Bigotry or Liberalism? Dissenting Politics and the Liberal Party

Abstract

Chapter Six demonstrates how anti-Catholicism and dissenting co-operation played a major role in altering the complexion of Scottish electoral politics for over a decade. It examines the political alliance forged within the Liberal party by the Free and United Presbyterian churches based largely if not solely on a shared opposition to the Maynooth endowment. Throughout Scotland the alliance allowed middle-class radical dissenters to wrest control of the Liberal party from the ruling Whig elite, and dominate Scottish elections after 1846. As was the case during the Voluntary Controversy, religion and politics were intertwined in Scotland and across Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, and Scottish dissent – especially voluntaryism – was often synonymous with the more radical elements of liberalism. The chapter explores the extent to which this alliance, so successful across Scotland at the 1847 and 1852 general elections, allowed for a unified political vision that moved beyond Maynooth and articulated a broader anti-Whig and radical agenda within both the Free and United Presbyterian churches. Did a liberal-radical vision of dissenting Presbyterian politics emerge in the years after 1843, or was the electoral alliance of the 1840s and 1850s simply a marriage of convenience based on the narrow platform of anti-Maynooth opposition?