to Cheapside, as well as Spitalfields and Finsbury.38 They ‘do not seem to have had much time for religion’, concluded John Bossy of the poor Irish. But he attributed low practice rates among the Irish to a rather elitist atti­ tude within English Catholicism, the English clergy having ‘fought shy of them for a long time’.39 Sheridan Gilley commented on the changes the Irish arrivals would bring in the next century: ‘Class, culture and a uniquely quietist traditional piety’ had shut the English Catholic Church off from the poor. It confronted in the Irish a manner of men utterly remote from its own experience. Its priests ministered to a devout gentry; they had now to serve a pious prole­ tariat. The faith in England had survived in the country; the Irish flocked to the towns. English congregations were small, and mostly worshipped in manor chapels; the Irish multitudes would require cathedrals.40

The legendary vicar apostolic of the London District, Richard Challoner, started to provide for them. Mentored by Challoner and with considerable experience in Irish Catholicism, John Milner recognized the key role that the Irish in England would play in the faith’s future, even if traditionally they had been rather ignored. In London, as elsewhere in England, the recovery of Catholicism can be seen in the construction of many new chapels in this decade, particularly in the towns. St Patrick’s was built in Soho in 1792 to supply the needs of the Irish poor, and was promoted and administered by the English Catholic Committee member and Irish Capuchin, Arthur O’Leary.41

37  Kirsty Carpenter, ‘The Novelty of the French Émigrés in London in the 1790s’, in Kelly and Cornick (eds.), A History of the French in London, p. 94. 38 Marianne Elliott, Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (London, 1982), pp. 288–9. 39 Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 312. 40  Sheridan Gilley, ‘The Roman Catholic Mission to the Irish in London’, Recusant History, 10 (1969), p. 123. 41 Ward, Dawn of the Catholic Revival, I, pp. 113, 302–11.

The Era of the French Revolution, 1789–1800  65

The Legacy of the 1790s and the Future of British and Irish Catholicism In 1799 the pro-­emancipist Irish chief secretary and future British foreign secre­ tary, Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, perceptively observed that whatever there was left of treason was represented in Defenderism. Protestants, particularly Presbyterians, had withdrawn. ‘The Northern Catholics’, he wrote, ‘always com­ mitted in feeling against the Presbyterians, were during the early period of the conspiracy loyal—­the religious complexion of the Rebellion in the South grad­ ual­ly separated the Protestants from the Treason, and precisely in the same degree, appear’d to embark the Catholics in it’.42 The transmission to the future of lower-­class Catholic disaffection in the form of Ribbonism, the direct outgrowth of Defenderism, was one of the legacies of the turmoil of the 1790s in both islands. Another was the stillbirth of a secular middle-­class Catholic leadership and the failure of the State to incorporate them. Troy was to emerge from the 1798 crisis as the effective leader of the Irish Catholics, the discrediting of the secular leaders of the former Catholic Committee helping to reassert Catholic Church authority, so shaken in the preceding years. On the other hand, Britain’s Church leaders had been fewer and more divided and no British Troy emerged. Even so, the triumph of the clergy was the same. Another legacy was the abolition of the Irish parliament in the Act of Union, bringing major Irish issues into the heart of British politics and there they would remain until the twentieth century and beyond. The Irish Catholic hierarchy sup­ ported the Union. They were given reason to believe that Catholic emancipa­ tion—­so difficult to secure through the Irish parliament—­would follow in the united British one. Accordingly, the Irish hierarchy became part of the Union campaign, raising pro-­Union addresses and encouraging Catholic electors to return pro-­Union candidates. However, George III made it quite clear that he would not approve. Lord Lieutenant Cornwallis and Castlereagh resigned, as did Pitt and Dundas. The hopes for emancipation, so high in the early decade, were to be unfulfilled, as the united parliament hardened in opposition. The old belief that London was a better friend than the Irish Protestant politicians was one of the casualties. The indifference of Pitt came as a particular shock, as did the depth of anti-­Catholic feeling in Britain, revealed in a bitter parliamentary debate at the first outing of the renewed relief campaign in 1805. With Lord Auckland’s warn­ ing, ‘If you admit the catholics to a participation of power, you admit the enemy within your camp’, the motion was overwhelmingly defeated.43 Until then Catholicism had not been particularly church-­based, with low prac­ tising rates in Britain and Ireland. But the beginnings of a recovery in episcopal 42  Castlereagh to the duke of Portland, 3 June 1799, NA, HO 100/87/5–7. 43  Lord Auckland in the House of Lords, 1 May 1805, Parliamentary Debates, IV, col. 827.

66  Marianne Elliott influence, the decline of the regulars, in Ireland in particular, as well as the failure of the State to accommodate a more secular-­minded middle class, all facilitated the reassertion of Church authority. Increasingly this would be a Church minis­ tering to the Irish poor, utterly transforming the gentry-­led Church of penal times in Britain. Enlightenment thinking had been flattening difference between the faiths, at least at the elite level. But developments in this period, including the evident revival and return of clerical supremacy, would stimulate politicized reli­ gion in the next century. The French Revolution spelt the end of the Catholic Enlightenment, which had failed to put down popular roots. In the nineteenth century Catholic reformers were sidelined by the Church and, as the Catholic Enlightenment’s historian Ulrich Lehner concludes: ‘Catholicism withdrew into an intellectual ghetto’.44

Select Bibliography Bartlett, Thomas, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690–1830 (Dublin, 1992). Bellenger, Dominic Aidan, The French Exiled Clergy in the British Isles after 1789 (Bath, 1986). Bossy, John, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975). Elliott, Marianne, The Catholics of Ulster: A History (London, 2000). Elliott, Marianne, When God Took Sides: Religious Identity in Ireland—­Unfinished History (Oxford, 2009). Gilley, Sheridan and Shiels, W. J. (eds.), A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre-Roman Times to the Present (Oxford, 1994). Keogh, Dáire, ‘The French Disease’: The Catholic Church and Irish Radicalism, 1790–1800 (Dublin, 1993). Macaulay, Ambrose, The Catholic Church and the Campaign for Emancipation in England and Ireland (Dublin, 2016). Mullett, Michael A., Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (Basingstoke, 1998). Norman, Edward, Roman Catholicism in England from the Elizabethan Settlement to the Second Vatican Council (Oxford, 1986). Schofield, Nicholas and Skinner, Gerard, The English Vicars-Apostolic, 1688–1850 (Oxford, 2009). Ward, Bernard, The Dawn of the Catholic Revival in England, 1781–1803, 2 vols. (London, 1909).

44 Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment, p. 217.

4

Catholics in the United Kingdom, 1800–1820 Michael Mullett

This chapter explores the struggle for civil rights for British and Irish Catholics in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, assessing the acute partisanship that arose over the question of how much to concede to the State in order to win emancipation, this being in terms of various ‘securities’ designed to protect the Protestant constitution of the United Kingdom from suspected Catholic subversion. On key issues relating to points of ecclesiastical independence, such as a proposed veto being awarded to the Crown in the appointment of Catholic clerics, the Irish laity and their clergy were on the whole less willing to concede than were some of their English co-­religionists. John Milner emerged as the leading spokesman for recalcitrance over securities. The second section of the chapter considers the period from 1800 to 1820 as a vital phase in the long-­term transition of the Church in Great Britain from a sect into a denomination, as well the consolidation of the role of the Irish Church as a model of Counter-­Reformation renewal and as a beacon of nationhood.

The Quest for Emancipation Before the end of the eighteenth century, British and Irish Catholics had been given extensive parliamentary relief from the penal laws involving property, employment rights, and freedom of worship. In the early nineteenth century, the campaign was focused on permitting British Catholics to vote in parliamentary elections (as Irish Catholics who qualified for the franchise had been able to do since 1793), to take seats in both houses of parliament, and to fill civil and military offices. The eagerness of the English Catholic upper classes to acquire full political and civil rights—­ emancipation—­ drew many of them towards the Cisalpine position whereby, in exchange for admission to parliament and to civil, military, and naval positions, they would adopt a form of Catholicism that was compatible with loyalty to the Crown and accept ‘securities’ for the safety of the  Protestant establishment. In opposition to this orientation in Great Britain, Michael Mullett, Catholics in the United Kingdom, 1800–1820 In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829. Edited by: Liam Chambers, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843443.003.0005

68  Michael Mullett the first loyalty of those known as the ultramontanes was to papal Rome, rejecting any such ‘securities’ that would infringe on papal authority. These securities related to four areas: Oaths of Allegiance; a Crown veto on clerical appointments, allowing the Crown to scrutinize candidates for episcopal appointment prior to their canonical appointment by Rome, in order to ascertain their political views; an exequatur, which was a permission for the British government to search letters coming from Rome addressed to Catholic clerics in Britain and Ireland; and the possibility of the government paying salaries to those Catholic clergy in whose appointment the State might have a say. There were various ­modulations around the theme of a royal veto, such as obtained in most States on the Continent as well as in parts of the British Empire. One route, the setting up of an advisory panel of leading Catholic laymen to screen candidates for promotion, would have had the effect of putting Catholic lay elites in control of senior clerical appointments in their Church. In another formulation of the veto proposal—­the ‘negative’ veto—­the king, rather than accepting a name or names put before him, could reject any suggested nominees until a nominee was suggested that met with his approval, conferring on him in effect the same kind of royal supremacy that he held over the established Protestant Churches in England, Wales, and Ireland, and turning the pope’s role into that of formal endorsement of a selection already made in Whitehall. As for the exequatur provision, one way of implementing it might have been for a cleric receiving any text from Rome to swear a declaration that it contained only spiritual, not political, material. The proposal of salaries for Catholic clerics was born out of a suspicion that if priests in Ireland remained reliant on contributions from their parishioners, they would likely fall in with what were suspected to be the rebellious attitudes of the Irish peasantry. On the other hand, there was the view that if the Irish clergy received money from the State they would then be seen by parishioners as Judas figures, thereby losing credibility when the State needed them to help restrain insurgency. Nothing in the end came of the salary idea. Behind these negotiations were two focuses of authority, the British Crown and the Holy See. Liberalization of the laws was opposed by King George III, who insisted that for him to give his assent to these concessions would be in violation of his coronation oath to defend the Church of England. The King’s rejection brought about the resignation in 1801 of the prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, who had linked the Act of Union of Britain and Ireland with Catholic emancipation. The other focus of power was the Holy See, which was regularly besieged by the rival Catholic parties in Britain and Ireland for its support, but was often inclined to be in agreement with British governments over securities. This was partly because the papacy was threatened with the possible seizure of the Papal States in central Italy by French invasions. In a period of humiliating disempowerment of the Holy See, after the French occupation of Rome in 1798, Pope Pius VI died a prisoner in France and his successor Pope Pius VII was also

Catholics in the United Kingdom, 1800–1820  69 taken prisoner in France; the Papal States were subsequently made part of the French Empire. A new era of good feeling between Rome and the British ­government was fostered by Pius VII’s refusal, as a head of state, to take part in the economic blockade of the United Kingdom by the French ruler Napoleon Bonaparte; and subsequently by the papacy’s hopes, following the fall of Napoleon in 1814–15, for British assistance in regaining its lost territories. Yet while Protestant Britain was the diplomatic ally of the papacy, there was a fear among British politicians that to give political rights to Catholics would mean awarding power to those seen as taking instructions from an incarcerated pontiff who had to take his orders from Britain’s mortal enemy, France. A key organizing forum for British Catholics, monitoring their interests and defending their outlook, was the lay Catholic Board, established in 1808, with membership subsequently extended to the vicars apostolic and other Catholic clerics. Traditionally, the vicars apostolic, who, as Cormac Begadon notes in his chapter, governed the Catholic Church in England and Wales, tended to be recruited from the old Catholic aristocracy and generally complied with the Cisalpine standpoint that obtained in their social background.1 The leading Cisalpine spokesman, Charles Butler, and the rest of the party including their part-­sympathizer, the vicar apostolic of the London District from 1812, William Poynter, encountered a formidable opponent in John Milner, son of a London-­based tailor, and the most vehement, unscrupulous, and effective champion of the ultramontane cause in Britain and Ireland in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Milner’s theories on Church government envisaged the laity as subjects of the clergy, the bishops as overlords of the lower clergy, and the papacy as supreme power over the bishops. In a continuous flood of impassioned and often vituperative writings, Milner led opposition to the Cisalpines, singling out Butler as ‘undermining the religion of which I am a pastor and a guardian’.2 Milner’s stridency in advocating the ultramontane cause meant that filling a vacancy in 1803 in the position of vicar apostolic of the Midland District became critical in the affairs of the early-­nineteenth-­century English Catholic community, since, if Milner was given the post, it would catapult him into a powerful position. Milner’s promotion, which was inevitably opposed by the Cisalpines, was supported by the Irish bishops, being significant for his future role as their spokesman against English Cisalpine polices. Appointed by Pope Pius VII, in 1804 Milner took up his residence in the Midland industrial town of Wolverhampton, one of the new urban centres of the English Catholic community, symbolically breaking links with the traditional rural and squirearchical orientation of post-­Reformation English Catholicism. 1  See Cormac Begadon’s Chapter 6, in this volume. 2  Bernard Ward, The Eve of Catholic Emancipation being the History of the English Catholics during the First Thirty Years of the Nineteenth Century, 3 vols. (London, 1911–12), II, pp. 273–4.

70  Michael Mullett While Milner developed a hard line on concessions in the Catholic ec­cle­si­as­tic­al system which were designed to win emancipation, Protestants continued to demand securities in return for toleration, and endemic anti-­popery in both houses of parliament frustrated calls for further reform of the remaining penal laws in Britain and Ireland. In Ireland, with its 80 per cent Catholic population, public assemblies in Dublin in 1804 called on parliament to remove the remaining legal disadvantages affecting Catholics. Thereupon, a petition was introduced into the House of Lords by William Wyndham, Baron Grenville, and into the Commons by the veteran radical Charles James Fox. This overture was defeated in May 1805 by majorities of 129 in the House of Lords and 212 in the Commons. In March 1807 Grenville introduced a bill opening senior offices in the army and navy to British Catholics. It was opposed by the King, bringing about another major governmental resignation, this time the dissolution of the wartime coalition known as the Ministry of All the Talents. In 1808 the MP Sir John Coxe Hippisley raised the question of the veto in a speech supporting a motion from the Irish MP Henry Grattan, a frequent ­pro­pon­ent of emancipation measures. The senior Irish prelates John Thomas Troy, archbishop of Dublin, and Edward Dillon, archbishop of Tuam, were among those who had initially favoured the veto and, in England, in his Letter to a Parish Priest of August 1808, Milner wrote in its support. In Ireland, however, there was a furious popular reaction against any possible intervention by the Crown in the appointment of bishops. This crystalized around a sense of betrayal by the higher clergy: Troy was portrayed as ‘a complete government man’ and it was alleged that leading laymen, too, were prepared to ‘give up almost anything to get into parliament, and to be made judges and generals’. Ireland’s ‘antient [sic] hierarchy’ was being ‘sold to the highest bidder’ and Milner was the ‘travelling agent’ for the betrayal.3 Whether or not the Irish hierarchy were frightened by the virulence of lay opposition into rejecting the veto proposals, in September 1808 the Irish ­bishops ruled out any alteration ‘in the Canonical mode hitherto observed in the nomination of the Irish Roman Catholic Bishops’, basically by unilateral papal endorsement.4 By September 1809, Milner had undergone a volte face over the veto, insisting, however, on his unwavering consistency over the issue. From this point on, the question of the veto became pivotal between Cisalpine willingness to compromise with the State and ultramontane insistence on the Church’s self-­government.

3  S. J. Connolly, ‘The Catholic Question, 1801–12’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, v: Ireland under the Union, I, 1801–70 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 41–2. 4 Ward, Eve of Catholic Emancipation, I, p. 77.

Catholics in the United Kingdom, 1800–1820  71

The Search for a Compromise In late January 1810 members of the Catholic Board met in London and agreed a series of five resolutions which were accepted by a meeting of Catholics on 1 February. The fifth of these seemed to its opponents to be buying emancipation in return for a sell-­out of Catholic ecclesiastical autonomy, for it claimed that ‘any arrangements founded on this basis of mutual satisfaction and security, and extending to [Catholics] the full enjoyment of the civil constitution of their country will meet with their grateful concurrence’.5 The supporters of the fifth reso­ lution included all the vicars apostolic except Milner, as well as leading Cisalpine laymen. However, whatever ‘full enjoyment of the civil constitution of the country’ might entail, and apart from the vagueness of the phrase ‘any arrangements’, the opponents took exception to the resolution on account of its commitment to support ‘the maintenance of the established religion of the country’, which was interpreted as a pledge to let in the veto. A meeting of the Irish bishops in 1810 condemned the resolution with Milner also now seeing the veto being implied in it. The Cisalpine laity’s enthusiasm for the fifth resolution may be explained by their acceptance of the need to give further assurances to the Protestant establishment of loyalty to the Crown. With Napoleon’s occupation of Rome and seizure of Pius VII, there was the concern—­ and despite the Pope’s refusal to support the Napoleonic blockade of Great Britain—­that the ‘national enemy by putting pressure on the pope could attempt to tamper with the loyalty of Catholics’. As Ambrose Macaulay notes, ‘This would have been a contorted conclusion’, but it may go a considerable way towards explaining the subsequent series of hostile parliamentary majorities: of 104 in the Commons and ninety-­six in the Lords in May and June 1810; and of sixty-­three in the Commons and fifty-­nine in the Lords on a motion in support of Irish Catholics in April 1812.6 It will be seen, however, that, despite these defeats, parliamentary opposition to Catholic pol­it­ical rights was declining numerically by this time: the total parliamentary op­pos­ition vote was reduced by about a half between 1805, when it stood at 341, and 1812, when it came down to 177. Thereafter, parliamentary voting moved decisively in support of improved conditions for Catholics, when, in the early summer of 1812, a motion in their favour, introduced by a leading pro-­Catholic politician, George Canning, passed the Commons with a majority of 235 over 106; it was lost in the Lords, and therefore defeated, but by only one vote, 126 to 125. Perhaps the following year, then, might have seen a breakthrough in the resolution of the Catholic question 5 Ambrose Macaulay, The Catholic Church and the Campaign for Emancipation in Ireland and England (Dublin, 2018), p. 159. 6 Macaulay, The Catholic Church, p. 29.

72  Michael Mullett in parliament. In April 1813, Grattan introduced a Catholic relief bill in the House of Commons. The measure proposed to allow Catholics to hold offices in the armed forces and municipal corporations, to serve as justices of the peace, and to vote in parliamentary elections (Irish Catholics already had the franchise, which would now be extended to British Catholics) and to sit in parliament. As amended by Canning, the measure included provisions to set up two commissions of peers, Irish and English prelates and others, in order to advise the Crown on episcopal appointments and an exequatur. When the bill came before a committee of the Commons, the speaker, Charles Abbott, advised the members that it would be a disastrous error to award political power to Catholics, as the pope’s subjects, because his control over them was incompatible with the country’s Protestant constitution and that the clause giving them the right to vote for and become MPs should be deleted. That clause, the heart of the matter, was then removed from the text by a majority of four in the Commons. It is possible that Milner’s A Brief Memorial on the Catholic Bill (1813), which was distributed before the vote and maintained that the bill’s conditions were irreconcilable with Catholic ‘discipline’, influenced some members into rejecting the bill as a piece of legislation that Catholics themselves did not want, and it was subsequently abandoned.7 Following the shock of the defeat of Grattan’s bill, Bishop Poynter requested guidance from Rome on what might be the proper response of the vicars apostolic in the likely event of the future presentation of a similar measure. The reply was a two-­part text issued in February 1814, during the Pope’s continued absence from Rome, in the name of Monsignor Giovanni Battista Quarantotti, the vice-­ prefect of Propaganda Fide. One part of the document dealt with the political situ­ation of the papacy, for as part of the settlement that was to follow the fall of Napoleon, the British foreign secretary, Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, was to give his backing for the restoration of the papal territories. For the other section, concerned with ecclesiastical matters, Quarantotti had been taking advice from a strong opponent of Milner, Revd Paul MacPherson, rector of the Scots College in Rome. The text, the ‘Quarantotti rescript’, addressed to Bishop Poynter, gave assurances ‘that Catholics may with satisfaction and gratitude accept and embrace the [1813] bill which was presented for their emancipation’, including the royal veto, along with the further provision of a clerical oath concerning correspondence with Rome.8 The reception of the rescript in Britain and Ireland picked out the fault-­lines of divisiveness both within and between the Irish and British Catholic Churches. In England, a meeting of the Catholic Board took place in June 1814 to draw up a message of congratulations to Pius VII on his liberation amidst the collapse of the Napoleonic regime: one of the advantages of the abdication of Napoleon in April 7 Macaulay, The Catholic Church, pp. 183–98. 8 Ward, Eve of Catholic Emancipation, II, p. 82.

Catholics in the United Kingdom, 1800–1820  73 1814 and the freeing of the Pope from French custody was the dissolution of apprehension on the part of English Protestant politicians that the Catholics’ spiritual superior was the captive of the national enemy. The board’s message offered the ‘fullest and most unequivocal assurances of adherence and respect’ to the rescript, with sideswipes against Milner and his associates: ‘our bosom enemies’.9 The silence of the rescript on detailed mechanisms for implementing the royal  veto might have meant that the King could select candidates for Catholic clerical promotion, a gift for the Cisalpine ‘vetoists’. Three of the English vicars apostolic (Milner did not participate), along with MacPherson and one of the Scottish vicars apostolic met, also in June, to felicitate the Pope on his readmission into Rome on 24 May and to state that ‘This rescript meets and removes all our difficulties’.10 In Ireland, however, while Archbishop Troy’s acceptance of the text led to his being reviled in letters to him as a ‘mock Doctor and perverted wretch’, Bishop James O’Shaughnessey of Killaloe was only the most outspoken among his fellow diocesans in decrying ‘this pernicious measure . . . virtually fatal to the Catholic Religion of Ireland’.11 There was also a feeling of resentment that the English Cisalpines were imposing the rescript on Catholic Ireland. A meeting of the Irish bishops in May 1814 declared the rescript not to be obligatory. Milner’s reaction—­impulsive and highly effective—­was to leave for Rome on horseback in order to impress on the restored pontiff his own side of the story. He arrived a few days after Pius and managed two audiences with the Pope, his Anglo-­Saxon brusqueness contrasting with the silken suavity of the papal administration. No one, friend or foe, could match Milner in his political skill, focus, and deviousness, all qualities seen at their most masterly in May and June 1814, when he put to the Pope and cardinals the anti-­Cisalpine case so successfully that in June 1814 Rome issued a partial repudiation of Quarantotti’s actions, explaining them in the context of the Pope’s absence and shelving the rescript. For the moment Milner, with his ruthless vilification of Poynter, Quarantotti, and Butler, was held in ­considerably high repute in Rome, resulting in talk of his being appointed as rector of the English College. With his ceaseless clamour, he would, however, soon come to be regarded in Rome as intemperate, and a letter to him from Cardinal Lorenzo Litta in 1815 expressed anger at his disruption of the vicariate apostolic. The next phase of negotiations involved the papal bureaucracy developing a position from which Catholics in Britain and Ireland might offer securities to the government in exchange for progress towards civil rights. Following Napoleon’s escape from Elba in February 1814, Pius and the cardinals fled for protection to Genoa, which was guarded by a British garrison and fleet. Milner, and Poynter, who was also in Italy to present his own case at the Holy See, followed on. From 9 Ward, Eve of Catholic Emancipation, II, pp. 95–6. 10 Ward, Eve of Catholic Emancipation, II, p. 97. 11 Ward, Eve of Catholic Emancipation, II, pp. 88–9.

74  Michael Mullett there in April 1815 Cardinal Litta gave Poynter a missive which was based on guidance notes that the secretary of state, Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, had provided for Castlereagh during discussions at the Congress of Vienna which negotiated the post-­Napoleonic war settlement of Europe and in which Consalvi played a leading role in winning back the Italian Papal States. The ‘Genoese letter’, modified by the Pope to limit papal concessions and cancelling the Quarantotti rescript, offered: first, three variants of an oath of ‘obedience and true fidelity’ to George III and his family, with a commitment to defend the Crown, disclose plots, and so on, but with no renunciation of the papal ‘temporal power’ over sovereigns, seriously impeding its acceptability to British statesmen and parliamentarians; second, a form of veto ‘allowing those to whom it appertains to present to the King’s ministers a list of candidates, in order that if any of them should be obnoxious or suspected, the Government may immediately point him out, so that he may be expunged’, always giving the pontiff enough names from which to choose; and, third, a brief dismissal of the exequatur.12 Insofar as the refusal of Catholics to comply unfailingly with Protestant demands diminished the chances of further relief, the relative intractability of the Genoese letter, especially over the exequatur, must have been at least one of the reasons for a relative decline in parliamentary support for emancipation in the mid-­1810s, as compared with a hopeful increase in the years down to 1813. As we saw earlier, in 1812 a pro-­Catholic motion passed the Commons with a majority of 235 to 106 and was only defeated in the upper house by one vote. In sharp contrast, in May 1815 even though the contents of the Genoese letter were not yet officially known to MPs, in debates in the House of Common the anti-­Catholic majority was eighty-­one and in June, in the Lords, twenty-­six. Then, in May 1815, a promoter of Catholic emancipation since 1810, Sir Henry Brooke Parnell, introduced into the Commons a resolution composed by the emergent leader of lay Irish Catholics, Daniel O’Connell; Parnell was ruled out of order. Subsequently, motions for refusing pro-­Catholic petitions for England were carried in the Commons in June 1815 by 228 to 147 and in June in the Lords by eighty-­six to sixty: hostile majorities and a low point in the long-­term strategy of seeking to win Catholic emancipation through parliamentary agitation. In June 1816, a motion for a ‘settlement’ for Catholics, introduced by Grattan, seconded by Parnell, and supported by Castlereagh, was lost in the Commons by a majority of 172 to 141, and in the Lords by seventy-­three to sixty-­nine. For the remainder of the second decade of the nineteenth century, the parliamentary accounting continued to show fluctuating opposition to an amelioration of the condition of Catholics: in May 1817 motions in favour of Catholics were defeated in the Commons by twenty-­four and in the Lords by fifty-­two; in May 1819 a

12 Ward, Eve of Catholic Emancipation, II, pp. 135–7; Macaulay, The Catholic Church, pp. 247–60.

Catholics in the United Kingdom, 1800–1820  75 motion brought into the Commons by Grattan was lost by only two votes, although a similar proposal was rejected in the Lords by forty-­six votes, while a bill to abolish a declaration against the doctrine of transubstantiation was rejected by fifty-­nine votes. It will have become apparent in this chapter so far that the issue of Catholic relief came before the two houses of the United Kingdom parliament on a considerable number of occasions in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, so that it may be helpful to present, at the conclusion of this section, in Table  4.1, a summary of the progress or otherwise of moves in the various aspects of the campaign for emancipation. Overall trends in parliamentary voting in the first two decades of the nineteenth century are not easy to discern and there was no progressive pattern in favour of Table 4.1.  Parliamentary votes on British and Irish Catholic civil improvements, 1805–19 Date

Lords

May 1805 May 1805 May 1808 May 1808 May 1810 June 1810 May 1811 June 1811 April 1812 April 1812 June 1812 June 1812 February 1813 March 1813 May 1813 May 1813 May 1815 May 1815 May 1816 June 1816 May 1817 May 1817 May 1819 May 1819 June 1819

129 87 96 59 102 1

26 4 52 46

Commons

212 153 104 63 75 129 40 67 42 4 81 31 24 2 59

Against/For Catholic Relief Against Against Against Against Against Against Against Against Against Against For Against For For Against Against Against Against Against Against Against Against Against Against Against

Source: Ward, Eve of Catholic Emancipation, I, pp. 263–6; II, 347–51.

76  Michael Mullett reform of the remaining penal laws. Factors for and against majorities included variable parliamentary attendance levels. Both houses of parliament were debating chambers, in which members could be swayed by the eloquence and prestige of one speaker or another: Canning’s support was important in  favour of change, whereas the opposing voice of a rising star in the Tory party, the chief secretary of Ireland between 1812 and 1818, Sir Robert Peel, operated against it, as did the hostility of the Tory government, from 1812 to 1827, represented by Robert Jenkinson, second earl of Liverpool as well as the prince regent from 1811 to 1820, George Augustus Frederick, prince of Wales. That said, it was George who in 1817 awarded his commission in the Royal Navy, with a back payment of salary to the Catholic Edward Whyte, a move rightly seen as key in helping ease the passage of civil emancipation twelve years later.

New Growth The revival of the Catholic Church in Britain and Ireland was underway in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. In Ireland, by 1800, the Catholic Church already possessed an impressive clerical and episcopal presence, a stock of Church buildings, schools, and a strong, if sometimes critical, lay following. The case of just one diocese, Cork, confirms our impression of the institutional strength of Ireland’s Catholic Church. It comprised eighty-­ one chapels and seventy-­four clergy, thirty-­five of them parish priests and thirty-­nine curates. The opening Mass for Cork city’s magnificent gothic-­style pro-­cathedral in 1808 was attended by two archbishops and three bishops, and the event was a celebratory milestone in ‘the resuscitation of public Catholic worship in Ireland after penal times’. In terms of overall clerical numbers, where Scotland had forty priests in 1800, Ireland possessed 1,614.13 The religious orders played a role in Ireland’s early nineteenth-­century Catholic revival, despite the challenges they faced, for they helped address the problem of a continuing shortfall of clergy in relation to Ireland’s rapid population increase, serving as both parish priests and curates to incumbents. The preaching orders of friars were active in some of the country’s towns and cities. Galway, for instance, acquired Franciscan, Augustinian, and Dominican friaries, each with a chapel. In Limerick, the Dominicans had their convent and chapel, the ‘chapel’ being in fact ‘a large edifice in the early Gothic style’, built in 1815. The Limerick chapel of the Augustinians ‘was built for a theatre and was purchased by the friars in 1824: 13  Samuel Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, 2 vols., 2nd edn (London, 1840), I, pp. 421–2; Ward, Eve of Catholic Emancipation, I, p. 73; S. J. Connolly, Priests and People in Pre-­Famine Ireland, 1780–1845 (Dublin, 1982), pp. 31, 33.

Catholics in the United Kingdom, 1800–1820  77 the boxes and galleries are still preserved as seats for the congregation’. In the diocese of Cork all five of the main mendicant orders—­ Augustinian friars, Capuchins, Carmelites, Dominicans, and Franciscans—­were firmly established.14 The parochial priesthood of the Irish Church varied in standards of education and professional competence—­and a report of 1816 on his priests by the diocesan reformer James Warren Doyle, bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, may represent aspiration rather than reality: ‘They are energetic, active, laborious, shrewd and intelligent; they are the most moral class of persons, not only in this country, but, I think, existing on earth’. Clerical incomes varied from one part of the country to another, but an average of £150 per annum provided for a ‘respectable’ middle-­ class standard of living for young men entering the priesthood and typically coming from a social background of ‘the better sort of farmer’. Bishops’ annual stipends averaged £300.15 The 35 per cent increase in the number of Irish clerics in the early years of the nineteenth century, from 1,614 in 1800 to 2,183 in 1840, failed to match a 51 per cent increase in the nation’s population, though the struggle to adjust clerical supply to demographic demand confirms the centrality of Catholic faith in Irish lives. The single most important factor in raising the number of parish priests was the provision of seminaries in Ireland, aided by the re­open­ing of colleges on the Continent after 1815.16 In England, Scotland, and Wales the process of equipping local Catholic ­congregations with places of worship gained further momentum in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. In those years émigré priests from France—­ who may not have numbered more than about 10 per cent of the country’s supply of clergy—­nonetheless made a valuable supplement to England’s availability of Catholic clerics. The refugee French bishops and priests brought with them ­popular devotions such as the Sacred Heart of Jesus (favoured by both Milner and Butler) and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, as well as the splendour of French Catholic liturgical praxis, at a time when all forms of Christian congregational religious practice in Britain, including that of the Catholic community, generally lacked colour. London, where the eight chapels of Continental Catholic States had traditionally provided elaborate liturgies, received special attention in the nationwide building programme. At the opening, in 1808, of a new chapel in London’s Clarendon Square, Somers Town, Seignelay Colbert de Castlehill, the Scottish-­born bishop of Rodez, sang High Mass in full vestments: ‘The chapel was much crowded. The choir of the Portuguese Chapel sang and a great number of Protestant nobility and gentry attended.’ With Sunday Sung Mass at 11 a.m., 14 Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, I, pp. 421, 648; II, p. 275; for comment on the regulars, see: Connolly, Priests and People in Pre-­Famine Ireland, pp. 32–3, 290, n. 11; Michael  A.  Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 191–2. 15 Desmond J. Keenan, The Catholic Church in Nineteenth-­Century Ireland (Dublin, 1983), pp. 8–9, 66, 266; Connolly, Priests and People in Pre-­Famine Ireland, pp. 50–1. 16 Connolly, Priests and People in Pre-­Famine Ireland, pp. 33, 37.

78  Michael Mullett Somers Town became a centre of London Catholicism’s cosmopolitan culture, including a ‘Discourse [sermon] in English and French . . . At three o’clock Catechism in French. Vespers at four with the Benediction of the B. Sacrament.’ Even more architecturally aspirational than Somers Town, another metropolitan showpiece for the faith, in ‘severe classical style’, was the Moorfields St Mary’s chapel of 1817–20, a ‘kind of cathedral for the London District’, with a congregation, mostly poor, of as many as 16,000. St Mary’s became ‘the capital’s leading advertisement of a slowly reviving Catholicism . . . a spacious setting for the ritual of High Mass’, its Church plate being a gift from Pius VII.17 In Britain, as in Ireland, the religious orders played a role in the resuscitation of the Catholic Church in the early nineteenth century. In the wake of the French Revolution about thirty convents, colleges, and monasteries were resettled in England from the Continent. The Benedictine communities in Douai and Dieulouard, following residence in some temporary homes, settled at Ampleforth (1802) and Downside (1814) respectively, at both of which they established leading schools. The Benedictines also maintained their order’s historic fusion of the contemplative and pastoral life, with parochial missions, especially to the towns and their swelling Catholic and immigrant Irish populations. The president of the English Benedictine Congregation, Dom John Bede Brewer, had been chaplain in Bath, the Somerset centre of fashion, where members of the nation’s Catholic upper classes traditionally arranged their marriages, but at some point Brewer moved from fashionable Bath to less chic Woolton, near Liverpool. There the Church was struggling, with its four chapels, to provide pastoral care for a largely plebeian and Irish Catholic population that may have doubled in size, from 9,000 to 18,000, between 1810 and 1819.18 Following the papal suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773, the English Jesuits enjoyed the benefits of a legal ambiguity, since in English ‘law the Jesuits had no business being in England anyway, so being suppressed or not did not make a great deal of difference’, and in 1803 surviving members ‘were readmitted if they wished’. The English Jesuits operated their school at Stonyhurst in Lancashire and conducted parochial missions across England and Wales—­most effectively in towns, such as Preston, and in Wigan, 17  John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975), pp. 311, 357; Sheridan Gilley, ‘The Roman Catholic Church, 1780–1940’, in Sheridan Gilley and W. J. Sheils (eds.), A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre-­Roman Times to the Present (Oxford, 1994), p. 349; Ward, Eve of Catholic Emancipation, I, p. 192, II, pp. 302–3; The Laity’s Directory for the Year MDCCCXII, Ushaw College Library; Bryan Little, Catholic Churches since 1623: A Study of Roman Catholic Churches in England and Wales from Penal Times to the Present Decade (London, 1966), pp. 58–9; Olive Barnes, ‘The Catholic Church in England: The Politics of Allegiance and Identity, 1791–1908’ (PhD Thesis, Oxford Brookes University, 2011), p. 161; [Thomas Murphy], The Position of the Catholic Church in England and Wales during the Last Two Centuries: Retrospect and Forecast (London, 1892), pp. 49, 61. 18  J.  Anthony Williams (ed.), Post-­Reformation Catholicism in Bath, CRS 65–6, 2 vols. (London, 1975), I, pp. 66–9; John Davies, ‘Catholic Popular Piety: St Peter’s, Seel Street, Liverpool, in the Interwar Years’, North West Catholic History, 43 (2016), p. 44.

Catholics in the United Kingdom, 1800–1820  79 where from 1819 they served one of the borough’s two churches, the other being conducted by secular priests.19

Catholic Communities Around the English regions much of the older, post-­Reformation pattern of seigneurial patronage over small rural congregations remained in place in the first years of the nineteenth century. The mission at Birchley Hall, Billinge, north-­east of St Helens, Lancashire, which was traditionally linked closely to the gentry Anderton and Gerard families, became ‘renowned’ in 1801 for the imposition by the priest Henry Bennett of the last Catholic canonical penance in England, when a man accused of ‘a gross act of immorality’ was made to ‘kneel at the altar rails, confess his crime and receive the reproof of his pastor’. At Croxteth, in south-­west Lancashire, Charles William Molyneux, having entered the Church of England, continued temporarily to pay a stipend to the chaplain, and subsequently assisted in the building of a new chapel at nearby Gilmoss in 1823–4, to provide for a congregation numbering 300 in 1819. In 1803, at Hedon in the East Riding, the successor to the traditional patronal family, Francis Sheldon Constable, of Burton Constable, provided the funds, and probably the land, for a new chapel: ‘a brick edifice, the interior of which is very neatly finished and decorated’. A classic example of the surviving genre of the seigneurial supported countryside chapel was Yealand Conyers in north Lancashire, established by the Towneley family. The manageable pastoral demands of this rural congregation of only eighty made it possible for an incumbent, Basil Richard Barrett, to play his part in the vindication of English Catholicism’s intellectual life that took place in the early nineteenth century: Barrett authored ‘an analysis of aesthetics’, a biography of the Spanish Cardinal Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros, as well as a work in advanced mathematics.20 Among the missions served by scholar-­priests in the early years of the nineteenth century was the group consisting of Scarborough, Ugthorpe, and Whitby on the north Yorkshire coast. A refugee from Revolutionary France, remaining in 19  John Twist, ‘The Bicentenary of the Official Restoration of the Jesuits in 1814’, Stonyhurst Record, 2 (2014), p. 253; Geoffrey Holt, The English Jesuits, 1650–1829: A Biographical Dictionary, CRS 70 (London, 1984), p. 5; J. A. Hilton (ed.), ‘Catholic Chapels in Lancashire, 1819’, North West Catholic History, 45 (2018), pp. 8–9; J. A. Hilton, ‘The Case of Wigan: Catholic Congregationalism in the Age of Revolution’, North West Catholic History, 10 (1983), pp. 1–7. 20 John  F.  Giblin, The Anderton Family of Birchley and the Parish of St Mary, Birchley in Billinge (Formby, 1993), pp. 16–17; G. Holt, ‘Croxteth-­Gillmoss: The Development of a Mission’, North West Catholic History, 22 (1995), pp. 1–8; George Sutton, ‘The Catholic Mission of Nuthall and Hedon in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in George Bradley, Robert Finnegan, Dominic Minskip, and George Sutton (eds.), Four Essays in Yorkshire Catholic History (In the Post-­Reformation Period) (Leeds, 1994), pp. 23–4; J.  A.  Hilton, The Catholic Revival in Yealand, 1782–1852 (Preston, 1982), pp. 6–8.

80  Michael Mullett Britain until 1814 or 1815, Nicolas-­Alain Gilbert took up the mission in Whitby, where he built a chapel and presbytery, increasing the community from fifteen in 1774 to 300 in 1803. A versatile author in English, Gilbert’s most important literary production was a practical manual of prayers for the use of congregations made up of working people, The Method of Sanctifying the Sabbath Days at Whitby, Scarborough, &c. with a Paraphrase of some Psalms (1824), a major contribution to the series, produced in early-­nineteenth-­century northern England, of vernacular congregational prayer manuals. These productions also included the sets of prayers (1805; reissued 1823) compiled by the Preston-­based priests of the officially suppressed Society of Jesus, Joseph Dunn and Richard Morgan, and the Blackburn secular priest, William Dunn, as well as the Manual of Prayers for Sundays and Holydays (1833) authored by John Lingard at Hornby in Lancashire.21 In 1803, George Leo Haydock joined Gilbert’s mission at Ugthorpe, moving to Whitby in 1816. Like Barrett at Yealand Conyers, Haydock was a scholar-­priest, in the academic tradition of Douai, a legacy that was replanted in England, including at Ushaw College, which opened to students in 1808. The high point of Haydock’s prolific literary output was his edition of the ‘Douai’ version of the Bible in English. This huge task was commenced in 1807 amidst Haydock’s demanding pastoral work in Yorkshire. Haydock’s contribution to the enrichment of vernacular prayers for the use of congregations consisted of a series of man­ uals, compiled at Whitby, including A Collection of Catholic Hymns (1823) and Prayers before and after Mass (1822). Haydock’s tribute to his mentor Gilbert, was his edition of the latter’s Method of Sanctifying the Sabbath. Such writings, like those authored in Blackburn, Hornby, and Preston, made a major contribution to the devotional life of northern congregations in the course of England’s early-­ nineteenth-­century Catholic renewal.22 The historian Thomas Murphy linked George Leo Haydock with John Lingard as the ‘two scholars [who] did much to dispel the ignorant prejudices of the age’, both archetypes of the Douai-­Ushaw scholarly inheritance. Lingard arrived at Hornby in north Lancashire in 1811, a mission of the classic rural patronal type, having been established in 1762 by a wealthy Catholic woman, Ann Fenwick. The Catholic community centred on Hornby village, made up of labourers, weavers, and farmers, plus a few innkeepers and shopkeepers, consisted of 170 congregants in 1819. This rural chapelry thus provided the ideal undemanding location for the pursuit of Lingard’s scholarly, yet popular, historical writing: its high point was

21  Michael Mullett (ed.), English Catholicism, 1680–1830, 6 vols. (London, 2006), V, pp. 159–60; W. J. Nicholson, ‘Nicolas-­Alain Gilbert, French Émigré Priest’, Northern Catholic History, 12 (1980), pp. 19–22; D. A. Bellenger, ‘Nicolas-­Alain Gilbert’, Northern Catholic History, 15 (1982), pp. 13–14; Bossy, English Catholic Community, pp. 373–4. 22 Joseph Gillow (ed.), The Haydock Papers (London, 1888), pp. 135, 220–7, 201–4, 228; Sidney  K.  Ohlhausen, ‘The Haydock Bible after Two Centuries’, North West Catholic History, 40 (2013), pp. 24–36.

Catholics in the United Kingdom, 1800–1820  81 the ten-­volume History of England to 1688, produced between 1819 and 1830 and designed as a textbook for the country’s rapidly expanding number of Catholic schools.23 As the centre of gravity of early-­nineteenth-­century British Catholicism was shifting inexorably towards the towns, the ancient rural missions of which Lingard’s Hornby was an archetype might have appeared to be becoming outmoded backwaters, each typically served by the ‘practically extinct figure’ of the village-­based missioner. It is true that some of the country missions were now becoming glaring examples of decay. Thus at Horton in rural Gloucestershire in 1815—shortly before construction commenced of the magnificent St Mary’s, Moorfields, London—­Mass was said in the upper chamber of a poor cottage; the room was ten feet long by nine, with scarcely head room between [the celebrant] and the thatch. A deal table was used for the altar, and the wind blew through the broken panes of the window; about nine or ten persons assembled.24

John Yates spent his priestly life at Newhouses, near Esh, Lanchester, County Durham—­another archetypal country mission, where the old recusant family of Smythe were patrons. The inventory to Yates’s will seems to possess an in­escap­ able air of archaic shabbiness and poverty: ‘some ragged, patched linen albs etc., not decent to be used . . . Two old silver chalices . . . Two irons for altar breads’. Thoroughly rural in his lifestyle, John Yates farmed, leaving the proceeds of ‘the Sale of my Cows’ in his will. Yet the rural missions such as Newhouses might have been more than museum pieces, instead providing the indigenous human resources for the early-­nineteenth-­century British Catholic renaissance. John Yates may seem to us to have personified the gentle decay of rural Catholic practice over those years. He was, however, treasurer of one of the regional financial trusts that had been set up in order to ensure greater priestly financial independence from the laity: the Northern Brethren Fund. Yates went on to fill the office of vicar general, a senior position in the Northern District, being based at Brooms, Leadgate, County Durham. That location was known as the ‘cradle of Catholicity in [those] parts’, where an ‘old-­fashioned congregation’ had worshipped under the oversight of the Swinburne family. With the opening of the Victorian Consett ironworks, this mission was to typify the industrial focus of the nineteenth-­century English Catholic community, markedly so in Northumberland and Durham. Yet there

23 [Murphy], Position of the Catholic Church, p. 74; Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, pp. 141–2; J. A. Hilton, ‘Lingard’s Hornby’, in J. A. Hilton (ed.), Catholic Englishmen (Wigan, 1984), pp. 37–44; Peter Phillips, John Lingard: Priest and Historian (Leominster, 2008), pp. 150–72. 24 [Murphy], Position of the Catholic Church, p. 48.

82  Michael Mullett was no break here, providing continuity between the traditional ‘mission’ and the new ‘industrial’ Catholicism of the nineteenth century.25 In Scotland, the relationship between long-­standing rural congregations, especially in the Highlands and Islands, and new urban patterns of settlement and growth was that the former provided the human resources for the latter. The post-­ Reformation success of the Dominicans and Jesuits in re-­ Catholicizing the Highlands resulted in the fact that about 85 per cent of Scotland’s Catholic recusants came to be living in the Gaidhealtachd, in the north and west of the country. In Moidart, a Gaelic-­speaking community in Inverness-­shire, there were about 800 Catholics in 1804 ‘dispersed here and there in this mission . . . amongst whom there are some converts’. During the thirty-­eight years of the ministry of Norman Macdonald, in thirteen years from 1804 to 1817, the Catholic population in Moidart rose from around 800 to 950, ‘of whom are 34 are converts’. Marriage was a key factor in encouraging conversions, and Macdonald had the ‘great pleasure of receiving to the Sacraments a lady, the daughter of a minister [of the Kirk] recently converted to the Faith, who had married a Catholic’.26 Glengarry, also in Inverness-­shire, with 800 Catholics in 1822, was another of north-­west Scotland’s Catholic heartlands. Donald Forbes, the area’s missioner from 1819, ministered to a remarkable 1,080 enumerated Catholics, including 200 people in Glen Moriston and a further eighty in Stratherrick, south of Loch Ness. In the chapel in Newton, Abercalder, midway between Glengarry and Fort Augustus, 500 customarily heard Mass. Arisaig, on the north-­ west coast of Inverness-­shire, was ‘almost entirely Catholic and . . . contained more than 1,000 people’. The surviving medieval church of Malrubber was ‘surrounded by an almost entirely Catholic population’. In Kintail, east of Skye, there were ‘at least 200 Catholics’. In the ‘Lesser Isles’, midway between the Outer Hebrides and the mainland—­Eigg, Rum, and Canna—­there were 500 Catholics. The chapel on Eigg would be crowded for Sunday Mass, with congregations of up to 200, kneeling on the hard earth, while those ‘who had a mind’ might take a peat to kneel on.27 The next question concerns what happened to these numerous and, indeed, often preponderant, Catholic populations of the Highlands and Islands. Emigration from these communities was the consequence of the long-­term process known as the Clearances taking place in the Highlands and Islands between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an undertaking in which thousands of acres of marginal land were converted by landlords into more profitable sheep

25 Bernard  W.  Kelly, Historical Notes on English Catholic Missions (London, 1907; reprinted London, 1995), pp. 105, 169; Will of John Yates, 1827, Ushaw College Archives, UC/110; Bossy, English Catholic Community, pp. 245–8; Anstruther, Seminary Priests, IV, p. 312. 26 Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, pp. 102–14; Frederick Odo Blundell, The Catholic Highlands of Scotland: The Western Highlands and Islands, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1909; reprinted Miami, FL, 2019), II, pp. 146–51. 27 Blundell, The Catholic Highlands, II, pp. 83–4, 127–8, 132, 183–4, 195, 199–200.

Catholics in the United Kingdom, 1800–1820  83 runs, forcing crofters off their holdings. In the case of Glengarry, the large-­scale migration went back as far as the 1770s and 1780s, and was focused on Canada. In the case of the Lesser Isles, ‘many emigrated this summer [1822] to America’. In other cases, the destination of migration was not made specific: of Arisaig, for example, it was reported in 1822 that ‘a few years ago about 300 emigrated’, although the destination was not clear. Glasgow, only a few miles south of the Highland line, was a natural target for dispossessed Catholic Highlanders in search of work and wages, and poverty was the hallmark of migrants from the north and west of the city, in a period when local priests would leave their missions to go on fundraising begging tours in Ireland and England. Thus a demographic exchange was taking place in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Scotland’s Highlands and Islands Catholicism did not disappear: it migrated and reappeared.28 In Wales, which was contained within the Western Vicariate Apostolic and was the least Catholic entity of the four nations in Britain and Ireland, the small community centred on eight long-­standing missions: Holywell, with its popular shrine, traditionally under Jesuit oversight, and Talacre, both in Flintshire in the north-­east; Brecon, in mid-­Wales; and, in the south-­east, in Monmouthshire, at Abergavenny, Perthîr, Monmouth, Usk, and Llanarth. The grouping at Llanarth in north Monmouthshire was typical of post-­Reformation English and Welsh rural congregations sheltering under recusant gentry protection, in this case that of the Herbert family, at whose home of Llanarth Court Mass was celebrated by household chaplains. In contrast with this seigneurial pattern, new Catholic nuclei were beginning to emerge in the ports of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire. The feature shared by these new urban, coastal communities was Irish immigration. In Cardiff, where ‘a few Irish’ were pillars of the nascent congregation, and in Newport, where in 1812 ‘a small and inconvenient church’ provided for about 2,000 worshipers, ‘mostly necessitous Irish’, the scene was already set for the Hibernization of Welsh Catholicism as the nineteenth century proceeded.29 Thus in each of the four nations the lineaments of the social history of nineteenth-­century Catholicism were being laid down in the first two decades of the century, not yet a second spring but the closing of what had often been a harsh winter. We have seen in this chapter that, on the more political front, parliament was regularly addressed over the Catholic question, leading towards eventual le­gis­la­tive emancipation in 1829 but that the traditional hold of the Cisalpine-­ leaning squirearchy and nobility over the community was being loosened in the first two decades of the nineteenth century and that the ultramontane leader, 28 Blundell, The Catholic Highlands, II, pp. 127, 183–5, 195. 29  Life and Times of Bishop Thomas Joseph Brown, 1798–1880 (Cardiff, [c.2001]), p. 8; Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, pp. 163–4; John Hobson Matthews (ed.), ‘The Old Registers of the Catholic Missions of Llanarth in the County of Monmouth, 1781–1838’, in Miscellanea III, CRS 3 (London, 1906), pp. 144–80.

84  Michael Mullett John Milner, who was at the height of his highly controversial fame and influence in the course of those decades, paved the way for the Victorian clerically led, Rome-­oriented Church. The English, Scottish, and Welsh Catholic community’s demographic explosion had to wait until the middle of the century, but a busy programme of church-­building had already begun to prepare accommodation for those added numbers, while, especially under the influence of émigré French clergy, a minor devotional revolution was moving Catholic congregations away from Bishop Challoner’s quiet, domestic piety into a fuller liturgical and parochial life, some of it expressed in the vernacular. In Ireland, the Church was also undergoing revival in the early nineteenth century, but it was the Catholic laity who would lead the campaign for emancipation in the 1820s. These data mean, then, that this chapter has been able to introduce British and Irish Catholic life over two of its most formative decades.

Select Bibliography Bartlett, Thomas, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690–1830 (Dublin, 1992). Bossy, John, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975). Bushkühl, Matthias, Great Britain and the Holy See, 1746–1870 (Dublin, 1982). Connolly, S. J., Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1780–1845 (Dublin, 1982). Couve de Murville, Maurice M.L, John Milner, 1752–1826 (Birmingham, 1986). Johnson, Christine, Developments in the Roman Church in Scotland, 1789–1829 (Edinburgh, 1983). Leighton, C. D. A., ‘Gallicanism and the Veto Controversy: Church, State and Catholic Community in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, in R.  V.  Comerford, Mary Cullen, Jacqueline  R.  Hill, and Colm Lennon (eds.), Religion, Conflict and Coexistence in Ireland: Essays Presented to Monsignor Patrick  J.  Corish (Dublin, 1990), pp. 35–58. Macaulay, Ambrose, The Catholic Church and the Campaign for Emancipation in Ireland and England (Dublin, 2016). Mullett, Michael (ed.), English Catholicism, 1680–1830, 6 vols. (London, 2006). Norman, Edward, The English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1984).

5

‘The Abominable Cath. Quest.’ Catholic Emancipation, 1820–1830 Thomas Bartlett

An observer surveying the Irish and British political scene in the early 1820s would surely have concluded that the prospect of a successful outcome to the long-­running campaign for Catholic emancipation appeared to be remote. Irish Catholics (though not English or Scottish Catholics) had been given access to the parliamentary franchise—­the so-­called 40-­shilling (s.) freehold vote—­in 1793, but eligibility for seats in the Irish parliament had not been forthcoming. Similarly, in 1801, despite vague promises and ‘understandings’, the passing of the Act of Union had not been accompanied by Catholic emancipation. Since then, there had been unrelenting and successful opposition, headed by George III and then by his son, the prince regent after 1812, and ably organized in parliament by Sir Robert Peel (Irish chief secretary, 1807–12; home secretary, 1822–7) to any concession to Irish or, indeed, British Catholics. A series of campaigns headed by Daniel O’Connell, by 1805 the undisputed leader of Catholic Ireland, usually with petitioning at their centre, had achieved precisely nothing. Admittedly, the ­number of MPs in the House of Commons in favour of Catholic relief had grown during the twenty years after Union, and in 1821, a bill proposed by W. C. Plunket, MP for Dublin University and, since Henry Grattan’s death in 1820, the effective spokesman for Catholic claims in the Commons, was carried by six votes in that house.1 It should be noted, however, that Plunket’s bill contained ‘securities’ providing for government supervision of episcopal correspondence with Rome and, as such, was denounced by Daniel O’Connell, a vocal opponent of anything of the sort, as ‘rascally’ and ultimately an attempt to ‘decatholicise Ireland’.2 Insofar as English and Scottish Catholic leaders were prepared to accept ‘securities’ they too incurred the wrath both of O’Connell and of that other stormy petrel, Bishop John Milner, vicar apostolic for the Midland District, who denounced his fellow 1  Between 1805 and 1821 there were fourteen votes on Catholic claims in the House of Commons, thirteen of which resulted in defeat: James A. Reynolds, The Catholic Emancipation Crisis in Ireland, 1823–29 (New Haven, CT, 1954), p. 87. 2 O’Connell to his wife, Mary O’Connell, 14 April 1821, in Maurice O’Connell (ed.), The Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell, 8 vols. (Dublin, 1972–80), II, p. 315.

Thomas Bartlett, ‘The Abominable Cath. Quest.’: Catholic Emancipation, 1820–1830 In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829. Edited by: Liam Chambers, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843443.003.0006

86  Thomas Bartlett English Catholic bishops for, as he saw it, traducing the tradition of ‘glorious ­martyrdom’ of their sainted predecessors. (Nor did the readiness of English and Scottish Catholic leaders to accept government controls win them any favours: in April 1822 a modest proposal to permit English Catholic lords to take their seats in the House of Lords was rejected by their fellow peers by forty-­two votes, and a year later, another proposal to give English and Scottish Catholics the same voting rights as their counterparts in Ireland was thrown out by the Lords.)3 In the event, Plunket’s bill was rejected by thirty-­nine votes in the House of Lords. O’Connell was unashamedly delighted with this outcome for he grasped immediately that the rejection had revealed a central truth. As he put it: ‘Even the Vetoists [i.e. those in favour of some form of government control] must admit that se­cur­ ities do no good for we are kicked out as unceremoniously with them as without them’.4 For emancipation to succeed, a new way forward had to be charted, for it was now evident that emancipation would never be given, it could only be taken.

Catholic Rent On 26 April 1823, the Dublin Evening Post, a pro-­Catholic newspaper, published a report that Daniel O’Connell and Richard Lalor Sheil, previously at odds over the veto, had dined together and had agreed to put their differences behind them and to set up a Catholic Association which would adopt ‘all such legal and constitutional measures as may be most useful to obtain Catholic Emancipation’. At an inaugural meeting a few days later, between twenty and sixty people (mostly lawyers) showed up and it was agreed that the new association would have no representative function (to avoid falling foul of the 1793 Convention Act which outlawed any association claiming to have a representative function), that journalists would be welcome to attend its meetings, that its membership lists would be open to public scrutiny, and that ten members would constitute a quorum.5 This Catholic Association was immediately denounced by its opponents as a ‘popish parliament’, a revealing reference to the ‘parliament’ convened by James II in 1689 that had sought to reverse the Restoration land settlement in Ireland. Initially, however, there seemed to be little reason for alarm. The Association was not specifically formed to organize a petition, though it proceeded to do just that. Rather, it set out to politicize all manner of Catholic grievances and to focus on ‘practical . . . not abstract questions’, such as the activities of the Kildare Place Society (an educational proselytizing body), the lack of a Catholic chaplain at

3 G. I. T. Machin, The Catholic Question in English Politics, 1820–30 (Oxford, 1966), pp. 36, 43. 4  O’Connell to the O’Conor Don, 23 April 1823, in O’Connell (ed.), The Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell, II, p. 139. 5 Reynolds, Catholic Emancipation Crisis, pp. 13–15.

Catholic Emancipation, 1820–1830  87 Newgate Prison, Catholic access to cemeteries (by law, all burial grounds were under the control of the Church of Ireland), bias in the law courts, and the question of tithes. Initially, progress was slow: weekly meetings throughout 1823 were sparsely attended, and on at least six occasions a quorum was not found. Not surprisingly, even the ever-­vigilant Henry Goulburn, Irish chief secretary from 1821 to 1827, concluded that no action needed to be taken against it, and he predicted that the Association would die a natural death.6 The turning point in the Association’s fortunes came some ten months after its first meeting, when at O’Connell’s suggestion a Catholic rent was announced, set at 1 penny (d.) per month, and to be levied throughout Ireland. ‘All I ask is one farthing a week from one-­sixth of the Catholics’, declared O’Connell, and he challenged his audience, ‘who is it that cannot afford a farthing a week?’7 The aid and cooperation of the Catholic clergy was quickly sought. As O’Connell explained to Bishop James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin (the famous—­or infamous—­Catholic propagandist; pen name JKL),8 clerical support was needed to ‘prevent frauds in the collection and the obtrusion of improper persons or improper objects amongst the collectors or subscribers’ and he asked him (and the other Catholic bishops) to ‘procure a list of the parishes in his diocese’, along with the name and address of each parish priest.9 A nationwide network of collectors, church­war­ dens, and inspectors was soon in place, under the watchful eye of the parish clergy. The ‘Monthly Catholic Rent’, as O’Connell called it, began to flow into the Association’s coffers, at first a paltry £130 per week, but by the autumn of 1824, this had risen to £300 per week, and by March 1825, the Association had assets of £13,000, and a weekly rental income of £1,840. What was this money for? O’Connell’s initial idea was to raise funds ‘to secure the press’ (i.e. favourable notices) in British and Irish newspapers, but the amounts raised quickly led to more expansive plans.10 Funds were also made available to parish clergy in Ireland for educational and church purposes. In addition, new premises for the Association’s meetings were urgently needed, for along with the weekly income had come hundreds of new members: no danger now of failing to attract a ­quorum. Numerous committees were quickly established to organize petitions, conduct a census of the Catholic population of Ireland, draft addresses, investigate the grievances of Catholic 40s.-freeholders, and arrange legal aid for victimized 6 Reynolds, Catholic Emancipation Crisis, pp. 14–16. 7 Brian Jenkins, Era of Emancipation: British Government of Ireland, 1812–30 (Kingston and Montreal, 1988), p. 216. 8  JKL had published, in October 1822, A Vindication of the Religious and Civil Principles of Irish Catholics, an uncompromising defence of Catholic teaching. See Fergus O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation: Daniel O’Connell and the Birth of Irish Democracy (Dublin, 1985), p. 42. 9 O’Connell to Doyle, 5 March 1824, in O’Connell (ed.), The Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell, III, 49. 10  O’Connell to Mary O’Connell, 18/19 March 1824, in O’Connell (ed.), The Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell, III, p. 55.

88  Thomas Bartlett Catholic peasants. Moreover, proceedings at the Association’s meetings were conducted in a parliamentary manner, and the worst fears of those who had feared a ‘popish parliament’ appeared to be confirmed. As hostile observers, and some friends to the Catholic cause, looked on in fascinated horror, O’Connell was exultant: ‘the Catholic rent will surely emancipate us’.11 Catholic Association funds were also used to pay for a London agent, Eneas MacDonnell, whose task was to promote Catholic affairs at Westminster, to see to the insertion of Association business in British papers, and to fund a new newspaper in England, The Truth Teller, that would be devoted to the Catholic cause. He was also to liaise with the newly formed English Catholic Association, a body initially headed by the leading English Catholic peers, Lords Petre, Arundel, and Shrewsbury, and which quickly set up branches in Preston, Manchester, York, Sheffield, and Pontefract.12 Relations between Irish and English Catholics had frequently been strained, for the latter had generally favoured a less clamorous approach to campaigning (‘What a pity the Irish cannot be quiet’ lamented Bishop William Poynter of London in 1815) while their acquiescence in possible ‘se­cur­ities’ caused difficulties. Within a few years, however, congratulatory addresses were being exchanged between the English and Irish Associations, O’Connell and Sheil were invited to address the English, later British, Catholic Association, and by 1828 Sheil was commending English Catholic leaders for having abandoned ‘their pusillanimous and servile’ conduct. Tensions between the two bodies, however, would remain over the English Catholic attitude towards ‘securities’ and these would resurface as emancipation approached.13 The runaway success of the Catholic rent between 1824 and 1825 requires explanation, for the idea itself was by no means a new one. O’Connell himself, when calling for a ‘Monthly Catholic Rent’ in 1824, was able to point to a similar scheme proposed by William Parnell in 1811 and he reminded his audience that forty years earlier Lord Kenmare, an Irish Catholic peer, had called for a £1 levy in each of 2,500 parishes in Ireland in order to defray the substantial expenses incurred in petitioning. Neither plan had borne fruit, though variations on them were revived in 1809, 1810, and in 1813 nothing came of these initiatives. Undaunted, O’Connell continued to call for funds to meet the expenses of the Catholic campaign. In 1819, he came up with the idea of a levy of 2s. 6d. from each Catholic household to pay for petitions. Once again, his suggestion drew a negative response.14 And yet, when O’Connell announced his Catholic rent 11 O’Connell to John Primrose, 18 December 1824, in O’Connell (ed.), The Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell, III, p. 89. 12 Machin, Catholic Question, p. 46. 13  Ambrose Macaulay, The Catholic Church and the Campaign for Emancipation in England and Ireland (Dublin, 2016), pp. 257, 321, 327, 338. 14 O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, pp. 51–2; Reynolds, Catholic Emancipation Crisis, pp. 55–7; Thomas Bartlett, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690–1830 (Dublin, 1992), pp. 331–2.

Catholic Emancipation, 1820–1830  89 scheme in March 1824 it met with wholehearted approval from Irish Catholics of all classes, not least from the Catholic bishops and clergy, without whose network of churches, organizational skills, and enthusiasm, the collection of the rent would surely have faltered. What had changed? One answer lies in the very broad range of issues that the new Catholic Association addressed. True, Catholic emancipation—­access to parliament—­was still a priority, but now peasant grievances of every kind were highlighted, ran­ging from the predatory activities of individual landlords, through the perennial problems of tithes, Orange depredations, rack-­renting, and on to the plight of Catholic soldiers denied access to a Catholic chaplain, and much else besides. Seats in parliament—­the core of the Catholic emancipation campaign—­could only directly concern a handful of well-­to-­do Catholics; but the Association now promised Catholic liberation and this meant something to every Catholic in the land. The Catholic clergy were enthusiastic from the start. A reluctance to become involved in fund-­raising—­visible in earlier campaigns—­was quickly overcome as Catholic priests had recently found themselves under constant attack from Protestant evangelicals, the latter emboldened by the announcement of a ‘Second Reformation’ in 1822. Catholic parish clergy resolved to fight back by ensuring that the Catholic rent was duly gathered on ‘Rent Sunday’ and properly accounted for.15 An added incentive for them was the real prospect of funding from the Catholic Association for Catholic schools, and this money would enable them to refute charges from Protestant missionaries, or what one Catholic leader called ‘itinerant biblical fanatics’, that they deliberately kept their flocks in ignorance.16 As Thomas Wyse, a leading member of the Catholic Association, put it, within a short period, ‘the cause of education became identified with the cause of emancipation’.17 Another answer lies in broad societal changes that, taken together, meant that the Ireland of the 1820s was certainly not the Ireland of the 1790s. Enormous changes had occurred in Irish society since those days, not the least of which was that a population of around five million in 1800 had ballooned, officially, to over seven million in 1821, though O’Connell claimed the true figure was at least eight million at that date. He called for a new census to prove this and had the Catholic Association take it on as yet another project.18 Catholic numbers were now a key part of the emancipation argument. For most of the post-­Union period, the overwhelming majority enjoyed by Catholics over Protestants in Ireland was cited as a key reason why Catholics could not be given political power. Catholic numbers were now to be flaunted and deployed as a central reason why emancipation could 15 Reynolds, Catholic Emancipation Crisis, pp. 50–2. For the ‘Second Reformation’, see Irene Whelan, The Bible War in Ireland: The Second Reformation and the Polarization of Catholic-­Protestant Relations, 1800–1840 (Madison, WI, 2005). 16  As described by Archbishop Patrick Curtis of Armagh: Macaulay, The Catholic Church, p. 331. 17  Quoted in O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, pp. 62–3. 18 Reynolds, Catholic Emancipation Crisis, p. 70.

90  Thomas Bartlett no longer be denied. And as William Gregory noted, ‘the Catholic rent . . . is the most efficient mode that could be devised for opening a direct communication between the popish parliament and the whole mass of the popish population’.19 That ‘popish population’ was also, to an extent unknown elsewhere in Europe, highly politicized, for the period 1793 to 1820 witnessed acute political turmoil, bloody rebellion, equally bloody repression, and widespread agrarian insurrection, most of which coincided with a global war from 1793 to 1815. These up­heavals provided the essential backdrop to the pre-­1820 campaigns for Catholic emancipation, for their key feature—­the near-­annual procurement of lengthy petitions—­would educate and, to a degree, empower those who signed, while their perennial failure would surely embitter those who took part. The publication of pamphlets detailing and enumerating Catholic grievances assisted in this process of educating Catholics to ‘know your wrongs’,20 and so too did a burgeoning newspaper press which had a nationwide reach and very large readership (or audience, for papers were frequently read out loud to spectators). By 1820 seventeen newspapers were published in Dublin, eleven of an anti-­Catholic bent and just six in favour, though the latter included the Dublin Evening Post and the Freeman’s Journal, both of which had much larger circulations than the rest.21 It was noticeable too that in the 1820s, unlike in the 1790s, there was an audience for Irish news abroad, and the proceedings of the Catholic Association were sometimes published in French, German, and Italian. Sheil, for example, wrote articles for the French periodicals, L’Étoile, and Le Globe. The growing number of Irish immigrants in the United States also made a contribution: $6,000 was raised for the Association by a network of support bodies based along the east coast from Savannah to Boston. The Association reciprocated by setting aside £5,000 for Irish priests to work in the United States. By the 1820s the Catholic cause had been internationalized.22 The recruitment of over 150,000 Irishmen, mostly Catholics, into the armed forces of the Crown during the French wars should also be mentioned. This recruitment was quite unprecedented and was in itself conducive to politicization, while the rapid demobilization of what remained of this armament after Waterloo was destabilizing for Irish rural society. The soldiers returned to Ireland unheralded and unsung, and O’Connell’s attempt to cite their services and their valour as an argument for emancipation was simply ignored. The Catholic Association, however, did make a point of highlighting Catholic ex-­soldiers’ grievances, and this had an impact, as revealed by the military bearing of Catholic 19  Quoted in Bartlett, Fall and Rise, p. 332. 20  See, for example, Henry Parnell, A History of the Penal Laws against the Irish Catholics from 1689 to the Union (Dublin, 1808); the Catholic Association sought to update this report in the 1820s; Reynolds, Catholic Emancipation Crisis, pp. 64–5. 21 Reynolds, Catholic Emancipation Crisis, pp. 75–7. 22 Reynolds, Catholic Emancipation Crisis, pp. 83–6.

Catholic Emancipation, 1820–1830  91 electors as they marched to vote at the Waterford and Clare elections in 1826 and 1828 respectively. High prices for agricultural produce during wartime had been followed by a severe peace-­time recession, which in turn fuelled agrarian protest or (its official term) ‘outrage’. A series of poor harvests in the early 1820s added to the ongoing misery.23 It was in the 1820s that the mythical ‘Captain Rock’ emerged as the putative leader of a series of agrarian insurrections through the southern parts of Ireland. Much alarm, terror even, was aroused by ‘Captain Rock’s’ ferocious attacks on magistrates, landlords, soldiers, constables, and tithe collectors, and there were frequent demands for new laws, more soldiers, and exemplary punishments. Some even professed to regard the Rockite movement as the armed wing of the Catholic Association.24 O’Connell rejected this claim and argued instead that the Catholic Association had successfully redirected the insurgents’ energies into peaceful pursuits and thus reduced rural crime.25 What could not be denied, however, were the religious overtones to ‘Captain Rock’s’ onslaughts and to rural disorder generally, for these were infused with sectarianism. Moreover, anti-­ Protestant feeling had recently come to the fore with the widespread distribution of the prophecies of Signor Pastorini (the English Catholic Bishop Charles Walmesley), first published in 1790 but many times reprinted. Pastorini, basing his prophecies on his reading of the Book of Revelation, forecast the destruction of Protestantism in Ireland in either 1821 or 1825. In this atmosphere of fevered political speculation, sectarian excitement, and the memory of past triumphs and failures, O’Connell’s proposal for a Catholic rent met with a ready, even enthusiastic, response. How would Peel and Goulburn respond to the novel challenge that O’Connell and the Catholic Association now presented?

The Waterford and Clare Elections By the autumn of 1824 it was evident that something approaching an ‘Irish revolution’ had taken place. Alarmed observers claimed the Catholic Association— ‘this Irish Parliament’26—with its Catholic rent, its membership of thousands, its numerous meetings at parish, county, provincial, and national ­levels, and its copious petitions on all manner of Catholic grievances was threatening to usurp 23  For reports of famine along the west coast of Ireland and excessive rain in the south of Ireland ruining the potato crop, see Daniel Leahy to earl of Shannon, 15 December 1821, PRONI, Shannon MSS, D2707/A3/1/50; John Walker to Sidmouth, 30 June 1822, The National Archives (UK), HO 100/167/254–7. 24 Macaulay, The Catholic Church, pp. 333. 25  On the historical ‘Captain Rock’, see James  S.  Donnelly, Jr., Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821–1824 (Madison, WI, 2009). 26  Palmerston to Peel, [late 1824], in C.  S.  Parker (ed.), Sir Robert Peel from His Private Papers, 2 vols. (London, 1891), I, p. 357.

92  Thomas Bartlett English government in Ireland. Altogether, the Association posed, wrote the chancellor of the exchequer, George Canning, ‘the most difficult problem that a government ever had to deal with’.27 What to do? Clearly, doing nothing was not an option, and any idea that Peel may have had of waiting for the usual ‘split’ to occur in the Association or, indeed, of stalling until it broke the law was firmly ruled out by George IV. The King clamoured for action and threatened to rescind the long-­standing ‘open policy’ of his cabinets on Catholic emancipation if none were forthcoming.28 For his part, the duke of Wellington, a key adviser to the King, excitedly forecast ‘civil war in Ireland sooner or later’ if the Association were not quickly put down.29 The difficulty was, as Peel ruefully pointed out, the Association had been careful to stay on the right side of the law—­indeed it claimed to be a charity—­and he forecast great skill would be needed in drafting a bill to outlaw the Association and then even greater skill in piloting it through the House of Commons.30 Certainly, such a bill would not pass the Commons without bringing on a major debate on Catholic emancipation, and this would lead almost certainly to another majority in favour of concession to Catholics in the House. Perhaps a successful prosecution of O’Connell himself might be an acceptable substitute for action against the Association? O’Connell had praised Simon Bolivar, the liberator of Latin America, and had apparently called for an Irish Bolivar. Surely this constituted an incitement to armed insurrection? The problem here, or more of an embarrassment really, was that Bolivar had just been praised by the British government, and the State of Colombia itself was about to be accorded diplomatic recognition. The legal case against O’Connell had to be dropped.31 In the end, Peel determined on an Act that would outlaw Irish societies or associations that met for longer than fourteen days, along with a ‘sunset’ clause that would see the Act expire in two years. In an attempt at balance, the proposed Unlawful Societies in Ireland Act would embrace both the Catholic Association and the Orange Order, though clearly the Catholic Association was the target. Only the Association was alluded to by Goulburn when he introduced the bill, and he made much of its leaders’ alleged connection to ‘the traitors of old times’— Theobald Wolfe Tone, Thomas Russell, and Robert Emmet. Both the Association and the Orange Order dissolved themselves shortly before the bill became law on 9 March 1825.32 O’Connell had travelled to London when the bill was being debated and he had numerous discussions with English MPs who were in favour of granting

27  Canning to Peel, 6 November 1824 in Parker (ed.), Sir Robert Peel, I, p. 345. 28  From 1812 on, the Catholic question was an ‘open’ one in government meaning that ministers could have their own views on the subject. 29  Wellington to Peel, 3 November 1824, George IV to Peel, 19 November 1824, in Parker (ed.), Sir Robert Peel, I, pp. 348–9. 30  Peel to Goulburn, 6 November 1824, in Parker (ed.), Sir Robert Peel, I, pp. 346–8. 31 Jenkins, Era of Emancipation, pp. 223–4. 32 O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, pp. 82–9.

Catholic Emancipation, 1820–1830  93 emancipation, if only to remove the logjam that was holding up parliamentary and other desired reforms. He was also feted as the man of the moment and invited to dine with dukes and earls: even the prince of Wales sat down with him. Those MPs in favour of parliamentary reform were anxious for O’Connell’s endorsement, and their leader, Sir Francis Burdett, brought forward a motion on 1 March for the Catholic claims to be considered. This passed the Commons by a majority of thirteen. A bill for emancipation was drawn up accompanied by two ‘wings’, so-­called because, it was claimed, they would enable the bill to ‘fly’ through parliament. These ‘wings’ proposed eliminating the 40s.-freeholder vote, as well as providing for the State payment of Catholic clergy. To general astonishment, O’Connell agreed to these securities, and they duly passed the Commons by twenty-­seven votes only to go down to defeat in the Lords by a majority of forty-­eight, a figure much larger than expected. Contrary to rumours that they were well disposed to the bills, Lord Liverpool, the prime minister, and the duke of York had spoken out strongly against them, the latter claiming that the King, his brother, would never agree to Catholic emancipation ‘so long as the coronation oath stood as it did on the Statute book’.33 Church bells rang out in triumph throughout England on the news of the bill’s defeat, and those Church of England clergy who had sponsored the large majority of the 400 or so anti-­Catholic petitions that had flooded into parliament had their victory. Liverpool’s government and George IV were never more popular.34 At the time and since, O’Connell’s apparent turnaround on the issue of se­cur­ ities has been much debated. Had his head been turned by the attention paid to him by metropolitan society?35 Was his agreement merely driven by his desire to take silk, to gain that coveted legal recognition, hitherto denied him on purely sectarian grounds?36 Or was this simply a pragmatic decision by a pragmatic pol­ it­ ician who would keep his eye on the main prize whatever strings were attached?37 In any case, O’Connell had to endure much criticism in Ireland for what was seen as a complete volte-­face by him. One prominent critic, the radical journalist, John Lawless, tactlessly made a point of quoting O’Connell’s own words against him on the issue of so-­called ‘securities’.38 The rejection of Burdett’s bill and its ‘wings’ by the Lords was perhaps fortunate for O’Connell’s leadership. On the face of it, then, by mid-­1825, the campaign for Catholic emancipation had received a decisive setback. O’Connell’s leadership was now under unprecedented scrutiny in Ireland, while stalemate continued between the Commons and 33 O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, pp. 97–102; Jenkins, Era of Emancipation, p. 230. 34 As Bathurst assured Liverpool: Bathurst to Liverpool, 23 May 1825, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Earl Bathurst (London, 1923), pp. 584–5 (hereafter HMC, Bathurst); Machin, Catholic Question, pp. 54, 62. 35 Macaulay, The Catholic Church, p. 339. 36 O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, p. 95. 37 O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, pp. 91–4. 38 Macaulay, The Catholic Church, p. 340; O’Connell to Ed. Dwyer, 15 March 1825, O’Connell (ed.), The Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell, III, 139–40.

94  Thomas Bartlett the Lords in England. Moreover, the Crown’s undying opposition to all ­concession had once again been made clear, while the cabinet’s ‘open policy’ on the Catholic question held out little promise of Catholic advance. Appearances, however, were quite deceptive. O’Connell quickly saw off his critics, resumed his role as the Catholic leader of a ‘New’ Catholic Association (‘new’ to circumvent the Unlawful Societies Act) and called for the resumption of the Catholic rent. The struggle would continue unabated in Ireland. Again, could the stand-­off between the Lords and Commons in England be allowed to go on indefinitely, and could the impasse at cabinet level on ‘this unpleasant business’ (as Lord Liverpool, the prime minister, described it) be permitted to continue?39 From the private cor­res­ pond­ence of the main actors—­Peel, Liverpool, Wellington—­it is evident that some thought was being given at the highest level to seeking a way out of the ongoing crisis. Peel was clearly pondering how best to safeguard the Protestant position in Ireland, as it appeared that Catholic emancipation could not be long delayed. Already in 1825, while still voicing his firm opposition on the main point, he had broken ranks with his supporters in Dublin over the issue of payment for Catholic clergy. He blithely assured an outraged William Gregory that such payment would have the same effect on Catholic priests as that made to their Presbyterian counterparts in Ireland, ‘converting [them] from factious politicians into quiet ministers of religion’.40 Liverpool, for his part, acknowledged that a resolution of the Catholic question could not be kept ‘in abeyance’ forever, while Wellington toyed with the notion of a Concordat with Rome, for he too was persuaded that resistance to Catholic claims could not be maintained indefinitely.41 What was needed was some great ‘calamity or alarm’, or ‘irresistible necessity’ (Lord Grenville)42 or ‘some scene of public danger or calamity’ (W. C. Plunket)43 that would present Peel or Liverpool or Wellington with that plausible crisis that would enable them to yield under apparent duress. Ironically, it would be those 40s.-freeholders whom O’Connell was quite prepared to abandon in 1825 that stepped forward to do just that. The terms of the Act of Union had given the lion’s share of parliamentary representation to the Irish counties rather than to the Irish boroughs (sixty-­four seats out of a hundred). In these counties the 40s.-freeholder, generally Catholics outside Ulster, was supreme. By 1820 a Catholic ‘interest’ could be identified in no fewer than eighteen of the twenty-­three counties outside the nine in Ulster. What the statistician Edward Wakefield in 1812 had labelled as ‘political agronomy’,

39  Liverpool to Bathurst, 30 April 1825, HMC, Bathurst, p. 579. 40  Peel to Gregory, 21 March 1825, Parker (ed.), Sir Robert Peel, I, pp. 369–70. 41 Liverpool to Bathurst, 22 May 1825, in HMC, Bathurst, pp. 583–4; Macaulay, The Catholic Church, p. 341. 42  Cited in Bartlett, Fall and Rise, p. 334. 43  Plunket to Canning, 18 December 1825, David Plunket (ed.), The Life, Letters, and Speeches of Lord Plunket, 2 vols. (London, 1867), II, pp. 224–6.

Catholic Emancipation, 1820–1830  95 namely, the multiplication, not so much feckless as reckless, by Irish landlords of 40s.-freeholds in order to expand the electorate at their command, had proceeded apace since 1793. So long as the freeholder possessed the vote and the landlords possessed the freeholder then all would be well at election time, for it was axiomatic that the tenants would obey their landlord’s wishes in casting their votes. Failure to do so would have consequences, which might include eviction. For many years, however, there had been warning signs that the Irish 40s.-freeholder was proving anything but obedient in following their landlords’ directions. In 1818, there had been freeholder ‘revolts’ in Counties Wexford, Sligo, Leitrim, Armagh, and Cork, and in 1823 O’Connell and Sheil had intervened decisively on the side of a pro-­Catholic candidate against an anti-­Catholic incumbent MP in Dublin. Irish landlords, public protestations to the contrary, had not been oblivious to the dangers posed by a volatile electorate. In order to minimize the threat of an upset, they had taken care to provide acceptable ‘Catholic’ candidates for ‘their’ counties or, more successfully, had entered into agreements with county rivals to reduce drastically the number of contested elections. In 1812, nine counties had a poll, in 1818 this had slipped to eight, and by 1820 only three counties held a contest. The opportunity for a freeholder revolt was thereby seriously limited. In short, it was by no means apparent that the presence of a large, potentially disaffected electorate on its own could be turned to the advantage of the Catholic Association. O’Connell was always hugely sceptical about turning the freeholder against his landlord, for he saw them as nothing more than ‘the property of the Protestant proprietors’.44 He credited his victory in Dublin in 1823 entirely to local circumstances that surely would not apply elsewhere. And, as we have seen, he had been quite prepared to have the 40s.-freeholders cut off in 1825. The County Waterford election in 1826 was to prove O’Connell’s analysis incorrect, while his own election for County Clare in 1828, once again with massive as­sist­ ance from the hitherto despised 40s.-freeholder, was to provide that final public crisis that forced Peel and Wellington to act. The representation of County Waterford had long been divided between the Devonshire and Beresford families, with each claiming a single parliamentary seat. Devonshire’s man was a supporter of Catholic claims, but the Beresford incumbent was Lord George Thomas Beresford who yielded to none in his op­pos­ ition to Catholic emancipation. From at least 1824, an informal group of Catholics ‘distressed by the discordancy between the electors and the elected’ in that county, and headed by a wealthy merchant, Thomas Wyse, had been planning to contest the Beresford seat.45 Even before a general election was called in June 1826, a creditable local candidate had been found, the liberal Protestant, Henry Villiers 44  Cited in Bartlett, Fall and Rise, p. 336. 45  The Waterford election of 1826 can be followed in O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, pp. 122–32.

96  Thomas Bartlett Stuart, to run against Beresford. Initially, the Catholic Association, headquartered in Dublin, had paid little attention to the goings-­on in Waterford: following O’Connell’s lead, it was sceptical about a successful challenge to the long-­standing hegemony of this powerful Ascendancy family. Before long, however, it was ­evident that a struggle of epic proportions was brewing. To defeat the challenge to its hegemony, the Beresford party combed the elect­ or­al lists and attempted to put together a coalition of county interests that would surely enable them to see off Villiers Stuart. For their part, Wyse and his associates built on the network of local Catholic Association branches and, in effect, created the first political machine in Ireland. Sensing that Villiers Stuart might win, O’Connell pledged him his support. Lawyers were hired to scrutinize their opponent’s lists of voters, liberal Protestant interests were courted, favourable newspaper coverage was solicited, and the whole was carried on in a carnival atmosphere. Above all, the active support of the local Catholic clergy was sought and found readily forthcoming. Their role in the collection of Catholic rent had brought home to them the enormous political authority that they possessed, and they did not hesitate to use it. The result was not long in doubt: Villiers Stuart romped home with a near 1,000-­vote majority over Beresford. Moreover, as if emboldened by the overthrow of the Beresford candidate, other freeholder revolts broke out in Louth, Cavan, Monaghan, Westmeath, and Mayo, scoring significant successes. In Louth, the ‘Catholic’ candidate was narrowly defeated by John Leslie Foster, nephew of John Foster, the last speaker of the Irish parliament, and in­tim­ ate of Sir Robert Peel. Leslie Foster won by just five votes over a candidate who had only entered the race ten days before polling. Once again, the Catholic clergy had played a key role, shepherding the 40s.-freeholders to the polls and, offering them, as a shaken Leslie Foster complained to Peel, ‘a choice between the distress warrant [essentially, eviction] and the cross [essentially, damnation]’. Few had hesitated to plump for their salvation. The lesson was immediately drawn: ‘Hereafter, no man will ever have a quiet election who does not support them [the Catholics]’, forecast Lord Donoughmore, while Leslie Foster warned Peel that if the 40s.-freehold franchise were not scrapped at least sixty ‘Catholics’ would be returned at the next election, ‘and such Catholics!’.46 In public at least, Peel affected to disbelieve that the government needed to deal with the Catholic question. He claimed to have drawn comfort from the strong showing in England of anti-­Catholic candidates in the general election, for this could conceivably cost the pro-­ Catholics their majority in the House of Commons.47 In any case, he refused to concede that emancipation was now

46 Bartlett, Fall and Rise, p. 339; O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, p. 151. Leslie Foster meant pro-­ Catholic MPs. 47  For anti-­Catholicism as a factor in the general election of 1826 in England, see Machin, Catholic Question, pp. 69–86.

Catholic Emancipation, 1820–1830  97 i­n­ev­it­able, and he airily waved away the alarmists by pointing out that the next general election would not take place until 1832 or 1833 (in fact, the next one was in 1830) and he hoped that by then the landlords would have regained possession of the 40s.-freeholder vote. In private, however, he undoubtedly realized that the Waterford election result was precisely that ‘scene of public danger or calamity’ that was needed to abandon the government’s ‘open’ policy on the Catholic question. Accordingly, he turned his mind to the manner in which emancipation might be granted while, at the same time, ensuring ‘the best terms for the future security of the Protestant’.48 Peel was presumably hoping for a period of quiet in which to review his options but this was denied him, for the two years after the general election saw huge political turmoil at the heart of English politics. In January 1827, the duke of York died: a heavy loss to the ‘Ultras’, as those members of the Lords who were determined on all-­out resistance were styled. A month later Lord Liverpool was stricken by a stroke, and a new prime minister was needed. Perhaps Wellington would step forward or even Peel himself? Neither was enthusiastic and, given the fragmented state of the parties in the House of Commons, the King had little option but to turn to the pro-­Catholic chancellor of the exchequer, George Canning. Peel and six other ministers promptly resigned and the new Canning cabinet, formed after tortuous negotiations, had a clear majority of pro-­Catholic ministers. However, this did not mean that the Catholic cause would be brought forward. Canning may have been strongly pro-­Catholic for most of his min­is­ter­ ial career but on accepting the premiership he resolved not to be rushed. He assured the King that there would be no move on the Catholic question—­at least, not yet—­and further, he made clear that he was not at that time in favour of parliamentary reform, or indeed on doing anything about repealing the Test and Corporation Acts directed against Protestant Dissenters in England. These Acts had long been effectively suspended, but their presence on the statute books had recently become a major grievance with the growing Methodist community in England. Quite how long an anti-­Catholic George IV and a pro-­Catholic prime minister could have jogged along together must remain unanswered: in August 1827, after barely three months in office, Canning died. ‘Another blow to wretched Ireland’, was O’Connell’s comment.49 His successor was Lord Goderich, who soon proved unsuitable for high office, as well as being unacceptable to the King. Goderich was replaced in January 1828 by the duke of Wellington, with Sir Robert Peel returning to the Home Office.

48  Plunket to Canning, 18 December 1825 in Plunket (ed.), The Life, Letters, and Speeches of Lord Plunket, II, pp. 224–6; Peel to John Leslie Foster, 3 November 1826, Parker (ed.), Sir Robert Peel, I, pp. 422–3. 49  O’Connell to Mary O’Connell, 9 August 1827, O’Connell (ed.), The Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell, III, p. 340.

98  Thomas Bartlett As noted above, since 1825 both Wellington and Peel had been privately ­ ulling over how best to resolve the Catholic question while at the same time m safeguarding ‘the Protestant interest in Ireland’.50 In public, and in parliamentary debate, they remained uncompromising in their opposition to Catholic emancipation, and they soon made reassuring changes to the personnel in Dublin Castle in order to calm their supporters’ nerves. Marquess Wellesley had proved a flop as lord lieutenant, constantly complaining, and indignant, as he put it, at having to endure ‘the kicks of the ass and the dirt of the monkey’, and at being ‘degraded, vilified, an object of scorn and detestation, without protection or even care’.51 His brother, the duke of Wellington, had little time for him, or for his ‘absurd’ marriage to a wealthy American Catholic, and moved to have him replaced by Henry Paget, marquess of Anglesey—­known as ‘One leg’ Anglesey52—who had served with the duke in Spain. Anglesey was believed to be firmly hostile to Catholic emancipation, indeed in a debate in 1825 he had urged Catholics to rebel so that they could be crushed. Once appointed to Dublin, however, he seems to have experienced a change of heart, dining with veterans of the 1798 Rebellion, sporting shamrock bouquets, and, eventually, counselling concession on the Catholic question.53 Wellington, too, had become apparently more flexible on the issue. In April 1828, he nodded through parliament the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts: overnight the principle and the precedent had been established for ‘breaking in upon the constitution’.54 And in June 1828, in a debate in the Lords on a pro-­Catholic motion, he delivered a studiously ambiguous speech which managed both to reassure the Ultras and encourage the Catholics.55 Meanwhile in Ireland, the New Catholic Association had, with the expiry of the Unlawful Societies Act, resumed its collection of the Catholic rent, with the money being used to compensate and defend tenants who had been victimized by their landlords for not voting according to their wishes in 1826. It had also begun holding provincial gatherings and parish meetings at which numerous Catholic grievances were debated. On Saturday, 17 January 1828, in a most impressive display of organization and solidarity, over two-­thirds of the 2,500 parishes in Ireland held pro-­emancipation rallies. Wellington’s government could do little about any of this, even though the law officers of the Crown were of the opinion that the new association was an illegal body and that its rent collection an illegal activity. The new association could not be outlawed because a majority in favour

50  Quoted in Bartlett, Fall and Rise, p. 335. 51  Wellesley to W. C. Plunket, 19 March 1824, in Plunket (ed.), The Life, Letters, and Speeches of Lord Plunket, II, pp. 145–6. 52  Anglesey had lost a leg at the battle of Waterloo. 53 O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, p. 179; Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Rights, 1829 (London, 2018), p. 224. 54 Machin, Catholic Question, p. 114. 55 O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, pp. 186–7.

Catholic Emancipation, 1820–1830  99 of this action could not be found either in the cabinet or in the Commons, nor did it seem likely that there would be a majority in favour of striking off the ­40s.-freeholder or raising the voting qualification to £5 or £10. Any action of this sort without accompanying emancipation, declared Plunket, would be viewed as a declaration of war against the Catholic people of Ireland. The election for County Clare offered Wellington and Peel a way out of the impasse.56 This by-­election was made necessary by William Vesey Fitzgerald’s promotion to a cabinet position in May 1828. He was one of the MPs for County Clare and, on being made president of the Board of Trade—­an office of profit under the Crown—­he was bound by law to stand for re-­election. However, instead of the Catholic Association (the ‘New’ had been dropped by early 1828) endorsing a Protestant to oppose him, O’Connell announced that he would be a candidate, even though if elected he would be unable to take his seat.57 There could be little doubt about the result. All the features of earlier ‘freeholder revolts’ were quickly displayed: the serried ranks of freeholders ably marshalled by their priests, the fiery speeches, the exhortations to ‘Vote for your religion’, and the final result, a victory for the outsider, in this case O’Connell, by 2,057 votes to 982. Two years earlier, following the Waterford election, Leslie Foster had forecast sixty ‘Catholic’ MPs in the next general election, with O’Connell’s victory in Clare in 1828 there was every prospect of at least sixty Catholic MPs being returned. Still Wellington hesitated: as a military man he knew what needed to be done but he was determined to move cautiously and only with a fully formulated plan. Peel agreed with this strategy. As O’Connell put it, they would only act when it had become ‘necessary for the English government to do something for Ireland’.58 What may have encouraged Wellington and Peel to move closer to a settlement of the Catholic question were the alarming accounts from all sides concerning the military bearing of the Catholic voters during the Waterford and, especially, the Clare elections. They had moved, it was reported, ‘in regular military order’ and, as they had marched in formation into Ennis, the county town, they had responded to commands of ‘keep in step’ and ‘right shoulders forward’.59 Never one to miss an opportunity to further rattle the duke, O’Connell claimed that he had ‘whispered’ in his ear that after the election some 300 soldiers on duty in Ennis had thrown their caps in the air to celebrate his triumph.60 Anxiety over the reliability of Irish troops—­a constant, if groundless, concern of English government in Ireland—­was thereby rekindled.61 Moreover, Wellington was all too well

56 Bartlett, Fall and Rise, p. 341. 57  John Keogh had suggested this ploy in the 1790s: O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, p. 189. 58  O’Connell to Pierce Mahony, 17/19 September 1828, O’Connell (ed.), The Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell, III, pp. 407–8. 59 Reynolds, Catholic Emancipation Crisis, pp. 157; Fraser, The King and the Catholics, p. 197. 60 O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, p. 200; Reynolds, Catholic Emancipation Crisis, p. 147. 61 Fraser, The King and the Catholics, p. 215.

100  Thomas Bartlett aware of a groundswell of resistance from diehard Irish Protestants to what looked like the coming capitulation. Beginning in Ireland, during the late summer of 1828 a network of rabidly sectarian Brunswick Clubs was organized and by November some 108 branches had become affiliated to the Brunswick Club of Ireland.62 There were similar, though much less dangerous, developments in England, where Pitt Clubs, Brunswick Clubs, and various Orange bodies tried to mobilize popular feeling against the likely resolution of the Catholic question. Their main argument—­that the House of Commons did not reflect the feeling in the country on the admission of Catholics—­was probably sound, but their aristocratic leaders were at the same time nervous about inciting popular protest. To the English ‘Ultras’, the very name ‘Club’ had distinct echoes of Revolutionary France, and hence they sought to restrict their activities to petitioning, dec­lar­ ations, and meetings. One of the few large-­scale meetings took place at Penenden Heath, Kent, in October 1828, where a noisy debate took place between those opposed to Catholic emancipation and those in favour.63 It was all rather different in Ireland, where a month earlier a potentially bloody confrontation between Orange partisans and thousands of Catholics headed by John Lawless had been narrowly averted at Ballybay, County Monaghan.64 Ireland, it seemed, was on the brink of civil war.

Endgame As late as December 1828, Wellington continued to insist in private that, while he was ‘sincerely anxious to witness a settlement of the Roman Catholic Question . . . I confess I see no prospect of such a settlement.’65 His remarks were promptly published in the Dublin Evening Post and were generally seen as a clear sign of Wellington’s intentions. Similarly, Peel’s brother-­in-­law, George Dawson, hitherto a staunch and vocal anti-­Catholic, had earlier revealed his change of heart on the Catholic question at an Orange gathering in Derry, and this was widely believed to reflect where Peel now stood on the issue.66 In August 1828, Wellington had outlined his plans to George IV: first to suppress the Catholic Association; second, to scrap the 40s.-freehold franchise; and third to make the concession on emancipation. He had discussed with Peel the possibility of an annual suspension of the laws against Catholics, or even a restriction on the number of Catholic MPs, or paying the salaries of Catholic clergy: but these had all been given up, on practical, political, or constitutional grounds. 62 O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, pp. 209–10. 63 Machin, Catholic Question, pp. 131–41. 64 O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, p. 212. 65  In a letter to his friend from the Peninsular War, William Curtis, Catholic archbishop of Armagh (Machin, Catholic Question, pp. 128–9). 66 Machin, Catholic Question, pp. 126–7.

Catholic Emancipation, 1820–1830  101 Wellington had then sought the King’s permission to discuss the matter with the lord chancellor. This was reluctantly granted, and in short order his proposals were adopted as government policy. As rumours swirled around Westminster, Wellington and Peel continued in public at least to behave as if they had had no change of mind on the Catholic question; but the King’s speech at the opening of parliament in January 1829 contained a reference to the Catholic question. A lengthy debate followed, with Peel speaking for five hours explaining variously that it was now a ‘moral necessity’ to settle the Catholic question and that ‘the pressure of present evils’ meant concession.67 The bill duly passed the Commons, and in the House of Lords, Wellington’s reputation, or perhaps his martial manner, carried the day, though the Ultras would have their revenge for his ‘apostasy’ in due course.68 George IV resisted pressure from his brother, the duke of Cumberland, to hold out and, while drinking heavily, throwing tantrums, and tearfully likening his fate to that of Louis XVI, was brought to give his royal assent. The bill became law on 13 April 1829.69 By the terms of the Act, the Catholic Association was to be suppressed, but it cheated the hangman by voluntarily disbanding before the Act came into force. Catholics were now eligible to sit in parliament, the oaths on taking one’s seat were changed so as not to affront Catholic consciences. The first to take his seat, was not O’Connell who had to stand for election again in Clare, but rather the son of the premier English Catholic peer, the duke of Norfolk. In 1830 five English Catholics and eleven Irish Catholics were returned. All offices, civil and military, save the highest (the monarch, lord lieutenant of Ireland, lord chancellor of England), were now open to Catholics. In a sop to anti-­Catholic prejudice, there were continued restrictions on Catholic priests wearing clerical garb, on installing bells in, and building steeples on, Catholic churches, on Catholic bishops using ‘territorial’ titles similar to their established church equivalents, on Catholic bequests, and Jesuits and other religious orders were barred from entry into the United Kingdom (these terms proved entirely unworkable).70 There was no mention of bishops’ appointments, papal infallibility, or scrutiny of episcopal cor­res­pond­ence with Rome. The coronation oath remained unchanged and was not altered until the late nineteenth century. The 40s.-freeholder franchise was elim­in­ated, and the Irish electorate fell from around 216,000 to some 61,000: it would not recover until the 1860s. O’Connell in public dramatically claimed he would rather ‘die on the scaffold’ than give up the 40s.-freeholder, but in private he let it be known that he would not cause a fuss.71 He had never placed too much reliance on them. English and Scottish Catholics for the first time were 67 Fraser, The King and the Catholics, p. 244; O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, p. 239. 68  See Machin, Catholic Question, pp. 179–90. 69 Fraser, The King and the Catholics, p. 255; O’Ferrall, Catholic Question, pp. 245–6. 70  See O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, pp. 318–23. 71 Macaulay, The Catholic Church, pp. 380, 388; Bartlett, Fall and Rise, p. 342.

102  Thomas Bartlett now eligible for the new higher franchise of £10. O’Connell was delighted with his victory: he described the terms as ‘very good, frank, direct, complete, no veto, no control, no payment of the clergy’ and he proclaimed 14 April 1829 as the ‘first day of freedom’.72

Conclusion Surveying the political scene in England in 1820 and assessing the prospects for Catholic advance, Antonia Fraser wrote that ‘it would have been a bold prophet who foresaw the eventual fate of Catholic Emancipation’.73 O’Connell’s triumph in 1829 could not have been predicted, and if matters had remained as they had since 1793, it could easily have been the 1860s or even 1918 before Catholics were admitted to Westminster. Had the Reform Act of 1832 been enacted without Catholic emancipation being conceded it would have damaged Catholic prospects, for in a reformed parliament anti-­Catholic (and anti-­Irish) sentiment among the English and Scottish public would surely have proved an additional barrier. We might note that in February 1829, just a matter of weeks before emancipation was conceded, no fewer than 720 anti-­Catholic petitions were presented to parliament against 220 in favour of emancipation: a revealing indication of English and Scottish opinion.74 In short, given the power of the Crown and the determination of successive kings not to yield on the Catholic question, along with the continued embrace at cabinet level of an ‘unpolicy’, it is difficult to see how emancipation could have been conceded. In addition, the members of the House of Lords’ distrust of ‘innovation’, along with their desire to uphold the ‘Protestant Constitution’, generally regarded as the foundation of Britain’s greatness, and their determination to maintain ‘aristocratic government’, all meant that progress on the Catholic question would be negligible. It was the Catholic rent initiative of 1824 that was to prove decisive in moving the Catholic question from the forlorn to the irresistible.75 From that point on, government policy was no longer about total resistance to Catholic claims: no matter what was declared in public, it was about concession accompanied by safeguards. In this latter endeavour Peel and Wellington were successful. Had the example of the freeholder revolts in Waterford and Clare been followed in the 1830 general election, some sixty Catholic MPs quite possibly might have been elected; cutting off the 40s.-freeholder ensured this did not happen. It would be nearly sixty years before Catholics were a majority among Irish MPs at Westminster. The Catholic rent was O’Connell’s initiative and it succeeded because of the politicization of Irish society that had occurred over the previous 72 Macaulay, The Catholic Church, p. 388. 74 Machin, Catholic Question, p. 148.

73 Fraser, The King and the Catholics, p. 164. 75 O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, p. 77.

Catholic Emancipation, 1820–1830  103 thirty years. An Irish nation had emerged by the early 1820s, a nation that was conscious of its rights and well schooled in its grievances: a nation, moreover, that would never be comfortable in a Protestant State. As Peel had predicted ‘the settle­ment of the Catholic Question would not be the settlement of Ireland’, and after 1829 the ‘abominable Cath. Quest.’76 became simply the Irish question.

Select Bibliography Bartlett, Thomas, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690–1830 (Dublin, 1992). Fraser, Antonia, The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Rights, 1829 (London, 2018). Jenkins, Brian, Era of Emancipation: British Government of Ireland, 1812–30 (Kingston and Montreal, 1988). Macaulay, Ambrose, The Catholic Church and the Campaign for Emancipation in England and Ireland (Dublin, 2016). MacDonagh, Oliver, The Hereditary Bondsman: Daniel O’Connell, 1775–1829 (Dublin, 1988). Machin, G. I. T., The Catholic Question in English Politics, 1820–30 (Oxford, 1966). O’Ferrall, Fergus, Catholic Emancipation: Daniel O’Connell and the Birth of Irish Democracy (Dublin, 1985). Reynolds, James  A., The Catholic Emancipation Crisis in Ireland, 1823–29 (New Haven, CT, 1954).

76 Peel to William Gregory, 2 November 1826, 26 January 1829, British Library, Add. MSS 40,334/272; bishop of Lincoln to Peel, 14 August 1827, cited in Fraser, The King and the Catholics, p. 171.



6

The Infrastructure of Catholicism Cormac Begadon

The period 1746–1829 was one which saw many significant changes to the infrastructure of Catholicism in the four nations. Indeed, the most visible signs of the evolving nature of the Catholic communities in Britain and Ireland were the developments in their physical and pastoral infrastructures. This evolution was not uniform, however, and improvements varied between, and within, the four nations. Yet while the infrastructure of Catholicism developed unevenly in the towns and cities, villages and townlands of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, there was an overriding sense of improvement and modernization, however gradual this may have been. This was brought about not only by changes in the political and social landscapes affecting the respective Churches, but also was as a result of better economic fortunes and, crucially, patterns of migration. This chapter documents the evolution of the infrastructure of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland, with particular attention given to pastoral structures and ­ demographics, chapel-­building, elementary education, and finances.

Pastoral Structures and Demographics Ireland, with the largest numbers of Catholics, had a very different pastoral structure to England and Wales, or Scotland. Propaganda Fide, the Roman congregation with responsibility for mission territories, where the Church was not legally established, oversaw the British and Irish Churches. However, unlike in England and Wales, or in Scotland, the parish and diocesan structures in Ireland had not been obliterated following the introduction of the Protestant Reformation, and by the eighteenth century they were largely intact. The pastoral system was organized around the four ecclesiastical provinces of Armagh, Cashel, Dublin, and Tuam, in which there were a total of twenty-­six dioceses. By 1747 not one of these dioceses was without a resident bishop, as had often been the case previously, with this complete episcopal body enjoying assistance in the form of vicars general, and sometimes diocesan chapters.1 In theory the archbishop who ruled the principal 1  In 1747 the diocese of Dromore, vacant since 1716, was filled, leaving no Irish diocese without a bishop after this point. Cormac Begadon, The Infrastructure of Catholicism In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829. Edited by: Liam Chambers, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843443.003.0007

The Infrastructure of Catholicism  105 diocese within each province had powers of supervision over the suffragan bishops, but the reality was quite different, and frequent squabbles over power necessitated referral to Rome for settlement.2 Nonetheless, episcopal succession was a given after 1750. Improvements were also evident in the area of pastoral provision; by the middle of the century most parishes had a resident parish priest, and many had, in addition, assisting clergy. The greater number of priests in Ireland in this period were secular clergy, supplemented by a substantial number of regulars. The clergy as a whole was coming under increasing pressure, however, due to demographic shifts: in 1750 the Catholic population was estimated at 1,850,000, but by 1830 it had risen to a staggering 6,200,000.3 The organizational structures and pastoral practicalities in England and Wales, and Scotland, differed considerably from those in Ireland. In Britain, the diocesan and parochial systems, as promoted by Trent, did not exist. For much of the seven­teenth century, England and Wales was designated an apostolic vicariate, with episcopal jurisdiction resting in the hands of a single vicar apostolic. This situation changed during the reign of James II, when in 1688 Innocent XI appointed four vicars apostolic to oversee the London, Midland, Northern, and Western Districts. Each vicar apostolic was ordained a titular bishop, but exercised ‘authority not in his own name but in the name of the Pope’.4 Instead of ministering in formal parishes, priests were assigned to missions, often covering large geographical areas. The number of Catholics in England and Wales was estimated to have fallen to little over 1 per cent of the population by 1760, totalling about 75,000.5 Returns made for 1773 put the total number of priests at 386. Of this figure only 175 were seculars, with 211 regulars, the bulk of whom were Benedictines and former Jesuits.6 Between 1770 and 1800 the Catholic population grew steadily, estimated at 120,000 in 1800.7 However, in the first half of the nineteenth century the number of Catholics in England and Wales increased ­dra­mat­ic­al­ly, thanks largely to the mass immigration of Irish Catholics, reaching 425,000 by 1840.8

2 S. J. Connolly, Priests and People in Pre-­Famine Ireland, 1780–1845 (Dublin, 1982; repr. Dublin, 2001), p. 56. 3  Emmet Larkin, The Pastoral Role of the Roman Catholic Church in Pre-­Famine Ireland, 1750–1850 (Dublin, 2006), p. 22; Brian Gurrin, ‘Population and Emigration, 1730–1845’, in James Kelly (ed.), The Cambridge History of Ireland, iii: 1730–1880 (Cambridge, 2018), p. 225. 4 Nicholas Schofield and Gerard Skinner, The English Vicars Apostolic, 1688–1850 (Oxford, 2009), p. 3. 5  Clive Field, ‘Counting Religion in England and Wales: The Long Eighteenth Century, c.1680–c.1840’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 62 (2012), p. 710; the returns of papists made by the Anglican bishops to the House of Lords in 1767 put the Catholic population at 66,690, excluding those in Welsh dioceses (Marie Rowlands, ‘1767—The Sources’, in Marie Rowlands (ed.), English Catholics of Parish and Town 1558–1778, CRS Monograph 5 (London, 1999), p. 262). 6  J. H. Whyte, ‘The Vicars Apostolics’ Returns of 1773’, Recusant History, 9 (1968), pp. 206–14. 7  Field, ‘Counting Religion in England and Wales’, p. 710. 8  Field, ‘Counting Religion in England and Wales’, p. 710.

106  Cormac Begadon The ecclesiastical structures in Scotland were broadly similar to those in England and Wales, although the reality of pastoral provision on the ground differed. Historians disagree on the extent to which Scotland’s Catholic population had decreased during the eighteenth century. Bishop George Hay estimated it at approximately 30,000 in 1780.9 A vicariate apostolic had been established for Scotland only in 1694, with Propaganda Fide splitting the nation into Highland and Lowland Districts under the authority of separate vicars apostolic in 1727.10 It was not until 1827 that this arrangement was altered, when Rome created three Scottish districts: Eastern, Northern, and Western.11 This development reflected the changing demographic realities of the Scottish Church; by this date the total number of Catholics had risen to 70,000, many of whom lived in the cities and towns of Lanarkshire and Midlothian.12 By the 1820s, the Scottish Church was undergoing a radical transformation, which was initially brought about by internal migration, but thereafter compounded by sustained immigration from Ireland. For most of the eighteenth-­ century Scotland’s Catholic population was heavily concentrated in the Highlands and Islands, many being native Gaelic speakers. For example, by the 1750s, the number of Catholics on the Hebridean islands of Barra and South Uist totalled over 3,100, representing the two highest concentrations of Catholics in Scotland as a whole.13 In 1762 Catholics in the Lowland District—­the district in which the majority of larger urban settlements were situated—­numbered only a little over 6,000, although this figure had been growing throughout the century.14 However, after 1780 a demographic shift was apparent, as the southern Lowlands replaced the Highlands as the more significant population centre for Scottish Catholics. This change occurred due to the forced migration of the Highland Clearances, and was later cemented by the arrival of large numbers of Irish Catholics after 1798, who were mainly drawn to the industrial counties of Ayrshire, Dumbartonshire, Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire, and Wigtownshire.15 The social structure of Britain’s Catholic population changed considerably thanks to industrialization and increased immigration from Ireland, which had begun in the late eighteenth century, but which only began to significantly affect the Catholic populations in the three nations after 1800. One of the most

9  James Darragh, ‘The Catholic Population since the Year 1680’, Innes Review, 4 (1953), pp. 54–5. 10  Schofield and Skinner, The English Vicars Apostolic, p. 7. 11  The residence of the vicar apostolic for the Eastern District was at Edinburgh; for the Western District it was Glasgow; and for the Northern District it was Aberdeen. 12  Darragh, ‘The Catholic Population since the Year 1680’, p. 59. 13  Kathleen Toomey, ‘Emigration from the Scottish Catholic Bounds, 1770–1810 and the role of the clergy’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1991), p. 3; James Kyd, Scottish Population Statistics including Webster’s Analysis of Population, 1755 (Edinburgh, 1975), pp. 33–59. 14  Michael Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (Basingstoke, 1998), p. 178. 15 Darragh, ‘The Catholic Population since the Year 1680’, p. 55; Gurrin, ‘Population and Emigration, 1730–1845’, p. 227.

The Infrastructure of Catholicism  107 important consequences of this immigration was the creation of an urban Catholicism in the nineteenth century, which had not existed in Scotland or Wales in the eighteenth century and only to a lesser extent in England. In Wales, for example, this evolution was especially evident. Bishop Charles Walmesley’s returns for 1773 recorded a Catholic population of just 750 (served by nine priests), the majority of whom lived in the border counties of Brecknockshire and Monmouthshire.16 Native Welsh Catholics had been traditionally absent from the increasingly urbanized and industrialized districts of southern Carmarthenshire and Glamorganshire before the arrival of Irish immigrants.17 After 1809 towns like Newport became growing centres of urban Catholicism, its port proving popular with Irish Catholics who sought employment in rapidly industrializing south Wales. The town of Swansea saw a rapid growth in its Catholic population, which necessitated the establishment of a new mission by 1808.18 By 1850 the town had an Irish-­born population of 1,333, the vast majority of whom were Catholics.19 Such was the impact of Irish immigration that the Catholic population of Wales increased by a staggering 735 per cent between 1773 and 1839.20 Migration and industrialization impacted considerably on the nature of Catholicism in England too. Towns like Newcastle showed signs of this demographic change long before the arrival of sizeable numbers of Irish Catholics; bolstered by the passing of the English Catholic Relief Act of 1791, the community erected a new church to serve the predominantly English congregation in 1798.21 Lancashire and Yorkshire—­the counties which had traditionally been home to the greatest number of Catholics before 1800—were bolstered too by the arrival of large numbers to their industrial centres. For example, nine of the towns whose Catholic population numbered over 200 in 1767 were located in industrial areas, particularly in the coalfields of the north, but also in port cities like Liverpool, where population growth was most evident.22 In 1767 the city’s Catholic population stood at a little over 1,700; by 1829 the figure had grown closer to 30,000.23 In London too demographic changes occurred, with the expansion of a socially diverse and increasing Catholic population by the 1760s, although the ­transformation was not as marked as in other parts of the country. Returns for 1767 suggest the existence of a substantial Catholic community; 1,492 Catholics were recorded in the City, with a further 7,724 in Westminster; by 1850 the 16  Philip Jenkins, ‘ “A Welsh Lancashire?” Monmouthshire Catholics in the Eighteenth Century’, Recusant History, 15 (1979), p. 176. 17  As late as 1825, some estimates suggest that the Catholic population of Cardiff numbered only one dozen: Paul O’Leary, Immigration and Integration: The Irish in Wales, 1798–1922 (Cardiff, 2000), p. 58. 18  Louise Miskell, ‘Intelligent Town’: An Urban History of Swansea, 1780–1855 (Cardiff, 2006), p. 125. 19 Miskell, ‘Intelligent Town’, p. 125. 20 O’Leary, Immigration and Integration, p. 55. 21  Jonathan Bush, ‘The Catholic Community in Newcastle, 1791–1845’, unpublished conference paper, 2018. 22  Marie Rowlands, ‘The New People’, in Rowlands (ed.), English Catholics, p. 330. 23  John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975), pp. 312, 425.

108  Cormac Begadon number was somewhere in the region of 100,000.24 As noted above, England and Wales’ total Catholic population in 1840 was estimated at 425,000.25 Yet while the Catholic population grew substantially across the four nations between 1740 and 1830, the number of priests ministering on the ground did not keep pace. In 1780, the Church in England and Wales was served by just under 400 priests who ministered to a population of approximately 80,000.26 The Catholic population had increased by 1820, but the number of priests on the mission had essentially remained static, despite the numerical boost that it had received from the influx of French émigré clergy in the wake of the French Revolution.27 It was in Ireland, however, that the pastoral strain on the clergy was greatest; in 1750, 2,100 priests served a Catholic population of 1,850,000, but by 1840 this number had risen only to 2,400, while the population had grown to 6,600,000.28 This meant that the priest to people ratio had risen from 1:880 to 1:2,750. The heavy pastoral burden under which clergy operated limited the extent to which pastoral care could be offered to growing but increasingly disparate Catholic populations, and by 1830 many Catholics still remained outside of the sacramental fold. In Britain, the provision of pastoral care was further complicated by the fact that many lay Catholics were situated in areas where Church infrastructure was nascent and inadequate, or in many cases simply non-­existent. Great numbers of Catholics laboured in transient industries ­and ministering to them presented significant challenges. Similarly, the large numbers of Ulster Catholics who were engaged in seasonal agricultural work in the Scottish Lowlands and the Irish dock workers of southern Wales were not easily absorbed into parish life.29 Another development that impacted on pastoral care and ministry was the gradual depletion of the regular clergy. By the mid-­eighteenth century friars and monks were important players in the provision of pastoral care in each of the nations. In Ireland they were entrenched within the diocesan system, with many serving as parish priests and curates. In 1750 they numbered 800 out of a total clerical population of 2,100.30 They were dealt a severe blow in 1751, when Benedict XIV ordered the closure of their domestic noviciates, an act which ‘launched that long decline which by 1800 would reduce the regular clergy of Ireland to numerical and pastoral insignificance’.31 Between 1750 and 1800 their

24  Rowlands, ‘The New People’, p. 303. 25  Field, ‘Counting Religion in England and Wales’, p. 710. 26 Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 422. 27 Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 356. 28 Larkin, The Pastoral Role, p. 22. 29  For more on the challenges of ministry in south Wales, see O’Leary, Immigration and Integration, pp. 58–60. 30 Larkin, The Pastoral Role, p. 29. 31  Hugh Fenning, The Undoing of the Friars of Ireland: A Study of the Noviciate Question in the Eighteenth Century (Louvain, 1972), p. 236.

The Infrastructure of Catholicism  109 numbers almost halved, falling again by 1850 to just 180.32 In England and Wales, where the assistance of Benedictines and Jesuits had traditionally been critical, a similar strengthening of the secular clergy’s hand had occurred with the publication in 1753 of the papal bull Apostolicum Ministerium, which effectively copper fastened the authority of the vicars apostolic, decreeing that all religious were in need of episcopal approval prior to commencing their ministry in England and Wales. The ‘Rules of the Mission’ laid out in the bull remained ‘the chief constitutional regulations for the Church in England’ until 1850.33 The regular clergy were dealt a further blow by the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773. Their presence had been greatest in England and Wales, where 121 Jesuit priests were ministering in 1773.34 After the suppression the former Jesuits placed themselves under the respective vicar apostolic, with the majority continuing their ministry.35 In Ireland and Scotland their numbers were considerably lower; the suppression simply added to the increasing pastoral burden that the clergy across the four nations faced.

Chapel-­Building The pastoral needs of Catholics in Ireland in the first decades of the eighteenth century were catered for by an extensive network of chapels; the ‘Report on the State of Popery’ commissioned by the Irish House of Lords in 1731 returned a total of 943 public chapels.36 Its findings suggested that a revival of sorts was already underway, recording that 229 of these had been built since 1714.37 In rural areas they were mostly primitive buildings, but in Dublin and the cities and towns of Leinster and Munster, the reality was often different. In 1749 a report was commissioned to inquire into the state and condition of Catholic chapels in Dublin. It recalled buildings which gave little to indicate an ecclesiastical nature from the outside, but with interiors which were well appointed. At St Mary’s, Liffey Street, the altar was ‘railed in, steps ascending to it of oak; for part of the altar covered with gilt leather, and the name of Jesus in glory in the midst. On the altar is a gilt tabernacle, with six large gilt candlesticks, and as many nosegays of

32 Larkin, The Pastoral Role, p. 29. 33 Edwin Burton, The Life and Times of Bishop Challoner (1691–1781) 2 vols. (London, 1909), I, p. 313. 34  Paul Shore, The Years of Jesuit Suppression, 1773–1814: Survival, Setbacks and Transformation (Leiden, 2020), p. 55. 35  Thomas M. McCoog, ‘Libera nos Domine’? The Vicars Apostolic and the Suppressed/Restored English Province of the Society of Jesus’, in James  E.  Kelly and Susan Royal (eds.), Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-­Reformation (Leiden, 2016), p. 91. 36 Larkin, The Pastoral Role, p. 273. The report underrecorded the actual number of chapels, having omitted the diocese of Kerry as a whole, and a large swathe of Waterford and Lismore. 37 Larkin, The Pastoral Role, p. 138.

110  Cormac Begadon artificial flowers.’38 St Mary’s was not unique in its relative sophistication, but worries over the safety of crowded chapels was becoming increasingly pressing by the 1740s. Newspapers carried accounts of accidents in overcrowded chapels, a number of which resulted in fatalities; the most serious occurred on 27 February 1744 in an ‘old house’ in Pill Lane, ‘where a priest was officiating Mass, fell down, by which accident he and nine others were killed, and several hurt’.39 The subsequent closure of chapels by government order in 1744 can be seen as the last great crack-­down on the public practice of Catholicism in Ireland. An insight into the condition of chapels in rural Ireland comes from the records of Archbishop James Butler II, who undertook a pastoral visitation of his diocese of Cashel during the years 1750–4. Butler described the ‘newly built’ chapel at Ballinahinch, Co. Tipperary as ‘not thoroughly thatched, without whitewash, plastering or glass windows’, while he recorded that the chapel at nearby Moyglass was ‘well thatched’, but stood at only 7 feet high.40 During his tours of Ireland, Alexis de Tocqueville was apparently greeted by similar structures as late as the 1830s. In one instance he observed that a chapel in the western diocese of Tuam was particularly spartan: ‘the floor was of beaten earth; the altar was of wood; the walls had neither paint nor pictures, but remained as the mason had left them’.41 In some rural areas, where chapels either did not exist or were in­ad­ equate to meet pastoral demands, the sacrament was celebrated in the open air, in sheds, huts, or on moveable altars, although this necessity was certainly waning in the second half of the eighteenth century.42 Buoyed by the passing of a Catholic Relief Act in 1782 and a sustained period of economic growth, the 1790s saw a further period of chapel-­building in Ireland that would continue virtually uninterrupted until the outbreak of the Great Famine in 1845. This saw the replacement of many older structures, and the emergence of a growing number of the larger, if not architecturally pretentious, ‘barn chapels’.43 These buildings could usually accommodate large congregations—­ with some having capacity of over 1,000—often thanks to the addition of galleries. Some, however, were of a higher standard, and were subsequently enhanced; an important example being the cathedral in Waterford City, itself a ‘new chapel’, opened in 1793. 38  Nicholas Donnelly (ed.), State and Condition of Roman Catholic Chapels in Dublin, both Secular and Regular, A.D. 1749 (Dublin, 1904), p. 12. 39  Exshaw’s Magazine, February 1744, cited in John Brady (ed.), Catholics and Catholicism in the Eighteenth-­Century Press (Maynooth, 1965), p. 65. 40 Christopher O’Dwyer (ed.), ‘Archbishop Butler’s Visitation Book’, Archivium Hibernicum, 33 (1975), pp. 43, 69. 41  Cited in Connolly, Priests and People in Pre-­Famine Ireland, p. 109. 42  For further reading, see David Fleming, ‘The “Mass Rock” in Eighteenth-­Century Ireland: The Symbolic and Historical Past’, in James Lyttleton and Matthew Stout (eds.), Church and Settlement in Ireland (Dublin, 2018), pp. 182–207. 43  Kevin Whelan argues that ‘barn chapels’ had been begun to appear from the 1740s onwards in Religion, Landscape and Settlement in Ireland: From Patrick to Present (Dublin, 2018), p. 185.

The Infrastructure of Catholicism  111 By the 1740s England and Wales was increasingly well served by a resident body of clergy, operating free from fear of the scaffold. As the threat of physical molestation generally dissipated, avenues to develop the pastoral offering opened up and improving infrastructure became a pressing concern to reformers. London, as is well-­known, was home to a number of embassy chapels, conceived to serve foreign diplomats and their families. In reality they were open to all, and by the 1750s these modern, architecturally sophisticated structures were un­ashamed­ly offering grand liturgies to the city’s growing Catholic population. Outside of London, purpose-­built chapels were not all that common before the passing of the Catholic Relief Acts of 1778 and 1791. If they existed, they were functional, modest structures, usually devoid of any outward sign of their sacramental nature. When, in 1746, the first Catholic chapel in Liverpool, run by the Benedictines at Edmund Street, was destroyed by rioters, its replacement was disguised as a warehouse with lumber stored on the ground floor.44 Elsewhere, the Mary Ward Sisters erected a fine chapel at their convent in York in 1769. At Bath, where the Benedictine monks had established a mission to a strong Catholic community, a tavern, known as the Bell Tree, served as a Mass-­house from the early 1700s, an arrangement that was not unheard of elsewhere in the country.45 In the north, at Leeds, where the town’s Catholic population was growing thanks to industrialization, a new mission was established in 1786 with a chapel paid for by the cotton spinner, Joseph Holdforth.46 At about the same time wealthy Catholic landowners were adding chapels to their homes, some in a very public manner. At Wardour Castle, Wiltshire, Henry, the eighth Baron Arundell, followed the call of Bishop Charles Walmselely, OSB, vicar apostolic of the Western District, who suggested that the laws prohibiting Catholic worship were no longer applicable.47 In 1770 Arundell employed the services of James Paine, a leading proponent of the Palladian style, to design a sumptuous new chapel said to have been modelled on the most fashionable churches in Rome.48 Perhaps the best example of how attitudes towards Catholic public worship were changing was the visit of George III to Lulworth Castle, Dorset, to inspect the new chapel built for the Weld family in 1788, with fifteen Weld children singing ‘God Save the King’ on his arrival.49 While the gentry could erect chapels with confidence from the relative safety and privacy of their estates, Catholic places of worship elsewhere faced intermittent threats of discrimination and occasional physical attack. In 1780, the Gordon Riots resulted in damage and, in the worst cases, destruction of chapels. 44  Sarah Brown, ‘Catholic Church Building in England’, Ecclesiology Today, 38 (2007), p. 9. 45  Pamela Gilbert, The Restless Prelate: Bishop Peter Baines (Leominster, 2006), p. 18. 46  Nigel Yates, Eighteenth Century Britain: Religion and Politics, 1714–1815 (London, 2008), p. 44. 47  Christopher Martin, A Glimpse of Heaven: Catholic Churches of England and Wales (London, 2006), p. 33. 48 Martin, A Glimpse of Heaven, p. 33. 49 Martin, A Glimpse of Heaven, p. 36.

112  Cormac Begadon In London the chapel of the Bavarian embassy was gutted and looted by the mob, while at Bath the new chapel was so badly damaged that the city’s Catholic community was forced to revert to their old home at the Bell Tree House.50 A ‘violent response to the first Catholic Relief Act of 1778’, the Gordon Riots represented ‘the last major national expression of anti-­Catholicism’, while it has been argued that their decisive suppression marked a significant change in attitudes.51 A decade later, the Catholic Relief Act of 1791 effectively opened the floodgates to the building of chapels throughout England and Wales on a vast scale. The Act legalized Catholic public worship, and sanctioned the building of Catholic chapels and churches on the condition that they had no steeple or bell.52 One estimate puts the number of chapels built in England and Wales during the period 1791–1814 at 900.53 Many were modest and functional buildings, while others were more modern. Early examples of the building boom were chapels at Newport, on the Isle of Wight, and the one at Netherton, Lancashire. At Newport the chapel dates from 1791, and was completed with a Doric columned porch, giving it an appearance that was ‘not as self-­effacing as was usually thought prudent at the time’.54 At Netherton, a chapel built in 1793 exhibited a more cautious approach, fronted by a presbytery in order to obscure, rather than hide, its ecclesiastical purpose. In London too, new chapels were built to cater for the growing Irish community. At Soho Square, the Capuchin, Arthur O’Leary, oversaw the erection of a new chapel, opened in 1792 and dedicated to St Patrick.55 In Scotland, Catholic chapels were a rarity before the 1780s, with most priests before this date having to make use of makeshift Mass stations, often in barns on isolated farms or in private lodgings. At Tynet, Banffshire, Catholics felt sufficiently secure to erect a new chapel around 1769; a low single-­storey barn, the height of the ceiling was only 13 feet.56 On Barra and South Uist new chapels were erected towards the end of the century.57 After the 1790s a marked shift occurred as the Catholic population grew in the cities and towns, especially in the regions of Lothian and Strathclyde. The cities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh had been important mission centres from the early eighteenth century, but after 1784, when the ‘first true [Highland] clearances occurred from within Catholic Bounds’, Catholics settled in growing numbers.58 By the 1790s nine major urban centres

50 Gilbert, The Restless Prelate: Bishop Peter Baines, p. 18. 51  Brown, ‘Catholic Church Building in England’, p. 10. 52  Brown, ‘Catholic Church Building in England’, p. 10. 53 E. I. Watkin, Roman Catholicism in England from the Reformation to 1950 (London, 1957), p. 158. 54 Martin, A Glimpse of Heaven, p. 46. 55  Denis Evinson, The Catholic Churches of London (Sheffield, 1988), p. 58. 56 Christine Johnson, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, 1789–1829 (Edinburgh, 1983), p. 152. 57 Yates, Eighteenth Century Britain, p. 45. 58  Toomey, ‘Emigration from the Scottish Catholic Bounds’, p. 25.

The Infrastructure of Catholicism  113 had chapels, each said to be offering preaching in Gaelic.59 In 1799 George Gordon, recently returned from the Scots College, Paris, set about building a modern chapel in Aberdeen for the burgeoning Catholic population, complete with Gothic styling, choir, and organ.60 In 1792 Glasgow received its first post-­ Reformation Catholic priest, with the appointment of Alexander McDonnell, who used a hall previously owned by the duke of Hamilton as a chapel, with capacity for 300 worshipers.61 The efforts of the Wurzburg Benedictine, Kilian Pepper, to rejuvenate the Catholic community in Dundee were so successful that they resulted in the purchase of a site for a new chapel in 1790.62 In 1814 St Mary’s, Edinburgh, was opened, while at Glasgow in the same year, construction commenced on St Andrew’s chapel. Both were designed by a prominent pro­pon­ ent of the Gothic style, James Gillespie.

Elementary Education In the eighteenth century there were marked variations in the provision of elem­en­tary education for Catholics in the four nations. In Ireland a relative degree of toleration towards Catholic schooling had existed even before the passing of a Catholic Relief Act in 1782. Some schools, like those operated by the Carmelites, Dominicans, and Poor Clares in Dublin, catered for the daughters of wealthier families. These families could also send their sons to one of the many Irish colleges on the Continent, even if they hoped to pursue a career outside of the religious state, or more locally, to one of the many ‘classical schools’ that operated in the towns and cities. These schools charged fees, like the one at Clarendon Street, Dublin, which cost ‘1 guinea entrance and 1 guinea per quarter, with boys being taught English, Latin and mathematics’.63 In rural Ireland, the ubiquitous ‘hedge school’ remained a popular option for Catholics for much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Little more than a school master teaching children of all ages, the hedge school offered an education that was not as primitive as many nineteenth and twentieth century Catholic apologists suggested.64 That they were held in high esteem no doubt contributed towards their sustained growth: the bishop of Meath, Patrick Plunkett, recorded 240 hedge schools in his diocesan report for 1790.65 A ‘poor school’ system also provided rudimentary instruction for the less well-­ off. These schools were normally 59 Patricia Dennison, The Evolution of Scotland’s Towns: Creation, Growth and Fragmentation (Edinburgh, 2018), p. 189. 60 Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, p. 177. 61 Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, p. 178. 62 Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, p. 180. 63  John Brady (ed.), ‘Catholic Schools in Dublin in 1787–8’, Reportorium Novum, 1 (1955), p. 194. 64  See Antonia McManus, The Irish Hedge School and its Books, 1695–1831 (Dublin, 2002). 65 McManus, The Irish Hedge School, p. 21.

114  Cormac Begadon managed by a parochial body that organized annual charity sermons and oversaw the distribution of resources to the poor, including food and clothing. The passing of a Catholic Relief Act in 1782 proved pivotal, however, to the provision of Catholic education, with schools now legally permitted. In 1802 Catholic education in Ireland was boosted by the foundation of the Christian Brothers by Edmund Rice, with the specific focus of providing education for the Catholic poor. By 1830 the congregation had made fourteen foundations in Ireland, and a further two in England, at Preston and Manchester.66 Along with parochial and poor schools they remained the mainstay of education for poorer Catholics well into the nineteenth century, after the foundation of the National School system in 1831. Although an extensive network of Catholic schools had been developed in the houses of British religious on the Continent, dating from the early 1600s, establishing schools in England, Wales, and Scotland was a much more difficult task, even in the more favourable political atmosphere of the eighteenth century. There were rare examples, however; at Hammersmith and York, the Mary Ward Sisters had set up boarding and poor schools in 1669 and 1686 respectively, which were said to have been the only formal Catholic schools for girls in England and Wales.67 The schools, which ‘breached the regulations which forbade parents to educate their daughters as Catholics either at home or abroad’, were situated discreetly behind ordinary rows of houses so as not to attract attention.68 Male religious also set up schools in the eighteenth century, although none achieved the renown of the schools at Hammersmith and York. The Benedictines, worried by the increasing incursions of the French State into education by religious orders, were spurred on to develop informal schools in England from the 1760s.69 At Sedgley Park, Staffordshire, the secular priest William Errington opened a boarding school in 1762 to cater for the sons of middle-­class Catholics.70 Traditionally, it had been common for monks and Jesuits to act as private tutors to the children of wealthy Catholics. Returns made in the 1760s and early 1770s attest to the existence of charity and mission schools throughout the country, which catered to the needs of Catholic children from a broad social spectrum.71 By 1778 a school at Brindle, Lancashire, was catering for up to thirty boys, while schools at Woolton, near Liverpool, had thirty-­five boys on their roll in April 1792.72 Committees of lay Catholics oversaw the establishment and management of many 66  Dáire Keogh, Edmund Rice and the First Christian Brothers (Dublin, 2008), p. 148. 67  Caroline Bowden, ‘Convent Schooling for English Girls in the “Exile” Period, 1600–1800’, in Morwenna Ludlow, Charlotte Methuen, and Andrew Spicer (eds.), Churches and Education, SCH 55 (2019), p. 178. 68  Bowden, ‘Convent Schooling for English Girls’, p. 178. 69 Geoffrey Scott, Gothic Rage Undone: English Monks in the Age of Enlightenment (Bath, 1992), p. 174. 70 Yates, Eighteenth Century Britain, p. 41. 71  For more on schools, see Rowlands (ed.), English Catholics. 72 Scott, Gothic Rage Undone, p. 176.

The Infrastructure of Catholicism  115 of these schools; for example, those at Seal Street chapel, St Nicholas’ and St Patrick’s in Liverpool were run in this manner.73 In Scotland too, new Catholic schools were beginning to spring up in the towns and cities. A paucity of surviving sources makes it difficult to chart this evolution, but schools opened at Edinburgh, Glenlivet, and Aberdeen between 1788 and 1791.74 The English Catholic Relief Act of 1791 removed most of the remaining legal prohibitions against Catholic education, although there was some opposition to the opening of new schools at local levels. Soon after the prefect of Propaganda Fide, Leonardo Antonelli, wrote to the vicar apostolic of the Northern District, William Gibson, pleading with him that ‘since the law now allows schools for the instruction of youth under the care of Catholic masters, this Sacred Congregation is anxious that they should be established’.75 The French Revolution had a significant impact on the educational landscape for English and Welsh Catholics, and indeed for their co-­religionists in Ireland and Scotland. The Revolution led to the closure of schools run on the Continent by female and male religious; many of these communities settled in England, with some opening schools soon after their return. The Benedictine monks established schools, first at temporary locations, before finding permanent homes at Ampleforth and Downside. The former Jesuits of St Omer, who relocated to Bruges and then Liège, put down roots at Stonyhurst in 1794, setting up their own school. These three institutions later went on to become successful public schools. The secular clergy too became involved in elem­en­tary education, opening up colleges at Oscott in Warwickshire, Ushaw in Durham, and Ware in Hertfordshire, which not only educated would-­be priests, but also those aiming for careers in the secular world. However, not all religious-­run establishments were founded to educate the children of wealthier Catholics. The Benedictine nuns, previously at Cambrai, settled at a temporary home at Woolton, Lancashire, and took charge of a school in 1795, previously run by the monks.76 In England and Ireland especially, Catholic education was affected by the increasing involvement of female religious. In the English Church, nuns and sisters had traditionally played an important role in schooling; the Mary Ward Sisters and the various English religious communities on the Continent operated a network of schools, catering mostly for children from better-­off families. The Churches in Ireland and Scotland did not have such an extensive system of convents in exile, although both Continental Irish houses—­the Benedictines at Ypres 73 Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 348. 74  Stephen McKinney and Raymond McCluskey, ‘The Education (Scotland) Act, 1918, in Historical Context’, in Stephen McKinney and Raymond McCluskey (eds.), A History of Catholic Education and Schooling in Scotland (London, 2019), p. 16. 75  Cited in J.  Arthur, The Ebbing Tide: Policy and Principles in Catholic Education (Leominster, 1995), p. 11. 76 See Scholastica Jacob (ed.), A Brief Narrative of the Seizure of the Benedictine Dames of Cambray and Two Hairs and a Dish of Tortoise, from the writings of Dame Ann Teresa Partington (Stanbrook, 2016).

116  Cormac Begadon and the Dominicans at Lisbon—­ran schools.77 In Ireland a small number of communities managed to operate in the eighteenth century, mostly in Dublin. All of these communities were involved in the provision of education, mostly in the form of boarding schools catering for the daughters of wealthier Catholics. The 1770s, however, saw the beginnings of a slow, but sustained apostolic concern for the poor among new orders of female religious. This was manifested initially by the foundation of Presentation Nuns (1791), and later by the Irish Sisters of Charity (1815), and the Sisters of Mercy (1831), orders which made the education of the poor central to their respective missions. In 1800 the number of female religious in Ireland was estimated at 120, but by 1851 that figure had grown to 1,500, the majority of whom were involved in education.78 The increasing role played by female orders in this field at the beginning of the nineteenth century mirrored a much wider pattern that emerged across Catholic Europe in the wake of the French Revolution. However, it is important to acknowledge that the role of religious in the area of elementary education should not be overstated in the period before emancipation. In England, nine orders of female religious were spread amongst twenty-one communities.79 With the exception of the Mary Ward Sisters, all of the orders had been active on the Continent before the French Revolution; many of them set up schools upon their return, usually for the education of middle-­class girls. Female religious would not go on to play a significant role in the education of the poor in Britain until after 1839, with the arrival of the first Sisters of Mercy from Ireland. That there were no convents at all in either Scotland or Wales during the period under review meant that elementary education in the pre-­emancipation Church was still very much lay dominated, though increasingly with additional clerical oversight. In Ireland too, elementary education was conducted for the most part by lay teachers, who were supplemented by a rapidly expanding network of catechetical confraternities, the most significant of which was the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine. The confraternity in Ireland dated from the 1750s, but it was only in the 1780s that a more uniform and structured approach was adopted in some of the more prosperous dioceses, namely Dublin, and Kildare and Leighlin.80 The primary work of the confraternity was undertaken by lay teachers

77  Registers for the English convents suggest that their schools received significant numbers of Irish and Scottish schoolgirls. 78  Maria Luddy, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-­Century Ireland (Cambridge, 1995), p. 23. 79 Barbara Walsh, Roman Catholic Nuns in England and Wales, 1800–1937: A Social History (Dublin, 2002), p. 12. 80  Cormac Begadon, ‘Confraternities and the Renewal of Catholic Dublin, c.1750–c.1830’, in Colm Lennon (ed.), Confraternities and Sodalities in Ireland: Charity, Devotion and Sociability (Dublin, 2012), pp. 40–1.

The Infrastructure of Catholicism  117 (many of whom were women), under clerical supervision, providing catechesis, increasingly with moral guidance too, to children of all ages.81

Finances Funding the construction of an improved Catholic infrastructure in the four nations was a considerable task, which was complicated by the fact that the Church had only a modest material base to build upon. In addition to the challenge of constructing a physical infrastructure, there was also the task of maintaining a large and expanding body of clergy, many of whom had returned from the Continent in the wake of the French Revolution. The Revolution had ef­fect­ ive­ly led to the closure of a vast network of British and Irish colleges, seminaries, and religious houses, the majority of which had also acted as places of secular education. Considerable wealth was bound up in these institutions, with cen­tur­ ies of investment behind them. New and increasingly innovative ways of fund-­ raising would be needed to meet the challenges posed by the events of the 1790s. By the eighteenth century, British and Irish Catholics had built up a wealth of expertise in the art of fund-­raising. Ineligible for financial support from their respective governments, the Church in Britain and Ireland looked elsewhere to fund their considerable infrastructural network, much of which lay not at home, but in Flanders, France, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Papal States. While some of these institutions had been founded thanks to the generosity of European monarchs, once established, they relied on school fees, benefactions, and a decent helping of guile to survive. From the mid-­eighteenth century priests frequently returned from the Continent in search of funds; in 1777, for example, the president of the Irish College, Antwerp, Hugh McMahon, travelled to Dublin and the Ulster dioceses in search of funds, collecting £350 for his troubles.82 Raising money in this manner was part and parcel of the Church’s life, without which its mission would have been much curtailed. In eighteenth-­century Ireland, the charity sermon was one the most tried and tested fund-­raising techniques, especially in the wealthier towns and cities.83 Newspaper accounts suggest that some were events of social prestige and also of interdenominational friendship. A charity sermon held at Lazer’s Hill chapel, Dublin, in December 1785, was attended by some of ‘the most respectable

81 Martin Brenan, The Confraternity of Christian Doctrine in Ireland, A.D.  1775–1835 (Dublin, 1934). 82 ‘Donations to continental colleges’, [1777?], Dublin Diocesan Archives (hereafter DDA), AB2/3/1(11). 83  For further reading on the importance of the charity sermons, see James Kelly, ‘Appealing to “the Humane and Charitable”: The Evolution of the Charity Sermon in Ireland, 1700–1860’, Archivium Hibernicum, 73 (2021), pp. 258–311.

118  Cormac Begadon Protestant parishioners’ and was a ‘happy instance of that general philanthropy and general liberality of disposition that now so fortunately pervades all descriptions of men in this kingdom’.84 Funds raised at these events were also used to support the expanding network of poor schools. A surviving document, dated 1814, outlined thirty-­four Sundays for sermons to be preached in aid of a wide array of city charities, including orphanages, widows’ homes, asylums, and in­firm­ar­ies in Dublin.85 In Ireland some the contributions had always come from poorer Catholics, but by the late eighteenth century tapping into this market was becoming more expedient for a number of reasons. Enticing ever-­increasing numbers of the Catholic poor to become religiously engaged, participating not just sacramentally but also financially, was a concern for reform-­minded clergy. A financial contribution was seen not only as an investment but, equally im­port­ant­ly, as a public declaration of support. Thus, many of the new chapels and schools were built thanks to the contributions of the many rather than, as had often previously been the case, the few. An early example of this was at the village of Knockavilla, Co. Tipperary, where a rather primitive chapel was erected not long before 1759, built with mud walls and a thatched roof, thanks to ‘publick collections’.86 One of the key methods of financing the Church in Ireland was the Station Mass, which one eminent historian of Irish Catholicism labelled ‘the most interesting and important religious practice to emerge in pre-­ Famine Ireland’.87 Significantly the Station Mass fulfilled both pastoral and pecuniary functions. The worsening priest to people ratios, coupled with insufficient chapel capacity, had complicated the provision of pastoral care in the pre-­Famine period. Stations developed as a means of counteracting these obstacles, by essentially extending priests’ pastoral reach and affording greater numbers of lay Catholics the o ­ p­por­tun­ity to attend, fulfilling their requirements to make Easter confession and communion. Priests visited the homes of respectable parishioners on appointed days throughout the year (usually in the Easter and Christmas seasons), where neighbours gathered, usually in large numbers. In these houses priests would celebrate Mass, preach, and hear confessions, as well as offering catechesis to children, after which a (much-­criticized) dinner for clergy and invited guests would take place.88 The Stations were, however, vital to the Church’s fund-­raising efforts, giving clergy 84  Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, 22 December 1785, cited in Brady (ed.), Catholics and Catholicism in the Eighteenth-­Century Press, p. 232. 85  ‘List of charity sermons to be preached in Dublin from Sept. 1813 to Jun. 1814’, 1814, DDA, AB2/30/1(170). 86 Christopher O’Dwyer (ed.), ‘Archbishop Butler’s Visitation Book’, Archivium Hibernicum, 34 (1977), p. 36. 87 Larkin, The Pastoral Role, p. 189. 88  For more on the Station dinner and the reservations of senior clergy relating to the practice, see Larkin, The Pastoral Role, pp. 189–258.

The Infrastructure of Catholicism  119 ready access to large numbers of Catholics, many of whom attended chapels at best infrequently. These socio-­religious occasions proved to be vital opportunities for parish clergy to collect dues as well as any arrears that may have accrued over the preceding year. For much of the eighteenth century, the cost of erecting chapels, like the one at Knockavilla, with little or no architectural pretentions, was modest; strikingly, Archbishop Butler suggested that a chapel could be built for as little as £4 in 1754.89 As the century drew to a close, however, many congregations wanted something more befitting its role than a thatch chapel. With this in mind, by the early 1800s it was common for construction to commence on chapels without a clear idea of how long the building process might take, or, more importantly, how it would be financed. This was especially true where wealthy benefactors were absent, which meant a reliance on more modest contributions from those of middling and poorer incomes.90 It was common for these building projects to run into difficulties, often brought about by lack of funds, meaning it was not unheard of for even the most modest of chapels to be left unfinished for years, especially in Ireland. In England a system of funding for chapels, especially in towns, began to emerge from the middle of the eighteenth century whereby clergy were maintained by means of congregational subscriptions, payment of which often entitled worshippers to a seat in the chapel.91 In many cases chapels were administered by groups of trustees or lay committees representing congregations. Lay committees often exercised control over the material fabric of chapels, with responsibility for purchases and payments resting in their hands, while the remit of some, as was the case with the Moorfield’s Chapel Society in London, stretched into the educational and charitable spheres.92 Yet while this system of funding and governance was one of the defining characteristics of urban Catholicism in England in the pre-­emancipation period, so too were the contributions of wealthy benefactors, which were important, especially in the erection of new chapels. At Hassop, Derbyshire, the church of All Saints was opened in 1816, built thanks to the generosity of the Eyre family at a cost over £2,400.93 Similarly, the church of St  Mary and St John at Pleasington, in the industrial town of Blackburn, Lancashire, was built thanks to the intervention of a wealthy benefactor, a local landowner, John Francis Butler. Butler donated the enormous sum of £23,000 for the erection of one of England’s earliest neo-­Gothic Catholic churches.94 89 Christopher O’Dwyer (ed.), ‘Archbishop Butler’s Visitation Book’, Archivium Hibernicum, 33 (1975), p. 10; Christopher O’Dwyer (ed.), ‘Archbishop Butler’s Visitation Book’, Archivium Hibernicum, 34 (1977), p. 36. 90 Brendan Grimes, ‘Funding a Roman Catholic Church in Nineteenth-­ Century Ireland’, Architectural History, 52 (2009), p. 147. 91 Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 338. 92 Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 348. 93 Martin, A Glimpse of Heaven, p. 39. 94 Martin, A Glimpse of Heaven, p. 48.

120  Cormac Begadon Catholic landowners also played a central role in the funding of infrastructure. They were especially prevalent in the temporary settlement of the religious communities fleeing the Continent in the wake of the French Revolution, and subsequently contributed to the erection of more permanent homes. The Benedictine communities, previously at St Laurence’s, Dieulouard, and St Gregory’s, Douai, were given refuge by Sir William Smythe, at Acton Burnell, Shropshire. The monks of St Laurence’s moved in 1804, Ann Fairfax, daughter of the ninth Viscount Fairfax of Emley, having offered them a house at Ampleforth, Yorkshire, where they settled permanently. Their confrères from St Gregory’s remained at Acton Burnell until 1814, when they found a home at Downside, having received a generous parting gift of £400 from the Smythes to furnish their new home.95 When the same monks sought to erect a new chapel, they unashamedly distributed a ‘begging circular’ among parents and friends in 1817, raising £850 for their efforts.96 That the contributions of wealthy Catholics were vital to the provision and maintenance of infrastructure can be seen through the records for Catholic schools and institutions for the poor, which often recorded them as having only one source of income, ‘usually a Catholic member of the gentry, who built the school on his property’.97 In Ireland and Scotland, wealthy benefactors, willing to fund the erection of monumental churches, were scarcer. However, in Ireland, the expansion of Catholic infrastructure was assisted by a considerable number of Protestant gentry, whose involvement has traditionally been overlooked. It was not uncommon for Protestant landowners to donate land for new chapels; Lady Tynte Caldwell, for example, donated the land for a new chapel in the rural parish of Dunlavin, Co. Wicklow, while at Narraghmore, Co. Kildare, the duke of Leinster gave over a plot.98 In some cases Protestant gentry even helped to finance the erection of new chapels. At Sandyford, Co. Dublin, Lord Castlecoote donated £500 for the construction of a new chapel in the late eighteenth century, while at nearby Booterstown, Lord Fitzwilliam paid for a new chapel, complete with a fashionable Italianate façade, which was opened in 1813.99 When the construction of a metropolitan chapel (a de facto cathedral) in Dublin ran into financial difficulties, an appeal was made to ‘Citizens of other religious Persuasions’ to meet the shortfall. The call for contributions was successful; a grand new church, based on the designs of St Philippe de Roule in Paris, was duly opened.

95  Alban Hood, From Repatriation to Revival: Continuity and Change in the English Benedictine Congregation, 1795–1850 (Farnborough, 2014), p. 59. 96 Hood, From Repatriation to Revival, p. 58. 97  Eric Tenbus, English Catholics and the Education of the Poor, 1847–1902 (Abingdon, 2016), p. 17. 98  Samuel Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, 2 vols. (London, 1837), I, pp. 91, 583. 99  Peter Pearson, Between the Mountains and the Sea: Dun Laoghaire-­Rathdown County (Dublin, 1999), pp. 258, 331.

The Infrastructure of Catholicism  121 For the Church in Ireland, its ever-­increasing diaspora would in time become an important source of funding. Historians have long examined the Irish abroad as a ‘vital source of familial remittance and as a cash cow for political purposes’, but their funding of ecclesiastical infrastructure has been underestimated until recently.100 Clerical fund-­raising tours abroad became increasingly common long before the Famine and provided the means to finance more ambitious and architecturally more sophisticated buildings. These tours were not, however, limited to the Irish. Priests from Scotland were crossing over the Irish Sea by the 1810s in search of funds to pay for the construction of new chapels. Some of these would be situated in areas which had large Irish populations, but not all; by the 1820s some Scottish priests, whose respective congregations were said not to have a ‘single Irishman’, travelled to Ireland in search of funds, ‘because they found that Catholics in Scotland were unable to meet the escalating demands made on them as chapel after chapel was planned’.101 Reflecting in 1835 on how the new Dominican church in Cork City had been funded, its prior, Bartholomew Russell, OP, made the following comments: ‘Rich and Poor, Protestant and Catholic, Citizen and Stranger, have with generous emulation contributed towards the erection of this sacred edifice.’102 While Russell was, of course, referring to the construction of his own church, his comments, illustrating the breadth of sources of the donations to Catholic infrastructural projects, can be seen as reflective of the changes that had occurred in the funding of chapels, schools, and religious houses across Britain and Ireland before the passing of emancipation.

Conclusion Between 1746 and 1829, the Catholic Church in the four nations underwent immense changes which amounted to a radical transformation, affecting all facets of Catholicism. A mass programme of modernization pervading every aspect of the Church’s mission was undertaken. Its primary pastoral structures—­the missions, parishes, dioceses, and districts—­were adapted and expanded to fit shifting realities, while an enormous boom in chapel- and school-­building reflected the Church’s drive to meet more effectively the pastoral needs of ever-­increasing populations. The repeal of anti-­Catholic legislation allowed the Church to embark on these programmes of modernization. However, the motivation to modernize was not simply brought about by the political thaw, it was also the result of

100  Sarah Roddy, ‘The Spoils of Spiritual Empire: Emigrant Contributions to Nineteenth-­Century Irish Catholic Church Building’, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, 5 (2012), p. 95. 101 Johnson, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, p. 159. 102  Cited in Grimes, ‘Funding a Roman Catholic Church’, p. 164.

122  Cormac Begadon shifting pastoral realities. These were most marked in England and Scotland, where there were significant demographic changes in the Catholic population, brought on in part by sustained immigration from Ireland. Dramatic population growth in Ireland meant that enhancing pastoral structures was of even greater importance. Yet while the Church’s infrastructure in Ireland and Britain made great strides, it had not entirely shed all of its penal characteristics, and by 1830 much work still remained to be done. The changes that occurred in terms of fund-­raising, with increased clerical oversight, mirrored those that were taking place across all facets of Catholic life. In English Catholic political circles, the control exerted by the gentry was gradually eroded from the late eighteenth century. The struggle for emancipation only served to exacerbate this process, leading to enhanced clerical control and, in Britain, to a confidence ‘to seek a return to ordinary government of the Church by canon law and a territorial episcopate’.103

Select Bibliography Connolly, S.  J., Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1780–1845 (Dublin, 1982; repr. Dublin, 2001). Field, Clive, ‘Counting Religion in England and Wales: The Long Eighteenth Century, c.1680–c.1840’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 62 (2012), pp. 693–720. Hood, Alban, From Repatriation to Revival: Continuity and Change in the English Benedictine Congregation, 1795–1850 (Farnborough, 2014). Johnson, Christine, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, ­1789–1829 (Edinburgh, 1983). Larkin, Emmet, The Pastoral Role of the Roman Catholic Church in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1750–1850 (Dublin, 2006). Martin, Christopher, A Glimpse of Heaven: Catholic Churches of England and Wales (London, 2006). Schofield, Nicholas and Skinner, Gerald, The English Vicars Apostolic, 1688–1850 (Oxford, 2009). Yates, Nigel, Eighteenth Century Britain: Religion and Politics, 1714–1815 (London, 2008).

103  Edward Norman, Roman Catholicism in England: From the Elizabethan Settlement to the Second Vatican Council (Oxford, 1985), p. 64.

7 Catholic Belief and Practice Peter Phillips

Prayer takes us to the heart of that private and intimate relationship between an individual and God. In exploring public devotions, the celebration of Mass and the sacraments, as well as more popular devotions which have attached themselves to local shrines and favourite saints, places of pilgrimage, and even some practices which have their origins in pre-­Christian times, we are also exploring the deeply felt experiences which give Christians their sense of identity and belonging. This chapter will attempt to look at Catholic devotion in Britain and Ireland as the Catholic community escaped the constraints of the penal laws. In many locations, the celebration of the sacraments moved out from their former domestic settings to the larger and more public gatherings in local chapels. Prayer books were increasingly available; preaching and devotions like Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament became more common. The bishops, particularly in Ireland, attempted to regulate what they viewed as unseemly practices which had become attached to certain events like the burial of the dead and the celebration of local holy sites. Protestant observers were often edified by their attendance at Catholic celebrations but certain sacraments such as the celebration of marriage offered a serious challenge to civil law; burials, too, could form a point of ­discord between the priest and the parson. The sacraments of Holy Orders and of the Anointing of the Sick have not been discussed here because so little information is available. Priests brought the sacrament to the sick and dying, sometimes travelling considerable distance to do so. For English, Scottish, and Welsh candidates, ordination to the priesthood generally took place on the Continent until the 1790s, when most domestic colleges opened. In Ireland, and to a lesser extent Scotland, ordination at home was prevalent before the French Revolution.

The Setting of the Liturgy and the Sacraments The setting of Catholic liturgies in Britain and Ireland changed significantly between the 1740s and the 1820s as population increase and a growing sense of toleration encouraged the construction of new chapels, although the pace of Peter Phillips, Catholic Belief and Practice In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829. Edited by: Liam Chambers, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843443.003.0008

124  Peter Phillips change varied considerably across the four nations.1 This ensured the continued use of irregular liturgical venues, frequently as a result of poverty and attendant inadequate resources. Even in London, alongside the liturgically rich experience of the embassy chapels, Mass was still celebrated in garrets, and Catholics gathered in hired rooms at local inns to hear sermons until late in the eighteenth century. The register of Monox Hervey who lived on Red Lion Street, High Holborn, gives us some idea of the celebration of Mass by an itinerant London priest in the 1730s, and in the decades that followed. Apart from records of baptisms, he noted people reconciled to the Church in various places across London both in lodgings and before the congregation in inns.2 As late as 1851, Bishop James Brown, in one of his earliest pastoral letters to the people of the Diocese of Shrewsbury, which at that time included north Wales, recorded: The Holy Sacrifice in some of our congregations is in a room of a public tavern, in one a loft over a stable, in another over a common blacksmith’s shop . . . there are two counties in our Diocese in which there is only one Chapel, and in three, in which there is neither Station, nor Chapel, nor Priest.3

In urban Ireland, a network of chapels was already in place by the middle of the eighteenth century. In Dublin, Rocque’s city plan of 1756 records chapels in alleyways and back courts, and some were well decorated with paintings and ­statues.4 A series of systematic parish visitations initiated by Archbishop John Carpenter, and continued by Archbishops John Thomas Troy and Daniel Murray, ensured a higher standard of liturgical celebration and pastoral administration.5 In 1825 the Doric-­style ‘metropolitan chapel’ opened in Marlborough Street, Dublin, the largest post-­Reformation Church in Ireland, and soon to become the pro-­Cathedral.6 In some parts of rural Ireland, poverty and attendant lack of resources sometimes meant that priests celebrated Mass in the open air or in barns, rather than in chapels, and it is possible to identify a house-­based, rather than church-­based, religion; many smaller chapels had no font or permanent The author wishes to thank Geoffrey Scott and Anthony Crisp for their help in preparations for the writing of this chapter. 1  See Cormac Begadon’s Chapter 6, in this volume. 2  Eamon Duffy, ‘Richard Challoner 1691–1781: A Memoir’, in Eamon Duffy (ed.), Challoner and His Church (London, 1981), p. 7; Joseph Stanislaus Hamsom (ed.), ‘The Catholic Registers of the Rev. Monox Hervey alias John Rivett alias John Moxon’, in Miscellanea IX, CRS 14 (London, 1914), pp. 313–80. 3  Bishop James Brown, Pastoral letter, 25 November 1851, Shrewsbury Diocesan Archives. 4  Patrick Corish, The Catholic Community in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Dublin, 1981), pp. 83–4. 5  Cormac Begadon, ‘Laity and Clergy in the Catholic Renewal of Dublin, c.1750–1830’ (PhD Thesis, NUI Maynooth, 2009), pp. 250–1. 6  Begadon, ‘Laity and Clergy’, pp. 47–53; Kevin Whelan, Religion, Landscape and Settlement in Ireland: Patrick to Present (Dublin, 2018), pp. 189–90.

Catholic Belief and Practice  125 reservation of the Blessed Sacrament.7 In Scotland, there were few chapels but a considerable number of additional make-­do Mass stations.8 Bishop George Hay, vicar apostolic of the Lowland District, made long journeys, sometimes on foot, to provide Mass in distant parishes without a resident priest, wrapped up in his plaid and looking more like ‘a Thief than a Bishop’.9 In Ireland, conditions in rural parishes began to improve as bishops commenced visitations. Efforts were made to have baptisms in chapel rather than in the family’s house, and baptismal fonts were gradually introduced.10 In England a survey of baptismal registers suggests that many children were baptized on their day of birth, or at least within a few days of it, although baptisms were celebrated considerably later in some missions. While it was rare among the Irish at home, and those who settled in England, not to have their children baptized, or to die without receiving absolution from a priest, regular Mass attendance and the sacrament of confirmation were often neglected.11 Bishop Richard Challoner, soon after having been consecrated coadjutor to Bishop Benjamin Petre in 1741, confirmed in London on twenty occasions, and, within two years, had conducted an extensive visitation of the whole London District. The numbers confirmed suggest infrequent provision of the sacrament in previous years; he conducted a second visitation of the district in 1749.12 Confirmation registers for the vast Midland District of England have been ­preserved, and though incomplete, especially for the nineteenth century, they provide some sense of reception of the sacrament.13 The bishops covered the whole of the district about every ten years, visiting a group of missions each year in the spring or summer, though Bishop John Milner also made visits in the winter. On the two occasions on which the registers included the age of the candidates, they range from 9 to 80 years old.14 Bishop John Briggs, vicar apostolic for the Northern District, celebrated the first confirmations since the Reformation in Richmond, Yorkshire, in 1837; of the fifty-­six confirmed, twenty-­seven were converts.15

7 Whelan, Religion, Landscape and Settlement, pp. 179–86; S.  J.  Connolly, Priests and People in Pre-­Famine Ireland, 1780–1845 (Dublin, 1982), pp. 94–5. 8  See J. F. S. Gordon (ed.), The Catholic Church in Scotland from the Suppression of the Hierarchy till the Present Time: Being Memorabilia of the Bishops, Missioners, and Scotch Jesuits (Glasgow, 1869), pp. 45–6, 372, 410. 9  Gordon (ed.), The Catholic Church in Scotland, p. 239. 10  Hugh Fenning, ‘From the Penal Laws to the Birth of Modern Nationalism’, in Brendan Bradshaw and Dáire Keogh (eds.), Christianity in Ireland: Revisiting the Story (Dublin, 2003), p. 141. 11  See Connolly, Priests and People, p. 91. 12 Edwin H. Burton, The Life and Times of Bishop Challoner (1691–1781), 2 vols. (London, 1909), I, pp. 137, 141, 147–55, 159, 174–86, 295–7. 13  John Egan (ed.), The Bishops’ Register of Confirmations in the Midland District of the Catholic Church in England, 1768–1811 and 1816 (West Wickham, 1999). 14  Egan (ed.), The Bishops’ Register of Confirmations, pp. 22, 46–7. 15  John Orlebar Payne, Old English Catholic Missions (London, 1900), p. 65.

126  Peter Phillips In England, Holy Communion for the laity was reserved traditionally to the principal feasts, the eight ‘Indulgences’ as they were known, but this was chan­ging. Members of pious confraternities, such as the Bona Mors, were encouraged to go to confession and communion once a month. Similarly, as early as 1778 Archbishop James Butler of Cashel in Ireland established a Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament whose members were to receive Holy Communion on the third Sunday in the month; nevertheless the custom for most Irish Catholics was to communicate once or twice a year.16 This was also true of the London Catholic, William Mawhood, who recorded in his diary that he went to confession and Holy Communion at Christmas and Easter, and occasionally, but rarely, on a few other occasions during the year. This might have reflected the conservatism of Bishop Challoner, his usual confessor: it is certainly noticeable that after Challoner’s death in 1781, Mawhood attended communion rather more often. Peter Gifford of Chillington Hall in Staffordshire made a resolution to receive the sacraments every three or four weeks.17 Occasionally apparent aberrations crept in. Henry Rutter, fearful for his uncle’s reputation, reported jokingly in 1789 of a rumour he had heard about altar servers at his mission at Mowbreck in Lancashire. Robert Banister admitted the rumour to be correct: ‘two very elegant young girls . . . for the first time were my acolytes last Christmas Day, being dressed up in fine muslin frocks and very nice tippets, and blue silk bonnets, and red merroquin slippers. They officiated in the same dress on three or four other festivals.’18 Confession boxes were absent from most English chapels. In 1784, Robert Banister advised his nephew to ‘sit not with a great handkerchief before your face like one that is ashamed of himself or of his employ, but as much as possible show your countenance full of serenity, gravity, piety and compassion’.19 In Ireland the practice of confession remained somewhat patchy. When Bishop Patrick Joseph Plunkett of Meath visited his diocese in 1780, he was ‘scandalised to find so many grown-­up young of both sexes who had never been at confession’, and refused to confirm in two chapels because the children had not been prepared sufficiently.20 Already in 1755 the decrees of Cloyne and Ross urged clergy to ensure that a penitent was sufficiently informed before administering absolution, emphasizing the duty of the clergy to give appropriate instruction: ‘They shall teach the laity how to examine their consciences and how to confess’.21 Bishop George Plunkett 16 Connolly, Priests and People, pp. 92–3. 17 Marie Rowlands, ‘The Education and Piety of Catholics in Staffordshire in the Eighteenth Century’, Recusant History, 10 (1969), p. 67. 18  Robert Banister to Henry Rutter, 27 July 1789, in Leo Gooch (ed.), Revival of English Catholicism: Banister-Rutter Correspondence, 1777–1807 (Wigan, 1995), p. 142. 19  Banister to Rutter, 14 October 1784, in Gooch (ed.), Revival of English Catholicism, p. 74. 20 Connolly, Priests and People, pp. 59, 90, 120–4; Ian McBride, Eighteenth Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (Dublin, 2009), pp. 252–4. 21  Cited in Katherine O’Driscoll, ‘Reform, Instruction and Practice: The Impact of the Catholic Revival on the Laity in the Dublin Diocese’ (PhD Thesis, NUI Galway, 2016), p. 56.

Catholic Belief and Practice  127 of Elphin’s report of 1826 to Cardinal Guilio Maria della Somaglia, pro-­prefect of Propaganda, might be taken as fairly representative: he tackled the pastoral breakdown ‘by Preaching, teaching, hearing confessions and baptizing in the several disorderly parishes of the diocese’ and ruled that Christian doctrine was to be taught in all parishes; the Epistle and Gospel were to be read in the vernacular, the difficult parts being explained with a sermon each Sunday; Christmas and Easter confession was to begin on the same day in all parishes, and people ignorant of Christian doctrine not admitted to the sacraments; first communion was to be given at the age of 12 after a year of instruction and frequent confession; con­firm­ ation was to be administered in all parishes each year, the bishop noting that ‘tho’ delicate and sickly I have not neglected this part of my duty’.22 In rural Ireland the custom of house-­based practice focused on the Station Mass remained: a priest visited particular houses in his parish to hear confessions, celebrate Mass, and give instruction, normally during Christmas and Eastertide. The parish priest would also collect his dues from parishioners on these occasions and the visit would be marked by a lavish dinner for the priests and local dignitaries with the inevitable jollity and consumption of much alcohol.23 In 1819, Cardinal Francesco Luigi Fontana, prefect of Propaganda Fide, asked Archbishop Troy to end ‘the abuse of administering the sacraments outside of the church’, protesting at women being confessed without the necessary safeguards to insure ‘that no irregularities occurred between the priest and the penitent’.24 Troy, himself not particularly happy with Station Masses, and especially the accompanying Station dinners, protested that the situation in rural Ireland made it impossible to comply with such demands. The nature of sacramental practice in the pre-­Famine Church is suggested by David W. Miller’s work on weekly Mass figures, estimating that by the mid-­1830s attendance in rural areas was probably on average no more than 40 per cent and often much lower than this.25 It is possible that making one’s Easter duties in an Ireland with its insufficient, and often dilapidated, rural chapels counted more to identify Catholic belonging than attending weekly Sunday Mass. Emmet Larkin’s thesis that Catholic reform arrived only with ‘the devotional revolution’, identified strongly with Cardinal Paul Cullen from the 1850s, has been qualified, but not undermined, by Thomas McGrath who points to the important liturgical reforms such 22  Emmet Larkin, The Pastoral Role of the Roman Catholic Church in Pre-­Famine Ireland, 1750–1850 (Dublin, 2006), pp. 66–7. 23 Larkin, The Pastoral Role, pp. 189–90, for an important assessment of the phenomenon, see pp. 189–258. 24  Begadon, ‘Laity and Clergy’, p. 233. 25  David W. Miller, ‘Irish Catholicism and the Great Famine’, Journal of Social History, 9 (1975), pp. 81–98; David W. Miller, ‘Mass Attendance in Ireland in 1834’, in Stewart Brown and David W. Miller (eds.), Piety and Power in Ireland, 1760–1960: Essays in Honour of Emmet Larkin (Notre Dame, IN, 2000), pp. 158–79; David W. Miller, ‘Landscape and Religious Practice: A Study of Mass Attendance in Pre-­Famine Ireland’, Éire-­Ireland, 40 (2005), pp. 90–106.

128  Peter Phillips as those of Bishop James Doyle in the diocese of Kildare and Leighlin in the 1820s and Daniel Murray, coadjutor to Troy in Dublin from 1809, and then archbishop of Dublin from 1823.26

Preaching and Prayer Preaching, as in any age, was variable: some priests certainly did preach well, some not at all. Pulpits only appeared in Irish chapels after the restoration of regu­lar visitations by bishops late in the eighteenth century, but many local pastors preached with vigour in Irish, usually after Mass.27 To help them, Irish authors published a number of sermon books, notably Bishop James Gallagher’s Sixteen Irish Sermons in an Easy and Familiar Stile (1736).28 In Scotland, Bishop George Hay was recorded as a ‘peculiarly animated, impressive and forceful preacher . . . his language was of the simplest kind, delivered in the old Scottish dialect, in which he always spoke. If an expression escaped him which the common people seemed unlikely to understand, he would presently substitute another phrase, perhaps a Scotch one.’29 Mawhood’s diary records regular preaching in London, usually at vespers in one of the embassy chapels, sometimes at the Ship Inn, or other venues where Challoner, also a well-­regarded preacher, preached and gave instruction. Soon after his consecration in 1779, Bishop Plunkett of Meath informed his clergy that they should give at least a short instruction each Sunday at Mass.30 In 1784, Robert Banister in  Lancashire warned his nephew strongly against pretension when preaching: ‘I  therefore entreat you never to study for fine phrases and fine language, grand metaphors and tropes, but study to convey the sacred truths of the gospel on the plainest and easiest manner possible into the minds of the simple and illiterate; doing otherwise is labour lost’.31 Some priests in rural areas simply rifled old books of sermons. Bishop William Bernard Ullathorne of Birmingham recorded that in the tiny mission of Pocklington in Yorkshire where he was brought up in the early decades of the nineteenth century, an émigré priest, Abbé Fidele, had four sermons written in

26  Emmet Larkin, ‘The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850–75’, American Historical Review, 77 (1972), pp. 625–52; Thomas McGrath, ‘The Tridentine Evolution of Modern Irish Catholicism, 1563–1962: A Re-­Examination of the “Devotional Revolution” Thesis’, Recusant History, 20 (1991), pp. 512–23. 27  Fenning, ‘From the Penal Laws to the Birth of Modern Nationalism’, p. 141. 28 Connolly, Priests and People, p. 78. 29  Gordon (ed.), The Catholic Church in Scotland, p. 56. 30  Desmond Keenan, The Catholic Church in Nineteenth-­Century Ireland (Dublin, 1983), p. 92. 31 Robert Banister to Henry Rutter, 14 October 1784, in Gooch (ed.), Revival of English Catholicism, p. 73.

Catholic Belief and Practice  129 English and that ‘when he had read the first words of one of them the congregation knew the rest by heart’.32 The proliferation of prayer books in the late-­eighteenth century suggests an increasing literacy amongst the growing Catholic middle classes, although the rosary remained as a central devotion for many. Prayers were available for those who could not attend Mass. Bishop John Stonor, vicar apostolic of the Midland District in England, published An Exercise of Devotion for Sundays and Holydays, Mornings and Evenings, particularly fitted for the Use of such Neighbourhoods or Families as have not the Opportunity of Assisting at Church Service (1742). On a more humble level John Saddler, a Liverpool publisher, produced The Poor Man’s Posey of Prayers; or The Key of Heaven in 1755 for ‘mariners and others whose business will not allow them to attend the public service of Mass’.33 Similarly, the Scottish Jesuit, Alexander MacKenzie, collected a series of prayers and devotions for use in prison, The Poor Prisoner’s Comforter (1764).34 Bishop Ullathorne’s autobiography recorded how his father and another man led prayers on alternate Sundays at the chapel in Scarborough: the usual English prayers were said aloud, then all in silence read the prayers for Mass in the Garden of the Soul, making a sort of spiritual communion, and then the lector for the week read one of Archer’s sermons . . . in the afternoon the usual psalms and prayers were said aloud and the children said their catechism to the lectors.35

The works of John Gother were republished and widely read, including his Holy Mass in Latin and English (compiled and edited by William Crathorne, 1718). The work was contrary to Alexander VII’s prohibition on translating the Mass into the vernacular, a ban still maintained by Bishop Charles Walmesley, vicar apostolic of the Western District of England, as late as 1796.36 Bishop Challoner, who had been received into the Church by Gother as a boy, assumed his mantle, his writings firmly rooted in the work of Gother himself, as well as Francis de Sales and Vincent de Paul. In his The Garden of the Soul (1740), Challoner appears more cautious than his mentor: he provided prayers to accompany the Mass, but no complete text, either in Latin or English. He included other devotions proper to Sundays, such as English versions of vespers and compline. 32  William Bernard Ullathorne, The Devil is a Jackass, ed., Leo Madigan (Leominster, 1995), p. 6. 33  Marie B. Rowlands, ‘1767 – Religious Life’, in Marie B. Rowlands (ed.), English Catholics of Parish and Town, CRS Monograph 5 (London, 1999), p. 270. 34 See Lisa Maclain, ‘Underground Devotions’, in Robert Scully with Angela Ellis (eds.), A Companion to Catholicism and Recusancy in Britain and Ireland (Leiden, 2022), pp. 594–5. 35 Ullathorne, The Devil is a Jackass, p. 13. 36  Charles Walmesley to Peter Coghlan, 14 March 1796, in Frans Blom, Jos Blom, Frans Korsten, and Geoffrey Scott (eds.), The Correspondence of James Peter Coghlan (1731–1800), CRS 80 (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 255.

130  Peter Phillips Sheridan Gilley points to ‘the essentially biblical cast of Challoner’s mind’, a reflection of the Douai tradition, which offered a far better grounding in the Scriptures than was usual in seminaries of the Counter-­Reformation.37 Catholic life remained austere and prayer rather sober. ‘Nevertheless’, as John Saward, John Morrill, and Michael Tomko argue, ‘the reflective spirituality and clear, quiet devotion of the complex and uncertain period can still inspire’.38 Challoner’s extensive writings, particularly The Garden of the Soul and his Meditations, together with Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints, provided the staple reading of generations of Catholics in Britain and Ireland. It was a reworking of Catholicism for the eighteenth century.39 Clergy responded to the needs of their congregations and experimented with English prayers, often in the face of considerable episcopal disapproval. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Charles Cordell, missioner in Newcastle, introduced Sunday vespers in the vernacular in his chapel, publishing a four-­volume work in English which drew together the liturgy of the Mass, Office, and sacraments. Cordell’s preface encouraged people ‘to communicate at the proper time, that is, immediately after the communion of the priest’, taking to heart Benedict XIV’s ruling that each had the right to receive the Blessed Sacrament consecrated at the Mass he or she attended, a comment which suggests that Holy Communion was often received outside of the celebration of the Mass.40 Similar things were happening in Liverpool where the Benedictine, Archibald Benedict Macdonald, missioner in St Mary’s, also encouraged prayer in English.41 John Lingard, anxious to make worship in his chapel in rural Lancashire more accessible to his parishioners as well as to Protestant observers, followed in the same ­tradition, later producing for his congregation a Manual of Prayer on Sundays and During Mass (1833), a fine illustration of his desire for clarity and simplicity in the liturgy. In comparison to many older manuals, Lingard came near to providing a free translation of the Preface and Canon of the Mass, simplified in a manner appropriate to his congregation.42 On Palm Sundays, Lingard was accustomed to have someone read the Passion narrative aloud in English while he read quietly in Latin.43 In his writings on the liturgy, he rejected the mere repetition of time-­honoured, but unconsidered, phrases being particularly hard on the garbled and incomprehensible Litany of Loreto, enquiring: were 37  Sheridan Gilley, ‘Challoner as a Controversialist’, in Duffy (ed.), Challoner and his Church, p. 93. 38  John Saward, John Morrill, and Michael Tomko (eds.), Firmly I Believe and Truly: The Spiritual Tradition of Catholic England, 1483–1999 (Oxford, 2011), p. 254. 39  See Michael Tomko’s Chapter 12, in this volume. 40  Charles Cordell (ed.), The Divine Office for the Use of the Laity, 4 vols. (London, 1763) I, p. xxxii. 41 Archibald Benedict Macdonald, The Lay-­ man’s Afternoon Devotion: On All Sundays and Holydays throughout the Year. To which is added, Short Prayers at Benediction: With Litanies and Night Prayers usually said in Catholic Families (Preston, 1778). 42  Peter Phillips, John Lingard: Priest and Historian (Leominster, 2008), p. 309. 43 Phillips, Lingard, p. 311.

Catholic Belief and Practice  131 ‘protestant dancers, jumpers and ranters’ to be replaced by ‘Catholic gallopers’?44 Lingard’s slightly younger contemporary at Douai, George Leo Haydock, wrote on the Biblical roots of the Litany of Loreto, and composed a Scriptural version of a Litany to the Blessed Virgin Mary, as well as reflections on the relationship between the Mass and the Passion of Christ to be used by the laity while hearing Mass.45 In Ireland, a strong popular piety attached to the rosary, ‘the Blessed Virgin Mary [playing] an important role in Counter-­Reformation spirituality’, and a powerful tradition of oral Irish prayer existed.46 Many of the 500 prayers gathered by Diamuid Ó Laoghaire have their roots in the eighteenth century.47 Tomás de Bhál argues that with the publication of Archbishop James Butler’s catechism in 1777, and the increasing popularity of works by Challoner and Hay, Irish devotion became ‘Georgian in style and pattern rather than Gothic or Gaelic’.48 Catholic prayer in Scotland also was dominated by the rosary and an oral culture of prayer, reflected in the Ortha nan Gailhead / Carmina Gaedelica a compendium of prayers, hymns, and miscellaneous Celtic material collected by Alexander Carmichael in the late nineteenth century, but having its roots in earlier devotion.

Liturgical and Popular Devotions Many British and Irish bishops were cautious about liturgical innovation. Bishop William Sharrock, vicar apostolic of the Northern District would only grudgingly allow Benediction in the late 1790s, giving permission ‘provided it did not supersede instruction’.49 Mawhood attended Benediction several times when he was abroad, but only recorded the devotion once in England, in the Sardinian embassy on Sunday 16 January 1774, which suggests that it was a rare event.50 In fact, Challoner’s The Garden of the Soul contains the first description of Benediction in any English prayer book. Benediction could be found occasionally in country houses; Mawley Hall, Shropshire, has a recusant silver thurible by William Grundy of London (1757), a late-­eighteenth-­century Belgian silver incense boat, 44  The Catholic Magazine and Review, 3 (January 1833), p. 19. For Lingard’s whole discussion, see Phillips, Lingard, pp. 314–18. 45  George Leo Haydock, A Key to the Roman Catholic Office (Whitby, 1823), pp. 54–7, 70–3; George Leo Haydock, in N. A. Gilbert, The Method of Sanctifying the Sabbath Days at Whitby, Scarborough, and co. with a Paraphrase on Some Psalms (York, 1824), pp. 42–4. Examples of all these prayers can be found in Saward, Morrill, and Tomko (eds.), Firmly I Believe and Truly, pp. 396–401. 46  Donal Kerr, ‘The Catholic Church in the Age of O’Connell’, in Bradshaw and Keogh (eds.), Christianity in Ireland, p. 165. 47  Diamuid Ó Laoghaire, Ár bPaidreacha Dúchais (Baile Átha Cliath, 1975). 48  Tomás de Bhál, ‘Patterns of Prayer and Devotion, 1750–1850’, in Placid Murray (ed.), Studies in Pastoral Liturgy, vol. 3 (Dublin, 1967), p. 214. 49  Brian Foley, Some Other People of the Penal Times (Lancaster, 1991), p. vi. 50  E. E. Reynolds (ed.), The Mawhood Diary, CRS 50 (London, 1956), p. 71.

132  Peter Phillips and a presumed late-­eighteenth-­century Continental silver monstrance. Jenico Preston, missioner at Abergavenny, was keen to promote devotion to the Blessed Sacrament throughout England and Wales with the Forty Hours, and Perpetual Adoration, devotions which developed in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He renovated the chapel at Abergavenny, his sister made new vestments by cutting up old ones, and he taught a little choir Gregorian chant to encourage the congregation’s participation. At last, on Easter Sunday 1798, he celebrated Benediction for the first time, with Latin hymns, incense made with materials purchased from the local apothecary, and vespers before the Blessed Sacrament exposed, the whole followed by English night prayers.51 Benediction was performed once a month at the Petre’s house, Thorndon, Essex, with ex­pos­ ition between Mass and vespers on at least seven major feasts.52 In the little mission at Shrewsbury, Benediction was not introduced until Samuel Jones installed a small chamber organ in the chapel in 1827: Benediction on the first Sunday of the month; Sunday Mass at 10.30 with Latin vespers in the afternoon, a sermon at both; during the week Mass on Wednesdays and Fridays.53 In Ireland, bishops gradually introduced devotional practice from the Continent. Bishop John O’Brien of Cloyne and Ross conducted a series of parish missions in 1765 and 1766, visiting with a team of priests, catechizing, hearing confessions, and celebrating Holy Communion.54 As early as 1746 the stations of the cross had been introduced into the Franciscan chapel in Wexford.55 In 1809 a Confraternity of the Sacred Heart was founded at George’s Hill Convent, with members promising to make a ‘holy hour’ of devotion to the Sacred Heart, one of the earliest examples of such a devotion in the country. About the same time Fr Henry Young, who picked up the idea from the Vincentians in Rome, introduced the devotion of the nine first Fridays and, with the authority of Archbishop Murray, he started missions in country parishes.56 By the late eighteenth century many parishes, particularly in Dublin, had a branch of the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine to assist in the catechizing of children.57 Inevitably politics intruded into devotion. For example, in 1799 Edward Dillon, archbishop of Tuam banned the use of scapulars, which had become popular as objects not only of devotion but also as symbols of allegiance to the Irish rebels.58 Charles Girdin 51  Preston to Coghlan, 30 September, 21 November 1797, 5 March, 9 April 1798, in Blom, Blom, Korsten, and Scott (eds.), The Correspondence of James Peter Coghlan, pp. 290–4, 300–6, 327–31, 333–7. 52 Roderick O’Donnell, ‘The Architectural Setting of Challoner’s Episcopate’, in Duffy (ed.), Challoner and his Church, p. 69. 53 Peter Phillips ‘Shrewsbury: A Catholic Community’, in J.  P.  Marmion (ed.), Shrewsbury: Millennium Essays (Stratton on the Fosse, 2000), p. 64. 54 McBride, Eighteenth Century Ireland, pp. 255–6. 55  Fenning, ‘From the Penal Laws to the Birth of Modern Nationalism’, p. 142. 56  See Keenan, The Catholic Church in Nineteenth Century Ireland, pp. 78, 149, 157. 57  O’Driscoll, ‘Reform, Instruction and Practice’, pp. 66–82. 58  Dáire Keogh, ‘The Catholic Church in Ireland in the Age of the North Atlantic Revolutions, 1775–1815’, in Bradshaw and Keogh (eds.), Christianity in Ireland, p. 159.

Catholic Belief and Practice  133 introduced Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament followed by Benediction into Scotland in his chapel at Aberdeen from 1816 onwards.59 In England and Wales liturgical innovations were increasingly imported from abroad, such as devotion to the Sacred Heart which Bishop Milner introduced to his seminary at Oscott after bringing back from Rome in 1814 a panel of painted glass showing the Sacred Heart as described in the visions of St Gertrude and installing it in a small Gothic-­style chapel to encourage devotion among the ­students.60 British and Irish Catholics also maintained devotional practices with strong local roots. English and Welsh Catholics retained the popular pilgrimage to St Winefride’s Well at Holywell, in north Wales, and to the Marian shrine at Fernyhalgh in Lancashire throughout the period.61 In Ireland, a round of penitential practices was associated with Croagh Patrick, lay directed and not always in accordance with the teaching of the Council of Trent.62 Lough Derg remained a place of austerity, and was not interfered with, but pilgrimages to local wells and patterns (the celebration of places associated with local religious patrons), often immersed in what the clergy might have considered superstition, continued to proliferate. The bishops and clergy tried hard to regulate excesses associated with such places. Michael  P.  Carroll, however, insists that their apparent link with pagan custom is a distraction: he points to their strong connection to penitential practice; their emphasis on repetition and orderliness, walking round the station in a precise number of ‘rounds’; and their decisive lack of emphasis on figurative representation. ‘Characterized by a set of emphases that were internally consistent but quite different from the emphases characteristic of official Catholicism’, they were at first legitimated by the clergy.63 Kevin Whelan agrees: ‘rather than regarding these beliefs as a superstitious residue from an earlier belief system, it is more accurate to understand them as expressing a vigorous exchange between vernacular beliefs and Catholic theology’.64 The formative influence of the Franciscans, especially the Franciscan scholars of Louvain, in a complex, but creative, me­di­ ation between folk tales and post-­Tridentine beliefs must be acknowledged here.65 The bishops remained uneasy and, by 1829, they had totally abolished

59 Christine Johnson, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, 1789–1829 (Edinburgh, 1983), p. 168. 60  Illustrated in Saward, Morrill, and Tomko (eds.), Firmly I Believe and Truly, p. 250. See Bishop Milner’s Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus (London, 1867). 61  Milner recorded and authenticated the cure of Winefrid White in 1805: see Bernard Ward, The Eve of Catholic Emancipation, being the History of the English Catholics during the First Thirty Years of the Nineteenth Century, 3 vols. (London, 1911–12), I, pp. 196–201. 62  In 1812, 20,000 people climbed the mountain: see Whelan, Religion, Landscape and Settlement, pp. 110–11; Connolly, Priests and People, p. 109. 63 Michael  P.  Carroll, ‘Rethinking Popular Catholicism in Pre-­Famine Ireland’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 23 (1995), pp. 354–65. 64 Whelan, Religion, Landscape and Settlement, p. 110. 65 Anne O’Connor, ‘To Hell or Purgatory? Irish Folk Religion and Post-­Tridentine Counter-­ Reformation Catholic Teachings’, Béaloideas, 80 (2012), pp. 115–41.

134  Peter Phillips pilgrimages to wells, although the practice lingered on for another generation and, ul­tim­ate­ly, the bishops’ attempts to introduce a transforming Tridentine discipline across Ireland met with mixed success.

Fasting and Charity The practices of fasting and abstinence, and the distribution of charity, remained important as markers of Catholic life. Of course, fasting touched only the relatively well-­off, but, for those who could, days of fasting and abstinence provided a not­ able feature of Catholic practice. Catholics fasted on the forty days of Lent; on Fridays, except in the Christmas and Easter seasons; on Ember days; in Whit week; in the third week of September; in Advent; on the vigils of great feasts. This entailed taking only one meal a day, with a light collation in the evening. Catholic society in London was perhaps a little more relaxed but that this was something taken very seriously can be illustrated by the scandal caused in the north of England earlier in the eighteenth century when it was declared, falsely as it happens, that meat was to be allowed for three days a week during Lent.66 Abstinence was demanded of communicants on Sundays of Lent; on Rogation days; on St Mark’s day; all Fridays, not fast days; and all Saturdays in Lent. The large number of holydays could be something of a problem, especially for agricultural workers. The thirty-­six holydays of obligation were reduced by Rome to twelve as late as 1777 in England and Wales, and similar reductions were made the following year in Ireland, the remaining marked as simply days of devotion. After 1777, fasts on the eve of the former holydays were transferred to the Wednesdays and Saturdays of Lent.67 Attitudes were changing during the period covered by this chapter. In 1799, Lady Jerningham’s brother-­in-­law, who had come to stay for Easter, left Costessey during the Easter Triduum because ‘the fasting and praying this week was too much for him’.68 In most places, the approach to fasting had become rather more relaxed as the century went on: Henry Rutter confessed to his uncle his unease with the growing custom of taking ‘a good dish of chocolate’ at breakfast;69 a little later Banister confessed to his nephew that ‘we eat [buns] here in Lent bona fide; you make no scruple of eating apple-­pies or tarts which are not made without butter in the crust’.70 Fasting was increasingly mitigated for various reasons: in 66 Foley, Some Other People of the Penal Times, pp. 93–103. 67  Rowlands, ‘The Education and Piety of Catholics’, p. 70. 68  Bernard Ward, The Dawn of the Catholic Revival in England, 1781–1803, 2 vols. (London, 1909), I, p. 229. 69 Henry Rutter to Robert Banister, 14 March 1784, in Gooch (ed.), Revival of English Catholicism, p. 65. 70 Robert Banister to Henry Rutter, 2 April 1789, in Gooch (ed.), Revival of English Catholicism, p. 134.

Catholic Belief and Practice  135 1758 Bishop John Hornyold of the Midland District and Bishop Thomas Talbot in London gave permission for meat on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays of Lent, and eggs and cheese (whitemeats) until Holy Week, owing to difficult economic circumstances.71 William Mawhood received a dispensation from Bishop Talbot to eat meat three times a week during the Lent of 1782, and from time to time during subsequent Lents.72 A large number of these fast days were abolished by Pius VI in 1781, the obligation being restricted to Fridays in Lent, Ember weeks, Advent, and certain vigils.73 In Scotland, Bishop Hay hesitated to grant a general dispensation from fasting in Lent, but allowed his clergy to grant private dispensations in cases of necessity, with some good work imposed as compensation.74 The distribution of charity, too, was a mark of Catholic life. It was customary for Catholics of substance to make two wills, one to fulfil the legal obligation, and a spiritual will instructing an executor to grant various gifts of alms to support Catholic causes. In England, those of means left money for the celebration of Masses, for the mission of Douai College, for the support of local priests and schools, as well as other causes. Families, for example, supported trusts to pay for Catholics to be apprenticed.75 From early in the eighteenth century the Catholic laity in London were involved in establishing a series of charities: an annual sermon and collection was instituted for a ‘Benevolent Society for the Relief and the Aged and Infirm Poor’ jointly at the Sardinian chapel and Moorfields in 1761. Further societies followed: the ‘Charitable Society for Poor Children’ in 1764; the ‘Beneficent Society for Apprenticing the Children of Poor Catholic Parents’ in 1784; a ‘Laudable Society’ for clothing the ragged in 1796. Poor schools were set up in Wapping and Bermondsey in the 1770s and 1790s, and a school for up to 400 children at St Patrick’s church, Soho.76 Such charity was also evident in Ireland. Patrick Corish notes an impressive list of charities in Waterford by 1779, in spite of their remaining illegal under the penal code.77 Richard Deveraux’s money was responsible for providing chapels and other sources of Catholic support in Wexford.78 Irish merchants supported temperance and educational projects, orphanages, libraries, and other local initiatives. The growing Irish middle classes were also responsible for the proliferation of confraternities which attended to the physical and spiritual needs of the poor.79 Bishop Challoner had a 71  ‘Instructions and Regulations for the Fast of Lent, 1758, Addressed to the Faithful of the London District’, in Foley, Some Other People of the Penal Times, p. 174; Rowlands, ‘The Education and Piety of Catholics’, pp. 70–1. 72  Reynolds (ed.), The Mawhood Diary, p. 171. 73  Rowlands, ‘The Education and Piety of Catholics’, p. 71. 74  Gordon (ed.), The Catholic Church in Scotland, pp. 225, 235. 75  See, for example, Foley, Some Other People of the Penal Times, pp. 115–22. 76  See Sheridan Gilley, ‘English Catholic Charity and the Irish Poor in London’, Recusant History, 11 (1972), pp. 184–5. 77  Patrick Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience (Dublin, 1985), p. 173. 78 Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience, p. 153. 79  Begadon, ‘Laity and Clergy’, pp. 80–8, 148–62.

136  Peter Phillips number of charities at his disposal which gave him considerable funds to disperse: the Metcalf fund provided him with the interest on £1,000 to support those in need; other investments yielded funds which maintained a student at Douai, assisted hospital patients and prisoners, especially those condemned to die, and  imprisoned debtors.80 Another occasion for benevolence occurred when Challoner arranged that a benefaction of £1,000 should be passed on to Bishop Hay in 1769 to assist the poverty stricken missions in Scotland.81 When a serious persecution broke out in South Uist and the Western Isles a few years later, in 1771, money was collected to pay for a large-­scale emigration of the islanders to St John’s Island, Newfoundland, in Canada.82 Simon Bordley was instrumental in raising funds in Lancashire for this cause, writing to James Peter Coghlan to ask for Challoner’s support.83

Marriage Marriage law was closely associated with rights of property. A marriage ­performed before a Catholic priest was lawful in England but, in 1753, the lord chancellor, Lord Hardwicke, seeking to put an end to the increasing scandal of clandestine marriages, something important and necessary, pushed a Marriage Act through parliament, which excluded only Quakers and Jews from its provision that all weddings had to be performed before a minister in the local Anglican church. This proved a serious problem for Dissenters and Catholics alike. If Catholics did as they had always done, the Catholic priest was subject to threat of transportation, and the couple attempting such a marriage were regarded as ­felons. Bishop Challoner accepted the need for the Act, but his preference was for a couple first to get married before a Catholic priest, and then to attend the Anglican church, merely enacting a civil ceremony by ignoring both Anglican blessing and prayers. The duke of Norfolk persuaded the government to concede just this: the intention of the legislator was that the Anglican ‘service’ was ‘only a ceremony prescribed by law for the civil legality of the marriage’.84 This did not quite solve matters, for many considered that even attending the Anglican service represented communicatio in sacris, and was therefore sinful. Bishop Stonor was in favour of a greater compromise with the authorities, citing Benedict XIV’s recent document De Synodo Diocesana libro octo (1748), which seemed to allow the possibility of such practice, reflecting the situation in parts of Holland and 80  See Duffy, ‘Richard Challoner’, p. 9. 81  Gordon (ed.), The Catholic Church in Scotland, p. 64. 82  Gordon (ed.), The Catholic Church in Scotland, pp. 78–83. 83  Bordley to Coghlan, 13 January 1772, Blom, Blom, Korsten, and Scott (eds.), The Correspondence of James Peter Coghlan, p. 32. 84 Burton, The Life and Times of Bishop Challoner, I, p. 331.

Catholic Belief and Practice  137 Germany.85 This was also the case in Scotland, ‘the later practice in Scotland was to hold a private ceremony, frequently in the minister’s own house, or elsewhere’.86 Bishop Hay, approached in 1784 to grant a dispensation to a poor woman who wanted to marry a Protestant, agreed, providing he allowed her to practice her religion ‘and to let her have the children be [brought up as Catholics], or at least the daughters, if he can be induced to do so’.87 Bishop Hay’s pastoral letter of 1778 insisted that priests of his district had Banns proclaimed in the local Church of Scotland chapel, a necessity confirmed by the response to an inquiry to the lord advocate in 1794.88 Priests occasionally balked at this. Marriages before a Catholic priest were not recognized in Scottish law until 1834, but irregular marriages were deemed to be legal, if frowned upon, a particular problem in Scotland, especially for those ministering to immigrant Irish labourers. Often these had promised marriage to a woman in Ireland, and sometimes already had children with her, and then promised marriage to a Scottish woman, again sometimes having children (promise subsequente copula). As the decrees of Trent had been published in parts of Ireland, but not in Scotland until 1908, the second relationship could be considered a valid marriage in canon law, unless the first relationship were recognized as establishing a moral validity, something of a moral conundrum for priests ministering in such communities.89 In 1787 Propaganda Fide, guided by the fact that the decrees of Trent had not been promulgated in England and Wales, ruled that it was valid, but not lawful, for Catholics to be married in a Protestant church, and thus those married before a parson would not need to be remarried by a priest. Many tried to marry first before a priest, or perhaps straight after the Anglican service. Many simply married before the Anglican priest, foregoing the need of a Catholic priest altogether. The parents of the priest and historian, John Lingard, married in St George’s, Hanover Square, London, on 25 April 1765, ‘a church which specialised in ex­ped­ itious and inexpensive marriages, at a guinea a time, without the encumbrances of banns or licences’; there is no record of their being married before a Catholic priest.90 The situation remained contentious until the Marriage Act of 1836, eighty years later, which allowed Catholics and Dissenters to marry according to their own rites, with the attendance of a registrar and two witnesses.

85 For De Synodo and the difference of opinion between Stonor and Challoner, see John Bossy, ‘Challoner and the Marriage Act’, in Duffy (ed.), Challoner and his Church, pp. 126–36. 86  J. D. Holmes, ‘Some Cases of Conscience, with Particular Reference to the Marriage Act of 1753’, Recusant History, 10 (1970), p. 354, n. 9. 87  Gordon (ed.), The Catholic Church in Scotland, p. 236. 88  Gordon (ed.), The Catholic Church in Scotland, pp. 150, 364. 89 Johnson, Developments, pp. 175–6. See also Alasdair Roberts, ‘Catholic Marriage in Eighteenth Century Scotland’, Innes Review, 34 (1983), pp 9–15. 90  Peter Ackroyd, Blake (London, 1999), p. 4.

138  Peter Phillips The situation in Ireland regarding marriages was more complex. Marriages between Catholics were left as matters of common law.91 The Irish clergy attempted to prevent marriages between Catholics and Protestants which, in any case, had been the subject of severe legislation passed by the Irish parliament.92 The Irish bishops introduced Tridentine marriage legislation which demanded that a couple be married before a priest and two witnesses, but in a haphazard manner so that confusion remained about the areas in which such legislation had indeed been promulgated.93 In May 1780 Cardinal Leonardo Antonelli, prefect of Propaganda Fide, wrote to Bishop Troy of Ossory making it clear that the all marriages of Christians were regulated by the Tridentine decrees, and that Benedict XIV’s rulings could not be taken as a precedent, but eventually he conceded that mixed marriages, performed without the presence of a Catholic priest, could be accepted as valid. A pastoral letter of Bishop Troy in 1782 forbade certain folk customs associated with marriage, instructing that a ­ ­couple’s first child should be baptized in the parish chapel and not, as was then customary, in the home.94

Burial of the Dead Prayers for the dead had been included in Challoner’s The Garden of the Soul. On occasion Catholics were buried quietly on old monastic ground. The cemetery of the Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre, established outside Chelmsford, but in secret in 1799 when Catholic burial grounds were still illegal, is thought to be the earliest post-­Reformation Catholic cemetery to have been created.95 St James’ cemetery in Winchester had always remained in Catholic hands: both Challoner’s mother and John Lingard’s parents were laid to rest there. Some Catholic families retained a Catholic chapel in the local Anglican parish church. Challoner’s burial in January 1781 at Milton in Berkshire offers a good example. Masses were celebrated at the major chapels in London, and a funeral service was celebrated at Briant Barrett’s house in rural Berkshire; it is not known whether Challoner’s body was present for this, but probably not. Challoner was then buried in the Barrett vault in Milton church where the rector read the service, adding a

91  For this paragraph, see Patrick  J.  Corish, ‘Catholic Marriage under the Penal Code’, in Art Cosgrove (ed.), Marriage in Ireland (Dublin, 1985), pp. 67–77; Connolly, Priests and People, pp.  194–200. For problems relating to ‘couple-­beggars’ and clandestine marriages, see Connolly, Priests and People, pp. 200–12. 92 Connolly, Priests and People, pp. 197–8. 93  Maria Luddy and Mary O’Dowd, Marriage in Ireland, 1660–1925 (Cambridge, 2020), pp. 32–5. 94  S. J. Connolly, ‘Marriage in Pre-­Famine Ireland’, in Cosgrove (ed.), Marriage in Ireland, p. 93. 95  See Hannah Thomas, The Secret Cemetery: A Guide to the Burial Ground of the English Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre in the Parishes of Boreham & Springfield, Chelmsford (Leominster, 2017).

Catholic Belief and Practice  139 generous appreciation of Challoner in the burial register.96 By the eighteenth century, English Catholics were no longer buried at night, and by 1750 public burial during the daytime in the local churchyard had become acceptable for most Anglican incumbents,97 although it contravened the 1791 Relief Act forbidding Catholic burial services. Some Catholic chapels such as St Mary’s, Mulberry Street, Manchester, which opened in 1794, provided a burial crypt from the time of its opening.98 In Ireland funerals were generally celebrated in the home accompanied by a wake involving inevitable abuses, and games often of an explicit sexual nature. It proved hard for the bishops to transfer the celebration to a more seemly one in church. A pastoral letter attached to the statutes of Cashel (1810) attempted to deal with this problem.99 Irish migrants brought this custom with them to England and, as late as 1898, Bishop Richard Lacy of Middlesbrough ordained that ‘in cases where a “wake” has been held over a corpse it is my wish and command that the prayers of Holy Church and the funeral rites be withheld from the same.—Let the people be encouraged to pray for their dead.’100 In Ireland coffins were carried long distances to ancestral graveyards, with burial rights preserved by families over generations; family rows could be sparked off by disagreements on the route taken; the dead were in the care of women who prepared the body for burial and organized a keening ritual as crowds accompanied coffins on their journeys.101 Church of Ireland incumbents often allowed burial in the parish graveyards; as in England, this could provide a useful source of income, but William Magee, the Church of Ireland archbishop of Dublin, did not approve of this practice, forbidding a Catholic service in a Dublin graveyard in 1822.102 When money became available, land was purchased for new Catholic cemeteries in England as well as Ireland. The establishment of Catholic burial grounds had its problems: the Anglican incumbent of Goosnagh in Lancashire complained to Henry Carter, priest at Newhouse, who opened a chapel and burial ground in 1806, that the latter was ‘cheat[ing] him of the usual fees’.103 At the end of the century, as rebellion threatened in Ireland, a small but significant number of priests

96 Burton, The Life and Times of Bishop Challoner, II, pp. 277–9. 97  John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975), p. 143. 98  Gerard Connolly, ‘Catholicism in Manchester and Salford, 1770–1850’, 2 vols. (PhD Thesis, University of Manchester, 1980), I, p. 465. 99 Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience, p. 181; Whelan, Religion, Landscape and Settlement, pp. 97–106. 100 Margaret  H.  Turnham, Catholic Faith and Practice in England, 1779–1992 (Woodbridge, 2015), p. 103. 101 Whelan, Religion, Landscape and Settlement, pp. 86–7, 93–4. 100–6; Connolly, Priests and People, pp. 157–8. 102 Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience, p. 157. 103  Joseph Gillow, The Haydock Papers (London, 1888), p. 75.

140  Peter Phillips colluded with the United Irishmen in letting funerals become a cover for rallies of protest against the government.104

Conclusion The second half of the eighteenth century marks a period of reform and consolidation in the Catholic communities of Britain and Ireland. Reform was uneven and gradual, older customs often surviving well into the following century. Catholic life was built around a tradition of prayer rooted in the writings of Challoner, and the increasingly public celebration of the sacraments. Catholics sometimes lived comfortably with their Protestant neighbours, coming together for worship in their newly built chapels both in the countryside and in town. In England, seigneurial Catholicism had for the most part given way to an urban Catholicism composed of growing congregations of the middle classes and poor labourers. In all four nations the foundation was laid to prepare the way for ultramontane devotional practices so disdained by Lingard. In the Irish case, Emmet Larkin identified these practices as a post-­Famine ‘devotional revolution’ though, as this chapter notes, the roots of this revolution go further back than Larkin allowed.105 By the end of our period, Joseph Curr, missioner in Manchester, was to make significant changes in his edition of The Garden of the Soul (1823), and other works of Challoner, rejecting public involvement of the congregational in prayer, and introducing a more authoritarian and polemical version of the faith.106 This changing devotional practice, together with the urbanization of Catholicism, allowed clergy to reach out to the huge numbers of Irish immigrants who had already started to settle in London, and to the industrial areas of south-­west Scotland, northern England, and southern Wales in the later eighteenth century. The Irish immigrants established communities. Baptism was deemed essential, but not Sunday observance: a ceilidh provided a better sense of Catholic identity for them than attending Sunday Mass.107 They often preferred the ministrations of itinerant Irish priests to those of the local English missioners. And yet, at the beginning of the industrial age, the Church, by the imposition of clerical dom­in­ ance over the laity, had in its own way made a clear option for the poor. Rowland Broomhead, in failing health, complained in 1817 to Bishop Gibson of the strain 104 Keogh, ‘The Catholic Church in Ireland’, p. 159; Whelan, Religion, Landscape and Settlement, p. 94. 105  Larkin, ‘The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850–75’, pp. 625–52; McGrath, ‘The Tridentine Evolution of Modern Irish Catholicism’, pp. 84–99; O’Driscoll, ‘Reform, Instruction and Practice’, pp. 5–11. 106  Connolly, ‘Catholicism in Manchester and Salford, 1770–1850’, II, pp. 66–85. 107 Gerard Connolly, ‘The Transubstantiation of Myth: Towards a New Popular History of Nineteenth-Century Catholicism in England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 25 (1984), p. 89.

Catholic Belief and Practice  141 of spending up to ten hours in the confessional in his attempt to win back for the Church the crowds of Irish immigrants seeking work in the town.108 The clergy went out into the industrial slums administering spiritual and material comfort to the Catholic masses amidst the dire poverty and disease of the inner-­city cellars, courts, and tenements in which they clustered.

Select Bibliography Begadon, Cormac, ‘Laity and Clergy in the Catholic Renewal of Dublin, c.1750–1830’ (PhD Thesis, NUI Maynooth, 2009). Bossy, John, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975). Burton, Edwin  H., The Life and Times of Bishop Challoner (1691–1781), 2 vols. (London, 1909). Connelly, S. J., Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1780–1845 (Dublin, 1982). Gordon, J.  F.  S. (ed.), The Catholic Church in Scotland from the Suppression of the Hierarchy till the Present Time: Being Memorabilia of the Bishops, Missioners, and Scotch Jesuits (Glasgow, 1869). Johnson, Christine, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, 1789–1829 (Edinburgh, 1983). Larkin, Emmet, The Pastoral Role of the Roman Catholic Church in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1750–1850 (Dublin, 2006). O’Driscoll, Katherine, ‘Reform, Instruction and Practice: The Impact of the Catholic Revival on the Laity in the Dublin Diocese’ (PhD Thesis, NUI Galway, 2016). Saward, John, Morrill, John, and Tomko, Michael (eds.), Firmly I Believe and Truly: The Spiritual Tradition of Catholic England, 1483–1999 (Oxford, 2011). Yates, Nigel, The Religious Condition in Ireland, 1770–1850 (Oxford, 2006).

108  Connolly, ‘Catholicism in Manchester and Salford, 1770–1850’, I, pp. 186–92, 439.

8 Anti-­Catholicism and Protestant Relations with Catholics Colin Haydon

This chapter examines anti-­ Catholicism and Protestant-­ Catholic relations in Britain and Ireland from 1746 to 1829. The discussion is broadly chronological but largely thematic. The chronological investigation appears straightforward, and is often recounted in political histories: the steps towards eventual Catholic emancipation marked by periodic reforming legislation. Those advances, ­be­token­ing the political and social elite’s growing tolerance, sometimes encountered obstructions—­notably the riots in Scotland and England of 1778–80 and the Irish Rising of 1798—but only temporarily. By contrast, the reconstruction of Protestant-­Catholic, face-­to-­face relations poses complex evidential problems. These resemble the difficulties which disconcerted Macaulay when writing his famous description of England in 1685: as he conceded, so large an account was ‘necessarily . . . very imperfect’, being ‘composed from scanty and dispersed materials’.1 Or those of Keith Thomas, who bemoaned the inadequacy of ‘the historian’s traditional method of presentation by example and counter-­example’ when mapping the thinking of past generations.2 Such evidential difficulties are spotlighted by four events which occurred in midland and northern England in 1745–6. The occurrences are selected because of the thought-­provoking detail offered by the surviving sources. The caveats they raise should be recalled when reading the generalized account of British and Irish anti-­Catholicism which follows.

A Three-­Pipe Problem In 1745–6, alarms abounded that English ‘Papists’ were about to rise in support of the Jacobites and there were also instances of anti-­Catholic violence. At Brailes, a Warwickshire village, it was reported that the Protestants were in ‘the greatest 1  Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, ed. Charles Harding Firth, 6 vols. (London, 1913–15), I, p. 270. 2  Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971), p. x. Colin Haydon, Anti-­Catholicism and Protestant Relations with Catholicsn In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829. Edited by: Liam Chambers, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843443.003.0009

Anti-Catholicism and Protestant Relations  143 Consternation by the Threats and Menaces of the Papists’.3 When the Catholics of Egton, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, ‘made great rejoicings’ following the Jacobite victory at Prestonpans, the ‘Ship carpenters of Whitby . . . [threatened] to hack and hew the said papists in pieces’.4 When Cumberland’s army marched north, the ‘populace . . . broke ye windows of one of ye Popish Chappells’ at Durham, and ‘plundered the house adjoining which belonged to ye Priest’.5 And, after the Rebellion, a government soldier threatened, at gunpoint, and robbed a Catholic family at Stretford, near Manchester.6 Each of these four cases raises the same fundamental questions. Was the anti-­Catholicism manifested in 1745–6 just the product of a short-­lived national emergency, an aberration from a usually peaceful coexistence between local Protestants and ‘Papists’? Or was it the visible release of a perennial, bubbling, but normally invisible hatred, an intolerance that blighted Protestant-­Catholic social relations? Two cases suggest one answer, two the other. The goading of Protestants by Catholics at Egton, and the threatened reprisal, appear quite untypical of normal confessional relations there. W. J. Sheils studied the village over a long period—­from 1590 to 1780—and concluded that accommodation, not conflict, was sought by ‘Papists’ and Protestants alike.7 It is noticeable, too, that violence against the Catholics was threatened by a mob at Whitby (some 5 miles distant), not by Protestant neighbours. At Durham, the attack on the chapel likewise seems an aberration: in the 1720s, Daniel Defoe noted, the city was ‘full of Roman Catholicks, who live peaceably and disturb no Body, and no Body them . . . going as publickly to Mass as the Dissenters . . . to their Meeting-­ house’.8 Comparably, in 1746, two representatives of the north-­east’s Catholics contacted Edward Chandler, the Church of England bishop of Durham, apparently hoping that he could dampen the disturbances.9 However, by contrast, the robbery at Stretford seems to spotlight deep confessional antagonisms locally. One son of the family, John Morris, later maintained that the soldier’s thuggery was initiated by a ‘man in the neighbourhood, who was a bitter enemy to my parents, because they were Papists’.10 He claimed too that he and his brother, when children, were attacked—­indeed, nearly drowned—­by a man who was ‘an 3 Walter Wyatt to duke of Newcastle, 2 November 1745, The National Archives, State Papers Domestic, 36/73/1/22. 4 Rupert  C.  Jarvis, Collected Papers on the Jacobite Risings, 2 vols. (Manchester, 1971–2), II, pp. 313–14. 5 Edward Hughes, North Country Life in the Eighteenth Century: The North-­East, 1700–1750 (London, 1952), pp. 24–5. 6 ‘The Life of Mr. John Morris, of Manchester. Written by Himself ’, Arminian Magazine, 18 (1795), p. 19. 7  W. J. Sheils, ‘Catholics and their Neighbours in a Rural Community: Egton Chapelry, 1590–1780’, Northern History, 34 (1998), pp. 109–33. 8 [Daniel Defoe], A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, 3 vols. (London, 1724–7), III, p. 189. 9 Hughes, North Country Life, p. 25. 10  ‘The Life of Mr. John Morris’, p. 19.

144  Colin Haydon inveterate enemy to my father, on account of his religion’.11 And the ‘Consternation’ of the Protestants of Brailes was a recrudescence of local religious strife that is documented for the periods of the Civil Wars, James II’s reign, and the Revolution of 1688, and, above all, the 1730s.12 Following the Revolution, the parish’s churchwardens had informed Bishop Edward Stillingfleet that ‘unless the Lawes be executed against popish Recusants we can expect no peace amongst us’, a statement which was not exaggerated rhetoric.13 So, in quieter times, was conciliation more common than confrontation? Conflict generated sources—­perhaps most valuably legal documents—­but were vocal, litigious, or violent adversaries representative of a whole community? Does an absence of such documentation betoken good interconfessional relations or the biting of tongues?14

The Continuing Propagation of Anti-­Popery The propagation of anti-­Catholicism and anti-­Catholic stereotypes continued in the years after 1746. Anti-­popery was embedded formally in the calendar. Both  the Church of England and Church of Ireland Prayer Books contained 5  November services commemorating the Gunpowder Plot and William III’s landing at Torbay. ‘I believe an English Peasant knows very little more of the Transactions of his ancestors that [sic] he is informed by Tradition on the return of the . . . 5th of November [and other anniversaries]’, supposed Thomas Amyot, a young lawyer, in 1794.15 In Ireland, the Rising of 1641 was marked by a Church of Ireland service on 23 October, an anniversary also commemorated by Dissenters.16 Sermons on these and other occasions outlined the principal charges against Catholicism: that it assailed both ‘sober, rational Reformed Religion’ and ‘the best-­ balanced Constitution under heaven’.17 So flawed was ‘Popery’, Protestant ­preachers inveighed, that it imperilled, not promoted, the salvation of adherents. Many of its tenets, notably transubstantiation, alleged Mariolatry, purgatory, and papal supremacy, were untrue. Catholicism kept the Scriptures from the laity, and its superstitions—­the veneration of relics, false miracles, implausible lives of 11  ‘The Life of Mr. John Morris’, pp. 19–20. 12  Mercurius Civicus Londons Intelligencer, 8–16 June 1643; Colin Haydon, ‘ “The Mouth of Hell”: Religious Discord at Brailes, Warwickshire, c.1660–c.1800’, The Historian, 68 (2000), pp. 23–7. 13  Churchwardens of Brailes to Bishop Edward Stillingfleet, [1689?], Worcestershire Record Office, BA 2,289/3 (xi), Ref 807. 14  Nadine Lewycky and Adam Morton (eds.), Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England (Farnham, 2012); Carys Brown, ‘Everyday Anti-­Catholicism in Early Eighteenth-­Century England’, in Claire Gheeraert-­Graffeuille and Geraldine Vaughan (eds.), Anti-­Catholicism in Britain and Ireland, 1600–2000 (Basingstoke, 2020), pp. 55–72. 15 Penelope  J.  Corfield and Chris Evans (eds.), Youth and Revolution in the 1790s (Stroud, 1996), p. 88. 16  Toby Barnard, Irish Protestant Ascents and Descents, 1641–1770 (Dublin, 2004), pp. 111–42. 17  George Lavington, A Sermon Preached before the House of Lords (London, 1747), pp. 22, 24.

Anti-Catholicism and Protestant Relations  145 saints—­gulled the ignorant. It overrode conscience, and mechanical confession and penance constituted an encouragement, not a barrier, to sin. It sought to impose belief by savage force as Spanish brutality in the New World, the Marian burnings, the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the Gunpowder Plot, the Irish Rising of 1641, and countless other examples proved. Respecting politics, Protestants conventionally held that ‘Papists’ favoured tyranny and would not keep faith with heretics, while Catholic priests could dispense individuals from their obligations of oaths. ‘Papists’ had, preachers stressed, dangerous allegiances, not only to the pope but also, until at least James III’s death in 1766, the Jacobite claimant: Hugh Macdonald, vicar apostolic of the Highland District, had blessed the Jacobite standard at Glenfinnan.18 In wartime, the Catholic population seemed a potential fifth column for the French and Spanish. Irish Catholics were a particular concern: ‘Ireland is the Side, on which England is, and will be most liable to be wounded’, declared Bishop Hayter of Norwich in 1753.19 Edmund Burke deplored ‘the poison, which under the Name of antidotes against Popery’, had for so long ‘been circulated from . . . [the] Pulpits.’20 Protestant rituals were performed on appropriate anniversaries, and other occasions too. On 5 November, ‘pope-­burnings’ in English towns might be elab­or­ate, with the ringing of church bells, processions, the firing of cannons and guns, window illuminations, fireworks, feasting, and toasts, besides the bonfires themselves. Effigies of the pope might be splendid, but at village displays just a few sticks with a paper tiara sufficed. Irish Protestants held formal commemorations on 23 October as well as on 4 November, William III’s birthday. Local events took place in provincial towns, notably those marking Cork’s liberation in 1690 and the siege of Derry in 1688–9. More plebeian Irish celebrations occurred on the anniversaries of the Battles of the Boyne and Aughrim.21 A living Protestant hero was celebrated in Edinburgh in February 1781: when Lord George Gordon, personally blamed for the previous year’s riots in London, was acquitted of treason, the ‘intelligence was received with joy by all ranks of people; and a general illumination took place at night’.22 Some Protestant memorials were lasting: famously, in London, the Monument, with its inscriptions proclaiming the Great Fire a ‘popish’ plot; William III’s statue at College Green, Dublin, provides another example. Yet the most common conduit of prejudice was language itself. Derogatory terms were ubiquitous. ‘Popery’ centred on the pope, not Christ: Popery not Christianity was the title of one especially pungent sermon.23 ‘Papists’ 18  Thompson Cooper, rev. Mark Dilworth, ‘Macdonald, Hugh (1699–1773)’, ODNB. 19  Thomas Hayter, A Sermon Preach’d . . . on Wednesday, May 2d, 1753 (London, 1754), p. 29. 20  The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford and others, 9 vols. (Oxford, 1981–2000), III, p. 614. 21  Ian McBride, ‘Memory and National Identity in Modern Ireland’, in Ian McBride (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 17–18. 22  London Chronicle, 13–15 February 1781. 23  William Prior, Popery not Christianity (London, 1750).

146  Colin Haydon were the pope’s adherents. Roman Catholicism, ‘Romish’, and ‘outlandish’ (often coupled with ‘Papist’) emphasized the ‘foreign’ character of the faith, whose priests and gentlemen has strong educational links to the Continent. ‘My good neighbours’, wrote a Berkshire village’s parson in 1767, ‘seem now to be a little ashamed of ye name of Papists, by which . . . they don’t love to be called, & wod. disown it, & say they are not Papists, but good Catholicks.’24 Burke also decried the ‘poison’ circulated by the presses.25 Certainly the thriving press facilitated the perpetuation of anti-­popery. New versions of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, including in Welsh, continued to appear.26 Paul Wright’s New and Complete Book of Martyrs (London, 1784) was huge, but publishers also produced smaller compilations. Similarly, John White reduced his 1753 Protestant Englishman Guarded to the New Preservative against Popery (for ‘the lower People’).27 Respecting Ireland, Sir John Temple’s The Irish Rebellion (London, 1646), detailing the horrors of the 1641 Rising, was republished in London in 1746, in Dublin in 1751, and at Cork in 1766; it fostered the hostility of John Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism, to the Catholic Irish.28 Anti-­Catholic publications stressed the unchanging character of ‘Popery’. ‘Popery is always the same, and so will continue, until it shall cease out of the earth’, proclaimed a 1776 Book of Martyrs.29 Anti-­Catholic books, tracts, sermons, catechisms, histories, and prints poured from the British and Irish presses throughout the period. ‘Popery’ was attacked in theological treatises and works displaying Enlightenment thinking, as well as in periodical and newspaper articles. Mundane almanacs contained chronologies listing the Gunpowder Treason, the Irish massacre, the Great Fire, the Revolution of 1688. Alarms or events swelled publications: the widespread fear of a ‘growth of Popery’ in England of the mid-­1760s; the 1778 pro­ posals for Catholic relief in England and Scotland and the English Relief Act; agrarian unrest in Ireland from the 1760s. The all-­but-­free press also permitted the publication of works supporting greater toleration. Yet, as this chapter shows, although the extension of toleration was ably promoted between 1746 and 1829, it was also simultaneously challenged, notably by the growth of Evangelicalism. Henry Venn and John Wesley published compact attacks on ‘Roman’ theology, while Hannah More issued a tiny Book of Martyrs as one of her Cheap Repository Tracts.30 In Scotland, the Evangelical John Erskine published his wide-­ranging 24  Return of William Deane, 21 November 1767, Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, DI/9/1/3. 25  Writings and Speeches of Burke, III, p. 614. 26  Paul O’Leary, ‘When Was Anti-­Catholicism? The Case of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-­Century Wales’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 56 (2005), p. 310. 27  John White, A New Preservative against Popery (London, 1758), p. iv. 28  The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M., ed. Nehemiah Curnock, 8 vols. (London, 1938), III, p. 314; IV, pp. 260, 268; V, p. 420. 29  The Book of Martyrs, ed. M. Madan (London, 1776), p. i. 30  H[enry] Venn, Popery a Perfect Contrast to the Religion of Christ (London, 1778); John Wesley, Popery Calmly Considered (London, 1779); Book of Martyrs ([Bath?], [1795]).

Anti-Catholicism and Protestant Relations  147 Considerations on the Spirit of Popery (Edinburgh, 1778). One well-­informed Catholic priest was sure that, in England, ‘the Field Preachers . . . put [cheap ‘No Popery!’ pamphlets] into the hands of the people’.31

Changes, and Otherwise In later eighteenth-century Ireland, many Protestants continued to fear the ­discontented and restive Catholic majority. Nonetheless, changes were occurring in Britain. From 1746, the Jacobite threat receded and, as a result, Protestant perceptions of Catholics as disloyal subversives diminished, even if deflated hostility swelled again during wars with ‘popish’ powers. As Britain’s international status rose, that of her Catholic enemies slipped. The papacy appeared contemptibly weak. Excepting Ireland, the State seemed integrated and well ordered, capable of containing domestic challenges. Political unrest evident from c.1790 to 1830 was initially encouraged by a different religious persuasion, the non-­ Trinitarian Dissenters. Not all of these motors, however, dissipated popular ‘No Popery!’ prejudice. So where were more tolerant attitudes most evident? And where were their limits? In a hierarchical society, the lead came from the Court. Two leading Catholics, the ninth Lord Petre and Thomas Weld, became personal friends of George III, who visited their family seats.32 More famously, the prince of Wales illegally married the Catholic Maria Fitzherbert in 1785. Catholicism was, he claimed, a ‘religion for a gentleman’.33 Judicially, Lord Mansfield and Lord Camden emasculated the provisions of the English penal statutes in particular cases (thereby establishing precedents).34 In the English shires, Catholic landowners worked with nearby Protestant gentlemen in order to improve local roads and river navigation, and mixed more frequently with the Protestant gentry than hitherto at county gatherings. In Wales, where Catholicism was weak, Protestant gentlemen discarded anti-­popery.35 Nevertheless, most English Catholic landowners remained somewhat distanced from the Protestant quality. Those who lived in the Thames valley tended to socialize chiefly with their co-­religionists at home and in Bath. This distancing partly resulted from their finances: deriving their income overwhelmingly from heavily taxed estates, they could not always compete with 31  James Barnard, The Life of the Venerable and Right Reverend Richard Challoner, D.D. (London, 1784), pp. 162–3. 32  Dominic Aidan Bellenger rev., ‘Petre, Robert Edward, ninth Baron Petre (1742–1801)’, ODNB; F. J. Turner, ‘Weld, Thomas (1750–1810)’, ODNB. 33 Colin Haydon, Anti-­ Catholicism in Eighteenth-­ Century England, c.1714–80 (Manchester, 1994), p. 167. 34  James Oldham, ‘Murray, William, first earl of Mansfield (1705–1793)’, ODNB; Haydon, Anti-­ Catholicism, p. 174. 35  Philip Jenkins, The Making of a Ruling Class (Cambridge, 1983), p. 178.

148  Colin Haydon Protestants in flaunting wealth.36 Moreover, prejudice could persist in polite society. Sir Thomas Gascoigne of Parlington, Yorkshire, converted from Catholicism to the Established Church in 1780, but he was still liable to anti-­Catholic abuse.37 Was he, at worst, a dangerous ‘crypto-­Papist’? The Westminster politician Robert Craggs Nugent, from an Irish Catholic gentry family, conformed to Anglicanism, but, in retirement, he reverted to Catholicism.38 In Ireland itself, intensely complex relations between locally significant Catholics and wealthy Protestants resulted from the massive displacement of Catholic landowners and professionals in the early modern period. There was confessional distancing in ‘polite’ Dublin.39 Some Catholic middlemen in rural Tipperary lived cheerfully with Protestant neighbours.40 But there were, most strikingly in Ulster and County Wexford, resentful Catholic families, too, gallingly leasing land confiscated from their forebears. There was easy social intercourse among scholars of different confessional affiliations. The Catholic Charles Howard, who became the tenth duke of Norfolk in 1777, was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and of the Society of Antiquaries in 1768; his first Royal Society proposer was Charles Lyttelton, the scholarly Church of England bishop of Carlisle.41 Sir John Webb, prominent Wiltshire Catholic landowner, was elected a Royal Society fellow in 1764, and Lord Petre was elected FRS and FSA in 1780.42 The great collector of antiquities Charles Townley, of a Lancashire Catholic and Jacobite family, was elected FSA in 1786 and FRS in 1791, and joined the Antiquaries’ council in 1798.43 Two Catholic scientists, the naturalist Marmaduke Tunstall and Sir Henry Charles Englefield, were fellows of both societies, and Englefield also secured election to the Linnean Society, the Geological Society, and the Astronomical Society.44 Englefield was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, established in 1783, too, while John Geddes, coadjutor vicar apostolic of the Lowland District, was a member of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, founded in 1780.45 The Benedictine and future 36  Sally Anne Jordan, ‘Catholic Identity, Ideology, and Culture: The Thames Valley Catholic Gentry, from the Restoration to the Relief Acts’ (PhD Thesis, University of Reading, 2002), pp. 139–49. 37  Alexander Lock, Catholicism, Identity, and Politics in the Age of Enlightenment (Woodbridge, 2016), pp. 109–11, 125, 226. 38  Patrick Woodland, ‘Nugent, Robert Craggs, Earl Nugent (1709–1788)’, ODNB. 39  T. C. Barnard, ‘ “Grand Metropolis” or “The Anus of the World”? The Cultural Life of Eighteenth-­ Century Dublin’, in Peter Clark and Raymond Gillespie (eds.), Two Capitals: London and Dublin, 1500–1840 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 187–9. 40  Ian McBride, Eighteenth-­Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (Dublin, 2009), p. 122. 41  Gordon Goodwin, rev. Matthew Kilburn, ‘Howard, Charles, tenth duke of Norfolk (1720–1786)’, ODNB; Bernard Nurse, ‘Lyttelton, Charles (1714–1768)’, ODNB; ‘Howard, Charles (1720–1786)’, https://royalsociety.org/fellows/fellows-­directory/ (accessed 7 December 2021). 42  ‘Webb, John (–1797)’, https://royalsociety.org/fellows/fellows-­directory/ (accessed 7 December 2021); Bellenger, ‘Petre, Robert Edward, ninth Baron Petre (1742–1801)’, ODNB. 43  B. F. Cook, ‘Townley, Charles (1737–1805)’, ODNB. 44 B.  B.  Woodward, rev. Yolanda Foote, ‘Tunstall, Marmaduke (1743–1790)’, ODNB; Bernard Nurse, ‘Englefield, Sir Henry Charles, seventh baronet (c.1752–1822)’, ODNB. 45  Matthew Kilburn, ‘Geddes, John (1735–1799)’, ODNB.

Anti-Catholicism and Protestant Relations  149 vicar apostolic of the Western District, Charles Walmesley, was admitted a fellow of the Royal Society in 1750 and was involved in discussions concerning the adoption of the Gregorian calendar later in the decade.46 When the Royal Irish Academy was founded in 1785, a denominational restriction was not imposed, though only two of the eighty-­ eight foundation members were Catholics.47 Individual connections are of interest. Joseph Berington, learned priest and Cisalpine spokesman, famously gained the friendship of the dazzling intellectual and Unitarian minister Joseph Priestley.48 Geddes was a friend of the historian and Church of Scotland minister William Robertson. Edward Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, mercilessly castigated and ridiculed ‘Popery’. Yet, shortly before his death, he spent a day with Charles Erskine, the pope’s nuncio in England.49 Gibbon’s polished manners precluded rudeness to individual Catholics and he was appalled by the coarse ‘No Popery!’ of the Gordon Riots, ‘a dark and diabolical fanaticism, which I had supposed to be extinct’.50 The cosmopolitan Mr Gibbon was ambivalent or flexible about Continental Catholicism. He was shocked by the Swiss abbey of Einsiedeln’s opulence and worship, but conceded that ‘the Catholic superstition . . . is often the parent of taste’.51 Protestant Britons undertaking the Grand Tour frequently decried ‘Popery’ in the Italian and German states, and in France. Relics were derided as insults to reason.52 There was condemnation of monks’ idleness and the ‘imprisonment’ of nuns in convents.53 Walter Stanhope, visiting Paris in 1769, contended that ‘ye common people [there] are ye most superstitious in ye world’.54 Protestant travellers deplored the juxtaposition of shocking poverty and street beggars with hugely ornate and wealthy churches or religious houses, especially since Catholicism’s many holy days were held to promote idleness and stifle economic advance (not least in Ireland). Sumptuous religious art might delight the eye, but it could lure the unwary or ignorant into superstition. Yet Continental travel could prove a solvent to prejudice too. James Edward Smith, botanist and first president of the Linnean Society, toured widely in Europe in 1786 and 1787, and observed, ‘Those who have travelled in Catholic countries might easily shew superstition and bigotry to be by no means universal among the thinking part of

46  Geoffrey Scott, ‘Walmseley, Charles (1722–1797)’, ODNB. 47  R.  B.  McDowell, ‘The Main Narrative’, in T.  Ó Raifeartaigh (ed.), The Royal Irish Academy: A Bicentennial History, 1785–1985 (Dublin, 1985), p. 12. The Catholics were the antiquarian Charles O’Conor and the physician John Purcell. 48  J. P. Chinnici, ‘Berington, Joseph (1743–1827)’, ODNB. 49 Patricia B. Craddock, Edward Gibbon, Luminous Historian, 1772–1794 (London, 1989), p. 338. 50  The Letters of Edward Gibbon, ed. J. E. Norton, 3 vols. (London, 1956), II, p. 245. 51  Gibbon’s Autobiography, ed. M. M. Reese (London, 1970), pp. 51, 78. 52  Jeremy Black, The British and the Grand Tour (London, 1985), p. 190. 53 Black, Grand Tour, pp. 191, 192. 54 Black, Grand Tour, p. 192.

150  Colin Haydon the community.’55 Even travels in Ireland might mollify: when recording tours there, Richard Pococke, Church of Ireland bishop, commented without animosity on prominent Catholics, Catholic chapels, pilgrimage sites, and holy wells.56 Berington thought that the Grand Tour was important in dispelling the prejudices of society’s ‘higher ranks’. ‘Many of them had travelled,’ he wrote, ‘and had seen religion in all its modes; they had dined with Cardinals, and perhaps conversed with the Pope.’57 Frederick Augustus Hervey, when Church of Ireland bishop of Derry, was received by Clement XIV (1769–74).58 So was Philip Francis, who noted that Clement conversed ‘freely and amicably with heretics’.59 Philip Yorke, later third earl of Hardwicke, thought Pius VI (1775–99) ‘civil and polite’.60 But the ‘Beast’ could remain in the eye of a beholder. At Rome, the Methodist John Fletcher was appalled at ‘the adoration of the Pope’.61 Even important Protestant clerics might become more accommodating to Catholics. Although the English bishops monitored Catholicism in their dioceses, they raised few objections to altering the penal statutes until Catholic emancipation itself was mooted. Archbishop Thomas Secker of Canterbury did not discountenance tolerating Catholicism in Canada, and only one bishop voted against the Quebec bill.62 The bishops did not oppose the English relief legislation of 1778. John Moore, a later archbishop of Canterbury, accepted, albeit gingerly, the Relief Act of 1791, legalizing Catholic worship in England and Wales.63 The bill for emancipation of 1829, against which the archbishop of Canterbury, William Howley, spoke, proved greatly divisive. Nonetheless, ten bishops voted even for that.64 Turning from prelates, the behaviour of other prominent clergymen is significant. John Wesley’s hostility to ‘Popery’ was immense, as shown in many publications, and especially in one concerning Catholic relief.65 Yet, when in Ireland, he lodged with a ‘Popish gentleman’ at Cappoquin, and found one priest he met ‘sensible’ and another not ‘wanting either in sense or learning’.66 In 1799, Rowland Hill, fervent Evangelical and ‘No Popery!’ zealot, vehemently preached Protestantism in the north of Ireland, spurred by the 1798 Rebellion.67 But, two years before, he had, remarkably, asked Bishop John Douglass, vicar apostolic of the London District, whether a conforming Catholic priest should ‘be received as 55  James Edward Smith, A Sketch of a Tour on the Continent, 3 vols. (London, 1793), I, p. xxvii. 56  Richard Pococke’s Irish Tours, ed. John McVeagh (Blackrock, 1995). 57  [Joseph Berington], The State and Behaviour of English Catholics (London, 1780), p. 98. 58  Gerard O’Brien, ‘Hervey, Frederick Augustus, fourth earl of Bristol (1730–1803)’, ODNB. 59 Black, Grand Tour, p. 196. 60 Black, Grand Tour, p. 197.    61 Venn, Popery, p. v. 62  Francis Blackburne, Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, 2 vols. (London, 1780), I, p. 317; Haydon, Anti-­Catholicism, p. 194. 63  Nigel Aston, ‘Moore, John (bap. 1730, d. 1805)’, ODNB. 64 G. I. T. Machin, The Catholic Question in English Politics, 1820 to 1830 (London, 1964), p. 177. 65 Wesley, Popery Calmly Considered. 66  The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, III, p. 402; VII, pp. 274, 492. 67  David Hempton and Myrtle Hill, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society, 1740–1890 (London, 1992), p. 39.

Anti-Catholicism and Protestant Relations  151 a Minister of the Established Church’.68 The attitudes of most English-bred clergy appointed to Church of Ireland bishoprics were unlikely to have been modified by visits to, or residence in, their dioceses.69 The violence of the Whiteboys and Rightboys, with particularly their hostility towards tithes, was alarming. Charles Agar, archbishop of Cashel and later archbishop of Dublin, frequently embodied opposition to Catholic relief.70 Ulster Presbyterians remained appalled at ‘popish’ theology, as did granite Presbyterians in Scotland. Revealingly, William Robertson resigned the leadership of the Church of Scotland’s moderate party following the abandonment in 1779 of Catholic relief, which he favoured. Scotland, he regretfully told the General Assembly, was not yet ready for the repeal of the penal laws.71

Localities, Individuals, and Violence How much tolerance, and tension, can be detected locally and individually? In some places, confessional strife lessened for specific reasons. At Brailes, its essential dynamic was a sizeable, and sometimes aggressive, Catholic minority, protected by important Catholic landowners, the Sheldons, living a few miles distant. But, after William Sheldon’s death in 1780, the family left the mansion and some members became Anglicans; and Catholic-­Protestant feuding diminished.72 In dispersed settlements in north-­east England, Catholics practised their religion unobtrusively, keen not to parade it before Protestant neighbours.73 Likewise, in the Highland parish of Ardnamurchan, where there had been friction between the Church of Scotland and local Catholics in the 1780s, Bishop Alexander MacDonald, the vicar apostolic, wanted to be ‘on good terms with . . . the presbytery’, not ‘tampering with Protestants’.74 Yet, individuals could still ignite intolerance in small places. At Ufton in Berkshire and Lytham in Lancashire, parsons understandably disliked local Catholics who had been ‘out’ during the ’45.75 In the 1760s, the Evangelical John Fletcher dutifully confronted the (somewhat

68 Eamon Duffy, ‘ “Over the Wall”: Converts from Popery in Eighteenth-­ Century England’, Downside Review, 94 (1976), p. 21. 69 Barnard, Irish Protestant Ascents, p. 133. 70  Kenneth Milne, ‘Agar, Charles, first earl of Normanton (1736–1809)’, ODNB. 71  Jeffrey R. Smitten, ‘Robertson, William (1721–1793)’, ODNB. 72  Haydon, ‘ “Mouth of Hell” ’, p. 27. 73 Leo Gooch, ‘ “Chiefly of Low Rank”: The Catholics of North-­East England, 1705–1814’, in Marie  B.  Rowlands (ed.), English Catholics of Parish and Town, 1558–1778, CRS Monograph 5 (London, 1999), pp. 245, 254–5. 74  Clotilde Prunier, Anti-­Catholic Strategies in Eighteenth-­Century Scotland (Frankfurt am Main, 2004), p. 117. 75  Return of Henry Land, 29 August 1767, Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, DI/9/1/3; John Addy, ‘Bishop Porteus’ Visitation of the Diocese of Chester, 1778’, Northern History, 13 (1977), p. 192.

152  Colin Haydon provocative) Catholics in his parish, Madeley in Shropshire.76 On Hebridean South Uist, a former Catholic landowner aggressively sought to curtail ‘Popery’ on his estate in the 1770s.77 In growing English towns, ‘Papists’ could be largely ignored, when they were heavily outnumbered by Protestants. ‘Catholics feel completely at ease’, observed a French visitor to Bury St Edmunds in 1784, ‘they practise their religion without concealment, and everyone knows without demurring.’78 At Worcester, Charles Henry Wharton, an American priest, enjoyed ‘connexions . . . with many valuable protestants, with whom . . . [he] lived in habits of in­tim­acy and friendship’.79 By contrast, in County Armagh’s plantation towns, the juxtaposed Protestant and Catholic populations, both preserving bitter sectarian memories, lived separately. Comparably, in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Protestants and Catholics lived apart, the former in better-­built homes. British and Irish Catholic gentlemen were debarred from public offices commensurate with their rank, while humble Catholics might experience denial of employment or discrimination or bullying at work. In 1753, a Protestant landowner at Egton decided that any convert to ‘Popery’ would lose his tenancy, and, in the 1820s, Evangelical landowners in Ulster sought mass conversions to Protestantism among their tenantry.80 Most horribly, in County Armagh in the 1780s and 1790s, Protestant ‘wreckers’ destroyed the linen webs and looms, and sometimes the homes, of Catholics.81 On Barra, the threat was made to ‘bring in Protestant tenants’, since Catholic holy days were economically disruptive, and, in 1820, one potential proselyte to Catholicism maintained that ‘were I to remove to Inverness and . . . [convert] so much is . . . the hatred against Catholics . . . I would get no employment’.82 The Catholic John Morris provided a detailed account. When in his teens, in the 1750s, he was apprenticed to an Anglican master who ‘would not have any servants who did not attend the established Church’, and, although Morris submitted to that, his parents ‘advised him to take no notice of what . . . [was] said [there] by . . . [Anglican] ministers’.83 His master also held prayers every morning and night, probably a further source of awkwardness.84 Were friendships strained, marred, or broken by differences of faith? At Egton, Catholics left bequests to Protestant friends in their wills and vice versa, which indicates friendships that lasted until death.85 Certainly, conversions risked 76  Malcolm Wanklyn, ‘Catholics in the Village Community: Madeley, Shropshire, 1630–1770’, in Rowlands (ed.), English Catholics, pp. 231–3. 77 Prunier, Anti-­Catholic Strategies, p. 85. 78  Francis Young, The Gages of Hengrave and Suffolk Catholicism, 1640–1767, CRS Monograph 8 (London, 2015), p. 159. 79  Charles Henry Wharton, A Letter to the Roman Catholics of the City of Worcester (London, 1784), p. 11. 80  Sheils, ‘Catholics and their Neighbours’, p. 125; Hempton and Hill, Evangelical Protestantism, pp. 86–9. 81  David W. Miller (ed.), Peep O’Day Boys and Defenders (Belfast, 1990), p. 114. 82 Prunier, Anti-­Catholic Strategies, pp. 88–9. 83  ‘The Life of Mr. John Morris’, pp. 20, 22. 84  ‘The Life of Mr. John Morris’, p. 20. 85  Sheils, ‘Catholics and their Neighbours’, p. 128.

Anti-Catholicism and Protestant Relations  153 alienation from friends and an entire social circle. That was especially true for Catholic priests who apostatized. ‘What right has a deserter to take along with him the affections of those on whom he turns his back?’, Berington brutally asked.86 James Smith, ordained at Lisbon, converted to the Established Church and secured a living; thereafter, he could not bear meeting Catholic clergy.87 Charles Billinge, a Jesuit, likewise converted, but the Church offered him only irregular, ill-­paid employment. Based in Wolverhampton, he sometimes encountered the boys of Sedgley Park school who, unsurprisingly, taunted him cruelly.88 And how far could religious differences disrupt families? In England, Catholic noble and gentry families were famously endogamous: for reasons of faith, trad­ ition, and law, since Protestant relations might seek to seize their estates.89 In Ireland, the renunciation of Catholicism preserved the fortunes of landowning or professional families. Yet if fathers (at least formally) conformed, their wives might privately continue as Catholics. Mixed marriages were not uncommon below the elite ranks in England, though it is difficult to assess the degree to which they were more than usually liable to friction. Parents might disapprove. In 1771, Penelope Fellows, from a Shropshire Catholic family, married Edward Bancroft, from New England Puritan stock; although she remained a Catholic, she was seemingly never reconciled with her parents.90 The religious upbringing of children in a mixed marriage might provoke parental disputes (the children were normally reared as Catholics). Unaccustomed to ‘popish’ mores, did Protestant fathers fear the erosion of their patriarchal authority by intruding priests? In England, Protestant conversion to Catholicism often occurred near a mixed couple’s wedding or child’s christening, suggesting that, in the partners’ eyes, religious differences were best eliminated within families.91 Conversions could split families. When Edward Gibbon famously ‘turned Papist’ at Oxford, his landowner father, ‘neither a bigot nor a philosopher’, immediately sought his reconversion.92 John Wesley recounted the case of a girl in Athlone who converted to Methodism following apparently supernatural intervention. For this, her parents, who were ‘zealous Papists’, ‘beat . . . [her] many times, and at last turned . . . [her] out of doors’.93 When John Morris, aged only 19, joined the Methodists, he recorded that ‘This step . . . brought upon me a torrent of persecution from all quarters, particularly from my relations.’94 That ‘persecution’ was not 86  Joseph Berington, Reflections Addressed to the Rev. John Hawkins (Birmingham, 1785), p. 6. 87  John Kirk, Biographies of English Catholics in the Eighteenth Century, ed. John Hungerford Pollen and Edwin Burton (London, 1909), p. 212. 88  Duffy, ‘ “Over the Wall” ’, p. 8. 89  Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991), p. 99. 90 Thomas J. Schaeper, Edward Bancroft (New Haven, 2011), pp. 30, 84, 184. 91  Eamon Duffy, ‘ “Poor Protestant Flies”: Conversions to Catholicism in Early Eighteenth-­Century England’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Religious Motivation, SCH 15 (Oxford, 1978), p. 301. 92  Gibbon’s Autobiography, pp. 40, 42. 93  The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, IV, p. 270. 94  ‘The Life of Mr. John Morris’, pp. 72–3.

154  Colin Haydon cruel or mindless, however: Morris’s mother believed that salvation was possible only within the Catholic Church.95 Likewise, when his son Samuel converted to Catholicism in 1784, Charles Wesley wrote, in a distressing poem, ‘That poison of the Romish sect, / O let it not his soul infect.’96 Various societies and bodies promoted anti-­ Catholicism assiduously. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge did so in England and Wales through its charity schools and publications; and its correspondents monitored ‘perversions’ to Rome. The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge countered ‘Popery’ in the Highlands using such means, and opposed the relief bill  proposed in 1778. In London in the 1770s, there were Sunday ‘debating-­ clubs . . . [for] religious arguments’, including ‘harangues in favour of the Protestant and the Roman Catholic religions’.97 Most effective was the Committee for the Protestant Interest, formed in Scotland to coordinate opposition to relief. Protestant fervour and Scottish pride were linked: did not the Claim of Right preclude the legislation? Anti-­Catholic associations multiplied, ‘Declarations and Resolutions against . . . [relief] were published from every corner of the kingdom’, and petitions were sent to parliament.98 In England, Gordon’s Protestant Association, which demanded the repeal of the 1778 Relief Act, operated from London. Supporters established branches in Canterbury, Carlisle, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Rochester; Gordon had followers or contacts in Norwich, Plymouth, and Portsmouth; and societies at Bath and Bristol supported his cause. Through meetings and publications, petitions were raised, with London’s bearing 44,000 signatures.99 It was natural that ‘Protestant’ bodies proliferated in Ireland. The Incorporated Society in Dublin for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland established schools in which children from acquiescing, impoverished Catholic families were educated (for menial work) as Protestants; and, with its sister society in London, it organized sermons by distinguished preachers decrying ‘Popery’.100 By the 1740s, on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, the middle-­class Protestant Society and the Boyne Club organized marches, with drums and trumpets, through the streets of Dublin.101 Of lasting significance was the foundation of the Orange Order in 1795. The first lodges in Ulster had their antecedents in earlier Protestant and oath-­ bound societies, the Volunteers,

95  ‘The Life of Mr. John Morris’, pp. 20, 72. 96  The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley, ed. G.  Osborn, 13 vols. (London, 1868–72), VIII, p. 424. 97  Fanaticism and Treason (London, 1780), p. 27. 98  Scotland’s Opposition to the Popish Bill (Edinburgh, 1780), p. viii; Robert Kent Donovan, No Popery and Radicalism: Opposition to Roman Catholic Relief in Scotland, 1778–1782 (New York, 1987). 99 Haydon, Anti-­Catholicism, pp. 207–9. 100  Kenneth Milne, The Irish Charter Schools, 1730–1830 (Dublin, 1997); Colin Haydon, ‘ “[A]lmost the only Histories We Can Boast”: The Charter-­School Sermons and their Perceptions and Uses of Irish History’, Eighteenth-­Century Ireland, 28 (2013), pp. 78–94. 101  McBride, ‘Memory and National Identity’, p. 18.

Anti-Catholicism and Protestant Relations  155 County Armagh’s vigilantism, and freemasonry. By 1798, Orangeism had spread to seventeen counties; Ulster was its stronghold; Dublin had five lodges (a ‘Grand Lodge’ was formed there).102 To defeat the 1798 Rising, Orangemen joined the militia and yeomanry. Thereafter, they remained unswervingly hostile to Catholic relief. Violence and rioting were the most conspicuous manifestations of anti-­ Catholicism, most notoriously the Gordon Riots. The scale of those riots horrified contemporaries. Subsequent representations, in images and in Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841), convey that horror. And the tumults continue to intrigue historians.103 In Scotland, the Protestant campaign against relief engendered rioting in Edinburgh and Glasgow in 1779, and attacks on Catholic property including an Edinburgh mass house. The proposed relief bill for Scotland was dropped, but the unsuccessful demand for the repeal of English Relief Act provoked the huge London riots of 1780, during which the Bavarian and Sardinian embassy chapels and various mass houses were wrecked, and Catholics’ homes and business premises attacked. There were further riots or demonstrations in Bath, Birmingham, Hull, and Newcastle upon Tyne.104 During the tumults, it is often unclear whether the ‘No Popery!’ crowds were confronting an impersonal, national menace, or drawing from wells of face-­to-­face sectarian antagonisms. Some of the London rioters allegedly declared ‘What are Catholics to us? We are only against Popery!’, which indicates the former.105 But the same source also claimed that rioters were ‘called upon to go to such a house, as there were Catholics there’, which suggests the importance of personal animosities.106 In Edinburgh, according to Bishop George Hay, individual Catholics were identified in the streets and threatened: ‘There is a Papist, a black Papist, knock him down, shoot him.’107 In 1779–80, the State faced a crisis: America might be lost, and Britain was at war with France and Spain; Catholics generally, and sometimes local Catholics, appeared an enemy within. A similar conjuncture had occurred at the unpropitious start of the Seven Years’ War. During a fracas at Hereford in December 1756, a ‘popish’ farmer was attacked, accused of preferring to ‘Sell [corn] to the french for 5. Shill. than to his own Country for 7. shs. 6 pen.’108 In Ireland, the links between confessional, ethnic, economic, political, and social antagonisms ensured that popular violence was potentially endemic. Rural and

102  James Wilson, ‘Orangeism in 1798’, in Thomas Bartlett, David Dickson, Dáire Keogh, and Kevin Whelan (eds.), 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective (Dublin, 2003), p. 359. 103  Ian Haywood and John Seed (eds.), The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Cambridge, 2012). 104 Haydon, Anti-­Catholicism, pp. 216–17. 105  William Hamilton Reid, The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies (London, 1800), p. 24. 106 Reid, The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies, p. 24; cf. George Rudé, Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1970), p. 288. 107  [George Hay], A Memorial to the Public (London, 1779), p. 16. 108  D. W. Linden to J. Williams, 10 December 1756, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, 478 E, fol. 16v.

156  Colin Haydon small-­town Protestant families were highly vulnerable to attack, as the Whiteboy disturbances emphasized. In County Armagh, with its volatile mixture of Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Catholics, violent plebeian Protestant vigilantism grew in the late eighteenth century, soon countered by the Catholic Defenders. In the 1780s, the Protestant Peep O’Day Boys confiscated arms from Catholics, while in 1795–6, Orangemen brutally drove numerous Catholics from their homes.

From the French Revolution to Catholic emancipation The French Revolution effected further changes in attitudes to Catholics. When the Revolutionaries began to overhaul and then persecuted the French Church and, in 1793–4, sought to uproot it, pro-­Catholic sympathies grew. The English and Welsh Relief Act of 1791 and another, in 1793, permitting Catholic worship in Scotland, provoked no disturbances like the riots of 1779 and 1780.109 While Britain and France were at war, the Revolutionaries were denounced as enemies of Christianity. For example, at the Church of England and Church of Ireland fast day services in 1793, the Revolutionaries were described as having ‘cast off their faith in Thee, the Living God’, and, the next year, it was noted that ‘in the very Center [sic] of Christendom, [they] threaten[ed] destruction to Christianity’.110 In 1796, they were the foes of all Christendom, ‘ourselves and other Christian Nations’, Protestants and Catholics alike.111 The press praised Henri Essex Edgeworth, ‘an English [sic] Priest of the Catholic persuasion’, who, ‘with such dignified benevolence’, attended Louis XVI on the scaffold.112 Many émigrés who fled France for Britain, including priests, monks, and nuns, were treated with kindness. Accommodation was found for them, and funds raised. In 1793, the Gentleman’s Magazine noted that a plaque had been erected at Winchester, where some French priests were housed, to express the exiled clergy’s ‘gratitude to the British nation’.113 The University of Oxford, partly the Established Church’s great seminary, even printed an edition of the Vulgate in 1796, ‘IN USUM CLERI GALLICANI IN ANGLIA EXULANTIS’.114 Nonetheless, the Revolution revived some forms of anti-­popery too. For British and Irish Protestants, dechristianization in France, the pope’s capture, and the 109 Peter  W.  Walker, ‘Tolerating Protestants: Anti-­ Popery, Anti-­ Puritanism, and Religious Toleration in Britain, 1776–1829’, in Evan Haefeli (ed.), Against Popery: Britain, Empire and Anti-­ Catholicism (Charlottesville, 2020), p. 272. 110  A Form of Prayer, To be Used . . . upon . . . the Nineteenth of April [1793] (London, 1793), p. 13; A Form of Prayer, To be Used . . . upon . . . the Twenty-­eighth of February [1794] (London, 1794), pp. 6, 17. 111  A Form of Prayer, To be Used . . . upon . . . the Ninth of March [1796] (London, 1796), pp. 5, 14. 112  Lloyd’s Evening-­Post, 25–8 January 1793; Public Advertiser, 5 February 1793. Edgeworth was an Irishman. 113  Gentleman’s Magazine, 63, part 1 (1793), p. 391. 114  Novum Testamentum Vulgatæ Editionis (Oxford, 1796), title page.

Anti-Catholicism and Protestant Relations  157 proclamation of the Roman Republic suggested that Babylon was tottering.115 ‘I have no hesitation in expressing my satisfaction, that the kingdom of Antichrist has, in the revolution of France, received a fatal blow’, a correspondent told the Wesleyan Arminian Magazine in May 1794.116 Spencer Perceval, Evangelical and future prime minister, identified Bonaparte as the Woman of Revelation and concluded, in a pamphlet of 1800, that the Revolution was God’s instrument for destroying ‘popish superstitions’.117 Events in Ireland further stoked anti-­popery. The 1798 Rebellion, in some Protestants’ eyes, was a recrudescence of the terrible bloodshed of 1641, with the trans-­confessional hopes of the United Irishmen confounded by popular violence. In County Wexford, the epicentre of the Rising, Protestants were massacred at Scullabogue and Wexford Bridge. The horrors of the Rebellion’s suppression were unlikely to allay the fears of the potentially very vulnerable Protestant minority: ‘there is not one Papist in one hundred who has not confederated . . . to extirpate the whole race of Heretics from the Island’, Bishop Euseby Cleaver of Ferns opined.118 The Rising quickly spurred Evangelical proselytizing in Ireland and it left an appalling memory. In 1823, the Methodist Adam Clarke visited Ireland and maintained that ‘if strong measures are not resorted to by government . . . a general massacre of the Protestants is at the door’.119 The Orange press in Dublin discussed the Catholic Association’s supposed planning for it.120 As with Temple after 1641, 1798 had its commemorator: Sir Richard Musgrave, whose two-­volume Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland (Dublin, 1801) greatly influenced unswervingly conservative Britons in the nineteenth cen­tury.121 Musgrave’s Memoirs, along with his A Concise Account of the Material Events and Atrocities which Occurred in the Late Rebellion (Dublin, 1799), argued that Catholic insurgents, directed by fanatical priests, had hoped to exterminate Protestants in Ireland. For Musgave, 1798 had its forerunners: the massacres of the Cathars and the Huguenots, as well as 1641.122 The Memoirs wholly discounted the perception that Crown coercion and brutal troops had provoked, then ignited, the Rising. The political message was clear: further pro-­Catholic concessions, including emancipation, were unthinkable.

115 David Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 98–100. 116  ‘A Letter from a Gentleman, on the Revolution in France’, Arminian Magazine, 17 (1794), p. 276. 117  P. J. Jupp, ‘Perceval, Spencer (1762–1812)’, ODNB. 118  Bishop Euseby Cleaver to Thomas Grenville, 8 June 1798, British Library, Add MS 41,855, fol. 156r–v. 119  W. R. Ward, Religion and Society in England, 1790–1850 (London, 1972), p. 119. 120 James J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c.1760–1832 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 242. 121 Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative, p. 96. 122  James Kelly, ‘ “We were all to have been massacred”: Irish Protestants and the Experience of Rebellion’, in Bartlett, Dickson, Keogh, and Whelan (eds.), 1798, p. 326.

158  Colin Haydon After the Union, the possibility of Catholic emancipation continued to exacerbate ‘No Popery!’ animus. Supporters of the Protestant constitution opposed further relief, even after Daniel O’Connell’s victory in the County Clare election of July 1828. To this end, ‘Brunswick Clubs’ were formed in Britain and Ireland; by November, there were thirty-­six British clubs, dominated by the landed gentry.123 Older bodies, Orange lodges and Pitt clubs, excited ‘No Popery!’ sentiment. County meetings were held to demonstrate opposition to emancipation in Cheshire, Cornwall, Devonshire, Kent, the Marches, and Wales. Petitions against emancipation, often promoted by Anglican clergy, were raised: over 2,000 by the end of March 1829.124 Hostility was considerable in Scotland, as public meetings and petitioning showed, and marked in Wales (Anglesey alone produced more than twenty petitions).125 Nonetheless, in April, parliament voted for emancipation and George IV reluctantly assented.

Plumbing the Depths Anti-­Catholic resentment and violence during and after the ’45 or during wars against Catholic powers were not inherently irrational. By contrast, some popular anti-­Catholic beliefs (which are largely ignored by scholars) were amorphous and, for unsympathetic rationalists, disconcerting. Lofty eighteenth-­century scholars rarely recorded instances but antiquaries, folklorists, and others sometimes noted them in the nineteenth century. So what should be made of a Carmarthen schoolchild’s initial answer, during an education inspection in 1846, to the question ‘Who betrayed him [Christ]?’: ‘Bloody Mary’?126 Or a mid-­Victorian example of the Sussex dialect: ‘if so be as de Romans gets de upper harnd an us, we shall be burnded, and bloodshedded, and have our Bibles took away from us’?127 Or a late-­Victorian Suffolk gardener’s account of Mary I: ‘She was a horrid wicked woman . . . They say that when she live at Framlingham . . . Castle she was confined of—­some say a serpent, some say a devil’?128 The Sussex and Suffolk examples seemingly drew on local folklore or popular memory: Lewes’s Marian burnings were commemorated at its famous 5 November celebrations, while Mary I was proclaimed at Framlingham. In a similar vein, the author Flora Thompson recorded the confused thinking of late-­nineteenth-­century English hamleteers: Catholics as ‘folks as prays to images’; who ‘worshipped the Pope, a bad old man, 123 Machin, Catholic Question, pp. 131–3, 135–7. 124 Machin, Catholic Question, p. 148. 125  Martin J. Mitchell, ‘Anti-­Catholicism and the Scottish Middle Class, 1800–1914’, in Gheeraert-­ Graffeuille and Vaughan (eds.), Anti-­Catholicism, p. 222; O’Leary, ‘When Was Anti-­Catholicism?’, pp. 311–12. 126  Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales, 3 parts (London, 1847), I, p. 293. 127 W. D. Parish, A Dictionary of the Sussex Dialect (Lewes, 1875), p. 62. 128  Camilla Gurdon, ‘Folk-­lore from South-­East Suffolk’, Folk-­Lore, 3 (1892), p. 558.

Anti-Catholicism and Protestant Relations  159 some said in league with the Devil’; whose religious practices were ‘monkey tricks’.129 Sometimes, beneath the popular confusion, the initial teaching is visible. The ‘bad old man’ is a garbled recollection of Bunyan’s ‘old Man’ pope; but was a preacher’s contempt for ‘monkish tricks’ simply incomprehensible to an ill-­educated congregation?130 These gleanings are muddled, distorted; but how far was such stuff a foundation for Protestant prejudice over centuries? And how far did some folklore run counter to such hostility? The belief that  Catholic magic was especially efficacious can be glimpsed repeatedly. In Staffordshire, it was noted in the nineteenth century that ‘many Protestant miners resort to the Catholic Church to obtain palms’, which they ‘use . . . in the mines as a charm against the devil’.131 In Ireland, the ceaseless Protestant attacks on ‘popish superstitions’ and the ‘magic’ of Catholic priests testify to the popular appeal of those beliefs. In the 1720s, Protestants visited the Catholic pilgrimage centre of St Winifred’s well, Flintshire, in order to obtain miraculous cures.132 Sometimes, in oral tradition, a return to Catholicism was nostalgically equated with a return to a happier, more integrated English society, that ‘the Roman Catholics shall have this country again, and make England a nice place once more’.133 Various eighteenth-­century chapbooks depicted friars as learned or comic dupes, and retold ‘popish’ legends.134 In Norfolk, butter would come if a quasi-‘Romish’ incantation were employed.135 That there were cross-­currents which tempered the severity of popular anti-­Catholicism is not altogether surprising. When their austere clergy rejected folk beliefs and customs, Protestants may have warmed to Catholics and their priests.136 There is some evidence that this occurred. In Georgian Northumberland, the ‘Vulgar . . . [claimed] none . . . [could] lay a Spirit but a Popish Priest’.137 In the Scottish Highlands, it was believed that ‘a Popish priest [could] cast out devils, and cure madness, and that the Presbyterian clergy [had] no such power’.138 In Wales, it was held that Catholic priests had greater power over spirits than Protestant clergymen.139 Such notions persisted. In the mid-­nineteenth century, an elderly woman in a Yorkshire village claimed that her house was haunted by spirits. When the parish parson said that he ‘did not profess 129  Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 214. 130  John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. N. H. Keeble (Oxford, 1984), p. 54. 131  Charles Henry Poole, The Customs, Superstitions, and Legends of the County of Stafford (London, [1883]), pp. 19–20. 132  Anon. to Thomas Meighan, 23 June 1733, Westminster Diocesan Archives, London, MS A XXXIX, fol. 102r. 133 John Gunn, ‘Proverbs, Adages, and Popular Superstitions, Still Preserved in the Parish of Irstead’, Norfolk Archaeology, 2 (1849), p. 304. 134  John Ashton, Chap-­books of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1882), pp. 25–7, 53–5, 237–44; Charles A. Federer (ed.), Yorkshire Chap-­Books (London, 1889), pp. 25–170, 256–75. 135  A. Nutt, ‘Churn Charm’, Folk-Lore, 3 (1892), p. 138; A. Nutt, ‘Sympathetic Bees’, Folk-Lore, 3 (1892), p. 138. 136  Cf. Richard Jago, The Causes of Impenitence Consider’d (Oxford, 1755). 137  John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1777), p. 113. 138 Prunier, Anti-­Catholic Strategies, p. 100. 139  T. Gwynn Jones, Welsh Folklore and Folk-­Custom (Cambridge, 1979), p. 44.

160  Colin Haydon to “lay spirits” ’, she retorted ‘a priest o’ t’ au’d church . . . wad a’ deean it. They wur a vast mair powerful conjurers than you Church-­priests.’140 Comparably, in 1815, a Worcestershire farmer’s wife, when sick, ‘declared that a multitude of infernal spirits surrounded her’.141 An Anglican incumbent could not assist, but a Catholic priest successfully performed an exorcism and the farmer’s wife recovered. She then converted to Catholicism.142

Conclusion By 1829, octogenarian British and Irish Catholics had witnessed relief and emancipation. Perhaps the changes can be exaggerated: de facto, unspoken toleration of worship was conceded well before legislation ratified it; and only a minority of Catholics gained directly from emancipation. Nevertheless, the symbolic import—­the ending of the Protestant constitution—­was immense, as both ­proponents and op­pon­ents fully recognized. In part, the legal changes resulted from gradual, seemingly inexorable, political, religious, social, and cultural drifts: thus Macaulay contended that the ‘Declaration of Right  .  .  .  contained the germ . . . of the law which relieved the Roman Catholics from civil disabilities’.143 Yet, contingency was crucial in determining the timing of key measures. The immediate impetus for British and Irish relief proposals of the 1770s was the drive to recruit Catholic soldiers for the flagging war in America.144 When Wellington became prime minister in January 1828, Catholic emancipation seemed grounded:145 no one foresaw the County Clare by-­election in July or O’Connell’s exploitation of the moment. Nevertheless, anti-­Catholicism, instead of contracting after 1829, swelled again and mutated, re-­emerging with a vengeance. It drew strength from altered circumstances: the papacy’s nineteenth-­century revival; fears of ‘crypto-­Papists’, exacerbated by the Oxford Movement and Ritualism; Irish migration to England, Scotland, and Wales; the ties of growing Irish nationalism with Catholicism. The Protestant abhorrence of Rome’s distinctive theology, a theology supposedly at worst precluding salvation, remained.

140 J. C. Atkinson, Forty Years in a Moorland Parish (London, 1891), p. 59, n. 1. 141  Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic, and Culture, 1736–1951 (Manchester, 1999), pp. 23–4. 142 Davies, Witchcraft, Magic, and Culture, pp. 24–6. 143 Macaulay, History of England, III, p. 1,311. 144  Robert Kent Donovan, ‘The Military Origins of the Roman Catholic Relief Programme of 1778’, Historical Journal, 28 (1985), pp. 79–102. 145 J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1660–1832 (Cambridge, 2000), p. 527.

Anti-Catholicism and Protestant Relations  161

Select Bibliography Barnard, Toby, Irish Protestant Ascents and Descents, 1641–1770 (Dublin, 2004). Donovan, Robert Kent, No Popery and Radicalism: Opposition to Roman Catholic Relief in Scotland, 1778–1782 (New York, 1987). Gheeraert-Graffeuille, Claire and Vaughan, Geraldine (eds.), Anti-Catholicism in Britain and Ireland, 1600–2000 (Basingstoke, 2020). Haefeli, Evan (ed.), Against Popery: Britain, Empire and Anti-Catholicism (Charlottesville, 2020). Haydon, Colin, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c.1714–80 (Manchester, 1994). Haywood, Ian and Seed, John (eds.), The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2012). Machin, G. I. T., The Catholic Question in English Politics, 1820 to 1830 (London, 1964). McBride, Ian, Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (Dublin, 2009). O’Leary, Paul, ‘When Was Anti-Catholicism? The Case of Nineteenth- and TwentiethCentury Wales’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 56 (2005), pp. 308–25. Prunier, Clotilde, Anti-Catholic Strategies in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Frankfurt am Main, 2004).

9 Convents and Women Religious Tonya J. Moutray

The later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries posed many challenges for Irish and British women religious and their convents, both at home and abroad, punctuated as they were by revolution in the United States, France, the Austrian Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal, as well as rebellion in Ireland.1 This chapter marks out the diverse historical trajectories of the Irish and English convents, as well as some of the women religious who inhabited them. Women religious is a broad term that encompasses both contemplative nuns and active sisters, as well as ‘lay’ (sometimes referred to as ‘converse’) sisters who performed the domestic work of the convent. Their experiences differed greatly, not only because of their varying national and socio-­economic backgrounds, but also because the convents they occupied were scattered across Continental Europe, England, Ireland, and North America. Irish and British women religious deployed varying models of religious life—­ active and contemplative, European and indigenous—­ which ­governed their daily lives and led to diverse social contributions. This chapter begins by exploring the state of religious life for women in Ireland and England prior to the French Revolution. The convents survived within a challenging political environment in which legislative relief stoked anti-­Catholic ­sentiment, threatening the livelihood of Catholic establishments, especially in England. The next sections of this chapter explore Irish and English convents established in exile on the Continent and located in the pathway of the French Revolution before, during, and after political upheaval. All but four communities sought refuge in England by 1800 (see Table 9.1). Their experiences of settlement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries tended to follow a pattern of negotiation within the local community, reassessment of the community’s needs once financial stability was achieved, and subsequent moves before a suitable dwelling was established as a permanent location. The dislocations of women religious during war complicated community notions of place, as well as individual and corporate identities into the nineteenth century and beyond. Disrupted far less by the war in France, women religious in Ireland forged ahead within both traditional religious orders and the newly 1  I am indebted to Caroline Bowden, Scholastica Susan Jacob, Liam Chambers, James E. Kelly, and John McCafferty for their concise comments and corrections. Tonya J. Moutray, Convents and Women Religious In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829. Edited by: Liam Chambers, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843443.003.0010

Convents and Women Religious  163 Table 9.1.  Irish and British women religious on the Continent by 1789 Location / Date Founded

Institute

Migration to England

Lisbon/1639 Ypres/1665 Paris/1634 Bruges/1629 Louvain/1609 Brussels/1599 Cambrai/1623 Dunkirk/1662 Ghent/1624 Paris/1653 Lisbon/1594 Antwerp/1618–19 Hoogstraten/1678 Lierre/1648 Paris/1659 Brussels/1660 Brussels/1619; Bruges/1662 Aire/1629 Dunkirk/1625 Gravelines/c.1609 Rouen/1644 Liège/1642

Irish Dominicans Irish Benedictines English Augustinians English Augustinians English Augustinians English Benedictines English Benedictines English Benedictines English Benedictines English Benedictines English Bridgettines English Carmelites English Carmelites English Carmelites English Conceptionists, Blue Nuns English Dominicans English Franciscans English Poor Clares English Poor Clares English Poor Clares English Poor Clares English Sepulchrines

Remained Remained until 1914 Remained until 1911 1794, returned 1802 1794 1794 1795 1795 1794 1795 1809, 1861 1794 1794 1794 1800 1794 1794 1799 1795 1795, returned 1814 1795 1794

Sources: Adapted from Carmen M. Mangion, Contested Identities: Catholic Women Religious in Nineteenth-­Century England and Wales (Manchester, 2008), p. 35; Caroline Bowden (gen. ed.), The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, 6 vols. (London, 2012–13), VI, p. xvii.

established active congregations, the focus of the final section of the chapter. While it would take the restoration of the hierarchy by Rome in 1850 for any religious orders to be fully established in England, by the late eighteenth century Catholic women in Ireland were laying down a pattern of organizational expansion that would be replicated in Britain and Ireland, as well as in India, Australia, New Zealand, and North America in the nineteenth century.

Irish Orders and English Institutes, 1746–1789 Irish women religious played key roles in the shaping of Catholic religious culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Urbanization had brought increased

164 Tonya J. Moutray numbers of workers to the cities, opening the door for Irish women to ­professionalize women’s work in the community as a natural extension of their home training.2 This led to community validation of women religious, which en­abled them to broaden their reach and influence. Twelve houses of women religious existed in Ireland in 1750 from among the traditional orders of Carmelite, Augustinian, Poor Clare, and Dominican. They provided boarding facilities and schooling for the Catholic elite but were in a state of decline.3 As the century progressed, the Dominicans, Poor Clares, and Carmelites reframed their work to become more active in orientation; they were following the lead of the newly developing women’s congregations in Ireland, which, in turn, were modelled on other active religious groups, such as the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (IBVM) founded by Mary Ward in St Omer in 1609, as well as the French Ursulines, founded by Angela de Merici in 1535, a flourishing teaching order in France by the late eighteenth century, with a branch in Cork by 1771 managed by the intrepid Nano Nagle, who went on to found the Presentation Sisters.4 Pope Benedict XIV’s 1749 bull, Quamvis Iusto, clarified that the status of ‘religious institute’ could be applied to Irish and English active women’s orders, sanctioning them as ‘religious’ rather than ‘lay’. True to the mission of the Mary Ward Institute—­the spiritual training of young women—­the Hammersmith convent opened a school in 1669 and boarded students from 1677 to 1771.5 Susan O’Brien describes the Bar Convent in York as a ‘seed-­bed for raising virtuous and pious Catholic women’, as the sisters ran both an elite boarding school for wealthy Catholics and another for girls seeking day instruction. The curriculum in the boarding school included French and Latin, decorative arts, dancing, music, and drawing. Teaching about ten students a year, about one in ten scholars at the Bar Convent professed either at one of the exiled English convents on the Continent or at one of the two convents at home. The Bar Convent also recruited members among Irish Catholics: in 1814 there were six Irish sisters and two Irish novices. English students were from Yorkshire, Durham, Lincolnshire, Lancashire, and Northumberland, though this base was expanding in the second half of the

2  Rosemary Raughter, ‘Pious Occupations: Female Activism and the Catholic Revival in Eighteenth-­ Century Ireland’, in Rosemary Raughter (ed.), Religious Women and Their History: Breaking the Silence (Dublin, 2005), p. 28. 3 Mary Peckham Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion, & Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750–1900 (Oxford, 1998), p. 6; Raughter, ‘Pious Occupations’, p. 41; Seamus Enright, ‘Women and Catholic Life in Dublin, 1766–1852’, in James Kelly and Dáire Keogh (eds.), History of the Catholic Diocese of Dublin (Dublin, 2000), pp. 272–3. 4  Enright, ‘Women and Catholic Life in Dublin’, p. 284. 5  Caroline Bowden, ‘Convent Schooling for English Girls in the “Exile” Period, 1600–1800’, in Morwenna Ludlow, Charlotte Metheun, and Andrew Spicer (eds.), Churches and Education, SCH 55 (2019), pp. 178–9.

Convents and Women Religious  165 eighteenth century with students from London, India, and the West Indies. Over 800 students were taught at the Mary Ward Institutes.6 Though it would have been more difficult to live as a religious in England than on the Continent prior to the French Revolution, the Bar Convent professed twenty-­one women from 1750 to 1800. The women’s capital included their own inherited money, dowries, and interest on loans that they provided for local Catholic gentry. Actively engaged in the local community, the convents offered boarding facilities for women, religious instruction to adults and children, nursing services to the poor, and access to their chapel. The anti-­Catholic Gordon Riots in 1780 targeted religious institutions, including the Hammersmith convent. Though it escaped damage, the school closed the next year due to its con­ tinued financial difficulties.7 The Bar Convent school remained open with increasing student enrollments as the century progressed. The 1791 English Relief Act allowed Catholics to worship freely and teach children. Although this legalized the sisters’ work as educators, they could not be open about their religious status, wear their habits publicly, profess new members, teach the children of Protestants, legally establish a convent or a college, or mount a steeple or bell on their chapels. Thus, they deployed a variety of workarounds so as not to arouse suspicion, such as removing Catholic statues, pictures, or crucifixes from the chapel and workrooms, and relinquishing religious names and garb when outside of the convent.8 This was the very environment that refugee nuns who arrived in England would also face in the years of Revolution ahead.

Irish and English Convents Abroad, 1746–1789 In the forty-­three years before Revolution in France dismantled the monastic orders, both internal and external forces complicated the management of Irish and English convents abroad where most women religious were located. After 1746, Irish and English convents felt the economic impacts of Jacobite retrenchment.9 Continued funding of convents required sound management and often assistance from agents at home. Beyond the income from boarding both students and gentle­women, other major sources of revenue included dowries (these were usually paid in cash, but annuities could also be used), donations from bene­factors, 6 Susan O’Brien, ‘Women of the “English Catholic Community”: Nuns and Pupils at the Bar Convent, York, 1680–1790’, in Judith Loades (ed.), Monastic Studies: The Continuity of Tradition (Bangor, 1990), pp. 269–70, 272–3, 275–7; Bowden, ‘Convent Schooling for English Girls’, p. 187. 7  Derived from WWTN; O’Brien, ‘Women of the “English Catholic Community” ’, p. 270. The boarding school closed in 1771 according to Bowden, ‘Convent Schooling for English Girls’, p. 179. 8  O’Brien, ‘Women of the “English Catholic Community” ’, p. 276. 9 James E. Kelly, English Convents in Catholic Europe, c.1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020), p. 127.

166 Tonya J. Moutray and investments. The latter were in the form of interest collected on money ­contractually given on loan.10 Yet persistent financial difficulties plagued some groups. For example, the Pontoise Benedictines dissolved in 1786 due to the ‘frightful list of our enormous debts’, as their abbess explained, and the Paris Conceptionists were ‘frequently in embarrassed circumstances’, according to their historian, Margaret J. Mason. The Ypres Benedictines were impoverished by mid-­ century, and the Lierre Carmelites accepted more local postulants because there were not as many coming from England.11 Natural disaster also threatened survival: the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 devastated the English Bridgettine convent (the only group claiming direct descent from a pre-­Reformation English order), though it was rebuilt over time. The Irish Dominican convent in nearby Belém, Nossa Senhora of Bom Successo (Our Lady of Good Success), survived the earthquake though the belfry and chapel floor (the latter was damaged after the choir grille fell) were replaced.12 Nuns forged relationships with royalty, local and exiled Catholics, and supporters from home, as well as with local bishops and the exiled English colleges from which their chaplains were assigned.13 These relationships generated support during times of both scarcity and plenty. Convent profession records indicate a decrease in number and smaller community sizes in the second half of the century, as seen with the Ypres Benedictines, Gravelines Poor Clares, Bruges Augustinians, Cambrai Benedictines, and the Brussels Franciscans; the Paris Benedictines, Liège Sepulchrines, and Paris Conceptionists, on the other hand, were expanding. Others, such as the English Bridgettines, maintained a nearly equal number of professions in the second half of the century (twenty-­three) as they did in the first (twenty-­six).14 The Irish Dominicans had professed thirty sisters by 1760, about one-­third of whom were Portuguese, the rest primarily from Ireland or Irish exiled families settled in Portugal. The numbers fluctuated near the end of the century, with forty-­four members and thirteen novices by 1780.15 Most of the convents abroad provided education for Catholic girls primarily of Irish and English origins, though students from Scotland, Wales, Continental Europe and the British colonies were also admitted. As Caroline Bowden has shown, the convent schools provided a highly individualized model of education, allowing parents to coordinate their daughters’ educations on their own terms. 10 Kelly, English Convents, pp. 109–20. 11  Margaret J. Mason, ‘The Blue Nuns in Norwich’, Recusant History, 24 (1998), p. 95; Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (New York, 2003), p. 82; Kelly, English Convents, p. 127. 12  Honor McCabe, A Light Undimmed: The Story of the Convent of Our Lady of Bom Successo, Lisbon, 1639–2006 (Dublin, 2007), pp. 102–3. 13 Kelly, English Convents, pp. 19–20. 14 O’Brien, ‘Women of the “English Catholic Community” ’, p. 276. The Sepulchrines and Benedictines used the word ‘Dame’ to refer to a choir nun (derived from WWTN). 15 McCabe, A Light Undimmed, pp. 105–6.

Convents and Women Religious  167 This could include sending a student to another convent that specialized in a ­particular subject. For example, the family of Charlotte Jerningham, Lady Frances Jerningham’s daughter, sent her first to the Paris Conceptionists, also known as the Blue Nuns, and then to the French Ursulines to learn French in the 1780s.16 Some young women who had been schooled in convents became conditioned to religious life while others were prepared for life in the world. For example, the Conceptionists’ convent was more akin to a finishing school than a training for the novitiate (such as might be found with the Poor Clares or the Benedictines). There were girls of all ages (one as young as 4) in the care of the nuns. Beyond the movement of students between convent schools, there was also significant movement of women trying their vocations, seeking the best possible fit for themselves. Likewise, communities were selective about who would proceed to profession.17 In terms of the national composition within convents abroad, a majority of the women were of English origin, although each convent experienced a degree of cultural, ethnic, and national diversity. Nearly 4.5 per cent of the women professed in English convents after 1750 and before 1800 had documented Irish origins from at  least one parent.18 Marie-­Louise Coolahan, who examined pre-­1750 records, suggests that ethnic distinctions were rarely noted within convent writings, and usually in the context of a clash between English and Irish nuns.19 Other professions also came from outside England from 1750 on: 4.3 per cent had documented origins in the Low Countries, about 1.5 per cent were of Scottish (nine in total) or Welsh (nine in total) background, and nearly 1.4 per cent listed French heritage (eight in total). Lay sisters—­or the nuns whose purpose was to perform the domestic work of the convents—­were sometimes found among local Catholic women, though many also came from home countries. There was considerable diversity in the backgrounds and lived experiences of women religious. For example, the Sepulchrines professed ten Irish women between 1750 and 1800, the largest Irish contingent found in the English convents.20 Some English and Irish women joined local communities, for example, Catherine Dillon and Anne Nevill joined the Benedictines of Montargis, one of few French communities that sought refuge in England during the Reign of

16  Bowden, ‘Convent Schooling for English Girls’, pp. 177–204. 17  Caroline Bowden, ‘Missing Members: Selection and Governance in the English Convents in Exile’, in Caroline Bowden and James  E.  Kelly (eds.), The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Communities, Culture and Identity (Aldershot, 2013), pp. 53–68; Bowden, ‘Convent Schooling for English Girls,’ pp. 181–2, 191; Walker, Gender and Politics, pp. 31, 36; Joseph Gillow and Richard Trappes-­Lomax (eds.), The Diary of the Blue Nuns: An Order of the Immaculate Conception of our Lady at Paris, 1688–1810, CRS 8 (London, 1910), p. 163. 18  Entries in the WWTN. I have included anyone whose mother, father, or place of birth is tagged. 19  Marie-­Louise Coolahan, ‘Archipelagic Identities in Europe: Irish Nuns in English Convents’, in Bowden and Kelly (eds.), English Convents in Exile, p. 218. 20  Coolahan, ‘Archipelagic Identities’, p. 214; WWTN.

168 Tonya J. Moutray Terror.21 Other women shared colonial and Irish origins. Two daughters of Isidore Lynch, a Cork merchant, and Judith Meade, the Anglo-­Irish daughter of Thomas Meade, a planter and slave-­owner in the West Indies, were professed in Liège with the Sepulchrines (Anne and Mary), and another three with the Irish Benedictines in Ypres (Eleanor, Clementina, and Bridgit).22 By the end of the eighteenth century, forty-­one women from Maryland had professed in English convents in Europe.23 Though the convents themselves were designated as ‘English’ or ‘Irish’, their locations abroad and membership composition raise questions about individual and corporate identities. Did Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and English nuns share a col­ lect­ive vision rooted in shared experiences of post-­Reformation exile? Protestant polemic grouped them together as ‘the Popish Jacobite party’.24 It may be that nuns bridged national or ethnic differences with a shared Jacobite mentalité so that the particular political affiliations of convents informed the community ethos. James E. Kelly argues that nuns’ identities were more informed by Catholic formation within religious orders than by national differences, asserting that the ‘failure to form an archipelagic Catholic identity in the Catholic diaspora shows, once again, the English convents as part of a wider religious identity’. Because communities were also integrated into an international framework of Catholic reform, there was ‘a constant negotiation of national and transnational imperatives’.25 Coolahan explains that while nuns’ nationality mattered, the emphasis was placed first upon the identity of the religious order; next, that of the particular convent; and, finally, that of the international community forged out of a shared understanding of the imperatives of the Council of Trent.26 Both national and international Catholic identities seem to have worked recursively, reinforcing the significance of political and religious matters, and the shared consequences of changing legislation towards Catholics both at home and in the countries of exile. Though far fewer women from Scotland, Ireland, or Wales inhabited English convents than did English women, the fact that many of these communities were quite small meant that ethnic, socio-­economic, and national differences between nuns—­choir and lay—­novices, students, and even the boarders shaped the individual community’s reputation, and contributed to both transnational and national sensibilities within the convent.

21  Margaret J. Mason, ‘Nuns of the Jerningham Letters: The Hon. Catherine Dillon (1752–1787) and Anne Nevill (1754–1824), Benedictines at Bodney Hall’, Recusant History, 23 (1996), p. 35. 22 Richard  B.  Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775 (Baltimore, 1994), pp. 177–8. 23 Caroline Bowden, ‘Part II: American Connections’, in Caroline Bowden (gen. ed.), English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, 6 vols. (London, 2012–13), I, p. 139. 24  ‘Document 2: Excerpt from Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (Thursday 1 June 1780)’, in Bowden (gen. ed.), English Convents in Exile, VI, p. 135. 25 Kelly, English Convents, pp. 10–11; Coolahan, ‘Archipelagic Identities’, p. 215. 26  Marie-­Louise Coolahan, ‘Identity Politics and Nuns’ Writings’, Women’s Writing, 14 (2007), pp. 306–20.

Convents and Women Religious  169

English and Irish Convents Abroad, 1789–1829 Revolutionary political forces made Continental life virtually impossible for nuns living in France and the Austrian Netherlands in the 1790s, although the Irish Benedictines in Ypres and the English Augustinians in Paris remained there until the early twentieth century. The National Constituent Assembly began dis­mant­ ling the monastic enterprise in France in 1789 when religious houses were barred from receiving postulants or allowing candidates for profession to take vows. Legislation suppressing religious practice in community followed in 1790 when French nuns were offered a pension and encouraged to disperse. In 1791, convents became the property of the government. On 13 February 1792, all French religious orders were dissolved, while on 18 August 1792, all teaching and hospital congregations, as well as confraternities, were officially banned, though some nursing sisters worked by appointment of the government.27 The vast majority of French convents were inactive by 1792 and an estimated 55,000 women religious, 44,000 of whom were nuns, were displaced.28 English groups in France resisted political authority in various ways, and their convents remained intact until 1793 due to their uncertain legal status in France: English nuns owned their own property, and their claim to provide education only to English Catholics might not have been at first considered a direct threat to the project of the Revolution. The Paris Augustinians made these arguments—­ loyalty to the French nation, recruitment of only English girls, and economic independence—­in an appeal to the government to remain in Paris in 1791. Carmen M. Mangion estimates that about 400 English women religious were in France when the Revolution began.29 Like their French counterparts, they were subject to inventories, inspections, and harassment by authorities and the general public. From February 1793, when France declared war on Britain, some who remained were imprisoned, at times within their own convents, alongside secular prisoners. Some groups, such as the Paris Benedictines and the Rouen Poor Clares, were permitted by the local French authorities to allow refractory priests to say Mass within their chapels for lay Catholics resisting the changes to tradition. The Paris Conceptionists, Augustinians, and Benedictines at first remained at their own lodgings, but found themselves all under one roof at the convent of the

27  Nigel Aston, Religion and Revolution in France, 1780–1804 (Washington, DC, 2000), p. 232. 28  Elizabeth Rapley and Robert Rapley, ‘An Image of Religious Women in the Ancien Régime: The États des religieuses of 1790–91’, French History, 11 (1997), p. 389; Derek Beales, Prosperity and Plunder: European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, 2003), p. 86. 29  ‘Memorial of the English Nuns, Settled at Paris, in the Rue des Fosses, Saint Victor’, in Extract from the Proceedings of the Board of Administration of the District of Douay on the Fourteenth of December, 1791 (London, n.d.), pp. 15–17; Carmen  M.  Mangion, ‘ “Avoiding Rash and Imprudent Measures”: English Nuns in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1801’, in Bowden and Kelly (eds.), The English Convents in Exile, p. 250.

170 Tonya J. Moutray Augustinians by 1794.30 The imprisoned British national, Helen Maria Williams, a well-­known literary figure who had been living and writing in France since the onset of the Revolution, was incarcerated with the Conceptionist nuns in November 1793. Williams described them as ‘amiable country-­women’, living in a spirit of ‘true fraternity’. Recording the Revolutionary violence that threatened nuns’ lives, Williams documented the ‘uncontrollable rage’ of one ‘Brutus’, a police officer, who assaulted a nun by attempting to tear off her veil.31 Before being sent to the Château de Vincennes, a chronicler from the Paris Benedictines described a French officer in the cell of the mother superior on 15 July 1794: he was searching for images of the Sacred Heart, a charged symbol of counter-­Revolutionary activity.32 The Cambrai Benedictines, who initially were led to understand that they would stay in their convent, were transported to a former Visitation convent in Compiègne in October 1793. Here they learned of the sixteen French Carmelites with whom they were incarcerated, and who were later guillotined in Paris in July 1794. The peasant clothing the Carmelites had left behind was given to the English Benedictines for their release later that year, and which they wore with reverence upon their migration to England, saving one set that is held in their archives to this day.33 The years of survival without adequate housing or sus­ten­ ance took a tremendous toll on English and Irish communities across France and the Low Countries; many of the vulnerable, about seventy-­five, had died before the Reign of Terror was over, and more deaths would follow in England.34 Just under 400 women from English convents abroad arrived in England.35 The majority of those residing in the English convents in the Austrian Netherlands migrated to England during 1794, including the Lierre, Hoogstraten, and Antwerp Carmelites, Bruges and Louvain Augustinians, Ghent and Brussels Benedictines, Brussels Dominicans, Liège Sepulchrines, and the Bruges Franciscans. The exiled Carmelites sent four members (three from Hoogstraten and one from Antwerp) to establish a branch in Port Tobacco, Maryland in 1790. Initially supported by European benefactors, and with the work of Fr Charles Neale who managed a farm for them, the group prospered, and by 1807, had twenty members.36 The remaining Hoogstraten Carmelites returned to England.37 With the transfer of 30 ‘Account of the Community during the French Revolution’, in Bowden (gen. ed.), English Convents in Exile, VI, p. 306. See also ‘The Rouen Chronicles, Book III’, in Bowden (gen. ed.), English Convents in Exile, VI, p. 360. 31  Helen Maria Williams, Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France, from the Thirty-­first of May 1793, till the Twenty-­eighth of July 1794, and of the Scenes which have passed in the Prisons of Paris, 4 vols. (London, 1795), I, pp. 182–93. 32  ‘Account of the Community during the French Revolution’, p. 313. 33  Scholastica Jacob (ed.), A Brief Narrative of the Seizure of the Benedictine Dames of Cambray and Two Hairs and a Dish of Tortoise, from the writings of Dame Ann Teresa Partington (Stanbrook, 2016), pp. 41–2. 34  Based on figures derived from the database and convent lists in WWTN. 35  Based on figures derived from the convent lists in WWTN. 36  Bowden, ‘Part II: American Connections’, pp. 139–41. 37  The community relocated to Normandy in 1825 and returned to England in 1870.

Convents and Women Religious  171 power to the Directory in 1795, women religious could stay or leave France, but did not retain property rights, initiating a second migration to England in 1795. The Dunkirk, Gravelines, and Rouen Poor Clares, and the Paris, Dunkirk, and Cambrai Benedictines also returned at this time. The Paris Conceptionists remained in their convent until forced out in 1799 when any remaining monastic properties were officially confiscated by the Directory. They came to England in 1800 but did not survive as a community. The Aire Poor Clares had returned the year before. If elderly or infirm members felt that they could not travel, sometimes they stayed behind. For example, the Bruges Augustinians left a small cohort behind, one, an arthritic lay sister who stated she would rather endure the guillotine than travel to England.38 Though some twentieth-­century community historians wrote about the arrival of the English convents as the fulfillment of their mission—­to bring Catholicism back to their homeland—­nuns’ contemporary accounts reveal that their lives in war and subsequent migrations were traumatic, and in some cases, fatal. As a member of the Bruges Augustinians recalled, ‘our jerney [sic] almost ruin’d us’.39 In 1794, the English Franciscans at Abbey House in Winchester lost Mary Ann Teresa Monington who though ‘being of a very active disposition and Clever at business, particularly in writing letters’ expired within months of arrival in England.40 The trauma of displacement is also woven into nuns’ depictions. Dame Ann Teresa Partington recalled that when the Benedictines of Cambrai were ordered out of their convent in October 1793, they became so ‘overwhelmed with sorrow at being thus turned out of their beloved abode’, so ‘stupefied with grief ’, that they forgot to pack. She recalls that they ‘had not courage enough to cast a passing glance at our dear Convent, which, from the time we had been driven out had been turned into a common Gaol’.41 The grief of losing beloved members and their convents characterized nuns’ descriptions of the Terror. Though these his­ tor­ies were recorded in the years after the communities had settled in England rather than in real time, their remembrance through the act of writing was painful: ‘It is three Years since these scenes of horror happened yet the writer of this declares that her Blood Chills whenever she thinks of that dreadful day’, Dame Partington recalled. An account from one of the Benedictines of Paris states that as far as the loss of their convent, ‘tis Impossible to convey any Idea to those who have not Experienced it’.42 A sense of the state of new exile infuses nuns’ writings 38  Francis Young, ‘Mother Mary More and the Exile of the Augustinian Canonesses of Bruges in England 1794–1802’, Recusant History, 27 (2005), pp. 86–102, esp. p. 88; Tonya Moutray, Refugee Nuns, the French Revolution, and British Literature and Culture (New York, 2016), pp. 112–18; ‘An Account of the Austin Nuns Travels from Bruges to England—­the Year 1794’, in Bowden (gen. ed.), English Convents in Exile, VI, p. 374. The author cites eleven whereas Young, ‘Mother Mary More’, cites nine. 39  ‘An Account of the Austin Nuns’, p. 376. 40  The Book of the Dead of the Franciscan Nuns, p. 223 (WWTN). 41  Jacob (ed.), Brief Narrative, pp. 22, 46. 42  Jacob (ed.), Brief Narrative, p. 28; ‘Account of the Community during the French Revolution’, p. 313.

172 Tonya J. Moutray with a sort of double awareness in which various identities and national loyalties were expressed at different rhetorical moments. Though expressing gratitude towards the British nation, Sister Mary Francis of Sales (Frances Henriette Jerningham), a Bruges Augustinian, portrayed the community’s sojourn in England as the ‘time of our exile’.43 This trope found its way into contemporary community histories. The Lierre Carmelites who eventually settled in Darlington wrote in the 1980s that the community had brought back human remains when they left, ‘in order not to be separated from them during their “exile” in England though they were in fact now returning providentially to their homeland’.44 Upon return, women religious were not easily integrated into British society. While the British government provided them with a guinea and a half per month until 1830, they could not legally recruit members, teach Protestant children, establish a convent, or wear religious dress in public.45 There were hostile pockets of anti-­Catholics in working-­class areas who threatened riots at the sight of refugee French religious; and English nuns initially met with a mixed reception due to confusion about their national origins.46 For example, a member of the Antwerp Carmelites recounted that upon arrival in London in 1794, they were called ‘French Devils’: ‘we cut a very ridiculous figure, some having the secular clothes over the Habit, and all without bonnets’. Once the spectators understood that the women were English, they ‘showed us all the civility they could’, and cried out, ‘Ladies you are welcome home’.47 Likewise, the Bruges Augustinians initially were mistaken for ‘French Men in disguise’ by the locals, and curiosity about the nuns’ religious difference meant that at Hengrave Hall, ‘we were never an Hour secure of being alone for all sorts of persons Flocked to see us, as they would have done to see some Foreigne Christians’. Often exposure had economic and practical benefits: visitors might choose to donate money, provide furniture or provisions, or purchase the nuns’ ‘fancy’ works, including silk flowers, embroidery, pin cushions, and the like.48 For the Bruges Augustinians at Hengrave Hall, allowing Protestants to attend their services had the ‘desired effect by removing prejudices’. Influential Catholic benefactors also interceded on behalf of religious. For

43  Sister Mary Francis’s letter is quoted in Margaret  J.  Mason, ‘Nuns of the Jerningham Letters: Elizabeth Jerningham, 1727–1807 & Frances Henrietta Jerningham, 1745–1824, Augustinian Canonesses of Bruges’, Recusant History, 22 (1995), p. 359. See also Scholastica Susan Jacob, ‘From Exile to Exile: Repatriation, Resettlement and the Contemplative Experience of English Benedictine Nuns in England, 1795–1838’ (PhD thesis, Durham University, 2022). 44  The History of Darlington Carmel from the Foundation of Lierre Carmel, 1648 (Darlington, 1982), p. 25. 45  Benedictines of Stanbrook Abbey, In a Great Tradition: The Life of Dame Laurentia McLachlan, Abbess of Stanbrook (New York, 1956), p. 43. 46  Callum Whittaker, ‘ “La Généreuse Nation!” Britain and the French Emigration, 1792–1802’ (MA Thesis, University of York, 2012). 47  ‘Account of the Nuns Coming to England’, in Bowden (gen. ed.), English Convents in Exile, VI, p. 380. 48  ‘An Account of the Austin Nuns’, p. 376; C. S. Durrant, A Link between Flemish Mystics and English Martyrs (London, 1925), pp. 378–9; Benedictines of Stanbrook Abbey, In a Great Tradition, p. 33.

Convents and Women Religious  173 ex­ample, Lady Gage requested the permission of parliament, as well as the ­archbishop of Canterbury, for the Augustinians to wear their habits within the estate, which was granted them.49 Repatriated nuns landed in private, rural residences—­in contrast to their locations in urban centres on the Continent—­where they might keep out of the public eye and could attempt to establish enclosure. For example, the Paris Benedictines inhabited Marnhull House near Wardour, describing it as ‘truly pleasing . . . both house and Garden was Encompassed round with pretty high Walls . . . a kind of Inclosure’. Their next home, Cannington Court, also provided architectural protection from the outside, and was described in 1807 by Mother Theresa Joseph as ‘very convent-­like’, though her obituary reveals ‘she had still greater fatigue to endure—­the house being in a very unfinished state as little had been done before she arrived with the Community’.50 As a former Benedictine monastery, it was a suitable property, but many modifications were necessary to fully utilize the space. Other refugee groups had to make do without architectural enclosure. For example, the Conceptionists were installed in a corner house on Magdalen Street in Norwich, just a bridge away from the very centre of the city, certainly not a very private space for them to get on with the work of prayer. The Cambrai Benedictines shared two adjacent town houses in Woolton, Lancashire, for twelve years, although the buildings had no chapel or library, and when they rented Salford Hall near Evesham in 1807, they could not renovate the house.51 The Bruges Augustinians had no chapel space at Hengrave Hall, and for some initial months, they moved their chairs from room to room. They also fetched fresh water from local fish ponds for eight months before pipes were put in. They ‘were obliged to keep a boy, a cart, and an ass’ since they were 4 miles from the nearest village, Bury. One member recounted, ‘We are Visited by Numbers of all sorts . . . we cant [sic] keep enclosure hear [sic], some admiers [sic] very much our Dress’.52 This detail reveals that the general public was not so interested in shutting down the nuns’ activities as they were enjoying the spectacle of Catholic women religious. The Brussels Benedictines living in Winchester relegated the habit to the morning hours when visitors were less likely to intrude. The practice of wearing the habit varied and changed within communities over time. Newly professed nuns might maintain secular dress so as not to draw attention to their new status. The Cambrai Benedictines did not fully resume wearing their habits until 1823.53 49 Durrant, Flemish Mystics and English Martyrs, pp. 376–7. 50  ‘Notes and Obituaries of the English Benedictine Nuns of our Blessed Lady of Good Hope in Paris’, pp. 341–2, 403 (WWTN). 51  Benedictines of Stanbrook Abbey, In a Great Tradition, pp. 42, 45. 52 Durrant, Flemish Mystics and English Martyrs, pp. 375, 378; ‘An Account of the Austin Nuns’, p. 376. 53  Bernard Ward, The Dawn of the Catholic Revival in England, 1791–1803, 2 vols. (London, 1909), II, pp. 123; Benedictines of Stanbrook Abbey, In a Great Tradition, p. 29; Durrant, Flemish Mystics and English Martyrs, pp. 383–5.

174 Tonya J. Moutray The repatriated nuns opened schools for Catholic girls as soon as they were able and ideally after the prioress made an oath of loyalty in accordance with the Catholic Relief Act of 1791.54 Only a month after moving to Hengrave Hall in 1794, the Bruges Augustinians opened a school. The Dunkirk Benedictines who took over the Hammersmith convent in 1795, admitted students within a year.55 There was no longer a need for English Catholics to send their children abroad, and a greater range of Catholics could now access such education. Patronage-­based relationships with Catholic families brought in students. For example, four grandchildren of Sir Thomas Gage were enrolled with the Bruges Augustinians. The French Benedictines resettled at Bodney Hall were also patronized by the English Catholic elite—­Lady Frances Jerningham had five grandchildren enrolled there in 1806. The nuns also drew students from further afield. The Cambrai Benedictines in Woolton documented students not only from Wales and Ireland, but also Spain, Portugal, Brazil, and Jamaica; they also catered to children of refugee French émigrés.56 Though it would not become law, the 1800 Monastic Institutions bill brought nuns’ activities into political debate. Fears that nuns were teaching working-­class children, spreading French principles, and recruiting new members led to an inquiry initiated by Charles Butler into the affairs of nuns, and of which Mother Mary More of the Bruges Augustinians complained. Though Butler was advocating for the nuns, it was not until a distinction could be made by politicians between foreign refugee nuns and English repatriated nuns that outcomes could be predicted—­there was a general belief that the English orders would gradually die out while those from France would inevitably return there. Ultimately, the bill was not passed and nuns were left to quietly resume their lives; however, the uproar around the recruitment of novices had made nuns’ gains—­ however small—­more visible. The Augustinians at Hengrave Hall had secretly professed three choir nuns, one who was a Protestant convert, by 1800. They had also trained a lay sister from Ireland. The Cambrai Benedictines in Woolton professed seven members over a twelve-­year period. Other professions created local scandal, such as that of Juliana Weld in 1795, daughter of Thomas Weld, known for his support of the La Trappe monks at Lulworth.57 The Bruges Augustinians, who returned to the Continent in 1802, were not the only order to do so: the Poor Clares of Gravelines temporarily recuperated their convent in 1814, though due 54 Durrant, Flemish Mystics and English Martyrs, p. 379. Sometimes the Oath of Loyalty was not taken until later. 55  Young, ‘Mother Mary More’, p. 90; A History of the Benedictine Nuns of Dunkirk: Now at St Scholastica’s Abbey, Teignmouth, Devon (London, 1958), pp. 132, 138. 56  Benedictines of Stanbrook Abbey, In a Great Tradition, p. 43; Mason, ‘Nuns of the Jerningham Letters’, p. 68; Ann Teresa Partington, Account Book, Stanbrook Abbey Archives, Wass. 57  The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, 36 vols. (London, 1806–20), XXXV, pp. 340–86; Moutray, Refugee Nuns, pp. 117–18; Durrant, Flemish Mystics and English Martyrs, pp. 383–5; Janet  E.  Hollinshead, ‘From Cambrai to Woolton: Lancashire’s First Female Religious House’, Recusant History, 25 (2001), pp. 478–80.

Convents and Women Religious  175 to low numbers, they returned to England and bequeathed it to the Ursulines of Boulogne in 1838.58 Others, such as the Benedictines of Cambrai, wished to return to France but could no longer repurchase their properties. The two convents in Portugal remained open during the 1790s and were not threatened until a French force under General Jean-­Andoche Junot arrived at the Tagus Estuary in Lisbon on 29 November 1807 and encamped near the Irish convent. When British and Portuguese troops finally ousted the French in Vimeiro on 17 August 1809, the English Bridgettines sent ten members of their order to Aston Hall in England though six remained to see their convent transformed into an army hospital for the duke of Wellington’s troops, which was occupied in this manner until 1813. Thus, the remaining Bridgettines were displaced, joining the Irish Dominican nuns at their convent for four years, the chapel of which was in use by Wellington for billeting his soldiers, while the out-­buildings were used to stable horses. When the Peninsular War ended in 1813, the remaining Bridgettines recovered their property, leaving the nuns in Lisbon to relative peace until the Revolution in 1820, which brought with it the same anti-­clericalism experienced by Catholics in France and the Low Countries twenty years earlier. Monastic communities were suppressed on 20 April 1823. For just over a month until the Revolution was quelled, the three Dominican houses in Lisbon were ordered by the government to coalesce at Rey Salvador, an idea the Irish nuns’ resisted, evident in their multiple appeals to the King, as well as to the British chargé d’affaires, Edward Michael Ward. Upon return to their convent on 25 June 1823, the Irish Dominicans recovered many items which had been sold by the government. They also opened a school, receiving their first pupil and boarder in 1829, and remained in Portugal.59 In the years leading to Catholic emancipation—­which did not directly address or change the status of religious orders in England—­relocated communities moved multiple times, which meant that practical matters were to be attended to before legacy construction or historical documentation. Settlement patterns suggest that communities of nuns moved at similar intervals; usually once or twice by 1800, again by 1829, and to a permanent home after that. For example, in 1835, the Cambrai Benedictines bought the property that would become Stanbrook Abbey, moving there in 1838 after having lived in Woolton and Abbot’s Salford, while the Paris Benedictines moved from Marnhull to Cannington Court in 1807 and then to Colwich in 1836.60 The movements of repatriated nuns in England over about a forty-­year period suggest that this was how long it took before refugee groups were more fully self-­determining. 58  M. W. Sturman, ‘Gravelines and the English Poor Clares’, London Recusant, 7 (1977), pp. 7–8. 59 McCabe, A Light Undimmed, p. 111, 114–24. The entire Bridgettine community returned to England in 1861: see Eddie Jones, Syon Abbey, 1415–2015: England’s Last Medieval Monastery (Leominster, 2015). 60  Benedictines of Stanbrook Abbey, In a Great Tradition, pp. 51–2; Robert Eaton, The Benedictines of Colwich, 1829–1929: England’s First House of Perpetual Adoration (London, 1929), pp. 65–79, 193.

176 Tonya J. Moutray

Irish Traditional Orders and Women’s Congregations, 1775–1829 The development of primarily urban-­based active congregations was led by ­ten­acious Irish Catholic women whose status, training, and resources provided the impetus behind the expansion of modernized religious orders in Ireland. These included the Sisters of Charity, the Presentation Sisters, the Loreto Sisters (the Irish branch of the IBVM), the Sisters of Mercy, and the Brigidines. While the term ‘sister’ was typically used instead of ‘nun’ in the newer congregations, the class-­based division remained: a ‘lay’ sister, sometimes referred to as a ‘house’ or ‘converse’ sister, enabled the sisters to manage schools. A dowry was not required of all teaching sisters; the value of particular postulants was based upon their capabilities, education, or talents.61 Beyond using their own resources, women religious accepted bequests or donations from lay Catholics eager to support new enterprises. Clergy also accommodated congregations in their parishes, and ­bishops in their dioceses, mostly serving as allies, though occasionally they imposed their own views on the communities.62 As Seamus Enright argues, women religious in Dublin were leaders and collaborators in a ‘broader movement of reform and modernization’.63 One of the best-­known figures in this movement is Hanora ‘Nano’ Nagle, founder of the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which became the largest provider of education to girls in Ireland by the early nineteenth century. Nagle had initially opened schools in Cork (sometime between 1754 and 1755). With the inheritance she received from her uncle in 1757, five schools for girls and two for boys were fully supported. While both genders learned to read, boys were taught writing while girls were taught needlework. Nagle herself had been schooled on the Continent; there is some suggestion that she may have studied at the Ypres Benedictine convent. She had also determined to enter religious life and went to Paris to do so. Though her whereabouts both in school and in a Parisian convent remain unknown, she emerged with an ‘understanding of the economics of convent management’.64 Upon returning to Ireland, Nagle financially sustained and managed a foundation of Paris Ursulines established in Cork in 1771 at the invitation of the Ursulines and Bishop Francis Moylan. Though Nagle provided property and financing, she never joined them, founding instead—­and in opposition to Moylan’s and the Ursulines’ wishes—­the Sisters of the Charitable Instruction of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1775 in Cork. She also adapted the Ursuline constitutions to the needs of the new community. In 1791, well after Nagle’s 61  Enright, ‘Women and Catholic Life in Dublin’, p. 268; Magray, Transforming Power, p. 9; Deirdre Raftery, Catriona Delaney, and Catherine Nowlan-­Roebuck, Nano Nagle: The Life and the Legacy (Newbridge, 2019), pp. 9–11. 62 Magray, Transforming Power, pp. 9, 27–8, 44. 63  Enright, ‘Women and Catholic Life in Dublin’, p. 268. 64  Raftery, Delaney, and Nowlan-­Roebuck, Nano Nagle, pp. 20–2, 27, 74.

Convents and Women Religious  177 death in 1784, the name of the organization changed to the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary.65 Nagle’s protégé, Teresa Mulally, had also founded schools in Dublin in 1766 and 1787, and Nagle’s sisters were teaching in them by 1794. Though she did not become a religious, Mulally worked to further the congregation’s mission. Mulally’s ‘Address to the Charitable of St. Michan’s Parish’ (1766) asserted women’s ‘peculiar abilities’ to educate poor girls of which there was a ‘pressing need’. There was an evangelical focus on instructing them out of ‘ignorance, idleness, and vice’. A number of new foundations were developed across Ireland after Nagle’s death. The Presentation Sisters abandoned Nagle’s flexible framework in 1806 and became enclosed, but this did not prevent further expansion, which peaked between 1807 and 1830, with the development of twenty-­two houses across fourteen counties.66 By 1832, when the national system of education had begun integrating convent schools, there were twenty-­eight Presentation schools in Ireland.67 The founder of the Irish Sisters of Charity, Mary Frances Aikenhead, was the daughter of an Irish Catholic mother and a Scottish Anglican physician whose family had settled in Ireland. Aikenhead trained for three years at the Bar Convent before returning to Ireland to found a community of Sisters of Charity in 1815. Aikenhead was clear that she did not want the congregation to be based on the Continental model of the Daughters of Charity, but on the Rule from the Mary Ward Institute. At the Bar Convent, Aikenhead had met the charismatic Catherine Walsh, who helped manage the Trinitarian orphanage located on North William Street in Dublin after their return from England. In 1819, the Catholic philanthropist Maria O’Brien transferred the management of her refuge for Catholic girls to the Sisters of Charity. Later, Walsh moved the North William Street community to Summer Hill and Gardiner Street in 1828 and 1830, respectively. Known for her social charm and literary knowledge, Walsh was beloved by the sisters long after her death. She had modelled a mother-­daughter relationship between mother superiors and members, a distinctive feature of the group’s early identity.68 While Catherine Walsh and Mary Aikenhead were still in training for religious life at the Bar Convent, they were joined in 1814 by Frances Ball—­a former student at the school—­who was preparing to establish the first Irish IBVM foundation in Dublin. The first of many branches of Loreto Sisters (as they became known), dedicated to the instruction of children, was established at Rathfarnham

65  Enright, ‘Women and Catholic Life in Dublin’, pp. 269, 288. 66  Raftery, Delaney, and Nowlan-­Roebuck, Nano Nagle, pp. 36, 43; Magray, Transforming Power, pp. 16–17; Enright, ‘Women and Catholic Life in Dublin’, pp. 269–71. 67  Raftery, Delaney, and Nowlan-­Roebuck, Nano Nagle, p. 98. 68 Magray, Transforming Power, pp. 18–19, 50.

178 Tonya J. Moutray House outside Dublin in 1822. Nine more would follow.69 As communities grew, small groups of sisters built working branches in new locations. The Brigidines, whose official status remained ambiguous until 1889, also taught children. Founding convents in Tullow in 1807 and Mountrath in 1809 to aid in his burgeoning Sunday school enterprise, Bishop Daniel Delaney implemented older contemplative practices such as enclosure and, in 1822, solemn vows so as to attract postulants from higher socio-­economic backgrounds. Another congregation was established in 1823 in Roscrea. Delaney also developed lay confraternities and the Patrician brothers (a male congregation), and he relied on his close friend, Judith Wogan-­Browne, to serve as the ‘de facto reverend mother’ of the Brigidines (though she did not join as a religious). Educated at the Irish Benedictine convent in Ypres, Wogan-­Brown was well placed in this role, though her grip on the community’s finances and refusal to allow boarders at the convents made it difficult for the Brigidines to establish economic security until well into the nineteenth century. The Tullow and Mountrath communities developed schools for both paying and charity students. After Delaney’s death, the Brigidines established an orphan school at Tullow (c.1816) to assist in the care of destitute children. Tullow continued to board children from orphanages, including those of the Sisters of Charity and the Poor Clares, into the nineteenth century.70 A convert to Catholicism, Catherine McAuley founded a secular version of the Sisters of Mercy in Dublin in 1827, having used her Protestant inheritance to lease property to undertake an enterprise in Baggot Street in 1824. She travelled to France the next year to study the Sisters of Mercy’s model of educational provision for the poor. Like Mulally and Nagle, McAuley had been teaching children in economic need prior to purchasing the property that would house destitute young women and become the school for hundreds of local girls. Her connections to Protestant charitable organizations, as well as inherited money from her Protestant guardian, funded her philanthropy but also caused grumbles among the Catholic elite; McAuley’s Sisters of Mercy were perceived as competing with Aikenhead’s Sisters of Charity. In addition, Mother Mary Clare Moore later commented, ‘The foundress was sneered at as an upstart, as uneducated’. Furthermore, McAuley was framed as stepping out of her gender role and was excoriated as ‘unsexed’ by a priest in a letter addressing her as ‘C. McAuley, Esq’. With the intervention of Archbishop Daniel Murray of Dublin, McAuley formalized her Catholic religious congregation after religious profession in 1831, further legitimizing the enterprise and her leadership. In joining the Sisters of Charity in the nursing of cholera victims in 1832, the

69  Enright, ‘Women and Catholic Life in Dublin’, pp. 285–6. 70 Magray, Transforming Power, pp. 24–5; Ann Power, The Brigidine Sisters in Ireland, America, Australia and New Zealand, 1807–1922 (Dublin, 2018), pp. 60–1, 77, 80–2, 88–91, 94–6.

Convents and Women Religious  179 Sisters of Mercy demonstrated that mobile units of collaborating social aid groups could be of great service.71 While those of a looser form of religious life were safeguarding their reputations by coming into greater conformity, the traditional religious orders transformed more of their work into active service. The differences between the new religious congregations and the old contemplative orders were fewer than at any other time. In fact, the Dominicans and some Carmelite communities separated canonically from the male orders and were placed under the jurisdiction of the archbishop of Dublin, just as the women’s congregations were. This enabled them to carry out their revised mission with fewer restrictions, such as in their observance of fasts, as well as dispensation from strict enclosure, all necessary accommodations for the running of schools and orphanages. The Poor Clares and Carmelites, for example, opened schools for the poor. After 1800, the traditional orders were expanding alongside the religious congregations, creating further branches to accommodate fresh initiatives or to serve new populations.72 Far from the anti-­Catholic depictions of women religious being forever sep­ar­ ated from their families when they joined a convent, many Irish women religious, like their English, Scottish, and Welsh counterparts, maintained kinship ties outside of, within, and across convents. Almost half of the Ursulines in Cork in the first fifty years (1767–1817) had siblings in the convent, and some shared niece/ aunt or cousin/cousin relationships. Likewise, siblings also joined Presentation convents together, such as at George’s Hill where 22 per cent of the women in the first fifty years (1791–1841) had sisters with them.73 Other Irish daughters were sent to the Irish Benedictines in Ypres, the Sepulchrines at New Hall in Essex, or the Ursulines in Thurles, or Waterford.74 There were significant connections between the two IBVM convents established in England and the Irish women’s congregations that grew rapidly in number over the second half of the eighteenth century. First, both shared the status of being unenclosed, which had been granted by the Quamvis Iusto ruling of 1749. Elite Irish Catholics had sent their daughters not only abroad to the exiled convents, but also to the Mary Ward Institutes in England and the Ursulines in Paris. Catherine Walsh, Mary Aikenhead, and Frances Ball all trained at the Bar Convent. Ball founded the first Irish branch of the IBVM based on this training, and Aikenhead chose the constitution of the English IBVM as the basis for that of the Irish Sisters of Charity.75 Women religious in Irish congregations also experienced the same criticism applied to Mary Ward and her ‘galloping girls’. Father 71 Enright, ‘Women and Catholic Life in Dublin’, pp. 286–90; Magray, Transforming Power, pp. 20–3. See also Mary C. Sullivan, The Path of Mercy: The Life of Catherine McAuley (Dublin, 2012). 72  Enright, ‘Women and Catholic Life in Dublin’, pp. 275–7. 73 Magray, Transforming Power, p. 52. 74  Enright, ‘Women and Catholic Life in Dublin’, p. 284. 75 Magray, Transforming Power, p. 19.

180 Tonya J. Moutray Nicholas Barron encouraged Nagle’s community to forbear when others termed them ‘Galloping’ or ‘Walking’ nuns.76 Interestingly, the Sisters of Mercy acquired this title in the nineteenth century, though the connotation had changed into something positive. Indeed, the construction of McAuley as ‘unsex’d’ parallels the framing of Ward and her followers who were seen to be stepping outside of boundaries deemed appropriate for women in the late sixteenth and early seven­ teenth centuries. Beyond geographical proximity in two Protestant jurisdictions, shared family and social networks, and a united Catholic mission, it is also true that there were deep ties between the founding women of Irish congregations and the sisters at the Mary Ward Institute in York whose influence extended into the written constitutions of Irish communities.

Conclusion Across this eighty-­three-­year period, women religious from Ireland, England, Wales, and Scotland were active participants in shaping the future of religious life for women, as well as in constructing their own legacies of leadership and col­lect­ive action. Those who survived the French Revolution shared similar experiences of trauma, dislocation, and adaptation in Protestant England, recording what they could in community chronicles, letters, and other documents. For scholars, the variety of materials from this period make it a fertile period for ­historical study. Though the Revolutionary Wars were a time of great peril for women religious, the political backlash that followed drove forward a continued desire for the redevelopment of religious orders in Ireland, England, France, Portugal, and modern-­day Belgium. The social reform efforts of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provided a rationale for the diversification, replication, and global expansion of women’s religious orders, particularly those active in orientation, into the twentieth century.

Select Bibliography Bowden, Caroline and Kelly, James E. (eds.), The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Communities, Culture and Identity (Aldershot, 2013). Enright, Seamus, ‘Women and Catholic Life in Dublin, 1766–1852’, in James Kelly and Dáire Keogh (eds.), History of the Catholic Diocese of Dublin (Dublin, 2000), pp. 268–93. Kelly, James E., English Convents in Catholic Europe c.1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020).

76  Enright, ‘Women and Catholic Life in Dublin’, p. 270.

Convents and Women Religious  181 Magray, Mary Peckham, The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion, & Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750–1900 (Oxford, 1998). Mangion, Carmen M., ‘ “Avoiding Rash and Imprudent Measures”: English Nuns in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1801’, in Caroline Bowden and James E. Kelly (eds.), The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Communities, Culture and Identity (Aldershot, 2013), pp. 247–63. Mangion, Carmen M., Contested Identities: Catholic Women Religious in NineteenthCentury England and Wales (Manchester, 2008). Moutray, Tonya, Refugee Nuns, the French Revolution, and British Literature and Culture (New York, 2016). Raftery, Deirdre, Catriona Delaney, and Catherine Nowlan-Roebuck, Nano Nagle: The Life and the Legacy (Newbridge, 2019). Walker, Claire, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (New York: 2003).

10 Colleges, Seminaries, and Male Religious Houses Liam Chambers

On 16 May 1746, William Duthie, the master of the seminary at Scalan, near Glenlivet, in Scotland watched ‘from one of the neighbouring hills’ as soldiers surrounded the modest building. Duthie had already evacuated the students and property. The soldiers’ visit was expected, part of a mopping up exercise which attended the defeat of Jacobite forces at the Battle of Culloden a month before. A near-­contemporary account described the scene: Duthie saw his habitation surrounded with armed men whom he knew to be full of barbarous fury; in a short time the smoakey flames began to ascend; he could soon perceive the Roof fall in and after a little there was nothing left but Ruins. This was to him and to many others a dismal sight but the worst was that it seemed to be only the beginning of evils; they knew not what was to follow nor where nor when these barbarities were to end: the entire extirpation of the Catholicks out of Scotland was loudly threatened and was justly to have been feared without the interposition of Divine providence in their favour.1

Duthie’s pessimism was understandable but the destruction of the seminary at Scalan did not mark ‘the beginning of evils’. Duthie organized a hasty rebuilding in 1749 and the seminary survived through the 1750s before John Geddes oversaw the construction of a new building, along with a more general renewal of the seminary, in the 1760s.2 If the events of 1746 did not prefigure a period of sustained persecution, they did underline clearly the challenges involved in maintaining domestic seminaries in mid-­eighteenth century Scotland, an observation which applies even more to Ireland and England. Of course, British and Irish Catholics did not depend on domestic seminaries. From the 1560s onwards, they had established extensive networks of English, Scots, and Irish colleges, sem­in­ar­ ies, and male religious houses in Continental Europe in order to provide access to 1  John Geddes, ‘A Brief Historical Account of the Seminary of Scalan [1777]’, in William James Anderson (ed.), ‘The College for the Lowland District at Scalan and Aquhorties: Registers and Documents’, Innes Review, 14 (1963), pp. 99–100. 2  John Watts, Scalan: The Forbidden College, 1716–1799 (East Linton, 1999), pp. 94–133. Liam Chambers, Colleges, Seminaries, and Male Religious Houses In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829. Edited by: Liam Chambers, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843443.003.0011

Colleges, Seminaries, Male Religious Houses  183 education, to form priests, and to maintain communities of regular clergy.3 These networks were at their most extensive in the 1740s, but they faced significant external and internal challenges in the second half of the eighteenth century and many were already under severe pressure before the outbreak of the French Revolution. Almost all of the colleges closed in the 1790s, but this coincided with a political rapprochement between Catholics and the government in Britain and Ireland which facilitated the establishment of a network of domestic institutions. This did not mean the complete abandonment or disappearance of the pre-­ Revolutionary Continental networks: centuries of investment ensured that British and Irish Catholic interests made substantial attempts at retrieval and revival. While many of the Continental colleges never reopened, a significant number survived; and even where this was not the case, some financial investments were at least partially recovered. This ensured that alongside the establishment of a domestic college network, British and Irish Catholics retained a more modest, but nonetheless significant, Continental network into the nineteenth century.

Continental Networks, 1746–1789 In the mid-­eighteenth century, the networks of Irish, Scots, and English colleges extended across Catholic Europe. The Scots had colleges in Douai, Paris, Rome, and Madrid. English colleges operated in Douai, Paris, Rome, and Lisbon, as well as a trio of small Spanish institutions at Valladolid, Madrid, and Seville. Dozens of Irish colleges were located in France, Spain, the Austrian Netherlands, and the Papal States, although by the mid-­eighteenth century the most important institutions were in France: the colleges in Paris, Nantes, and Bordeaux. In addition to these colleges for a mix of schoolboys, seminarians, lay students, and secular clergy, the regular clergy operated their own extensive networks. The English (Paris, Dieulouard, Douai, Lamspringe) and Scottish Benedictines (Regensberg, Würzburg) maintained monasteries and schools. The English Jesuits ran an important college at St Omer, while the Irish Jesuits had a much smaller college at Poitiers. The Irish Franciscans (Louvain, Boulay, Prague, Rome, Capranica) and Dominicans (Louvain, Rome, Lisbon) also operated networks of friaries and colleges. These took on renewed significance following the introduction of Roman regulations which closed their novitiates at home in 1751.4 Finally, houses of English Franciscans (Douai) and Dominicans (Bornheim), and Irish Augustinians (Rome) and Capuchins (Wassy, Bar-­sur-­Aube) further illustrate the range of British and Irish Continental networks. 3  For female religious, see Tonya Moutray’s Chapter 9, in this volume. 4  Hugh Fenning, The Undoing of the Friars: A Study of the Novitiate Question in the Eighteenth Century (Louvain, 1972), pp. 240–53.

184  Liam Chambers While most of the institutions under discussion used the description ‘college’, in reality they fulfilled a range of functions, as schools, seminaries, university hostels, and religious houses. They varied markedly in terms of size, from more than a hundred students at the larger colleges like the English in Douai and St Omer or the Irish in Paris, to twenty or fewer at some much smaller institutions, like the Irish colleges in Lille, Toulouse, Lisbon, and Rome. In the mid-­eighteenth century, the number of students in the Spanish colleges was more modest still.5 The student intake varied too. Some colleges, notably the English institutions in Douai and St Omer, operated boarding schools, educating the children of the British and Irish elite. While a number of colleges functioned primarily as sem­in­ ar­ies (the Roman colleges provide good examples), others catered in effect to a mixture of higher level students, those intended for the priesthood, as well as lay students. The most pressing challenge for all of the colleges was financial. Indeed, this explains the determination of the Scottish Church to maintain seminaries at home, despite the evident difficulties. The Irish Church had evolved a unique solution to the problem of funding large-­scale student formation on the Continent. The bishops operated what Thomas O’Connor has described as a system of ‘antecedent ordination’: they raised men aged 24 or older to the priesthood and then sent them abroad for education, preferably to one of the Irish colleges. The system did not reflect the spirit of the Council of Trent, but the ordained student could generate sufficient income through Mass stipends and other sources to cover the cost of his education. On the eve of the French Revolution more than half the students at Irish colleges on the Continent were ordained clergy.6 The nature of the curriculum varied widely too. In many of the Irish colleges, students followed a detailed daily timetable, but they attended classes externally. Students at the Irish College in Paris took classes in nearby university collèges de plein exercise, although by the later eighteenth century additional lessons were offered in-­house. This constituted a quite different student experience to that afforded by colleges where a full curriculum was provided within the walls of the institution and students might have had little or no interaction with the local student or host community. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the English College in Douai had long ended the practice of sending students elsewhere for classes and provided instead a full complement of classes internally. The Society of Jesus exerted a strong pedagogical influence across the college networks. In addition to their

5  For a comparative assessment of the number of students at English institutions, see Maurice Whitehead, English Jesuit Education: Expulsion, Suppression, Survival and Restoration, 1762–1803 (Farnham, 2013), p. 31. For secular Irish colleges, see: Papers relating to Royal College of St Patrick, Maynooth, p. 50, H.C.  1808 (152) ix, 420. For the Scottish colleges: Records of the Scots Colleges at Douai, Rome, Madrid, Valladolid and Ratisbon (Aberdeen, 1906). 6  Thomas O’Connor, ‘The Domestic and International Roles of Irish Overseas Colleges, 1590–1800’, in Liam Chambers and Thomas O’Connor (eds.), College Communities Abroad: Education, Migration and Catholicism in Early Modern Europe (Manchester, 2017), p. 92.

Colleges, Seminaries, Male Religious Houses  185 own colleges in St Omer and Poitiers, they managed a number of English, Irish, and Scots colleges, particularly in Spain and Rome. In some respects, the Continental colleges were flourishing in the second half of the eighteenth century. In Paris, the Irish student community acquired an impressive second college on rue du Cheval Vert, which opened in 1776.7 In Douai, student numbers at the English College peaked at 164 in 1784.8 The establishment of domestic seminaries, like Scalan, had an impact on the number of students who enrolled in the Scots colleges on the Continent in the second half of the eighteenth century, but even in this case a marked increase in student admission occurred in the 1770s.9 In reality, however, the college networks were under increasing pressure in the late ancien régime as a result of a number of factors. The suppression of the Jesuits and, more generally, the reforming impulse evident in a number of European States threatened the stability of many of the British and Irish colleges. Portugal suppressed the Jesuits in 1759, and France and Spain followed suit in 1764 and 1767 respectively, before Clement XIV’s papal suppression in 1773. (Lorenzo Ricci, the superior general, was held at the English College before he was imprisoned at the Castel Sant’Angelo.10) The suppressions impacted directly on the English and Irish Jesuit colleges on the Continent: the Irish Jesuits at Poitiers closed their house in 1762, with some investments moving to Paris; the English Jesuits relinquished their important college at St Omer to the secular clergy based at Douai in the same year, and retreated first to Bruges and, in 1773, to Liège.11 The implications extended beyond the Jesuit colleges to the institutions the society administered, although the results varied across the Continent. In Rome, the Irish College had already been targeted by those in­tri­ guing against the Jesuits, and Italian seculars took charge of the English, Scots, and Irish colleges following the suppression.12 At Douai, the Scottish Jesuits ceded management to their secular colleagues and moved to Dinant.13 In Spain, the suppression triggered a significant restructuring. Most of the smaller English and Irish colleges closed, leaving the English College at Valladolid and the Irish College at Salamanca (along with the secular-­run Irish College at Alcalá de Henares, which would close as a result of mismanagement in 1785). The Jesuit-­run 7  Joe McDonnell, ‘From Bernini to Celtic Revival: A Tale of Two Irish Colleges in Paris’, Irish Arts Review, 18 (2002), p. 166. 8  P. R. Harris (ed.), Douai College Documents, 1639–1794, CRS 63 (St Albans, 1972), p. 383. 9  Tom McInally, The Sixth Scottish University: The Scots Colleges Abroad, 1575 to 1799 (Leiden, 2012), p. 134. 10 Michael  E.  Williams, The Venerable English College, Rome: A History, 1579–1979 (Dublin, 1979), p. 59. 11  Francis Finegan, ‘The Irish College of Poitiers, 1674–1762’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 104 (1965), p. 34; Whitehead, English Jesuit Education, pp. 41–142. 12  Christopher Korten, Half-­Truths: The Irish College, Rome and a Select History of the Catholic Church, 1771–1826 (Leuven, 2021), pp. 17–46. 13  Julian Russell, ‘The Last Students at the Scots College, Douai’, Innes Review, 58 (2007), pp. 222–5.

186  Liam Chambers Scots College in Madrid had never been a significant institution and had stopped accepting Scottish students in 1734, instead sending the revenue from Scottish investments to support students at Douai. The suppression provided an opportunity for John Geddes to negotiate the recovery of Scottish property and the transfer of the college to Valladolid in 1771.14 The ecclesiastical and educational reforms initiated by Joseph II in the Holy Roman Empire threatened further instability and accounted for the closure of the Irish Franciscan College in Prague in 1786.15 The ability of the English Benedictines in France to accommodate to the reforms of the commission des réguliers provides an interesting counter-­example, but the key point is that the college networks were shrinking long before the closures of the 1790s.16 In a sense, the changes of the 1760s and 1770s consolidated the college networks, now concentrated more than ever in France, but this did not diminish recurring concerns about their financial viability. For example, the English College at Douai was in very serious financial difficulty in the 1780s as a result of issues evident since mid-­century, including legacy construction costs and challenges relating to student funding and income.17 In Paris, Nantes, and Bordeaux, the most significant Irish colleges all struggled to cope with financial pressures. In Paris, the construction of the new college created a worrying debt. Peter Flood, one of the proviseurs of the older Irish College in Paris, the Collège des Lombards, identified another important threat in 1783. He noted that the ‘yearly income’ of the priests had ‘within these three years last past, suffered a real diminution of at least one-­third. The sensible decay of piety and religion, in every order and description of the people, renders the calls to the altar daily less frequent and less beneficial. The effects are visible.’18 Flood had realized that changes in French devotional practice threatened the Irish system of ‘antecedent ordination’, with serious implications across the Irish College networks. The combination of suppression and financial pressure helps to explain why the colleges struggled to meet the needs of their respective missions in the decades before the French Revolution. This was exacerbated by the significant growth in the English and Irish Catholic communities in the late eighteenth century. In fact, the Irish and Scots colleges served both missionary and migratory functions. 14  Michael Briody (ed.), The Scots College, Spain, 1767–1780: Memoirs of the Translation of the Scotch College from Madrid to Valladolid (Salamanca, 2015). 15  Jan Pařez and Hedvika Kuchařová, The Irish Franciscans in Prague, 1629–1786 (Prague, 2015), pp. 151–60. 16  Geoffrey Scott, Gothic Rage Undone: English Monks in the Age of Enlightenment (Bath, 1992), pp.  205–10; Cormac Begadon, ‘Meandering Towards an Inevitable Death? English Benedictine Monasteries and their Responses to Enlightenment and Revolution’, in Cormac Begadon and James E. Kelly (eds.), British and Irish Religious Orders in Europe, 1560–1800: Conventuals, Mendicants and Monastics in Motion (Woodbridge, 2022), pp. 253–9. 17  David Milburn, A History of Ushaw College (Durham, 1964), pp. 8–18. 18 Flood to Patrick Plunkett, 8 June 1783, in Anthony Cogan, Diocese of Meath: Ancient and Modern, 3 vols. (Dublin, 1862–70), III, p. 89.

Colleges, Seminaries, Male Religious Houses  187 It is now clear that a majority of Irish and Scottish Catholic students who ­travelled to the Continent in the early modern period did not return home (this does not appear to have been the case for English students).19 While con­tem­por­ar­ies and later commentators viewed this as a kind of mission wastage, migration was a feature of the survival strategy adopted by Catholic families in the face of reduced options at home, and student migration was but a part of broader patterns of mobility. Indeed, many of the Irish and Scots colleges operated within wider migrant communities. Despite population growth at home, Irish and Scottish Catholic migration to the Continent had declined by the second half of the eighteenth century, particularly the movement of Irish soldiers enlisting in the French and other armies.20 As Irish and Scottish Catholic communities, including Jacobite networks, on the Continent contracted, the colleges would exist in an increasingly isolated manner. While this was not fully evident even by 1789, it would have had important implications for funding, especially at the Irish colleges which generally accepted only students born in Ireland. Toleration at home was a significant reason for the decline in migration to the Continent, which also opened a realistic possibility that higher-level education for Catholics, clerical and lay, might be possible in Britain and Ireland, with consequences for the colleges on the Continent. Peter Flood, in the letter cited above, also wondered about the possibility that the British government would ‘think it proper hereafter to prohibit foreign, and to encourage domestic education’.21 The problem was that the Continental networks involved centuries of investment which were not easily, if at all, moved. This explains why the French Revolution, essentially the catalyst for change, was so devastating.

Revolution and Closure, 1789–1808 The British and Irish colleges in France were embedded within local ecclesiastical and (in many cases) educational structures. College officials therefore witnessed the French Revolution with a sense of foreboding, especially as the National Constituent Assembly nationalized ecclesiastical property in October 1789, dissolved monasteries and convents and forbade new religious vows in February 1790, and introduced the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in July 1790. Some college administrators, such as Alexander Gordon, the principal of the Scots College 19  For a case study of Paris, see L. W. Brockliss, ‘The University of Paris and the Maintenance of Catholicism in the British Isles, 1426–1789: A Study in Clerical Recruitment’, in Dominique Julia and Jacques Revel (eds.), Les universités européennes du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle. Histoire sociale des populations étudiantes, 2 vols. (Paris, 1986–9), II, pp. 596–605; McInally, The Sixth Scottish University, pp. 201–8. 20  Liam Chambers, ‘The Irish in Europe in the Eighteenth Century, 1691–1815’, in James Kelly (ed.), The Cambridge History of Ireland, iii: 1730–1880 (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 588–91. 21  Flood to Plunkett, 8 June 1783, in Cogan, Diocese of Meath, III, p. 89.

188  Liam Chambers in Paris, decided that the solution was to sell their property and relocate, but this would have required the agreement of the French government, which was not forthcoming.22 John Baptist Walsh, the superior of the Irish Collège des Lombards, adopted a more circumspect approach. He argued (at least in public) that his college should be exempted from nationalization on the basis of a distinct national identity, allied with close attachment to France and, indeed, the Revolution. Walsh’s lobbying succeeded and the National Constituent Assembly exempted from nationalization not only the Collège des Lombards, but all of the ‘institutions of education, study or simply religious, made in France by foreigners, and for themselves’.23 Foreign nationality also ensured that the British and Irish administrators and students in the colleges did not have to take a position on the clerical oath recognizing the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, introduced in December 1790, which effectively split the French Church into constitutional and refractory groups. While the colleges adapted they became increasingly anomalous, and British and Irish priests and students encountered problems, especially from 1791 onwards. In Paris, Irish priests at the Collège des Lombards were unable to say Mass in local churches, with severe financial consequences. Charles McCarthy, a priest at the college, reported to Francis Leahy, the guardian of the Irish Franciscan college in Louvain, on 5 May 1791: ‘As we have lost every prospect of future existence in this unhallowed city, and our house now being on the brink of utter ruin, our society begins now to disperse.’24 Even more worrying were the intermittent attacks on Irish, English, and Scots colleges that occurred in the same year. An attack on the English College, Douai, was waylaid only when a group of students met the crowd with shouts of ‘Vive la Nation!’25 In Toulouse, the Irish College was menaced by the military barracks established next door in a former Ursuline convent.26 Although Walsh employed pro-­Revolutionary rhetoric in public, the two Irish colleges in Paris also opened their doors to refractory clergy and their congregants, which explains why they were targeted by Revolutionary crowds in September and October 1791. As the Revolution radicalized in the late summer and early autumn of 1792, the colleges came under more intense pressure. The collapse of the monarchy in August and the creation of a republic coincided with a crack-­down on refractory clergy, further legislation against religious practice, and, most starkly of all, the 22  M.  G.  Rapport, ‘A Community Apart? The Closure of the Scots College in Paris during the French Revolution, 1789–1794’, Innes Review, 53 (2002), p. 89–90. 23  Loi relative aux établissemens d’études, d’enseignemens, ou simplement religieux, faits en France par des étrangers, & pour eux memes (Paris, 1790). 24  Charles McCarthy to Francis Leahy, 5 May 1791, in Brendan Jennings (ed.), Louvain Papers, 1606–1827 (Dublin 1968), pp. 492–3. 25 Milburn, A History of Ushaw College, p. 30. 26 T. J. Walsh, The Irish Continental College Movement: The Colleges at Bordeaux, Toulouse and Lille (Dublin, 1973), pp. 137–8.

Colleges, Seminaries, Male Religious Houses  189 September massacres in Paris, which resulted in the murder of around 230 priests out of a total of 1,300 victims killed in just three days.27 Massacres occurred close to the British and Irish colleges and convents in the French capital, and included victims from university colleges, seminaries, religious communities, and parishes with strong connections to them.28 The events of the early autumn prompted Alexander Gordon to leave Paris, placing the Scots College in the care of Alexander Innes. However, the impact on the colleges was not as severe as might have been expected.29 On 26 September, John Farquharson, the principal of the Scots College, Douai, despaired at news of the Irish and English institutions in Paris, but he reported to Bishop George Hay that ‘This is rather alarming for us others, yet hitherto we’re left unmolested.’30 Indeed, the colleges still had sufficient ability to protect their interests. When a group of pro-­Revolutionary students and former students took control of the Irish College on rue du Cheval Vert in Paris, Charles Kearney, the superior, was able to appeal to the Girondin minister of foreign affairs, Pierre Lebrun-­Tondu, and the status quo was restored within a few weeks.31 Richard Marsh, the prior of the English Benedictines at Dieulouard, even sought to overcome his house’s financial worries by purchasing nationalized land in December 1792.32 Ultimately, even the more challenging landscape of later 1792 did not result in the closure of the colleges. While some students decided to leave, new ones continued to arrive in France as late as 1793, no doubt propelled by the continued availability of bursaries (bourses), where these existed. The outbreak of war between Britain and France in February 1793 was the event which rendered the difficult position of the colleges almost impossible. On 13 February 1793, the Revolutionary authorities seized the Irish College in Nantes and arranged for the superior and seventeen remaining students to return to Ireland.33 Five days later, the municipal authorities in Douai took charge of the British and Irish colleges and held the remaining officials and students. Farquharson and the students of the Scots College took the opportunity to leave, but the majority of the students at the English College remained. In fact, the Revolutionary authorities did not fully move against the colleges at this point. 27  Nigel Aston, Religion and Revolution in France, 1780–1804 (Basingstoke, 2000), p. 183. 28 Haim Burstin, Une révolution à l’oeuvre. Le Faubourg Saint-­ Marcel, 1789–1794 (Seyssel, 2005), p. 427. 29 Christine Johnson, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, 1789–1829 (Edinburgh, 1983), p. 98. 30 Johnson, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, p. 94. 31  Mathieu Ferradou, ‘ “La République au collège”, Paris, 29 octobre 1792. Catholicisme, radicalisme et républicanisme entre France et Irlande pendant la Révolution française (1792–1795)’, Études Irlandaises, 41 (2016), pp. 119–33. 32 Michael Rapport, Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France: The Treatment of Foreigners (Oxford, 2000), p. 170; see also Cormac Begadon, ‘Responses to Revolution: The Experiences of the English Benedictine Monks in the French Revolution, 1789–93’, British Catholic History, 34 (2018) 106–28. 33  Jules Mathorez, ‘Notes sur les prêtres irlandais réfugiés à Nantes aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’, Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France, 14 (1912), p. 172.

190  Liam Chambers In February and March 1793, the Convention confirmed that the foreign colleges could receive the revenues due to them for the first six months of the year and that the law of November 1790 remained in force.34 As late as September 1793, a group of students at the Irish College on rue du Cheval Vert in Paris petitioned the Convention to be allowed to continue their studies and protested their loyalty to France: ‘we do not concede in republican feelings to any citizen’.35 This small group were a pro-­Revolutionary minority but even they could not save themselves. On 9 October 1793, the Convention ordered the arrest of British and Irish subjects. This resulted in the closure of the colleges which had remained open, and the detention of many of the officials and students who had stayed in France. In Paris, the Irish, English, and Scots colleges were all seized. The Irish College on rue du Cheval Vert was converted into a temporary prison and the students found themselves confined within, along with some English and Scots. The authorities also took control of the Irish colleges in Bordeaux, Lille, and Toulouse. The students at Bordeaux were repatriated. By this stage, the houses of the Irish regulars in France—­the Franciscans at Boulay, the Capuchins at Wassy and Bar-­ sur-­Aube—­had closed and their communities had dispersed.36 At Dieulouard, Richard Marsh had made careful preparation for closure, which finally occurred in October. The seizure of property had begun in Douai earlier in the year and was completed in October, when the remaining priests and students were im­prisoned. A group of English students from Douai were held for fourteen months, mainly at a prison in Doullens, along with some English Benedictines and, briefly, a group of students from the English College at St Omer. Irish, English, and Scots officials and students in Paris and Douellens were released in the autumn of 1794. While some returned to their colleges, the buildings were mere shells and very few former residents remained in France. On 2 March 1795, thirty-­two officials and students from Douai (including six Benedictines), along with a further sixty-­two from St Omer, finally crossed the Channel from Calais to Dover.37 As the French Revolutionary army moved into the southern Netherlands, from 1793 onwards the Irish and English colleges closed there too, including the three Irish colleges in Louvain (Franciscan, Dominican, and ‘pastoral’ or secular). The English College of the ‘Gentlemen of Liège’ had experienced more upheaval than any of the Continental colleges in the decades before 1789. The Liège Revolution, and the war between Austria and France created further uncertainty, finally broken by the French victory at Fleurus in 1794 which preceded the formal annexation of the southern Netherlands. This persuaded the community of

34 Rapport, Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, p. 170. 35 ‘Pétition des Etudians Irlandois au Citoyen Président de la Convention’, 7 octobre [1793], Archives Nationales (France), C 271, dossier 666, pièce 29. 36 Fenning, The Undoing of the Friars, pp. 379–80. 37 Milburn, A History of Ushaw College, pp. 22–5.

Colleges, Seminaries, Male Religious Houses  191 priests and students to leave Liège, via Rotterdam, on an eventful journey to England.38 The suppressions and confiscations in France and the southern Netherlands reduced the Continental college network to the institutions in Italy and Iberia. The French occupied Rome on 10 February 1798 and the declaration of the Roman Republic followed eight days later before Pius VI was taken prisoner to France. The following month, Paul MacPherson, a prominent Scottish priest, escorted most of the Irish, English, and Scottish students to England.39 In Rome, the Irish Dominican John Connolly and the Irish Franciscan James MacCormick worked to preserve their institutions, but republican authorities quickly suppressed all of the British and Irish colleges in the city. The perseverance of Connolly and MacCormick was not, however, in vain: their colleges survived until the collapse of the republic in 1799 and the restoration of Pius VII the following year. The same was not the case for the Irish Augustinian College at San Matteo in Merulana, which was sold off and demolished.40 The Irish, English, and Scots colleges for seculars survived too, with some help from the British government, but like the regular houses they did not reopen before the second French occupation in 1808 cast doubt on their future once more. The closure of the colleges elsewhere on the Continent ensured that English, Scots, and Irish houses in Iberia—­at Valladolid, Salamanca, and even Lisbon—­ took on a new importance which they were unable to meet. In 1802, Thomas Taylor, the rector of the English College at Valladolid, advised Bishop John Douglass, vicar apostolic of the London District, that he should not send new students to the college that year. Douglass accepted the advice, but he looked forward to ‘San Albano maintaining 30 students within her walls at one time. The prospect will then in truth brighten and compensate for losses at Rome and France’. As Michael Williams notes, Douglass’s comments underline the fact that ‘there were no signs that the Bishops wanted to give up the idea of Continental colleges’.41 In reality the English College was in a very difficult position in the early years of the nineteenth century and the Peninsular War only exacerbated the situation. The French occupied Valladolid in 1808 and the small community of fourteen students began to depart, although the last student left only in 1812.42 John Gordon, the rector at the Scots College, took a similar decision in December 1808, sending four students home, while a single student, Alexander MacKenzie, along with Gordon and Alexander Cameron, remained. From 1811, Cameron 38 T. E. Muir Stonyhurst, rev. edn (Cirencester, 2006), pp. 80–1. 39 Johnson, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, p. 106. 40  Karen Harvey, ‘Religion and Money: Irish Regular Colleges in the Roman Republic of 1798–99’, in Eighteenth-­Century Ireland, 8 (1993), pp. 73–82; Leonard Boyle, San Clemente Miscellany, i: The Community of SS. Sisto e Clemente in Rome, 1677–1977 (Rome, 1977), pp. 59–71. 41 Michael E. Williams, St Alban’s College, Valladolid: Four Centuries of English Presence in Spain (London, 1986), p. 119–20. 42 Williams, St Alban’s College, Valladolid, p. 122.

192  Liam Chambers kept a lonely watch in the college.43 The French did not take Salamanca until the following year, when the students at the Irish College left. Patrick Curtis, a future archbishop of Armagh, remained as rector, although he was forced to leave the city on three occasions.44 As in Rome, the closures in Valladolid and Salamanca were not permanent. The English and Irish colleges in Lisbon also closed tem­por­ ar­ily during the French occupation of the city between 1807 and 1813.

Domestic Colleges, 1793–1829 The closure of the Continental colleges and, more generally, the disruption of Catholic student mobility from Britain and Ireland to the Continent encouraged the establishment or development of domestic institutions for the formation of clergy and the education of lay students. The British government was willing to  facilitate the bishops, finding common cause in opposition to the French Revolution. In Ireland, colleges established following a Catholic Relief Act of 1782, which permitted the foundation of Catholic schools, were developed as small seminaries from 1793, notably in Kilkenny and Carlow. Further diocesan seminaries followed, for example in Waterford (1807), but most bishops could not muster the resources to fund their own institutions. Elsewhere, bishops attempted to provide basic formation to would-­be priests, but in many cases ­bishops must have simply continued the standard practice of antecedent ordination but without the ability to send the newly ordained to Paris, Nantes, or one of the other Irish colleges abroad. By 1793–4, the Irish bishops had initiated a campaign to permit them to establish endowed seminaries, directed at the Irish administration in Dublin. They argued that they were unwilling to expose students to Revolutionary ideas in France and they extolled the benefits of domestic sem­in­ar­ies which would ensure a loyal clergy. As John Thomas Troy, the archbishop of Dublin, explained in November 1793, Irish students travelling to France even after a counter-­Revolution, ‘would be exposed to the great danger of imbibing seditious maxims and propagating them afterwards in this kingdom’.45 The overtures of Troy and the other bishops made little headway before the calamitous lord lieutenancy of Earl Fitzwilliam in early 1795, which held out the promise of Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform, before his swift recall in late February. One of the consequences was that the new lord lieutenant, Earl Camden, was willing to concede a higher education college to Irish Catholics in an attempt to shore up their loyalty without agreeing to further political relief. As a result, the 43  Maurice Taylor, The Scots College in Spain (Valladolid, 1971), pp. 161–9. 44  León M. Gómez Rivas, ‘Letters from the Irish College in Salamanca during the Peninsular Wars (1808–14)’, Archivium Hibernicum, 64 (2011), pp. 194–208. 45  Cited in Vincent J. McNally, ‘John Thomas Troy, Archbishop of Dublin, and the Establishment of St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, 1791–5’, Catholic Historical Review, 67 (1981), p. 571.

Colleges, Seminaries, Male Religious Houses  193 Irish parliament approved legislation for the creation of the Royal College of St  Patrick, which opened in Maynooth, County Kildare, later in the year. The government funded the college, which was governed by twenty-­one trustees: ten lay (four Protestants and six Catholics), along with ten bishops and the president of the institution.46 The significance of the establishment of Maynooth College lay not only in the creation of an embryonic alternative to the Continental colleges, but in the rapprochement that it represented between the British and Irish administrations and the Irish Catholic hierarchy which had co­alesced around opposition to France and the French Revolution. Although low-­level Protestant antipathy towards the college endured, especially in 1798 and again in 1803, the Irish parliament, and subsequently the United Kingdom parliament, provided the college with an annual grant, which stabilized at £9,673 from 1813 onwards. This was sufficient to finance an impressive building programme, although conditions were always very challenging as the student body rose quickly to 200, before increasing to 250 after 1808, 350 by 1820, and approaching 450 by 1830. Initially, the college continued the Continental practice of accepting older, ordained students, but this ended in 1799, with important consequences for the social background of the students: the number of poorer students (for whom ante­cedent ordination permitted study) must have thinned, to be replaced by students of at least modest means.47 The college—­like its Continental predecessors—­could not keep pace with the rapid population growth in Ireland and the priest to ­people ratio rose in consequence. As Troy commented in 1802, ‘We daily witness an alarming decrease of clergy.’48 In the 1790s, and probably beyond, bishops, especially in the poorer dioceses, resorted to whatever means necessary to provide sufficient clergy.49 From the beginning the Maynooth trustees envisaged the provision of education for lay students as well as seminarians. A lay college opened in 1800, but closed after seventeen years. At this stage Catholic lay students had more opportunities: Trinity College, Dublin, opened its doors to them in 1793, while medical students had been travelling in increasing numbers to Scottish universities in the later eighteenth century. Irish Catholic families of sufficient means sent their sons to the English colleges at Douai, St Omer, and Liège before the Revolution, and turned to the successor institutions established in England from the mid-­1790s. The establishment of Clongowes Wood College (1814) and Tullabeg College 46  See the excellent account in Dáire Keogh, ‘The French Disease’: The Catholic Church and Irish Radicalism, 1790–1800 (Dublin, 1993), pp. 68–88; Patrick Corish, Maynooth College, 1795–1995 (Dublin, 1995), pp. 1–25; McNally, ‘John Thomas Troy’, pp. 565–88. 47 Corish, Maynooth College, chs. 2–3; Eighth Report of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry, p. 452, H.C. 1826–7 (509), xiii, 990. 48  John Thomas Troy to Alexander Cameron, 22 November 1802, Scottish Catholic Archives, Blairs Letters, BL 4/197/12. 49  Emmet Larkin, The Pastoral Role of the Roman Catholic Church in Pre-­Famine Ireland, 1750–1850 (Dublin, 2006), pp. 41–5.

194  Liam Chambers (1818) created opportunities at home, although as Ciaran O’Neill has noted a Catholic who received ‘an extensive and holistic intermediate education in the first half of the nineteenth century in Ireland was likely to have been either sponsored by the clergy or relatively wealthy in their own right’.50 The closure of the Continental colleges was especially challenging for the Irish regular clergy, whose numbers had been in decline since before the 1751 decree of Propaganda ordering the closure of their domestic novitiates. While Propaganda allowed a limited intake of new novices at home from 1773 onwards, the decline continued. As Joseph McMahon has commented in relation to the Irish Franciscans: ‘What had befallen the Continental colleges was symptomatic of what was taking place in the province.’51 In 1800 there were 400 regulars in Ireland; this had reduced to 165 by 1840.52 The closure of the colleges appears to have necessitated a domestic system of novitiate and formation, which was only overcome with the reopening of the Roman colleges.53 In his history of Maynooth College, Patrick Corish noted the French influence on the nascent institution, although this was already on the wane by 1829. French influence was evident in England too, but in a different manner, as successor institutions emerged to the Continental colleges in Douai and Liège, as well the Benedictine network. Indeed, England experienced a flood of arrivals from France in the early 1790s, among them French exile clergy, English female religious, and officials and students from the English colleges. The English bishops were as anxious as their Irish counterparts to find alternatives to the Continental colleges, especially as students arrived back in England from Douai in 1792 and 1793. On 16 November 1793, John Douglass marked the inauguration of a sem­in­ ary, St Edmund’s College, at Old Hall Green Academy, a school in Ware, Hertfordshire. The new, initially temporary, seminary was quickly overflowing with students, and by 1794 northern arrivals from Douai were sent closer to home, some to a school at Tudhoe in Durham and, from September 1794, to a more permanent base at Crook Hall. While the English bishops, especially Douglass in London and William Gibson, a former president of Douai College, now vicar apostolic of the Northern District, engaged in protracted discussions about the possibility of a single college to replace Douai, no agreement was reached. In 1795 the architect James Taylor drew up plans for a new college building at Ware, which was largely completed in 1799 and students moved in during January 1800. The college struggled through the first two decades of the

50  Ciaran O’Neill, Catholics of Consequence: Transnational Education, Social Mobility, and the Irish Catholic Elite, 1850–1900 (Oxford, 2014), p. 27. 51  Joseph MacMahon, ‘The Silent Century, 1698–1829’, in Edel Breathnach, Joseph MacMahon, and John McCafferty (eds.), The Irish Franciscans, 1534–1990 (Dublin, 2009), p. 82. 52 Larkin, The Pastoral Role, pp. 45–7. 53  Patrick Conlan, ‘Reforming and Seeking an Identity, 1829–1918’, in Breathnach, MacMahon, and McCafferty (eds.), The Irish Franciscans, p. 104.

Colleges, Seminaries, Male Religious Houses  195 nineteenth century. In 1818, William Poynter, former president and now vicar apostolic of the London District, reduced the student numbers from eighty to around fifty by closing it to ‘secular students’, leaving an ‘ecclesiastical establishment’ with a lay preparatory school attached. Meanwhile, Crook Hall accommodated twenty-­five students at the outset in 1794, but reached sixty by 1807. They could not all be accommodated, so twenty students resided at Tudhoe Academy. In 1808 the students transferred to a new, permanent, but unfinished college at Ushaw, where forty-­seven students and five professors began the year, rising to eighty by July 1809, this despite a typhus outbreak which caused the death of five students. By 1811, the college accommodated 130 students and Gibson initiated the construction of an east wing in 1812, completed following a successful appeal for funding by 1819, although the college was in perennial debt.54 The disruption caused by the French Revolution also created the opportunity for a new initiative, realized in the foundation of St Mary’s College, Oscott, which opened in early 1794 under the presidency of John Bew, who had been superior of the English College in Paris. The college was closely associated with the Cisalpine Club and was managed by lay and clerical governors. While the college provided formation to clerical students, it concentrated more fully on the education of lay students even after crippling debts encouraged the governors (labelled the ‘old government’) to hand over the college—­which had only thirty-­seven ­students—­to the decidedly anti-­Cisalpine victor apostolic of the Midland District, John Milner.55 In 1794, the former Jesuits and their students at the English College in Liège had settled in Stonyhurst, Lancashire, in consequence of a donation made by the prominent Catholic landowner Thomas Weld of Lulworth. The early decades were taken up with improving the existing building and expanding it, although as Thomas Muir has commented ‘conditions remained extremely tough’.56 This did not prevent the expansion of the number of students, from an initial twelve in October 1794 to more than 250 after 1812. The college also faced problems arising from the uncertain status of the former Jesuits who ran the college, suspicion from the local population, and issues with the vicars apostolic. The tensions contributed to a decline in student numbers, but they had recovered to some extent by the time Leo XII approved the formal restoration of the Society of Jesus in England in 1829.57 Indeed, as Maurice Whitehead has argued, Weld’s benefaction ensured the survival of English Jesuit education and it ‘provided the infrastructure to allow their contribution to the English Catholic Enlightenment

54  Bernard Ward, The History of St Edmund’s College, Old Hall (London, 1893), chs. 6–10; Peter Phillips, ‘Replanting Douai in the North of England, 1794–1808’, Recusant History, 29 (2009), pp. 367–79; Milburn, A History of Ushaw College, parts 1–2; Eamon Duffy, ‘Introduction: Historical’, in James E. Kelly (ed.), Treasures of Ushaw College: Durham’s Hidden Gem (London, 2015), pp. 17–18. 55 Michael E. Williams, Oscott College in the Twentieth Century (Leominister, 2001), pp. 2–3. 56 Muir, Stonyhurst, p. 87. 57 Muir, Stonyhurst, pp. 83–97.

196  Liam Chambers to continue and develop’.58 Like the former Jesuits at Liège, two of the English Benedictine houses on the Continent founded colleges in England, although their establishment was much more convoluted. Some of the monks of St Gregory’s at Douai shared the prison experience of their English College neighbours before they finally reached England in 1795. The community established itself at Acton Burnell in Shropshire before moving to a new and permanent home at Downside in 1814. Some of the Dieulouard Benedictines also experienced imprisonment before re-­establishing their community at Wooton Hall, Warwickshire, as well as Acton Burnell, which preceded the foundation made at Ampleforth, Yorkshire, in 1802. The Paris community regrouped in the former home of their Douai confreres in 1818.59 The situation in Scotland illustrates a third means of dealing with the closures on the Continent: reliance on what had been clandestine domestic colleges. George Hay, the vicar apostolic of the Lowland District, had been aware of the inadequacy of the seminary at Scalan since taking up his position in 1778.60 The Scottish Catholic Relief Act of 1793, coupled with the closure at Douai, encouraged a move to a more appropriate site and building. In October 1796, Hay acquired a farm at Aquhorties, near Invernurie, and the seminary for the Lowland District moved there in 1799. Tellingly, the government provided £600 towards the construction of the new building, along with an (irregularly paid) annual grant of £50, which stopped in 1805. Hay also raised funds among Scottish Catholics and attempted to do so in England, apparently without success. In fact, the seminary relied on the income from the surrounding farm and was plagued by financial problems. The college was small, built for twenty students and three masters, but had only ten clerical and four lay students in 1801. Nonetheless, the conditions were a considerable improvement on Scalan, and Hay’s intent was clear from his published Regulations for the Administration of the College of Aquhorties (Edinburgh, 1799).61 Indeed, despite the challenges, the modest success of Aquhorties is evident when contrasted with the challenge of proving a college for the Highland District. A small college at Guidal had been dispersed in 1746 and a replacement was not established until the foundation of a college at Glenfinnan in 1768, which moved to Buorblach in 1770, before another move, this time to Samalaman in 1783. The recurring issue of finance resulted in a poorly provided building. A decade after it opened, the recently appointed Bishop John Chisholm reported that ‘This house, unfinish’d, takes in water through the

58 Whitehead, English Jesuit Education, p. 191. 59  Alban Hood, From Repatriation to Revival: Continuity and Change in the English Benedictine Congregation 1795–1850 (Farnborough, 2014). 60 Watts, Scalan, p. 214. 61 Johnson, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, pp. 77, 195–216; Frans Blom, Jos Blom, Frans Korsten and Geoffrey Scott (eds.), The Correspondence of James Peter Coghlan (1731–1800), CRS 80 (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 297.

Colleges, Seminaries, Male Religious Houses  197 walls and if not repair’d will fall’.62 Eventually, in 1803, the college transferred again, to Lismore. Chisholm’s plan was to fund the Lismore College through the manufacture and sale of lime on the surrounding farm at Kilcheran. In 1804, lime kilns and a quay were constructed for the business, but it never proved sufficient and the tiny college, normally of eight or nine students with one master, struggled on all fronts until the little community finally moved temporarily to Aquhorties in 1828.63 The move was precipitated by the decision of John Menzies of Pitfodels in 1826 to gift his estate at Blairs, just outside Aberdeen, for the provision initially of a replacement for Aquhorties and ultimately for a college for the entire Scottish Catholic mission created to accommodate sixty students. On 2 June 1829, the community at Aquhorties, perhaps comprising twenty-­six students, made the journey to Blairs.64 The opening of the new college in the year of Catholic emancipation stood in sharp contrast to the events of 1746 which opened this chapter.

Continental Recovery and Revival, 1794–1829 While the British and Irish bishops successfully established domestic institutions from the mid-­1790s, they also hoped to revive the Continental colleges or, at the very least, to recover as much pre-­Revolutionary revenue as possible. The early histories of Maynooth, Ushaw or St Edmund’s, Ware, never mind the struggles at Aquhorties or Lismore, ensured an acute sense of the loss of significant properties and investments abroad. British and Irish Catholics could draw on very modest levels of government funding, as well as the resources of expanding Catholic communities, but these were never sufficient and financial insecurity combined with continuing political uncertainty to push the bishops to work towards revival or recovery abroad, with mixed results. As we have noted, the French authorities released former British and Irish college officials and students from prison in 1794 and most left France. At this point, the British and Irish bishops had no means of working towards recovery or revival, but the very small band of former college officials who remained in France were able to assert their claims to the colleges. The key figure was John Baptist Walsh, the former administrator of the Irish Collège des Lombards in Paris. Walsh had been imprisoned in 1793, but he was free by December 1794 when he began a campaign of support for a group of former Irish College officials and students. Walsh aligned himself and his colleagues with the Revolution, noting that they had been ‘driven from their country by British despotism’, placing 62 Johnson, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, p. 76. 63 Johnson, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, pp. 71–8, 231–5; Alexander S. MacWilliam, ‘The Highland Seminary at Lismore, 1803–1828’, Innes Review, 8 (1957), pp. 30–8. 64 Johnson, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, pp. 236–43.

198  Liam Chambers them out of step with the Irish bishops. In response, the Convention provided modest practical support and in September 1795 Walsh and his colleague, Charles Kearney, the superior of the Irish College on rue du Cheval Vert in Paris, were restored to possession of the college property and revenues. Walsh and Kearney faced almost insurmountable educational, ecclesiastical, and, above all, financial challenges and therefore had little option but to rent out the two Irish colleges as they battled competing claims to the properties, notably those of the Prytanée français, in the later 1790s.65 Elsewhere, individuals sustained similar campaigns. In Louvain, a small group of Irish Franciscans headed by James Cowan remained in their college in the hope of recovering the property. Luke Bellew in Douai and James Blake in Bordeaux campaigned for the recovery of Irish colleges in their respective cities, as did the Scottish priest Alexander Innes and the English Benedictine Henry Parker in Paris. The concordat (15 July 1801) and the Peace of Amiens (25 March 1802–18 May  1803) provided opportunities for renewed British and Irish interest in the colleges. In some cases, college properties had already been ‘sold and resold’, as John Farquharson reported on the former Scots College in Douai in March 1802, and there was no hope of recovery.66 The future of many of the French colleges hung in the balance, however, until the Consulate decided their fate in a flurry of decrees issued between 1801 and 1805. On 16 September 1801, a Consular decree confirmed that the Irish and Scots colleges in Paris could continue to enjoy their property and revenues, which would be administered by their respective su­per­ iors and employed for the education of young men from Ireland and Scotland. Crucially, the decree placed the colleges under the surveillance of a ‘bureau gratuit’ composed of three State officials and two nominees of the first consul.67 Essentially, the Bureau replaced the ancien régime structures within which the colleges had operated and brought them directly under the superintendence of the French State. In 1802, the Bureau united all of the Irish and Scots colleges in France to the Parisian institutions in a single institution (établissement). Peter Flood, acting as representative of the four Irish archbishops, favoured the union of the Irish colleges, and Alexander Cameron, coadjutor vicar apostolic of the Lowland District, had supported a similar move for the Scots colleges, but neither were satisfied with the final decision. In February 1803 Walsh was appointed administrator and, in June, the English colleges in France were annexed to the already complex établissement. An imperial decree of 18 May 1805 ‘definitively confirmed’ the amalgamation of the Irish, Scots, and English colleges, the ­rev­enues to be used to open the Irish College on rue du Cheval Vert in Paris.

65  Liam Swords, The Green Cockade: The Irish in the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Sandycove, 1989), pp. 100–5. 66  Cited in Johnson, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, p. 182. 67  Bulletin des lois de la République française, 101 (Paris, [1801]), pp. 346–8.

Colleges, Seminaries, Male Religious Houses  199 A victory for Walsh, his main challenge was to find students: the British and Irish bishops resolutely opposed sending any to what John Farquharson called Walsh’s ‘heterogenous shop’. As an alternative, the college developed into an institution for French pennsionnaires, as well as the children of Irish, English, and Scots migrants, with strong connections to the French military and especially to Napoleon’s Irish Legion. In 1809 Walsh was deposed as administrator and the Bureau placed Henry Parker, the English Benedictine, in charge, at least provisionally. Under Parker, the college was forced to provide a temporary home to a group of foreign clergy who had been expelled from Rome: mainly Irish, but including one English, four Maltese, and one Albanian. By 1813, the college was under the administration of a former Irish priest, Richard Ferris, who was deeply antithetical to the interests of the British and Irish Churches.68 The Restoration of Louis XVIII in 1814 precipitated a new and complex wrangle for control of the French colleges and their revenues. The Irish bishops ­succeeded in having Paul Long recognized by the French government as ­administrator in January 1815 and they finally resumed sending students from 1817. Richard Ferris retained strong connections, however. He remained an influential member of the Bureau and he even made an unlikely comeback as administrator for a brief period in 1820, before the position was given to Charles Kearney, who had been college superior on the outbreak of the French Revolution three decades earlier. While the reopening of the Scots and English colleges was not an option, students from Scotland and England were funded by their respective recovered revenues to study in France. Moreover, Irish, English, and Scottish interests, notably Daniel Murray, William Poynter, and Alexander Patterson, pressed for a more favourable settlement and were jubilant in 1824 when the Bureau was abolished and the Irish, English, and Scottish revenues were sep­ar­ ated. Following a very difficult period in the later 1820s, the Irish College in Paris developed into a modest sized seminary, while the English and Scottish rev­enues (or fondations) continued to be used to support students housed elsewhere in Paris.69 The French reoccupation of Rome in 1808 created further uncertainty for the British and Irish colleges in the city and their re-­establishment occurred grad­ ual­ly only from 1814 onwards. For example, Paul MacPherson, the former su­per­ ior, returned to the Scots College in 1814 and encouraged the bishops to send students in 1818, although it was 1820 before the first five arrived from Lismore 68  ‘Extracts from the Minutes of the Bureau Gratuit (19 June 1802 – 8 October 1810)’, Russell Library, Maynooth University, Irish College Paris Papers, MS 61; Swords, The Green Cockade, chs. 11–19. 69  Liam Chambers, ‘The “British Establishments”, the Irish College in Paris and Restoration France’, in Liam Chambers and Thomas O’Connor (eds.), Forming Catholic Communities: Irish, Scots and English College Networks in Europe, 1568–1918 (Leiden, 2018), pp. 261–84; Iida Saarinen, ‘The Trouble with France: Making Scots Priests in France’, in Chambers and O’Connor (eds.), Forming Catholic Communities, pp. 286–8.

200  Liam Chambers and Aquhorties.70 The English College reopened under Robert Gradwell in 1818, with ten students (six from Ushaw and four from Old Hall) in the week before Christmas. One of the arrivals, Nicholas Wiseman, would take up the position of rector on Gradwell’s appointment to the episcopacy.71 The Irish Franciscans reasserted control of St Isidore’s in 1814, a consequence of the patient campaign waged by James MacCormick. The Irish Dominican community re-­established itself in 1816, initially in a temporary home, before moving to Santa Maria della Pace and, finally, back to San Clemente in January 1825.72 The secular Irish College was also much slower to reopen. In 1819, it was merged with the Collegio Urbano, of Propaganda Fide, before Michael Blake arrived in Rome to lobby for re-­establishment. This finally took place in 1826, but in a new building in via delle Botteghe Oscure.73 Under Paul Cullen, who was appointed rector in 1831, the college expanded, moved to new premises, and slowly developed into a much more significant institution for the Irish Church than had been the case in the eighteenth century. The Spanish colleges also reopened after the fall of Napoleon’s Empire. The presence of Alexander Cameron ensured that the Scots College in Valladolid was still standing at the end of the Peninsular War, even if the billeting of French troops had ‘reduced [it] to tatters’.74 The pressing needs of the Scottish Church might explain why the college received students earlier than the English or Irish colleges: twelve students arrived in 1816. In 1813, William Irving was appointed rector of the English College in Valladolid, but like many of his con­ tem­por­ar­ies he faced a daunting task. In November 1814, he explained to a correspondent: ‘The debts exceed 300,000 reales, and there was not a farthing.’ In 1820, the college accepted new students for the first time, seven in total, but the numbers remained low for the remainder of the decade before later increasing.75 In Salamanca, the Irish College was in very poor condition and while a new rector, Patrick Mangan, arrived in Spain in 1817, it was 1821 before the Irish College consisting of ten students and staff was provided with a new home in the Colegio de Arzobispo Fonseca (they were evicted in 1830 but reinstated seven years later).76 While the British and Irish bishops worked for the recovery and revival of the Continental colleges in France, they also grasped the opportunity presented by the end of the Napoleonic war to press for compensation for losses in France. Under the treaties of Paris of 1814 and 1815, France agreed to compensate British subjects who had lost property in France and a joint or ‘mixed’ commission of

70 Johnson, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, pp. 190–1. 71 Williams, The Venerable English College, Rome, pp. 82–3, 93–8. 72 Boyle, San Clemente Miscellany, pp. 89–107. 73 Korten, Half-­Truths, pp. 260–80. 74 Taylor, The Scots College in Spain, p. 167. 75 Williams, St Alban’s College, Valladolid, pp. 126–39. 76  Monica Henchy, ‘The Irish College at Salamanca’ Studies, 70 (1981), p. 224; D.  J.  O’Doherty, ‘Students of the Irish College, Salamanca’, Archivium Hibernicum, 6 (1917), pp. 22–3.

Colleges, Seminaries, Male Religious Houses  201 British and French appointees set about the task of adjudicating claims. In 1818, the French and British governments negotiated a new convention whereby a British commission would decide on the remaining cases for which the French provided funding. The claims submitted by the English, Scots, and Irish colleges and religious houses (male and female) were the most substantial of those con­ sidered by the commissioners. Following years of complex negotiations, in which William Poynter, vicar apostolic of the London District, played a leading role, the commissioners rejected the claims on 19 January 1824. The Privy Council confirmed the decision following an appeal by the English colleges in Douai, Paris, and St Omer on 25 November 1825, which also meant that the claims of the other British and Irish institutions fell. The basis for the rejection was significant. The Privy Council found that the colleges ‘were in the nature of French corporations; they were locally established in a foreign territory, because they could not exist in England; their end and object were not authorized by, but were directly opposed to, British law . . . they must be deemed French establishments’.77 Poynter, who had expended so much time and resources on the claims, was bitterly disappointed. He was in no doubt about the reason for the rejection: ‘£120,00 have been denied to us . . . Justice is . . . denied to us because we are Catholics’.78 When an appeal was taken in Paul Long’s name in 1832, on behalf of ‘the Irish Roman Catholic colleges in France’, it fared no better. Daniel O’Connell and Michael Quin argued that the Irish colleges’ case was ‘clearly distinguishable’ from that of the English colleges, but ultimately the Privy Council found that on one of Lord Gifford’s key reasons for his decision, no distinction was to be made: ‘These colleges were French establishments, and that fact is conclusive’.79

Conclusion In the early twentieth century Bernard Ward, historian of the English ‘Catholic revival’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and president of the St Edmund’s College, Ware, reflected confidently on the closure of the Continental colleges in the 1790s: ‘that which seemed at the time so great a calamity to the Church in England, in the end turned out to be a blessing’.80 Ward was certainly correct that the closures appeared calamitous to contemporaries, Irish and Scottish, as well as English. In the mid-­eighteenth century, the British and Irish 77  Jerome William Knapp, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined before the Committees of His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council, Appointed to Hear Appeals and Petitions, 3 vols. (London, 1829–36), II, p. 48. 78 Cited in Bernard Ward, The Eve of Catholic Emancipation being the History of the English Catholics during the First Thirty Years of the Nineteenth Century, 3 vols. (London, 1911–12), III, p. 149. For a useful overview of the ‘Douay claims’ case from an English Catholic perspective, see pp. 128–49. 79 Knapp, Reports, II pp. 52, 58. 80  Bernard Ward, The Dawn of the Catholic Revival in England, 1781–1803, 2 vols. (London, 1909), II, p. 69.

202  Liam Chambers colleges on the Continent played vital roles both in the maintenance of Catholicism at home and the migration of Catholics abroad. As we have seen, the colleges were already under pressure in the decades preceding the French Revolution, but the events of the 1790s still marked a profound change, forcing the closure of colleges, and the hasty and haphazard creation of a network of successor and new institutions at home. In the early nineteenth century, the uneven results fostered a nostalgia among some bishops and clergy for what had been lost. In 1806, James MacLachlan, a Scottish priest, commented in a letter to his bishop that ‘The want of a foreign education I consider as a loss in different respects, but chiefly because I have not seen religion in its splendour with regard to its exterior part.’81 MacLachlan’s observation was important, but perhaps the most significant loss was one of autonomy. The French Revolution ensured that colleges which had been only loosely, if at all, controlled by the British and Irish bishops gave way to new institutions founded or guided by the episcopacy. The bishops were also keen to fill the vacuum on the Continent created by the collapse of the ancien régime structures within which the colleges operated. Both the ­bishops and the former college administrators were acutely conscious of the loss of centuries of accumulated property, investment, and experience on the Continent, and in consequence they worked towards recovery when this was possible. The post-­Napoleonic settlement provided an opportunity for the re-­ emergence of a more modest British and Irish Continental college network, alongside their new domestic counterparts, but one now more firmly under the control of the churches at home.

Select Bibliography Chambers, Liam and O’Connor, Thomas (eds.), College Communities Abroad: Education, Migration and Catholicism in Early Modern Europe (Manchester, 2017). Chambers, Liam and O’Connor, Thomas (eds.), Forming Catholic Communities: Irish, Scots and English College Networks in Europe, 1568–1918 (Leiden, 2018). Corish, Patrick, Maynooth College, 1795–1995 (Dublin, 1995). Johnson, Christine, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, 1789–1829 (Edinburgh, 1983). McInally, Tom, The Sixth Scottish University: The Scots Colleges Abroad, 1575 to 1799 (Leiden, 2012). Milburn, David, A History of Ushaw College (Durham, 1964). Watts, John, Scalan: The Forbidden College, 1716–1799 (East Linton, 1999).

81  Cited in Johnson, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, pp. 197–8.

Colleges, Seminaries, Male Religious Houses  203 Whitehead, Maurice, English Jesuit Education: Expulsion, Suppression, Survival and Restoration, 1762–1803 (Farnham, 2013). Williams, Michael  E., The Venerable English College, Rome: A History, 1579–1979 (Dublin, 1979). Williams, Michael E., St Alban’s College, Valladolid: Four Centuries of English Presence in Spain (London, 1986).

11 ‘Every Quarter of the World’ Catholics in the British Empire Dominic Aidan Bellenger

The years covered by this chapter witnessed the fall and rise of both the ­apparently monolithic Catholic Church and the British Empire. The Catholic Church found its temporal power and its very future put in doubt by the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath. The Church’s revival was slow and uncertain but was marked by a new energy, reflected in its office of Propaganda Fide, charged with the missionary activity of the Church, and a strident ultramontanism which gradually replaced worldly authority with spiritual force. The loss of the American colonies to the British Empire was followed, a generation later, by the hard-­fought defeat of France in the Napoleonic Wars, which settled Atlantic hegemony for a century and gave Britain command of the seas. By 1815 the British Empire had a global population of more than forty million people distributed across the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and the Antipodes. In this imperial history there is an increasing historiography but the role of the churches, especially the Catholic Church, has been neglected.1 The foundations laid by the Catholic Church were to be the beginnings of a massive growth. In this work the vicars apostolic of the London District, whose brief from Propaganda included the spiritual care of Catholics in the empire, was crucial. When the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War brought French Canada and a number of Caribbean islands under the British Crown the response of Bishop Richard Challoner was to suggest the formation of more vicariates apostolic.2 His successors, James Talbot and John Douglass, gradually distanced themselves from the American colonies, now independent, which had been the principal pastoral concerns of the London vicars overseas, and there vicariates apostolic soon became dioceses. It was William Poynter, in office as coadjutor to Bishop Douglass from 1803 to 1812 and as vicar apostolic from 1812 to 1827, 1  See Hilary  M.  Carey, God’s Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c.1801–1908 (Cambridge, 2011); John Gascoigne, ‘Religion and Empire, in Historiographical Perspective’, Journal of Religious History, 32 (2008), pp. 151–78. 2  Geoffrey Holt, ‘Bishop Challoner and the Jesuits’, in Eamon Duffy (ed.), Challoner and his Church: A Catholic Bishop in Georgian England (London, 1981), pp. 149–50. Dominic Aidan Bellenger, ‘Every Quarter of the World’: Catholics in the British Empire In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829. Edited by: Liam Chambers, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843443.003.0012

Catholics in the British Empire  205 who made a crucial difference in the development of the Catholic Church in the empire. His Burkean approach to all things French and Revolutionary made him a stalwart defender of legitimate government and suspicious of dissent and dis­ order. His cautious creativity showed him as adept in dealing with the British government and especially the War and Colonial Office, as with the Holy See and principally Propaganda.3 Poynter’s surviving papers reveal his wide interests in the colonial sphere from America to India.4 His diaries are particularly informative.5 They show his personal rapport with the secretary of state for war and the colonies, Henry Bathurst, who was in post from 1812 to 1827, the whole of Poynter’s vicariate, and the undersecretary, Henry Goulburn. Neither man was normally much enamoured of Catholicism but they must have appreciated the bishop’s obvious loyalty and patriotism.6 Meetings with the colonial ministers included, for example, with Bathurst on 1–2 April 1815 concerning priests in the West Indies, on 28 July 1817 with regard to the Cape of Good Hope, and on 6 December 1824 on the appointment of a vicar apostolic in Canada, and with Goulburn on 24 February 1819 for providing a priest for Dominica. All the meetings revealed the close attention shown to all Catholic appointments in the colonies at a time when in the home country State interference in an as yet unemancipated Catholic community was the epicentre of conflict and division. As in so much, in negotiating a modus vivendi in this area, which was particularly sensitive given the way in which Rome had lost out to secular powers in Catholic countries with regard to episcopal appointments, as far as Britain was concerned the empire got there first. In his humble London residence, a terraced house in Holborn, Poynter received among many others Joseph-­Octave Plessis, bishop of Québec (14 August–10 September 1819) and Jeremiah O’Flynn, an Irish priest en route to New South Wales (24 January 1817). In his study he pored over a correspondence which showed him to be a go-­between not only for Propaganda, with which he was in almost daily correspondence, but also with church leaders across the empire and beyond. On 30 October 1824, for example, he recorded: ‘Packet from Rome. Large letter with parcel for Dr Mareschal Baltimore, letter to Umpierres Macao, Dr Buckley Trinidad, Dr Conwell Philadelphia.’7 Macau, the focus of British trade with China

3 Sheridan Gilley, ‘Challoner, Richard (1691–1781)’, ODNB; Geoffrey Scott, ‘Douglass, John (1743?–1812)’, ODNB; J. P. Chinnici, ‘Poynter, William (1762–1827)’, ODNB; T. A. B. Corey, ‘Talbot, James Robert (1726–1790)’, ODNB. 4  Archives of Archbishop of Westminster, London (hereafter AAW), Poynter A 65, Non-­British 1816–27. 5  Peter Phillips (ed.), The Diaries of William Poynter V.A. (1815–1824), CRS 79 (London, 2006). 6  Neville Thompson, ‘Bathurst, Henry, third Earl Bathurst (1762–1834)’, ODNB; G.  F.  R.  Barker, rev. David Eastwood, ‘Goulburn, Henry (1784–1856)’, ODNB. 7  Phillips (ed.), The Diaries of William Poynter, p. 248.

206  Dominic Aidan Bellenger until the acquisition of Hong Kong in 1842,8 was also the residence of the proc­ur­ator of Propaganda Fide in China, a position held by Raffaele Umpierres.9 Despite his relatively humble ecclesiastical status Poynter’s formidable network revealed the importance of London, as the chief city in the British Empire, in the papacy’s international missionary policy.

Europe There were a number of British territories in Europe, all in the Mediterranean and mostly with a Catholic majority population and local hierarchies, which impinged less directly on Poynter.10 Gibraltar came into British possession in 1713 following the Treaty of Utrecht. Ecclesiastically it was part of the Spanish diocese of Cádiz. As early as the 1770s, the governor of Gibraltar had petitioned the Holy See to make ‘the Rock’ ecclesiastically independent. In 1792 a vicar general for  Gibraltar was appointed with wide-­ranging authority but it was not until 1816 that the apostolic vicariate of Gibraltar was created with John Baptist Zino, from Genoa, as its first vicar. In Gibraltar, as elsewhere, real power in the Church was in the hands of the laity: a junta or vestry controlled finances and even cler­ ic­al appointments; as in the Church of England, a table of fees for sacraments was drawn up. A serious dispute over the power of the junta, seen as an attack on the rights of clergy and simoniacal in its charging for sacraments, developed on Zino’s resignation in 1839. It was not until 1910 that Gibraltar gained its own diocese.11 Malta was another long-­term British dependency. Napoleon had ousted the Order of St John, which had ruled the island from 1530, but the Maltese called for British assistance and it became a protectorate in 1800. Despite the terms of the Treaty of Amiens (1802), so often a dead letter, it became a British Crown colony on 23 July 1813 with Sir Thomas Maitland as its all-­powerful governor. Even after the departure of the theocratic knights, Malta was a markedly Catholic country with numerous clergy, perhaps making up 10 per cent of the population.12 Although the rights and immunities of the Church, as well as full religious liberty, were recognized by the British, there were difficulties in the nomination and appointments of bishops.13 Malta’s Catholic identity was alarming to those who dreamt, as the nineteenth century went on, of an Anglican British world, but it 8 Rogerio M. Puga, The British Presence in Macau, 1635–1793 (London, 2013); and, more generally, R. Po-­chia Hsia, ‘Christianity and Empire: The Catholic Mission in Late Imperial China’, in Stewart J. Brown, Charlotte Methuen, and Andrew Spicer (eds.), The Church and Empire, SCH 54 (2018), pp. 208–24. 9 R. G. Tiedeman, Christian Missionary Societies in China (London, 2015), p. 38. 10  See Robert Holland, Blue-­Water Empire: the British in the Mediterranean since 1800 (London, 2012). 11 Edward G. Archer, Gibraltar: Identity and Empire (London, 2006), p. 94. 12  Desmond Gregory, Malta, Britain and the European Powers, 1793–1815 (London, 1996), p. 30. 13  H. I. Lee, ‘British Policy toward the Religion, Ancient Laws and Customs in Malta 1824–1851’, Melita Historica, 3 (1963), pp. 1–14.

Catholics in the British Empire  207 showed that even the most strident Catholicism was not a barrier to imperial integration.14 Elsewhere in the Mediterranean British rule lasted for shorter periods. Menorca, taken by the British in 1708 during the War of the Spanish Succession, was lost in 1802 after a succession of conquests and changes of regime. Its principal port, Mahón, was regarded as the finest harbour in the Mediterranean.15 The dominant Catholic population was probably the first to be granted full toleration. Mahón, as it were, was worth a Mass.16 The Ionian Islands came under British rule in 1815 and were formally known as the United States of the Ionian Islands from 1815 to 1864. Culturally and religiously cosmopolitan, the islands’ Catholics were served by the diocese of Corfu, established in 1310.17 There was a brief Anglo-­ Corsican kingdom (1794–6),18 but this and the relatively short-­ lived British occupation of Sicily (1806–15), which was intended to block Napoleon’s access to the Levant, left little time for the authorities to discuss the finer points of Catholic accommodation, even if a new constitution was put together and an attempt made to abolish feudalism in the notoriously disordered island.19

North America The thirteen colonies of British America, unlike their Mediterranean counterparts, were not very Catholic.20 In general, they reflected a model of the home country which was Puritan, Presbyterian, and strongly anti-­papist, where even a bishop was regarded with deep suspicion. Catholicism existed but, as in Great Britain, it was thinly spread and patchy, strongest in Maryland and Pennsylvania, with small numbers in New Jersey and Virginia. Maryland was the heartland of Catholic British America, but by the middle of the eighteenth century it was a small entity in numerical decline. Maryland’s foundation as a place of toleration in the 1630s by the Catholic Cecilius Calvert, second Baron Baltimore, had 14  See Nicholas Dixon, ‘Queen Adelaide and the Extension of Anglicanism in Malta’, in Brown, Methuen, and Spicer (eds.), The Church and Empire, pp. 281–95; and, more generally, Joseph Hardwick, An Anglican British World: The Church of England and the Expansion of the Settler Empire, c.1790–1860 (Manchester, 2014). 15  Desmond Gregory, Minorca: The Illusory Prize: A History of the British Occupation of Minorca between 1708 and 1802 (London, 1990). 16  See Peter  M.  Doll, Revolution, Religion, and National Identity: Imperial Anglicanism in British North America, 1745–1795 (London, 2000), pp. 119–20; Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783 (London, 2007), p. 264. 17  Sakis Gekas, Xenocracy: State, Class and Colonisation in the Ionian Islands, 1815–64 (New York, 2017). 18 Desmond Gregory, The Ungovernable Rock: A History of the Anglo-­ Corsican Kingdom (London, 1985). 19  Desmond Gregory, The Insecure Base: A History of the British Occupation of Sicily, 1806–1815 (London 1988). 20  See among others Robert Emmett Curran, Shaping American Catholicism: Maryland and New York, 1805–1915 (Washington, DC, 2012); James Hennessy, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States (Oxford, 1980).

208  Dominic Aidan Bellenger promised more than it delivered. A utopian experiment at the beginning, it had become a predominantly Protestant colony. Catholics had limited civil rights: they could own property but not vote or hold public office. The Church’s ministry was largely in the hands of the Jesuits, three of whom had arrived with the first colonists,21 and with the suppression of the society they continued their work and retained, as ex-­Jesuits, their property and influence, including their slaves.22 At the outbreak of the American Revolution there were twenty-­three ex-­Jesuits working in Maryland and Pennsylvania, the latest generation of over a hundred Jesuits who had ministered to a Catholic population which never amounted to more than 3,000. There were no communities of women religious. The New Orleans Ursulines, founded in 1627, were in French, not British, America,23 and the community of Carmelite nuns founded in 1790 at Port Tobacco in Maryland post-­dated British rule, although as many as sixty-­six American women entered English-­speaking convents in Europe before 1800.24 There was a small educational presence, with Jesuit schools at Newtown and Bohemia Manor, but those who sought higher education looked towards Europe and principally the English Jesuit College at St Omer in France. The leading families among the Catholic Marylanders, mainly resident in St Charles and St Mary counties, found consolation in wealth. Outside Maryland Catholicism in the latter years of British rule was becoming more urban. In Philadelphia the small chapel that opened in the 1730s had amassed a congregation of perhaps 1,200 by the Revolution. Places of worship in towns were endowed by prosperous members of the congregation who assumed proprietorial rights and who were as keen to exercise control over the clergy as were the country landowners. This lay control was to cause major conflict with the newly assertive clergy after the Revolution. Unlike Maryland, with its predominance of English-­speaking Catholics, a 1757 census revealed that Philadelphia’s Catholics were 70 per cent German speaking, with 30 per cent having English as their first language.25 In the wars of the 1750s between Britain and France the Catholics, especially in the towns, were looked upon as potential fifth columnists. Anti-­Catholicism remained ingrained, but by the time of the Revolution twenty years later Catholics were as likely as not to favour a complete break with the colonizing country, though their opinion did not count for much. Their political influence remained marginal, as was their numerical 21 Robert Emmett Curran et al. (eds.), The Maryland Jesuits, 1634–1835 (Baltimore, 1976); John T. McGreevy, American Jesuits and the World (Princeton, 2016). 22  Thomas Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1717–1838 (New York, 2001). 23  Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 (Chapel Hill, 2007). 24  WWTN; see also Margaret M. McGuinness, Called to Serve: A History of Nuns in America (New York, 2013), pp. 23–4; on Port Tobacco: Carmen  M.  Mangion (ed.), English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, vi: The Convents in the Outside World, gen ed. Caroline Bowden (London, 2012). 25 Hennessy, American Catholics, p. 50.

Catholics in the British Empire  209 presence in the new nation. In the newly created republic, Catholics shared the national acceptance of slavery. The regularization of an institutional church in British America had to wait until the end of British rule. Catholics in British America had to rely on the vicars apostolic in London for anything episcopal; there were no sacraments of con­firm­ation and holy orders in the thirteen colonies. The London vicars were suspicious of the Jesuits in America and both sides were probably pleased to be at a distance. No vicar apostolic in London had ever visited America. The consecration of the ex-­Jesuit John Carroll as the first Catholic bishop of the new republic took place in England, in 1790. The English connection, not least because of the Maryland Jesuits’ dependence on the English Jesuits, lingered long into the new century. Carroll’s world picture was formed by his prosperous background and European education. He used the French Sulpicians to further his plans for the education of the clergy. The college at Georgetown brought Catholicism and Jesuits to the new capital and showed his great devotion to the education of the clergy. He built a grand new cathedral in Baltimore to replace a simple disguised chapel. Carroll’s great work reflected a pan-­European sensitivity. He was a patriotic citizen of the new republic, and he dreamt of a fully developed American Church, somewhat Gallican in its identity, but lack of personnel made this impossible. The essentially American character of the American Church was to come later; so was its great Irishing.26 The accession of New France to the British following the Seven Years’ War brought into the British Empire for the first time a well-­integrated and well-­ established Catholic community with its own bishop in Québec. Indeed, the Catholic Church in New France, with its landed endowments, had a status which amounted to an established church like the Church of England. There had been a bishop in New France since 1658 and a diocese since 1674. It was the first see erected in the Americas north of Mexico, and its remit covered the whole of North America except the thirteen colonies and Spanish Florida. It remained the  only Canadian Catholic diocese until 1817. Alongside the Jesuits, who had worked strenuously among the native Americans (thereby acquiring a fiercely pro-­French fighting force) as well as among the colonists, notching up several martyrs along the way, were representatives of several other orders of male religious, including the Sulpicians, famous for their seminaries in which perfect French ecclesiastics were formed, Recollect Franciscans and Trinitarians. Montréal, alongside Québec, had become a forum for all things French and Catholic, the French ancien régime Church in miniature.27 26  Joseph Agonito, The Building of an American Catholic Church: The Episcopate of John Carroll (London, 1988); Maura Jane Farrelly, Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity (Oxford, 2012). 27  For the Canadian Church, see W. J. Eccles, ‘The Role of the Church in New France’, in W. J. Eccles, Essays on New France (Toronto, 1977), pp. 26–37; Terence  J.  Fay, A History of Canadian Catholics: Gallicanism, Romanism and Canadianism (Montréal, 2002).

210  Dominic Aidan Bellenger One way in which the French Church excelled in Canada was in its deployment of women religious. Introduced originally to Gallicize the native Americans, they developed vital educational and medical facilities. The Ursulines were the first to arrive, in 1639, and they took a central role in educating French Canadian women, which became their principal task once the experiment with the native Americans had stalled. The Congregation of Notre-­Dame, developed in New France as a grouping of active, non-­cloistered religious women by the middle of the seventeenth century had opened twelve schools by 1731. The nursing sisters known as the Hôspitaliers, more formerly the Canonesses of St Augustine of the Mercy of Jesus, founded the Hôtel-­Dieu in Québec, the first hospital in America north of Mexico. They also administered the Hôpital Général of Québec (1692), whose cemetery accommodated 1,000 French and British soldiers killed in the war which transferred Québec to British rule. The work of the religious sisters survived the transition and prospered; their practical good works and exemplary behaviour perhaps compensated for their ‘conventism’.28 Britain’s acquisition of New France by the Treaty of Paris (1763) meant immediate challenges to this French Catholic Church. The well-­read knew of the strong independence of the Gallican Church from Rome and sensed there was a distance between French Catholicism and the hated ‘Popery’, but the new masters were aiming at ‘the reformation of the Canadian Church towards the polity of the Church of England’ with the Anglican bishop of London, who had responsibility for the colonies, not the Catholic bishop of Québec, as ordinary. This policy remained in the background throughout the period covered by this chapter but it was still an ideal from the colonial viewpoint.29 The French Catholics themselves, and especially their bishops, showed their loyalty as true royalists, allowing the passage of the Quebec Act 1774 which guaranteed free practice of the Catholic faith. Modelled on the Menorcan arrangements, Brendan Simms has argued that the Quebec Act was a strategic move ‘to cut the Catholic population free from France’, and ‘of a piece with other security inspired relief measures of the 1770s particularly in Ireland’.30 From the perspective of the already restive thirteen col­ onies, it not only appeared to legitimize popery but also seemed to entrench the boundaries of British power by expanding the boundaries of French Canada. For those opposed to British rule the Quebec Act was one of those Intolerable Acts which threatened traditional colonial rights. Throughout the turmoil of the American Revolution the Act contributed to the continuing loyalty of the French Canadians. Whether the Quebec Act was about toleration or merely submitted

28  See entries on ‘Congregation de Nôtre Dame’, ‘Hospitals’, and ‘Ursulines’ in Gerald Hallowell (ed.), Oxford Companion to Canadian History (Oxford, 2004). 29 Doll, Revolution, Religion, p. 152. 30 Simms, Three Victories, p. 583.

Catholics in the British Empire  211 the Church to British control is historiographically controversial. As in so much of Canadian history, opinion divided along English/French lines.31 What was clear was that under British rule the Canadian Church was cut free of the worldwide Church. The religious orders were not allowed new members. The bishop could not go to France or Rome; the first to do so was Joseph-­Octave Plessis fifty years on. It was an instrument of the colonial State. As late as 1794 Bishop Jean-­François Hubert reported to Rome that ‘for the government, the authority of a Catholic bishop is merely marginal, and the continuance of the episcopate seems to depend entirely on the king’s will’.32 Some new life was made possible by the French Revolution. In 1793 the bishop of St Pol de Léon, JeanFrançois de La Marche, who had become the effective leader of the numerous French exiled clergy in Britain, and was well connected in British political circles,33 dispatched Abbé Philippe-­Jean-­Louis Desjardins to test the viability of sending large numbers of the émigré clergy, little employed in exile, to Canada. In the event, some fifty priests were settled in Canada, increasing the number of clergy by a third. Desjardins was among those who came to Canada, where he became vicar general to Bishop Hubert. Among his many achievements was the acquisition of nearly 200 French works of art pillaged during the Revolution, which were brought to Canada, reinforcing in material culture the continuing endurance of an enclave of ancien régime France in the British Empire.34 The arrival of a dozen French Sulpicians refreshed their society and offered hope for the training of future priests.35 Plessis, bishop of Québec from 1806 and archbishop from 1818, was a crucial figure in the stabilization of the Canadian Church. He had his episcopal title recognized by the colonial authorities, who had previously regarded the Catholic leader as a ‘superintendent’ of the Catholics, and he took an active part in political life treading the narrow path between compliance and submission in his dealings with the British.36 The Constitutional Act of 1791 reformed the Quebec Act in order to accommodate many thousands of American loyalists from the United States. Québec province was to be henceforth divided into the largely unpopulated western part, Upper Canada, and the eastern part, Lower Canada; the description upper and lower came from their relative positions on the St Lawrence River. Lower Canada 31  See Robert Bothwell, Canada and Quebec: One Country, Two Histories, rev. edn (Vancouver, 1998). 32 Doll, Revolution, Religion, p. 153. For Bishop Hubert, see Gilles Chaussé, ‘Hubert, Jean-­François’, in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, http://www.biographi.ca/en/ (4 December 2022). 33  Dominic Aidan Bellenger, The French Exiled Clergy in the British Isles after 1789 (Bath, 1986), pp. 99–104. 34  Maurice Hutt, ‘Abbé P.-J.-L.  Desjardins and the Scheme for the Settlement of French Priests in  Canada, 1792–1802’, Canadian Historical Review 39 (1953), pp. 93–124; Claude Galarneau, ‘Desjardins, Philippe-­Jean-­Louis’, in Dictionary of Canadian Biography. 35  Jacques Des Rochers, The Sulpicians of Montreal: A History of Power and Discretion, 1657–2007 (Montréal, 2013). 36  James H. Lambert, ‘Plessis, Joseph-­Octave’, in Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

212  Dominic Aidan Bellenger was to retain its French Catholic identity; Upper Canada was to have British—­ that is, English—­laws and institutions.37 One ethnic group associated most closely with the colonization of Upper Canada was the Scottish, strongly represented among the American loyalists. More surprisingly, given the later historiographical emphasis on Presbyterians, is the strength of the Catholic element. ‘Indeed’, as T. M. Devine suggests, ‘Catholics were probably the largest single Scottish denomination in British North America during the eighteenth century, drawn mainly from the loyal enclaves of Catholicism in western Inverness-­shire and the Outer Hebrides, which had survived the Reformation.’38 The Scottish Catholics included the substantial remnant of the Glengarry Fencibles, a militia force, who, demobilized after their part in quelling the 1798 Rebellion in Ireland, were granted land in Canada for their ­service. Their de facto leader and a former chaplain was Alexander McDonell, who was to become the first Catholic bishop in Upper Canada. McDonell was a formidable character, educated in Paris and Valladolid before the French Revolution and ordained priest in 1787. He ministered to Highlanders seeking employment in Glasgow, helped found the Fencibles, and became probably the first Catholic chaplain in the British Army. In 1804 he went to York in Upper Canada (now Toronto) and made his headquarters at Glengarry. In 1810 he ­lobbied Bathurst in London to allow the erection of apostolic vicariates in Upper Canada and in 1819 he was appointed vicar apostolic of Upper Canada. McDonell was consecrated as bishop on 31 December 1820. In 1826 the vicariate became a diocese with its see at Kingston. McDonell was a great loyalist to the colonial power, viewed as a staunch Tory, and he became part of the Legislative Council of  Upper Canada in 1831. He died on a fund-­raising tour in Scotland in 1840. In the latter part of his episcopate he was faced with increasing Irish immigration, disturbing his Caledonian idyll; in particular, an Irish priest, William John O’Grady, whose political opinions were radical and opposed to McDonell’s, became the centre of what the bishop regarded as unacceptable dissent. A later generation of clergy moved away from McDonell’s legitimism and were less submissive to the State.39 Although Lord Baltimore’s Ferryland colony of the 1620s in Newfoundland may have had, in the person of Anthony Pole, alias Smith, the first Catholic priest resident in British North America, the colony soon failed. The French maintained a chapel in Newfoundland, but after the British took over in 1713 Catholic numbers dwindled. Religious liberty was introduced in 1779 and by the 1780s there 37  See Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire (London, 2011). 38 T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire: The Origins of the Global Diaspora (London, 2004), pp. 192–3. 39 J.  E.  Rea, ‘McDonell, Alexander’, in Dictionary of Canadian Biography; Royce McGillivray, ‘Macdonell, Alexander (1762–1840)’, ODNB. See also Lucille Campey, Scottish Pioneers in Upper Canada, 1784–1855 (Toronto, 2005).

Catholics in the British Empire  213 was a significant number of Irish immigrants, mainly involved in fishing. In 1827 there were 30,128 Catholics and 28,212 Protestants. The Catholics were settled mainly between Placentia Bay and Conception Bay on the Avalon Peninsula.40 As early as 1784 Pius VI appointed a prefect apostolic in Newfoundland, the first English-­speaking Catholic jurisdiction in North America. The prefect, James Louis O’Donel, was appointed vicar apostolic and consecrated bishop in 1796, the first Catholic bishop in North America outside Québec. The Irish community, often economically deprived, was volatile and this ‘transatlantic Tipperary’ had its own version of the 1798 uprising in 1800. Catholics remained largely excluded from public life but, as with McDonell in his diocese, the first three bishops in Newfoundland preferred conciliation to confrontation.41 All three were Irish Franciscans. O’Donel, Rome educated, taught theology in Prague before becoming Irish provincial of his order. His difficulties were less with the colonial authorities, despite an altercation in 1786 with the future William IV when serving as a naval officer, than with his congregation: Irish provincial loyalties were transferred to Canada. The bishop was characterized by ‘enthusiastic loyalism’: in 1801 his statutes for the vicariate included compulsory prayers for the King of England and an instruction to the clergy to oppose ‘with all the means in their power all plotters, conspirators, and favourers of the infidel French’.42 He received a modest pension. His successor, Patrick Lambert, also Rome educated, found the people of  Newfoundland infected with ‘the Rash of the new philosophy’. Lambert was conscientious in his charge, on good terms with the bishop of Québec, and pas­ tor­al­ly inclined to the native American Mi’kmaq people. Chief Justice Colclough described him as ‘honest, loyal and well-­intentioned’ although an ‘irritable man of no abilities’. The third bishop, Thomas Scallon, again Rome educated, was confronted by the increasing impoverishment and, despite his predecessors’ best efforts, radicalization of his congregations. Most of the ten priests who assisted him were loyal; but one, John Power, was a constant critic, as he had been of the first two bishops. Scallon enjoyed ‘almost preternaturally good relations with both power and Protestant’.43 Nova Scotia, in its guise as Acadia, was in 1605 the first French colony in the future Canada. Once in British hands from 1713, a policy of expelling the Acadians was enforced and a rigorous policy of religious uniformity was followed by a succession of governors in an attempt to convert Catholics and make them loyal subjects. In 1787 Charles Inglis, born in Ireland, formerly rector of New York’s Trinity Church, an emigrant loyalist, became the first Anglican colonial 40 Colin Barr, Ireland’s Empire: The Roman Catholic Church in the English-­ Speaking World, 1829–1914 (Cambridge, 2020), p. 79. 41 ‘O’Donel, James Louis’, Dictionary of Canadian Biography; Raymond  J.  Lahey, ‘Lambert, Patrick’, Dictionary of Canadian Biography; Raymond  J.  Lahey, ‘Scallon, Thomas’, Dictionary of Canadian Biography. 42 Barr, Ireland’s Empire, p. 79. 43 Barr, Ireland’s Empire, p. 86.

214  Dominic Aidan Bellenger bishop, based in Halifax.44 Immigration meant that Catholics from Ireland began to arrive, and two years after some Catholic disabilities had been removed the Capuchin James Jones, who had been working in Cork, became in 1785 the first English-­speaking priest in the colony. In 1800 he went to London in an attempt to recruit some clergy for the Canadian mission. He also spent some months in Bath, taking the waters.45 A number of the French émigré priests from England came to serve the remaining Acadian Catholics, including the remarkable Jean-­ Mandé Sigogne, originally from Tours, an outspoken Gallican and rigorist.46 His views were not so far removed from another loyalist Catholic priest who, as Nova Scotia’s first bishop, was to be crucial in building up the Catholic community. The Irish Edmund Burke, Paris educated, worked in County Kildare and then in Québec, before going to Upper Canada, where he ministered at Fort George, also known as Niagara-­ on-­ the-­ Lake. His determination was ‘to counteract the Machinations of Jacobin Emissaries among the settlers and numerous Tribes of surrounding Indians’. As vicar general from 1801 and vicar apostolic from 1818 he was a great builder: schools, a monastic house, and a cathedral in Halifax, the last of which opened in 1820. A skilled polemicist, he argued strongly for the Catholic cause but was on good terms with the colonial authorities.47 He was part of a pattern of loyalist prelates in an expanding Canada, where the increasing number of Irish immigrants were to give a very different complexion to the Church of the next generation. Prince Edward Island, politically separated from Nova Scotia in 1769, attracted the highest proportion of Scottish immigrants to Canada, among them perhaps 2,000 Catholics by 1798, many of them led by John MacDonald of Glenaladale. The first leader of the Prince Edward Island Catholics was Angus MacEachern, who came to the island from Scotland in 1790 and in 1816 built a chapel in Charlottestown dedicated to St Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury. In 1819 he was appointed as vicar general of the archbishop of Québec and consecrated bishop. In 1829 he was appointed first bishop of Charlottestown with a diocese covering Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and the Magdalen Islands.48

The Caribbean, Central America, and South America The Caribbean was crucial for the deployment of shipping during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, as it had been for generations in the

44 Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, p. 149. 45  A. A. MacKenzie, ‘Jones, James’, Dictionary of Canadian Biography. 46  Bernard Pothier, ‘Sigogne, Jean-­Mandé’, Dictionary of Canadian Biography. 47  R. A. MacLean, ‘Burke (Bourke), Edmund’, Dictionary of Canadian Biography. S. Karly Kehoe, ‘Catholic Relief and the Political Awakening of Irish Catholicism in Nova Scotia, 1780–1830’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 46 (2017), pp. 1–20. 48  G. Edward MacDonald, ‘MacEachern, Angus Bernard’, Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

Catholics in the British Empire  215 on­going conflict between Britain and France for Atlantic hegemony. The area’s rich pickings, especially its sugar production and raw cotton, gave it a per­man­ ent importance, as did its central part in the slave trade. By the end of the eighteenth century the Caribbean colonies gave employment to half of Britain’s long-­distance shipping. By 1750 black Africans composed about 85 per cent of the population of the British West Indies; by 1815 slaves outnumbered free by twelve to one. Not all the work force was African; perhaps a half a million European workers had come to the islands before 1840, many of them from Ireland and Scotland.49 The empire in the Caribbean was being consolidated throughout the period. Before 1750 Barbados, the Leeward Islands (Antigua, St Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat), and Jamaica had been conquered and annexed. The Seven Years’ War added Dominica, Grenada, St Vincent, and Tobago. The Napoleonic Wars saw the inclusion of St Lucia and Trinidad. The frequent changes of administration and movement of population left the Caribbean culturally and religiously fluid.50 In the earlier col­onies the Catholic presence was peripheral, except perhaps in Montserrat, where a large number of Irish had settled but with little in the way of an organized church. In Jamaica there was a Catholic community in Kingstown and an Irish Franciscan priest by 1792. A church was built by a Spanish merchant in 1811. In Dominica the French established a Catholic community, while in Grenada, where the first Catholic church had been opened in 1718, Count Arthur Dillon’s Irish regiment settlers boosted numbers from 1779, and by 1827 Irish missionaries were arriving. St Lucia, where Catholicism predominated, remained strongly Catholic under British rule. Martinique, British from 1809 to 1814, was another island served by French priests, and Bathurst wanted to send some English clergy there to counteract French influence. This did not happen but it did provide work for some of the émigré French priests in England. Of all the islands, it was Trinidad which had the most complete Catholic history.51 Ecclesiastical oversight of the Caribbean and the Atlantic islands of the Bahamas and Bermuda was complicated and uncertain, and veered between the various Luso-­Hispanic jurisdictions of Latin America, the vicariate apostolic of the Danish West Indies, founded in 1776, and the archdiocese of Baltimore. When Trinidad became British it was, from a Catholic perspective, under the diocese of Guyana, but in 1819 its first vicar apostolic, Bishop James Buckley, was installed. Buckley was a Londoner and had 49 Devine, Scotland’s Empire, p. 221. 50  See, among others, Antoine Demets, The Catholic Church in Montserrat, West Indies (Plymouth, 1980); Francis J. Osborne, A History of the Catholic Church in Jamaica (Chicago 1988); Nini Rodgers, ‘The Irish in the Caribbean, 1641–1837: An Overview’, Irish Migration Studies in Latin America, 5 (2007), pp. 145–56. 51 John T. Harricharan, Church and Society in Trinidad: The Catholic Church in Trinidad, 1498–1863 (privately printed, 2005); S. Karly Kehoe, ‘Colonial Collaborators: Britain and the Catholic Church in Trinidad c.1820–1840’, Slavery and Abolition, 40 (2018), pp. 130–46; V.  Leahy, Catholic Church in Trinidad, 1797–1820 (Port of Spain, 1980).

216  Dominic Aidan Bellenger been a student at the English College Lisbon, of which he was president from 1806 until his Trinidad appointment. Buckley did not have an easy time. His later years were troubled by a schism led by Francis Ritter. Ritter, born in Dutch Demerera, was the son of a white planter and a black slave. Taken up by his father’s family, he was ordained priest in Mechelen, in present-­day Belgium. He met Bishop Buckley in London and moved to Trinidad. He became disillusioned, both with the maltreatment of the slaves and what he regarded as a too cosy relationship between Buckley and the colonial officials. He was suspended from his duties but continued his pastoral work.52 Catholicism in the Caribbean was fractured by ethnicity, social divisions, and race. Its typical makeup is suggested by a letter of 1815 by the Irish priest Jeremiah O’Flynn to Poynter about St Croix, a Danish island taken by the British in 1808, where the Tuites, a rich Irish planter family, were very influential: ‘there are at present about eleven thousand R.  Catholics in this Island, ten thousand of whom are poor distress[ed] slaves about Eight hundred free Negroes and Mulatoes the rest are whites’.53 Across the Caribbean, Catholics who were not slaves did not challenge the continuation of slavery and this undoubtedly contributed to the negative experience of empire in which Catholicism was complicit. There were only two British footholds on the Central and South American mainland: British Guyana and British Honduras. The Dutch colonies of Berbice, Demerera, and Essequito, on the northern corner of the South American con­tin­ ent, dedicated to the cutting of sugar cane, were first under British oversight in 1796 and were officially ceded to Britain in 1814, becoming a single colony, British Guyana, in 1831, with its capital at Georgetown. Its successor, Guyana, had, in 2020, the lowest Catholic population in any Latin American country. It was probably only after 1835, with the arrival of Portuguese from Madeira, that the Catholic Church was established.54 In Central America, British Honduras, now Belize, did not become a Crown colony until 1862, but British influence was dominant after 1783 and its Christian population was mainly Protestant. Many of its Catholics were refugees from Spanish Honduras who settled principally at the village of Moulins River c.1830. There had been Spanish missions to the Mayans resident in the area from 1524 to 1707, but by British times their work had long ended and the only evidence of a Catholic presence was archaeological.55

52 Harricharan, Church and Society, pp. 111–24. 53 Jeremiah O’Flynn to William Poynter, 31 October 1815, AAW, Poynter A 65, Non-­British 1816–22. 54  M. Noel Menezes, ‘The Madeiran Portuguese and the Establishment of the Catholic Church in British Guiana, 1835–98’, Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora, 7 (1988), pp. 57–78. 55 W. R. Johnson, A History of Christianity in Belize, 1778–1838 (Lanham, 1985); Charles M. Woods et al., Years of Grace: the history of Roman Catholic Evangelisation in Belize, 1524–2014 (Belize, 2015).

Catholics in the British Empire  217

Africa and Asia The African continent was not extensively colonized by the British before 1829. Its rich and diverse religious history, including the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, was largely undisturbed by Catholicism until later in the nineteenth century.56 Its importance to the empire was perceived to be as a source of slaves and its human cargo was taken across the Atlantic from various trading posts on the continent’s west coast. In Sierra Leone, a Crown colony from 1808, its governor Sir Charles MacCarthy, an Irish-­born Catholic, invited the Sisters of St Joseph de Cluny, a newly founded French active congregation, to organize hospitals and schools in a colony uniquely composed of freed slaves, some of them black loyalists from the United States. In 1824, under MacCarthy, the trading posts of the Gold Coast (Ghana) were transferred to the Crown. The island of Madeira, long a Portuguese colony, was tied in closely with the British Atlantic trading system and had both a British factory and a sizeable English-­speaking population closely associated with the Madeira wine trade. In the years 1801–2 and from 1810 to 1814 it was under protective British occupation. The principal town, Funchal, with its European-­style Gothic cathedral, was the see of a huge diocese, subject only to Lisbon, with a huge territorial brief when it was founded: not only the islands of Madeira but all the territories under Portuguese authority in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In time this area diminished but the importance of combining trade and mission was clear to the Portuguese.57 If Madeira was predominantly Catholic the Cape Colony, in South Africa, under British rule in 1806, had been, as far as settlers were concerned, steadfastly Protestant following centuries of Dutch rule.58 The few Catholics were mainly Irish and although a small group of Dutch priests served the colony from 1804 to 1806 it was not until the appointment of Edward Bede Slater, an English Benedictine, as first vicar apostolic of Good Hope by Pope Pius VII on 18 June 1818 that a resident priest arrived. Slater’s brief included Mauritius, where he was to reside and, Funchal-­like, minister to much of the southern hemisphere. Patrick Scully, an Irish priest, in the Cape from 1820 to 1824, built South Africa’s first Catholic church. It was not until 1837 that the Cape received its own vicar apostolic, when it was separated from Mauritius. Scully, like other clergy in the Cape, received an annual grant of £75 from the government, and this added fuel to the fire when the influential settler William Parker, an Irishman from Cork, 56  See Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa, 1450–1950 (Oxford, 1994). 57  Desmond Gregory, ‘British Occupation of Madeira during the Wars against Napoleon’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 66 (1988), pp. 80–96; Desmond Gregory, The Beneficent Usurpers: A History of the British in Madeira (London, 1989). 58  For the Catholic Church in South Africa, see J. B. Brain, The Catholic Church in the Transvaal (Johannesburg, 1991); William E. Brown, The Catholic Church in South Africa from its Origins to the Present Day (London, 1960).

218  Dominic Aidan Bellenger and virulently anti-­Catholic, sensed too much Catholic influence in the colony, especially in the person of Christopher Bird, who acted as colonial secretary in the Cape from 1818 to 1824.59 Bird, who was probably the best connected of the Catholics in the Cape, had taken the so-­called Canada oath of allegiance, which did not require adhesion to the Church of England. Parker’s attacks, which reached Westminster, led eventually to Bird’s dismissal. The force of anti-­ Catholicism and the long-­existing religious conflicts of Europe were all too easily transferable to the colonies.60 Scully was also dogged by a battle between himself and his paymasters, the church wardens. Lay control and funding was another constant in colonial Catholic history, as has already been illustrated in Gibraltar and Philadelphia. When Patrick Raymond Griffith arrived as vicar apostolic in April 1838, by which time the Catholic population had reached 2,000, his first act was to sack the wardens.61 Mauritius, situated about 1,200 miles from the south-­east coast of Africa, is part of the Mascarene Islands. Abandoned by the Dutch, who had arrived as early as 1598, in 1710, it became French in 1715 and was named the Île de France, with its principal town and naval base at Port Louis. It came to Britain by the Treaty of Paris (1814), providing a port of great strategic importance to those British ships proceeding to Asia. The French Catholic identity of the island was safeguarded by the British and a spacious new church opened, with government approval, in 1816. Bishop Slater, nominally of the Cape of Good Hope but resident in Mauritius, had an elevated sense of his mission. Although his chief qualification for the post was that he had made a good impression on Carlo Maria Pedicani, secretary of Propaganda, he informed his uncle and fellow monk, Bede Brewer, then president of the English Benedictines, rather grandly: ‘South Africa was to be given over to the Congregation by way of recognition for the services it has rendered the Church.’62 Slater’s appointment reflected a definitive restatement of the principle, generally enforced, that all Catholic prelates in British colonies should be subjects of the Crown. Most of the population of Mauritius were slaves, working on sugar plantations, who were only gradually converted to Catholicism even after emancipation. The Catholic faith of many settlers was, at best, lukewarm.63 India was technically not part of the empire until the establishment of the Raj in 1858, but British interests had become paramount in the sub-­continent. The British East India Company, originally established as a trading company in the 59 Barr, Ireland’s Empire, pp. 151–203. 60  John Wolfe, ‘Anti-­Catholicism in the British Empire, 1815–1914’, in Hilary Carey (ed.), Empires of Religion (London, 2008), pp. 43–66. See also Robert Ross, Status and Responsibility in the Cape Colony, 1750–1879 (Cambridge, 1999). For Bird, see his entry in Dictionary of South African Biography, 5 vols. (Pretoria, 1968–87), I, pp. 66–7. 61 Barr, Ireland’s Empire, p. 162. 62  Alban Hood, From Repatriation to Revival: Continuity and Change in the English Benedictine Congregation, 1795–1850 (Farnborough, 2014), pp. 181–2. 63 A. Nagapen, Histoire de l’église. Isle de France—­Île Maurice (Port Louis, 1996).

Catholics in the British Empire  219 early part of the seventeenth century, had by the second half of the eighteenth gained effective political power in much of India. Its principal assets were a strong administration, an autonomous judicial structure, and a private army twice the size of the British Army. In 1773 the company established its headquarters in Calcutta and, either through direct rule or through dependent rulers, its power was overwhelming. Christianity was very much a minority religion in India but the company, avowedly non-­partisan when it came to faith, allowed some pas­ tor­al support for its Catholic employees; many of its soldiers were Irish. It was not until the 1833 Charter Act that Christian missionaries, mainly Protestant, were allowed, although in the eighteenth century Carmelites from Italy had settled in Bombay and French Capuchins in Madras.64 In India there was an ancient Christian community, the St Thomas Christians, whose foundation went reputedly to apostolic times and who had their own rites and traditions. Friction between these Christians and European missionaries was never far from the surface, especially in Kerala, where the community was strongest.65 The complexity of the Catholic position in India was no more obvious than in Goa, the burial place of St Francis Xavier, the greatest of Catholic missionaries. Goa, established as a Portuguese colony in 1510 (and remaining one until its annexation by India in 1961) was never a British colony but during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars it hosted a British fleet and was under British ‘protection’ from 1797 to 1813. Goa was effectively the headquarters of the Portuguese Catholic Empire in Asia and its archbishop was given the title ‘Primate of the East’ by Pope Gregory XII in 1572. St Paul’s College, founded by Francis Xavier c.1542, which housed India’s first printing press, was a seminary which educated clergy not only for Goa but far beyond;66 Goa was the heart of a Catholic Orientalism which spread through the Portuguese networks.67 Importantly, for the Catholic history of the British Empire, the Goanese Oratory, the only Oratory in Asia, had special pastoral care of the Catholic mission in Ceylon or Sri Lanka; in 1800 sixteen of the forty-­five-­strong Oratorians were in Sri Lanka.68 Sri Lanka had been evangelized by the Portuguese in the early part of the sixteenth century but the work was countered by the Dutch East India Company, which developed a strong presence on the island. Catholic revival came with the missionary work of St Joseph Vaz, a Goanese Oratorian, who died in 1711. By the 64  Kenneth Ballhatchet, ‘The East India Company and Roman Catholic Missionaries’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 44 (1993), pp. 273–88. See also Kenneth Ballhatchet, Class, Caste and Catholicism in India, 1789–1914 (London, 1998). 65 Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India: The beginning to AD 1707 (Cambridge, 1984), p. 117. 66 Charles J. Borges, The Economics of the Goa Jesuits, 1542–1759: An Explanation of their Rise and Fall (Goa, 1994). 67  Angela Barretto Xavier and Ines G. Zupanot, Catholic Orientalism (Oxford, 2001). 68  Charles J. Borges, Oscar Guilherme Pereira, and Hannes Stubbe, Goa and Portugal: History and Development (Goa, 2000), p. 280.

220  Dominic Aidan Bellenger beginning of British rule a Catholic community of some 80,000 had developed. British occupation began in 1796 and the Treaty of Amiens confirmed possession of the Dutch part of Sri Lanka. The whole island became British with the an­nex­ ation of Kandy in 1815.69 The colony’s second governor, Sir Thomas Maitland, working his constitutional skills again, assisted by the judge, Sir Alexander Johnson, gave the Sri Lankan Catholics an effective carte blanche in 1806: ‘The Roman Catholics should be allowed the unmolested profession and exercise of their religion in every part of the British settlements in the island of Ceylon.’ Until 1834, when a local diocese was erected, Sri Lanka came under the bishop of Cochin.70 British rule in Burma began in 1824. A vicariate apostolic had been established in 1741 with the Barnabite order providing the manpower; they continued until 1832. Vincenzo Sangermano, a Barnabite, worked in Burma from 1783 to 1806, mainly in Rangoon. He provided the East India Company with an accurate map of Rangoon and compiled a pioneering study in his Description of the Burmese Empire, published posthumously in 1833 with a foreword by the future cardinal, Nicholas Wiseman. The map won him a pension from the colonial authorities. The book was the first detailed Western account of the country.71 Malaya had a more developed Catholic identity. The Catholics in Malaya were mainly settlers. A Catholic church was opened in Penang in 1787 with the blessing of Francis Light, the colony’s founder, and in 1808 the College General, a pan-­Asian sem­in­ ary under the auspices of the French-­based Missions Étrangères de Paris, was established with predominantly Chinese students. As with St Paul’s College in Goa, the British turned at least a blind eye to a centre of Catholic formation with an impact far beyond its locality. Two of the College General’s professors were among the 1839 Korean martyrs canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1984. A Catholic priest had arrived in Singapore by 1821 and a church opened there in 1830. In Malacca years of Dutch rule had eclipsed the glory days of the previous Catholic Portuguese presence and in 1838 the old Portuguese diocese was suppressed.72

Australia Expansion in the British Empire was nowhere more rapid and successful than in the Pacific. Enlightened interests in geographical and scientific discovery combined with utility in establishing a colony in the Australian continent, which was only gradually opened up and mapped by Europeans at the same time it was being settled. The name Australia, referring to the southern continent, was first 69 V. Perniola, The Catholic Church in Sri Lanka: Colombo Vicariate, 1795–1844 (Colombo, 1992). 70 Simon C. Chitty, A Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the Catholic Church in Ceylon (Colombo, 1848), pp. 18–19. 71  P. Amat di S Filippo, Studi bibliografici e biografia sulla storia geografia in Italia (Rome, 1882), pp. 247–8. 72 Felix G. Lee, Catholic Church in Malaya (Singapore, 1963).

Catholics in the British Empire  221 officially used in 1817. Before that it was known as New Holland. In 1779 a special committee of the House of Commons heard evidence from Sir Joseph Banks, recommending ‘Botany Bay, on the Coast of New Holland’ as a place for colonial settlement. By 1784 the idea of making the Australian colony a penal settlement where the transported, having escaped the gallows, were given a chance of a new life, had been accepted. The Catholic presence was felt with the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. A tenth of the early convicts were Catholics by birth, mainly Irish; by 1803 a total of 2,086 Irish Catholics had been transported. By 1828 the first Australian census revealed a total of some 10,000 Catholics. It was predominantly a lay Catholic experience, non-­sacramental, home-­based, and difficult to evaluate.73 As early as 1792 Catholics in Parramatta had asked the governor of New South Wales, Arthur Philip, for a priest, but despite his understanding of the possible ‘civilizing’ impact of Christianity, even in its Catholic form, no priest arrived until 1800. The first priests were not invited: they were all Irish, all convicts, and all associated with the unsuccessful 1798 Rebellion in Ireland. Their pastoral impact was slight. James Harold conducted a private ministry in Parramata and, pardoned in 1810, went to Philadelphia. James Dixon, awarded conditional emancipation in 1803, was sanctioned, briefly, from 1803 to 1804, to celebrate Mass publicly before returning to Britain in 1808. Peter O’Neill, who (alongside Harold) spent some time in Norfolk Island, the most austere of the penal settlements, returned to Ireland in 1803 for a ministry of over forty years. All three worked on their own account without the backing of colonial authorities or their nominal ecclesiastical superior, the vicar apostolic of the London District.74 The most colourful of the early ‘missionaries’ was Jeremiah Francis O’Flynn. A native of County Kerry, O’Flynn had joined, along with many other young Irishmen, the Trappist monastery established at Lulworth in Dorset, and travelled with that community in 1813 as far as Martinique. He arrived in Sydney at the end of 1817, calling himself prefect apostolic of New Holland or ‘Bottanibe’, a title which he had hoped to obtain from the Pope without the permission of the British authorities; he had been in contact with both Lord Bathurst and Bishop Poynter, who both regarded him as unsuitable. He was regarded as ill-­educated, lacking in diplomacy, and far too brash. His stay in Australia was a short one; he was deported in May 1818, more on account of his difficult personality and lack of legal status than on that of his priesthood. Paul Collins has noted that his departure ‘put pressure on the Colonial Office to speed up the process already in train to appoint priests to New Holland’. The English vicar apostolic of the 73 For an overview of the origins of the Australian Church, see Ian Breward, A History of the Australian Churches (Oxford, 1993); Patrick O’Farrell, The Catholic Church and Community in Australia (Melbourne, 1977). 74  Harold Perkins, ‘Harold, James (1744–1830)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, https://adb. anu.edu.au/ (4 December 2022); Vivienne Parsons, ‘Dixon, James (1758–1840)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography; Vivienne Parsons, ‘O’Neil, Peter (1757–1835)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography.

222  Dominic Aidan Bellenger Midland District, John Milner, reflected: ‘Though Mr. Flynn has failed in his heroical undertaking, I hope he has prepared the way for some one or more good Irish missionaries to succor the poor souls in the other hemisphere.’ In November 1818 Bathurst and Poynter agreed that New South Wales should come under the jurisdiction of Bishop Slater in Mauritius and that O’Flynn should be formally dismissed as prefect: ‘it will be much to the benefit of religion that he should be relieved of it’.75 John Joseph Therry, from Cork, ordained in 1815, volunteered to go to Australia and, having made himself known to Slater, he and another priest, Philip Conolly, from Dublin, arrived in Sydney as accredited chaplains with government pensions. Therry began to build a new chapel in Sydney, on the site of the present St Mary’s Cathedral, on the edge of Hyde Park near the convict barracks; its foundation stone was laid by the governor, Lachlan Macquarrie, on 29 October 1821. Therry, a natural missionary, tough and independent-­minded, was perhaps the first Catholic priest to show a pastoral concern for the indigenous people as well as settlers, but his activities were often thwarted as he was in continuous disagreement with the local authorities and later, after 1834, with the appointment of the English Benedictine John Bede Polding as vicar apostolic of New Holland and Van Diemen’s Land.76 Therry was energetic but impetuous. Conolly, who also had his disagreements with Therry and was noticeably eccentric himself, spent fourteen years in Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, building up the Catholic community, but finishing in a turmoil of administrative difficulties and conflicts about landownership. The pioneering years of Australian Catholicism were anything but quiet.77

Conclusion Catholic activity was present throughout the British Empire in ‘every quarter of the world’.78 It was a diverse presence. It encompassed both historic ecclesial structures from formerly French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonies as well as places where the church was a small lay-­ led congregation. It embraced a remarkable variety of diasporas, from American loyalists, French royalists, and Acadians to Irish and Scots, part of the huge mass movement of the period

75  Paul Collins, A Very Contrary Irishman: The Life and Journeys of Jeremiah O’Flynn (Northcote, 2014); Vivienne Parsons, ‘O’Flynn, Jeremiah Francis (1788–1831)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography. 76  See Dominic Aidan Bellenger, ‘The English Benedictines and the British Empire’, in Sheridan Gilley (ed.), Victorian Churches and Churchmen: Essays Presented to Vincent Alan McClelland (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 217–24. 77  J.  Eddy, ‘Therry, John Joseph (1790–1864)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography; Linda Monks, ‘Conolly, Philip (1786–1839)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography. 78  Patrick Coloquhoun, A Treatise of the Wealth, Power and Resources of the British Empire, in Every Quarter of the World, including the East Indies (London, 1814).

Catholics in the British Empire  223 which also included transported convicts and the human cargo of slaves.79 Evangelization was largely confined to settlers and the beginnings of British Protestant missions, which began to gain momentum in the 1790s80 in making the empire ‘Protestant, commercial, maritime and free’,81 was not as yet taken up by the Catholics. There was, not for the first or last time, a shortage of clergy to take up the work and, not surprisingly, those who chose to minister in the empire were often eccentric or singular. All the work of the Church was done under sufferance at best, except perhaps in the Mediterranean and Canada, and if it contributed to the emancipation debate in Britain it was more about accommodation than principle. When the Holy See was given some leeway, as in the creation of vicariates apostolic and dioceses, perhaps it was done at the cost of Rome not pushing too hard for the freedoms of Irish Catholics.82 Opportunities for further evangelization of both indigenous and settler populations had been opened up, and a wider and less Eurocentric Catholic vision was made possible.

Select Bibliography Ballhatchet, Kenneth, ‘The East India Company and Roman Catholic Missionaries’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 44 (1993), pp. 273–88. Carey, Hilary  M., God’s Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c.1801–1908 (Cambridge, 2011). Collins, Paul, A Very Contrary Irishman: The Life and Journeys of Jeremiah O’Flynn (Northcote, 2014). Devine, T.M., Scotland’s Empire: The Origins of the Global Diaspora (London, 2004). Doll, Peter  M., Revolution, Religion, and National Identity: Imperial Anglicanism in British North America, 1745–1795 (Madison, WI, 2000). Hutt, Maurice, ‘Abbé P.-J.-L. Desjardins and the Scheme for the Settlement of French Priests in Canada, 1792–1802’, Canadian Historical Review, 39 (1953), pp. 93–124. Jasanoff, Maya, Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire (London, 2011). Phillips, Peter, (ed.), The Diaries of Bishop William Poynter, V.A. (1815–1824), CRS 79 (London, 2006). Rafferty, Oliver, ‘The Catholic Church, Ireland and the British Empire, 1800–1921’, Historical Research, 84 (2011), pp. 288–309. 79 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1780–1939 (Oxford, 2009). 80  Rowan Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire, c.1700–1850 (Oxford, 2007). 81 P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India and America, c.1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005), p. 6. 82  Oliver Rafferty, ‘The Catholic Church, Ireland and the British Empire, 1800–1921’, Historical Research, 84 (2011), pp. 288–309.

12 Catholic Literature and Print Culture in English Michael Tomko

The long eighteenth century merits greater recognition as an imaginative, extensive, experimental, lively, and complex period of literary innovation and production for Catholics in Britain and Ireland. Such a characterization might initially startle. When John Henry Newman looked back to this era in Catholic culture in his 1852 ‘second spring’ sermon, he found not vitality, but ‘a silence’. Among Catholics, there was not even what could be rightly called a ‘community’, but rather a disparate and divided ‘mere handful of individuals, who might be counted, like the pebbles and detritus of the great deluge’.1 These scattered, post-­ diluvian co-­religionists had no common culture after the Reformation, no literature of their own, and could in no way influence the national literary inheritance. ‘English Literature will ever have been Protestant’, Newman concluded in his 1865 Idea of a University.2 Later, James Joyce would look with scorn at the Catholic poet Thomas Moore as a would-­be Irish exception from the Georgian era, belittling the ‘droll statue of the national poet of Ireland’ outside Trinity College Dublin for being neither rebelliously modern nor authentically ancient.3 Against this bleak backdrop, critical accounts of a Victorian dawn of Catholic literary life—­including Newman as well as poets Gerard Manley Hopkins, Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson, and Coventry Patmore—­become even more radiant, casting light forward to twentieth-­ century Catholic literary greats such as Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh and household favourites such as Rumer Godden or Caryll Houselander.4 The Catholic revival did positively reflect on the sixteenth century, the days of ‘dungeon, fire, and sword’ in Frederick Faber’s memorable lyric,5 when the Counter-­ Reformation works of Richard Crashaw, Edmund 1  John Henry Newman, ‘The Second Spring’, in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions (Notre Dame, IN, 2007), p. 171. 2  John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN, 1982), p. 235. 3  James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London, 2003), p. 195. 4 Ian Ker, The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh (Notre Dame, IN, 2003). For short introductions and selections from Meynell and Houselander, see John Saward, John Morrill, and Michael Tomko (eds.), Firmly I Believe and Truly: The Spiritual Tradition of Catholic England, 1483–1999 (Oxford, 2011), pp. 531–4, 671–7. 5  Frederick W. Faber, ‘XXIX. Faith of Our Fathers’, Jesus and Mary: Or Catholic Hymns (London, 1849), p. 133. Michael Tomko, Catholic Literature and Print Culture in English In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829. Edited by: Liam Chambers, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843443.003.0013

Catholic Literature and Print Culture in English  225 Campion, or Robert Southwell were clandestinely printed in priest holes or Continental institutions. Surveying the martyrs of a newly persecuted Church in 1946, Waugh felt near to Campion’s ‘same, pure light shining in darkness, uncomprehended’.6 Others looked to the phenomenal success of the acerbic outsider Catholics canonized as Augustan authors, Alexander Pope and John Dryden. The death of the latter ‘great figure’ in 1700, Greene remarked, ‘left the new age, the quieter, more rational age, curiously empty’.7 The years between these fascinating generations of modern and early modern Catholics only seem to present quieted absence or a strange and severed miscellany, pitifully recalled in Newman’s words: ‘Here a set of poor Irishmen, coming and going at harvest time, or a colony of them lodged in a miserable quarter of the vast metropolis. There, perhaps an elderly person, seen walking in the streets, grave and solitary, and strange, though noble in bearing’. Atomized and invisible to one another and the reading public, the ‘few adherents’ of this Catholic remnant moved through these years ‘silently and sorrowfully’.8 Yet this dramatic narrative risks obscuring the transformational and enduring developments in Catholic culture from the period. As Michael Mullet has written, ‘English Catholics of the later Georgian age patiently built the foundations of the edifice that their Victorian heirs inherited and developed.’9 This building was often literal: projects ranged from John Milner’s small but assertive Gothic chapel in Winchester to the domestic founding or relocation of monasteries, seminaries, colleges, and schools from abroad.10 This building was also literate. Cormac Begadon has outlined the way that efforts in Ireland to ‘improve pastoral infrastructure’ and ‘religious culture’ among Catholics encompassed the ‘renewal and erection of many chapels’ alongside the ‘publication and sale of Catholic devotional literature’.11 Across and between Britain and Ireland, the effort to craft a distinctive literature for Catholics through the medium of print culture was an integral, though often conflicted, part of these cultural, political, and social transformations. How did texts play an increasingly pivotal role in the era’s infrastructural and cultural changes? Developing Benedict Anderson’s theory of the formation of national identity, Joshua King has argued that print culture became the way Britain formed an ‘imagined spiritual community’ in the nineteenth century, as 6  Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Campion (San Francisco, CA, 2005), p. 14. 7  Graham Greene, ‘Fielding and Sterne’, in Collected Essays (New York, 1969), p. 84. See also the epigraph from John Dryden’s ‘The Hind and the Panther’, in Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (London, 1971), p. 6. 8  Newman, ‘The Second Spring’, pp. 171–2. 9 Michael A. Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (New York, 1998), p. 138. 10  Bridget Patten, Catholicism and the Gothic Revival: John Milner and St Peter’s Chapel, Winchester (Winchester, 2001); David Milburn, A History of Ushaw College (Durham, 1964), pp. 3–86. 11  Cormac Begadon, ‘Catholic Devotional Literature in Dublin, 1800–30’, in James  H.  Murphy (ed.), The Oxford History of the Irish Book, iv: The Irish Book in English, 1800–1891 (Oxford, 2011), p. 331.

226  Michael Tomko ‘British imaginative authors, journalists, educators, and clergy represented the printed page as a medium for envisioning and partaking in a national Christian community.’12 Such diverse efforts were ‘not simply the means by which we im­agine community’, King writes, ‘they partially constitute the communities we envision’.13 Likewise, at one level, for eighteenth-­century Catholics, constituting some form of ‘imagined spiritual community’ for themselves through print was pressing, both across England, Scotland, and Wales and amid reform efforts in Ireland seeking ‘greater internal cohesion’ within the Catholic community.14 At another level, in newspapers, parliamentary debates, and local gatherings in churches, coffee shops, and pubs, the debate over Catholic emancipation—­often referred to as the Catholic question—­demanded an account of how the Catholic communities in Britain related to the national community, or what William St Clair has termed the ‘reading nation’.15 There was no single or simple answer to questions of how Catholicism read itself and how it was read. This chapter will follow the complex responses offered within three areas: first, the efforts to ‘build the foundations’ of a recognizable ‘spiritual community’ partially through the medium of circulated printed works; second, the adaptive and creative quality of these widely varying forms of writing—­from apologetics and polemics to daily devotionals—­that formed a kind of imaginative and engaging proto-­literature even in the absence of landmarks of literary achievement; and, finally, the ­ubiquitous, but divided, narration of the nation’s religious and political history. This period may not often be remembered for its ‘great figures’, although Milner, the hagiographer Alban Butler, the priest and historian John Lingard, and the playwright and novelist Elizabeth Inchbald have generally been underestimated.16 Likewise, Irish Catholic print culture in English was marked by a ‘noticeable absence of native authors’, but booksellers in this period built their business around works by these English Catholic authors, Catholic classics from the Continent, and devotional and didactic texts by Bishop Richard Challoner, his mentor John Gother, and the prolific Scottish Bishop George Hay.17 Rather than giants, a wide variety of such figures from many sectors of society undertook a 12  Joshua King, Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain’s Age of Print (Columbus, OH, 2015), p. 3. 13 King, Imagined Spiritual Communities, p. 18. 14  Begadon, ‘Catholic Devotional Literature in Dublin’, p. 333. 15  William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004). For broader cultural issues raised by Catholic emancipation, see Michael Tomko, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778–1829 (Basingstoke, 2011). 16  For Milner’s ideas and leadership, see Cadoc Leighton, ‘John Milner and the Orthodox Cause’, Journal of Religious History, 32 (2008), pp. 345–60; and Cadoc Leighton, ‘John Milner, History and Ultramontanism’, Archivium Hibernicum, 63 (2010), pp. 346–74. For Inchbald, see Annibel Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What: The Life of Elizabeth Inchbald (Lexington, KY, 2013); Michael Tomko, ‘Between Revolutionary Jacobins and English Catholic Cisalpines: The Roles of Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821) in the Age of Enlightenment’, in Ulrich Lehner (ed.), Women, Enlightenment, and Catholicism (London, 2018), pp. 189–201. 17 Begadon, ‘Catholic Devotional Literature in Dublin’, p. 336; Cormac Begadon, ‘Catholic Religious Publishing, 1800–91’, in Murphy (ed.), The Oxford History of the Irish Book, iv, pp. 371–2.

Catholic Literature and Print Culture in English  227 remarkable literary task: the attempt to use the medium of print to articulate, for themselves and for the reading nation at large, how the pebbles of a people scattered from London to Lancaster to Limerick constellated a Catholic community with a past and future in Britain and Ireland.

‘Let Them Join Themselves in Heart and Affection’: Early Foundations of Catholic Georgian Print Culture, 1688–1780 Post-­1750s English-­language Catholic culture across Britain and Ireland was grounded in English Catholicism’s earlier pivot, following the 1688 Revolution, from politics to print and the development of a textual network that sought to enhance and enable spiritual and liturgical life, and to provide shared guides for faith and morality. There were two sources for this project. First, a large portion of Catholic reading in Britain stretching late into the nineteenth century was constituted by translated and republished Continental authors: Thomas à Kempis, St  Francis de Sales, Fénelon, Bossuet. Milner’s 1790s paraphrased reworking of St  Teresa of Avila’s spirituality was a continuation of a tradition of translated imports going back to Dryden’s The Life of St Francis Xavier (1688), which gained him no literary acclaim like his Virgil translations, but did bridge the gap in English readers’ imaginations of Catholic culture on the Continent and across the globe.18 Second, the homegrown works of Gother, Challoner, Hay, and Butler formed a distinct proto-­literary tradition, which maintained their prominence in terms of Catholic books in English throughout the long eighteenth century and beyond. Begadon has described Ireland’s Catholic literature market in 1800 as ‘dominated by’ these authors and cites an 1830s Catholic reading list that puts Gother and Milner alongside translations of Bonaventure and Augustine.19 Butler’s six-­ volume encyclopedic hagiography was among the most popular works published by subscription in Dublin around the turn of the nineteenth century, and Butler, Challoner, and Hay still held sway in Irish Catholic book catalogues in the 1840s and the 1890s.20 This section will attempt to recapture the tenor and tone of the nascent network of formative texts stemming from Gother and Challoner. Geremy Carnes offers a fine-­grained historical and cultural account of how Catholics experienced the 1688 Revolution as a ‘profound and painful

18 John Milner, The Exclamations of the Soul to God: or, The Meditations of St Teresa after Communion (London, 1790); Dominique Bouhours, The Life of St Francis Xavier, trans. John Dryden (London, 1688). 19  Begadon, ‘Catholic Religious Publishing, 1800–91’, p. 372. 20  Charles Benson, ‘The Dublin Book Trade’, in Murphy (ed.), The Oxford History of the Irish Book, iv, pp. 30, 36. For more on Butler, see Saward, Morrill, and Tomko (eds.), Firmly I Believe and Truly, pp. 321–33.

228  Michael Tomko transformation’.21 Catholic writers did not enter into a period of moribund silence, according to Carnes, but became an ‘oppressed yet dynamic and adaptive religious minority of great complexity’ that sought ‘to influence a broad public’.22 This argument corrects accounts of a quiet eighteenth century, explicitly citing and challenging the ‘second spring’ description of Catholics as cultural and social ‘detritus’. Yet Carnes’s study still recognizes that, for post-­1688 Catholics, ‘closet shrines and private chapels were once again the primary sites in which they ministered to their souls’ and that, out of this fragmentation, eighteenth-­century Catholic culture sought to foster ‘cohesion in the face of the powerful forces that sought to dissolve it’.23 While Carnes focuses on the ways that the ‘popular and polite literature’ of Dryden and Pope helped Catholics ‘maintain a sense of community identity’, some of the most efficacious works in this cultural project stood outside, or at least alongside, the literary genres of poems, novels, and plays.24 Even as Dryden’s religious conversion makes for one of the most interesting moments in literary biography, the pivot of Gother—­the Catholic apologist, writer, and priest—­would be one of the most culturally influential. Gother had been at the centre of English intellectual and political life under James II, volleying polemical pamphlets with Edward Stillingfleet and a host of Protestant controversialists. Gother’s A Papist Misrepresented and Represented, or, A Two-­Fold Character of Popery (1685) was a landmark work of cultural criticism that took on  prejudicial anti-­ Catholic stereotypes in circulation since the Henrician Reformation; attempted to break their hegemonic charm; and then offered rational, theological correctives. This created what Gother called a ‘two-­fold’ perspective: Gother expressed his own religious beliefs and position, but he also understood how his marginal community was perceived by those in the dom­in­ant culture. Such a ‘two-­fold’ awareness could lead to second-­guessing and internalized self-­denigration, but it could also empower critique of complacent self-­assuredness and narrow-­minded privilege. Gother’s The Papist Misrepresented demonstrated this comprehensive mindset and traced how discourses of dominance—­the tropes, images, and catchphrases found in popular and polite literature—­could be carefully and methodically disenchanted and disabled. In the 1820s, when the populist journalist William Cobbett wielded his own his­torio­graph­ic pen against every such inherited ‘magpie-­saying’ of anti-­Catholic his­tor­ians, he was following in Gother’s critical tradition and its expression in English Catholic historiography that included Butler’s anti-­imperial depictions of the sufferings of countless martyrs at the hands of impious power; Challoner’s alternative national religious histories in Britannia Sancta, or, the lives of the Most Celebrated British, English,

21 Geremy Carnes, The Papist Represented: Literature and the English Catholic Community, 1688–1791 (Newark, DE, 2017), p. 27. 22 Carnes, The Papist Represented, pp. xv, xvii. 23 Carnes, The Papist Represented, p. 2, 3. 24 Carnes, The Papist Represented, pp. xvii, 27.

Catholic Literature and Print Culture in English  229 Scottish, and Irish Saints (1745), Memoirs of Missionary Priests (1741–2), and A  Memorial of Ancient British Piety (1760); and Charles Dodd’s recalcitrant account of the Reformation in the multivolume The Church History of England, from the year 1500, to the year 1688 (1737–42).25 Alongside this critical project and its historiographic expression, Gother’s texts also established a mode of imaginative, pastoral outreach that would shape Catholic culture throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Eamon Duffy has commented, ‘The Revolution put an end to his polemical activity, but his most enduring work began in 1689 with the publication of Instructions for Particular States and Conditions of Life.’26 The Instructions were just one contribution to what Duffy calls the ‘little books’ that superseded Gother’s previous big interventions in the realm’s religious politics. These were ‘small, cheap devotional and instructional works’, but their reach was impressive.27 They were aimed at all walks of Catholic life, as indicated in the very title of Instructions for Masters, Traders, Labourers (1699), and their wide dissemination provided a common touchstone for far-­flung Catholic populations and the clergy that served them. They had a dual focus: how to live a good Catholic life in the world and how to grow a life of prayer and right worship. For the former, Gother attempted to enter imaginatively into the experiences of his readers across class, profession, gender, and region, including those trying to be moral in the marketplace: ‘The Hardness of Customers makes Shopkeepers Swear and Lie; and therefore are Customers Hard, because they know Shopkeepers will Swear and Lie.’28 This far-­reaching ethical empathy about ordinary life will be better realized in the novelistic depictions of a Charles Dickens or an Anthony Trollope, but Gother’s ability to write beyond the rectory into the shop, mill, or kitchen is nevertheless remarkable. His spiritual works extended this imaginative work. He provided a ‘short Glance at the Chief Ceremonies used at Mass’ for Catholics as ‘a great help to direct them in their Devotion’. He placed himself in the position of the ordinary layperson and offered a ‘slow motion’ account of the meaning of the rituals within the Mass: kneeling, the sign of the cross, the priest’s kissing of the altar.29 This advice was broadcast to the Catholic community throughout the country in Gother’s characteristic prose—­calm and clear, moderate, steadying, traditional, sober. As significant as was the tone set by Gother in these works, the effect of their widespread circulation that helped to create a kind of print network for a Catholic ‘reading nation’ may have been just as important. Gother contributes forty-­two entries to

25 William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (1824–7; Rockford, IL, 1988), p. 15. 26  Eamon Duffy, ‘Richard Challoner 1691–1781: A Memoir’, in Eamon Duffy (ed.), Challoner and His Church: A Catholic Bishop in Georgian England (London, 1981), p. 2. 27  Duffy, ‘Richard Challoner 1691–1781’, p. 2. 28  John Gother, Instructions for Masters, Traders, Labourers (London, 1699), p. 32. 29  John Gother, Instructions and Devotions for Hearing Mass (London, 1699), p. 96.

230  Michael Tomko Thomas Clancy’s English Catholic Books, 1641–1700: A Bibliography, but that number swells to 117 entries in the 1700–1800 edition.30 Well beyond the com­ pos­ition date of Gother’s works and even his own death, his books guided Catholics through life in the Georgian world. The two proto-­literary qualities of these texts—­a Catholic outsider’s often satirical self-­consciousness of English culture and a pastor’s nascent novelistic or dramatic movement from theological principle into the experience of the particular—­also shaped an alternative trajectory for eighteenth-­century Catholic print culture. Gother’s The Pope’s Supremacy Asserted from the Considerations of some Protestants and the Practice of the Primitive Church (1688) may not seem a promising place to find a literary forerunner for Waugh or Greene. Indeed, its preface anathematized the ‘Railery and Romancing’ of literature and the stage, thundering that the ‘Vindication of Truth’ and ‘Search into Religion’ should not be remade into a ‘Controversial Comedy’ or ‘a Farce’ by some ‘Hungry Poet’.31 Yet his pamphlet, subtitled ‘a dialogue between a church-­divine and a seeker’, took the form of a dramatic dialogue—­a kind of controversial or theological play. It opens with a ‘Seeker’, a thoughtful, ordinary Protestant whose assumptions have been unsettled by ‘Papist’ books like Gother’s own. He meets a smug Anglican ‘Divine’ who only deigns to answer sound logic with ‘hard words’ and ‘magisterial slightings’.32 The format hearkens back to Plato’s Socratic dialogues and would find later analogues in David Hume’s sceptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (c.1751, 1779) and William Wordsworth’s versified, ecclesiastical debates in The Excursion (1814). The liveliness of The Pope’s Supremacy Asserted, however, should not be overstated. The ‘dialogue’ consists of largely uninterrupted monologues that feature marginal page citations, very little character development, and no discernable action. Nevertheless, after their exchange, the ‘Seeker’ concludes: ‘This won’t do with me, and therefore I must ee’n seek out for a better Guide; and so farewell.’33 With the closing turn of the ‘Seeker’, Gother has imaginatively reversed (in an admittedly limited way) an interpersonal power dynamic. While this dialogue remains an austere narrative, the ‘Seeker’ seems to be headed towards some kind of conversion. In these closing words, tinged with both regret and resolution, can be heard a strange but stirring mix of determination amid uncertainty. Such complex emotions and states of mind would echo forward through the more nuanced fictional and autobiographical conversion narratives of Charles Ryder or Newman in the years to come. 30 Thomas H. Clancy, English Catholic Books, 1641–1700: A Bibliography (Brookfield, VT, 1996), pp. 71–8; Frans Blom, Jos Blom, Frans Korsten, and Geoffrey Scott, English Catholic Books, 1701–1800: A Bibliography (Brookfield, VT, 1996), pp. 129–40. 31  John Gother, ‘To the Reader’, The Pope’s Supremacy Asserted from the Considerations of Some Protestants and the Practice of the Primitive Church: In a Dialogue between a Church-­Divine and a Seeker (London, 1688). 32 Gother, The Pope’s Supremacy Asserted, p. 52. 33 Gother, The Pope’s Supremacy Asserted, p. 52.

Catholic Literature and Print Culture in English  231 Gother’s attempt to critique the worldliness of the dominant culture and to nurture a Catholic alternative resounded in the next generation through his protégé, Bishop Challoner, the London vicar apostolic from 1739 (initially as coadjutor) until his death in 1781 following the Gordon Riots. Gother’s sharp distinction between religious writing and plays that appeal to the ‘extravagant Appetites of a Distemper’d People’ can be heard in Challoner’s The Garden of the Soul (1740), a devotional vade mecum for eighteenth-­century Catholics. ‘Take care to banish from yourself and family all lewd and irreligious books’, Challoner warned, ‘and such as may be of dangerous consequence to faith or morals; as romances, play books, novels, fortune-­books, & c.’34 Gother and Challoner’s dual influence in the late eighteenth century can be seen in the early life of the playwright and novelist Elizabeth Inchbald. On the one hand, as a conscientious young Catholic concerned about the ‘dangerous consequence’ of acting and writing, she shared her worries about eternal salvation with the Scottish priest and controversial biblical scholar, Alexander Geddes. On the other hand, Inchbald, travelling in a provincial acting company in the 1770s, relied on the Catholic print network to fulfill basic religious obligations. Inchbald and John Philip Kemble—­the age’s great Shakespearean actor and former Douai student—­ could be found ‘reading’ the Mass together on a Sunday.35 In other words, even in a far-­flung, worldly, secular setting, they were able to congregate for worship as Catholic co-­religionists because of the printed page. They could have been ­following the guidance in The Garden of the Soul on ‘A Method for Hearing Mass for the Absent’: Let them make choice of a proper time in the morning, and either by themselves (or if they have a family, summoning them together) let them go into their oratory, and there present themselves in spirit before the altar of God: after having bewailed their misfortunate in being kept at a distance from these heavenly mysteries, let them join themselves in heart and affection with all that are offering this sacrifice to God at that time; representing more particularly to themselves that mass which is then offered in the place they commonly hear mass; and applying themselves to the same devotions they commonly use in time of hearing mass.36

This shared textual observance is an instance of how, in Begadon’s words, ‘Reading Catholic books at this time was not only an individual act but also a social activity’, not only in Ireland but across the Anglophone Catholic world in the late 34  Gother, ‘To the Reader’, The Pope’s Supremacy Asserted; Richard Challoner, The Garden of the Soul: Or, a Manual of Spiritual Exercises and Instructions for Christians who (Living in the World) Aspire to Devotion (London, 1755), p. 173. 35  James Boaden, The Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, 2 vols. (London, 1833), I, p. 82. 36 Challoner, The Garden of the Soul, p. 94.

232  Michael Tomko eighteenth and early nineteenth century.37 For Inchbald and Kemble’s efforts at ‘living in the world’ while maintaining their Catholic moral and spiritual life, those devotional ‘little books’ in Duffy’s term—­or ‘good books’ in Challoner’s—­ were critical.38 The 1770s episode of celebrity devotion not only shows the increasingly complex relationship between Catholic culture and the mainstream British ‘republic of letters’ but also illustrates the inherited significance of a print culture network rooted in Gother’s post-­1688 evangelizing and robustly con­ tinued by Challoner. The seemingly indefatigable bishop and prolific religious writer set the tone for  eighteenth-­century Catholicism, sometimes dubbed ‘Garden of the Soul’ Catholicism after Challoner’s ubiquitous collection of prayers and devotions. Covering morning prayer to evening prayer and almost every facet of life in between, this lodestar, which made its way to all corners of Britain and Ireland, was just one of many apologetic, meditative, historical, and translated classic works for which Challoner was responsible. His 500 entries help the bibliography of English Catholic Books, 1701–1800 reach 356 pages, with The Garden of the Soul alone accounting for thirty entries from 1740 to 1800 in editions from London, Dublin, Manchester, Wolverhampton, Preston, Newcastle, and Kilkenny. As Challoner’s title implies, this spirituality represented a turning inward, an enclosure for the reader—­the cultivation of a sacred space of contemplative devotion amid a challenging religious climate defined by the regnant Anglicanism and emerging Enlightenment. Yet The Garden of the Soul was also a vehicle of transmission, including traditional prayers and voices from the medieval past and broader European inheritance. In addition, the devotional manual provided communal connection, sounding the same devotional notes wherever it was opened. Even for those removed from the rest of the community, Challoner’s devotional book called any scattered Catholics to ‘join themselves in heart and affection with all that are offering this sacrifice to God at that time’, thereby constituting a spiritual community through a shared liturgical experience mediated through print culture. Despite Challoner’s disavowal of the ‘dangerous consequences’ of novels and play books, there is also, as with Gother, an imaginative and dramatic strand that animates the devotional and spiritual writing in his own book. Again, in this example, The Garden of the Soul directed spiritual communicants to ‘representing more particularly to themselves that mass which is then offered in the place they commonly hear mass’. This is an imaginative spiritual exercise akin in many ways to the Ignatian contemplative tradition, but Challoner did not emphasize ‘transport’ to an unfamiliar Holy Land to make a sacred narrative intimate. Rather, Challoner’s imaginative ‘representing’ reunited readers to a memory of a familiar 37  Begadon, ‘Catholic Devotional Literature in Dublin’, p. 341. 38 Challoner, The Garden of the Soul, p. 172.

Catholic Literature and Print Culture in English  233 place of worship, bringing them back home to the celebration of the sacraments amid a familiar community. The same type of imaginative contemplative intensity informed Challoner’s Think Well On’t (1734), which provided focused meditations on the moral life, metaphysics, the Passion, a Good Death, and the Final Things for each day of the month. He asked the reader to take the book into a private place that would allow for ‘Recollection’ or what Challoner calls ‘Consideration’. ‘Place thyself in the Presence of thy God’, Challoner urged, ‘representing him to thyself by a lively Faith’.39 The daily reflections then instructed readers by asking them to place themselves mentally in another moment, such as their own death bed: ‘Ah! My poor Soul, enter now into the same Sentiments which thou shalt certainly have at the Hour of thy Death; thus, and only thus, thou shalt be out of Danger of being put upon by this deceitful World.’40 The warning against ‘the world’ was the most common refrain in Challoner’s writing and one of the most common themes of this period. It mitigated against what might at first seem like a move towards the privatization of spirituality. This was indeed an internalized withdrawal from the world at large into a closeted space and not a shared one, but Challoner’s ‘little book’ went with the reader, conveyed traditional practices and prayers, and imaginatively united the devotions, concerns, and values of all those within the Catholic print network, hallowing out for the individual a distinct sense of religious and communal identity set apart from the dominant Protestant culture. In addition to this contemplative imaginative strain, Challoner’s religious writings also possess a subtle dramatic quality. On the one hand, this could be fairly conventional, as when Challoner’s The Young Gentleman Instructed (1735) staged three dialogues between an avuncular tutor and an impressionable Catholic youth. Their discussions on atheism, deism, and Unitarianism gave the young man—­and the reader—­an awareness of the intellectual challenges posed by the Enlightenment as well as adequate responses to them. On the other hand, the dramatic dialogue more subtly informed his Catholick Christian Instructed (1737), whose ‘question and answer’ might initially seem a typical catechetical ‘quiz’. However, the surprisingly piquant tone of the exchanges went beyond predictable queries followed by rote answers. The questions did not simply elicit Catholic doctrine, they seemed to confront and to challenge Catholic beliefs and practices: Why do you treat of the Sign of the Cross before you begin to speak of the Sacraments? . . . Is it not a great Prejudice to the Faithful that the Mass is said in Latin, which is a Language the generality of them do not understand? . . . Is there any thing in Scripture that insinuates this great Devotion that should be in all 39  Richard Challoner, Think Well On’t: or, Reflections on the Great Truths of the Christian Religion. For Every Day in the Month (London, 1734), pp. 3–5. 40 Challoner, Think Well On’t, p. 41.

234  Michael Tomko Ages to this blessed Virgin? . . . But why do you call the blessed Virgin the Mother of God? . . . But in some of the Addresses made to the Saints or Angels, I find Petitions for Mercy, Aid, or Defence; what say you to that?41

The querulous, aggressive, and often condescending ‘I’ who asked these questions seemed to assume that Catholicism represented indefensible superstitions and obvious errors. This ‘I’ was a self-­assured questioner much like the ‘Divine’ in Gother’s earlier dialogue. The interrogated ‘you’ had to calmly, rationally, and ­eloquently muster the resources and rationale for a response. The quasi-­literary dramatic dialogue in The Catholick Christian Instructed was not primarily concerned with memorization or even instruction; rather, Challoner constructed it as a moment of encounter between a Catholic and a ‘worldling’. This proto-­literary form provided a formative imaginative experience to maintain resilience and enable apologetics. As such, Challoner himself explicitly located it within the trad­ ition of Gother by promising to ‘vindicate’ Catholicism from ‘the Misrepresentations of our Adversaries’.42

‘To Display the Native Purity and Beauty of the Catholic Faith’: Reimagining Catholicism in the Age of Emancipation, 1780–1829 The 1778 passage of limited Catholic Relief Acts in Westminster and Dublin, the resulting anti-­Catholic riots in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and London, and Challoner’s subsequent death together marked an important turning point for the Catholic community. On the one hand, there would be widespread support—­sometimes generously just and sometimes begrudgingly pragmatic—­for extending more rights to Catholics and removing penal restrictions against them, eventually culminating in the 1829 passage of Catholic emancipation. On the other hand, there remained much historical resentment and fear of Catholicism, sometimes mildly intolerant and sometimes vehemently oppositional. These two ambivalent forces complicated the already complex role of print culture in the Catholic community, particularly in what Gother called its ‘two-­fold’ character. Catholics began to be much more conscious of being ‘overheard’ by the nation at large, with their pol­it­ ical, cultural, and social prospects determined in part by the impression made by their writing. So, while the Catholic print network continued to look inward with formative devotional and moral writing, its outward glance became increasingly self-­conscious and marked by division. Joseph Berington, Charles Butler, and the

41  Richard Challoner, The Catholick Christian Instructed: In the Sacraments, Sacrifice, Ceremonies, and Observances of the Church. By Way of Question and Answer (London, 1737), pp. 1, 105–6, 224, 235–6. 42 Challoner, The Catholick Christian, ‘The Preface’.

Catholic Literature and Print Culture in English  235 Cisalpines downplayed the theological, cultural, and intellectual distance between modern Britons and modern Catholics, even at the cost of diluting their own distinct religious identity and heritage; traditionalists like Milner vindicated Catholic truth claims and demanded justice for past wrongs and persecution, even at the risk of perpetuating religious conflict and alienation. In the age of emancipation, this external regard and internal crossfire shaped a Catholic print network moving from ‘little books’ to the new publishing and periodical media associated with the modern civil sphere. In 1797, Peter Newby, the Douai-­ educated teacher and unheralded poet, attempted to start a publishing business in the Catholic enclave of Preston dedicated to the printing of Catholic books.43 In the same piously entrepreneurial spirit, William Joseph Walter—­a writer and professor at St Edmund’s, Ware—­ translated and edited a series of Catholic books before emigrating to Philadelphia to launch the ‘Catholic Family Library’. Their ingenuous efforts were short-­lived and unsuccessful, in contrast with the modern business savvy of the London-­ based James Peter Coghlan, who had far-­flung Catholic personal and professional contacts and collaborations throughout England, North America, émigré communities in England, and English Catholics in religious and educational institutions across Europe. He published books and fulfilled orders for Bishop Hay and other prominent Scottish Catholics, partnered with Edinburgh Catholic pub­ lishers and booksellers, and managed reciprocal publishing and copyright matters for the Irish book trade.44 After Coghlan’s death in 1800, Keating, Brown, and Keating would succeed him and continue to operate through this transnational, religious network. Parallel efforts in Ireland of varying success and scope likewise mixed worldly and spiritual ambitions. Whether by James Haley in Cork or Patrick Wogan and James Hoey in Dublin, these Catholic printers combined offerings of catechisms, devotionals, and sermons with textbooks, almanacs, and newspapers to further their own business interests but also to advance the Catholic cause in religion and politics. Across Britain and Ireland, there were also multiple attempts after 1800 to establish a Catholic periodical to unite the readership of a national Catholic community and to advance the cause of Catholic emancipation, blatantly signalled in titles such as The Catholic Advocate of Civil and Religious Liberty or The Catholic Emancipator. Other periodicals included The Catholic Magazine and Reflector of Keating, Brown, and Keating, who would later publish the Catholicon, or The Christian Philosopher and the Catholic Spectator and Monitor; Charles Butler’s Catholic Gentleman’s Magazine; the Edinburgh-­based The Phoenix launched by the poet George Duncombe Cox; the Irish Captain Rock in London; Milner’s The 43  Josephine Malone, Peter Newby Friend to All Mankind (Aylesford, 1964), pp. 141–3. 44  Frans Blom, Jos Blom, Frans Korsten, and Geoffrey Scott (eds.), The Correspondence of James Peter Coghlan (1731–1800), CRS 80 (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. xxvii–­xxix.

236  Michael Tomko Orthodox Journal; and The Catholic Miscellany, edited, like many other efforts, by the vehement William Eusebius Andrews.45 These journals showed the ‘two-­fold’ character of Catholic writing, ever aware of printed pages circulating among both the Catholic community and a Protestant British audience. For instance, Butler’s Catholic Gentleman’s Magazine promised to always offer ‘pages of peace’, enlisting ‘gentle courtesy’ and ‘good manners’ in the ‘Catholic cause’.46 In other words, the Catholic Gentleman’s Magazine would seek to gain the respect of readers of the long-­established Gentleman’s Magazine as a path to emancipation. This was to no effect on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who suspected ‘courteous Butler’ as ‘Rome’s smooth go-­between’ as much as he detested Milner as ‘Rome’s Brazen Serpent’.47 Yet Coleridge’s disdain was about the only thing that could unite Milner and Butler. Milner’s Orthodox Journal, under the editorship of Andrews, was relentless in its attacks on Butler and the Cisalpine Catholics. Milner was even told by Rome to cease contributing after this internecine culture war became too intense. The periodicals’ contents show how broad and multifaceted the cultural campaign for Catholic emancipation had become. Not only did they feature the type of ecclesiastical and political coverage to be expected in a journal dedicated to the ‘Catholic cause’, these journals also had regular selections of poetry and book reviews. A claim to cultural cachet was an important part of Catholic print culture in the age of emancipation. Walter’s editing of Robert Southwell, for instance, was a step towards establishing a Catholic literary canon in English. Walter would go even farther, claiming in 1816 to have uncovered a Fountains Abbey poetic manuscript by an ‘ancient English bard’ titled Clavis Scientiae, or Bretayne’s Skyll-­ Kay of Knowing, that would reveal the English Catholic Dante to the world.48 More conventionally, James Archer, known for his eloquent preaching at London’s Bavarian embassy chapel, collected and printed his sermons in the 1780s, before subsequent editions were published by Coghlan. The rationale for Archer’s Sermons on Various Moral and Religious Subjects differed from the devotional needs met by Challoner and Gother. Archer hoped readers would find ‘the genuine spirit of Religion, equally remote from superstition and impiety’.49 He expanded on how the style and substance of that authentic religion was represented by a Catholic Church that was not foreign, parochial, or primitive: 45  John R. Fletcher, ‘Early Catholic Periodicals in England’, Dublin Review, 198 (1936), pp. 284–310. See also Paul Richardson, ‘John Lingard and the English Catholic Periodical Press, 1809–1841’, in Peter Phillips (ed.), Lingard Remembered: Essays to mark the Sesquicentenary of John Lingard’s Death, CRS Monograph 6 (London, 2004), pp. 65–81. 46  Charles Butler, Catholic Gentlemen’s Magazine, 1 (1818), p. 3. 47  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Sancti Dominici Pallium: A Dialogue between Poet and Friend’, in Kathleen Coburn (ed.), The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 16 vols. (Princeton, 1983–2001), XVI, I:II, pp. 1048–54. 48  Robert Southwell, Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears, ed. W.  Jos. Walter (London, 1822); W.  Jos. Walter, ‘Preface’, An Account of a Manuscript of Ancient English Poetry (London, 1816). 49  James Archer, Sermons on Various Moral and Religious Subjects, for Some of the Principal Festivals of the Year (London, 1789), p. vi.

Catholic Literature and Print Culture in English  237 It has been my constant endeavor, both in this and in the former publication, to display the native purity and beauty of the Catholic Faith, and to exhibit the doctrines, and moral precepts of the Gospel, not as disfigured by the narrow and illiberal conceptions of some men, not as distorted by the interests and passions of others.50

Archer’s balanced ‘display’ and ‘exhibit’ of Catholic ‘native purity and beauty’ spoke to the Catholic community but also assuaged anti-­Catholic anxieties in the ‘smooth’ style cultivated by Butler as a lawyer and man of letters. Not all imaginative efforts, however, were so irenic. While Butler and Archer seem to have been constantly imagining the perception and reaction of the non-­Catholic reader, Milner continued the controversial ‘proto-­ literary’ tradition of Gother and Challoner in The End of Religious Controversy (1818). While tackling traditional apologetic topics, ranging from idolatry to transubstantiation, Milner not only followed Gother in dedicating a whole chapter to ‘Various Misrepresentations’ but further developed his imaginative dialogue. This ‘controversy’ was conducted between Milner and a fictional Protestant correspondent, ‘James Brown, Esq.’, who wrote from his home in New Cottage. The eight-­month exchange of letters expanded to other members of the ‘Friendly Society of New Cottage’. This epis­tol­ ary form mirrored a common device of the eighteenth-­century novel and framed Milner’s work as a kind of proto-­novel, which provided a fictional account of transforming individual perceptions and collective beliefs. The ‘friendly society’ seemed to be moving towards Rome, just as with Gother’s ‘Seeker’, under Milner’s admonitions to dismiss ‘all wordly respects of whatever kind from your minds’.51 It may seem strange to find something novelistic about treating religious and political issues through characters’ changing relationships in The End of Religious Controversy, given the high-­pitched anti-­Catholic stereotypes of the Gothic novel and the sensational villainy of monks, nuns, and Jesuits in the so-­called ‘penny dreadfuls’.52 Yet in this period, a different literary strand—­the emerging genres of the national tale and historical novel—­were approaching the role of Catholicism in British and Irish society with greater subtlety and acumen. Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791) narrated a multigenerational story about an interreligious marriage and was arguably the first ‘Catholic novel’ in English. It followed the tumultuous and unlikely courtship of the fiery and fashionable young Protestant woman, 50 Archer, Sermons, p. vi. 51  John Milner, The End of Religious Controversy, 3 vols. (London, 1818), III, p. 246. 52  For the cultural politics of Catholicism in the Irish Gothic, see Luke Gibbons, Gaelic Gothic: Race, Colonization and Irish Culture (Galway, 2004); and Jarlath Killeen, The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction: History, Origins, Theories (Edinburgh, 2014). For broader geographic and chronological accounts of the Gothic and anti-­Catholicism in British culture, see Diane Long Hoeveler, The Gothic Ideology: Religious Hysteria and Anti-­Catholicism in British Popular Fiction, 1780–1880 (Cardiff, 2014); and Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820–1900 (Notre Dame, IN, 2013).

238  Michael Tomko Miss Milner, and a grave, solitary, and strange, though noble laicized English Catholic priest, Dorriforth.53 Yet in the ‘wordling’ Miss Milner’s badinage—­either with Dorriforth or his Jesuit tutor Sandford—­the echoes of the imagined dialogic exchanges of Gother or Challoner can be heard. ‘I should from my own opinion believe so, but in some respects I am like you Roman Catholics’, teases Miss Milner, ‘I don’t believe from my own understanding, but from what other people tell me’.54 This remarkably complex and self-­conscious banter about religious representation and misrepresentation invested the book with greater social, political, and even theological import beyond just ‘Railery and Romancing’. Inchbald’s work shared these characteristics with the national tale, a form of the novel ­dom­in­ated by women writers such as Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), and Jane Porter whose lives and subject matter moved between England, Ireland, and Scotland. Around the time of the Act of Union with Ireland, these innovative novelists used representative national characters to discuss broader political and cultural relations through engaging and often tumultuous marriage plots.55 While these authors were not Catholics themselves, the place of Catholicism in the United Kingdom—­and what Claire Connolly has called ‘confessional difference’ and the ‘complex and variegated world of nineteenth-­century belief ’—featured prominently in the national tale.56 For instance, the travelling English gentleman began his difficult courtship of the noble Glorvina in Owenson’s epistolary The Wild Irish Girl (1807) by being literally knocked off his feet while spying on her at a Catholic Mass in the west of Ireland. In adapting and canonizing many features of the national tale in the historical novel, Walter Scott revisited the historical and political place of Catholicism in Scotland, whether among the Scottish Jacobites in Waverley (1814) or among the Reformation-­era intrigues surrounding Melrose Abbey and Mary Queen of Scots in The Monastery (1820) and The Abbot (1820). These novels’ plots generally moved towards pacification, some sort of romantic happy ending, even while the stalled progress of Catholic emancipation troubled the Union, but the 1820s works of Irish Catholic novelists such as John and Michael Banim and Gerald Griffin recalled, rather than sublimated, social violence as religious difference and divisive histories persisted in politics and on the page. Just as the ‘proto-­literary’ traits of Catholic texts began to make their way into the literary mainstream in the age of emancipation, so too did the Catholic narrating of alternative versions of national and religious history enter into the 53 Francis Young, ‘Elizabeth Inchbald’s “Catholic Novel” and its Local Background’, Recusant History, 31 (2013), pp. 573–92. 54  Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story (Oxford, 1988), p. 16. 55 For the national, religious, and cultural politics of the national tale and historical novel in Scotland and Ireland, see the influential studies by Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, 1997); and Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge, 2002). 56  Claire Connolly, A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–1829 (Cambridge, 2012), p. 126.

Catholic Literature and Print Culture in English  239 public sphere. Catholic print culture in England and Ireland constantly mediated hopes for emancipation through a retelling of the past.57 C. D. A. Leighton has shown how mid-­eighteenth-­century Catholic writers such as Charles O’Conor and John Curry moved between historical and political writings ‘to address the Protestant community effectively’ about contemporary controversies, even when the subject was as ostensibly remote as pre-­Norman Ireland.58 The crossover intensified in later decades, with the Catholic question, as Clare O’Halloran has argued, becoming ‘a critical sub-­text for almost all Irish antiquarian writing’.59 Indeed, the Catholic periodicals were filled with the latest news in antiquarianism, often featuring regular sections dedicated to historical topics. Andrews even edited an 1820s periodical focused on historical critique, with the unlikely title A Critical and Historical Review of Fox’s Book of Martyrs: Shewing the Inaccuracies, Falsehoods, and Misrepresentations in the Work of Deception. Milner was named a fellow of the Society of Antiquarians for his monumental The History, Civil and Ecclesiastical, and Survey of the Antiquities of Winchester (1798–1801). He in turn attacked Butler’s Historical Memoirs of English, Irish and Scottish Catholics from the Reformation to the Present Time (1819–21) for being too pacific towards a Protestant audience, even though it was nowhere near as obliging as the Cisalpine vision of Joseph Berington’s Literary History of the Middle Ages (1814), which might be considered anti-­Catholic medievalism by a Catholic priest. In these his­ torio­graph­ic battles among Catholics, the central contention was over whether nineteenth-­century Catholicism should jettison a connection to its ‘papist’ past in order to join a more enlightened modernity or whether a ruined past with its heroic endurance of persecution and suffering should be recalled to controvert the founding narrative of an empowered Anglicanism. Amid this internecine battle over the Catholic historical ‘display’, there stands John Lingard’s History of England (1819–30), a work criticized by Milner but later adapted by Hilaire Belloc. Lingard, as a conscientious priest, was attempting to tell, in compelling and clear prose, a national and religious history that would vindicate the Catholic position, but would do so through careful sifting of primary sources and objective historical method. For his scientific, rather than partisan, approach to historiography, he is sometimes given the sobriquet of the ‘English Ranke’.60 The persisting debate over Lingard’s allegiances is itself testament that Lingard’s historical acumen and imagination do, in some ways, transcend the limitations of the period’s other pointed historiographic interventions. At the same time, the ‘two-­fold’

57  John Vidmar, English Catholic Historians and the English Reformation, 1585–1954 (Brighton, 2005), pp. 23–74. 58 C.  D.  A.  Leighton, Catholicism in a Protestant Kingdom: A Study of the Irish Ancien Régime (Dublin, 1994), p. 126. 59  Clare O’Halloran, Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c.1750–1800 (Cork, 2004), p. 5. 60 Donald F. Shea, The English Ranke: John Lingard (New York, 1969).

240  Michael Tomko professionalism and partisanship of History of England very much belongs to the ambivalent struggles to make sense of past, present, and future for Catholics in Britain amid the uncertain prospects of emancipation.61

‘In the Very Centre of the Island’: The Catholic Print Network in English beyond 1829 If the guiding works of Gother and Challoner helped establish a textual network among Catholics across Britain and Ireland, and if this network’s critical, his­ torio­graph­ic, and proto-­literary elements transformed to meet the challenges of periodical and publishing culture in the age of emancipation, why has the period often been relegated to dormancy? Our dominant accounts may simply not be attuned to the particular legacies of figures such as Gother, Butler, or Milner—­the texts they composed and the institutions they built. Newman himself, however, even in the ‘second spring’ sermon, did not commit this sin of omission. Newman’s 1850s sermon was delivered at the august 1830s buildings of Oscott College. Yet the seminary’s humble 1790s foundation belonged to the Georgian wave of Catholic institutions established or re-­established in England in the wake of the French Revolution, often with tenuous prospects. In describing the post-­ Revolutionary plight of the English community of Benedictine sisters who were displaced from Flanders to Worcestershire’s Stanbrook Abbey, Tonya Moutray has argued that ‘how well refugee nuns fared often depended on a plethora of shifting and unpredictable circumstances over which they had minimal control’.62 The future of ‘Old Oscott’ was no less uncertain until Milner assumed its leadership in 1808. In thanksgiving, Newman recalled and recognized Milner, who died in 1826, letting him speak again amid the neo-­Gothic grandeur of Oscott’s chapel designed by Augustus Welby Pugin, a Victorian architect also indebted to Milner’s earlier championing of the Gothic revival.63 There followed an unexpected moment of dialogue across generations, similar to the ‘proto-­literary’ dialogues found in Challoner’s and Gother’s works. Rhetorically, Newman dramatically reanimated Milner, letting him hold forth eloquently in the midst of Newman’s own sermon, so that it was ultimately the former bishop who described the contemporary ‘resurrection of the Church’:

61  For Lingard as a ‘Cisalpine’ historian, see Joseph P. Chinnici, The English Catholic Enlightenment: John Lingard and the Cisalpine Movement, 1780–1850 (Shepherdstown, WV, 1980). For a corrective challenge, see Peter Phillips, ‘Re-­Evaluating John Lingard’s History of England’, Recusant History, 28 (2007), pp. 529–46. 62 Tonya  J.  Moutray, Refugee Nuns, the French Revolution, and British Literature and Culture (London, 2016), p. 10. 63 Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (New Haven, 2007), p. 141.

Catholic Literature and Print Culture in English  241 Say that one time, rapt in spirit, he [Milner] had reached forward to the future, and that his mortal eye had wandered from that lowly chapel in the valley which had been for centuries in the possession of Catholics, to the neighbouring height, then waste and solitary. And let him say to those about him: ‘I see a bleak mount, looking upon an open country, over against that huge town, to whose inhabitants Catholicism is of so little account . . . And there on that high spot, far from the haunts of men, yet in the very centre of the island, a large edifice, or rather pile of edifices, appears with many fronts, and courts, and long cloisters and corridors, and story upon story. And there it rises, under the invocation of the same sweet and powerful name which has been our strength and consolation in the Valley’.64

It is easy to miss how strangely creative this oratorical moment is. The unnamed, imagined ‘Milner’ goes on to describe the ‘old chant’, the clerical procession, and the liturgy that Newman and his audience were themselves experiencing in real time. Why? Newman’s literary device acknowledged and participated in a tradition—­recent, local, and still resonating amid these buildings. He circulated the spirit of his prolific forebear to unite past and present as well as to connect the Catholics found ‘in corners, and alleys, and cellars, and the housetops, or in the recesses of the country’ with this foundational event at ‘the very centre of the island’.65 So, when Newman summoned the departed spirit of Milner, it was not a moment of Revolutionary retrieval, but rather a moment of continuity. Newman did not name Milner, presuming the bishop and writer would be immediately recognized and easily remembered. In the mid-­nineteenth century, Newman was joining a living, retrospective tradition from the long eighteenth century constituted by personal connection; material and institutional indebtedness; and re­flect­ive texts that were constantly reimagining a communal path forward by reinterpreting a contested past. If leaving Milner unnamed made his importance implicit, so too did eighteenth-­century print culture take on unspoken significance. Newman’s work was not complete until it was broadcast, distributed as a printed text just as Gother’s edifying ‘instructions’ had been. A pamphlet version of Newman’s sermon was soon printed in Fleet Street, Dublin, and Derby by the Victorian Catholic publishing house, T. Richardson and Son, so that Catholics in all those disparate ‘corners’ and ‘recesses’ could see Milner’s vision, hear Newman’s words, and also be a part of the ‘second spring’. This publication itself provides an example of the enduring, but often unrecognized, complexity and vitality of Georgian Catholic print culture.66 For Victorian Catholics as with Georgian

64  Newman, ‘The Second Spring’, p. 175–6. 65  Newman, ‘The Second Spring’, pp. 172–3, 176. 66  John Henry Newman, The Second Spring. A Sermon Preached in the Synod of Oscott, on Tuesday July 13th, 1852 (London, 1852).

242  Michael Tomko Catholics, these words—­diffused and disseminated through print—­would serve as reminders of how to structure their lives and to set themselves apart from the world around them—­a constitutive call to community and to worship that had resounded in Catholic print culture throughout the eighteenth century.

Select Bibliography Carnes, Geremy, The Papist Represented: Literature and the English Catholic Community, 1688–1791 (Newark, DE, 2017). Duffy, Eamon (ed.), Challoner and His Church: A Catholic Bishop in Georgian England (London, 1981). King, Joshua, Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain’s Age of Print (Columbus, OH, 2015). Moutray, Tonya  J., Refugee Nuns, the French Revolution, and British Literature and Culture (London, 2016). Phillips, Peter (ed.), Lingard Remembered: Essays to mark the Sesquicentenary of John Lingard’s Death, CRS Monograph 6 (London, 2004). Saward, John, Morrill, John, and Tomko, Michael (eds.), Firmly I Believe and Truly: The Spiritual Tradition of Catholic England, 1483–1999 (Oxford, 2011). Tomko, Michael, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778–1829 (Basingstoke, 2011).

13 Catholic Literature and Literary Culture in Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh

This chapter deals with Catholic literary culture in Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish in the period from 1746 to 1829. Of the three languages surveyed, Irish stands out in terms of both volume and variety of Catholic literary production. This is reflected in the space devoted here to each language. Examining these three Celtic languages and their literary cultures side by side allows for the ex­plor­ation of a number of issues. These include the connections between print and manuscript, the place of Catholic literary activity within the larger context of literary production, and the relationship of Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish to literature in English and other European languages. Examining them together also highlights some stark points of contrast: Irish had a much larger number of speakers than Scottish Gaelic or Welsh, but print in the Irish language was much more restricted than in either of the others. Be that as it may, specifically Catholic religious printing in Irish was much more productive than the output in the other two languages combined. In Scotland, Catholic Gaels were a religious minority within a greater Gaelic culture increasingly dominated by Presbyterianism. The small community of Welsh Catholics found themselves in a similar position with regard to Protestant denominations. The study of Welsh-­language Catholic writing has tended to focus on earlier periods of recusancy.1 Presbyterian religious literature of our period in Scottish Gaelic has been studied intensely but the same cannot be said for the less ­vo­lu­min­ous Catholic literature.2 Certain aspects of the Catholic literature of Irish-­speaking Ireland have been studied in detail but by no means exhaustively. For much of our period, Irish literature was inseparable from the distinctive brand of Irish Jacobitism which emphasized the loyalty of the Stuarts to Catholicism. Literary reflexes of Irish Jacobitism have been discussed elsewhere

I am grateful to my colleague, Dr William Mahon, Aberystwyth University, for his comments on a draft of this chapter. I alone am responsible for the shortcomings which remain. 1  Geraint Bowen, Welsh Recusant Writings (Cardiff, 1999). 2  Donald Meek, ‘Gaelic and the Churches’, in Colin MacLean and Kenneth Veitch (eds.), Scottish Life and Society, a Compendium of Scottish Ethnology: Religion (Edinburgh, 2006), pp. 363–78. Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh, Catholic Literature and Literary Culture in Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829. Edited by: Liam Chambers, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843443.003.0014

244  Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh and are not dealt with here although they provide the backdrop to much of the literature discussed in this chapter.3 What follows cannot be exhaustive and the main focus is on specifically ‘religious’ Catholic literature: catechisms, sermons, and other devotional literature in print and in manuscript, with occasional diversions into other relevant material. It must be remembered that the literature surveyed here represents only the tip of a larger iceberg of Catholic vernacular cultural practice in a hostile and centralizing Hanoverian State.

Wales Welsh Catholicism in our period, although marginalized and maligned, was not as heavily tainted by the Jacobitism so associated by some with Catholic culture in the Scottish Highlands. Neither did Welsh Catholics constitute the same proportion of the population that Irish-­speaking Catholics in Ireland did. The success of the Reformation in Wales was remarkable and Welsh-­language culture came to be dominated by Reformed churches, moulding it in a way that invites comparison with Presbyterian Gaelic Scotland.4 Catholic traditions had vanished across large areas of Wales by the mid-­eighteenth century yet there remained areas, especially along the border with England, where the proportion of Catholics was more significant and where Catholic practices were sustained by local gentry.5 These areas included Holywell in Flintshire in the north-­east and parts of Monmouthshire in the south-­east of the country.6 The latter area in particular had a significant history of Catholic recusant literature.7 That tradition had been silent for nearly a century when a number of works by David Powell (alias Dewi Nantbrân, alias Brother Gregory) were published.8 A Franciscan friar who spent time in Douai before returning to Wales in 1740, Powell served in the Abergavenny area. He was responsible for the three printed volumes which constitute the period’s main contribution to Catholic devotional literature in Welsh: 3 Breandán Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghéar. Na Stíobhartaigh agus an tAos Léinn (Dublin, 1996); Vincent Morley, The Popular Mind in Eighteenth-­Century Ireland (Cork, 2017). 4 Trystan  O.  Hughes, ‘Roman Catholicism’, in Richard  C.  Allen and David Ceri Jones, with Trystan O. Hughes (eds.), The Religious History of Wales: Religious Life and Practice in Wales from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (Cardiff, 2014), p. 69; Niall Ó Ciosáin, ‘Devotional Publishing in Irish and Scottish Gaelic’, in James Kelly and Ciarán Mac Murchaidh (eds.), Irish and English: Essays on the Irish Linguistic and Cultural Frontier, 1600–1900 (Dublin, 2012), p. 278. 5  Hughes, ‘Roman Catholicism’, p. 69. 6  Philip Jenkins, ‘A Welsh Lancashire? Monmouthshire Catholics in the 18th Century’, Recusant History, 15 (1979), p. 186; John R. Guy, ‘Eighteenth-­Century Gwent Catholics’, Recusant History, 16 (1982), pp. 78–88. 7  Frank Olding, ‘Some Welsh Popish Books: Recusant Literature in Monmouthshire, 1550–1781’, Monmouthshire Antiquary, 22 (2006), pp. 19–37. 8 Robert Thomas Jenkins, ‘Powell, David (Dewi Nantbrân; died 1781)’, in Dictionary of Welsh Biography, https://biography.wales/article/s-­POWE-­DAV-­1781 (accessed 1 August 2021).

Catholic Literature in Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish  245 • 1764: Catechism Byrr o’r Athrawiaeth Ghristnogol; er Addysc Ysprydol, i Blant; a’r Werinos Anwybodus trwy Gymru Oll. • 1764: Sail yr Athrawiaeth Gatholic. • 1776: Allwydd y Nef. All three of the volumes were printed in London. The first of the three appears to derive from a version of the popular ‘Doway’ catechism compiled by Henry Turberville in the seventeenth century. The second was a translation of a work by the English Catholic bishop and prolific author, Richard Challoner. The third, published by the prominent London Catholic publisher, James Peter Coghlan, was an adaptation of an earlier Catholic work in Welsh, Allwydd neu Agoriad Paradwys i’r Cymrv (Yn Lvyck [Liège], 1670) by the seventeenth-­century writer John Hughes but also contained a small amount of Powell’s own original verse.9 In his preface to the 1776 volume, Powell stated that he undertook the volume because of a lack of such books and especially ‘pan clowais bagad ohonoch yn dymuno cael y cyfryw weddiau yn eich iaith eich hun’ (‘when I heard that many of you wished to have such prayers in your own language’).10 It would be 1829 before this area of south-­east Wales produced another item of Welsh Catholic written literature. A Welsh translation of Henry Howard’s Remarks on the Erroneous Opinions Entertained Respecting the Roman Catholic Religion (Carlisle, 1825) was made in 1829 at the instigation of the Jones family of Llanarth, but it remained in ­manuscript.11 At the opposite end of Wales, one can delineate another area of Catholic literary activity more political than devotional. William Owen, antiquary and historian, was born in Anglesey in 1785 and served as a marine during the Napoleonic Wars. His 116-­page pamphlet Drych Crefyddol yn Dangos Dechreuad y Grefydd Brotestanaidd (Liverpool, 1824) purported to be a history of Protestantism containing an account of the Welsh Catholic martyrs. Owen’s authorship of an 1829 pamphlet defending the marquis of Anglesey after making representations in the House of Lords in favour of Catholic emancipation earned its author the nickname ‘Y Pab’ (the Pope) in Caernarfon.12 One final work ­worthy of note is Thomas à Kempis’ De Imitatione Christi. This canonical text was first translated into Welsh by the Catholic translator Hugh Owen and printed posthumously as Pattrwm y Gwir-­Gristion. Neu Ddilyniad Iesu Grist in 1684. The Catholic nature of the text was greatly muted in the Welsh rendition by the Anglican William Meyerick in 1723. Meyerick’s translation was a new one, but Owen’s name was retained on the frontispiece. It was reprinted a number of times in our period including at Shrewsbury in 1756, 1768, and 1773, and at Wrexham in 1775. 9 Bowen, Welsh Recusant Writings, pp. 73–4. 10 Bowen, Welsh Recusant Writings, p. 73. 11  Guy, ‘Eighteenth-­Century Gwent Catholics’, p. 85. 12  Robert Thomas Jenkins, ‘Owen, William (1785–1864)’, in Dictionary of Welsh Biography, https:// biography.wales/article/s-­OWEN-­WIL-­1785 (accessed 1 August 2021).

246  Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh

Gaelic Scotland In contrast to Wales, where Catholics constituted a small and geographically dispersed community, the Catholic population of the Gaelic-­speaking Highlands, although small, was largely to be found in specific areas, often in high concentrations. There were just over 13,000 baptized Catholics in the Highlands in 1766.13 These Gaelic-­ speaking Catholics were found especially in the area around Strathglass and Lochaber, and on the west coast in those areas under Clan Ranald control, including the peninsulas of Knoydart, Arasaig, Morar, and the islands of Eigg, Canna, South Uist, and Eriskay, as well as the Isle of Barra. In all of these areas, Gaelic was the predominant and often exclusive language of the people. There is a high degree of correlation between the Highland areas in which Catholicism survived into our period and those served in the seventeenth century by missions of Gaelic-­speaking Irish priests (most often Franciscans), encouraged or in some cases tolerated by clan chiefs.14 At the outset of our period, Highland Catholics constituted a larger proportion of the Scottish Catholic population than is easily comprehended today after extensive Highland emigration and clearance combined with massive nineteenth-­ century Irish immigration to Lowland Scotland. Indeed, a by-­product of Highland emigration and clearance was Gaelic expansion and settlement in North America. In 1772, a party of 210 Gaelic-­speaking Catholics from South Uist and Lochaber emigrated to St John’s Island (now Prince Edward Island).15 The catalyst for the emigration from South Uist was attempts at forced conversion. Subsequent emigrations further bolstered the number of Gaelic-­speaking Catholics in the Canadian maritime provinces but it was not until 1824 that the first Canadian-­born Gaelic-­speaking priest was ordained.16 The defeat of Jacobite forces at Culloden, at the opening of our period, became an important symbol in the Scottish Gaelic consciousness—­one which transcended both religion and politics—­a symbol of the shattering of Gaelic cultural institutions.17 In at least partial response, a number of Scottish clergymen, reacting against what they perceived to be decline in the vitality of Gaelic culture,

13  Roderick MacDonald, ‘The Catholic Gàidhealtachd’, Innes Review, 29 (1978), pp. 56–72; Mark Dilworth, ‘Catholic Glengairn in the Early Nineteenth Century: Part One’, Innes Review, 7 (1956), pp. 12; Alexander MacWilliam, ‘A Highland Mission: Strathglass, 1671–1777’, Innes Review, 24 (1973), pp. 75–102. 14  R.  Scott Spurlock, ‘Confessionalization and Clan Cohesion: Ireland’s Contribution to Scottish Catholic Renewal in the Seventeenth Century’, in David Edwards and Simon Egan (eds.), The Scots in Early Stuart Ireland: Union and Separation in Two Kingdoms (Manchester, 2016), pp. 169–202. 15  Matthew Dziennik, The Fatal Land: War, Empire and the Highland Soldier in British America (New Haven, CT, 2015), p. 85. 16  D. Campbell and R. MacLean, Beyond the Atlantic Roar: A Study of Nova Scotia Scots (Montreal, 1974), p. 217. 17  William Gillies, ‘Gaelic Songs of the Forty-­Five’, Scottish Studies, 30 (1991), p. 40.

Catholic Literature in Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish  247 set about collecting traditional Gaelic literature and literary material.18 The lar­gest and most significant collections were those of Revd James McLagan, Revd James McNicol, and Revd Ewen McDiarmid, all Presbyterian ministers. Their collections were pre-­dated by that of the only Catholic cleric known to have made such a collection: Fr John Farquharson, a native of Auchindryne in Braemar. Farquharson was educated at the Scots College in Douai before returning to Scotland in 1729 to serve the Jesuit mission to the Highlands in Strathglass. While there he is said to have amassed a significant manuscript collection of Gaelic poetry. Unlike the collections of the Presbyterian ministers which, through their offspring, found institutional homes in Scotland, Farquharson’s collection was deposited at the Scots College in Douai and has since disappeared. After the ­suppression of the Jesuits in 1773, he lived with his nephew at Balmoral, serving as his chaplain.19 As well as being a collector, Farquharson enjoyed a repu­ta­tion as a poet, although only one composition attributed to him has survived: Rabhadh Mhic Shimi (Lord Lovat’s warning), a poem of approximately fifty-­six lines in which Farquharson rebuked the eleventh Lord Lovat for his mistreatment of a fellow priest, and foretold Lovat’s eventual demise. The poet’s allusion to Lovat’s eventual method of execution, beheading in the aftermath of the ’45, attests to the ‘oral’ nature of the poetry.20 Other Catholic priests also produced Gaelic verse. Fr Angus MacDonald was apparently born in the Isle of Eigg, and from 1804 until about 1826 was parish priest in the predominantly Catholic island parish of Barra in the Outer Hebrides. He was thereafter head of the Scots College in Rome where he died in 1830.21 His extant Gaelic verse provides an insight into how the Catholic clergy negotiated relationships with traditional clan chiefs in the process of morphing into a more Lowland or Anglo-­centric landlord class. MacDonald’s output included a song to the MacNeill of Barra composed during the Napoleonic War as well as a later lament for the MacNeill clan chief. Most important in religious terms, however, is his verse meditation on purgatory.22 MacDonald was one of those Catholic priests who welcomed the efforts of the Protestant schools run by the Edinburgh Society for the Support of Gaelic Schools to promote Gaelic literacy in his own parish.23 Not all of this small corpus of poetry composed by Catholic clergymen was 18  Celestina Savonius-­Wroth, ‘Bardic Ministers: Scotland’s Gaelic-­speaking Clergy in the Ossian Controversy’, Eighteenth-­Century Studies, 52 (2019), pp. 225–43. 19  Colin Chisholm, ‘The Rev. John Farquharson, Priest of Strathglass’, Celtic Magazine, 7 (1882), pp. 141–6; Alasdair Roberts, ‘Jesuits in the Highlands: Three Phases’, Journal of Jesuit Studies, 7 (2020), pp. 103–16. 20  Colin Chisholm, ‘Lord Lovat’s Warning’, Celtic Magazine, 7 (1881), pp. 49–52; George Henderson Leabhar nan Gleann (Edinburgh, 1898), p. 140. 21 Odo Blundell, The Catholic Highlands of Scotland: The Western Highlands and Islands (Edinburgh, 1917), pp. 20–1. 22 Henderson, Leabhar nan Gleann, pp. 151–9. 23  Elizabeth Ritchie, ‘The People, the Priests and the Protestants: Catholic Responses to Evangelical Missionaries in the Early Nineteenth-­Century Scottish Highlands’, Church History, 85 (2016), p. 295.

248  Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh religious per se, but it provides insight into the life of Catholic clergy in our period. These poems did not appear in print until Fr Allan MacDonald, parish priest of Eriskay, edited a collection of largely Catholic hymns in 1893.24 Only four volumes of Catholic religious literature are known to have been printed in Scottish Gaelic during the period examined here; three of them were catechisms of varying length, along with a single item of devotional prose, a Gaelic translation of the popular De Imitatione Christi by Thomas à Kempis: • 1781: [Robert Menzies], Aithghearradh na Teagaisg Chriosduidh le dearbhaidh Scrioptuir, air Modh Ceisd agus Freagair . . . • 1785: [Robert Menzies], Leamhuin Chriosd, ann Ceithear Leabhraichean: Sgriobhta ann Ladaoin le Tomas A Cempis. • 1815: Ewen MacEachan, An Teagasc Chriosda. • 1826 or 1828: Athghearradh do’n Teagasg Chriosduidh. It is significant that the first three volumes were published in different places: London, Edinburgh, and Inverness, respectively, the first being printed by the London printer James Peter Coghlan. The details of where (and when, precisely) the last volume was printed are not known. The geographic displacement of printing finds parallels in other aspects of Catholic culture of the Highlands, and would continue throughout the nineteenth century when Scottish Gaels in Scotland were often reliant on Canadian printers for Catholic devotional material imported from the expanding Gaelic-­speaking diaspora. Robert Menzies was born in Aberfeldy. A favourite of Bishop George Hay, vicar apostolic of the Lowland District, Menzies was sent to study at the Scots College at Douai, before returning to Scotland in 1775 where he served the Highland Catholics of Edinburgh until his death in 1791. The chapel (in fact a very humble room) of his Gaelic-­speaking congregation at Blackfriars Wynd was wrecked and looted in the anti-­Catholic riots of 1779 after which a better one appears to have been built. His 1781 catechism was a translation of a version of the ‘Doway’ catechism of Henry Turberville, An Abridgment of Christian Doctrine, Catechistically Explained by Way of Question and Answer. This Gaelic version was published by the pre-­eminent Catholic publisher of the age: James Peter Coghlan of London. Coghlan was a close associate of Bishop Hay and was also well-­known, through Hay, to Menzies himself.25 Ewan MacEachan grew up in Arisaig, part of the traditional Clan Ranald dominions. He entered the Scots College in Valladolid in Spain at 17 where a large proportion of the students were Gaelic speakers. He did not return to Scotland until 1800, where he served in Arisaig and Badenoch 24  [Fr Allan MacDonald], Comh-­chruinneachadh de Laoidhean Spioradail (Oban, 1893), pp. 27–31. 25  Frans Blom, Jos Blom, Frans Korsten, and Geoffrey Scott (eds.), The Correspondence of James Peter Coghlan (1731–1800), CRS 80 (Woodbridge, 2007).

Catholic Literature in Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish  249 before being appointed to the Highland Seminary then located on the Inner Hebridean island of Lismore. While there, he complained to the procurator of the Scottish Catholic mission in Edinburgh about a lack of books for students and he requested copies of Menzies’ Gaelic catechism for the seminarians. MacEachan was an eccentric and eventually had to be removed to Strathglass. It was after his removal that his catechism appeared in print, in 1815. He transferred finally to Braemar in 1818 where he remained for the rest of his life. He continued to prod­ uce devotional and lexicographical material including a dictionary and a translation of the Bible but these lie outside the timeframe covered by this chapter.26 The Catholic catechism reportedly printed in the late 1820s was allegedly written down from the recitation of Bishop Ranald MacDonald by his nephew. Bibliographical information on this volume derives primarily from later editions; its origins warrant further investigation.27 The sparse situation of Catholic printing contrasts sharply with Gaelic-­language literary culture more generally. As Ronald Black, Donald Meek, and others have demonstrated, both secular and Protestant religious publishing in Scottish Gaelic was relatively vibrant in this period.28 This lack of printed catechisms applies to other genres also. A small number of Presbyterian sermons were printed in Gaelic in the period. A greater number of manuscript collections of sermons composed by Protestant ministers in Gaelic are extant but no such Catholic collection exists for our period in print or manuscript. This means that we lack the direct insight into the nature of Catholic preaching in Scottish Gaelic in our period which is readily available for Presbyterian preaching. Catholic clerics must have supplemented their preaching with material translated impromptu from English to their Gaelic-­speaking flocks, a practice common also in Ireland. No doubt this practice, along with the general lack of printed devotional material, contributed to the situation whereby the twentieth-­century Roman Catholic preaching style in Gaelic could be described as ‘generally closer to ordinary spoken Gaelic than is Protestant preaching’.29 Throughout the seventeenth century, Irish priests served in Gaelic-­speaking Scotland on account of the linguistic advantage Irish gave them in working with Gaelic-­speaking communities. This practice continued into the eighteenth century; in 1743 for instance, eleven Scottish priests were ministering in the Highlands,

26 Alasdair Roberts, ‘Maighstir Eobhan MacEachainn and the Orthography of Scots Gaelic’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, 65 (2004), pp. 358–405. 27  Donald MacLean, Typographia Scoto-­Gadelica (Edinburgh, 1915), p. 84. 28  Ronald Black, ‘A Handlist of Gaelic Printed Books, 1567–1800’, Scottish Gaelic Studies, 25 (2009), pp. 35–93; Donald Meek, ‘Gaelic Printing and Publishing’, in Bill Bell (ed.), The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, iii: Ambition and Industry, 1800–1880 (Edinburgh, 2007), pp. 107–22. 29  Donald Meek, ‘The Pulpit and Pen: Clergy, Orality and Print in the Scottish Gaelic World’, in Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf (eds.), The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–1800 (Manchester, 2003), p. 90.

250  Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh along with two Irish priests.30 Ranald MacDonald produced a substantial printed volume of Scottish Gaelic poetry, now popularly known as the ‘Eigg Collection’, in 1776. His father was the great Gaelic Jacobite poet and convert to Catholicism, Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, who had compiled a printed anthology of Gaelic poetry in 1751, Ais-­eiridh na Sean Chánoin Albannaich, after his conversion to Catholicism. Neither printed volume was religious as such, but an extant manuscript penned by Ranald (or perhaps by his father) contains material ultimately derived from the seventeenth-­century Irish Franciscan Francis O’Molloy’s Irish grammar along with some Catholic liturgical material.31 Thus it appears that at least some material from Catholic seventeenth-­century Irish-­language printed books circulated in Scotland in the eighteenth century, although the extent cannot have been great.32 This lack of printed religious material for Gaelic-­speaking Catholics belies the wealth of religious and devotional material which was undoubtedly current in oral culture, including prayers, charms, blessings, and other vernacular folk practices. These lie outside the scope of this chapter. It has been noted above that much of the religious or quasi-­religious poetry composed in Gaelic by Catholic clerics did not appear in print until the late nineteenth century. The survival of the poetry is testament to the enduring relevance of these compositions to Gaelic-­ speaking Catholic communities. Just as our period comes to a close, the rapid expansion of Scottish Gaelic into periodicals began in earnest with the establishment of An Teachdaire Gae’lach in 1829 to meet the demands of increasingly literate Gaelic speakers. However, this Gaelic literacy was one based on the Protestant Bible. Among the genres practised in the periodicals was the còmhradh or prose dialogue.33 The còmhradh was almost exclusively the preserve of Presbyterian ministers and offers valuable but heavily biased insight into how Catholics were perceived by their Presbyterian neighbours. One illustrative example is the anonymously authored Còmhradh eadar Domhnall agus Eoghann mu thimchioll Eaglais na Roimhe (‘a conversation between Domhnall and Eoghan on the subject of the Church of Rome’) printed in Inverness in 1834. After much debate on the flaws of the Catholic Church, the còmhradh closed with the Catholic and illiterate Eoghan being gifted a Gaelic Bible by his proselytizing Protestant neighbour Domhnall. Although Eoghan could not read, he informed his neighbour that he had a grandson who would read the scripture to him. The Edinburgh Society for the Support of Gaelic Schools, a Protestant or­gan­ iza­tion founded in 1811, soon became an important provider of education to 30 Fiona A. MacDonald, Missions to the Gaels: Reformation and Counter-­Reformation in Ulster and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, 1560–1760 (Edinburgh, 2006). 31  Glasgow University Library, MS Gen 9; see Ronald Black, ‘The Gaelic Manuscripts of Scotland’, in William Gillies (ed.), Gaelic and Scotland (Edinburgh, 1989), p. 151. 32  See also Ulrike Hogg, ‘Scottish Gaelic Manuscripts after the Beginning of Printing’, in Matthew James Driscoll and Nioclás Mac Cathmhaoil (eds.), Hidden Harmonies: Manuscript and Print on the North Atlantic Fringe, 1500–1900 (Copenhagen, 2021), pp. 278–80. 33 Sheila Kidd, Còmhraidhean nan Cnoc: The Nineteenth-­ Century Gaelic Prose Dialogue (Edinburgh, 2016).

Catholic Literature in Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish  251 Catholic and Protestant Gaels alike, carrying on, albeit in a less aggressive way, the work of the Scottish Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. While some Catholic clergy in the Highlands opposed it vigorously, others like the aforementioned Fr Angus MacDonald in Barra took a more pragmatic approach to its work, allowing for the acquisition of Gaelic literacy by younger Catholics. The imaginary interaction between Domhnall and Eoghan underlines further Elizabeth Ritchie’s observation that early-­ nineteenth-­ century Gaelic-­ speaking ‘Highland Catholics were surrounded by a revitalized, indigenous and expansionist protestant culture’.34

Ireland The most obvious contrast between the situation of Catholics in Ireland and Scotland in our period was numerical. The number of Irish-­speaking Catholics in Ireland was to be reckoned in millions rather than thousands. Moreover, there was a degree of correlation between Catholicism and the Irish-­language not evident between Scottish Gaelic or Welsh and Catholicism. Throughout our period, Irish society was intensely bilingual and diglossic,35 whereas in Scotland, the Highland line formed an (admittedly permeable) linguistic and cultural boundary. Commenting on eighteenth-­century publishing in Ireland, James Kelly has described the ability of the State and individuals ‘to confine political, religious and moral discourse and the circulation of ideas, images and texts within the parameters of what the ruling Protestant elite deemed normative’.36 These were parameters within which Irish-­speakers and Catholics, two largely overlapping groups representing by far the largest portion of the population, were marginalized at best and persecuted at worst. Nonetheless, Irish-­language publications could attain a degree of popularity in our period, under certain circumstances, as the following three examples illustrate. The first and earliest of these was a series of sermons composed by James Gallagher while he was bishop of Raphoe between 1725 and 1737. First published as Sixteen Irish Sermons in an Easy and Familiar Stile, on Useful and Necessary Subjects (Dublin, 1736), Gallagher’s sermons proved extremely popular. They were reprinted (with a seventeenth sermon added) on eight further occasions in our period: in 1752, 1767, 1777, 1795, 1798, 1807, 1809, and 1819. Their popularity continued well into the nineteenth century; indeed, as late as the twentieth century, Irish-­speakers in Donegal could recite extracts from

34  Ritchie, ‘The People, Priests and Protestants’, p. 278. 35  Niall Ó Ciosáin, Print and Popular Culture in Ireland, 1750–1850, Lilliput edn (Dublin, 2010), p. 7. 36  James Kelly, ‘Regulating Print: The State and the Control of Print in Eighteenth-­century Ireland’, Eighteenth-­Century Ireland, 23 (2008), p. 143.

252  Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh Gallagher’s sermons by heart.37 Their geographic reach was also wide: in 1825, the volume was listed as a text for religious instruction in schools in Donegal, Kildare, Galway, and Kerry.38 As well as their popularity as a printed book, Gallagher’s sermons were also copied into contemporary manuscripts by scribes.39 Yet despite their success—­and the contemporary popularity of the genre in English in Ireland—­Gallagher’s was the only collection of sermons printed in Irish in our period. The only volume to rival the success of Gallagher’s sermons was The Pious Miscellany, an anthology of the celebrated Waterford poet and reformed sinner, Tadhg Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin. First printed in Clonmel in 1802, The Pious Misellany was a collection of twenty-­five poems and soon became a best-­seller. It represents, as Niall Ó Ciosáin has observed, the only reflex of a largely native and lay culture to make the successful transition into print. The lay origins of the poetry notwithstanding, its transition to print was facilitated by some limited element of institutional church support; thirty-­eight clergymen were listed among the first edition’s 200 subscribers. The volume represents ‘the principal success of Irish vernacular printing in the early nineteenth century’.40 A Catholic printed work which enjoyed an even more localized popularity was The Spiritual Rose. First printed in Monaghan in 1800, The Spiritual Rose was a distinctive collection of litanies, meditations, and prayers in Irish. Matthew Kennedy, probably the schoolmaster of Mansefield, Co. Louth undertook the translation and compilation of the volume. It was reprinted in 1819, 1820, and again in 1825 with some material attributed to Revd Bernard Callan (alias Brian Ó Cathaláin), parish priest of the nearby Donaghmoyne and Inniskeen.41 Tellingly, in an edition of The Pious Miscellany printed in Cork in 1821 the printer included an advertisement letting ‘it to be known to all who may have rare or scarce books of devotion in the Irish or English language, that he [the printer] is most desirous of printing new and correct editions’. The advertisement continued, stating that ‘R[oman] C[atholic] clergyman are most earnestly solicited for translations into Irish of such approved works as Think Well On’t, Imitation of Christ, Spiritual Combat’. As Ó Ciosáin has noted, it is significant that the printer was approaching the clergy rather than the other way around.42 37 Ciarán Mac Murchaidh, ‘Dr. James Gallagher, alumnus Kilmorensis: Bishop of Raphoe (1725–37) and Kildare & Leighlin (1737–51)’, Breifne, 10 (2004), pp. 220–1. 38  Ciarán Mac Murchaidh, ‘The Catholic Church, the Irish Mission and the Irish Language in the Eighteenth Century’, in Kelly and Mac Murchaidh (eds.), Irish and English, p. 181. 39 Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail, ‘From Print to Script: Some Evidence in Manuscripts Compiled in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-­ Century Ireland’, in Driscoll and MacCathmhaoil (eds.), Hidden Harmonies, p. 348. 40 Richard Sharpe, ‘Tadhg Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin’s Pious Miscellany: Editions of the Munster Bestseller of the Early Nineteenth Century’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, section C, 114 (2014), pp. 237–8; Ó Ciosáin, Print and Popular Culture, pp. 140–50. 41  Malachy McKenna, The Spiritual Rose: Prayers and Meditations in Irish (Dublin, 2001). See also nn. 61–2 below. 42  Quotation from Ó Ciosáin, Print and Popular Culture, p. 141.

Catholic Literature in Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish  253 The small printed catechism represents a distinct type of printed book often intended for the use of children or young people. Small, flimsy, and in regular use, tracing these books often presents particular bibliographical challenges. Michael Tynan’s work has done much to elucidate the textual tradition of these catechisms, but is now in need of large-­scale revision.43 The most significant catechism was probably that of Michael O’Reilly who was appointed bishop of Derry in 1739. His catechism, in English and in Irish, came to be used throughout the country, going through over thirty editions. A catechism composed in Irish by James Pulleine was printed at least twice, in 1748 and 1782. James Butler, archbishop of Cashel, authorized a catechism in 1777 and an Irish version of it was printed in Dublin for use in Meath in 1784. A version of the same catechism in Munster Irish appeared in 1792. Other printed catechisms were authorized for the dioceses of Limerick and Cloyne, and appeared in Irish although none achieved the popularity of O’Reilly or Butler.44 Others still, of course, circulated orally and in manuscript form (as discussed below). Catholic religious works in English were in wide circulation in eighteenth-­ century Ireland and provided ready material for translation into Irish.45 Some of these translations circulated in manuscript while others made it into print. The Cork schoolmaster Uilliam Mac Coitir translated Bishop Challoner’s Think Well On’t into Irish for Bishop John Murphy of Cork.46 Another Irish translation of the same work, Machtnuig go Maith Air, was made by the Waterford poet and scholar Pádraig Denn and printed in Clonmel in 1819. A further translation of the text into Irish by the Limerick scribe and schoolmaster Eoghan Caomhánach was published as Smuain go Maith Air (Dublin, 1820).47 An Irish translation of Thomas à Kempis’ De Imitatione Christi was made in east Ulster in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, probably by the aforementioned James Pulleine. This version seems to have had some circulation in manuscript form; it was known in Dublin to the future archbishop, John Carpenter, in the middle of the eighteenth century and was copied as late as 1810 by the scribe Brian Mac Cionnaith in Co. Monaghan.48 Despite an attempt to publish the work by subscription in the 1760s, this Ulster translation of Thomas à Kempis did not make it into print.49 In the nineteenth century, the Cork priest and Irish scholar, Fr Dónall 43  Michael Tynan, Catholic Instruction in Ireland, 1720–1950: The O’Reilly/Donlevy Catechetical Tradition (Dublin, 1985). 44  Richard Sharpe and Mícheál Hoyne, Clóliosta: Printing in the Irish Language, 1571–1871, an Attempt at Narrative Bibliography (Dublin, 2020). 45  Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin, ‘Clódóireacht Chaitliceach in Éirinn san ochtú haois déag’, Irisleabhar Mhuighe Nuadhadh (1964), p. 98. 46  Breandán Ó Conchúir, Scríobhaithe Chorcaí, 1700–1850 (Dublin, 1982), p. 24. 47  Sharpe and Hoyne, Clóliosta, pp. 515–17. 48  Colm Ó Baoill, ‘Scríobhaithe agus Saothrú an Léinn i dTuaisceart na hÉireann ó c. 1300 i Leith. Tús Taighde’, Léann, 1 (2007), p. 86. 49  Nicholas Wolf, An Irish-­speaking Island: State, Religion, Community, and the Linguistic Landscape in Ireland, 1770–1870 (Madison, WI, 2014), p. 193.

254  Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh Ó Súilleabháin, undertook another Irish translation of Thomas à Kempis’ De Imitatione Christi from Latin into Irish; it was published in Dublin in 1822.50 Much of the Irish-­speaking population would have been exposed to Irish literature aurally, whether from Irish printed books or manuscripts being read aloud or English-­ language publications being translated extemporaneously. Fr John Murphy, parish priest of Corofin in Co. Clare, was renowned as a preacher in Irish, but he also translated extemporaneously into Irish from popular Catholic texts such as Challoner’s Think Well On’t and from the English version of Thomas à Kempis’ De Imitatione Christi.51 The well-­established tradition of the translation of Continental Catholic works into Irish also continued in the eighteenth century. Translations made from French publications were especially noteworthy; this is hardly surprising given the extent to which France played an important role in Irish Catholic clerical education before the establishment of St Patrick’s College, Maynooth in 1795.52 One such manuscript translation is Trompa na bhFlaitheas (from the French original, La Trompette du ciel), completed in Co. Cork by the Carmelite Tadhg Ó Conaill. Ó Conaill saw himself following in the footsteps of the seventeenth-­century Louvain Franciscans, seeking to address ‘a need among their fellow priests and the laity for devotional material in Irish’.53 The manuscript record illustrates the greatest sense of continuity of tradition from the Irish Counter-­Reformation output of the seventeenth century. The number of extant eighteenth-­century Irish-­language manuscripts is at least 1,000. The number preserved from the first half of the nineteenth century is greater still.54 The manuscript record attests to the enduring popularity of seventeenth-­century religious texts originally printed on the Continent: Scathán Shacramuinte na hAithridhe (Louvain, 1618), Párrthas an Anma (Louvain, 1645), and Lucerna Fidelium (Rome, 1676).55 Most enduring of all, however, was the devotion of eighteenth- and nineteenth-­century Irish scribes to the works of the seventeenth-­ century author Geoffrey Keating, including Eochair-­Sgiath an Aifrinn, a tract on the virtues of the Mass and Trí Bior-­Ghaoithe an Bháis, a treatise on sin, repentance, and death.56 As well as these canonical texts, con­tem­por­ary manuscripts contained a wide variety of miscellaneous texts including saints’ lives, theological treatises, missals, charms, folk cures, and prayer books.57 Manuscript translations 50  Ó Conchúir, Scríobhaithe, pp. 178–82. 51 Wolf, An Irish-­speaking Island, p. 228. 52  Cornelius Buttimer, ‘The French Sources of Religious Teaching in Pre-­famine Gaelic Ireland’, in Haydn Mason (ed.), Transactions of the Eighth International Congress on the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1992), pp. 620–4. 53 Mac Murchaidh, ‘The Catholic Church’, p. 183; Cecile O’Rahilly, Trompa na bhFlaitheas (Dublin, 1955). 54  Brian Ó Cuív, ‘Ireland’s Manuscript Heritage’, Éire-­Ireland, 19 (1984), pp. 90, 104. 55  Ní Úrdail, ‘From Print to Script’, pp. 336–47; Nioclás Mac Cathmhaoil, ‘On the Origins of the Ulster Manuscript Tradition, 1690–1800: Some Initial Observations’, in Pádraig Ó Macháin (ed.), Paper and the Paper Manuscript: A Context for the Transmission of Gaelic Literature (Cork, 2019), p. 62; Ó Conchúir, Scríobhaithe, pp. 236–7. 56 Wolf, An Irish-­speaking Island, p. 204. 57  Mac Cathmhaoil, ‘On the Origins’, p. 59.

Catholic Literature in Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish  255 of pastoral letters such as that of Bishop Edmund French of Elphin in Roscommon, dated 1798, are also extant.58 Many Catholic clergymen functioned as scribes in our period and indeed a number of later-­eighteenth-­century Irish-­language manuscripts produced by Irish students on the Continent have survived. Brian Ó Cathaláin neatly illustrates this priest-­poet-­scribe nexus; while a seminarian in Antwerp he wrote a manuscript miscellany of prose and poetry with some spiritual material in the 1770s before he returned to a parish in Monaghan. He also composed poetry in Irish and his Irish translation of a Catholic hymn appeared in The Spiritual Rose.59 A later colophon in Ó Cathaláin’s manuscript indicates that a relation seems to have had the same manuscript in his possession in the 1790s when he was a student in Louvain.60 While parts of Munster and south-­east Ulster maintained a vibrant scribal practice that was firmly rooted in the tradition of literacy throughout the period (as did smaller networks of scribes, poets, and scholars elsewhere), this was not the case everywhere. An understudied innovation in terms of Irish-­language literacy was the emergence, most especially in Connacht, of the practice of writing Irish according to the spelling conventions of English.61 This innovation can be attributed to a large expansion in the Irish-­speaking population along with inadequate provision for the acquisition of traditional Irish literacy. Increasing opportunities for the acquisition of literacy in English meant that print literacy in Irish during our period was often approached through literacy in English, even for Irish speakers.62 In our period the practice is most especially visible in extant manuscript sermons. The degree to which this system (or more properly systems) was found throughout the country is demonstrated by the extant examples of three clerics from different ends of the country: Augustine Kirwan, warden of Galway, educated at Salamanca, composed a now fragmentary sermon c.1780;63 John Heely of Co. Louth penned a series of such sermons in the period from 1796 to 1816;64 Michael Meighan, parish priest of Gortnahoe in Co. Tipperary, wrote such sermons in the 1820s.65 These are just three geographically and chrono­logic­al­ly diverse examples; a full catalogue of this material and a more nuanced ana­lysis of its chronological and geographical distribution, like much else relating to the study of Irish-­language sermons, remains a desideratum. Unfortunately, the 58  Brian Ó Cuív, ‘Tréadlitir ó 1798’, Éigse, 11 (1966), pp. 57–64. 59 Wolf, An Irish-­speaking Island, p. 202. 60  Pádraig Ó Macháin, ‘Fr Séamas Ó Muraidheagh OP (c.1703–1767): An Irish Scribe and Poet at Louvain’, Seanchas Ard Mhacha, 24 (2012), pp. 104–13. 61 William Mahon, ‘Scríobhaithe Lámhscríbhinní Gaeilge i nGaillimh, 1700–1900’, in Gerard Moran and Raymond Gillespie (eds.), Galway History and Society: Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County (Dublin, 1996), pp. 623–50. 62  Ó Ciosáin, Print and Popular Culture, p. 189. 63  For discussion, see William Mahon, Doctor Kirwan’s Catechism, by Thomas Hughes (Cambridge, MA, 1991), pp. 226–7. 64  Seosamh Ó Labhraí, ‘Seanmóir ar Pháis Chríost’, Seanchas Ard Mhacha, 18 (2000), pp. 100–16. 65  Anselm Ó Fachtna, ‘Seanmóir ar Pháis ár dTiarna Íosa Críost’, Éigse, 12 (1968), pp. 177–98.

256  Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh simplistic characterization of the orthography as ‘barbarous’ by some scholars, has meant that the material has not been subjected to the serious study that it deserves. The substantial extant volume of this material notwithstanding, the perception of the orthography as ‘barbaric’ is likely to have impacted the ­preservation of these sermons even in their own time. The practice was not by any means limited to manuscript sermons; Irish-­ language Catholic catechisms and other material, both religious and secular, circulated in manuscript form using this English-­based spelling in Connacht and elsewhere. Neither was the use of the so-­called ‘phonetic’ spelling limited to manuscript; it was used in many of the printed Catholic catechisms in our ­period.66 A noteworthy point of intersection between the traditional and new forms of literacy, as well as the world of print and manuscript transmission, is provided by the history of ‘Kirwan’s Catechism’, the only such catechism to have been edited. The catechism is associated with Revd Augustine Kirwan who was appointed parish priest of Moycullen in west Galway in 1753 and would later become warden of Galway. No copy of the first printed edition of the catechism has been found but its editor, William Mahon, suggests an approximate date of 1830 so that its publication may well fall within the chronological scope of this chapter. Prior to its printing, however, it had circulated in manuscript from at least the 1790s: a version of it is the so-­called ‘Abbeyknockmoy Catechism’, a manuscript written according to English-­ based orthography in east Galway around 1803. Another manuscript copy of Kirwan (although there attributed to ‘Tim Sullivan’) in traditional orthography was made in east Galway in 1828.67 Cork was one of the most prolific areas of literary production in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Many local patrons were Catholic clerics, including two bishops. While their literary output was not entirely (or even mostly, in some instances) devotional, this community of scholars allowed for the cultivation of an intellectual milieu in which devotional and religious Catholic literature played a prominent role. When John O’Brien was appointed Catholic bishop of Cloyne and Ross, in 1748, the poet and scribe Seán Ó Murchú na Ráithíneach welcomed the appointment in the following terms: full-­throated joy, acclaim and cheer abound in Cloyne since John O’Brien was made Bishop.68

66  Ó Ciosáin, Print and Popular Culture, p. 185. 67 Mahon, Kirwan’s Catechism; Mahon, ‘Scríobhaithe’, pp. 629–30. 68            tá suairceas labhartha is aiteas ag dáimh gan chiach i gCluain ó gairmeadh Easpag de Sheán Ó Briain. Torna, Seán na Ráithíneach (Dublin, 1954), p. 337; translation by Charles Dillon available at https://www.ria.ie/news/library-­library-­blog-­focloir-­stairiuil-­na-­gaeilge/bishop-­john-­obrien-­and-­ his-­250-­year-­old-­irish (accessed 1 August 2021).

Catholic Literature in Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish  257 A significant patron of Irish manuscript production, and secular as well as religious literature, O’Brien had literary credentials of his own.69 He left Ireland for France in 1767 where his dictionary, Focalóir Gaoidhilge-­Sax Bhéarla (Paris, 1768), was published. He died in France a year later. The dictionary was compiled under O’Brien’s supervision by Fr Seán Ó Conaire and Mícheál mac Peadair Ó Longáin. It was at least in part conceived of as an effort to assist Catholic clergy retuning from the Continent to reacquaint themselves with Irish.70 The greatest patron of Catholic literary activity in our period was undoubtedly the Lisbon-­educated John Murphy, bishop of Cork from 1815. A bibliomaniac, Murphy sponsored what was essentially a manuscript factory where he employed scholars to copy and produce Irish manuscripts.71 However, the production of manuscripts, while significant, was not the most important outcome of this endeavour. Rather, by bringing a group of scholars and scribes together with a common sense of purpose, intellectual energy, and the requisite financial support, Murphy created a community of practice which was more than the sum of its parts.72 Other Catholic clergymen cultivated more modest levels of scribal and/or literary activity, some but not all of which was concerned with religion.73 Fr Dónall Ó Súilleabháin, the translator of De Imitatione Christi into Munster Irish mentioned above, is one case in point, as the poetry to him by Mícheál Óg Ó Longáin and Finín Ó hAllúráin attests.74 Smaller networks of scribes, scholars, and poets worked elsewhere. The ever-­ entrepreneurial Dublin-­ based scribe Muiris Ó Gormáin composed a poem in praise of Patrick Fitzsimons, the Irish-­speaking archbishop of Dublin between 1765 and 1769: Amongst your gentle flock you do not suffer the perverted stock of Calvin, nor the Lutherans—­an uncompromising crew— O lord who is not found wanting in theology.75

69  Ó Conchúir, Scríobhaithe, pp. 218–22. 70 F.  M.  Jones, ‘The Congregation of Propaganda and the Publication of Dr O’Brien’s Irish Dictionary, 1768’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 77 (1952), pp. 32–3. 71  Margaret Lantry, ‘The Library of Bishop John Murphy, Patron and Bibliomaniac’, in Pádraig Ó Macháin and Sorcha Nic Lochlainn (eds.), Leabhar na Longánach: The Ó Longáin Family and their Manuscripts (Cork, 2018), pp. 217–58; Ní Úrdail, ‘From Print to Script’. 72  Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail, The Scribe in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-­century Ireland: Motivations and Milieu (Münster, 2000). 73  Anna Heussaff, Filí agus Cléir san Ochtú hAois Déag (Dublin, 1992). 74  Ó Conchúir, Scríobhaithe, pp. 180–2. 75           I measc do chaorchann go caoin, ní fhuilingir saoibhshliocht Chailbhín, nó Lúitéirian—­dream is docht – a thriath nach fann sa diagacht. Quotation from Nioclás Mac Cathmhaoil, Muiris Ó Gormáin: Beatha agus Saothar Fileata (Indreabhán, 2013), pp. 130–1.

258  Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh Despite his distaste for the ‘perverted stock of Calvin’, Ó Gormáin was often employed as an occasional assistant and/or teacher to elite English-­speaking Protestants or institutions such as Trinity College, Dublin. As archbishop, Fitzsimons made the case for Irish as a requisite for the clergy in the dioceses of Leinster.76 Fitzsimons’ successor, John Carpenter, was consecrated Catholic archbishop of Dublin in 1770. Carpenter was a native of the city, the son of a merchant tailor, and an able Irish-­language scribe who had been a member of the Dublin-­ based Ó Neachtain scholarly circle in the first half of the eighteenth century.77 By the second half of the eighteenth century a much smaller number of Catholic Irish-­language scholars were active in the city. These included another product of the Ó Neachtain circle, Charles O’Conor of Belanagare, the eminent historian.78 Carpenter commissioned O’Conor to provide Irish translations for the edition of the Rituale Romanorum published in Dublin in 1777.79 In 1773, Carpenter wrote to the authorities in Rome asking that an Irish speaker be appointed rector of the Irish College there so that Irish seminarians could be instructed in the language (although internal politicking may also have been a factor in this request).80 While neither Fitzsimons nor Carpenter cultivated Irish manuscripts and literature on the scale of Bishop Murphy in Cork, both demonstrated their personal commitment to their Irish-­speaking flock. The picture painted here of clerical patronage of scribes, the enthusiasm and devotion of individual clergymen, and, indeed, the scale of outputs when compared with the rather abysmal provision for Catholics in Wales or Gaelic Scotland is potentially misleading. Numerous as they may appear, these were exceptional clerics. Niall Ó Ciosáin has demonstrated, for instance, that O’Brien’s dictionary was not a gesture in support of Irish speakers by the institutional church but rather ‘an attempt by an individual churchman to remedy the neglect of the language by that institution as a whole’.81 The institutional Catholic Church in Ireland during the second half of the eighteenth century and even more so in the first half of the nineteenth century was not favourably disposed to the Irish language or to Irish-­language culture. Despite a significant demand for printed religious works by Irish-­language readers, the demand was largely met by English-­language publications. 76  Proinsias Mac Cana, Collège des Irlandais and Irish Studies (Dublin, 2001), p. 33. 77 Brian Mac Giolla Pádraig, ‘Dr John Carpenter: Archbishop of Dublin, 1760–1786’, Dublin Historical Record, 30 (1976), pp. 2–17; Liam Mac Mathúna, The Ó Neachtain Window on Gaelic Dublin, 1700–1750 (Cork, 2021). 78 Nessa Ní Shéaghdha, ‘Irish Scholars and Scribes in Eighteenth-­Century Dublin’, Eighteenth-­ Century Ireland, 4 (1989), pp. 41–54. 79  Sharpe and Hoyne, Clóliosta, pp. 303–4. 80  M. J. Curran, ‘Archbishop Carpenter’s Epistolae (1770–1780): Part I (1770–1775)’, Reportorium Novum, 1 (1955), pp. 154–72. 81  Niall Ó Ciosáin, ‘Language, Print and the Catholic Church in Ireland, 1700–1900’, in Donald McNamara (ed.), Which Direction Ireland? Proceedings of the 2006 ACIS Mid-­ Atlantic Regional Conference (Newcastle, 2007), p. 130.

Catholic Literature in Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish  259 The establishment of St Patrick’s College in Maynooth in 1795 might have provided an institutional space for Irish. It was, however, from the outset, a thoroughly Anglicized and Anglicizing institution. The establishment of the college coincided with the re-­emergence of Catholics into civic life, but the expansion of the Catholic middle class which underlay this development was increasingly Anglophone.82 So too, with ‘the gradual reconstruction of the Catholic Church infrastructure’, of which Maynooth was arguably the most important part, ‘the language of the Catholic Church establishment remained predominantly English’.83 Maynooth in turn provided a model for local diocesan seminaries which exposed students to more intense linguistic and cultural Anglicization than would have been possible on the Continent. It is therefore of note that the increasing social marginalization of Irish coincided with a growth in the absolute number of speakers in the last part of the eighteenth century and first part of the nineteenth century, before the Famine.84 Irish had its greatest number of speakers just as our period comes to an end, something approaching four million.85 Despite this growth in the absolute number of Irish speakers ‘the official Church functioned almost entirely in English, while attempting to reach a largely Irish-­ speaking lower class’.86 The linguistic discrepancy between the institutional Church and its Irish-­speaking flock could not be ignored entirely, however. The Meath scholar and priest, Fr Pól Ó Briain, was appointed as the first professor of Irish at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth in 1804, having taught the language there since 1801. He was also a poet of some renown; much of his verse prior to his ordination at Maynooth in 1803 was more risqué than one might expect and demonstrated a fondness for drink and female company.87 More in keeping with his professorial and clerical position was his Practical Grammar of the Irish Language (Dublin, 1809). When, in 1815, Ó Briain visited Cork, he was welcomed in verse by the scribe Mícheál Óg Ó Longáin who praised Ó Briain’s scholarship and learning.88 This demonstrates quite neatly the fact that while one can, in general terms, speak of distinctive geographic areas of literary activity, one must also be cognizant of the remarkable degree of cohesion which existed among Irish-­language scribes, scholars, and poets in various parts of the country. The lack of ready patronage for Irish-­language scribes, scholars, and teachers from other sources drove some Irish Catholic scholars and schoolmasters into the 82  Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, I mBéal an Bháis: The Great Famine and the Language Shift in Nineteenth-­ Century Ireland (Cork, 2015), pp. 13–14. 83  Ó Tuathaigh, I mBéal an Bháis, pp. 19–20. 84  Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, ‘An Chléir Chaitliceach, an Léann Dúchais agus an Cultúr in Éirinn, c.1750–1850’, Léachtaí Cholm Cille, 16 (1986), p. 111. 85 Wolf, An Irish-­speaking Island, pp. 277–8, n. 6. 86  Ó Ciosáin, Print and Popular Culture, p. 135. 87  Paul Rouse, ‘O’Brien, Paul (c.1763–1820)’, in Dictionary of Irish Biography, https://www.dib.ie/ biography/obrien-­paul-­a6491 (accessed 1 August 2021). 88  Ní Úrdail, The Scribe, p. 75.

260  Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh arms of the emergent Protestant Bible societies, despite the warnings of priests and fellow teachers.89 Catholic teachers who worked for the Bible Society included scribes such as Mícheál Óg Ó Longáin, who had been at the centre of the scribal activity sponsored by Bishop John Murphy in Cork city in the 1810s, and the Louth scholar Matthew Kennedy who had translated and compiled The Spiritual Rose first published in 1800. One of the most vocal and prominent critics of the Bible Society and its teachers was the poet Dáibhí de Barra of east Cork who rallied in his verse against the Catholic school teachers willing to work for the Protestant societies.90 Others converted wholeheartedly to Protestantism and embraced the new outlet that the Bible Society provided for their literary or scholarly activities. One such convert was the Sligoman Thaddeus Connellan who became an effective advocate for the publication of Irish religious material for the instruction of Irish speakers. As such, he became a target for sharp criticism and was castigated by other Irish scholars.91 The long-­standing institutional negligence of the Catholic Church with regard to the language, combined with the enthusiasm and drive of Connellan and others, would eventually lead some Irish-­speaking Catholics, clerical and lay, to view literacy and printed books in Irish with suspicion.92 Given the social situation of Irish speakers at the time, it is no wonder that popular poetry and song of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often dealt with religious themes. Polemical compositions giving public voice to Catholic grievances were common, with most poets of the period making ‘some contribution to the genre’;93 popular songs condemned Luther, Calvin, and other Protestant reformers. Among those songmakers was Antaine Raiftearaí, the Mayo-­born poet who spent most of his life in east Galway. His song poetry provides insight into the popular understanding of religious difference of the period, as too do the compositions of the Cork poet Máire Bhuí Ní Laoire. The lack of female voices in this chapter is striking but it reflects the dominance of men in the life of the institutional Church and the marginalization of women’s voices within the contemporary print and manuscript record. On the other hand, as Angela Bourke and Patricia Lysaght have pointed out, ‘the oral tradition of spiritual

89 Pádraig de Brún, Scriptural Instruction in the Vernacular: The Irish Society and its Teachers, 1818–1827 (Dublin, 2009). 90 Niamh Ní Shiadhail, ‘Form and Function in Nineteenth-­ century Literature: The Second Reformation Movement and the Dialogue Poems of Dáibhí de Barra’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 36 (2017), pp. 126–46. 91  Lesa Ní Mhunghaile, ‘The Irish Language in County Meath, 1700–1900’, in Arlene Crampsie and Francis Ludow (eds.), Meath History and Society: Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish Country (Dublin, 2015), p. 565. 92  Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin, A Hidden Ulster: People, Songs and Traditions of Oriel (Dublin, 2003), pp. 22–6. 93  Vincent Morley, ‘The Irish Language’, in Richard Bourke and Ian McBride (eds.), The Princeton History of Modern Ireland (Princeton, 2016), p. 333.

Catholic Literature in Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish  261 practice and religious teaching’ was one in which women were prominent.94 While that tradition is outside the scope of this chapter, of note here is the genre of Irish-­language lament poetry which holds particular currency in Munster in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These laments for prominent Catholic men who had fallen foul of an unjust administration were attributed to women and were ‘a focus of resistance to Protestant or English rule’.95 The best-­known product of the genre is Caoine Airt Uí Laoire, attributed to Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. Another of the same genre is attributed to Cáit de Búrca for her brother Fr Nioclás Mac an tSíthigh. Both Ó Laoire and Mac an tSíthigh represented a Catholic challenge to the position of the Protestant establishment. Neither lament was popular in the manuscripts of the period, but rather enjoyed a popularity beyond them.

Conclusion The stark contrast between the small volume of Catholic religious material in Welsh and Scottish Gaelic on the one hand and the much more voluminous and varied Irish material on the other is what one might expect given the relative size of their respective Catholic communities. In 1800, there were two or three million Irish speakers compared to perhaps half a million speakers of Scottish Gaelic or Welsh. However, the position of Catholic printing in Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh was the opposite of what we know of printing in those languages more generally from this period as the ‘number of readers in [Scottish] Gaelic was many times larger than the number of readers in Irish’.96 Scottish Gaelic and Welsh readers were overwhelmingly Protestant. In Scotland, the Protestantization of Gaelic-­language culture, and the absorption of Scottish Gaeldom into the British State are two themes of our period. The same was broadly true of Welsh-­language culture. A rapid and drastic expansion in the printing of Scottish Gaelic and Welsh was driven and controlled by Protestant ministers who would go on to develop sophisticated and polished prose styles, forged on the pages of nineteenth-­century periodicals. For the rest of the nineteenth century, however, more Catholic devotional literature in Scottish Gaelic was printed by the diaspora in Canada than in  Scotland. Further, early-­ nineteenth-­ century migration from Ireland was

94 Angela Bourke and Patricia Lysaght, ‘Spirituality and Religion in Oral Tradition’, in Angela Bourke and others (eds.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, iv: Irish Women’s Writings and Traditions (Cork, 2002), p. 1399. 95  Angela Bourke, ‘Lamenting the Dead’, in Bourke and others (eds.), Field Day, iv, p. 1365. 96  Niall Ó Ciosáin, ‘Popular Song, Readers and Language: Printed Anthologies in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, 1780–1820’, in John Kirk, Michael Brown, and Andrew Noble (eds.), Cultures of Radicalism in Britain and Ireland (London, 2013), p. 134.

262  Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh beginning to shift the centre of gravity for Catholic culture in both Scotland and Wales.97 The degree of social marginalization of Irish speakers was much greater than that of Scottish Gaelic speakers. That is not to dismiss the social marginalization of Gaelic in Scotland which was significant. Welsh, on the other hand, maintained a degree of geographic and social cohesion which could not be sustained in Ireland, where an essentially ethnic conflict intersected with a religious one, during a period further complicated by increasing language shift, or in Scotland, where language was, at least in the abstract, firmly rooted in geography. Despite the very different situations of vernacular Catholic literature in Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish Highlands, commonalities emerge. In particular, one might point to the prominence of translations from the works of Bishop Challoner and versions of the so-­called ‘Doway’ catechism of Henry Turberville, reflecting increased literacy in English and access to print in that language. Translations of Thomas à Kempis’ De Imitatione Christi are also to be found in all three languages (although the Welsh version, as discussed above, is to be distinguished from the Irish and Scottish Gaelic versions). The pre-­eminent Catholic publisher of the period, London-­based James Peter Coghlan, printed Catholic devotional material in both Scottish Gaelic and Welsh but not Irish. Many of those involved in the cultivation of Catholic religious literature in Irish (Bishop John O’Brien, Fr Pól Ó Briain) and Scottish Gaelic (Revd Ewen MacEachan) were also involved in the production of dictionaries and grammars of the languages. One could also point to Protestant parallels in both Ireland and Scotland; it is significant that this trend transcended confessional and national boundaries.

Select Bibliography Allen, Richard and Jones, David Ceri, with Hughes, Trystan O. (eds.), The Religious History of Wales: Religious Life and Practice in Wales from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (Cardiff, 2014). Black, Ronald, ‘Gaelic Religious Publishing, 1567–1800’, Scottish Gaelic Studies, 24 (2008), pp. 73–85. Bowen, Geraint, Welsh Recusant Writings (Cardiff, 1999). Jenkins, Philip, ‘A Welsh Lancashire? Monmouthshire Catholics in the 18th Century’, Recusant History, 15 (1979), pp. 176–88. Kelly, James and Mac Murchaidh, Ciarán (eds.), Irish and English: Essays on the Irish Linguistic and Cultural Frontier (Dublin, 2012).

97  Paul O’Leary, Immigration and Integration: The Irish in Wales, 1798–1922 (Cardiff, 2002).

Catholic Literature in Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish  263 Meek, Donald, ‘Saints and Scarecrows: The Churches and Gaelic Culture in the Highlands since 1560’, Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology, 14 (1996), pp. 2–22. Ní Úrdail, Meidhbhín, The Scribe in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Motivations and Milieu (Münster, 2000). Ó Ciosáin, Niall, ‘Language, Print and the Catholic Church in Ireland, 1700–1900’, in Donald McNamara (ed.), Which Direction Ireland? Proceedings of the 2006 ACIS Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference (Newcastle, 2007), pp. 125–38. Ó Ciosáin, Niall, Print and Popular Culture in Ireland, 1750–1850, Lilliput edn (Dublin, 2010). Sharpe, Richard and Hoyne, Mícheál, Clóliosta: Printing in the Irish Language 1571–1871, an Attempt at Narrative Bibliography (Dublin, 2020).

14 This Side of the Alps Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland Shaun Blanchard

Monolithic conceptions of ‘the Enlightenment’ as a sun with its centre in Paris and its rays more or less wherever the influence of the philosophes shone have given way to scholarship accentuating the variety and diversity of ‘enlightened’ intellectual, political, and even theological projects underway during the eighteenth century. It is now widely recognized that Enlightenment came ‘in many different hues, some of them national, but more of them transnational and thematic’.1 Although the relationship between Catholicism and Enlightenment was once considered almost purely oppositional—­and ‘much of the blame’ for such a narrative can be laid at the feet of intransigent Catholics themselves2—it is nevertheless a ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ that is ‘among the oldest claimants for a separate place under the Enlightenment’s sun’.3 As early as 1980, in the context of arguing for a distinctly English Catholic Enlightenment, Joseph Chinnici asserted that it ‘can no longer be doubted’ that there ‘was a positive Catholic response to the Enlightenment and that this response pervaded every major European country’.4 The work of a retinue of scholars, especially in the first decades of the twenty-­first century, has ensured that the concept of a Catholic Enlightenment now has widespread purchase.5 This chapter sketches Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland, with ­special attention paid to the final quarter of the eighteenth century. The first section introduces Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland as pluriform phenomena while the next three sections consider three distinct yet overlapping streams of enlightened Catholicism. Rather than organizing this chapter 1  Dale K. Van Kley, ‘Conclusion: The Variety of Enlightened Experience’, in William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram (eds.), God in the Enlightenment (Oxford, 2016), p. 280. 2  Ulrich Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement (Oxford, 2016), p. 3. 3  Van Kley, ‘Conclusion: The Variety of Enlightened Experience’, p. 290. I take the image of the Enlightenment as a sun with its centre in Paris from Van Kley, who rightly rejects such a monolithic conception. 4 Joseph P. Chinnici, The English Catholic Enlightenment: John Lingard and the Cisalpine Movement, 1780–1850 (Shepherdstown, WV, 1980), p. 3. 5 See, for example, Ulrich Lehner and Jeffrey Burson (eds.), Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History (Notre Dame, IN, 2014). Shaun Blanchard, This Side of the Alps: Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829. Edited by: Liam Chambers, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843443.003.0015

Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland  265 chronologically or by country, I have preferred a thematic approach. For Scotland, England, and Wales, where relatively small Catholic communities were under the same ecclesiastical form of organization, such a course needs little justification. British Catholic intellectuals were regularly in touch, and the ‘Cisalpine’ network, while predominantly English, counted among its ranks the most significant enlightened Scottish Catholic, Alexander Geddes. Leading Welsh Catholics were fully integrated into British Catholic society, and Wales was ecclesiastically united with a part of England in the Western District. Nevertheless, the connection between Welsh Catholicism and Catholic Enlightenment is currently a scholarly lacuna. The relationship between enlightened Catholics in Ireland and Britain, however, is not nearly so straightforward. Their contexts differed in many important respects. Perhaps most significant is the fact that Catholics in Britain were a tiny minority of the population, while Irish Catholics were the great majority and yet still faced intense political oppression and cultural prejudice. Because of this shared experience of persecution, the commonalities and interplay between enlightened Catholicism in Britain and in Ireland are many and profound. Just as one can speak of a Catholic Enlightenment in the German and Italian States, this chapter argues that it is meaningful to speak of distinctive, if plural, Catholic Enlightenments in Britain and Ireland. This ‘variety of enlightened experience’, to quote Dale Van Kley, was born in part from a common experience of oppression and political insecurity with its legal roots in the penal laws and its cultural roots in anti-­Catholicism (‘no popery’). In the wake of the tumultuous events of 1688 and the repeated failure of Jacobite resistance punctuated by the disaster at the Battle of Culloden (1746), many Catholic intellectuals focused not on resistance but on justifying the inclusion of their community in the full blessings of the British Constitution. For all their differences, Catholics in the Hanoverian kingdoms tended to employ the same intellectual, political, and religious tools to attempt to reconcile their faith to the realities they faced in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

Plural Streams: Mapping Catholic Enlightenment The term Catholic Enlightenment refers to pluriform, transnational phenomena. It describes varieties of positive engagement with the values and methodologies of the Enlightenment in the realms of philosophy, science, politics, and theology. Catholic Enlightenment thinkers shared aims and goals with other religious enlighteners and sometimes with anti-­clerical, secular, or anti-­Christian philosophes, while attempting the harmonization of Catholic culture, society, and faith with the new learning. Intellectual orientations and values shared by enlightened Catholics included an openness to the new science and philosophy

266  Shaun Blanchard (Locke, Descartes, Newton, and others), a vision for the holistic reform of society (by means of anything from republicanism or democracy to enlightened despotism), and a concern with ‘reasonable’ theology or ‘rational’ devotion which often took shape in efforts to rid the Catholic faith of bigotry and ‘superstition’. An overriding preoccupation both in Britain and in Ireland was proving to Protestant-­dominated societies that Catholicism was not inherently bigoted, superstitious, or treasonous, and that Catholics therefore should be integrated into the political and cultural mainstream. For this reason, Britain and Ireland are particularly fertile terrain for the study of Catholic Enlightenment: Catholics there had such strong vested interests in publicly portraying themselves as rational, useful, and tolerant people worthy of the blessings of the British Constitution. This contrasts strongly with almost every other Catholic Enlightenment milieu: on the Continent, ‘enlightened’ ideas and policies were often promoted or even imposed by Catholic kings, bishops, or governments. Before 1746 we can locate a number of important precursors to later enlightened Catholic thought, some contours of which have recently been illuminated by Gabriel Glickman.6 Many generative impulses came from Catholic engagement on the Continent with French thought, from Fénelon and moderate Enlightenment thinkers to more radical theological and political ideas associated with Quietism, Freemasonry, and Jansenism. Much of this new energy and ex­peri­men­tal thought was centred on the Jacobite networks of exiles.7 British and Irish intellectuals contributed to early Enlightenment thought and to many of the most significant debates on the European scene.8 While the Jacobite networks were fertile incubators of Enlightenment thinking, especially regarding the politics of pluralistic States and religious toleration, Jacobite identity became less and less relevant after Culloden. The Jacobite experience and its aftermath gave added impetus to enlightened Catholic attempts ‘to reframe the defence of the recusant community, and promote a rational, humanist form of Catholicism, made fit to participate in English civil society’.9 Much of the scholarship on Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland focuses on the latter half of the eighteenth century, and the final quarter especially. In Britain, after an ‘age of Challoner’,10 often depicted as relatively quiet and

6  Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology (Woodbridge, 2009). 7 Anna Battigelli, ‘Fénelonian Reform, Catholic Jacobites and Jane Barker’s Enlightenment Dramas of Conscience’, in Ulrich Lehner (ed.), Women, Enlightenment and Catholicism: A Transnational Biographical History (New York, 2018), pp. 203–15. 8 For a particularly important example, see Thomas O’Connor, An Irish Theologian in Enlightenment France: Luke Joseph Hooke, 1714–1796 (Dublin, 1995). 9  Gabriel Glickman, ‘Gothic History and Catholic Enlightenment in the Works of Charles Dodd (1672–1743)’, Historical Journal, 54 (2011), p. 359. 10 See Eamon Duffy (ed.), Challoner and His Church: A Catholic Bishop in Georgian England (London, 1981).

Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland  267 insular, the ‘Cisalpine’ network came to prominence in the late 1770s. Cisalpinism was a progressive ideology expressed concretely in social and pol­it­ical groups dedicated to legal emancipation (the English Catholic Committee and, from 1792, the Cisalpine Club). As the name suggests, Cisalpines self-­consciously contrasted themselves with ‘transalpine’ or ‘ultramontane’ conceptions of Catholicism with which they disagreed theologically. More to the point, however, these ‘foreign’ ideas were seen to impede the cultural and political status of Catholics in Britain and Ireland. Cisalpine leaders like the lawyer Charles Butler, the priest Joseph Berington, and the aristocrats Robert, ninth Baron Petre and Sir John Courtenay Throckmorton were thoroughly men of the Enlightenment as well as committed Catholics. Much of the scholarship on the English Catholic Enlightenment focuses on the Cisalpines and their opponents, including ­fundamental studies by Chinnici and Eamon Duffy.11 While some women connected to Cisalpinism have been studied, much more work remains to be done.12 Scholarship on the Scottish Catholic Enlightenment likewise focuses on the later eighteenth century, and on a significantly smaller community of scholars and clerics than in England. The work of Mark Goldie, in particular, has illuminated the contributions of figures like the vicars apostolic George Hay and John Geddes, as well as the famous cousin of Bishop Geddes, the radical priest-­ scholar Alexander Geddes.13 The Irish situation is much more complex. In contrast to the English and Scottish Enlightenments, Irish Enlightenment is a more contested category.14 Some recent scholarship argues persuasively that there was an Irish Enlightenment, and has found room for Catholics alongside Irish Presbyterians and the politically dominant Anglicans.15 As in Britain, leaders of an activist Catholic Committee (the Irish Committee was founded in 1760, preceded by the Catholic Association in 1756) like the historian Charles O’Conor and the physician John Curry are exemplars of Irish Catholic Enlightenment.16 Priests such as the Capuchin Arthur O’Leary, 11 Chinnici, English Catholic Enlightenment; Eamon Duffy, ‘Joseph Berington and the English Catholic Cisalpine Movement, 1772–1803’ (PhD Thesis, Cambridge University, 1973). 12  Michael Tomko, ‘Between Revolutionary Jacobins and English Catholic Cisalpines: The Roles of Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821) in the Age of Enlightenment’, in Lehner (ed.), Women, Enlightenment and Catholicism, pp. 189–201. See also Cormac Begadon, ‘A Lived Enlightenment: The Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre and the Making of a Modern and Cosmopolitan Community at Liège, c.1740–94’, paper presented at the Catholic Record Society conference, 20 July 2021. A monograph on the canonesses is under preparation. 13 See, inter alia, Mark Goldie, ‘The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment’, Journal of British Studies, 30 (1991), pp. 20–62. 14  For example, Marc Hight argues that there were ‘enlightened Irish Catholics’ (abroad) but no ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ in Ireland. See Marc Hight, ‘An Eighteenth-­Century Catholic Enlightenment in Ireland?’, Eighteenth-­Century Ireland, 36, (2021), pp. 1–25. 15  See the special issue ‘Ireland and Enlightenment’ of Eighteenth-­Century Studies, 45 (2012), edited by Sean D. Moore, especially the introduction by Moore (pp. 345–54), as well as Michael Brown, The Irish Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 2016), especially pp. 106–58. 16 Luke Gibbons and Kieran O’Conor (eds.), Charles O’Conor of Ballinagare: Life and Works (Dublin, 2015); Michael Brown and Lesa Ní Mhunghaile, ‘Futures Past: Enlightenment and

268  Shaun Blanchard who preached of religious liberty, and the politically radical printer Matthew Carey have also been convincingly framed as enlightened Catholics in recent studies.17 Towards the end of the century, especially during the tumultuous 1790s marked by positive and negative reception of French Revolutionary ideas, the activity of the United Irishmen, and ultimately the Rebellion of 1798, the picture of Catholicism’s relationship to Enlightenment in Ireland becomes further complexified, if more intriguing. The rest of this chapter describes three streams of Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland. First, Catholic participation in enlightened scholarship is considered; next, enlightened theological and devotional culture; finally, enlightened ecclesio-­political networks. The first stream admits the most diverse set of actors, some of whose ‘enlightened’ proclivities did not extend to their theology or their politics. Only the latter stream, the ecclesio-­political, constituted a ‘movement’ as such. This conceptual mapping seeks to illuminate networks of affinity and delineate shared endeavours, methods, and goals among enlightened British and Irish Catholics, while recognizing that these three streams are only heuristic devices with very porous (sometimes virtually non-­existent) boundaries. Additionally, the complex fissures and disagreements in these Catholic communities, the roots of which were often decades or even centuries in the past, must also be acknowledged. In this sense—­and in many others—­enlightened Catholicism should not be seen as sui generis, but rather as one stage of a community’s attempt to reform itself and to make sense of the political and cultural situation it found itself in.

Catholic Contributions to Enlightened Scholarship The first stream of Catholic Enlightenment, and the one that admits the lar­gest and most diverse set of actors, is participation in enlightened scholarly activity. Indeed, openness to the new learning is the common denominator all enlightened Catholics shared. The always-­porous boundaries between scholarship, politics, and theology were particularly so for politically and culturally marginalized early modern Catholics in Britain and Ireland. That is, the scholarly activity of enlightened Catholics in these lands was typically animated by theological convictions and driven by political agendas.

Antiquarianism in the Eighteenth Century’, in James Kelly (ed.), The Cambridge History of Ireland, iii: 1730–1880 (Cambridge: 2018), pp. 380–405. 17  James Kelly, ‘ “A Wild Capuchin of Cork”: Arthur O’Leary (1729–1802)’, in Gerard Moran (ed.), Radical Irish Priests, 1660–1970 (Dublin, 1998), pp. 39–61; Nicholas  M.  Wolf, ‘Advocacy, the Enlightenment, and the Catholic Print Trade in Matthew Carey’s Dublin’, Éire-­Ireland, 49 (2014), pp. 244–69; Padhraig Higgins, ‘Matthew Carey, Catholic identity and the Penal Laws’, Éire-­Ireland, 49 (2014), pp. 176–200.

Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland  269 The career of John Lingard, one of the brightest lights of the English Catholic Enlightenment, is illustrative of this situation. Lingard is known first and foremost as a historian of England. His research, which meticulously employed ori­gin­al documents and archives, has aged relatively well. Educated at Douai in the final days of the college, Lingard imbibed the enlightened approach to history of the Maurists, Mabillon, and Claude Fleury. Lingard was influenced by the positive theology of Bossuet and aligned himself with an irenic, Muratorian style of intellectual and theological discourse prevalent among many enlightened Catholics in Europe.18 As becomes clear in his correspondence, Lingard’s prolific historical output had alleviation of the Catholic political plight squarely in view. Chinnici even called this leading Catholic historian the ‘foremost [English] apolo­gist for Catholic Emancipation’.19 Another clear concern of Lingard’s research was to demonstrate that the contemporary Roman Catholic Church, and not the established Anglican Church, was continuous with medieval and ancient English Christianity. Such a historical and theological task was intensely political. A further theological preoccupation of Lingard’s was to keep alive a Cisalpine or Muratorian approach to Catholic theology and devotion, and to hold at bay ‘superstitious’ encroachments often identified with the ‘warmer climes’ of Italy and Spain. Thus, Lingard bemoaned the increasing influence of Jesuits and ultramontanists in England. This approach had in mind not only the internal purity of Catholicism, but the external goal of encouraging both respectful coexistence with Protestants and, when possible, their conversions. Lingard’s enlightened credentials are often seen first and foremost through the prism of his historical scholarship, which carried on the European Catholic Enlightenment tradition exemplified by the Maurists and Ludovico Muratori. And yet, Lingard’s scholarship explicitly sought to combat political and cultural anti-­Catholicism at home, and also to address the theological concerns of his own community. Other leading enlightened Catholic historians like the Irish antiquarian and political activist Charles O’Conor and British Cisalpines like Berington also engaged fluidly in scholarly, political, and theological enterprises, defying tidy categorization. In the eighteenth century, due to the penal laws, Catholics could not take degrees at the universities, and it was difficult to train seminarians, priests, and Catholic secular professionals in Ireland or Britain. Thus, British and Irish institutions in the Low Countries, France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal served the higher educational needs of Catholics. Some were wealthy enough to pursue these opportunities with family money, some were fortunate enough to be sponsored, and others had arrangements such as Mass stipends (for those already ordained), scholarships, or other sources of income. 18  On Lingard, see Peter Phillips, John Lingard: Priest and Historian (Leominster, 2008). 19 Chinnici, English Catholic Enlightenment, p. 33.

270  Shaun Blanchard Douai, which boasted English, Scots, and Irish colleges, is a good example of an institution that reflected an openness to the pursuits and methodologies of the moderate, mainstream Enlightenment. Michael Sharratt’s work, which draws on the Douai ‘dictates’ (surviving seminarians’ lecture notes compiled as handbooks), has shed light on the educational training of a significant contingent of ‘enlightened’ clergy.20 A Newtonian view of the natural world and Lockean anthropology were among the enlightened currents imbibed by many students, including the Cisalpines. In the case of the English College, Douai, Chinnici notes four crucial elements: an aversion to scholasticism, an inchoate historical consciousness, moderate Newtonianism, and a theological approach that could ad­equate­ly differentiate essentials from non-­essentials.21 In addition to their formal education, the ‘grand tour’ culture of gentry and aristocrats exposed a number of prominent British Catholics to enlightened Catholicism on the Continent. The journeys of Berington and Sir John Throckmorton to Europe, including Italy and the Habsburg lands, were instrumental in shaping Cisalpine predilections for enlightened and Josephinist-­style reform.22 While enlightened British and Irish Catholics embraced the new scientific learning and inculcated it into curriculums when they could, there were not many notable scientists among their ranks. This is surely one of the many consequences of the penal laws, which severely hampered the possibilities for Catholic higher education as well as the financial resources available for patronage.23 Nevertheless, some Catholics did distinguish themselves in the sciences. An interesting ex­ample is Charles Walmesley, Benedictine monk and vicar apostolic of the Western District from 1763 to 1797. While the political and ecclesiastical upheavals of the 1780s and 1790s revealed him to be deeply conservative, in his younger years Walmesley made impressive scientific contributions which reflected the enlightened bent of many Benedictine communities.24 Immersed in cutting-­edge con­ tem­por­ary scientific and mathematical discussions, Walmesley published several scientific works and presented a paper at the Parisian Academy of Sciences on

20  See, for example, Michael Sharratt, ‘Natural Philosophy at Douai, Crook Hall and Ushaw’, in Peter Phillips (ed.), Lingard Remembered: Essays to Mark the Sesquicentenary of John Lingard’s Death (London, 2004), pp. 9–16. 21 Chinnici, English Catholic Enlightenment, p. 4. 22  See Duffy, ‘Cisalpine Movement’, pp. 133–4, 192–4, 240–1; Geoffrey Scott, ‘The Throckmortons at Home and Abroad, 1680–1800’, in Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott (eds.), Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation (Farnham, 2009), pp. 207–8. 23  Nevertheless, advances in realms of agricultural and mineral resources would also be considered scientific achievements. See Alexander Lock, Catholicism, Identity and Politics in the Age of Enlightenment: The Life and Career of Sir Thomas Gascoigne, 1745–1810 (Woodbridge, 2016), pp. 149–218. 24  Geoffrey Scott, Gothic Rage Undone: English Monks and the Age of Enlightenment (Bath, 1992). On the contributions of Scottish Benedictines to the Enlightenment, see Thomas McInally, A Saltire in the German Lands: Scottish Benedictine Monasteries in Germany, 1575–1862 (Aberdeen, 2016).

Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland  271 comets.25 He was in dialogue with d’Alembert, Alexis Clairaut, and Leonhard Euler.26 The recommendation of d’Alembert and others led to his admission into the Royal Society of London (1750) and, through Euler, to the Royal Academy of Berlin (1751).27 The British government even contacted Walmesley in 1751 to secretly enlist his aid with the long overdue transition to the Gregorian calendar.28 On an ecclesiastical mission to Rome for his order between 1754 and 1755 Walmesley was inducted into the Institute of Bologna and imbibed the spirit of the circle surrounding the brilliant Jesuit scientist Ruggiero Boscovich.29 What Walmesley’s career teaches us is that conservative politics and theology did not necessarily mean opposition to enlightened scholarship. In Walmesley’s context, this is an especially important point due to the prominence of Jesuits and (after 1773) ex-­Jesuits in British Catholic culture, education, and spirituality. It cannot be assumed that, due to their ultramontanism and traditional devotional culture, British Jesuits (and their students) were ipso facto not enlightened Catholics. Considered from the perspective of their scholarly pursuits and achievements, some of them clearly were. The English Jesuit Christopher Maire, for example, collaborated with Boscovich in making extraordinary contributions to cartography.30 There are good starting points for the relationship between the Jesuit order and Catholic Enlightenment in Britain, but much more work remains to be done.31 English and Scottish Catholics in particular engaged positively with the new philosophical currents of the mainstream or moderate Enlightenment. Let us consider the situation in Scotland. Two of the most important leaders of the eighteenth-­century Scottish mission, the Vicars Apostolic George Hay and John Geddes, were enlightened Catholics of a philosophical bent. However, unlike the radical Alexander Geddes, who spent much of his career in England, the contributions of Hay and John Geddes are not very well-­known. Like Walmesley, Hay and John Geddes were formed in the enlightened milieu of Benedict XIV Lambertini’s Rome. Both men were educated there from 1751 to 1759, and Geddes was taught by Boscovich. Hay and Geddes were both formed in Lockean and Cartesian philosophy instead of traditional scholasticism. This is especially apparent in Hay’s ‘The Elements of Metaphysics’, an unpublished 200,000-­word 25 Gary Lee Nelson, ‘Charles Walmesley and the Episcopal Opposition to English Catholic Cisalpinism, 1782–1797’ (PhD Thesis, Tulane University, 1977), p. 39. 26  Geoffrey Scott, ‘The Early Career of Bishop Charles Walmesley O.S.B., D.D., F.R.S., 1722–1797’, Downside Review, 115 (1997), pp. 258–61. 27  Scott, ‘Early Career’, pp. 258–61. 28  Malcolm Freiburg, ‘Going Gregorian, 1582–1752: A Summary View’, Catholic Historical Review, 86 (2000), p. 9. 29  Nelson, ‘Charles Walmesley’, p. 41; Scott, ‘Early Career’, pp. 253–4. 30  Geoffrey Holt, ‘ “An Able Mathematician”: Christopher Maire’, Recusant History, 21 (1993), pp. 497–502. 31  Geoffrey Holt, The English Jesuits in the Age of Reason (London, 1993); Maurice Whitehead, English Jesuit Education: Expulsion, Suppression, Survival and Restoration, 1762–1803 (London, 2016).

272  Shaun Blanchard tome dated 1792. Hay was indebted to the Aberdeen professor, Thomas Reid, later successor to Adam Smith and a leading Common Sense philosopher.32 While the  bishops eschewed the radical ecumenical overtures of Alexander Geddes, their philosophical acumen and Lambertinian irenicism allowed them to converse with ease with good-­willed Protestants (John Geddes was a friend of Robert Burns), especially about the exciting philosophical currents shaping the Scottish Enlightenment.33 Hay’s central goal was to ‘marry contemporary philosophy with Catholic doctrine’34 by embracing Locke as well as Scottish lights such as Reid and James Beattie, while of course rejecting Humean scepticism. In 1775, Hay published Scripture Doctrine of Miracles, which engaged British (Beattie) and Roman (Lambertinian) sources. This apologetic work was reprinted into the mid-­nineteenth century.35 Additionally, Hay was possibly behind the translation and London publication of the work of the French Jesuit philosopher Claude Buffier.36 Hay and John Geddes evinced eager engagement with the mainstream Scottish Enlightenment, especially with their friendly Aberdonian Protestant colleagues, and with moderate Catholic Enlightenment impulses from the Continent.

Enlightened Theological and Devotional Culture A second stream of Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland was an enlightened theological and devotional culture. This ‘stream’ describes a common set of ideas and tendencies; I do not assert the existence of any particular school or discernible ‘movement’ as such. While this second stream of Catholic Enlightenment was in many ways a tributary of the first, some Catholics (such as Bishop Walmesley) who accepted enlightened scholarship opposed many enlightened theological and devotional tendencies. Thus, this second stream includes a strongly overlapping yet not identical set of protagonists from the first one. The roots of an enlightened theology and devotional life lay in a long ­tradition epitomized by figures like John Gother, an English Catholic convert from Presbyterianism.37 Gother’s A Papist Misrepresented and Represented (1665)

32  Mark Goldie, ‘Common Sense Philosophy and Catholic Theology in the Scottish Enlightenment’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 302 (1992), pp. 281–2. On Hay, see also Gregory Tirenin, ‘From Jacobite to Loyalist: The Career and Political Theology of Bishop George Hay’, British Catholic History, 35 (2021), pp. 265–93. 33  Goldie, ‘Common Sense Philosophy’, pp. 285–91, 298. 34  Goldie, ‘Common Sense Philosophy’, p. 301. 35  Goldie, ‘Common Sense Philosophy’, pp. 304–5. 36 Goldie, ‘Common Sense Philosophy’, p. 296. The work was Traité des premières véritéz (Paris, 1729). 37  On Gother, see John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (New York, 1976), pp. 117, 128, 131–2, 171–2, 259, 265, 271–3, 285–6, 369, 395.

Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland  273 emphasized the biblical foundations of Catholicism and consigned a number of contentious matters to the realm of adiaphora. Enlightened British and Irish Catholics followed in the path trod by irenic forebears like Gother. They sought to represent the Catholic faith as peaceful, prayerful, tolerant, holy, and biblical—­as the faith of the early Church and the original Christianity of their countries. In the eighteenth century, works such as the Yorkshireman Stephen Tempest’s Religio Laici (1764), which emphasized practicality, irenicism, and reason, were tailored for the education of enlightened Catholic gentlemen.38 While various indigenous traditions loomed large in enlightened British and Irish theology, the travels, education, and religious vocations that took some Catholics abroad prevented self-­referential insularity. Exposure to the new philosophical, theological, and political currents on the Continent ‘aligned them with the modernising momentum within the eighteenth-­century Catholicism of the European Enlightenment’.39 Enlightened piety and theology were characterized by a strong turn against scholasticism, a preference for critical, often Gallican historiography, and resistance to ‘transalpine’ or ‘ultramontane’ ideas and devotions which were considered foreign, especially disadvantageous in a Protestant polity, and tending towards superstition. A desire to appear not only biblically sound but reasonable (and, thus, as fit for equal citizenship and participation in public life) inspired the diffusion of classics such as Lodovico Muratori’s Della regolata devozione dei cristiani (1747). Alexander Kenny, an Irish Augustinian, translated this central Catholic Enlightenment text and published it in Dublin in 1789 as The Science of Rational Devotion. Kenny’s rather dynamic rechristening of the book’s title and his somewhat free translation says as much about his own theological perspective (and, we may presume, that of his numerous subscribers, who included Arthur O’Leary) as Muratori’s. While there was virtually no true Jansenism in Britain or Ireland in this period, the internecine conflict which rent the French Church and was eventually exported to the rest of Europe nevertheless had many interesting reverberations across the Channel.40 Enlightened British and Irish Catholics displayed little interest in ‘late’ Jansenism’s continued intransigence on matters of divine grace, but they did have unmistakable affinities with certain ‘Jansenist’ ideas concerning religious toleration, liturgy, and ecclesiology. Catholic opponents of the British 38 Lock, Catholicism, Identity and Politics, pp. 5, 30–9. 39 Michael Mullett, ‘An English Catholic Traveller: Sir John Courtney Throckmorton and the Continent, 1792–1793’, in Marshall and Scott (ed.), Catholic Gentry, p. 217. 40  For the Jansenist sympathies of the Throckmortons, a leading Cisalpine family, see Scott, ‘The Throckmortons at Home and Abroad’, pp 182–7, 192–4. On Scotland, see the many articles of James  F.  McMillan, especially ‘Jansenists and Anti-­Jansenists in Eighteenth Century Scotland: The Unigenitus Quarrels on the Scottish Catholic Mission, 1732–1746’, Innes Review, 39 (1988), pp. 12–45. Irish Jansenism, contrary to persistent myth, was a significant phenomenon only in the seventeenth century. See Thomas O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, 1600–70: Religion and Politics in Flanders, France, Ireland and Rome (Dublin, 2008).

274  Shaun Blanchard Cisalpines pointed these similarities out whenever they could. Thus, even though myths surrounding Jansenism’s impact in Britain and Ireland abound, we should not underestimate the importance of European debates over Jansenism—­as well as Gallicanism and Josephinism—­on British and Irish Catholics. The initial seventeenth-­century turmoil over grace and penance had morphed into a multifaceted and consuming eighteenth-­century debate over ecclesiology, religious toleration, liturgy and devotion, secular and regular clergy, the role of the laity, and the authority of the episcopate and national churches vis-­à-­vis the pope and curia. These issues were front and centre for enlightened British and Irish Catholics, especially as they sought to thread a perilous needle between maintaining the Catholicity and doctrinal integrity of their faith and advancing irenic dialogue with their suspicious Protestant overlords and neighbours as they pursued political concessions and cultural acceptance. The British Cisalpines were so formed by Gallican texts that some have called them ‘Anglo-­Gallicans’.41 Following the Gallican theological method represented par excellence by Bossuet, the Cisalpines saw scripture and the Church fathers as the basis of theology.42 This ‘positive theology’ was inculcated in the Cisalpines during their seminary formation abroad (especially at Douai) and gave even the more moderate Cisalpines like Lingard a dismissive attitude towards con­tem­por­ary scholasticism: I care little for the opinions of divines. Martene43 has taught me that. Assuming that the customs of their times were those of all antiquity they have propagated many an unfounded notion, and one goose following another, such notions have come down to us.44

The Cisalpine approach was ‘an assiduous search for “pure doctrine” in the Church Fathers, councils, and popes’.45 Their theological and historical training, rooted in Gallicanism and the French historical tradition, was ‘eminently suited to distinguish essentials from accidentals’.46 Such a theological task had direct political utility since the path to relief from penal legislation lay in oaths which needed to be acceptable to Crown and parliament as well as to the Catholic consciences of the swearers. While it would be anachronistic to apply the modern theological term ‘­ecumenical’ to British or Irish Catholics in this period, the term ‘proto-­ecumenical’

41 For example, Richard  J.  Schiefen, ‘ “Anglo-­ Gallicanism” in Nineteenth-­ Century England’, Catholic Historical Review, 63 (1977), pp. 14–44. 42 Chinnici, The English Catholic Enlightenment, pp. vii–­ix; 3–8; Philips, John Lingard, pp. 1–49. 43  Edmond Martène (1654–1739), Maurist Benedictine. 44  Lingard cited in Chinnici, English Catholic Enlightenment, p. 8. 45 Chinnici, English Catholic Enlightenment, p. 8. 46 Chinnici, English Catholic Enlightenment, p. 9.

Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland  275 is warranted. This term is justified since efforts were made in this period that went beyond irenicism, that is, the employment of conciliatory and amiable language and behaviour. Theologically enlightened Catholics generally exhibited a ­dia­logic­al posture towards Protestants that went well beyond a desire to not needlessly offend. This enlightened proto-­ ­ ecumenism minimized differences between the confessions, relegated a number of papal or ‘Jesuitical’ positions to the realm of adiaphora (or even blatantly rejected them), and, while insisting that the Catholic Church was the true Church of Christ, recognized the truths present in the Protestant confessions as generously as possible, to the point of arguing that Protestants could reach salvation without converting to Catholicism. For ex­ample, in his republication of James Corker, OSB’s classic Roman Catholic Principles, Joseph Berington omitted the title ‘Vicar of Christ’ for the pope and rewrote a passage ‘on the exclusive right of the Roman Church to call herself the Church of Christ’.47 While the original text read that the marks of the Church were ap­plic­able to no other Christian body, Berington’s rewrite applied the marks to the Catholic Church, but did not explicitly exclude other Christians groups. Key to this proto-­ecumenism was a full-­hearted affirmation of civil religious liberty, and an implicit (at times explicit) recognition that the policy of the papacy and many Catholic States in violently persecuting error and heresy was misguided, if not an abuse of the gospel.48 This proto-­ecumenical orientation is clear in published texts, sermons, private correspondence, and the friendships enlightened Catholics pursued with Protestant neighbours.49 All of the prominent British Cisalpines manifested such an orientation, as did enlightened Irish Catholics such as O’Leary, Carey, and O’Conor. A particular culture surrounding the liturgy, devotional life, and the Bible developed in enlightened Catholics circles. This culture owed much to Gallican and enlightened historiography, positive theology, and the proto-­ecumenical concerns described above. While theologically enlightened Catholics were usually staunch in defence of the seven sacraments and transubstantiation, they often conceded, implicitly or explicitly, that there were major defects in contemporary Catholic liturgical and devotional life. Joseph Berington provides one of many possible examples of an enlightened view of liturgy and devotions. In a popular apologetical work, Berington maintained that the Catholic Church would probably have switched from Latin to a vernacular liturgy long ago had it not been for an unfortunate hardening of positions in the Reformation era. Berington’s perspective

47  Duffy, ‘Cisalpine Movement’, p. 155. 48  Berington’s rather unguarded statements on these subjects were important planks in the case of the vicars apostolic against him. See Eamon Duffy, ‘Doctor Douglas and Mister Berington—­An Eighteenth-­Century Retraction’, Downside Review, 88 (1970), pp. 249–69. 49  On the proto-­ecumenical attitudes shared by Bishop John Carroll of the United States, see my ‘Neither Cisalpine nor Ultramontane: John Carroll’s Ambivalent Relationship with English Catholicism, 1780–1800’, US Catholic Historian, 36 (2018), pp. 1–28.

276  Shaun Blanchard illustrates the general Cisalpine attitude, one that adhered to established Catholic discipline but intimated a desire for change.50 Prominent British Catholic leaders like Throckmorton, Lingard, Gregory Gregson, OSB, Joseph Wilkes, OSB, and Alexander Geddes all expressed throughout their careers a preference for more use of the vernacular in the liturgy, and sometimes for a predominantly English Mass.51 Across the Atlantic, this view was shared by the ex-­Jesuit John Carroll, who corresponded with a number of prominent English and Irish Catholics. Carroll became the first bishop in the United States in 1790 and did more than anyone to shape Catholicism in the early Republic.52 Flowing from their theological and philosophical sensibilities and converging with a desire to combat the Protestant accusation of ‘superstition’, enlightened Catholic devotional life tended towards the textual, rational, Christocentric, and minimalistic. The more extravagant Baroque devotional styles associated with Counter-­Reformation Catholicism and the Mediterranean world were consistently put down in Cisalpine publications, sometimes in vituperative language that probably did more to harm their cause than to help it. Berington and Geddes’ criticisms of purported miracles in Italy, and of devotions as commonplace as scapulars and rosaries raised more eyebrows than just those of the conservative vicars apostolic.53 Due to several factors, approved versions of the vernacular scripture were not controversial among Catholics in Britain and Ireland in this period. The Bible as well as vernacular missals and prayer books were particularly important for Catholics living in a sometimes unstable ecclesiastical and pastoral situation. Nevertheless, when Catholics embraced the Enlightenment project of biblical criticism, controversy inevitably ensued. At the centre was Alexander Geddes’ impressive if idiosyncratic undertaking of scriptural translation and commentary. Geddes’ project—­totally impractical in scope—­was nevertheless a remarkable achievement of enlightened Catholic scholarship, done from a genuinely religious perspective. Some Catholics, however, felt Geddes’ methods were too rationalistic and undercut confidence in the divinely inspired Word. Among others things, Geddes was aware that the Pentateuch was the result of multiple scribal traditions and stages of editing, and not the work of Moses.54 Several decades after Geddes’ 50 Joseph Berington, Reflections Addressed to Reverend John Hawkins, to which is added, an Exposition of Roman Catholic Principles, in Reference to God and Country (Birmingham, 1785), pp. 73–4. 51  On Lingard and the liturgy, see Bossy, The English Catholic Community, pp. 374–85; Emma Riley, ‘John Lingard and the Liturgy’, in Philips (ed.), Lingard Remembered, pp. 143–56; Emma Riley, ‘Lingard as Liturgist’, in J. A. Hilton (ed.), A Catholic of the Enlightenment: Essays on Lingard’s Work and Times (Wigan, 1999), pp. 33–47. 52  See Blanchard, ‘Neither Cisalpine nor Ultramontane’. 53 For the moderate perspective of Lingard, see his Prayers to be said Before and After Mass . . . (Manchester, 1805); Instructions and Prayers Before, At and After Mass . . . (Manchester, 1830). 54  Alexander Geddes, Prospectus of a New Translation of the Holy Bible . . . (Glasgow: 1786). See the studies of Reginald Fuller, Alexander Geddes, 1737–1802: Pioneer of Biblical Criticism (Sheffield, 1984);

Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland  277 death, the last major Cisalpine figure, John Lingard, published his own translation of the gospels. Lingard’s project was scholarly but also pastoral, with the goal of advancing a more biblical piety for English Catholics. Lingard believed sober Christocentrism was threatened by the rising tide of ultramontanism—­complete with imported Marian devotions, Irish immigrants, Jesuit missionaries, and the neo-­Gothic Pugin churches he detested.55 Yet long before Lingard grumpily sounded the alarm against the nascent ‘­second spring’ culture, radical Catholic Enlightenment ventures like Geddes’ modern biblical criticism had been buried by episcopal leadership in Britain. Associated—­fairly, in the case of Geddes—­with Jacobinism, republicanism, and ecclesiastical democracy, the cause of Cisalpinism was seen as little better than Jansenism by a post-­1789 hierarchy that valued political and ecclesiastical centralization and conformity above all.56 It is to the intimately connected political and ecclesiastical controversies of that era that we now turn.

Enlightenment and Catholic Ecclesio-­Politics For Catholics, religion was inescapably political since the disabilities levelled against them were justified for some ‘political’ reasons—­their suspected ‘foreign’ (papal) or ‘treasonous’ (Jacobite) allegiances—­and others that were more properly ‘theological’—refusal to swear to the royal ecclesiastical supremacy or to renounce ‘superstitions’ like transubstantiation. While a number of religious issues had political freight in this period, it was ecclesiological matters that took centre stage in the tense negotiations over Catholic relief, as well as in the resulting internal Catholic conflicts which reached a high point in the 1780s and 1790s. The connection between politics and ecclesiology was a concern of many enlightened Catholics around Europe. In Britain and Ireland, however, the issues surrounding the relationship between Catholicism, citizenship, and loyalty to the State were especially neuralgic. The closest that enlightened Catholicism came to  being an organized movement—­as opposed to a set of scholarly aims and methods or theological proclivities and tendencies—­can be identified in those Catholic organizations that operated at the intersection of politics and ec­cle­si­as­ tic­al affairs. In Ireland, enlightened Catholics like Charles O’Conor and John Curry led the Catholic Committee to advocate for political reform through an irenic presentation of Catholic theological and civic principles and a revisionist and William Johnstone (ed.), The Bible and the Enlightenment: A Case Study: Alexander Geddes 1737–1802 (London, 2004). 55  John Lingard, A New Version of the Four Gospels . . . (London, 1836). See Peter Phillips, ‘The New Version of the Four Gospels’, in Phillips (ed.), Lingard Remembered, pp. 157–69. 56  See Mark Goldie, ‘Alexander Geddes at the Limits of the Catholic Enlightenment’, Historical Journal, 53 (2010), pp. 61–86, esp. p. 86.

278  Shaun Blanchard account of Irish history. In England, a similar Catholic Committee—­first exclusively lay and then expanded to include sympathetic enlightened clergy—­used the same means as the Irish to advance their agenda.57 Catholic reception of Enlightenment thought built upon an already existing arsenal of arguments for political reprieve and social acceptance.58 In some cases, especially in the turbulent 1790s, Enlightenment influences radicalized these arguments, particularly in Ireland. The 1790s is the pivotal decade for the ecclesio-­political efforts of enlightened Catholics in Britain and Ireland. Enlightenment ideas had permeated sections of the Catholic upper and middle classes. In 1791, the Cisalpine Catholic Committee appealed to the consciences of the MPs and other British gentlemen for relief in this ‘Age of Science and Philosophy’.59 In Ireland, the efforts of the Catholic Committee combined with the political calculations of the government produced a Relief Act in 1793 that profoundly enhanced Catholic fortunes—­the right to vote was granted as well as admittance to most military and civil offices. For English and Welsh Catholics,60 a second Relief Act of 1791 essentially granted full toleration of Catholic worship and ecclesiastical life as well as many other ­benefits. Yet the negotiations preceding that Act’s passage revealed significant ideological fissures in the Catholic community and led to new ones. These conflicts, termed the ‘Cisalpine stirs’,61 must be understood not only in their British context but against the backdrop of a European Catholic community rent by the French Revolution, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and the internecine conflict between an ideological coalition of Erastians and late Jansenists and their op­pon­ents, which included the Pope, the Roman curia, and networks of ex-­Jesuits. While we cannot recount this complex history in any detail,62 let us examine the position of enlightened British and Irish Catholics on religious toleration and ecclesiology in order to illuminate the intimate connection between these questions and political relief, and to understand both the appeal and the risks of enlightened political Catholicism, which ultimately lost ground internally to a nascent ultramontanism before being essentially eclipsed in the nineteenth century.

57  The Cisalpine Club, founded in 1792 and dissolved in 1830 upon the passage of Catholic emancipation in 1829, was the successor of the English Catholic Committee. 58  On Catholic relief before 1791, see Chapter 2 by James Kelly in this volume. 59 See The Case of the English Catholic Dissenters (1791), in Archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster (hereafter AAW), A 43/42. 60  Scottish Catholics had to wait for a 1793 Relief Act for any de iure mitigation of their situation. 61 See especially Eamon Duffy, ‘Ecclesiastical Democracy Detected: I (1779–1787)’, Recusant History, 10 (1970), pp. 193–209; Eamon Duffy, ‘Ecclesiastical Democracy Detected: II (1787–1796)’, Recusant History, 10 (1970), pp. 309–31; Eamon Duffy, ‘Ecclesiastical Democracy Detected: III (1796–1803), Recusant History, 13 (1975), pp. 123–48; Brian Carter, ‘Controversy and Conciliation in the English Catholic Enlightenment, 1790–1840’, Enlightenment and Dissent, 7 (1988), pp. 3–24; Mary Rowlands, ‘The Staffordshire Clergy, 1688–1803’, Recusant History, 9 (1968), pp. 219–41. 62 See, inter alia, Cormac Begadon, ‘Responses to Revolution: The Experiences of the English Benedictine Monks in the French Revolution, 1789–93’, British Catholic History, 34 (2018), pp. 106–28.

Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland  279 Enlightened Irish Catholics publicly and consistently supported at least civil religious toleration, and sometimes de iure religious liberty, which they grounded theologically. Such stances had clear strategic import as part of an effort to win over the goodwill of their Protestant neighbours, who feared a Catholic majority under the sway of a purportedly tyrannical and bigoted Roman Church. These Protestant fears explicitly motivated the historical work of Charles O’Conor and John Curry, who sought to rewrite a biased version of Irish history that saw Catholics as uniquely disposed to sectarian violence, massacres, and general civil disorder—­a narrative which was used to justify Catholic political and economic subjugation. Catholic political leadership in Ireland often came not from ecclesiastics, but from gentry and members of the urban middle class. Laymen like O’Conor, Curry, and Thomas Wyse led the Catholic Committee, which followed the trend of Irish Catholics employing Whig constitutionalist language in their arguments for political relief. In 1786, O’Conor quipped (ironically) that Catholics had ‘all become good Protestants in politics’.63 With a strategy similar to the English Catholic Committee, the Irish Committee insisted on their loyalty to the Hanoverians, disavowal of Jacobitism, and peacefulness in spite of the Protestant myths surrounding the 1641 massacres.64 Beginning in 1783–4, John Keogh and some other middle-­class merchants sounded a more radical tune. The fascinating Matthew Carey, a radical who favoured American independence and was exiled to Philadelphia in 1784, was cut from this cloth.65 The Irish bishops certainly took an interest in the political process, but they were generally warier of the enlightened political language a number of educated laymen employed. Nevertheless, some clerical voices strongly advocated enlightened ideas in the public sphere. One of the most famous of these was Arthur O’Leary, the ‘wild Capuchin of Cork’. O’Leary had ties to the British Cisalpines and, like them, went beyond pragmatic toleration to advocate de iure religious liberty on both civil and theological grounds.66 Appealing to the spirit of both the early Church and the ‘enlightened’ age in which he lived, O’Leary’s Essay on Toleration (subtitled a ‘plea for liberty of conscience’) argued that the Inquisition and the execution of heretics ‘are no parts of the Catholic creed’ and that ‘true religion’ should be spread and preserved only by preaching, virtuous living, and ‘boundless peace and charity’.67

63  Cited in Ian McBride, Scripture Politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), p. 25. 64  See McBride, Scripture Politics, pp. 22–5. 65  On these points, see Higgins, ‘Matthew Carey’, p. 176; and Matthew Carey’s The Urgent Necessity of an Immediate Repeal of the Whole Penal Code Candidly Considered (Dublin, 1781). 66  Kelly, ‘ “A Wild Capuchin of Cork’”, pp. 39–61. 67  Arthur O’Leary, An Essay on Toleration or Mr O’Leary’s plea for Liberty of Conscience (Dublin, 1780), p. 39. See the discussion in Kelly, “‘A Wild Capuchin of Cork,’” pp. 45–9.

280  Shaun Blanchard The British Cisalpines were keen to highlight their full-­hearted support for religious liberty in their political campaigns.68 The Catholic Committee’s Third Blue Book (1792) contained a summation of their position. In the hope of removing ‘every difficulty attaching to the spiritual jurisdiction [of the pope]’, the Committee voted to affirm unanimously: the only spiritual authority which I acknowledge is that which I conscientiously believe to have been transmitted by Jesus Christ to his Church, not to regulate by any outward coaction, civil and temporal concerns of subjects and citizens, but to direct souls by persuasion in the concerns of everlasting salvation.69

This stark denial of the Church’s coercive power—­a power which the papacy, the Jesuits, and many others had consistently asserted was definitive Catholic teaching—­was a bold declaration of religious liberty and the rights of individuals, even erring ones. Opponents of the Cisalpines argued this statement was a mere paraphrase of theses in the Acts and Decrees of the Synod of Pistoia (1786), which were condemned as heretical by Pope Pius VI in the bull Auctorem Fidei (1794).70 This doctrinal difference became a sticking point in the campaign of the vicars apostolic against Cisalpine priests like Geddes and Berington, who were threatened with removal of their faculties and other censures. Nevertheless, Cisalpine circles clearly retained a belief in religious liberty into the nineteenth century. The most thorough articulation of an enlightened Catholic ecclesiology in Britain was formulated in the final two decades of the eighteenth century by Cisalpines like Berington, Geddes, Wilkes, Throckmorton, and Butler. This Cisalpine ecclesiology was rooted in indigenous British sources, medieval conciliarism, and French Gallicanism; but also heavily influenced by enlightened anthropology, political philosophy, and contemporary theological developments. The result was a Cisalpine synthesis of English Catholic Whiggery with the ecclesiological primitivism popular in radical anti-­ultramontane Gallican and Jansenist circles.71 Thus, the rights of local bishops, secular priests, and the laity were stressed alongside the values of decentralized ecclesiastical authority, consensus, conscience, and deliberation.

68 See, inter alia, Chinnici, English Catholic Enlightenment, pp. 26, 29–36. 69  Catholic Committee, Third Blue Book (London, 1792), p. 46, copy accessed in Archives of the Archdiocese of Birmingham, C1236. 70 See Auctorem Fidei 4–5 in Denzinger–­ Hünermann, §§2604–5 (Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals, 43rd edition, originally compiled by Heinrich Denzinger; revised, enlarged, and, in collaboration with Helmut Hoping, edited by Peter Hünermann for the original bilingual edition; and edited by Robert Fastiggi and Anne Englund Nash for the English edition (San Francisco, 2012)). 71 On Whig politics among the Cisalpine gentry, see the interesting test case of the apostate-­ turned-­MP Thomas Gascoigne profiled in Lock, Catholicism, Identity and Politics.

Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland  281 The Cisalpines believed that the success of their political project rested on their ability to convince Protestants, especially in the government, that Catholicism was not a threat to the public, the Established Church, or the State. For example, in 1787 a group of Protestant Dissenters lobbied for a repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, which limited their rights. These Dissenters claimed that the Test Act was aimed at ‘Papists’, who really did have unsound political principles, an accusation which sparked rebuttals from Berington and Geddes.72 The Cisalpine position can be summed up in Berington’s famous statement: ‘I am no Papist, nor is my religion Popery. [Whereas] Catholic is an old family name, which we have never forfeited, the word Roman has been given to us to indicate some undue attachment to the See of Rome.’73 It was this perception of an ‘undue attachment’ to Rome that the Cisalpines became obsessed with shedding, for theological, cultural, and political reasons. Of course, in order to not be considered dangerous ‘papists’, enlightened Catholics had to give some account of their continued attachment to the pope as supreme head of the Universal Church to which they belonged. To this end, Berington, Butler, and others articulated a minimalist understanding of papal authority that was primitivist, conciliarist, and sensitive to the concerns of the ‘enlightened’ (Protestant) gentlemen they wished to assuage. According to Berington, the papal headship was limited, not absolute. The pope was ‘the principal executive power’ and ‘the head of [the] constitution’ of the Church.74 In his aforementioned republication of James Corker’s classic Roman Catholic Principles,75 Berington also rewrote a passage on ecclesiology that fused classic conciliarism with enlightened and Whiggish political values. The Cisalpine priest called ecumenical councils ‘the representative body of the church’ and the pope ‘the first ecclesiastical magistrate’ who had ‘a limited superintendence’ and was ‘bound by the laws of the constitution’.76 While the Cisalpines had their own theological reasons to espouse conciliarism, the political and cultural situation of their day led them, among other things, to spirited denials of the pope’s temporal authority within other realms, his ‘deposing power’, and his infallibility. All Catholics repudiated the persistent myths that Catholics were not bound to ‘keep faith with heretics’, that they could use equivocation while taking oaths, and that they could be absolved in the confessional from binding contracts. Obviously, the perception that Catholics inordinately inclined to deceit in business or, more damagingly, in political life, had a

72  Duffy, ‘Cisalpine Movement’, p. 162. 73  Joseph Berington, The state and behaviour of English Catholics, from the Reformation to the year 1780 (London, 1780), p. vi. 74 Berington, The state and behaviour of English Catholics, p. 152. 75  See n. 50 above. 76 Berington, Reflections, pp. 66, 68–9. Charles Butler’s language was similar. See Duffy, ‘Cisalpine Movement’, p. 155.

282  Shaun Blanchard debilitating cultural effect and encouraged support for the financial and legal penalties they suffered.77 The highly charged political debates surrounding the passage of the English Relief Act of 1791 gave rise to equally charged intra-­Catholic doctrinal controversy between the Cisalpines and the party sometimes called ‘ultramontane’ or ‘transalpine’. Three of the four English vicars apostolic and several Jesuits, Charles Plowden chief among them, were the most prominent spokesmen for this conservative, pro-­papal network. Cisalpine political activity brought to the surface not only methodological differences between the two parties—­differences rooted in distinct responses to Enlightenment-­era developments in history, philosophy, and politics—­but also theological differences. The doctrinal disputes that came to the fore hovered in the murky boundary between politics and ecclesiology, in an  age that featured quite chaotic developments in both. These developments included changing views of the role of the pope, the bishops, and the laity, the relationship between Church and State, religious liberty, relations between Catholics and Protestants, and the tenuous balance between hierarchical authority and the rights and consciences of individuals. Nevertheless, the stress on the British Catholic community caused by wrangling over the precise wording of an oath for the Act of 1791 did more to ramp up internal Catholic tensions than to cause any breakthrough with parliament. The text of the 1774 Irish oath of loyalty, which all parties concerned could agree upon, was anti-­climactically added at the eleventh hour.

Conclusion: The Fading of Enlightened Catholicism This chapter has traced three distinct yet overlapping streams of Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland. First, an ideologically diverse group of British and Irish Catholics contributed to enlightened scholarship both at home and abroad. Second, an enlightened theological and devotional culture took hold amongst some British and Irish Catholics. This culture had strong affinities with Muratorian circles on the Continent and was rooted in critical historiography and positive theology. Finally, an ecclesio-­political stream of Catholic Enlightenment, unlike the previous two streams, was a movement as such. British and Irish Catholics of this persuasion used enlightened theo-­political ideas, sometimes quite radical ones, in order to campaign externally for relief and emancipation, and internally for ecclesiastical reform.

77  Hilton explains the connections between these Protestant prejudices, legislation, papal power, and Cisalpine ecclesiology in J.  A.  Hilton, ‘The Cisalpines’, in Hilton (ed.), A Catholic of the Enlightenment, pp. 10–20.

Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland  283 After the tremendous boon of the English Relief Act of 1791, conservative clerics began to assert more effective control over the British Catholic community. The Whiggish, lay-­led Cisalpines were associated with the purportedly levelling and disordered political and theological forces that were ravaging France and, ominously, being exported to the rest of Europe. The success of the conservative party was apparent in their marginalization of the clerical auxiliaries of Cisalpinism like Berington, Alexander Geddes, and the Staffordshire clergy led by Joseph Wilkes.78 The vicars apostolic, typically conservative on ecclesio-­political matters, were aided by the searing pens of ex-­Jesuits like Charles Plowden and his brother Robert, as well as John Milner, who was beginning his long career as a divisive firebrand. A clear turn in Britain towards a more clerical, hierarchical, and papalist Catholicism mirrored Continental developments, and was intimately connected with the shifting of the political winds after the French Revolution, the influx of Irish immigrants, and the rise of Romanticism. The long-­term success of this shift was marked by the promotion of the militantly anti-­Cisalpine Milner to vicar apostolic of the Midland District in 1803, an office from which he exercised great influence until his death in 1826. Milner exemplified the new and confident ultramontane spirit, and its concomitant desire to put the presumptuous Cisalpine gentlemen and their theologically dangerous priestly accomplices in their place. Such an attitude was epitomized in Milner’s quip that the nomination of pastors should rest with the successor of Peter, not Lord Petre.79 While Lingard, along with Mark Aloysius Tierney and John Fletcher, kept alive the spirit of enlightened Catholicism well into the nineteenth century, theirs was a moderate Cisalpinism that manifested itself mostly in checks upon ultramontanism, triumphalism, and devotional extravagance, while also preserving a sober and irenic tradition of historical scholarship and apologetics.80 Conclusions regarding the Irish Catholic Enlightenment are more difficult to draw, not least because the very existence of an Irish Enlightenment has been contested. According to Jim Smyth, if there was one, it was ‘surely during the 1790s and among the United Irishmen’.81 Michael Brown’s case that there was an Irish Enlightenment stretching the bulk of the eighteenth century, and that it included Catholics, is a strong one. Brown, however, argues that this Enlightenment broke up at the end of the eighteenth century and in a sense failed, unable to resolve the question: ‘who was Irish?’82 The inability to reach consensus on this 78  On this process, see Goldie, ‘Geddes at the Limits of the Catholic Enlightenment’, pp. 61–86; Duffy, ‘Doctor Douglas and Mister Berington’, pp. 249–69. 79  Duffy, ‘Cisalpine Movement’, p. 205. 80 See, inter alia, James J. Sack, ‘The Grenvilles’ “Eminence Grise”: The Reverend Charles O’Conor and the Latter Days of Anglo-­Gallicanism’, Harvard Theological Review, 72 (1979), pp. 123–42. 81 Jim Smyth, ‘Wolfe Tone’s Library: The United Irishmen and “Enlightenment” ’, Eighteenth-­ Century Studies, 45 (2012), p. 423. 82 Brown, Irish Enlightenment, pp. 462–3, at p. 462. See also Michael Maurer, ‘Überwindung des Konfessionellen durch das Nationale in der irischen Aufklärung’, in Jürgen Overhoff and Andreas Oberdorf (eds.), Katholische Aufklärung in Europa und Nordamerika (Göttingen, 2019), pp. 254–67.

284  Shaun Blanchard simple yet interminably thorny question helped set the stage for modern ­sectarianism and dashed the dreams of irenic Protestants ranging from Theobald Wolfe Tone to Edmund Burke. Much more work remains to be done exploring the relationship between enlightened Catholicism and Catholic membership in the United Irishmen. Additionally, to what extent was the nineteenth-­century campaign for relief, which culminated in Catholic emancipation in 1829, a direct ideological descendant of the efforts of the enlightened Irish Catholic Committee of Charles O’Conor? Should Daniel O’Connell, then, be understood as an enlightened Catholic? Or was the situation fundamentally altered by the French Revolution and the up­ heavals in Ireland in 1798? While there are intriguing parallels between enlightened Catholicism on the Continent and in Britain and Ireland, it is the uniqueness of the social and political situation faced by Catholics in these lands that makes their story all the more interesting and worth telling.

Select Bibliography Brown, Michael, The Irish Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 2016). Chinnici, Joseph, The English Catholic Enlightenment: John Lingard and the Cisalpine Movement, 1780–1850 (Shepherdstown, WV, 1980). Duffy, Eamon, ‘Ecclesiastical Democracy Detected: I (1779–1787)’, Recusant History, 10 (1970), pp. 193–209. Duffy, Eamon, ‘Ecclesiastical Democracy Detected: II (1787–1796)’, Recusant History, 10 (1970), pp. 309–31. Duffy, Eamon, ‘Ecclesiastical Democracy Detected: III (1796–1803)’, Recusant History, 13 (1975), pp. 123–48. Gibbons, Luke and O’Conor, Kieran (eds.), Charles O’Conor of Ballinagare: Life and Works. (Dublin, 2015). Glickman, Gabriel, ‘The “Secret Reformation” and the Origins of the Scottish Catholic Enlightenment’, in Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris, and John Marshall (eds.), Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Honour of Mark Goldie (Woodbridge, 2019), pp. 257–79. Goldie, Mark, ‘The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment’, Journal of British Studies, 30 (1991), pp. 20–62. Goldie, Mark, ‘Alexander Geddes at the Limits of the Catholic Enlightenment’, Historical Journal, 53 (2010), pp. 61–86. Hilton, J. A. (ed.), A Catholic of the Enlightenment: Essays on Lingard’s Work and Times (Wigan, 1999). Kelly, James, ‘ “A Wild Capuchin of Cork”: Arthur O’Leary (1729–1802)’, in Gerard Moran (ed.), Radical Irish Priests, 1660–1970 (Dublin, 1998), pp. 39–61.

Catholic Enlightenment in Britain and Ireland  285 Scott, Geoffrey, ‘The Throckmortons at Home and Abroad, 1680–1800’, in Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott (eds.), Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation (Farnham, 2009), pp. 171–211.

15 Church Music A Barometer of Social-­Religious Change Thomas Muir

Music does not exist in a vacuum. It shapes and reflects social attitudes, especially when combined with text, as happens in a church service. It is therefore evidence for the nature of Catholicism in this period. This chapter explores three aspects. First, we will discuss how the structure of the community affected the capacity and willingness of Catholics to perform music both at home and on the Continent, with the embassy chapels in London acting as a musical interface between them, at least in England. Such patterns were modified by Catholic relief, the influx of Continental institutions after the French Revolution, and the development of Catholic music publishing in London. In turn, this last had significant implications for performance technique. Second, the ability of music to distort the liturgy during this period must be considered. Not only did it alter the balance within services but, at a detailed level, music could ­produce an emphasis on certain words and phrases at the expense of others. In their different ways such properties applied to both the contemporary Baroque-­Classical styles and to the prevailing ‘measured’ form of plainchant, whose technical features must be clearly understood. By extension the ability of music to express ideological standpoints should also be noted; the Jacobite connotations of Adeste Fideles are a prime example. Third, we will see how, in the early nineteenth century, the appearance of large Haydn-­Mozart Masses brought Catholic music to a turning point. Was it as a reflection of Catholic belief and culture looking ‘forward’ and ‘outward’ or ‘backward’ and ‘inward’, or a mixture of both?

Dissemination and Performance Before the 1790s, the striking feature in Catholic music-­making was the contrast between what happened at home and what happened on the Continent. At home the penal laws compelled Catholics to keep a low profile, thereby curtailing open performance, a habit that often persisted thereafter. For example at Sedgley Park Thomas Muir, Church Music: A Barometer of Social-­Religious Change In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829. Edited by: Liam Chambers, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843443.003.0016

Church Music  287 College, Staffordshire, High Mass and Benediction were spoken as late as 1816.1 Likewise in Lowland Scotland, even after Catholic relief had been introduced, Bishop George Hay banned all church music for fear of inflaming Protestant opinion.2 Nor was this unjustified. During the Gordon Riots, crowds torched the Bavarian and Sardinian embassy chapels along with virtually all their music.3 The result was that in most places music-­making was limited in scale, repertoire, sophistication, and skills. Fr James Preston’s experiences at Abergavenny would have been quite typical. On his arrival in 1797, he found there was no High Mass, no sung Benediction, and no choir gallery.4 Of course, there were exceptions. As in William Byrd’s day, Catholic gentlemen of wealth and influence could, if so inclined, create establishments of musical excellence, examples included the Welds at Lulworth and the Arundells at Wardour.5 Yet often there was a problem. Their chapels were usually small (Wardour was an exception), limiting the size of congregations from which musicians could be drawn. They were private rooms and their priests depended on gentry patronage. So here gentlemen were largely in charge. If they had no musical interest, little was likely to happen, whatever the inclinations of the priest and other laity. In Ireland things were more mixed. Catholics could worship publicly, and they were supported by an extensive network of Mass centres. As early as 1731 the ‘Report on the State of Popery’ prepared for the Irish House of Lords listed 893, and there were probably more, given that it was incomplete.6 Yet here we encounter uncertainties, stemming from their considerable variety, both in design and state of repair. For a start there were an additional fifty-­five private chapels and ninety-­seven ‘huts, sheds and moveable altars’, mostly in Ulster. Contrary to popu­lar belief they existed not because of persecution but poverty, and in some cases due to the activities of itinerant friars. The effect though was similar. Such places, by definition, were unsuitable for the development of a sophisticated

1 Frank Roberts, A History of Sedgley Park and Cotton College, ed. Neil Henshaw (Cotton, 1985), p. 41. 2  Shelagh Noden, ‘The Revival of Music in the Post-­Reformation Catholic Church in Scotland’, Recusant History, 31 (2012), pp. 246–60. 3 Philip Olleson, ‘The London Embassy Chapels and their Music in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-­Centuries’, in David Wynn Jones (ed.), Music in Eighteenth Century Britain (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 103–4. 4  Bennett Zon, ‘Plainchant in the Eighteenth-­Century English Catholic Church’, Recusant History, 21 (1993), p. 375. Preston was the third son of the Jenico, tenth Lord Gormanston, County Meath. 5  See, for example, Bennett Zon, ‘Plainchant in the Eighteenth-­Century Roman Catholic Church in England (1737–1834): An Examination of Surviving Printed and Manuscript Sources with particular reference to the work of John Francis Wade’ (D.Phil. Thesis, University of Oxford, 1993), pp. 139–42. 6 Finbar McCormick, ‘Mass-­Houses and Meeting Houses: Catholic and Presbyterian Church Design in Eighteenth-­Century Ireland’, in James Lyttelton and Matthew Stout (eds.), Church and Settlement in Ireland (Dublin, 2018), p. 215; David Fleming: ‘The “Mass-­Rock’ in Eighteenth-­Century Ireland: The Symbolic and Historical Past’, in Lyttelton and Stout (eds.), Church and Settlement in Ireland, pp. 186–90.

288  Thomas Muir music based on a written Latin liturgy. This applies even more to Highland Scotland, given the legal ban on public worship and partial dependence on an itinerant clerical ministry. In Ireland, at least some priests were said to have travelled as pipers, harpists might have performed at Mass, and there are examples of devotional and carol texts sung to popular melodies.7 Next, turning to rural parish chapels, many had a ‘long-­aisle’ or ‘T’ design with the altar at the centre of the long western wall or at the head of the ‘T’ respectively and pews lined up longitudinally on either side or in front of it. In both instances the object was to cram in as many people as possible. This, of course, need not have inhibited the formation of choirs, but it was a disincentive for using organs or other instrumentalists, since they took up more space. The solution then would have been to construct galleries, as happened with better-­built chapels in urban areas; but in rural districts this was not an option because the walls were too low. Design differences therefore promoted a musical divide between town and country.8 Furthermore, persisting, albeit declining, habits of pre-­ Counter-­ Reformation observance worked against a church music dependent on regular attendance focused on one parish chapel. Indeed, cramped accommodation must have obstructed attempts to change this, especially when exacerbated by expanding congregations. On the Continent, the situation was very different. In Catholic countries any gentleman on the Grand Tour would have encountered church music that was open, frequently ostentatious, large-­scale, and sophisticated, especially in Rome. Moreover, some British (and perhaps Irish) colleges, monasteries, and convents had strong musical establishments and enjoyed a sung communal Office. Instruction must have been given; however, only the Scots College which transferred to Valladolid in 1771 had music on its curriculum.9 Much of the evidence comes from surviving chant books copied by John Francis Wade. Educated by the Dominicans at Bornheim, he mainly worked in London. Yet despite this many of his books have associations with Continental institutions, especially the English College at Douai, judging by frequent appearances of the Missa Duacena.10 Unsurprisingly, his work contained strong French influences; for example, his notation was based on François de La Feillée’s system 7  William  H.  Grattan Flood, with an introduction by Seóirse Bodley, A History of Irish Music (Shannon, 1970), pp. 243–5, 256–7; Kieran Daly, ‘Catholic Popular Devotional Music’, in Harry White and Brian Boydell (eds.), The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland, 2 vols. (Dublin, 2013), I, pp. 172–8; Nóirin Ní Riain, ‘Kilmore Carols’, in White and Boydell (eds.), The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland, I, pp. 568–9. Apart from Shelagh Noden’s work, virtually no research has been done on Scottish Catholic music in this period, especially on its ‘cross-­over’ with oral folk cultures. See also, Chapter 13 by Ó Muircheartaigh, in this volume, especially pp. 260–1. 8  McCormick, ‘Mass-­Houses and Meeting Houses’, pp. 216–17, 219–24. 9  See, for example, Maurice Whitehead, ‘ “In the Sincerest Intentions of Studying”: The Educational Legacy of Thomas Weld (1750–1810), founder of Stonyhurst College’, Recusant History, 26 (2002), pp. 181–2, 192, n. 56; Shelagh Noden, ‘Songs of the Spirit from Dufftown’, Innes Review, 70–1 (2019), p. 40. 10  Bennett Zon, The English Plainchant Revival (London, 1999), pp. 105–8.

Church Music  289 of plainchant.11 A crucial limitation on its dissemination, however, was the heavy reliance on hand copying. Wade did produce some printed editions; but even then only the text and staves were printed, while the notes were inserted by hand.12 Of course, other printed liturgical-­musical books were produced on the Continent, some of which were obtained by British and Irish communities (and can still be found occasionally in their archives); but they existed alongside other manuscript volumes, and many pre-­dated the eighteenth century.13 Their quality and the fact they continued to be used suggest that, as with volumes by Wade, they were master-­copies. Musical performance practice therefore would have been medieval in character. Key volumes would be issued to leading choral officials; everybody else made do with rough copies or learnt the music by rote.14 Certainly secondary copies were made from Wade’s books, and presumably sub-­copies made from them, the Fernyhalgh notebook being a good example.15 In this way then Wade’s repertoire was transmitted to clergy working at home, but its effects were diminished because only a certain number of copies could be made. Only with print could the bottle-­neck be broken. Here then lies the significance of Samuel Webbe the elder’s An Essay on the Church’s Plainchant, which drew heavily on Wade’s work. This succeeded earlier publications produced by James Marmaduke and Thomas Meighan, both engraved and therefore of limited output, whereas Webbe’s publication used moveable plainchant type.16 In Ireland, however, Webbe’s Essay exerted little influence. Here the first printed plainchant book—­a Missale Romanum—­dates from 1777, and was produced under the aegis of Archbishop John Carpenter of Dublin. The publisher, Patrick Wogan of Dublin, followed this with several other books: the Officium Defunctorum (1778 and 1793), P. Hoey’s A Plain and Concise Method of Learning the Gregorian Note (1800), and High Mass, and Sundays Vespers, as Sung in the Parish Chapels of the R.G. Archdiocess of Cashell (1799), later republished as High Mass and Sundays Vespers, as Sung in Most of the Different Roman Catholic

11  François de La Feillée, Méthode nouvelle pour apprendre parfaitement les régles du plain-­chant et psalmodie (Poitiers, 1748). 12  See, for example, the Bona Mors ([London], 1737) and The Roman Gradual on the Gregorian Notes ([London], 1737). These are discussed in Zon, The English Plainchant Revival, pp. 120–3. 13  For the example of the Sepulchrine collections (now housed at Durham University), see Thomas Muir, Roman Catholic Church Music in England, 1791–1914: A Handmaid of the Liturgy? (Aldershot, 2008), p. 67 (table 3:2). 14  For a discussion of such procedures, see John Harper: The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Fourth to the Eighteenth Century: A Historical Introduction and Guide for Students and Musicians (London, 1991), pp. 58–9. 15  Uncatalogued volume signed by Fr Anthony Lund (1731–1811) held in the Talbot Library collection, now housed at Liverpool Hope University. 16  James Marmaduke, A Pious Association . . . and the True Method to learn the Church Plain-­Song (London, 1748); Thomas Meighan, The Art of Singing (London, 1748); [Samuel Webbe], An Essay on the Church Plain Chant, 3 parts (London, 1782). Webbe’s authorship has been disputed, but it is evident in Frans Blom, Jos Blom, Frans Korsten, and Geoffrey Scott (eds.), The Correspondence of James Peter Coghlan (1731–1800), CRS 80 (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 103.

290  Thomas Muir Chapels throughout the United Kingdom (1808). Both editions included the text (unacknowledged) of James Marmaduke’s The True Method to Learn the Church Plain-­song of 1748. However, like Webbe, they used moveable type, and this, along with their titles, suggests a bid to promote a more widespread performance of plainchant.17 Two very different musical worlds therefore coexisted. Their meeting point was in London, at the embassy chapels maintained by the Catholic powers. At any time there were up to nine of them; but detailed—­and incomplete—­information only survives for the Bavarian, Portuguese, Sardinian, and, to a lesser extent, Spanish embassies.18 The interface is illustrated by Wade, whose Cantus Diversi included ‘German’, ‘Italian’, ‘Polish’, ‘Portuguese’, ‘Spanish’, and ‘Sardinian’ Masses.19 The remaining repertoire must have been enormous. Rosemarie Darby lists twenty-­nine Masses and forty-­nine other pieces from the Bavarian chapel, yet only two out of the twenty volumes surviving from the Bavarian chapel pre-­date 1791, so the scale of music-­making before the Gordon Riots must have been greater than their contents indicate.20 Charles Barbandt’s Sacred Hymns, Anthems and Versicles of 1766 alone contains twenty-­nine motets and fifty-­five hymn settings. Moreover, just as with Wade, the identity of their composers reveals a mixture of native and foreign contributions. Barbandt himself worked at the Bavarian chapel, while Darby’s list includes works by Francesco Ricci, Daniel Perez, Benedetto Marcello, Joseph Haydn, and Mozart. Alongside them are works by Webbe, Samuel Wesley, John Danby, Stephen Paxton, and Henry Nixon. The absence of French material is noteworthy. This, of course, reflects the balance of sources, but it is something that persisted into the early nineteenth century, perhaps because of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars with France. Quantity did not preclude quality, for the chapel choirs included professional British and foreign singers from the London opera scene. For instance, alongside Charles Dignum and Danby, there were Manuel Garcia, Giovanni Liverati, and Giuseppe Naldi. Indeed, the Bavarian chapel was known as the ‘Shilling Opera’.21 As a result, despite liturgical-­aesthetic concerns, operatic mannerisms became stock-­in-­trade amongst British and Irish Catholic singers for decades to come. Embassy chapels also provided training. For example, in 1792 Webbe advertised free lessons in plainchant, sheer experience must have produced formidable 17  Bennett Zon, ‘The Revival of Plainchant in the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1777–1858: Some Sources and their Commerce with England’, in Patrick Devine and Harry White (eds.), The Maynooth International Musicological Conference 1995, Selected Proceedings, part 2, Irish Musical Studies, 5 (Dublin, 1996), pp. 254–5. I must also thank Dr Liam Chambers for help with Irish sources and other material in this chapter. 18  The other centres were the French, Imperial, Neapolitan, Polish, and Venetian embassies. 19  See John Francis Wade, Cantus Diversi (1751; at Stonyhurst) (1761; at Douai Abbey, MS 6). 20  Rosemarie Darby, ‘The Music of the Roman Catholic Embassy Chapels in London, 1765–1825’ (M.Mus. Thesis, University of Manchester, 1984), pp. 142–6. 21  Anon., ‘Sketch of the State of Music in London’, Quarterly Magazine and Review, 11 April 1820.

Church Music  291 sight-­singing capabilities, and most leading musicians like Vincent Novello had sizeable private teaching practices.22 In this way schools of choir-­director composers emerged. William de Fesch (Bavarian chapel) taught Thomas Arne (Sardinian chapel); Barbandt trained Webbe (Sardinian, Portuguese, and Bavarian chapels); Webbe trained his son Samuel Webbe the younger (Sardinian chapel) Danby (Spanish chapel), and Novello (Portuguese chapel). Nixon (Sardinian chapel) married Danby’s daughter. As a result, embassy chapels became showcases of musical excellence, not just for Catholics, but also for non-­Catholic visitors. In effect they acted as conduits for the injection of new music, and styles, into London culture. The connections with opera and other secular music-­making reinforced this tendency. For instance, Webbe, Danby, and Paxton belonged to the Glee Catch Club. Indeed, increasingly the effects spread further afield. For example, in 1741 Arne and his sister Mrs Cibber paid a celebrated visit to Dublin where the composer Thomas Pinto ran the Smock Alley Theatre. Pinto himself was born in London of mixed Italian-­British parentage; his compositions can be found in embassy repertoire; his second wife was Arne’s ex-­mistress and he died in Edinburgh. Pinto’s career illustrates the considerable impact that London and foreign Catholic visitors had on the vigorous Dublin opera and concert scenes. The crucial difference, however, was the absence of anything like the embassy chapels. As far as we know the only reference to anything comparable before the 1790s was the performance in April 1789 at the archiepiscopal chapel in Francis Street of a Te Deum specially composed by Thomas Giordani to celebrate George III’s recovery from madness.23 Even allowing for the balance of surviving evidence, there is little doubt that in the early nineteenth-­century embassy chapels enjoyed an Indian summer. Indeed the introduction of Haydn-­Mozart Masses implies larger resources. Novello had twelve choristers in the Portuguese choir, and in 1808 his organ ‘grew’ from one to three manuals.24 Yet there were limits to what even he could achieve, given that the floor space was only 45 feet square. More significantly, in the long term, the embassy chapels were increasingly sidelined by the effects of Catholic relief. This had two consequences. First, the English Catholic Relief Act of 1778 allowed Catholics to worship and perform music openly. Second, the 1791 English legislation permitted the building of chapels.25 These accelerated existing trends, not­ably a move out from gentry households and the growth of Catholicism in the towns, especially when fuelled by Irish immigration. Musical direction 22  The Laity’s Directory (London, 1792), p. 34; Fiona Palmer, Vincent Novello (1781–1861): Music for the Masses (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 106–9, 122–4. 23  Gerard Gillen, ‘Church Music in Dublin, 1500–1900’, in Brian Boydell (ed.), Four Centuries of Music in Ireland (London, 1979), p. 26. 24  Gillen, ‘Church Music in Dublin, 1500–1900’, p. 24. Olleson, ‘The London Embassy Chapels’, pp. 113–15. 25  These dates, of course, apply to England and Wales only. In Ireland and Scotland the pattern was different.

292  Thomas Muir therefore shifted from gentlemen, to priests and congregations, as Preston’s vigorous attempts to promote congregational plainchant at Abergavenny show.26 There were more people to draw musicians from and the gradual relaxation of anti-­ Catholic prejudice encouraged ambition. Thus, at the opening of St  Cuthbert’s, Durham, in 1826 a Haydn Mass was performed accompanied by an orchestra of fifteen musicians from Madame Tussaud’s.27 Due to the pent-­up frustrations caused by Bishop Hay’s restrictions the upsurge was particularly powerful in Lowland Scotland. Hay retired in 1803 and his successor, Alexander Cameron, while not unsympathetic, appears initially to have been cautious. However, between 1810 and 1820 every mission in the district except Perth established a choir. Most also acquired an organ; and this in communities where virtually no religious music tradition had existed before.28 In London the picture was the same. Increasingly, new centres challenged embassy chapel dominance: notably, the pro-­Cathedral at St Mary’s, Moorfields (rebuilt in 1781), and St Patrick’s, Soho (1793). Here the celebrated Irish Capuchin preacher and composer, Arthur O’Leary, held forth. Born in Cork, trained at St Malo, and then chaplain at the Spanish chapel, he epitomized the transition that was taking place. In 1788 and 1798 the Bavarian and Sardinian chapels had been replaced by public chapels, albeit under embassy patronage. In 1829 the Portuguese chapel—­the last survivor—­closed down. Such trends were reinforced by the French Revolution, which produced a vast influx of émigrés. Most were temporary residents, and to some extent they remained distinct from British Catholics, but they were used to worshipping openly, and of course their clergy could sing. Even in Abergavenny, Preston ser­ ious­ly considered recruiting a Fr Grandmaison to teach his congregation plainchant, citing congregational practice around Liège, where he had been trained.29 More enduring was the arrival of Continental religious establishments. Naturally they brought their musical traditions with them, although many scores were lost in the rush—­sometimes only temporarily. Even so, straitened circumstances attenuated their music. For example, at Woolton, between 1785 and 1807, the Benedictine nuns from Cambrai had no chapel, and even after they moved to Salford Hall, they did not get an organ until 1817.30 However, once roots had been put down, things changed. At Stonyhurst, until St Peter’s church was opened (1835), the ex-­Jesuits worshipped in converted stables with an organ in the horse-­loft. Nonetheless they enthusiastically subscribed to Novello’s A Collection 26  Zon, ‘Plainchant in the Eighteenth-­Century English Catholic Church’, pp. 375–9. 27 J. M. Tweedie, Popish Elvet: The History of St Cuthbert’s, Durham, part 1 (Durham, 1981), p. 121. 28 Christine Johnson, Developments in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, 1789–1829 (Edinburgh, 1983), pp. 164–6. 29  Preston to Coghlan, 5 March 1798, in Blom, Blom, Korsten, and Scott (eds.), The Correspondence of James Peter Coghlan, p. 327. 30 Felicitas Corrigan, In a Great Tradition: Tribute to Dame Laurentia McLachan (London, 1956), p. 42.

Church Music  293 of Sacred Music.31 Its subscription list demonstrates the triangular relationship between the college (the largest Catholic school in Britain), the gentry families who patronized it, and Catholic London. Indeed, such patterns must have been replicated elsewhere, but with variations. Thus with seminaries, as gentry influence declined, the triangle would have been between the college or monastery (since they too sent priests out to chapels), the missions and the London Catholic music publishing scene. That publishing world was the key third ingredient that had emerged by 1829. Its roots go back to Barbandt’s Sacred Hymns and Versicles of 1766, the first British Catholic polyphonic music publication since Byrd’s Gradualia of 1605–7. The thread was then picked up by Webbe with An Essay on the Church’s Plainchant, A Collection of Sacred Music, A Collection of Motetts and Antiphons, and A Collection of Masses. The latter three consisted entirely of compositions by himself or his son.32 The real breakthrough though came with Novello’s A Collection of Sacred Music, for its subscribers included many members of the social, political, and musical establishment, including members of the royal family. Interestingly, 112 of the 472 published copies subscribed went to Dublin. This work was followed by Novello’s Twelve Easy Masses (1816), A Collection of Motetts for the Offertory (c.1818), The Evening Service (1822), and Convent Music (1834). Except for the last, which was designed for the nuns at Hammersmith, these were compendiums of music from the embassy chapel repertoire, including compositions by Novello himself. However, in 1819–24 he took a step further, publishing a complete series of Haydn and Mozart Masses (some of them spurious).33 He also began moving in an antiquarian direction with his Fitzwilliam Music, Purcell’s Sacred Music, and A Periodical Collection of Sacred Music.34 It was in this form then that embassy repertoire was exported throughout Britain, as George Gordon’s A Collection of Sacred Music illustrates. This was published in Edinburgh, so it is a notable exception to the London-­ centred music publishing business dominated by

31 Vincent Novello, A Collection of Sacred Music (London, 1811); T.  E.  Muir, Stonyhurst (Cirencester, 2008), pp. 85, 124. 32  Samuel Webbe, A Collection of Sacred Music as used in the chapel of the King of Sardinia (London, [1785?]); Samuel Webbe, A Collection of Anthems and Motetts of 1,2,3, and 4 voices or chorus calculated for the more Solemn parts of Divine Worship (London, 1792); Samuel Webbe, A Collection of Masses (London, 1792). 33  These though were not the first printed versions to reach or be produced in England. See, for example, Charles Latrobe (ed.), Selection of Sacred Music from the Works of the Most Eminent Composers (London, 1806); Mozart, ‘Mass No. 1’ and other early editions of Mozart Masses by Breitkopf and Haertel at Ushaw College, Durham (uncatalogued in the old Music Room). 34  Vincent Novello (ed.), Fitzwilliam Music, being a Collection of Sacred Pieces selected from the Manuscripts of Italian Composers in the Fitzwilliam Museum (London, 1825); Vincent Novello (ed.), Purcell’s Sacred Music (London, 1826); Vincent Novello (ed.), A Periodic Collection of Sacred Music selected from the Best Masters (London, n.d.). Victoria Cooper, The House of Novello: Practice and Policy of a Victorian Music Publisher (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 30–6, 54–5, 64–5, lists the spurious Masses, Novello’s sources, and the correlation between Novello’s numbering and the Hob. and Kȍchel catalogue identifications.

294  Thomas Muir Novello. Nonetheless, according to Gordon’s correspondence, it was widely circulated not just in Scotland but even in the more rural parts of Ireland. Its contents show it to be an updated version of what Novello had already been producing, albeit with Spanish inflections inherited from his training at the Scots College in Valladolid. Thus, alongside fifteen pieces by Haydn, eleven by Mozart, and nine by Beethoven, there is Adeste Fideles, Dumont’s Second Mass, thirty works by Webbe, and five by his son.35 Novello’s work contributed to significant changes in performance practice and compositional style. Webbe’s publications had used figured bass organ ac­com­pani­ments, and in this he followed Baroque practice. Novello had no such confidence, perhaps because he was aiming at provincial as well as London markets. He provided fully realized parts, even ‘upgrading’ Webbe’s settings in new editions. Moreover Novello often specified the organ registration, either explicitly or by providing a table showing the relationship between dynamics and recommended stops. Clearly these choices reflected the capabilities of the 1808 Portuguese embassy instrument at his disposal, since its three manuals encouraged terraced (rather than gradually changing) dynamics; but this is also a feature of Classical instrumentation. In these two ways then, Novello promoted the switch from Baroque to Classical styles.36 Such aspects were especially important with Haydn-­Mozart Masses. Normally British Catholic churches could not expect to have sizeable orchestras at their disposal. The trick then was to provide a fully realized organ reduction that could stand alone but to which extra instruments could be added. In effect, Novello converted music designed for large-­scale aristocratic, cathedral, or monastic establishments for use by proletarian, and sometimes Irish, Catholic chapels. Novello did not stop there. He not only edited music for publication but printed it himself. In 1830 he put this on a permanent basis with the establishment of a fully-­fledged printing and publishing business, headed by himself and his son Joseph Alfred Novello.37 Nonetheless, in the medium term, its significance must not be overrated. Back in the 1790s the big problem James Peter Coghlan (Webbe’s printer) had faced when producing plainchant was obtaining suitable musical type; and essentially what he got, while just about adequate for the simpler forms of plainchant, was too crude for the requirements of ‘modern’ notation.38 As a result, Novello relied on engraving. This produced excellent quality scores, but at a price; since print runs ran to hundreds, rather than the thousands of copies produced by moveable type. Yet the costs of creating the original plates were 35  Noden, ‘Songs of the Spirit from Dufftown’, pp. 42–51; Noden, ‘The Revival of Music in the Post-­ Reformation Church in Scotland’, p. 255; George Gordon, A Collection of Sacred Music calculated for the Use of Small Choirs, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1822–28). 36 Muir, Roman Catholic Church Music in England, p. 72. 37 Palmer, Vincent Novello, pp. 86–7. 38  Zon, ‘Plainchant in the Eighteenth-­Century Roman Catholic Church’, pp. 365–6.

Church Music  295 similar. The tendency then was to publish master full vocal scores from which single line manuscript copies could be made.39 Novello even offered printed equivalents for sale. This meant that singers still sang parts like instrumentalists, hurdling from note to note along their own line. Just as in plainchant they would have thought lineally, relying on their ears to register chordal connections with other parts. It was only in 1849 with the start of J. A. Novello’s ‘Cheap Musical Classics’ series that the situation was transformed. These used an improved moveable type developed by William Clownes and, as a result, the Novellos could now produce quality scores in quantity. Mass production catering for a wider market drove down prices in an ever-­expanding ‘virtuous cycle’ that increased sales still further. Moreover, because Vincent Novello had had the forethought to prepare piano, as well as organ, reductions of Haydn-­Mozart Masses he could break into the burgeoning Choral Society movement.40 In this way Novello and Co. became the largest music publishing company in the Victorian period and simultaneously facilitated the dissemination of Classical-­style Catholic church music into non-­ Catholic society.41

Your Disobedient Servant? Music and Meaning in the Liturgy Knowing what music was available, how frequently, and when and where it was performed is all important, but this does not reveal much about what it meant for worshippers. In ecclesiastical theory, music was supposed to be a ‘faithful servant of the liturgy’;42 but like all servants it could become uppity and end up distorting the messages it was supposed to convey. Hence the complaints that ‘modern’ music, especially the Classical-­Viennese style, had become too ‘operatic’ and that a return should be made to the church’s ‘ancient’ plainchant.43 Unfortunately many such pronouncements were made by people who, whatever their other qualifications, were not professional musicians. Pope Benedict XIV, for example, in his encyclical Annus Qui (1749) sheltered behind an array of ecclesiastical (not musical) authorities stretching back into the Middle Ages. Consequently, his list of orchestral instruments was somewhat anachronistic.44 All too often such 39  For example, see Thomas Muir: ‘Music for St Cuthbert “Patron Saint of the Faithful North”: The Musical Repertory of St Cuthbert’s Catholic Church, Durham, 1827–1910’, in Rachel Cowgill and Peter Holman (eds.), Music in the British Provinces, 1690–1914 (Aldershot, 2007), p. 272. 40  These are in the 1828–9 editions. For Novello’s thinking, see Cooper, The House of Novello, appendix 3, pp. 169–70. 41  Michael Hurd, Vincent Novello and Company (London, 1981), pp. 42, 50–4. 42  The phrase was used by Pope Pius X in his encyclical Tra Le Sollecitudini (1903), cited in Robert Hayburn (ed.), Papal Legislation on Sacred Music, 95 A.D. to 1977 A.D. (Collegeville, 1979), p. 230. 43 Anon., ‘Review of Novello, The Evening Service’, Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, 5 (1823), pp. 198–206. 44  Benedict XIV, Annus Qui (1749), cited in Hayburn (ed.), Papal Legislation on Sacred Music, pp. 98–104.

296  Thomas Muir concerns were really an expression of ruffled religious-­aesthetic sensibilities. This does not mean they were invalid, but to assess their force it is necessary to observe how the two genres actually worked. Eighteenth-­century plainchant was quite different from the Solesmes varieties used today. It was a living form to which new repertoire and techniques were being added and, at its heart, there lay a rhythmic tension between words and music. Potentially, this was as corrosive as anything alleged with ‘modern’ styles. The distortion starts with the way it was written down. The scribe first ruled out the stave, which could be in five as well as four lines; next, he wrote out the text, then marked off each word with bar-­lines; and finally, he inserted the notes (sometimes these last two stages were reversed). That is why, with Wade for example, we sometimes find crooked bar-­lines and difficulties squeezing notes into available spaces.45 Figure 15.1 provides a transcript of what you can get.

15.1 Example 1:  Opening line of Adeste Fideles from John Francis Wade, Cantus Diversi, 1760.

The effect of the barring is plain. Attention is focused on each word at the expense of the phrase. In doing so, it slows down the tempo. Judging by Novello’s recommendation in Convent Music (𝅗𝅥 = 66) plainchant of this sort moved at only half, or even a third, of the speed taken now. Furthermore, the bold square type promotes a heavy percussive execution, distorting understandings still further. Next we must see what the different symbols mean. The system is quite simple, and strictly proportionate; hence the denomination: measured chant.46 ▪ = the basic pulse. 𝇓 or ▪. = a double-length note. ◆

= a half-­length note.

Applied to the Stonyhurst version of Adeste Fideles, Figures 15.2 and 15.3 show what this produces.

45 Muir, Roman Catholic Church Music in England, p. 65. 46  For other varieties, see Zon, ‘Plainchant in the Eighteenth-­Century Roman Catholic Church in England (1737–1834)’, pp. 28–9.

Church Music  297

15.2 Example 2(a):  Original opening line of the Stonyhurst version of Adeste Fideles.

15.3 Example 2(b):  Modern ‘translation’ of the original opening line of the Stonyhurst version of Adeste Fideles.

Note that the Stonyhurst version uses triple time, but in both cases strictly proportionate note lengths impart a tighter, more stylized rhythm. This corresponds exactly to the metre, but in the St Edmund’s manuscript it is undermined by the positioning of bar-­lines after each word instead of allowing for up-­beats, as happens in the Stonyhurst example. Nonetheless the use of short and long note lengths denotes Classical metre of the sort known to Virgil rather than ‘ecclesiastical’ Latin. This was hardly surprising, given that measured chant had evolved during the Renaissance, from which derived the Latin taught in eighteenth-­century Catholic schoolrooms.47 Thus plainchant really could have been ‘sung as it was spoken’, but not in the sense understood by Solesmes. However if, in fact, ‘ecclesiastical’ Latin had been the norm then there would have been a rhythmic contradiction between what was sung and what was spoken, as Bennett Zon suggests.48 Measured chant is easy to ‘translate’ into ‘modern’ notation, because that too is proportionate. Moreover, scribes did not hesitate to add ‘modern’ symbols, such as slurs, sharps, quavers, dynamics, and time-­signatures. This explains the migration of some plainchant into ‘modern’ repertoire, as happened with Adeste Fideles. In addition, plainchant could be set in two or more parts, as Gallican musicians showed, and sometimes the different lines were set in plainchant and ‘modern’ notation.49 Indeed, if a figured bass accompaniment was added it was often difficult to distinguish between ‘modern’ music and plainchant, especially if the latter was harmonized diatonically on a note-­by-­note basis, as in an old-­fashioned hymn tune. It was therefore still possible to claim that plainchant and ‘modern’ music were compatible, as in the Renaissance period, even if ‘modern’ styles had significantly changed since then. Thus, in a sung service the body of the text was

47 Muir, Roman Catholic Church Music in England, pp. 62–5. 48  See the chapter by Bennett Zon in Volume IV of this series. 49  Zon, ‘Plainchant in the Eighteenth-­Century Roman Catholic Church’, pp. 28–34. For examples, see the set of four uncatalogued MSS part books from the community of the Sepulchrine Canonesses at New Hall, now housed in Durham University’s special collections.

298  Thomas Muir chanted on a monotone, while through-­composed pieces, whether in plainchant or ‘modern’ forms, punctuated the whole.50 A Mass setting, because its movements were planned as a coherent whole, therefore consolidated the framework of the service. The Kyrie would be balanced by the Agnus Dei, the Gloria by the Credo; and all four have a tripartite literary structure. This was all very well provided the music was short and straightforward, and simply delivered the text, as happens with Masses by Webbe and Novello. The trouble arose when larger more elaborate settings were envisaged. Consider Haydn’s Missa in Angustiis, or Nelson Mass. It adds forty minutes to the service and uses large vocal-­instrumental resources, including trumpets and timpani, defying regulations laid down in Annus Qui. In short, attention is drawn away from crucial parts of the service, such as the Absolution and Canon, which might be uttered while the Sanctus-­Benedictus was sung. If this happened then differences between chanted monotones and ‘modern’ extravaganzas might become too blatant to ignore. Descending to details, something similar is evident. A whole array of techniques enabled composers to ‘word paint’ with a vengeance, transforming prayers and matter-­of-­fact statements (such as the Creed) into emotional drama. For example in the Nelson Mass the sopranos rise to a top ‘g11’ at ‘et resurrexit’ and ‘ascendit in coelum’, from whence (at ‘judicare vivos’) it descends to a Middle ‘c1’ at ‘mortuus’.51 In particular many devices, such as repetition, dynamic changes (sometimes sudden), elaborate melismas, switches between solo and choral voices, and between elaborate counterpoint and homophonic statements underline particular words and phrases at the expense of others. In this way ‘tu Gloria dei Patris, Amen’ repetitions account for 64/252 bars in the Gloria of the Nelson Mass. Clearly extensions of this sort are driven by musical imperatives. Indeed, the preceding Kyrie is cast in Sonata Form. Thus what begins as an attempt to reinforce liturgical meanings can end up adding to and even distorting the original message. None of this was especially new. Complaints against it, even in plainchant, had been made for centuries, as Annus Qui makes plain. What was different was the larger, more diverse, and arguably more powerful toolkit that had become avail­ able. Yet Haydn was a devout Catholic, his early training was as a chorister in St Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna, and his last major works were Masses.52 It is no surprise then to find that in the Nelson Mass he displayed a firm grip on liturgical imperatives. For example he stuck to the tripartite structure of the Gloria and

50  Thomas Muir, ‘Sacred Music for a Sacred Space: Dogma, Worship and Solemn Mass during the Victorian Era’, in Martin Clarke (ed.), Music and Theology in Nineteenth-­Century Britain (Aldershot, 2012), pp. 40–50. 51  Nelson Mass, bars 139–57: Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (London, 1971), pp. 45, 63, 80. 52  For the strength of Mozart’s Catholic beliefs, see Alfred Einstein, Mozart: His Character—­His Work (1945; London, 1971), pp. 88–97.

Church Music  299 Credo which, as a statement of faith, begins in bare octaves. When he ‘bent the liturgical rules’, he knew exactly what he was doing. Like Shostakovich, he was quite capable of encoding music as well as words. His late Masses were therefore not just religious concerts in honour of his Esterhazy patrons; they were political-­ religious statements against the atheist French Revolutionary regime that Austria was fighting at the time. For British Catholics this signalled a radical change in thinking, but in Ireland the response was more ambivalent, as shall be seen later. To appreciate the change—­and distinction—­it is useful to return to Adeste Fideles. This began life as Jacobite propaganda which, if recognized, would fuel anti-­Catholic prejudice amongst Protestants. Therefore it had to be deniable. Moreover, everything was done through the text alone. In these two respects it was quite unlike Haydn. Here is how it works. In the first verse the ‘faithful’ (Catholics or loyal Jacobites) are summoned to worship at ‘Bethlehem’, which in Jacobite parlance meant the Stuart Court in exile. Verse two contains parts from the Creed, but they can be read as pro-­Stuart statements of the divine right of kings—‘God from God, Light from Light . . . Very God, begotten not created’. After that, in verse three, angels are urged to ‘sing in exultation’, recalling Gregory the Great’s pun ‘Non Angli sed Angeli’—not Angles (English) but Angels—­when planning the conversion of England. Now by itself all this is speculation. What matters then is the context. In some Wade manuscripts Adeste Fideles is preceded by a ‘Domine Salvum Fac’ setting in honour of James III. In The Evening Office of the Church (1773) the title page has a picture of Bonnie Prince Charlie surrounded by other Jacobite symbols, some of them coded.53 Furthermore, we know that in Ireland, at the Channel Row Dominican Priory, Dublin, it was sung with precisely such Jacobite connotations at the time of the 1745 Rebellion. Indeed it is possible that Wade paid a visit, bringing with him the volume, dated 1737, that may be the same as that which ended up at Clongowes Wood College—­now, alas, stolen.54 By the 1790s, however, such Jacobite encoding had been largely forgotten, one reason for this being the English Catholic Relief Act of 1778. This required all Catholics to pray for George III; and as a result several new ‘Domine Salvum Fac’ settings were composed and existing ones modified.55 Second, the French Revolution made the Catholic Church an ally of the British government. It was in this context that Haydn’s Nelson Mass acquired a political force transcending its liturgical import. The premiere at Eisenstadt coincided with news of the Battle of

53  Illustrated in Bennett Zon: ‘ “O Come All Ye Faithful”—Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Christmas Carol’, https://www.dur.ac.uk/news/newsitem/?itemno=7328 (accessed on 6 June 2021). 54 John Stephen, The Adeste Fideles: A Study on its Origin and Development (Buckfast, 1947), pp. 13–16. 55  See, for example, Vincent Novello (ed.), A Collection of Motets for the Offertory & Other Pieces Principally Adapted for the Morning Service (London, [1818?]). This has twelve settings, one by Wesley, another adapted from Mozart, and all the others by Novello himself.

300  Thomas Muir the Nile; and in 1800 Nelson himself paid a visit when again it may have been performed. Haydn’s original title—­Missa In Angustiis, or ‘Mass in hard times’—is underlined by the opening militaristic trumpet fanfares, while the ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’ at the end is presented in a triumphantly positive D major, in complete contrast to the grim D minor of the Kyrie. Of course, a positive end to the Agnus Dei is not unusual in Mass settings of this type; but here surely it signifies peace through victory, as opposed to the quiet peace achieved through God’s saving mercy conveyed by the bare text. Thus in this case Haydn, unlike Wade, uses musical expression, not literary encoding and iconography, to openly transform liturgical statements into political messages. At the time, if British Catholics sang them, they endorsed their government’s foreign and domestic security agenda. In Ireland, however, things would have been different. Here, as Marianne Elliott shows, opinion was ambivalent and fluid.56 The hierarchy, horrified by Revolutionary anti-­clerical excesses, was desperate to cooperate with the government, hoping for religious concessions in return. In this context it is interesting that later, in 1818, Novello dedicated his Mottets for the Offertory, which have twelve ‘Domine Salvum Fac’ settings, to the staunchly anti-­ Revolutionary Archbishop John Thomas Troy of Dublin. On the other hand, the United Irishmen, like the Jacobites, saw France as an ally; and many Irish clergy had been educated there. In 1798, the year of the Irish Rebellion, celebrations of a British victory might for them have seemed out of place.

‘Ancient’ and ‘Modern’: A Parting of the Ways Late Haydn Masses therefore proved to be, and remain, liturgically controversial, for once the Napoleonic wars ended the political imperatives that made sense of them were removed, leaving the musical-­liturgical tensions plain for all to see. Initially, however, the grand Classical-­Viennese style appeared to carry all before it. As noted earlier, Vincent Novello produced complete editions of Haydn and Mozart Masses. These included spurious settings, as well as works by Hummel, Beethoven, Weber, and other iconic figures. British composers also contributed, so clearly there was demand. As early as 1784 Samuel Wesley sent off to Rome his ninety-­minute Missa di Sancto Spiritu.57 Among others, Henry Nixon composed Masses, although these were not published till after his death in 1849.58 Hence the perception that plainchant was under attack. Yet here we are in danger of reading later attitudes into contemporary statements. The cry ‘Plainchant in 56  See Chapter 3 by Marianne Elliott in this volume. 57  Philip Olleson, ‘Samuel Wesley and the Missa di Sancto Spiritu’, Recusant History, 24 (1999), pp. 309–19. This was not performed until 1997, at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. 58  Copies of these, other works, and correspondence are held in archives of the Royal College of Music. For catalogue listings, see HYGeorge7 and HYGeorge10.

Church Music  301 danger’ was a classic polemical ploy, used to advance, not merely defend, the cause. This was the strategy used by Augustus Pugin in his Earnest Plea for the Revival of the Ancient Plainsong.59 However, the introduction to Webbe’s, An Essay on the Church Plain Chant offers a different emphasis: While we admit the sanctity of the institution, can we forbear regretting the great neglect in the cultivation of [plainchant]? . . . If we consider the great effect that is produced in divine service by a few untutored voices; how much greater must the effect be, if every individual in the congregation, capable of singing, should join in a well regulated choir, and all united by the harmony of a well-­ touched organ.60

Here plainchant was in danger because it had been poorly executed, rather than not sung at all. It was also a sales pitch by the author and part of a periodic process of renewal. Webbe’s Essay replaced the mid-­eighteenth-­century publications by Marmaduke and Meighan, as well as the manuscripts by Wade. Two decades later it would be upgraded by the provision of fully realized organ parts in Novello’s editions. The aggressive intent lay in the promotion of congregational plainchant, which was exactly what Preston attempted at Abergavenny. This was a recurring theme in plainchant polemics until Vatican II. As such, it pitted plainchant against polyphony. Congregations were enlisted as allies of the clergy (who were assumed to want plainchant) against choirs. As the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review stated in 1823: Another cause (of the disappearance of Plainchant) has . . . arisen from the employment of regular singers, instead of the clergy as formerly; the latter were content to sing the old chants in unison, but the former would naturally wish to display their abilities in part-­singing. But a still more effective cause has . . . been the gradual change of taste in the musical part of the congregations (induced originally by the employment of professional performers), and the consequent necessity on the part of the proprietors and conductors of various Catholic Chapels, to bring forward such compositions as would be most attractive and satisfactory to those who attended the service.61

Note too the beginnings of misrepresentation. The music targeted here was presumably the smaller-­scale semi-­Italian embassy chapel repertoire, but polemicists soon subsumed this within the easier target of the grand Viennese Mass. They ‘forgot’ that many earlier Haydn-­Mozart Masses were shorter and written for 59  London, 1850. 60 Webbe, An Essay on the Church Plain Chant, pp. [i]–ii. 61  Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, 5 (1823), pp. 198–206.

302  Thomas Muir quite slender resources,62 and they ignored the fact that performances of big Mass settings with orchestras were reserved for major festivals and other grand occasions, such as the dedication of a church. Take, for example, the journal of Peter Augustine Baines, covering the period 1817–19 when he worked at Bath, which reportedly had an excellent choir. During this time he mentioned only two occasions involving ‘a beautiful Hayden Mass, full band’. Other entries indicated more straightforward services, such as ‘Sung High Mass at 101/2’, the implication being that he chanted it himself with perhaps some relatively simple numbers sung by a choir at the Ordinary and Proper in either plainchant or modern style.63 In any case, at this time not too much should be read into the idea of conflict between genres. Compatibility and congruence were the dominant themes. Just as plainchant was being ‘modernised’, so the development of the Classical style involved combining some older Baroque approaches with the new-­fangled Galant style of the 1750s and 1760s. On his visits to England, Haydn heard grand per­ form­ances of Handel Oratorios which are thought to have influenced his oratorio The Creation and his late Masses. Mozart too knew the genre. In 1789 he even reorchestrated Messiah.64 More generally the late Classical style is unthinkable without a substantial injection of counterpoint, especially that used by J. S. Bach. In this technical respect Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven looked back in order to move forward, and this shows in their late Masses as well as in their other output.65 The same thing happened in Britain with Wesley and Novello, not so much in their compositions, but in what music they promoted. Both looked forward and backward. For example, Novello’s Twelve Easy Masses has four works by himself, settings by Joano Baldi, Giovanni Casali, Joachim de Natividad, and Webbe, along with five plainchant settings (one arranged by Wesley, another, from Louis XIV’s reign, by Henri Dumont). Wesley enthusiastically promoted Bach while Novello prepared Haydn-­Mozart Masses for publication alongside his Fitzwilliam Music and Purcell’s Sacred Music. In this he was assisted by Wesley. Later he produced an edition of Palestrina.66 Note that with Purcell and Bach they looked outside the Catholic canon, and in every instance Novello engaged in a process of self-­education through documentary research beyond the embassy chapel repertoire he had been brought up with. Fitzwilliam Music, of course, used manuscripts from the 62  See Einstein, Mozart, pp. 331–69, for a survey of Mozart’s Masses. 63  J. Anthony Williams, ‘Journal of Peter Augustine Baines OSB, 1817–19’, in J. Anthony Williams (ed.), Post-­Reformation Catholicism in Bath, vol. 1, CRS 65 (London, 1975), pp 200–39. See the entries for 25 December 1818 (Christmas), 20 March 1818 (Easter), and 19 October 1817, when he was staying in Liverpool, where a new chapel had just been opened. 64 Kȍchel 572. Recording in German by the Orf Choir and Orchestra, dir. Charles Mackerras. (Deutsche Gramaphonen, 1974; CD 427153–2). Two remastered CDs. Mozart first heard Messiah at Mannheim in 1777. 65 Rosen, The Classical Style, pp. 367–8 (Mozart and Haydn), 374 (Beethoven); Einstein, Mozart, pp. 362–3. 66 John Moore Capes (ed.) and Vincent Novello (rev.), Selection from the Works of Palestrina, ‘Prince of Music’ (London, n.d.).

Church Music  303 Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge; whilst for his Mozart-­Haydn editions he collected manuscripts from Christof Breitkopf and Charles Latrobe. In 1829 he even made a ‘pilgrimage’ to Salzburg.67 This eclectic approach was encouraged by the end of the Napoleonic wars, as it facilitated travel across Continental Europe. This was where the latest musical developments were taking place, so the pattern was to follow Continental leads. British Catholics were better placed than their compatriots to exploit this as members of a supranational organization which ensured that a mix of native and foreign elements did not seem incompatible, especially at a time when the rise of toleration meant less suspicion of foreign ‘Papist’-infected imports. The church music experience might also have influenced a particular attitude towards repertoire. For example, and with some justification, a contemporary would have regarded Haydn as primarily a composer of great Masses, not as someone who developed the string quartet and symphony. Indeed, by and large, this was the last period before the 1970s when the Catholic Church stood at the forefront of mu­sic­al innovation. Three sets of reasons explain why this ceased to be so. First, musically speaking, it is hard to see how the Grand Viennese Mass could have been developed much further. As we have seen, even under Haydn it had almost outgrown the Mass. The even larger works by Beethoven in general proved impractical. The main musical developments were in opera, orchestral, and Chamber music, all of them secular forms. Even the oratorio, under the aegis of the Choral Society movement, became a concert recital event, albeit with religious trimmings. Second, the change reflected revulsion at the anti-­clerical aspects of Enlightenment thinking and the secular utilitarian imperatives of the Industrial Revolution, the latter summed up by Pugin’s Contrasts.68 One response was to take refuge in a medieval past. Musically speaking that meant plainchant. It therefore followed that plainchant had to be purged of its more modern tendencies, starting with accidentals.69 Third, Catholic emancipation offered a choice between two musical strategies. One involved taking advantage of competition on a level playing field with other denominations by adopting modern user-­friendly approaches, such as experimenting with vernacular liturgies, keeping to a classical architecture in tune with the prevailing townscape, and in music showcasing the latest styles. Thus, in Scotland, Gordon incorporated twenty-­three vernacular hymn settings in his Collection of Sacred Music; and, like Novello, he did not hesitate to adapt secular 67 Palmer, Vincent Novello, pp. 84–6, 139–41, 143–4, 147–50, 158–66; Cooper, The House of Novello, pp. 29–68; Michael Kassler (ed.), The English Bach Awakening: Knowledge of J. S. Bach and his Music in England, 1750–1830 (Aldershot, 2004), especially the essays by Philip Olleson, Michael Kassler, and Yo Tomita. 68  Augustus Pugin, Contrasts: Or, A Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages and Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day; Shewing the Present Decay of Taste (London, 1836; revised edn 1841). 69 Zon, The English Plainchant Revival, pp. 217–19.

304  Thomas Muir music for religious purposes.70 The alterative strategy was to protect Catholics from the Protestant and secular temptations of the modern world. This meant emphasizing the points of difference: liturgy in Latin, neo-­Gothic churches which would contrast with the prevailing architectural environment, and plainchant in opposition to ‘modern’ styles. Above all, this approach would emphasize the ‘Roman’ character of the Catholic Church: using the Roman Missal (1570), and adopting the ‘Roman’ measured plainchant found in Francisco Soriano and Felice Anerio’s Medician Gradual of 1614–15, a plainchant purged of Gallican excrescences and associated with Palestrina. In addition Renaissance polyphony would be substituted for more modern styles, helped by its compatibility with measured plainchant notation. There was an added bonus. A Roman emphasis underlined ultramontane papal authority, thereby helping clerics to assert their authority over the laity, especially the Catholic aristocracy. Defensive thinking of this sort was present before 1829, if only in embryonic form. In Britain it became significant due to the challenge posed by Irish immigration. Prior to 1840 this was already substantial, thanks to the demands of the Industrial Revolution; but after the Famine it became a flood, and similar considerations also applied to the predominantly Catholic population left in Ireland. Faced with the prospect of ‘leakage’ from the faith, the response had to be defensive. Limited clerical and material resources had to be used in a disciplined cler­ic­al­ly directed way to protect the Irish—­and other Catholics—­from a secular world. Musically speaking that was what campaigns to promote plainchant and Renaissance polyphony came to be about, hence the equation of ‘modern’ music with the theatre. Their ideological basis is betrayed by the fact that their polemic was not musical, in a strictly technical sense. As Zon shows, the polemic was dressed up in liturgical-­theological language. Music was used as a metaphor for doctrinal truth.71

Select Bibliography Cooper, Victoria, The House of Novello: Practice and Policy of a Victorian Music Publisher, 1829–1866 (Aldershot, 2003). Muir, Thomas, Roman Catholic Church Music in England, 1791–1914: A Handmaid of the Liturgy? (Aldershot, 2008). Noden, Shelagh, ‘The Revival of Music in the Post-Reformation Catholic Church in Scotland’, Recusant History, 31 (2012), pp. 246–60. Olleson, Phillip, ‘The London Embassy Chapels and their Music in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, in David Wyn Jones (ed.), Music in Eighteenth Century Britain (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 101–18. 70  Noden, ‘Songs of the Spirit from Dufftown’, pp. 61–3. 71  See the chapter by Zon in Volume IV.

Church Music  305 Palmer, Fiona, Vincent Novello (1781–1861): Music for the Masses (Aldershot, 2006). Zon, Bennett, The English Plainchant Revival (London, 1999). Zon, Bennett, ‘The Revival of Plainchant in the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1777–1858: Some Sources and their Commerce with England’, in Patrick Devine and Harry White (eds.), The Maynooth International Musicological Conference 1995, Selected Proceedings, part 2, Irish Musical Studies 5 (Dublin, 1996), pp. 251–61.

Discography Haydn, Joseph, Missa in Angustiis. English Concert Choir and Orchestra, dir. Pinnock, Trevor (Deutsche Gramophon, 1990, CD 423097). Plainchant: Cathédrale D’Auxerre XVIIIe Siécle. Ensemble Organum, dir. Peres, Marcel (Harmonia Mundi, 1990, CD 901319).

16 Feeble References Catholic Material Culture Carol M. Richardson

It is impossible to write a satisfactory overview of ‘British and Irish Catholic culture’ from Culloden to Catholic emancipation because England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales each deserve their own studies. So rich is this story, it would have to extend to migrants on the Continent and further afield.1 Unsurprisingly, England has long overshadowed the other nations although ongoing scholarship continues to broaden the field. Emphasis remains more on cultural identity expressed by means of text rather than art and objects, however.2 Rather than attempting to correct established narratives in so short a chapter, I revisit ­relatively well-­known case studies in order to challenge Anglo-­imperial and antiquarian assumptions. To achieve this, here I will draw particular attention to that which I would argue is one of the most distinctive features of Catholic culture per se, namely the con­tinu­ity of tradition, memory, and identity embodied in art, architecture, and artefacts. In the context of eighteenth-­century antiquarianism and the upheavals caused by the French Revolution, the material of Catholic culture takes on explicit significance. In Charles Dickens’ 1841 novel, Barnaby Rudge, the character of Geoffrey Haredale personified a long-­suffering Catholic gentry, reconciled to social and political inconspicuousness.3 In the midst of the Gordon Riots, the secretary of state reassures Haredale that, ‘the sympathies of the King, the Administration, and both Houses of Parliament, and indeed of all good men of every religious persuasion, were strongly with the injured Catholics’. Haredale is, ‘grateful for this consolation, feeble as it was in its reference to the past’, but collapses soon after, broken by a context which leaves him disenfranchised, marginalized, and powerless.4 The Gordon Riots, Dickens implied, could hardly make up for the 200 years 1  See, for example, Liam Chambers and Thomas O’Connor (eds.), Forming Catholic Communities: Irish, Scots and English College Networks in Europe, 1568–1918 (Leiden, 2017); James E. Kelly, English Convents in Catholic Europe, c.1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020), pp. 78–98. 2  Here I contrast with Dom Aidan Bellenger in Downside Abbey: An Architectural History (London, 2011), p. 14: ‘Recusant memory expressed itself verbally rather than visually’. 3 Iain McCalman, ‘Controlling the Riots: Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, and Romantic Revolution’, History 84 (1999), pp. 458–76. 4  Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (London, 1841), ch. 66. Carol M. Richardson, Feeble References: Catholic Material Culture In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829. Edited by: Liam Chambers, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843443.003.0017

Catholic Material Culture  307 of anti-­ Catholicism. ‘Feeble’ was an understatement when applied to the unbridgeable void between sixteenth-­century persecution and early-­nineteenth-­ century reconciliation. ‘Reference to the past’ underscored the difference between Catholic culture and the Protestantism that had replaced it in pockets of northern Europe. In the Catholic context, material culture represented the cumulative and collective experience of religious identity. While relics of confessors and martyrs offered points of direct contact with past witnesses, more mundane objects such as books, fabrics, statues, and paintings embodied the continuity of practice they were made to frame or support. In contrast, Lutherans—­and Protestants more generally—­asserted the primacy of sacred text over any other kind of evidence to claim continuity back to Christ’s apostles. Catholics, however, continued to hold on to the things that gave material form to their faith and, as a direct result, considerable care was taken to document and indeed authenticate such fragments.5 In the centuries between the dissolution of the monasteries in England and Wales in the 1530s and 1540s, and the French Revolution in the 1790s, Catholic culture endured on the Continent in colleges, convents, monasteries, and friaries where communities treasured the remains taken into exile in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they both represented what had been lost, and served as potential seeds of Catholicism’s longed-­for regrowth. But the Revolutionaries resented those who fled their houses taking with them, ‘not only the furniture and other objects reserved for the [French] Republic . . . but in their criminal audacity they go to the lengths of snatching countless objects which actually belong to the [church] fabric, like altars, pulpits, balustrades, stalls, columns, panelling’.6 There were sharply divided values at play here: on the one hand, the ousted communities endeavoured to save what they could of their treasured pasts while, on the other, Revolutionary forces viewed religious material culture as just recompense for centuries of oppression. The plight of the English Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre at Liège is a case in point. Liège was sucked into the French Revolution in the summer of 1789 and the canonesses—­a sizeable community of seventy-­five, thirty-­two professed nuns among them—­were finally forced to leave the city in April 1794.7 Their pre­par­ ations included ordering hundreds of small wooden chests from a local carpenter to hold books, archival materials, and other precious objects. Some valuables were forwarded to a rented house in Maastricht but larger objects had to be left behind, including ‘our organ, great clock, a considerable quantity of furniture, the

5  Simon Ditchfield, ‘Martyrs on the Move: Relics as Vindication of Local Diversity in the Tridentine Church’, in Diana Wood (ed.), Martyrs and Martyrologies, SCH 30 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 283–94. 6  Report from the Dyle region, Belgium, 1796, Kim Woods (trans.), Imported Images: Netherlandish Late Gothic Sculpture in England, c.1400–c.1550 (Donnington, 2007), p. 144. 7  Hannah Thomas, The Secret Cemetery: A Guide to the Burial Ground of the English Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre (Leominster, 2017).

308 Carol M. Richardson choir hangings etc’.8 The anonymous writer of the community’s diary provided a nun’s-­eye view of the significance of material culture as many of these women had not seen the outside of their community buildings for some years: We were most concerned at not being able to take our large Tabernacle and great Altar Stone, but there was no possibility of moving the latter as it was half as large as the altar. We took the little one belonging to the Chapel, and one we had for a portable Altar, which we had got for the use of the Infirmary.

Travelling first to Maastricht, by June the community was forced on to Rotterdam by barge. There, awaiting safe passage to London, they received an invitation from Lord Stourton who offered them his house at Holme, near Market Weighton in the East Riding of Yorkshire, as temporary lodgings. When they arrived at Holme, they especially liked the chapel, ‘larger than they commonly are in England and . . . the first chapel on the ground floor that was built in Yorkshire’ but the house was also damp and cold and the ‘chapel ornaments quite mouldy’.9 By 1800 the sisters were installed at New Hall in Essex, the former Tudor palace of Beaulieu near Chelmsford, ironically built by Henry VIII, whose royal arms dec­ or­ate the chapel, and home to Mary Tudor. New Hall was in a good state of repair, and the chapel soon reconsecrated with the relics of Saints Teresa, Francis Xavier, and others. The great clock originally left behind in Liège, as well as two bells, did eventually end up installed at their new home.10 This brief account of the English Sepulchrines’ upheaval questions traditional scholarly emphasis on large-­scale architectural projects, predominantly in the nascent Gothic revival style, at the expense of the more intimate gaze of the ‘nuns’-eye view’. As a result, mainstays of Catholic culture long hidden—­often mundane objects that were portable and of little overt value, such as bells and furniture—­signify the unbroken continuity of experience just as much as, if not more so, than larger or higher value objects. When Catholics collected, it was as much a tenet of faith as an intellectual activity and landed Catholic patrons at home and abroad were ideally positioned to embrace the characteristically long view. The collection of classical statues gathered in London by Charles Townley is a case in point, singled out in their depiction by Johann Zoffany and subsequent incorporation into the British Museum. Although generally discussed as Grand Tour antiquarianism, I will argue here that the Townley marbles are also representative of a family who preserved and nurtured Catholic culture. 8 Richard Trappes-­Lomax (ed.), ‘Records of the English Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre at Liège, now at New Hall, Essex, 1652–1793’, Miscellanea X, CRS 17 (London, 1915), p. 116. 9  Trappes-­Lomax (ed.), ‘Records of the English Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre’, p. 134. 10  ‘Our Archives’, https://canonesses.co.uk/who-­we-­are/archives/#1571913220280-­be70ec32-­e888 (accessed 29 March 2021).

Catholic Material Culture  309 The scholarly impetus to isolate and emphasize novelty over continuity distorts and disguises evidence of Catholic culture which should be reframed as per­sist­ ence rather than absence. Catholic chapels in England built in the context of relief  and emancipation, for example, are usually singled out in terms of their uniqueness, weakening the deep roots of endurance, experience, and memory, as I shall argue below. The scattered remnants of English Catholicism incorporated into the outward signs of religious expression in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are often difficult to see but they are there, familiar to local communities and parishes as validations and vindications of their patient religious exile in their own country and on the Continent: it is these references to the past that this essay will highlight, shoring up the foundations of the Catholic art and culture that continued to flower, albeit more overtly, in the designs and buildings of the Pugins just a few decades later.

Royal Reconciliation There was no sudden reintegration of Catholic with Protestant cultures in the late eighteenth century. Instead, there were occasional—­though measured—­signs of tolerance that nevertheless affirmed the control of the establishment over those long excluded from it. Contact between British and Irish Protestants and the Catholic heartland was sustained by the popularity of the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century. Conversely, British empiricism added momentum to scientific investigation in Rome.11 The Jesuit, John Thorpe, who was English-­language confessor at St Peter’s from 1765 until his death in 1792, observed and facilitated the procuring of artworks for both English Catholic and English Protestant collectors.12 Such accommodation was brought to an abrupt end by the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. When, in 1794, the community of English Franciscan nuns, who had been settled at Our Lady of Dolours in Bruges since 1663, was forced to seek shelter in England, they were grateful to be able to bring some of their community’s belongings with them. They singled out the king, his most Gracious Majesty George the 3rd [who] had secretly but efficaciously tolerated, and even promoted the entrance of the English religious into these Kingdoms, and had given private orders to the Customs houses, to let the church

11 Christopher  M.  S.  Johns, Papal Art and Cultural Politics: Rome in the Age of Clement XI (Cambridge, 1993), p. 196. 12  James E. Kelly, ‘Jesuit News Networks and Catholic Identity: The Letters of John Thorpe to the English Carmelite Nuns at Lierre, 1769–89’, in James  E.  Kelly and Hannah Thomas (eds.), Jesuit Intellectual and Physical Exchange between England and Mainland Europe, c.1580–1789: The World Is Our House? (Leiden, 2018), p. 338.

310 Carol M. Richardson stuff, breviaries etc etc pass free which according to the laws of the realm could not be brought into this country.13

At a higher social level, Dickens’s ‘sympathies of the King’ hinted at the genteel (if gloating) rapprochement signalled between the Stuarts and the Hanoverians when, for example, King George III gave the impoverished cardinal and duke of York, Henry Stuart, grandson of the deposed James II and VII, an annual pension of £4,000. A leader in The Times for 28 February 1800 drew attention to the King’s benevolence, bestowed on the ‘placid, humane, and temperate, [cardinal who] sought consolation for the misfortunes of his predecessors, in a scrupulous observance of the duties of his religion’. Fallen on hard times at the age of 75, ‘it was reserved for Great Britain to sooth [sic] the malevolence of his fortunes’.14 George III’s sixth son, Augustus, duke of Sussex, had been a regular visitor to the cardinal’s villa at La Rocca to the south of Rome, and was instrumental in supporting his royal relation in his plight.15 Several Stuart items, including a portrait of James Francis Edward Stuart, James II’s son, by Francesco Trevisani, came into the Royal Collection via Sir John Hippsley, a diplomat and mutual friend to the cardinal and the prince of Wales, the future George IV.16 In 1816, almost a decade after the cardinal died in 1807, George IV contributed £200 to bring to completion the Stuart monument commemorating James Francis and his two sons, Charles Edward and Henry Benedict, in St Peter’s basilica in Rome.17 The donation was prompted by the visit of the sculptor, Antonio Canova, to London in 1815 in the retinue of a close associate of Cardinal Henry, Cardinal Ercole Consalvi. Canova nevertheless described the contribution as a rather perfunctory gift and the austere monument, eventually unveiled in 1819, is rather too small for its location, overshadowed by that of the Polish princess, Maria Clementina Augusta Sobieska, wife of James Francis and mother to Charles and Henry.18 As ever, outward appearances are only part of the story. It can hardly have been an accident that the Stuart monuments sit over the site of the shrine of St Andrew, Peter’s brother and Scotland’s patron saint, which stood in the Constantinian

13  Richard Trappes-­Lomax (ed.), The English Franciscan Nuns, 1619–1821 and the Friars Minor of the Same Province, 1618–1781, CRS 24 (Exeter, 1922), pp. 98–9. 14  The Times, 28 February 1800. 15  Kathryn Barron, ‘ “For Stuart Blood Is in My Veins” (Queen Victoria): The British Monarchy’s Collection of Imagery and Objects Associated with the Exiled Stuarts from the Reign of George III to the Present Day’, in Edward Corp (ed.), The Stuart Court in Rome: The Legacy of Exile (Aldershot, 2003), p. 149. 16  H. Stewart, ‘The Will of Henry, Cardinal Duke of York’, The Stewarts, 10 (1955), p. 26; Edward Corp, The King Over the Water (Edinburgh, 2001), pp. 58–9. 17 Antonio Canova to Count Leopoldo Cicognara, 7 December 1816, in Antonio Canova, Epistolario, 1816–1817, 2 vols. (Rome, 2002), I, p. 553. 18 Herbert M. Vaughan, The Last of the Royal Stuarts, Henry Stuart, Cardinal York (London, 1906), p. 267; Barron, ‘ “Stuart Blood” ’, p. 155.

Catholic Material Culture  311 basilica, a connection of which Cardinal Henry as archpriest of St Peter’s for more than fifty years would have been all too well aware. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, British Catholics had continued to express themselves openly on the Continent and it was in this context that Catholic culture was largely known to Protestants at home in a romanticized form, albeit as more theatre than religion. Grand Tourists reported the novel intensity of the Catholic Mass, and were ‘extremely affected with awe, if not with devotion’.19 Late eighteenth-­century Catholic sites in London, such as Warwick Street chapel and the Portuguese embassy chapel, were frequented by curious non-­Catholic audiences (as opposed to congregations).20 In March 1793, for example, the Gentleman’s Magazine reported on multidenominational crowds attending High Mass for French refugees at the Spanish embassy chapel in London, noting that ‘the whole religious ceremony was grand, impressive, and affecting’.21 Later the same year, the requiem held for Louis XVI by the French priests of the King’s House in Winchester was attended by the great and the good.22 Even beyond urban centres, when the English Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre at Liège were temporarily housed at Holme in Yorkshire in the mid-­1790s, at first the locals thought they were ‘Frenchmen dressed in women’s clothes’ and ‘threatened to light the beacon to raise the alarm of invasion across the country’ but soon enough they were visiting the canonesses’ chapel, ‘out of curiosity and to hear the singing’.23 Among the Protestant artistic elite, there was reluctant acknowledgement that Catholic cultural soil was more fertile. Artists and patrons went to Rome to see ‘the greatest works of art the world has ever produced’, as Sir Joshua Reynolds wrote to his patron Lord Edgcumbe, in 1750.24 But back home Hogarth bemoaned the lack of opportunities in Britain for artists to paint histories because, ‘our religion forbids nay doth not require Images for worship or pictures to work up enthusiasm’.25 Edward Gibbon similarly mused that ‘the Catholic superstition, which is always the enemy of reason, is often the parent of taste’ as opposed to ‘the cold frugality of the Protestants’.26 At the same time, Hogarth condemned the popularity of foreign paintings because ‘shiploads of dead Christs, Holy Families 19  Joseph Warton cited in Maria Purves, The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange, and the Popular Novel, 1785–1829 (Cardiff, 2009), p. 57. 20  Aidan Bellenger, ‘The English Catholics and the French Exiled Clergy’, Recusant History, 15 (1981), pp. 444–5; Purves, Gothic and Catholicism, p. 84, n. 12. 21  Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1793, p. 252. 22  Gentleman’s Magazine, October 1793, p. 931; Purves, Gothic and Catholicism, p. 39. 23  Trappes-­Lomax (ed.), ‘Records of the English Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre’, p. 135. 24 John Ingamells and John Edgcumbe (eds.), The Letters of Sir Joshua Reynolds (New Haven, 2000), p. 9; Clare Haynes, Pictures and Popery: Art and Religion in England, 1660–1760 (Aldershot, 2006), p. 7. 25  Michael Kitson (ed.), Hogarth’s ‘Apology for Painters’, Walpole Society, 41 (Oxford, 1968), p. 89; Haynes, Pictures and Popery, p. 5. 26  Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. B. Radice (Harmondsworth, 1990), pp. 134–5; Haynes, Pictures and Popery, p. 5.

312 Carol M. Richardson

Figure 16.1.  William Hogarth, The Battle of the Pictures, 1745, etching and engraving, 208 × 212 mm, Bridgeman Images.

and Madonnas and other dismal dark subjects, neither entertaining or ornamental’ flooded the market.27 With characteristic wit, Hogarth imagined foreign pictures attacking his own paintings in his Battle of the Pictures which he made to advertise the sale of his works in 1745 (Figure 16.1).28 In the engraving, on the left, the art market is represented by a cracked tower, its door reached by a steep flight of stairs and guarded by a pikeman. Below, paintings of classical and Catholic subjects—­nymphs and satyrs, Europa and the Bull, praying Magdalenes and St Francis before the cross—­line up in regiments of copies, some of them flying across to stab Hogarth’s paintings, still fresh in his studio on the right, their uniqueness emphasized by the presence of the palette and brush on the ground. 27  Hogarth, writing as ‘Britophil’, St James Evening Post, 7–9 June, 1737, republished in London Magazine, July 1737, pp. 385–6; Haynes, Pictures and Popery, p. 6. 28 Jenny Uglow, Hogarth: A Life and a World (London, 1997), p. 323; Haynes, Pictures and Popery, p. 6.

Catholic Material Culture  313

Antiquarianism Perhaps ironically, much of the classical antiquity that attracted the passions of Grand Tourists was framed by and preserved as a result of its Roman and Catholic context: ‘a backward gaze’ to the classical and Paleo Christian precedents for papal deference.29 In a Catholic context, the popes epitomized the fulfilment of Latin culture and since the sixteenth century material artefacts had been purposely documented as aspects of Christian archaeology which existed to confirm the Church’s longevity. The collection of antiquities amassed by Charles Townley, immortalized through Johann Zoffany’s portrait, is a case in point. Displayed at the Royal Academy in 1790 as A Nobleman and his Collection, Zoffany depicted Charles Townley surrounded by highlights from his collection arranged in the library of his London house, 7 Park Street.30 The painting has come to stand for the culture of antiquity in late eighteenth-­century England, so much so that Viccy Coltman describes it as, ‘pictorial shorthand for the art-­historical classification known as neoclassicism’.31 Likewise, James Moore discusses Townley as ‘perhaps the most important collector of Greco-­Roman antiquities in Britain, combining a zeal for collecting with a genuine scholarly interest in the ancient world’.32 Despite the scholarly attention Zoffany’s painting has received, I would argue that its sitter’s religious identity is an integral but overlooked aspect of the work. Charles Townley was a collector and skilled linguist as a direct result of his Catholicism.33 He studied at the English College in Douai, the first of the early modern Continental colleges, leaving there in his late teens for Paris where he was privately tutored. Charles was one of the long line of Towneleys, who were rooted in the history and landscape of Lancashire going back to the thirteenth century and prominent recusants from the sixteenth when they were singled out as ‘obstinate’ Catholics. They became synonymous with stubborn resistance, enacting the family motto, ‘Tenez le Vray’ (‘Hold the Truth’), and were regularly fined for refusing to attend conformist services.34 Although Charles’s great-­great-­ grandfather, Richard Towneley, was a renowned mathematician and natural phil­ oso­pher who corresponded with Continental leaders in the fields of scientific enquiry, his Catholicism excluded him from establishment assemblies such as the 29 Johns, Papal Art, pp. 40–4, 197. 30 Mary Webster, ‘Zoffany’s Painting of Charles Townley’s Library in Park Street’, Burlington Magazine, 106 (1964), pp. 316–23. 31 Viccy Coltman, ‘Representation, Replication and Collecting in Charles Townley’s Late Eighteenth-­Century Library’, Art History, 29 (2006), p. 304. 32  James Moore, ‘History as Theoretical Reconstruction? Baron D’Hancarville and the Exploration of Ancient Mythology in the Eighteenth Century’, in James Moore, Ian Morris, and Andrew J. Bayliss (eds.), Reinventing History: The Enlightenment Origins of Ancient History (London, 2008), p. 153. 33 Charles Townley adopted an older form of surname, while the family retains the spelling ‘Towneley’. 34 Barbara  D.  Palmer, ‘Recycling “The Wakefield Cycle”: The Records’, RORD (Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama), 41 (2002), p. 104.

314 Carol M. Richardson Royal Society.35 Richard’s grandsons supported the 1745 Rising but, while John escaped to France, Francis was captured at Carlisle and executed for treason in London in 1746 when Charles was 9 years old, and ‘Uncle Frank’s’ pitch-­preserved head was hidden in a cupboard in the chapel at Towneley Hall.36 It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Charles preferred speaking in French or Italian, and was much more at home in Italy than in Britain: he lived in Italy in 1767–8, and then returned in 1771–4 and in 1777.37 Holding his collection—­including more than 60,000 books—­in his London property, as opposed to the Towneley seat in Lancashire, Charles promoted himself to fashionable society.38 It was an effective strategy and he enjoyed opportunities unattainable to Richard Towneley a century earlier: he facilitated Sir Joshua Reynolds’s acquisition of Bernini’s Neptune and Triton from Rome in 1786, joined the Society of Antiquaries the same year, then, in 1789, entered the Society of Dilettanti, an offshoot of wealthy Antiquaries who had undertaken the Grand Tour.39 In 1791 Charles became trustee of the British Museum and his marbles were added to its collection on his death in 1805, bought for £20,000, his gems and coins for £8,200.40 Charles Townley’s collecting was wide-­ ranging but Zoffany’s painting, A Nobleman and his Collection, begun in the early 1780s, has brought particular attention to the antique aspects of his acquisitiveness (Figure 16.2). Although the painting has come to represent his social and cultural currency, it was not given to Townley until the end of the century when he stood as executor and guarantor for Zoffany’s estate.41 It represented an imagined gathering of some of the best works from Townley’s collection, assembled in the library of his recently completed archetypal neo-­Classicist London house. But Charles avoided the ubiquitous Adam brothers, preferring to work with architects trusted in the Catholic community.42 Instead, Townley’s interiors were inspired by Piranesi and the Vatican Pio-­Clementino sculpture galleries devised to affirm the papacy as the keystone of Western culture.43 35  Leslie Chapples, Noblesse Oblige: A Towneley Chronicle of Historical Fact, Marriage Links and Notable Family Associations (Burnley, 2016), p. 80; Leo Gooch, ‘ “The Religion for a Gentleman”: The Northern Catholic Gentry in the Eighteenth Century’, Recusant History, 23 (1997), p. 551; Alan Cook, ‘Rome and the Royal Society, 1660–1740’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 58 (2004), pp. 3–19. 36 Chapples, Noblesse Oblige, p. 22. 37  Thomas Dunham Whitaker, History of the Original Parish of Whalley and Honour of Clitheroe, in the Counties of Lancaster and York (Blackburn, 1801), p. 23. 38  Viccy Coltman, Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain since 1760 (Oxford, 2009), p. 61. 39 William Collier, ‘New Light on Bernini’s Neptune and Triton’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 31 (1968), pp. 438–40; Coltman, Classical Sculpture, pp. 105–7. 40  Webster, ‘Zoffany’s Painting’, pp. 316–23. 41  Coltman, ‘Representation, Replication and Collecting’, p. 306. 42 W.  John and Kit Smith, An Architectural History of Towneley Hall, Burnley (Burnley, 2004), pp. 71–2. 43  Gerard Vaughan, ‘The Townley Zoffany: Reflections of Charles Townley and his Friends’, Apollo, 417 (1996), p. 34; Jeffrey Collins, ‘The Gods’ Abode: Pius VI and the Invention of the Vatican Museums’, in Clare Hornsby (ed.), The Impact of Italy: The Grand Tour and Beyond (London, 2000), pp. 173–94.

Catholic Material Culture  315

Figure 16.2.  Johann Zoffany, A Nobleman and his Collection (Charles Townley in his Sculpture Gallery), 1782–98, oil on canvas, 127 × 102 cm © Towneley Hall Art Gallery and Museum/Bridgeman Images.

Rather than the ‘flock of travelling boys’ included in Zoffany’s contemporary Tribuna of the Uffizi (Royal Collection), Charles Townley is depicted with a more select group: Thomas Astle, palaeographer and collector, the politician and connoisseur Charles Greville, with Kam, Townley’s dog, at his feet.44 Kam was more 44  Quotation from Horace Walpole, 12 November 1779, in W. S. Lewis and others (eds.), Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 48 vols. (New Haven, 1937–83), XXIV, pp. 526–9; Penelope Treadwell, John Zoffany, Artist and Adventurer (London, 2009), p. 298.

316 Carol M. Richardson than a pet: the dog was brought to England in 1779 from Kamschatka in Siberia where he had been one of the sledge team responsible for carrying royal dispatches to the Russian commander. He represented his master’s loyalty to the Empire—­but also his religious faith.45 Dominating the centre of the painting, Townley faces antiquarian and traveller Pierre-­François Hugues, who styled himself Baron d’Hancarville, surrounded by the evidence of their historical method. D’Hancarville had already established himself in a similarly central role in the household of Sir William Hamilton between 1767 and 1776, cataloguing Hamilton’s vase collection.46 Townley adopted d’Hancarville as his in-­house ci­cer­ one (the two met in Naples in 1778), and he wrote the majority of his study of Greek art, published in 1785, in the Park Street house.47 Zoffany and D’Hancarville had coincided in Florence in the late 1770s when the artist was in the city painting the Tribuna of the Uffizi.48 Born in Germany and trained in Rome, Zoffany, like Townley, was a Catholic.49 The title Zoffany gave the painting is ironic. Although lynchpins of the local economy, Townley’s family had remained untitled gentry, not noblemen, as a result of their religion. Zoffany himself was an Imperial baron, a title that spoke too loudly of Catholic allegiances and was snubbed by George III.50 D’Hancarville’s roguish reputation continues to distract from the more serious consideration of his scholarship whereas his Catholic-­establishment credentials as librarian to Cardinal Alessandro Albani would have counted for much in the Towneley household.51 Accelerated by the Albani papacy of Clement XI, the family fostered research and expeditions to the eastern and southern edges of the Mediterranean—­from Greece and the Balkans to North Africa—­to expand the cultural boundaries of the Vatican Library and thereby consolidate precedents for Latin, Roman and therefore papal, supremacy.52 D’Hancarville was recommended to the Albani household by none less than Johann Winckelmann, Vatican prefect of antiquities between 1763 and 1768. Although Winckelmann’s ‘cyclical narrative of birth, rise, blossom and decay’ is better studied, D’Hancarville’s insistence on the endurance and unity of history is arguably better attuned to a religious culture defined by the unbroken continuity of the apostolic succession.53 45  Vaughan, ‘Townley Zoffany’, p. 35, n. 6. 46  Viccy Coltman, ‘Sir William Hamilton’s Vase Publications (1766-­1776): A Case Study in the Reproduction and Dissemination of Antiquity’, Journal of Design History, 14 (2001), pp. 1–16. 47  Pierre d’Hancarville, Recherches sur l’origine, l’esprit et les progrès des arts de la Grèce, 2 vols. (London, 1785). 48  Vaughan, ‘Townley Zoffany’, p. 32. 49  Webster, ‘Zoffany’s Painting’, pp. 316–17; William L. Pressly, ‘Genius Unveiled: The Self-­Portraits of Johan Zoffany’, Art Bulletin, 69 (1987), pp. 92–3. 50  Vaughan, ‘Townley Zoffany’, pp. 32–5; Treadwell, John Zoffany, p. 300. 51  Moore, ‘Theoretical Reconstruction?’, p. 148. 52 Johns, Papal Art, pp. 44–45. 53 Hans Christian Hönes, ‘Paper Monuments for Antiquaries (Caylus, Winckelmann, D’Hancarville): Metahistorical Interventions’, in Ingeborg Schemper-­Sparholz, Martin Engel, Andrea

Catholic Material Culture  317 D’Hancarville’s research under Townley’s auspices is of a very different order compared with the consumer focus and commercial application of the earlier Hamilton vase publications that established his reputation.54 In addition to documenting Hamilton’s vases, d’Hancarville equated their form and function with the ‘customary’ or ‘sacred’ vases and liturgical vessels of chalice, ewer and paten, ‘made use of in our Churches’. In the Recherches D’Hancarville’s emphasis shifted more towards the continuity of history to build a narrative that encompassed all religion.55 The classical gods were simply a means of expressing the attributes or qualities of the divine while the concept of a father of the gods in ancient myth­ ology, for example, was set alongside Plato’s emphasis on divine unity, which he equated ‘in very formal terms’ with the idea of ‘Logos’ or ‘Word’.56 In the Zoffany painting, D’Hancarville shares his desk with the bust of the nymph Clytie, acquired in 1772 in Naples from the Principe di Laurenzano.57 Clytie was the sculpture in the collection that Townley reputedly chose to personally save from the Gordon Riots mob in 1780, immediately before the painting. As Townley was a prominent signatory to the 1778 ‘Address to the King’ that led to the English Catholic Relief Act of the same year, his house and collection was targeted by the mob. D’Hancarville controversially reidentified Clytie as Isis on which Townley subsequently insisted, promoting d’Hancarville’s innovative interpretation in the context of the origins and significance of Greek art and its interconnectedness with the ancient cultures of Egypt and India. Much has been made of the bravado and sexual innuendo surrounding Townley’s bachelor status—­Clytie was referred to as his wife—­but this thinly veiled anxiety about the Towneley family line, as Mirian Al Jamil underlined.58 Similarly, the Recherches’ underpinning theology of unity has been overshadowed by d’Hancarville’s complementary but secondary concern with sexual symbolism. Richard Payne Knight stepped in when Townley could no longer afford to support d’Hancarville. This led to Knight’s illustrated Discourse on the Worship of the Priapus of 1786, a joke among friends that originally circulated among members of the Society of Dilettanti and has come to distort d’Hancarville’s work.59 Knight Mayr, and Julia Rüdiger (eds.), Der Arkadenhof Der Universität Wien Und Die Tradition Der Gelehrtenmemoria in Europa (Vienna, 2018), p. 266. 54  Coltman, ‘Hamilton’s Vase Publications’, pp. 1–16. 55 Pierre-­ François Hugues, Baron d’Hancarville, Collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities from the Cabinet of the Hon. W. Hamilton, 4 vols. (Naples, 1766–76), II, p. 76; Ruth Mack, ‘D’Hancarville’s Useful History’, Word & Image, 33 (2017), p. 300; Francis Haskell, ‘The Baron d’Hancarville: An Adventurer and Art Historian in Eighteenth-­Century Europe’, Past and Present in Art and Taste: Selected Essays (London, 1987), pp. 30–45. 56 D’Hancarville, Recherches, I, pp. 366–7. 57  Webster, ‘Zoffany’s Painting’, p. 318; B. F. Cook, The Townley Marbles (London, 1985), p. 15. 58  Miriam Al Jamil, ‘Hidden Dimensions and Elusive Forms in Johan Zoffany’s Charles Townley and Friends in his Library at Park Street, Westminster, 1781–1783, 1798’, in Felicity Loughlin and Alexandre Johnston (eds.), Antiquity and Enlightenment Culture: New Approaches and Perspectives (Leiden, 2000), pp. 104–28; Coltman, Classical Sculpture, p. 190. 59  Moore, ‘Theoretical Reconstruction?’, pp. 154, 157–8.

318 Carol M. Richardson began his Discourse with a letter sent by Lord Hamilton to the Dilettanti in 1781.60 Hamilton’s letter reported on the apparently phallic worship he witnessed in the little southern Molise town of Isernia in which he described ‘fresh proof of the similitude of the Popish and pagan religion’, highlighting wax votive phalluses sold as part of the feast of the healer saints, Cosmas and Damian.61 Linking back to ancient earth rituals, the saints’ feast was celebrated twice a year.62 Knight’s Discourse inadvertently sensationalized the last days of an age-­old observance because, soon after, the 1786 Leopoldine reforms banned such ex voto objects, the vast majority recycled as candles.63 It is difficult to pin down the precise circumstances in which Zoffany made his painting of A Nobleman and his Collection not least because of its prolonged production. What is clear is that its associations should be broadened from Grand Tour antiquarianism to include the intriguing position of the main protagonists at a crit­ ic­al juncture for their religion. This was less the ‘paradox of old in new’, as Coltman puts it, than the reassertion of the continuity that is the lifeblood of Catholicism.64

Continuity Charles Townley’s London display of gems, statues and coins enriched the already considerable collection accumulated by his ancestors in Lancashire. He also invested in his family seat, landscaping the Towneley park and embellishing the family chapel that was the focus of religious observance in the area until the construction (on land provided by the Towneleys) of the Catholic church in Burnley in 1846. The early sixteenth-­century Antwerp-­carved wooden altarpiece installed at Towneley Hall pre-­empted the mid-­nineteenth-­century trend for seeding larger projects with historical fragments more usually associated with the Pugins.65 Families such as the Towneleys accessed art and artefacts made available as a result of French Revolutionary determination to strip organized religion of its riches in the mould of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. This puts the Towneleys on either end of state aggression and preservation of Catholic culture.66 60 Frank J. Messmann, Richard Payne Knight: The Twilight of Virtuosity (Berlin, 2015), pp. 42–3. 61 Andrew Ballantyne, Architecture, Landscape and Liberty: Richard Payne Knight and the Picturesque (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 89–90; Haskell, ‘Baron d’Hancarville’, p. 43. 62  Giorgina Barbara Piccoli and Martina Ferraresi, ‘Cosmas and Damian: A Southern Italian Story of Tolerance, Sex, War, Religion, and Medicine’, Hektoen Journal: A Journal of Medical Humanities, 5 (2013). 63  John T. Paoletti, ‘Familiar Objects: Sculptural Types in the Collections of the Early Medici’, in Sarah Blake McHam (ed.), Looking at Renaissance Sculpture (Cambridge, 1998), p. 88. 64  Mack, ‘D’Hancarville’s Useful History’, p. 29; Coltman, ‘Hamilton’s Vase Publications’, p. 6. 65  Woods (trans.), Imported Images, pp. 307–12. 66 Thomas Dunham Whitaker, An History of the Original Parish of Whalley and Honour of Clitheroe, in the Counties of Lancaster and York, 3rd revised and enlarged edn (London, 1818), p. 487; Kim Woods, ‘Some Sixteenth-­Century Antwerp Carved Wooden Altarpieces in England’, Burlington Magazine, 141 (1999), p. 146.

Catholic Material Culture  319 In the decade following Charles’ death in 1805, the Towneley collection of books was put up for sale to pay for extensions to Towneley Hall. Highlights of the sale included an eleventh-­century Iliad purchased in Rome in 1773, and a manuscript anthology of English medieval biblical plays documented in the Towneley collection from the early seventeenth century.67 The plays were not simply a collector’s item, however: copied during the reign of Mary Tudor from the library of Whalley Abbey, a Cistercian house, less than 10 miles away, they were likely performed in Towneley circles well into the seventeenth century.68 The association ran deep: Towneley lands were originally granted by Whalley Abbey. When the abbey properties were broken up in the sixteenth century local gentry profited from, but also quietly protected, the abbey’s heritage.69 The jewel in the Towneley collection, rescued by the family in 1541, remain the fifteenth-­century Whalley Abbey vestments, one of only two complete English pre-­Reformation High Mass sets to survive.70 The vestments epitomize a culture of reuse and continuity: a maniple, for example, was made from fabric remnants left over from the alteration of the chasuble in the seventeenth century, evidence of the vestments’ continued use by priests of the Towneley family. Part of a different set, but also linked to Whalley and surviving in the Towneley collection, is an altar frontal recycling an early Tudor cross orphrey framed by two earlier bands mounted onto late-­eighteenth-­or early-­nineteenth-­century crimson silk edged with seventeenth-­century silver bobbin lace.71 While the fact that the Whalley vestments and frontal survive at all is worthy of comment, it is the nature of their preservation, by a local Catholic family who continued to use them, that speaks volumes in the context of this discussion.72 Whalley Abbey is emblematic of the long memory of Catholic culture and the deep-­seated connections that commonly underpin ‘new’ Catholic institutions reintroduced in our period. At Downside in Somerset, for example, between 1820 and 1823 a substantial new home was constructed for the English Benedictine Congregation’s community of St Gregory, and a new church followed later in the nineteenth century. English and Welsh monks had settled in Douai between 1605 67 The Iliad is now BL, Burney MS 86; on the plays, Meg Twycross, ‘ “They Did Not Come out of an Abbey in Lancashire”: Francis Douce and the Manuscript of the Towneley Plays’, Medieval English Theatre, 37 (2015), p. 150. 68  Now Huntington MS HM 1; Theresa Coletti and Gail McMurray Gibson, ‘The Tudor Origins of Medieval Drama’, in Kent Cartwright (ed.), A Companion to Tudor Literature (Oxford, 2010), pp. 235–43. 69  William Farrer and J. Brownbill (eds.), ‘Houses of Cistercian Monks: The Abbey of Whalley’, A History of the County of Lancaster, vol. 2 (London, 1908), pp. 131–9; ‘Lord Burghley’s Map of Lancashire (1590)’, Miscellanea IV, CRS 4 (1907), pp. 183, 188. 70  Lisa Monnas, ‘Opus Anglicanum and Renaissance Velvet: The Whalley Abbey Vestments’, Textile History, 25 (1994), pp. 3–27; Leanne C. Tonkin, ‘Comparative Approaches in Textile Conservation: The Whalley Abbey Vestments and Altar Frontal’, American Institute of Conservation Textile Speciality Post Prints, 20 (2010), pp. 88–101. 71  Tonkin, ‘Textile Conservation’, p. 89. 72  Coletti and McMurray Gibson, ‘Tudor Origins’, pp. 238–40.

320 Carol M. Richardson and 1607, but had been forced to return to England in 1794. Their new buildings were constructed from the same distinctive yellow stone—­limestone oolite from Doulting quarries in the Mendips—­that characterized the Benedictine motherhouse nearby, St Mary’s Abbey, Glastonbury. By means of material, Downside was therefore embedded in the Somerset landscape and reasserted the continuity of Catholic monasticism in the area.73 Ten miles to the south-­west of Whalley Abbey is Pleasington Priory, a Catholic church built before emancipation which regularly features in the story of late-­ eighteenth-­century English Catholic culture. Catholic chapels were constructed in England before 1791, but they were usually discrete, cheaply built, and out of the way. In Liverpool when the chapel of St Mary’s, Hadfield Street, was destroyed by a fire set by a mob reacting to the retreat of Prince Charles Edward Stuart from Derby in 1745, it was rebuilt in a quieter part of the city and designed to look like a warehouse.74 St Benet’s chapel, Netherton, Merseyside, constructed in 1793 was hidden by the priests’ house. The modest St Peter’s—­ now Milner Hall—­ Winchester, was constructed of cheap materials, and had to be heavily restored in 1950s as a result, but its style was highly significant. Consecrated in December 1792, as soon as the English Relief Act of the previous year made it possible, the driving force behind the project was John Milner, a priest at Winchester, who was elected fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1790 in recognition of his Gothic expertise.75 In 1798 Milner published on the ‘modern style of altering ancient cathedrals’, prompted by Wyatt’s ‘improvements’ at Salisbury Cathedral which saw English medieval frescoes whitewashed, and tombs and altars that disrupted architectural ‘uniformity’ removed.76 Milner later described his intention for St Peter’s at Winchester ‘to imitate the models . . . left us by our religious ancestors who applied themselves with such ardour and unrivalled success to the cultivation and perfection of ecclesiastical architecture’, leading Bossy to call it ‘a manifesto in itself ’.77 Pleasington Priory’s style was just as significant but it was built as a substantial structure and stands proud on raised ground. The Pleasington project was made possible by the support of a single patron, John Francis Butler, who commissioned it as a thank-­offering for his recovery from an accident nearby. His father, Richard Butler, bought the old Pleasington estate in 1777 but died only two years later. Richard was the younger brother of 73  Simon Haslett, ‘Unconformable Doulting Stone’, Somerset Magazine (November 1998), pp. 54–5; Bellenger, Downside Abbey, p. 7. 74 B. W. Kelly, Historical Notes on English Catholic Missions (London, 1907), p. 257. 75  Peter P. Brogan, ‘A Short History of St Peter’s Chapel—­now Milner Hall’, http://www.cwtarchive. co.uk/index.php/trustnews/21-­tn85-­89/964-­tn89-­04 (accessed on 14 December 2021). 76  John Milner, A Dissertation on the Modern Style of Altering Antient Cathedrals: As Exemplified by the Cathedral of Salisbury (London, 1798), p. 41. 77  John Milner, The History Civil and Ecclesiastical, and Survey of the Antiquities, of Winchester, 2 vols., 2nd edn (Winchester, 1809), II, p. 230; John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975), p. 334.

Catholic Material Culture  321 Father Thomas Butler who studied at Douai from 1749 and was subsequently appointed to the mission at Hornby (in the parish of Melling) where he stayed until his death in 1795, and during which time he built a presbytery, half of which was used as a chapel for fifty years. The Butlers were related to Henry Butler of Rawcliffe Hall, one of the oldest families in Lancashire.78 On the exterior there is a nod to the establishment with the central statue of John the Baptist on the west portal supported by a corbel decorated with the bust of George III.79 Ironically, the king, representing the Church Militant, shoulders the saint who stands for the Church Triumphant. Directly above in the archivolt is the ‘all-­seeing’ eye, or ‘eye of providence’, set within a triangle representing the Trinity from which rays of divine favour radiate. The architect chosen for the Pleasington project was John Palmer, later architect of Blackburn Cathedral (1826), who kept an illuminating journal of the project.80 In it Palmer recorded the first meetings held at the Manchester house of Father Edward Kenyon who set up a mission in Blackburn the same year. The initial meeting on 1 February 1815 established the principle ‘to build it on the model of which all our ancient churches were built before the pretended reformation’. When the plans were presented to Butler a few days later, on 5 February, everything but the ‘grand west portal’ was agreed. This was to be an ‘exact copy’ of one of the doorways at Whalley Abbey, constructed between 1330 and 1380. Whalley Abbey had long represented faithful persistence in the local area: nearby Hoghton Tower was built between 1560 and 1565, its chapel entered through an arch salvaged from Whalley Abbey, gift of William Allen, the leader of English Catholic exiles and future cardinal. Palmer visited the abbey on 31 March where, though ‘the day was very wet and disagreeable’, he made sketches of the surviving chapter house doorway and studies of what remained of the complex. Palmer then took Thomas Owen, the project’s lead sculptor, on a visit to Whalley Abbey, ‘where he took squeeses in clay, and afterwards cast them in plaster, of all the heads, leaves and flowers of the door, and marked each distinctly . . . to have them exactly carved a facsimile of the original’. While the decorative details of the Whalley portal archivolts and distinctive label stops dictated the form of Pleasington’s west door, Owen had to elaborate on his source material. The few corbel heads surviving at Whalley became an army of faces at Pleasington. To round off the story, when, around 1800, Stonyhurst College, just 4 miles to the north of Whalley, was extended for the former Jesuits of Liège, it incorporated stone from Whalley Abbey and two angels holding instruments of the Passion.81 Stonyhurst—­like St Edmund’s, Ware (1793), Oscott (1794), Maynooth in Ireland 78  ‘Catholic Registers of Robert Hall and Hornby’, in Miscellanea IV, CRS 4 (London, 1907), p. 323. 79  Christopher Martin, A Glimpse of Heaven: Catholic Churches of England and Wales (Swindon, 2006), p. 48. 80  John Palmer of Manchester, journal re. Pleasington Priory, Manchester Archives, M16/3/1. 81 Whitaker, Parish of Whalley (1818), p. 479.

322 Carol M. Richardson (1795), Ushaw (1808), and Blairs in Aberdeenshire (1829)—is an important expression of the pragmatism and growing confidence of late-­eighteenth-­century Catholic culture in England, incorporating the past to enshrine endurance, in the same way that a saint’s relics sanctifies an altar.

From Gentry to Clergy The members of the first English Catholic Committee, established in 1778 to organize political pressure for relief, were drawn exclusively from the nobility and gentry: no representation from the clergy was included. John Bossy called the period from the second half of the eighteenth century to the late 1820s ‘the Indian summer and final decay of the Catholic gentry as a governing power’ as many of the Catholic families who had managed to keep going between penal laws and emancipation were soon left behind.82 Bossy explored the issue in detail in his 1967 essay ‘Four Catholic Congregations in Rural Northumberland, 1750–1850’, although art and architecture was low on his list of priorities.83 A close-­knit community of Catholic gentry survived high up in on a south-­facing slope of the Cheviots, about 20 miles from the coast. More isolated than the Catholic communities encircling Whalley in Lancashire, Upper Coquetdale, was (and is still) remote and only accessible by pack road from Rothbury. At its heart was Holystone’s Lady’s Well, where St Paulinus, the first archbishop of York, was believed to have baptized 3,000 converts during Easter Week, 627 ce and in 1780 a salvaged fifteenth-­century statue of St Paulinus was erected in the pool. Nearby, Eslington was the seat of the Collingwoods, Callaly belonged to the Claverings, while the Radcliffes, Widdringtons, and Talbots were all within a 6-­mile radius, but only the Selbys of Biddlestone survived as a Catholic family into the nineteenth century.84 Old Biddlestone Hall (Figure  16.3) is believed to stand for the fictional Osbaldistone Hall, the ancestral home of Frank Osbaldistone, the narrator of Walter Scott’s novel, Rob Roy (1817), which is set against the Jacobite Rising of 1715. Frank is sent back to Osbaldistone/Biddlestone and the larger Catholic family from which his father separated as a result of religious difference. Scott described ‘a large and antiquated edifice, peeping out from a Druidical grove of huge oaks’, approached by ‘the windings of a very indifferent road’.85 This ‘antiquated edifice’, razed to the ground by fire, was replaced by a large Georgian structure in the late eighteenth century. Of the older structure, only 82  Burton cited in Bossy, English Catholic Community, pp. 330, 334. 83 John Bossy, ‘Four Catholic Congregations in Rural Northumberland, 1750–1850’, Recusant History, 9 (1967), pp. 88–119. 84  Leo Gooch, ‘Priests and Patrons in the Eighteenth Century’, Recusant History, 20 (1990), p. 210. 85  Walter Scott, Rob Roy (Boston, 1872; first published 1817), p. 152.

Catholic Material Culture  323

Figure 16.3.  Biddlestone Hall and Chapel, pre-­1950, photograph, Northumberland Archives, NRO 04194/5.

part of a fourteenth-­century tower house or Pele tower was left standing. Its 6-­foot thick stone walls and vaulted ceiling became the foundation and lower ­storey of the chapel, built around 1820.86 The tower/chapel thereby preserves and exposes the historical precedent in the shrine-­like structure that is all that survives today. The English Catholic Relief Act of 1791 made the building of Catholic churches possible, although bells and towers were forbidden. Biddlestone’s chapel, however, did not simply include a tower: it is a tower (Figure 16.4). While Biddlestone’s early-­nineteenth-­century chapel might, in architectural terms, be referred to as new, it served a long-­established estate and sat on the oldest remnants of the Selby possession. The Biddlestone Catholic community comprised the family, household, and tenants of the Selby family which, for good and ill, tied their fortunes very closely to that of the family. While the Selbys were only occasionally resident at Biddlestone before 1800, and as a result there was not always a priest attached, from the early nineteenth century until 1826, Walter Selby raised a large family there.87 The chapel, then, is the expression of a burgeoning clan and the life-­cycle rituals that family generates. But, when Walter’s wife died, he left Coquetdale, and the house was let to tenants, the chapel

86 ‘Biddlestone Roman Catholic Chapel, Nr Rothbury, Morpeth, Northumberland NE65 7DT: Conservation Statement for Historic Chapels Trust’ (Powys, 2016), p. 4. Sold by the family in 1914, the house was demolished in 1957. 87  Bossy, ‘Catholic Congregations’, p. 107.

324 Carol M. Richardson

Figure 16.4.  Biddlestone Chapel today, © Carol M. Richardson.

standing today as a reassertion of seigneurial continuity at precisely the point when the scales were tipping towards urban Catholicism and independent missions.88 The English Relief Acts of 1778 and 1791 that represented the successful canvassing of Catholic gentlemen gave freedoms to the laity but also to the clergy, augmented by returning religious and secular clergy. With the possibility of more public places of worship, priests no longer needed to operate from the big houses of the gentry and could move out into more populous communities.

Conclusion Defining Catholic culture in Britain and Ireland in the period between 1746 and 1829 as either the beginning or the end of any trends—­the beginning of Catholic identity freely expressed or the end of Catholic suppression—­misses the point. Bossy’s suggestion of a ‘transition from its ancient to its modern phase’ in relation to art and architecture falls into the trap of an unattainable teleology.89 From medieval drama to vestments, much of it only survives today because recusants 88  Bossy, ‘Catholic Congregations’, p. 110.

89  Bossy, ‘Catholic Congregations’, p. 88.

Catholic Material Culture  325 and antiquarians stepped in to collect, catalogue, and continue to use these remnants of a once common culture. Less obvious to recent scholars than classical statuary, the quiet but ongoing experiences of such families as the Towneleys and the Selbys raise important challenges to the demarcation of medieval, early modern, and Enlightenment cultures as distinct from one another.90 Catholic culture in Britain and Ireland in the second half of the eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth centuries was not a novelty introduced from the Continent, the result of Grand Tour fashion or Revolutionary necessity. It was something more subtle, represented in objects that embodied experience and persistence. The inherent materiality of Catholicism did not disappear but was carefully and deliberately preserved and nurtured by families and communities. While the chapels and convents enabled by Catholic relief are overshadowed by more conspicuous and confident mid-­nineteenth-­century churches and seminaries, the intrinsic historicism of their material culture finds its roots in our period.

Select Bibliography Al Jamil, Miriam, ‘Hidden Dimensions and Elusive Forms in Johan Zoffany’s Charles Townley and Friends in his Library at Park Street, Westminster, 1781–1783, 1798’, in Felicity Loughlin and Alexandre Johnston (eds.), Antiquity and Enlightenment Culture: New Approaches and Perspectives (Leiden, 2000), pp. 104–28. Barron, Kathryn, ‘ “For Stuart Blood Is in My Veins” (Queen Victoria): The British Monarchy’s Collection of Imagery and Objects Associated with the Exiled Stuarts from the Reign of George III to the Present Day’, in Edward Corp (ed.), The Stuart Court in Rome: The Legacy of Exile (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 149–64. Bellenger, Aidan (ed.), Downside Abbey: An Architectural History (London, 2011). Haynes, Clare, Pictures and Popery: Art and Religion in England, 1660–1760 (Aldershot, 2006). Kelly, James E., English Convents in Catholic Europe, c.1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020). Martin, Christopher, A Glimpse of Heaven: Catholic Churches of England and Wales (Swindon, 2006). Milner, John, A Dissertation on the Modern Style of Altering Antient Cathedrals: As Exemplified by the Cathedral of Salisbury (London, 1798). Purves, Maria, The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange, and the Popular Novel, 1785–1829 (Cardiff, 2009).

90  Coletti and McMurray Gibson, ‘Tudor Origins’, p. 228.

Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Aikenhead, Mary  177–80 Alexander VII, Pope  129–30 America. See, Empire, Catholics and Anderson, Benedict  225–7 Anson, Peter  7–8 Antonelli, Leonardo, Cardinal  115, 138 Archer, James  236–7 Arundell, Henry, eight baron Arundell  111 Augustinian friars education, Rome  183, 191 Ireland, in  76–7 Australia. See, empire, Catholics and Barbandt, Charles  290–1 belief and practice  9 baptism  123–5, 140–1 burials  87, 123, 138–9 England, in  139–40 Ireland, in  139–40 charity 135–6 societies 135–6 fasting 134–5 holydays of obligation  134 marriage 136–7 laws relating to  136–8 mixed marriages  153–4 sacraments, attendance at  125–7, 131–2, 134–5, 140–1 Mass attendance, figures for  126–8 see also, chapter 7; liturgy and public devotions; material culture, chapels Benedict XIV, Pope  108–9, 129–30, 136–7, 164–5, 271–2, 295–6 Benedictine monks Dieulouard/Ampleforth, St Laurence’s  78–9, 115, 120, 183, 188–91, 195–6 Douai/Downside, St Gregory’s  78–9, 115, 120, 183, 195–6, 319–20 education, and  114–15, 183, 185–6 empire, and  217–18 French 59 Lamspringe, SS Adrian and Denis  183

missions  78–9, 111 Paris, St Edmund’s  183, 195–6 Regensburg 183 Würzburg 183 Berington, Joseph  10–11, 45–7, 148–50, 152–3, 234–5, 238–40 Catholic Enlightenment  10–11, 266–7, 269–70, 274–6, 280–1, 283 Bolivar, Simon  91–2 Boscovich, Ruggiero, SJ  270–2 Bossy, John  5–6, 63–4, 321–2 Bourke, Angela  260–1 Bowden, Caroline  5–6, 166–7 Brewer, Bede, OSB  78–9, 218 Briggs, John, Bishop  125 Broomhead, Rowland  140–1 Brown, Michael  283–4 Browne, Thomas, Viscount Kenmare  43–4, 88–9 Buckley, James, Bishop  214–16 Burke, Edmund  54, 57–8, 61, 283–4 Burke, Richard  54 Burson, Jeffrey  10–11 Burtin, Edwin H.  5–6 Butler, Alban  129–30, 225–9, 240 Butler, Charles  69–70, 72–3, 77–8, 174–5, 234–40, 268, 280–1 Butler, James, Archbishop  110, 119, 126, 131, 253 Byrd, William  286–7, 293–4 Cameron, Alexander  191–2, 199–200 Campion, Edmund, SJ  224–5 Canada. See, empire, Catholics and Capuchins Wassy, Bar-sur-Aube  183, 190–1 Carey, Matthew  267–8, 275, 279 Caribbean, The. See, empire, Catholic and Carpenter, John, Archbishop  42–3, 124–5, 253–4, 258, 289–90 Carnes, Geremy  227–9 Carroll, John, Bishop  209, 275–6 Carroll, Michael P.  133–4 Carthusians 59

328 Index Catholic Association (1750s)  2, 18, 267–8 Catholic Association (1820s)  86–96, 98–102 Catholic Committee English  39–40, 45–7, 51–3, 58–60, 64, 266–8, 278, 280, 322 Irish  18, 33, 37–45, 51–6, 58–9, 61–2, 65, 267–8, 277–9, 284 Catholics ‘crypto’  147–8, 160 loyalty, expressions of  18–19, 31, 33, 39–40, 55, 309–10 Challoner, Richard, Bishop  4–6, 21–2, 33–5, 136–41, 204–5, 231 charity, and  135–6 pastoral care, and  64, 125–6, 128, 204–5 written cultures, and  4, 10–11, 83–4, 129–32, 225–9, 231–8, 240, 245, 253–4, 262 Chinnici, Joseph  264, 266–7, 269–70 Chisholm, John, Bishop  196–7 Christian Brothers  113–14 Cisalpines  5–6, 45–7, 53, 83–4, 234–6, 238–40, 266–7, 269, 273–5, 280–2 Catholic Emancipation, and  70–3 Stirs 278 see also, Enlightenment, Catholic Cistercian monks, Lulworth  174–5, 221–2 Clancy, Thomas  229–30 Clement XIII, Pope  31–2 clergy 9 episcopal oversight, of  126–7, 133–4 incomes 77 Ireland pastoral activities  77 radicalism, support for  62–3 numbers of  57, 108–9 Canada, in  211 England, in  57–8, 105, 108 Ireland, in  57–8, 76, 108 Scotland, in  57–8, 76 ordination, of  123 preaching, and  128–31, 236 Regulars 78–9 Ireland, in  76–7 numbers off  50–1, 108–9, 193–4 Scotland 246–50 Irish clergy, in  249–50 see also, French Revolutionémigré clergy Coghlan, James Peter  4, 45–7, 135–6, 235–6, 245, 248–9, 262, 294–5 Colley, Linda  50–1 confraternities and sodalities Blessed Sacrament  126 Bona Mors  126 Christian Doctrine  116–17, 132–3 Sacred Heart  132–3

Connolly, Claire  237–8 Connolly, John, OP  191 Connolly, S. J.  6–7 Coolahan, Marie-Louise  167–8 Consalvi, Ercole, Cardinal  73–4, 310–11 convents and women religious  9–10, 162–3, 168, 180 Augustinians 163–4 Bruges/Hengrave Hall  166, 170–5 Louvain 170–1 Paris 169–70 Benedictines Bodney Hall (French)  174 Brussels  170–1, 173 Cambrai/Woolton/Stanbrook  115, 166, 169–75, 240, 292–3 Ghent 170–1 Montargis (French)  167 Paris  59, 169–70, 173, 175 Pontoise 165–6 Ypres  115–16, 165–6, 176–9 Bridgettines, Lisbon  166, 174–6 Brigidines  176, 178 Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre Liège  170–1, 307–8 New Hall, Chelmsford  138–9, 308, 311 Carmelites  163–4, 179 Antwerp 170–3 Compiègne 169–70 Hoogstraten 170–1 Lierre  165–6, 170–1 Port Tobacco  170–1, 207–8 Conceptionists (Blue Nuns), Paris  166–7, 169–70, 173 Daughters of Charity  177 Dominicans  163–4, 179 Brussels 170–1 Dublin 299 Lisbon  115–16, 165–6, 174–5 English 162–6 see also, individual communities foundations, list of  163 Franciscans Bruges  170–1, 309–10 Brussels 166 Winchester 171–2 French Revolution, impact on  162–3, 165–72, 175, 180, 194–5 migration to Britain and Ireland  170–5, 179 education and schools  174–5 enclosure, obstacles to  173 habits, wearing of  172–3 Monastic Institutions bill  174–5

Index  329 Hôspitaliers (Canonesses of St Augustine of the Mercy of Jesus)  210 Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Loretto)  163–4, 176–80 Irish  162–6, 175–8 lay sisters  167 Mary Ward Sisters  115–17, 163–5, 179–80 Hammersmith  114–15, 293–4 York, Bar Convent  111, 114–15, 164–5, 177–80 music, in  292–4, 296, 299 Notre Dame New France  210 Poor Clares  163–4, 179 Aire 170–1 Dunkirk 170–1 Gravelines  166, 170–1, 174–5 Rouen 169–71 Presentation Nuns  115–16, 163–4, 176 Cork  163–4, 176–7, 179–80 Dublin 179 recruitment to convents  164–8, 170–1, 177–9 schools  165–7, 174 religious life  164–5 social background of members  167–8, 178–9 Sepulchrines. See, Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre Sisters of Charity Ireland  115–16, 176–9 Sisters of St Joseph de Cluny Sierra Leone  217 Sisters of Mercy Ireland  115–16, 178–80 Ursulines  163–4, 174–7, 179–80, 207–8, 210 see also, chapter 9; material culture Corish, Patrick  6–7, 135–6, 194–5 Corker, James, OSB  274–5 Corker, Maurus, OSB  18–19 Courtenay Throckmorton, John  266–7, 270 Crown, relations with the Holy See  68–9, 74 Cullen, Paul, Cardinal  127–8, 199–200 Curr, Joseph  140–1 Curry, John  18, 27–8, 238–40, 267–8, 277–9, Curtis, Patrick, Archbishop  191–2 Dalrymple, John  39–40 Darby, Rosemary  290–1 de la Marche, Jean-Francois, Bishop  57–8, 211 Delaney, Daniel, Bishop  178 Desjardins, Philippe-Jean-Louis  211 D’Hancarville, Baron  315–17 Dillon, Edward, Archbishop  70, 132–3 Dominican friars

education Bornheim  183, 288–9 Lisbon, Corpo Santo  183 Louvain, Holy Cross  183, 190–1 Rome  183, 199–200 Ireland, in  76–7 Scotland, in  82 Donovan, Robert Kent  7–8, 39–40 Douglass, John, Bishop  51–2, 150–1, 191–2, 194–5, 204–5 Doyle, James Warren, Bishop  77, 87, 127–8 Dryden, John  224–5, 227–9 Duffy, Eamon  5–6, 229–32, 266–7 Duthie, William  182–3 education colleges and seminaries  58–9, 77, 182, 184–5 commission des Réguliers, and  185–6 continental  9–10, 182–3, 185–8, 269 French Revolution and closure of  57, 59, 182–3, 185–93, 201–2 curriculum, at  184–5 English  183, 187–8, 199 Douai  183–6, 188, 270 Lisbon 183 Madrid 183 Paris  183, 185 Rome 183 Seville 183 Valladolid  183, 185–6, 191–2, 199–200 Irish  183–6, 188, 199 Alcalá de Henares  185–6 Bordeaux  183, 186 Douai 270 Lille 184–5 Lisbon 184–5 Nantes  183, 186, 189–90 Paris  183–9, 197–9 Rome  184–6, 199–200 Salamanca  191–2, 199–200 Toulouse  184–5, 188 local issues affecting  186, 188 numbers in  184–7 revival, post-Revolution  197–201 Scots  183–5, 188, 199 Douai  183, 185–6, 188–90, 246–7, 270 Madrid  183, 185–6 Paris  183, 187–9, 199–200 Rome  183, 247–8 Valladolid  248–9, 293–4 student makeup  184–7, 193–4, 269 domestic  9–10, 182–3, 192–3, 196–7 Blairs 321–2 Carlow 192–3

330 Index education (cont.) Crook Hall/Ushaw  115, 194–5, 321–2 Guidal/Glenfinnan 196–7 Invernurie 196–7 Kilkenny 192–3 Lismore  196–7, 248–9 Maynooth  58–9, 192–5, 259, 321–2 numbers in  193–7 Oscott  115, 195–6, 240, 321–2 Scalan  12–13, 15–18, 182–3, 185, 196–7 Ware, St Edmund’s  115, 192–4, 201–2, 321–2 Waterford 192–3 females, for  59, 114–16, 164–5, 172–3, 176–9 see also, convents elementary  113–14, 116–17 England, in  114–15 Sedgley Park  114–15, 286–7 Ireland, in  113–16 poor schools  113–18 see also, Jesuits, education Scotland, in  114–15 see also, chapters 6 & 10; convents; finances, fundraising; laity, education, role in Emancipation  2–3, 67–8, 89, 160 Catholic Association, England, and  88, 101–2 Catholic Association, Ireland, and  86–7, 90–2, 95–6, 98–9, 101–2 Catholic Board, and  68–9, 71, 89 Catholic Rent  86–9, 91–3, 96, 98–9, 102–3 clergy, role of in  89 elections, Waterford and Clare  2, 91–2, 95–6, 99, 101–2, 160 freehold franchise  96, 100–2 opposition to  97–100, 102, 150–1 parliament, and  71–2, 74–6, 85–6, 91–3, 98, 271 passing of  92–3, 101–2 terms of  101–2 see also, chapters 4 & 5 empire, Catholics and  9–10, 204, 222–3 American colonies  204–5, 212–13 family networks  207–8 legal status of Catholics, in  207–8 religious communities, in  207–8 slavery, in  208–9 structures and pastoral provision, in  204–9 Australia 220–1 structures and pastoral provision, in  205–6, 220–2 British East India Company  218–20 Burma 220 Canada  20–1, 37, 82–3, 150–1, 204–5 demographics 212 Newfoundland  135–6, 212–13

New France  209–11 Nova Scotia  212–14 religious communities  210–11 structures and pastoral provision, in  205–6, 209–13 Caribbean, The  36–7, 167–8, 204–6 pastoral provision and structures, in  205–6, 214–16 slavery, in  214–16 Dutch East India Company  219–20 Gibraltar 206 Good Hope  217–18 Guyana, British  214–16 Honduras, British  216 Hong Kong  205–6 India structures and pastoral provision, in 218–19 indigenous peoples  209–10, 212–13, 216, 222 Ionian Islands  207 Macau 205–6 Madeira 217–18 Malaya 220 Malta 206–7 structures and pastoral provision  206–7 Mauritius 218 Menorca 207 Sierra Leone  217 slavery, in  217 Singapore 220 Spanish Florida  209 Sri Lanka  219–20 see also, chapter 11; Jesuits, Ursulines Englefield, Charles Henry, Sir  148–9 Enlightenment  18, 233, 277–8 Catholic  26, 49, 65–6, 195–6, 264–8, 271–2, 278, 282 England, in  266–7, 271–4 Ireland, in  267–8, 273–4, 279, 283–4 liturgy, views on  275–7 piety and theology  272–3, 276, 280 Pistoia, Synod of  280 politics, ecclesio-  277–8 Protestant, relations with  274–5, 281 published works, on  272–7, 279–81 radical 276–7 scholarship, and  268, 270–1, 278 Scotland, in  266–7, 271–4 see also, chapter 14 Enright, Seamus  176 Errington, William  114–15 Faber, Frederic  224–5 Farquharson, John  188–90, 198–9, 246–7 Fenning, Hugh  6–7

Index  331 finances 117 fundraising  117, 120–1 colleges and  184–7, 196–7, 199–200 convents, and  165–6, 176–7 Empire, and  217–18 England chapel building  119 Ireland  117–18, 120 chapel building  118–21 charity sermons  117–18 Station Mass  118–19, 127–8 Protestant benefactors  120 Scotland 120–1 see also, chapter 6 Fitzsimons, Patrick, Archbishop  257–8 Flood, Peter  186–7, 198–9 Forbes, Donald  82 Foster, Leslie  96, 99 Foxe, John  146–7, 238–40 see also, Protestant, popular perceptions of Catholics Franciscan friars education Boulay 183 Capranica 183 Douai 183 Louvain, St Anthony’s  183, 188, 190–1, 197–8 Prague  183, 185–6 Rome 183 Ireland, in  76–7 Louvain  133–4, 253–4 Scotland 246 Freemasonry 266 French Revolution  8–11, 49, 53, 57–8, 65–6, 156, 186–7, 189–90, 278 clergy, émigré, and  3, 49, 57–60, 77–80, 108, 194–5, 211, 292–3, 311 legislation relating to religious communities, and  169–70, 187–91, 278 property, nationalization of, and  51, 169 see also, chapters 3 & 8; convents; education, continental colleges; Protestant, popular perceptions of Catholics; United Irishmen Gallagher, James, Bishop  251–2 Gallicanism  49, 51–2, 58, 273–4, 280 Gardiner, Luke, MP  38–9, 41–2 Gascoigne, Thomas, Sir  26, 147–8 Geddes, Alexander  10–11, 231, 264–7, 271–2, 275–7, 280–1, 283 Geddes, John, Bishop  1–2, 55, 148–9, 266–7, 271–2 education, and  182–3, 185–6

George III  39–40, 65, 111, 147–8, 310–11 emancipation, and  68–9, 85–6 George IV  1–2, 311–12 emancipation, and  91–2, 97, 100–1, 158 Gibson, William, Bishop  115, 140–1, 194–5 Gillespie, James  112–13 Gilley, Sheridan  63–4, 129–30 Glickman, Gabriel  15, 266 Goldie, Mark  266–7 Gordon, Alexander  187–9 Gordon, George, Lord  40–1, 45–7, 145–6, 154–5 see also, Protestant, popular perceptions of Catholics, riots Gordon, John  191–2 Gother, John  10–11, 129–30, 225–38, 240–2, 272–3 Grattan, Henry  42–3, 56, 70–2, 74–5, 85–6 Gregory, William  89–90, 93–4 Guthrie, Neil  14 Hamilton Rowan, Archibald  52 Hay, George, Bishop  55, 106, 124–5, 128, 131, 134–7, 155–6, 188–9, 196–7, 225–7, 235, 248–9, 266–7, 271–2, 286–7, 291–2 Haydock, George Leo  80–1, 130–1 Hill, Jacqueline  20–1, 39–40 Hornyold, John, Bishop  134–5 Horsley, Samuel, Bishop  57–8 Howard, Charles, tenth duke of Norfolk  148–9 Hughes, John  245 Hussey, Thomas, Bishop  61 Inchbald, Elizabeth  225–7, 231–2, 237–8 Jacobitism  3, 12–13, 16–17, 26–7, 31, 142–3, 165–6, 279 Catholicism, and  16–17, 36–7, 288–9 Culloden, Battle of  1–2, 8–9, 12, 24, 182, 246–7, 266 Elibank Plot  14 Ireland, in  14, 16, 50–1, 61–2 literature, and  15–16, 243–4, 249–50 music  16, 299 Rising of, 1745  3, 12–14, 29, 142–3, 182–3 Scotland, in  12, 16–17, 24, 50–1 Stuart Court, and  15, 31, 310–11 Wales, in  15–16, 244 see also, chapter 1 James II  310 James III  8–9, 16–19, 29, 31 support for  1–2, 17–18 Jansenism  266, 273–4, 277 Jebb, John  52 Jerningham, family  166–7, 171–2, 174

332 Index Jesuits 59–60 American colonies, in  207–8 Catholic Enlightenment, and  270–1, 280 education, and  184–5, 271 America, in  207–9 Georgetown 209 Clongowes Wood  193–4, 299 Liège, English Academy  59–60, 185–6, 190–1, 195–6, 321–2 Poitiers  183, 185–6 St Omer  183–5, 207–8 Stonyhurst  115, 183, 195–6, 292–3, 296–7, 321–2 Tullabeg 193–4 England, mission to  78–9 Restoration of  59–60, 108–9, 195–6 Scotland, mission to  82 Suppression of  3, 78–9, 185–6 see also, Empire, indigenous people Johnson, Christine  7–8, 55 Kearney, Charles  188–9, 197–9 Keating, Brown, and Keating, printers  235–6 Keating, Geoffrey  254–5 Kelly, James.  8–9, 251–2 Kelly, James E.  5–6, 168 Kenny, Alexander, OSA  273 Keogh, Dáire  53 Keogh, John  53–4, 56, 279 King, Joshua  225–7 King, William  33–4 Lacy, Richard, Bishop  139–40 laity agrarian societies, and  91 Defenders, The  61–3, 65 Ribbonmen 65 Whiteboys, The  16, 22–3, 27–8, 33–4 education, role in  114–17 fundraising, and  119–20, 217–18 gentry  21–3, 34–5, 68–9, 111–12, 147–8, 292–3, 322 see also, material culture Grand Tour, the, and  288, 308, 311, 313–14, 325 learned societies, and  148–9, 238–40 merchants England, in  25 Ireland, in  24–6 music, and  291–2 patrons, as  59 political affiliations, of  51 Protestant Dissenters, links with  52 see also, Emancipation; Enlightenment, Catholic; Gallicanism

Scottish nobility  24 seditious activities  63 Lalor Sheil, Richard  86–8, 90, 94–5 Lambert, Patrick, Bishop  212–13 Larkin, Emmet  6–7, 127–8, 140 Leahy, Francis, OFM  188 Lehner, Ulrich  10–11, 65–6 Leighton, C. D. A.  238–40 Lingard, John  79–81, 130–1, 137–40, 225–7, 238–40 Catholic Enlightenment, and  269, 274–7, 283 Litta, Lorenzo, Cardinal  72–4 liturgy and public devotions devotions  77–8, 83–4, 123, 131–4, 286–7 devotional aids  132–3 ‘devotional revolution’, theory of  127–8, 140 liturgy  77–8, 130–1 music  77–8, 264 pilgrimages  133–4, 244 see also, chapters 7 & 15 Lock, Alexander  26 Lockman, John  33–4 Lysaght, Patricia  260–1 Macaulay, Ambrose  6–7, 71 Macaulay, Thomas Babington  142 Mac Craith, Aindrias  15 MacDonald, Alexander, Bishop,  151–2 MacDonald, Allan  247–8 MacDonald, Angus,  247–8, 250–1 MacDonald, Archibald Benedict, OSB  130–1 MacDonald, Hugh  23–4, 144–5 Macdonald, Norman  82 MacDonald, Ranald, Bishop  248–50 MacEachan, Ewen  248–9, 262 MacEachern, Angus, Bishop  213–14 MacKenzie, Alexander, SJ  129, 191–2 MacPherson, Paul  72–3, 191, 199–200 Maire, Christopher, SJ  271 Mangion, Carmen  169–70 Manley-Hopkins, Gerard  224–5 Marsh, Richard, OSB  188–91 Marshall, P. J.  36–7 material culture  10–11, 306–7, 309, 311–14, 324–5 chapels 76 America, in  208–9 Canada, in  212–13 convents, and  307–8 England, in  77–81, 111, 119, 142–3 architecture  111, 119, 126–7, 139–40 embassy chapels, London  111–12, 131–2, 135–6, 290–2 Liverpool 320–1 Lulworth Castle, Dorset  111, 286–7

Index  333 Pleasington Priory, Lancashire  320–1 St Mary, Moorfields, London  291–2 Wardour Castle, Wiltshire  111, 286–7 Winchester 225 Ireland, in  76–7, 109–10, 118 architecture  109–10, 118, 124–5, 132–3, 287–8 St Mary’s, Dublin  124–5 liturgy, in  123–4 choirs 290–1 England, in  123–4, 126–7, 130–2, 291–2 Ireland, in  124–5, 132–3, 287–8 irregular settings, in  123–5, 127–8 Scotland, in  124–5, 287–8 Wales, in  123–4 numbers of  109–12 Scotland, in  77–8, 82, 111–12, 248–9, 287–8 architecture 112–13 Wales, in  77–8, 83 see also, chapters 6 & 16; liturgy and public devotions homes, private  322–3 Biddlestone Hall, Northumberland  303, 322–4 liturgical items  132–3 relics 306–8 Stuart, house of  310–11 Mawhood, William  126, 128–9, 131–2, 134–5 McAuley, Catherine  178–80 MacCormick, James, OFM  191, 199–200 McDonell, Alexander  212 McGrath, Thomas  127–8 McMahon, Hugh  117 McMahon, Joseph  193–4 Menzies, Robert  248–9 Meynell, Alice  224–5 military, Catholics in  20, 32, 36–7, 39–44, 49–50, 60–1, 90–1, 160 Miller, David W.  127–8 Milner, John, Bishop  59–61, 69, 71, 73–4, 77–8, 225–7, 235–42, 283 chapel building  320 Church government  69–70, 221–2, 240 Cisalpines, opposition to  69–70, 234–5 devotion 133–4 education 195–6 Emancipation  71–2, 85–6 pastoral care  64, 125 Veto, Crown  70, 72–3 Missions Étrangères de Paris 220 Moylan, Francis, Bishop  176–7 Mulally, Teresa  177–9 Muir, Thomas  195–6 Muirhead, Ian  7–8

Muratori, Ludovico  269, 273 Murphy, John, Bishop  253–4, 257–60 Murphy, Thomas  80–1 Murray, Daniel, Archbishop  124–5, 127–8, 132–3, 178–9, 199 Musgrave, Richard  157 music  286–7, 294, 297–8, 303 continental colleges, in  288–9 developments, in  294–9, 301, 303–4 embassy chapels, London, in  290–2 England, in  286–7, 289–90 Haydn, Joseph, influence on  290–5, 298–300, 302–3 Ireland, in  287–91, 300 Mass settings  298–300, 302–4 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, influence on  290–4, 300–3 plainchant  288–90, 292–3, 296–7, 300–1 publications  288–90, 292–4, 296, 302–3 Scotland, in  303–4 see also, chapter 15; material culture, liturgy, celebration of Mutch, Alistair  24 Nagle, Nano  163–4, 176–80 Napoleon I, Emperor  69, 71–2, 206–7 Neale, Charles  170–1 Newby, Peter  235 Newman, John Henry  4–8, 224–5, 240–2 Novello, Vincent  290–6, 298, 300–4 oaths Abjuration, of  35–6 Allegiance, of  36–42, 68 Loyalty, of  282 O’Brien, John, Bishop  132–3, 256–8, 262 O’Brien, Maria  177 Ó Ciosáin, Niall  251–2, 258 O’Connor, Thomas  184–5 O’Connell, Daniel  1–2, 74, 85–97, 99, 101–3, 158, 160, 200–1, 284 see also, Emancipation O’Conor, Charles  10–11, 18, 20–1, 33, 238–40, 258, 267–9, 275, 277–9, 284 O’Donel, James Louis, Bishop, OFM  212–13 O’Halloran, Clare  238–40 Ó Laoghaire, Diarmuid  131 O’Leary, Arthur, OFM Cap  38–9, 41–3, 64, 111–12, 267–8, 273, 275, 279, 291–2 O’Leary, Paul  7–8 O’Molloy, Francis, OFM  249–50 O’Neill, Ciaran  193–4 Oratorians India, in  219

334 Index O’Reilly, Michael, Archbishop  17–18, 253 O’Shaughnessy, James, Bishop  72–3 Owen, William  245 Paine, James  111 Papal Bulls Annus Qui 295–6 Apostolicum Ministerium 108–9 Auctorem Fidei 280 De Synodo Diocesana libro octo 136–7 Quamvis Iusto  164–5, 179–80 Palmer, John  321 Parnell, William  88–9 Partington, Anne Teresa  171–2 pastoral provision  27, 130–1 England, in  125, 130–1 Ireland, in  27–8, 125 Scotland, in  23 visitations 125–7 Wales, in  27 Pastorini, Signor. See, Walmesley, Charles, OSB Patmore, Coventry  224–5 Peel, Robert, Sir  2, 75–6, 85–6, 91–103 penal laws  2, 28–9, 45–7, 269 application of  36–7 England, in  27, 143–4 Ireland, in  34–5 Scotland, in  13–14, 150–1 Wales, in  15–16 legislation  13–14, 33–4, 37, 39–40, 156 Popery, Act of 1698  13–14 Petre, Benjamin, Bishop  125 Petre, Robert, ninth Baron Petre  147–9, 266–7 Pitt, William, MP  19, 45–7, 54, 56, 65, 68–9 Pius VII, Pope  68–9, 71–3, 77–8, 191, 217–18 Plessis, Joseph-Octave, Bishop  205–6, 211 Plunket, W. C.  85–6, 93–4, 98–9 Plunkett, George, Bishop  126–7 Plunkett, Patrick, Bishop  113–14, 126–9 Pope, Alexander  224–5, 227–9 Pope, David  24–5 populations and demographics, Catholic  33–4, 49–50, 83–4, 123–4 American colonies, in  208–9 Australia, in  221 Caribbean, The, in  214–16 England, in  21–2, 33–4, 105, 107–8 Durham, in  81–2 Lancashire, in  49–50, 78–81, 107–8 Liverpool, in  21, 25, 107–8 London, in  21–2, 77–8, 107–8 Manchester, in  21 Northumberland, in  81–2 Yorkshire, in  107–8

Guyana, British  216 Ireland, in  22–3, 70, 89–90, 104–5, 251 Ulster, in  22–3 Waterford, in  22–3 migration  34–5, 49–50, 78–9, 82–3, 121, 186–7 America, to  246 Canada, to  212–14, 246 Caribbean, The, to  214–16 continental Europe, to  186–7 England, Irish Catholics in  63–4, 105, 139–41, 160, 291–2, 304 Scotland, in  82–3, 106, 160, 246, 261–2 Wales, in  83, 106–7, 160 Scotland, in  12–13, 23–4, 49–50, 82–3, 106, 246 Glasgow, in  82–3, 112–13 Hebrides, in  106, 135–6 Highlands  23–4, 82–3, 246 Lowlands, in  106 Sri Lanka, in  219–20 urbanization and industrialization  21, 23–4, 49–50, 82–3, 106–8, 140–1 Wales, in  33–4, 49–50, 83, 106–8 Cardiff, in  83 Powell, David, OFM  244–5 Poynter, William, Bishop  9–10, 69, 72–4, 88, 194–5, 199–201 Empire, and  204–6, 214–16, 221–2 Preston, James  286–7, 291–3 Preston, Jenico  131–2 Printy, Michael  10–11 Propaganda Fide, Congregation of  4, 104–5, 115, 126–7, 137–8, 193–4, 205–6, 218 Protestant churches converts, Catholic, to  152–4 Scottish Kirk  17–18, 40 see also, Protestant, popular perceptions of Catholics Protestant, popular perceptions of Catholics  13–14, 16–18, 20, 27–9, 33–4, 37–8, 40–2, 45–7, 50–1, 142, 147, 151–2, 159–60, 291–2, 311–12 convents, and  168 French Revolution, and  156–7 Grand Tour, the, and  142, 270–1 Jacobite Rebellion, 1745 responses to  142–3, 151–2 popery, anti  2, 9, 50–2, 54, 58–9, 135–6, 144, 147, 151–3, 158–60 American colonies, in  207–8 Anglican Churches, and  144–6, 150–1, 159–60

Index  335 Good Hope, in  217–18 publications, relating to  33–4, 145–9, 157–9 rituals, and  145–6, 159–60 societies, promotion of  154–5, 158 riots and mobs, anti-Catholic  40, 47, 142–4, 155–6, 248–9 Gordon  2, 5–6, 41–3, 63, 111–12, 148–9, 155–6, 166, 286–7, 306–7, 317 see also, chapter 8 Pugin, Augustus Welby  240, 300–1, 303–4, 309 Pulleine, James  253–4 Quarantotti, Giovanni Battista, Monsignor  72–4 Quietism 288 Rebellion, Irish, of 1798  8–9, 59–63, 65, 154–5, 157 clergy, role in See, clergy, Ireland Protestants, killings of  63 Relief Acts, Catholic  2, 50–1 English (1778)  40, 45–7, 60–1, 111–12, 146–7, 154–6, 234–5, 278, 291–2, 299–300, 317, 324 English (1791)  51–2, 107–8, 111–12, 115, 138–9, 150–1, 156, 165, 174, 282–3, 292–3, 320, 322–4 Irish (1778)  41–2, 55, 60–1, 234–5 Irish (1782)  42–3, 110, 113–14, 192–3 Irish (1792)  51–2, 54 Irish (1793)  55–6, 61, 278 Quebec Act  39–40, 150–1, 210–12 Scottish (1793)  55, 156, 196–7 Ricci, Lorenzo, SJ  185–6 Rice, Edmund Ignatius  113–14 Ritter, Francis  214–16 Rowlands, Marie  21 Russell, Bartholomew, OP  121 Saville, George, Lord  39–42 Scallon, Thomas, Bishop  212–13 Sharratt, Michael  270 Sharrock, William, Bishop, OSB  131–2 Sheehy, Nicholas  27–8 Sheils, W. J.  143–4 Simms, Brendan  210–11 Slater, Edward Bede, OSB  217–18, 221–2 Smyth, Jim  283–4 Smythe, William, Sir  120 Southwell, Robert  224–5, 236 state support clergy, proposed salaries for  56, 68, 93, 100–1, 217–18 colleges, for  58–9 Emigrant Relief Committee  57–8 see also, finance

Stewart, Robert, Viscount Castlereagh  62–3, 65, 72–5 Stonor, John, Bishop  129, 136–7 structures, pastoral  4, 104–5, 121 apostolic vicarates England, in  69, 105 Scotland, in  23, 106 Wales, in  83 Ireland, in  47, 49–50, 61–2, 104–5 missions England, in  79–81 Scotland, in  82 Wales, in  83 see also, chapter 6 Stuart, Charles Edward  17–18, 31–2, 310–11 Stuart, Henry, Cardinal  310–11 Sulpicians  209, 211 Switzerland 149–50 Talbot, James, Bishop  204–5 Talbot, Thomas, Bishop  134–5 Tempest, Stephen  272–3 Temple, John  33–4, 146–7 Thomas, Hannah  307–8 Thomas, Keith  142 Thompson, Francis  224–5 Thorpe, John, SJ  309 toleration and relief  8–9, 18, 20, 33, 37, 41–2, 44–7, 56, 65, 121, 150–1, 277, 291–2 Constitutional Act  211–12 England, in  39–41, 58 Ireland, in  37–9, 41–4 relief, campaign for  49–50 see also, chapters 2 & 3 Scotland, in  41–2 see also, chapter 2 Tone, Theobald Wolfe  53, 91–2, 283–4 Townley, Charles  148–9, 308, 313–19 Treaties Paris, of  20 Trent, Council of  105, 133–4, 137, 168, 184–5 Troy, John Thomas, Archbishop, OP education, and  192–3 emancipation, and  70, 72–3 pastoral care, and  124–5, 127–8 radicalism, opposition to  62–3, 65 relief, and  53, 58–61 sacraments, and  138, 300 Tunstall, Marmaduke  148–9 Ullathorne, William Bernard, Archbishop  128–9 Union, Act of  62–3, 65, 94–5 United Irishmen  53–6, 61–3, 139–40, 157, 267–8, 283–4

336 Index Van Kley, Dale  265 Vesey Fitzgerald, William  99 Veto, Crown, on clerical appointments  68, 70–2, 74 Villiers Stuart, Henry, MP  95–6 Wade, John Francis  288–90, 296, 299–301 Wall, Maureen  6–7 Walmesley, Charles, OSB  91, 106–7, 129–30, 148–9, 270–1 Catholic Enlightenment, and  270–2 Walsh, Catherine  177–80 Walsh, John Baptist  187–8, 197–9 Walter, William Joseph  235–6 Ward, Bernard  5–6, 45–7, 201–2 wars American War of Independence  37–8, 60–1, 210–11 Napoleonic  73–4, 200–1, 204, 214–16 see also, chapter 11; French Revolution Seven Years’  19–20, 209 Spanish Succession  207 Webb, John, Sir  148–9 Webbe, Samuel  288–91, 293–5, 298, 300–3, Weld, Thomas  147–8, 174–5, 195–6 Wentworth, William, earl Fitzwilliam  40–1 Wesley, John  146–7, 150–4 Wesley, Samuel  290, 300, 302–3 Whelan, Kevin  6–7, 133–4 Whitehead, Maurice  195–6 Wilkes, Joseph, OSB  275–6, 283 William IV, King  212–13 Williams, Helen Maria  169–70 Williams, Michael  191–2 written cultures  224–30, 234–5, 241–3 catechisms  131, 229–30, 243–4, 248–9 devotional literature  21–2, 79–80, 129–32, 140, 227–9, 231–3, 243–4, 251–2, 272 continental authors  227, 245, 248, 253–4, 262 emancipation 234–5

history  227–9, 238–40 identity, Catholic  225–7, 238–40 Irish language, in  4–5, 10–11, 243, 251, 254–5, 257–62 catechisms  253, 256 devotional literature  251–2 dictionaries 257–8 pastoral letters  254–5 poetry 15 sermons  251–2, 255–6 translations, into  251–4, 257–8 literacy and illiteracy in Gaelic languages  250–1, 253–6, 260–2 novels 237–8 periodicals 235–6 poetry 224–5 polemics  227–9, 237–8 print, centres of  235–6, 245, 248, 257–8, 266–7 Scottish Gaelic language, in  4–5, 10–11, 82, 243, 246, 261–2 catechisms 248–9 literature 246–8 poetry 246–50 sermons 249 translations, into  248–50 sermons  128–30, 236–7, 243–4, 251–2 Welsh language, in  10–11, 243–5, 261–2 devotional literature  244–5 translations, into  245 see also, chapters 12 & 13 Wyndham, William, Baron Grenville  70, 93–4 Wyse, Thomas  89, 95–6 Yates, John  81–2 Yates, Nigel  6–7 Young, Charles  37–8 Zimmermann, Doron  14 Zoffany, Johann  308, 313–18 Zon, Bennett  297, 304