This article is a study of the Edinburgh‐based anti‐Catholic organisation, the Scottish Reformation Society, in the immediate aftermath of the 1850 restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in ...England and Wales, commonly known at the time as the papal aggression. The papal aggression sent shockwaves throughout England and was viewed by Protestants as an illegal attempt to overthrow Britain's civil and religious liberties by Pope Pius IX. Despite in practice only affecting England, the restoration also had a dramatic impact in Scotland, resulting in thousands of parliamentary petitions and sporadic bouts of communal violence. The Scottish Reformation Society, led by the controversial Free Church of Scotland minister James Begg, was at the forefront of this Scottish Protestant response. The society was dominated by Scotland's Presbyterian dissenters, particularly members of the establishmentarian Free Church. The Free Church had formed out of the 1843 Disruption in the Established Church of Scotland, a momentous politico‐ecclesiastical event which highlighted divisions between the British state and its Scottish church, the national kirk and dissent, and pro‐establishment and voluntary ecclesiologies. By focusing on the influence of a major Scottish anti‐Catholic society during a turbulent period for British Protestantism, this article examines the gulf between the rhetoric of national Protestant unity and the reality of national, ideological, and denominational divisions within mid‐nineteenth century Protestantism in the United Kingdom. It builds on existing research to highlight the various ways in which the anti‐Catholic movement was fractured on denominational lines and reflected the wider tensions of Scottish ecclesiastical politics in the years after the Disruption.
By assessing the Central Board of Dissenters, arguably the most influential liberal-voluntary group of the mid-nineteenth century and the political wing of Scottish dissent, this article questions ...whether the Liberal party in Edinburgh was indeed built on ‘bigotry alone’, and asks whether the groups that would later form the backbone of Scottish Liberalism until the Great War were, as John Brown claimed, the enemies of all oppressions and monopolies, or simply the products of sectarian strife. The Central Board of Dissenters acted as the conduit for ecclesiastical and political organisation for Edinburgh's radical voluntaries during the bitter conflict of the pre-Disruption period, and utilised this organisational strength after 1843 to create a pan-dissenting alliance based on the anti-Maynooth campaign. Despite their foundations in the intra-Presbyterian strife of Victorian Scotland, the electoral successes of this period created a base both in Edinburgh and across Scotland for a Liberal party, once it threw off the ideological shackles of these denominational struggles, which would dominate Scottish politics until the Great War.
The debates surrounding the reform of national education in Britain and Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century were often framed as a binary struggle between the religious establishment, which sought ...to retain control of the national schools, and dissenters who viewed education reform as an important step towards dismantling the state churches' traditional privilege and control over society. In Scotland, however, the picture was somewhat more complicated. While the 1843 Disruption, which split the Church of Scotland in two, was viewed by many within the non-established churches as a victory for dissent, the church that formed out of it - the Free Kirk - retained its belief in national and state-supported religion. This establishmentarian stance led the majority of the Free Church to oppose the creation of a non-denominational education system proposed by Scotland's voluntary dissenters, and indeed some within their own church, and especially one which failed to secure a place for religious instruction in the national schools. This article assesses how the fractious ecclesiological context of Scottish Presbyterian dissent influenced the direction of the education debates, particularly over religious instruction, in the almost three decades between the Disruption and the eventual passing of the 1872 Education (Scotland) Act. The education debates tended to reflect broader trends within Scottish dissent after 1843, offering dissenters the opportunity to unite against the weakened establishment in the aftermath of the Disruption, while also highlighting and often exacerbating the ideological divisions which hindered the emergence of a truly unified dissenting movement in Scotland for almost thirty years.
The 1843 Disruption of the Church of Scotland, which split the national church in two, was one of the most important events in Victorian Britain. The evangelical ministers who seceded from the Kirk ...to form the Free Church of Scotland did so in protest against the British state's intrusion in the church's affairs. The anti-English and patriotic rhetoric of the Disruption has led historians such as David Bebbington to argue that it represented something close to a nationalist movement. This paper questions this claim by assessing the nationalist characteristics of the Disruption and their role in shaping the political ‘unionist-nationalism’ of the mid-nineteenth century. It examines the kind of nationalist sentiment, if any, evident at the Disruption, the role of Free Church members in the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights, the short-lived proto-nationalist pressure group, and the nationalism of the Free Church minister James Begg, who called for Home Rule for Scotland in 1850. By assessing the influence of the Disruption's constructionist critique of the union on political nationalism, the paper argues that the religious nationalism evident in 1843 failed to translate to a political context in the mid-nineteenth century. The new religiously pluralist environment of the post-Disruption period saw the Free Church turn inwards and begin to focus upon its own denominational fortunes as a single Scottish national identity was replaced by a variety of competing confessional identities, each with their own claim to nationhood.
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