This is an important work on a significant chapter of Catholic, British and Irish history. Macaulay carefully traces the complexities of the relationship between British and Irish Catholics over the emancipation issue, their respective relationships with the Holy See, and British government demands and intrigues with these parties. The result is a magnificent exposition of the process by which emancipation was granted in 1829. The work is thoroughly researched using papers in Ireland, Britain and Rome. Very often the author lets the correspondence between the principal actors speak for itself. At one level this is the work's real value; it exposes material in the Vatican archives and in those of the former Propaganda Fide which are often, to say the least, under-used by historians who write on Catholicism in Britain and Ireland at this period.
Macaulay expounds on the discussion between Irish Catholics and details the principles of government calculations on the Catholic question in the period from 1790 to the late 1820s. Clearly he is thoroughly conversant with the Roman perspective on the religious and political complexion of Britain and Ireland in those decades. For certain circles of English Catholic opinion papal attitudes were less important than the need to represent Catholics as true and loyal subjects of the British state, and to afford proof of that devotion by giving concessions to the state over issues such as a royal veto over the appointment of Catholic bishops in the kingdom. There were, however, tensions precisely over this matter in the English Catholic body. The main opponent of this way of thinking was John Milner, from 1803 Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District, who consistently stressed the need for absolute loyalty to Catholic principles as he saw them.
For many years Milner acted as the agent of the Irish bishops in their dealings with British officialdom. In most instances he shared the conservative Irish view of relations between Catholicism and the British Protestant state and resisted any hint of concession on the veto question. The attempt by the Irish bishops, ultimately unsuccessful, to have Milner appointed Vicar Apostolic of the London District and displace the scholarly sensitive compromiser William Poynter is one of the least edifying episodes in the whole complicated tale of British and Irish ecclesiastical history during this period.
The author rightly pays particular attention to Henry Grattan's emancipation bill of 1813. The amendments which Canning introduced dealt with the veto and Exequatur, i.e. the government prerogative to examine episcopal correspondence with the papacy, in return for which Catholic bishops and priests would be salaried by the state. These propositions were strongly objected to in Ireland, not least by John Thomas Troy, the archbishop of Dublin. Daniel O'Connell was also vigorously opposed to such schemes since they would weaken the only effective impediment to British rule in Ireland: the Catholic Church. O'Connell's position was something of an anomaly. He virulently objected to the Union of 1801 and declared that he would rather live in an Ireland under the full rigour of the penal laws than live in the United Kingdom. But it was emancipation not Repeal of the Union that first exercised his undoubted political skills.
While the Irish regarded the terms of the 1813 bill as a form of episcopal enslavement, Poynter realised that a similar bill would again come before parliament. He wrote to Rome seeking guidance. The pope and most of his Curia being either scattered or in French exile the matter was handled by Mgr Giovanni Quaranttotti. He issued an infamous rescript permitting government veto over the appointment of bishops and conceding the Exequatur. This occasioned noisy and indignant protest from Ireland. The ruling was quashed when Pope Pius vii returned to Rome later in 1814.
Much is made, rightly, of the relationship between Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, Secretary of State of the Holy See, and Lord Castlereagh. Consalvi was invited to London with representatives of the other allied powers in June 1814. He was flattered by so much attention but Castlereagh's attempts to woo him on the question of concession to British anxieties in exchange for emancipation were overruled by the pope. Consalvi‘s diplomatic skills were more evident at the Congress of Vienna where he in effect managed to have the Papal States restored almost in their entirety.
This book carefully examines all the other staging posts on the road to emancipation: O'Connell's powerful and dominant role in the campaign, William Plunkett's bill of 1821, the Waterford election of 1826, O'Connell's success in Clare in 1828 and finally the granting of emancipation the following year. Significantly Macaulay entitles the chapter dealing with the 1829 Act ‘Emancipation wrested from the government’. He underscores the fact that emancipation was not the granting of political liberation to Catholics by a liberal and beneficent government and parliament, but rather the restoration of political rights in circumstances where rulers feared violent convulsion in Ireland if the concession was not given.
Occasionally there is a tendency to piety when for example the author refers to the ‘goodness and simplicity’ (p. 231) of the Irish bishops and clergy. He is more astute when he observes that in general they were behind the times politically.
Macaulay sets the struggles for emancipation, so far as institutional Catholicism was concerned, in the context of a wider confrontation between Ultramontanism, especially after the restoration of the Jesuits in August 1814, and a Gallican approach to Church–State relations. The author might have given a more sustained account of how in practice the Holy See dealt with the veto and Exequatur questions in its relations with other non-Catholic countries. Why was Protestant Britain singled out as the point of resistance in these matters? But this is a minor criticism of a work of such singular accomplishment that it is difficult to see how it will be surpassed for a very long time.
