For the Catholic Church in England the year 1829 stood perceptibly for the opening of a new epoch. For the Catholic Church in Europe at large, on the other hand, it meant (although not so realised at the time) the closing of an old one. 1830 indeed was to usher in an era of Revolution. Thrones were to be shaken and dynasties disappear, wild political theories were to be acted on, the map of Europe re-arranged, and the balance of power shifted. Religion was to be insulted, cathedrals sacked, monasteries burned, priests attacked, the Church plundered and cast from her high estate. But in 1829 there was as yet little thought of all this, and on the surface of things there was only an ordered tranquillity. Yet 1829 was to be the very last of those fifteen years of peace which followed on the downfall of Napoleon, and were the outcome of that European settlement so skilfully and (as it was vainly hoped) so lastingly engineered by the statesmen of the Congress of Vienna.

Though the history of Catholic Emancipation in England is a long one, and though the names of those who helped forward its achievement are many, the actual passing of the Bill was due entirely to oiie man, Daniel O’Connell. It was his plan that was accepted by the Catholics, his form of Bill that was accepted by the Government and Parliament, and his personal energy and political sagacity that carried the movement and guided it, till its success was attained. To him more than to any single man these Centenary celebrations should do honour.

Born in 1775, he was a humble Catholic lawyer, with a burning enthusiasm and a stirring and inflammatory eloquence; he lived through and watched carefully the events that preceded and followed the troubles of 1798. From his consideration of these, he learnt as his own lesson, a disbelief in physical force, a hatred of the French Revolution, and a distrust of secret conspiracy. Hence, his own methods were founded upon a very different philosophy than that of the heroes of ‘98. His political plan was to concentrate upon every sort of agitation, as violently as possible, but without bloodshed. His eloquence was able to produce the agitation and his personal dominating power was able to keep that agitation perfectly within bounds.

The Anglican episcopate in the House of Lords cut a sorry figure in the debates on Catholic Emancipation. To the last the bishops of the established Church resisted by vote and speech every proposal that would, as the Bishop of Bangor put it in 1808, place Catholics ‘on an equal footing with Protestants’; or, as the Bishop of Lincoln declared in 1828, ‘endanger the Protestant Establishment.’ Nor was the high churchmanship of the ancient university of Oxford more favourable to the civil rights of Catholics. John Henry Newman himself signed the petition against Catholic Emancipation—there were many of these petitions—and the university unseated Peel when he appealed to the electorate in 1829 as a supporter of Catholic claims.

But one distinguished clergyman of the Church of England, Sydney Smith, Canon of St. Paul’s, did most consistently and whole-heartedly champion the Catholic cause. With wit and humour, with knowledge and, above all, with a sincerity that lifted the argument above mere advocacy, Sydney Smith strove year after year for the accomplishment of justice. And he wrote so well that The Letters of Peter Plymley and the articles in The Edinburgh Review are capital reading to-day. A forceful writer, thoroughly well informed of his subject, sure of his ground and equally sure of the mentality of the people he addressed, Sydney Smith struck as skilfully and as fearlessly as Cobbett did at iniquity.

It will be very regrettable if, in this centenary year of Catholic Emancipation, some one competent does not undertake to write a Life of Charles Butler. The full story of his work for the advancement of the English Catholics should illuminate the whole condition of the Church in England in the last critical years of the penal laws, when an increasing number of Catholic families had abandoned the Faith, and when the prevailing philosophical tendencies brought new dangers to the small remnant that still remained steadfast. In Ireland, the persecution of the Church had been so thorough and vindictive that the Catholic population had been deprived of almost everything, and had practically nothing left to lose. But in England, the fact that the few Catholic families were mostly of the propertied class was a continual source of temptation to surrender.

Almost every year, as the second half of the eighteenth century wore on, some new case of apostasy would reduce still further the small number of devoted Catholic families, who still kept the faith alive and had gathered round them groups of dependents and retainers who attended Mass in the private chapels of the great houses. ‘In this year alone,’ wrote the Rev. Charles Berington in 1780, when Charles Butler had just reached his thirtieth year, ‘we have lost more by the defection of the two mentioned gentlemen (the heirs of the Duke of Norfolk and Lord Teynham) than we have gained by Proselytes since the Revolution.’

Was there ever such a benighted stretch of railway as the Birmingham, Cannock and Rugeley Line, L.M.S. P The grime, the smoke and reek, the glimpses of ‘dumps and the offal of modern industrial conditions, the gloomy, forbidding-looking stations, and the dank fields in between are so depressing that we instinctively bury ourselves in a book so as not to see the spectres.

Yet if we knew it, if Vre could but lift the veil of two hundred years, we might be conscious of spectres of a very different type. For we are on hallowed ground, even though now so defiled and besihirched that nothing seems further from it than romance. But here is the romance. In the British Museum there is preserved a list of convicted Recusants in the reign of Charles II. This list has been compiled from the returns made by the clerks of the peace in twenty-three counties during the years 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 26, 28 and 29, of Charles II. In it we have enshrined the names of 10,236 people who, rather than conform to the Church by law established, preferred to pay a fine of £20 a month for each grown-up person thus absenting himself, though only £10 for a wife.

English Anti-Catholic legislation reached its climax in the first year of the reign of William and Mary, when it provided that, in future, all recruits, before enlistment in the army, should be forced to take the attestation oath forswearing the Catholic religion. This stupid piece of bigotry prevented Catholics from engaging in the defence of their native land, and drove many ardent young spirits amongst English, Scottish, and Irish Catholics into foreign military service. Thus England was robbed of men who would have led her armies with the same brilliant success that attended them in their foreign commands. Every student of European history is confronted, from time to time, with the names of Brown, O’Donnell, Blake, MacMahon, to mention but a few. Perhaps the best known of these were the two Browns, Count George Brown, who held a high command in the Russian army, and his brilliant nephew, Ulysses Maximilian Brown, Count of the Holy Roman Empire and Field Marshal of Austria, who, after checking the victorious Frederick the Great on the field of Lobositz, 1756, fell in the battle of Prague (1757).