Maynooth 1845 | When a Protestant Queen Blushed for Ireland, Co. Kildare

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In 1845, Britain proposed repairs to a seminary it had built in Co. Kildare. Westminster duly lost its mind. A barrister printed his conclusions in capital letters. A Protestant Queen privately noted that the Protestants were 'a disgrace to the nation.' Gladstone resigned from Cabinet over the vote, then voted for it anyway.

James Lord's 1855 Digest presents 296 pages of forensic outrage against the Maynooth Grant. Cobbett — Church of England Protestant, unlikely defender of Catholic Ireland — provides three hundred years of inconvenient context. Kildare, it turns out, was fine. The argument was always somewhere else.

Features readings from James Lord's Digest of the Maynooth Commission Report (1855) and The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol. II (1908).