page_title: Catholic Church in England and Wales
section_title: Nineteenth century and the Irish
hierarchical_section_title: Catholic Church in England and Wales / History / Nineteenth century and the Irish
caption_attribution_description: English: Statue of John Henry Newman (Cardinal Newman) at the en:Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, en:Brompton Road, London, England. Popularly called Brompton Oratory. Photographed by me 29 September 2006. Oosoom
context_page_description: The Catholic Church in England and Wales is part of the worldwide Catholic Church in full communion with the Holy See. It traces its history to the apostles through the Apostolic succession in the Western Latin Church, particularized and recorded in Roman Britain as far back as the 1st century. Later, in the 6th century, the church was judicially bonded to the Apostolic See of Rome, when Pope Gregory I through his Benedictine and Roman missionary, Augustine of Canterbury, established a direct link from the Kingdom of Kent to the Holy See in 597 AD. This ancient link to which Irenaeus says "every church" should "resort" on account of its "preeminent authority," has enriched the inter-church identity of the English Catholic Church, not only across Britain and continental Europe but also and especially globally within what is sometimes referred to as the "Catholic Communion of Churches".
context_section_description: After this moribund period, the first signs of a revival occurred as thousands of French Catholics fled France during the French Revolution. The leaders of the Revolution were virulently anti-Catholic, even singling out priests and nuns for summary execution or massacre, and England was seen as a safe haven from Jacobin violence. Also around this time (1801), a new political entity was formed, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which merged the Kingdom of Great Britain with the Kingdom of Ireland, thus increasing the number of Catholics in the new state. Pressure for abolition of anti-Catholic laws grew, particularly with the need for Catholic recruits to fight in the Napoleonic Wars. Despite the strong opposition of King George III, which delayed reform, 1829 brought the culmination of the liberalisation of the anti-Catholic laws. Parliament passed the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829, giving Catholics almost equal civil rights, including the right to vote and to hold most public offices. If Catholics were rich, however, exceptions were always made, even before the changes. For example, American ministers to the Court of St. James's were often struck by the prominence of wealthy American-born Catholics, titled ladies among the nobility, like Louisa (Caton), granddaughter of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, and her two sisters, Mary Ann and Elizabeth. After Louisa's first husband (Sir Felton Bathurst-Hervey) died, Louisa later married the son of the Duke of Leeds, and had the Duke of Wellington as her European protector. Her sister Mary Ann married the Marquess of Wellesley, the brother of the Duke of Wellington; and her other sister Elizabeth (Lady Stafford) married another British nobleman. Though British law required an Anglican marriage service, each of the sisters and their Protestant spouses had a Catholic ceremony afterwards. At Louisa's first marriage, the Duke of Wellington escorted the bride.
  In the 1840s and 1850s, especially during the Great Irish Famine, while much of the large outflow of migration from Ireland was headed to the United States to seek work, hundreds of thousands of Irish people also migrated across the channel to England and Scotland and established communities in cities there, including London, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow, but also in towns and villages up and down the country, thus giving Catholicism in England a numerical boost.
caption: Statue of Cardinal Newman outside Brompton Oratory, London
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