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‘The Popish Army of the North’: Anti-Catholicism and Parliamentarian Allegiance in Civil War Yorkshire, 1642–46

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Andrew Hopper
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Extract

By the time of the outbreak of the Civil Wars, may educated British Protestants considered Roman Catholicism to be an anti-religion; indeed, the Cambridge divine William Fulke went so far as to equate it with devil worship. Wealthy and powerful English Catholics attracted extreme hostility in moments of political crisis throughout the early modern period, but in 1642, fear of Roman Catholicism was even used to legitimate the terrible act of rebellion. Keith Lindley has emphasized the civil war neutrality of English Catholics, while many current historians, nervous of displays of religious prejudice, have portrayed the anti-Catholic fears of parliamentarians as cynical propaganda. Michael Finlayson has condemned anti-Catholicism as ‘irrational paranoia’, to be compared with anti-Semitism, which might, had it not been for the growth of liberal traditions in nineteenth-century England, have led to some sort of ‘Final Solution’.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , May 2000 , pp. 12 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 2001

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References

The author wishes to acknowledge the kindness of the staff at York Minster Library and is also grateful for the encouragement of Prof. James A. Sharpe and Dr. William Sheils. Thanks are also offered to the History Research seminar at the University of York for useful comments on an earlier draft presented as a research paper in January 1999.

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