of her sister, Queen Mary, had burnt in one-ninth of the time. Under James I. an attempt was made to distinguish between the loyal and disloyal Catholics, the latter comprising all those who maintained the pope's right to depose sovereigns from their throne. This led to a violent division among the Catholics themselves. Many forswore the deposing power; the majority, acting under imperative orders from Rome, refused to deny it. The government retorted by adding several new penal laws to the statute-book, though less than thirty Catholics were brought to the scaffold during James's reign. Under Charles I. the position of the Catholics was greatly improved, largely owing to the king's marriage with a French princess. Although not actually repealed, the penal laws were seldom put in force, and mass was openly celebrated in London and elsewhere. On the outbreak of the Civil War the Catholics naturally sided with the king, and a great many fell fighting for the royalist cause; towards the survivors Cromwell was unexpectedly merciful. Very few were put to death, though a number of estates were confiscated. Under Charles II. came a new period of prosperity; two Catholics, Lords Arlington and Clifford, were admitted to the inner circles of the government. Protestant suspicion was excited; in 1673 was passed the Test Act, obliging all office-holders to receive the sacrament in the Established Church, and to declare their disbelief in transubstantiation.[1] Five years later (1678) popular exasperation found a more savage outlet, and greedily swallowed the tales of Titus Oates about a mythical “popish plot.” A number of victims were brought to the scaffold, and Catholics were declared incapable of sitting in either house of parliament. James II., however, was utterly indifferent to the feelings of his subjects. He packed the privy council, the army and the universities with Catholics, and tried to legalize the exercise of their religion by an utterly unconstitutional Declaration of Indulgence. Three years were enough to convince the nation that he was “endeavouring to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion, and the laws and liberties of this kingdom”; and on his deposition in 1688 Roman Catholics, or persons married to Roman Catholics, were declared incapable of succeeding to the throne. A new oath of allegiance was imposed on all holders of military office; they were required to swear that no foreign prelate had, or ought to have, any jurisdiction, whether civil or ecclesiastical, within the realm. Further, a number of statutes were passed with the object of putting every possible obstacle in the way of Catholics educating their children in their own creed, or of inheriting or buying land. That they remained so long “utterly disabled from bearing any public office or charge” was due to the participation of many of their number in the Jacobite revolts of 1715 and 1745. After Culloden, however, it was seen that all serious danger of a Stuart restoration was passed; and in 1778 Catholics who abjured the Pretender and denied the civil authority of the pope were relieved from their most pressing disabilities. A proposal to extend this measure to Scotland led to violent agitation in that country. Feeling soon spread to England, and culminated in the Gordon riots of 1780. Meanwhile, however, strenuous efforts were being made by the Roman Catholics to obtain relief by establishing a reasonable modus vivendi with the government. Within the Catholic body itself there was even at this time a more or less pronounced anti-Roman movement, a reflection of the Gallican and Febronian tendencies on the continent of Europe, and the “Catholic Committee,” consisting for the most part of influential laymen, which had been formed to negotiate with the government, was prepared to go a long way in repudiating the extreme claims of the Holy See, some even demanding the creation of a national hierarchy in merely nominal dependence on Rome, and advocating the substitution of English for Latin in the services. This attitude led to a somewhat prolonged conflict between the Committee and the vicars apostolic, who for the most part represented the high ultramontane view. The outcome of the Committee's work was the great Protest, signed by 1500 bishops, priests and leading laymen, in which the loyalty of Catholics to the crown and constitution was strenuously affirmed and the ultramontane point of view repudiated in the startling declaration, “We acknowledge no infallibility in the pope.” As the result of the negotiations preceding and following this action, the government in 1791 passed a bill relieving from all their more vexatious disabilities those Roman Catholics[2] who rejected the temporal authority of the pope; and during the first quarter of the 19th century a series of attempts was made to abolish Catholic disabilities altogether. To this, however, George III. and his successors were bitterly opposed; only in 1829 did George IV. give way, and allow the passage of the Catholic Relief Act. This virtually removed all restrictions on Catholics, except that it left them incapable of filling the offices of Regent, Lord Chancellor, or Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; and it expressly debarred their priests from sitting in the House of Commons.
Ecclesiastical Administration.—During the reign of Elizabeth this was necessarily in a chaotic state. As the Marian clergy died out, their place was taken by priests trained at theological colleges established for this purpose at Douai, Rome, Valladolid and other places. These were the “seminary priests,” objects of great suspicion to the government. About 1580 Jesuit missionaries began to come, and soon became involved in bitter quarrels with the secular missionaries already at work. Mutual jealousies were only increased when the seculars were grouped together under an arch-priest in 1599. Nor were matters much bettered when the papacy took advantage of the presence of a Catholic queen in England, and sent over in 1625 a vicar-apostolic[3]—that is, a prelate in episcopal orders, but without the full authority of a diocesan bishop. He was soon compelled to withdraw, and the direction of affairs fell to an intermittent series of papal envoys accredited to Henrietta Maria or Catherine of Braganza. On the accession of James II. a new vicar-apostolic—John Leyburne, bishop of Adrumetum in partibus—was at once appointed (1685); three years later England was divided into four districts—the London, Midland, Northern and Western—each under a vicar-apostolic. This arrangement lasted till 1840, when the number of vicariates was doubled by the addition of the Welsh, Eastern, Lancashire and Yorkshire districts. In 1850 came the “restoration of the hierarchy” by Pope Pius IX., when England was mapped out into an archbishopric of Westminster[4] and twelve suffragan sees, since increased to fifteen (sixteen including the Welsh see of Menevia). This “papal aggression” caused great excitement at the time, and an Ecclesiastical Titles Act was passed in 1851, though never put in force, forbidding Roman Catholic prelates to assume territorial designations.[5]
- ↑ This declaration, which denounced the mass as “idolatrous and superstitious,” was taken by all office-bearers, including bishops on taking their seats in the House of Lords, until the Relief Act of 1829. It was imposed by the Act of Settlement on the sovereign also, in order to make impossible any repetition of the policy of James II. This “Declaration of the Sovereign” formed the subject of heated debate on the accession of kings Edward VII. and George V., and in August 1910 parliament substituted for it a simple declaration of adhesion to the Protestant religion.
- ↑ They were described in the first draft of the bill as “Protesting Catholic Dissenters,” but this was changed, in deference to the strenuous remonstrances of the vicars-apostolic, into “Roman Catholics.”
- ↑ Richard Smith, bishop of Chalcedon in partibus (d. 1655).
- ↑ Cardinal Wiseman (q.v.) was the first archbishop of Westminster. It was on his advice that Pope Gregory XVI. increased the number of English vicariates-apostolic in 1839, and from 1840 onward, as vicar-apostolic first of the Midland and afterwards of the London district, he was mainly instrumental in bringing the English Roman Catholic Church into closer touch with “the spirit of Rome.” The outward sign of this was the substitution of the Roman ritual for the English pre-Reformation use hitherto followed in the services, while English Roman Catholicism became increasingly ultramontane in temper, a tendency much strengthened under Cardinal Manning.
- ↑ The titles of the sees could not by law be the same as those of the Established Church. In several cases, however (e.g. Birmingham, Liverpool, Southwark, Newcastle), sees have since been created by act of parliament bearing the same titles, so that there are now often two bishops bearing the same style. From the point of view of the State, that of the Roman Catholic bishop is, of course, only a title of courtesy, the Anglican bishop alone having the legal right to bear it.
