ABSTRACT
The Catholic community did not escape the Revolution and its aftermath unscathed, and it was compromised by its involvement in Jacobitism for at least the thirty-five years. The roots of Jacobitism lay in the civil wars and interregnum of the mid-seventeenth century. Scottish and Irish Jacobites resented the Stuart court's anglocentricity, but they usually recognised the logic behind it. The mountain of debt the Catholic élite as a whole appears to have been groaning under, if petitions to the Forfeited Estates Commission set up in 1716 are taken at face value, was partially artificial. It is true that only a handful supported the accommodation between the Catholic community and Hanoverian dynasty proposed by the Duke of Norfolk and Lord Waldegrave in 1716. The conjunction between the squalid demise of the Jacobite cause in the late 1750s, when it was finally killed by Charles Edward Stuart's brutality and alcoholism, and the growth of élite tolerance of English Catholicism is not coincidental.
