Book Description

Roman Catholicism remained a threat to the English constitution for three centuries following the Reformation, and virulent hatred of popery was widespread among Parliament and public alike. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, with Europe in revolutionary turmoil, Britain's stability and safety were seen to depend on defending the Protestant constitution, and to many this meant continuing to exclude Catholics from political and public life--disabilities bitterly resented especially among the predominantly Catholic Irish. In this book, Wendy Hinde examines the interaction of events and personalities in the sixteen months from January 1828 to April 1829 which brought the issue to a crisis, culminating in the defiant election of Catholic activist Daniel O'Connell for County Clare in July 1828 and 'a glorious and bloodless victory' for the Irish Catholics and their unlikely champion, the Duke of Wellington. Wellington stood firm against strong public opposition, fierce resistance in the Commons and the Lords, and the intransigence of King George IV, who believed that he was bound by his coronation oath to maintain the rights and privileges of the Church of England. Finally, on 13 April 1829, after earlier sacking the entire Cabinet and changing his mind overnight, the embattled King put his signature to the Catholic relief bill, and five weeks later the first Irish MP took his seat in Parliament. In tracing this vexed passage of a bill described by one of its opponents as 'the most fatal, the most infatuated and suicidal measure ever adopted by a British Parliament', Wendy Hinde considers Catholic emancipation in relation to other important aspects of the contemporary political scene: pressure for parliamentary reform, the changing relationship between Lords and Commons, the declining power of the monarch and the rise of Irish nationalism. She shows that Catholic emancipation did not fatally undermine the English constitution, as many had feared; nor, as others had hoped, did it bring peace, prosperity and an end to sectarian discord to the Irish people. However, in demonstrating that constitutional change was possible and that public pressure could be brought to bear on the government without bloodshed, it opened the way for the further political, social and economic reforms of the 1830s.