Prejudice and Popery

Once won, rights and freedoms are taken for granted. We all find it difficult to imagine life before the Married Women’s Property Act, when everything belonging to a wife — goods, chattels, children — automatically became the sole property of her husband. Those born since the 1960s can’t really envisage what it was like for practising homosexuals in those days. By a similar token, the mind can scarcely take in the fact that in Penal times, Catholics could not buy or sell land; or that it was an imprisonable offence for Catholics to run a school. It was a legal offence to dress as a monk or a nun out of doors.

It was the relaxation of these stringent and, by then, totally unnecessary, laws, which led, in the hot summer of 1780 to the so-called Gordon Riots, in which Lord George Gordon inflamed the worst mob violence London had ever seen, with more than 1,000 dead. The rioters were not conspicuous for their theological subtlety. When called upon to attack a house because ‘there are Catholics there’, one group shouted back: ‘What are Catholics to us? We are against Popery.’

It is with these terrifying scenes, familiar to readers of Barnaby Rudge, that Antonia Fraser begins her unflagging narrative. Her book traces that half century between the Gordon Riots and the moment, in 1829, when the Tories, guided by the Duke of Wellington, realised that enough was enough, and the anti-Catholic laws could safely be repealed. Indeed, that in Ireland, it would not be safe until they were repealed. The Duke of Norfolk, and the few remaining Catholic peers, could fish out their ancient robes of state and take their seats in the House of Lords. Catholic schools could function legally, and the religious orders, many of whom had fled from revolutionary Europe, could lead their prayerful lives without the authorities worrying that a new Gunpowder Plot was being hatched.