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HISTORIES OF THE SACRED AND SECULAR, 1700 –2000
Anti-Catholicism
in Britain and Ireland,
1600–2000
Practices, Representations and Ideas
Edited by
Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille
Geraldine Vaughan
Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700–2000
Series Editor
David Nash
Department of History
Oxford Brookes University
Oxford, UK
This series reflects the awakened and expanding profile of the history of
religion within the academy in recent years. It intends publishing exciting
new and high quality work on the history of religion and belief since 1700
and will encourage the production of interdisciplinary proposals and the
use of innovative methodologies. The series will also welcome book pro-
posals on the history of Atheism, Secularism, Humanism and unbelief/
secularity and to encourage research agendas in this area alongside those
in religious belief. The series will be happy to reflect the work of new
scholars entering the field as well as the work of established scholars. The
series welcomes proposals covering subjects in Britain, Europe, the United
States and Oceania.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14868
Geraldine Vaughan
Editors
Anti-Catholicism in
Britain and Ireland,
1600–2000
Practices, Representations and Ideas
Editors
Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille Geraldine Vaughan
Université de Rouen Normandie Institut Universitaire de France
ERIAC EA4705 Université de Rouen Normandie
Mont-Saint-Aignan, France GRHis EA3831
Mont-Saint-Aignan, France
Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700–2000

ISBN 978-3-030-42881-5 ISBN 978-3-030-42882-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42882-2
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
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electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
This edited collection originated in two conferences, which took place at

the University of Rouen Normandie in 2017 and 2018, and which were
materially and intellectually supported by our research units, the ERIAC
(“Équipe de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur les Aires Culturelles,”
EA4705) and the GRHis (“Groupe de recherche d’Histoire,” EA 3831),
as well as by the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) and the Groupe De
Rercherches 3434 Mondes britanniques. We would like to warmly thank
their directors, namely Miguel Olmos (ERIAC), Michel Biard and Anna
Bellavitis (GRHis), and Jean-François Dunyach (GDR3434), and wish to
extend our thanks to the support staff in those research units, particularly
to François Delisle (GRHis) and Benoît Roux (ERIAC).
We are also grateful to Adam Morton and the participants in the “Anti-
Catholicism in Britain and Europe” workshop at Newcastle University
(September 2018) for providing stimulating ideas which helped to build
this edited collection.
The publishing team at Palgrave has been immensely helpful and reac-
tive, and we would like to thank David Nash for including this volume in
the series Histories of the Sacred and the Secular, 1700–2000.
Last but not least, we would like to convey our sincerest gratitude to all
the authors of this collection, for the high quality of their contributions as
well as for their patience during the editorial process.
v
Contents
1 The Catholic “Other” 1

Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille and Geraldine Vaughan
Part I Living Together: Catholic Responses to

Anti-Catholicism 19
2 Catholic Strategies of Resistance to Anti-Catholicism in

Seventeenth-Century England 21
Luc Borot
3 Anti-Popery in Eighteenth-Century Scotland: A Scottish

Catholic Perspective 37
Clotilde Prunier
4 Everyday Anti-Catholicism in Early Eighteenth-Century

England 55
Carys Brown
vii
viii Contents
Part II Hating the Other: The Polemics of Anti-Catholicism 73
5 “The Great Contest Between the Papist and Protestant”:

Anti-Catholicism in Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life
of Colonel Hutchinson 75
6 “Papists Make a Direct Profession of This Shamefull Sin”:

Denouncing Catholic Ignorance in Seventeenth-Century
England 93
Sandrine Parageau
7 Beyond “The General Consent of the Principall Puritans

and Jesuits against Kings”: The Rationalist Plea for
Resistance in John Milton and Algernon Sidney109
Christopher Hamel
8 Through the French Looking Glass: Anti-Semitism,

Anti-Protestantism and Anticlericalism. A Study in
Doctrines of Hatred at the Turn of the
Twentieth Century127
Valentine Zuber
Part III Capitalizing on Anti-Catholicism and the Rise of

Englishness 143
9 The Scandalous Nun: Anti-Catholic Representations of

English Nuns in Exile in the Seventeenth Century145
Laurence Lux-Sterritt
10 Joseph Addison, Anti-Catholicism and Politeness163

Claire Boulard Jouslin
11 Papal Tyranny on the Stage: The Jacobite Rising of 1745

and the London Theatres181
Marc Martinez
Contents ix
12 Anti-Catholicism and the Rhetoric of Slavery in Irish

Writing, c. 1690–1730199
James Ward
Part IV The Demise of Anti-Catholicism in the Secularized

World? 217
13 Anti-Catholicism and the Scottish Middle

Class 1800–1914219
Martin J. Mitchell
14 Fishing for Controversy: W.S. Kerr and the Demise of

Church of Ireland Anti-Catholicism237
Alan Ford
15 A New Order in Post-conflict Northern Ireland—The

Museum of Orange Heritage255
Karine Bigand
16 The Rise and Fall of Anti-Catholicism in Scotland273

Sir T. M. Devine and Michael Rosie
17 Conclusion: Taking the Long View of Anti-Catholicism289

John Wolffe
Name Index301
Subject Index305
List of Contributors
Karine Bigand Aix Marseille Univ, LERMA, Aix-en-Provence, France

Luc Borot Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, CNRS, IRCL UMR
5186, Montpellier, France
Claire Boulard Jouslin Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, Prismes
EA4398, Paris, France
Carys Brown Trinity College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Sir Tom M. Devine University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
Alan Ford University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille Université de Rouen Normandie, ERIAC
EA4705, Mont-Saint-Aignan, France
Christopher Hamel Université de Rouen Normandie, ERIAC EA4705,
Laurence Lux-Sterritt Aix Marseille Univ, LERMA, Aix-en-Provence, France
Marc Martinez Université de Rouen Normandie, ERIAC EA4705,
Martin J. Mitchell University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
Sandrine Parageau Institut Universitaire de France, Université Paris
Nanterre, CREA EA370, Nanterre, France
Clotilde Prunier Université Paris Nanterre, CREA EA370, Nanterre, France
xi
xii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Michael Rosie University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Géraldine Vaughan Institut Universitaire de France, Université de
Rouen Normandie, GRHis EA3831, Mont-Saint-Aignan, France
James Ward Ulster University, Coleraine, UK
John Wolffe The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
Valentine Zuber École Pratique des Hautes Études (PSL), Histara
EA7347, Paris, France
List of Tables
Table 15.1 Order positions on religious issues, 2007–2008 (%).

Jonathan Tonge et al., “New Order: Political Change and
the Protestant Orange Tradition in Northern Ireland,” The
British Journal of Politics and International Relations 13
(2011): 404 259
Table 15.2 Attitudes to republican violence, 2007–2008 (%). Tonge
et al., “New Order,” 409 259
Table 16.1 Religion and occupational class National Statistics -
Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC), 2011: men aged
15–34280
Table 16.2 Religion and occupational class (NS-SEC), 2011:
women aged 35–54 280
Table 16.3 Catholics and mixed marriages/relationships, 2001 282
xiii
CHAPTER 1
The Catholic “Other”
Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille and Geraldine Vaughan
This project unites French, British and Irish researchers—with their dis-
tinctive approaches and scholarly traditions—into exploring a form of
“Otherness” in Britain and Ireland from the post-Reformation period up
until today.1 This interdisciplinary collection of essays, bringing together
historians, literary scholars, sociologists and philosophers, offers a multi-
faceted vision of issues associated with the “Otherness” of Roman
Catholics in Britain and Ireland. It does not claim to identify with a single
historiographical tradition but rather seeks to show the complexity of a
phenomenon which spans five hundred years. Concentrating on practices,
1
The wide-ranging study of anti-Catholicism has been popularized by excellent recent
publications such as John Wolffe, ed., Protestant-Catholic Conflict from the Reformation to
the Twenty-First Century: The Dynamics of Religious Difference (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013).
C. Gheeraert-Graffeuille (*)
Université de Rouen Normandie, ERIAC EA4705, Mont-Saint-Aignan, France
e-mail: [email protected]
G. Vaughan (*)
Institut Universitaire de France, Université de Rouen Normandie,
GRHis EA3831, Mont-Saint-Aignan, France
© The Author(s) 2020 1

C. Gheeraert-Graffeuille, G. Vaughan (eds.), Anti-Catholicism in
Britain and Ireland, 1600–2000, Histories of the Sacred and
Secular, 1700–2000,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42882-2_1
2 C. GHEERAERT-GRAFFEUILLE AND G. VAUGHAN
representations and discourses, it reflects the broadening of the historical

field to culture since the 1970s, culture being anthropologically under-
stood as “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in
symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by
means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowl-
edge about attitudes towards life.”2
The “cultural turn” has had institutional and epistemological conse-
quences which are relevant to our present project. For instance, by permit-
ting ecclesiastical history to come out of its institutional ghetto,
developments in methodologies have encouraged the emergence of a
socio-cultural approach to religious history. Transformed perspectives
have also resulted in a growing interest in individual voices and experi-
ences and, most crucially for the study of anti-Catholicism, in their sym-
bolic and verbal manifestations and constructions. Our common venture
here is thus to offer a “polyphonic history”—recognising, as Peter Burke
states, “the value of interaction, interpenetration and hybridization” of
our different scholarly backgrounds and exploring the world of anti-
Catholicism “between practices and representations.”3
Physical manifestations of Catholic hatred, assaults and violence
throughout the early and late modern period are not central to our analy-
sis. Contributors are more concerned with the elaboration, discourse and
perpetuation of anti-Catholic prejudice. In his analysis on early modern
anti-Popery, the historian Peter Lake stressed the twofold dimension of
prejudice against the Catholic “Other,” which expressed irrational fears as
well as the conscious assertion of a Protestant identity. As Lake further
wrote: “[c]ertainly anti-Popery appealed to people’s emotions. It did so
because it incorporated deeply-held beliefs and values and it helped to
dramatize and exorcize the fears and anxieties produced when those values
came under threat.”4
Is there a single definition of anti-Catholicism? Anti-Catholic sentiment
was a complex, protean phenomenon directed against the Roman Church,
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 89.
2
Peter Burke, “Cultural History as Polyphonic History,” Arbor 743 (2010): 484.
3
“Between Practices and Representations” is the subtitle of Roger Chartier’s Cultural History:
Between Practices and Representations (Ithaca: Cornel University, 1988). See Chartier, “Le
monde comme représentation,” Annales ESC 44.6 (1989): 1505–1520.
4
Peter Lake, “Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice,” in Conflict in Early Stuart
England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–1642, ed. Richard Cust and Anne Hughes
(London: Longman, 1989), 97.
THE CATHOLIC “OTHER” 3
its prelates and parishioners. It varied according to time and place. The
historian John Wolffe has offered researchers a synthetic vision of its key
strands.5 Three major aspects might be defined for our present study. First,
and more markedly up until 1829 and the passing of Catholic emancipa-
tion, anti-Catholicism was set in a constitutional framework, emanating
from the State and the legislature (the Penal Laws were meant to disable
Catholic subjects on a religious, economic and political basis).6 This con-
stitutional anti-Catholicism resulted from the belief that Catholic subjects
were potentially disloyal to the Crown and British institutions. They were
thus barred from civic and political positions. In the later nineteenth cen-
tury and well into the twentieth century, constitutional anti-Catholicism
was embodied in the debates around the issues of secular and religious
State primary education.7 Second, anti-Catholicism also meant anti-
Popery, in the sense that it embodied a strong theologico-political preju-
dice against the “tyrannical” powers of the Pope and the Roman Church.
Catholicism was viewed as an illiberal doctrine, in contrast with
Reformation principles which affirmed liberty of conscience. Third, anti-
Catholicism had a socio-national dimension, meaning that the “Other”
was perceived as fundamentally un-English, un-British or un-Scottish—
this is where debates on the inclusion of Ireland into a wider British iden-
tity come into perspective. This form of anti-Catholicism mobilised ethnic
prejudices, based on the demeaning of continental and Irish national iden-
tities, considered as being inferior to a strong Protestant British identity.
This collection of essays thus works by multiplying angles and
approaches to tackle the composite issue of anti-Catholicism since the
5
John Wolffe, “Protestant-Catholic Divisions in Europe and the United States: An
Historical and Comparative Perspective,” Politics, Religion and Ideology, 12.3 (2011): 250.
See also J. Wolffe, “A Comparative Historical Categorisation of Anti-Catholicism,” Journal
of Religious History, 39.2 (2015): 182–202. Wolffe identifies four major categories of anti-
Catholicism: constitutional-national, theological, socio-cultural and popular.
6
Penal Laws were passed after the Reformation and mainly enforced in Ireland. Their
purpose was to exclude Catholics from the political, economic and military spheres. Its main
provisions were progressively dropped from the late eighteenth century onwards. See, for
instance, Sean Connolly, “The Penal Laws” in Kings in Conflict: The Revolutionary War in
Ireland and Its Aftermath 1689–1750 W, ed. A. Maguire (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1990),
157–172.
7
Geraldine Vaughan, “‘Britishers and Protestants’: Protestantism and Imperial British
Identities in Britain, Canada and Australia from the 1880s to the 1920s,” Studies in Church
History, 54 (2018): 359–373.
Protestant Reformation in Britain and Ireland.8 However, anti-Catholicism

was not exclusively a (British) Protestant affair. In the Catholic countries
of Europe, anti-Catholicism could thrive in the form of anticlericalism—
this was also the case in post-revolutionary France (Valentine Zuber’s
chapter explores French manifestations of anti-Catholicism). It is of course
difficult to infer, from a range of geographically and historically diverse
studies, one single contention, but what this collection as a whole suggests
is that there can be no teleological narration of anti-Catholicism—its man-
ifestations have been episodic, more or less rooted in common world-
views, and its history does not end today. To that effect, the chronological
boundaries adopted here are fluid in order to reflect the conflictual nature
of anti-Catholicism—from the reign of Elizabeth I up to the early twenty-
first century. It is hoped that such a thematic and interdisciplinary approach
will further help readers to understand how anti-Catholicism evolved and
revolved in British and Irish history. In line with current historiographical
trends, the first part of this book looks at Catholic and Protestant interac-
tions in discourses and cultural practices and examines the Catholic
response to outbursts of anti-Catholicism. Nevertheless, satire and contro-
versy have always fuelled religious and political conflicts—the second part
will examine anti-Catholic polemics in their plasticity and adaptability to
various political, social and theological contexts. The third part of this col-
lection will be devoted to the study of anti-Catholicism and the emergence
of modern national identities, with a focus on Englishness. Finally, the
fourth part will explore more contemporary issues, by trying to answer the
following question: has anti-Catholicism truly declined since the late
twentieth century?
8
The case of Wales is not distinguished from the more general British experience in this
collection. Nevertheless, there were specific features of anti-Catholicism in Wales, mainly
connected to its strong Dissenting tradition. For an interesting debate on the changing
nature and presence (or absence) of anti-Catholicism in Wales during the late modern era,
see Trystan Owen Hughes, “Anti-Catholicism in Wales, 1900–1960,” Journal of Ecclesiastical
History 53.2 (2002): 312–325; Paul O’Leary, “When Was Anti-Catholicism? The Case of
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Wales,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 56.2 (2005):
308–325.
Living Together: Catholic Responses

to Anti-Catholicism
Until well into the twentieth century, the history of British Catholics and
Catholicism was written by Catholics as a history of persecution and mar-
tyrdom. It was, to quote Alexandra Walsham, “an obscure byway and
minor distraction from the grand narrative of progress that released the
people of England, Wales and Scotland from popish ignorance, supersti-
tion and tyranny.”9 One of the main reasons for this separatist and hagio-
graphical methodology was the exclusion of English Catholics from full
citizenship from the time of the Reformation onwards—apart from the
short interruption of the reign of Mary Tudor (1553–1558)—until the
Emancipation Act of 1829. However, since John Bossy’s pioneering work,
influenced by the French Annales, the English Catholic community and
their cultural practices have received more historiographical attention.10 In
2005, in the preface to Catholics and the “Protestant Nation,” historian
Ethan Shagan wrote that Catholicism “was not a discrete subject but a
crucial facet of early modern culture” and made it clear that the purpose
of his book was to “pull Catholicism back into the mainstream of English
historiography.”11 The relationships between Catholics and Protestants in
the post-Reformation era have now become a more central subject of
study, as it appears essential to “[adopt] a perspective that examines
Catholicism and anti-Catholicism, Protestantism and anti-Protestantism
as inextricably linked bodies of opinion and practice.”12 There is much
9
Alexandra Walsham, Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (2014; London:
Routledge, 2016), 6.
10
John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London: Darton, Longman
& Todd, 1975). Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England
c.1400–c.1585 (1992; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). For recent historiographical
overviews, see A. Walsham, “In the Lord’s Vineyard: Catholic Reformation in Protestant
Britain,” Catholic Reformation, 1–52; Ethan Shagan, “Introduction: English Catholic
History in Context,” Catholics and the “Protestant Nation”: Religious Politics and Identities
in Early Modern England, ed. E. Shagan (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2005), 1–21.
11
Shagan, Catholics and the Protestant “Nation,” vi, 1–2.
12
Walsham, Catholic Reformation, 3, 2; Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed. The
Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3; Lucy E. C. Wooding, Re-thinking Catholicism in
Reformation England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); P. Lake and Michael Questier, The
Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). For a literary approach, see Alison Shell, Catholicism,
evidence that early modern English Catholics interacted with the rest of
society in multiple ways: contrary to what has often been assumed, they
were not necessarily rejected by their Protestant parishes and continued to
participate in local and national politics.13 This was particularly true of a
category of Catholics, those called “Church Papists,” who conformed to
the Church of England to avoid persecution and fines and who probably
found it easier to integrate into the social life of their towns and villages
than recusants.14 When Alexandra Walsham chooses the term “coexis-
tence” to designate inter-denominational relationships, she warns us that
there should be no idealising of interreligious cohabitation. Although
Christian charity made it obligatory to love one’s neighbour, for most
seventeenth-century Protestants, their religion was the only true one and
Papists remained objects of hatred.15 Thus, the phrase “charitable hatred,”
which encapsulates early modern interconfessional relationships, estab-
lishes that religious coexistence did not mean mutual acceptance in the
seventeenth century.16 There is in fact much evidence that anti-Catholic
sentiment persisted at least up until the end of the Hanoverian period and
probably much longer as many pages of the present volume will suggest.17
To be sure, from the eighteenth century onwards, less repressive legisla-
tion in England made the cohabitation between Catholics and the
Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2004); Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy. Catholic
and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2005).
13
M. C. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern Britain: Politics,
Aristocratic Patronage and Religion c. 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006); Nadine Lewyckcy and Adam Morton, “Introduction,” Getting Along? Religious
Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England, ed. N. Lewycky and
A. Morton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 16–18.
14
See A. Walsham, Church Papists. Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in
Early Modern England (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1993), 1–3.
15
A. Walsham, “Cultures of Coexistence in Early Modern England: History, Literature
and Religious Toleration,” The Seventeenth Century 28.2 (2013): 115–137; Lewycky and
Morton, Getting Along 14–15; Shagan, Catholics and the Protestant “Nation,” 2.
16
A. Walsham, Charitable Hatred. Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 315–322.
17
Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England. A Political and Social
Study (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); John Wolffe, God and Greater
Britain. Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland 1843–1945 (London: Routledge,
1994), 32–33; Linda Colley, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument,” Journal of British
Studies 31.4 (1992): 318–319.
redominantly Protestant population smoother, but it did not prevent

p
outbreaks of sectarian violence, as for instance at the time of the Jacobite
risings or of the Gordon Riots of 1780.18
The chapters in this first section examine various Catholic responses to
anti-Catholicism. In the wake of recent studies, Luc Borot offers a survey
of the diverse strategies of resistance devised by the seventeenth-century
clandestine English Catholic minority, either at home or from abroad, in a
context of State repression. However contradictory and heterogeneous
those strategies were, they entailed that most English Catholics were will-
ing to be part of the English nation. This is particularly manifest in their
participation in national political life as well as in their efforts to maintain
and preserve “a properly English spiritual lineage largely ignored on the
Continent, and denied by English authorities.”19 Clotilde Prunier traces
an analogous desire among Scottish Catholics to belong to the Scottish
nation, in a context of intensified Presbyterian persecution in the years fol-
lowing the battle of Culloden (1746) and during the debate on the Repeal
of the Penal Laws (1778–1779). The paradox which emerges from the
memorials and letters she examines is that the relief from persecution was
eventually negotiated via the intervention of the British State whose laws
eventually proved protective of the Scottish Catholic minority.20 Finally,
Carys Brown concentrates on interpersonal relationships between
Catholics and Protestants through an examination of the correspondence
of several eighteenth-century English families. Despite apparent peaceful
coexistence between communities, she shows how age-old prejudices and
stereotypes were perpetuated, revealing the resilience of every day anti-
Catholicism mostly manifest in the form of verbal intolerance.
18
Haydon, Anti-Catholicism 76–173; 204–244. See also George Rudé’s seminal study:
G. F. E. Rudé, “The Gordon Riots: A Study of the Rioters and Their Victims,” Transactions
of the Royal Historical Society 6 (1956): 93–114.
19
Luc Borot, “Catholic Strategies of Resistance to Anti-Catholicism in Seventeenth-
Century England,” in this volume [Chap. 8, p. 000]. See A. Walsham, The Reformation of
the Landscape. Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011).
20
Clotilde Prunier, Anti-Catholic Strategies in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Frankfurt:
Peter Lang, 2004).
Hating “The Other:” The Polemics

of Anti-Catholicism
The second section of this volume concentrates on anti-Catholic polemics,

which developed in various contexts and genres and which persist today,
probably because of their plasticity and their capacity to address political,
theological and social issues in various contexts. For that matter the dis-
courses of anti-Popery, which emerged after the reign of Mary Tudor, did
not always mean to attack Catholicism but were used to label other forms
of deviance: before the Civil War, for instance, the term “Papist” was used
to designate the Laudian supporters of absolute monarchy.21 Nevertheless,
despite the numerous metamorphoses and the adaptability of anti-Catholic
discourse, anti-Catholic tropes remained remarkably permanent: Papists
were still pictured as being treacherous to the State, deceitful, ignorant
and superstitious; their religion was regarded as tyrannical, anti-Christian,
persecutory and threatening to the integrity of both State and Church.22
Moreover, in the early modern period, these essentialising representations,
in which Puritan preachers delighted, had an undeniable polarising effect
and could produce symbolic and physical violence.23 Obviously, the temp-
tation is great for us to dismiss such bigoted discourses as irrational. Yet it
must be recognised that for all their would-be irrationality, they were
more often than not careful ideological constructions whose power of
explanation and bearing on historical reality should not be downplayed.24
For a number of revisionist historians, early modern anti-Popery—not
Puritanism—was viewed as responsible for the major conflicts of the sev-
enteenth century. To quote John Coffey, these historians “have identified
21
Lake, “Anti-Popery,” 92–97; Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles. Republican
Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 49–50;
Charles-Édouard Levillain, “Papistes et antipapistes dans l’Angleterre des Stuarts
(1640–1689),” in “Rome, L’unique objet de mon ressentiment.” Regards critiques sur la
papauté, ed. Philippe Levillain (Rome: École française de Rome, 2011), 215–227.
22
See P. Lake, “Anti-Puritanism: The Structure of a Prejudice,” in Religious Politics in
Post-Reformation England, ed. P. Lake and Kenneth Fincham (Woodbridge: Boydell Press,
2006), 80–97, here 96.
23
Walsham, Charitable Hatred, 124–127. On anti-Popery in sermons, see Robin Clifton,
“The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution,” Past and Present 52 (1971):
23–55, here 35–38.
24
On the problematic dichotomy between ideas and practices, see Walsham, “Cultures of
Coexistence,” 66–67. On the rationality of anti-Catholicism versus revisionist emphasis on
passions, see Lake, “Anti-Popery,” 73–80.
Popery as the most powerful and visceral force in English politics, one
which helped to topple Charles I and his son James II.”25 Furthermore,
from the Henrician Reformation onwards, anti-Catholicism was a strong
expression of national values. This was the case in John Foxe’s Acts and
Monuments and also in sermons, satire and pamphlets. It was also percep-
tible in all the national narratives which contrasted “Protestant” suc-
cesses—the victory against the Spanish Armada, the Glorious
Revolution—with Catholic infamy—the Gunpowder Plot, the Irish
Rebellion and the Popish Plot. All these events were endlessly repeated
and recapitulated within a providential framework, the better to bring out
the inherent danger of a foreign religion and the grandeur of Protestant
Britain.26 Unsurprisingly, throughout our time period, Protestant anti-
Catholicism served to forge a British Protestant national identity, itself the
cornerstone of Whig historiography while relegating Catholicism and
Catholics to the margins of mainstream history.27 Likewise, Roman
Catholicism being for its enemies synonymous with tyranny, anti-Popery
was, as Clement Fatovic argued, central “in the development of liberal and
republican conceptions of liberty” from John Milton to William
Blackstone.28
By exploring and contextualising anti-Catholicism in seventeenth-
century English intellectual debates and historiography, the chapters in
this second section show the limits of anti-Catholic binary polemics and
25
John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558–1689 (2000;
London: Routledge, 2013), 3. On revisionist history and anti-Catholicism, see Lake, “Anti-
Popery,” 72.
26
See David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells. National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in
Elizabethan and Stuart England (1989; Thrupp: Sutton Publishing, 2004). Marotti, “Plots,
Atrocities, and Deliverances. The Anti-Catholic Construction of Protestant English History,”
in Religious Ideology, 131–132. Lake, “Anti-Puritanism,” 91; Anne McLaren, “Gender,
Religion, and Early Modern Nationalism: Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, and the Genesis
of English Anti-Catholicism,” American Historical Review 107.3 (2002): 739–767; Carol
Z. Weiner, “The Beleaguered Isle: A Study of Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Anti-
Catholicism,” Past and Present 51 (1971): 27–62.
27
Walsham, Catholic Reformation 6–7; Tony Claydon and Ian McBride, “The Trials of the
Chosen Peoples: Recent Interpretations of Protestantism and National Identity in Britain
and Ireland,” in Protestantism and National Identity, c.1650–c-0.1850, ed. I. McBride and
T. Claydon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 7–9. Wolffe, God and Greater
Britain, 16–17.
28
Clement Fatovic, “The Anti-Catholic Roots of Liberal and Republican Conceptions of
Freedom in English Political Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 66.1 (2005): 37–58,
here 39–41.
the occasional proximity between Catholic and Reformed discourses.29

Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille traces the use of anti-Popery in Lucy
Hutchinson’s history-writing in the Memoirs of the Life of Colonel
Hutchinson. Writing from a Protestant perspective, Hutchinson demon-
strates how and why Henry VIII’s imperfect Protestant Reformation and
the ensuing Popish policies of the Stuarts caused the outbreak of the Civil
War. In her subsequent relation of the English Revolution in
Nottinghamshire, her anti-Catholicism is less explanatory and proves inef-
fective in accounting for the complexity of historical reality. It gives way to
virulent anti-Puritanism as the responsibility for the military conflict is
shifted on to the Puritans whose moral conduct is presented as being as
reprehensible as that of Papists.30 The following chapter, by Sandrine
Parageau, is less concerned with the targets and the purpose of anti-
Catholic polemics than with the ideas and preconceptions that lay beneath
them. Focusing mostly on early seventeenth-century theological and intel-
lectual debates, she anatomises the cliché of Popish ignorance which,
despite its ideological consistency, did not match the religious reality it
sought to represent: Protestants, like Catholics, had to face problems of
ignorance in dealing with their congregations. What is more, some among
them were intellectually indebted to scholastic writings from which
Catholic theologians also drew, which contributed to play down the divide
between Catholic and Protestant discourses on the question of ignorance
and confirms the “cross-pollination of ideas, imagery and texts across con-
fessional divides” that a number of studies have brought to light.31 Such a
blurring of the lines is also prominent in republican political thought. As
Christopher Hamel demonstrates in his chapter about the deposition of
tyrants, the two republican thinkers Algernon Sidney and John Milton
were fully aware of the dangerous proximity between Reformed and
Catholic arguments on the issue of resistance to tyrants. As a matter of
fact, their hostility to Catholicism and their refusal to be taken for Jesuits
in disguise made it impossible for them to base their approach on their
scholastic arguments and led them to devise secular arguments based on
natural reason. In that light, anti-Catholicism proved unexpectedly
29
See Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 5; A. Milton, “A Qualified Intolerance: The Limits
and Ambiguities of Early Stuart Anti-Catholicism” in Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in
Early Modern English Texts, ed. A. F. Marotti (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 91–93.
30
See Lake, “Anti-Puritanism,” 86.
31
Shagan, Catholics and the Protestant “Nation,” 2. See Milton, “A Qualified
Intolerance,” 91.
constructive: by steering them away from theology and religious polemics,

it enabled them to adopt more rational strategies. Finally, by way of com-
parison, Valentine Zuber’s chapter reviews Leroy Beaulieu’s famous equa-
tion between three discourses of hatred—anticlericalism, anti-Protestantism
and anti-Semitism—which combined religious, racial and social resent-
ments under the pretext of defending the integrity of the French nation
supposedly threatened by “foreign” religions. The methodological limits
of such a comparison are undeniable; however, by bringing together those
three “antis”, Leroy-Beaulieu reveals the uneasy proximity between those
discourses of hatred, the rejection of religious pluralism and a nationalistic
reactionary vision of French politics.
Capitalising on Anti-Catholicism and the Rise

of Englishness
The third part of this volume is an exploration of the connections between

anti-Catholicism and Englishness in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies. Over the past three decades, historians have revisited the links
between Protestantism and the construction of nationalities within the
British Isles in the eighteenth century. In the early 1990s, this new
approach was most clearly formulated by British historian Linda Colley
with her best-selling Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, published on
the other side of the Atlantic in 1992. In another article, Colley affirmed
that “[t]he absolute centrality of Protestantism to the British experience in
the 1700s and long after is so obvious that it has often been passed over.”32
This renewed interest in the religious element at work within the elabora-
tion of a British identity in the late modern era was clearly stimulated by
the flourishing of socio-religious history. It also went against a too narrow
Church-based writing of religious history—it was Protestantism as a com-
mon basis which was examined as a possible pillar for national identities.
Accordingly, this third part asks whether anti-Catholicism can be consid-
ered an essential ingredient in the elaboration of an English Protestant
national identity. Yet, historians Ian McBride and Tony Claydon have
urged researchers to “find a way of writing about Protestantism and
national identity which acknowledges their interdependency, but gives
due weight to the mismatches between them.”33 In other words, although
32
Colley, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument,” 316–317.
33
McBride and Claydon, “The Trials of the Chosen Peoples,” 26.
anti-Catholicism is central to our analysis here, we are aware that religious

beliefs must not be overestimated in the building of national sentiment.
However, there were periods when external threats and/or internal anxi-
eties were duly exploited to foster patriotic sentiments—the wars against
Catholic continental powers and eighteenth-century Jacobite rebellions
being the most obvious examples. Historian Colin Haydon, who pio-
neered broad-range studies of eighteenth-century anti-Catholicism in his
1993 opus, wrote of the Jacobite scares as British equivalents of the
Grandes Peurs, occasioning the “most spectacular manifestation of a
deeply entrenched anti-Catholic mentalité.”34 Public entertainment, sen-
sational pamphlets and propaganda literature could all serve to raise levels
of anti-Catholic anxieties—hence the success of lubricious nuns, stage
frights and polite thrills in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Mockery was used as a traditional weapon against Roman Catholics in
Stuart and Georgian Britain—thus satire and comedy making fun of
vicious friars and depraved prelates were sure to attract large audiences.
Another dimension of anti-Catholicism seldom explored is the profit-
able enterprise it represented for theatre managers and pamphlet publish-
ers. Staging anti-Catholicism belonged to the “protean nature of
anti-Catholic cultural forms.”35 Marc Martinez explores the profit-making
industry of stage entertainment during the great rising of 1745, focusing
on the plays performed at two rival theatres, Covent Garden and Drury
Lane. Analysing several anti-Papist plays, he shows how the repertories of
the two playhouses closely reflected contemporary anti-Papist hysteria. In
giving vent to anti-Popery, the theatre managers unquestionably aimed at
fostering patriotic feelings in times of national crisis, but they also sought
to financially profit from the sensationalism of the plays. Capitalising on
anti-Catholicism was also a characteristic of the abundant pamphlet litera-
ture circulating in early modern England. Nevertheless, although they
were always a trope of anti-Catholic discourse, nuns and nunneries fea-
tured quite rarely in the anti-Catholic pamphlets circulated in the first half
34
Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, 99.
35
Haydon, “‘I love my King and my Country, but a Roman Catholic I hate’: Anti-
Catholicism, Xenophobia and National Identity in Eighteenth-Century England,” in
Protestantism and National Identity, 43.
of the seventeenth century. Laurence Lux-Sterritt offers an exploration of

the marketing success of two rare “scandalous nuns” writings published at
two moments of national crisis, the “Spanish Match” and the “Irish
Rebellion.” Mockery and titillation were the key munitions intended to
lure readers into a classic exposition and vindication of true Protestant
national values: “England had to appear as safe haven for true Christians,”
where the Pope held no power. In the end, women were just used as
objects to attract readers’ attention, and the fate of English nuns in conti-
nental nunneries was quickly passed over. Can traces of anti-Catholic
mockery be found in eighteenth-century English politeness? Exploring
the concept of politeness as an instrument for historical analysis, Laurence
E. Klein characterises it as a “useful tool for understanding and organizing
cultural practices.”36 How could anti-Catholicism be compatible with the
apparent moderation and tolerance of English politeness? In her chapter
on Joseph Addison, the editor of The Spectator, Claire Boulard Jouslin
argues that eighteenth-century politeness was a paradoxical agent of anti-
Catholic expression aimed at strengthening English identity. Going
through Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy and the Whig
Freeholder, she shows that Catholicism loomed as “a threat to the integrity
of the Protestant English nation and way of life.”37 She concludes that
Addison’s anti-Catholicism extended to the realm of fashion and manners
which had to be purged of all traces of Popery. His agenda was clearly to
make English politeness distinctly anti-Catholic—as part of the larger
project of the reform of manners. Finally, in a chapter on anti-Catholicism
in Irish writing, James Ward examines how Catholicism was conceptually
and rhetorically associated with slavery—a common trope to refer to the
attitude of the Church of Rome. Through a range of literary, political and
philosophical texts, and adopting a memory studies approach, he analyses
the persistence and evolution of antislavery rhetoric in late seventeenth-
and early eighteenth-century Ireland, from the Glorious Revolution to
Irish House of Lords’ “Report on the State of Popery” in 1731.
36
Lawrence E. Klein, “Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth
Century,” The Historical Journal 45.4 (2002): 898.
37
See in this volume the chapter by Claire Boulard Jouslin, “Joseph Addison, Anti-
Catholicism and Politeness,” p. 000.
The Demise of Anti-Catholicism

in a Secularised World?
Popular anti-Catholicism loomed large from the late eighteenth century

to the late Victorian era. From the Gordon Riots (1780) to the anti-
Popery busts of the early 1850s (1850 marked the restoration of the
Catholic hierarchy in England) and in the 1880s, there were regular out-
breaks of anti-Irish violence in British industrial cities. This upsurge in
anti-Catholicism was connected to the increase in Irish (Catholic) immi-
gration to Britain from the early nineteenth century onwards. The number
of Irish born in Britain in 1841 amounted to 415,725 people who were
unevenly distributed across Britain: Irish migrants tended to settle in
industrial cities—in some cases, the Irish communities (i.e. the Irish born
and their descendants) represented up to 20% of the population of indus-
trial towns.38 Martin Mitchell recounts in his chapter on nineteenth-
century Scotland that the growth of Irish immigration added to, and
intensified, existing anti-Catholic sentiment in Scotland. Yet, in a revision-
ist fashion, by focusing on middle-class Scots, he argues that there was not
the widespread hostility to the Catholic community that some have
claimed and that Scottish Protestants and Irish Catholics mixed and asso-
ciated to a significant degree—for example, on local boards, educational
enterprises and so on. This argument would seem to fit in with the more
general view that the “secularisation” of late modern British society went
hand in hand with a toning down of anti-religious prejudice. In other
words, are “secularisation” and anti-Catholicism compatible? A teleologi-
cal vision of modernisation would lead us into thinking that anti-
Catholicism died with the decline of religious practice in Britain. Yet how
can scholars account for the ostensible survival of a set of anti-Catholic
attitudes up until today? In September 2010, when Pope Benedict XVI
came on an official State visit to Britain, the “Protest the Pope” umbrella
group, bringing together humanist, atheist and secular groups, prepared
several actions and demonstrations against the papal tour. In Edinburgh,
Rev. Ian Paisley and his ultra-Protestant supporters objected to the com-
ing of the “antichrist” and distributed pamphlets listing “recent scandals”
within the Roman Catholic Church. Thus, Secularist societies and
Protestant religious groups testified to the survival of a British anti-Popery
tradition going back to the Reformation. Yet, this protest against the
38
Donald MacRaild, The Irish Diaspora (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 34.
abuses of clerical power in the Roman Church is not confined only to

these groups—in view of the current sex scandals involving members of
the Roman Catholic clergy (with children and nuns as victims)—anti-
Catholicism is also openly advocated by women campaigners and, in some
cases, liberal Catholics.39
The heated historiographical debates around the secularisation para-
digm may have sometimes obscured our understanding of the late modern
contemporaries’ relationship to religion. Without reviewing fifty years of
intense scholarly discussion on the issue of modernisation and the socio-
political withdrawal of organised religion, a few elements can be briefly
retraced.40 Since the 1960s, sociologists and historians from Europe and
North America have been at the forefront of discussions around the exis-
tence, extent and chronology of the supposed “secularisation” of the
Western world. In brief, secularisation can be defined as the decline of
Churches as institutions and the drive from compulsory religious practice
(commanded earlier by the State and then by the pressure of society and
community) to personal choice—characterised by sociologist Grace Davie
as the change “from obligation to consumption.”41 It was presented from
the 1950s as associated with the urbanisation, industrialisation and global
modernisation of Western societies since the late eighteenth century. Yet
the “secularisation narrative” has been challenged with force in the past
two decades by scholars who have insisted upon its teleological and posi-
tivist dimension—leading some to consider that the study of religious
“change” rather than “decline” in Western societies offers a wider angle of
analysis.42 How does the British anti-Catholic phenomenon interact with
this vision of society where Churches and beliefs have, statistically at least,
39
See the documentary aired on Arte on March 5, 2019: “Religieuses abusées, l’autre
scandale de l’Église,” by Marie-Pierre Raimbault and Eric Quintin.
40
Amongst recent publications, see David Hempton and Hugh McLeod, eds.,
Secularization and Religious Innovation in the North Atlantic World (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2017); Steve Bruce, Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
41
Grace Davie, “From Obligation to Consumption: A Framework for Reflection in
Northern Europe,” Political Theology 6.3 (2005): 281–301.
42
See Jeremy Morris, “Secularization and Religious Experience: Arguments in the
Historiography of Modern British Religion,” The Historical Journal 55.1 (2012): 195–219;
William Gibson, “New Perspectives on Secularisation in Britain (and Beyond),” Journal of
Religious History 41.4 (2017): 431–438; John Wolffe, “Towards the Post-Secular City?
London since the 1960s,” Journal of Religious History 41.4 (2017): 532–549. For a stimu-
lating perspective on secularisation as a narrative, see David S. Nash, “Believing in
retreated since the 1960s? In the context of growing ecumenism from the
1960s, what prospects were still open for sectarian rivalries? Sectarianism,
defined as the rivalries between Protestants and Roman Catholics, has had
a particularly bitter history in Ireland and in Scotland.43 The geographical
shift to the Scottish and Irish contexts in part IV of this volume offers a
reflection on the issue of the survival of anti-Catholicism in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries. Certainly, overt anti-Catholicism has become
more and more unfashionable since the 1970s. Exploring the writings of
Anglican Bishop William S. Kerr (1873–1960), Alan Ford unearths the
quintessence of three hundred years of anti-Catholic controversy within
the Church of Ireland. He presents Bishop Kerr as the last of a long line
of Church of Ireland clergy who saw their intellectual mission as attacking
the “errors” of the Church of Rome. He demonstrates that the early
1960s saw the end of that type of controversial theology and the end of
open anti-Catholicism within the Church of Ireland.
Moving away from the ecclesiastical institution, the history of the
Orange Order (founded in the late eighteenth century) offers a perspec-
tive on long-lasting anti-Catholic stance (a Roman Catholic still cannot be
admitted to the Order today) of a religious, social and political nature.
Karine Bigand studies the ways in which Northern Irish Orangeism is cur-
rently trying to amend its sectarian image in post-conflict Ireland. The
peace process and the new rhetoric of the post-conflict era have led the
Order to reposition itself on the political spectrum. In recent years, it has
also sought to rebrand itself as an open, inclusive institution, moving away
from the strict defence of religious values to the promotion of Orange
culture and heritage. Accordingly, both the chapters on Ireland do not
qualify the survival of anti-Catholic prejudices but reflect on the general
change in wide-ranging public and ecclesiastical opinion which now ren-
ders open anti-Catholicism socially and politically unacceptable.
The subsequent chapter offers a vision of anti-Catholicism set in a con-
temporary Scottish context. Since the 1999 Edinburgh Festival outcry of
Secularisation—Stories of Decline, Potential, and Resurgence,” Journal of Religious History

41.4 (2017): 505–531.
43
Sectarianism is a term which suits the Scottish and Irish contexts—it designates a com-
plex blend of political, social and religious prejudice. The Victorians rather spoke of “big-
otry.” Sectarianism can refer to a wide range of attitudes, from the “undue favouring of a
particular denomination” (Oxford English Dictionary) in terms of employment or residence
to overt violence displayed by one sect against another denomination. See G. Vaughan, The
‘Local’ Irish in the West of Scotland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 40–57.
James Macmillan, the renowned Catholic composer, who denounced a

“visceral anti-Catholicism” in Scottish society, there has been an ongoing
debate in public, government and academic circles as to the survival of
sectarianism in the country.44 Historian Sir Tom Devine and sociologist
Michael Rosie argue that sectarianism in Scotland is definitely on the wane,
much to the dislike of a rising anti-sectarian industry (because it is possible
to capitalise on anti-sectarianism too!) encouraged by the recent Scottish
government’s inquiry into the phenomenon (2013–2015).45 Thus, both
chapters on contemporary Ireland and Scotland offer a wider understand-
ing of the richer meaning of “secularisation” in the contemporary British
Isles, in the sense that as a concept, it might be valid mainly to understand
such secularisation not as the disappearance of organised religion, but
rather as the reorganisation of religious beliefs in modern societies.46
The concluding chapter by John Wolffe explores issues of longue durée
continuity and change in anti-Catholicism, by insisting on the eschatologi-
cal dimension of anti-Catholic rhetoric, and thus showing that anti-
Catholics themselves envisioned their fight against Rome as a history
without an end. Wolffe focuses on three pivotal events spanning the first
half of the nineteenth century, namely, the Union of the British and Irish
Parliaments (1800), Catholic Emancipation (1829) and the restoration of
the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales (1850). These events brought
anti-Catholicism into enduring and complex association with both “the
Irish question” and with assertive forms of British nationalism. While they
need to be understood in the context of their time, they also resonate
across the centuries, for example, back to the papal deposition of Elizabeth
I in 1570 and forward to the travails of British (and especially Ulster
Protestant) relations with the European Union. Finally, John Wolffe also
investigates the emergence of a secularised form of anti-Catholicism since
the 1950s and, in some cases, the transmutation of anti-Catholic discourse
into contemporary forms of Islamophobia.
44
See the academic response to James MacMillan’s outcry: T. M. Devine, ed., Scotland’s
Shame? Bigotry and Sectarianism in Modern Scotland (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing,
2000); Steve Bruce, Sectarianism in Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004).
45
The Advisory Group on Tackling Sectarianism in Scotland (appointed in 2013) published
its final report in 2015, concluding that sectarianism was still an ongoing problem in Scottish
society and making a series of recommendations. See report on https://www2.gov.scot/
Publications/2015/05/4296 (accessed on December 6, 2018).
46
Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Le pèlerin et le converti. La religion en mouvement (Paris:
Champs, 1999).
PART I
Living Together: Catholic Responses

to Anti-Catholicism
CHAPTER 2
Catholic Strategies of Resistance to Anti-

Catholicism in Seventeenth-Century England
Luc Borot
The Fairies marry not; but there be amongst them Incubi, that have
copulation with flesh and blood. The Priests also marry not.
Most scholars working on early modern English Catholicism will have

recognized Hobbes’s anti-clerical jibe from chapter 47 of Leviathan, pub-
lished in 1651, in the midst of the century and of the revolutionary peri-
od.1 Reception scholarship should lead us to wonder how a cultivated
clandestine Catholic English gentleman, in the years leading up to the
Restoration, would react on first discovering these lines. Would his human-
ist education allow him to laugh at the literary quality of the whole
1
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012), 3, ch.
47, 1122.
L. Borot (*)
Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, CNRS, IRCL UMR 5186,
Montpellier, France
© The Author(s) 2020 21

C. Gheeraert-Graffeuille, G. Vaughan (eds.), Anti-Catholicism in
Britain and Ireland, 1600–2000, Histories of the Sacred and
Secular, 1700–2000,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42882-2_2
22 L. BOROT
a rgument concluded by this joke, or would his religious, social and politi-
cal experience, increased by those of a whole community for three genera-
tions, make him cringe at it? How could a community respond to the huge
amount of talent serving anti-Catholicism when it was performed by Mr.
Thomas Hobbes? But we also know, as this gentleman would, that it was
not always performed with the same quality of wit. In the same century, in
the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot or during the mis-named “Popish”
Plot, less worthy intellects than Hobbes’s were at work, and beyond
words, policies buttressed an anti-Catholicism that was in many ways the
default-setting, as it were, of British mentalities throughout the archipel-
ago, with, as usual, a different status for Ireland.
An earlier slanderous piece, from the inferior pen of the soldier and
polygraph Barnabe Rich, in his 1624 New Irish Prognostication, a confla-
tion of his 1609 Description of Ireland, will take us into proper confes-
sional hatred, tinged with ethnic rejection:
Now, to speak of [the] dispositions [of the Irish], whereunto they are
addicted and inclined. I say, besides they are rude, uncleanlie, and uncivill,
so they are cruell, bloudie minded, apt and ready to commit any kind of
mischiefe. I do not impute this so much to their naturall inclination, as I do
their education that are trained up in Treason, in Rebellion, in Theft, in
Robery, in Superstition, in Idolatry, and nuzeled from their Cradles in the
very puddle of Popery.
This is the fruits of the Popes doctrine, that doth preach cruelty, that
doth admit of murthers and bloudy executions; by poisoning, stabbing, any
other maner of practise howsoever: the pope teacheth subjects to resist, to
mutinie, and to rebel against their Princes.
From hence it proceedeth, that the Irish have ever beene, and still are,
desirous to shake off the English government.
From hence it doth proceed, that the Irish cannot endure to love the
English, bicause they differ so much in Religion.2
If there was such a thing as an anthropology of Barnabe Rich, he would

seem to take part in the debate on natura naturans and natura naturata.
Is Catholicism so deeply ingrained into them that the Irish receive it with
their mothers’ milk who themselves drank it from their mothers’ breast, or
2
Barnabe Rich, A New Irish Prognostication, or Popish Callender. Wherein is Described the
Disposition of the Irish with the Manner of Their Behaviour, and How They for the Most Part
Are Addicted to Poperie (London: Francis Constable, 1624), ch. 4, 15–16.
2 CATHOLIC STRATEGIES OF RESISTANCE TO ANTI-CATHOLICISM… 23
are they corrupted by their religion, or does their nature merely provide
Catholicism with such a fertile ground that it thrives there without fail?
Therefore, another question comes to mind: how do you counter such
prejudices when you have no legal right to speak up for yourself (or your-
selves) because of your religion? Modern critics would describe Rich’s
stance as racialist or the Irish in his description as “racialised.” But there
are many examples of similar language being used about English Catholics
in England, and in Scotland they were characterised along the same lines
well into the eighteenth century.
The Catholic community of England was “clandestine” or “under-
ground” in those decades. For them, there was danger in visibility, there-
fore in protesting, in publishing, in petitioning, in using all legal forms of
address and communication between subjects and authorities. Could you
jeopardise your family and friends, and even your own lives, by sending a
“loyal address” to a new sovereign, no matter how effectively loyal to your
monarch you were, when the very mention or suspicion of your religious
views would point to you as a traitor? Recent research on the religious
demography of early modern England points to a Catholic population of
between 1 and 2% of the whole in the latter part of the seventeenth cen-
tury.3 But had one produced these figures to an angry “mobile” in the
days of the “Popish” Plot and Exclusion Crisis around 1680, it would
have been a very light argument when confronted with the reputation of
power, influence and even witchcraft attached to that tiny, besieged popu-
lation. Before the civil war, as Peter Marshall shows, the increase in the
number of Jesuits in England (from 16 in 1598 to 193 in 1639) reveals at
the same time some kind of toleration and a better sacramental provision
for a more assertive community.4 As Hobbes also put it in Leviathan: “rep-
utation of power is Power, because it draweth with it the adhaerence of
those that need protection.”5 In this very peculiar case, it may seem to
work, but it works the other way around: because you have a reputation of
3
Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745. Politics, Culture and
Ideology (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009), 2 and n7, sets their numbers at 60,000, refer-
ring to John Bossy, while Tim Harris, in Restoration. Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685
(London: Penguin Books, 2006), 28, provides an estimation of 1.2% of the English popula-
tion by mid-century.
4
Peter Marshall, Reformation England, 1480–1642 (London: Arnold, 2003), 189.
5
Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 10, 132.
24 L. BOROT
nefarious power, you draw the hostility of those who want to preserve
their prosperity and power under their own government.6
Because of the specific status of English Catholics, the first set of resis-
tance strategies examined will be religious, because the mode of repression
and exclusion came from the State, the second set will be their political
strategies, and because the imposition of Protestantism was done through
a cultural revolution, the final area under consideration will be their cul-
tural resistance, before raising questions about their political participation
under James II as a form of resistance.
Religious Resistance
Religious attitudes to oppression are largely varied, ranging from violence
to others and oneself to passive or active prayer. The missionaries and their
supporters who were sentenced for high treason exposed their lives, the
Gunpowder plotters targeted other people’s lives, which led to effective
loss of life and eventually exposed their own. The weapons of the Church
are prayer and fasting (Matt. 17:20, Mark 9:28)7 so some chose to pre-
serve the faith in secret at home, while others followed institutional forms
of religious life privately or in monasteries and convents abroad.
As the editorial of the Leveller newsbook The Moderate reported in its
issue on Charles I’s execution, “not death, but the cause, makes the
martyr.”8 It was a way to cast discredit upon the king’s demise in an atmo-
sphere of mounting distrust at the Army grandees’ doings. If we focus on
the strategy and results of the Gunpowder plotters of 1605, we have a
typical case of backfiring terrorism, which makes for an ironical joke with
an anachronistic term.9 The plan targeting the royal family and the mem-
bers of both Houses of Parliament overestimated the readiness of the mass
of the English to support the accession of a foreign Catholic dynasty and
the return to Catholicism as the only legal religion of England. The even-
tual success of the inculturation of Protestantism in the previous quarter
of century had probably turned the plotters’ expectations into pipe
6
Also see Marshall, Reformation England, 127, 163.
7
Biblical references are to the Douay-Rheims Bible, ed. Richard Challoner (London:
Baronius Press, 2005). In the gospels, verse numbering may differ from standard numbering.
8
The Moderate, Impartially Communicating Martial News to the Kingdom of England
(London: January 30 to February 6, 1649) sig. Gg r.
9
Antonia Fraser, in The Gunpowder Plot. Terror and Faith in 1605 (London: Phoenix,
2002), justifies her use of this term, concerning the plotters, 124–125.
dreams.10 Among the efficient means to establish their own dynasty,

Machiavelli’s aspiring princes were advised to slaughter the whole ruling
elite of the conquered city.11 Here, had the powder blown up the Houses
of Parliament, it would have been much more momentous: the ruler of
the three kingdoms would have been killed with his heirs and with the
hereditary and elected leaders of England.
The whole commonweal12—or the fabric of relationships weaving soci-
ety together from the smallest parishes to the head of the kingdom—
would have been hurt, and the only reaction to be expected would have
been similar to the Elizabethan Bond of Association of 1583, binding the
gentry into a quasi-republican covenant.13 Survival for individual Catholics
as for their underground institutions would have been more than uncertain.
Others beyond the plotters were executed and some were later acknowl-
edged by the Church as having suffered martyrdom: Brother Nicholas
Owen, a Jesuit lay brother, was canonised in 1970, whereas the superior
of the Society’s English province, Father Garnet, was not, but neither
were the plotters themselves. The difficulty for the Church, in Rome as
within the English mission, was the breach of the doctrine of passive obe-
dience by the plotters and their accomplices. For the Catholic Church,
martyrdom must be accepted, not sought, and murder would imply per-
forming evil so that a greater good might ensue: though they were accused
of teaching such tenets, the Jesuits on the mission should not have given
the impression that they sanctioned such strategies. Other men’s lives,
unconcerned or even hostile to the plot, were lost in the process, and
many other people put in danger of their lives and liberty.
In the battle to maintain a living faith in the community, it was impor-
tant to promote a national Catholic legacy in the age of protestantisation.
10
Marshall, Reformation England, 145–151.
11
Niccolo Macchiavelli, De Principatibus/Le Prince, ch. 8, ed. and trans. Jean-Louis
Fournel and Jean-Claude Zancarini (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 92 (refer-
ence to the Italian text).
12
Mark Knights, and Glenn Burgess, “Commonwealth: the Social, Cultural, and
Conceptual Contexts of an Early Modern Keyword,” The Historical Journal 54:3 (2011):
663–666.
13
Luc Borot, “Are Hobbes and Harrington’s Commonwealths the End of the Renaissance
Commonweal?,” in The “Commonwealth’ as Political Space in Late Renaissance England, ed.
Raffaella Santi, Samuel Zeitlin Garret, Myriam Isabelle Ducrocq, and Luc Borot (n.p.:
Wolters Kluwer Italia, 2014), 57–63.
26 L. BOROT
In his English Martyrologe (Douai, 1608), John Wilson dedicates his work
to the Catholics of England. As he writes:
And though the thing itself needed none other Patrons then the glorious
Saintes themselves … I thought it most convenient, that YOW, whose hartes
and myndes are firmely fixed in the honour and veneration of so glorious
and elected wightes, and for the imbracing wherof yow daily suffer so great
and many persecutions, should take upon yow this Protection, for whose
comfort and consolation principally … the same is published. I do not heere
offer unto you any new thing … but that which so many ages since, hath by
a certaine inheritance, as it were, of your forfathers, descended still, by good
right and title, unto yow, and shall heerafter unto your, and all posterity. …
I have heere gathered togeather, and restored unto yow againe, that which
the iniury of tymes had violently taken from yow, and sought to abolish all
memory therof: humbly presenting the same, as a duty of my love towards
yow, & my dearest Countrey.14
The English Catholics are the fittest dedicatees of the work, Wilson
suggests, because they themselves are martyrs. They are those whose spir-
its are turned towards these martyrs of yore and suffer for their “imbrac-
ing” of the faith of “your forfathers.” The English were deprived of their
spiritual “inheritance” by the cultural revolution of the Reformation:
Wilson roots the spiritual experience of the clandestine Catholics in a
national lineage. The concluding words point to the author’s patriotism,
when he and his intended readers were accused of being supporters of
foreign powers. Interestingly, at the end of the book, after the usual tables
enumerating the saints and his sources, Wilson appends a catalogue of
English martyrs for the Catholic faith since Henry VIII up to 1608. This
list covers sig. Aa to Aa8v°, and an un-paginated page was added to com-
plete the martyrologe, to keep apace of the repression.15
In the face of repression, it must have been particularly uplifting to be
described as a community of martyrs. The individual and collective
14
John Wilson, The English Martyrologe Conteyning a Summary of the Lives of the Glorious
and Renowned Saintes of the Three Kingdoms, England, Scotland, and Ireland ([St-Omer],
1608), sig. ∗2r–v.
15
As Alexandra Walsham explains, the locations of the new martyrs’ sufferings were
becoming sites of pilgrimage and devotion, just as their martyrdoms were occasions for apos-
tolic activity towards Catholics and others: The Reformation of the Landscape. Religion,
Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), 221–231.
experience, so often clandestine, acquired a new meaning by the attribu-

tion of this status. The witnessing of the Catholics turned them into mar-
tyrs, therefore into saints … a title that the “Godly sort” were going to
take upon themselves in the Interregnum decade. As there had been a
blessed remnant in the Israel of old, so the clandestine Catholics of
England maintained the faith. As Alexandra Walsham and Peter Marshall
both insist, the “nicodemism” or “Church papistry,” for which many were
equally blamed by their Protestant neighbours and the Jesuits, can also be
read as a message of continuity; they had always been present in the parish
churches, and as they were reading their prayers in their Latin missals dur-
ing Prayer-Book services, they quietly asserted their trust in the perpetua-
tion of their faith.16
For the lay faithful, clandestine liturgies had been organized all over
Scotland and England for decades by now, and special devotionals were
printed, hand-copied and circulated in various forms.17 When places of
worship could not be securely provided in private homes, nature could
be turned into an alternative sanctuary, as Alexandra Walsham explains in
The Reformation of the Landscape. She contends that “persecution and
proscription compelled them to embrace the natural environment,
alongside dismantled shrines and redundant churches, as an arena for
individual devotion and collective worship.”18 Her book looks at the
strategies deployed by clergy and laity to restore and maintain former
shrines in natural spaces; they could also defy the authorities by organis-
ing pilgrimages to such centres as Saint Frideswide’s Holywell in Wales,
which seems to have been in continuous use as a shrine in the years of
interdiction.19 Clandestine worship relied on the occasional availability
of priests on the mission, who, in turn. relied on continental foundations
to be trained to the priesthood and on expert laity to stay alive and escape
16
Marshall, Reformation England, 185–186; Walsham, The Reformation of the
Landscape, 175.
17
The English Catholic community must have been the religious group for which the larg-
est number of books was printed from the reign of Elizabeth to the start of the Long
Parliament. Marshall, Reformation England, 189–190; A. F. Allison and D. M. Rodgers, The
Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640,
vol. II: Works in English (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994). Its authors list 932 printed titles, of
which 28 only clearly are translations, but of which many others may be unidentified
translations.
18
Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape, 155–156, see also 166.
19
Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape, 196–198.
28 L. BOROT
arrest.20 The Easter obligations of yearly confession and communion were

difficult to keep. For the rest, private devotion was a powerful means of
remaining in the faith, as it was a spiritual substitute for the sacraments,
sanctioned by the Church, though insufficient. Religious vocations, on
the other hand, were more difficult, and far more dangerous, to realise.
As it involved the Church, religious life would have required a clear
episcopal authority to sanction and oversee it—conditions that were not
fulfilled. When institutional solutions were proposed, they could arouse
crises within the missionary clergy, as during the Arch-priest Controversy.21
But as monastic life appeared in Egypt in the fourth century after the end
of persecutions and as a substitute for martyrdom,22 martyrdom was never
far from some religious vocations and organization attempts in the centu-
ries of English recusancy.
The Welsh Benedictine monk Dom Augustine Baker (1575–1641) is a
case in point. After his conversion, he travelled to Italy to be admitted into
an Italian branch of the Benedictine order, and on returning to England
in 1607, he was granted permission to stay in the same prison as the last
surviving Benedictine of the English congregation, the nonagenarian
Dom Sigebert Buckley, to receive from him the continuity of the congre-
gation. Baker was thus introduced into the lineage of the congregation
revived under Mary I, in the last moment of monastic life in England. He
subsequently stayed in France and in the Spanish Flanders, where he was
ordained a priest, and worked as chaplain and spiritual director to several
feminine congregations of his order, not least that of Dame Gertrude
More, the mystic whose works he edited and saw through the press.23
Involved in several controversies concerning mystical theology in the
European Church, but also within the English Benedictine order in exile,
he was a major figure in the development of a properly English mystical
lineage based on medieval figures such as Richard Rolle, Thomas Hilton,
Julian of Norwich or the Cloud of Unknowing. One might have thought
that he had been mobile enough for a member of an order which had
20
The methods and people are well documented. Antonia Fraser describes the operation
of the Jesuits’ network by the Vaux women (The Gunpowder Plot, 40–44).
21
Sandra Jusdado-Mollmann, “L’Obéissance chez les catholiques anglais: la controverse
sur l’Archiprêtre (1598–1603) ou la naissance d’un Catholicisme spécifiquement anglais”
(Doctoral Dissertation, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, 2005), 271–332.
22
Jacques Lacarrière, Les Hommes ivres de Dieu (Paris: Fayard, 1975), 21–47.
23
Augustine Baker, O.S.B., The Life and Death of Dame Gertrude More, ed. Ben Wekking
(Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universität Salzburg, 2002).
(and still has) stability among its vows, but he was sent off as a missionary
to England at the age of 63, and died of an epidemic while ministering to
Londoners in 1641, after escaping pursuivants for three years.24
Baker’s relationship to the continental Church was sometimes tense, as
he got involved in the controversy on quietism while helping a female
English community on whom Jesuit directors had been imposed, to
receive another style of spiritual direction. The followers of Baker’s
approach to the spiritual life could feel that they were connecting back to
a properly English spiritual lineage largely ignored on the Continent and
denied by English authorities.
But as Laurence Sterritt’s research shows, these exiled women were far
from passive in the civil war and Interregnum decades. Like many mem-
bers of the Catholic gentry, they sided with the royalist party. Several con-
vents in Belgium and France provided safe caches for royalist agents, lent
money, circulated correspondences during the Cromwellian years and also
financially supported the exiled king Charles II. In all that, they were
behaving very much like the spies that they and their fellow English and
Scottish Catholics were expected to be, according to the British govern-
ments’ propaganda north and south of the Borders. They were simply
supporting the resistance at home with their prayers, their moneys and the
circulation of intelligence. Some of their houses in Belgium, Northern
France and Paris were the backyards of English resistance to Godly Rule
and of English Catholic resistance to prohibition and repression.25
Though religious life was difficult and dangerous in England itself,
some Catholic women attempted to overcome this situation with radical
innovation. When attempting to develop female Catholic education in
England, they were defeated by both the Catholic hierarchy and the
Protestant English establishment. Mary Ward, the foundress of the
Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was typical of the three dimensions
of underground English Catholicism: first, she received a secluded recus-
ant Yorkshire education, as her youth in a gentry household was decisive
for her vocation. Second, she developed a radical sense of innovation in
the face of the Protestant establishment. Third, her innovations met with
24
David Daniel Rees, “Baker, David (name in religion Augustine),” Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), article published online
September 23, 2004, revised January 9, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/1110.
25
Laurence Sterritt, English Benedictine Nuns in Exile, 1598–1688. Living Spirituality
(Manchester: MUP, 2017).
30 L. BOROT
diffidence and hostility on the part of her own Church, due to the divi-
sions of the English Catholic community between Jesuits and the secular
clergy. This, as much as the clash between the principles of her projected
Institute and the Tridentine rules of female religious life, led to the even-
tual prohibition of her order. She is representative of the most daring
forms of female Catholic life in England, in that some of her religious and
lay collaborators worked in English villages, educating and catechizing,
sometimes gaining converts.26
Political Resistance
Without entering into the particulars of English Catholicism’s confes-
sional geopolitics, if one was to draw a map of English religious houses on
the Continent, one would end with an illustrated network of their political
allies—Spain and the Spanish Flanders, the Holy German Empire,
Portugal, Bavaria, France and Italy. But the English Catholic presence in
Europe did not necessarily reflect anti-English action on the part of
English Catholics: indeed, the ambiguities of the Protestant English State
allowed it to send Catholic envoys and ambassadors to Catholic countries.
For instance, under the Protectorate, when the Quaker missionaries
Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers landed in Malta in 1658, the English
consul they dealt with, John Jacob Watts, was himself a Catholic, whose
sister was a nun in one of the island’s many convents.27 Another case of
political ambiguity is that of the convert-revert Sir Kenelm Digby, who
worked in Rome with several cardinals, supported his exiled king but also
seems to have worked for Oliver Cromwell.28
The part played by the promotion of Catholics in the British kingdoms
in the State negotiations between Louis XIV and the sons of Charles I was
central. At the end of the century, after the Glorious Revolution and the
deposition of James II, joining the Jacobite court and its military force in
26
L. Sterritt, Redefining Female Religious Life: French Ursulines and English Ladies in
Seventeenth-Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
27
A True Account of the Great Tryals and Cruel Sufferings Undergone by Those Two Faithful
Servants of God Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers. La Vicenda di due quacchere prigioniere
dell’inquisizione di Malta, ed. Stefano Villani (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 2003), 26–30.
28
Anne-Laure Philippon-De Meyer, “Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–1665). Un Penseur à l’Âge
du Baroque” (Doctoral Dissertation, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, 2017), 64–65.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
hailstones. Instinctively dropping on my knees, I gripped an angle of
the rock, curled up like a young fern frond with my face pressed
against my breast, and in this attitude submitted as best I could to
my thundering bath. The heavier masses seemed to strike like
cobblestones, and there was a confused noise of many waters about
my ears—hissing, gurgling, clashing sounds that were not heard as
music. The situation was quickly realized. How fast one’s thoughts
burn in such times of stress! I was weighing chances of escape.
Would the column be swayed a few inches away from the wall, or
would it come yet closer? The fall was in flood and not so lightly
would its ponderous mass be swayed. My fate seemed to depend on
a breath of the “idle wind.” It was moved gently forward, the
pounding ceased, and I was once more visited by glimpses of the
moon. But fearing I might be caught at a disadvantage in making too
hasty a retreat, I moved only a few feet along the bench to where a
block of ice lay. I wedged myself between the ice and the wall, and
lay face downwards, until the steadiness of the light gave
encouragement to rise and get away. Somewhat nerve-shaken,
drenched, and benumbed, I made out to build a fire, warmed myself,
ran home, reached my cabin before daylight, got an hour or two of
sleep, and awoke sound and comfortable, better, not worse, for my
hard midnight bath.—From “The Yosemite.” Copyright by The
Century Co., New York, and used by their kind permission.
THE TORTURE OF THE STRAIT-JACKET

By Jack London
Have you ever seen canvas tarpaulins or rubber blankets with
brass eyelets set in along the edges? Then imagine a piece of stout
canvas, some four and one-half feet in length, with large and heavy
brass eyelets running down both edges. The width of this canvas is
never the full girth of the human body it is to surround. The width is
also irregular—broadest at the shoulders, next broadest at the hips,
and narrowest at the waist.
The jacket is spread on the floor. The man who is to be punished,
or who is to be tortured for confession, is told to lie face-downward
on the flat canvas. If he refuses, he is man-handled. After that he
lays himself down with a will, which is the will of the hang-dogs,
which is your will, dear citizen, who feeds and fees the hang-dogs for
doing this thing for you.
The man lies face-downward. The edges of the jacket are brought
as nearly together as possible along the center of the man’s back.
Then a rope, on the principle of a shoe-lace, is run through the
eyelets, and on the principle of shoe-lacing the man is laced in the
canvas. Only he is laced more severely than any person ever laces
his shoe. They call it “cinching” in prison lingo. On occasion, when
the guards are cruel and vindictive or when the command has come
down from above, in order to insure the severity of the lacing the
guards press with their feet into the man’s back as they draw the
lacing tight.
Have you ever laced your shoe too tightly, and, after half an hour
experienced that excruciating pain across the instep of the
obstructed circulation? And do you remember that after a few
minutes of such pain you simply could not walk another step and had
to untie the shoe-lace and ease the pressure? Very well. Then try to
imagine your whole body so laced, only much more tightly, and that
the squeeze, instead of being merely on the instep of one foot, is on
your entire trunk, compressing to the seeming of death your heart,
your lungs, and all the rest of your vital and essential organs.
I remember the first time they gave me the jacket down in the
dungeons. It was at the beginning of my incorrigibility, shortly after
my entrance to prison, when I was weaving my loom-task of a
hundred yards a day in the jute mill and finishing two hours ahead of
the average day. Yes, and my jute-sacking was far above the
average demanded. I was sent to the jacket that first time, according
to the prison books, because of “skips” and “breaks” in the cloth, in
short, because my work was defective. Of course this was ridiculous.
In truth, I was sent to the jacket because I, a new convict, a master
of efficiency, a trained expert in the elimination of waste motion, had
elected to tell the stupid head-weaver a few things he did not know
about his business. And the head-weaver, with Captain Jamie
present, had me called to the table where atrocious weaving, such
as could never have gone through my loom, was exhibited against
me. Three times was I thus called to the table. The third calling
meant punishment according to the loom-room rules. My punishment
was twenty-four hours in the jacket.
They took me down into the dungeon. I was ordered to lie face-
downward on the canvas spread flat upon the floor. I refused. One of
the guards, Morrison, gulleted me with his thumbs. Mobins, the
dungeon trusty, a convict himself, struck me repeatedly with his fists.
In the end I lay down as directed. And, because of the struggle I had
vexed them with, they laced me extra tight. Then they rolled me over
like a log upon my back.
It did not seem so bad at first. When they closed my door, with a
clang and clash of levered boltage, and left me in the utter dark, it
was eleven o’clock in the morning. For a few minutes I was aware
merely of an uncomfortable constriction which I fondly believed
would ease as I grew accustomed to it. On the contrary, my heart
began to thump and my lungs seemed unable to draw sufficient air
for my blood. This sense of suffocation was terrorizing, and every
thump of the heart threatened to burst my already bursting lungs.
After what seemed hours, and after what, out of my countless
succeeding experiences in that jacket I can now fairly conclude to
have been not more than half an hour, I began to cry out, to yell, to
scream, to howl, in a very madness of dying. The trouble was the
pain that had arisen in my heart. It was a sharp, definite pain, similar
to that of pleurisy, except that it stabbed hotly through the heart itself.
To die is not a difficult thing, but to die in such slow and horrible
fashion was maddening. Like a trapped beast of the wild, I
experienced ecstasies of fear, and yelled and howled until I realized
that such vocal exercise merely stabbed my heart more hotly and at
the same time consumed much of the little air in my lungs.
I gave over and lay quiet for a long time—an eternity it seemed
then though now I am confident that it could have been no longer
than a quarter of an hour. I grew dizzy with semi-asphyxiation, and
my heart thumped until it seemed surely it would burst the canvas
that bound me. Again I lost control of myself and set up a mad
howling for help.
In the midst of this I heard a voice from the next dungeon.
“Shut up,” it shouted, though only faintly it percolated to me. “Shut
up. You make me tired.”
“I’m dying,” I cried out.
“Pound your ear and forget it,” was the reply.
“But I am dying,” I insisted.
“Then why worry?” came the voice. “You’ll be dead pretty quick an’
out of it. Go ahead and croak, but don’t make so much noise about
it. You’re interruptin’ my beauty sleep.”
So angered was I by this callous indifference, that I recovered self-
control and was guilty of no more than smothered groans.—From
“The Star Rover.” Copyrighted by The Macmillan Co., New York, and
used with their kind permission.
A SON OF COPPER SIN

By Herman Whitaker
Within his bull’s-hide tepee, old Iz-le-roy lay and fed his little fire,
stick by stick. He was sick, very sick—sick with the sickness which is
made up of equal parts of hunger, old age, fever and despair. Just
one week before his tribe had headed up for Winnipegoos, where
the whitefish may be had for the taking and the moose winter in their
yards. But a sick man may not travel the long trail, so Iz-le-roy had
remained at White Man’s Lake. And Batiste, his son, stayed also.
Not that it was expected of him, for, according to forest law, the man
who cannot hunt had better die; but Batiste had talked with the
gentle priest of Ellice, and had chosen to depart from the custom of
his fathers.
And things had gone badly, very badly, since the tribe had
marched. North, south, east and west, the round of the plains, and
through the leafless woods, the boy had hunted without as much as
a jack-rabbit falling to his gun. For two days no food had passed their
lips, and now he was gone forth to do that which Iz-le-roy had almost
rather die than have him do—ask aid of the settlers.
“Yea, my son,” the old warrior had faltered, “these be they that
stole the prairies of our fathers. Yet it may be that Big Laugh, best of
an evil brood, will give us of his store of flour and bacon.”
So, after placing a plentiful stock of wood close to the old man’s
hand, Batiste had closed the tepee flap and laced it. At the end of an
hour’s fast walking, during which the northern sky grew dark with the
threat of still more cruel weather, he sighted through the drift a
spurting column of smoke.
The smoke marked the cabin of John Sterling, and also his
present occupation. Within, John sat and fired the stove, while Avis,
his daughter, set out the breakfast dishes, and his wife turned the
sizzling bacon in the pan.
“I declare,” exclaimed the woman, pausing, knife in hand, “if that
bread ain’t froze solid!”
“Cold last night,” commented Sterling. “Put it in the oven, Mary.”
As she stooped to obey, the door quietly opened and Batiste
slipped in. His moose moccasins made no noise, and he was
standing close beside her when she straightened. She jumped and
gasped:
“Lor’ ’a’ mercy! How you do scare one! Why don’t you knock?”
Batiste stared. It was the custom of his tribe thus to enter a house,
a custom established before jails were built or locks invented. His
eye therefore roamed questioningly from one to another until Sterling
asked:
“What d’ye want, young fellow?”
Batiste pointed to the frying pan. “Bakin!” he muttered. “The bakin
of Big Laugh, I want. Iz-le-roy sick, plenty sick. Him want flour, him
want ba-kin.”
The thought of his father’s need flashed into his mind, and
realizing the impossibility of expressing himself in English, he broke
into a voluble stream of Cree, punctuating its rolling gutturals with
energetic signs. While he was speaking, Avis ceased rattling her
dishes.
“He looks awfully hungry, dad,” she whispered, as Batiste finished.
Now, though Sterling was a large-souled, generous man, and
jovial—as evidenced by his name of Big Laugh—it happened that,
during the past summer, a roving band of Sioux had camped hard by
and begged him out of patience. That morning, too, the threatening
weather had spoiled an intended trip to Russel and touched his
temper—of which he had a goodly share.
“Can’t help it, girl,” he snapped. “If we feed every hungry Injun that
comes along, we’ll soon be out of house and home. Can’t do
anything for you, boy.”
“Him want ba-kin,” Batiste said.
“Well, you can just want.”
“Iz-le-roy sick, him want ba-kin,” the boy pleaded.
His persistence irritated Sterling, and, crowding down the better
feeling which spoke for the lad, he sprang up, threw wide the door,
and shouted:
“Get, you son of copper sin! Get, now! Quick!”
“Father!” pleaded the girl.
But he took no heed, and held wide the door.
Into Batiste’s face flashed surprise, anger and resentment.
Surprise, because he had not believed all the things Iz-le-roy had
told him of the white men, but had preferred to think them all like
Father Francis. But now? His father was right. They were all cold
and merciless, their hearts hard as their steel ax-heads, their
tongues sharp as the cutting edge. With head held high he marched
through the door, away from the hot stove, the steaming coffee, and
the delicious smell of frying bacon, out into the cold storm.
“Oh, father!” remonstrated his wife, as Sterling closed the door.
“Look here, Mary,” he answered testily, “we fed a whole tribe last
summer, didn’t we?”
“But this lad don’t belong to them,” she pleaded.
“All the worse,” he rejoined. “Do an Injun a good turn an’ he never
forgets. Give him his breakfast, an’ he totes his tribe along to dinner.”
“Well,” sighed the good woman, “I’m real sorry.”
For a few moments both were silent. And presently, as the man’s
kindly nature began to triumph over his irritation, he hitched uneasily
in his chair. Already he felt ashamed. Casting a sheepish glance at
his wife, he rose, walked to the door, and looked out. But a wall of
whirling white blocked his vision. Batiste was gone beyond recall.
“Where’s Avis?” he asked, returning to the stove.
“A-vis!” called her mother.
But there was no answer. For a moment man and wife stared each
other in the eye; then, moved by a common impulse, they walked
into the kitchen. There, on the table, lay the half of a fresh-cut side of
bacon; the bread-box was open and a crusty loaf missing; the girl’s
shawl was gone from its peg and her overshoes from their corner.
“Good God!” gasped the settler. “The child’s gone after him!”
They knew the risk. All the morning the storm had been brewing,
and now it thundered by, a veritable blizzard. The blizzard! King of
storms! It compels the settler to string a wire from house to stables, it
sets men to circling in the snow, it catches little children coming
home from school and buries them in its monstrous drifts.
Without another word Sterling wound a scarf about his neck,
grabbed his badger mitts, and rushed outside.
When Avis softly closed the kitchen door she could just see
Batiste rounding a bluff that lay a furlong west of her father’s stables.
She started after him; but by the time she had covered half the
distance a sea of white swept in between and blotted him from view.
She struggled on, and on, and still on, until, in spite of the seventy
degrees of frost, the perspiration burst from every pore and the scud
melted on her glowing face. This was well enough—so long as she
kept moving; but when the time came that she must stop, she would
freeze all the quicker for her present warmth.
This, being born and bred of the prairie, Avis knew, and the
knowledge kept her toiling, toiling on, until her tired legs and leaden
feet compelled a pause in the shelter of a bluff. She was hungry, too.
All this time she carried the bread and meat, and now, unconscious
of a pair of slant eyes which glared from a willow thicket, she broke
the loaf and began to eat. While she ate, the green lights in the eyes
flared brighter, a long red tongue licked the drool from grinning jaws,
and forth from his covert stole a lank, gray wolf.
Avis uttered a startled cry. This was no coyote, to be chased with a
stick, but a wolf of timber stock, a great beast, heavy, prick-eared,
strong as a mastiff. His nose puckered in a wicked snarl as he slunk
in half-circles across her front. He was undecided. So, while he
circled, trying to make up his mind, drawing a little nearer at every
turn, Avis fell back—back towards the bluff, keeping her white face
always to the creeping beast.
It was a small bluff, lacking a tree large enough to climb, but
sufficient for her purpose. On its edge she paused, threw the bacon
to the wolf, and then ran desperately. Once clear of the scrub, she
ran on, plunging through drifts, stumbling, falling, to rise again and
push her flight. Of direction she took no heed; her only thought was
to place distance between herself and the red-mouthed brute. But
when, weary and breathless, she paused for rest, out of the drab drift
stole the lank, gray shadow.
The brute crouched a few yards away, licking his sinful lips,
winking his devil eyes. She still had the loaf. As she threw it, the wolf
sprang and snapped it in mid-air. Then she ran, and ran, and ran, as
the tired doe runs from the hounds. For what seemed to her an
interminable time, though it was less than five minutes, she held on;
then stopped, spent, unable to take another step. Looking back, she
saw nothing of the wolf; but just when she began to move slowly
forward, thinking he had given up the chase, a gray shape loomed
right ahead.
Uttering a bitter cry, she turned once more, tottered a few steps,
and fainted.
As, wildly calling his daughter’s name, Sterling rushed by his
stables, the wind smote him with tremendous power. Like a living
thing it buffeted him about the ears, tore at his breath, poured over
him an avalanche of snow. Still he pressed on and gained the bluff
which Avis missed.
As he paused to draw a free breath, his eye picked out a fresh-
made track. Full of a sudden hope, he shouted. A voice answered,
and as he rushed eagerly forward a dark figure came through the
drift to meet him. It was Batiste.
“What do you want?” he asked.
Sterling was cruelly disappointed, but he answered quickly: “You
see my girl? Yes, my girl,” he repeated, noting the lad’s look of
wonder. “Young white squaw, you see um?”
“Mooniah papoose?” queried Batiste.
“Yes, yes! She follow you. Want give you bread, want give you
bacon. All gone, all lost!” Sterling finished with a despairing gesture.
“Squaw marche to me? Ba-kin for me?” questioned Batiste.
“Yes, yes!” cried Sterling, in a flurry of impatience.
“I find um,” he said, softly.
Briefly Batiste laid down his plan, eking out his scanty English with
vivid signs. In snow, the white man rolls along like a clumsy buffalo,
planting his feet far out to the right and left. And because his right leg
steps a little further than the left, he always, when lost, travels in a
circle. Wherefore Batiste indicated that they should move along
parallel lines, just shouting distance apart, so as to cover the largest
possible ground.
“Young squaw marche slow. She there!” He pointed north and east
with a gesture. “Yes, there!”
Batiste paused until Sterling got his distance; then, keeping the
wind slanting to his left cheek, he moved off north and east. Ever
and anon he stopped to give forth a piercing yell. If Sterling
answered, he moved on; if not—as happened twice—he traveled in
his direction until they were once more in touch. And so, shouting
and yelling, they bore off north and east for a long half-hour.
After that, Batiste began to throw his cries both east and west, for
he judged that they must be closing on the girl. And suddenly, from
the north, came a weird, tremulous answer. He started, and throwing
up his head, emitted the wolf’s long howl. Leaning forward, he waited
—his very soul in his ears—until, shrill yet deep-chested and
quivering with ferocity, came back the answering howl.
No coyote gave forth that cry, and Batiste knew it.
“Timber wolf!” he muttered.
Turning due north, he gave the settler a warning yell, then sped
like a hunted deer in the direction of the cry. He ran with the long,
lithe lope which tires down even the swift elk, and in five minutes
covered nearly a mile. Once more he gave forth the wolf howl. An
answer came close by, but as he sprang forward it ended with a
frightened yelp. Through a break in the drift he spied a moving
figure; then a swirl swept in and blotted it from view.
But he had seen the girl. A dozen leaps and he was close upon
her. Just as he opened his mouth to speak, she screamed and
plunged headlong.
When consciousness returned, Avis was lying on her own bed.
Her mother bent over her; Sterling stood near by. All around were
the familiar things of life, but her mind still retained a vivid picture of
her flight, and she sprang up screaming:
“The wolf; oh, the wolf!”
“Hush, dearie,” her mother soothed. “It wasn’t a wolf, but just the
Cree boy.”
Batiste had told how she screamed at the sight of his gray, snow-
covered blanket, and the cry had carried even to her father. But
when she recovered sufficiently to tell her story, the father shuddered
and the mother exclaimed:
“John, we owe that boy more than we can ever pay!”
“We do!” he fervently agreed.
Just then the latch of the other door clicked, and a cold blast
streamed into the bedroom. Jumping up, the mother cried:
“Run, John; he’s going!”
“Here, young fellow!” shouted the settler.
Batiste paused in the doorway, his hand on the latch, his slight
body silhouetted against the white of the storm.
“Where you going, boy?”
“To Iz-le-roy,” he answered. “Him sick. Bezhou!”
Sterling strode forward and caught him by the shoulder. “No, you
don’t,” he said, “not that way.” Then, turning, he called into the
bedroom: “Here, mother! Get out all your wraps while I hitch the
ponies. And fix up our best bed for a sick man.”—From “The
Probationer,” copyright and used by the kind permission of author
and publishers, Harper & Brothers, New York.
SOMBRE[7]
By William Wetmore Story
Long golden beams from the setting sun swept over the plains of
Andalusia, and fell upon the Geralda tower of the great cathedral of
Sevilla, many miles in the distance. In their path they illumined a
stretch of vast pastures enclosed by whitened stone walls, and
dotted with magnificent cattle. In a far corner of one of the
enclosures the figure of a young girl passed through an arched stone
gateway. As she paused to look upon the scattered groups of
grazing beasts, the level rays played in lights and shadows upon the
waving masses of dark chestnut hair, richly health-tinted young face,
creamy neck, and large, lustrous eyes now painfully dry, as if tears
were exhausted. She gazed from group to group, calling eagerly,
“Sombre! Sombre!”
A pair of long, gleaming horns rose abruptly amid the browsing
herd, and a magnificent bull came towards her at a brisk trot. The
sunbeams glinted upon his dark coat as it swelled and sank under
the play of powerful muscles. His neck and shoulders were leonine
in massive strength, the legs and hind-quarters as sleek and
symmetrical as those of a race-horse, but his ferociousness was
held in check by that devoted love dumb animals express for those
who love them.
In a moment the young girl’s white arms were thrown around the
animal’s dusky neck, and her cheek was lain against the silken skin.
“Oh, Sombre!” she murmured, “do you know what they are going to
do with you? Papa wants to send you to the Plaza de Toros! I have
begged him in vain to spare you. Does he think after Anita has
brought you from a tiny calf to be such a beautiful, dear toro that she
can give you to the cruel matador to be tortured, made crazy and
killed?”
She was sobbing bitterly, and the devoted beast was striving
vainly to turn his head far enough to lick the fair neck bending down
upon his. Presently the sobbing ceased, and she stroked the strong
shoulders with her small hand.
“Never fear, Sombre, if they take you to Sevilla Anita will find a
way to save you! Now, say good night.”
Sombre thrust out his huge tongue and licked the little hand and
arms. Then she bent forward and kissed him on the frowning, furry
forehead and departed.
Anita’s path homeward lay through another field where a herd of
cattle were being driven. A young herdsman, riding a strong horse at
a brisk canter, saw the young girl enter from the adjoining pasture.
With joyful exclamation in English he rode towards her calling,
“Anita, have you seen the posters?”
Waiting until he reached her side, with bated breath she asked, “Is
—is Sombre advertised?”
“Yes, on the outer gateway. But here, I have a poster in my
pocket.”
Plaza de Toros de Sevilla
May 17.
Anniversary of the King’s Birthday,
Six Bulls to be killed,
The two magnificent brother bulls
Sol and Sombre,
and others very ferocious,
against
The intrepid Matadores,
Lariato, the American, and
Amador, of Sevilla.
“It is cruel of them, cruel! (Reading) ‘Lariato, the American.’ Why,
that is yourself! You will spare him! You will spare my Sombre!”
“They do not permit me to fight Don Alonzo’s bulls, for I raise them
and they would not fight me. Amador will fight Sombre.”
“No, no! You must fight Sombre. That wicked Amador will kill him!”
“But so would I, Anita, or be killed by him!”
Anita was silent for a time; suddenly she exclaimed: “Orlando, do
you love me well enough to put faith in a promise which will seem
impossible of fulfillment?”
“God knows I do!”
“Then listen; if Sombre goes to the Plaza de Toros, you must fight
him and spare him even though they hiss and jeer at you.”
“Death is easier. Perhaps the managers will let me fight him, for
you have raised him, and I can tell them that I have scarcely seen
him. I will fight him, Anita, and for your sake I will let him kill me!”
“No, no, Orlando, for this is my promise, even in the last extremity
Sombre shall not harm you!”
“And then, Anita!”
“Then I will leave my father’s house and go with you. We will buy
Sombre and go to those plains in your country you love so to tell
about. You will become a ranch hero, and Sombre shall be the
patriarch of our herd!”
“I have tried that once and failed!”
“Ah, but you had neither Sombre nor Anita then!” And waving him
a kiss she ran off across the field.
On the 17th of May, in the Plaza de Toros, there was a murmur
from thousands of throats like the magnified hum of bees. Amador of
Sevilla had killed several bulls and now there was a short
intermission. In a stall of the lowest tier sat Anita alone. Presently a
band of music began a stately march, and under a high stone
archway a long procession advanced. First, gaudily caparisoned
picadors on blindfolded studs, two by two, separated and came to a
halt, facing the center, with long lances abreast. Then red-coated
toreadors carrying long barbs, with brilliant streamers of ribbon,
grouped themselves near the heavy closed doors of the bull-pen;
finally, the capeadors in yellow satin, carrying flaming red capes on
their arms, filed around like the mounted picadors and stood
between their studs.
The music ceased, the murmur of voices died away, and the gates
of the bull-pen were thrown open. At a quick trot, a great black bull
dashed in, receiving in his shoulders as he passed the toreador’s
two short barbs. Anita gripped her chair and gasped, “Sombre!”
Coming from a darkened pen, Sombre had trotted eagerly forward,
expecting to find himself once more in his loved pastures, but he
paused, bewildered in the glare of light. Hither and thither he turned
in nervous abruptness, his head raised high, his tail slowly lashing
his flanks. Then he lowered his grand head and sniffed the earth,
and then he smelled fresh, warm blood, the blood of his own kind.
With gathering rage he lowered his keen horns close to the ground
and gave a deep, hoarse bellow of defiance, flinging clod after clod
with his forefeet high above his back. Then there flaunted toward him
a red object at which he charged, but it swept aside, and a new sting
of pain was felt in his neck, and warm blood was trickling over his
glossy skin. Again and again he charged, but each time the red thing
vanished and there was more pain, more torturing barbs that
maddened him.
Presently a horseman advanced with lowered spear. Surely horse
and rider could not vanish. Ah, no! Sombre found that it was not
intended that they should. Rushing upon them he struck them with
such a blow that they were forced backwards twenty feet and both
gave a scream of pain. The picador was dragged away with a broken
leg, and the horse lay lifeless, for Sombre’s horn had pierced its
heart. Instantly a great cry went up from that crater of humanity,
“Bravo! Bravo, Toro! Bravo, Sombre!”
More than once he earned that grand applause, then his
tormentors disappeared and through one of the archways advanced
a young man tall and athletic. On his left arm hung a scarlet mantle,
and in his right hand he carried a long, keen sword. Passing under
the archway, the matador swept his sword in military salute, then
with lowered point he stepped into the arena and faced his
antagonist. Upon all fell an awful silence, for Lariato and Sombre
were met in a struggle to the death!
For a time the combatants stood motionless, eyeing each other
intently. Then came stealthy movements, hither and thither, then
thundering, desperate charges, and graceful, hair-breadth escapes.
At last in one great charge, Sombre’s horn tore the mantle from
Lariato’s arm and carrying it half around the ring, as a flaming
banner, the bull ground and trampled it in the dust. A slight hissing
was heard in the audience which turned to thundering applause
when Lariato contemptuously refused a new mantle! The audience
became breathless, the man alone was now the mad beast’s target!
Sombre, dripping with blood and perspiration, his flanks swelling
and falling in his great gasps for breath, his eyes half blinded by the
dust and glare of the arena, gave the matador one brief glance, then
with head low down, charged upon him. Lariato’s long keen blade
was lowered confidently to its death-dealing slant.
Just as the murderous sword-point seemed about to sink through
the bull’s shoulders, into his very heart, a despairing woman’s cry
reached the matador’s ears. Then a mighty hiss, interspersed with
hoots and jeers, went up from the exasperated spectators, for the
bull thundered on, with the sword scarcely penetrating the tough
muscles, standing upright between his shoulders, while Lariato stood
disarmed.
Coming to a standstill far beyond his antagonist, Sombre shook
his huge neck and the sword spun high into the air and fell toward
the center of the ring. Lariato took several steps toward it, but
tottered and fell upon the ground in a swoon, for he had been
severely bruised.
With an exultant roar, the bull rushed back to complete his victory;
the hissing and the hooting was hushed, and groans of horror filled
the air. Suddenly, just as the animal had gained full headway in his
murderous charge, a slight, white figure glided into the ring, and a
clear voice cried “Sombre!”
At the sound of that voice, the charging beast came strainingly to a
halt, threw up his head, and gazed eagerly about, then turned and
rushed toward the girl! Capeadors hurried forward flaunting their red
capes, but she waved them back.
“Go back! You shall torment him no more, my poor, tortured,
wounded Sombre!”
In a moment the great beast was beside her, licking her dress and
arms and hands. As she deftly extricated the barbs from his neck
and shoulders, the thousands of throats around them shrieked out a
vast pandemonium of bravos. Blood was covering her hands and
staining her dress, but Anita was blind to it. Meanwhile Lariato had
struggled to his feet and hurried towards her. “God bless you,” he
was saying, but she pushed past him with a glad smile, saying,
“Wait, I have something to say to them!”
Standing in the middle of the ring, Anita waited for silence.
Delaying until not a sound was heard, she said in a clear voice that
reached every ear:
“Jeer not at Lariato; he spared my pet, my Sombre, because he
loved me.”
No matador ever gained such applause as followed. Bouquets,
sombreros, scarfs, and full purses showered into the ring, and as
that strange group stood facing the ovation, “Bravo, Lariato, Bravo,
la Señorita de Toros, Bravo, Sombre!” rang out and reëchoed over
the distant housetops.
A COMBAT IN THE ARENA

By George Croly
A portal of the arena opened, and the combatant, with a mantle
thrown over his face and figure, was led into the surroundery. The
lion roared and ramped against the bars of his den at the sight. The
guard put a sword and buckler into the hands of the Christian, and
he was left alone. He drew the mantle from his face, and bent a slow
and firm look around the amphitheater. His fine countenance and
lofty bearing raised a universal shout of admiration. He might have
stood for an Apollo encountering the Python. His eyes at last turned
on mine. Could I believe my senses? Constantius was before me.
All my rancour vanished. An hour past, I could have struck the
betrayer of the heart—I could have called on the severest
vengeance of man and heaven to smite the destroyer of my child.
But to see him hopelessly doomed, the man whom I had honored for
his noble qualities, whom I had even loved, whose crime was, at the
worst, but the crime of giving way to the strongest temptation that
can bewilder the heart of man; to see the noble creature flung to the
savage beast, dying in tortures, torn piecemeal before my eyes, and
his misery wrought by me, I would have supplicated earth and
heaven to save him. But my tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth.
My limbs refused to stir. I would have thrown myself at the feet of
Nero; but I sat like a man of stone—pale—paralyzed—the beating of
my pulse stopped—my eyes alone alive.
The gate of the den was thrown back, and the lion rushed in with a
roar and a bound that bore him half across the arena. I saw the
sword glitter in the air; when it waved again, it was covered with
blood. A howl told that the blow had been driven home. The lion, one
of the largest of Numidia, and made furious by thirst and hunger, an
animal of prodigious power, crouched for an instant, as if to make
sure of his prey, crept a few paces onward, and sprang at the
victim’s throat. He was met by a second wound, but his impulse was
irresistible. A cry of natural horror rang round the amphitheater. The
struggle was now for an instant, life or death. They rolled over each
other; the lion, reared upon his hind feet with gnashing teeth and
distended talons, plunged on the man; again they rose together.
Anxiety was now at its wildest height. The sword now swung round
the Christian’s head in bloody circles. They fell again, covered with
blood and dust. The hand of Constantius had grasped the lion’s
mane, and the furious bounds of the monster could not lose his hold;
but his strength was evidently giving way—he still struck his terrible
blows, but each was weaker than the one before; till, collecting his
whole force for a last effort, he darted one mighty blow into the lion’s
throat and sank. The savage beast yelled, and spouting out blood,
fled howling around the arena. But the hand still grasped the mane,
and the conqueror was dragged whirling through the dust at his
heels. A universal outcry now arose to save him, if he were not
already dead. But the lion, though bleeding from every vein, was still
too terrible, and all shrank from the hazard. At last, the grasp gave
way, and the body lay motionless on the ground.
What happened for some moments after, I know not. There was a
struggle at the portal; a female forced her way through the guards,
rushed in alone, and flung herself upon the victim. The sight of a new
prey roused the lion; he tore the ground with his talons; he lashed his
streaming sides with his tail; he lifted up his mane and bared his
fangs. But his approaching was no longer with a bound; he dreaded
the sword, and came sniffing the blood on the sand, and stealing
round the body in circuits still diminishing.
The confusion in the vast assemblage was now extreme. Voices
innumerable called for aid. Women screamed and fainted, men burst
into indignant clamors at this prolonged cruelty. Even the hard hearts
of the populace, accustomed as they were to the sacrifice of life,
were roused to honest curses. The guards grasped their arms, and
waited but for a sign from the emperor. But Nero gave no sign.
I looked upon the woman’s face; it was Salome! I sprang upon my
feet. I called on her name; called on her, by every feeling of nature,
to fly from that place of death, to come to my arms, to think of the
agonies of all that loved her.
She had raised the head of Constantius on her knee, and was
wiping the pale visage with her hair. At the sound of my voice, she
looked up, and, calmly casting back the locks from her forehead,
fixed her eyes upon me. She still knelt; one hand supported the head
—with the other she pointed to it as her only answer. I again adjured
her. There was the silence of death among the thousands around
me. A fire dashed into her eye—her cheek burned—she waved her
hand with an air of superb sorrow.
“I am come to die,” she uttered, in a lofty tone. “This bleeding body
was my husband—I have no father. The world contains to me but
this clay in my arms. Yet,” and she kissed the ashy lips before her,
“yet, my Constantius, it was to save that father that your generous
heart defied the peril of this hour. It was to redeem him from the
hand of evil that you abandoned your quiet home!—Yes, cruel father,
here lies the noble being that threw open your dungeon, that led you
safe through the conflagration, that, to the last moment of his liberty,
only sought how he might preserve and protect you.” Tears at length
fell in floods from her eyes. “But,” said she, in tones of wild power,
“he was betrayed, and may the Power whose thunders avenge the
cause of his people, pour down just retribution upon the head that
dared—”
I heard my own condemnation about to be pronounced by the lips
of my own child. Wound up to the last degree of suffering, I tore my
hair, leaped upon the bars before me, and plunged into the arena by
her side. The height stunned me; I tottered a few paces and fell. The
lion gave a roar and sprang upon me. I lay helpless under him, I
heard the gnashing of his white fangs above me.
An exulting shout arose. I saw him reel as if struck—gore filled his
jaws. Another mighty blow was driven to his heart. He sprang high in
the air with a howl. He dropped; he was dead. The amphitheater
thundered with acclamations.
With Salome clinging to my bosom, Constantius raised me from
the ground—the roar of the lion had roused him from his swoon, and
two blows saved me. The falchion had broken in the heart of the
monster.
The whole multitude stood up, supplicating for our lives in the
name of filial piety and heroism. Nero, devil as he was, dared not
resist the strength of popular feeling. He waved a signal to the
guards; the portal was opened, and my children, sustaining my
feeble steps, showered with garlands and ornaments from
innumerable hands, slowly led me from the arena.
KAWEAH’S RUN
By Clarence King
As I walked over to see Kaweah at the corral, I glanced down the
river, and saw, perhaps a quarter of a mile below, two horsemen ride
down our bank, spur their horses into the stream, swim to the other
side, and struggle up a steep bank, disappearing among bunches of
cottonwood trees near the river.
They were Spaniards—the same who had swum King’s River the
afternoon before, and, as it flashed on me finally, the two whom I had
studied so attentively at Visalia. Then I at once saw their purpose
was to waylay me, and made up my mind to give them a lively run.
I decided to strike across, and jumping into the saddle threw
Kaweah into a sharp trot.
I glanced at my girth and then at the bright copper upon my pistol,
and settled myself firmly.
By this time I had regained the road, which lay before me traced
over the blank, objectless plain in vanishing perspective. Fifteen
miles lay between me and a station; Kaweah and pistol were my only
defense, yet at that moment I felt a thrill of pleasure, a wild moment
of inspiration, almost worth the danger to experience.
I glanced over my shoulder and found that the Spaniards were
crowding their horses to their fullest speed; their hoofs, rattling on

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Anti-Catholicism in Britain and Ireland, 1600-2000: Practices, Representations and Ideas 1st Ed. Edition Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille

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Anti-Catholicism in Britain and Ireland,

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More information about this series at

Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700–2000

This edited collection originated in two conferences, which took place at

1 The Catholic “Other” 1

Part I Living Together: Catholic Responses to

2 Catholic Strategies of Resistance to Anti-­Catholicism in

3 Anti-Popery in Eighteenth-Century Scotland: A Scottish

4 Everyday Anti-Catholicism in Early Eighteenth-Century

Part II Hating the Other: The Polemics of Anti-Catholicism 73

5 “The Great Contest Between the Papist and Protestant”:

6 “Papists Make a Direct Profession of This Shamefull Sin”:

7 Beyond “The General Consent of the Principall Puritans

8 Through the French Looking Glass: Anti-­Semitism,

Part III Capitalizing on Anti-Catholicism and the Rise of

9 The Scandalous Nun: Anti-Catholic Representations of

10 Joseph Addison, Anti-Catholicism and Politeness163

11 Papal Tyranny on the Stage: The Jacobite Rising of 1745

12 Anti-Catholicism and the Rhetoric of Slavery in Irish

Part IV The Demise of Anti-Catholicism in the Secularized

13 Anti-Catholicism and the Scottish Middle

14 Fishing for Controversy: W.S. Kerr and the Demise of

15 A New Order in Post-conflict Northern Ireland—The

16 The Rise and Fall of Anti-Catholicism in Scotland273

17 Conclusion: Taking the Long View of Anti-Catholicism289

Karine Bigand Aix Marseille Univ, LERMA, Aix-en-­Provence, France

Michael Rosie University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Table 15.1 Order positions on religious issues, 2007–2008 (%).

The Catholic “Other”

Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille and Geraldine Vaughan

© The Author(s) 2020 1

representations and discourses, it reflects the broadening of the historical

Protestant Reformation in Britain and Ireland.8 However, anti-­Catholicism

Living Together: Catholic Responses

Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge

­ redominantly Protestant population smoother, but it did not prevent

Hating “The Other:” The Polemics

The second section of this volume concentrates on anti-Catholic polemics,

the occasional proximity between Catholic and Reformed discourses.29

constructive: by steering them away from theology and religious polemics,

Capitalising on Anti-Catholicism and the Rise

The third part of this volume is an exploration of the connections between

anti-Catholicism is central to our analysis here, we are aware that religious

of the seventeenth century. Laurence Lux-Sterritt offers an exploration of

The Demise of Anti-Catholicism

Popular anti-Catholicism loomed large from the late eighteenth century

abuses of clerical power in the Roman Church is not confined only to

Secularisation—Stories of Decline, Potential, and Resurgence,” Journal of Religious History

1 The Catholic “Other” 1

Part I Living Together: Catholic Responses to

2 Catholic Strategies of Resistance to Anti-Catholicism in

3 Anti-Popery in Eighteenth-Century Scotland: A Scottish

4 Everyday Anti-Catholicism in Early Eighteenth-Century

Part II Hating the Other: The Polemics of Anti-Catholicism 73

5 “The Great Contest Between the Papist and Protestant”:

6 “Papists Make a Direct Profession of This Shamefull Sin”:

7 Beyond “The General Consent of the Principall Puritans

8 Through the French Looking Glass: Anti-Semitism,

Part III Capitalizing on Anti-Catholicism and the Rise of

9 The Scandalous Nun: Anti-Catholic Representations of

10 Joseph Addison, Anti-Catholicism and Politeness163

11 Papal Tyranny on the Stage: The Jacobite Rising of 1745

12 Anti-Catholicism and the Rhetoric of Slavery in Irish

Part IV The Demise of Anti-Catholicism in the Secularized

13 Anti-Catholicism and the Scottish Middle

14 Fishing for Controversy: W.S. Kerr and the Demise of

15 A New Order in Post-conflict Northern Ireland—The

16 The Rise and Fall of Anti-Catholicism in Scotland273

17 Conclusion: Taking the Long View of Anti-Catholicism289

Karine Bigand Aix Marseille Univ, LERMA, Aix-en-Provence, France

Protestant Reformation in Britain and Ireland.8 However, anti-Catholicism

redominantly Protestant population smoother, but it did not prevent

Catholic Strategies of Resistance to Anti-