‘We Protestants in Masquerade’: Burning the Pope in London

Abstract

At the height of the Exclusion Crisis, an annual ‘solemn mock procession’ of the pope marched ‘through the City of London’ to a large bonfire into which an effigy of the pope was dumped. These processions took place on the accession day of Elizabeth I. They reportedly attracted as many as two hundred thousand spectators. This article reads these processions through the lens of civic ceremony, taking the performance of civic identity on the streets of London as the foundation of the threatening power of these cultural events. It demonstrates the significance of the trajectory of the march to Temple Bar, marking London’s boundary with Westminster and the court. This article also analyses the satiric broadside engravings that bolster the credibility of the processions’ central claim: that Englishness and Protestantism were inseparable and united against the foreign threat of Catholicism. With a variety of contemporary witnesses, this article challenges the claims that Protestantism had a united front at the time or that the purported statue of Elizabeth at Temple Bar was even a likeness of her. Working with the vocabulary of civic ceremony, the ‘Solemn Mock Processions’ of the Pope revive an old prejudice to coerce a unified national identity based on the exclusion of religious others.