Why are there so few Catholics in Regency romances?

Aspiring writers are encouraged to write the story they want to tell. I am an avid fan of Heyer. What writer of historical romance is not? However, when I was a teenager I was a bit curious, just curious, not affronted, as to why, in her many historical romance novels, she mostly avoided the Catholic question that was so rampant in the context of her settings, including the Regency period, where it was hotly debated in parliament. Why did she not write about this subject?

Yes, I know she had Dominica in Beauvallet marry, well Beauvallet, and I know her heroine was a Catholic in an Inquisition-infested Spain. Perhaps that justifies her marriage to a Protestant by Protestant clergy with the implication that her – safe – future in Elizabethan England is assured. But as a Catholic myself, I felt it was a bit of a cop out. I understand that Elizabethan England was not safe for Catholics, that Beauvallet was Elizabeth’s treasured buccaneer and that it was a patriarchal society. I mean I know that now. I didn’t really appreciate it when I was 19.

The novel I have written is set in 1833 during the short reign of William IV, so just before Victoria came to the throne in 1837. It is mostly true that the Catholic Relief Act of 1829 was the last Act of Parliament to grant freedom to Catholics. The Act of 1829 allowed Catholics to vote and to take a seat in Parliament. The first Catholic Relief Act was in 1778. This allowed Catholics the right to buy property, and in an environment where there was an increasing demand for more and more soldiers to fight the many wars on the continent, to legally join the army. It also repealed the penal laws, freeing Catholics from persecution and prosecution (fines, arrests, imprisonment, exile) for practising their faith. It also meant that the lucrative practice of informing against Catholics was stopped. The reward for successful information was £100.00. Now that Catholics could legally own property it also meant that non-Catholic relatives could no longer apply to the courts to be granted the property owned by Catholics.

The Act of 1791 gave Catholics the right to worship freely.

I can’t answer my question as to why Heyer, or for that matter Austen, didn’t treat these issues in their novels, except that apparently Heyer didn’t really set much store by any religion. I suppose that except for Catholics at that time, probably very few people living then cared particularly for a law that would have no discernible bearing on their own lives. But religious intolerance is nothing new, it is not the prerogative of any one country or era so there were Englishmen and women who were certainly very concerned because they distrusted, even hated, Catholics as the following record shows.

ROMAN CATHOLIC DISABILITY REMOVAL BILL.

HL Deb 16 April 1821 vol 5 cc220-64 [Lord Mansfield arguing for his objection.]

 For the sake, then, of the Protestants, he protested against this bill. To the securities it provided he alike objected: they went to remedy no anomaly, to reconcile no subsisting difficulty. England had long enjoyed the benefit of her present form of laws. During their operation she had made a rapid progress in all the arts of civilized life: her arms had gained her the highest renown; and her constitution had been the admiration both of Catholic and Protestant: it secured to all the fullest enjoyment of toleration and personal protection. They ought never to forget the fact, that with the existing form of government was inseparably interwoven the Protestant church: the one could not be affected without the other.

So this is some of the history of the story I want to tell in my first novel.  It is a story of a Catholic girl from Scotland who falls in love with an English Protestant Peer.  My working title is Elizabeth’s Daughter.