British Catholics Fight For Freedom

In the years since the Reformation, Catholics in England went from a sizable chunk of the population to a persecuted minority. Then, as I wrote about in my last column, the atmosphere changed. The new United Kingdom of Great Britain was more confident in its Protestantism, less scared of rebellion and treachery from its Catholic subjects.

Gradually the penal laws designed to suppress Catholics and their faith were reduced, abolished, or just ignored. Admittedly they had succeeded in their role, reducing the Catholic population to a mere rump in a country once known as the Dowry of Mary. As the penal laws were relaxed, the biggest change came with the entry of Ireland into the United Kingdom. Suddenly five million Catholics were added to the largely protestant nation, but instead of leading to wholesale anti-Catholic persecution as seen in the preceding centuries, a new approach reflected the new times.

Lay Catholic leaders were especially keen to reintegrate into the civic life of the nation. Like everything in history, it’s never quite as clear cut as it first appears, as there were plenty of lay Catholics keen to avoid compromise, and the vicars apostolic were often divided on the best way to proceed with securing Catholic participation in the life of the nation. Clerical authority remained strong in the various committees set up to fight the war for freedom, such as the 1808 Catholic Board. The main lay influences on these committees were aristocratic and clerical, but the growing middle class was about to make their mark, with the help of the Irish.

Daniel O’Connell set up his Catholic Association in Ireland in 1823, closely followed by the English version. Rather than being a partnership of clergy and aristocracy, these were clergy and middle-class lay-led effort. In these tumultuous years, many bills went to Parliament in an attempt to bring Catholic emancipation from the realm of a dream to reality. It was the content of these bills that would cause division with the Catholic community of England and between the Catholics of England and Ireland. The main concern of many sympathetic protestants was to preserve the independence of the state, and one way of doing that was to enforce a level of control over the Catholic Church in the UK. For example, the idea was often floated that the stipends that were provided to Catholic clergy should come from the British state.

This was not an unusual practice in the Church in other countries. Neither were some of the other proposals, such as the right of the Crown to scrutinise documents from Rome (the Crown by this stage simply means the government of the UK). There was also the argument for the ‘veto,’ which would allow the Crown to remove the names of any episcopal candidate that they disliked. It was the idea of the veto which proved the most divisive within the Catholic community. It particularly divided the English from the Irish.

In 1810 the Catholic Board approved the principle at a meeting in London, whilst Daniel O’Connell’s campaign refused to countenance the idea that the British government would have a say in something so central to the fabric of Catholic life. It was this refusal to accept the veto which held up the passing of some version of the Emancipation Act (though a version of the veto was accepted by the Irish in a Bill put forward in 1825. This Bill passed the Commons but fell in the Lords). There is always some version of the veto present in each era of Catholic history, whether it was medieval kings authorising the appointments or the deals done with communist governments in the 20th century. Sadly there was even a version of this arrangement recently put in place with the government of China.

By 1829 the situation had become untenable. The establishment, as suspicious as they were of Catholicism and what they saw as the bizarre practices of Popery, felt that the exclusion of Catholics and non-conformist protestants from public life went against the needs of a liberal social order. O’Connell himself proved to be the trigger for the change which transformed the situation of Catholics in the United Kingdom. As part of the penal laws, Catholics could not sit as Members of Parliament. In 1828 O’Connell stood as a candidate in County Clare, winning the election. O’Connell’s victory led to the conversion of two legends of early nineteenth-century British politics to the cause of Catholic emancipation.

The Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel, previously opposed to emancipation now realised it was a  necessary step. The Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister at the time. Hero of the Napoleonic wars and victor at the Battle of Waterloo, Wellington tended to be a conservative-leaning Prime Minister who sat in the House of Lords; he was a Tory who believed in maintaining the social fabric of the United Kingdom. Wellington was an Irishman himself, born into the Protestant Ascendancy in Dublin. Not a man by nature sympathetic to Catholicism, in debates in the House of Lords (the chamber most hostile to emancipation) he declared,

It is impossible to suppose that a small number of persons admitted into this House, and a small number admitted into the other House, while we have a Protestant Sovereign on the Throne, should be productive of legislative danger to the Church of England in Ireland.

Sir Robert Peel, most famous for founding the first modern police force (and the reason that the early police in Britain were known as ‘Peelers’) was the other key player in getting the legislation through Parliament. The final Emancipation Act included a few restrictions and caveats put in place to keep secure the protestant settlement so valued by the establishment, these included a parliamentary oath that denied the right of the Pope to have any secular authority over the United Kingdom. It’s interesting to note what restrictions were not enacted, such as the ban on religious orders. Also, many penal laws remained, especially in Ireland, but most became dead letters, impossible to enforce in the new atmosphere and political reality.

The consequences of the Act for the United Kingdom were diverse. On the religious side, it would take just over twenty years for the hierarchy to be reconstituted in England and Wales. There was also a steady trickle of notable converts to the Catholic Faith which continued up until the era of the Second Vatican Council, including figures such as Newman and Evelyn Waugh, but also embracing many ordinary Englishmen and women whose names are lost to history.

There were political consequences too. Unsurprisingly, the increase in the Catholic voter base in Ireland began the process which led to the development of a distinct Irish political movement and the formation of political parties to represent that movement; parties that took to winning seats in the House of Commons and even became the deciding factor in who would become the Prime Minister of the most powerful nation on earth.  One that campaigned for Home Rule for Ireland in the nineteenth century. It’s also worth pointing out that the Home Rule movement in Ireland, whilst building on the Catholic votes of the vast majority of Irishmen, also embraced protestant supporters (and leaders, such as Charles Stewart Parnell) as well as Catholics.

Ultimately the passage of the Emancipation Act was part of a process of liberalization that included a growing campaign for a wider voter franchise; as well as reflecting the explosive growth of a middle class that was far more non-conformist than the traditional elites of England. As the nation changed, the role of Catholics became more prominent as well as accepted in the wider world. The stage was now set for the return of the hierarchy to England, and the career of a legendary cardinal archbishop of Westminster.