Protestants in Victorian Ireland: A Minority and a Majority

Abstract

Protestants in Victorian Ireland:A Minority and a Majority Leah Robinson (bio) There are moments throughout the Victorian history of Protestants in Ireland that highlight the ways in which Protestants enjoyed the power and privileges of a majority despite the fact that, numerically, Protestants were a minority denomination. Not only did Protestants hold the status of majority and minority concurrently but their status as minority or majority in a given context was the catalyst for significant historical events. In what follows, I discuss Protestants in Ireland in the Victorian era in relation to the national church, the Penal Laws, the Act of Union, the famine, evangelism, and Home Rule. In the eighteenth century, the Anglican (Protestant and Episcopal) population was a statistical minority with power we might associate with a majority. At the height of its numbers, the Anglican population never rose above 12 per cent; membership in the Church, at its height in the 1760s, was only about 300,000 (Busteed 28). For comparison, by 1834, Roman Catholics represented 80.7 per cent of the population. Protestant Dissenters, as they became known, including Presbyterians, Society of Friends (Quakers), Baptists, European Protestants, and Independents, represented 8 per cent, and members of the Anglican Church, 11 per cent.1 Following the establishment of the national church in 1536, there was a 10 per cent "tithe" levied on the income of all Irish, Catholic and Protestant, Anglican and Dissenter alike. The tax created a divide between the majority religious group on the island and the minority Anglican Church. As a result, the majority of Christians in Ireland were paying for a church that they did not attend. A second source of discontent among non-Anglicans was the Penal Laws. The acts of the Irish Parliament passed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries limited Catholics' abilities to worship, take certain jobs, own land, and vote; they guaranteed the Protestant Ascendancy. The Penal Laws not only maintained power among the Protestant elite but also encoded an ideology about the very soul of Ireland. Could Ireland be a Protestant nation for a Protestant people? The Act of Union, taking effect on 1 January 1801, seemed to answer this question in the affirmative—but as power shifted more fully to London, amelioration of the Irish situation became a perennial issue. This was an issue made more acute by the rapid growth in the Irish population in the first half of the century. As a result of population growth, rents rose significantly for the majority of the Irish population. The initial success of the potato as the foundation of working-class people's nutrition in this period led to a population increase from five million in 1800 to over eight million in 1841 (Green 266). By 1845, though, the potato blight, which led to the Great Famine, had catastrophic consequences for the people and led to increasing religious [End Page 159] tensions. Although the London government made some attempt at relief, there were many fingers pointed as to why the death toll was so high, with government, local authorities, land owners, and religious institutions blaming one another for the deaths. Westminster ultimately viewed the financial element of the famine as most important, its position summarized by the slogan "Irish property should pay for Irish poverty" (Bartlett 285). Roman Catholics were disproportionately affected by the famine. Protestant religious organizations took it upon themselves to provide food for those in need—with mixed consequences. While some of these organizations were praised (such as the Quakers), others were accused of "souperism." This term was widely used in relation to Protestant groups that exchanged food for conversion to Protestantism. This practice, by most accounts, was not an overly common occurrence, but as these conversion stories circulated across a famine-stricken Ireland, sectarian tensions mounted. The Presbyterian mission's Jon Edgar made it clear in his text Cry from Connaught (1846) that the soup kitchens offered "not only bread for the body but bread of life for the soul" (qtd. in Finlay 100). While arguably exaggerated, the tales of souperism continued after the famine, and caused a wider rift in the Protestant and Catholic populations in the north and the south...