ABSTRACT
The zenith of British power and influence was reached in the 1860s. Despite diplomatic reverses, no nation would plan to engage Britain in war without both formidable allies and a very strong navy. The state church of Wales in 1870 remained the Church of England – an ecclesiastical and cultural affront which Scotland avoided during the negotiations for Union. A strong and influential study has argued that the experience of regular warfare against France – 'the Catholic Other' as it has become known – in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was instrumental in forging a Protestant British nation from diverse constituent elements. In the middle years of the nineteenth century the Protestant British had to accommodate themselves to a huge influx of, predominantly Catholic, Irish. The Irish dispersed widely throughout much of Britain during the nineteenth century. William Ewart Gladstone's Irish Church Disestablishment Act of 1869 was carried against substantial Tory opposition in the Lords.
