Prejudice and Popery

Once won, rights and freedoms are taken for granted. We all find it difficult to imagine life before the Married Women’s Property Act, when everything belonging to a wife — goods, chattels, children — automatically became the sole property of her husband. Those born since the 1960s can’t really envisage what it was like for practising homosexuals in those days. By a similar token, the mind can scarcely take in the fact that in Penal times, Catholics could not buy or sell land; or that it was an imprisonable offence for Catholics to run a school. It was a legal offence to dress as a monk or a nun out of doors.

It was the relaxation of these stringent and, by then, totally unnecessary, laws, which led, in the hot summer of 1780 to the so-called Gordon Riots, in which Lord George Gordon inflamed the worst mob violence London had ever seen, with more than 1,000 dead.