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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 May 2018
This article explores the links between the assertion of British imperial identities and the anti-Catholic discourse and practices of a network of evangelical societies which existed and flourished in Britain and in the dominions from the halcyon days of the empire to the late 1920s. These bodies shared a broad evangelical definition of Protestantism and defended the notion that religious beliefs and their political implications formed the basis of a common British heritage and identity. Those who identified themselves as Britons in Britain and in the dominions brought forward arguments combining a mixture of pessimistic interpretations of British history since the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act with anxieties about ongoing Irish Catholic immigration and an alleged global papist plot. They were convinced that Protestantism was key to all civil liberties enjoyed by Britons. Inspired by John Wolffe's pioneering work, the article examines constitutional, theologico-political and socio-national anti-Catholicism across Britain and its dominions.
This article was written during a period as a visiting fellow at the School of Divinity, Edinburgh University, which was generously funded by a Royal Society of Edinburgh / Caledonian Research Fund European Visiting Research Fellowship. I would like to thank Sir Tom Devine for his remarks on an earlier version of this article and also Patrick Vaughan for his comments.
1 ‘Les nations colonisatrices sont presque toutes protestantes; le protestantisme, par sa tendance individuelle, la simplicité de ses moyens, son peu de besoin de communier avec le reste de la chrétienté, semble par excellence la religion du colon. Avec sa Bible, l'Anglais trouve au fond de l'Océanie l'aliment religieux que le catholique ne peut recevoir sans tout un établissement officiel d’évêques et de prêtres’: Renan, Ernest, ‘De l'avenir religieux des sociétés modernes’, Revue des Deux Mondes 29 (1860), 761–97, at 773.Google Scholar
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5 The expression ‘ultra-Protestant’ appeared in the early 1840s (OED) and referred to people who put forward extreme views in religious matters. It was inspired by the French use of ‘ultras’ with reference to the ultra-royalists in early nineteenth-century France. In this article, the ‘ultra-Protestant’ militants are persons or groups who founded specific religious and/or politico-religious associations, who gave religious issues the highest priority in their Weltanschauung and who, arguing that there was an urgency to defend Protestantism, exercised pressure on political circles.
6 Walter Walsh (1847–1912) was a militant evangelical Anglican journalist, essayist and writer, who launched the Protestant Observer in 1888. He was the author of the best-selling The Secret History of the Oxford Movement (London, 1898). The societies enrolled within the Imperial Protestant Federation were listed in several reports, such as The Imperial Protestant Federation, Report for 1899–1900 and A History of the Formation and the Progress of the Federation, to which is appended Information regarding its 27 Federated Organisations (London, 1900).
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21 Peter Cunich, ‘Archbishop Vaughan and the Empires of Religion in Colonial New South Wales’, in Carey, ed., Empires of Religion, 137–60, at 145.
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