I would like to express my thanks to Alan Heesom of the University of Durham and to David Bebbington of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, for their many useful comments and criticisms during the preparation of this paper. Besides those persons mentioned in the notes, I am also indebted to the staffof the Durham County Record Office for their patient help with the Londonderry Papers.

1 Newcastle Chronicle, 24 December 1867, p. 2. On the Fenian scare in the North-East, see The Times, 8 October 1867, p. 9;10 October, p, 10; 11 October, p. 8 ; and Newcastle Chronicle, 7-15 October.

2 By 1861 the Irish-bora population of County Durham and Newcastle comprised 5.5% of the total population. Only in Cumberland, Lancashire and Cheshire was this figure matched. Population Census: Enumeration Abstracts of Place of Birth, 1861, Parliamentary Papers, 1863, 53, Pt. 2, p. 485. For the relative density and distribution of the Irish population in England, see the map in Jackson, John A., TheIrish in Britain (London, 1963), p. 12 Google ScholarPubMed.

3 Cooter, R.J., The Irish in County Durham and Newcastle c. 1840-1880, M.A. Thesis (Durham, 1972)Google Scholar.

4 Population Census: Enumeration Abstracts of Place of Birth, 1851, Parliamentary Papers, 1852-53, 88, Pt. 2, p. 303.

5 Status Animarum, etc., [for the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle], 2, 1847-1912, transcribed and compiled by Rev. J. Lenders, January-March 1931, pp. 11-15. I am obliged to the Rt Rev. James Cunningham, Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle, for permission to consult this MS.

6 ‘Irish in England’, Letter XV (19 October 1872), p. 662. Newcastle’s Medical Officer echoed this in 1874, stating that in only three other provincial towns—Liverpool, Manchester and Bradford—was there a higher proportion of Irish. Cited in Middlebrook, S., Newcastle Upon Tyne, Its Growth and Achievement (Newcastle, 1950), p. 273 Google Scholar.

7

‘The Horrid War i’ Sandgeyt’, Allan’s Illustrated Tyneside Songs and Readings (Newcastle, [186?]), revised ed. 1891, p. 381 Google Scholar. On the riot see: Tablet, 12 (24 May 1851), pp. 323-4; Newcastle Chronicle, 16 May 1851, p. 6 and Newcastle Journal, 17 May 1851, p. 5.

8 Much less than a third of the Irish liable for Poor Law removal were actually deported, and Poor Law relief to Irishmen without the residency requirements was commonplace. See : AH Saints Parish: Guardians’ Meeting, 1840-48, and Minutes of the Newcastle Board of Guardians 6, 1845-46; 7, 1847: Newcastle City Archives. The Newcastle Corporation’s failure to make scapegoats of the Irish to excuse their own sanitary neglect during fever and cholera outbreaks is also revealing compared to the statements by other corporations with Irish populations.

9 In 1851, 38% of the population of Durham and Northumberland were immigrants from outside the counties. A staggering 67.4% of Newcastle’s population in 1851 was not born in Northumberland. Population Census, 1851, 303; House, J.W., North-Eastern England Population Movements and the Landscape Since the Early 19th Century (Newcastle, 1954), p. 3ffGoogle Scholar.

10 Robert Moore offers sociological insights on this phenomenon in his effort to explain the surprising lack of anti-Irishness in the 1860’s and ‘70s in some of the newer colliery villages of Durham: Pit-Men, , Preachers and Politics: The effects of Methodism in a Durham mining community (Cambridge, 1974,) pp. 76–77 Google Scholar.

11 17.8% of the total population of Durham and Northumberland could be accommodated by the Church of England, while 29.8% could be accommodated by the other denominations. Census of Great Britain: Religious Worship: England and Wales, 1851, Parliamentary Papers, 1852-53, 88, pp. cclxxiv, ccxcii. On the basis of percentage of available seating accommodation, there was 1 Anglican seat to 1.24 Methodist seats. For all of England and Wales this ratio was 1:0.41. Calculated from Table C in Horace Mann, ‘On the Statistical Position of Religious Bodies in England and Wales’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 18 (June 1855), p. 157. The figures do not take into account the accommodation shortage (which was worse only in Lancashire), a burden that fell almost entirely to the Nonconformist denominations.

12 Newcastle Courant, 21-28 March 1851. As E. R. Norman points out, the Dissenters generally enjoyed the spectacle of No Popery without contributing much to it themselves. For their outcry in 1851 they were chastised by their leaders and warned to avoid embarrassing inconsistencies: Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (London, 1968, paperback ed.), pp. 66-67. It should be noted that when national feeling was at its height over the Titles Bill, the petition from Newcastle with the most signatures was from 1,067 residents who were not concerned with the aggrandisement of Popery, but with a ‘modification of the tax upon carriages’ in the proposed Income Tax Bill. Newcastle Courant, 28 March 1851, p. 3.

13 During the election of 1852, for example, when Maynooth was supposedly a household word, an anti-Maynooth meeting sponsored by the Protestant Alliance in Newcastle drew an attendance ‘so meagre that the proceedings were adjourned sine die’ The same occurred in Durham City. Gateshead Observer, 27 March 1852, p. 3; Tablet, 13 (3 April 1852), p. 213; Durham Chronicle, 26 March 1852, p. 6; and Durham Advertiser, 26 March 1852, p. 4.

14 Though an Orange Lodge was formed in Newcastle in November1814 and continued to be registered as a Friendly Society until 1830, thereare no references in the local press to any Battle of Boyne Day celebrations nor any indication of disturbances on St Patrick’s Days by Orangemen. A single exception is the disturbance at Consett on 12 July 1882, but on that occasion Orangemen were specially imported. Durham Chronicle, 14 July 1882, p. 5.

15 For example: in 1842, Thomas Dunn was installed as the first Catholic Lord Mayor of Newcastle since the Reformation; in 1844, Henry T. M. Witham became the first Catholic High Sheriff of County Durham, and when W. T. Salvin contemplated standing as a county candidate in 1837, Lord Durham’s agent, Henry Morton, wrote to his employer that ‘informed estimates suggested that his Catholicism would cost the Liberal party only two hundred out of over two thousand votes’. Blair, C.H. Hunter, The Mayors and Lord Mayors of Newcastle, 1216-1940(Newcastle, 1940), p. 119 Google Scholar; Fordyce, William, The History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham (Newcastle, 1857), 1, p. 150 Google Scholar, and the obituary on Witham in the Phrenological Journal, 18 (April 1845), p. 188; the quotation by Morton is given in Nossiter, T.J., Elections and Political Behaviour in County Durham and Newcastle 1832-74, D.Phil. (Oxford, 1968), p. 99 Google Scholar.

16 The letter’s existence and the reaction to it is confirmed through Belaney’s second letter as printed in the Seaham Weekly News and reprinted in the Tablet, see below, note 25.

17 Belaney was born in Scotland of wealthy parents in 1804; educated at Edinburgh and then at Cambridge where he received his M.A. in 1846. After holding various curacies in Northumberland, he became the Vicar of Arlington, Sussex, 1843-52. Denounced as a Jesuit, he brought a lawsuit against one of his churchwardens in 1852, the year of his own conversion to Catholicism. He became one of the most indefatigable workers for Catholicism in Britain, introducing the Jesuits to Glasgow and the Servite Fathers toLondon. He spent his entire income on the church (contributing over £1,000 to one chapel alone) and died on 24 August 1899, a pauper. At his death he was the oldest priest in England. Tablet, 62 (2 September 1899), pp. 363-4; Venn, J.A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, Pt. 2, 1752-1900, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1940), p. 217 Google Scholar.

18 Lord Londonderry’s tyranny as a colliery owner has recently come under reconsideration in A. J. Heesom, ‘Entrepreneurial Paternalism: The Third Lord Londonderry (1778-1854) and the Coal Trade’, Durham University Journal, 66 (June 1974), pp. 238-56. Of thehatred felt for Londonderry by both contemporaries and historians, Heesom admits that ‘It is hard, even when all the evidence is examined, to find Londonderry not guilty’. As The Times said in posthumous tribute, ‘The truth is, that the reactionary sympathies of such a man need no apology’. 4 December 1861, p. 9.

19 The sobriquet for the Third Marquess used by later generations of Londonderrys : Edith Londonderry, Anne, Frances (London and N.Y., 1958), p. vii Google Scholar.

20 ‘Seaham Harbour’, Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 2 August 1862, p. 4. This impression of Lady Londonderry was based on her heavy expenditure on churches, infirmaries, reading rooms, etc., in Seaham Harbour and in her colliery villages. William Fordyce, for example, wrote of her and her husband that they ‘employ thousands of workpeople, and both take a lively interest in their social and moral improvement, and in the establishment of schools for the education of the children’: History of Coal, Coke, Coal-Fields [and] Iron (London, 1860), p. 92 Google Scholar. Those in her employment, however, treated her with more fear than respect.

21 Lives of Lord Castlereagh and Lord Stewart(London, 1861), 3, p. 213 Google Scholar.

23 Disraeli (London, 1966), pp. 296, 126.

23 Disraeli to Lady Bradford, 1874, quoted in Londonderry, Edith ed., Letters from Benjamin Disraeli to Frances Anne Marchioness of Londonderry, 1837-1861 (London, 1938), p. 193 Google Scholar.

24 The Tablet later referred to the place as ‘a miserable sort of loft in the back premises of an inn’ and later still as ‘a miserable loft over a stable’, N.S. 2 (7 August 1869), p. 314; N.S. 4 (9 July 1870), p. 52. By 1907 it was being recalled as a‘storeroom over a stable’ to which the congregation came in ‘such numbers as almost to cause suffocation’. Kelly, Bernard W., Historical Notes on English Catholic Missions (London, 1907), p. 350 Google Scholar. Belaney’s description was of a crowded hayloft.

25 Belaney to Frances Anne Vane Londonderry, Seaham Harbour, 2 November 1860. Re printed in Tablet, 21 (24 November 1860), p. 740.

26 Frances Anne to Rev. G. Wilkinson, Seaham Hall, 9 November 1860, ibid., p. 740.

27 Ward, Thomas H., Men of the Reign (London, 1885), p. 145 Google Scholar.

28 F. Whellan, Directory of Durham and Newcastle 1856, pp. 640-2.

29 Benefice Files of the Church Commissioners (Seaham) 40453, 23 December 1842.

30 G. Howard Wilkinson to Lady Londonderry, Seaham Harbour, 12 November 1860, reprinted in Tablet, loc. cit.

31 Born 1825, the third son of the Third Marquess (and second son of Frances Anne), he was MP for Durham City, December 1852 till June 1853, when unseated by petition. He succeeded his older brother as MP for the Northern Division of County Durham, 1854-64, but his career was punctuated by bouts of insanity, in which state he died in 1864.

32 Frances Anne to Rev. Belaney, Seaham Hall, 15 November 1860, Tablet, loc. cit.

33 Record, 30 November 1860, p. 4.

34 Belaney to Lady Londonderry, London, 19 November 1860, Tablet, loc. cit.

35 He sent £300 to Bishop Hogarth from Ireland in January I860, Tablet, 22 (7 January 1860), p. 4. St Godric’s, Durham, a showpiece of Catholicism for the cathedral city, was opened by Manning in November 1864.

36 The article is quoted verbatim in a press cutting (undated, untitled) marked 7 December 1861, contained in the Londonderry Papers, Durham County Record Office—216 (hereafter D/LO/C).

37 Vicar of Chris’s Church, New Seaham, (1860-189?); his church was also paid for and endowed by the Marchioness. See D/LO/C—201.

38 Robert Anderson to Lady Londonderry, 6 January 1862, D/LO/C—216.

39 Rev. Scott to Lady Londonderry, 6 January 1862, D/LO/C—216. The figure includes women and children. The census taken by the Catholic Church in 1861 showed Seaham to have a population of 799 Catholics, 473 of whom were adults. Status Animar um etc., op. cit., 2, pp. 27-33.

40 Lord Adolphous to [? Hull Advertiser], copy, 18 January 1862, D/LO/C—216.

41 R. Laurence Pemberton to Lady Londonderry, 7 March 1862, D/LO/C—216.

42 Robert Anderson to Lady Londonderry, 10 March 1862, D/LO/C—216.

43 Adolphous to Lady Londonderry, undated, D/LO/C—216.

44 Gorman, W.Gordon, Converts to Rome, 1850-1910 (London, 1910), p. 18 Google Scholar.

45 Priscilla M. A. Beckwith to Lady Londonderry, 9 December 1862, D/LO/C—216. The attitude to the Irish Catholics bears comparison with the better-known expostulation by another north-eastern Catholic, Mrs Barbara Charlton, that ‘English Catholics are responsible beings who are taught right from wrong, whereas Irish Catholics, belonging to a yetsavage nation, know no better and ate perhaps excusable on that account’. Charlton, L.E.O., Recollections of a Northumbrian Lady, 1815-66 (London, 1949), p. 244 Google Scholar.

46 As quoted in Beckwith to Lady Londonderry, date illegible, D/LO/C—216. Lady Londonderry’s notes and letters on this aspect are not extant.

47 Lady Elizabeth Jocelyn, wife of the Fourth Marquess and daughter of the Third Earl of Roden. Widow of the Sixth Viscount Powerscourt,she married Frances Anne’s stepson, Castlereagh (as he was then called) at the British Embassy in Paris in 1846. Gorman, op. cit., p. 175; Frances Anne, op. cit., p. 226. Frederick William Castlereagh (1805-72) was the first son of the Third Marquess by a former marriage. He became the Fourth Marquess in 1854, but had no connections with the Durham estates. The first son of Frances Anne was Henry, Viscount Seaham (1821-84), later Earl Vane, who became the Fifth Marquess in 1872. The Londonderry Papers: Catalogue (Durham County Council, 1969), p. 150.

48 Tablet, N.S., 2 (7 August 1869), p. 314.

49 Pastoral, 25 January 1854, Ushaw Collection of Pastorals and Circulars of the Vicars Apostolic and Bishops for the Northern Division and the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, 1753-1869, 3.I am indebted to Rev.Payne, Librarian of Ushaw College, for his permission to consult this invaluable collection and also for his many acts of kindness in placing Ushaw’s splendid resources at my disposal.

50 The stone was laid on 22 July 1869 and the church, with accommodation for 500, was opened in July 1870.

51 See : Norman, op. cit. ; Best, G.F.A., ‘Popular Protestantism in Victorian Britain’, in Robson, Robert ed., Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain (London, 1967), pp. 115-42Google Scholar; Treble, J.H., The Place of the Irish Catholics in the Social Life of the North of England, 1829-51, Ph.D. Thesis (Leeds, 1969)Google Scholar; Hickey, J., ‘Catholics in Cardiff’, in Hickey, , Urban Catholics (London, 1967), pp. 56–134 Google Scholar; Handley, James E., The Irish in Modern Scotland (Cork, 1947)Google Scholar; and Gilley, S.W., Evangelical and Roman Catholic Missions to the Irish in London, 1830-1870, Ph.D. Thesis (Cambridge, 1970)Google Scholar, subsequently published in Downside Review, 89 (January 1971), pp. 64-89 and in three articles in Recusant History, October 1969-January 1971.

52 Election address, dated 7 April 1852, and printed in the Durham Advertiser, 4 June 1852, p. 4.

53 For a discussion of this Tory ideology in terms of the Irish Question and No Popery see Cahill, Gilbert A., ‘Irish Catholicism and English Toryism’, Review of Politics, 19 (January 1957), pp. 62–76 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 Though Norman Gash, SirPeel, Robert (London, 1972), p. 279 Google Scholar, describes him as ‘an Orange peer’, Londonderry’s contempt was reserved for the Presbyterians of Co. Down, not the Catholics. Londonderry was also one of the peers who voted in person in favour of the third reading of the Emancipation Bill on 10 April 1829. Hansard, 2nd ser. 21, p. 694. See the letters on Londonderry and Catholic Emancipation, D/LO/C—123. The Hull Advertiser, whilst castigating Lady Londonderry, spoke, quite rightly, of the late Third Marquess as ‘a good Irish Landlord’.