The King and the Catholics
England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
In the eighteenth century, the Catholics of England lacked many basic freedoms under the law: they could not serve in political office, buy or inherit land, or be married by the rites of their own religion. So virulent was the sentiment against Catholics that, in 1780, violent riots erupted in London—incited by the anti-Papist Lord George Gordon—in response to the Act for Relief that had been passed to loosen some of these restrictions.
The Gordon Riots marked a crucial turning point in the fight for Catholic emancipation. Over the next fifty years, factions battled to reform the laws of the land. Kings George III and George IV refused to address the “Catholic Question,” even when pressed by their prime ministers. But in 1829, through the dogged work of charismatic Irish lawyer Daniel O’Connell and the support of the great Duke of Wellington, the watershed Roman Catholic Relief Act finally passed, opening the door to the radical transformation of the Victorian age. Gripping, spirited, and incisive, The King and the Catholics is character-driven narrative history at its best, reflecting the dire consequences of state-sanctioned oppression—and showing how sustained political action can triumph over injustice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fraser (Cromwell) provides a brisk popular history of the fight for Catholic emancipation in England and Ireland. She begins with the Gordon Riots in 1780 and takes readers through the complexities of nearly 40 years of politicking around the question of religious rights in the United Kingdom, leading up to the passage of the Catholic Relief Act in 1829. The Act was designed to ease penalties that had been on Roman Catholics in the United Kingdom since the 17th century. Fraser discusses a variety of these laws they included restrictions on the ownership of private property and the education of children and how they affected the Catholic population from peasant to aristocrat. Although some small pieces of legislation to relieve Catholics had been passed prior to 1829, general relief legislation always foundered on resistance in the House of Lords and from monarchs. Fraser traces how the conditions arose in the 1820s to allow this resistance to be overcome, including the convincing of two dedicated opponents of relief, Arthur Wellington and Robert Peel, leaders of the Conservative Party government in the House of Commons. Fraser's account, which entertains with fine descriptions of London's heated political and religious climate, will interest any reader of popular histories.
