Anti-Catholicism in the United Kingdom dates back to the martyrdom of Saint Alban in the Roman era. Attacks on the Church from a Protestant angle mostly began with the English and Irish Reformations which were launched by King Henry VIII and the Scottish Reformation which was led by John Knox. Within England, the Act of Supremacy 1534 declared the English crown to be "the only supreme head on earth of the Church in England" in place of the Pope. Any act of allegiance to the latter was considered treasonous because the papacy claimed both spiritual and political power over its followers. Ireland was brought under direct English control starting in 1536 during the Tudor conquest of Ireland. The Scottish Reformation in 1560 abolished Catholic ecclesiastical structures and rendered Catholic practice illegal in Scotland. Today, anti-Catholicism remains present in the United Kingdom, particularly in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Anti-Catholicism among many of the English was grounded in the fact that the Holy See sought not only to regain its traditional religious and spiritual authority over the English Church, but was also covertly backing regime change in alliance with Philip II of Spain as a means to ending the religious persecution of Catholics throughout the British Isles. In 1570, Pope Pius V declared Elizabeth I who ruled England and Ireland deposed and excommunicated with the papal bull , which also released all Elizabeth's subjects from their allegiance to her. This rendered conditions impossible even for Elizabeth's subjects, like Richard Gwyn and Robert Southwell, who were completely apolitical but persisted in their allegiance to the Catholic Church in England and Wales, as the Queen and her officials refused to accept that her subjects could maintain both allegiances at once. The Recusancy Acts, legally coercing English, Welsh, and Irish citizens to conform to Anglicanism and attend weekly services on pain of prosecution for high treason, date from Elizabeth's reign. Later, regicide and decapitation strike plots organized by persecuted Catholics were heavily exploited by the Crown for propaganda and further fuelled anti-Catholicism in England. In 1603, James VI of Scotland became also James I of England and Ireland.
The Glorious Revolution of 1689 involved the overthrow of King James II, who converted to Catholicism before he became king and sought to implement both Catholic emancipation and freedom of religion, and his replacement by son-in-law William III, a Dutch Calvinist. The Act of Settlement 1701, which was passed by the Parliament of England, stated the heir to the throne must not be a "Papist" and that any heir who is a Catholic or who marries one will be excluded from the succession to the throne "for ever." This law was extended to Scotland through the Act of Union which formed Great Britain. The Act was amended in 2013 as regards marriage to a Catholic and the ecumenical movement has contributed to reducing sectarian tensions between Christians in the country.
Beginnings English Reformation
The Act of Supremacy issued by King Henry VIII in 1534 declared the king to be "the only supreme head on earth of the Church in England" in place of the pope. Any act of allegiance to the latter was considered treasonous because the papacy claimed both spiritual and political power over its followers. It was under this act that Thomas More and John Fisher were executed and became martyrs to the Catholic faith.
The Act of Supremacy (which asserted England's independence from papal authority) was repealed in 1554 by Henry's devoutly Catholic daughter Queen Mary I when she reinstituted Catholicism as England's state religion. She executed many Protestants by burning. Her actions were reversed by a new Act of Supremacy passed in 1559 under her successor, Elizabeth I, along with an Act of Uniformity which made worship in Church of England compulsory. Anyone who took office in the English church or government was required to take the Oath of Supremacy; penalties for violating it included hanging and quartering. Attendance at Anglican services became obligatory—those who refused to attend Anglican services, whether Roman Catholics or Puritans, were fined and physically punished as recusants.
Elizabethan regime
English anti-Catholicism was grounded in the fear that the Pope sought to reimpose not just religio-spiritual authority but also secular power over England, a view which was vindicated by hostile actions of the Vatican. In 1570, Pope Pius V sought to depose Elizabeth with the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis, declaring her a heretic and dissolving Catholics' duty of allegiance to her. This engendered a state of war between the Pope and England, escalating to extended hostilities and culminating in a failed 1588 invasion by Spanish forces.
Elizabeth's resultant persecution of Catholic Jesuit missionaries led to many executions at Tyburn. Priests like Edmund Campion who suffered there as traitors to England are considered martyrs by the Catholic Church, and a number of them were canonized as the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. In the 20th century, a "Shrine of the Martyrs at Tyburn" was established at the Catholic Tyburn Convent in London.Tyburn Martyrs at Tyburn Convent website.
Foxe's Book of Martyrs
The persecution of the adherents of the reformed religion, both Anglicans and Nonconformist Protestants alike, which had occurred during the reign of Elizabeth's elder half-sister Queen Mary I, was used in the time of Elizabeth I to fuel strong anti-Catholic propaganda in the hugely influential Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Those who had died in Mary's reign, under the Marian Persecutions, were effectively canonised by this work of hagiography.
In 1571, the Convocation of the Church of England ordered that copies of the Book of Martyrs should be kept for public inspection in all cathedrals and in the houses of church dignitaries. The book was also displayed in many Anglican parish churches alongside the Holy Bible. The passionate intensity of its style and its vivid and picturesque dialogues made the book very popular among Puritan and Low Church families, Anglican and nonconformist Protestant, down to the nineteenth century. In a period of extreme partisanship on all sides of the religious debate, the partisan church history of the earlier portion of the book, with its grotesque stories of popes and monks, contributed to anti-Catholic prejudices in England, as did the story of the sufferings of several hundred reformers who had been burned at the stake under Mary and Bishop Bonner.
17th- and 18th-century polemics
Later several accusations fuelled strong anti-Catholicism in England including the Gunpowder Plot, in which Guy Fawkes and other Catholic conspirators were found guilty of planning to blow up the English Parliament on the day the King was to open it. The Great Fire of London in 1666 was blamed on the Catholics and an inscription ascribing it to 'Popish frenzy' was engraved on the Monument to the Great Fire of London, which marked the location where the fire started (this inscription was only removed in 1831). The 'Popish Plot' involving Titus Oates further exacerbated Anglican-Catholic relations.
The beliefs that underlie the sort of strong anti-Catholicism once seen in the United Kingdom were summarized by William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England:
As to papists, what has been said of the Protestant dissenters would hold equally strong for a general toleration of them; provided their separation was founded only upon difference of opinion in religion, and their principles did not also extend to a subversion of the civil government. If once they could be brought to renounce the supremacy of the pope, they might quietly enjoy their seven sacraments, their purgatory, and auricular confession; their worship of relics and images; nay even their transubstantiation. But while they acknowledge a foreign power, superior to the sovereignty of the kingdom, they cannot complain if the laws of that kingdom will not treat them upon the footing of good subjects.. — Bl. Comm. IV, c.4 ss. iii.2, p. *54
The gravamen of this charge, then, is that Catholics constitute an imperium in imperio, a sort of fifth column of persons who owe a greater allegiance to the Pope than they do to the civil government, a charge very similar to that repeatedly leveled against Jews. Accordingly, a large body of British laws such as the Popery Act 1698, collectively known as the Penal Laws, imposed various civil disabilities and legal penalties on recusant Catholics.
A change of attitude was eventually signalled by the Papists Act 1778 in the reign of King George III. Under this Act, an oath was imposed, which besides being a declaration of loyalty to the reigning sovereign, contained an abjuration of Charles Edward Stuart, the Pretender to the British throne, and of certain doctrines attributed to Roman Catholics (doctrines such as those stating that excommunicated princes may lawfully be murdered, that no faith should be kept with heretics, and that the Pope has temporal as well as spiritual jurisdiction in the realm). Those taking this oath were exempted from some of the provisions of the Popery Act. The section as to taking and prosecuting priests were repealed, as also the penalty of perpetual imprisonment for keeping a school. Catholics were also enabled to inherit and purchase land, nor was a Protestant heir any longer empowered to enter and enjoy the estate of his Catholic kinsman. However, the passing of this act was the occasion of the anti-Catholic Gordon riots (1780) in which the violence of the mob was especially directed against Lord Mansfield who had balked at various prosecutions under the statutes now repealed. The anti-clerical excesses of the French Revolution and the consequent emigration to England of Catholic priests from France led to a softening of opinion towards Catholics on the part of the English Anglican establishment, resulting in the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1791 which allowed Catholics to enter the legal profession, relieved them from taking the Oath of Supremacy, and granted toleration for their schools and places of worshipJ. R. H. Moorman, A History of the Church in England (London: A. & C. Black, 1973), pp. 312–313 The repeal of the Penal Laws culminated in the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829.
19th century
Despite the Emancipation Act, however, anti-Catholic attitudes persisted throughout the 19th century, particularly following the sudden massive Irish Catholic migration to England during the Great Famine.L. P. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (1968), pp. 5–22.
The forces of anti-Catholicism were defeated by the unexpected mass mobilization of Catholic activists in Ireland, led by Daniel O'Connell. The Catholics had long been passive but now there was a clear threat of insurrection that troubled Prime Minister Wellington and his aide Robert Peel. The passage of Catholic emancipation in 1829, which allowed Catholics to sit in Parliament, opened the way for a large Irish Catholic contingent. Lord Shaftesbury (1801–1885), a prominent philanthropist, was a pre-millennial evangelical Anglican who believed in the imminent second coming of Christ, and became a leader in anti-Catholicism. He strongly opposed the Oxford Movement in the Church of England, fearful of its high church Catholics features. In 1845, he denounced the Maynooth Grant which funded the Catholic seminary in Ireland that would train many priests.John Wolffe, "Cooper, Anthony Ashley-, seventh earl of Shaftesbury (1801–1885)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 accessed 6 Nov 2017