parently at his orders by the ministry-opposed it in the Lords, and in spite of the warm support of Chatham it was defeated in that House. In 1779, however, it was brought in with more success, and by the concurrence of both parties Dissenting ministers and tutors were admitted to the benefits of the Toleration Act without a subscription to the Articles, provided they declared themselves Christians and Protestants, and believers in the Old and New Testaments.2 In the same year the Irish Parliament relieved the Irish Nonconformists from the Test Act. On these questions the tendency of the Whigs was somewhat more decidedly towards religious liberty than that of the Tories. This was, however, in some degree due to the greater freedom of an Opposition, and in some degree to the old alliance of the Dissenters with the Whigs; and each party was much divided, and the prevailing temper of Lord North was far removed from intolerance. In one most important measure, which marks an epoch in the history of religious liberty, the Government, as we have already seen, represented the liberal, and the Opposition the intolerant side. The Quebec Act of 1774, establishing Catholicism in Canada, would a generation earlier have been impossible, and it was justly considered a remarkable sign of the altered condition of opinion that such a law should be enacted by a British Parliament, and should have created no serious disturbances in the country. The Church party was at this time closely allied with the Court against the Americans. The bishops were on nearly all questions steady supporters of Lord North, and only one of them actively opposed the Quebec Bill. The Whig party and the City politicians were fiercely hostile to the measure. Chatham denounced it as a breach of the Reformation, of the Revolution, and of the King's Coronation Oath,' 'a gross violation of the Protestant religion.' The City of London presented an address to the King petitioning him not to give his assent to a Bill which was inconsistent with his Coronation Oath and with his position as protector of the Protestant religion. When the King went down to the House of Lords to give his assent to Correspondence of George III. with Lord North, i. 101. 2 19 Geo. III. c. 44. See Belsham's Life of Lindsey, pp. 66 67 CH. XIII. THE CATHOLIC QUESTION. 503 the Bill, he was met by cries of No Popery!' from an angry mob, and the Sovereign who in his later years was justly regarded as the bitterest enemy of his Catholic subjects in Ireland, was now described as leaning more strongly to Popery than any English monarch since the Stuarts. It was customary to compare George III. in this respect to Charles I.2 When Burke, in 1775, moved his famous scheme for conciliating America, Horace Walpole commented upon it in these terms: It is remarkable that in his proposed repeal he did not mention the Quebec Bill-another symptom of his old Popery.' The success of the Quebec Act led Parliament, a few years later, to undertake the relief of the Catholics at home. from some part of the atrocious penal laws to which they were still subject. The absurdity of maintaining such laws suspended over the heads of a small and peaceful fraction of the nation, in an age of general enlightenment and toleration, was now keenly felt, and it was the more conspicuous on account of the marked change which had passed over the spirit of the chief Catholic Governments of Europe. Religion had everywhere ceased to be a guiding motive in politics. Nearly all the Catholic governments of Europe were animated by a purely secular spirit, and were completely emancipated from clerical influence. Pombal in Portugal; Choiseul, Malesherbes, and Turgot in France; Aranda and Grimaldi in Spain, however much they may have differed on other points, were in this perfectly agreed. If Austria, under Maria Theresa, formed a partial exception, the accession to the empire of Joseph II. in 1764 had already given a new bias to its policy. The Jesuits, who represented especially the intolerance and aggressiveness of Catholicism, had, for many years, lost all credit and almost all power. They had been expelled from Portugal in 1759, from France in 1764, from Bohemia and Denmark in 1766, from Spain, the Spanish colonies in America, Venice and Genoa in 1767, from Malta, Naples, and Parma in 1768, and, at last, in 1773 Clement XIV. had been induced to issue his famous bull suppressing the order. In nearly all Catholic countries, the tendency was to enlarge the bounds of religious liberty, to secularise the Government, and to restrict the power of the Church. Charles III. had almost completely fettered the Inquisition of Spain. In the course of a few years, stringent laws were made reducing the power of the clergy in Venice, Austrian Lombardy, Piedmont, Parma, and the Two Sicilies. An imperial edict in 1776 had abolished some of the worst forms of persecution in Austria and Hungary, and in the same year Necker, though an austere Calvinist, obtained a foremost place among the ministers of France. All these things made the legal position of the English Catholics appear especially shameful, and the laws against them manifestly reflected the passions and the intolerance of another age. In considering, however, the real working of these laws, we must remember the curious conservatism of English legislators, who have continually preferred to allow a bad or an unpopular law to become dormant rather than repeal it. The Statute-book is by no means a true reflex of contemporary opinion and practice, for it is full of strange survivals of other ages. Thus a law of Henry V. which provided that all members of counties and boroughs must be residents in the constituencies they represented, and that no non-resident could be a voter, was suffered to be absolutely obsolete for centuries, and was at last removed from the Statute-book in 1774. I have already referred to the law for slowly pressing to death prisoners who refused to plead, which was only repealed in 1772,2 and to the law for punishing Irish witches with death, which was only repealed in 1821,3 and several other almost equally striking instances may be adduced. Shortly before the Restoration, thirteen gipsies were executed at one Suffolk assize, under a law of Elizabeth, which made all gipsies found It was repealed by 14 Geo. III. c. 58. See for much information on this subject, Creasy's Hist. of the Con stitution, 257-260. 2 12 Geo. III. c. 20. 505 in England liable to death,' and this law, though censured by a committee of the House of Commons in 1772,2 was not repealed till 1783. The mediaval appeal of murder,' which enabled the heir of the deceased person to challenge the alleged murderer to battle, after his acquittal by a jury, and which took away from the Crown all power of pardoning the accused if he were defeated, was recognised by English law during the whole of the eighteenth century. It was eulogised in Parliament by Dunning in 1774, and it was only abolished in 1819 on account of an appellee having, in the previous year, thrown down his glove in the Court of King's Bench and demanded his legal right of trial by battle.5 The wager of law,' according to which a man who was charged with a debt was released from it if he denied the obligation, and obtained eleven neighbours to swear, from a general knowledge of his character, that they believed him, existed in English law till 1833.6 From time to time an ingenious man exhumed some obsolete and forgotten law for the purpose of extorting money or gratifying revenge. Thus, in 1761, we find a lady tried at Westminster to recover a penalty of 20l., under a law of Elizabeth, because she had not attended any authorised place of worship for a month previously, and acquitted by the jury on the ground of her ill-health. In 1772, a vicar was fined 10l. and his curate 51. for not having read in church an old Act against cursing and swearing. The vicar, it appears, had dismissed his curate, and the sons of the latter having discovered the existence of this long-forgotten law, brought the action in revenge, not knowing that their father would be involved in the condemnation. In 1774, a gentleman was indicted at the Chester Assizes for having broken the law of Elizabeth, which, in order to prevent the increase of the poor, made it penal to erect any detached cottage without accompanying it with four acres of freehold land. The judges expressed great indignation at the proceeding, and at their representation the statute 8 • Blackstone, book iv. c. 13. 2 Parl. Hist. xvii. 448-450. 323 Geo. III. c. 51. 4 Parl. Hist. xvii. 1291–1297. See, too, Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors, viii. 22-24. 59 Geo. III. c. 46. 3 & 4 William IV. c. 42. "British Chronicle, Feb. 23, 1761. 8 Gentleman's Magazine, 1772, p. 339. 931 Eliz. c. 7. See Blackstone, book iv. c. 13. was repealed in the following session.' Two statutes of Charles II. requiring that the dead should be buried in woollen, and imposing a penalty of 5l. on clergymen who neglected to certify to the churchwarden any instances in which the Act was not complied with, were only repealed in 1814, on account of a number of actions being brought by a common informer to recover the penalties.2 In all, or nearly all of these cases, the prosecutions were due to private motives of revenge or avarice, and similar motives, no doubt, inspired most of those directed against Catholics. The Act still subsisted which gave a reward of 1001. to any informer who procured the conviction of a Catholic priest performing his functions in England, and there were occasional prosecutions, though the judges strained the law to the utmost in order to defeat them, and insisted upon a rigour and fulness of proof that would not have been exacted in any other case. In 1767, a priest named John Baptist Malony was tried at Croydon on the charge of having administered the sacrament to a sick person, was found guilty and was condemned to perpetual imprisonment. He lay for some years in confinement, and was then banished from England. In the same year, a mass-house in Southwark was suppressed, but the priest succeeded in escaping by a back-door. Two priests, named Webb and Talbot- the latter a brother of Lord Shrewsbury— were prosecuted in 1768 and 1769, but were acquitted through a defect in the evidence establishing their orders. Malony 2 Phillimore's Hist. of Geo. III. p. 68. 54 Geo. III. c. 108. According to Burke (speech at Bristol in 1780), two or three years. Burke's Works, iii. 389. Oliver says his imprisonment lasted four years. (Collections illustrating the Hist. of the Catholic Religion in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, &c. pp. 14, 15.) Lord Shelburne alluded to this case in a speech in 1778. Mr. Malony, a priest of the Roman Catholic persuasion, had been apprehended and brought to trial by the lowest and most despicable of mankind, a common informing constable of the City of London. He was convicted of being a popish priest, and the Court were reluctantly obliged to condemn him (shocking as the idea was) to perpetual imprisonment. His Lordship was then in office, and though every method was taken by the Privy Council to give a legal discharge to the prisoner, neither the laws then in force would allow of it, nor dared the King himself to grant him a pardon. He, however, with his colleagues in office, was so perfectly persuaded of the impolicy and inhumanity of the law, that they ventured to give him his liberty at every hazard.'-Parl Hist. xix. 1145. |