essay2

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TMA02
What factors worked against mutual toleration between Catholics and Protestants between the mid sixteenth century and the end of the nineteenth century?

In answering this question first I shall look at the theological differences between the Catholics and Protestants as explained by John Bossy and John Chidester and the CD. Then I will turn to the case study of The UK and Irish Republics churches and the impact that the German reformation had on them outlined by the second course CD and the resultant economic and religious history behind the failings of the Irish Anglican Church to deliver a unified system of religion owing to historic loyalties be they to the sovereign or the Pope of the population and linguistic tolerance for the whole Island of Ireland that in the nineteenth century shifted to language and culture rather than religion. I shall then turn to the resultant establishment of linguistic revival as its counter in the nineteenth century. I will conclude with the factors be looked at as how this inspired armed resistance in 1916 which led to the split between Britain and Ireland rather than a federal union of the Isles and the whole Empire. This will draw on the course textbooks for the period in the question to answer. I will conclude with the key factors that emerge from this analysis that worked against Protestant - Catholic mutual toleration. Thankfully this time period is more tolerant thanks to interdenominational and inter faith initiatives whatever the ‘gut instincts’ of their individual adherents.

Bossy’s argument about the difference of sacraments is a more detailed than what is explained in the audio CD and covers a diverging view of the sacraments and purgatory that inspired reform. There can be viewed that there was a danger of an after effect from the crusades seeing Christian states taking it out on each other as the reformation can be seen as a war against impurities of the soul rather than and instead

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of redemption through violence the former Advocated by Zwingli described in the course CD and developed by him and his followers following his debate in Zurich.

Turning to Britain and Ireland as the case study I note the after-effects of the Spanish armada that had at that time been endorsed by the papacy that had excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I from Rome and authorised ‘regime change’[1] the Spanish king Philip II to reclaim the kingdom of England[2] that he had been husband but not king of under the previous Queen Mary I. During that time he had supported her attempts to bring it back to Roman Catholicism indirectly and spasmodically. As a result the English population viewed Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland with suspicion for showing support to the defeated ships caught in the storms. This has historically created a centre and periphery in terms of investment and at that time the main cities were London, Edinburgh and then Bristol for the developing tea and slave trade as the basis for a merchant navy under companies at the Royal Exchange developed further by James 1st to defend and enrich the crown and the realm and aid scientific and cultural exploration.

Hence war was a factor with the failings of an integrated peace plan and pre Westphalia and the formal abolition of the Holy Roam Empire with its claims of Roman Catholic temporal superiority over the papacy a lack of international law that fully recognised individual state sovereignty regardless of the confession of the ruler

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and any territorial or economic gains any country made as part of its conflict and conversion or coexistence in the non European world discussed in the next study
topic. This lack of a framework for dialogue and tolerance can and did create difficulties fuelled by propaganda against other states on the back of the last war as a crude warning for them not to seek retaliation. In city’s where there were diplomat and immigration populations centres produced mutual intolerance, one example of which was the Gordon or Ritualism riots in London in the nineteenth century. This created a differing procedure for them which until recently with government citizenship initiatives and any attempt to grant those working and paying taxes here an amnesty, played into the hands of the politicial far right.

Such incidents were despite and perhaps as a result of a fearful reaction to the enlightenment thinking of the eighteenth century combined with the Oxford movements attempts at reconciliation with Rome. Followers of the martyrs memorial petition in the nineteenth century mentioned By Dr Susan Mumm in CD 2 could have seen such attempts as a corruption of the Church of England from its foundation of the book of common prayer and the articles of religion and other Christian denominations opinions that English should have paramount usage and their theology of the healing of the bible in the vernacular, derived from Luther’s 95 thesis in Wurtenberg and the German Reformation.

This justification by prayer book and articles is inspired and established in Edward VI reign, restored by Elizabeth I and reaffirmed by King Charles II upon his accession to

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the throne after the 1660 restoration of the crown after the Cromwellian Commonwealth. This view was espoused by a fearful population against both Irish
immigration produced by the potato famine of that time and the economic turmoil that lay behind that owing to structural difficulties in the British Imperial economy[3]. From
that perspective at these times the idea of immigrants threatening their livelihood seemed a real threat.

In the mainland UK there was also Dynastic feuding owing to the lack of a coherent whole British Isles state with accurate communication between all its population centres and a universally supported church that enjoyed majority support in all its home island territories as a result of the factors analysed above. This occurred due to a lack of technology of later in the modern age and the fact picked up on in the study guide chronology that there were diverging reformations in England and Scotland. Calvinism took a differing form in the Scottish Reformation owing to differing trade links on Scotlands East Coast and a separate vernacular document in the Scots tongue and then Knox’s psalter which was more stridently distinct from any notion of being a ‘reformed and catholic’ church that it had taken in England. Another reason was the feuding within the House of Stuart under the mother of James 1st Queen Mary between these Calvinist Presbyterians and the Roman Catholic and English supporting

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aristocracy. This resulted in church schisms and protestant plantations as those to whom the compromise of James VI (I of England) regency saw dissent from their
covenant to one another and their perceptions of kirk. When James I and VI sought to repair this in his reign from London by seeking to introduce the prayer book and articles of religion this caused
further alienation but did produce the Episcopalian church, loyal to Canterbury and King that was distinct from the Scottish states established church.

Thus these difficulties saw some settled elsewhere with some support from Elizabeth I at the end of her reign as the Cecil’s began to negotiate the succession to the monarch. The major example was in Ulster to keep down catholic lords in Ireland on land confiscated from them in battle by Elizabeth’s forces, antagonising Catholic Protestant relations and creating Londonderry in need of defence by William of Orange in a later reign. All of this was there as the lack of a coherent form of governance equal to England was still occurring despite the 1540 upgrading from Overlord of Ireland to King in Henry VIII’s title. The English overlordship of Ireland was an occurance from the reign of Henry II claiming title over the Earl of Pembroke’s lands in Ireland which he had gained after marrying the High Kings Daughter after he restored him to his throne following an invite to do so to Henry II from the Pope.

Hence the notion of fusion of countries was fraught with difficulty and occured after conquest usually in europe without the use of referenda and international law prior to

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the EU and the only way that was done in the more distant past was one sided and anti semitic (Austrian anschluss the proving ground of Goebell’s nice and nasty approach
portraying the allegedly nice austrian Hitler against the allegedly nasty thieving Jews, later compounded by Goebells in the war saying that they were rats and vermin). Had
Hitler had the electoral reform and referenda commission in his day and played by the rules of the League of Nations, would the Jews not have perished in the death camps
of Auschwitz and Birkenau. Not if you read the writings of the man and Mein Kampf in which he places his woes at their behest. So how did the genocidal maniac slip through in Germany? Note pictures in Chidester and the despair of not being unified by temporal rulers, the idea of a new Charlemagne idealised warfare and the UK as a
potential ally with visits by Chamberlain bolstering support for the Nazi regime in the 1930s in Hitler’s mind and the political ambitions of Churchill who is said to asked Hitler about the plight of the Jews when he was in Germany.

Hence under economic analysis it can be argued that to win an empire the Union of crowns in an era prior to proper fiscal regulation, fiscal borrowing against land in England and Ireland occurred without reference to its long term sustainability as such concepts hadn’t been developed scientifically on the basis of the plantations, prior to attempts at UK wide parliamentary regulation of this practice after the 1829 Emancipation of Catholics Act which sought to reduce the antagonisms and resentments of previous legislation.

There was also a lack of an Anglican prayer book for the Gaels as conformity was in Language and the Irish and Scots dialects were being separated by differing
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codification in writing as oral culture was codified. Further other Protestant faith communities under the then English speaking Irish Parliament in Dublin vetoed this
and enforced it harshly in places by the nonconformists who again differed in religion and believed in no surrender to popery for fear of death in some very vocal and visceral speeches to ‘wake the population up to the message of grace and salvation of
‘Jesus Christ’ (See Paisley account of History in study guide two) and no right of return to their areas of Scotland and England having worked themselves out of
poverty. Those horrified by that or during the 1801-1921 fusion of Parliaments sought to build a common linguistic revival to build up through civil society bilingualism across all churches and allow from an Anglican perspective more clergy who could
minister to the whole population and convert through co-existence. How this was viewed and commented on in mainland Britain at the time is of note with the ideals of the pre-eminence of the English language and the empire conquering the whole world created fear that they couldn’t support this and defend and sustain the entire empire.

This Differs from the welsh common prayer book movement granted royal patronage under Elizabeth 1st and saw itself as part of the church of England but linguistically distinct. It was self financing by the welsh commerce and print community within the city (Study Guide 2) and who wanted equality with England within the union under a common crown (why Plaid Cymru has historically in the twentieth century not been a specifically pro independence party as it united nonconformists and Anglicans horrified with war of both conflicts and wanting to rebuild the UK as a federation of


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Kingdoms until the EU and SNP policy developments of Independence in Europe replaced Independence in the Commonwealth in their rhetoric at election time). [4]

Hence a resultant fear of persecution and a lack of a mercantile and industrial base on the island of Ireland led to an agriculture based economy that was backward compared with England and couldn’t cope in the 1840s with washout harvests leading to starvation and poverty or support in full the required level of evangelism and clergy
training for documents and services in Irish and Gaelic. This can be seen as a consequence of the great game of nations against the predominantly Roman Catholic French and Spanish being won on the back of slavery. This was where companies based on diverging faith communities with destinations to differing American colonies pre 1787 funded conquest elsewhere as the UK gained an empire but lacked a way to govern it without population movements under a rule of law at the centre, unlike America after the revolutionary wars.

However as naval technology and communications improved the concept of the rule of law. This was then enforced by the victorious and better managed British navy from Trafalgar. It was then used to abolish slavery and curtail piracy on the high seas of the Atlantic while the Americans still had the former, In turn this then enabled Queen Victoria to end slavery there as well by backing Abraham Lincoln over the South as UK citizens regardless of faith, denomination or branch fought to stop slavery, inspired by the fact that they were no longer doing it themselves and

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campaigns in the press and supplications to Parliament. However there were those who fought to keep slavery as well and this divide in the aristocracy saw some
resistance to home rule as well and partly justified paranoia against the other be it Marxism, socialism, Germans or Russians.[5]

Ultimately the issues in diverging churches and across these isles that fuelled these divisions were incomplete unity and historic divisions of country because there are distinct nations on these islands and there was a conflicting doctrines of supremacy and lineage stemming from the desire of Henry VIII to have a son to stop the
bloodshed of civil war of the preceding century. It was also to found the idea of the empire distinct from Rome to defend the Catholic faith and unify the Island without the excesses of Edward 1st as his sister was Queen of Scotland. Hence with the benefit of hindsight there were failures of structures of law and governance based on mutual respect and harmony within the country owing to real and perceived threats from overseas. How the countries of the UK and the Irish Republic emerged is beyond the scope of this essay however the inability to stop the revolt of 1916 because it was a right to rebel and justified as Ireland was in the view of nineteenth century Sinn Fein at that time as a seperate country distinct from the papal recognition of the British Crown and hidden from the mainland UK population during the troubles is still used as false justification by the Real IRA.



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Hence in my view there is a need for Alliance for Democracy as a political party at this general election to allow the testing of the idea of a federation of the Kingdoms under a council of the Isles to develop so that the Sovereign Crown can be kept in
Ulster and the President in Ireland and any change there occurs democratically. This would allow for both to then look to the Commonwealth as a potential means for reunification as Her Majesty the Queen in 2009 encouraged people to do[6]. Then Ireland and Britain could evolve constitutionally without being played by the Irish American community supplying funds for guns for the Real IRA until the next recession caused there facilitates the USA to join the Commonwealth or the next UK government invites the USA to join. Perhaps then the historical differences between Catholicism and Protestantism could be healed in time for the papal visit in 2010 and terrorism be eliminated as a justification in conflict within Christendom as part of stopping Al Queda and other forms of terrorism across the world under the rule of law and the United Nations.

James Ware
Word Count: 2,665

Bibliography

Bossy, John Christianity in the West 1400-1700 (Oxford, 1985)

Chidester, David Christianity A Global History (Penguin, 2000)

Guy, John Tudor England (Cambridge)

Forster, R. F, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (Penguin, 1988)

Study Guide 2

Course Audio CDA5389 CD2 The reformation and its aftermath.

BBC Radio London, 3pm Christmas Day Broadcast of Her Majesty the Queen
[1] Repealed by the realpolitik acceptance of a protestant monarchy by treaty in
[2] Mentioned by Tutor in 20/04/10 tutorial and confirmed when reading John Guy “Tudor England” (1997,)
[3] Thus Poverty Overseas and a fear of the other has produced the megaphone diplomacy effect from Protestant Populations in both Britain and America with the streets of New York and Boston Nineteenth Century seeing hostility to the crown fuel
Ctd.pg.3 into a lawless underclass in poor accommodation, characterised in England and in an era pre housing benefit post ww2 of no blacks no irish in the windows of London streets.


[5] This culminated in the twentieth century with the Official Secrets Act of 1909 and 1911 following popular fear of German spies.
[6] BBC Radio London, 3pm Christmas Day Broadcast of Her Majesty the Queen