English Catholics in the Eighteenth Century: An Interpretation

Abstract

The question of post-Reformation Catholicism in England has received increased attention of late from historians of various creeds, with the Elizabethans and the Generation of 1829 exercising a particular fascination. Only the eighteenth century continues to suffer neglect—and this despite the monumental scholarship of an earlier day, when Edwardian ecclesiastics ventured to reconstruct the Georgian world of Bishop Challoner and the missioners of the “Penny Chapels.” Their conclusions now stand in need of fundamental revision, not only in the interests of greater impartiality, but in order to determine more precisely the condition of a religious minority, allegedly subjected to the heaviest disabilities. “Proscribed and persecuted the Catholic faith has notoriously been for the last three centuries,” so wrote the editor of Dolman's Magazine in 1847; and, some fifty years later, neither Bishop Burton nor Bishop Ward thought it necessary to demur. Indeed, for them, the period which culminated in the riots of 1780 so obviously reflected the malice of the Protestant majority as to justify the demand for“Relief”or “Emancipation.”