Anti-Catholicism in the United Kingdom

Notable early martyrs include St Alban, and Thomas Becket, although anti-clericalism can be found in medieval writers like Chaucer. See also Æbbe the Younger, a nun killed by the Vikings, and Alcuin, who describes a bloody Viking attack on Lindisfarne.

Mention should also be made of critics of Church corruption like John Wyclif, and his followers the Lollards.

English Reformation

Sir Thomas More, the Catholic government official executed in 1535 by King Henry VIII

The Act of Supremacy issued by King Henry VIII in 1534 declared the king to be "the only supreme head on earth of the Church in England" in place of the pope. Any act of allegiance to the latter was considered treasonous because the papacy claimed both spiritual and political power over its followers. It was under this act that Thomas More and John Fisher were executed and became martyrs to the Catholic faith.

The Act of Supremacy (which asserted England's independence from papal authority) was repealed in 1554 by Henry's devoutly Catholic daughter Queen Mary I when she reinstituted Catholicism as England's state religion. She executed many Protestants by burning. Her actions were reversed by a new Act of Supremacy passed in 1559 under her successor, Elizabeth I, along with an Act of Uniformity which made worship in Church of England compulsory. Anyone who took office in the English church or government was required to take the Oath of Supremacy; penalties for violating it included hanging and quartering. Attendance at Anglican services became obligatory—those who refused to attend Anglican services, whether Roman Catholics or Puritanss, were fined and physically punished as recusants. He did not like them...

Elizabethan regime

Further information: Elizabethan Religious Settlement

Foxe's Book of Martyrs helped shape lasting popular notions of Catholicism in Britain.

In the time of Elizabeth I, the persecution of the adherents of the reformed religion, both Anglicans and Nonconformist Protestants alike, which had occurred during the reign of her elder half-sister Queen Mary I was used to fuel strong anti-Catholic propaganda in the hugely influential Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Those who had died in Mary's reign, under the Marian Persecutions, were effectively canonised by this work of hagiography. In 1571, the Convocation of the Church of England ordered that copies of the Book of Martyrs should be kept for public inspection in all cathedrals and in the houses of church dignitaries. The book was also displayed in many Anglican parish churches alongside the Holy Bible. The passionate intensity of its style and its vivid and picturesque dialogues made the book very popular among Puritan and Low Church families, Anglican and nonconformist Protestant, down to the nineteenth century. In a period of extreme partisanship on all sides of the religious debate, the partisan church history of the earlier portion of the book, with its grotesque stories of popes and monks, contributed to anti-Catholic prejudices in England, as did the story of the sufferings of several hundred reformers who had been burned at the stake under Mary and Bishop Bonner.

English anti-Catholicism was grounded in the fear that the Pope sought to reimpose not just religio-spiritual authority but also secular power over England, a view which was vindicated by hostile actions of the Vatican. In 1570, Pope Pius V sought to depose Elizabeth with the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis, declaring her a heretic and dissolving Catholics' duty of allegiance to her. This engendered a state of war between the Pope and England, escalating to extended hostilities and culminating in a failed 1588 invasion by Spanish forces.

Elizabeth's resultant persecution of Catholic Jesuit missionaries led to many executions at Tyburn. Priests like Edmund Campion who suffered there as traitors to England are considered martyrs by the Catholic Church, and a number of them were canonized as the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. In the 20th century, a "Shrine of the Martyrs at Tyburn" was established at the Catholic Tyburn Convent in London.[1]

Frontispiece to Pyrotechnica Loyalana, Ignatian Fire-Works suggesting Catholics in general and Jesuits in particular were responsible for the Great Fire of London, as well as other misfortunes around the world. In the centre 8 men, 4 of which dressed as Jesuits throw Hand Grenades at a globe, while the pope uses a set of bellows to fan the flames of fires in London and Rome. At the bottom of the image a Jesuit releases four foxes with firebrands tied to their tails, while Guy Fawkes is shown entering the vault beneath Parliament and Robert Hubert, the man who falsely confessed to starting the Great Fire of London, conspires with William Barrow, one of the accused in the Popish Plot.[2]

Later several accusations fuelled strong anti-Catholicism in England including the Gunpowder Plot, in which Guy Fawkes and other Catholic conspirators were found guilty of planning to blow up the English Parliament on the day the King was to open it. The Great Fire of London in 1666 was blamed on the Catholics and an inscription ascribing it to 'Popish frenzy' was engraved on the Monument to the Great Fire of London, which marked the location where the fire started (this inscription was only removed in 1831). The 'Popish Plot' involving Titus Oates further exacerbated Anglican-Catholic relations.

The beliefs that underlie the sort of strong anti-Catholicism once seen in the United Kingdom were summarized by William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England:

As to papists, what has been said of the Protestant dissenters would hold equally strong for a general toleration of them; provided their separation was founded only upon difference of opinion in religion, and their principles did not also extend to a subversion of the civil government. If once they could be brought to renounce the supremacy of the pope, they might quietly enjoy their seven sacraments, their purgatory, and auricular confession; their worship of relics and images; nay even their transubstantiation. But while they acknowledge a foreign power, superior to the sovereignty of the kingdom, they cannot complain if the laws of that kingdom will not treat them upon the footing of good subjects..

— Bl. Comm. IV, c.4 ss. iii.2, p. *54

The gravamen of this charge, then, is that Catholics constitute an imperium in imperio, a sort of fifth column of persons who owe a greater allegiance to the Pope than they do to the civil government, a charge very similar to that repeatedly leveled against Jews. Accordingly, a large body of British laws such as the Popery Act 1698, collectively known as the Penal Laws, imposed various civil disabilities and legal penalties on recusant Catholics.

A change of attitude was eventually signalled by the Papists Act 1778 in the reign of King George III. Under this Act, an oath was imposed, which besides being a declaration of loyalty to the reigning sovereign, contained an abjuration of Charles Edward Stuart, the Pretender to the British throne, and of certain doctrines attributed to Roman Catholics (doctrines such as those stating that excommunicated princes may lawfully be murdered, that no faith should be kept with heretics, and that the Pope has temporal as well as spiritual jurisdiction in the realm). Those taking this oath were exempted from some of the provisions of the Popery Act. The section as to taking and prosecuting priests were repealed, as also the penalty of perpetual imprisonment for keeping a school. Catholics were also enabled to inherit and purchase land, nor was a Protestant heir any longer empowered to enter and enjoy the estate of his Catholic kinsman. However, the passing of this act was the occasion of the anti-Catholic Gordon riots (1780) in which the violence of the mob was especially directed against Lord Mansfield who had balked at various prosecutions under the statutes now repealed.[3] The anti-clerical excesses of the French Revolution and the consequent emigration to England of Catholic priests from France led to a softening of opinion towards Catholics on the part of the English Anglican establishment, resulting in the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1791 which allowed Catholics to enter the legal profession, relieved them from taking the Oath of Supremacy, and granted toleration for their schools and places of worship[4] The repeal of the Penal Laws culminated in the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829.

Despite the Emancipation Act, however, anti-Catholic attitudes persisted throughout the 19th century, particularly following the sudden massive Irish Catholic migration to England during the Great Famine.[5]

The forces of anti-Catholicism were defeated by the unexpected mass mobilization of Catholic activists in Ireland, led by Daniel O'Connell. The Catholics had long been passive but now there was a clear threat of insurrection that troubled Prime Minister Wellington and his aide Robert Peel. The passage of Catholic emancipation in 1829, which allowed Catholics to sit in Parliament, opened the way for a large Irish Catholic contingent. Lord Shaftesbury (1801–1885), a prominent philanthropist, was a pre-millennial evangelical Anglican who believed in the imminent second coming of Christ, and became a leader in anti-Catholicism. He strongly opposed the Oxford movement in the Church of England, fearful of its high church Catholics features. In 1845, he denounced the Maynooth Grant which funded the Catholic seminary in Ireland that would train many priests.[6]

The re-establishment of the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy in England in 1850 by Pope Pius IX, was followed by a frenzy of anti-Catholic feeling, often stoked by newspapers. Examples include an effigy of Cardinal Wiseman, the new head of the restored hierarchy, being paraded through the streets and burned on Bethnal Green, and graffiti proclaiming 'No popery!' being chalked on walls.[7] Charles Kingsley wrote a vigorously anti-Catholic book Hypatia (1853).[8] The novel was mainly aimed at the embattled Catholic minority in England, who had recently emerged from a half-illegal status.

New Catholic episcopates, which ran parallel to the established Anglican episcopates, and a Catholic conversion drive awakened fears of 'papal aggression' and relations between the Catholic Church and the establishment remained frosty.[9] At the end of the nineteenth century one contemporary wrote that "the prevailing opinion of the religious people I knew and loved was that Roman Catholic worship is idolatry, and that it was better to be an Atheist than a Papist".[10]

The Liberal party leader William Ewart Gladstone had a complex ambivalence about Catholicism. He was attracted by its international success in majestic traditions. More important, he was strongly opposed to the authoritarianism of its pope and bishops, its profound public opposition to liberalism, and its refusal to distinguish between secular allegiance on the one hand and spiritual obedience on the other. The danger came when the pope or bishops attempted to exert temporal power, as in the Vatican decrees of 1870 as the climax of the papal attempt to control churches in different nations, despite their independent nationalism.[11] His polemical pamphlet against the infallibility declaration of the Catholic Church sold 150,000 copies in 1874. He urged Catholics to obey the crown and disobey the pope when there was disagreement.[12] on the other hand, when religion ritualistic practices in the Church of England came under attack as too ritualistic and too much akin to Catholicism, Gladstone strongly opposed passage of the Public Worship Regulation Bill in 1874.[13]

Benjamin Disraeli, the long-time Conservative leader, wrote many novels. One of the last was Lothair (1870) – it was "Disraeli's ideological Pilgrim's Progress".[14] It tells a story of political life with particular regard to the roles of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches. It reflected anti-Catholicism of the sort that was popular in Britain, and which fuelled support for Italian unification (the "Risorgimento").[15]

Since World War II anti-Catholic feeling in England has much abated. Ecumenical dialogue between Anglicans and Catholics culminated in the first meeting of an Archbishop of Canterbury with a Pope since the Reformation when Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher visited Rome in 1960.[16] Since then, dialogue has continued through envoys and standing conferences.

Residual anti-Catholicism in England is represented by the burning of an effigy of the Catholic conspirator Guy Fawkes at local celebrations on Guy Fawkes Night every 5 November.[17] This celebration has, however, largely lost any sectarian connotation and the allied tradition of burning an effigy of the Pope on this day has been discontinued – except in the town of Lewes, Sussex.[18] The "Calvinistic Methodists" represented a militant core of anti-Catholics.[19]

As a result of the 1701 Act of Settlement, any member of the British royal family who joins the Catholic Church must renounce the throne.[20] The Succession to the Crown Act 2013 allows members to marry a Roman Catholic without incurring this ban.

Opposition to the State visit by Pope Benedict XVI to the United Kingdom can be found on that page.

Ireland's Catholic majority was subjected to persecution from the time of the English Reformation under Henry VIII. This persecution intensified when the Gaelic clan system was completely destroyed by the governments of Elizabeth I and her successor, James I. Land was appropriated either by the conversion of native Anglo-Irish aristocrats or by forcible seizure. Many Catholics were dispossessed and their lands given to Anglican and Nonconformist Protestant settlers from Britain. However, the first plantation in Ireland was a Catholic plantation under Queen Mary I; for more see Plantations of Ireland.

To cement the power of the Anglican Ascendancy, political and land-owning rights were denied to Ireland's Catholics by law, following the Glorious Revolution in England and consequent turbulence in Ireland. The Penal Laws, established first in the 1690s, assured Church of Ireland control of political, economic and religious life. The Mass, ordination, and the presence in Ireland of Catholic Bishops were all banned, although some did carry on secretly. Catholic schools were also banned, as were all voting franchises. Violent persecution also resulted, leading to the torture and execution of many Catholics, both clergy and laity. Since then, many have been canonised and beatified by the Vatican, such as Saint Oliver Plunkett, Blessed Dermot O'Hurley, and Blessed Margaret Ball.

Although some of the Penal Laws restricting Catholic access to landed property were repealed between 1778 and 1782, this did not end anti-Catholic agitation and violence. Catholic competition with Protestants in County Armagh for leases intensified, driving up prices and provoking resentment of Anglicans and Nonconformist Protestants alike. Then in 1793, the Roman Catholic Relief Act enfranchised forty shilling freeholders in the counties, thus increasing the political value of Catholic tenants to landlords. In addition, Catholics began to enter the linen weaving trade, thus depressing Protestant wage rates. From the 1780s the Protestant Peep O'Day Boys grouping began attacking Catholic homes and smashing their looms. In addition, the Peep O'Day Boys disarmed Catholics of any weapons they were holding.[21] A Catholic group called the Defenders was formed in response to these attacks. This climaxed in the Battle of the Diamond on 21 September 1795 outside the small village of Loughgall between Peep O' Day boys and the Defenders.[22] Roughly 30 Catholic Defenders but none of the better armed Peep O'Day Boys were killed in the fight. Hundreds of Catholic homes and at least one Church were burnt out in the aftermath of the skirmish.[23] After the battle Daniel Winter, James Wilson, and James Sloan changed the name of the Peep O' Day Boys to the Orange Order devoted to maintaining the Protestant ascendency.

Although more of the Penal Laws were repealed, and Catholic Emancipation in 1829 ensured political representation at Westminster, significant anti-Catholic hostility remained especially in Belfast where the Catholic population was in the minority. In the same year, the Presbyterians reaffirmed at the Synod of Ulster that the Pope was the anti-Christ, and joined the Orange Order in large numbers when the latter organisation opened its doors to all non-Catholics in 1834. As the Orange order grew, violence against Catholics became a regular feature of Belfast life.[24] Towards the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century when Irish Home Rule became imminent, Protestant fears and opposition towards it were articulated under the slogan "Home Rule means Rome Rule".

• Anti-Catholicism in literature and media
• Anti-Catholicism in the United States
• Anti-clericalism
• Henry VIII of England

• Álvarez-Recio, Leticia, and Bradley L. Drew, eds. Fighting the Antichrist: A Cultural History of Anti-Catholicism in Tudor England (2011)
• Arnstein, Walter L. Protestant versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England: Mr. Newdegate and the Nuns (University of Missouri Press, 1982).
• Arnstein, Walter L. "The Murphy Riots: A Victorian Dilemma," Victorian Studies (1975) 19#1 pp. 51–71 in JSTOR
• Brewer, John D., and Gareth I. Higgins. "Understanding anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland." Sociology (1999) 33#2 pp. 235–255.
• Brewer, John, and Gareth Higgins. Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland: The Mote and the Beam (Springer, 1998).
• Bush, Jonathan. "Papists" and Prejudice: Popular Anti-Catholicism and Anglo-Irish Conflict in the North East of England, 1845–70 (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).
• Bush, Jonathan. "The priest and the parson of Hartlepool: Protestant-Catholic conflict in a nineteenth-century industrial town." British Catholic History 33#1 (2016): 115–134.
• Clifton, Robin. "The popular fear of Catholics during the English Revolution." Past & Present 52 (1971): 23–55. in JSTOR
• Coffey, John. Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558–1689 (Routledge, 2014).
• Haydon, Colin. Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, C. 1714–80: A Political and Social Study (1993)
• Haydon, Colin. "Eighteenth-Century English Anti-Catholicism: Contexts, Continuity and Diminution." in John Wolffe, ed., Protestant-Catholic Conflict from the Reformation to the Twenty-first Century (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2013), 46–70. Table of contents
• Hoeveler, Diane Long. The Gothic Ideology: Religious Hysteria and Anti-Catholicism in British Popular Fiction, 1780–1880 (U of Wales Press, 2014).
• McNees, Eleanor. "'Punch' and the Pope: Three Decades of Anti-Catholic Caricature," Victorian Periodicals Review (2004) 37#1 pp. 18–45 in JSTOR, illustrated
• Norman, E.R. Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (1968)
• Paz, D.G. Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (1992)
• Sheils, William J. "Catholicism in England from the Reformation to the Relief Acts," in Sheridan Gilley and William Sheils, eds. A history of religion in Britain: practice and belief from pre-Roman times to the present. (1994), 234–51.
• Wallis, Frank H. Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian Britain (Edwin Mellen Press, 1993).
• Wheeler, Michael. The old enemies: Catholic and Protestant in nineteenth-century English culture (Cambridge UP, 2006) excerpt
• Wiener, Carol Z. "The Beleaguered Isle. A Study of Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Anti-Catholicism." Past & Present 51 (1971): 27–62. in JSTOR