Among Victorian Protestants, the idea of the "Norman Yoke" was sometimes linked with anti-Catholicism, with claims that the English Anglo-Saxon Church was freer of Papal influence than the Norman one. They cited events such as the Pope's blessing of William the Conqueror and the homages of various Plantagenet kings to the Papacy as proof of this idea. This linking of "Anglo-Saxon" English nationalism and anti-Catholicism influenced Charles Kingsley's novel "Hereward the Wake" (1866), which, like "Ivanhoe", helped popularize the image of a romantic Anglo-Saxon England destroyed by the Normans. On the other hand, Thomas Carlyle rejected the idea of the "Norman Yoke"; in his "History of Friedrich II of Prussia" Carlyle argued the Norman conquest had been beneficial because it had helped unify England.