While most contemporary audiences and readers associate British monarch George III with Lin Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton, particularly the king’s show-stopping “You’ll Be Back,” few would connect Harold Pinter to the Abominable Question of Catholic Emancipation. Thanks to Pinter’s widow, Lady Antonia Fraser, and perhaps this review, however, they are now linked. It would appear that the constituencies in the battle for religious freedom from 1780 to 1829 would have nothing to do with the middle-class characters inhabiting Pinter’s plays, but a quick read of Fraser’s book shows that fashion may be the only difference between Pinter’s cast of thugs, criminals, politicos, and pugilists and the eighteenth-century British monarchy. At the heart of both authors’ work is power, and both use their razor-sharp wit to skewer the overinflated.Like Pinter’s, Fraser’s canon is multifaceted and substantial: fourteen historical nonfiction works, including two memoirs, Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter and My History: A Memoir of Growing Up. Her most famous historicals feature women: The Weaker Vessel: Women’s Lot in Seventeenth-Century England, The Warrior Queens, The Wives of Henry VIII, and Marie Antoinette: The Journey, which was later made into a film directed by Sofia Coppola, starring Kirsten Dunst. Her Jemima Shore mysteries were also the basis of two successful television series.A convert to Catholicism at the age of fourteen, Fraser admits that since that time, she has had a “lifelong fascination with Catholic history” (xi). Judging from Our Israeli Diary, 1978, which documents her trip with Pinter, Pinter did not. It is comical to read of Fraser’s delight in all things religious, while Pinter’s response is always one of polite disinterest.According to Fraser, The King and the Catholics continues the work she began in Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot. And both address an issue she says is “timeless: the rights of people to practice their own religion” (xi). And just a few examples from the book support her claim. She begins with the Gordon Riots, which resulted in over one thousand dead and destruction to the city “that would not be surpassed until the Blitz in the Second World War” (1). Led by Lord George Gordon, the unrest was a response to the Catholic Relief Act, which gave Catholics the right to buy land, removed the persecution of priests, and permitted Catholic schools. While the act also required Catholics to take an oath of allegiance, Gordon and others thought the concession did nothing to alleviate the real threat of Catholic religious freedom—the threat of foreign political interference, or worse, from the Vatican. Fraser is quick to note, too, that the Catholics were far from innocent. She reminds us of their bloody deeds, treachery, and attempts to overthrow governments, and almost anticipating the pandemic, she includes the mention of an anti-vaxxer pope, Leo XII (132).Clearly, ignorance fueled much of the hostility. Religious differences were often just an excuse to riot: “the mere word ‘Popery’ was in fact inflammatory,” but many did not know, quoting Daniel Defoe, “whether it be a man or a horse” (3). To connect the eighteenth century to contemporary times further, during an 1826 election in Waterford, the loser, George Beresford, who argued that Catholics should be grateful to their aristocratic “natural protectors,” contested the election in a manner similar to America’s forty-fifth president (162–63). The election, by the way, was won by the behind-the-scenes work of the great emancipator, Daniel O’Connell, a Protestant sympathetic to Catholic Emancipation and who persuaded the notoriously rowdy pork butchers of Waterford to “take the pledge” and not drink until the election was won (163), in this case by a Protestant sympathetic to Catholic Emancipation.The book is filled with entertaining details about affairs, sins, missteps, waffling, politics, deals, crimes, bodily functions, and savageries, all the best bits that make British history so addictive. A friend who also read the book said, “How does Fraser find these details?” Perhaps it is her experience writing detective fiction, which certainly helps in this book. Though we all know the ending, Fraser’s artistry makes the final stages of this battle over religious freedom exciting, suspenseful, and relevant. More importantly, as an outspoken critic against the misuses of power through her political activism and her body of work, Fraser reminds us that such battles are, unfortunately, timeless, and the defense of such freedoms necessary no matter what the era.
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Sep 2, 2024
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