Incomplete analogies

The only thing particularly surprising about Jane Stevenson's editorial in the Guardian is that it took this long for someone to write it. As is so often the case with historical analogies, the parallels between Roman Catholics in sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century England and Muslims in the twenty-first century UK look more than a bit shaky when examined under a high-power historical microscope. Be that as it may. One cannot expect too much in the way of historical detail from a brief op-ed piece, of course, but this Victorianist felt particularly startled by Stevenson's truncated vision of English anti-Catholic prejudice:

But there are more optimistic reflections to be drawn from the story of Catholics in England. There were two major outbreaks of popular anti-Catholic hysteria in England after the gunpowder plot, the reaction to the so-called"popish plot" in the late 17th century, and the Gordon riots in the 18th century. But relations were easing, and in the 19th century Catholics' full civil rights were restored. Today practising Catholics are probably the largest active faith community in the country.

Not surprisingly, given the goings-on across the Channel, Catholic-Protestant"relations" did enjoy a brief uptick in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even then, however, feelings remainded decidedly mixed; Charlotte Smith's The Emigrants (1793), which meditates on the fate of Catholic priests who have fled to England, is exemplary in its simultaneous condescension and sympathy. ("And now the poor pale wretch receives, amaz'd,/The pity, strangers give to his distress,/Because these Strangers are, by his dark creed,/Condemn'd as Heretics...")

But Stevenson's account of the nineteenth century somehow leaves out the UK's third and fourth major explosions of anti-Catholic sentiment: first, the debate over and backlash from the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829); second, the response to the so-called "Papal Aggression" (1850). Now, Stevenson's upbeat interpretation of history is correct in one sense: while there were certainly many instances of anti-Catholic violence and rioting, as D. G. Paz has documented, the legislative trends were in favor of greater tolerance and equality.

But that's just it: legislative trends only partly reflected mainstream Protestant attitudes. Obviously, for toleration to suceed--and for the MPs to retain their seats afterwards!--there had to be public support for Catholic civil rights, as well as contempt for anti-Catholic attitudes. (As one Liberal MP tersely noted of yet another debate over the Maynooth grant,"Thank god! this question has come at last to be regarded as both ridiculous & impracticable."*) Nevertheless, pro-Catholic legislation prompted more anti-Catholic fury, in the form of associations (still-extant organizations like the Protestant Truth Association and the Scottish Reformation Society), public lectures and entertainments (e.g., Father Gavazzi, Giovanni Giacinto Achilli, etc.), novels, histories, tracts, poems, journal and newspaper articles, and what sometimes feels like a never-ending cascade of tracts. Not to mention a spanking new (and very bad) edition of Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Even after Roman Catholicism had died as a political issue, the very mainstream Religious Tract Society created the"For Faith and Freedom" series to commemorate"the struggles and the sufferings of nations and of individuals against the tyranny and superstitions of the Church of Rome."** Nor, quite frankly, were all Catholics exactly thrilled at the prospect of total cultural integration, as debates over Catholic attendance at Oxford and Cambridge suggest.***

In other words, as analogies go, this one falls prey to the temptation of looking at the positive half of the picture (nineteenth-century advances in civil rights for Catholics) and neglecting the very significant negative half (widespread and ongoing anti-Catholic sentiment, accompanied by anxieties in some Catholic quarters about assimilation). Surely we can all think of other examples where greater legal toleration for a disliked minority prompted popular responses that were, to say the least, the opposite of welcoming...

UPDATE: In comments, Alan Allport and Dale Light make two useful observations. Light is correct, of course, that Catholics were hardly"passive" participants in this conflict; in addition to the theological disputes that Light notes, one could add the sometimes inept political lobbying chronicled by Dermot Quinn. I was trying to keep to the logic of Stevenson's piece, but of course one should also discuss Catholics in the Victorian public sphere. (I'm not sure that"dialogue" is the right word for it.) Allport properly notes some clumsiness in my own argumentation: I should have made it more clear that Victorian anti-Catholic violence was never on the same scale as that of earlier examples--although the riots can't necessarily be reduced to beating up"the Catholics across the street," either.

*--The Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 1858-1865, ed. T. A. Jenkins, Camden Fourth Series, vol. 40 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1990), 38. Sir John was even blunter in his draft observations:"May bigotry always assume that aspect!" (38)

**--Advertisement in Emma Leslie, Peter the Apprentice: A Tale of the Reformation in England (London: Religious Tract Society, n.d.). The RTS seems to have cobbled this series together from a combination of new and pre-existing novels, most published in the mid-to-late 1880s and early 1890s.

***--See Vincent Alan McClelland, English Roman Catholics and Higher Education 1830-1903 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).