ABSTRACT
One of the key elements highlighted by recent historians of Britain in the so-called ‘long eighteenth century’, notably Linda Colley in her ground-breaking Britons: Forging the Nation (1992) and Colin Haydon in his Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1995), has been that of the potent power and influence of Protestantism and of an attendant virulent anti-Catholicism (Catholicism being demonized as an unacceptable ‘Other’ to an evolving British national identity and self-understanding).1 Haydon has delineated the ingredients of an eighteenthcentury anti-Catholicism that was ingrained in the national and popular religious consciousness and fed by such potent symbols of supposedly popish cruelty and persecution as the fires of Smithfield, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot. He has emphasized the important part played in keeping alive a popular and elite anti-Catholic historical memory and English ‘Protestant’ self-image by the seminal influence of the gruesome accounts, visual as well as textual, given in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, commonly known as his ‘Book of Martyrs’. Foxe helped link Catholicism in the minds of English people with religious persecution, foreign interference, arbitrary government and despotism. Haydon has argued that a previous reluctance by historians to recognize the force of eighteenth-century English anti-Catholicism as symbolized by a continued popularity and propagation of Foxe’s martyrology can be ascribed to a historiography of post-Revolution toleration, growing secularism and Latitudinarian or somnolent Anglicanism.2
