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Catholics, property, and the experience of the penal laws in eighteenth-century England: Evidence from the Vincent Eyre Manuscripts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 June 2022
Abstract
This article seeks to nuance our understanding of how the penal laws against Roman Catholics were interpreted in eighteenth-century England and how English Catholics of the era experienced their status as a penalised minority. Using evidence from Ushaw Library’s Vincent Eyre Mansucripts, it examines how propertied Catholics navigated proscriptions against owning and selling property. Although much scholarship has emphasised the flexibility that the statutes afforded Catholics, this article focuses not on the enforcement of these laws but on the pressure they exerted on Catholics’ daily consciousness. Vincent Eyre, a Derbyshire conveyancer, trained under Catholic conveyancers in London and worked as agent for the tenth Duke of Norfolk in Sheffield. His manuscripts, which consist principally of legal opinions and briefs on conveyancing cases, testify to the pervasive uncertainty under which Catholics laboured as they sought to assert a ‘good title’ to property, protect their faith from legal discovery, and assert their standing as subjects despite laws that disabled them from full belonging to the nation. This article builds on recent work that charts Catholics’ affective experiences in eighteenth-century Britain as their dynamic contributions in the period are increasingly recognized.
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- Research Article
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- © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press
Footnotes
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I would like to acknowledge the support of a Holland Visiting Fellowship at the Durham Residential Research Library, which made possible the research on which this article is based. I would also like to thank Dr. James Kelly of Durham University, Ushaw Library Archivist Dr. Jonathan Bush, my fellow fellows, and Dr. Liam Chambers of Mary Immaculate College for their support and advice. Lastly, I appreciate the comments of anonymous peer reviewers, whose suggestions improved the article.
References
1 For a detailed study of the enforcement of a particular penal law (against Catholic ownership of horses valued at more than £5), see Anthony R.J.S. Adolph, ‘Papists’ Horses and the Privy Council 1689-1720’, Recusant History (hereafter RH) 24 (1998): 55-75, which argues that enforcement was particularly acute in the years following the Glorious Revolution and while the possibility of a Jacobite return remained plausible. For arguments that focus on the English Catholic community’s development in the context of penalisation, see for example Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500-1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006) and Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community, 1688-1745: Politics, Culture, and Ideology (Rochester, NY: Boydell, 2009). In general, the historiography of the penal laws in Ireland has been more fully developed: an early revisionist work emphasizing the Catholic community’s development is Maureen Wall, The Penal Laws, 1691-1760 (Dublin: Dublin Historical Association, 1967); see also Louis Cullen, ‘Catholics under the penal laws’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland 1 (1986): 23-36 and Thomas Bartlett, ‘The penal laws against Irish Catholics: were they too good for them?’ in Oliver P. Rafferty, ed. Irish Catholic Identities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 154-168.
2 Walsham, Charitable Hatred, 314. In the Irish context, James E. Kelly provides a useful overview of the development and revision of the view that the penal laws sought to extirpate Catholicism entirely. He observes that although questions have been raised about the validity of seeing the Irish penal laws as a coherent code, a popular understanding of the assorted penal statutes as a relatively organized body of law seems to have existed in England from the late seventeenth century. James E. Kelly, ‘The historiography of the Penal Laws’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland Special Issue 1: New Perspectives on the Penal Laws (2011): 27-52, at p. 32.
3 John Bossy’s emphasis on gentry Catholic households in The English Catholic Community: 1570-1850 (London: Dartman, Longmans and Todd, 1975) has been updated by accounts that emphasize more popular forms of Catholicism; see for example J.J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984).
4 Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c. 1714-1780: A Political and Social Study (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 15. Overall, Haydon writes, ‘[w]hilst popery was still condemned as wicked and abhorrent, the behaviour of papists became an increasingly insignificant matter in the legislature’s eyes’. However he acknowledges that the legislature was often in advance of popular feeling on this issue. Ibid., 54. For an example of a sanguine assessment of Catholics’ situation with respect to the penal laws pertaining to property, see J. C. H. Aveling’s claim that ‘Between 1697 and 1791 Catholic landowners bought land with impunity, in spite of the law to the contrary’; J. C. H. Aveling, The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation (London: Blond and Briggs, 1976), 279. David Butler offers a more typical and moderate assessment when he observes that ‘ the penal laws did not bite as sharply as they seemed to read’. David Butler, ‘The Catholic London District in the Eighteenth Century’, RH 28 (2006): 245-68, at p. 247.
5 Carys Brown, ‘Everyday Anti-Catholicism in Early Eighteenth-Century England’, in Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille and Geraldine Vaughan, eds. Anti-Catholicism in Britain and Ireland, 1600-2000 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2020), 60.
6 See for example Glickman, The English Catholic Community and Michael C. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern Britain: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion c. 1550-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
7 Bartlett, ‘The penal laws against Irish Catholics’, 162. See also Richard Fitzpatrick, ‘Catholic inheritance under the penal laws in Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies 44 (2020): 224-247, at p. 247 where ‘the psychological impact of the penal laws’ is described as ‘deeply personal’, involving persistent ‘fear, if not outright panic’ at particular times of risk. I am indebted to Dr. Liam Chambers for pointing me to Fitzpatrick’s essay.
8 For work that enlarges our understanding of how Catholics experienced their status as a minority religious community, see Liesbeth Corens, Confessional Mobility: England Catholics and the Counter-Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) and James E. Kelly and Susan Royal, Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-Reformation (Leiden: Brill, 2017). On the creation of Catholic ‘emotional community’ in this period, see Claire Walker, ‘Political Ritual and Religious Devotion in Early Modern English Convents’, in Merridee L. Bailey and Katie Barclay, eds. Emotion, Ritual and Power in Europe, 1200-1920 (London: Palgrave, 2017), 221-239.
9 “Services gay ban lifted,” BBC News 12 January 2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/599810.stm Accessed 20 December 2021.
10 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1765-9), 2:4.57.
11 John Lord Campbell, The Lives of the Chief Justices of England, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1849), 2:515; cited in Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, 48.
12 Joseph Berington, The State and Behaviour of the English Catholics, from the Reformation to the Year 1780 (London, 1780), viii.
13 Richard Burn, The Justice of the Peace, and Parish Officer, 2 vols (London, 1755), 2:275.
14 Walsham, Charitable Hatred.
15 On anti-Catholicism as a constitutive element of the English character, see for example Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). On the charge of foreignness against Catholics, see for example Peter Lake, ‘Anti-popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, eds. Conflict in Early Stuart England (London: Routledge, 1989), 79.
16 Vincent Eyre Manuscripts, Ushaw College Library, GB-0298-UC/P28 (hereafter UC/P28), 2/20(2) and UC/P28/2/40.
17 The recusancy statutes proper begin with 1 Eliz. I, c. 2, the Act of Uniformity (1559). A fine for educating children abroad was introduced by 27 Eliz. I, c. 2 (1584), which was extended under James I (1 Jac. I, c. 4, 1603). By 3 Car. I, c. 2 (1627), parents could be deprived of property rights, and 3 & 4 Jac. 1, c. 5 (1605-6) prevented children educated abroad, as well as those educated in Catholic seminaries, from inheriting, possessing, or enjoying the profits from land. For a detailed discussion, see J. Anthony Williams, Catholic Recusancy in Wiltshire 1660-1791 (London: Catholic Record Society, 1968). I am indebted to an anonymous peer reviewer for this reference.
18 See Williams, Catholic Recusancy, 45-6.
19 Brown, ‘Everyday Anti-Catholicism’, 66.
20 Williams, Catholic Recusancy, 52.
21 The Derbyshire Eyres were a minor gentry family whose recusancy can be traced to at least the first half of the seventeenth century. An Edward Eyre of Newbold, possibly the great-great-great grandfather of Vincent Eyre, is listed as paying a fine for recusancy in 1632; see Clare Talbot, ed. Miscellanea. Recusant Records, Catholic Record Society Record Series 53 (1961), 352. Rosamond Meredith notes that this branch of the Eyre family ‘was only very remotely connected with the Hassop Eyres’, whose fortunes she detailed in ‘A Derbyshire Family in the Seventeenth Century: The Eyres of Hassop and Their Forfeited Estates’, RH 8 (1965): 12-77 and ‘The Eyres of Hassop from the Test Act to Emancipation’, RH 9 (1968): 267-287.
22 7 & 8 Will. 3, c. 24 (1696) prohibited Catholics from practicing as barristers and was repealed in 1791 by 31 Geo. 3, c. 32. For further information on the work of English and Irish conveyancers in eighteenth-century London, see John Bergin, ‘The Irish Catholic Interest at the London Inns of Court, 1674-1800’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland 24 (2009): 36-61.
23 Details of the Eyre brothers’ lives and careers can be found in John Kirk, Biographies of the English Catholics in the Eighteenth Century, eds. John Hungerford Pollen, S.J., and Edwin Burton (London: Burns & Oates, 1909), 74. Kirk states that Vincent Eyre studied at Douai for four years, returning to England in 1764. Douai College documents list Vincent and Edward as being admitted together from Esquerchin in June 1760, with John and Thomas following a year later. The last mention of Vincent seems to be in the 1763 Prefect of Studies Book. See P. R. Harris, Douai College Documents, 1693-1764, Catholic Record Society Record Series 63 (1972), 221, 228, 232.
24 Brown, ‘Everyday Anti-Catholicism’, 68.
25 UC/P28/2/39.
26 UC/P28/2/20 (2).
27 Richard G. Williams, ‘Mannock Strickland (1683-1744): The Life and Career of a Catholic Jacobite Counsellor-at-Law’ (Ph.D. Diss., Birkbeck College, University of London, 2000), 98. I am indebted to Dr. James Kelly for pointing me to Williams’s work.
28 Williams observes that ‘there was good money to be made in a career in the law’ and proposes a range for ‘overall fees’ for conveyancing work ‘from £14 to £40 … though it is possible that this range is on the high side’. Williams, ‘Mannock Strickland’, 19, 112.
29 UC/P28/2/79.
30 UC/P28/2/20 (2).
31 UC/P28/2/19; UC/P28/1/85.
32 UC/P28/1/50.
33 John Tracy Atkyns, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Chancery, 3 vols. (London, 1765), 1:527.
34 UC/P28/1/50.
35 UC/P28/1/50.
36 UC/P28/1/50.
37 UC/P28/1/23.
38 John Comyns, Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Courts of the King’s Bench, Common Pleas and Exchequer (London, 1744), 664-65.
39 Alexander Luders, ed. The Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1819; rptd. 1963), 4, Pt 2:1021.
40 Blackstone, Commentaries, 2:257.
41 Montagu Chambers, ed. The Law Journal Reports for the Year 1860 (London, 1860), 29, n.s., Pt 2:46.
42 UC/P28/2/71.
43 UC/P28/2/79.
44 Comyns, Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged, 216.
45 UC/P28/2/45. The case is variously known as Marlom v. Bringloe, Mallom v. Bringloe, and Matlem v. Bingloe and was presided over by Chief Justice John Willes. See The English Reports (Edinburgh: William Green, 1912), 125, Common Pleas III: 1063-7.
46 UC/P28/2/1.
47 Henry Hobart, The Reports of that Reverend and Learned Judge, the Right Honorable Sir Henry Hobart, 5th ed ([London] In the Savoy, 1724), 74.
48 Hobart, Reports of that Reverend and Learned Judge, 73.
49 Comyns, Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged, 211. The printed copy in the archive is UC/P28/1/5.
50 UC/P28/2/45.
51 UC/P28/2/45. For commentary on ‘the great case of Roper and Ratcliff’, see William Peere Williams, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Chancery, 3 vols ([London] In the Savoy, 1740), 2:4-6.
52 UC/P28/2/45.
53 UC/P28/1/81.
54 UC/P28/1/21.
55 UC/P28/2/45.
56 UC/P28/1/9.
57 Atkyns, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined, 1:527.
58 Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1999), 8.
59 UC/P28/2/33.
60 UC/P28/2/33.
61 UC/P28/2/35.
62 On the construction of religious belief as a choice in modernity, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007).
63 UC/P28/1/5.
64 UC/P28/2/14.
65 UC/P28/2/35. For a case involving the 1703 Irish Act to Prevent the further growth of Popery (2 Ann., c. 6), which went further than the English acts and specified that ‘the children of papists are taken to be papists’, see UC/P28/3/38.
66 Cited in Glickman, The English Catholic Community, 58.