Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England

E. R. Norman, E. Norman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138665514
• eBook ISBN: 9781000639308
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

First published in 1968, this book provides an introduction to the subject of anti-Catholicism in Victorian England and a selection of illustrative documents. It demonstrates that Victorian 'No Popery' agitations were in fact almost the last expressions of a long English tradition of anti-Catholic intolerance and, in reality, the legal and socia

Introduction

1

The Anti-Catholic Tradition

In 1875 Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, probably the best known text in the very ample library of British anti-Catholic literature, was republished in London.¹ Among the engravings illustrating the sufferings of the early Protestants was one depicting the Massacre of St Bartholomew. It was vivid and crude, but a point was made; and it is strange to realize that this scene of the dispatch of sixteenth-century Huguenots—a scene which is today enclosed in the specialist history-book—was almost as familiar to the Victorians as the Bible itself. Those with any degree of literacy must have slid through almost daily mention of it in the massive religious journalism of the nineteenth century. The less-endowed would have recognized the event from cheap prints and from frequent reference in the pulpit. For this representation of the Massacre of St Bartholomew, together with numerous other tableaux on similar themes, belonged to a tradition of anti-Catholicism whose wide acceptance and long endurance, among all classes in society, secured it an important place in Victorian civilization. The same edition of Foxe also included an introductory essay by a Protestant clergyman which adequately exemplifies the attitude which gave strength to the tradition. ‘Let us then hold up the inhuman system to merited execration’, wrote that divine of the Roman Catholic religion; ‘let parents teach their children, and children teach their children, to dread and to oppose this abomination of desolation’.²

¹ For an account of the place of this work in the Protestant tradition, see William Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation, London, 1963.

² Ingram Cobbin, ‘Essay on Popery’, in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, London, 1875, p. iv.

The huge volume of ‘No Popery’ literature in the nineteenth century indicated clearly—as Newman pointed out—that Catholicism was ‘the victim of a prejudice which perpetuates itself and gives birth to what it feeds upon’.³ This prejudice accumulated easily enough. Popular hatred founded largely on ignorance of the real tenets of Catholicism, and more informed antipathy established through inquiry into the beliefs and organization of the Catholic Church, were able to join hands because, as Newman again noticed, English Protestants ‘think our creed is so irrational that it will fall to pieces of itself, when the sun of reason is directed upon the places which at present it is enveloping’.⁴ This judgment was an accurate enough assessment. Catholic beliefs, especially the sacerdotal nature of the Christian ministry (which the Protestant Archbishop Whately called ‘religion by proxy’⁵), the primacy of St Peter and the See of Rome, the invocation of saints, veneration of the Virgin, transubstantiation, popular miracles and so on,⁶ seemed to some Protestants mildly derisory, to others downright wicked, and to some, even perverted. The claim of infallibility for the Church, exacerbated by the Vatican Decrees of 1870, seemed final proof, to those who sought it, of the essentially unenlightened condition of the whole of Catholicism, structure and doctrine alike. ‘Popery is not changed—has not grown—has not advanced with the times—is not liberal—does not study national interests or individual happiness—but is still the same old persecuting enemy.’⁷ Thus said ‘Patrick Murphy’ in 1865, in a work entitled Popery in Ireland, which described the rescue of a young girl from a convent where she had been ‘imprisoned’ for reading the Bible. Protestants, in fact, commonly supposed that the Bible was ‘popery’s only antidote, the sword that slays the monster’.⁸ The miraculous element in the lives of Catholic saints also appeared to be a high indication of superstition. Newman’s belief in the liquefaction of the blood of St Januarius at Naples, for example, seemed utterly fantastic to Protestant Englishmen. Blanco White, who had been a Catholic priest in Spain before his defection to England, to Anglicanism, and ultimately to Socinianism, took special pleasure in ridiculing the simple credulity of his Spanish former co-religionists. The full spirit of the anti-Catholie tradition breathes through his account of the diverting occasion when he first managed to look into the shrine of St Ferdinand at Seville. The saint, who had been declared incorruptible, was plainly made largely of painted parchment.⁹ But that was abroad, and as every British Protestant knew, ‘the scenes of commerce, pleasure, dissipation and vice, which abound in continental cities on the Sabbath, mark them at once as under the dominion of the “Man of Sin”.’¹⁰

³ J. H. Newman, Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, (1851), London, 1892 edition, p. 11.

⁴ Ibid., p. 275.

⁵ See Richard Whately, Essays (Third Series) on the Errors of Romanism, fifth edition, London, 1856, p. 44.

⁶ For a full list, see Karl von Hase, Handbook to the Controversy with Rome, translated by A. W. Streane, second edition, London, 1909, 2 vols.

⁷ Patrick Murphy on Popery in Ireland, or Confessionals, Abductions, Nunneries, Fenians and Orangemen. A Narrative of Facts, London, 1865, p. viii. The author was in fact G. H. Whalley, M.P. for Peterborough, and the work, despite its subtitle, has strong fictional qualities.

⁸ Ibid., p. 101.

⁹ J. Blanco White, Practical and Internal Evidence against Catholicism, Second edition, London, 1826, p. 179.

¹⁰ Cobbin, op. cit., p. xvii. And see Doc. 12.

Although superstitious belief and idolatrous worship were frightful enough, Protestants also supposed the ‘Man of Sin’ to be inextricably involved with vile practices. Monks and nuns, confessors and popes were all popularly imagined to indulge themselves with contemptible vices.¹¹ The Protestant tradition certainly suspected that the rule of celibacy was largely a fiction, and that the seclusion of monastic cells invited (almost) unthinkable practices. ‘In the days of Henry VIII,’ wrote the Reverend Ingram Cobbin, ‘when the monasteries were fully explored in England, the abbots, priors, and monks kept as many women each as any lascivious Mohammedan could desire, and their crimes [also?] renewed the existence of Sodom and Gomorrah.’ Convents, he declared, were ‘no better than brothels of the worst description’.¹²

¹¹ See Herbert Thurston, No Popery, Chapters on Anti-Papal Prejudice, London, 1930, p. 15ff.

¹² Cobbin, op. cit., p. xi.

In addition to superstition and moral corruption, the Protestant tradition also distrusted the political claims of die Church of Rome. Bound by a ‘double allegiance’, to Pope and Crown, Catholics were imagined to be potential—and sometimes (as in Ireland) even actual—subversives of the Protestant Constitution. Most nineteenth-century commentary pointed to the temporal sovereignty of the Papacy in Italy and the continued, though theoretical, existence of the deposing power of the Papal throne. Even Gladstone, in the famous Vatican Decrees controversy of 1874, lent his authority to this aspect of the case against Rome. In the popular imagination it was always the Jesuits, of course, whose secret network wrought subversion of free constitutions and liberal laws everywhere: part of a grand design to enslave the minds of men in the dark ‘medievalism’ and ‘priestcraft’ of the Vatican. The Papal States in Italy were held up as an example of this despicable force where it was successful (Doc. 13). ‘Judge the Pope by the prevailing belief of Protestant England, derived from the misrepresentations of the press, its platform, or its pulpit,’ wrote J. F. Maguire, the Catholic member of Parliament for Cork City, in 1870, ‘and one beholds in him a combination of temporal despot and spiritual imposter, at once the scourge of an afflicted people, and the arch-priest of Satan.’¹³ With this view of Catholicism went the assumption that its adherents’ unenlightened bigotry inclined them automatically to intolerance. The numerous and lurid accounts of the savaging of Protestants during the Reformation, and the popular engravings of the terrors of the Inquisition, added such proof as was thought necessary. Even Blanco White, who was too complicated a man to be incautious in his criticisms of Rome, was capable of assuming the ‘indubitable fact that sincere Roman Catholics cannot conscientiously be tolerant’.¹⁴

¹³ J. F. Maguire, Pius the Ninth, London, revised edition, 1878, p. 4.

¹⁴ J. Blanco White, op. cit., p. v.

The ideology of anti-Catholicism drew upon a tradition extending backwards to the Reformation and beyond. It influenced the behaviour of all classes in English society in the nineteenth century. Workingmen frequently gave vent to their interpretation of the tradition in localized petty rioting, and as the immigration of poor Irish labourers increased during and after the famine years of the later 1840’s, with the resulting depression of the labour market, such disturbances became almost endemic. English working-men did not discriminate between the unskilled Irishmen and their religion. The notorious Stockport riots in 1852, when two Catholic chapels in a district of heavy Irish settlement were sacked and desecrated by a mob of working-men, showed such popular causes of religious disharmony at work. The coming of the Irish did, however, give a new mobility to the Catholic population in England and Scotland; it altered its distribution as well as its size. The immigrants settled as an urban residuum, in Liverpool, Glasgow, Swansea and London, and they roamed the countryside as navvies. The available statistics do not offer a very accurate indication of their numbers, but the 1841 census gave a figure of 400,000 Irish-born in England, Wales ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• PREFACE
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• DOCUMENTS
• INDEX TO INTRODUCTION