Kahn, Helena Kelleher. Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland’s Political and Religious Controversies in the Fiction of May Laffan Hartley. ELT.
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36 results for Catholic for Politics
May Laffan
became involved with various political scenes through her family members and friends. The Fitzgibbon half of her family were conservative Unionists, and she was influenced by her maternal great-uncle
's essay collection entitled Ireland in 1868. He believed Irish Catholics were unfit for governance, and dismissed the need for amendments (such as those introduced by Gladstone) to landlord/tenant laws. Laffan seems to have shared this view of Catholics, and often highlights the error of attempts at political change. Yet at the same time she strongly disagreed with the current tenant laws, and supported the
, which was dedicated to land reform and envisaged eventual ownership by the current tenants of the land. Many of her novels present the desperate situation of tenant farmers unprotected by law and at the mercy of selfish and irresponsible landlords.
's cousin
was Liberal MP for Cashel in Tipperary, and four other cousins (all of them priests) were politically active in support of Home Rule (but opposed to violent republicanism). Among her acquaintances were prominent Irish nationalists. While
was imprisoned for his involvement with
, she sent him copies of her first two novels.
Jane Barker
Though all the English at St-Germain were Jacobites this did not mean they were all in agreement. There were deep and sometimes acrimonious divisions among them over tactics, principles, and especially allegiances.
was a convinced member of the non-compounders, hardline
who rejected Anglican compromise plans for restored Stuart rule with some constitutional limits.
Elizabeth Cellier
met
, an active and prominent Catholic, who enlisted her in work on behalf of imprisoned co-religionists.
Rose Hickman
had been nearly ten years married when the Protestant
died on 6 July 1553, and the Catholic
succeeded him. This was bad news for those of her religious opinions: in
's own words, the cruel Papists persecuted the people of God.
Lady Eleanor Douglas
In Lichfield, with some local women,
and
,
discussed resistance to
's current reforms of the
. At Lichfield Cathedral the altar had been moved away from the congregation and beautified with new hangings reminiscent of Catholic churches.
Maria Edgeworth
, with
and the rest of the family, were forced to leave their house to escape the Catholic rebels.
Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
In her Memoirs
writes of her family's experiences during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of June 1780. The family fled their house for fear of the rioters, and went to Clapton in north-east London, where they were sheltered by friends. Both
's family and the family they stayed with were mistaken for Catholics. She writes of watching the fires, and of friends whose houses were destroyed.
Lady Lucy Herbert
It was
who persuaded her sister
to write out the full story of how she engineered her husband's escape from the Tower and who then preserved and apparently circulated the story. She no doubt understood the importance of her sister's account to Catholic recusant history. Nuns were accustomed to both writing and reading vivid accounts not only of their enclosed female communities but also of the struggles of women in the world to preserve the
faith under persecution (often while their husbands were in prison). Scholar
has suggested that in playing midwife to her sister's writing,
was helping to bring the convent historical tradition to the eyes of a secular readership.
Lady Jane Lumley
and her husband attended the coronation of
. As a Roman Catholic,
, was a natural Mary supporter, while his wife was cousin to the recently deposed and arrested
.
Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan
When she settled with her husband in Dublin, Sydney Morgan became friendly with the
and the nationalist lawyer
. Her oppositional, liberty-loving opinions strengthened with her age. She was a staunch supporter of Catholic Emancipation, and the cause of Irish liberty was the great cause of her life. She entertained some reservations from the beginning about
's leadership style in his
, although he on his side expressed the greatest respect for her political influence. Her unfulfilled dream remained reconciliation between liberal Protestant and romantic Gael; she saw O'Connell's later agenda as sectarian.
Eleanor Rathbone
first stood for parliament in October 1922 as an Independent candidate for East Toxteth in Liverpool, a particularly deprived district in a city polarised between Orange Toryism and Catholic radicalism. An anonymous Tory leaflet did her great damage by equating family allowances with a tax on single men to support large (by implication, Catholic) families.
Lady Arbella Stuart
Two plots, the Bye and the Main plots, followed James's accession. The Bye plot was a scheme by Catholic priests to kidnap James and force him to grant religious toleration. The Main plot, in which
was implicated, aimed to replace James with
, and then to make peace with Spain and decree toleration for Catholics. Despite falling under suspicion of plotting and despite crippling expense, Arbella was able to remain at court for years.
Frances Neville, Baroness Abergavenny
's husband not only attended the coronation of the Catholic monarch
on 1 October 1553 (while her eldest brother had just been imprisoned for supporting the rival Protestant candidate
); he also played a key role early the next year in putting down Wyatt's Rebellion (named from
, son of the poet of the same name) against Mary and her re-Catholicizing agenda. Such family division must have been an extreme form of something not uncommon; see, for example,
. Years later Lord Abergavenny was one of those who tried
and found her guilty of treason.
Anne Bacon
In spite of her Puritan convictions
pledged her allegiance without delay to the Catholic
and was later a gentlewoman of the privy chamber. She thus benefited the male members of her family, whose loyalty might well have been suspect, and enabled her husband to keep a low profile until the more congenial reign of
.
George Gordon, sixth Baron Byron
Setting out as a Whig, he became a radical, shocking the Lords with fiercely rhetorical speeches in support of Catholic emancipation and better treatment and remuneration for the new class of industrial workers.
Mary Caesar
Gyllenborg had spent most of the summer of 1716 staying with
and Mary Caesar at Benington. He and Charles Caesar were both arrested early in 1717, and Caesar once again incarcerated in the Tower.
, his partner in these machinations, lent moral support to the families of his fellow-prisoners as well as her own. When government agents searched the house, she convinced one of them that there are Women that have as much Resolution as men. Since no incriminating papers were found, Charles Caesar was released on ten thousand pounds bail. Plans for the invasion then continued through summer 1717; Caesar had no doubt that the English people were tired of
; they would even no raise objection to Spanish, Catholic troops helping to effect a restoration of James III, since the new king would give assurances of the safety of the Church of England . James was so pleased with Charles Caesar's service that he sent a portrait of himself to
, who treated it with the utmost reverence. The plot, however, failed.
Cassandra Cooke
In politics
was conservative, horrified at the idea of Catholic Emancipation as mischievous & abominable.
Elizabeth Delaval
The plotters had a pot (or bottle) made with a false bottom: the pewterer was told this was designed for smuggling jewels, but of course its contents were really to be letters. The warrant for
's arrest was followed three days later by another for a servant of hers. There is a rumour that she was sent to the Tower of London, but it is more probable that she fled directly abroad. Her involvement means that she, like her parents before her, was prepared to suffer hardship in the cause of the troubled house of Stuart. She became a Jacobite (though never a Roman Catholic) almost as soon as that designation acquired political currency.
Anne Dowriche
held strong political views which were inextricably bound up with her religious position. She was a Protestant, therefore a supporter of Elizabeth I, who wanted her own country in turn to support Protestant minorities in Catholic Europe.
notes that this kind of religious patriotism might well be particularly strong in people living near the West Country coast, where invasion scares occurred frequently even after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in August 1588.
Anne Francis
was a conservative royalist who rejoiced repeatedly at the recovery of
from his first bout of illness (and wrote a song for the local Sunday school pupils to rejoice too) and praised the Tory government in the persons of
and Prime Minister
. Despite her conservative patriotism, however, she was open-minded enough to acknowledge that religious faith can find different modes, and to write a warm lament at the death in early 1790 of
, Vicar Apostolic of London, who had suffered for his Roman Catholic faith.
Naomi Jacob
She later entered municipal politics in the London borough of Marylebone, making an impassioned speech in support of the Socialist candidate. After that she was adopted as candidate for several elections herself, but was never successful in the poll. More than once, in Birmingham and again in Marylebone, she was harrassed on account of her Jewish name. She says she was always a committee Socialist: weak on dates or figures, good on the topic of housing, vulnerable as a Catholic on birth control. She had been adopted as a candidate for Sevenoaks when she realised that her health would not allow her to stand. She wrote in her first book of memoirs about the Labour Party, with a passage on its prominent women, but at the same date, 1933, she sounded quite respectful of the one-party (Fascist) condition of Italy, and the energy of
.
Ann Jebb
was a convinced and effective supporter of most reformist causes of her day. During the 1770s she reprobated the design of coercing the American colonies,, and supported parliamentary reform, liberty for Ireland, toleration (and the vote) for Roman Catholics, and the abolition of slavery. As regards suffrage, she looked on parliamentary representation as the only effectual safeguard of [the people's] sacred rights. She was later a supporter of the French Revolution, and she came to believe in universal suffrage. (She may have meant by this universal male suffrage, as most of her contemporaries would have done, but in view of her husband's strong statement about gender equality in his Theological Propositions and Miscellaneous Observations, it is just possible that she was a suffragist in the feminist sense before her time.)
Hannah Lynch
formulated her political creed in a letter in French to
in 1901: she was, she said, solidly (carrément) anti-Catholic, anti-militarist, anti-nationalist, very much a republican. The only people she could love were the weak, the humble, the unhappy or unfortunate; women, she added, generally belonged in these categories.
Catherine Marsh
She wrote, in 1886 and 1891-2, several letters protesting against the first and second Home Rule Bills which sought to reduce British political and religious control over Ireland. Her anti-Home-Rule stance was no doubt shaped by Evangelical distrust and distaste for the
.
Mary Russell Mitford
When she wrote of her hatred of Enclosure Bills, and her pleasure when some glorious obstinate bumpkin of the true John Bull breed stood up against a Lord of the Manor to oppose them, she seemed to be thinking more of the beauty of the landscape than the fate of its inhabitants. She wrote on 2 March 1829 that she was delighted about the Catholic Emancipation Act (which was shortly to receive the royal assent); she looked to it to bring peace to Ireland. The following year she assumed on a visit to London that she would mingle socially with Whigs and largely avoid Tories; but she was dreading the spread of liberal opinions. She told a friend who opposed the Reform Bill that she supported it because she saw it as the only preservative against a much worse state of things. If we have not reform we shall have revolution. In 1833 she announced to an Irish friend: I am turned
ite, partly from love of his speeches.