Vol. 14 No. 17 · 10 September 1992
pages 15-16 | 2895 words
Not Many Dead
Linda Colley
- Riot, Risings and Revolution: Governance and Violence in 18th-Century England by Ian Gilmour
Hutchinson, 504 pp, £25.00, May 1992, ISBN 0 09 175330 9
Ian Gilmour is a distinguished and highly intelligent example of a once rare species: he is a Conservative with a cause. Unfortunately for him, however – and perhaps for the rest of us as well – his cause is no longer that of the political party he has always espoused. The son of a baronet, he was born into Toryism in much the same way as Anthony Trollope’s Duke of Omnium was born to Whig Liberalism, passing through Eton, to Balliol, to marriage with a daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch, to the Bar, to safe Conservative seats in rural Norfolk and Buckinghamshire, and then on to cabinet rank, first as Secretary of Defence under Heath, and then as Lord Privy Seal and Deputy Foreign Secretary. Then came Margaret Thatcher’s consolidation of her own style of party leadership and, on 14 September 1981, the end of his political progress.
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Letters
Vol. 14 No. 20 · 22 October 1992
From Padraig O’Conchuir
At the end of her review of Ian Gilmour’s Riot, Risings and Revolution (LRB, 10 September), Professor Colley stressed the factor of popular anti-Catholicism as a phenomenon potentially useful to 18th-century British governments. Not long after the Gordon riots there was an influx of French aristocrats leavened by émigré curés unable to accommodate themselves to the Goddess of Reason. At an influential level that influx helped to allay anti-Papist prejudice. And for the Catholic Church in England the accretion of priests who had of necessity to acquire a working competence in English was very helpful. Statistically, the Catholic Church in England is virtually an Irish apanage. That has had a marked effect on Catholic historians. Positively, they have tended to exaggerate the minimal recusant (Brideshead) tradition as well as the slow drip of High-Church Anglican converts. Negatively, the Irish element has been considerably minimised or ignored. In that framework the French priests were retrospectively welcome to the historians.
Those historians can be congratulated on their success in preventing one particular Irish skeleton from rattling in its cupboard. A handful of men were arrested in May 1798, at Margate, where they were awaiting a passage to France. The Ascendancy Irish government made extensive use of paid informers and agents provocateurs, so it was aware that the thwarted travellers were connnected with the Society of United Irishmen. An insurrection had been planned for the next month, June 1798, so there was at least a reasonable likelihood that the travellers intended to seek military aid from revolutionary France. All those arrested were Protestants, with one exception, James Quigley or Coigly. Not only was he a Catholic, but he was a priest into the bargain. It is difficult to avoid the impression that it was because of anti-Catholic feeling among the jury that he was the only one condemned.
Padraig O’Conchuir
London E6
