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One of the many tragic layers to sectarian violence – past and present – is the reality that the fighting occurs between people who are not strangers. They are married to one another and descended from one another. They know and love one another and worship the same God, even as they kill and maim one another and destroy each other’s property. This chapter explores the daily reality of Protestant-Catholic relations in eighteenth-century Maryland. Although the fear of Catholicism in colonial America was real, that fear did not always manifest itself in Maryland as a fear of actual Catholics. This distinction is crucial to any explanation of why Catholics joined forces with a group of people who used anti-popery to justify a break from Britain, or why Protestants who fulminated about the “tyranny of popery” gave Catholics a place at the table in their revolt.

Two spectres, often indistinguishable, haunted many theologians in England during the 17th century. They called one popery and the other by the names of Arminianism and Socinianism, seeing their embodiment in particular individuals or groups. Those so accused sometimes replied in kind, but more usually they resorted to a counter-charge of puritanism. Truth, half-truth, and falsehood were all involved in this labelling. Although the focus of concern altered with circumstances, most of the ingredients can be found present in Oxford from the late Elizabethan period onwards. Broadly speaking, an obsession with Roman Catholicism was increasingly paralleled by alarm about a novel rationalizing tendency in religion. An important milestone in this development was the Oxford publication, in 1638, of The Religion of Protestants, by William Chillingworth. The character of Oxford divinity, until the reign of Charles I, was militantly protestant, generally Calvinist, in the sense of adhering to the Reformed theology of grace, and strongly evangelical.

John Bowden warned John Henry Newman that “one day” he and theTractswould be “charged with rank Popery”, and suggested that aTractshould be written to refute the accusation. Newman took Bowden's “hint” and wrote twoTractson theVia Media. A declaration that the Church of England has taken theVia Mediathat lies between the (so called) Reformers and the Romanists, Popery, and Protestantism. The theory of theVia Mediaseemed very persuasive and plausible but it needed developing to become substantive. TheVia Mediaas a “theory” raised serious objections. However, this does not mean that it is unreal. The reality of a doctrine needed to be tried and tested. It is further argued that Protestantism and Popery are real religions but theVia Media, though viewed as an integral system, never existed except on paper.

Beginning with an examination of John Jewel’s famous ‘Challenge’ sermon of 1559, this chapter argues that Paul’s Cross preachers avoided complex theological questions by concentrating on the reliability of Protestant and Catholic clerics as teachers. These sermons adopt the ‘confutational’ genre: they do not explain doctrine, but exhort the hearers to avoid an error. London’s conversion to Protestantism can be gauged by anti-Catholic preaching at Paul’s Cross: before the 1570s, sermons often made the denunciation of Catholicism their main subject; thereafter, ‘anti-popery’ at Paul’s Cross became conventional, cut off from polemics and designed merely to reassure the hearers that they stood on the right side of the religious divide.

The relationship between art and Anglicanism had many aspects. The chapter begins with a very brief exploration of clerical portraiture, religious satire, Bible illustration, and topographical prints. The rest is dedicated to the visual culture of the church interior. It surveys the use of ornament on fittings, including fonts and pulpits, before exploring the expanding repertoire for painting at the altar. The extent to which paintings of Moses and Aaron, the apostles, and subjects narrating the life of Christ were admitted to Anglican churches during the period may surprise. Over a thousand examples have been identified. Although many of them were lost during nineteenth-century campaigns of ‘restoration’, sufficient were recorded or survive to recover a just sense of the vivid visual culture of eighteenth-century Anglicanism. The chapter also offers some observations about the largely tacit system of visual decorum that operated to guard the Church from the dangers of idolatry.

This chapter focuses on 1 Henry VI. Some critics see it as the first part of a trilogy. Others have identified it as a sort of prequel, written after the success of the plays that have become known as 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI had rendered a return to the same subject a profitable prospect. Ultimately, 1 Henry VI reshuffles the pack of narrative tropes and ideological materials it inherited from parts II and III. It relocates the threat of female political agency outside England and organises it under the sign not merely of witchcraft but of popery. It similarly displaces the locus of ancient political virtue from civil to military affairs, and downgrades the role of the king. Still central is the topos of noble faction, but that faction is centred not on the succession but rather on the conduct of the war.

This chapter examines political prints that responded to the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis (1679–82). It compares the political prints of the “Tory” Sir Roger L’Estrange, Licenser to the Press, with that of the “Whig” Stephen College, a “Protestant Joiner”. College was executed for his political cartoon, “A Ra-ree Show”, in 1682. This chapter uses these satirical engravings in order to contextualize the so-called “Tory Reaction” of 1681. It argues that one of the reasons why the Tories were so successful, by most accounts, in their efforts to discredit the Whigs has to do with the concept of loyalism. As the Whig agenda became increasingly tied to republican and non-conformist aims, their connection to loyalism began to dissolve. This made the Whigs vulnerable to challenges to their beliefs and practices both from without (by Tories) and from within (by the mainline elements from inside the Whig party itself).

Having lost a legal battle with Richard Bentley, Conyers Middleton went to Rome for a year and a half during the mid 1720s. During his time in Italy, Middleton developed a view of Christian antiquity at odds with the mainstream orthodox one. This chapter examines both the evolution of Middleton’s stance orthodoxy to heterodoxy and the perceptions and consequences of that evolution. It considers the arguments of his Letter from Rome (1729), highlighting their latently heterodox implications. It shows how the Letter from Rome’s latent heterodoxy became manifest in Middleton’s Letter to Dr Waterland (1730). Finally, it details the ways that his attacks on Daniel Waterland destroyed his relationship with his first patron — Edward Harley, second earl of Oxford — and permanently damaged his career prospects.

Part III of this book deals with Zachary Grey. This introductory chapter to Part III anatomizes eighteenth-century orthodox anti-popery. It begins by showing how Zachary Grey’s own family history emblematized the complicated legacy of England’s Reformation. It turns next to consider his undergraduate reading notebooks, which foreshadow his mature thought regarding the English church and state. It concludes with a close examination of his unpublished work on Islam and the Portuguese Inquisition, which reveal clearly the lineaments of his anti-popish thought.

This chapter details events in Burke's life from 1757 to 1765, when he shifted his attention from literary pursuits to the demands of public business. In 1759, he accepted the patronage of William Gerard Hamilton and soon found his energies swamped by the demands of his employer. In the early 1760s, he visited Ireland on official business, and it was in this period that he began to compose his work on the Irish popery laws. By 1765, his writings were connected exclusively to parliamentary or party business. His great polemical works, which appeared later in his career, were all constructed as responses to immediate events. Consequently, they were not directly products of study and meditation. Nonetheless, his deepest concerns were related to the intellectual projects that he nurtured in the 1750s. These projects included his early historical writing.

This chapter explores the triangular relationship between lay government, ecclesiastical authorities, and the individual Christian. Adiaphora constituted non‐doctrinal matters regarded as ‘indifferent’; mainly rites and ceremonies, but perhaps encompassing church government as well. These issues were central to negotiations over comprehension and were rooted in the theology of Christian liberty. However, the royal supremacy of the civil magistrate in the English Church meant that adiaphora unavoidably raised questions about law and authority. Discussions about the casuistry of obedience brought to the fore the psychological dilemmas of conformity. Debating the aesthetics of worship and their relationship to the remnants of Catholic ‘Popery’ rendered problematic the identity of the English Church. This chapter explores what was distinctive about the Restoration phase of an argument as old as the English Reformation, and how this complicates notions of toleration in the seventeenth century.

This chapter assembles institutional evidence, such as the relevant Penal Laws, the State of Popery Report (1731), together with correspondence and notes from Catholic clerics regarding illegal schools that offered Latin. It discusses the controversial question of cost, asserting that in some cases poor boys did manage to acquire a classical education (sometimes described as training in the humanities) before proceeding to Continental seminaries. It also discusses the limitations of official reports, whatever their source. The concluding section presents the rapidly changing political situation at the end of the eighteenth century, including the Catholic Relief Acts, which culminated in the 1798 rebellion and the Act of Union.

This chapter explores William Penn’s political thought as it developed during the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis (1678–1681). During these years, Penn became an increasingly prominent member of the Quaker leadership, defending Friends in print and before Parliament. He also remained active in the nation’s political life and, given increasingly dim prospects for toleration in England, began exploring the possibility of securing land in America. Penn’s political thinking during these years focused on two primary issues: Parliament and popery. He reiterated his long-standing commitment to Parliament’s role in the governance of the realm and, while echoing popular concerns about the seditious potential of English Catholics, also attempted to find ways to guarantee loyal English Catholics their civil rights. In all these endeavors, Penn sought to articulate a social and political vision that would enable individuals to build a common life together despite their religious differences.

This chapter analyses the public fuss generated by the arrival of Mary Stuart in England and the projected match between Mary and the duke of Norfolk. This marks the arrival in England, from Scotland, of the libellous secret history, directed by the regime against Mary. Considerable attention is paid to a group of tracts by Thomas Norton, written in response to the revolt of the northern earls, in which, while ostensibly defending the Elizabethan state, Norton also made serious criticisms of the status quo, and proposed various means whereby that state might be purged of Catholics and crypto-Catholics and the regime’s true supporters amongst the godly might be discovered and rewarded; an offensive that provoked an, if not overtly Catholic, then an aggressively anti-Puritan, defence of Mary and Norfolk, with which Norton’s works are compared and contrasted.

This chapter introduces the second political conjuncture around which the book is organized, that initiated by the projected match between Elizabeth and the duke of Anjou and perpetuated by the scheme to associate James VI with his mother in the government of Scotland. It traces the central tropes of the libellous secret history through John Stubbs’s Gaping Gulf and finds the same lines of ideological force animating Henry Howard’s response thereto as prompted the crypto-Catholic Marian legitimism described in the previous chapters. Hopes raised by the Anjou match prompted the outbreak of public politicking amongst certain English Catholics, with tragic results. The dashing of those hopes prompted the Throckmorton conspiracy, the regime’s use of which for propaganda purposes, round out the picture of the Elizabethan state’s public response to the ideological challenge represented by Catholic argument and assertion.

This chapter explores reactions to the Jansenist anti-casuist and anti-Jesuit writings among Restoration religious thinkers and pamphleteers. These ranged from a straightforward assimilation of the material into existing structures of anti-Catholic thinking, to a more nuanced reception, which took account of the positive theological case argued by the Port-Royalists as well as the colourful evidence of Catholic iniquity which their polemics comprised. The latter added little that was absolutely new for English thinkers already conversant with Catholic theology and casuistry, but their style and power was striking, and their impact is visible across English religious discourse in the period. The manner in which they were used, furthermore, points to divisions within English theology. Their focus on morality, and their technical criticisms of probabilism, it is suggested, were of greatest relevance to thinkers reacting against a theological framework which prioritized faith over obedience, and denigrated the authority of reason.

This explains how first Lord Burghley and then queen Elizabeth gradually embraced the view of Spanish villainy contained in the French tracts. It traces Burghley’s development from the use of indirect discourse, ventriloquizing (in the Letter to Mendoza) the voice of English Catholic loyalism, vacillating in the face of the failure of the Armada, through various forms of direct vituperation, first, in a somewhat whimsical play by John Lyly performed at court and then through a decidedly unwhimsical unpublished tract designed to stop the Dutch negotiating with Spain, before finally combining the vision of Spanish tyranny and ambition, of the French tracts, with the view of the threat posed by the Catholic mission, articulated in his own earlier works, in a major royal proclamation of 1591. Again, actual or implicit tensions between the queen and some of her leading councillors are crucial to the account.