Lady Antonia Fraser has written a book entitled The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Rights 1829. Don’t be put off by the dreary subtitle. This study of the battle for emancipation, enacted by Parliament despite the tantrums of George IV, is packed with expertly chosen anecdotes.
This I wasn’t expecting – but then I didn’t know what to expect, having always steered clear of the books streaming from the pen of the eldest daughter of the Earl of Longford. I was put off as a teenager by Private Eye’s relentless mockery of her; then there was that business of the soft-Left “June 20 Group” which met in the house of Lady Antonia and her husband, Harold Pinter, in 1990.
The inaugural meeting of the June 20 Group has been forgotten by history. A pity. Lady Antonia’s diaries capture one of the great comic episodes in English literary history. Twenty-one bien pensant anti-Thatcher writers and grandees of the Fourth Estate gathered in the Pinters’ drawing room in fragrant Campden Hill Square. John Mortimer was there, of course; so was Germaine Greer – who is no longer bien pensant, alas, now that she’s offended the “trans” lobby – and Anthony Howard, former editor of the New Statesman. Lady Antonia remembers that Howard spoke for 40 minutes – “a bit long” – and then upset the assembled company by asking how they could take Rupert Murdoch’s shilling.
Peace was only restored afterwards. “Later, when they had all gone,” writes Lady Antonia, “Harold read Shakespeare’s sonnets to me with the perfume of my regale lilies, especially strong this year, filling the drawing room. That was really the best part of the evening.”
Some Catholics were upset when she married Pinter in 1980, but it does seem to have been a happy union. The diaries recall: “As we left the register office, one optimistic journalist called out: ‘How does it feel to be plain Mrs Pinter? ‘She’s not,’ snapped Harold. The next day, the Daily Mirror, of all people, explained the rules of the British peerage to its readers: how ‘Lady’ came from my father, an earl, not my previous husband, and I could carry it with me however many times I married.”
…….
I’m not surprised that Harold Pinter, a Jewish boy from Hackney, was so annoyed by “Mrs Pinter”. We social climbers tend to be more punctilious about these things than actual toffs. For years I’ve been waging a campaign against life peers who insert their Christian names into their titles, thus masquerading as the younger sons of dukes and marquesses or the daughters of dukes, marquesses or earls. Woe betide the research assistant for Lord Alton of Liverpool (for my money, the most principled politician at Westminster) who rings up on behalf of “Lord David Alton”.
If I were Irish, I wonder if I’d be a member of that dying breed, the “Castle Catholic” – ie, Catholics from modest backgrounds who haunt the dinner tables of their Anglo-Irish betters. Which brings us back to The King and the Catholics. Although Antonia Fraser’s father was a Catholic convert, his title (his smartest one, that is – he was simultaneously a Labour hereditary baron and a life peer) was Protestant Irish. One of Lady Antonia’s Pakenham forebears vigorously opposed Catholic emancipation, as did most peers.
You might think that, as a result, Daniel O’Connell – whose election to Parliament for County Clare forced the passage of the Act – would detest the English aristocracy. Far from it.
The voluble “King Dan”, a quintessential Castle Catholic, basked in the flattery of the Whig nobility. Writing to his wife from London, he boasted of dining with four dukes. On another occasion, writes Lady Antonia, he was disappointed that the company included “only one duke – of Norfolk – only two earls, Grey and Bessborough, but we had a Marquess of Lansdowne”. And then he pulled himself up short. “Only think that earls are now become so familiar to me that I left out Earls Fitzwilliam and Sefton.”
…….
As I say, Castle Catholics are a dying breed. Indeed, one of their most distinguished representatives left us last year, and he wasn’t technically Irish.
“If you want Cormac to attend something, let slip that a duchess will be present,” a priest once told me. He was referring, of course, to Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor.
His Eminence and I didn’t get on: he once marched into the offices of the Daily Telegraph demanding my head on a plate after I’d blogged ferociously against his attempts to undermine Summorum Pontificum. Yet, right at the end, he schmoozed me at a dinner for the newly created and gloriously pompous Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri. I duly preened. So did Baldisseri, whom Cormac bombarded with bouquets, tossing them with a naughty glint in his eye.
Now that he’s gone I miss him. Somehow he didn’t look like the sort of person who would die. The least we can do, I think, is toast him with a glass of the “refreshing cocktail” invented by the raffish Dicky Umfraville in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time: Death Comes for the Archbishop.
Damian Thompson is editor-in-chief of the Catholic Herald and associate editor of The Spectator
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.