Letteratura scientifica selezionata sul tema "Gordon riots, 1780 – fiction"

Abstract The 1780 protests against the Catholic Relief Act were the most violent and controversial disturbances of the eighteenth century and have predictably given rise to several historical interpretations. Early studies sought to emphasize the political immaturity and deep sectarian prejudices of the common people and the anarchy and degenerate character of the riots themselves. By contrast, George Rude, in his first exploration of British crowds, insisted that the riots were more orderly and purposive than historians had assumed. Set within the context of the emergent radical movement, the riots, according to Rude, drew their inspiration from radical elements in London's Protestant Association and from antiauthoritarian notions of the “Englishman's birthright.” Directed initially against Catholic chapels and schools, the disturbances developed into a social protest against the rich and propertied. This essay adopts a different approach. Like Rude, it endorses the view that the riots seldom deviated from the cue of the Protestant Association. Despite the drunkeness and almost festive air which accompanied the disturbances, the riots constituted a disciplined reprisal against the Catholic community and a Parliament that refused to bow before popular pressure. Indeed, the pattern of violence reveals that rioters acted discriminately, directing their anger at Catholic chapels, houses, and schools and at the property of those sympathetic to Catholic relief. Only with the sacking of the gaols and distilleries did the disturbances deviate from their original objective and, even then, the degree of looting and lawlessness can be easily exaggerated. At the same time, the Gordon riots cannot be categorically viewed as a social protest against the rich. Although the targets of the crowd included a disproportionate number of prominent Catholics and parliamentary supporters of the Relief Act, the prime aim of the rioters was to immobilize the Catholic community and to intimidate Parliament. To be sure, elements of social protest did accompany the disturbances. In the carnivalesque freedom of the occasion participants sometimes showed a sardonic disrespect for rank. Moreover, the opening of the gaols, initially to rescue imprisoned rioters, denoted an almost Brechtian contempt for the prison system and the law in general. In the final phases of the riot, however, the social hostilities of the crowd were essentially local and concrete, directed against crimps, debtors' lockups, and toll bridges. That is, they addressed the customary oppressions of the poor, not a generalised form of social levelling. Nor were the riots closely associated with radical politics. Although some London radicals sympathised with the protesters in the initial stages of the disturbances, others, influenced by Enlightenment ideas, clearly did not. In fact, many were deeply troubled by the riots, fearing their excesses would prejudice popular movements in general. Basically the protests against the Catholic Relief Bill cut across traditional political alignments. Ideologically the Protestant Association was remarkably protean, drawing support from proministerial, but evangelical, conservatives as well as from radicals troubled by ministerial incursions upon liberty in Britain and America. Ultimately the anti-Catholic protests of 1780 pitted a cosmopolitan social elite against a more traditional rank and file fuelled by an evangelical fear of an incipient Catholic revival. In sum, the Gordon riots drew upon populist, nationalist sentiments that did not square with conventional political alignments. It remained to be seen how these forces could be accomodated in contemporary political discourse.

Lord George Gordon (1751‐1793), was son of Cosmo George, third Duke of Gordon and Katherine Duchess of Gordon. His mother remarried Staats Long Morris, an American soldier and politician, who inculcated in Gordon an admiration of America, particularly during his naval service based in America and a long posting in Jamaica where he experienced the cruelty of slavery under British rule. Gordon left the navy under a cloud and entered parliament in 1774 under demeaning circumstances, voting for the Opposition where he launched a series of attacks on the government of Lord North. In 1780, he marched as president for a Protestant Association on Parliament in protest at the 1778 Catholic Relief Act for England, and the possibility of bringing in a similar bill for Scotland. The ‘Gordon Riots’ outside Westminster followed and Lord George was arrested for treason but in 1781 was exonerated. He was later charged with libel and again imprisoned. By this time he had converted to the Jewish faith and on 26 April 1792 wrote a powerful indictment of slavery to the Speaker of the House of Commons.

ABSTRACT This article examines John Wesley's anti-Catholicism and his hostility to ‘popery’ on theological, social, and political grounds. The subject is related to wider attitudes to the Catholic minority and its faith in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. The article stresses the complexity of Wesley's thinking, thinking which ranged from his admiration for some post-Reformation Catholic figures to his abhorrence of a Church that he feared imperilled the souls of its adherents. It further investigates various germane topics, such as the response of Catholics to early Methodism and Wesley's involvement in the events that culminated in the Gordon riots of 1780.

Of what he called ‘The Great Fear of Popery’, Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote: ‘that fear … constantly renewed, had acquired a momentum of its own. It was the English equivalent of the great European witch-craze, and it would remain formidable for three centuries, a national neurosis which could be awakened again and again: in the myth of the great Irish massacre of 1641 (still repeated, over a century later, by John Wesley), in the great scare of the Popish Plot of 1678, in the fable of the Warming Pan in 1688, even, though with dwindling force, in the Gordon Riots of 1780 and the “Papal Aggression” of 1851, ‘(sic). He might have added the Tichborne trial to the list.

AbstractIn 1778, in response to news of the American alliance with France, the British government proposed a series of Catholic relief bills aimed at tolerating Catholicism in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Officials saw the legislation as a pragmatic response to a dramatically expanded war, but ordinary Britons were far less tolerant. They argued that the relief acts threatened to undermine a widely shared Protestant British patriotism that defined itself against Catholicism and France. Through an elaborate and well-connected popular print culture, Britons living in distant Atlantic communities, such as Kingston (Jamaica), Glasgow, Dublin, and New York City, publicly engaged in a radical brand of Protestant patriotism that began to question the very legitimacy of their own government. Events culminated in June 1780, with five days of violent, deadly rioting in the nation's capitol. Yet the Gordon Riots represent only the most famous example of this new, more zealous defense of Protestant Whig Britishness. In the British Caribbean and North America, unrelenting fears of French invasions and the perceived incompetence of the government mixed with an increasingly confrontational Protestant political culture to expose the fragile nature of British patriotism. In Scotland, anti-Catholic riots drove the country to near rebellion in early 1779, while in Ireland, Protestants and Catholics took advantage of this political instability to make demands for economic and political independence, culminating in the country's legislative autonomy in 1782. Ultimately, Catholic relief and the American alliance with France fundamentally altered how ordinary Britons viewed their government and, perhaps, laid the foundations for the far more radical political culture of the 1790s.

The Gordon Riots of 1778 were one of the most violent public demonstrations of the century in London, and represent the culmination of an explosive religious and political climate in late 18th century England. This paper examines the nature and extent of the riots as well as details of specific rioters to shed light on the fact that even among London’s lower orders there existed a deep and complex set of beliefs about how British society should be structured. While on the surface the riots may appear to be simply yet another expression of xenophobia, they were connected to a growing nationalism tied to religion, global economics, and a strained domestic situation. I argue that the methodical, discriminate nature of the riots reflects the deeply held belief in the rightful supremacy of Protestantism as essential to the identity and security of Britain and demonstrates that anti-Catholicism could unify different social classes under a single cause.

There is a disparity between expectations that the members of a community will work together for the common good — and the stark reality that human beings form into groups, or parties, to engage in conflict with each other. This is particularly the case in so-called popular governments that include some wider political involvement by the people. In ancient Greece stasis, or endemic conflict between the democratic and oligarchic elements of a city was very common. Likewise, the late Roman Republic maintained a division between the populares and the optimates. In both cases there was violence as both sides battled for dominance. For example, in late republican Rome street gangs formed that employed intimidation and violence for political ends.In seventeenth century England there was conflict between those who favoured royal authority and those who wished to see more power devolved to parliament, which led to Civil War in the 1640s. Yet the English ideal, as expressed by The Book of Common Prayer (1549; and other editions) was that the country be quietly governed. It seemed perverse that the members of the body politic should be in conflict with each other. By the late seventeenth century England was still riven by conflict between two groups which became designated as the Whigs and the Tories. The divisions were both political and religious. Most importantly, these divisions were expressed at the local level, in such things as the struggle for the control of local corporations. They were not just political but could also be personal and often turned nasty as families contended for local control. The mid seventeenth century had been a time of considerable violence and warfare, not only in Europe and England but across Eurasia, including the fall of the Ming dynasty in China (Parker). This violence occurred in the wake of a cooler climate change, bringing in its wake crop failure followed by scarcity, hunger, disease and vicious warfare. Millions of people died.Conditions improved in the second half of the seventeenth century and countries slowly found their way to a new relative stability. The Qing created a new imperial order in China. In France, Louis XIV survived the Fronde and his answer to the rage and divisions of that time was the imposition of an autocratic and despotic state that simply prohibited the existence of divisions. Censorship and the inquisition flourished in Catholic Europe ensuring that dissidence would not evolve into violence fuelled by rage. In 1685, Louis expelled large numbers of Protestants from France.Divisions did not disappear in England at the end of the Civil War and the Restoration of Charles II. Initially, it appears that Charles sought to go down the French route. There was a regulation of ideas as new laws meant that the state licensed all printed works. There was an attempt to impose a bureaucratic authoritarian state, culminating in the short reign of James II (Pincus, Ertman). But its major effect, since the heightened fear of James’ Catholicism in Protestant England, was to stoke the ‘rage of party’ between those who supported this hierarchical model of social order and those who wanted political power less concentrated (Knights Representation, Plumb).The issue was presumed to be settled in 1688 when James was chased from the throne, and replaced by the Dutchman William and his wife Mary. In the official language of the day, liberty had triumphed over despotism and the ‘ancient constitution’ of the English had been restored to guarantee that liberty.However, three major developments were going on in England by the late seventeenth century: The first is the creation of a more bureaucratic centralised state along the lines of the France of Louis XIV. This state apparatus was needed to collect the taxes required to finance and administer the English war machine (Pincus). The second is the creation of a genuinely popular form of government in the wake of the expulsion of James and his replacement by William of Orange (Ertman). This means regular parliaments that are elected every three years, and also a free press to scrutinise political activities. The third is the development of financial institutions to enable the war to be conducted against France, which only comes to an end in 1713 (Pincus). Here, England followed the example of the Netherlands. There is the establishment of the bank of England in 1694 and the creation of a national debt. This meant that those involved in finance could make big profits out of financing a war, so a new moneyed class developed. England's TransformationIn the 1690s as England is transformed politically, religiously and economically, this develops a new type of society that unifies strong government with new financial institutions and arrangements. In this new political configuration, the big winners are the new financial elites and the large (usually Whig) aristocratic landlords, who had the financial resources to benefit from it. The losers were the smaller landed gentry who were taxed to pay for the war. They increasingly support the Tories (Plumb) who opposed both the war and the new financial elites it helped to create; leading to the 1710 election that overwhelmingly elected a Tory government led by Harley and Bolingbroke. This government then negotiated the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, with the Whigs retaining a small minority.History indicates that the post-1688 developments do not so much quell the ‘rage of party’ as encourage it and fan the fires of conflict and discontent. Parliamentary elections were held every three years and could involve costly, and potentially financially ruinous, contests between families competing for parliamentary representation. As these elections involved open voting and attempts to buy votes through such means as wining and dining, they could be occasions for riotous behaviour. Regular electoral contests, held in an electorate that was much larger than it would be one hundred years later, greatly heightened the conflicts and kept the political temperature at a high.Fig. 1: "To Him Pudel, Bite Him Peper"Moreover, there was much to fuel this conflict and to ‘maintain the rage’: First, the remodelling of the English financial system combined with the high level of taxation imposed largely on the gentry fuelled a rage amongst this group. This new world of financial investments was not part of their world. They were extremely suspicious of wealth not derived from landed property and sought to limit the power of those who held such wealth. Secondly, the events of 1688 split the Anglican Church in two (Pincus). The opponents of the new finance regimes tended also to be traditional High Church Anglicans who feared the newer, more tolerant government policy towards religion. Finally, the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695 meant that the English state was no longer willing to control the flow of information to the public (Kemp). The end result was that England in the 1690s became something akin to a modern public culture in which there was a relatively free flow of political information, constant elections held with a limited, but often substantial franchise, that was operating out of a very new commercial and financial environment. These political divisions were now deeply entrenched and very real passion animated each side of the political divide (Knights Devil).Under these circumstances, it was not possible simply to stamp out ‘the rage’ by the government repressing the voices of dissent. The authoritarian model for creating public conformity was not an option. A mechanism for lowering the political and religious temperature needed to arise in this new society where power and knowledge were diffused rather than centrally concentrated. Also, the English were aided by the return to a more benign physical environment. In economic terms it led to what Fischer terms the equilibrium of the Enlightenment. The wars of Louis XIV were a hangover from the earlier more desperate age; they prolonged the crisis of that age. Nevertheless, the misery of the earlier seventeenth century had passed. The grim visions of Calvinism (and Jansenism) had lost their plausibility. So the excessive violence of the 1640s was replaced by a more tepid form of political resistance, developing into the first modern expression of populism. So, the English achieved what Plumb calls ‘political stability’ were complex (1976), but relied on two things. The first was limiting the opportunity for political activity and the second was labelling political passion as a form of irrational behaviour – as an unsatisfactory or improper way of conducting oneself in the world. Emotions became an indulgence of the ignorant, the superstitious and the fanatical. This new species of humanity was the gentleman, who behaved in a reasonable and measured way, would express a person commensurate with the Enlightenment.This view would find its classic expression over a century later in Macaulay’s History of England, where the pre-1688 English squires are now portrayed in all their semi-civilised glory, “his ignorance and uncouthness, his low tastes and gross phrases, would, in our time, be considered as indicating a nature and a breeding thoroughly plebeian” (Macaulay 244). While the Revolution of 1688 is usually portrayed as a triumph of liberty, as stated, recent scholarship (Pincus, Ertman) emphasises how the attempts by both Charles and James to build a more bureaucratic state were crucial to the development of eighteenth century England. England was not really a land of liberty that kept state growth in check, but the English state development took a different path to statehood from countries such as France, because it involved popular institutions and managed to eliminate many of the corrupt practices endemic to a patrimonial regime.The English were as interested in ‘good police’, meaning the regulation of moral behaviour, as any state on the European continent, but their method of achievement was different. In the place of bureaucratic regulation, the English followed another route, later be termed in the 1760s as ‘civilisation’ (Melleuish). So, the Whigs became the party of rationality and reasonableness, and the Whig regime was Low Church, which was latitudinarian and amenable to rationalist Christianity. Also, the addition of the virtue and value of politeness and gentlemanly behaviour became the antidote to the “rage of party’”(Knights Devil 163—4) . The Whigs were also the party of science and therefore, followed Lockean philosophy. They viewed themselves as ‘reasonable men’ in opposition to their more fanatically inclined opponents. It is noted that any oligarchy, can attempt to justify itself as an ‘aristocracy’, in the sense of representing the ‘morally’ best people. The Whig aristocracy was more cosmopolitan, because its aristocrats had often served the rulers of countries other than England. In fact, the values of the Whig elite were the first expression of the liberal cosmopolitan values which are now central to the ideology of contemporary elites. One dimension of the Whig/Tory split is that while the Whig aristocracy had a cosmopolitan outlook as more proto-globalist, the Tories remained proto-nationalists. The Whigs became simultaneously the party of liberty, Enlightenment, cosmopolitanism, commerce and civilised behaviour. This is why liberty, the desire for peace and ‘sweet commerce’ came to be identified together. The Tories, on the other hand, were the party of real property (that is to say land) so their national interest could easily be construed by their opponents as the party of obscurantism and rage. One major incident illustrates how this evolved.The Trial of the High Church Divine Henry Sacheverell In 1709, the High Church Divine Henry Sacheverell preached a fiery sermon attacking the Whig revolutionary principles of resistance, and advocated obedience and unlimited submission to authority. Afterwards, for his trouble he was impeached before the House of Lords by the Whigs for high crimes and misdemeanours (Tryal 1710). As Mark Knights (6) has put it, one of his major failings was his breaching of the “Whig culture of politeness and moderation”. The Whigs also disliked Sacheverell for his charismatic appeal to women (Nicholson). He was found guilty and his sermons ordered to be burned by the hangman. But Sacheverell became simultaneously a martyr and a political celebrity leading to a mass outpouring of printed material (Knights Devil 166—186). Riots broke out in London in the wake of the trial’s verdict. For the Whigs, this stood as proof of the ‘rage’ that lurked in the irrational world of Toryism. However, as Geoffrey Holmes has demonstrated, these riots were not aimless acts of mob violence but were directed towards specific targets, in particular the meeting houses of Dissenters. History reveals that the Sacheverell riots were the last major riots in England for almost seventy years until the Lord Gordon anti-Catholic riots of 1780. In the short term they led to an overwhelming Tory victory at the 1710 elections, but that victory was pyrrhic. With the death of Queen Anne, followed by the accession of the Hanoverians to the throne, the Whigs became the party of government. Some Tories, such as Bolingbroke, panicked, and fled to France and the Court of the Pretender. The other key factor was the Treaty of Utrecht, brokered on England’s behalf by the Tory government of Harley and Bolingbroke that brought the Civil war to an end in 1713. England now entered an era of peace; there remained no longer the need to raise funds to conduct a war. The war had forced the English state to both to consolidate and to innovate.This can be viewed as the victory of the party of ‘politeness and moderation’ and the Enlightenment and hence the effective end of the ‘rage of party’. Threats did remain by the Pretender’s (James III) attempt to retake the English throne, as happened in 1715 and 1745, when was backed by the barbaric Scots.The Whig ascendancy, the ascendancy of a minority, was to last for decades but remnants of the Tory Party remained, and England became a “one-and one-half” party regime (Ertman 222). Once in power, however, the Whigs utilised a number of mechanisms to ensure that the age of the ‘rage of party’ had come to an end and would be replaced by one of politeness and moderation. As Plumb states, they gained control of the “means of patronage” (Plumb 161—88), while maintaining the ongoing trend, from the 1680s of restricting those eligible to vote in local corporations, and the Whigs supported the “narrowing of the franchise” (Plumb 102—3). Finally, the Septennial Act of 1717 changed the time between elections from three years to seven years.This lowered the political temperature but it did not eliminate the Tories or complaints about the political, social and economic path that England had taken. Rage may have declined but there was still a lot of dissent in the newspapers, in particular in the late 1720s in the Craftsman paper controlled by Viscount Bolingbroke. The Craftsman denounced the corrupt practices of the government of Sir Robert Walpole, the ‘robinocracy’, and played to the prejudices of the landed gentry. Further, the Bolingbroke circle contained some major literary figures of the age; but not a group of violent revolutionaries (Kramnick). It was true populism, from ideals of the Enlightenment and a more benign environment.The new ideal of ‘politeness and moderation’ had conquered English political culture in an era of Whig dominance. This is exemplified in the philosophy of David Hume and his disparagement of enthusiasm and superstition, and the English elite were also not fond of emotional Methodists, and Charles Wesley’s father had been a Sacheverell supporter (Cowan 43). A moderate man is rational and measured; the hoi polloi is emotional, faintly disgusting, and prone to rage.In the End: A Reduction of Rage Nevertheless, one of the great achievements of this new ideal of civility was to tame the conflict between political parties by recognising political division as a natural part of the political process, one that did not involve ‘rage’. This was the great achievement of Edmund Burke who, arguing against Bolingbroke’s position that 1688 had restored a unified political order, and hence abolished political divisions, legitimated such party divisions as an element of a civilised political process involving gentlemen (Mansfield 3). The lower orders, lacking the capacity to live up to this ideal, were prone to accede to forces other than reason, and needed to be kept in their place. This was achieved through a draconian legal code that punished crimes against property very severely (Hoppit). If ‘progress’ as later described by Macaulay leads to a polite and cultivated elite who are capable of conquering their rage – so the lower orders need to be repressed because they are still essentially barbarians. This was echoed in Macaulay’s contemporary, John Stuart Mill (192) who promulgated Orientals similarly “lacked the virtues” of an educated Briton.In contrast, the French attempt to impose order and stability through an authoritarian state fared no better in the long run. After 1789 it was the ‘rage’ of the ‘mob’ that helped to bring down the French Monarchy. At least, that is how the new cadre of the ‘polite and moderate’ came to view things.ReferencesBolingbroke, Lord. Contributions to the Craftsman. Ed. Simon Varney. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982.Cowan, Brian. “The Spin Doctor: Sacheverell’s Trial Speech and Political Performance in the Divided Society.” Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell. Ed. Mark Knights. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 28-46.Ertman, Thomas. Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.Fischer, David Hackett. The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, New York: Oxford UP, 1996.Holmes, Geoffrey. “The Sacheverell Riots: The Crowd and the Church in Early Eighteenth-Century London.” Past and Present 72 (Aug. 1976): 55-85.Hume, David. “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm.” Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985. 73-9. Hoppit, Julian. A Land of Liberty? England 1689—1727, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.Kemp, Geoff. “The ‘End of Censorship’ and the Politics of Toleration, from Locke to Sacheverell.” Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell. Ed. Mark Knights. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 47-68.Knights, Mark. Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.———. The Devil in Disguise: Deception, Delusion, and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.———. “Introduction: The View from 1710.” Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell. Ed. Mark Knights. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 1-15.Kramnick, Isaac. Bolingbroke & His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992.Macaulay, Thomas Babington. The History of England from the Accession of James II. London: Folio Society, 2009.Mansfield, Harvey. Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1965.Melleuish, Greg. “Civilisation, Culture and Police.” Arts 20 (1998): 7-25.Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty, Representative Government, the Subjection of Women. London: Oxford UP, 1971.Nicholson, Eirwen. “Sacheverell’s Harlot’s: Non-Resistance on Paper and in Practice.” Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell. Ed. Mark Knights. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 69-79.Parker, Geoffrey. Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 2013.Pincus, Steve. 1688: The First Modern Revolution. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009.Plumb, John H. The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675–1725. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.The Tryal of Dr Henry Sacheverell before the House of Peers, 1st edition. London: Jacob Tonson, 1710.

This chapter is devoted to parliamentary reform and the art of representing the People—two topics that engaged Dickens’s fervent interest as a writer and reporter. It emphasizes the role played by the media in the passage of the Reform Act of 1832. Reporting the parliamentary debates remained an official breach of privilege until after Dickens’s death, though it was tolerated. The chapter asks how the private is made public in fiction and journalism from The Mirror of Parliament to Dickens’s parliamentary sketches. It offers a history of parliamentary reform intertwined with Dickens’s own family history, while examining the pressures on Parliament to offer a “mirror” of the nation. Next, it returns to Gurney’s Brachygraphy, showing how the unconscious satire of its practice texts concerning legitimate rule reverberated in Dickens’s fiction. The chapter ends with Dickens’s first contracted novel, Barnaby Rudge, a tale of the Gordon Riots of 1780. It reads this historical novel as both a response to parliamentary history and a re-presentation of events Dickens witnessed: the anti-Catholic riots leading to parliamentary reform. These events produced the “breach” birth of Dickens as a writer.

Abstract This chapter explains the war experience of American Jews and Jewish patriots. Jews served in wartime alongside their Gentile countrymen. Washington and others accepted Jews as soldiers and promoted them as officers, something no other country did at the time. When Jewish patriots wrote of their experiences in wartime, they simply assumed citizenship and membership in the struggle against Britain and the colonial apparatus. They believed the war made them citizens. At least twice, British officers ordered the expulsion of Jews from occupied areas—Georgia and St. Eustatius. Meanwhile, Britain’s attempt to widen religious citizenship to Catholics resulted in the Gordon Riots of 1780. Jews fought for the revolution and Washington’s decision to include Jews as soldiers served the United States far better than anti-Semitism served Britain. After the war, the Jewish patriots had all ended up in the town of Philadelphia and started building a national religious organization and consciousness alongside their community and institution, Mikveh Israel.

Abstract Lord North’S ministry began propitiously. Much of its success derived from North’s gifts as a parliamentarian, much too from the confidence which he inspired among the back-bench country gentlemen. It was clear, however, that the ferments of the 1760s had had permanent consequences, not least in the searching scrutiny to which the traditional assumptions of the eigheenth-century constitution were subjected by critics of the regime. These included Dissenters in matters of Church as well as State. North’s handling of imperial affairs, in India, in Canada, and in America, suggested resourcefulness and firmness. His decision to use force against the American colonies was widely supported and positively strengthened his political position. But when the war began to go badly in 1777, a crisis of unpre cedented dimensions unfolded. Recognition of American independence came to be seen as unavoidable. Something of the same sort threatened in Ireland with the appearance of the Volunteer movement. In England a campaign in favour of’ economical reform’, and to a lesser extent parliamentary reform, made itself felt. The Gordon Riots of 1780 heightened the sense of impending catastrophe. North’s survival until the surrender at Yorktown nearly two years later only postponed a resolution of these conflicts. The Peace was unpopular, though less humiliating than had been feared.

Abstract The withdrawal in 1766 of papal recognition of the Stuarts’ claim to the throne of Britain and Ireland paved the way for the repeal of the penal laws. Irish Catholics were better organized than their British equivalents in the 1760s, but enduring anti-Catholic sentiment, animated by a combination of historical memory and contemporary events, ensured no progress was made until the early 1770s when the Irish and Westminster parliaments approved measures—an Oath of Allegiance and the Quebec Act most notably—that held out the promise that legislation to repeal the penal laws might soon follow. Military and political calculations, spurred by the exigencies of the American War of Independence provided the context for breakthrough acts in 1778 but the contrasting reactions of public opinion in both jurisdictions determined what was to follow. In Ireland, optimistic hopes that an era of religious toleration and political accommodation beckoned resulted in additional relief measures in 1782, but efforts to extend the franchise to Catholics in 1783–4 aroused atavistic fears for the Protestant constitution that ensured no further relief was forthcoming during the 1780s. In Great Britain, meanwhile, opposition in Scotland to the reliefs agreed at Westminster in 1778 prompted an outbreak of ‘no popery’, peaking in the Gordon Riots in London in June 1780. This underlined the enduring strength of anti-Catholic sentiment there and, by encouraging a much chastened Catholic leadership to rethink its approach, exposed divisions within Catholic ranks.