by these liturgical practices. The prosecutions (which were often instigated by the Church Association) gave considerable impetus to the foundation and work of the English Church Union. The Society of the Holy Cross (SSC) played a crucial role in championing and developing the use of elements of proscribed Catholic ritual in Anglicanism. Perception of ritualism as a threat to English identity For many who opposed ritualism, the key concern was to defend what they saw as the fundamentally Protestant identity of the Church of England. Nor was this just a matter of an ecclesiological argument: for many, there was a sense that Catholic worship is somehow "un-English". Catholicism was deeply associated in many minds with cultural identities which, historically, many English people had commonly treated with suspicion, especially the Spanish, the French, and the Irish. For an ideological defense of this position, it was argued that English identity was closely tied in with England's history as a Protestant country that, after the Reformation, had played a key role in opposing Catholic powers in Continental Europe (especially Spain and then France). In the minds of such people, Protestantism was inextricably identified with anti-despotic values and Catholicism with autocracy that, in the religious arena, hid behind the "disguise" of such things as complicated rituals whose meaning deliberately lacked transparency. The opposition to ritualism therefore had a deeply cultural and symbolic significance that extended far beyond purely theological concerns. Ritualists themselves were often at pains to try and present the "Englishness" of the ritual they championed by (mostly) keeping English as the language of the liturgy and reconstructing Anglo-Catholicism as a recovery of pre-Reformation Catholic forms that were specifically English: a revival of interest in the Sarum Rite (the pre-Reformation Catholic liturgy of Salisbury) was sparked off by the Ritualist movement. This tendency was also often expressed in such details as the revival in the use of the pre-Reformation Gothic forms rather than the Baroque – the Baroque was more closely linked in the minds of many with specifically continental and Counter Reformation forms. Ritualism and Christian socialism Although ritualism had an aesthetic and ideological appeal for many in the cultural elite, and had a cognate relationship with the Gothic Revival, the idea that it was inextricably linked with an inclination towards political despotism was a misapprehension. Ritualism had an appeal for many who were politically conservative and had supporters highly placed in