IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to understand Victorian culture without understanding the role of religion in shaping, consolidating, and challenging that culture. In countless ways, religion was integral to Victorian culture: Britain and Ireland had established churches; political and religious questions were often intertwined, as with the Maynooth Controversy and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland; religious questions were regularly enacted in public, as when the reestablishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy (1850) inspired riots and the hangings in effigy of the pope and the newly-created Cardinal, Nicholas Wiseman. Victorians regularly sought religious meanings in cataclysmic events; the response to the Sepoy Rebellion (1857) was framed in religious terms, as Britons from the queen on down sought a divine explanation for the uprising. As that response shows, religion – specifically, Protestant Christianity – was an important component of national identity, as Linda Colley has argued in Britons: Forging the Nation.