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The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England QUOTES

The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England QUOTES

1 " 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: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England

2 " 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: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England

3 " She was a Catholic... And deemed that fallen worship far more dear Perhaps because ’twas fallen...’ Lord Byron, Don Juan "

― Antonia Fraser , The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England

4 " In fact, throughout Catholic Europe local princes were accustomed to having a say in episcopal appointments; England’s status since the Reformation as a mission territory had meant that the bishops had enjoyed a particular independence. "

― Antonia Fraser , The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England

5 " the entrenched version of Anti-Catholic history – what Smith called the tradition of ‘fire, faggot and bloody Mary’. Smith in his role of Peter Plymley expostulated: ‘Are you aware that there were as many persons put to death under the mild Elizabeth as under the bloody Mary?’4 "

― Antonia Fraser , The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England

6 " The fictional Rev. Abraham, however, was granted very different views, based on the entrenched version of Anti-Catholic history – what Smith called the tradition of ‘fire, faggot and bloody Mary’. Smith in his role of Peter Plymley expostulated: ‘Are you aware that there were as many persons put to death under the mild Elizabeth as under the bloody Mary?’4 "

― Antonia Fraser , The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England

7 " Unfortunately, nearly ten years after the publication of Peter Plymley, Smith was protesting in a country where ‘No Popery’ was still the most popular election battle cry.5 "

― Antonia Fraser , The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England

8 " In short, throughout the eighteenth century the English were regularly involved in wars with Catholic France and Catholic Spain. "

― Antonia Fraser , The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England

9 " Pointing again in the direction of tolerance was the Quebec Act of 1774. Following the treaty which ended the Anglo-French wars in North America, Canada passed to the British. Yet the largest part of the population was Catholic. "

― Antonia Fraser , The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England

10 " There were probably about 70,000 or 80,000 British Catholics in the 1770s, out of a population of seven million, with estimates of the specific Scottish Catholic population varying between 12,000 and 19,000. "

― Antonia Fraser , The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England

11 " For the time being the continuing influx of Irish workers, who were all Catholic, was an unsettling element, as everything about Ireland at that time was unsettling to the class known as the Protestant Ascendancy which ruled it. "

― Antonia Fraser , The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England

12 " For obvious reasons the Catholic aristocracy was heavily intermarried. "

― Antonia Fraser , The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England

13 " IRELAND NOW HAD its Parliament formally swallowed up in that of the United Kingdom by an Act which came into force on 1 January 1801. "

― Antonia Fraser , The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England

14 " the ruling classes, as the phrase Protestant Ascendancy indicates, tended one way, while their social inferiors, whether servants, farmers or soldiers, were almost universally Catholic. "

― Antonia Fraser , The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England

15 " There were 10,000 stout fellows, as Daniel Defoe had written earlier in the century in The Behaviour of Servants, who would spend their last drop of blood against Popery but ‘do not know whether it be a man or a horse’. "

― Antonia Fraser , The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England

16 " However, they were of course the natives of the island, and it was the Protestant Ascendancy whose history stretched back to invasion, notoriously that of Cromwell in 1649, and subsequent settlement in the great estates of the land. "

― Antonia Fraser , The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England

17 " These ferocious riots were in fact a protest against the Catholic Relief Act which had received the Royal Assent of George III in June 1778. "

― Antonia Fraser , The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England

18 " No Catholic in England and Scotland was allowed to buy or inherit land. Exercising the function of a Catholic priest or running a Catholic school were both activities punishable by life imprisonment. Catholics could not receive commissions in the army or navy, or officially be soldiers or sailors. In the same way, Catholics who declared themselves as such could not attend universities, let alone take degrees "

― Antonia Fraser , The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England

19 " Even if both bride and groom were Catholics, they could not get married legally by a Catholic priest in a Catholic church: such a ceremony would have no status under the law, with all the consequent penalties. The Marriage Act of 1753, which had relaxed the rules for other dissenting religions, left out the Catholics. "

― Antonia Fraser , The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England

20 " Catholics could not in theory inherit property – giving rise to the unpleasant possibility of one member of the family declaring adherence to the official Protestant religion of the State, and demanding to inherit property otherwise destined for a Catholic heir. "

― Antonia Fraser , The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Religious Liberty in Georgian England