Quotes from Antonia Fraser

In short, throughout the eighteenth century the English were regularly involved in wars with Catholic France and Catholic Spain.

Research among aristocratic women has produced the statistics that 45% died before the age of fifty,one quarter from the complications of childbirth; these figures do not however allow the debilitations caused by consent parturition.Many women must have died of diseases and conditions related to the pain and the perel,worn through by ceaseless child-bearing,who didn't actually die in labour.

Pointing again in the direction of tolerance was the Quebec Act of 1774. Following the treaty which ended the Anglo-French wars in North America, Canada passed to the British. Yet the largest part of the population was Catholic.

There were probably about 70,000 or 80,000 British Catholics in the 1770s, out of a population of seven million, with estimates of the specific Scottish Catholic population varying between 12,000 and 19,000.

For the time being the continuing influx of Irish workers, who were all Catholic, was an unsettling element, as everything about Ireland at that time was unsettling to the class known as the Protestant Ascendancy which ruled it.

For obvious reasons the Catholic aristocracy was heavily intermarried.

IRELAND NOW HAD its Parliament formally swallowed up in that of the United Kingdom by an Act which came into force on 1 January 1801.

the ruling classes, as the phrase Protestant Ascendancy indicates, tended one way, while their social inferiors, whether servants, farmers or soldiers, were almost universally Catholic.

There were 10,000 stout fellows, as Daniel Defoe had written earlier in the century in The Behaviour of Servants, who would spend their last drop of blood against Popery but 'do not know whether it be a man or a horse'.

However, they were of course the natives of the island, and it was the Protestant Ascendancy whose history stretched back to invasion, notoriously that of Cromwell in 1649, and subsequent settlement in the great estates of the land.

These ferocious riots were in fact a protest against the Catholic Relief Act which had received the Royal Assent of George III in June 1778.

No Catholic in England and Scotland was allowed to buy or inherit land. Exercising the function of a Catholic priest or running a Catholic school were both activities punishable by life imprisonment. Catholics could not receive commissions in the army or navy, or officially be soldiers or sailors. In the same way, Catholics who declared themselves as such could not attend universities, let alone take degrees

Even if both bride and groom were Catholics, they could not get married legally by a Catholic priest in a Catholic church: such a ceremony would have no status under the law, with all the consequent penalties. The Marriage Act of 1753, which had relaxed the rules for other dissenting religions, left out the Catholics.

Catholics could not in theory inherit property – giving rise to the unpleasant possibility of one member of the family declaring adherence to the official Protestant religion of the State, and demanding to inherit property otherwise destined for a Catholic heir.

anyone who chose to provide information leading to the conviction of a Catholic priest could expect a payment of £100 (about £7,500 today).

The leader – the initiator – of the ferocious protests against this mild relaxation of the Anti-Catholic laws was a curious individual even to his contemporaries. Lord George Gordon's unusual appearance – long red hair to his shoulders, and slightly protuberant blue eyes – added to the startling impression which he left upon observers, and inspired Horace Walpole to call him 'the lunatic apostle'.

What was happening was a maniacal assault on the inhabitants of the Paris prisons, with some of the royal family's most beloved attendants still incarcerated in the La Force. These included the Marquise de Tourzel and Pauline-and that hate figure so often in obscene popular publications, the lesbian paramour of the "Infamous Antoinette", the Princesse de Lamballe.

The execration in best-selling pamphlets and obscene engravings did not cease, many people expecting the Queen to take Jeanne de Lamotte Valois's former place in the Salpétréne prison. Any evil, including a daring jewel robbery brilliantly organized from a closed prison could be attributed to her.

Officially the soldiery had to wait for the Riot Act to be read by a local authority, according to the rules of the time.

Duc de La Rochefoucauld which was peculiarly appropriate to Louis XIV in 1667 was his reflection on the human heart where 'new passions are forever being born; the overthrow of one almost always means the rise of another'.

in 1793 there was a Catholic Relief Act for Ireland. The prohibition against Catholics voting there was relaxed and the so-called Forty-shilling Freeholders – named after the value and status of their property – were emancipated (but they still could not stand for state office, of course). The Irish Catholics could also now inherit by the same rules as Protestants, and take 999-year leases

Lord George Gordon's own Narrative of these tumultuous events is not marked by any regrets: this, despite the colossal destruction and loss of life which had followed the presentation of the Petition which he had masterminded.

The circumstances created by the French Revolution were once again part of the equation. The origin of the grant was a wish to prevent seminarists from crossing over to wartime France, whence they might return full of inappropriate revolutionary sentiments; but the effect was to bring Catholics generally closer into the Establishment

At some point the conscience of King George III, a decent, amiable, certainly not intolerant man, with good Catholic friends and compassionate towards unfortunate Catholic refugees, found itself stirred into a frenzy by the prospect of allowing these same Catholic friends and their children to participate in any way in the government of the country