[21] The Member for Oldham was the noted William Cobbett (1762-1835), who, after an extraordinary career in England and America, entered the first Reformed Parliament. Cobbett was very violent in his opposition to Jewish liberties. See note 24. [22] The Albigenses, who took their name from one of their strongholds, the town of Albi on the Tarn, were an anti-sacerdotal sect in the South of France during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, infected with Manichæan heresy. They suffered the most horrible cruelties in the crusade carried on against them from 1209 to 1218 under the command of Simon de Montfort, the father of the Simon de Montfort so well known in English history. See T. F. Tout, “The Empire and the Papacy,” pp. 216, 401. [23] See note 6. [24] On March 1, 1833, Mr. Hill presented a petition by Unitarians in favour of the “removal of all Religious Disqualifications still existing, and especially for the removal of the Disabilities affecting the Jews.” It was on this occasion that Cobbett raised the objection to which Macaulay’s argument is the reply. The reference to Paine’s “Age of Reason” is also a covert hit at Cobbett, who reprinted Paine’s work. [25] Macaulay here overstates the case. The synagogue has at various times been reluctant to receive and unwilling to seek proselytes. But it does not reject them. [26] Lord George Gordon (1751-1793), the third son of Cosmo George, Duke of Gordon, was charged with high treason for having in 1780 headed terrible riots in London directed against the removal of certain Roman Catholic disabilities. He was acquitted on the ground that he had no treasonable intentions. He afterwards embraced the Jewish faith, and was received into the covenant of Abraham in Birmingham, but without the sanction of the Jewish ecclesiastical authorities in London. A vivid description of the “No Popery” riots of 1780 will be found in Dickens’ “Barnaby Rudge,” which also contains a reference to Lord George’s change of religion. [27] In the report of Grant’s speech in the _Times_ of April 18, 1833, occurs this passage:—