Antonia Fraser’s last history book was about the 'perilous question' of parliamentary reform in 1832. The King and the Catholics takes on the 'abominable question' of Catholic emancipation three years earlier. It is also, Fraser writes, 'in one sense, the sequel' to her seminal study of the gunpowder plot. It deals with religious intolerance, xenophobia, rising populism, 'a people strangely fond of royalty' (Lord Holland’s observation), and a seemingly intractable Irish problem. It was the great issue of the day, 'mixed up with everything', one bishop noted, that 'we eat or drink or see or think' ... Fraser, a convert to Catholicism, as well as a descendant of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Longfords, tells the story with erudition, sprezzatura and a tremendous sense of fun. Every page is shot through with humour and humanity.
Fraser’s fourteenth work of nonfiction opens with one of the biggest bangs in English history, the extraordinarily destructive Gordon Riots of 1780 protesting the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, which legalized priests, Catholic schools, and Catholic inheritance, balanced only by amending the oath of allegiance to repudiate the pope’s 'temporal' authority ... The chief heroes of the long Catholic emancipation campaign were Kerry County Catholic Daniel O’Connell, who insisted on nonviolence, and the Duke of Wellington, the victor of Waterloo, whose insistent political pragmatism finally convinced the king ... As she has accomplished with so much modern British history, Fraser makes the story of the Catholic Question’s resolution riveting.
The King and the Catholics isn’t as magisterial as Mary Queen of Scots or as flat-out exciting as Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot. Instead, it’s a convincing and worthy addition to the already impressive Fraser corpus ... Fraser’s presentation of this story is free of both footnote skirmishes and extravagant claims, but she devotes too much attention to the many minor players’ biographical minutiae at the expense of commentary and analysis of the complex, even self-contradictory situations that emerge in the course of her narrative ... There’s readerly consolation, however, in the book’s many small and wonderful discoveries.
The great success of Fraser’s book is that it helps explain how anti-Catholic fears paralysed British policy for 50 years, the various attempts to reverse this position, and the extraordinary cast of characters who were involved in the fight for rights ... Writing with a historian’s skill and a novelist’s heart, Fraser shows how O’Connell was able to bring the British government to the point where it felt it had no alternative but to concede emancipation, and persuade King George IV to relent on what was a profound issue of conscience for him.
Ms. Fraser writes with verve and lightness of touch, even when dealing with intractable political argument. Readers unfamiliar with the intricacies of Regency politics will learn much from her spirited retelling, though her book, being based mainly on printed and secondary sources, retells much that is already known ... O’Connell’s religious legacy has been powerfully ambivalent... But the activities of the Catholic Association undoubtedly contributed to an escalation in Irish sectarianism, and O’Connell’s political dependence on the local influence of the Catholic parish clergy was a milestone in the embroilment of the Catholic Church in Irish society, which has recently so spectacularly unraveled. Some reflection on these complex long-term consequences of Emancipation would have enhanced the reader’s sense of the contemporary relevance of the struggles the author so vividly describes.
In 18th-century England, Catholics were a thoroughly oppressed minority. Despite the easing of some restrictions in 1778, in the early 19th century, new members of Parliament were required to swear an anti-Catholic oath. How was the government persuaded to pass 'An Act for the Relief of His Majesty’s Roman Catholic Subjects' (1829), which was, in the words of one Catholic cardinal, 'to us what the egress from the catacombs was to the Christians'? Fraser’s cast of characters won’t surprise readers familiar with the outlines of the story: Her three stars are Irish Catholic activist Daniel O’Connell and, in Downing Street, the Duke of Wellington and Robert Peel, pragmatic politicians who served, respectively, as Prime Minister and Home Secretary ... Though marred by the occasional cliché, Fraser’s account is salted with delicious details ... though not for readers seeking innovative analysis but a perfectly solid and sometimes-entertaining overview of the great men who brought about vital political change in Britain.
Fraser provides a brisk popular history of the fight for Catholic emancipation in England and Ireland. She begins with the Gordon Riots in 1780 and takes readers through the complexities of nearly 40 years of politicking around the question of religious rights in the United Kingdom, leading up to the passage of the Catholic Relief Act in 1829. The Act was designed to ease penalties that had been on Roman Catholics in the United Kingdom since the 17th century. Fraser discusses a variety of these laws—they included restrictions on the ownership of private property and the education of children—and how they affected the Catholic population from peasant to aristocrat ... Fraser traces how the conditions arose in the 1820s to allow this resistance to be overcome ... Fraser’s account, which entertains with fine descriptions of London’s heated political and religious climate, will interest any reader of popular histories.
