Yesterday, I posted the first half of my review  of Maura Jane
Farrelly’s “Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic
Identity.” Today, we conclude the review. The heart of
Farrelly’s book is her account of efforts in the years after the
Glorious Revolution (so-called!) to restrict the rights of
Catholics in Maryland. Farrelly builds on the work of previous
scholars in showing how anti-Catholicism was a unifying
political principle after 1688, first in Britain, but also in
America. In both countries, the on-going wars with France, in
which the threat of a Jacobite restoration was always present,
the essential Protestant nature of the British nation was
brought to the fore. Britons on both sides of the Atlantic came
to understand that their religious and civil liberties were
bound together and both were, consequently, threatened by any
encroachment of Romanism, priestcraft and arbitrary government.
The efforts of Maryland’s Protestants to further strip Catholics
of their rights, therefore, were part o