GEORGE STANLEY FABER: NO POPERY AND PROPHECY

BY

S.W. GILLEY Durham

"Defoe says, that there were a hundred thousand stout country­ fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse". 1 Such anti-Cath­ olicism has been a central strand in English culture since the Refor­ mation, a prejudice "into which we English are born, as into the fall of Adam", 2 as part of a nationalist assertion of the virtues of Protestant Britannia against its Popish enemies, France and Spain, and as the very heart of an English epic of liberation from Rome in the six­ teenth century. The story needed a villain, as Jack needed a giant; and what better villain than Giant Pope? The fires of Smithfield were burnt into the popular mind by George Foxe's Acts and Mouments, commonly called his Book if Marryrs, the most widely read of all works after the Bible, and the British epic identified Romanism with continental despotism and tyranny, with poverty and wooden shoes, so that the Reformation became the mother of English enlighten­ ment and liberty.3 Anti-Catholicism had a continuous history from 1520, and in the eighteenth century was an essential part in the definition of British nationhood.4 Its passions among the quality, however, abated some-

I W. Hazlitt, Sketches and Essays and Winterslow (London, 1912), p. 71. 2 Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, cited in J. Pereiro, Cardinal Manning: an Intellectual Biography (Oxford, 1998), p. 174. 3 For a survey, see P.B. Nockles, '''The Difficulties of Protestantism': Bishop Milner, John Fletcher and Catholic Apologetic against the Church of England in the Era from the First Relief Act to Emancipation, 1788-1830", Recusant History, vol. 24 (October, 1998), pp. 193-236. Some of the principal recent works in this area are C. Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in eighteenth-century England: a political and social sturfy (Manchester, 1993) and D.G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford, 1992). 4 L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven and London, 1992), pp. II-54. 288 GILLEY what in the second half of the century. The Catholic Relief acts of 1778 and 1791 were the work of a respectable opinion which treated Romanism with indifference. English Catholics were accepted as a small but decent element in English society, living quietly among their friends and neighbours. The Gordon Riots of 1780 seemed to show that their chief foe was the mob, which was feared by elite society as well, and "the years between 1780 and 1800 saw a hia­ tus in the history of anti-Catholicism",5 even if it only went under­ ground. Even more feared after 1 790 was the French Revolution, the work, it was believed, of atheists, Deists and scoffers at all reli­ gion, and the French emigre clergy, exiles from the Revolution, were welcomed in England as the persecuted priesthood of a sister Establishment, and were supported by the State and private charity. The mobs in the early 1790s turned on Unitarians and other radical Dissenters suspected of revolutionary sympathies, while the British gov­ ernment funded the new Irish seminary at :Maynooth and the Scot­ tish Catholic clergy, in a tacit return for the Church's opposition to revolution on the continent and in Ireland. These developments suggested the emergence of a new and closer relationship between British society and the Roman Catholic Church, in a common contribution to the cause of counter-revolution, the heightening of Catholic participation in British life and the reversal of the enmities of centuries. But other changes pointed in a different direction. England was undergoing an industrial revolution, the first nation in the world to do so, with an attendant population explosion in the towns of the manufacturing north, and in these towns after 1790, there was a great growth in the Protestant Dissenting Churches, especially the various branches of Methodism, which were close to the anti-Catholic tradition. The quickening pace of emigration from Protestant and Catholic Ireland into these towns was to mean a new heat in rela­ tions between the Churches; while the rebellion in Ireland in 1798 inaugurated a new Catholic nationalism which has only abated in our own day. Anti-Catholicism was reinforced by anti-Irishness, hos­ tility to the continental Catholic enemy without being echoed in sus­ picion of the Irish Catholic enemy within. Moreover the expansion of Catholicism and Dissent posed a chal­ lenge to the position of the Established Church, which made no

5 J. Wolffe, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain 1829-1860 (Oxford, 1981), p. 2.