The objection to Roman Catholics was that their loyalty to the Pope was an allegiance to a "foreign" ruler which prevented their being good citizens at home.

Against this prejudice it was useless to point to what had been done by Englishmen for their country, when all the land was Catholic, and all accepted the supremacy of the Pope.

It was not till 1778 that the first Catholic Relief Bill was carried, a Bill that "shook the general prejudice against Catholics to the centre, and restored to them a thousand indescribable charities in the ordinary intercourse of social life which they had seldom experienced." The last Roman Catholic to die for conscience' sake was Oliver Plunket, Archbishop of Armagh, who was executed at Tyburn, when Charles II.

was King, in 1681.

After the Revolution, Nonconformists and Catholics were no longer hanged or tortured for declining the ministrations of the Established Church, but still were penalised in many lesser ways.