Religion and identity in modern British history (Presidential address)

Abstract

‘The Church of England’ declared a leading article in The Times on 8 July 1980 ‘is the British national church’. Such a novel declaration produced apoplexy at the presidential breakfast-table. My topic is an impossibly wide one, only tackled previously, in his distinctive fashion, by Dr Daniel Jenkins. I cannot hope to cover every aspect of it. That apparently innocent sentence in the newspaper does, however, provide me with my text. Its context was an article concerning itself with the possibility that the Prince of Wales might marry a Roman Catholic. Not even a president of the Ecclesiastical History Society can offer comment as to probabilities in this matter and, like The Times, we are only concerned with principles. Concluding, perhaps not surprisingly, that it would seem intolerable to the ‘broad public’ that an excellent heir to the throne should be excluded because of his wife’s religion it added that ‘any sensible person’ would hope that the matter would not be raised. There were still what it called ‘anti-Catholic prejudices’ among a relatively small minority in England and Wales, a rather larger minority in Scotland and a considerable proportion of the Protestant community in Northern Ireland. A constitutional issue ‘which would bring all these birds flapping down out of the rafters’ was not desirable.