In 1860, the French historian Ernest Renan wrote:
. . . nearly all colonizing nations are Protestant. Because of its individual character, its simple means, its lesser need to be in communion with the rest of Christendom, Protestantism appears to be the perfect religion for the settler. With his Bible, the Englishman finds in the depth of Oceania the spiritual nourishment that the Roman Catholic cannot find without the official establishment of an episcopate and a priesthood.Footnote 1
He might have added further that Protestantism provided settlers with a powerful means of attachment to the metropole. Renan's contemporary outlook on the spirit of British imperialism echoes one of the many connections between religion and empire which have since been explored by historians. In the past thirty years, the ties between empire and Protestantism have been studied according to its ideological, missionary and humanitarian facets. Linda Colley's 1992 opus showed how Protestantism had partly ‘invented’ Great Britain, while the conquest, possession and administration of a common empire held Britons together. The equation of Britishness, Protestantism and imperialism has since been revisited to highlight the diversity of Protestantism and the competing understandings of what it meant to be a Briton in the United Kingdom and its colonies.Footnote 2 However, historians such as John MacKenzie have demonstrated how the empire could provide an arena where members of the four nations could both express their different identities and come together as Britons.Footnote 3 By focusing on ultra-Protestant societies across Greater Britain, this article seeks to examine how some asserted a Protestant-British identity in a world which they saw as threatened by the aggressive competition of (Irish) Roman Catholicism and growing secularism. In line with the historiographical position adopted by Tony Claydon and Ian McBride, the purpose of this article is ‘to redirect attention away from descriptions to aspirations . . . [t]reating protestant nationhood . . . as an anxious aspiration, rather than as a triumphal description’.Footnote 4
In the 1880s, during the halcyon days of the British empire, a number of ultra-Protestant writers and organizations with imperial networks were anxious to assert the indissoluble link between an imperial Britishness and a Protestant identity.Footnote 5 Rather than exploring a specific church, this study concentrates on the anti-Catholic discourse and practices of a number of ultra-Protestant agencies active both in the metropole and across the empire. The Imperial Protestant Federation (IPF), founded by Walter Walsh in 1898, was instrumental in uniting a number of societies under the banner of empire and Protestantism.Footnote 6 Thus, amongst others, the Calvinistic Protestant Union (1888), the Scottish Protestant Alliance (1884) and the Women's Protestant Union (1891) in Britain, and the Protestant Protective Association in Canada (1890) and the Australian Protestant Defence Association (1902) in the dominions, together with Orange lodges across the British world, affiliated to the IPF. These bodies shared a broad evangelical definition of Protestantism which affirmed the supreme authority of the Bible, justification by faith alone, salvation through the unique sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, and regeneration of believers through the action of the Holy Spirit. They also defended the notion that religious beliefs and their political implications formed the basis of a common British heritage and identity. John Wolffe's pioneering study has demonstrated how imperial networks of anti-Catholic societies had elaborated a common defence of British values across the empire.Footnote 7 Those who identified themselves as Britons in Britain and in the dominions brought forward arguments combining a mixture of pessimistic interpretations of British history since the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act with anxieties about ongoing Irish Catholic immigration and a so-called global papist plot. They were convinced that Protestantism was key to all civil liberties enjoyed by Britons.
This flourishing of ultra-Protestant societies must be set in a wider context of the ongoing Irish migrations to Britain and its empire, as well as the political turmoil manifested around the issue of Home Rule. Rates of Irish emigration since the 1840s had been impressive: by 1881, 5,400,000 people inhabited Ireland, while there were an estimated 3,680,000 living overseas.Footnote 8 In 1914, Catholics of Irish descent represented around 25% of the Australian population.Footnote 9 Nevertheless, the late Victorian and Edwardian eras were periods when Irish emigration rates were slowing down. Added to fears of an unending stream of Irish Catholic migrants to Britain and its dominions, political debates surrounding the possible advent of Home Rule in Ireland brought anguish to ultra-Protestant observers across the empire. In 1912, Robert Sellar, a staunch Protestant Scots-Canadian newspaper editor, addressed a warning to his compatriots in his Ulster and Home Rule: A Canadian Parallel: ‘so long as Ireland is united to Britain they [the Protestants] are safe, but the moment the tie is cut and they pass under the government of a Home Rule legislature they will be, as a people, abandoned to their enemies’.Footnote 10
In order to analyse the various forms of anti-Catholicism at work, the categorization adopted here will diverge slightly from Wolffe's typology.Footnote 11 An examination of the connection between religious principles and national identities, in the contemporary writings, journals, newspapers and archives of these societies reveals three distinct forms of anti-Catholicism: constitutional, theologico-political and socio-national.
Constitutional Anti-Catholicism
Constitutional anti-Catholicism encapsulates all aspects of anti-Catholicism which were state-driven and operated within a legal framework to exclude Catholics from public and civic positions. No further anti-Catholic legislation was adopted in the United Kingdom after the enactment of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill in 1851.Footnote 12 In fact, no Kulturkampf took place during mid- and late Victorian times.Footnote 13 Yet this did not prevent tensions from resurfacing around the ‘true’ allegiances of Roman Catholics and their loyalty as British subjects. Accordingly, the Imperial Protestant Federation (1898) prescribed in its revised constitution of May 1901:
Article 7. To oppose all attempts to:
a. Alter the Coronation Oath and the Declaration against Transubstantiation
b. Open the Throne of England to a Romanist
c. Repeal the Bill of Rights or the Act of Settlement
d. Throw open the offices of Lord High Chancellor of England and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland to Roman Catholics.Footnote 14
The article did not address any true political or social threat emanating from Roman Catholic milieux but demonstrated how members of the IPF were anxious to position themselves as the guarantors and protectors of the English constitution. Section (d) also confirmed their intention to maintain the political disabilities enshrined in the 1829 Roman Catholic Relief Act. In accordance with section (a), the Church Association and National Protestant League's first question to all candidates for the 1906 General Election was: ‘Will you, if elected, resist every attempt to alter or abolish, either the King's Declaration now required by the Bill of Rights, or the Coronation Oath?’Footnote 15 In 1910, the Church Association gathered over one million signatures from petitioners across the British dominions against any alteration of the King's Declaration.Footnote 16
Safeguarding the restriction on Catholic processions prescribed in the 1829 Emancipation Act was key for ultra-Protestant societies. Section 26 of the act forbade Catholic liturgical processions with clergy in vestments. This section was often loosely interpreted by civil and judicial authorities in the late Victorian period, yet crises surrounding the public processions by Catholics resurfaced during the Edwardian era.Footnote 17 For instance, in September 1908, during the nineteenth International Eucharistic Congress, the planned procession of the blessed sacrament through the streets of Westminster sparked political turmoil. Ultra-Protestant societies and organizations put pressure on the police and the Liberal government to ban this demonstration of Roman Catholicism.Footnote 18 In the end, the Catholic authorities agreed to abandon the procession of the Holy Host, but the undiplomatic handling of the affair led to the resignation of Lord Ripon, a prominent Roman Catholic, as Lord Privy Seal.
Nearly a century after its adoption, parliamentary debates on the removal of major Catholic disabilities testified to the sensitivity of the subject. In December 1926, the Unionist Scottish MP McInnes Shaw argued that:
In the West of Scotland we feel that not enough is known of this Bill, and the great deal of ill-feeling which has been aroused . . . . . . . [T]here are a number of Orangemen in Scotland. They are a very gallant and law-abiding people, but they feel that there is more in this Bill than meets the eye, and for that reason more time should be given for Scotland to digest the proposals.Footnote 19
After some debate, amendments to sections of the 1829 act were adopted by parliament and enforced in Scotland.
In contrast, the constitutional position of Roman Catholics was more favourable in the dominions. In the Canadian colonies, the acquisition of French (Catholic) Quebec had led to the passing of the 1774 Quebec Act, which effectively granted freedom of religious practice. With the 1791 Constitutional Act, the legislative assemblies for Lower and Upper Canada permitted Catholics to vote and to become representatives. Legal and political toleration of Roman Catholics varied in each Canadian colony, but on the whole, it was in advance of the British Isles.Footnote 20 In the Australian colonies, the 1836 Church Act promulgated by Richard Bourke, the Irish Protestant governor of New South Wales, placed all Christian denominations on an equal footing. This legislation alarmed the Anglicans as it successfully disestablished the Church of England and ‘seemed to question the essential link between Church and State which was the bedrock of the British Empire’.Footnote 21 Nevertheless, other state-related arguments were brandished by ultra-Protestant bodies, who persistently claimed, for instance, that Roman Catholics were over-represented in official occupations. Hence the Protestant Protective Association in Ontario, founded in the early 1890s, criticized the government because 25 per cent of civil servants were Roman Catholics, whereas their proportion in the general population was closer to 15 per cent.Footnote 22
Another dimension of constitutional anti-Catholicism which emerged from the 1870s onwards centred on the related issues of education, secularization and the state's attitude towards denominational schools. The position of local and central colonial authorities regarding public support for schools varied significantly across the dominions. In Canada, the Manitoba Schools controversy in the 1890s illustrated the strong opposing views on the status of religious instruction in State schools. The Act to Establish a System of Education in the Province of Manitoba (1871) had put in place a system of separate Protestant and Catholic schools. Responding to the pressure of ultra-Protestant and secularist lobbies in the early 1890s, Manitoba abolished state-supported denominational schools in 1891. This sparked a crisis which was partly resolved by the adoption of the 1896 act, which permitted half an hour of religious instruction in public schools.Footnote 23 Nevertheless, ultra-Protestant bodies usually aligned with secularists in asking for minimal or no support from the public authorities for Roman Catholic schools. Similarly, in New South Wales, the Australian Protestant Defence Association declared in its manifesto:
Under the plea of ‘freedom of instruction’, Archbishop Kelly has publicly declared his intention to fight for State endowment of Roman Catholic schools. This unquestionably means State aid to religion, and as the control of Roman Catholic Schools is wholly in the hands of the priesthood who are under the direction of the Vatican in Rome, and as the teaching staff consists exclusively of members of so-called religious orders’, it means State aid to the most undesirable elements in our community and not the most loyal. This would also involve the disruption of the present admirable system of public instruction.Footnote 24
In the United Kingdom, in the 1920s, similar arguments were brought forward by ultra-Protestant bodies who protested against the 1918 Education (Scotland) Act, which had enabled Catholic schools to become part of the state system while remaining under Catholic clerical control. In its annual report for 1925–6, the Scottish Women's Protestant Union identified three great perils for Scottish society, one of which was the existence of the Roman Catholic schools.Footnote 25
Theologico-Political Anti-Catholicism
This second type of anti-Catholicism encompasses the interconnection of theological and political concerns, particularly around the issues of power structures and authoritarianism. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, theologico-political anti-Catholicism was seen as contiguous with Reformation principles and in line with major evangelical values. Ultra-Protestant associations emphasized their anti-papal stance by combining theological rejection of Roman Catholicism with an abhorrence of the alleged tyrannical, freedom-destructive and imperialistic views of the Vatican. Classic religious ‘errors’ ascribed to Roman Catholics were ‘transubstantiation, the Sacrifice of the Mass, Invocation of Saints, Purgatory, Prayers for the Dead, Auricular Confession, and Extreme Unction’, along with alleged priestly domination, ignorance of the laity and the tyrannical powers of the papacy.Footnote 26 ‘Provocations’ by the Vatican energized the theological anti-Catholic discourse: thus the promulgation of papal infallibility in 1870 and the condemnation of mixed marriages contained in the Ne Temere decree of 1907Footnote 27 were presented as proofs of the Vatican's sectarian and political agenda. Ultra-Protestant societies thus connected religious and political dimensions in their writings and lectures.
These societies operated within imperial networks in different ways, and one efficient medium was the professional agitators whom they regularly invited to lecture throughout the British Empire.Footnote 28 For instance, Charles Chiniquy (1809–99), a former French-Canadian Catholic priest, who had joined the Presbyterian Church in 1860, spent the rest of his life lecturing against the ‘Romish’ Church in Scotland, Australasia and the United States.Footnote 29 Edith O'Gorman, a celebrated escaped nun, lectured across Britain in the early 1880s before travelling through Australasia from 1885 to 1888. In the thirty-fifth edition of her successful autobiography Convent Life Unveiled (first published in 1871), she wrote: ‘The circulation of my books and thousands of lectures delivered have been the means of arousing the British public to the danger of Rome's aggressive encroachment on the rights of Free Speech, Free Press, and Liberty of Conscience’.Footnote 30
The conviction that the Roman Church was profoundly anti-liberal led to the development of a discourse on the connection between the fight against Catholicism and the preservation of British liberties across the United Kingdom and the dominions. It also prompted a progressive discourse contrary to the reactionary image ultra-Protestant societies sometimes conveyed. These associations were resolutely modern in their propaganda, in the prominent role women played in them and in their official discourse on the progress of Protestant societies. There was thus certainly a liberal and progressive flavour to the theological and political anti-Catholic discourse in Britain. This fits with what Michael Gross has demonstrated concerning the German Kulturkampf, which originated not in conservative but rather in liberal circles.Footnote 31 The indissoluble link between Protestantism and civil liberties was at the heart of this discourse and was insisted upon especially by colonists who were keen to remain loyal to their British roots. In 1912, the Orangemen of British Columbia sent a copy of an address to their brethren in Ireland, in which they stated: ‘The Papacy hates Britain to-day as it hates no other nation on earth. This hate arises from the fact that Britons, as a people, insist on individual liberty’.Footnote 32
Socio-national Anti-Catholicism
In the third type of anti-Catholicism, ethnic prejudices and social considerations coalesced to form a xenophobic discourse which essentialized British identity. As the historian James Miller observed for Canada, ‘in the late nineteenth century the emphasis on theological disputation gave way to a nationalistic preoccupation with the social and political implications of Catholicism’.Footnote 33 In this form, ultra-Protestant discourse stressed the socially progressive and modern aspect of Protestant Britishness, which was connected to ethnic stereotypes, over against the so-called reactionary character of Catholic nations. The common Briton-ness of metropolitans and colonists was supposed to rest on values of social and moral progress which had been fought for since the Reformation. As the Revd Robert F. Horton wrote in England's Danger (1899), the Protestant spirit ‘since Descartes philosophized and Bacon opened the gates of modern science, has made the progress of human mind’.Footnote 34 Thus Catholic countries and their inhabitants were described as backward and illiberal. National stereotypes of the Irish and the French associated the dominance of Catholicism with economic underdevelopment and archaic social structures. It was alleged that Catholic societies remained in a state of poverty partly because they needed to support numerous clergy through tithes and partly because of the superfluity of holy days on which no work was done. In Canada, the Scottish-born Methodist minister George Douglas (d. 1894) held similar views regarding Quebec, which was cited as a possible example of what could happen if French Catholics were not controlled:
Take a million of the free men of your Ontario and contrast them with a million of our Franco-Canadians, and what is the commercial value of the one as contrasted with the other. . . . Because the intelligence of the one [Quebec] is stagnant and nil, while that of Ontario is aggressive, and hence the ever-increasing demand with the skilled power of supply.Footnote 35
This view of Catholic backwardness was typical of the contemporary association of low moral standards with poverty; ‘[a]scribing poverty to laziness and, in turn, laziness to Catholicism evoked a sort of primordial note which few Protestants refrained from striking’.Footnote 36 The Protestant Alliance Official Organ drew its readers’ attention to ‘Protestantism as the bulwark of national independence and social freedom . . . Protestant nations have prospered and grown great, while those that have remained under the blighting influence of Popery have dwindled down and decayed.’Footnote 37 In ultra-Protestant discourse, the fear of national decay, which was heightened after the South African War (1899–1902) and various reports on the physical and moral disabilities of the working urban classes, became at times quite obsessive. In this display of anti-Catholicism, ethnic prejudices were mobilized to put forward a common British identity, with an insistence on the masculine and virile qualities of the Anglo-Saxon race. This also expressed itself in demonstrations of anti-clericalism, particularly directed against Anglo-Catholic priests in Anglican churches, who were ridiculed for their love of fancy vestments, incense and bells.Footnote 38 Caricatures of tonsured Anglo-Catholic priests could be found in the Protestant Alliance Official Organ. For example, in January 1900 a cartoon entitled ‘Oil for Troubled Waters’ featured two clergymen in a boat. The ‘Strong Man’, an evangelical minister, addressed a ‘Little Man’, saying: ‘Why, your nonsense about incense, vestments, candles, chasubles, and tunicles has so troubled the waters, that we shall both go down unless you go overboard’.Footnote 39
Amongst the anxieties expressed regarding loyalty to British identity, the fear of Irish domination was present in the colonies and regions where their migration had been significant. Thus promoters of the Australian Protestant Defence Association wrote in The Watchman in 1902: ‘We are Britishers, and we have no desire that Australia should become a second Ireland, dominated by men who are never so happy as when they are in league with Britain's enemies’.Footnote 40 Thus anti-Catholicism acted as the best defence against the contamination of deleterious (worldwide) Irish and (Canadian) French influences. Also, within the colonial world, competition with French missionaries heightened a sense of urgency, in particular in connection with the indigenous inhabitants of Canada and on the Pacific islands. Accordingly, only imperial unity could act efficiently against papist influence, whether Irish or French, as the Canadian writer W. A. Armstrong asserted in the 1880s: ‘[i]f we British Canadians are to remain freemen, we must check the encroachments of the Romanists. To do so, there is in fact but one course open to us – the unity of the Empire.’Footnote 41 By asserting common British values, ultra-Protestant colonists were anxious to preserve what they considered as Anglo-Saxon values, that is, industriousness and progress. In turn, British associations in the United Kingdom relied on their colonial counterparts to maintain and preserve Britishness at home. In 1906, the Imperial Protestant Federation claimed to include 1.6 million members and 57 societies, of which a third were in the dominions.
After the First World War, there was a revival of this type of anti-Catholicism, both in Britain and in the dominions. Scotland was particularly affected by this resurgence. The campaign waged by the Kirk following the 1923 General Assembly Report on The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality targeted Scots-Irish Catholics for nativist and ecclesiastical reasons.Footnote 42 The offensive by the Kirk, which specifically claimed to be ethnic, because it targeted Irish nationals, and not religious, was set in a wider British and European context of mounting nationalisms. In Scotland as well as more generally in Britain, as convincingly demonstrated by R. M. Douglas, the 1916 rising and the Irish war of independence racialized attitudes to the Irish.Footnote 43 Douglas characterizes in this manner the racial prejudice which resurfaced against the Irish at the time of the partition of Ireland:
With the withdrawal in 1921 of the Irish Free State from the United Kingdom . . . there seemed little advantage to be gained from continuing to proclaim the miscibility of British and Irish stocks. To the contrary, assertions of the racial incompatibility of the two peoples now served both to provide an explanation for Britain's failure to assimilate the Irish to Anglo-Saxon norms, and to assuage the wounded amour-propre of the nation whose identity Ireland had so brusquely repudiated. The 1920s thus witnessed the growth, to a degree unseen since the mid-1880s, of a tendency to characterize the Irish in racial – and usually derogatory – terms . . . .Footnote 44
Douglas also argued that anti-Catholicism was not a component of the rise of anti-Irishness in Scotland. Yet, from the perspective of ultra-Protestant societies active in the 1920s, there was definitely a religious trigger to the socio-national rejection of Roman Catholics. It might be argued that there was in fact a combination of anti-Catholic and nationalistic concerns which sparked off some aggressive campaigns and demonstrations against Irish-born residents and people of Irish descent. The Scottish Protestant League, founded in 1920 by Alexander Ratcliffe, issued a leaflet entitled ‘Who Fills our Prisons?’ during the 1929 General Election Campaign:
There is an immediate need for legislation to control the influx of Irish Roman Catholics, who are imported into this country to snatch the jobs from Protestants and to help the Romish Church Romanise the country . . . for legislation to control the importation of undesirable Roman Catholic Irishmen, who are becoming a menace to the moral and spiritual welfare of the country and a heavy burden on the rates and taxes . . .Footnote 45
Ratcliffe's arguments were a typical nationalistic mixture of rejection on the grounds that Irish migrants were a labour-snatching, demoralizing and pauperized population.
The necessity of maintaining an imperial connection between anti-Catholic movements dwindled during the inter-war years. After the death of Walter Walsh in 1912, the IPF struggled to survive in the late 1910s and early 1920s.Footnote 46 But the slowing down of the IPF's activities was essentially due to mutations within the dynamics of anti-Catholicism. With its flexibility, the anti-Catholic stance had adapted to the various colonial contexts and could be mobilized for purely local purposes, with at times only a vague reference to a common British background. Outside the colonies, anti-Catholicism was a transatlantic movement which resurfaced in the United States within extremist associations such as the Klu Klux Klan.Footnote 47 Within the United Kingdom, the plasticity of anti-Catholic discourse and practice allowed it to be incorporated into rising nationalist discourses, especially in Scotland.
Conclusion
From the 1880s up to World War I, the imperial project of ultra-Protestant societies across the British world revolved around the maintenance of Protestantism and anti-Catholicism as the pillars of a common Britishness. Ultra-Protestant bodies were convinced they were fighting an enemy who had an imperial agenda, as Walter Walsh wrote in the IPF Report for 1899–1900:
Rome knows that by weakening Protestantism in the British Empire she will paralyze it everywhere, and her emissaries are labouring day and night with this object in view. . . . We are face to face with a deadly foe, which will not be content to live with us on terms of equality . . .Footnote 48
In some respects, these societies presented reactionary features, particularly with their determination to revert to a pre-1829 position and their exaltation of the virtues of an idealized Reformation past. Nonetheless, they were eager to appeal to the urban middle classes and presented a discourse which was meant to be liberal, modern and progressive. The leaders and organizers of these societies resorted to all modern means for the greater and faster propagation of their ideas – newspapers, pamphlets and books; women were actively employed in various capacities, and preachers were regularly invited to address the masses.
The plasticity and adaptability of anti-Catholicism was manifest in the progressive relinquishing of the imperial connections during the inter-war era. The three types of anti-Catholicism presented in this article (constitutional, theologico-political and socio-national) broadly corresponded to successive time periods, and the first two types were definitely losing ground by the late 1910s. By contrast, socio-national anti-Catholicism, which was particularly adaptable to different colonial and metropolitan contexts, thrived in the 1920s and early 1930s. In a context of rising European nationalism and successful racial theories, it could be mobilized to exclude the Irish from the nationalist project (Scotland, Australia) or to discard French influences (Canada). Further exploration is needed into the diminishing references to a common Britishness in ultra-Protestant bodies across the Commonwealth in the 1930s and into the links between the growth of secularization and the history of ultra-Protestant agencies in post-World War II societies.
