When the Emancipation Act of 1829 passed into law there was a surge of popular Catholic loyalty throughout Ireland. Personal loyalty was expressed as gratefulness to the King for having given royal assent to the bill, whilst assurances were also given that Catholics would be ‘loyal to the Constitution and fearless in its defence’.Footnote 1 Such professions of loyalty attempted to overcome the accusation that Catholics could not be trusted as subjects, as their principle allegiance was owed to Rome rather than the British state. But, they were also used by Catholics to contest the exclusive vision of loyalism that was built on British patriotism, the Protestant constitution and anti-Catholicism, and the associated symbols of Magna Charta and the Glorious Revolution.Footnote 2 Indeed, the day after the act had been given royal assent the Dublin Evening Post reported on the successful passage of ‘THE IRISH BILL OF RIGHTS … THE MAGNA CHARTA OF IRELAND’.Footnote 3 In a similar vein, the newspaper drew comparisons between Catholic emancipation and the ‘Glorious Revolution’, declaring that ‘In Ireland, we have had a REVOLUTION too. But it has not cost a single life—it has not caused a single tear—thanks to Parliament—thanks to the Minister—Thanks to the King’.Footnote 4 Such rhetoric was used to facilitate a deepening sense of Catholic loyalty to the British connection by incorporating its symbols, institutions and traditions as non-partisan. In the same way, ‘prosperous’ Catholics who had benefited from the act sought to mimic their English counterparts socially and culturally as closely as possible.Footnote 5 However, for the Irish Catholics ‘of all social levels’ who had ‘entertained unrealistic, almost millenarian, expectations’ about the practical benefits the act would deliver, the coming decades would reveal that it had ‘not wrought the miracles for which they had hoped.’Footnote 6 Nevertheless, the passage of the Emancipation Act did offer an opportunity for Catholics to reimagine their loyalty as equal subjects for the first time under the legislative union between Great Britain and Ireland (1801-1921).
This article explores the ebbs and flows of Catholic loyalty, and its conception, performance and reception in the decades that followed the passage of the Emancipation Act in three distinct sections, which are organised chronologically. The first section considers how Catholic loyalty was articulated in the immediate aftermath of 1829 and its evolution through the 1830s and 1840s. It explores the emergence of competing visions of Catholic loyalty, as espoused by nationalists, unionists, and the state. The second section surveys the retrenchment of ‘popular’ forms of Catholic loyalty following the demise of the repeal movement, and its existence in an increasingly confined political space. This period witnessed the concentration of public professions of Catholic loyalty amongst a more conservative, albeit reformist, lay and clerical elite who defended themselves against renewed charges of disloyalty and confronted the resurgence of ever more potent nationalisms throughout the 1850s and 1860s. The final section considers how Catholic loyalty evolved on both a practical and intellectual level following the declaration of the Pope’s infallibility and the renewed focus it placed on the civil allegiance of Roman Catholics across the British Isles in the 1870s. Throughout, this article concentrates on the loyalty proffered by the Irish Catholic social, political and cultural elite, as they had the ability, opportunity, and inclination to articulate and demonstrate loyalty publicly. The fluidity and exchange of ideas and experiences across national boundaries in the context of the four nations of the United Kingdom are also acknowledged. It does so whilst recognising the absence of sustained scholarly consideration of the viability of Catholic loyalty throughout the course of the nineteenth century. Indeed, historians have typically been preoccupied with a binary understanding of Protestant loyalisms and Catholic nationalisms, and the presumption that Irish loyalism, in its most familiar Anglican form, was ‘uniformly reactionary and homogenous’.Footnote 7
Catholic loyalty has long been considered an oxymoron. Not least because the emotional temporal allegiances to the crown and constitution it entailed were competing with spiritual ones to Rome, and were as a consequence complicated. Throughout the second half of the eighteenth-century and well in to the opening decades of the union, a pragmatic Catholic loyalty to the crown and constitution was supposed to have been galvanised by the quest for relief from the penal laws, the desire for access to a range of professional outlets, and aspiration to status as equal subjects. Once emancipation was secured, however, Irish Catholic loyalty more broadly is presumed to have been in continuous decline throughout the rest of the century. The British state continued to prioritise the needs and wants of the Protestant establishment over the Catholic population in Ireland, whilst the symbiotic relationship between Protestantism and loyalism became increasingly pronounced. These circumstances hindered Catholic social mobility and exacerbated their increasing alienation from the state. Limited reform arrived too little too late and conflicted with the rising expectations of the Catholic population, which found expression through successive and increasingly self-assertive Irish nationalisms. This process culminated in a war of independence and the end of the union in the early twentieth century.Footnote 8 However, the contemporary reality was more complex than this traditional narrative would suggest.
In this context, our superficial grasp of Catholic loyalty in the nineteenth century can be attributed, at least in part, to the fact that the ‘fertile terrain of contemporaneous political ideas that were inspired by Ireland’s experience of Union has yet to be analysed by historians’.Footnote 9 When Catholic loyalty has received scholarly attention in this period, it has typically been in relation to the nationalist perception and reception of the Queen in Ireland, or as the by-product of an examination of Ireland’s relationship with the monarchy more broadly. This existing research has demonstrated the endurance of plebeian displays of Catholic loyalty to the monarchy beyond 1829. It has also contributed to our understanding of the fluidity of Irish political discourses and identities throughout the Victorian period. However, in focusing on its monarchical dimension, the experience of Irish nationalists has been prioritised, and the exploration of Catholic loyalty as a viable and distinct identity in its own right has been limited.Footnote 10 Fortunately, however, the diversity of experiences of the union, including those of Catholics, are garnering ever more attention.Footnote 11 Allan Blackstock has recently identified three distinguishable variants of Irish loyalty in the first half of the nineteenth century, including the most recognisable and exclusively ‘Anglican, neo-conservative’ vision of loyalism, a liberal version that embraced Presbyterians and some Anglicans who pursued inclusive reform, and finally Catholic loyalty, which was similar to its liberal counterpart but drew on the support of a fundamentally different demographic.Footnote 12 Historians have also begun exploring Catholic loyalty through biography and revealed the motivational complexities and diverse expressions it found throughout the reign of Queen Victoria. In the decades that followed emancipation, it was often bound with social, cultural and economic aspirations, and with the belief that it would yield practical results both at home and in the empire. It was as much about personal ambition as it was improving the lot of Catholics more broadly.Footnote 13 What this recent scholarship has confirmed is that our ability to illuminate the associational dimensions or collective expressions of Catholic loyalty has been limited by insufficient conceptual clarity. It is not a problem simply confined to Irish historiography. There has also been limited interest in ‘an actual or potential collective identity’ of non-traditional proponents of loyalty in the territories of the British empire during the long nineteenth century, beyond a ‘befuddled fealty to the Great White Queen across the sea’.Footnote 14
The absence of a coherent and widely accepted definition of Catholic loyalty should not, however, come as a surprise. It has recently been noted that loyalty is most often defined by what it is not rather than what it is. The complex and multiple loyalties that come to define individual identities only complicate matters further.Footnote 15 In exploring the history of Catholic loyalty throughout the period under review, this article seeks to illustrate the contours of a schema of Catholic loyalty, or more accurately, a ‘conceptual topography’ of Catholic loyalties.Footnote 16 Loyal Catholics, or those who embodied and espoused a version of loyalty, found common ground in the distinction they drew between their necessary spiritual allegiances and civic duties. But, there were distinguishable divisions within this collective mentalité that overlapped and competed with one another. First, there were those who were invested in the British connection, crown and constitution once religious equality had been secured in principle by emancipation. They believed it their duty to try and conform to the parameters of an exclusively Protestant loyalism in all but their Catholicism. They were typically members of elite society or the higher echelons of the professions who had the necessary religious and political credentials, and the professional and social networks, to validate their loyalty. Second, there were those drawn from a broader section of society, who did not believe that religious equality had been secured by emancipation, but who invested their loyalty in the state and the constitutional status quo as the best means to achieve religious equality and advance their interests through further reform. Finally, there were those who sought to advance a version of loyalty that was compatible with an emphasis on Irish constitutional nationalism and changes to the union, but who failed to gain traction as the proponents of a widely accepted loyalty. It was this variant that would come to dominate the religious and political discourse in Ireland, first as espoused by Daniel O’Connell and the repeal movement, and then as a ‘neo-Catholic loyalty’ that coexisted with the call for national autonomy in the form of home rule and its political vehicle, the Irish Parliamentary Party.Footnote 17
This article demonstrates that Irish Catholic loyalty took on different expressive forms, which were dependent on the individuals proclaiming their loyalty, their relationship to the objects of their loyalty, and how the British state and Protestant establishment received it. Whilst many Catholics necessarily expressed their spiritual loyalties, they were clear that it remained distinct from their civic duties. However, they had to demonstrate that when ordering their loyalties, the British connection and all it entailed did not occupy a paltry ‘second place’ next to their religion.Footnote 18 There was movement within and between these forms of loyalty. Although they would all find currency in political and religious discourse, it was the final vision that would emerge as the most popular, but also as the variant that most lacked legitimacy as a viable foundation for a ‘true’ and widely accepted loyalty.
I
The fight for Catholic emancipation in the United Kingdom was hard won. The relaxation of the penal laws enabled the large Catholic population of Ireland to leverage their power and secure legislative change for Catholics across the British Isles. As one observer put it, they had forced ‘the power of England to yield’.Footnote 19 Their efforts in this endeavor are best characterised as ‘loyal opposition’, as the ‘associational bonds’ between Catholics and the state were considered ‘worthy of preservation, indeed, of repair and rebuilding’.Footnote 20 The question of prospective Catholic loyalty—or more pressingly for alarmed Britons and Protestants, disloyalty—was of central concern at this time. Those communities and individuals who opposed the legislative passage of the Emancipation Act advanced familiar rhetorical tropes about Catholic conspiracies and the Pope’s temporal authority, alongside the belief that it was a ‘burglary … on the constitution’,Footnote 21 and a ‘“stepping stone” to subvert Protestantism in church and state’.Footnote 22 They believed their fears were realised in its immediate aftermath when Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847), ‘the liberator’ and enigmatic leader of the campaign for Catholic emancipation, declared in favour of repealing of the Act of Union. The Morning Post, panicked that ‘an Anti-Union Society, as effacious for the purposes of agitation as the late Catholic Association, may carry on its operations without violating the letter, or incurring the penalties of the law’, questioned if O’Connell’s actions were ‘to be taken as one of the proofes of Catholic loyalty and respect for the laws and constitution which were to follow, and which we are daily told have followed, the removal of religious distinctions?’Footnote 23 In reality, O’Connellism was considered alongside clandestine oath-bound societies of agrarian agitators, including the Rockites, Ribbonmen and Whiteboys, as ‘component parts of one nefarious, disloyal, Irish Catholic conspiracy hell-bent on the slaughter of Protestants and the dismantling of Crown and Constitution.’Footnote 24 Though ill-defined, the emergence of an organised repeal threat only served to consolidate this association in the minds of the establishment. By February 1834, when William IV reinforced his commitment to the constitution and the union ‘under the blessing of Divine Providence’, his speech was ‘clearly aimed at O’Connell’s repeal agitation, denying it constitutional legitimacy and typically linking the union with the vitality of the British nation.’Footnote 25
It was not surprising that O’Connell’s call for repeal gained traction. For the forty-shilling freeholders who had been enfranchised by Catholic relief in 1793 and disenfranchised when the Emancipation Act restricted the vote to those with a property qualification of over ten pounds, neither the union nor emancipation had met expectations. Irrespective of whether they had been susceptible to the influence of their landlords or their priests, a common complaint, they had undoubtedly been crucial to O’Connell’s success.Footnote 26 As such, he was forced to find the means to balance his mobilisation of a popular base of support, whilst securing parliamentary representation for his cause.Footnote 27 However, not all Catholics saw Ireland’s future in the same terms as O’Connell and his supporters. A band of elite and aristocratic Catholics in Ireland repeatedly rejected the call for repeal. These men conformed to a more conservative vision of loyalty, and sought to mimic their Protestant counterparts socially and politically once emancipation had brought them back into the fold of elite society. For these lay Catholics, the question of constitutional loyalty was intimately bound with the union. For example, Lord Killeen (1791-1869) declared his opposition to the repeal movement in December 1830 despite his anticipation that it would become popular. MPs such as Thomas Wyse (1791-1862) paid the price for failing to support the movement and lost their parliamentary seats at the next election. This did not deter Catholic members of the aristocracy, or those who did not have parliamentary ambitions, from expressing their loyalty in reference to their unionism. For example, the Catholic-led ‘Declaration of the Friends of the Union’ was supported by Lords Killeen, Southwell (1777-1860) and Gormanston (1796-1876). They were members of some of oldest and most important Catholic families in Ireland who, irrespective of the penal laws, had held on to their status and power.Footnote 28 It is clear that in the immediate aftermath of Catholic emancipation, elite lay Catholics could be found expressing loyalty alongside very different visions of Ireland’s future under the union.
Before long, O’Connell’s ambitions for repeal of the union were put on the back foot. By 1835, O’Connell’s ‘No Tories, No Tithes’ campaign had attracted significant support away from the Whigs, and provided the occasion for the resurgence of the Tories. In turn, the Whigs were forced to associate more closely with O’Connell and his supporters in parliament, and the Lichfield House Compact formalised this working relationship. The parliamentary pact enabled O’Connell and his supporters to exercise patronage networks to advance more Catholics into positions of power, which served to satisfy his ambitions at this time.Footnote 29 This is not to suggest that the question of Catholic loyalty ceased to be of importance in light of the less prominent calls for repeal and the diminished need for opposition. The Standard revealed concerns about Catholic enfranchisement and the more assertive O’Connellism that was proving successful in advancing Catholics into positions of influence and dominating the Irish political scene. The newspaper claimed that: ‘the mask is wearing out … Roman Catholics themselves no longer pretend to loyalty … We are already awakening, as a nation, from our foolish dream of Roman Catholic loyalty; and at whatever risk we will soon act, and act with energy, upon the natural suggestions of our recovered reason’.Footnote 30 Catholics loyal to crown and constitution were seemingly caught between a rock and a hard place when their efforts to participate in and benefit from the union also intensified accusations of their disloyalty to these very same objects.
Whilst O’Connell’s popularity naturally stimulated a strong reaction amongst his opponents, he was an astute operator and the vision of loyalty he championed evolved and responded to contemporary realities. Queen Victoria’s succession to the throne in 1837 proved to be an event that was accompanied by ‘realistic hopes and expectations’ as well as ‘fantasies’.Footnote 31 O’Connell was enamoured with the young Victoria. His ‘royalist enthusiasm did seem at times to go beyond the merely tactical’, and there was little doubt that he was ‘both flattered and impressed’ when he and his two sons were introduced to the Queen at St. James’s Palace.Footnote 32 It has been argued that his ‘emotional intensity’ and ‘unbridled loyalty’ for the Queen influenced the wider Catholic Irish response to her coronation in 1838.Footnote 33 There were, however, limitations to the vision of Catholic loyalty advanced by O’Connell. Not least, because his motivations were suspected of being purely pragmatic. This was most obvious when he embedded loyalty to the monarchy in his repeal movement, and formalised the ‘Loyal National Repeal Association’ in April 1840. Members took an oath of allegiance to the Queen, and in return received a button inscribed with ‘God save the Queen’ and ‘repeal of the Union’.Footnote 34 These tactics ‘shift[ed] the ideological markers of loyalism’ for Catholics. O’Connell maintained professions of monarchical loyalty and personal allegiance to the Queen, whilst defending his movement against accusations of disloyalty and safeguarding his own unrivalled preeminence in Ireland.Footnote 35 Indeed, O’Connell went to great efforts to imbue the movement with political legitimacy by deploying the language of loyalty. He often did so by contrasting Catholic loyalty with the ‘sordid and selfish faction’ of conditional Protestant loyalists who sought to ‘coerce’ Victoria.Footnote 36 Tactically, the language of loyalty also encouraged distance between the movement and militant nationalists and separatists.Footnote 37 Despite the personal fidelity espoused for the monarch as the object of his loyalty, the overt radical agenda pursued by the movement undermined its loyal credentials. Rather than conforming to the conventions of loyal opposition, O’Connell had established new rituals that failed to supplant the more conservative and exclusive vision of loyalty then advanced by Britons and Protestants.
The limitation of O’Connell’s vision of loyalty, as invested in the person of the young Queen, was hastily exposed. Whilst O’Connell’s personal reverence for Victoria appears to have initially been reciprocated, the relationship had ‘turned sour’ by 1843.Footnote 38 This much was not surprising, given that in January of 1843 O’Connell famously declared it the ‘Repeal year’, and held ‘monster meetings’ up and down the country beginning in April. The events were incredibly popular and mobilised the support of huge crowds. Sir James Graham, Secretary of the Home Department, moved quickly to head off this threat to the state. He wrote to Lord De Gray, the Irish Lord-Lieutenant, instructing him to consult with the Irish Lord Chancellor about future plans to dismiss magistrates who participated in repeal meetings in April 1843.Footnote 39 By May, De Gray had begun dismissing Justices of the Peace for their involvement with the movement, and within just two months, 46 magistrates (approximately 1 percent of Ireland’s total) were replaced or had resigned in protest.Footnote 40 O’Connell and other high-profile Catholic repealers were dismissed as their politics were ‘inconsistent with the determination of her Majesty’s Government to uphold the Union’.Footnote 41 Although O’Connell had established loyalty to the throne as a core element of the Irish constitutional nationalist tradition, it did not quell Protestant fears of Catholic disloyalty.Footnote 42 O’Connell ultimately complicated future declarations of allegiance and fidelity for Catholics whose loyalty was not bound with nationalist ambitions. There was disparity between the loyalty embedded in and espoused by the Loyal National Repeal Association and the expectations of the British state. Given the radical tone O’Connell adopted in simultaneously declaring loyalty to the monarch, decrying the ‘servility and oppression’ of ‘a union in name only’, and claiming ‘the weakness of England would be the opportunity of Ireland’, it was clear why. Even he acknowledged that combining the language of loyalty with the call for repeal would be used as proof of Catholic disloyalty.Footnote 43
O’Connell’s efforts to modify the constitutional relationship between Britain and Ireland actually encouraged further legislative reform to engender Catholic loyalty. Repeal of the union was not an option for the Conservative Sir Robert Peel during his second tenure as Prime Minister (1841-1846). Instead, his attempts to ‘pacify’ Ireland ensured that efforts to encourage Catholic loyalty remained on the political agenda. The clergy were considered an integral link between the state and the lay community when it came to ensuring Catholic loyalty at this time.Footnote 44 Efforts had previously been made to improve this relationship, notably with the establishment of a Catholic seminary at Maynooth in 1795. After 1801, the seminary was bestowed with a grant from the government on the basis of an annual vote to educate loyal priests in Ireland and shield them from continental and revolutionary influences. In 1845, Peel’s proposal to remove the annual vote on the bequest and to increase it three-fold occasioned the ‘Maynooth grant controversy’. A large majority in the House of Commons eventually carried the measure, but the damage had been done, as the debates had led to a resurgence of no-popery in Britain and Ireland. James Murphy has argued that through measures such as this, Peel ‘sought to manipulate the political discourse so that Toryism and support for the union might be seen as true loyalty’, and conversely ‘nationalism and support for repeal as disloyalty’. He ‘largely succeeded’ in this endeavor.Footnote 45 But Peel was not alone, and Catholics could be found contributing to this vision of loyalty explicitly.Footnote 46
O’Connell’s imprisonment for sedition in the summer of 1844 and death in 1847 signalled a watershed in Irish political life. Although O’Connell operated as the ‘Uncrowned King of Ireland’, he was also the last nationalist leader to offer unbridled loyalty to the monarchy.Footnote 47 In a recently emancipated Ireland, though, professing monarchical loyalty was not enough to placate the fears of Protestants or the establishment, as the largely Catholic repeal cause was bound with disloyalty. The disparity between O’Connell’s ‘public loyalty’ and the active loyalism propagated by those of a more conservative ilk, who saw loyalty and unionism as one and the same, was profound.Footnote 48 Whilst episodes such as the Maynooth Grant controversy placed a premium on the articulation of Catholic loyalty, the Great Famine and the failed Young Ireland rebellion in 1848 ensured its ongoing relevance. In July 1848, during a debate on the suspension of Habeas Corpus in the House of Lords, Lord Stanley spoke on the condition of Ireland, highlighting how those Roman Catholics who could be considered loyal were perceived:
it is impossible for a Roman Catholic gentleman, or a Roman Catholic farmer, openly to espouse the cause of order against the cause of sedition, without being branded with the name of Orange Catholic—without being denounced as a traitor to his faith, his country, and his God. Those who are engaged in fostering the spirit of sedition look upon the Protestant as the supporter of order, and therefore as their natural straightforward and open enemy; they look upon the loyal Catholic as a deserter from their own ranks, and as a renegade, to be regarded with double the hostility directed against a Protestant under similar circumstances.Footnote 49
Stanley articulated the close association between Protestant identity, social rank and loyalty. The ‘Orange Catholic’ epithet stressed that those elite Catholics who chose to mimic their Protestant counterparts socially, culturally and politically, faced alienation in an increasingly radicalised and polarised Ireland. More importantly, he articulated the competing loyalties of Catholics in Ireland at this time. He also revealed that loyalty to constituted authority, law and order, was only considered ‘true’ when it took priority over any form of agitation. In light of the more assertive Catholic nationalism embedded in the Irish psyche and extolled by O’Connell, and the militant separatism that found currency in the Young Ireland movement, there was limited confidence in plebeian Catholic loyalty of this kind.Footnote 50 Indeed, the Prince Consort, Albert, had himself noted that the influential Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland ‘L[or]d C[larendon,] does not believe that there is one loyal Roman Catholic in the country.’Footnote 51
The ebbs and flows of the popularity of the monarchy in Ireland during these years undoubtedly contributed to fears of Catholic alienation from the state and disloyalty. But the personal popularity of Queen Victoria also reached an apogee. The monarch’s first royal visit to Ireland took place in 1849 and has been described as ‘an example of perfect unity between the sovereign and a hitherto disloyal Irish people’. It heightened public anticipation and expressions of monarchical allegiance, though they were largely ‘symbolic and unstable’.Footnote 52 Although there were fears about the likely success of the visit in light of the famine and the failed rebellion, it was considered an overwhelming triumph, and the Queen was met with an enthusiastic reception up and down the country. These displays of public loyalty, including the erection of welcome banners and ‘triumphal arches … bearing inscriptions of endearment’, crowds flocking to the streets to cheer royal processions, gun salutes, and fireworks indicated the popularity of the monarchy but were limited in exposing the practical or emotional attachment that many Catholics felt towards the institution.Footnote 53 The public enthusiasm masked the more nuanced reception and loyalty offered by the Roman Catholic Church. Leading members of the hierarchy were divided in their opinions of how to receive the Queen and the contents of their loyal address. The address ultimately conformed to expectations, but the negotiations preceding it revealed stark divisions amongst the hierarchy on the topic of loyalty.Footnote 54 The hierarchy’s back and forth was, perhaps, indicative of the fact that the wave of popular loyalty was to be short-lived. In the years immediately following the famine, ‘public debate in Ireland was particularly sour and sectarian.’Footnote 55 However, the closing years of the late 1840s did not spell the end for Catholic loyalty as a meaningful concept altogether. Debates between the Roman Catholic Church, the British state, and Irish nationalists over what Catholic loyalty meant continued to resonate throughout the 1850s and 1860s.
II
Catholic loyalty necessarily evolved in the vacuum left by the demise of O’Connellism and the Great Famine in Ireland. In the first two decades following Catholic emancipation, there is little doubt that O’Connell had narrowed the political space in which Catholics could demonstrate their loyalty to the British connection, crown and constitution. Consequently, different forms of Catholic loyalty were increasingly concentrated amongst the Catholic political and social elite. This was apparent with renewed conflict between the Catholic Church and the British State. In 1850, the question of the divided allegiances of Catholics was brought into sharper focus in the public mind than had been the case at any time since the campaign for emancipation. The English Roman Catholic Church had grown more confident throughout the 1830s and 1840s as the Oxford Movement attracted high-profile converts from the Anglican Church.Footnote 56 The resurgence of Anglo-Catholicism coincided with the arrival of successive waves of Irish migrants on Britain’s shores, and not only large numbers of impoverished Catholics, but also Protestants who brought with them ‘deep-seated confessional antagonisms’ that contributed to a heightened sectarian atmosphere.Footnote 57 Pope Pius IX was moved to instate a territorial hierarchy of bishops and archbishops in Britain to accommodate a growing lay community, which provoked widespread outrage. The Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, authored an inflammatory public letter to the bishop of Durham in response, in which he coined the term ‘papal aggression’ to condemn the actions of the Roman Catholic Church. Russell’s comments, which happened to fall on the eve of Guy Fawkes day in 1850, contributed to and were indicative of the widespread resurgence of popular anti-Catholicism that swept through Britain. The annual celebrations took on a stronger ‘sectarian flavour’ than usual, and witnessed levels of ‘No Popery’ not seen since the Gordon Riots in the 1780s.Footnote 58 It was troubling for those invested in Catholic loyalty. Referring to the commemorations, John O’Connell, son of ‘the liberator’, stated that ‘by ordering salutes to be fired and other signs of state rejoicing’ the Prime Minister was ‘polluting the standard of his sovereign’, as the celebrations involved ‘a foul and utter calumny upon Catholic loyalty and virtue’.Footnote 59
Pius IX’s actions ultimately increased the scope and scale of popular anti-Catholicism in the United Kingdom, and intensified questions about the viability of Catholic loyalty. Many reaffirmed their loyalty in light of the increased scrutiny of the Pope’s temporal authority. Catholics who sought to entrench their loyalty by distancing themselves from the Pope’s actions often emphasised that their allegiance to the British crown and constitution was unconditional. The Rev. H. J. Marshall, ‘late an Anglican minister’ and convert to Catholicism, delivered a lecture on the Queen’s supremacy in spiritual matters at St. Anthony’s Catholic Church in Liverpool during a Sunday morning service in 1850. Having required all those in attendance to sign a declaration of fidelity, he sought to advance an unconditional vision of Catholic loyalty that he contrasted with conditional Protestant loyalism. He asserted that the loyalty of those in attendance ‘would have to be tested to uphold her Majesty against the very parties who now so clamorously denounced the Catholics’, before continuing to claim that ‘Catholic loyalty was founded in their religion, and consisted of a firm and unflinching attachment to the person of her Majesty, whom they would defend at every risk against her enemies.’Footnote 60 Allegiance to the monarch was used to undermine accusations of disloyalty, whilst also creating the political space to challenge the status quo, but it often failed to gain any real traction.
However, in light of the Pope’s actions there were members of the lay community who were no longer able to reconcile their religion with their allegiance to the crown and constitution. A more conservative variant of Catholic loyalty was evident amongst some high-profile Catholics at this time. For at least one English Catholic peer, it was impossible to accommodate the actions of the Pope whilst maintaining his duties as a subject of the Queen and member of the establishment. Lord Beaumont, the thirteenth Duke of Norfolk, considered the erection of a territorial hierarchy ‘totally incompatible with allegiance to our Sovereign and with our constitution’, and as such he abandoned the Roman Catholic Church in September 1851, and only appears to have been reconciled to it on his deathbed.Footnote 61 In doing so, it has been argued that he chose ‘subjecthood in a pluralistic state over loyalties to a foreign religious authority.’Footnote 62 Norfolk’s response appears to have been relatively unique, and was not one that characterised the wider, and particularly the Irish, response to the actions of the Catholic Church.
The government’s legislative response to the Pope’s actions undermined Catholic loyalty. The Ecclesiastical Titles Bill was anti-Catholic in nature, prohibiting the Catholic clergy from assuming their territorial titles in Britain and subjecting them to penalties if they did so.Footnote 63 Although it placed limitations on the Roman Catholic Church in Britain, it elicited hostile opposition from the Catholic population of Ireland and revealed the contractarian nature of loyalty for many Catholics at this time. The controversy called many Catholics back into the public sphere who had been uneasy with the prospect of public agitation since the passage of the Emancipation Act, a fact that was widely publicised. Speeches made by prominent Catholics at meetings across the country revealed that many individuals who had refused to support repeal were being spurred to public agitation.Footnote 64 In Louth, a prominent local Catholic revealed ‘that he was astonished that they should be called on nearly a quarter of a century after they had achieved emancipation to defend their religion from coercion’. His ‘surprise’ was mixed with ‘sorrow’, for ‘he thought the time had come when Protestants, Presbyterians, and Catholics could meet together for their country’s good’.Footnote 65 The British state might have wanted to safeguard Protestant ascendancy, but Catholics sought the true equality that had been promised by emancipation. In opposing an act that sought to undermine the rights that had previously been extended to Catholics, their loyalty was framed within the context of reform and the search for equality.
A number of high-profile Irish Catholic MPs at this time framed their opposition to the bill in reference to the Emancipation Act and the rights and equalities it had extended to them.Footnote 66 They drew on a long and varied tradition of ‘loyal opposition’. William Shee, English-born of Irish stock and the cousin of the new Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, epitomised this view. He framed his opposition in explicitly contractarian terms, complaining that it had violated ‘the emancipation contract’. The Emancipation Act entitled Catholics to ‘insist upon the full measure and the complete enjoyment of every privilege then conceded to them’, and as such Catholics were well within their rights as subjects to oppose the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill.Footnote 67 Shee’s vision of the scope and boundaries of Catholic loyalty appears to have mirrored the ‘contractarian’ loyalty advanced by Ulster Protestants.Footnote 68 The group of MPs who opposed the bill became known as the ‘Pope’s Brass Band’, and although they failed in their opposition to its legislative passage, they formalised their working relationship with each other, and the Roman Catholic Church, through the Catholic Defence Association which sought the repeal of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act.Footnote 69 Subsequently, they worked closely with the Tenant Right League and sought reform of the ‘land question’ and civil and religious liberties. In pursuit of these aims, they pledged themselves to independent opposition in the House of Commons. The coalition met with huge popularity and electoral success at the general election in 1852. But two of the most prominent members quickly betrayed their pledges and accepted office, resulting in the so-called Independent Irish Party continuing as a diminished political force for the rest of the decade.Footnote 70 Nevertheless, their opposition to the act had revealed the contours, when confronted with religious discrimination, of this variant of Catholic loyalty.
Irrespective of the sectarian tone of Irish politics in the early 1850s, the mid-Victorian decades are widely perceived to have provided the state with the best opportunity to engender loyalty in the Irish Catholic population. Irish constitutional nationalism lacked political continuity or a vehicle in Westminster during these years, and instead Catholic politicians supported whichever dominant party in the House of Commons pursued their cause. In this context, it has been argued that the 1850s in particular presented ‘an ideal time for British attempts to refashion Ireland along lines more acceptable to Victorian sensibilities … freed from sectarianism and nationalism’.Footnote 71 Moreover, the mid-Victorian period witnessed the settling of Ireland ‘as never before, or after, into an accommodation with English power within the United Kingdom’.Footnote 72 On a popular level this reconciliation between Catholics, both lay and clerical, and the state was to be effected not only by the repeated visits of members of the royal family to Ireland throughout these years, but also by the efforts of successive governments to realise civil and religious equality through further reform.
The clerical body of the Roman Catholic Church was considered central to any successful attempts to engender loyalty in the Catholic population of Ireland. In 1853, the question of the loyalty of the priesthood had resurfaced in the House of Lords during a debate on the appointment of a select committee to inquire into the system of education at Maynooth College. The Earl of Shaftesbury noted that if the students of Maynooth ‘were educated as good and loyal Catholics, why then the College had fulfilled the conditions on which the grant was made’. Though he was also insistent that they ‘had a right to know if the views of civil and religious liberty taught there were the same as those recognised by the constitution of this country, or those entertained by the Grand Duke of Tuscany’.Footnote 73 The Earl of Derby was less concerned, believing that the ‘enlargement of the grant in 1845’ resulted in the clergy having been populated with ‘a more loyal, a more dutiful, and a more educated class of persons’.Footnote 74 The close association of Maynooth College with Gallican theology no doubt bolstered such views. Irish Gallicanism was specific to its political, theological, ecclesiastical and geographical context, and as such has been characterised as a multifarious ‘body of beliefs capable of influencing individuals and groups whose primary concerns were more immediate political and social issues’.Footnote 75 At its most basic, however, political Gallicanism was equated with opposition to Rome’s intervention in state matters, whilst theologically it embodied opposition to the dogma of papal infallibility.Footnote 76 The principle of ‘rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s’ as it was delivered at Maynooth was clearly more compatible with a form of Catholic loyalty sought by the state and recognised by more conservative portions of society. The college was accused, particularly in its early years, of inculcating ‘a servile subjection to the [British] throne’ through its teaching.Footnote 77 During the opening decades of the union, however, it was clear that the political Gallicanism of the Ancien Régime was in irretrievable decline, and it was paving the way for the resurgence of Ultramontanism.Footnote 78 By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, only a minority of the church hierarchy occupied this position.
The supposed absence of loyalty amongst the clergy at this time was attributable, at least in part, to the so-called ‘devotional revolution’ that the Irish Roman Catholic Church was undergoing. The arrival of Paul Cullen (1803-1878) in Ireland as the Archbishop of Armagh in 1849, who proceeded to the Dublin see and finally became Ireland’s first Cardinal in 1867, accelerated these changes in the character of the Irish Catholic Church. Cullen’s first major undertaking in Ireland was to call the Synod of Thurles, through which efforts were made to standardise the administrative and religious practices of the church and bring them more closely in line with Rome. It set the tone for his tenure in Ireland, during which time the church, both lay and clerical, became more disciplined, assertive, and witnessed a transformation in devotional practices.Footnote 79 Ultramontanism emphasised the supreme authority of the Pope in both spiritual and temporal matters, and sought to make the Roman Catholic Church’s character more international, superseding those national churches that had traditionally exercised more autonomy, particularly in France. Initially confined to conservative portions of the church and closely associated with the Jesuits, Ultramontanism emerged as the most dominant theology during Pius IX’s tenure as Pope. Rome’s direction influenced the increasingly dominant Ultramontane character of the church in Ireland, and it induced considerable anxiety amongst those portions of society already doubtful of Catholic loyalty. British and Protestant fears emanated from the belief that the clergy would influence their flocks towards disloyalty, whether that was in terms of their allegiance to Rome, or, as was increasingly the case, towards more assertive forms of Irish nationalism. Even if Cullen did not preside over a ‘revolution’ as such, his contemporaries and successors still recognised the theological conflict that he waged, and won, in Ireland.Footnote 80
It was not simply theology that conditioned Catholic loyalty, but also the actions of church leaders and their willingness to engage with the apparatus of the British state in Ireland. The lines between loyalty and unionism were often blurred. The association of Gallicanism with Catholic loyalty to the British connection was apparent, but it was a spent force theologically and diminished over time. Archbishop Daniel Murray (1768-1852) was a Gallican, and also one of the most prominent clerics to be labelled a ‘Castle Catholic’, a synonym for his loyal tendencies. His acceptance of a commission under the Charitable Bequests Act in 1844, along with Bishop Cornelius Denvir (1791-1865) of Belfast, earned both men denunciation but was revealing in this respect.Footnote 81 The ‘old fashioned deference to the state’ of the likes of Murray and Denvir however, was in decline.Footnote 82 But Irish Gallicanism did not simply equate with loyalty and Ultramontanism with disloyalty. Ultramontane clergy could also be ridiculed for their supposed loyalty from Irish nationalists who felt they were too amiable to the British administration. The member of the hierarchy most frequently scorned for his ‘whiggishness’, and for having been in bed with Dublin Castle in the 1850s, was Cullen. In 1854, for example, The Nation lamented that Cullen was ‘fast subsiding into the rank of a mere Whig Bishop. Disgusted with agitation, tolerant of treachery to the people, bent on small boons, or emulous of … DR MURRAY’s prudent example’.Footnote 83 The fact that ‘half a century ago, more than half of the episcopacy were Castle Bishops—voted for the veto, petitioned for the pension, supported the Union …’, was cause for concern. Despite their conflicting theologies, Cullen was seen to be ‘hand in glove with the Castle’, just like his predecessors.Footnote 84
Although the theological divisions within the church could obscure the contours of loyalty, the religious controversies that preoccupied Viscount Palmerston’s second Liberal ministry of 1859 to 1865 reemphasised its political dimensions. Palmerston’s legislative programme included religious provision for Catholics in prisons, the abolition of church rates, reform of the education system, and proposed alternatives to the oath of allegiance that would enable Catholics to swear their fidelity without pledging to uphold the Established Church. The legislative attempts to reconcile Catholics to the union ensured that the question of Catholic loyalty, or more accurately safeguards against the divided allegiances of Catholics, remained on the political and public agenda.Footnote 85 For W. E. Gladstone, the political and religious issues facing the establishment constituted ‘a multitude of questions, each of which represents a separate knot as yet untied’.Footnote 86 The efforts to tackle these issues, even if largely unsuccessful, evidenced that the negotiation over both the form and language of Catholic loyalty was not only undertaken between the Catholic Church and the political establishment, but also the lay community. The re-emergence of a potent revolutionary nationalism would serve to highlight the social and cultural distance between those who desired Ireland’s independence through any means, and those Catholics, lay and clerical, who advocated loyalty to the crown and constitution and sought accommodation with the British state.
The years of Palmerston’s premiership coincided with the growth of a secret oath-bound society of revolutionary separatists, the Fenians.Footnote 87 E. R. Norman has argued that for Protestants who were ‘willing to doubt the depth of Catholic loyalty to the Crown in a general sense … Fenianism provided an occasion of proof.’Footnote 88 An early editorial of the Irish People newspaper, the mouthpiece of the Fenian movement, derided the Emancipation Act as ‘illustrative of the insidious nature of England’s concessions to Ireland’, the principal effect of which was ‘to retard the winning of our independence and to denationalise thousands of our countrymen’.Footnote 89 The argument that the Emancipation Act had served to coopt middle-class and elite Catholics into ‘the system of interests that sustained the Union’ was a prevalent one in post-O’Connell Ireland. It has been claimed that the Fenians, in particular, believed that the act sought to divide these classes and the clergy from the masses of the Irish people.Footnote 90 In other words, it served as the ‘means, in the hands of the foreign government of England, of bribing and corrupting wealthy or educated Catholics, of seducing them from the national ranks.’Footnote 91 Catholics willing to reap the rewards for their loyalty were frequently criticised by the Fenians on the basis that they could not be trusted to serve the interests of their country. They cautioned that it ‘would be very dangerous to admit into the councils of a patriotic movement a liar so unblushing as Fingall, or a knave so dishonest as Trimlestone, or political swindlers like the Bellews’.Footnote 92 It was clear in their criticism of these men, the cream of the Irish Catholic elite, that for the Fenians Ireland’s future autonomy was compromised by a Catholic loyalty that was intimately bound with social rank and proximity to the British establishment.
On the other hand, loyal Catholics were alarmed by the emergence of the Fenians and their relative popularity, not least because of the threat they posed to the crown and constitution, the objects of their loyalty. Opposition to this militant brand of republicanism served to galvanise Catholic loyalty, and it extended beyond the elite lay Catholic community in Ireland.Footnote 93 In one recent assessment, it has been argued that Cardinal Cullen was a ‘conditional’ unionist ‘with loyal tendencies’,Footnote 94 and that his ‘absolute loyalty to the church and Rome evolved into a conditional but increasingly entrenched loyalty to the state.’ Central to this reading of loyalty was his opposition to the revolutionary Fenian movement.Footnote 95 Cullen’s so-called ‘loyalty’ to the British state was more about seeking accommodation for Catholics and the advancement of their interests than it was an emotional attachment to either the crown or constitution. Moreover, his motivation for opposing revolutionary separatism was not rooted in his ‘loyalty’, but rather his respect for the constituted authority following his experience of the revolutionary fervor spearheaded by Giuseppe Mazzini and unleashed in Italy in 1848.Footnote 96 It is also the case that his obstinate Ultramontanism always left his loyalty suspect in the eyes of more conservative proponents of loyalism. More clamorous opposition to the Fenians and a clearer articulation of Catholic loyalty could be found amongst his peers.
The Bishop of Kerry, David Moriarty (1814-1877) condemned the Fenians in no uncertain terms when, following their failed rebellion in 1867, he declared ‘eternity was not long enough, nor hell hot enough to punish those miscreants’.Footnote 97 He saw Catholic loyalty as the preserve of the ‘Catholic nobility, gentry, upper class mercantile men, upper class professional men’, but was concerned about its limited traction outside of this elite. Whilst he saw the ‘spirit of loyalty percolating downwards’ to the classes he identified, inculcating an attachment ‘to the British connection’ in them, he believed that by the time this loyalty reached ‘as far as the clergy there it stop[ped]’. It was because these men formed the ‘intermediate class between the gentry and the people’, that loyalty found little currency amongst the majority of the Irish Catholic population.Footnote 98 Moriarty indicated that it was ‘hard to have the loyalty of duty without the loyalty of affection’, and advocated a stronger royal presence in Ireland to instill the latter.Footnote 99 Sentimental attachment to the crown and constitution was often articulated as a central and necessary attribute of any viable form of Catholic loyalty.Footnote 100 However, the emotional attachment of Catholics to the civic objects of their fidelity was always deemed suspect whilst their spiritual loyalties were simultaneously proffered to Rome.
Moriarty’s vision of loyalty was a complex commixture of support for the monarchy and the British state. As the ‘only liberal catholic bishop in Ireland’, and a representative of Liberal Catholicism more broadly, he held ‘English political and institutional forms … in very special reverence’.Footnote 101 Liberal Catholicism emphasised individual freedoms and parliamentary government as compatible with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, and found currency among the English and Irish Catholic elite. The 1850s and 1860s were characterised as ‘the years of the Liberal Catholic movement in England’,Footnote 102 and a recent biography of the high-profile convert to Roman Catholicism, Whig MP and member of the so-called ‘Shannon-estuary group’, William Monsell, has provided insights into its Irish equivalent.Footnote 103 The Liberal Catholic movement never found substantial support amongst the body of the Church, and was a spent force by the 1870s. Nonetheless, a small band of Liberal Catholics pursued a reformist agenda to engender loyalty to the monarch and Irish accommodation within the union. In a letter to W. E. Gladstone shortly before he took office as Prime Minister for the first time in 1868, Moriarty also requested that two Irishmen be included in Gladstone’s cabinet, and a Catholic be appointed as the Lord Chancellor for Ireland. He prefaced this request by suggesting to Gladstone that he ‘remember what a mistake was made after 29 by leaving the Emancipation act so long a dead letter’,Footnote 104 and in doing so, like many high-profile Catholics before him, advocated Catholic professional advancement as a means to prove religious equality, moderate Irish disaffection, and fasten loyalty to the union. Catholic Ireland faced a myriad of issues in the 1850s and 1860s socially, politically, and theologically, but it was also this context that encouraged more overt and clamorous articulations of Catholic loyalty by the lay and clerical elite in the public sphere.
III
On assuming office in 1868, Gladstone famously declared his ‘mission to pacify Ireland’. He did not comply with requests to include Catholics in his cabinet. However, his desire to ‘combine sensitivity to Irish cultural peculiarities with a strong opposition to Ultramontane and foreign republican tendencies in Irish politics’, led him to seek legislative solutions to the land question, educational provision for Catholics, and to disestablish the Church of Ireland.Footnote 105 The belief that disestablishment would deepen Catholic loyalty to the union was met with some serious doubts. According to The Standard: ‘it is said, this act, whether of justice or of generosity, will conciliate the Roman Catholic clergy and assure the loyalty of their flocks. Never was there a more futile hope—a vainer credulity’. Cardinal Cullen came under particular criticism in the paper as ‘a Papal partisan’ who had introduced a ‘different spirit’ into the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, inculcating an ‘enmity cherished and fostered by an ultramontane monarchy [that] points not at the Protestant Church, but at the Protestant Constitution and policy of the Empire.’ Central to their concerns was how different the character of the Catholic Church was under Cullen, as the ‘Roman Catholic Clergy were loyal when Archbishop MURRAY was at their head; and loyal to a Government which recognised the Irish Church as a vital portion of the British Constitution.’Footnote 106 Ultramontanism was considered a threat to Catholic loyalty, and the bill was criticised for aiming to conciliate and reward the disloyal.Footnote 107 The accusation that Roman Catholicism, Ultramontanism, and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland would ‘undermine the constitutional supremacy of the Queen’ marred the progress of the Disestablishment Bill through the House of Commons. Gladstone rejected this argument, ‘assuring the Queen that the reform would directly reap a proportional dividend in expressions of loyalty.’ Such hopes were thrown into doubt before the bill had even passed, and following its passage in 1869 did not come to fruition.Footnote 108
When the First Vatican Council, convoked by Pope Pius IX, enacted the dogma of Papal Infallibility in 1870, the language of Catholic loyalty and its conception in the British Isles necessarily evolved. Although the actuality of a British or Irish kulturkampf has come under question given the absence of state-sponsored anti-Catholic legislation, the fact remains that the first half of the 1870s witnessed heightened tensions between the church and state.Footnote 109 Hilary Jenkins has remarked that during these years, opinion in Ireland was split between ‘the bishops and the clergy as agents of the people in the defence of Irish and, therefore, Roman Catholic interests’ and the ‘champions of liberty against an assertive clerical force exercising political power through the abuse of the altar, pulpit and confessional for the aggrandisement of clericalism or sacerdotalism’.Footnote 110 The divide was not simply a sectarian one. Indeed, the two Catholics at the centre of the high-profile incidents in Ireland that best illustrate these divisions were in the latter camp. Father Robert O’Keeffe, a parish priest, sued his bishop in 1871 and was subsequently removed from his duties as a chaplain to the local poorhouse and manager of national schools in Callan. The Catholic Judge, William Keogh (1817-1878), presided over the Galway election petition in 1872 and unseated the popular nationalist candidate on the grounds of the undue spiritual intimidation perpetuated by the local Catholic bishop and clergy. The ensuing controversies dominated the press, raising important questions about, and yielding examples of, Catholic loyalty. Both men saw their Irishness and faith, albeit to varying degrees, as wholly compatible with their loyalty. For O’Keefe, this was found in his private expression of loyalty to the Queen and public declarations of his loyalty to both the church and state that were an extension of his Gallican views.Footnote 111 As a traditional Gallican, O’Keefe had much in common with liberal Catholics who ultimately sought accommodation and compromise with the British state by offering their loyalty to the crown and constitution, in contrast to the ‘patriotic’ Irish Gallicans’ who invested their loyalty in the Irish nation and the Ultramontanes who were loyal to Rome above all.Footnote 112 The role that these men could play in moderating the politics and loyalty of their flocks and local communities was marked.Footnote 113 For Keogh, his loyalty was articulated alongside an intense bout of anti-clericalism, which revealed the importance he placed on strong lay leadership to reconcile Catholics to the British state. The cases of both O’Keeffe and Keogh illustrate the increased tensions within the lay and clerical body of Catholic Church when it came to the question of loyalty in the early 1870s.
Loyal Catholics who considered themselves men of ‘moderate opinions’ could be found lamenting their treatment by Ultramontane Catholics who placed their loyalty to Rome above all.Footnote 114 The retrenchment of Catholic loyalty to the elite was illuminated not only by their vocal opposition to ardent forms of Irish nationalism, but also by the fact that it was only those ‘Irish Catholic gentlemen, sincere adherents of their own faith and their own form of worship, and who are neither affected with disloyalty nor subservient to Ultramontanism’ who could be expected to act independently of their church.Footnote 115 The so-called ‘Irish university question’, or rather the search to find a form of higher education provision that was amenable to various religious and political factions, which raged throughout the entire duration of the nineteenth century, was just one arena in which these divisions manifested publicly in the early 1870s.
Gladstone had continued with his programme of legislative reform to address Irish issues, and his University Bill of 1873 was ambitious. It sought to provide a secular infrastructure for higher education by expanding the University of Dublin and incorporating a number of the controversial Queen’s Colleges and the ailing Catholic University. But, it also took on much wider significance. The Liberal MPs Sir Dominic Corrigan (1802-1880) and Sir Rowland Blennerhasset (1839-1909) were the only two Catholics to vote with the bill, and as a consequence earned the public and private scorn of Cullen. Bishop Moriarty had also favoured the bill’s passage.Footnote 116 Cullen’s opposition was driven at least in part by the threat it posed to the power of Roman Catholic Church to educate its own flocks. Corrigan illustrated why. He had worked to prevent the Catholic University gaining a charter,Footnote 117 was a sincere advocate of secular education, and he refused calls for repeal of the union or a federalist parliament.Footnote 118 Corrigan was one of a number of elite Catholics who rose to prominence in the 1840s and 1850s, who sought to provide strong lay leadership, and promote the social and professional benefits of loyalty and unionism. Corrigan retired from Parliament after the failure of the bill.Footnote 119 In his efforts to please everybody, Gladstone had managed to please nobody, and the bill was doomed to fail. The fall of his government signalled the height of Cullen’s power and the political influence of the Roman Catholic Church. It also demonstrated that those Catholics who promoted and provided lay leadership in order to secure reform and accommodation within the union, often rooted in a vision of loyalty, were increasingly marginalised.
Once Gladstone’s government had been defeated over the University Bill, his inability to reconcile Ultramontane Catholics to the state became clear. His hostile response to the declaration of papal infallibility in spiritual and temporal matters was fuelled by this experience, and manifested in the ‘literary remains’ of the British kulturkampf.Footnote 120 In 1874, Gladstone published The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance, and a year later defended the position he had put forth in Vaticanism: An Answer to Replies and Proofs. Papal infallibility had concerned Gladstone and he was also angered by the clerical sabotage of his University Bill, but even so, the publications were out of character.Footnote 121 Gladstone argued that in light of the declaration of papal infallibility Catholicism was fundamentally incompatible with allegiance to the state, and his musings on the topic would reveal a broad conception of Britishness, which required the loyalty of subjects and citizens. Central to his concerns were the allegiances of Catholics to the state, and its security.Footnote 122 Gladstone clearly feared the possibility that Catholicism would encourage disloyalty and act as a threat that could undermine the established order:
The Pope’s infallibility … his claim to the obedience of his spiritual subjects has been declared in like manner without any practical limit or reserve; and his supremacy, without any reserve of civil rights, has been similarly affirmed to include everything which relates to the discipline and government of the Church throughout the world.Footnote 123
As a consequence, he questioned the possible loyalty of Catholics directly, emphasising that England was entitled to know ‘in what way the obedience required by the Pope and the Council of the Vatican is to be reconciled with the integrity of civil allegiance?’Footnote 124 Moreover, he utilised the language of loyalty and asked if ‘Rome requires a convert, who now joins her, to forfeit his moral and mental freedom, and to place his loyalty and civil duty at the mercy of another?’Footnote 125 While Gladstone’s musings on the topic were viewed as anti-Catholic, the questions raised by the pamphlets were important ones, and not easily answered.
It was not entirely clear what Gladstone was calling for, or how Catholics keen to demonstrate their loyalty could overcome the fears he articulated. An ‘Irish Catholic Layman’ wrote to the press to complain of the ‘long essay about the alleged shortcomings of Catholics’ in which Gladstone simultaneously failed to ‘define the character, the extent, limits, or, in a word, any feature whatsoever of that which he holds up as the test and criterion of Catholic loyalty’.Footnote 126 The criticism Gladstone levelled at the Catholic Church and its members lacked clarity, and defenders of various forms of Catholic loyalty were encouraged to come forward, and stressed that Catholics could be loyal from a position of principle. The Catholic Union of Ireland, for example, ‘proposed and carried an emphatic denial of the impeachment of Catholic loyalty’.Footnote 127 Loyalty to the crown and constitution was often presented as unconditional and a natural product of Catholicism, in an effort to allay the fears of Protestants and to defend against accusations of disloyalty.
Although declarations of unconditional loyalty were a familiar defensive rhetorical device, they were also rarely, if ever, taken at face value. Deep suspicions about the emotional attachment of Catholics to the crown and constitution in light of the more assertive tone emanating from Rome persisted. During the Synod of Maynooth in 1875, the Bishops and Archbishops’ address noted that ‘when the Church, although ever willing to give to Caesar what is Caesars, refuses to surrender to him also that which is God’s, the cry of treason is raised, and her assertion of her own spiritual liberty and of the liberty of men’s souls is pronounced to be disloyalty.’ The consequence, once the likes of Gladstone’s pamphlets stoked anti-Catholicism was, they claimed, a return of the penal laws.Footnote 128 Despite the trying circumstances under which they sought validation, it was stressed that whilst ‘Catholics have had no great encouragement to be either devoted or loyal …’, more broadly, and had long been inflicted by ‘pains …[and] penalties; penal laws and persecution’, they had remained ‘loyal from education, from duty, and from principle’ nonetheless.Footnote 129 The increasingly marginalised demographic of Catholics who had invested in loyalty, but who had failed to reap its benefits, were placed in an unenviable position and were squeezed between the rise of more potent and viable forms of Irish nationalism on the one hand, and the increasingly authoritarian position of their church on the other, as the Victorian period wore on.
IV
In his recent effort to trace ‘the trajectories of loyalty and loyalism in Ireland’ during the first half of the nineteenth century, Allan Blackstock has concluded that ‘only the exclusive [Protestant] strand of loyalism fully transformed into active loyalism.’ The ‘mobilisation and militarisation’ of this loyalism had ‘lasting associational dimensions allowing [the] domination of public space and hence monopolisation of expressions of loyalty’. Catholic loyalty never mirrored these characteristics. Blackstock’s perceptive assessment that the absence of a coherent organisational infrastructure for Catholic loyalty meant that it only found expression as an ‘intermittent presence’ and as part of a reformist agenda, can be extended beyond 1850.Footnote 130 This article has demonstrated that once emancipation had been achieved in 1829, the absence of a galvanising objective to mobilise Catholic loyalty resulted in a fragmented, highly individual, and discursive approach to its articulation and expression. Catholic loyalty throughout the duration of the early and mid-Victorian era must instead be characterised by competing loyalties.
The most dominant form of Catholic loyalty in this period and beyond emphasised the compatibility of allegiance to the monarch with Irish nationalism. But it failed to meet the expectations of the British state and gain legitimacy, not least because sustaining the popularity of its parliamentary vehicles required the use of radical language that took aim at the constitutional status quo. Other forms of Catholic loyalty in the Victoria era were more viable. Once it became clear that the expectations that accompanied Catholic emancipation were not realised, there was a vocal group who saw loyalty as the best means to achieve reform to advance their religious, social and professional interests. Whilst this form of loyalty was compatible with the accommodation sought by the clerical body of the church with the state in the 1830s and 1840s, they were increasingly in conflict as Rome’s authority became more pronounced. It was the most conservative form of Catholic loyalty, however, that was both the most tangible and widely accepted. It was also the most marginal. Typically, a position only occupied by elite Catholics who fully participated in the establishment, they were invested in the British connection, crown and constitution once religious equality had been secured in principle by emancipation. This form of loyalty was rooted in these individuals’ sense of duty to try and conform to the parameters of an exclusively Protestant loyalism, socially, culturally and politically, in all but their Catholicism. The motivational factors driving these individuals were complex. It was also the case that for a large portion of the Irish Catholic population this was vision of loyalty was increasingly incompatible with their spiritual identity or ambitions for the Irish nation.
The fact that Catholic loyalty was never mobilised and expressed in organisational form has belied its significance in the context of Victorian Ireland, but also in the British Isles, and indeed in the British Empire, more widely. Loyalty took on a broader conception than allegiance to the monarch, yet the other objects of an individual’s loyalty remained sufficiently oblique so as to ensure that loyalty remained the exclusive preserve of Protestants and the British establishment. Little over a decade after Gladstone had first published his expostulations on papal infallibility, it was noted that ‘it is possible that … [he] may have used the Queen’s name only typically, to signify the laws and institutions of England, and he may think it is likely that the Pope may be in conflict with them’.Footnote 131 Catholic loyalty was continually undermined in the British and Protestant popular imagination by Catholics’ necessary spiritual loyalties on the one hand, and political agitation, particularly when it was associated with nationalist ambitions, on the other. And yet, loyalty was also used as a marker of political legitimacy. It seemed that only those Catholics who were willing to deny their spiritual allegiance ‘with voice or with pen’ could be counted on as loyal. However, if they were to ‘give utterance’ to their spiritual principles, irrespective of their actual emotional attachment or loyalty to British and largely Protestant symbols, they would be denounced as ‘incapable of being loyal, and of discharging … [their] civil duty.’Footnote 132 The same was true of any expression of nationalist desires, as the next chapter in Irish history showed, when a ‘neo-Catholic loyalty’ that could coexist with the call for Home Rule and its political vehicle, the Irish Parliamentary Party, appealed to large portions of the Catholic population but failed to placate the fears of the traditional proponents of loyalism.Footnote 133 Despite considerable negotiation over its form, function and validity, loyalty to the British connection, crown, and constitution was and remained a viable position for Catholics in early and mid-Victorian Ireland.
