The Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 involved two Parliamentary
Acts which ended Catholicism’s monopoly over the Church of England. The Act of
Supremacy re-established the Church’s independence from Rome, with Parliament
conferring the title of Supreme Governor of the Church of England to the
reigning monarch, while the Act of Uniformity set the order of prayer to be
used in the English Book of Common Prayer and that abstaining from weekly
sermons would result in a 12d fine.¹ The Marian Bishops who refused to
submit to the settlement were removed from their position of authority,
effectively removing any nationwide Catholic leadership.²Pope Pius IV was
hoping Elizabeth may abandon such heretical policies, which is why it took till
1563 for him to decree the Church of England services as heretical which was a
message that was not to reach the English public until 1566.³ Catholicism continued to exist and be practiced in
Elizabethan England, especially in areas where government authority was least
effective like Wales.⁴ However without the support of the
state Scarisbrick notes that the Marian clergy’s, ‘fatal shortcoming was that
they had no way of replacing themselves.⁵
’English Catholics were
therefore without substantial leadership, limited in their devotional prospects
and being obliged to conform to a heretical faith of their sovereign.
This study will consider the multiple ways in which English
Catholics responded to negative impacts of the settlement by referring to
contemporaries like Robert Parsons and historians like Walshman, Bossy and
Haigh. Church Papistry, recusancy, persecution and loyalty to the realm will
all be subjects under scrutiny in order to assess what role each played in the
state of Catholicism during the English Reformation.
A recusant was a person who did not attend church sermons,
and due to the fact such an act was a fineable offense resulted in many
Catholics initially becoming Church Papists who attended sermons but privately
kept their Catholic beliefs.⁶ Most saw their consciousness as
determining their faith, a matter that was not simply expressed by what Church
one attended because there their level of conformity could be minimal, for
instance by refusing to partake in the communion.⁷ Not taking communion was not a civil
offence, spiritual punishments like excommunication could be meted out by the Church of England, but as Catholics
saw this church as illegitimate they were not that threatened by it.⁸ As a result many did not see much trouble with attending
services because they could ignore its heretical messages while avoiding being
penalised. There was also the fact that the ideals of the Reformation such as
iconoclasm were only slowly introduced by unsympathetic local churchwardens in
places like Lancashire and Essex, resulting in few noticing any real
difference.⁹ For instance a visitor to a parish
in Cheshire in 1578 described it as a den of popery where, ‘Ther is in the church an altare standing undefaced. There lacketh a
lynnon clothe and a covering for the communion table a chest for the poore and
keeping the Register in.’ and it was run by, ‘Jane...an old
no one (nun) is an evell woman and teacheth false doctrine. They refuse to
communicate with usuall breade. None come
to the Communion iii tymes a yeare.’¹⁰
Marshall notes that in the 1560s there was indeed a continued
use of pre-Reformation things like altars, the sign of the cross and even
communions for the dead mainly in peripheral regions like the north, but even
in southern communities like Suffolk and Sussex.¹¹
To many Church Papists in these regions the Reformation cannot of appeared to
be too well entrenched which may have led some to feel that their outward
conformity was a temporary compromise, which would be eventually resolved by the
Church of England returning under papal supervision.¹² Even some Marian bishops
like Langdale and Pursglove said that to show outward conformity by being a
church papist was fine for Catholics to do, because by attending services a lot
of stress and conflict was avoided and if once there they did not fully embrace
this heretical faith their consciousness would be clear.¹³ Church Papists felt
by outwardly conforming to the statutes of the Elizabethan settlement,
Catholics were able to live lives unmolested by the state, and by not
acknowledging its spiritual legitimacy their consciences’ were free of sin.
However
the seminary priests felt differently, Jesuit preacher Campion condemned both
Langdale and Pursglove for their endorsement of Church Papistry.¹⁴ Fellow
Jesuit Robert Parsons also decried the idea of Catholics attending these
heretic’s ‘naughty service’ and that
to do so would leave such people open to the ‘infection’ of heresy. ¹⁵ These seminary priests were trained
abroad in English Colleges like Douai and Rome and had returned to England in
order to work as missionaries in a land under a heretical church, thus
prolonging the presence of Catholic priests many decades after the Marian
clergy had died out.¹⁶ These seminary priests wanted to take a different
approach than what they felt the Marian clergy was doing, which was surviving
within the enemy’s religious framework. Bossy feels these priests wanted to
create a Catholic community completely separate from the Church of England.¹⁷
Parsons would write in 1600 that he felt the seminaries had saved Catholicism
from conforming completely with the heretical Church of England, whereas the
Marian Church with its feeble, pre-Reformation hierarchy was allowing it to
happen.¹⁸ The seminary priests were not trying to physically rebuild what had
been lost, but were in fact on an evangelical mission to build up the faith,
unity and integrity of English Catholics, something they felt the community had
lost.¹⁹ These priests were reformers who realised the need to confront
Protestantism head on in order to strengthen Catholicism. They preached and
distributed an English translation of the bible in order to counter the Book of
Common Prayer, because Cardinal Allen realised that without a Catholic version,
the laity was only left with the ‘corrupt
version’ which would certainly lead them astray.²⁰ Priests in the country
were there to ensure that people understood the correct faith and to make sure
their spiritual needs were satisfied by holding things like masses. In order to
do this they needed to try and evade the authorities, which they did via things
like disguises and a well established safe house system from the
pre-Elizabethan period.²¹ The grand aim of many seminary priests, especially
the Jesuits, was to convert England, as is evident from an account Parsons
wrote about a meeting of himself and other Catholic exiles in Rome in 1575, ‘all these wished well the conversion of
their country, but agreed not well in the meanes or manner of consultation.’²²
Carrafiello feels this led to a kind of Holy War discourse against the heathen persecutors of Elizabeth’s
government, who would one day fall to their Catholic victims.²³ Jesuits and
other seminary priests responded to the Elizabethan settlement by openly
rejecting it and spread a message of its heretical tendencies and inevitable
destruction. They opposed church papistry because they saw it as a sign of
surrender, which is why they appealed to Catholics to become recusants because
this showed that they were fully opposed to the Church of England.²⁴
It
would be incorrect to suggest the seminary priests began the Catholic response
of recusancy to the Elizabethan Settlement, there had been former members of
the Marian clergy who outwardly conformed but actually performed masses in
secret for their congregation in the 1560s.²⁵ Haigh notes that by the 1570s there
were approximately around fifty Marian priests leading recusant masses.²⁶ In
truth recusancy was not continuously enforced by the authorities and Questier
feels the authorities were quite selective in who they targeted and when.²⁷ For
example one observer noted how if somebody was deemed a ‘good fellow’ in the community he saw 'no
pursevante in Ingland would ever lay handes on such a man for a recusant.'²⁸
Thus showing there were places that valued their community harmony over their
religious purity. There were other methods to avoid punishment such as only
turning up occasionally to services in order to show outward conformity, while
the rest of the time is spent as a recusant, such a practice was used to great
effect by families like the Trollopps of Thornley and the Stapletons of
Carleton.²⁹ However the separatist expression of the seminary priests certainly
had some impact because the amount of recorded cases of recusancy rose during
the 1570s and 1580s which is either an indication that they were encouraging
more of it or were making the authorities more vigilant.³⁰ The Jesuits had
established recusancy as the definition of opposition to the Church of England,
but instead of being left without devotional guidance the Jesuits tried to
serve these recusants spiritual needs.
In
order to bring about the conversion of England, the seminary priests seem to
have taken a top-down approach, mainly looking to serve the needs of the gentry
because they were influential allies to have in the conversion process. John
Gerard told the first Jesuit missionaries in 1580, ‘The way I think, to go about making converts is to bring the gentry
over first and then their servants, for Catholic gentlefolk must have Catholic
servants.’³¹ Carrafiello has also made the point that by appealing to the
gentry, seminaries felt they may be able to influence them into working to
politically undermine the government.³² The gentry would often try to employ
priests as household chaplains, there was a ready supply of seminary priests to
employ and many were more than willing to serve as chaplains as it provided
them with security and comfort.³³ Gentlemen would certainly be able to furnish
their homes for all they needed in Catholic devotion, which is why gentlemen
like Lord Vaux commented that his house was his parish.³⁴ However Haigh feels this
actually undermined the mission of trying to preserve English Catholicism.
Haigh notes that the south, in particularly London, was overrepresented by
Catholic priests while other regions like Wales and northern counties with high
Catholic populations had a limited amount of priests.³⁵ In 1586 Robert Southall
commented on this disparity:
‘there are
many counties, each containing not a few Catholics, in which there is not a
single priest, while the priests actually working in the harvest betake themselves
in great numbers to one or two counties, leaving the others devoid of pastors.’³⁶
This
disparity continued to be a problem for decades, as Christopher Lee’s comment
on Oxfordshire in 1633 suggest, ‘there
are so many priest in this county it is difficult to find shelter for them
all.’³⁷ Haigh does acknowledge the work of seminary priests who did serve
the needs of the poor such as John Leyton in 1620s Lancashire, but notes that
such priests were an overworked minority who were not numerous enough to reach
out to every Catholic. Haigh feels that in expense for securing priests to
serve the needs of the gentry, popular Catholicism in areas without Catholic
priests steadily gave way to full conformity with the Church of England.³⁸
Increasingly
harsh legislation was introduced by the government in the 1570s and 1580s; such
as increasing recusancy fines to £20 and making it a treasonable offence to be
a priest who was ordained abroad, or to harbour such people. This legislation
was to result in the executions of 123 seminary priests and 59 lay Catholics
between 1577 and 1603. Such legislation was deemed necessary in a time when the
Pope and Spanish King were calling for Elizabeth’s deposition and when treacherous
plots were being discovered domestically.³⁹ A language of unity under
persecution was created by Catholics like Thomas Hide who felt that this was
actually a good thing:
‘Notwithstanding all
this, Gods Churche hath her faythfull flocke that confesseth the catholike
trueth openly, mauger the divell, heresie, and tyrannie. And notwithstanding
all worldly disgraces, overthwarts injuries, persecution amd execution, yet it
is there left some good number that never bowed their knees to Baal, never
received the breaded Communion, neither went to the schismaticall service. Yea
somenumber that be ready to render their goods to the world, and their soules
to God, as willing in this quarrel to dye as to live... It is the blessed wil
of God that the glory of his militant church should multiply in persecution,
should increase under oppression.’ ⁴⁰
It
is for this reason that condemned Catholics made such an effort to show they
were Catholic martyrs before they were executed by wearing their vestments,
stressing their conviction and even publicly forgiving and converting other
condemned prisoners.⁴¹ However it seems that others did not maintain the same
resilience, with many returning to the show outward conformity by attending
sermons again due to the increased risk of disobeying the regime. There were
Catholics who remained loyal to the state and there were those who feared its
ability to punish, as a result many Catholics kept their beliefs private, thus
undermining the Jesuits attempt to confront the regime as it created divisions
within the English Catholic Community.⁴² However Aveling thinks instead of this
being a sign of surrender, ‘It was the Church-papists who saved the Catholic
Community.’ This is due to the fact the recusants and their money had been
depleted by state oppression; the conformists preserved their numbers and
capital and were even able to move Catholicism towards accepting its position
in Reformation England, as a quiet, minority faith.⁴³ Thus the calls of the
secular clergy and Appellant Party became more popular amongst lay Catholics
who were weary of rebellious activism, because these groups wanted a future for
Catholicism where it was an organised and tolerated group within society.⁴⁴
Under
James I, Catholicism continued to grow despite attempts to stop it doing so by
exiling all Catholic priests in 1604 and by making non-communicating in church
a penal offence. This is because James was willing to accept a subject’s
outward conformity as a substantial enough sign of loyalty, which is why Church
Papists like Henry Howard were able to be attendants at the royal court.⁴⁵ With
the exception of a few Catholics like Catesby, most were willing to stay loyal
to this merciful monarchy, who did not rigorously hunt Catholicism down and was
even willing to grant concessions like the Episcopal position for Appelant
William Bishop in 1623.⁴⁶ However this loyalty was conditional, with the
majority of Catholic priests and members of the laity rejecting James’s Oath of
Allegiance statute, an oath which recusants would take in which they proclaimed
their loyalty to the monarchy and rejected any papal attempts to depose him as
unjust. Most rejected this because they felt such an oath put them in a
tentative position between their spiritual and sovereign leader.⁴⁷ The growing
number of seminary priests under James led to more Catholics spiritual needs
being met and the idea of household religion with chaplains became firmly
established for Catholic gentlemen, but despite this growth several sections of
the English Catholic society were still left unattended to.⁴⁸
The seminary priests, who gradually replaced the Marian
clergy as the main providers of Catholic preaching under the reign of
Elizabeth, were dependent on the capital and hospitality provided by lay
Catholics. The Catholic gentry were able to easily secure their services and
were therefore able to preserve their faith, but for other laymen it was
largely out of their control and as Haigh has already indicated the spiritual
needs of all English Catholics weren’t fulfilled. Such people would receive no
Catholic teaching at a time when many were obliged to attend Church of England
services where it is likely they would undergo, ‘not rapid conversion but
grudging conformity.’⁴⁹ Although these people were deprived
of such devotional structures and personnel by the government, it also should
be acknowledged that some of the seminary priests made themselves unavailable
by targeting the government by becoming martyrs and trying to encourage open
defiance to the Church of England. This encouraged greater government persecution
and penalties, which many of the laity felt unable to confront despite the
rhetoric of the persecuted Godly and therefore felt obliged to conform. Despite the prominence of Catholic gentlemen,
this group was largely unwilling to participate in any form of regicide in
order to convert the nation either due to their loyalty to the monarch or their
fear of being destroyed.⁵⁰ English Catholicism was able to
survived in its minority status and in places it did evolve into an evangelical
form of worship, however due to the failure of political intervention and
effective government legislation meant that Catholicism would never be anything
more.
Endnotes
1.
P. Marshall, Reformation England 1480-1642 (London, 2003), pp.115-119
2.
J.J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984), pp.138-140
3.
Marshall, Reformation, p.171
4.
C. Haigh, 'From Monopoly to Minority:
Catholicism in Tudor England', TRHS 31 (1981), p.132
5.
Scarisbrick, English People, pp.141-145
6.
Marshall, Reformation, pp.169-171
7.
J. Bossy, 'The Character of
Elizabethan Catholicism' in Crisis in Europe 1560-1660, ed.
Aston, T., (London, 1965), p.226
8.
A. Walsham, Church Papists (Woodbridge, 1994), p.86
9.
Ibid.,
pp.14-17
10.
K.R. Wark, Elizabethan Recusancy in Cheshire (Manchester, 1971), pp.80-81
11.
Marshall, Reformation, p.171
12.
P. Holmes, Resistance and Compromise (1982), pp.108-124
13.
A. Walsham, '"Yielding to the
extremity of the time": conformity, orthodoxy and the post-Reformation
Catholic community', in Conformity and orthodoxy in the
English church, c.1560-1660, ed. Lake, P., and Questier, M.,
(Woodbridge, 2000), p.229
14.
M. Questier, 'What happened to English
Catholicism after the English Reformation?', History 85 (2000), p.30
15.
R. Parsons, [A] brief discours contaying certayne reasons why Catholiques refuse to
goe to church (1580), ed. L.
Hicks (London, 1942).
16.
Bossy, ‘Character’, p.231
17.
J. Bossy, The
English Catholic Community 1570-1850 (London, 1975), p.114
18.
R. Parsons, Story of Domesticall Difficulties, ed. J.H. Pollen (London, 1906).
19.
Questier, What happened, p.39
20.
Letter of Cardinal Allen to Dr.
Vendeville dated 16 September 1578, trans. in The First and Second Diaries of
the English College, Douay, ed. T. F. Knox (London, 1878), p. xli.
21.
P. Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early
Modem Europe (Cambridge, 1990), p.189
22.
Parsons, Domesticall
23.
M. Carrafiello, 'English Catholicism
and the Jesuit mission of 1580-1581', HJ 37 (1994), pp.765-768
24.
C. Haigh, 'The Fall of a Church or the
Rise of a Sect? Post-Reformation Catholicism in England', HJ 21 (1978), p.184
25.
A. Walsham, Church Papists (Woodbridge, 1994), p.15
26.
C. Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge, 1975),
p.256
27.
Questier, What happened, p.35
28.
Verstegan, R., An Advertisement written to a Secretarie of my L. Treasureres of
Ingland (Antwerp, 1592), p.44
29.
Questier, What happened, p.36
30.
Marshall, Reformation, p.178
31.
J. Gerard, Autobiography of an Elizabethan, ed. P. Caraman (London, 1951),
p.33
32.
Carrafiello, ‘Jesuit’, pp.771-772
33.
Haigh, Monopoly, p.137
34.
Bossy, Community, p.225
35.
Haigh, Monopoly, pp.133-134
36.
J.H. Pollen, Unpublished documents relating to the English martyrs (London,
1908), p.309
37.
Haigh, Monopoly, p.134
38.
Ibid.,
pp.144-146
39.
Marshall, Reformation, pp.173-180
40.
T. Hide, A consolatorie epistle to the afflicted catholikes (Louvain, 1580).
41.
P. Lake, and M. Questier, 'Agency,
appropriation and rhetoric under the gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the state
in early modern England'. Past & Present 153
(1996), pp.100-107.
42.
Walshman, Papists, pp.69-77
43.
J.C.H. Aveling, The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from
Reformation to Emancipation (London, 1976), p.162
44.
Bossy, J., ‘'The English Catholic
Community 1603-1625' in The Reign of James VI and I, ed. Smith,
A.G.R. (London, 1973), pp.93-105.
45.
LaRocca, J.J., "'Who Can't Pray
with Me, Can't Love Me": Toleration and Early Jacobean Recusant Policy', JBS 23 (1984), pp.26-35.
46.
Marshall, Reformation, pp.185-188
47.
LaRocca, ‘Can’t Love
me’, pp.32-35
48.
Bossy, ‘1603-1625’, pp.101-104
49.
Walshman, Papists, p.7
50.
Bossy, ‘Character’, p.246
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