The King and the Catholics Quotes

“but there had been nothing equal to it since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. (In 1685 Louis XIV had removed that freedom granted to the Huguenots by Henry IV to practise their own religion; it led to persecution followed by widespread emigration.) It was an odd comparison since the Revocation removed a liberty and Catholic Emancipation granted it.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“It was the unhappy (Protestant) Huguenots, notably after the Massacre of St Bartholomew, who had sought to escape France and settle in England. Now the picture had changed. France was no longer a Catholic enemy, but an enemy representing Unbelief who was thus an enemy of Catholicism. It was a country in which nuns and priests were likely to be murdered, or imprisoned and executed during the Terror of 1792.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“George IV remained unwilling to give his Royal Assent to the bill until the very end. He did so finally, ‘with pain and regret’,”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“Anti-Catholicism in England was certainly not eliminated in 1829, just as permanent peace was certainly not achieved in Ireland.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“The fact that Catholic soldiers could die for a country which denied them the worship they wanted was constantly and rightly emphasized during the campaign for Emancipation.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“Peel was certainly no Judas: he was a man of honest conviction who had honestly changed his mind and had the courage to say so. Nevertheless, the slur would affect his standing in the Tory Party and the next great campaign for Reform.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“the Duke of Wellington placed the peace and welfare of that actual United Kingdom above religious scruples and decided that Emancipation was necessary to secure it. The religious scruples included those of the sovereign, swept aside at the end in a masterly way that only Wellington could manage.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“Nuns evidently did not evoke the same primitive angry dread as monks.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“Catholic priests could not be Members of Parliament.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“Neither the Lord Chancellor specifically nor, by implication, the Prime Minister could be Roman Catholics. The latter would be precluded by the clause which forbade any Catholic to advise on ecclesiastical appointments, a duty which comes to the Prime Minister of a country in which there is an officially Established Church.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“It was not until the reign of his son George V (who took the oath in its old form) that a bill was passed in both Houses which abolished the old declaration of 1689 and substituted the positive for the negative: a declaration ‘that I am a faithful Protestant’ who would maintain the enactments which secured the Protestant Succession to the throne as well as the throne itself. The Coronation Oath taken by Queen Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953 consisted of a similar positive statement.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“Before reading the speech from the throne, Edward VII was called by the Lord Chancellor, in accordance with the Bill of Rights of 1689, to repeat a declaration repudiating the doctrine of Transubstantiation and asserting that ‘the invocation or adoration of the Virgin Mary or any other saint and the sacrifice of the Mass as they are now used in the Church of Rome are superstitious and idolatrous’. There was to be no evasion, equivocation or mental reservation whatever. King Edward saw it as a gratuitous insult to his Catholic friends,”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“Fifty-odd years after the Gordon Riots, Daniel O’Connell hailed the Emancipation Act as ‘one of the greatest triumphs recorded in history – a bloodless revolution more extensive in its operation than any other political change that could take place.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“Daniel O’Connell had to wait until Parliament reassembled to commence his parliamentary career. He finally took his seat on 4 February 1830.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“the new oath which was the prelude to taking his seat; the hateful declarations against Transubstantiation, adoration of the Virgin Mary and the ‘superstitious and idolatrous’ Mass of the Church of Rome were no longer demanded.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“On 18 April, five days after the passing of the bill, he took his seat in the House of Lords, with Lord Dormer and Lord Clifford, the first Catholics to do so since the reign of Charles II. There were in fact only eight Catholic peers available – one duke, one earl and six barons – whereas 200 years earlier there had been at least twenty-two. The rest of the titles had one way or another slipped out of Catholic hands.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“O’Connell, an Irish Roman Catholic, had been duly elected for Co. Clare nine months earlier.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“THE FIRST DAY OF FREEDOM!’: this was how Daniel O’Connell headed one letter on 14 April 1829, the day after Catholic Emancipation became law in Britain and Ireland.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“Robert Peel, whose conversion had sparked off the last stage of the struggle, would be able to address the House of Commons once more as its Leader. The wearer of the crown had not in the end gone against the will of his government: Emancipation was proposed in the King’s speech.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“Peel now wrote to the Dean of Christ Church (his old college) to tell him that he intended to bring in a bill in favour of Emancipation and offering his resignation if it was required.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“Above all it was essential that Peel should still be speaking for the government in the House of Commons where the Duke, as a peer, had no voice. Wellington duly passed Peel’s memo on to the King on 14 January, and the next day the King interviewed all those members of the Cabinet hitherto pledged against Emancipation. In the end King George, with reluctance, agreed to consider the whole question of Ireland.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“This came after the Archbishop of Canterbury and two of his fellow bishops had indicated to the Prime Minister that the attitude of the Church of England towards Catholic Emancipation, symbolized by their persistently hostile voting in the House of Lords, had not changed.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“ON 12 JANUARY 1829, a week before Anglesey’s tragic, tearful and triumphant departure from Ireland, the Home Secretary, Robert Peel, wrote a long letter to Wellington. He told him that if his resignation would be an ‘insuperable obstacle’ to Emancipation, he would stay.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“In the 1820s there was prejudice, but there was also progress.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“In 1825 the Bishop of Chester estimated that there were now about half a million Catholics in England, risen from 67,000 in 1750, while in Glasgow the figure had leaped from 300 to 25,000, almost entirely imported from Ireland.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“The need for labour, combined with the sheer poverty of Ireland, inspired that despairing urge for emigration in search of a better life which is universal to history. St Patrick’s Day began to be celebrated in Manchester. By 1821 there was said to be an Irish Catholic population in Liverpool of 12,000, which would rise to 60,000 in the next ten years.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“And, just as Peel was believed to have done previously for the opposite result, Plunket evidently swayed the House of Commons in favour of Relief. His basic theme was, crudely put: why pick on the Catholics? ‘He might be an infidel, he might believe in Jupiter, in Osiris, the ape, the crocodile, in all the host of heaven, and all the creeping things of the earth, and [still] be admitted to all the privileges of the state.’ For the first time since 1813 there was a victory for Emancipation in the Commons by six votes – and at the third reading by nineteen – only to be thrown out by the Lords.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“in England after 1815 a general atmosphere of relaxation towards the Catholic community, even if it was for the time being unaccompanied by any positive legal results.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“In 1775 Louis XVI had been faced with his own Coronation Oath crisis. His chief minister, Turgot, wanted the King to drop the King’s pledge to extirpate heretics, which had actually been inserted in the thirteenth century to deal with the Albigensian heresy of the Cathars, but was now applied to Protestants.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829

“One feature of the trial – as with all other trials – was of course the fact that the jury consisted entirely of Protestants, Catholics being debarred from jury service.”
― Antonia Fraser, The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829