VOICES OF DISTRUST: THE EXPRESSION OF ANTI-CATHOLIC FEELING IN SCOTLAND, 1778-1781

Abstract

In the religious history of Great Britain the years around 1780 are full of contention and violence. Every student of George Ill's reign has heard of another, more notorious George, Lord George Gordon. The Protestant Association headed by Gordon and the wildly destructive riots he encouraged in London in June 1780 are familiar to us through Eugene Black's account of the incendiary organization and George Rude's analysis of the London riot itself.1 Gordon's Association and the No Popery outburst which immobilized the capital for nearly a week resulted from two years' agitation, but the long campaign which mobilized thousands of alarmed Protestants has not received much attention. The purpose of the present study is to examine in detail one aspect of the great movement which Lord George Gordon captured, namely the propaganda which excited Protestant subjects of the king in Scotland and sporadically aroused them up to the time of the great London riot and indeed for many months thereafter. Three parliaments, at Westminster, Dublin and Edinburgh, had enacted the Roman Catholic penal laws, and for this reason three measures were considered necessary to grant George Ill's Catholic subjects a few liberties. After protracted negotiations, the course of which was obscure at the time and remains difficult to trace today, Sir George Saville, an opposition Whig, introduced the English Roman Catholic Relief Bill with government approval on 14 May 1778. Luke Gardiner followed with a bill in the Irish House of Commons on 25 May. Both measures passed successfully, the English one with hardly any debate. Both statutes were modest. The English Act left priests subject to 'perpetual imprisonment' for saying Mass, but it abolished