Why choose this subject? First, because I think there is a general historiographical problem about nationality in early-modern Europe, which has been rather abandoned and is perhaps worth another look. Second because, on the Catholic side of the subject, there is a problem of actuality concerning Ireland and a rather different one concerning Holland. Third, because there is a specific and limited issue in the history of English Catholicism. I shall really be concerned with a simple problem raised by Arnold Oskar Meyer in his England and the Catholic Church under Queen Elizabeth: how far the internal conflicts among English Catholics, generally known as the Archpriest controversy, are to be explained as an outbreak or resurgence of ‘nationalism’, a conflict of ‘national’ and ‘Catholic’ tendencies. There have been good reasons for objecting to Meyer’s view that this was the case: his conceptions of national character, of ’puritanism’, were by present standards shaky, and he weakened his personal position by becoming more closely involved with the Third Reich than he perhaps need have been. The recent historiography of the subject has been largely a history of attempts to find an alternative: in the international competition of France and Spain; in the constitutional hostility of gentry and clergy; in the geographical determinism of Braudelian routes; in the ecclesiastical choice between a traditional and a missionary church. Many of them have been made by myself; most recently Christopher Haigh has added another, connected with the continuity or discontinuity of Elizabethan Catholicism with its pre-Reformation predecessor.

In 1581, in his Answer to a seditious pamphlet, William Charke wrote

This was, of course, a partisan point of view. However, the extent to which it had won general acceptance among Englishmen of all social classes can be demonstrated by reference to the Armada crisis of seven years later. Not only did pamphleteers like Thomas Deloney appeal for patriotic effort,

That... all with one accord
On Sion hill may sing the praise
of our most mightly Lord

but recusant apologetic makes it clear that the catholics were fully aware of the prevailing opinion that papists could not be good Englishmen.

Their sense of national identity is not something that men have been in the habit of directly recording. Its strength or weakness, in relation to commitment to international causes or to localist sentiment, can often only be inferred by examining political and religious attitudes and personal behaviour. So far as the early modern period is concerned, the subject is hazardous because groups and individuals must have varied enormously in the extent to which national identity meant something to them or influenced their lives. The temptation to generalise must be resisted. It is all too easy to suppose that national identity became well established in England in the Tudor century, when a national culture, based on widespread literacy among gentry, yeomen and townsmen, flowered as it had never done before, when the bible was first generally available in English, when John Foxe produced his celebrated Acts and Monuments, better known as the Book of Martyrs. Recent work reassessing the significance of Foxe’s account of the English reformation and other Elizabethan polemical writings provdes a convenient starting point for this brief investigation of some of the connections between religious zeal and national consciousness between 1558 and 1642.

In the early seventeenth century, when Europe was divided along religious lines and works of polemical theology circulated widely, most Englishmen seem to have been convinced that their nation was part of a protestant community of nations with certain common interests. This attitude had its roots in the recent past, when the government of queen Elizabeth had aided—albeit adroitly—the Dutch and French Calvinists and had maintained close relations with several protestant states, particularly in the Rhineland. When the ‘Invincible Armada’ from Spain had been thwarted in its intended object, the English were thankful to Providence for the events which had preserved protestantism on the island. The common cause among protestant states thus came to be thought of, by statesmen and ordinary citizens alike, as an effort to safeguard the political autonomy of the protestant states, particularly against the great Hapsburg monarchy in Spain and Austria, and to preserve the protestant faith against the revived Roman Catholicism of the counter-reformation. Religion and national identity were so closely linked that English ‘papists’ had constantly to struggle against a suspicion that they were unpatriotic or disloyal.

‘Until 1563 the progress of the reformation in Wales was linked with the use of English as a prescribed language . . . Few decisions had more far-reaching consequences than the decision to abandon this principle so far as religion was concerned in Wales’. Walker believes that this change of policy in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign was brought about by what he calls ‘the deep-seated conservatism of the Welsh Church’, and quotes the letter of bishop Nicolas Robinson of Bangor (1566–86) to Cecil, in which Robinson claims that the slow progress of the reformation in the principality was at least partly due to ‘the dregs of superstition which did grew chefly upon the blindness of the clergie’ and ‘the closing up of God’s worde from them [that is, the Welsh people in an unknown tongue’. Richard Davies, bishop successively of St Asaph (1560–1) and of St Davids (1561–79) believed that if the Welsh church was to be directed along the path required by Elizabeth’s government then the language of the overwhelming majority of the people would have to be employed in both liturgy and pulpit. Only worship in Welsh would make the Anglican church an acceptable institution in Wales, and that necessitated ministers fluent in the vernacular whose teaching was buttressed by the reading of the scriptures and the performance of divine service in the same tongue.

Of the many problems confronting post-reformation English catholics, that of national identity was among the most acute. For the nation at large, to be English was to be protestant, and to be papist was to be an alien.’ That catholics owed primary allegiance to the pope, to Spain, to France, was an axiom throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the exile of the catholic Stuarts at the revolution of 1688 merely varied the form in which the national tradition expressed itself. In his last public utterance William III equated ‘a Popish Prince, and a French Government’, judicial proclamations spoke of ‘papists and disaffected persons’, and George I’s first parliament declared that catholics

Calvin’s reformed Geneva had as its motto post tenebras lux; the city set on a hill found an identity not only in maintaining the precarious miracle of political independence but in the God-given task of preserving truth and shedding light. In the sixteenth century the republic bore witness to its salvation through a corporate life of ordered righteousness, by printed propaganda and through a stream of missionaries and martyrs. Sympathisers also poured into Geneva but while many sixteenth-century exiles from France and French-speaking territories had quickly assumed important office in the Genevan church and the economic and political life of the republic, those who arrived after 1685 found themselves for the most part trapped in second-class employment enjoying second-class civil rights. Briefly, the central change was that Calvin’s city had depended for its survival on the commitment and capital of newcomers—like Calvin himself—while eighteenth-century Geneva had bred and trained its own clergy and men of affairs. In 1769 Jacob Vernet wrote of the hereditary right of the Genevan citizen to his rôle in the city’s life.

The Maxim my country right or wrong is unquestionably difficult and perhaps impossible to justify; certainly no Christian can easily regard the nation as the supreme object of loyalty. Yet during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars intensive efforts were made in press and pulpit, through the courts and through informal social pressure, to enhance patriotism. Patriotism almost certainly became stronger and more widely diffused. How did the denominations respond to this dilemma? My aim is to suggest some links between denominational affiliation and attitudes to nationalism. The topic is an important one; at this time religion usually set the terms of the debate about loyalty.

Revolution confuses nationality. The French Revolution drove from France’s shores many émigrés who carried the conviction that they, rather than the masters of the new order, enshrined the true France. This sentiment was encouraged by the experience of exile which produced an exaggerated consciousness of Frenchness, especially among the clergy.

This paper has two intentions. Firstly it wishes to show how internal and external influences worked on the exiles in England to create a mentality of deep separation. Secondly it wishes to hint at the implications of this separation especially in that highly developed sense of religio-national identity which became so clear a characteristic of the emigration.

The Victorian liberal Roman catholic historian lord Acton thought that the history of the world was one of the growth of liberty. By liberty, he meant national independence and freedom of speech and worship, the liberties of nineteenth-century liberalism: and in his conception of the past, he drew on the whig interpretation of English history as a conflict between a progressive tradition and a reactionary one: between churches, parties and classes representing either freedom or authority. The classic statement of the idea is the whig lord Macaulay’s in 1835:

The papal bull Universalis Ecclesiae of 1850 set up a hierarchy of bishops with ordinary power to replace the vicars apostolic who had ruled the catholic church in England since 1688. It stated explicitly that the new bishops were to have all the necessary powers to rule their dioceses in the same way as titular bishops elsewhere, and it spoke clearly about the resumption of the ‘common law of the church’ in England. Yet the commitment of the Roman authorities to a fully independent hierarchy was not wholehearted. The church in England was to remain under the aegis of the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda), whose normal brief was to look after missionary territories not stable enough to have properly constituted hierarchies. According to the bull, the English bishops were to send regular reports on the state of their dioceses to Rome, and were to be diligent in informing Propaganda ‘of everything which they shall think profitable for the spiritual good of their flocks’.

By the mid-nineteenth century, two generations after the revolution and the creation of an independent state, Americans were still unsure of the ultimate limits and character of their nation. If there was too much evident optimism over the country’s prospects to write of the nation’s suffering a crisis of identity, it is equally clear that the major questions of the 1840s and 1850s—territorial expansion, the future of slavery, and massive immigration—provided issues the precise resolution of which would fundamentally affect the future direction of the Union. Over the first two of these the evangelical protestant community, the dominant and most influential opinion-forming religious group in American society, found itself seriously divided; indeed by the eve of the civil war the slavery question had split all the major evangelical denominations. In contrast, this same community appeared to show much more cohesion and unanimity in defending the nation’s evangelicalism against the swollen tide of foreign immigrants, three million of whom poured into American ports between 1845 and 1854, the vast majority victims of Irish famine and refugees from the European revolutions of 1848. The immediate danger to American nationality, as evangelicals defined it, lay not in the immigrants’ poverty and foreignness, but in their Catholicism. The Lutheran minister, Frederick Anspach, likened the American nation to a virgin who should ‘sacredly guard her honor’ against catholic vampires who ‘would convert her into a courtezan for the Pope.’

‘The Church of England’ declared a leading article in The Times on 8 July 1980 ‘is the British national church’. Such a novel declaration produced apoplexy at the presidential breakfast-table. My topic is an impossibly wide one, only tackled previously, in his distinctive fashion, by Dr Daniel Jenkins. I cannot hope to cover every aspect of it. That apparently innocent sentence in the newspaper does, however, provide me with my text. Its context was an article concerning itself with the possibility that the Prince of Wales might marry a Roman Catholic. Not even a president of the Ecclesiastical History Society can offer comment as to probabilities in this matter and, like The Times, we are only concerned with principles. Concluding, perhaps not surprisingly, that it would seem intolerable to the ‘broad public’ that an excellent heir to the throne should be excluded because of his wife’s religion it added that ‘any sensible person’ would hope that the matter would not be raised. There were still what it called ‘anti-Catholic prejudices’ among a relatively small minority in England and Wales, a rather larger minority in Scotland and a considerable proportion of the Protestant community in Northern Ireland. A constitutional issue ‘which would bring all these birds flapping down out of the rafters’ was not desirable.

Wales and Scotland were in the nineteenth century, as they have remained in the twentieth, nations within a multinational state. Where boundaries of nation and state did not coincide in nineteenth-century Europe there was commonly a surge of feeling in favour of achieving a remedy. This was equally true of nations like Italy and Germany that were divided internally by political frontiers and of nations like the Serbs and the Rumanians who were lumped together with other peoples under the rule of greater powers. There was an efflorescence of nationalism, that is, of the political assertion of nationhood. The British Isles were not immune, for Ireland was deeply affected by the new mood. Yet Wales and Scotland were largely untouched by the nationalist spirit. Only from the 188os, with the example of the Irish Home Rulers to imitate, was there any significant stirring of aspirations after self-government, and then the vanguard in both nations gave no thought to the possibility of taking independence as its goal. Wales and Scotland were remarkably quiescent when viewed in a European context.

In the generation before the first world war, Scottish national identity was found not in the church, established or free, but in the town hall; in an ethical Christian community faith rather than ‘churchianity’. For Scotland was a working model of the civic church of W. T. Stead. In particular in Glasgow, that faith of the ‘new’ professional layman proved itself flexible, responsive to urban social problems and readily exportable. Civic patriotism was at once national and international.

We are building a Church’, wrote Ernest Barson, minister of Penge congregational church in 1911, ‘. . to welcome to worship and service men and women . . . of real faith, such as we often meet in our homes, in business, in social service, but for whom room and freedom have not always been found in the Churches . .’ A year later he opened his church. A minister from Purley spoke on the church and the businessman, and one from Brixton spoke on worship: ‘the church must be learned, common and catholic’. This speaker delighted in paradox:

The stubborn resistance of the protestants of Ulster to the Irish national movement is a notorious fact of modern Anglo-Irish history. Though such resistance to national movements by a minority is by no means a unique phenomenon in the history of nationalism, it may be, as Peter Gibbon claims, in his Origins of Ulster Unionism, that ‘nowhere else has such a movement encountered a rival of comparable effectiveness, popular support and staying power’. Much of that popular support and staying power came from the presbyterians of Ulster, for, as T. W. Moody has written:

Significantly, until the formation of the general assembly of the presbyterian church in Ireland in 1840, the mainstream presbyterian body in Ireland was the synod of Ulster.

‘The Church of Scotland has consistently upheld Scotland’s historic nationhood and identity’. The purpose of this paper is to consider the validity of this claim by examining the records of the general assembly of the church since 1946. The general assembly’s pronouncements on this theme take the form of deliverances on the reports submitted by the committee on church and nation.

The general assembly of 1946 declared their conviction that Scottish interests were being increasingly jeopardised by disregard of Scottish sentiment and the claims of Scotland as a nation. The remedy proposed was ‘a greater decentralising of authority and an increased measure of independence within the sphere of Scottish administration.’ The following year the call for decentralisation was placed with the context of ‘schemes of nationalisation’ and ‘the possible invasion of human rights and local independence by large-scale collectivism.’

In retrospect, we may agree that the prayer book crisis of 1927 and 1928 was not as critical as it seemed at the time, but it did leave unfinished business for a future generation. The draft prayer book of the Church of England had been rejected by parliament, and if any saner revision of that church’s worship proved acceptable to the church it would still have to be approved by parliament.

Gregory Dix, who worried about these things more than was good for him, expressed a common opinion in 1945. He felt that any return to parliament would be fatal, since ‘the debate would inevitably circle around’ the real presence in the eucharist, and instead he suggested that the church should ‘not directly challenge parliament at all’ but quietly institute a new book backed by about seven bishops at ‘a moment when parliament was pre-occupied’. This was not done. By the time the Church of England had some idea of how it wanted to pray, the debate about real presence was almost irrelevant. Furthermore, bishops were no longer the natural people to put forward a new book, though some of them did not know it. What was actually done was to slip in alternative series of eucharistic rites by liturgical scholars whose work was in fact revised at a more popular level. Their series 1, giving what so many were supposed to have wanted in 1927, was almost totally ignored. It proved something of a surprise to everyone that an overwhelming majority of parishes preferred series 2 and then series 3, despite or because of their uninspired prose. If the 1662 book of common prayer was almost totally abandoned in many areas, this was neither intended nor expected.

The inseparability of national identity and Catholicism in modern Spain has never been more pugnaciously and confidently affirmed than in the provocative hyperbole of Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo. ‘Spain, evangeliser of half the globe; Spain, hammer of heretics, light of Trent, sword of Rome, cradle of Saint Ignatius . . .; that is our greatness and our unity: we have no other’. This uncompromising statement undoubtedly owes some of its stridency to the age of the author when he wrote it—he was twenty-five—and something to his abiding convictions and temperament. But one does not have to search very assiduously this most famous defence of catholic orthodoxy as the source of Spanish grandeur in order to realise that Menéndez y Pelayo’s fervour and language are both sharpened by nostalgia. Volumes six and seven of his history of Spanish heterodoxy which trace the history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constitute one long lament for lost catholic unity, lost cultural homogeneity and, lost with them, an irretrievable simplicity and clarity of national self-definition. When he wrote his eloquent and audacious lament in the early 1880s he was well aware that the uniformity of religious belief which he had unhesitatingly discerned beneath minor, and usually imported, heterodoxy in earlier Spanish history already belonged irrecuperably to the past. Moreover, he found himself as many lesser followers were also to do in the uncomfortably Canute-like position of opposing the uncontrollable while asserting an ideal which had to be articulated as a series of negative and necessarily unsatisfactory defensive reactions.