ABSTRACT
‘Protestantism lay at the core of British national identity’, and it was the Protestant religion which, as Linda Colley has shown, helped to forge the nation in the century before Victoria’s accession to the throne. 2 Irish Protestants felt themselves to be an integral part of the nation so forged. The anti-Catholicism which helped to define and fuel that Protestantism had even older roots, of course, in the Marian persecutions, the Spanish Armada, the Glorious Revolution. For Irish Protestants, the siege of Derry and the Battle of the Boyne were outstandingly important chapters in their heritage. While constitutionally Catholics had been admitted to the political nation in 1829, anti-Catholicism lived on. In 1900 the Revd C.H. Kelly proclaimed: ‘With all the experience of long ages Popery has not improved; with all the religious and civil liberty granted to its Church in this Empire, it is still the foe of true liberty, of free speech, of private judgement’. 3 Kelly was not an Irish Protestant; he was an ex-President of the English Wesleyan Conference, and newly appointed Chairman of the National Council of Evangelical Free Churches in Britain. Irish evangelicals (that is, most Irish Protestants), like English ones, continued to mistrust the Church of Rome. As Edward Norman has pointed out, ‘through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and then from the Gordon Riots of 1780 until well into the present century, there were anti-Catholic disturbances in Britain’. 4 The cry of ‘No Popery’ was not confined to Irish Protestants, though they continued to raise it for much longer than Protestants in the rest of the British Isles. In Ireland a potent mix of religion and politics — particularly in Ulster - ensured that their anti-Catholicism was part of a living and developing tradition. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, further names have been added to their roll-call of martyrs, and further episodes have kept alive their very real and widely held feelings of anti-Catholicism.
