134 ENGLISH SAGA

the leisured and endowed landed gentry. The spiritual side of
their natures would have been stifled but for their feeling for
religion. This was like themselves: downright, undiscriminating
and practical. Its dominant note was a militant Protestantism,
which comprised a great readiness to criticise, a strong sense
of self-righteousness, a very real respect for integrity and
sound moral conduct and an unreasoning distrust of the Pope
an8 of all foreign fal-lals. Jt found vigorous expression in
the busy black-coated, white-tied unction of Exeter Hall—the
League of Nations Union of the day—where middle-class
opinion was ceaselessly mobilised in favour of missionary,
pacifist and humanitarian ventures, all of a strongly Protestant
.trend. Its antithesis was the Puseyite movement which, spreading
out from Oxford—still the home of lost causes—was filling long-
neglected, sober Hanoverian parish churches with painted
chancels, niches, candles, altars, Popish-looking rails to keep off
the profane laity, and painted windows bearing the idolatrous
image of the Virgin Mary.1

This drift to Rome, as it seemed to many of our great-grand
parents, aroused all the Protestant pugnacity of the British
people. In 1850 an attempt by the Pope to create English metro-
politan titles for Catholic bishops all but brought down the
government, who were suspected of being lukewarm in their
opposition to this outrageous act of "invasion."2 Mobs pro-
cessed through the streets of quiet provincial towns, smashing
Catholic shop windows, tearing up chapel railings and bearing
effigies of the offending Pope and his Cardinals (previously
exhibited in some local tailor's window) to the bonfire. In his
public letter repudiating what Punch described as "an insolent
papal brief," the Premier, Lord John Russell, assured an anxious
nation that "no foreign prince or potentate will be permitted
to fasten his fetters upon a nation which has so long and nobly
vindicated its right to freedom of opinion, civil, political and
religious... ^ I will not bate a jot of heaxt or life so long as the
glorious principles and the immortal martyrs of the Reformation
shall be held in reverence by the great mass of a nation which
looks with contempt on the mummeries of superstition." This,
and a great deal more like it, was the kind of language the serious

lal wanted Oliver and Ms dragoons to march in and put an end to it all." Lcttersand
literary Xanains of Edward IfogeraM, I, /&>.

*frme NwLettmofEduvrd ?&%&<&(& I. R. Barton) 148.