Anti-Catholicism Catholics, and his replacement by a Dutch Protestant. For decades the Stuarts were supported by France in plots to invade and conquer Britain, and anti-Catholicism persisted. The Gordon Riots of 1780 were a violent anti-Catholic protest in London against the Papists Act of 1778, which was intended to reduce official discrimination against British Catholics. Lord George Gordon, head of the Protestant Association warned that the law would enable Catholics in the British Army to become a dangerous threat. The protest evolved into riots and widespread looting. Local magistrates were afraid of reprisals and did not issue the riot act. There
Anti-Catholicism in the United States increasing waves of Catholic immigrants, particularly from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and Mexico. It often focused on the alleged intrigues of Catholic states or Catholic peoples against the majority Protestant United States. Historians have studied the motivations for anti-Catholicism. The historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. characterized prejudice against the Catholics as "the deepest bias in the history of the American people." The conservative writer Peter Viereck once commented that (in 1960) "Catholic baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals." The historian John Higham described anti-Catholicism as "the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history". The historian Joseph G.