crescent-shaped
Geuzen medal at the time of the anti-Spanish
Dutch Revolt, with the slogan ("Rather Turkish than Papist"), 1570 , memorial to
Meriel Lyttelton (a daughter of
Thomas Bromley) from 1769, remembered "for Breeding up her Children in the Protestant Religion, Their Ancestors having been Papists" According to the
Oxford English Dictionary, the word
Papist was first used in 1528. The word was in common use by Protestant writers until the mid-nineteenth century, as shown by its frequent appearance in
Thomas Macaulay's
History of England from the Accession of James II and in other works of that period, including those with no sectarian bias. The word is found in certain surviving statutes of the
United Kingdom, for example in the English
Bill of Rights of 1689 and the Scottish
Claim of Right of 1689. Catholics have been excluded from the British throne for centuries. In 1701, Parliament passed the
Act of Settlement, which requires that only a Protestant monarch could rule over England and Ireland. Under the
Act of Settlement of 1701, no one who professes "the popish religion" may succeed to the throne of the
Kingdom of England and the Act continues to apply to the United Kingdom and all of the
Commonwealth Realms; until the
Succession to the Crown Act 2013 amended it with effect from 2015, the Act of Settlement also banned from the throne anyone who married "a papist". Fears that
Roman Catholic secular leaders would be
anti-Protestant and would be unduly influenced from Rome arose after all allegiance to the Pope was banned in England in the reigns of
Henry VIII and
Elizabeth I.
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), the author of ''
Gulliver's Travels, employed the term in his satirical essay A Modest Proposal, in which he proposed selling Irish babies to be eaten by wealthy English landlords. Daniel Defoe wrote in the popular Robinson Crusoe'' (1719), near the end of the novel: "[...] I began to regret having professed myself a Papist, and thought it might not be the best religion to die with." Similar terms, such as the traditional
popery and the more recent
papalism, are sometimes used, as in the
Popery Act 1698 and the Irish
Popery Act. The
Seventh-day Adventist prophetess
Ellen G. White used the terms
papist and
popery throughout her book
The Great Controversy, a volume harshly criticized for its anti-Catholic tone. During the
American presidential election of 1928, the
Democratic nominee
Al Smith was labeled a
papist by his political opponents. He was the first Roman Catholic ever to gain the presidential nomination of a major party, and this led to fears that, if he were elected, the United States government would follow the dictates of the Vatican. ,
John F. Kennedy and
Joe Biden are the only Roman Catholics to have been elected President of the United States. The term is still sometimes used today, although much less often than in earlier centuries. ==Crypto-Papism==