ABSTRACT
The addition of Papal Infallibility to the agenda of the first Vatican Council, in 1870, and the prospect of some new and extreme statement on the relations of Church and State, produced a stiffening of Protestant opinion in Britain which contemporaries fully expected to run into a national frenzy of ‘No Popery’. In fact the anti-Catholic tradition did re-appear in all its militancy, but this time the public reaction was less sharp, certainly less organized, and less popular than it had been on comparable occasions in the past. Everywhere, of course, both Churchmen and Protestant Dissenters expressed disgust at the proceedings in Rome; but the Council failed to provoke the vulgar wrath, as the Maynooth Grant question of 1845 and the ‘Papal Aggression’ episode in 1850 had done. It was to men of ‘enlightened opinion’ that the Council’s work seemed most distasteful. At first they had been prepared to look with mild humour at the extraordinary survivals from an antique order of things who arrived in Rome during 1869. But when the Fathers began to discuss matters of moment, the luxury of good-natured outrage was exchanged for contempt. To the Protestants—as also to a minority of Catholics—it seemed as though all the propositions of the 1864 Syllabus of Errors were being condemned again, with increased authority, by men purporting to deliberate and act on behalf of the whole Catholic Church. Modern learning, science, individual freedom, and the liberal state: the council fathers appeared determined to outlaw every aspect of the nineteenth century which British Protestantism had come to espouse as of the essence of enlightenment in the new age. It is not surprising that ‘informed’ opinion should regard this intrusion by the Catholic leaders as a demonstration of medieval survival. The description given by Gregorovius of Archbishop Manning, whom he happened to meet at a dinner party in Rome during February 1870, came near to summarizing 81the attitude of the exponents of modern thought. ‘Closely observed the fanatic,’ wrote Gregorovius with asperity; ‘a litle grey man, looking as if encompassed by cobwebs.’ 1
