Antonia Fraser is well known for both fiction and non-fiction works. I have her biographies of Mary Queen of Scots and King Charles II. I have also read a magazine (?) article, where she cast doubts on the official version of the Gunpowder Plot. She writes good, old-fashioned narrative history - shades of C.V. Wedgwood? She admits, in her Author's Note at the start, to a lifelong fascination with Catholic history, but the tone of the book is pretty balanced.
There was half a century between the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 and the passing of the Emancipation Bill in 1829. From violence to a 'bloodless revolution'. Caught up in the extremely emotive, partisan, often bigoted clashes were a gallery of fascinating characters. It is one of Antonia Fraser's strengths that she is a compelling delineator of human beings. It is what makes her such a readable biographer.
The tone was set from the very top - by George III, who reigned through most of this period, dying in 1820, and George IV. The former was determined to stick to his Coronation Oath (devised in 1689) to the utmost of your power maintain the laws of God, the true profession of the Gospel, and the Protestant reformed religion established by law. He (and his successor) maintained the Catholic problem/menace caused him to lose his mind. George IV had visited Ireland in August 1821 (the first reigning monarch to do so since Richard II in 1399) and his behaviour and hints to the Irish suggested movement on Emancipation. By the end of his reign, however, he was as firmly opposed to it as his father was. Then there were the royal brothers (George III had nine sons), Frederick, Duke of York - the bulwark of the Protestant cause; William, Duke of Clarence - a more liberal figure altogether; and Ernest, Duke of Cumberland. York and Cumberland were both firmly anti Catholic.
Lord George Gordon, the sixth child of the Duke of Gordon, whose long red hair to his shoulders and slightly protuberant blue eyes and libertine private life gave a certain flamboyance but erratic (Fraser suggests he might have been bipolar) leadership to the 1780 rioting. Arrested and indicted for High Treason, he was subsequently acquitted. Repeated misbehaviour meant further imprisonment and he died of a fever, aged 42, in Newgate.
Hovering over everything was the ever-present problem of Ireland. Wolfe Tone's leadership of the Irish revolt of the United Irishmen against English domination in 1798 can be contrasted with the more measured, and politically skilful, movement led, firstly, by Henry Gratton and then by Daniel O'Connell. The latter, in particular, knew how to sway and lead opinion, (his big, burly figure indicated health and strength) by personality, compelling oratory and sound political judgement. Not for nothing was he known as King Dan or the Liberator (he much admired, and copied, Simon Bolivar of South America).
On the Catholic side there were other fascinating figures. Bishop John Milner, rigid believer in the dominance of the (Catholic) church over the aristocracy, possibly seeing himself as a Catholic Moses, leading his flock out of bondage and the wilderness. He was to prove a thorn in the flesh of the Protestants and, often, an embarrassment to his own side. His approach contrasted with the English Catholic aristocrats - Lord Petre of Thorndon Hall in Essex, who had a Jesuit chaplain, was Grand Master of the Masonic Order, but regarded as a true and liberal Christian. The Weld family were based at Lulworth Castle in Dorset. I have been to the Great Chapel in the castle grounds, which Thomas Weld had started to build in 1786. The story was that George III, on a visit had, with a wink, suggested that it was going to be a free-standing family mausoleum. Other ancient Catholic families included the Stourtons, Stonors, Gages and Throckmortons. Many of the family leaders joined the Catholic Committee - loyal to the Crown, maintaining that the Catholic clergy's authority, like the Pope's, was to be spiritual only. Cisalpine rather than Transalpine.
Ranked above them all was the Howard family, at its head Charles 11th Duke of Norfolk. He declared that if he was going to hell, he would rather go to hell from the House of Lords than anywhere else; he who preferred an 'ambivalent' status. Also important was the papal delegate, Cardinal Ercole Consalvi (the first cardinal to set foot officially in England since Reginal Pole), who built up a useful rapport with the Prince Regent. Antonia Fraser estimates that there were c.70,000-80,000 British Catholics in the 1770s out of a population of some 7 million.
Apart from O'Connell, the two men who did the most for Catholic Emancipation, by persuading a weeping George IV grudging to give way, were, ironically, diametrically opposed to it throughout their previous political careers.The Duke of Wellington (and brother Richard, Marquess Wellesley, whom the Duke referred to as 'whoring'! and who was far more favourable to the push for Catholic rights) and Robert Peel, Chief Secretary to Ireland and, later, Home Secretary, whose early contempt for the Catholic aristocrats and opposition to Catholic Emancipation gained him the nickname Orange Peel. His record of opposing Catholic Emancipation was both long-held and publicly held. Antonia Fraser heads a late chapter From RPeel to Repeal. (Political) common sense prevailed - others would view it as trimming sails to the prevailing wind. If so, not the first nor the last politician to do so. In more recent times the Rev. Dr. Ian Paisley (1926-2014), a Protestant firebrand, known by some as the Northern Ireland Ayatollah - who was on record as saying that Catholic homes caught fire because they were loaded with petrol bombs and that Pope John Paul II was the Antichrist - ended up 'in bed' (or, rather, government) with an arch enemy and Catholic, Martin McGuiness (1950-2017), so much so that they were nicknamed the Chuckle Brothers. Leopards can change their outward spots at the very least.
I came away from reading the book with a much clearer idea of why Catholic Emancipation succeeded, but equally aware of why so much trouble was to blight relations between Ireland and England for another two centuries It is still a smouldering pot - the ashes have not burnt out.
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