A HUNDRED YEARS AGO

A GLANCE AT THE FORMER POSITION OF ENGLISH AND IRISH CATHOLICS1

H

ARDLY more than a century ago-that is, at

the very beginning of the year 1801-Pitt, the illustrious Pitt, greater son of a great father, felt himself compelled to resign the office of Prime Minister of England because King George III obstinately refused to agree to the measure of Catholic Emancipation proposed by the ministry. At the present day, when for more than two generations we have been accustomed to enjoy full liberty in religious matters and to claim our rightful position in the State as citizens, it is somewhat difficult for us English, and more difficult for you in free America, to realise the meaning of that term "Emancipation," and to understand the actual position of our English and Irish Catholic forefathers at the dawn of the nineteenth century. They were still suffering under the very real remnants of the penal code which had been designed to destroy them, and from which Pitt had pledged himself to his Irish supporters to free them.

Pitt was not alone in his desire to assist the small

1 A lecture given at Birmingham in 1901, and printed in America in 1905.

and impoverished body of Catholics to obtain some relief from the intolerable yoke which they had borne so long with exemplary fortitude. For the last quarter of the previous century most, if not all, serious English politicians had recognised the essential injustice of the attempt to force men by pains, penalties, and disabilities to accept what their consciences rejected; and already some measures of relief had eased the pressure of the previous two hundred years. The success, in 1774, of Lord North's Bill, which practically established Catholicism in Canada, led Parliament a few years later to look nearer home. In spite of Chatham's denunciation of the "Quebec Act," as the Canadian measure was called, which he declared to be an overt "breach of the Reformation," Sir George Savile introduced a Bill in 1778 to relieve English Catholics from some part of what Mr. Lecky characterises as "the atrocious penal laws to which they were still subject."

It is hardly possible to exaggerate the hopeless condition to which at this time Catholics had been reduced. Ingenious repressive measures had taken the place of more active persecution, and the Catholic at best found himself an alien in his own country. Whilst the statute book still recorded against his property, his liberty, and even his life, laws which were ever held in terror over him, and which were at times, through spite or religious fanaticism, even invoked against him, he was sedulously shut out from all participation in the national life of his country, and all professions were equally barred against him. At first, and for generations, Catholics had struggled to free themselves from the strong grip of the State upon their throats, which was intentionally choking the life out of them. Like a suffocating man

under like conditions, some did not stop to think whether their efforts were right or politic, or could be justified by the cut-and-dried principles of casuistry.

It is easy for us, who do not feel the strong arm of the law ever threatening our existence, to criticise and condemn the action of this or that individual amongst them who, as he saw himself and others lying, writhing, helpless and dying, thought to make terms which would give them air and life and hope again. But at the time of which I now speak, even these bids for liberty were things of the past; and-to carry out my simile-the Catholic body had ceased to struggle in its agony, and lay breathless and almost without any visible sign of life under the mailed hand of the State, assisted by the studied repression and neglect of the Protestant nation. Hope had long since departed from the breasts of most; and almost the only prayer which in the records of that terrible time the historian can recognise as uttered by the rapidly dwindling body of English Catholics, is one for resignation and for the grace to be left to die in peace.

There were, of course, exceptions; but gloom and despair seem to have settled down as a black cloud over English Catholics from the middle of the eighteenth century. Those who persisted in acting and agitating were looked on, even by those for whom they fought and strove, as dangerous disturbers of a tacit truce, and as men who by their indiscretions might well bring down again upon the heads of all the rigours of active persecution. Sad indeed-terribly sad-was the lot of that band of the faithful few at that time. In all the chronicles of history I know of no page which records a more touching, a more heartrending, story than that of this

yearly diminishing remnant of those who had never bowed their knees to Baal, who had proved themselves ready to undergo the long-drawn agony of a life-martyrdom for the faith of their fathers.

"My thoughts," says the great Daniel O'Connell, speaking to English Catholics-" my thoughts turn to that period in your history when religious dissension assembled all its elements together, and scattered to the wind the faith and ritual of your forefathers. Sad, indeed, since that time has been the record of religion and its sufferings in England. He who would follow it seems to himself as though present at a shipwreck where naught may be discerned on every side but scattered and disjointed fragments-here perhaps the broken plank, there the shattered spar. But still the helm was left; it was fashioned of the heart of oak, and while that survived there was hope for those who clung to it."

But even hope itself had wellnigh departed; and in the darkest hours that went before the dawn of better times the thoughts of many hearts were but little removed, except by resignation to God's will, from blank despair. Still, some souls chafed at the situation, and were restless under the debasing and precarious condition in which they found themselves.

"Shall I," wrote one of the most vigorous of the malcontents—“ shall I sit down silently satisfied, because the good humour of a magistrate chooses to indulge me, whilst there are laws of which any miscreant has daily power to enforce the execution? My ease, my property and my life are at the disposal of every villain, and I am to be pleased because he is not at this time disposed to deprive me of them. To-morrow his humour may vary, and I shall then be obliged to hide my head in

some dark corner, or to fly from this land of boasted liberty."

From time to time this did take place; and, as the historian of the eighteenth century has recorded, the poor Papist was forcibly reminded that the harsh measures of the penal code could still with a little ingenuity be applied to him. Some busybody of an individualan enemy or a zealot-not unfrequently exhumed obsolete and half-forgotten laws for the purpose of extorting money, of gratifying revenge, or appeasing his thirst for the persecution of those who differed from him. In 1761 a lady was tried at Westminster to recover a penalty of £20, under a law of Elizabeth, because she had not been to a place of worship for the previous month. Down to the days of Pitt the law still adjudged £100 reward to any one who would procure the conviction of a priest. As late as 1767 a priest was tried at Croydon on the charge of having administered the Sacrament to a sick person, found guilty and condemned to perpetual imprisonment. He actually lay in gaol for three or four years for his offence, and then was banished out of England. In the same year a chapel in Southwark was forcibly suppressed, and the priest escaped from the officers by the back door; and although probably Father Malony was the only priest actually convicted and sentenced for being a priest during the reign of George III, the attempts were sufficiently numerous to cause constant apprehension of what might at any time happen, and to render the position of Catholics sufficiently precarious.

Lord Mansfield and Lord Camden, the former in particular, incurred odium, and in fact suffered popular violence, for the way in which they set themselves as