The Emergence of Public Congregations 1778–1800

The position of English Catholicism at the end of the eighteenth century was one of hope in a small but growing group of Catholics as they emerged from the penal days and began to develop as a denominational force in the country, providing a springboard to the future development of the Catholic faith in England. Without their efforts, financial help and example, the whole of the country would have been as barren as those parts, such as in the East Riding of Yorkshire, where there had been no evident practice of the faith since the Reformation. This group also provided, in its quiet spirituality, the roots of the energetic English Catholic Church that developed over the course of the nineteenth century, a process that was paralleled by the Protestant Evangelical Revival growing out of the restrained Protestant spirituality of the early eighteenth century.

The signal for this emergence to begin was the passing of the First Catholic Relief Act in 1778 (18 George III c.60) which eased the strictures of the Penal Era. During the early eighteenth century, the thrust of the Anti-Catholic Penal laws, in place since the reign of Elizabeth I, were changed by William and Mary to further ‘prevent the growth of Popery’, and George I in order to deprive Catholic gentry of the socio-economic means of survival and thereby prevent them financing and supporting the Catholic mission. There were two major and related reasons for this: first, a persistent and rationalist dislike of Catholicism, which was perceived as the epitome of supernatural religion and conservatism that needed to be suppressed; second, the fragility of the claims to the English throne by both William and Mary, and later the new royal House of Hanover, all of whom Parliament had invited to take the English crown in order to preserve the Protestant nature of both the monarchy and the state from the Catholic Stuart line. Despite only limited use of the new penal legislation, a combination of pressure from the Catholic gentry and the Whig government's principles of liberty allowed a small measure of relief from the penal laws to be enacted in 1778.