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What was the South African War of 1899-1902 really about? Was it about gold, high finance, and geopolitical maneuvers? Or was it about God's wrath and the desire of the papacy to destroy the Protestant British Empire? Most historians posit some variation of the former. A vocal subculture of anti-Ritualist Protestants living at the turn of the century, however, would have argued the latter. The anti-Ritualists were an alliance of Evangelical Anglicans and Nonconformists, united by their strong dislike of Catholicism. For them the South African War was not merely a secular conflict; it was a spiritual warfare between Protestantism and Catholicism breaking out into human history. Historians today have forgotten that the South African War was not the only crisis afoot in Great Britain between 1899 and 1902. In fact, it was engulfed by what contemporaries called the "Great Church Crisis," a conflict between the Protestant and Ritualist (or Anglo-Catholic) parties within the Church of England occurring between 1898 and 1906. For many anti-Ritualist Protestants, the two crises - the South African War abroad and the war on Ritualism and Catholicism at home - bled into one another so that the war appeared to be directly linked to domestic religious strife.
Victorian panic over the supposed Romanization of the Church of England dates back to the inauguration of the Oxford Movement in 1833 and was heightened by the conversion of John Henry Newman in 1845, the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales in 1850, and the attempt to pass legislation against Ritualism in 1874.1 The sense of crisis among Protestants about the growth of Anglo-Catholicism within the Church of England and the growing assertiveness of Roman Catholicism from outside came to a head in 1898 when diree developments precipitated a renewed moral panic: the 1897 publication of Walter Walsh's Secret History of the Oxford Movement, the 1898 ami- Ritualist protests of John Kensit, and Liberal leader William Harcourt's 1898 Parliamentary speeches against Ritualism.2 Harcourt and his political allies feared that a Roman Catholic conspiracy would bring the Church of England back under papal control through the instrument of Ritualism.3 For Harcourt and most Liberals, British prosperity and freedom depended upon independence from foreign rule, including the influence of the papacy....