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Irish Catholicism and English Toryism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Gilbert A. Cahill
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Extract

In the midst of the European Revolution of 1848, T. B. Macaulay offered the classical Whig explanation for England's immunity to it. England needed no revolution in 1848 because it had had its own safe and sane revolution of 1688, climaxed by that masterpiece of political wisdom, the Whig settlement. Without wholly superseding this distinctly Whig interpretation of England's stability in the midst of Europe's mid-nineteenth century cataclysms, Elie Halévy has supplemented it by pointing to the stabilizing influence of the Methodist-Evangelical Movement.Macaulay and Halévy overlooked one important element in Britannia's ability to rule the waves of revolution. It is an element somewhat repellent to liberal-minded historians, both in its nature and its source. For one of the factors in England's stability was the growth of a xenophobic, anti-revolutionary, nationalistic spirit and it was closely connected with anti-Catholicism. This anti-Catholicism was fostered and given direction by the Conservatives between 1832 and 1845, at which time it split that party wide open over the issue of the grant to the Roman Catholic Seminary of Maynooth in Ireland, as it had sixteen years earlier over Catholic Emancipation. The remarkable success of the Conservatives in rallying Englishmen to the anti-Irish “no-Popery” standard has been obscured by the traditional view that the period 1829–1848 saw the triumph of the liberal ideology, beginning with Catholic Emancipation, passing through the Reform Bill of 1832, and culminating in the Repeal of the Corn Laws.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , January 1957 , pp. 62 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1957

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References

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60 One exception was the so-called Papal Aggression of 1850. During this agitation, Lord John Russell played much the same game that he had played in 1848, substituting the “no-Popery” standard in 1850 for the anti-Irish one of 1848. The sentiments invoked, those of the anti-Maynooth demonstration, have been aptly described by Spencer Walpole. “The Mussulman, driven to his last defence, raises the standard of the Prophet and proclaims a holy war. But the Englishman, if Protestantism be in danger, shouts, ‘No Popery’ and creates equal enthusiasm.” Walpole, , op. cit., V, 119.Google Scholar