• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

As the nineteenth century progressed, Scots and Welshmen rose to the highest positions in government. Jews became knights and barons. Most remarkably, Benjamin Disraeli became prime minister of Great Britain, first in 1868 and then again in 1874. Although his family had converted to the Anglican Church, Disraeli was known to be of Jewish background. By the First World War, the humorist John Hay Beith was able to write in his spoof The Oppressed English:

Today a Scot is leading the British army in France, another is commanding the British grand fleet at sea, while a third directs the Imperial General Staff at home. The Lord Chancellor is a Scot; so are the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Foreign Secretary. The Prime Minister is a Welshman…Yet no one has ever brought in a bill to give home rule to England!20

Meanwhile, stunning the world, Britain had by the 1830s abolished its slave trade while it was still extremely lucrative. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Royal Navy policed the world's oceans, crusading against other nations’ slave trading from Africa to the Americas. Britain's abolitionist campaign gave it the moral high ground over not just its main rival, France, but also, even more satisfyingly, over its former colony the United States. At a cost of millions of pounds, and in precisely the same era that it achieved global dominance, Great Britain became known as the “most moral” power in the world. As the historian Linda Colley puts it, “Successful abolitionism became one of the vital underpinnings of British supremacy in the Victorian era, offering—as it seemed to do—irrefutable proof that British power was founded on religion, on freedom and on moral calibre, not just on a superior stock of armaments and capital.”21

There was, however, a hitch. British identity from the beginning was forged on a bedrock of Protestantism, in opposition to Catholic Spain and France.22 This core religious component of British identity planted a seed of intolerance that the empire never quite overcame. Indeed, British Protestantism created a fateful problem for the empire in the very heart of the United Kingdom: the problem of Catholic Ireland.

THE CATHOLIC PROBLEM AND THE

LIMITS OF “BRITISH” TOLERANCE

The Irish never received the same treatment in Great Britain as did the Scots or the Welsh. The principal reason was religion. By 1700, the Scots, the Welsh, and the English were all predominantly Protestant, whereas the Irish remained stubbornly Catholic. Great Britain's loss of Ireland is in many ways a story of too little tolerance, too late.

It would be hard to overstate the persistence and intensity of mutual hatred between Catholics and Protestants in British history. Endless religious wars left a legacy of enmity and anger. Like witches in previous eras, Catholics in England were often scape-goated, physically assaulted, or plunged in water until near drowning. Even Locke, in his famous 1689 Letter on Toleration, excluded Catholics, whose opinions were “absolutely destructive of all governments except the Pope's.” Catholicism was depicted as not only blasphemous but also primitive and superstitious. As one English newspaper put it in 1716: “A Papist is an Idolator, who worships Images, Pictures, Stocks and Stones, the Works of Mens Hands; calls upon the Virgin Mary, Saints and Angels to pray for them; adores Reliques,” “eats his God by the cunning Trick of Transub-stantiation,” and “swears the Pope is infallible.”23

At the same time, many in England suspected that Catholic “traitors” and “conspirators” were plotting to overthrow the Protestant monarchy. These fears were not entirely unfounded. In 1601, an invasion force of more than three thousand Spanish soldiers, invited by Ireland's Catholic chieftains, landed on the southern Irish coast (where they were defeated by the English on Christmas Eve at the Battle of Kinsale). Repeatedly, Irish nobility allied themselves with Catholic Spain and France in attempts to oust their English overlords. Closer to home, in 1708,