ABSTRACT
The origins of the Whig-Peelite coalition presided over by Aberdeen from 1852-5 may perhaps be most precisely located in an extraordinary outburst of ultra-Protestant hysteria in 1850. Ostensibly, this was occasioned by a papal brief issued in that year by Pius IX, re-establishing the Roman hierarchy in England for the first time since the death of Mary Tudor. The effect would be to divide England into dioceses each with a bishop with a territorial title, and to create over them a Catholic archbishop of Westminster. The first archbishopdesignate of Westminster, Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, at once injudiciously published from Rome a florid pastoral letter ‘from out of the Flaminian Gate’ in which he wrote rhetorically of the ‘restoration of Catholic England to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament’. This unleashed a wave of anti-Papism in England of which, in one more spectacular display of demagogic Whiggery, Russell decided to be the aristocratic chief trumpeter.
He published an open letter to his friend the bishop of Durham denouncing this ‘papal aggression’, described the Pope himself as ‘an insolent and insidious enemy of Great Britain’ and made all the usual rabble-rousing references to Popish ‘mummeries’ and ‘superstition’. To the embarrassment of his colleagues, he had little difficulty in passing through both Houses an Ecclesiastical Titles Act (1851) invalidating the use by Papists of all territorial designations already used by Anglican clergy. The act was always a dead letter if only because the Roman Church did not designate any of its dioceses by territorial names used by the Church of England; and in 1871, Gladstone, who had firmly opposed the act as an interference with religious liberty, repealed it.
