PLOTS, PROPERTY AND THE ENGLISH CATHOLIC COMMUNITY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The eighteenth century is often thought of as a period of burgeoning religious toleration and intellectual enlightenment. Yet, though the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 gave freedom of worship to most Protestants, it also heralded a strengthening of punitive anti-Catholic laws, justified on the basis of the Jacobite threat: that England’s Roman Catholics were presumed to have a natural affinity for the exiled Stuart dynasty. In the wake of one Jacobite conspiracy, Robert Walpole’s government imposed a tax of £100,000 on the estates of English Catholics, as well as ordering the nation to swear loyalty to George I. Ted Vallance, Professor of early modern British political culture, will explore how these measures were implemented in Georgian York and how anti-Catholicism would have affected the Fairfax family.

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