The Anti-Catholic Tradition

In 1875 Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, probably the best known text in the very ample library of British anti-Catholic literature, was republished in London. ¹ Among the engravings illustrating the sufferings of the early Protestants was one depicting the Massacre of St Bartholomew. It was vivid and crude, but a point was made; and it is strange to realize that this scene of the dispatch of sixteenth-century Huguenots—a scene which is today enclosed in the specialist history-book—was almost as familiar to the Victorians as the Bible itself. Those with any degree of literacy must have slid through almost daily mention of it in the massive religious journalism of the nineteenth century. The less-endowed would have recognized the event from cheap prints and from frequent reference in the pulpit. For this representation of the Massacre of St Bartholomew, together with numerous other tableaux on similar themes, belonged to a tradition of anti-Catholicism whose wide acceptance and long endurance, among all classes in society, secured it an important place in Victorian civilization. The same edition of Foxe also included an introductory essay by a Protestant clergyman which adequately exemplifies the attitude which gave strength to the tradition. ‘Let us then hold up the inhuman system to merited execration’, wrote that divine of the Roman Catholic religion; ‘let parents teach their children, and children teach their children, to dread and to oppose this abomination of desolation’. ²