'A Trial for the Patience of Reason'? Grand Tourists and Anti-Catholicism after 1745

It has been thought that anti-Catholicism faded from elite British thinking after the Jacobite rising of 1745, evidenced most obviously by the passing of three Relief Acts between 1778 and 1829. This view needs some modification because anti-Catholicism was still rehearsed extensively in Grand Tour literature well into the nineteenth century. Three common tropes of elite anti-Catholic discourse are explored: attitudes to Jesuits, monks and nuns; places of pilgrimage; and the construction of Roman Catholicism as a twofold system of faith. The conclusion is drawn that anti-Catholicism was maintained because it was essential both to Protestant identity and to toleration.