When Catholic Emancipation came at last in 1829 it was the culmination of half a century’s agitation. The first landmark was the Relief Act of 1778, which repealed most of the penal legislation of the 1690S, and the second was the Act of 1791, which, in effect, removed penal restraint on Catholic worship in England. Of course, both the anti-Catholic hysteria of the Gordon Riots which followed the 1778 Act and the repression after the rebellions of 1715 and ’45 have remained vivid in the national memory. On the other hand, we ought to recall how Defoe observed that Durham was full of Catholics, Svho live peaceably and disturb nobody, and nobody them; for we … saw them going as publickly to mass as the Dissenters did on other days to their meetinghouse.’ After the death of the Old Pretender in 1766 the Pope recognized George III de facto and ordered the Catholic Church to pay no royal honours to ‘Charles III’. The penal laws on church-going were now only lightly enforced and then usually at the behest of informers, until the 1778 Act frustrated them, since it was no longer illegal for a priest to say Mass. Thomas Weld of Lulworth Castle (the head of probably the richest Catholic family in the kingdom) maintained six chaplains in different houses; his ability to do so must have been helped by the fact that the Lulworth estate had not paid the double land tax, for which it was theoretically liable, since 1725.* Mr Weld deliberately flouted the remaining archaic laws by building a handsome chapel in his grounds (‘truly elegant,—a Pantheon in miniature,—and ornamented with immense expense and richness’, said Fanny Burney).