Two books, each very different, both grippingly written, seem to me to have particular contemporary resonance. I’d recommend the pair to anyone seeking a fresh perspective on the current state of global affairs.
The first, perhaps surprisingly, is Antonia Fraser’s The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Rights, 1829. The clue to its pertinence is in the subtitle, however, where it mentions ‘Rights’. As A N Wilson notes in his review in The Spectator, once won, rights and freedoms are taken for granted. Today, we find it difficult, if not impossible, to imagine life before the Married Women’s Property Act, when a woman’s belongings automatically became the sole property of her husband upon marriage:
“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.”
The penal laws notably excluded Catholics from public life, but they extended to Protestant non-conformists too. Indeed, the term ‘non-conformist’ derived from their refusal to take the oath of adherence to the Established Church of England as required by the 1662 Act of Uniformity – specifically, to the ‘Articles of Religion’ in the new Book of Common Prayer.
No office in government could be held, nor in the church or the army, without the swearing of the oath. It was the reaction of the restored monarchy to Oliver Cromwell’s rule as Lord Protector. These penal laws increased in scope after the 1688 ‘Glorious Revolution’, when King James II, a Catholic, attempted to re-establish the rights of Catholics. This merely precipitated his deposal in favour of the staunchly Protestant Dutch Prince William of Orange, who was married to James’s daughter Mary.
Throughout the 18th Century the laws stood on the statute books, though were ameliorated somewhat to allow Catholic recruiting for the army, especially in Ireland. An attempt to repeal them in 1780 precipitated the ‘Gordon Riots’, which resulted in huge damage in London and 300 deaths.
Parliament was, on the whole, fairly relaxed about repeal. The reluctance lay with successive monarchs: George III and George IV both felt bound by their specifically Protestant coronation oaths, and (to begin with) the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel felt as strongly.
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