The Religious ‘Persecutions’ in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and British Sympathy for Italian Nationalism, 1851–1853

Abstract

AbstractThe history of British relations with the states of pre‐unification Italy is a neglected field of enquiry. The research that has been undertaken has tended to focus on the generally good relationship Britain shared with the Kingdom of Sardinia, the state which presided over Italy's national unification between 1859 and 1861. By contrast, the extent to which Britain's poor relations with the Papal States, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and the impact that negative perceptions of those countries had upon the development of British sympathy for Italian nationalism, are little understood. This article on British reactions to what the Victorians perceived as religious ‘persecutions’ in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany begins to redress this imbalance. Tuscany was in many respects one of the more progressive states in the Italian peninsula. Its government was moderate compared with those at Naples and Rome, it was affluent and it invested in a modern communications infrastructure. However, during the years following the revolutionary upheaval of 1848–9, the Tuscan state's policy of religious retrenchment led to a sequence of events – some of which involved British subjects – which were perceived as examples of religious ‘persecution’ in Victorian Britain. British reactions to these events illustrate the extent to which religion could affect British foreign policy during the mid‐nineteenth century, and they help to explain the emergence of British sympathy for the Italian nationalist cause during the 1850s.