Religion and Politics in the Risorgimento

Britain and the New Italy, 1861-1875

D. Raponi

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137342980
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire sociale

This book examines Anglo-Italian political and cultural relations and analyses the importance of religion in the British 'Orientalist' perception of Italy. It puts religion at the centre of a harsh political and cultural war, one that was fought on international, diplomatic, and domestic levels.

1

Italy as the ‘European India’: British orientalism, cultural imperialism, and anti-Catholicism, c. 1850–1870

As a Protestant Dean, to protest is my right:

As an Irishman born, I’ve a mission to fight:

As a preacher of peace, I bid all hold their tongue,

And list, while my curse at the Papists is flung . . .

I take it for granted, you know

My view of the Papists, expressed long ago . . .

That Papists are tricksters, and traitors, and thieves:

That none of them ever says what he believes:

That their faith makes the Irish to cheat, lie, and steal,

And be blackguards – as sure as my name is McNeile.

That the seven deadly sins are summed up in a priest:

That the clerical tonsure’s the mark of the beast:

That their Pope is the red Babylonian fye-fye:

His tiara a fool’s cap, his cross-keys a lie:

That their preaching and teaching lead straight to the pit:

That in devilish conclave their canonists sit,

Forging fetters for Protestants – soul, head and heel,

And fashioning faggots to roast.¹

The Reverend Dr Hugh McNeile, the author of the verses above, was an Irish-born, Calvinist Anglican of Scottish descent. He was known for his exceptional oratorical abilities, for his fierce anti-Catholicism and for his yet stronger anti-Tractarianism and anti-Anglo-Catholicism. A premillennial, McNeile had been a vocal opponent of the Catholic emancipation of 1829.² Ever since, his anti-Catholic speeches attracted vast crowds, and his compelling style of utterance, combined with a commanding presence, convinced many of the soundness of his spiritual crusade against Catholicism. A man not only of great skills, but also of deep faith and spirituality, his views were perceived as extreme and contentious among the upper circles of politics and of the Church of England, which resulted in the slow progress of his career (he became Dean of Ripon only when he was 70 years old). This notwithstanding, he was extremely popular among the lower classes, and his sermons are a good proxy to understand how English Protestant opinion perceived Catholicism in the late Victorian era, in particular after the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy.³

The re-establishment took place on 29 September 1850, when Pope Pius IX published a bull, Universalis Ecclesiae, with which he appointed the Archbishop of Westminster and twelve bishops. The following day Nicholas Wiseman was made cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. The Pontiff’s decision, together with the enthusiasm and openness with which Wiseman accepted and welcomed his appointment to the archbishopric, prompted an outraged reaction from the British public opinion, press, and establishment. Wiseman’s publication of his letter Ex Porta Flaminia, written in a somewhat hyperbolic and boastful tone, made things even worse⁴. The Times labelled it a ‘mongrel document, which reads like a cross between an Imperial rescript and a sermon addressed to the victims of an auto-da-fe’,⁵ and stated their preoccupation with the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy as a threat to the Church of England and to the country’s Protestantism, the ‘palladium of freedom of thought, of action, and of government’.⁶

Until then, the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, had been relatively undisturbed by the idea of having a Catholic hierarchy in the country. In August 1848 he answered a question from Sir Robert Inglis, Member of Parliament for Oxford, declaring that he was not opposed to the idea of Wiseman calling himself Archbishop of Westminster; and in 1849 he reiterated his conviction to the Earl of Shrewsbury, saying that he would not object to Catholic bishops taking the names of English towns.⁷ When Wiseman left for Rome on 16 August 1850, he told Russell that he would be made a cardinal, to which Russell raised no objections and, in fact, charged Wiseman with a diplomatic mission at the Vatican on behalf of the British government.⁸ Russell had almost believed that the restoration of the hierarchy would pass for the most part unacknowledged in Britain. However, when he realised that this was not at all the case, surprised by the public’s strong reaction, he adapted his stance accordingly.

For three weeks after the publication of the Papal bull in The Times, Russell did not say much publicly about it; he rather sent private letters to Palmerston, the Queen and the Bishop of London, in which he invited them to remain calm and not act in a hurry.⁹ On 4 November 1850, however, Russell published two letters addressed to the Bishop of Durham, calling the re-establishment of the hierarchy an act of ‘aggression’ by the Pope, from which The Times subsequently coined the expression ‘Papal Aggression’ – a phrase which would thenceforth mark Britain’s relations with the Papacy for at least a decade.¹⁰ In his letters, Russell expressed his disappointment towards the Pope, because ‘there is an assumption of power in all the documents which have come from Rome; a pretension of supremacy over the realm of England, and a claim to sole and undivided sway, which is inconsistent with the Queen’s supremacy . . . and with the spiritual independence of the nation.’¹¹ He thus promised that ‘no foreign prince or potentate will be at liberty to fasten his fetters upon a nation which has so long and so nobly vindicated its right to freedom of opinion, civil, political and religious.’¹² The letter closed with an appeal to the strengths of England, ‘a nation which looks with contempt on the mummeries of superstition’, and a warning of Tractarianism which, in Russell’s mind, posed an even greater threat because of the ‘laborious endeavours’ of the Tractarian members of the Church of England to ‘confine the intellect and enslave the soul.’¹³ Referring to Catholic practices as ‘mummeries of superstition’, Russell had at once satisfied England’s anti-Catholic appetite, and alienated Catholics with what they perceived to be a grave offense.¹⁴ Lord Shaftesbury, who despised the ‘abominable superstitions’ of Catholicism,¹⁵ exulted, and in his diary noted that ‘the feeling against the Papal Aggression is deep and extensive . . . John Russell has written a letter to the Bishop of Durham on this subject, bold, manly, Protestant, and true. It is admirably written.’¹⁶ Adopting a trope of masculinity that was to become common in Protestant critiques of Catholicism, Shaftesbury claimed that Protestants were real men and on the side of truth, whereas Catholics were effeminate and on the side of falsehood, for they were misled by the Pope.

On 5 November, on a particularly heated Guy Fawkes Day, effigies of Cardinal Wiseman and of the Pope were burnt, while the population violently demonstrated their contempt for the Catholic re-establishment.¹⁷ The Times declared that ‘the re-establishment of an entire hierarchy by Papal authority, without the assent of the existing Government of this nation . . . is an act of sovereignty.’¹⁸ Thus started ‘the most severe anti-Catholic tumult of the century’, which emerged ‘from all levels of society, from the working classes to the prime minister’, and that ‘brought to near universal expression an underlying anti-papal conviction common to nearly all non-Catholic English.’¹⁹ Thousands of petitions were signed and sent to the Crown, requesting some form of retaliatory action; thousands of meetings were held, chaired by indignant and angry local leaders.²⁰ Even though the new hierarchy did not extend beyond England’s borders, Scotland witnessed extensive protest movements, and the commission of the General Assembly of the Free Church stated that the Pope’s decision was ‘well fitted to awaken the alarm of all sound Protestants and patriots’.²¹ In Wales and Ulster there were also numerous expressions of outrage and complaint.²²

This chapter aims to demonstrate that anti-Catholicism and anti-Popery, which sometimes get confused but are different albeit closely related concepts, coexisted in Victorian Britain and constituted an important part of the mind-set with which Britons interpreted their relations with Italy and the Papacy. Although it is easier and less controversial to speak of anti-Popery as a shared feature of late Victorian Britain’s attitudes towards the Roman Catholic Church and its clergy, it is undeniable that elements of anti-Catholicism resurfaced periodically, especially at times of particular distress towards policies adopted by the Pontiff. As Lucy Riall has persuasively argued in a recent essay, in 1850s Britain opposition to Catholicism and the Pope went hand in hand.²³ The anti-Popery uproar unleashed by the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy induced powerful evangelical societies, such as the Evangelical Alliance, to develop an interest in Italian political and religious affairs that, despite their traditional anti-Catholicism, they would not normally have had.²⁴

The chapter will also provide the context and background to the events that will be studied in more detail in the following chapters, for it is difficult to understand Anglo-Italian and Anglo-Papal relations in the 1860s without first discussing, however briefly, the 1850s. Therefore, this first section is dedicated to demonstrating how the re-establishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy of 1850 was the spark that caused the latent anti-Catholicism of Great Britain to emerge again. It was not simply anticlericalism, for the clergy were not the only targets, nor was it only anti-Popery, because whilst the Pope and his policies were particularly harshly criticised, the British attacked many of the practices and doctrinal beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church: the institute of the confessional, the processions, the veneration of saints, as well as the Eucharist and priestly celibacy, to name just a few. Often, such attacks were conducted by employing old revisited stereotypes and prejudices, but this notwithstanding the targets were the Catholic Church as an institution and Catholicism as a religious confession. In addition, it will be seen how this anti-Catholicism and fear of a hypothetical ‘Papal Aggression’ at times bordered on paranoia. This was particularly evident at the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was widely held to be controlled by a Jesuit sect, whose aim was supposedly to infiltrate unspecified Catholic troops into England pretending to be visitors to the exhibition, but who, once in the country, would have allegedly annihilated Protestantism.²⁵ The Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, promoted by Lord John Russell and approved by Parliament (although never enforced), ought to be seen as the product of such an atmosphere of mistrust, suspicion, and pervasive hatred of all things Catholic.²⁶

The following sections will illustrate the ubiquitous religiosity of mid-century Victorian society, and the religious, cultural, and political influence of evangelicalism. Although the evangelical movement was divided on a number of issues, it was remarkably united when it came to anti-Catholicism. Consequently, religion easily spilled into politics when dealing with the Italian and Roman questions, which were analysed and confronted with an overt emphasis on the importance of Protestantism in making what the British deemed to be a superior, or ‘exceptional’, civilisation: their own. This consciousness and confidence of their ‘superiority’ over all nineteenth-century peoples, led the British to view Italians through an ‘Orientalist’ lens, as I argue in the concluding parts of this chapter. The evangelical missionaries studied throughout the book were agents of ‘cultural imperialism’, for they worked in Italy with the conviction that they were exporting a superior religion and civilisation: that combination of Protestantism, liberalism, and Free Trade that had made Britain the dominant world power. Although Italy was never colonised by the British, its liminal position between the Occident and the Orient, as well as its perceived ‘backwardness’ (supposed to have been caused predominantly, but not only, by Catholicism) in an imaginary geography that divided the world into civilised and uncivilised countries, made it a fertile ground for a form of imperialism that stopped short of military and political interference, but that culturally and religiously treated Italy as the ‘Orient’. In the pages that follow, I argue that Britain’s attitude to Italy was that of an ‘inner-European Orientalism’, at the same time both similar to and different from the attitude it reserved for Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Greece.²⁷

‘The pornography of the Puritan’: Anti-Catholicism and anti-Popery in mid-Victorian Britain

A 15-year old Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who would grow to become one of the greatest English-speaking preachers of the century, published in 1850 a fiercely anti-Catholic text titled Anti-Christ and her brood, or, Popery unmasked , which at the time was widely perceived to be a powerful response to the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy.²⁸ It is striking that an issue essentially concerned with the structures of institutional religion caused broad movements of protest and outraged the public mind of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ulster.²⁹ That ecclesiastical organisation, possibly the most ‘boring’ and least popular aspect of organised religion, could stir such a high tide of patriotism is a further sign, I believe, of the weakness of the secularisation theory when faced with historical evidence. That anti-Popery and, to a certain extent, anti-Catholicism ...