Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain 9780754657231, 9781472432520, 9781472432537, 2013043325, 075465723X

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Copyright © 2014. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Walsham, Alexandra. Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=1718589. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-16 08:03:30.

Copyright © 2014. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain

Walsham, Alexandra. Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=1718589. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-16 08:03:30.

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For John Bossy

Walsham, Alexandra. Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=1718589. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-16 08:03:30.

Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain Alexandra Walsham

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Trinity College, Cambridge, UK

Walsham, Alexandra. Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=1718589. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-16 08:03:30.

© Alexandra Walsham 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Alexandra Walsham has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street Union Road Suite 3-1 Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818 Surrey, GU9 7PT USA England www.ashgate.com

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Walsham, Alexandra, 1966– Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain / by Alexandra Walsham. pages cm.—(Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-5723-1 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-1-4724-3252-0 (ebook)— ISBN 978-1-4724-3253-7 (epub) 1. Counter-Reformation—Great Britain. 2. Catholic Church—Great Britain—History—16th century. 3. Catholic Church—Great Britain—History—17th century. 4. Counter-Reformation— England. 5. Catholic Church—England—History—16th century. 6. Catholic Church—England—History—17th century. 7. Great Britain—Church history— 16th century. 8. Great Britain—Church history—17th century. 9. England— Church history—16th century 10. England—Church history—17th century. I. Title. BX1492.W275 2015 282’.41009031—dc23 2013043325 ISBN 9780754657231 (hbk) ISBN 9781472432520 (ebk – PDF) ISBN 9781472432537 (ebk – ePUB)

IV

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Contents List of Figures Series Editor’s Preface Preface and Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations 1

In the Lord’s Vineyard: Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain

vii xi xiii xvii

1

Part I  Conscience and Conformity 2

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3 4

Yielding to the Extremity of the Time: Conformity and Orthodoxy

53

England’s Nicodemites: Crypto-Catholicism and Religious Pluralism

85

Ordeals of Conscience: Casuistry and Confessional Identity103

Part II Miracles and Missionaries 5

Miracles and the Counter-Reformation Mission

129

6

Holywell and the Welsh Catholic Revival

177

7

Catholic Reformation and the Cult of Angels

207

Part III  Communication and Conversion 8

Dumb Preachers: Catholicism and the Culture of Print

235

9

Unclasping the Book? The Douai-Rheims Bible

285

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vi

10

Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain

This New Army of Satan: the Jesuit Mission and the Formation of Public Opinion

315

Part IV Translation and Transmutation 11 12

Translating Trent? English Catholicism and the Counter Reformation

341

Beads, Books and Bare Ruined Choirs: Transmutations of Ritual Life

369

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Bibliography399 Index473

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List of Figures

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2.1 2.2

‘Reasons of Refusall’: Robert Persons, A brief discours containing certayne reasons why Catholiques refuse to goe to Church (Douai [London secret press], 1580), title-page. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Peterborough.E.5.12.58 Bell’s ‘comfortable advertisement’ on conformity denounced: Henry Garnet, An apology against the defence of schisme ([London secret press], 1593), titlepage. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Syn.8.59.123. 65

5.1 Garnet’s straw: ‘Miraculosa effigies R.P. Henrici Garneti’: from Andreas Eudaemon-Joannes, Apologia (Cologne, 1610). © The Trustees of the British Museum. Department of Prints and Drawings: 1861,0518.1314; AN1024564. 5.2 Image of the crucifix discovered in the trunk of an ash tree on the estate of Sir Thomas Stradling in Glamorganshire, 1561: Nicholas Harpsfield, Dialogi sex contra summi pontificatus, monasticae vitae, sanctorum, sacrarum imaginum oppugnatores, et pseudomartyres (Antwerp, 1573 edn), fold-out plate attached to p. 369. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Pet. A. 2.8. 5.3 The interior vision that led to the conversion of John Genings: John Genings, The life and death of Mr Edmund Geninges (St Omer, 1614), facing p. 94. By permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. Shelfmark C. 10.80(1). 6.1 6.2

Exterior of the chapel over St Winefride’s Well. © Crown copyright: Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. Bathing pool of St Winefride’s Well. © Crown copyright: Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales.

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148

155

164

180 181

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6.3 Interior of St Winefride’s Well. © Crown copyright: Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. 6.4 Robert, abbot of Shrewsbury, The admirable life of Saint Wenefride virgin, martyr, abbesse, trans. J[ohn] F[alconer] ([St Omer], 1635), title-page and frontispiece. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter. Shelfmark Syon Abbey 1635/ROB. 6.5 The martyrdom of St Winefride: Giovanni Battista de Cavalleriis, Ecclesiae Anglicanae Trophaea (Rome, [1584]). © The British Library Board. Shelfmark 551.e.35. 6.6 Holywell in the early eighteenth century: engraving. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Prints and Drawings: AN128898001, Registration number: 1867,0309.638; British XVIIc Mounted Roy.

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7.1

182

190 192

200

Jeremias Drexelius, The angel guardian’s clock (Rouen, [1630]), title-page. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Syn.8.62.6.218

8.1 Henry VIII distributing the word of God (verbum dei) to the English people: The bible in Englyshe [The Great Bible] (London, 1539), title-page. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Young 35. 8.2 The bible outweighing all the pope’s ‘trinkets’: A new-yeeres-gift for the pope ([London, c.1625]). By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 8.3 ‘A Showe of the Protestants Petigrew as ye have it before at large deducted’, in The apologie of Fridericus Staphylus … intreating of the true and right understanding of holy Scripture: of the translation of the Bible in to the vulgar tongue: of disagreement in doctrine amonge the Protestants, trans. Thomas Stapleton (Antwerp, 1565), fold-out plate, between sigs Gg4 and Hh1. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark 698.d.1. 8.4 The execution of Margaret Clitherow at York, 1586, from Richard Verstegan, Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis (Antwerp, 1587), p. 77. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark 4570.d.21.

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236

237

255

262

List of Figures

ix

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8.5 Protestant laypeople following the preacher in their bibles compared with Catholics fingering their rosary beads: John Foxe, Actes and monuments (London, 1610 edn), detail from title-page. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark K*7.1. 271 8.6, 8.7 Books for the illiterate?: Godly contemplations for the unlearned ([Antwerp, 1575]), title-page and sig. H1r. By permission of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Shelfmark Δ.14.10.277 8.8 The literature of private prayer: A method, to meditate on the psalter, or great rosarie of our blessed ladie (Antwerp [English secret press], 1598), sigs E8v–F1r. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark 3456.aa.10. 279 9.1 9.2 9.3

The Rheims New Testament: The new testament of Jesus Christ, translated faithfully into English, out of the authentical Latin (Rheims, 1582), title-page. By permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. Shelfmark C.12.23. 288 Anti-Protestant annotations on Colossians 2: The new testament of Jesus Christ, translated faithfully into English, out of the authentical Latin (Rheims, 1582), pp. 540–41. By permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. Shelfmark C.12.23.305 St Mark writing the Gospel: The new testament … the fourth edition, enriched with pictures ([Rouen?], 1633), illustration facing sig. A1r. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter. Shelfmark 1633/BIB. 311

10.1

A Protestant warning to beware of false prophets: A newe secte of friars called Capichini ([London, 1580]). © The British Library Board. Shelfmark Huth 50 (43).

12.1 12.2

‘Certaine of the Popes Merchandize lately sent over into England’, fold-out plate in B[ernard] G[arter], A newe yeares gifte dedicated to the popes holiness and all the Catholikes addicted to the sea of Rome (London, 1579). © The British Library Board. Shelfmark 3932.dd.15. ‘Lady Hungerford’s Meditations upon the Beades’, fold-out plate in John Bucke, Instructions on the use of the beades (Louvain, 1589). © The British Library Board. Shelfmark Huth 75.

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326

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380

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12.3 ‘The Prospect of Glasenbury Abby’: William Stukeley, Itinerarium Curiosum (London, 1724), plate 37. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Ll.11.61. 12.4 The ruined Lady Chapel, Mount Grace Priory, a destination of Catholic pilgrims in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Samuel and Nathaniel Buck, A Collection of Engravings of Castles, and Abbeys in England, 3 vols (London, 1726–39), i. 12. By permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. Shelfmark L. 6.56–58.

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390

391

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Series Editor’s Preface Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700 counter-balances the traditional, still-influential understanding of medieval (or Catholic) and reformation (or Protestant) religious history that has long resulted in neglect of the middle ground, both chronological and ideological. Continuities between the middle ages and early modern Europe remain overlooked or underestimated, in contrast to the radical discontinuities, and in studies of the later period especially, the identification of ‘reformation’ with various kinds of Protestantism too often leaves evidence of the vitality and creativity of the Catholic church, whether in its Roman or local manifestations, out of account. The series therefore covers all varieties of religious behavior, broadly interpreted, not just (or even mainly) traditional institutional and doctrinal church history, and is to the maximum degree possible interdisciplinary, comparative and global, as well as non-confessional. The goal is to understand religion, primarily of the ‘Catholic’ variety, as a broadly human phenomenon, rather than as a privileged mode of access to superhuman realms, even implicitly. The period covered, 1300–1700, embraces the moment which saw an almost complete transformation of the place of religion in the life of Europeans, whether considered as a system of beliefs, as an institution, or as a set of social and cultural practices. In 1300, vast numbers of Europeans, from the pope down, fully expected Jesus’s return and the beginning of His reign on earth. By 1700, very few Europeans, of whatever level of education, would have subscribed to such chiliastic beliefs. Pierre Bayle’s notorious sarcasms about signs and portents are not idiosyncratic. Likewise, in 1300 the vast majority of Europeans probably regarded the pope as their spiritual head; the institution he headed was probably the most tightly integrated and effective bureaucracy in Europe. Most Europeans were at least nominally Christian, and the pope had at least nominal knowledge of that fact. The papacy, as an institution, played a central role in high politics, and the clergy in general formed an integral part of most governments, whether central or local. By 1700, Europe was divided into a myriad of different religious allegiances, and even those areas officially subordinate to the pope were both more nominally Catholic in belief (despite colossal efforts at imposing uniformity) and also in allegiance than they had been four hundred years earlier. The pope had

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become only one political factor, and not one of the first rank. The clergy, for its part, had virtually disappeared from secular governments as well as losing much of its local authority. The stage was set for the Enlightenment.

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Thomas F. Mayer, Founding Series Editor

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Preface and Acknowledgements This collection of essays is intended as a contribution to our understanding of how the Catholics of England, Wales, and to a lesser extent Scotland, responded to the Reformation and adapted to the proscription and persecution of their religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It reflects the development of my thinking on post-Reformation Catholicism in the years since the publication of Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (1993). Prefaced by an extended introduction written especially for this volume, the chapters presented here in revised, updated and expanded form were published between 2000 and 2010. Some were commissioned for volumes; others appeared in journals and conference proceedings. Despite their genesis at different times during the last decade and a half, collectively they offer a coherent vision of how these minority Catholic communities energetically resisted their absorption into the Protestant kingdoms that comprised the British Isles. Readers will note points of intersection and themes in common between the essays. I have not sought to eliminate all areas of repetition, in order to preserve the integrity of the arguments developed in individual chapters. Errors have been corrected, new evidence has been incorporated where it has come to light and adjustments have been made to signal and reflect more recent historiographical interventions. Earlier versions of these essays appeared in the following locations. Chapter 2: ‘“Yielding to the Extremity of the Time”: Conformity, Orthodoxy and the Post-Reformation Catholic Community’, in Peter Lake and Michael Questier (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church 1560–1642 (Boydell and Brewer, 2000), pp. 211–36. Chapter 3: ‘England’s Nicodemites: Crypto-Catholicism and Religious Pluralism in the Post-Reformation Context’, in Keith Cameron, Mark Greengrass and Penny Roberts (eds), The Adventure of Religious Pluralism in Early Modern France (Peter Lang 2000), pp. 287–303. Chapter 4: ‘Ordeals of Conscience: Casuistry, Conformity and Confessional Identity in Early Modern England’, in Harald Braun and Edward Vallance (eds), Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe 1500–1700 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 32–48, 191–6. Chapter 5: ‘Miracles and the Counter-Reformation Mission to England’, Historical Journal, 46 (2003), 779–815; Chapter 6: ‘Holywell: Contesting Sacred Space in Post-Reformation Wales’, in Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (eds), Sacred Space in Early Modern

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Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 209–36. Chapter 7: ‘Catholic Reformation and the Cult of Angels in Early Modern England’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), Conversations with Angels: Essays Towards a History of Spiritual Communication 1100–1700 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 273–94. Chapter 8: ‘“Domme Preachers”? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print’, Past and Present, 168 (2000), 72–123. Chapter 9: ‘Unclasping the Book? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Vernacular Bible’, Journal of British Studies, 42 (2003), 141–67. Chapter 10: ‘This Newe Army of Satan’: The Jesuit Mission and the Formation of Public Opinion in Elizabethan England’, in David Lemmings and Claire Walker (eds), Moral Panics, the Press and the Law in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 41–62. Chapter 11: ‘Translating Trent? English Catholicism and the Counter Reformation’, Historical Research, 78 (2005), 288–310. Chapter 12: ‘Beads, Books and Bare Ruined Choirs: Transmutations of Catholic Ritual Life in Protestant England’, in Benjamin Kaplan, Bob Moore, Henk van Nierop and Judith Pollmann (eds), Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c.1570–1720 (Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 103–22. I am very grateful to the editors, presses and journals listed for permission to republish these essays in revised form. As this book was going to press, news reached me that Thomas Mayer had lost his battle with cancer. I shall always be grateful to him for his interest in including this volume in his ‘Catholic Christendom’ series, which now stands as a memorial to him. At Ashgate Tom Gray has displayed quite remarkable reserves of patience in the face of repeated and embarrassing delays due to other publishing commitments, heavy administrative burdens and moving institutions. I thank him for his longsuffering. Acknowledgement must also be made of the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the University of Exeter and the University of Cambridge for funding the research on which various parts of this book are based and for providing sabbatical leave. Among the many libraries and archives in which I have worked, I particularly wish to acknowledge the Archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster; Archives of the British Province of the Society of Jesus; Bodleian Library, Oxford; British Library; Downside Abbey; University of Exeter Library; Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC; National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; and, above all, the Cambridge University Library. I should like to reiterate the thanks I extended to a number of friends, colleagues and fellow scholars on the first publication of these essays. For passing on references, reading drafts, offering constructive criticism, saving me from serious mistakes and offering general encouragement, I owe much to Margaret Aston, Julia Crick, Simon Ditchfield, Eamon Duffy, Tom Freeman, Mark Greengrass, Sarah Hamilton, Arnold Hunt,

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Preface and Acknowledgements

xv

Elizabeth Ingram, Paulina Kewes, David Lemmings, Scott Mandelbrote, Peter Marshall, Tom McCoog, John Morrill, Judith Pollmann, Michael Questier, Joad Raymond, Alec Ryrie, Ethan Shagan, Alison Shell, Bill Sherman, Andrew Spicer and Lucy Wooding. As well as providing all these services, Anne Dillon has been a particular source of wisdom and kindness. Laura Kounine did excellent technical work in converting some of the chapters into suitable electronic formats. Stephen Cummins compiled the bibliography efficiently. It is a pleasure to mention several of my recent and current research students: Carys Brown, Liesbeth Corens, Andrew Czaja, Aislinn Muller and Coral Stoakes, whose exciting new work in this field has stimulated my thinking. I have additionally benefited from the sensible advice of the editors and referees of the journals in which several of these essays appeared, and the members of the seminar audiences to which earlier versions were presented. The embryo of the introduction was a paper delivered at a symposium in honour of Christopher Haigh at Jesus College, Oxford, in 2009; the invitation to give a plenary lecture at the ‘What was Early Modern English Catholicism?’ conference at Ushaw College, Durham, in 2013 helped me to improve a later draft considerably. It is a matter of tremendous regret and sadness that two of those who contributed significantly to the making of this collection are no longer with us. Chapter 7 was originally written in memory of Trevor Johnson, whose sudden death in June 2007 shocked his contemporaries and robbed Counter Reformation history of one of its brightest stars. The second loss recorded here is that of my former doctoral supervisor, Patrick Collinson, whose immensely subtle studies of puritanism remain a reservoir of inspiration, and whose support throughout the 21 years I knew him was constant and unfailing. The dedication records my debt to the greatest scholar of English Catholicism of the last century, John Bossy. His generosity to a young scholar at the start of her career and his continuing friendship have been of enormous importance. Alexandra Walsham West Wratting

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List of Abbreviations AAW Archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster, London AHR American Historical Review APC Acts of the Privy Council, ed. John Roche Dasent, 32 vols (London, 1890–1907) ARCR A.F. Allison and D.M. Rogers, The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640: An Annotated Catalogue, 2 vols (Alder shot, 1989–94) ARG Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte BL British Library, London Bodl. Bodleian Library, Oxford CHR Catholic Historical Review Clancy Thomas H. Clancy, English Catholic Books, 1641–1700: A Bibliography (Chicago, 2nd edn 1996). CRS Catholic Record Society CS Camden Society CSPD Calendar of State Papers Domestic, of the Reigns of Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I, and James I, 12 vols, eds R. Lemon and M.A.E. Green (London, 1856–72) EETS Early English Text Society EHR English Historical Review ERL English Recusant Literature 1558–1640, 394 vols, select. and ed. D.M. Rogers (London, 1968–79). Foley Henry Foley, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, 7 vols in 8 (London, 1877–84) HJ Historical Journal HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission JBS Journal of British Studies JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History JEMH Journal of Early Modern History JMH Journal of Modern History JRH Journal of Religious History Morris John Morris, The Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers, 3 vols (London, 1872–77). NH Northern History NLW National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth

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NS New Series ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (http://www. oxforddnb.com/) OED Oxford English Dictionary (http://www.oed.com/) OS Original Series, Old Series P&P Past and Present PS Parker Society RH Recusant History SCH Studies in Church History SCJ Sixteenth-Century Journal SP State Papers STC A.W. Pollard and G.R. Redgrave, A Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, revised and enlarged by W.A. Jackson, F.S. Ferguson and Kathleen F. Pantzer, 3 vols (1976–91). TNA The National Archives, Kew TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society In quotations from primary sources, unless otherwise stated, the original spelling has been retained, though the letters i and j, u and v have been made to conform to modern usage, and the archaic ‘thorn’ letter has been transcribed as ‘th’. Punctuation and capitalisation have generally been modernised, and abbreviations and contractions have been silently expanded. All dates are in Old Style, but the year has been taken to begin on 1 January.

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Chapter 1

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In the Lord’s Vineyard: Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain This collection of essays opens with a prayer: a fervent ‘prayer for the reparatione and reformatione of our Countrie’. Adjoined to Adam King’s translation of Peter Canisius’s influential catechism, it implored ‘maist merciful God’ to ‘look upon thy kirks prophaned be the hands of infidels, and the afflictione of thy deer flock’ and ‘cairfullie visite the vynyaird planted be thy right hand whilk the wyld bair trawails to wort and root out: strengthen the labourars thairof against the raige of thame who seiks to destroy it … mak thame victoriouse and mak thame that works weil thairin to possesss thy kingdome’.1 Published in the year of the Spanish Armada, 1588, this was a prayer for the restoration of Calvinist Scotland to its historic allegiance to Rome through the agency of the missionary priests. In describing it as a vineyard, King was, of course, invoking a compelling biblical metaphor for the visible Church of God upon earth. And this was a scriptural trope echoed by King’s fellow Catholics across the British Isles. In 1614, the English layman John Heigham wrote from his exile in the Low Countries, beseeching the ‘religious fathers and reverend priests to whome is committed the care of this our devastated vyniarde’ to distribute the ‘heavenlie Manna’ and ‘divine foode’ of the blessed sacrament to his co-religionists at home, ‘least they perishe by famine’, despite the grave dangers they faced in doing so.2 A few years later the same phrase sprang to the lips of Matthew Kellison, president of the English Catholic seminary at Douai, in his account of the life and martyrdom of Thomas Maxfield, the son of a Staffordshire recusant and an alumnus of the college, who had eagerly returned to labour in ‘this vineyard of ours’ before being arrested and executed at Tyburn in July 1616. Maxfield himself wrote in his farewell letter to Kellison of his pride in being a member of this blessed 1

  Peter Canisius, Ane catechisme or schort instruction of Christian religion drawen out of the scripturs and ancient doctours, trans. [Adam King] (Paris, 1588), fo. 37v. 2   John Heigham, A devout exposition of the holie masse with an ample declaration of all the rites and ceremonies belonging to the same (Douai, 1614), sig. †6r–v.

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Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain

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2

house of men who ‘hath afforded to our poor barren Contrye so much good and happie seed’.3 The Catholic Church to which all these writers self-consciously adhered was a universal Church, which by the early seventeenth century stretched not merely across the European continent but across the globe. As Gregory Martin wrote in a letter to his beloved, but misguided Protestant sisters, we are ‘of such a faith as is professed in Fraunce, in Spaine, in Flanders, Brabant, Zelant, &c. In a great part of Germanie, in all Italy, and beyond, wheresoever there be christians, and is now preached to the Indians, that never heard of Christ before, and encreaseth wonderfullye’.4 These quotations draw into focus the central themes of this book. The essays that comprise it examine key aspects of the experience and evolution of post-Reformation Catholicism, focusing chiefly on the period between the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558 and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, but extending across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They centre primarily on the realms of England and Wales, but place these against the backdrop of comparative events and tendencies in the kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland. Written over the course of the last decade and a half, and presented in revised and expanded form here, they reflect stages in an intellectual journey that has coincided with the historiographical transformations surveyed in this initial chapter. As a subject the history of Catholicism in the British Isles has emerged from the shadows and become one of the liveliest arenas of scholarly enquiry at the current time. The fruits of this new surge of interest by both historians and literary critics have been rich and abundant. A symptom and product of these trends, the essays in this volume are collectively underpinned by three key convictions. First, reacting sharply against the insularity of previous accounts, Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain underlines the importance of investigating developments in this region in relation to wider international initiatives for the rejuvenation of the Catholic faith, for the recovery of territories and peoples temporarily lost to the forces of heresy and for the evangelical conversion of the indigenous peoples of Asia and the Americas to Christianity. It seeks to highlight not only what might be gained from doing so, but also what insights the British situation might 3

  Quotation from John Bolt’s translation of Vita et martyrium D. Max-fildaei (Douai, 1616), widely attributed to Kellison; J.H. Pollen (ed.), ‘The Life and Martyrdome of Mr Maxfield, Priest, 1616’, in Miscellanea III, CRS 3 (London, 1906), pp. 30–58, pp. 34, 56. See also p. 37. 4   ‘To my lovinge and best belove sisters’, in Gregory Martin, A treatyse of Christian peregrination … whereunto is adjoined certen epistles written by him to sundrye his frendes: the copies whereof were since his decease founde amonge his wrytinges ([Paris], 1583), unpaginated.

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contribute to our understanding of the movement for Catholic renewal as a whole. The second suggestion made by this book is the necessity of adopting a perspective that examines Catholicism and anti-Catholicism, Protestantism and anti-Protestantism as inextricably linked bodies of opinion and practice, which exerted powerful reciprocal influence upon each other. It endeavours to shed light not merely on the internal history of the Catholic communities it studies but also on their lateral connections with other churches, congregations and sects. Thirdly, these essays emphasise the degree to which the condition of being a proscribed and persecuted minority constrained and shaped the experience of British Catholics and left lasting scars on the memory of subsequent generations. Practising one’s faith in secret, evading detection by hostile authorities and coping with exclusion from public life presented real difficulties and challenges to the Catholic laity and to the priesthood that served them. Yet while in some respects this served as a straitjacket, in others it functioned as a fillip and a stimulus. Paradoxically, it catalysed processes of religious identity formation and facilitated tendencies that were slower to emerge in territories where the Church was buttressed by the strong arm of the state and benefited from the support of a fully functioning episcopal hierarchy. If it often inhibited, at other times it operated as an effective incubator of developments that are now seen as a hallmark of the Counter Reformation itself. It placed obstacles in the path of some reform initiatives and fostered internal friction, but it also created unexpected opportunities and imbued English, Welsh and Scottish Catholicism with a peculiar dynamism. And this derived in large part from the experience of living in the multiconfessional society that was the most lasting and troubling legacy of the advent and entrenchment of Protestantism in these islands. Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain revisits older questions and raises new ones under four main headings. Part I (Conscience and Conformity) focuses upon the strategies employed by Catholic laypeople and clerics in response to the legislative requirement that they attend worship in reformed churches. It explores the moral dilemmas that surrounded the issue of how to behave in a context in which recusancy was a punishable offence and in which interaction with Protestants was perceived to threaten the very existence and survival of their faith. The chapters in this section examine how Catholics reconciled their consciences with outward conformity; the intellectual consequences of debates about dissimulation for theories of toleration; and the implications of these practices for interconfessional relations. Part II (Miracles and Missionaries) offers a fresh perspective on the activities and impact of the Jesuit and seminary-trained priests sent to Britain from Rome, Spain and the Low Countries and draws attention to the imaginative ways in which

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they sought to succour the faithful, reclaim those who had strayed and convince heretics that the Catholic Church was the only safe haven for their souls. It highlights their careful cultivation of aspects of traditional piety suppressed by Protestantism, the risks entailed in the evangelical tactics they employed and the ongoing determination of many missionaries to reclaim the nation as a whole to the bosom of Rome. Part III (Communication and Conversion) focuses upon how post-Reformation Catholicism reacted to the rapid changes linked with the birth and expansion of the printing industry and the spread of reading and writing literacy. It analyses how it utilised the new typographical medium in conjunction with older modes of communication; assesses the degree to which it overcame its deep and long-standing ambivalence about translating Scripture into the vernacular; and investigates the manner in which it sought to mould public opinion, craft its historical legacy and deflect the polemical attacks of its enemies. Part IV (Translation and Transmutation) provides an overview of how the ritual life of Catholics was recast in the wake of the Reformation. It traces how they adapted to having intermittent access to the sacraments of penance and the mass and examines the curious mixture of handicap and advantage attendant upon becoming a Church under the cross. The rest of this introduction erects a more detailed historiographical and analytical framework for the essays that follow. It provides a synoptic overview of the changing scholarly landscape from which they have emerged, serves as a gloss and commentary upon their intersections with each other and offers some reflections on the future development of this flourishing field. I Coloured by confessional sentiment and suffused with an unmistakeable strain of apology, until very recently the historiography of Catholicism in Britain was the near exclusive preserve of committed believers: a subfield, if not a ghetto occupied by the ancestors of those who had suffered for their faith in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its natural focus was the heroic band of missionary priests and laypeople who risked and sometimes sacrificed their lives defying official attempts to persecute their beleaguered religion into extinction. An extension of early modern martyrology itself, it was something of ‘a self-satisfied cottage industry’ which overlooked individuals who did not fit into this inspiring mould.5 It omitted those whose attitudes and actions contaminated the empowering image of 5

  Thomas M. McCoog, ‘Construing Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1582–1602’, in Ethan H. Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005), p. 95.

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resilience and unity constructed by contemporary clerical leaders. A bias towards the former was inbuilt in the sources which these priests and their successors assiduously gathered, transcribed and edited for the edification of posterity and to assist the ongoing campaign to secure the canonisation of the martyrs. Overtly or tacitly, it also shaped the pioneering endeavours of the scholars who founded the Catholic Record Society and the great bibliographers who catalogued the remarkable body of printed literature that emanated from the community and its diaspora.6 Inward-looking and afflicted by a kind of tunnel vision, this historiographical tradition was also a vertical history which neglected the horizontal relationships between Catholics and the several varieties of Protestants alongside whom they lived in these islands.7 Aptly described by Hugh Aveling as ‘a particularly locked hortus conclusus’,8 it replicated the splendid isolation that the ecclesiastical hierarchy insisted was the only way to save the faith from complete annihilation and it often dwelt on the tribulations of clergy and laity at home at the expense of their connections with the wider movement for spiritual and institutional renewal that was sweeping across Europe and beyond the seas to America and Asia. Indeed, it usually presumed that persecution effectively insulated this community from the currents of change to which their coreligionists on the Continent were exposed. For their part, most historians of the Counter Reformation showed little interest in Catholic minorities living in Protestant lands. Their excoriating experiences were at odds with the resurgent, militant and victorious Church of Rome with whose successful alliance with secular authority and role in the creation of powerful nation states these scholars were chiefly preoccupied.9 6

  This includes the Publications of the Catholic Record Society, its monograph series and its journal Recusant History; Antony Allison and David Roger’s ARCR, and the Scolar Press series of facsimiles of English Recusant Literature (1968–79). For Scotland, see, for example, William Forbes-Leith (ed.), Narratives of Scottish Catholics under Mary Stuart and James VI (London, 1889). 7   For a critique of this approach in relation to Protestant nonconformity, see Patrick Collinson, ‘Towards a Broader Understanding of the Early Dissenting Tradition’, in his Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983), pp. 527–62. 8   Hugh Aveling, ‘Some Aspects of Yorkshire Catholic Recusant History, 1558–1791’, in G.J. Cuming (ed.), The Province of York, SCH 4 (Leiden, 1967), p. 100. 9   Much early work on Catholicism was written from a partisan perspective, though its pioneering quality should not be denied: for example Charles Dodd, Church History of Catholicism, ed. M.A. Tierney, 5 vols (London, 1839–43); J.H. Pollen, The English Catholics in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth: A Study of their Politics, Civil Life and Government (London, 1920); J.H. Pollen, The Counter Reformation in Scotland (London, 1921); P.F. Anson, The Catholic Church in Modern Scotland 1560–1937 (London, 1937). The German Lutheran A.O. Meyer’s England and the Catholic Church under Queen Elizabeth, trans. J.R. McKee (London, 1915; 2nd edn 1967) is a valuable and unjustly overlooked study of

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Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain

Within the British historical mainstream, meanwhile, the study of Catholicism’s reduction to an embattled and passive minority has long remained an ‘intellectual backwater’, an obscure byway and minor distraction from the grand narrative of progress that released the people of England, Wales and Scotland from popish ignorance, superstition and tyranny.10 The tale of Protestantism’s triumph as the official and popular religion in Britain (though ultimately not in Ireland) left little room for those who had fruitlessly resisted the onward march of the Gospel, except as a motley crew of fugitives, traitors and conservative reactionaries. Antipopery and patriotism combined to confine Catholics to the fringes and margins of serious academic enquiry and, moreover, to exclude them from the literary canon. As Alison Shell has so acutely observed, these prejudices continue to cloud our vision and to condition how we interpret sixteenthand seventeenth-century religious culture in subtle and insidious ways.11 Over the last 35 years, however, our understanding of Catholicism in early modern England has been decisively reconfigured. Research on Wales and Scotland has been less extensive and slower to develop, but is now catching up rapidly.12 A critical turning point in this process was the publication of John Bossy’s The English Catholic Community 1570– 1850 in 1975. This marked a fork in the path between the settled and still vibrant tradition of recusant history and a newer style of historical enquiry infused with the spirit of the French Annales school and shaped by critical engagement with the disciplines of religious sociology and (to a lesser extent) social anthropology. Turning aside from his earlier work on exile politics, diplomatic relations and the link with France,13 Bossy’s aim in this book was to excavate the internal constitution and logic of English Catholicism as ‘a body of people … with its own internal structure and way of life’ rather than its relationship with the Protestant majority English Catholicism in its domestic and international context. The most influential older account of the Counter Reformation was Hubert Jedin, Katholische Reformation oder Gegenreformation? (Lucerne, 1946). 10   Christopher Haigh, ‘Catholicism in Early Modern England: Bossy and Beyond’, HJ, 45 (2002): 481–94, at 493. See also the comments of Ethan Shagan, ‘Introduction: English Catholic History in Context’, in Shagan, Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’, pp. 1–21. 11   Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558– 1660 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 103 and passim. 12   For a useful earlier overview of Catholicism in its British context, see Michael A. Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (Basingstoke, 1998). Katharine Olson is currently completing a major study of Welsh Catholicism; for Scotland see the forthcoming work of Scott Spurlock and Stephen Holmes. 13   John Bossy, ‘Elizabethan Catholicism: The Link with France’ (unpubl. PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1961); John Bossy, ‘English Catholics and the French Marriage 1577–81’, RH, 5 (1959–60): 2–16.

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or its repression and subjugation by the Erastian state. Approaching religion as ‘a continuum of behaviour rather than belief’, it traced the process by which the Catholic gentry and aristocracy progressively severed the bonds that united them with their neighbours and peers. It presented post-Reformation Catholicism as ‘a branch of the English nonconforming tradition’ and explicitly compared it with other dissenting groups such as Quakers and Presbyterians. This was closely linked with Bossy’s conviction that the community he placed under the microscope was the novel creation of the seminary priests and Jesuits who began arriving on the shores of this island in the 1570s.14 Bossy’s insistence that there was a sharp caesura between medieval Christianity and its muscular Tridentine successor rested on two assumptions. First, he implicitly subscribed to the view that the preReformation Church was essentially moribund and derelict. His work was predicated on the idea that Protestantism had delivered a deathblow to an old fashioned brand of religion that was concerned ‘less with doctrinal affirmation or dramas of conscience than with a set of ingrained observances’ tied to the cycle of the week and the seasons.15 Described by Keith Thomas as ‘a ritual method of living’,16 its demise was symptomatic of the shift from communal to individual Christianity that was the leitmotiv of Bossy’s wider interpretation of the effects of the concurrrent early modern movements for religious renewal.17 It contrasted sharply with the more strenuous and self-conscious species of piety practised in the holy households of the devout, which increasingly manifested itself in studious withdrawal and segregation from Anglican society. Secondly, Bossy’s vision betrayed the influence of Jean Delumeau’s decisive 1971 survey of Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire, which underlined the Counter Reformation’s intolerance of the lax morals and apathetic, quasipagan religiosity practised by the illiterate rural populace of Europe.18 14   John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London, 1975), quotations at pp. 7, 108, 296. Patrick McGrath’s Papist and Puritans under Elizabeth I (London, 1967) had also recognised the points of comparison between Catholic and Protestant dissent. 15   John Bossy, ‘The Character of Elizabethan Catholicism’, P&P, 21 (1962): 38–59, at 39. The same assumptions shaped his view of Ireland: ‘The Counter Reformation and the People of Catholic Ireland, 1596–1641’, in T.D. Williams (ed.), Historical Studies: Papers Read Before the Irish Conference of Historians VIII (Dublin, 1971), pp. 155–69. 16   Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (Harmondsworth, 1973; first publ. 1971), p. 88. 17   John Bossy, ‘The Counter Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe’, P&P, 47 (1970): 51–70; John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985). 18   Jean Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire, trans. Jeremy Moiser (London and Philadelphia, 1977).

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Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain

When the lingering residues of nostalgia and survivalism had been swept from the scene, what was left in England and Wales was a fervent, insular and politically quiescent upper class. For all the refreshing intellectual currents that inspired Bossy to approach his subject as a sociological phenomenon and to chart its evolution over the longue durée, his study still bore the tell-tale marks of a denominational paradigm inherited from the past. It too was concerned with the genesis and genealogy of the Catholic community as a congregation of recusants and regarded this deliberate act of separation as the principal criterion for membership of it.19 Bossy’s bold thesis was vigorously challenged by Christopher Haigh, whose work on Lancashire laid the foundations for a radically revisionist interpretation of the English Reformation, which turned on the point that the triumph of Protestantism was less the consequence of a groundswell of popular anticlericalism and enthusiastic support for the reformed Gospel than of a haphazard series of legislative acts and bureaucratic manoeuvres contingent upon the rise and fall of political faction. Encumbered by a forbidding theology of salvation which insisted that only a tiny remnant was predestined to salvation, he argued, the Reformation was passively resisted by much of the populace and struggled to put down permanent roots for several generations.20 The most memorable metaphor he employed to describe it was obstetric: Protestantism had a premature birth, experienced a difficult labour and came forth as a sickly child, which not merely failed to thrive but nearly perished in its first years.21 Haigh’s interest in Catholicism was a by-product of the assiduous attention he paid to the precarious health of this ailing infant. Rejecting the idea that late medieval Christianity and its institutional embodiment on earth was in terminal decline, he stressed instead the strength of traditional religion and the crucial role played by an intrepid band of Marian priests in the early decades of Elizabeth’s reign in establishing a stalwart recusant community. These conservative clerics and the laity for whom they catered were the umbilical cord that linked post-Reformation Catholicism with its precursor. Their achievements had been wrongly eclipsed by the activities of the missionaries, whose contribution to saving the faith from oblivion was exaggerated by the Jesuit Robert Persons to 19   Bossy, English Catholic Community, ch. 8. For an incisive and critical discussion of Bossy’s sectarian model, see Caroline M. Hibbard, ‘Early Stuart Catholicism: Revisions and Re-Revisions’, JMH, 52 (1980): 1–34, esp. 5–9. 20   Christopher Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge, 1975); (ed.), The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987); English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993). 21   Christopher Haigh, ‘The English Reformation: A Premature Birth, A Difficult Labour and a Sickly Child’, HJ, 33 (1990): 449–59.

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boost the reputation of his own order and by subsequent commentators who perpetuated this ‘fairy story’. In fact, the seminary priests were guilty of strategic and operational errors that resulted in a maldistribution of resources and left large numbers of ordinary Catholics without spiritual sustenance. Abandoning the perils of itinerant ministry to the poor for the comfortable life of a resident chaplain to the recusant nobility and gentry, they were in large part responsible for Catholicism’s retreat by c.1603 into ‘country house oblivion’. Its contraction into a small sect was not a function of persecution, let alone the charismatic power of Protestant preaching, but rather of the selfish decisions made by the very men whom Bossy, in common with previous historians, had seen as the saviours of the community, and by their wealthy patrons.22 These claims were disputed by Patrick McGrath, together with the suggestion that the term ‘mission’ was a misnomer.23 The priests who crossed the Channel, Haigh declared, were better conceived as members of a pastoral organisation than emissaries of an evangelical movement; they came to reconcile schismatics rather than to convert heretics.24 Lifting the subject from the confessional parameters in which it had hitherto been constrained, Haigh catapulted Catholicism into the heart of the debate about the Reformation. In essence, like Bossy himself, Haigh was concerned with the process by which the recusant community came into being – with the factors that had promoted Catholicism’s transition from monopoly to minority and its crystallisation into a sect. The difference was this: the post-Reformation Catholic community envisaged by Bossy was a fresh-faced adolescent captivated by religious trends of Continental origin, who had stepped into the place vacated by a geriatric faith which had succumbed soon after the bracing winds of Protestantism had blown through its frail bones. Even John Fisher and Thomas More were merely part of its posthumous history rather than the heralds and harbingers of a new era.25 Haigh’s 22

  Christopher Haigh, ‘From Monopoly to Minority: Catholicism in Early Modern England’, TRHS, 5th ser. 31 (1981): 129–47; ‘The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation’, in Christopher Haigh (ed.), English Reformation Revised, pp. 176–208; ‘The Church of England, the Catholics and the People’, in Christopher Haigh (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I (Basingstoke, 1984), pp. 195–217. 23   Patrick McGrath, ‘Elizabethan Catholicism: A Reconsideration’, JEH, 35 (1984): 414–28. See also Haigh’s response: ‘Revisionism, the Reformation, and the History of English Catholicism’, JEH, 36 (1985): 394–406; and Andrew R. Muldoon, ‘Recusants, Church-Papists, and “Comfortable” Missionaries: Assessing the Post-Reformation English Catholic Community’, CHR, 86 (2000): 242–57. 24   Haigh, ‘Continuity’, pp. 194–5. See also Haigh’s review article, ‘The Fall of a Church or the Rise of a Sect? Post-Reformation Catholicism in England’, HJ, 21 (1978): 181–6, esp. 184; English Reformations, ch. 15 (‘From Resentment to Recusancy’). 25   Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 4.

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Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain

Catholicism, by contrast, might be compared with a middle-aged man of robust constitution who had initially reeled at the shock of an unfaithful spouse and a swift divorce, but bounced back energetically and quickly adapted to his new circumstances, before handing over the baton to the next cohort of committed adherents of Rome. One important side-effect of Christopher Haigh’s research was the attention it focused upon what he called ‘the church papist penumbra’ – the amorphous mass of individuals who conformed fully, partially or occasionally with the established Church.26 Like A.G. Dickens and Hugh Aveling before him,27 Haigh was primarily interested in these fringe dwellers as a potential recruiting ground for the recusant community, as a reservoir from which, galvanised by clerical warnings about the evils of bowing to Baal and compromising with heresy, a body of more zealous Catholics was drawn. My own book Church Papists (1993) sought to alter the angle of vision. It argued that conformity was not merely a stepping stone on the road to recusancy, but an enduring and viable strategy for surviving persecution and for reconciling the competing allegiances to crown and faith that confronted those who clung to the faith of their forefathers. The relative invisibility of the church papist in the historical record attests to the success of the clerical campaign to define refusal to attend church as the only acceptable way of expressing Catholic identity and of the closely associated assault upon forms of behaviour that stained the pristine image of stoical resilience which the priesthood was so eager to project to its enemies. A type of dissimulation which could all too easily expose this beleaguered religion to damaging allegations of deceit and hypocrisy, conformity became entangled in a web of inter- and intraconfessional polemic. Challenging the sectarian model that still dominated the field, I suggested that recognising church papists as a persistent presence has significant consequences for our understanding of the shape and character of the post-Reformation Catholic community, as well as the manner in which England became a Protestant nation. It underlines the diversity of early modern Catholicism and the semi-separatism that remained a recurrent feature.28 26   Haigh, ‘Continuity’, 207; ‘Church of England, the Catholics and the People’, p. 205; Reformation and Resistance, p. 275. 27   A.G. Dickens, ‘The First Stages of Romanist Recusancy in Yorkshire 1560–1590’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 35 (1941): 157–81 and ‘The Extent and Character of Recusancy in Yorkshire, 1604’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 37 (1948): 24–48; J.C.H. Aveling, The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation (London, 1976), p. 60. 28   Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 1993; paperback edition with new preface 1999).

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As Michael Questier went on to emphasise in Conversion, Politics and Religion (1995), Catholics moved back and forth between conformity and recusancy with ease and frequency. These positions were not polar opposites or mutually exclusive categories. Nor was church papistry a symbol of resignation to Protestant hegemony and an uncomplicated sign of loyalty to the state and monarchy. Examining the strategies, political and pastoral, persuasive and punitive, by which proselytisers on both sides of the divide sought to effect changes of religion, Questier declared that there was no such thing as a unitary Catholicism and characterised it instead as ‘a series of dissident oppositional expressions of religious motive’.29 His subsequent work has served to underscore the point that the conflicts which erupted over conformity within Catholic ranks were not simply a function of lay resentment of and resistance to the directives of hard-line clerics unsympathetic to the plight of their charges.30 Such sentiments were not entirely absent from these disputes, but it is necessary to stress the willingness with which the missionary priests made compassionate allowances and casuistical concessions to tender consciences overwhelmed by external pressures. They cooperated with the elite laity in devising short-term strategies for surviving persecution and preserving their financial strength and political clout until their return to the corridors of power. Furthermore, as I argue in Chapter 2, the historiographical eclipse of the church papist has been accompanied by the eclipse of dissidents within the Catholic priesthood such as Thomas Bell who diverged from the uncompromising insistence of Robert Persons and others upon wholesale recusancy. Stigmatised as heretical deviants, these figures became convenient scapegoats in the quarrels that wracked the community and divided it schismatically in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Although they were swept under the carpet as an embarrassment by contemporary commentators and quietly eliminated from the accounts written by later historians, it was by no means inevitable that the outcome of these conflicts would be the triumph of those who opposed the advocates of qualified conformity, as the different policies that evolved in other contexts of minority Catholicism show, including Poland and Scotland. In the latter, the Jesuits themselves sanctioned attendance at Calvinist sermons, regarding exposure to preaching as less hazardous than 29   Michael C. Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 204. 30   See Michael Questier, ‘The Politics of Religious Conformity and the Accession of James I’, Historical Research, 71 (1998): 14–30; ‘What Happened to English Catholicism after the English Reformation’, History, 85 (2000): 28–47; ‘Conformity, Catholicism and the Law’, in Peter Lake and Michael Questier (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 237–61.

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exposure to prayer.31 Lake and Questier’s recent study of the York butcher’s wife Margaret Clitherow has developed these themes further. They have demonstrated that her martyrdom in 1586 occurred against the backdrop of these fractious internal struggles and shown how her memory was utilised as a tool to buttress the victors’ point of view. Precipitated by rival visions of how to tackle the challenges of ecclesiastical establishment, in complex ways these struggles foreshadowed the Appellant and Archpriest controversies.32 Replayed again then, albeit in a different key, they alert us to the plurality of Catholic communities and identities engendered by the Protestant Reformation in Britain. Conformity and recusancy were not simply religious but also intrinsically political issues. Non-attendance at church was an act of conscientious objection and civil disobedience, and by 1593 its consequences were crippling fines, confiscated estates, constraints on mobility and sometimes extended imprisonment. It was a radical stance, deliberately subversive of the prescriptions laid down by the state and potentially destabilising of the social, gender and patriarchal orders. This is an insight that recent publications in this field have served to bring to the fore, correcting the emphasis on the conservative quiescence of post-Reformation Catholicism that has long prevailed in the secondary literature.33 It is not surprising that one of the hallmarks of the tradition of recusant history was an insistence upon the passivity and loyalism of the community. Its practitioners were eager to vindicate their Catholic forebears from the highly effective smear campaign mounted by the Protestant establishment and redeem their reputation as patriotic Englishmen and women. Real coups and conspiracies were played down as wild aberrations and the work of unruly mavericks, if not dismissed as figments of the imagination akin to the rumours of a popish scheme to assassinate Charles II fabricated by Titus Oates in the late 1670s. According to Francis Edwards, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was invented by the Jacobean regime to tar adherents of the Church of Rome with the brush of treason.34 The associated notion that as time passed the recusant laity became increasingly politically impotent 31

  See Chapter 2, below.   Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London, 2011). 33   See esp. Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Puritans, Papists, and the “Public Sphere” in Early Modern England: The Edmund Campion Affair in Context’, JMH, 72 (2000): 587–627; Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven and London, 2002), part II. 34   Francis Edwards, Guy Fawkes: The Real Story of the Gunpowder Plot? (London, 1969); ‘Still Investigating Gunpowder Plot’, RH, 21 (1993): 305–46. See also Leo Hicks, An Elizabethan Problem (London, 1964). But see Mark Nicholls, Investigating Gunpowder Plot (Manchester, 1991). 32

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and indifferent has also persisted. This has been perceived as a function both of their disenfranchisement by the state and of their own voluntary withdrawal from political engagement. Bossy described the progress of Elizabethan Catholicism ‘from inertia to inertia in three generations’, as ‘loyalty supplanted enterprise’;35 Arnold Pritchard stressed the overriding fidelity of the gentry;36 and for Haigh too the Catholics of post-Reformation England were essentially apolitical.37 Peter Holmes placed some important question marks beside these propositions, but his own suggestion that lay views vacillated between resistance and non-resistance in a cyclical pattern and chronological rhythm is overly schematic and unsatisfying. It is also predicated on an assumed and stark dichotomy between these two positions.38 A key contribution to rethinking the relationship between Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’ was the volume edited by Ethan Shagan under this title in 2005. Intent upon reinscribing Catholicism within the historical mainstream and reinserting it into the central political narratives of the period, this collection of essays highlighted the significant contributions its adherents made to a common political culture and their agency as political actors throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.39 The political engagement of Catholics had not been wholly neglected completely in the intervening years, though the focus of discussion tended to fall upon leading lights within the priesthood. In the mid-1990s, Michael Carrafiello suggested that the spiritual language in which the English mission was couched was never more than a cover for Robert Persons’ ambition to effect the violent overthrow of the Protestant regime.40 Around the same time, Bossy acknowledged Persons’ entanglement in a variety of 35

  Bossy, ‘Character of Elizabethan Catholicism’, 57. See also ‘The English Catholic Community 1603–1625’, in Alan G.R. Smith (ed.), The Reign of James VI and I (London and Basingstoke, 1973), pp. 91–105; and ‘Unrethinking the Sixteenth-Century Wars of Religion’, in T. Kselman (ed.), Belief in History: Innovative Approaches to European and American Religion (London, 1991), 267–85. 36   Arnold Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England (London, 1970). See also W.R. Trimble, The Catholic Laity in Elizabethan England 1558–1603 (Cambridge, MA, 1964). 37   This is implicit throughout Haigh’s earlier work, for example ‘Continuity of Catholicism’, ‘From Monopoly to Minority’, English Reformations, chs 15–16, but cf. The Plain Man’s Pathway: Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England, 1570–1640 (Oxford, 2007), ch. 9, esp. p. 189. 38   Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of the English Catholics (Cambridge, 1982). 39   Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’. 40   Michael Carrafiello, ‘English Catholicism and the Jesuit Mission of 1580–1581’, HJ, 37 (1994): 761–74; Michael Carrafiello, Robert Persons and English Catholicism, 1580– 1610 (London, 1998).

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treasonous projects and Eamon Duffy similarly presented Cardinal Allen as a figure of considerable political ambivalence.41 Jesuit involvement in the international politics of contemporary Catholicism has also been a major theme of Thomas McCoog’s two books on the Society.42 Shagan’s collection, however, marked a clear recognition that the old chestnut of whether or not the English mission was a pastoral or political enterprise was a classic question mal posée, an insight that also underpins the work of Victor Houliston. Houliston’s excellent study of Persons’ polemic peers behind the rhetorical façade of the ruthless schemer constructed by contemporary controversialists to discover a man whose eirenic spiritual writings and strategic and satirical interventions in debates about the shape of the commonwealth cannot be neatly separated. They were all part of ‘an apostolate of letters’ through which he sought to advance the Catholic cause at home and abroad and reinstate Rome to institutional dominance. Taken together these texts constitute a coherent vision of resistance politics.43 Equally important insights have emerged from the work of Stefania Tutino,which is progressively transforming our understanding of the character and contours of Catholic political thought in this period, and its reciprocal interactions with wider European developments. Her book Law and Conscience (2007) charts Catholicism’s contribution to reconfiguring the nexus between temporal and religious authority and to delineating separate spheres of allegiance. And in a series of compelling articles she has delineated how key figures like Nicholas Sander and Robert Persons deployed quasi-contractual theories of government to question the authority of, and justify political disobedience to, a heretical sovereign whom the Pope had excommunicated. Persons drew not merely on ideas circulating within the French Catholic League, but also those embedded in that explosive Huguenot charter for revolt, the Vindiciae contra tyrannos. One consequence of this was to render the arguments enshrined in this tract problematic for Protestants and to necessitate their ‘secularisation’. Such developments further illustrate the intricate and dialectical relationship between reformed and Catholic political thinking, and the pressing need to rescue Catholicism from the

41

  John Bossy, ‘The Heart of Robert Persons’, in Thomas McCoog (ed.), The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits (Woodbridge, 1996), 141–58; Eamon Duffy, ‘William, Cardinal Allen, 1532–1594’, RH, 22 (1995), 265–90. 42   Thomas M. McCoog, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1541– 1588: ‘Our Way of Proceeding’ (Leiden, 1996); Thomas M. McCoog, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England 1589–1597; Building the Faith of Saint Peter Upon the King of Spain’s Monarchy (Farnham, 2012). 43   Victor Houliston, Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Persons’ Jesuit Polemic, 1580–1610 (Aldershot, 2007), at p. 20.

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margins and relocate it at the centre of our interpretations of intellectual developments in the early modern era.44 The vigorous debates about recusancy in which Robert Persons engaged with representatives of the Church and state were themselves a critical juncture. As I discuss in Chapter 3 and especially Chapter 4, its clerical Catholic advocates frequently justified this by citing the comparable arguments employed by Calvin and other heretical writers against nicodemites and ‘mass gospellers’ during the reign of Mary I and in parts of Europe where Protestantism remained a persecuted religion in the late sixteenth century. In doing so, they showed that concepts of ideological purity cut across confessional boundaries and inadvertently laid the foundations for respect for the rights of an erroneous conscience. This was also implicit in Robert Persons’ insistence in the dedicatory epistle to Elizabeth I that prefaced his Brief discours contayning certayne reasons why Catholiques refuse to goe to Church (1580) that refusal to attend heretical worship was a surer sign of political integrity than dissembling conformity. Geoffrey Elton regarded the eloquent calls of the Jesuit for religious liberty in other texts as merely ‘tendentious’,45 but in the light of the evidence assembled and analysed here the conventional assumption that Catholicism played no more than a minor and equivocal role in the rise of toleration should perhaps be reassessed.46 If Persons saw toleration as simply a temporary measure and a prelude to a reunification of the realm under one creed by the hand of providence, he concurred in this view with many pioneering contemporary Protestant writers themselves. Few in early modern society subscribed to the idea that religious pluralism was a positive development: convinced that truth was singular and indivisible, most continued to believe it was a recipe for disorder and

44

  Stefania Tutino, Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570–1625 (Aldershot, 2007); ‘Huguenots, Jesuits and Tyrants: Notes on the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos in Early Modern England’, JEMH, 11 (2007): 175–96; ‘The Political Thought of Robert Persons’s Conference in Continental Context’, HJ, 52 (2009): 43–62. See also her ‘Between Nicodemism and “Honest” Dissimulation: The Society of Jesus in England’, Historical Research, 79 (2006): 534–53; and Thomas White and the Blackloists: Between Politics and Theology during the English Civil War (Aldershot, 2008). For an earlier examination of Catholic political thought of lasting value, though less alive to its place within wider intellectual frameworks, see Thomas H. Clancy, Papist Pamphleteers: The Allen-Persons Party and the Political Thought of the Counter-Reformation in England, 1572–1615 (Chicago, 1964). 45   Geoffrey Elton, ‘Persecution and Toleration in the English Reformation’, in W.J. Sheils (ed.), Persecution and Toleration, SCH 21 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 163–87, at pp. 183–5. 46   Catholic thinkers are conspicuous by their absence from Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton, 2003).

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chaos, something to be endured only as a necessary evil, and a source of suspicion and unease. In short, it was a form of intolerance itself.47 As Stuart Schwarz’s penetrating study of the Iberian Catholic world has shown, however, out of the soil of these assumptions alternative attitudes could also grow – attitudes rooted in doubt, indifference and the view that each human being could find salvation in the faith of his or her choosing, which ran counter to the dogmatism that is too often assumed to have dominated this culture. Schwarz’s social history of ideas and ‘cultural history of thought’ recasts the debate about the origins of the theory and practice of tolerance that now prevails in Western society.48 Persons’ book may be seen as a testament to the extent to which the goalposts were in the process of moving, and to the part that minority Catholicism played in articulating the shifts engendered by the fragmentation of Christianity in the era of the Reformation. It strikes a chord with Peter Holmes’ recent observation that the ethical quandaries that confronted Catholic missionaries and lay communities in Britain and other contested territories in Europe and its empires may have contributed significantly to the evolution of the science of casuistry and the emergence of a relativistic, probabilist moral theology in the seventeenth century.49 It is increasingly clear, moreover, that recusants and church papists continued to retain office and influence in post-Reformation society. Michael Questier’s meticulous and powerful study of the aristocratic Browne family of Sussex and its entourage, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England (2006) should be acknowledged as a particular landmark. Carefully unravelling the webs of patronage, kinship and clientage woven around them, Questier shows that the Catholic nobility remained significant players in local and county politics and skilfully positioned themselves in an attempt to reach some kind of modus vivendi with the Protestant state. The internal clerical conflicts about ecclesiastical organisation and governance in which they became embroiled in the early seventeenth century were expressions of a set of problems and issues remarkably similar to those dividing the Church of England, with which, in various ways, they were enmeshed. His book has helped to rescue Catholics from the wings and restore them to the centre of the political 47

  On the wider intellectual context in the British Isles, see Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500–1700 (Manchester, 2006), pp. 1–5, 40–49, 228–47. 48   Stuart B. Schwarz, All Can be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven and London, 2008). 49   Peter Holmes, ‘Introduction’, in Peter Holmes (ed.), Caroline Casuistry: The Cases of Conscience of Fr Thomas Southwell SJ, CRS 84 (2012), pp. xi–xxxv, at xxxv. See also Stefania Tutino, Shadows of Doubt: Language and Truth in Post-Reformation Catholic Culture (Oxford, 2014), esp. pp. 28–32.

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stage.50 It has also served to complicate and problematise the very concept of ‘loyalty’, a vexing question that crystallised with particular acuity around James I’s Oath of Allegiance of 1606.51 And the varied pattern of English responses to this measure cannot be abstracted from their wider European context. The arguments deployed by those who sanctioned swearing it brought authors such as the Benedictine Thomas Preston and the Scottish jurist William Barclay under the radar of the curia and Inquisition. Such episodes demonstrate how far British Catholicism was entangled in the wider internal and international politics of the Church of Rome, as well as the ways in which it drew on resources such as Gallican thought to respond to the dilemmas presented by its minority status.52 In depicting post-Reformation Catholicism as at times ‘perilously uncompliant’,53 Questier’s work also unsettles long-standing assumptions about the essential passivity of the laity and converges with a growing sense that traditional dichotomies between resistance and compromise, acquiescence and treachery, are deeply misleading. Sandeep Kaushik has illuminated the complex outlook of the Northamptonshire magnate Sir Thomas Tresham, within which protestations of allegiance coexisted with veiled threats and with circumspect expressions of potentially subversive ideas. Concealed behind the defensive rubrics he employed in his public discourse with the state were deliberate acts of passive disobedience. He carefully carved a path between justifying an individual’s refusal to obey the dictates of a secular power and intimating that the state was illegitimate. The conciliatory tone of his petitions to the crown for a mitigation of Catholic persecution and his overt condemnation of the ‘monsters’, ‘vipers’ and ‘caitiffs’ who devised plots to topple and kill the monarch must be set alongside his private determination to defy its efforts to exterminate his religion. Although he dissociated himself from the more overtly dissident behaviour of his younger brother William, who fled England in 1582 and had close associations with the duke of Guise, he perhaps differed from his sibling less in the substance of his political philosophy than in the practical

50

  Michael Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2006). 51   See Michael Questier, ‘Loyalty, Religion and State Power in Early Modern England: English Romanism and the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance’, HJ, 40 (1997): 311–29; Michael Questier, ‘Catholic Loyalism in Early Stuart England’, EHR, 123 (2008): 1132–65; Johann P. Sommervile, ‘Papalist Political Thought and the Controversy over the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance’, in Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’, pp. 162–84. 52   Stefania Tutino, ‘Thomas Preston and English Catholic Loyalism: Elements of an International Affair’, SCJ, 41 (2010): 91–109. 53   Questier, Catholicism and Community, p. 66.

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means of achieving it.54 A similarly complicated picture has emerged from recent work on the extended Throckmorton family of Coughton in Warwickshire. Encompassing schismatics and recusants, zealous Protestants and traitors, this was a divided household and dynasty which exemplifies the muddy and ambivalent currents that ran through English Catholicism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: impulses towards patriotism and assimilation swirled alongside those towards segregation and conspicuous nonconformism.55 It is much harder to recover the political attitudes of Catholics below the level of the gentry, though indictments for seditious words provide us with a tantalising glimpse of what may be merely the tip of an iceberg of dissent. Behind David Browne, the Essex husbandman prosecuted in January 1581 for declaring that he ‘wolde doe the beste he colde’ to assist an invading army led by the late earl of Westmorland (whom he believed to be alive, well and biding his time in Ireland) and the tailor George Binkes who boldly stated that the Pope was ‘supreme head over all Christendom, and that King Philip of Spain is right king of England’ in 1592, stand an unknown number of others who shared their contempt for the current government and hoped that it would soon be overturned, but who prudently kept their opinions to themselves.56 In George Gifford’s popular Dialogue between a papist and a protestant of 1582 the figure of the church papist himself defended the practice of regicide, protesting that ‘it is one thing to commit treason against a prince which is godly, and another thing to kill an heretike which is no lawfull prince’.57 While Gifford’s book was a polemical intervention designed to underline the threat presented by Catholicism, the caricatures that comprised it drew on his own personal experience as a village pastor. And at the parochial level, even after the debacle of 1605, there were still people who held militant views. Four years later Henry Foxwell of Aisholt in Somerset told a Protestant minister who preached against Catholic ceremonies that ‘he would meet him both with word and sword’.58 This may be no more than the release of hot air but in 54   Sandeep Kaushik, ‘Resistance, Loyalty and Recusant Politics: Sir Thomas Tresham and the Elizabethan State’, Midland History, 21 (1996): 37–72, esp. 52–5. See also Gerard Kilroy, Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription (Aldershot, 2005), ch. 5. I draw also on an unpublished paper of my own, written prior to Kaushik’s article, but now superseded by it: ‘An English Politique? Sir Thomas Tresham and Elizabethan Catholicism’. 55   Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott (eds), Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation (Farnham, 2009). 56   J.S. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records: Essex Indictments: Elizabeth I (London, 1978), pp. 213–14; Haigh, Plain Man’s Pathways, p. 188. 57   George Gifford, A dialogue between a papist and a protestant, applied to the capacitie of the unlearned (London, 1583 edn), fo. 102r. 58   Cited in Haigh, Plain Man’s Pathway, p. 189.

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regarding the Gunpowder Plot as the last gasp of a community that steadily reconciled itself to its minority status, to quote Simon Ditchfield, we may be guilty of ‘falling into the usual trap of failing to forget the future’.59 Historians of Catholicism are beginning to take a leaf out of the book of recent scholars of puritanism: just as Patrick Collinson’s memorable depiction of the latter as ‘as factious and subversive as the Homily on Obedience’ is giving way to a renewed sense of the unruly radicalism latent within it, so too is there increasing awareness of the continuing part Catholics played in testing the limits of England’s monarchical republic and in delineating a ‘qualified form of citizenship’.60 Men like William Hungate alert us to a sector of the community that was by no means supine or resigned to subjugation: denouncing John Jewel’s famous Apology as a book ‘full of lyes and untreuthes’, he said ‘thatt he had of longe tyme foreborne to speake and argew of relygyon, butt now he would talke his bellye full, and would learne argumentes to dyspute with the proudest protestant yn England’.61 Catholics were not bystanders and spectators on the events that propelled the three kingdoms of the British Isles towards its mid- and late seventeenthcentury revolutions; they were also participants in them. In recognising the contingent and conditional quality of Catholic compliance, we should not overlook those who chose the option of exile or were forcibly deported overseas. Neglected since Peter Guilday’s study of 1914, this category of displaced persons is now receiving the renewed attention that has long been overdue.62 Peter Marshall’s work on those who fled in the wake of the Henrician Reformation has been complemented by Katy Gibbons’ fine study of those who settled in Paris and moved in the outer circles of the French Catholic League during the Elizabethan period. These emigrés yield important new insights into the relationship between English Catholics and the continental territories where they sought asylum. A destabilising presence in their host environment and a source of 59

  Simon Ditchfield, ‘Tridentine Catholicism’, in Alexandra Bamji, Geert Janssen and Mary Laven (eds), The Ashgate Companion to the Counter Reformation (Farnham, 2013), p. 17. 60   Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559– 1625 (Oxford, 1982), p. 177; ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, 69 (1987): 394–424; ‘The Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis and the Elizabethan Polity’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 84 (1994), 51–92. See Peter Lake, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I Revisited (by its Victims) as a Conspiracy’, in Barry Coward and Julian Swann (eds), Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe: From the Waldensians to the French Revolution (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 87–111. Quotation from Houliston, Catholic Resistance, p. 48. 61   BL, Lansdowne MS 97, fo. 179r. 62   Peter Guilday, The English Catholic Refugees on the Continent, vol. I, The English Colleges and Convents in the Catholic Low Countries, 1558–1795 (London, 1914).

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ongoing anxiety in London, their activities further question the stereotype of isolation and introversion embedded in the older historiography.63 Movement across national boundaries was inherently disturbing to the authorities and the experience of flight and dislocation radicalised and intensified the confessional awareness of those who left their homeland for Spain and the Low Countries. Brokers between the Catholic community in England and the international sponsors to whom they looked to launch a holy crusade, immigrants such as Richard Verstegan were also critical figures in the burgeoning book trade examined here in Chapter 8.64 Anne Dillon’s study of Verstegan’s production of graphical illustrated French and Latin broadsheets of Calvinist atrocities against the martyrs illuminates the visual component of his programme of propaganda. Leading Catholic rulers on the Continent were the intended audience of these prints, which he hoped would provoke them to ride to the rescue and uproot heresy from England.65 Academic expatriates residing in the Flemish territories of Philip II did not always adopt the strategy of protesting loyalty to Elizabeth and blaming her counsellors: Thomas Stapleton’s Latin Apologia addressed to the king in 1592 was a venomous ad hominem denunciation of the queen as a second Jezebel, evil genius, and witch designed to warn the rebel provinces of Holland and Zeeland of the consequences of embracing Protestantism and presenting England as a ‘pestilential hydra’. Attesting to a spirit of militant opposition and apocalyptic resistance that ‘strains the language of loyal opposition’, such texts assist in disentangling the exile experience from the ‘contradictory myths concerning obedience and treachery’ that surround it. They too imply that the passivity of postReformation Catholicism has been greatly exaggerated.66 All of these enterprises must be regarded as a vital arm of what Geert Janssen has christened ‘the Counter-Reformation of the Refugee’.67 The 63

  Peter Marshall, ‘Catholic Exiles’, in his Religious Identities in Henry VIII’s England (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 227–61; Katy Gibbons, English Catholic Exiles in Late SixteenthCentury Paris (Woodbridge, 2011). 64   Paul Arblaster, Antwerp and the World: Richard Verstegan and the International Culture of Catholic Reformation (Leuven, 2004). See also R. Zacchi and M. Morini (eds), Richard Rowlands Verstegan: A Versatile Man in an Age of Turmoil (Turnhout, 2012). 65   Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot, 2002), ch. 5. See also Christopher Highley, ‘Richard Verstegan’s Book of Martyrs’, in Christopher Highley and John N. King (eds), John Foxe and his World (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 183–97. 66   Jan Machielsen, ‘The Lion, the Witch and the King: Thomas Stapleton’s Apologia pro Rege Catholico Philippo II (1592)’, EHR, 129 (2014): 19–46, at quotations at 19, 45, 21. 67   Geert Janssen, ‘The Counter-Reformation of the Refugee: Exile and the Shaping of Catholic Militancy in the Dutch Revolt’, JEH, 63 (2012): 671–92. See also Geert Janssen, ‘The Exile Experience’, in Bamji, Janssen and Laven (eds), Ashgate Companion, pp. 73–90.

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English, Scottish and Welsh colleges and seminaries founded overseas likewise provided a location for a ‘diaspora activism’ that highlights the multiple and competing narratives of nationhood that coexisted in this period.68 In the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as impressive new research by Liesbeth Corens is revealing, English Catholics in the Habsburgruled Southern Netherlands continued to hope that the formal restoration of their faith as the state religion could still be achieved and to mobilise themselves to bring this about, negotiating the fluid interface between their religious and patriotic identities in extraordinarily subtle ways.69 The men and women who left England, Wales and Scotland to enter monasteries and convents on the Continent are another important component of this diaspora. Geographical separation sharpened the vocations of those who joined contemplative orders in France and the Low Countries and mysticism and claustration were no bar to the nuns’ involvement in a lively political culture that linked exiles with their coreligionists at home. Far from preventing participation in dissident activity, their liminal position offshore afforded them opportunities to engage in the controversies that would determine Catholicism’s future. They formed what Claire Walker has called ‘dislocated pockets of resistance to the Protestant Church and state’.70 Through the medium of writing, some of them, including the Benedictine Barbara Constable, functioned as ‘closet missionaries’ and articulated theories of the conditional nature of authority of their own.71 Their actions embodied a dialectical conception 68   See Mark Netzloff, ‘The English Colleges and the English Nation: Allen, Persons, Verstegan and Diasporic Nationalism’, in Ronald Corthell et al. (eds), Catholic Culture in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN, 2007), pp. 236–60; and David Worthington (ed.), British and Irish Emigrants and Exiles in Europe, 1603–1688 (Leiden, 2010), part 4. 69   Liesbeth Corens, ‘English Catholics in the Southern Netherlands, c.1660–1720’ (forthcoming PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge). 70   Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke, 2003), quotation at p. 174. See also her ‘Prayer, Patronage and Political Conspiracy: English Nuns and the Restoration’, HJ, 43 (2000): 1–23; ‘Loyal and dutiful subjects: English nuns and Stuart politics’, in James Daybell (ed.), Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1750 (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 228–42; ‘Crumbs of News: Early Modern English Nuns and Royalist Intelligence Networks’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 42 (2012): 635–55. On how Protestants responded, see Liesbeth Corens, ‘Catholic Nuns and English Identities. English Protestant Travellers on the English Convents in the Low Countries, 1660–1730’, RH, 30 (2011): 441–59. 71   Heather Wolfe, ‘Dame Barbara Constable: Catholic Antiquarian, Advisor, and Closet Missionary’, in Corthell et al. (eds), Catholic Culture, pp. 158–88; Jenna Lay, ‘An English Nun’s Authority: Early Modern Spiritual Controversy and the Manuscripts of Barbara Constable’, in Laurence Lux-Sterritt and Carmen M. Mangion (eds), Gender, Catholicism and Spirituality: Women and the Roman Catholic Church in Britain and Europe (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 99–114.

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of the relationship between action and contemplation, empowerment and abnegation, akin to that which Laurence Lux-Sterritt has discerned at the heart of Mary Ward’s ill-fated foundation in imitation of the Jesuits, the English Ladies.72 The physical exile of these men and women mirrored the inner exile experienced and cultivated by those whom circumstances compelled to stay at home. As Lowell Gallagher has commented, postReformation Catholicism was ‘a nomadic, experimental and interstitial’ phenomenon, whose adherents had to ‘navigate with vigilance and diplomacy their status as ‘insiders’ or ‘outsiders’. A significant stimulus to literary creation, the retreat into a reserved mental space was not the antithesis but the alter-ego of religious and political engagement.73 Catholics thus continued to claim a voice and assert their place in contemporary politics. As Peter Lake and Michael Questier have argued in their analysis of the Edmund Campion affair, they played a role in the genesis of a rudimentary (but still discernably Habermasian) public sphere. By focusing on the ways in which Catholics and their Protestant opponents manipulated the media of the spoken and printed word for polemical advantage and convenience, they have transcended the parameters of the earlier debate about the objectives of the Jesuit mission and illuminated its efforts to exploit ‘an echo chamber of public interest’, sway popular opinion and challenge the legitimacy of the Elizabethan regime. The exchanges in which Persons and Campion engaged with their Protestant opponents constituted part of an ‘overt ideological guerrilla war’ – a paper war in which they tussled over the questions of allegiance, obedience, trust and dissimulation that exercised states and their dissenting subjects across Reformation Europe.74 These themes were partially anticipated in my essay on ‘Dumb Preachers’ (Chapter 8), which highlights the use of print as an instrument of agitation. They are pursued further in Chapter 10, which explores the excitement and disquiet that surrounded the Jesuit mission, 72

  Laurence Lux-Sterritt, Redefining Female Religious Life: French Ursulines and English Ladies in Seventeenth-Century Catholicism (Aldershot, 2005); ‘Mary Ward’s English Institute and Prescribed Female Roles in the Early Modern Church’, in Laurence Lux-Sterritt and Carmen M. Mangion (eds), Gender, Catholicism and Spirituality: Women and the Roman Catholic Church in Britain and Europe (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 83–98; ‘Mary Ward’s English Institute: The Apostolate as Self-Affirmation?’, RH, 28 (2006): 192–208. Our knowledge of this dimension of English Catholicism has been transformed by the AHRC funded ‘Who Were the Nuns?’ Project, based at Queen Mary, University of London (http://wwtn.history.qmul. ac.uk/) and the publications it has generated: Caroline Bowden (ed.), English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, 6 vols (London, 2012–13); Caroline Bowden and James M. Kelly (eds), The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Communities, Culture and Identity (Farnham, 2013). 73   Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, chs 5–6; Lowell Gallagher, ‘Introduction’, in Lowell Gallagher (ed.), Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism (Toronto, 2012), pp. 3–24, at 8–9. 74   Lake and Questier, ‘Puritans, Papists, and the “Public Sphere”’, 605, 607.

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together with the techniques employed by its protagonists and apologists to present it as a formidable challenge to Protestant hegemony and to stir up a sense of apocalyptic expectation. My discussion of the furore associated with the arrival of the ‘new army of Satan’ is symptomatic of another significant development that has occurred in the historiography of Catholicism in the British Isles in the last decade: the recognition that popery and anti-popery cannot be disentangled and must be explored in tandem.75 Catholics and Protestants perceived each other through a series of distorting prisms that decisively shaped how they interacted with each other. Anthony Milton has demonstrated that the self-definition of English Protestantism was intricately but directly linked with how it perceived its relationship with the Church of Rome, while Lake and Questier are exploring how the equation works in reverse, as well as the ways in which the community’s own internal divisions were implicated in these processes.76 Peter Marshall has recently dissected the vibrant ‘black legend’ of John Calvin’s egotism and sexual depravity propagated by Catholic polemicists and how they utilised the allegations of sedition clustered around the Genevan reformer to underline the contrasting ‘loyalty’ of adherents of Rome and their rightful place within the English polity.77 However, the mutually reinforcing processes of identity formation embedded in contemporary polemic have been most extensively and fruitfully explored in recent years not by historians, but by literary critics such as Alison Shell, Frances Dolan, Raymond Tumbleson and Arthur Marotti. Their investigations of the role of Catholicism and anti-Catholicism in practices of cultural representation and Renaissance self-fashioning have taught us to be sensitive to the capacity of rhetoric and language to influence contemporary perception and action. They have drawn attention to the convergences between ideology and fantasy, shown how blurred are the boundaries between reality and imagination and urged us to abandon the futile attempt to demarcate them.78 75

  For an earlier clarion call to this effect, see Hibbard, ‘Early Stuart Catholicism’.   Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1994); Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England (London, 1989), pp. 72–106; Michael Questier, ‘Practical Anti-Papistry during the Reign of Elizabeth I’, JBS, 36 (1997): 371–96. 77   Peter Marshall, ‘John Calvin and the English Catholics, c.1565–1640’, HJ, 53 (2010): 849–70. 78   See Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination; Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca and London, 1999); Raymond D. Tumbleson, Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1660–1745 (Cambridge, 1998); Arthur F. Marotti (ed.), Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts 76

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A further area in which research has accelerated during the period in which the essays contained in this volume were originally written is the world of interconfessional relations. The question of how both members of competing churches and sects responded to what has been called ‘the adventure of religious pluralism’ and learnt to live with and amidst diversity has been the subject of extensive discussion over the last decade.79 Meticulous archival research by Bill Sheils, Malcolm Wanklyn and others has illuminated the unstable mixture of assimilation and segregation, anxiety and cooperation, which defined interactions between Catholics and their Protestant neighbours.80 Building on these insights, Chapter 3 considers the paradoxical consequences of the strategies Catholics employed to evade persecution and resist annihilation. It suggests that conformity served to entrench this plurality yet further: accepted by the state as a gesture of assent it simultaneously provided a loophole that allowed the old faith to survive and persist. It facilitated coexistence as a gesture of partial compliance but it also created conditions in which church papists became the subject of intense suspicion as a malignant fifth column. It lent credibility to the fear that the greatest threat to the establishment came from those who outwardly appeared to be compliant. Since the initial publication of this essay, I have developed these arguments in a fuller discussion of the dynamics of ‘charitable hatred’, which complements Benjamin Kaplan’s work on a larger European canvas in Divided by Faith.81 As these publications make clear, appreciation (Basingstoke, 1999); Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, 2005). 79   In addition to the items cited in subsequent footnotes, see Keith Cameron and Mark Greengrass (eds), The Adventure of Pluralism in Early Modern France (Oxford, 2000); C. Scott Dixon, Dagmar Freist and Mark Greengrass (eds), Living with Religious Diversity in Early-Modern Europe (Farnham, 2009); Nadine Lewycky and Adam Morton, Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England: Essays in Honour of Professor W.J. Sheils (Farnham, 2012); Keith P. Luria, ‘Religious Coexistence’, in Bamji, Janssen and Laven (eds), Ashgate Companion, pp. 55–72. 80   William J. Sheils, ‘Catholics and their Neighbours in a Rural Community: Egton Chapelry 1590–1780’, NH, 34 (1998): 109–33; William J. Sheils, ‘“Getting On” and “Getting Along” in Parish and Town: Catholics and their Neighbours in England’, in Benjamin Kaplan, Bob Moore, Henk van Nierop and Judith Pollmann (eds), Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c.1570–1720 (Manchester, 2009), pp. 67–83; Malcolm Wanklyn, ‘Catholics in the Village Community: Madeley, Shropshire, 1630–1770’, in Marie B. Rowlands (ed.), English Catholics of Parish and Town 1558–1778 (London, 1999), pp. 210–36. See also Andrzej Bida, ‘Papists in an Elizabethan Parish: Linton, Cambridgeshire, c.1560–c.1600’ (unpubl. Diploma in Historical Studies dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1992). 81   Walsham, Charitable Hatred, esp. chs 5–6; Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2007).

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of what Willem Frijhoff, writing of the Dutch Republic, describes as ‘interconfessional conviviality’ and ‘social ecumenism’ must be balanced by attention to the circumstances in which the latent virus of prejudice was inflamed.82 We must also consider what prevented intolerance from spilling over into violence. Here Anthony Milton’s suggestion that belligerent expressions of anti-Catholicism helped Protestants to come to terms with the promiscuous interactions with papists they had on a daily basis has considerable mileage.83 It is increasingly apparent that boundarybuilding was a pre-requisite for peaceful coexistence and that toleration depended, counter-intuitively, on the erection of literal and figurative barriers between those who practised it at the grassroots. Plurality was a powerful agent and catalyst of confessionalisation.84 How far these processes were accelerated as time progressed has yet to be fully investigated. Catholics were not beneficiaries of the Act of Toleration of 1689, but in signalling the state and society’s acceptance that the coexistence of different denominational strands of Christianity was here to stay the legislation undoubtedly altered the atmosphere in which adherents of the Church of Rome interacted with Anglicans and Dissenters. How did the Catholic community cope with its new-found stability and growing visibility under Hanoverian rule, or is this no more than an optical illusion? Did it develop an increasing tendency towards insularity and endogamy, as Bossy suggested,85 or were these processes of cultural differentiation muted by the ongoing horizontal connections 82

  Willem Frijhoff, ‘The Threshold of Toleration: Interconfessional Conviviality in Holland during the Early Modern Period’, in his Embodied Belief: Ten Essays on Religious Culture in Dutch History (Hilversum, 2002), pp. 39–65. See also Bob Scribner, ‘Preconditions of Tolerance and Intolerance in Sixteenth-Century Germany’, in Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner (eds), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 32–47. 83   Anthony Milton, ‘A Qualified Intolerance: The Limits and Ambiguities of Early Stuart Anti-Catholicism’, in Marotti (ed.), Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism, pp. 85–115. 84   For important recent work on these themes, see Keith P. Luria, Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early-Modern France (Washington, DC, 2005); Keith P. Luria, ‘The Power of Conscience? Conversion and Confessional Boundary Building in Early-Modern France’, in Dixon et al. (eds), Living with Religious Diversity, pp. 109–25; Thomas Max Saffley (ed.), A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World (Leiden, 2011), esp. Safley, ‘Multiconfessionalism: A Brief Introduction’, pp. 1–19, at p. 11, and Jesse Spohnholz, ‘Confessional Coexistence in the Early Modern Low Countries’, pp. 47–73; Jesse Spohnholz, The Tactics of Toleration: A Refugee Community in the Age of Religious Wars (Newark, 2011). See also my ‘Cultures of Coexistence in Early Modern England: History, Literature and Religious Toleration’, The Seventeenth Century, 28 (2013): 115–37. 85   John Bossy, English Catholic Community, ch. 6. See also his ‘English Catholics after 1688’, in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel and Nicholas Tyacke (eds), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford, 1991), pp. 369–87.

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which it maintained with the reformed majority? The diurnal of the Lancashire gentleman Nicholas Blundell reveals that he was a fully integrated member of the town of Little Crosby who maintained a close friendship with its Anglican vicar,86 and other studies reinforce the point that the eighteenth-century recusant gentry were not ostracised from county society. They practised their religion discreetly, but also interacted with their Protestant neighbours in their recreational life and participated in intellectual and cultural pursuits that were markers of their class.87 Sally Jordan’s study of land-owning Catholics in the Thames Valley between the Restoration and 1780, by contrast, stresses the effects of legislative restrictions that prevented their entry into esteemed professions: a partly self-imposed isolation that manifested itself in the formation of a separate and rather incestuous community, tied by faith, business and marriage.88 The tentative suggestions and speculations offered at the end of Chapter 4 clearly require further and fuller investigation. Afforded relatively little attention in this collection, the experience and evolution of Catholicism after 1660 is proving one of the richest terrains of current enquiry. Late Stuart Catholicism’s status as a homogeneous, quiescent and hermetically sealed enclave has been persuasively contested by Geoff Baker’s study of the mental world of the Lancashire gentleman William Blundell through the lens of his reading,89 while recent research on the Rookwoods of Stanningfield in late Stuart Suffolk has probed the intriguing problem of why a family whose members confirmed the aggressive stereotypes that circulated in anti-Protestant polemic nevertheless managed to get along with its neighbours.90 Gabriel Glickman is systematically dispelling enduring myths about the marginality and backwardness of eighteenth-century Jacobitism and underlining the Catholic community’s cosmopolitan sources of inspiration, as well as its

86   The Great Diurnall of Nicholas Blundell of Little Crosby, Lancashire 1702–1728, ed. J.J. Bagley, Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 110, 112, 114 ([1968–72]), see for example i. 74, 233; ii. 67, 210, and my discussion in ‘Supping with Satan’s Disciples: Spiritual and Secular Sociability in Post-Reformation England’, in Lewycky and Morton (eds), Getting Along?, pp. 52–4. 87   Leo Gooch, ‘“The Religion for a Gentleman”: The Northern Catholic Gentry in the Eighteenth Century’, RH, 23 (1997): 543–68. 88   Sally Jordan, ‘Gentry Catholicism in the Thames Valley, 1660–1780’, RH, 27 (2004): 217–43. 89   Geoff Baker, ‘William Blundell and Late-Seventeenth-Century English Catholicism’, NH, 45 (2008): 259–77; Reading and Politics in Early Modern England: The Mental World of a Seventeenth-Century Catholic Gentleman (Manchester, 2010). 90   Carys Brown, ‘The Rookwood Family of Stanningfield, Suffolk, and English Catholicism c.1689–c.1737’ (unpubl. BA dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2012).

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entanglement in and contribution to the Enlightenment.91 Approaching the topic from a different perspective, Eoin Devlin’s study of English engagement with Papal Rome and James II’s restoration of diplomatic ties with the Holy See turns on its head some lasting presuppositions and illuminates the absolutist ambitions for re-Catholicisation of this controversial monarch. Exemplifying the mutual benefits to be gained from placing British developments in their European context, and vice versa, it also underlines the point that the prolonged Protestant Reformation was fundamentally shaped by an equally extended Counter Reformation.92

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II The second half of this introduction speaks more directly to the suggestion that Catholicism in Protestant Britain must be understood in relation to the international movement for Catholic renewal. Over the last few decades, the study of this movement has itself been revitalised. Where earlier commentators regarded the initiatives that comprise it as essentially defensive, the rear-guard reaction of an institution jolted into aggressive action only by the onset of Protestantism, newer work has insisted that these were rather the twin strands of a single set of impulses for reform which predated Martin Luther’s momentous protest against indulgences in 1517 and had deeper intellectual and spiritual roots.93 Once integrated into a broader and highly influential thesis about the rise of the confessional state,94 emphasis on the predominantly coercive and acculturating quality of these parallel Reformations has also gradually dissipated.95 The catchwords and keynotes of more recent research have been negotiation, compromise, reciprocity, accommodation and exchange. 91

  Gabriel Glickman, ‘Andrew Michael Ramsay (1686–1743), the Jacobite Court and the English Catholic Enlightenment’, Eighteenth Century Thought, 3 (2007): 293–329; The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology (Woodbridge, 2009); ‘Gothic History and Catholic Enlightenment in the Works of Charles Dodd (1672– 1743)’, HJ, 54 (2011): 347–69; ‘The Church and the Catholic Community 1660–1714’, in Grant Tapsell (ed.), The Later Stuart Church, 1660–1714 (Manchester, 2012), 217–42. 92   Eoin Devlin, ‘English Encounters with Papal Rome in the Late Counter-Reformation, c.1685–c.1697’ (unpubl. PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2010); forthcoming in revised form from CUP. This offers a rather different perspective from Steven Pincus’s 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven and London, 2009), esp. chs 5–6. 93   Critical here was Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire. 94   Wolfgang Reinhard, ‘Reformation, Counter Reformation, and the Early Modern State: A Reassessment’, CHR, 75 (1989): 383–405. 95   For the earlier emphasis on coercion and regulation, see Bossy, ‘Counter Reformation and the People’.

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Stress on the imposition of Catholic values on the populace through the agency of quasi-absolutist regimes, reinforced by the activities of the Inquisition and other disciplinary tribunals, has been displaced by a fresh awareness of the ways in which the Church of Rome was regenerated from below and within. Historians are now more attuned to the delicate and dialectical interactions between clergy and laity, centre and periphery, universal and particular that characterised the movement for Christian renewal between c.1500 and 1800. They have moved decisively beyond what Simon Ditchfield has called the ‘hackneyed Punch-and-Judy show that is the Counter-versus Catholic Reformation debate’ and broken free of the constricting moulds set by a century and a half of scholarship.96 Critical here is John O’Malley’s observation that the adjective Tridentine is a misleading term for describing the early modern metamorphosis of Roman Catholicism.97 Although it is still widely regarded as an important organ of institutional, ritual and liturgical reform, the Council of Trent has been cut down to size as merely one component of a broader programme. Its decrees and directives do not encompass this project in its entirety and fail to reflect many features of the religious revival that marked the period. They offer little insight into the intense, introspective and sometimes ecstatic spirituality that became the signature of some branches of the movement and they obscure the systematic appeal to the emotions and senses as conduits to divine grace that underpinned baroque piety.98 They also conceal the crucial role played by new and rejuvenated religious orders, 96   Simon Ditchfield, ‘Of Dancing Cardinals and Mestizo Madonnas: Reconfiguring the History of Roman Catholicism in the Early Modern Period’, JEMH, 8 (2004): 386–408, at 387. Textbooks and syntheses reflecting these tendencies include Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge, 1998; 2nd edn 2005); Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700 (London, 1999); David Luebke, The Counter Reformation: The Essential Readings (Oxford, 1999); Mary Laven, ‘Encountering the Counter Reformation’, Renaissance Quarterly, 59 (2006): 706–20; Robert Bireley, ‘Redefining Catholicism: Trent and Beyond’, in R. Po-Chia Hsia (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 6, Reform and Expansion 1500–1660 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 145–61, Bamji, Janssen and Laven (eds), Ashgate Companion. See also Craig Harline, ‘Official Religion-Popular Religion in Recent Historiography of the Catholic Reformation’, ARG, 81 (1990): 239–62. For an incisive overview of historiographical trends, see John W. O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, MA, 2000). 97   O’Malley, Trent and all That, pp. 134–6. See also Simon Ditchfield, ‘Tridentine Catholicism’, in Bamji, Janssen and Laven (eds), Ashgate Companion, pp. 15–31. 98   H. Outram Evennett, The Spirit of the Counter Reformation, ed. John Bossy (Notre Dame, 1970) remains a lasting contribution to our understanding of the spirituality of the movement. On the senses, see now Nicky Hallett, The Senses in Religious Communities, 1600–1800: Early Modern ‘Convents of Pleasure’ (Farnham, 2013); Wietse de Boer, ‘The Counter Reformation of the Senses’, in Bamji, Janssen and Laven (eds), Ashgate Companion, pp. 243–60.

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including the Franciscans and Jesuits, and the impact of the missions they conducted both at home and abroad. Integrating the local and global dimensions of early modern Catholic Christianity and exploring how the Western encounter with indigenous peoples and civilisations in distant parts of the world informed and transformed the Church’s endeavours back in Europe are high on the agenda of historians determined to ‘decentre’ the Counter Reformation.99 These observations are an important framework for the essays in this collection that centre on the objectives and endeavours of the stream of seminary-trained priests, Jesuits and other regulars sent to Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and their reception by and interaction with the laity with whom they came into contact. It is necessary to reemphasise the critical part played by mission in the creation of postReformation Catholicism in Britain.100 This has long been an arena of historiographical contention, but we have now moved beyond the constraining paradigm of ‘success’ and ‘failure’.101 Christopher Haigh’s scepticism about the evangelical credentials of this enterprise has been overtaken by two interrelated developments: first, by the recognition that the boundaries between heresy and schism, conversion and reconciliation were porous and fluid,102 and second, by increasing awareness that the missionaries were intent not merely upon stiffening the resolve of those already committed to Rome but also upon persuading Protestants to embrace the creed they taught. They found prisons a fertile environment in which to achieve both of these aims, competing with Church of England ministers to win the souls of the convicted criminals alongside whom they were often executed.103 As Lake and Questier, Brad Gregory, Anne Dillon, Susannah Monta and others have shown, they adeptly turned their own deaths into a theatre of martyrdom, transforming the rites of humiliation to which the state subjected them on the scaffold into inspirational spectacles. Celebrating their heroic sacrifice and refuting claims that they died as traitors, printed texts written by their colleagues adhered scrupulously to the standards of humanist hagiography and functioned simultaneously as advertisements of the eternal merits of recusancy. If these martyrological 99

  Simon Ditchfield, ‘Decentering the Catholic Reformation: Papacy and Peoples in the Early Modern World’, ARG, 101 (2010): 186–208. 100   Bossy, English Catholic Community, esp. ch. 1. 101   Christopher Haigh, ‘Success and Failure in the English Reformation’, P&P, 173 (2001): 28–49. 102   See esp. Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion. Forthcoming work by Lucy Underwood will illuminate these complexities further. 103   Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Prisons, Priests and People’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), England’s Long Reformation 1500–1800 (London, 1998), pp. 195–234.

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narratives stressed that England was a Catholic country that required reclamation rather than conversion, this was a rhetorical strategy designed to emphasise the antiquity of the Church of Rome against the novelty of an upstart heresy. They circulated alongside scribally copied accounts that were saturated with signs and wonders reported by bystanders that testified to the spontaneous canonisation of the consecrated caste of priests upon which the laity depended for their sacramental survival and whose courage and charisma led them to be revered as living saints. Joint creations of the community and clergy, these manuscripts testify to the willingness of the Jesuits to exploit aspects of piety that had had come under attack during the Reformation and to fuel the popular appetite for the miraculous. The capacity of martyrs to win over indifferent and even hostile eyewitnesses was widely acknowledged.104 While some recent work on the Reformation has been dismissive of the significance of conversion as a motor of religious change, other scholars have continued to underline the importance of internal revolutions ‘loosed by the holy spirit’ in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.105 People crossed over between Catholicism and Protestantism with surprising frequency in this period and their peregrinations were frequently far more than pragmatic or political manoeuvres.106 Celebrated as converts by the Church which gained them and denigrated by their erstwhile coreligionists as apostates and renegades, the shifting institutional affiliations of clergy and laypeople obscure a series of dramatic individual epiphanies 104   See Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric Under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England’, P&P, 153 (1996): 64–107; Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1999), ch. 7; Dillon, Construction of Martyrdom, esp. ch. 2; Susannah Monta, Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005); Thomas M. McCoog, ‘Construing martyrdom in the English Catholic community, 1582–1602’, in Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’, pp. 95–127. 105  The phrase is Ethan Shagan’s in Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), p. 303, though it is a term he rejects as a description of the English Reformation. 106   On conversion, see Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion; Peter Marshall, ‘Evangelical Conversion in the Reign of Henry VIII’, in Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (eds), The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 14–37; Alison Shell, ‘Multiple Conversion and the Menippean Self: The Case of Richard Carpenter’, in Marotti (ed.), Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism, 154–97; Molly Murray, ‘“Now I ame a Catholique”: William Alabaster and the Early Modern Catholic Conversion Narrative’, in Corthell et al. (eds), Catholic Culture, pp. 189–215; Lieke Stelling (ed.), The Turn of the Soul: Representations of Religious Conversion in Early Modern Art and Literature (Leiden, 2012). A major AHRC project on ‘Conversion Narratives in Early Modern Europe: A CrossConfessional and Comparative Study, 1550–1700’ led by Simon Ditchfield and Helen Smith has recently drawn to completion at the University of York (http://www.york.ac.uk/crems/ conversion-narratives/).

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that deserve closer inspection. Susan Brigden was instinctively right to suggest at the end of an important article on ‘Youth and the English Reformation’ published in 1982 that by the mid-Elizabethan period it was no longer the new Gospel but Roman Catholicism that had the allure of an exotic, forbidden fruit to the adolescents of the realm.107 The missionaries recognised the vital necessity of winning the support of the next generation, whose defiance of parental pressure to conform with the law they elevated into pious exempla.108 Theirs was a movement fired by the excitement of the young men who entered the seminaries, many of whom came from households fractured by schism if not fully immersed in heresy. Recently subjected to forensic scrutiny by Lucy Underwood, the responsa scholarum of English Colleges in Rome and Valladolid reveal the elasticity of the categories of conversion and reconciliation, and the ambiguous interface between church papistry and nominal Protestantism in contemporary minds. Albeit filtered by the scribes who took down their testimonies, the evangelical language they used to describe their transition to Catholicism is telling: they spoke frequently of divine revelation and sudden interventions of celestial grace.109 We need, then, to recover a sense of the intensity, emotion and energy that underpinned the Counter-Reformation mission to Britain. These themes are developed especially in Part II of this book. Chapter 5 examines how the clergy harnessed fascination with the supernatural to bolster the morale of committed Catholics and persuade confirmed Protestants to cast off their soul-destroying errors. In defiance of the reformer’s insistence that modern miracles had ceased, they brandished the thaumaturgic wonders wrought by martyrs, relics and sacramentals as heavenly testimonies to the truth of their religion. They believed that God had sent these signs not merely to comfort the persecuted, but also to open the eyes of the heretics as he had enlightened the pagans of old. The reports of prodigies and providential interventions that coincided with the arrival of Persons and Campion in 1580 alert us to a body of opinion beyond the ranks of recusants that was open to influence, as I suggest in Chapter 10. Exorcisms, visions and the angelic apparitions discussed in Chapter 7 also proved to be powerful tools for inspiring zeal, defending contested tenets and delivering didactic lessons. These too were elements of religious experience about which the reformers were ambivalent, if not overtly antagonistic. Yet for 107

  Susan Brigden, ‘Youth and the English Reformation’, P&P, 95 (1982): 37–67.   Alison Shell, ‘“Furor Juvenilis: Post-Reformation English Catholicism and Exemplary Youthful Behaviour’, in Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’, pp. 185–206. 109   Lucy Underwood, ‘Youth, Religious Identity, and Autobiography at the English Colleges in Rome and Valladolid, 1592–1685’, HJ, 55 (2012): 349–74. 108

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this very reason they could prove a mixed blessing. If they could dazzle Protestants into questioning their faith, they could also provoke them to mocking contempt. The epistemological uncertainties that surrounded these phenomena exposed them to alternative interpretations that could be deeply damaging. Attributed by their confessional enemies to the malice of Satan, the Machiavellian stratagems of priests or the deceit of their lay accomplices, they could prove a source of scandal and embarrassment to a Church determined to uphold and defend its ideological and moral integrity. These chapters also highlight the tensions regarding supernaturalism and the discernment of spirits that simmered beneath the surface of the Catholic Reformation more generally. Across Europe, the wariness about manifestations of divine intervention that had prevailed in the early and middle decades of the sixteenth century in the wake of the initial Protestant assault coexisted with and tempered baroque enthusiasm.110 Uncovering a persistent strand of modest scepticism about the supernatural within English Catholic ranks, Francis Young’s recent book shows how early humanist caution converged with neo-Aristotelian metaphysics and later Jansenism to present a powerful challenge to the eager promotion of the miraculous that was the hallmark of the Jesuit mission and to the ‘mystical recusancy’ practised by prominent laymen like Sir Thomas Tresham. In rescuing these marginalised voices, he not only underlines the intraconfessional conflicts that divided the community and its active engagement with Continental theological and philosophical trends. He also shows how these developments helped to create the Protestant stereotype of Catholicism as a religion that specialised in forging false wonders, counterfeiting demonic possession and inventing ‘traditions’.111 The contentions within the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Catholic community surrounding these issues replicate those that were a feature of late medieval Christianity itself. It is increasingly apparent that narratives that locate the ‘disenchantment of the world’ in the post-Reformation period fail to recognise the deep undercurrent of anxiety about the preternatural that troubled the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Church. Indeed some historians have seen the surge of demonological writing in this era as a response to a ‘crisis of belief’ and discovered worries 110   See Clare Copeland, ‘Sanctity’, in Bamji, Janssen and Laven (eds), Ashgate Companion, pp. 225–41; Clare Copeland and Jan Machielsen (eds), Angels of Light? Sanctity and the Discernment of Spirits in the Early Modern Period (Leiden and Boston, 2013). See also Craig Harline, Miracles at the Jesus Oak: Histories of the Supernatural in Reformation Europe (New York, 2003). 111   Francis Young, English Catholics and the Supernatural 1553–1829 (Farnham, 2013).

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about the nature, reality and efficacy of magic at the very heart of this literature.112 Caroline Walker Bynum detects the paradoxical coexistence of two apparently opposite tendencies: unprecedented enthusiasm for tangible manifestations of the sacred and supernatural alongside renewed suspicion about its compatibility with true spirituality. She identifies ‘an intensifying rejection and an intensifying revering of matter as the locus of the divine’.113 These insights sit a little uneasily alongside Eamon Duffy’s influential study of Catholic England in The Stripping of the Altars. In emphasising the vitality and resilience of ‘traditional religion’ over signs of friction, disharmony and dissent, his book immediately transformed its field. It had the salutary effect of compelling us to rethink long-standing assumptions about the parlous condition of the Church on the eve of the Reformation, but it may have overstated its health.114 However, its power is now starting to wane and the pendulum of interpretation is beginning to swing once again. Robert Lutton and others are questioning Duffy’s emphasis on consensus and suggesting that the fifteenth-century Church was more diverse, fragmentary and internally riven than he implied. Organic changes were occurring within it that allowed lollardy and evangelicalism to germinate.115 Alongside this ran a corrosive humanist critique of ‘superstition’ which fed into a rhetoric of reform that later diverged, bifurcated and took separate institutional forms. These helped to regenerate it from within, but they also destabilised it, supplying an explanation for what Peter Marshall has described as the ‘perplexing fragility’ of some aspects of orthodox

112

  Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago, 2002); Michael D. Bailey, ‘The Disenchantment Of Magic: Spells, Charms, and Superstition in Early European Witchcraft Literature’, AHR, 111 (2006): 383–404. See also my ‘The Reformation and “The Disenchantment of the World” Reassessed’, HJ, 51 (2008): 497–528, esp. 502–4. 113   Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York, 2011), p. 285 and passim. 114   Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven and London, 1992; 2nd edn 2005). On the vitality of Scottish religion in the same period, see Audrey-Beth Fitch, The Search for Salvation: Lay Faith in Scotland 1480–1560 (Edinburgh, 2009). For Ireland, see Salvador Ryan, ‘Popular Religion in Gaelic Ireland 1445–1645’ (unpubl. PhD dissertation, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, 2002), part II. 115   Robert Lutton, Lollardy and Orthodox Religion in Pre-Reformation England: Reconstructing Piety (Woodbridge, 2006); ‘Geographies and Materialities of Piety: Reconciling Competing Narratives of Religious Change in Pre-Reformation and Reformation England’, in Robert Lutton and Elisabeth Salter (eds), Pieties in Transition: Religious Practices and Experiences, c.1400–1640 (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 11–40.

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piety.116 George Bernard’s recent monograph is the clearest sign that the high-water mark of revisionism has passed, though his emphasis on the areas of vulnerability that counter-balanced its vibrancy still leaves the riddle of why the Reformation occurred ultimately unresolved.117 In the context of these historiographical reorientations, the whole question of the relative roles of continuity and conversion in the making of the Catholic communities of England, Wales and Scotland after 1558 may need to be revisited once more. One site that exemplifies the links between the pre- and postReformation Catholic worlds is Holywell in Flintshire. This famous place of pilgrimage centred on the miraculous healing well consecrated to the seventh-century virgin St Winefride, which reputedly sprang up where her decapitated head fell. Chapter 6 traces the history of the shrine from the post-Conquest period to the eighteenth century, demonstrating how it was reinvented and embellished as an icon of Tudor piety on the eve of the break with Rome and how it defied and evaded destruction in the decades that followed the Henrician dissolution of the monasteries. Transformed into the headquarters of the Welsh Catholic revival, it became a rallying point for militant resistance to Protestantism, a centre of missionary outreach to the visitors who flocked to its waters in search of cures; and, in the reign of James II, a symbol of hope that a fully fledged Counter Reformation might soon come to pass in the British Isles. Part of an ancient geography of the sacred, it was also a lieu de mémoire, a bridge to an era of Christian history over which Catholics and Protestants fought bitterly for control. Holywell was one hub in a wide network of hallowed sites in the landscape, which were scarred by iconoclasm but survived as a potent reminder of a glorious past in which the faith of Rome had first been planted in these islands. It was a focus for articulating a historical vision that could unite the Catholics in the various realms that comprised it in defence of what William Allen called ‘the lost British lamb’, but which could also give expression to their separate ethnic and national identities. Christopher Highley has since analysed the narratives the English, Scottish and Welsh constructed about their religious heritage in greater detail and shown how memory was a key battleground in which polemical wars between the churches were waged, a theme I have further investigated in

116

  Peter Marshall, ‘Forgery and Miracles in the Reign of Henry VIII’, P&P, 178 (2003): 39–73, at 40. 117   George Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church: Vitality and Vulnerability before the Break with Rome (New Haven and London, 2012). See also my The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2011), ch. 1.

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relation to the landscape.118 In a society in which antiquity was regarded as a guarantor of truth, ecclesiastical history and antiquarianism were vital pieces of ammunition in the struggle for both confessional hegemony and evangelical success.119 Colonising and controlling interpretation of the recent past was an equally essential task. Historians have paid surprisingly little attention to the scholarly practices of the priests like Christopher Grene and his brother Martin, whose role in collecting and editing narratives of the heroic days of the Elizabethan and early Stuart mission and its martyrs – in creating its archive – should be more fully acknowledged. It is an irony that the surge of new work on English Catholicism (including my own) rests in large part on the material gathered and transmitted by early modern priests, and then sifted, selected and published by the heirs of this same tradition such as Richard Challoner, Henry Foley, J.H. Pollen and Bede Camm. Such texts, and the partisan ideological lenses through which they were filtered, deserve to be subjected to more careful and critical scrutiny. If Grene, Challoner and their predecessors were counterparts of the Protestant historian John Foxe, Catholic studies has yet to find its Tom Freeman.120 And the manuscripts these men preserved and interpreted for posterity were the medium in which an earlier generation had enshrined the collective memory of its sufferings. ‘Deprived of shrine and sarcophagus’, 118   Christopher Highley, ‘“The Lost British Lamb”: English Catholic Exiles and the Problem of Britain’, in David J. Baker and Willy Mally (ed.), British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 37–50; ‘“A Pestilent and Seditious Book”: Nicholas Sander’s Schismatis Anglicani and Catholic Histories of the Reformation’, in Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modern England (San Marino, CA, 2006), pp. 147–67; Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2008); Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, ch. 3. 119   See, among others, Donna B. Hamilton, ‘Catholic Use of Anglo-Saxon Precedents, 1565–1625’, RH, 26 (2003): 537–55; Felicity Heal, ‘Appropriating History: Catholic and Protestant Polemics and the National Past’, in Kewes (ed.), Uses of History, pp. 109–32; Jason Nice, Sacred History and National Identity: Comparisons between Early Modern Wales and Brittany (London, 2009); Katherine Van Liere, Simon Ditchfield and Howard Louthan (eds), Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World (Oxford, 2012). 120  Andrew Czaja’s Cambridge MPhil dissertation on ‘Catholic History and Memory in Christopher Grene’s Collectanea’ (2013) makes these points convincingly. Grene’s Collectanea are preserved in the archives of Oscott College and the English Province of the Society of Jesus in London. The latter were formerly at Stonyhurst. Richard Challoner, Memoirs of Missionary Priests ([London], 1741–42). Among Tom Freeman’s many interventions, see esp. ‘Fate, Faction and Fiction in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, HJ, 43 (2000): 601–24 and ‘Texts, Lies, and Microfilm: Reading and Misreading Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs”’, SCJ, 30 (1999): 23–46; Elizabethan Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The Making of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (Cambridge, 2011). See also Chapter 5, n. 10, below.

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writes Gerard Kilroy, transcription functioned as a substitute for physical monuments and memorials. The texts it engendered served as sacred relics.121 If history and memory were crucial instruments in the formation of Britain’s post-Reformation Catholic communities, so too were writing and print. The lingering assumption that Catholicism was hostile to the new technology for reproducing texts is another measure of the enduring influence that Protestant polemic has exerted over historical interpretation. Chapter 8 suggests that it has eclipsed the eagerness and ingenuity with which priests embraced the book as a megaphone for broadcasting messages to an international Catholic audience and as a surrogate preacher and pastor to their coreligionists at home. In doing so they were building on foundations laid in the late Middle Ages, not least by the Bridgettines and Carthusians who pioneered the strategy of ‘preaching with their hands’. But it must be acknowledged that persecution provided a particular incentive to their alliance with the press and the pen.122 Deprived of access to the pulpit and public podium, the community and its leaders turned to other methods of projecting their voice. They utilised printing alongside the media of manuscript, image, music and speech to succour the laity, engage in combat with heretics and also (somewhat counterproductively) to prosecute their own damaging internal squabbles and disputes. Augmenting the work of the great Catholic bibliographers, Allison and Rogers, subsequent studies by Alison Shell, Arthur Marotti, Earle Havens and others have delineated the contours of a Catholic ‘culture of persuasion’ which closely mirrored the one engendered by the Protestant Reformation.123 Alongside devotional objects and portable icons, printed texts functioned within this as badges of belonging, as well as sources of consolation, instruments of instruction and foci for meditation. The experience of proscription, I argue, catalysed the process by which Catholicism became as much a religion of the book

121

  Kilroy, Edmund Campion, esp. pp. 4, 14, 61, 86.   See my ‘Preaching without Speaking: Script, Print and Religious Dissent’, in Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (eds), The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700 (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 211–34. On the Bridgettines, see E.A. Jones and Alexandra Walsham (eds), Syon Abbey and its Books: Reading, Writing, and Religion 1400–1700 (Woodbridge, 2010). 123   Alison Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007); Arthur Marotti, ‘Manuscript Transmission and the Catholic Martyrdom Account in Early Modern England’, in Arthur Marotti and Michael D. Bristol (eds), Print, Manuscript and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England (Columbus, OH, 2000), pp. 172–99; Earle Havens, ‘Notes from a Literary Underground: Recusant Catholics, Jesuit Priests, and Scribal Publication in Elizabethan England’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 99 (2005): 505–38. See Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge, 2005). 122

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as Protestantism. It too developed a distinctive piety interpenetrated by literacy. Chapter 9 tackles the closely related issue of how the English Catholic hierarchy responded to the challenge presented by one of the Reformation’s most powerful weapons: the vernacular Bible. Although representatives of the Church of Rome retained reservations about the translation of Scripture into the vulgar tongue, their embattled condition persuaded them of the necessity of producing a version to fight the heretics on their own terms. Despite efforts to restrain private interpretation of the text by enclosing it in extensive annotations, the publication of the Douai Rheims Bible had the potential to promote lay independence. Like printing itself, it unsettled the hierarchical relationship between the clergy and their spiritual charges and shifted the balance of power. If this was one of the unforeseen consequences of becoming a minority, it was also one of the side-effects of the broader shift from script to print and from Latin to the vernacular about which Protestants had mixed feelings themselves. In deciding to recognise rather than resist the linguistic changes taking place in early modern society, they demonstrated a willingness to respond to local cultures and conditions that is reminiscent of the initiatives of Calvinist ministers in the Gaelic-speaking Highlands and islands.124 Catholic priests operating in Celtic regions were likewise alive to the need to communicate with the laity in their own languages and dialects. Harnessing traditional genres, they composed Welsh ballads and songs, translated prayers, homilies and polemical texts into Cornish and printed broadsides about famous shrines like the Holy House of Loreto in lowland Scots. In Ireland too, Bardic poetry became an important vehicle for resisting the Reformation.125 Likewise, the revival of Catholicism in the Hebrides and other parts of the 124   Jane Dawson, ‘Calvinism and the Gaidhealtachd in Scotland’, in Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke and Gillian Lewis (eds), Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1620 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 231–53. 125   For Welsh ballads, see below, p. 276. On Cornwall, see my ‘Antiquities CornuBritannick: Language, Memory and Landscape in Early Modern Cornwall’, in Robert Armstrong and Tadhg O hAnnrachain (eds), Christianities in the Celtic World (Palgrave, forthcoming 2014). The Loreto broadside is The wondrus flittinge of the kirk of our B. Ledy of Loreto (Loreto, 1635). There were corresponding versions in English and Welsh: The miraculous origin and translation of the church of our B. Lady of Loreto (Loreto, 1635); Dechreaud a rhyfedhus esmudiad eglwys yr arglwdhes Fair o Loreto (Loreto, 1635). James January-McCann of Aberystwyth University is currently working on Welsh language recusant literature. The connections between the Gaelic bardic tradition and Catholicism have been investigated by Samantha Meigs, The Reformations in Ireland: Tradition and Confessionalism, 1400–1690 (Basingstoke, 1997) and, with different emphases, by Marc Caball, ‘Religion, Culture and the Bardic Elite in Early Modern Ireland’, in Alan Ford and John McCafferty (eds), The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2005), 158–82.

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Scottish Gaidhealtachd relied on the capacity of Irish missionaries to work within the powerful clan structures of this semi-feudal society.126 Drawing into the foreground a theme implicit throughout this collection, Chapters 11 and 12 suggest that the social profile and base of postReformation Catholicism in Britain was far more heterogeneous than many earlier scholars conceded. The rediscovery of the church papist has been critical in qualifying the idea that the community was predominantly elite in composition, which has been one of the consequences of the historiographical concentration on recusancy. While the wealthy had the resources to pay the crippling fines associated with refusal to attend Protestant worship, conformity was a more affordable lifestyle for the majority. Despite the disproportionate attention lavished on the recusant nobility and gentry (and the copious documentation that survives about them), as Marie Rowland’s volume on Catholics of Parish and Town (1999) has shown, most of those who adhered to the Church of Rome in early modern England and Wales were probably members of the middling and meaner sorts of people.127 We need to look beyond the grand country houses in which the missionaries roosted as ‘sparrows on the roof top’ and recognise the multiplicity of Catholic communities that emerged in the wake of the Reformation.128 It is also necessary to abandon the assumption that committed and articulate Catholicism inevitably collapsed in the absence of regular access to priests and examine the creative adaptations made by Catholic laypeople who lacked constant clerical guidance and were often deprived of the spiritual nourishment of the mass. This was the starting point for Lisa McClain’s Lest we Damned (2004), which explores the explores the course that the laity and clergy charted between Catholic orthodoxy and practical necessity and emphasises their ability to maintain the functions of their piety without adhering strictly to institutional forms. She may, though, be mistaken in seeing the choice and flexibility that characterised English Catholic experience as at odds with the complexion of the Tridentine 126

  Cathaldus Giblin, The Irish Franciscan Mission to Scotland, 1619–1646 (Dublin, 1964); Fiona MacDonald, Missions to the Gaels: Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Ulster and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland 1560–1760 (Edinburgh, 2006), chs 2, 4; Scott Spurlock, ‘Confessionalization and Clan Cohesion: Ireland’s Contribution to Scottish Catholic Renewal in the Seventeenth Century’, RH, 31 (2012): 171–94. 127   Rowlands (ed.), English Catholics of Parish and Town. See also J.C.H. Aveling, ‘Catholic Households in Yorkshire 1580–1603’, NH, 16 (1980): 85–101; J.A. Hilton, ‘The Recusant Commons in the North-East 1570–1642’, Northern Catholic History, 12 (1980): 3–13; B.G. Blackwood, ‘Plebeian Catholics in the 1640s and 1650s’, RH, 18 (1986–87): 42–58; B.G. Blackwood, ‘Plebeian Catholics in Later Stuart Lancashire’, NH, 25 (1989): 153–73. 128   T.M. McCoog, ‘“Sparrows on a Rooftop”: “How we Live where we Live” in Elizabethan England’, in T.M. Lucas (ed.), Spirit Style Story: Essays Honoring John W. Padburg (Chicago, 2002), pp. 237–64.

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Church on the Continent.129 Instead, we should regard it simply as an indigenous variation on a wider European theme. Persecution intensified rather than engendered this tendency. As I argue in Chapter 12, the transmutations of ritual life that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were both intriguing and subtle: the faithful were compelled to seek new spaces in private homes and the landscape in which they could assemble for worship and to find ways of compensating for the rarity with which they could receive the sacraments of penance and the Eucharist.130 Liturgical and devotional practice in England did diverge in some respects from the patterns prescribed by the Council of Trent. Its domestication was in tension with episcopal and conciliar emphasis on the parish and exacerbated the difficulties that surrounded policing the use of sacred items like relics and sacramentals, though these were challenges that faced the ecclesiastical hierarchy throughout Europe. Disestablishment exacerbated rather than created impulses that had long troubled the Church of Rome: the desire of the laity for access to hallowed objects as sources of thaumaturgic protection and as foci for veneration.131 The material culture of religion in post-Reformation Britain has been relatively neglected by modern historians, but a number of scholars are now beginning to investigate how it was implicated in identity formation and the part played by physical artefacts in practices of dissimulation as well as devotion.132 129   Lisa McClain, Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience Among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642 (New York and London, 2004). 130   On the household, see my ‘Holy Families: The Spiritualization of the Early Modern Household Revisited’, in John Doran, Charlotte Methuen and Alexandra Walsham (eds), Religion and the Household, SCH 50 (Woodbridge, 2014), pp. 122–60. For the landscape, see my Reformation of the Landscape, ch. 3. 131  These issues are currently under investigation in the context of Renaissance Italy by Mary Laven and an ERC funded project on ‘Domestic Devotions: The Place of Piety in the Italian Renaissance Home’. See also Silvia Evangelisti, ‘Material Culture’, in Bamji, Janssen and Laven (eds), Ashgate Companion, pp. 395–416. 132   Bede Camm, Forbidden Shrines: An Account of Some Old Catholic Halls and Families in England, and of Relics and Memorials of the English Martyrs (London, 1910), esp. pp. 355–81, is attentive to physical artefacts. For a more recent study see Virginia C. Raguin (ed.), Catholic Collecting: Catholic Reflection 1538–1850: Objects as a Measure of Reflection on a Catholic Past and the Construction of Recusant History in England and America (Worcester, MA, 2006). Maurice Whitehead (ed.), Held in Trust: 2008 Years of Sacred Culture (Stonyhurst, 2008) catalogues some surviving material at Stonyhurst, which is the subject of research by Jan Graffius: ‘The Stuart Relics in the Stonyhurst Collections’, RH, 31 (2012): 147–69. See also my ‘The Pope’s Merchandise and the Jesuits’ Trumpery: Catholic Relics and Protestant Polemic in Post-Reformation England’, in Dagmar Eichberger and Jennifer Spinks (eds), Religion, the Supernatural and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Charles Zika (Leiden, forthcoming 2015). James Kelly is currently working on this topic.

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Even as it incubated tendencies that worried the clergy, in other respects and at the same time the household proved an ideal environment for cultivating an intense and precocious brand of Catholic devotion. It was a nursery of Jesuit-style spirituality and introspective sacrament-centred piety in which women were central figures and exercised an unusual level of agency. John Bossy’s fertile notion of ‘matriarchal Catholicism’ has stimulated some rich explorations of the reconfigurations if not inversions of traditional gender relations that were a perennial feature of the postReformation community. These were transformed into edifying exempla in clerical memoirs of pious recusant women, whose stalwart commitment to the Catholic cause was contrasted with the conduct of their lily-livered church-papist husbands. But this hagiographical trope may disguise the extent to which male conformity was part of what I have described elsewhere as a ‘natural division of labour in the management of dissent’.133 The experience of being a Church under the cross thus arguably helped as well as hindered the task of reform. Catholicism in Protestant Britain thus strikingly illustrates Mary Laven’s insight that the Counter Reformation was a movement ‘energised by opposition’.134 It shows that the periphery could set the pace for the centre and that minority Catholic societies anticipated developments that emerged more slowly in regions where Rome was predominant. The precocious foundation of offshore colleges and seminaries for training English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish priests is a case in point: elsewhere their establishment, so critical to the Tridentine reform programme, was a more protracted development. The lessons that historians of other countries might learn from England, Wales and Scotland may serve as a recompense for the inspiration that all the essays in this book have taken from studies of the process of Catholic renewal elsewhere. In stressing the significance of the mission as a tool of religious persuasion and an engine of spiritual transformation they follow the lead of Louis Chatellier and other scholars, who have highlighted the role played by the campaigns of revivalist preaching, catechesis and 133

  Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 153, and see pp. 150–60. Laurence LuxSterritt, ‘“Virgo becomes Virago”: Women in the Accounts of Seventeenth-Century English Catholic Missionaries’, RH, 30 (2011): 537–53, at 538; Frances Dolan, ‘Reading, Work and Catholic Women’s Biographies’, English Literary Renaissance, 3 (2003): 328–57; Colleen M. Seguin, ‘Ambiguous Liaisons: Catholic Women’s Relationships with their Confessors in Early Modern England’, ARG, 95 (2004): 156–85. See also Marie B. Rowlands, ‘Recusant Women 1560–1640’, in Mary Prior (ed.), Women in English Society 1500–1800 (London and New York, 1985), pp. 149–80 and ‘Harbourers and Housekeepers: Catholic Women in England 1570–1720’, in Kaplan et al. (eds). Catholic Communities, pp. 200–215. Walsham, Church Papists, pp. 80–81. 134   Mary Laven, ‘Legacies of the Counter-Reformation and the Origins of Modern Catholicism’, in Bamji, Janssen and Laven (eds), Ashgate Companion, pp. 451–69, at 469.

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moral instruction launched by the religious orders, notably the Jesuits and Capuchins, in reinvigorating the piety of ordinary people in the countryside. Itinerant regulars working largely outside diocesan structures in France, Italy, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and Poland supplemented the activities of the secular priesthood and episcopate which the Council of Trent envisaged as the chief instruments of the revitalisation of parochial life, and may ironically may have been more immediately effective.135 As I comment in Chapter 11, this observation casts the initiatives of the Catholic clergy who returned to Protestant England, Scotland and Wales in a new light. Here, in the absence of an ecclesiastical hierarchy, the clergy had no choice but to operate in missionary mode. This was a situation that played to the strengths of the Society of Jesus, which exercised influence disproportionate to its actual numbers. Although it also sowed the seeds of conflict with seculars who yearned for the restoration of a proper episcopal structure, freedom from the interference of bishops jealous of their authority allowed the Jesuits and their methods to flourish. A roving apostolate also proved well suited to the task of resuscitating Catholicism in the rugged Highlands and islands of Scotland, where the parish system was ill-matched with topographical realities, as the successes of the Lazarists, Franciscans and Vincentians in the Hebrides in the seventeenth century reveal.136 Even after the partial reinstatement of a shadow Catholic hierarchy in seventeenth-century Ireland, secular and regular missionaries remained a vital element of the Counter-Reformation challenge to Protestant hegemony in this most unruly of the Stuart kingdoms.137 Such evidence 135   Louis Châtellier, The Religion of the Poor: Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism, c.1500–1800, trans. Brian Pearce (Cambridge, 1997); David Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d’Otranto (Manchester, 1992), ch. 3; idem, ‘Adapt yourselves to the People’s Capabilities: Missionary Strategies, Methods and Impact in the Kingdom of Naples, 1600–1800’, JEH, 45 (1994): 269–96; Trevor Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles: The Counter Reformation in the Upper Palatinate (Farnham, 2009), pp. 126–52; Piotr Storlarksi, Friars on the Frontier: Renewal and the Dominican Order in Southeastern Poland 1594–1648 (Farnham, 2010). Eamon Duffy, ‘The Long Reformation: Catholicism, Protestantism and the Multitude’, in Tyacke (ed.), England’s Long Reformation, pp. 33–70, at 34. 136   Giblin, Irish Franciscan Mission; Benignus Millett, The Irish Franciscans 1651– 1665, Analecta Gregoriana 29 (Rome, 1964). See my Reformation of the Landscape, pp. esp. 190–91. On the Jesuits in Scotland, see Thomas M. McCoog, ‘“Pray to the Lord of the Harvest”: Jesuit Missions to Scotland in the Sixteenth Century’, Innes Review, 53 (2002), 127–88; Michael Yellowlees, ‘So Strange a Monster as a Jesuiste’: The Society of Jesus in Sixteenth-Century Scotland (Isle of Colonsay, Argyll, 2003). 137   For the episcopal hierarchy, Alison Forrestal, Catholic Synods in Ireland, 1600– 1690 (Dublin, 1998); for the role of the regulars, see items cited in n. 136 and Thomas O’Connor, ‘Irish Franciscan Networks at Home and Abroad, 1627’, in Worthington (ed.), British and Irish Emigrants and Exiles, pp. 279–95.

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reinforces the suggestion that persecution paradoxically facilitated as much as it inhibited the task of religious rejuvenation in Britain. The cases of England, Scotland and Wales also endorse recent emphasis on the elasticity of the Counter Reformation and its capacity to adapt itself successfully to different cultural and political environments. Rejecting the rigidities of the Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard’s thesis, Marc Forster has demonstrated through his research on southwest Germany that confessional cultures and identities were not merely imposed by bishops and civic officials from above but also sprang up from below.138 Judith Pollmann similarly speaks of the ‘creative and dynamic coalitions between priests and laypeople’ through which religious change was forged in those parts of the Low Countries that remained under the jurisdiction of the Catholic Habsburgs.139 These tendencies are even more apparent in contexts where there was no centralising state or puissant dynasty to support the Church’s endeavours. In the Dutch Republic, as Hal Parker’s study of Faith on the Margins has shown, clergy and laity collaborated as equal partners in a complex process of cultural negotiation which he calls ‘cooperative confessionalisation’.140 Similar forms of collaboration have been observed in studies of Ireland, where the failure of Protestantism to exert control beyond Dublin and the Pale and outside the enclave of settlers in Ulster created a situation in which Catholicism operated as a ‘visible underground church’. Priests and laypeople were equal partners in the struggle of the Catholic majority against Protestant subjugation, the end-product of which was a state that refused to conform to the cuius regio, eius religio principle and in which two rival confessional churches

138

  Marc R. Forster, The Counter-Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720 (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1992); Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque: Religious Identity in Southwest Germany, 1550–1750 (Cambridge, 2001). 139   Judith Pollmann, Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1520–1635 (Oxford, 2011), p. 202 and passim. 140   Charles Parker, Faith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, 2008), p. 242 and passim; ‘Cooperative Confessionalisation: LayClerical Collaboration in Dutch Catholic Communities during the Golden Age’, in Kaplan et al. (eds), Catholic Communities, pp. 18–32. Other key studies of Dutch Catholicism include James D. Tracy, ‘With and Without the Counter-Reformation: The Catholic Church in the Spanish Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, 1580–1650’, CHR, 71 (1985): 547–75; Frijhoff, Embodied Belief, esp. ch. 7; Christine Kooi, ‘Sub Jugo Haereticorum: Minority Catholicism in Early Modern Europe’, in Kathleen M. Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel (eds), Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honour of John W. O’Malley, S.J. (Toronto, 2001), pp. 147–62, and her Calvinists and Catholics during Holland’s Golden Age: Heretics and Idolaters (Cambridge, 2012).

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emerged.141 This pattern of interdependency was not always a recipe for harmony and it sometimes came at the cost of sacerdotal control and authority, but it aptly describes the manner in which minority Catholicism in Britain reacted to the twin challenges of survival and revival, and aligns with the picture presented in this volume, and especially in Chapters 11 and 12. These and other essays also question the tendency to posit a fundamental opposition between traditional and Tridentine religion. They reflect another significant trend in the historiography of the Counter Reformation more generally: a drift away from stressing its intolerance of popular culture towards exploring the extent to which it sought, in the words of David Gentilcore, to meet it halfway.142 As I argue throughout this book, we need to reconsider the assumption, shared by Bossy, Haigh and other scholars, that there was an unbridgeable gulf between the Catholicism of the gentry and aristocracy and that of the common people, and between imported Continental and vernacular religion.143 Instead, we must be attentive to their points of contact and the role of dialogue as well as confrontation. And here there are important insights to be gleaned from the burgeoning body of work on the global dimensions of the early modern movement for Catholic renewal, which has been critical in restoring a sense of the centrality of mission to this experiment and correcting the traditional overemphasis on Trent. Scholars of the encounters between Western missionaries and the indigenous religious cultures of the Americas and Asia display a sensitivity to hybridity and syncretism that provides a helpful model for understanding the interaction between local and

141   See Karl S. Bottingheimer, ‘The Failure of the Reformation in Ireland: Une question bien posée’, JEH, 36 (1985): 196–207; Colm Lennon, ‘The Counter Reformation in Ireland 1542–1641’, in Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie (eds), Natives and Newcomers: Essays on the Making of Irish Colonial Society, 1534–1641 (Dublin, 1986), pp. 75–92; Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Religion and Belief in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester, 1997); Ute Lotz-Heumann, Die dopplete konfessionalisierung in Irland. Konflikt und Koexistenz im 16. Und in der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 2000) and her ‘Between Conflict and Coexistence: The Catholic Community in Ireland as a “Visible Underground Church” in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, in Kaplan et al. (eds), Catholic Communities, pp. 168–82. 142   Gentilcore, ‘Adapt yourselves to the People’s Capabilities’. 143   For Bossy and Haigh, see above. For the tendency to contrast Counter Reformation and vernacular Catholicism in Celtic regions, see Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, pp. 29, 97–8; William James Anderson, ‘Rome and Scotland, 1513–1625’, in David McRoberts (ed.), Essays on the Scottish Reformation 1513–1625 (Glasgow, 1962), pp. 463–83; Bossy, ‘Counter Reformation and the People of Catholic Ireland’.

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universal religion back in Europe.144 The strategies used by the members of religious orders to bring salvation to ‘heathen’ civilisations converged with those employed by priests who sought to combat heresy. The parallels between the situation in that confronted the Catholic clergy in different continents were not lost on contemporaries. Jesuits in Brittany and the kingdom of Naples talked of the ‘Indians’ within their own midst145 and their colleagues in the British Isles were conscious of the affinities between their endeavours and those of fellow members of the Society abroad. The potential value of comparisons between England and Japan, where the Jesuits created a new Catholic community from scratch in the mid-sixteenth century, was pointed out as long ago as 1978 by Anthony Wright,146 and is now being pursued more systematically by Anne Dillon. As she shows, in each region the order utilised the rosary as a vehicle for conveying Tridentine teaching and sustaining the faith of underground congregations that had only irregular contact with priests. The tactic of using a tactile object was well suited both to the illiterate and to those unfamiliar with the language spoken by foreign evangelists.147 The crucifixion of 26 Christians in Nagasaki in 1597 supplied the Japanese with a body of martyrs to rival those executed by the Tudor and Stuart regime. English Catholics read texts like The theatre of Japonia’s constancy avidly and in the College at St Omer school plays were performed on the subject. During his confinement in Ely Castle in 1590, the recusant gentleman Gabriel Colford translated hundreds of ‘Japonian epistells’ written by Jesuits working in this mission field, alive to the shared experience of

144

  For helpful surveys of recent research see Tara Alberts, ‘Catholic Missions to Asia’, and Karin Vélez, ‘Catholic Missions to the Americas’, both in Bamji, Janssen and Laven (eds), Ashgate Companion, pp. 127–45, 147–62. Among some specific studies, see Nicholas Griffiths and Fernando Cervantes (eds), Spiritual Encounters: Interactions Between Christianity and Native Religions in Colonial America (Lincoln, NE, 1999); Ines G. Županov, Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in India (16th–17th Centuries) (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005); Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge, 2008); Mary Laven, Mission to China: Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit Encounter with the East (London, 2011). 145   Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch, p. 5; Adriano Prosperi, ‘The Missionary’, in Rosario Villari (ed.), Baroque Personae, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 160–94, at 178ff. 146   A.D. Wright, ‘Catholic History, North and South’, NH, 14 (1978): 126–51, esp. 138, and see 144 (on the need to locate English Catholicism ‘within the area of overseas missions’). 147   Anne Dillon, ‘“The Unlearned Mans Booke”: The Jesuits’ Use of the Confraternity of the Rosary in England and Japan, 1549–1700’, unpubl. paper. I am grateful to Dr Dillon for allowing me to cite this in advance of publication.

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persecution that connected Catholicism in the two countries.148 Nor did the similarities escape the attention of the Shogunate. Timon Screech has recently demonstrated that the expulsion of the Society from Japan in 1613 was partly inspired by anti-popish visual propaganda from England imported by the East India Company, which had a vested interest in its departure.149 It is clear that Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain can no longer be studied in abstraction from its international dimensions. One consequence of approaching Catholicism as a variation on themes being played out on a wider stage is to alert us to the real possibility that the long and contested Reformations that occurred in England and Wales might have had an alternative outcome. It is all too easy to assume that its contraction into a sect was inevitable if not by 1603, with the accession of James I, then certainly by the end of the 1620s. The stress that Christopher Haigh placed on the precariousness of Protestantism in its earliest phases coexists rather uncomfortably with his insistence that the Church of Rome had been reduced, irrevocably, to a minority by the turn of the seventeenth century.150 We need to extend his sense of the vulnerability of the Reformation to reversal in the 1540s, 50s and 60s into a much later period. As Caroline Hibbard and Jonathan Scott have wisely observed, anti-Catholicism must be rescued from its relegation to ‘the realm of pathological political pyschology’. The fears of Stuart Protestants about popish plots, domestic conspiracies and foreign invasion schemes that might put Rome back on top should not be dismissed as figments of a paranoid imagination, instances of mass delusion, and manifestations of irrational ‘moral panic’.151 As I suggest with reference to the Jesuit mission itself in Chapter 10, this obscures their capacity to cast light on contemporary mentalities. It also ignores the fact that they were rooted in an accurate observation of the end result of some of the vicious conflicts taking place on the Continent. Reports of the death of English Catholicism as an agent of regime change may have been exaggerated. In Europe, the Reformation was engaged in a desperate fight for its life, which in some contexts it ultimately lost. Military defeat was followed by aggressive 148   The theater of Japonia’s constancy, trans. William Badduley (St Omer [1624]); Paul Arblaster, ‘“G.C.”, Recusant Prison Translator of the Japonian Epistells’, RH, 28 (2006): 43–54. 149   Timon Screech, ‘The English and the Control of Christianity in the Early Edo Period’, Japan Review, 24 (2012): 3–40. 150   Haigh, English Reformations. 151   Hibbard, ‘Early Stuart Catholicism’, 9; Jonathan Scott, ‘England’s Troubles: Exhuming the Popish Plot’, in Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie (eds), The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford, 1990), pp. 107–31. Hibbard’s comment was made in reaction to Carol Z. Wiener, ‘The Beleaguered Isle: A Study of Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Anti-Catholicism’, P&P, 51 (1971): 27–62.

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and very successful campaigns of re-catholicisation. The examples of the Upper Palatinate and Bohemia investigated by the research of Trevor Johnson and Howard Louthan are especially pertinent. Louthan shows how within a century of the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, the Czech kingdom was reconverted to Catholicism by a potent combination of force and persuasion. Repressive initiatives designed to stamp out a tradition of heresy that had Hussite roots and dated back to the fifteenth century were pursued alongside a range of other techniques designed to reactivate attachment to a half-forgotten faith. Louthan is cautious about how far this programme of re-education transformed interior patterns of belief, but he is in no doubt about its effectiveness in creating a public culture of confessional belonging and corporate Catholic identity.152 The story of Bohemia’s re-catholicisation should give us pause for thought. It suggests that in other circumstances England could have followed the same path. While counter-factual speculation is always treacherous, recent research on the reign of Mary I implies that, had she lived, her Counter Reformation might just have worked. Where an earlier generation of scholars were convinced that the thwarted plan of the pious daughter of Catherine of Aragon to restore the Church of Rome was an unmitigated disaster that was doomed from the outset, current work sees it as a creative, conscientious and sincere attempt to reclaim the nation to the Catholic fold that had every chance of success. Contrary to the impression perpetuated by the anglocentric historiographical tradition that once prevailed, nor was it cut off or out of touch with developments in Europe. Lucy Wooding’s emphasis on the distinctively English cast of the Erasmian Catholicism that evolved between 1530 and 1570, before being suffocated by neo-scholastic and Tridentine tendencies,153 contrasts with the stress placed by William Wizeman and others on the degree to which these efforts at regeneration dovetailed with the Catholic evangelicalism emerging in the circles of the Italian spirituali and bore the imprint of, if not actually anticipated the decrees issued by the Council of Trent.154 Since the appearance of Thomas Mayer’s biography, the centrality of Cardinal 152

  Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas, and Miracles; Howard Louthan, Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (Cambridge, 2009). 153   Lucy E.C. Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford, 2000). Cf. the critical review of C.D.C. Armstrong, ‘English Catholicism Rethought?’, JEH, 54 (2003): 714–28. 154   See William Wizeman, The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor’s Church (Aldershot, 2006) and his ‘Re-imaging the Marian Catholic Church’, RH, 28 (2007): 353–64. John Edwards and Ronald Truman (eds), Reforming Catholicism in the England of Mary Tudor: The Achievement of Friar Bartholomé Carranza (Aldershot, 2005). For a recent collection on Marian Catholicism reflecting a range of interpretations, see Eamon Duffy and David Loades (eds), The Church of Mary Tudor (Aldershot, 2006).

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Reginald Pole (himself a key player in the European arena) as the architect and impresario of the Marian reform programme has been beyond doubt.155 Meanwhile, in Fires of Faith, Eamon Duffy has argued that England in the 1550s was the foremost ‘laboratory for Counter-Reformation experimentation’, adding to the mix the controversial suggestion that the strategy of executing stubborn Protestants was neither short-sighted nor misguided as a mechanism for restoring uniformity.156 The graphic engraved broadsheet depicting the martyrdom of the Carthusian fathers under Henry VIII published in Rome in 1555 investigated by Anne Dillon in a remarkable new book was designed not merely as a justification of the burnings but also as an imperative to carry them through to completion. Produced in the workshop of Michaelangelo himself for Philip II of Spain, it was designed to encourage him in the divinely appointed task of eliminating the cancer of heresy from the realm he jointly ruled with Mary. In the process, Dillon reveals in compelling detail the extent to which the England was caught up in the unpredictable currents of religious reform that swirled within Catholic Christendom in the fluid middle decades of the sixteenth century and implicated in the political ambitions of the Habsburg dynasty.157 Meanwhile, the blueprint for the restoration of Catholicism Robert Persons sketched out in his notorious ‘Memorial’ written in 1596, discussed at the beginning of Chapter 11, provides a startling glimpse of what might have happened had the Spanish Armada succeeded or Elizabeth been assassinated or ejected in favour of Mary Queen of Scots. Protestants themselves urgently prepared for these eventualities by devising the Bond of Association and by contemplating the structure of an interregnum government.158 And suspicion about James VI’s religious proclivities ran rife despite his Calvinist upbringing. Only in hindsight has the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the king and Parliament been seen as a last ditch attempt bungled by a bunch of amateur conspirators. Puritan anxiety that Laudianism amounted to a kind of Counter Reformation by stealth is another index of the continuing worry that the reformed religion was not yet safe. Fed by the news of the Thirty Years War filtering across 155

  Thomas F. Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge, 2000).   Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven and London, 2009), quotation at p. 8. On the burning of Protestants, see chs 4–8. 157   Anne Dillon, Michaelangelo and the English Martyrs (Farnham, 2012), p. 291. 158   See Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’ and ‘Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis’; David Cressy, ‘Binding the Nation: The Bonds of Association 1584 and 1696’, in DeLloyd J. Guth and J.W. McKenna (eds), Tudor Rule and Revolution: Essays for G.R. Elton from his American Friends (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 217–34; Paulina Kewes, ‘The Puritan, the Jesuit, and the Jacobean Succession’, in Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (Manchester, 2014). 156

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the Channel in the 1620s and 30s, this reached a high pitch in the wake of the slaughter of Protestant settlers during the Irish Rebellion of 1641, which evoked memories of the horrific events of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacres in France in 1572.159 Some contemporaries, among them William Prynne, thought that the regicide itself was the dastardly work of the papists and that sects like the Quakers were Catholics in disguise.160 Continuing concern about Catholicism’s capacity to subvert the status quo underpinned the Popish Plot scare and the Exclusion crisis and precipitated the so-called Glorious Revolution which toppled the Catholic James II from the throne. Louis XIV’s 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which brought an end to toleration of the French Huguenots, seemed to the Protestant majority a horrifying spectre of what might happen if the king abused the royal supremacy and used it to reverse the Reformation. Protestants never felt entirely secure and throughout the seventeenth century some Catholics remained confident that they would live to see their religion triumphantly restored to its rightful place on top. Casuists continued to discuss cases of conscience that pertained to the possibility that ‘England should be converted’ and to consider what might be expedient and necessary for ‘the peace and quiet of the whole kingdom, and for the introduction of the Catholic faith’ in this instance.161 They were convinced that the missionary enterprise to reconvert the nation to Rome launched more than a century before had not yet run out of steam and that laypeople had a key part to play in reinstating the religion to which generations of faithful people had adhered. Like the martyred priest Thomas Maxfield, they continued to hope and pray that the ‘Lord’s vineyard’ would be rescued from the Protestant heretics who had temporarily possessed it and produced poisonous grapes instead of sweet and nutritious fruits. The experience and memory of exclusion, marginalisation and persecution, then, invested post-Reformation Catholicism with a distinctive imprint. It created communities imbued with a potent sense of their religious identity as true believers surrounded by a sea of heresy and coloured by the conflicting allegiances and calls of conscience which the condition of being an embattled minority carried with it. The men, women and children who comprised them responded in different ways 159

  See Arthur Marotti, ‘Plots, Atrocities, and Deliverances: The Anti-Catholic Constructions of Protestant English History’, in his Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy, pp. 131–201. 160   William Lamont, Marginal Prynne, 1600–69 (London, 1963), pp. 138–40, and ch. 6 passim. 161   Peter Holmes (ed.), Caroline Casuistry: The Cases of Conscience of Fr Thomas Southwell SJ, CRS 84 (Woodbridge, 2012), case 115.

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to these challenges and carved their own paths through the thicket of ethical and political dilemmas entailed in living in a pluralistic society. They engaged directly in debate with the Protestant state; negotiated and tested the limits of allegiance to it; and adapted creatively to the challenges of maintaining the beliefs and practices of their faith in a context in which they were prohibited. They were conscious of their place in the long history of Christianity in the British Isles but also of their membership of an international Church which transcended national boundaries. They saw their own struggles as part of a wider spiritual revival with Europe and of a campaign of evangelical activity that stretched across the oceans to distant parts of the world. It is the contention of this collection of essays that the phenomenon of minority Catholicism has much to contribute to our understanding of this continental and global movement: a multi-stranded and immensely dynamic movement that transcended boundaries and linked the people of far-flung regions together through their common adherence to a distinctive creed and code of ritual, but which also adapted itself idiosyncratically to the different environments in which it found itself. Historians cannot afford to ignore Britain in their efforts to delineate the significance and lasting consequences of this cluster of ecclesiastical and spiritual impulses. Contrasts between contexts where the Church of Rome was dominant and those where it was banned and beleaguered should not be overstated. Far from a mere sideshow or pale shadow of events taking place in the Catholic heartlands of Europe, the story of Catholicism sub jugo haereticorum (under the yoke of heresy) is vital to them. The influences exerted were dual and mutual: British Catholicism did not develop in a vacuum, but nor was Catholic renewal and reform in other regions untouched by what was occurring in the Tudor and Stuart realms of England, Wales and Scotland. Paradoxically, persecution and suffering created an environment and conditions that both constrained and facilitated the early modern resurgence of the Church of Rome in the British Isles.

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Part I Conscience and Conformity

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Chapter 2

Yielding to the Extremity of the Time: Conformity and Orthodoxy*

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I At the Winchester Assizes in 1591, Ralph Milner, husband and father of eight or nine small children, bravely refused to comply with the laws requiring compulsory attendance at Protestant services. Offered his freedom in return for conformity, he declared that the loss of his soul was too high a price to pay for the temporal advantage and material comfort of his family. ‘Herewith’, it was said, ‘he went merrily to his death’.1 Bridget Strange, a middle-aged lady from Gloucestershire, incarcerated in gaol after 30 years of stiff and unwavering recusancy, was no less convinced that participation in heretical rites was an act of sheer insanity and spiritual suicide. Exasperated by government officials who persisted in trying to persuade her, in April of 1593 she declared defiantly that ‘she should be mad if she should go to the church’.2 The Northamptonshire gentleman Sir Thomas Tresham, who handed over a small fortune in fines for nonconformity to the exchequer and endured many stints of imprisonment in humiliating and unhealthy conditions, likewise regarded his ‘triple apprenticeship … in direst adversity’ as infinitely preferable   An earlier version of this chapter was published under the title of ‘“Yielding to the Extremity of the Time”: Conformity, Orthodoxy and the Post-Reformation Catholic Community’, in Peter Lake and Michael Questier (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church 1560–1642 (Boydell and Brewer, 2000), pp. 211–36. Spelling in quotations from primary sources was modernised in the original version, and this usage has been retained here. Several of the key sources for this essay have subsequently been edited and printed in Ginevra Crosignani, Thomas M. McCoog and Michael Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity in Early Modern England: Manuscript and Printed Sources in Translation (Toronto, 2010). The footnotes have been amended to provide page references to this volume. 1   J.H. Pollen (ed.), Unpublished Documents relating to the English Martyrs, vol. I, 1584–1603, CRS 5 (London, 1908), pp. 200, 203. 2  Anthony G. Petti (ed.), Recusant Documents from the Ellesmere Manuscripts, CRS 60 (London, 1968), p. 87. *

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to the ‘everlasting fire’ with ‘continual weeping, and gnashing of teeth’ into which those who failed to stand firm in the face of persecution were destined to descend. ‘[N]o man’, he wrote, ‘can make himself a cushion to lean upon to ease his elbows’.3 It is not surprising that the history of post-Reformation English Catholicism has largely been told in terms of the courageous recusancy exhibited by individuals like Ralph Milner, Bridget Strange and Sir Thomas Tresham. Ritual refusal to come to Common Prayer was the chief preoccupation of Protestant legislators and one main focus of the mythmaking of Catholic hagiographers. Yet it is increasingly apparent that the uncompromising stance adopted by these three men and women was only one of the ways in which Elizabethan and early Stuart Catholics negotiated the problem of living under a regime which had officially proscribed their religion and which, in turn, had been denounced wicked and illegitimate by Pope Pius V. A careful reading of civil and ecclesiastical records from this period reveals an astonishingly wide range of different responses to the moral predicament in which committed adherents of the Church of Rome ineluctably found themselves – responses characterised by various degrees of partial, occasional and qualified conformity. In 1577, for instance, John Harely of Brompton came to church quite regularly but ‘does there in the time of divine service read so loud upon his Latin popish primer … that he troubleth both the minister and people’, while John Vicars, a Hereford brewer, walked up and down the outer aisles of the cathedral to avoid having to listen to the liturgy.4 Many gentlemen obediently yielded their presence at matins but deliberately left their wives and children at home: this was a duty which young heirs like William Wigmore assumed when they came of age and succeeded to their patrimonial inheritance, anxious to preserve their estates intact for their successors.5 By contrast, one Mr Burdett of Sunning in Wiltshire only attended ‘now and then’ but refused point blank to receive the Protestant Eucharist.6 Non-communicating became a widely recognised sign of Catholic conscientious objection. Nevertheless, Jordan Metham of Wigganthorpe in Yorkshire went to some lengths to conceal his real motives in 1632, excusing his refusal to partake of communion wine on the grounds that it arrived in the parish

3

 HMC, Various Collections, vol. 3 (London, 1904), p. 124; BL, Additional MS 39830, fo. 87r. 4  Patrick Ryan (ed.), ‘Diocesan Returns of Recusants for England and Wales 1577’, in CRS Miscellanea XII, CRS 22 (London, 1921), pp. 78, 79. 5  Foley, iv. 422–3. 6  Ryan (ed.), ‘Diocesan Returns’, p. 86.

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in beer bottles and was consequently undrinkable!7 At a further remove we find individuals who went so far as to accept the sacramental bread but surreptitiously removed it from their mouths and slipped it into their pocket or sleeve. Questioned for this offence in 1600, Percival Cockerell of Whitby explained that a friend had seen a vision of ‘the devil gnawing of the souls of … those as received’, but Elizabeth Coulson, a serving maid suspected by the authorities of harbouring popish opinions, dissembled, claiming she had not swallowed the consecrated wafer ‘by reason of a pain in her side and a cough’.8 Beyond these might be situated an even more silent and invisible body of sympathisers with the Church of Rome who kept their Catholic convictions closely hidden and made no overt gesture of disapproval or separation. Conformity places people of this kind quite beyond the reach of the inquisitive historian. Of course, it is almost impossible to distinguish this class of church papists from that vast mass of involuntary Protestants engendered by the Elizabethan Settlement, men and women who grudgingly obeyed the dictates of the state and did not care enough to make a fuss – a group into which many of the former must have been gradually absorbed. The boundary between Catholic conformists and fervent but inconspicuous practitioners of a piety centred on the Prayer Book is equally difficult to draw.9 But this should not be allowed to justify relegating them to the margins of historical enquiry. Conformity needs to be seen as a positive option rather than a form of spineless apathy or ethical surrender; as a position of moral principle rather than an inferior, interim stage on the road to full-blown recusancy. Nor should these positions be seen as mutually exclusive: the boundaries between the two were permeable and individuals shifted between them frequently.10 While the ‘ambidextrous religious life’11 of the church papist could entail a high level of psychological strain, many found it a congenial solution to their conscientious 7  Hugh Aveling, Northern Catholics: The Catholic Recusants of the North Riding of Yorkshire 1558–1790 (London, 1966), p. 279. See pp. 92, 111, below for the elaborate pretences of some sixteenth-century Catholics. 8  Aveling, Northern Catholics, p. 195; J.C.H. Aveling, Catholic Recusancy in the City of York 1558–1791, CRS Monograph Series 2 (London, 1970), p. 197. 9   Judith Maltby has explored the more visible members of this group in Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1998). 10  For this point, see Michael Questier, ‘The Politics of Religious Conformity and the Accession of James I’, Historical Research, 71 (1998): 14–30, and ‘Conformity, Catholicism and the Law’, in Peter Lake and Michael Questier (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 237–61. 11  To borrow a phrase from Christopher Haigh, ‘The Church of England, the Catholics and the People’, in Christopher Haigh (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I (Basingstoke, 1984), pp. 195–220, at 200.

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dilemmas – an effective method of reconciling their conflicting loyalties to their country and their faith. At the same time, it did not always signal political passivity. As contemporaries came to realise, conformity could be an excellent cloak behind which to engage in subversive, antiProtestant activity, a cunning form of camouflage in the delicate game of cat and mouse Catholics played with the late Tudor and early Stuart authorities. Consequently, church papists began to seem far more of a potential threat to national security than incorrigible recusants.12 Thus, although confessional accounts of the English Reformation have tended to eclipse their contribution, in various respects they can be said to have played a vital role in securing the long-term survival and future of the Catholic community.13 In the rest of this chapter I want to suggest that the bias of both contemporary sources and subsequent historiography towards recusancy has left us with another distorting legacy: it has served to obscure the extent to which there were serious and deep-seated divisions within the Catholic priesthood about the legality of participating in Protestant worship. The orthodoxy of the Jesuit and Tridentine hard-line on total nonconformity was never uncontested: the subject of continuing struggle from the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign well into the seventeenth century, it reflected, precipitated and aggravated significant tensions within ecclesiastical ranks about both the confessional obligations of the laity and the organisation and objectives of the mission to England. Close analysis of the career of Thomas Bell, an influential seminary priest whose teachings on conformity stirred up a major controversy which culminated in his defection to the Protestant camp in 1592, reveals how far the clerical consensus on this issue was more apparent than real. It also highlights how tightly the internal histories of post-Reformation Catholicism and the Church of England are interwoven in this period.

12   See, for example, a note appended to a list of recusants compiled by the bishop of Carlisle in 1595: ‘it is thought that the church papists which come to church and receive not the communion be more dangerous and hurtful to the state than the simple recusants’. Claire Talbot (ed.), Miscellanea: Recusant Records, CRS 53 (London, 1961), p. 66. 13   See Hugh Aveling, The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation (London, 1976), p. 162 and passim; A.D. Wright, ‘Catholic History, North and South’, NH, 14 (1978), 126–51, esp. 148–50, and my Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 1993), esp. ch. 4.

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II The campaign against participation in Protestant rites began in the 1560s, in the hands of a small band of uncooperative Marian priests. Three years after Elizabeth’s accession, in response to an appeal from several prominent noblemen, Pope Pius IV had declared that intercommunion with heretics was in no case lawful – a decision confirmed by a secret committee appointed to discuss the issue by the Council of Trent. Throughout the first decade of the reign recusant clergy like Laurence Vaux tried hard to enforce these poorly publicised rulings. Though he feared it would seem ‘hard sharp bitter and sour’, Vaux wrote a letter to friends in Lancashire declaring that those who attended church ‘do not walk in the state of salvation’ and that it was not within the power of the ecclesiastical hierarchy to ‘dispense any of the laity to entangle them self … with schism’. In some quarters these efforts clearly bore fruit. 14 But the drive for comprehensive separation did not really gather momentum until the arrival of the first contingent of seminary-trained missionaries in 1574 and six years later of Jesuits from the English College in Rome. The latter in particular regarded it as a matter of the utmost importance and urgency: at a synod held at Southwark shortly after landing in England, Robert Persons and Edmund Campion sternly reaffirmed this tenet as ‘the sum of that which all priests should teach and insinuate into Catholics’ at all times and in all places, a point powerfully reinforced by Persons’ Brief discours containing certayne reasons why Catholiques refuse to goe to church (better known as ‘Reasons of Refusall’) printed by a clandestine press in London later that year (Figure 2.1).15

14

 For the papal ruling, see F.W. Maitland, ‘Pius IV and the English Church Service’, EHR, 15 (1900): 530–32; C.G. Bayne, Anglo-Roman Relations 1558–1565 (Oxford, 1913), pp. 163–81. Vaux’s letter is printed in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 60–61. For the petition of English Catholics to the Council of Trent and its declaration (which was not published until 1593, see n. 93 below), see Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 1–4, 9–25. For early attempts to enforce recusancy, see T.F. Knox (ed.), The Letters and Memorials of William Cardinal Allen 1532–1594 (London, 1882), p. xxiii, 21; Laurence Vaux, A Catechisme or Christian Doctrine, ed. T.G. Law, Chetham Society, NS, 4 (1885), pp. xxxii–xxxix. 15   See L. Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Persons, S.J., vol. I (to 1588), CRS 39 (London, 1942), p. xx; Thomas M. McCoog, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland and England 1541–1588: ‘Our Way of Proceeding?’ (Leiden, 1996), pp. 144–5. [Robert Persons], A brief discours contayning certayne reasons why Catholiques refuse to goe to church (Douai [London secret press], 1580). Persons wrote under the pseudonym of John Howlet. Gregory Martin’s A treatise of schisme (Douai [English secret press), 1578) was the first publication exclusively devoted to the subject.

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Figure 2.1 ‘Reasons of Refusall’: Robert Persons, A brief discours containing certayne reasons why Catholiques refuse to goe to Church (Douai [London secret press], 1580), title-page. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Peterborough.E.5.12. Animated by a firm conviction that Catholicism still held the hearts of most even though the queen was ‘mistress of the outward acts of many’, the clergy who spearheaded the English Counter Reformation saw the eradication of church papistry as one of their major priorities.16 This is not to say that the ‘conversion’ of obdurate heretics was never on their agenda, nor is it to endorse suggestions that they selfishly focused their resources and energies on rallying a pre-existing (and largely upper class)

16

  Quotation from J.H. Pollen (ed.), ‘Father Persons’ Memoirs’, CRS Miscellanea IV, CRS 4 (London, 1907), p. 79. See the instructions given to Persons and Campion before launching the Jesuit mission in 1580: Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials, pp. 319–21.

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constituency rather than on creating a new one.17 It is simply to stress that in their perception the crusade against conformity was crucial to reclaiming a formerly Catholic nation from the clutches of Protestantism and restoring it to its historic allegiance to the creed of St Augustine. Both in the steady stream of printed tracts which they disseminated on the subject and through their pastoral labours in the field, these priests maintained that staunch recusancy was the only stance conscientious Catholic laypeople could safely adopt.18 Men and women who inwardly adhered to the Church of Rome but outwardly complied with Protestant ordinances were guilty of the heinous sin of schism and would be punished by eternal torment in hell. Not only did they offend their co-religionists and lay themselves open to infection with the poison of heresy, they committed an act of flagrant idolatry and gross hypocrisy. To conform was to shirk every Christian’s duty to confess his or her faith without flinching: it manifested a lamentable lack of commitment which Tridentine clerics readily conflated with atheism – denial of God not in words but deeds. Like the lukewarm Church of Laodicea, warned the Benedictine Thomas Hill in his Quartron of reasons (1600), such schismatics would be spewed out of God’s mouth in distaste and disgust. ‘Calvin’s excrements’ disqualified themselves from the benefits of sacramental grace dispensed by the Mother Church and could expect no mercy on the final Day of Judgement.19 The implacable deity who narrates Ralph Buckland’s Embassage from heaven (1611) declares that he will shake off those who resort to the synagogue of Satan ‘as a man would cast filth from his coat’. ‘Pass this life as merrily as you can’, he warns conformists, ‘but hope not for the life to come’.20 Produced by leading figures involved in the mission, the literature on recusancy represented an attempt to establish a more stringent definition of what it meant to be a Catholic in the context of post-Reformation 17

 For the conversion of heretics, see George Gilbert’s memorandum of 1583, in Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials, pp. 333–6. For the view that the mission was biased towards the elite, see Christopher Haigh, ‘From Monopoly to Minority: Catholicism in Early Modern England’, TRHS, 5th ser., 31 (1981): 129–47, though note the criticisms of Patrick McGrath, ‘Elizabethan Catholicism: A Reconsideration’, JEH, 35 (1984): 414–28, at 422–6. 18  For more extensive analysis of this literature, see Walsham, Church Papists, ch. 2. Shorter discussions can be found in Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge, 1982), ch. 6 and Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1991), ch. 7. 19  Thomas Hill, A quartron of reasons of Catholic religion, with as many briefe reasons of refusall (Antwerp [English secret press], 1600), pp. 183–4. 20  Ralph Buckland, An embassage from heaven ([English secret press], 1611), pp. 117, 115 respectively.

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England. It was a reassertion of clerical control in a set of circumstances in which traditional structures of authority and communication had all but dissolved and in which laypeople had begun to devise their own sort of compromise with the late Tudor State. It symptomised a wider struggle to forge a fierce and resilient confessional identity in the face of de facto religious pluralism and to foster a piety and spirituality which went far beyond merely formal adherence to a set of beliefs. It also embodied a highly sophisticated exercise in propaganda and public relations: like the martyrologies produced on both sides of the Reformation divide, such books sought to project an image of the Catholic community untainted by any form of collaboration with heretics and unflummoxed by sustained efforts to annihilate it.21 At the same time, it needs to be recognised that the doctrine of recusancy strictly enjoined in such tracts was subtly but significantly tempered in practice. In the privacy of the confessional, priests were permitted to exercise a degree of leniency towards timid members of the laity who made some kind of concession to the demands of a harsh and oppressive regime. Cardinal William Allen’s final briefing with departing missionaries included advice on ‘how and where to condescend without sin to certain feebleness grown in man’s life and manners these ill times, not always to be rigorous, never over scrupulous, so that the church discipline be not evidently infringed, nor no act of schism or sin plainly committed’.22 Surviving training manuals from the English seminaries likewise disclose that in counselling contrite sinners, the clergy were instructed to take due account of the almost intolerable pressures and perils which Catholic men and women living in the midst of hostile Protestants faced on a daily basis. The casuistical footnotes which they added to Tridentine teaching on the utter iniquity of attendance at reformed services effectively carved out a legitimate space for the practice of principled occasional conformity by hand-picked members of the gentry and nobility. Pious church papists properly attuned to the potential dangers of indoctrination by heresy were not depraved schismatics deserving of the highest censures of the Church, but true sons and daughters, albeit more morally frail than their recusant neighbours. If no sympathy was shown for the dilemmas of the Catholic aristocracy, it was argued, many might be alienated and turn to Protestantism by default. Protecting both their financial assets and their social influence was vital if Rome was to have any chance at all of effecting a successful Counter Reformation, for ‘once these men have gone’, the casuists observed laconically, ‘religion in English will be finished or 21   On Catholic martyrologies, see Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot, 2002), esp. chs 2, 6. 22   Knox (ed.), Letters and Memorials, p. 34.

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virtually finished’. The policy of pastoral laxity with regard to conformity did not, then, entail acceptance of the status of a permanently oppressed minority; rather it embodied an intelligent awareness that invasions, armadas and assassination plots would inevitably fail if elite support for Roman Catholicism was steadily whittled away.23 Naturally this was not a strategy which the Tridentine priesthood was anxious to advertise to the Protestant authorities. Public knowledge about clerically condoned outward conformity might well precipitate stiffer tests of doctrinal orthodoxy such as compulsory reception of holy communion. It would also be a windfall to anti-Catholic polemicists keeping an eagle eye out for fresh evidence of the inherent duplicity and hypocrisy of the Romanist religion. Like equivocation, nicodemism was a practice which Counter-Reformation clerics concerned to preserve the pristine reputation of their persecuted faith realised could be acutely embarrassing.24 But it would be wrong to confuse compassion with connivance and imply that political pragmatism triumphed completely over theory. Conformity remained a hazard to the souls of the faithful and a serious blot upon the integrity of the resurgent Church of Rome. Catholic priests who dared to dissent from this view and suggest otherwise were denounced in the roundest and most immoderate tones. No one aroused more anger and irritation than Thomas Bell, a singularly outspoken opponent of doctrinaire insistence upon recusancy. And it is to the mercurial figure of Bell that we must now turn. III Born in Raskelf in Yorkshire in 1551, Thomas Bell’s childhood and early adolescence coincided with a decade of bewildering religious upheavals and reversals. In 1565, at the age of 14, he went up to St John’s College, Cambridge, where he fervently embraced Calvinism and entered the Church. On his return to the Dales four years later, although only a deacon, he became curate of the market town of Thirsk and possibly the local school master too.25 In the summer of 1570, several books lent to him 23

  See P.J. Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, CRS 67 (London, 1981), pp. 49, 94–6, 120, quotation at 61–2. See also Holmes, Resistance and Compromise, ch. 8; Walsham, Church Papists, pp. 64–7, 70. 24   On equivocation, see Johann P. Sommerville, ‘The “New Art of Lying”: Equivocation, Mental Reservation and Casuistry’, in Edmund Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge and Paris, 1988), pp. 159–84; Zagorin, Ways of Lying, ch. 9. 25   See John and J.A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, pt I, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1922–27), s.n. Thomas Bell. For evidence that he may have acted as schoolmaster in Thirsk, see Bell’s The Popes Funerall (London, 1605), sig. C2v.

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by one of his parishioners encouraged grave doubts about the validity of his ordination and the truth of the Protestant religion and induced him to abandon his post. Following a fruitless attempt to flee the country, he was committed to York Castle where he openly declared that the pope was the supreme head of the Church, saying ‘that he would stick in that opinion until death by God’s grace’. His ‘arrogance in words and behaviour’ and his audacity in smuggling a manuscript account of his conferences with the commissioners out of prison for circulation among conservative clergy in the vicinity of Thirsk led to his incarceration in stocks in the lowest ward of the Kidcote.26 According to a later commentator he was ‘more troublesome to the keepers than all the rest of the prisoners together’.27 In January 1576, however, Bell escaped and absconded to the Low Countries. From the seminary at Douai he proceeded to the newly established English College at Rome, where he took holy orders and from whence he was sent on the mission in May of 1582.28 For the next ten years Bell (alias Burton) was one of the most active and influential priests working in the north of England. Shortly after his arrival he acquired a high profile by masterminding an extremely daring and risky visit to the Catholic prisoners in York Castle, during which he and four colleagues celebrated a solemn high mass complete with full liturgical music.29 Prior to the arrival of John Mush and Richard Holtby, who were endowed with special faculties by Cardinal Allen, Bell seems to have been de facto superior of the Yorkshire clergy.30 Moving on to Lancashire, he continued to elude arrest – sometimes only by the skin of his teeth: during a night raid on one residence in 1584 he was obliged to flee in his bare feet, injuring them so badly that he had to spend an entire month in bed.31 Two years later an official report noted that he was ‘a dangerous person for

26   York, Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, HC.CP 1570/5, examinations of George Malton and Thomas Bell; HC.AB. 1572–4, fo. 39r–v. For Bell’s sufferings in prison, see Morris, iii. 300. 27  Francis Walsingham, A Search made into Matters of Religion ([St Omer], 1609), p. 58. 28   See T.F. Knox (ed.), The First and Second Diaries of the English College, Douay (London, 1878), pp. 25, 100–101, 277, 294, 358; Wilfrid Kelly (ed.), Liber Ruber Venerabilis Collegi Anglorum de Urbe, 1, Annales Collegi … 1579–1630, CRS 37 (London, 1940), p. 10; Talbot (ed.), Miscellanea: Recusant Records, pp. 199, 223; Knox (ed.), Letters and Memorials, p. 154. 29  Anthony Kenny, ‘A Martyr Manqué: The Early Life of Anthony Tyrrell’, The Clergy Review, NS, 42 (1957): 664–7. 30  Foley, vi. 133; Aveling, Catholic Recusancy in the City of York, p. 71. 31  Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials, p. 238. Further traces of Bell’s activities can be found in Petti (ed.), Recusant Documents, pp. 42, 56–7, 85.

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sedition, and well learned’.32 Based in the Wigan area, where he enjoyed the patronage and protection of Miles Gerard of Ince, he took the lead in organising a network of safe houses in which itinerant priests could find refuge and shelter. In 1588, with a characteristically inflated sense of his own self-importance, he can be found styling himself the ‘bishop of Chester’.33 It seems to have been in the late 1580s, in the context of a renewed wave of persecution by the Protestant authorities, that Bell began to teach that attendance at Protestant services was permissible, provided that those who did so refused to pray or receive the eucharist, displayed no reverence for the reformed liturgy, and made a clear pronouncement about their real motives for coming to church in the hearing and presence of the whole congregation. In a series of manuscript tracts beginning with ‘A Comfortable Advertisement to Afflicted Catholics’, he eloquently defended the practice of qualified conformity. None of these has survived, but the arguments he assembled can be reconstructed from the point by point replies prepared by his critics.34 Bell cited scriptural precedents for joining in worship with heretics in dire necessity, referring to the story of the three children Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego who attended a ceremony at which King Nebuchadnezzar had dedicated his idol in Babylon and to the case of Jehu, who dissembled his consent to sacrifices to Baal in order to plot the assassination of the ungodly priests who performed them.35 In the face of official intimidation, Catholics could claim that ‘just fear’ for their own safety and that of their families had compelled them to act, as it were involuntarily, against their own conscience and will. In this regard, Bell alluded to a private letter from Pope Gregory XIII which allegedly acknowledged the straitened state of the English laity and dispensed them from guilt of sin for schism.36 At any rate, recusancy was a ‘counsel of higher perfection’, a work of supererogation. It was without doubt the ‘more perfect’ path to salvation, 32

 TNA, SP 12/193/13.   See BL, Harley MS 360, fo. 32r. TNA, SP 12/215/79 and Christopher Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 280–81. 34   Bell’s arguments were refuted by Henry Garnet in An Apology against the Defence of Schisme ([London secret press], 1593) and in a tract on the subject appended to his A Treatise of Christian Renunciation ([London secret press], 1593) and by J.G. in ‘An answere to a comfortable advertisement, with it addition written of late to afflicted catholykes concerning goinge to churche with protestantes’, St Mary’s College, Oscott, MS E. 5.16. This has now been printed in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 157–243. From internal evidence, they have revised the previously accepted dating of this text to May 1588. 35  Garnet, Apology, §§5–6. 36  Garnet, Apology, pp. 42–4 and 7–8 respectively. 33

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a stance requiring superhuman courage and a divine vocation, but not one which ordinary men and women could really be expected to embrace.37 Bell also insisted that there were no extant canons or decrees which expressly banned the practice he advocated and claimed that Ad evitanda, a bull promulgated by the fifteenth-century Pope Martin V ‘for the avoiding of many scandals and many perils and for the helping of timorous consciences’, in fact absolved Catholics from the onerous responsibility of non communicatio sacris.38 He maintained that the mere material act of church-going was not a sin in and of itself and fell into the neutral category of things indifferent.39 It was only necessary to avoid conformity if there was serious danger of deceiving one’s peers and misleading the weak – and the bold protestation Bell enjoined church papists to make removed all risk of disedification and scandal.40 Nor, he alleged, was this a device of his own invention: no less respected a figure than Gregory Martin had approved it in his Treatise of schisme published with the imprimatur of William Allen and the entire college at Rheims.41 Denying that the recusancy laws had made attendance at common prayer a ‘sign distinctive’ between the two religions, Bell declared it to be nothing more than a litmus test of political reliability. Thus Catholics could justifiably claim that they came to church merely as a mark of respect for the Elizabethan regime: ‘Good people I am come hither not for any liking I have of any sacraments, service, or sermons accustomably used in this place, or to exhibit any reverence for the same, but only to give a sign of my allegiance and true loyalty to my prince’.42 A central piece of supporting evidence here was the case of Naaman Syrus from the Old Testament Book of Kings: the courtier granted leave by the prophet Elijah to accompany his ruler to the Temple of Rimmon to provide physical assistance. Recusancy writers always devoted space to repudiating this prototype for yielding one’s presence at heretical worship in Protestant England and it is not surprising that Bell used it as ‘a principal ground 37

  J.G., ‘Answere’, in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 226, 234. 38   Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 182–90, 229–31; Garnet, Apology, §8. 39   J.G., ‘Answere’, in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 190–203; Garnet, Apology, p. 51. 40   J.G., ‘Answere’, in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 218–24. 41   Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 167–72; Garnet, Treatise, pp. 150–51, 156–8. The relevant passage in Martin, Treatise of schisme, is on sig. F6r–v. 42   J.G., ‘Answere’, in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 203–16; Garnet, Apology, §35. Bell’s protestation is cited in J.G., ‘Answere’, ch. 1 (p. 162).

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Figure 2.2

65

Bell’s ‘comfortable advertisement’ on conformity denounced: Henry Garnet, An apology against the defence of schisme ([London secret press], 1593), title-page. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Syn.8.59.123.

of all his proceedings’, alleging that distinguished authorities including Nicholas de Lyra, Cardinal Cajetan and the theologians at the Council of Trent had all confirmed his interpretation of this critical passage.43 Thomas Bell’s ‘Comfortable Advertisements’ evidently enraged many of his fellow missionary priests. When verbal and written admonitions by John Mush and other colleagues in the north failed to make him see the error of his ways, a certain J.G. stepped in to refute Bell’s ‘false schismatical wicked and new doctrine’ and to settle the contentions which it was nourishing among his brethren labouring hard for God’s harvest 43

  J.G., ‘Answere’, in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, 172–4, 174–82, 201–3, quotation at p. 201; Garnet, Apology, §7. The relevant biblical passage is 2 Kings v.17–19. See Walsham, Church Papists, p. 40.

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in Lancashire and Yorkshire.44 J.G’.s uncompromising ‘Answere’ was supplemented by an Apology against the defence of schisme prepared by Henry Garnet, superior of the Jesuits in England (Figure 2.2). Both denounced Bell’s ‘evil hatched opinions’ as a recipe for the ruin of the Catholic religion concocted by the ‘subtle suggestion of the father of discord’, Satan himself. Intended as a personal reprimand of a contumacious priest, these tracts also circulated in manuscript ‘for the stay of the simple’ and as a ‘necessary preservation against all contagion of schism’.45 Garnet and J.G. poured scorn on Bell’s argumentation as ‘childish evasion’, ‘brabbling toys’ and ‘paltry shifting’, systematically undermining each pin upholding ‘the dangerous pillar of his own lovely conceit’.46 They denied that earlier commentators had endorsed his views about the legality of conformity, declared that the case of Naaman Syrus was ‘no whit like’ that of English Catholics, and set out to supply definitive proof that attendance at Protestant services was a mortal and damnable sin. Bell was accused of living in a ‘foolish paradise’ and of showing ‘too much carnal affection to the temporal states of his worldly friends’.47 His much vaunted protestation, moreover, was a ‘false alarum of comfort’: far from easing the ‘urgent perplexity of many’, it would bring more ‘intolerable distresses and miseries’. Rabidly Protestant magistrates and ‘hot spirited minister[s]’ might interpret it as an irreverent attack upon the Prayer Book and prosecute the perpetrator under the Act of Uniformity of 1559.48 Such schismatics were guilty of a double lie against both Catholicism and the reformed religion: there was ‘no fitter name for these new heretics’, said 44

  J.G., ‘Answere’, in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, p. 233. From J.G’.s ‘Answere’ it is clear that Bell had defended his opinions in several manuscript tracts: as well as his ‘Comfortable advertisement’ he had also produced an ‘Addition’, an ‘Answere to the syxt objections’, and an ‘Answere to the preestes letters’. Holmes, Resistance and Compromise, p. 238, identified J.G. with the Jesuit John Gerard, but Crosignani, McCoog and Questier suggest more persuasively that John Mush was the principal author, with possible assistance from Garnet. ‘J.G’. may be a combination of their names and allude to the collaboration. Mush is credited with a treatise against Thomas Bell; see T.G. Law, A Historical Sketch of the Conflicts between the Jesuits and Seculars in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1889), p. 52n. This is borne out by a remark in Bell’s Thomas Bels motives: concerning Romish faith and religion (Cambridge, 1593), p. 109 (the tract in which he renounced his Catholic opinions, on which, see below). 45   Quotations from Garnet, Apology, 4 (vere 5); J.G., ‘Answere’, in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 159, 161. 46   Quotations from J.G., ‘Answere’, in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 197, 234, 231, 171 respectively. 47   Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 201–3, 231–2, 235. 48   Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 161–7.

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Garnet, than ‘Protesting Protestants’.49 Bell had, in short, ‘overshot himself very grossly in this matter of going to church’. His ‘disordered dealings’ smelt of ‘great choler and extreme vain glory’. If he had ‘any sparkle of the sense of God and humility’ within him he would abandon his obstinate stance and defer meekly to the remonstrations of his priestly superiors; if not he would be forcibly pulled from his pedestal and cut off.50 The savagery of the Jesuit assault on the ‘comforter’ is not hard to explain. Disseminated in the interval between the Armada and the proclamation of 1591 and sharp legislation constraining convicted recusants within a five-mile radius of their place of residence placed on the statute book two years later,51 Bell’s teachings were bound to have pervasive influence. As Garnet remarked ruefully to Claudio Aquaviva, general of the order, in March 1593, they offered Catholics the prospect of blessed release from the ‘yoke of slavery’ laid upon them by the late Elizabethan regime.52 For laypeople close to the end of their tether, Bell’s unequivocal endorsement of occasional conformity must have seemed like nothing less than a lifeline. As J.G. observed, ‘weaklings … ready … with every little puff of persecution to fall’ and ‘wearied with suffering these cruel and intolerable vexations wherewith the heretics continually oppress them’ would ‘gladly follow’ his ‘plausible advice’ and ‘yield to the extremity of the time’. His doctrine would ‘easily pervert the simple and ignorant which like unto chaff are in danger to be blown out of God’s church’, drowning them in the ‘filthy puddle of schism’ and leading them down the slippery slope to spiritual perdition. It might also encourage grumblings of discontent against the clergy which ‘until now … [had] neglected and concealed from them this remedy’, seemingly ‘void of care and compassion over their miseries’.53 And after a decade of heroic and dedicated missionary work in the northwest, Bell commanded considerable admiration and respect: drastic action had to be taken to limit the damage his views would undoubtedly do to the unity and solidarity of the Catholic community. No less disturbing was the way in which Bell’s writings echoed the reasoning of contemporary casuistical manuals. In effect he carried the arguments used to excuse specific individual lapses into ‘schism’ through to their logical conclusions, elevating the penitential concessions made 49

 Garnet, Treatise, pp. 152, 154.   Quotations from J.G., ‘Answere’, in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 235, 189, 228 respectively. See also the preface (pp. 158–61). 51  P.L. Hughes and J.F. Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3 vols (New Haven, 1969), vol. iii, no. 738; 35 Elizabeth c.1–2. 52  P. Renold (ed.), The Wisbech Stirs 1595–1598, CRS 51 (London, 1958), p. 206. 53   J.G., ‘Answere’, in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 160, 171, 235, 237–8 respectively. 50

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to particular sinners into a general moral principle. His defence of the practice of going to church with a protestation was also corrosive because it exploited nuances and inconsistencies within the literature of recusancy itself – notably with regard to the case of Naaman Syrus, which Gregory Martin, Robert Persons and Henry Garnet all accepted as a precedent for courtiers to accompany the queen to reformed worship to perform some ceremonial service such as bearing a sword or mace or holding her train.54 Without doubt, a large part of Bell’s crime in the eyes of his Jesuit opponents was his indiscretion: his teachings threatened to dilute the glorious image of indomitable nonconformity they were trying to construct. ‘In publishing such a thing as did concern the states of all Catholics within the realm’ without the consent of his colleagues and superiors,55 he had leaked confidential information about the fugitive strategies employed by a Church under the cross and exposed the vulnerabilities of a religion whose spokesmen sought to present it as fearless and invincible.56 Garnet and J.G. interpreted Bell’s stubborn refusal to back down in the face of stern disapproval from high-ranking priests as proof of his arrogance and pride, pigheadedness and ‘stiffnecked iniquity’. He had become a ‘brazen target’ wilfully resisting ‘the arrows of wholesome counsel’.57 They were bitterly cynical about the real motives behind his ‘comfortable advertisements’ and suggested that in circulating them he sought nothing but ‘the vain puff of popular credit’. Bell does seem to have been irascible and cantankerous by nature and there may have been a grain of truth in these claims. But we must not ignore evidence to the effect that he was also a compassionate pastor responding with sensitivity to the almost unbearable pressures being laid upon the Lancashire laypeople to whom he ministered: men and women torn apart by the conflicting 54   J.G., ‘Answere’, in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 231–3. For acknowledgement of the validity of Naaman Syrus as a precedent in some cases, see Martin, Treatise, sigs F6v–7v. Persons, Brief Discours, fos 24v, 62r–62v; Garnet, Treatise, p. 156; Garnet, Apology, pp. 54–5. Garnet appears to have written an entire tract on the case of Naaman with reference to a particular gentleman: see A.F. Allison, ‘The Writings of Father Henry Garnet, S.J. (1555–1606)’, Biographical Studies, 1 (1951): 7–24, at 9, 15. See also Walsham, Church Papists, pp. 67–8. 55   J.G., ‘Answere’, in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, p. 236, and see pp. 235–40 passim. 56   In their recent account of the Bell episode, which extends and augments the line of argument developed in this essay, Peter Lake and Michael Questier comment that ‘on the central question of how far it was licit to attend Protestant churches, Bell was much closer to his critics than either he or they would have cared to admit’. ‘Rather than a conflict between rigorists and laxists … we have a competition between two different styles of rigorism’. (The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London, 2011), pp. 143, 147.) 57  Garnet, Treatise, pp. 5–4 (vere 4–5).

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demands of piety and patriotism.58 In this light, Bell’s obstinacy begins to seem more like the intense frustration of a priest convinced that dogmatic insistence upon recusancy was driving many committed Catholics straight into the arms of their heretical adversaries. Thomas Bell’s defiant stance caused ripples as far away as Rome and false rumours spread that he had been or soon would be formally excommunicated by the pope, a sentence allegedly procured by Cardinal William Allen.59 In the event, it was thought better to use a ‘mild proceeding than the Ecclesiastical sword’60 and in December of 1592 Allen took the extraordinary step of issuing an open letter to the English Catholics. In it he acknowledged the ‘excessive troubles and pains and perils’ which the laity suffered ‘daily and hourly’ in the name of their faith and urged them to constancy with the promise of eternal bliss in heaven. He warned priests on the mission that on no account were they to teach or defend ‘that it is lawful to communicate with the Protestants in their prayers or service or conventicles’ since this was ‘contrary to the practice of the church and the holy Doctors in all ages’ – and this firm reaffirmation of the tenet of non communicatio sacris came from the lips of His Holiness Clement VIII himself. Nevertheless, Allen advised his ‘loving brethren’ that they should ‘use great compassion and mercifulness towards such of the laity especially as for mere fear or saving their family, wife and children from ruin are so far fallen as to come sometimes to their churchs or be present at the time of their service’. ‘[B]e not hard nor rough nor rigorous nor morosi in receiving again and absolving them when they confess their infirmities and be sorry for the same’. Conformity was a serious transgression of divine law yet ‘no more severity is to be required of the penitent then in any other sins that be subject to the sacrament of penance, and perhaps [less], all circumstances well and discreetly weighed’. ‘In most cases of this kind’ he concluded, ‘tutior est via misericordiae quam justitiae rigoris’, the way of mercy was safer than the rigour of justice.61 Allen’s letter was designed to 58   J.G., ‘Answere’, in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, p. 229. J.G. conceded that, if Bell yielded to the advice of his superiors, his colleagues in the north should impute his teachings to ‘the exceeding great compassion which his tender heart taketh upon our country’s calamities and his Catholic children’s miseries’ (p. 160). 59  For the rumours of Bell’s excommunication, which were apparently spread by John Scudamore, see P. Renold (ed.), Letters of William Allen and Richard Barret 1572–1598, CRS 58 (London, 1967), 232; Walsingham, Search, p. 59. 60  Garnet, Treatise, p. 168. 61   Knox (ed.), Letters and Memorials, pp. 344–5; also printed in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 260–62. This paragraph corrects an error of dating and interpretation in the original edition of my Church Papists, p. 69. The mistake was corrected in the paperback edition (1999).

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‘repress the singularity’ of Bell and counteract his harmful teachings but ironically it had the opposite effect: as Henry Garnet remarked, ‘out of so sweet and pleasant a flower’ many ‘gathered poison’, interpreting it as a papal licence for occasional conformity.62 By the time this circular letter reached Catholics in England, however, Bell had already ‘voluntarily discovered himself’ to the northern ecclesiastical commissioners.63 One can almost hear the sigh of relief clerical leaders breathed when the news filtered through: his apostasy was regarded as an effective antidote to his poisonous teachings and Allen was confident that the faithful would accord no further credence to the quisling.64 Garnet published his Apology against the defence of schisme and appended a tract denouncing Bell’s device of church-going with a protestation to his Treatise of Christian renunciation – a move which would have been highly imprudent while the renegade formally remained within missionary ranks.65 Garnet alighted upon Bell’s defection triumphantly, insisting that it proved ‘how near this point of doctrine in God’s judgement is unto flat heresy & Atheism’; Robert Persons would later include it in a catalogue of providential punishments which had befallen ‘such as have been seditious in the English Catholic cause’; and Cardinal Sega observed ‘[s]uch is nearly always the fate of these libertines, who proudly chafe under the yoke of lawful obedience’.66 The precise reasons behind Bell’s apostasy are peculiarly hard to unravel, as is the exact chronology of his fervent return to the Protestant faith, which apparently took place some time in October 1592, probably at Lambeth Palace, where he had been sent for examination by order of Archbishop Whitgift.67 In the recantation tract he published with the approval of the Privy Council in November 1593, he outlined the ‘special motives’ which had induced him to forsake popery and embrace the reformed religion: this alteration of heart had been wrought by the irresistible grace of God, who had inclined him to peruse the works of learned Catholics and ‘little by little’ brought him to ‘behold as in a glass of crystal’ and ‘as the Sun shining 62

 Garnet, Treatise, pp. 168, 161–2 respectively.  As noted in a letter from the Privy Council to the earl of Derby dated 2 Sept. 1592: APC, xxiii. 164. On 31 Aug. 1592, he was said to be still at large as a Catholic priest: TNA, SP 12/242/125. 64  Renold (ed.), Letters of Allen and Barret, p. 232. 65   On the dating of these tracts see Allison, ‘The Writings of Father Henry Garnet’, pp. 11–12. It may well be that Garnet’s Apology circulated in manuscript prior to its publication. 66  Garnet, Treatise, p. 168; Robert Persons, ‘An Observation of Certayne Aparent Judgments’, in CRS Miscellanea II, CRS 2 (London, 1906), p. 203; Foley, vi. 15. 67  See APC, xxiii. 166–7, 227; BL, Lansdowne MS 72, fo. 125r; TNA, SP 12/243/51. 63

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at noon day’ the false, erroneous and execrable doctrine of the Church of Rome and the internal contradictions and corrupt accretions with which it was riddled. ‘[U]pon the due consideration thereof I could not but loath, detest and abhor all papistry; and stand at open defiance with the same’.68 There are distinct dangers in taking a text shaped by generic conventions and clouded by polemical intent too much at face value. Even so, we have no real grounds for doubting the sincerity of Bell’s evangelical conversion experience: his earlier history suggests that he was what contemporaries called a ‘Quick-silver, Gun-powder spirit’, psychologically prone to violent pendulum swings from one brand of Christianity to the opposite extreme.69 As Michael Questier has argued, changes of confessional allegiance were often merely exterior manifestations of internal spiritual twistings and turnings to which the bitter theological conflicts between (and within) Catholicism and Protestantism were largely irrelevant.70 Nevertheless it looks very much like Bell was a casualty of the heated controversy about conformity which his own writings had ignited.71 But did he jump or was he pushed? On the one hand, his sudden exit from the scene appears to have been partly engineered by the Jesuits – by the late summer of 1592, doggedly persisting in his ‘perverse’ opinions, Bell had become a serious liability to the Tridentine cause, a volatile chemical compound which it was perhaps best to throw overboard. On the other, he may have lost patience with the fatal inflexibility of his critics – men committed to a policy which seemed to elevate abstract issues of ideological purity above the urgent practical matter of sustaining the morale of the suffering laity. Might his departure have reflected a deep disillusionment with the priorities of those directing English Catholic affairs from the comfort of Italy and the Low Countries and a conviction that they were completely out of touch with the grassroots realities at home? 68  Bell, Thomas Bels motives, dedication to the Privy Council, sigs ¶2r, ¶¶3r. See also Bell, The Popes Funerall, sig. A4r–v. Bell evidently wrote his Motives in Cambridge, from where he sent it to Lord Burghley, following a recommendation from Justice Richard Young. See BL, Lansdowne MS 75, fos 12r, 40r, 42r. 69   See Richard Montagu, Appello Caesarem (London, 1625), p. 112 and S.R. [Richard Smith], An Answer to Thomas Bels late challeng named by him the downfal of popery (Douai, 1605), sig. C7v. 70   Michael Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge, 1996), esp. ch. 3 and Michael Questier, ‘Crypto-Catholicism, Anti-Calvinism and Conversion at the Jacobean Court: The Enigma of Benjamin Carier’, JEH, 47 (1996): 45–64. 71   Bell’s apostasy is discussed in these terms in Michael Questier, ‘English Clerical Converts to Protestantism, 1580–1596’, RH, 20 (1991), 455–77, at 468. See also Lake and Questier, Trials of Margaret Clitherow, p. 182, for the point that his defection had the effect of pushing any kind of church papistry beyond the pale of orthodoxy.

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The difficulty we face in trying to disentangle Thomas Bell’s motives is greatly compounded by the colourful details of his subsequent career. Turning his back on ten years of valiant labours in Lancashire, Bell betrayed to the authorities everything he knew about the underground structure and organisation of the mission: he identified the location of priest holes and mass centres and supplied comprehensive lists of recusants and church papists who harboured seminary priests living and working in the region.72 As his horrified former colleagues complained, this Judas-like traitor had ‘afflicted his dear friends and acquaintance’, sparing ‘not his singular benefactors’ – including Miles Gerard of Ince, and ‘yea, his own faithful and trusty man’, Edward Bagshaw, who was doomed to die a martyr’s death. Bell was sent back to the north as a spy and pursuivant, where he assisted in the operation of the special commissioners, participated in night raids and cooperated in uncovering the Hesketh Plot in 1594.73 ‘By the earnest motion’ of the earl of Huntingdon, he also engaged in a preaching campaign in Yorkshire ‘where the harvest is great, and the workmen few’.74 He was employed in public disputations with recalcitrant papists including Henry Walpole and in 1600 can be found delivering one of the series of sermons which convicted recusants in York Castle were compelled to attend. Perhaps understandably, Bell ‘seemed doubtful of his credit with the prisoners’ and the uncooperative congregation, singularly unimpressed by this attempt to force-feed them heretical errors, apparently did not even bother to block their ears.75 But Bell’s chief occupation until his death around 1610 was as a semiprofessional anti-Catholic propagandist. Over a dozen pieces of virulent Protestant polemic streamed from his pen, tracts with impertinent titles like The downefall of poperie, The anatomie of popish tyrannie, The popes funerall and The woefull crie of Rome. Most of these books dedicated to unveiling the ‘rude lying Hotch-potch of Omnigitherum’ that was the Catholic religion now make tedious and unexciting reading: Bell had no scruples about recycling material repeatedly – he was forever cross-

72

  See TNA, SP 12/243/51, 52 and 71; APC, xxxiii. 354–5, 365–6; HMC, Salisbury MSS, IV (London, 1892), p. 242 (‘A catalogue of recusants and suspected persons in Lancashire, out of Bell’s book’); BL, Lansdowne MS 72, fo. 125r–v; AAW, A Series IV, no. 38 (a copy of the information Bell supplied to the earl of Derby). 73  B.C., The dolefull knell, of Thomas Bell (Rouen, 1607), p. 390. On Gerard, who made ‘a very humble submission’ and ‘dutiful protestation of his conformity’, see APC, xxiv. 110–11; John Strype, Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion, 4 vols in 7 (Oxford, 1824), iv. 262. 74  Strype, Annals, iv. 210–11. 75   BL, Additional MS 34250, fo. 67r.

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referencing and plagiarising himself.76 As one of his adversaries remarked with some justice, all of his works were so similar ‘that any man may easily know them to be puppies of one litter and sundry puddles stewing from one sink’.77 Each employed the same distinctive technique – the device of confuting the papists ‘out of the bowels of popery itself’, citing the words of its own controversialists (usually wrenched grossly out of context) so as to make it seem as if they were verily recanting their faith.78 Bell’s boast that he had invented this ‘rare methodical discourse’ himself may be taken with a large pinch of salt.79 No less vainly did he brag that his Jesuit enemies were quite unable to confute him, vaunt upon their failure to take up his repeated invitations to a viva voce debate and claim in his last book, The Catholique triumph, that in June of 1609 they had even tried to assassinate him – he had not dared to open a parcel accompanied by an unmarked letter ‘as having apparent inducements to suspect poison, pestilence, or other like infection diabolical’.80 Bell’s blustering efforts on behalf of the Protestant religion did not go unrewarded. Queen Elizabeth granted him a government pension of £50 per annum, which was continued by King James after 1603,81 and he appears to have enjoyed the patronage of a distinguished collection of politicians and prelates, including Sir Thomas Egerton, John Whitgift, Matthew Hutton, Tobie Matthew and Richard Bancroft, to whom he respectfully dedicated a tract condemning the ‘fantastical imaginations’ of the ‘proud Brownists, saucy Barrowists, and arrogant Puritans’ and earnestly defending the Church of England from the vicious and unwarranted attacks of the presbyterians.82

76  Thomas Bell, The survey of popery (London, 1596); The hunting of the Romish foxe (London, 1598); The anatomie of popish tyrannie (London, 1603); The downefall of poperie (London, 1604); The popes funerall (London, 1605); The woefull crie of Rome (1605); The tryall of the new religion (London, 1608); The Jesuites antepast (London, 1608); A Christian dialogue between Theophilis a deformed Catholike in Rome, and Remigius a reformed Catholike in the Church of England (London, 1609); The Catholique triumph (London, 1610). Quotation from The golden ballance of tryall (London, 1603), p. 45. 77  Philip Woodward, The fore-runner of Bels downefall ([Douai, 1605]), sig. A4v. 78  Bell, Thomas Bels motives, sig. ¶¶2v. 79  Bell, Thomas Bels motives, sig. ¶2v. In BL, Lansdowne MS 75, fo. 40r, Bell said this technique was ‘A thing to my knowledge, never yet attempted by any man’. 80   See Bell, Downefall of popery, sigs A2r–v, A4r–v; Bell, The popes funerall, sig. *1r; Bell, The Catholique triumph, p. 419. 81  Bell, The Jesuites antepast, p. 226. 82  Thomas Bell, The regiment of the Church (1606), quotations at pp. 96–7. Evidence of Bell’s connections can be found in the dedications to his tracts.

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IV Assimilated to the traditional stereotype of the apostate, ‘Sir Thomas Turncoat’83 was destined to become a stock figure in early Stuart antiProtestant polemic. Richard Smith and Philip Woodward sharply ridiculed this ‘patched minister created of two recantations’, condemned him as ‘the captain of all changeable chameleons’ and celebrated the purging of such an excrement from the Catholic priesthood.84 Bell’s apostasy has, not unnaturally, served to enhance his reputation as a maverick; it has reinforced the general – and mistaken – impression that his views regarding attendance at Protestant services were eccentric and unrepresentative. In the last section of this chapter I want to suggest that this is an assumption which we need to rethink: rather than see Bell’s teachings on conformity as so heterodox that they could not be tolerated by the rest of his colleagues, it might be argued that he was the victim of a struggle to uphold an orthodoxy which was far more tenuous and precarious than it has hitherto seemed. The doctrine of recusancy was a site of conflict and contention from the moment of its first articulation in the early 1560s. Bell was not the first or last to diverge sharply from the stance adopted in tracts like Persons’ ‘Reasons of Refusall’ and most of his arguments derived from the dissenting clerics in whose footsteps he followed. Although missionary leaders branded these ‘naughty priests’ as wicked schismatics and ‘scandalous neuters’ and depicted them as a small handful of troublemakers ‘exceeding far out of the right way’, Bell’s claim that his endorsement of occasional conformity with a protestation was ‘a common practice in the realm’ was far more than a mere rhetorical ploy.85 The closer we look the more the apparent consensus on this issue begins to seem like an optical illusion. In the early 1580s Dr Alban Langdale, deprived archdeacon of Chichester and resident chaplain to Anthony Browne, Lord Montague, of Battle in Sussex, argued that mere physical presence at church did not constitute acceptance of heresy. He may have been the author of a surviving manuscript tract written in response to Person’s ‘Reasons of refusall’, which contended that outward conformity could be justified in the difficult circumstances in which English Catholic gentlemen were currently living. This used the examples of Naaman the Syrian and Joseph of Arimathea, among other biblical figures, to insist that it was not mortal 83

 B.C., Dolefull knell, p. 68.  Woodward, Fore-runner, sig. A3v; B.C., Dolefull knell, 66; B.C., Bels trial examined (Rouen, 1608), p. 9. 85   J.G., ‘Answere’, in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 178–82, at 180. 84

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sin to conform, if due care was taken not to mislead the weaker brethren. ‘The scandal being avoided, the bare act of itself wanteth blame’.86 This view was reinforced by Dr Robert Pursglove, formerly suffragan bishop of Hull, who said that church-going was acceptable provided it was performed solely for the sake of secular loyalty.87 Bell evidently cited both in his ‘Comfortable Advertisement’ and J.G. ‘marvel[led] that Mr Advertiser in this place remembered not Mr Thomas Langdale, priest and also apostata’ as well.88 Prior to 1583, Thomas Langdale, the Jesuit nephew of Alban, had served as a respected ecclesiastical diplomat and penitentiary in Loreto and Rome. In that year, however, he returned to England and, pretending to be a papal legate charged with liberating the ensnared consciences of Catholics, began to teach that ‘it was not only lawful in these extremities to go to church without protestation but also to receive the supper of the Lord’ – a position which ultimately forced him to take refuge on the other side of the confessional fence.89 Few seem to have shared the view that participating in the Protestant eucharist was permissible, but quite a number of missionary clergy endorsed the less stringent line on occasional conformity associated with the two Langdales, Pursglove and Bell. In March 1590 a government spy reported that priests in Cumberland and Westmoreland were telling their flocks that attendance at church could be condoned as long as no credit was given to Calvinist rites, and the renewed onslaught on recusants launched in the early years of that decade apparently inspired at least a dozen clerics to advocate the practice of partial conformity.90 Several of these (including William Hardesty, with whom Bell had close links, and Robert Gray, who was

86

 The tract is preserved in TNA, SP 12/144/69 and discussed in Walsham, Church Papists, pp. 51–4. It has now been printed in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 116–29, quotation at p. 124 (who ascribe it to Langdale or William Clitherow). It was denounced by Robert Persons and George Blackwell in ‘Against going to Churche’, BL, Additional MS 39830, fos 14–20, printed in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 143–56. See also J.H. Pollen (ed.), ‘The Memoirs of Robert Persons’, in CRS Miscellanea II, CRS 2 (London, 1906), pp. 179–81; Pollen (ed.), ‘Father Persons’ Memoirs’, pp. 3–6. 87   DNB, s.n. Pursglove; Aveling, The Handle and the Axe, pp. 37–8. 88   J.G., ‘Answere’, in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 180–81. 89   See Pollen (ed.), ‘Memoirs of Robert Persons’, pp. 181–2; Pollen (ed.), ‘Father Persons’ Memoirs’, pp. 101–5; Foley, iv. 50, 678–80; Morris, ii. 21–2. 90  Pollen (ed.), Unpublished Documents, p. 182; Renold (ed.), The Wisbech Stirs, pp. 203–5. See also Patrick McGrath, ‘Apostate and Naughty Priests in England under Elizabeth I’, in D.A. Bellenger (ed.), Opening the Scrolls: Essays in Catholic History in Honour of Godfrey Anstruther (Bath, 1987), pp. 50–83, at 78.

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arrested in 1593 in possession of a copy of the aforementioned tract on church-going) were ostracised and eventually defected or were expelled.91 Indeed, Michael Questier has gone so far as to suggest that Bell was the unofficial leader of a loose coalition of priests who repudiated excessively rigorous application of the doctrine of recusancy – a coalition which in the end he failed to crystallise into a coherent opposition party.92 This is strongly borne out by the tract on this subject which Henry Garnet attached to the end of his Treatise of Christian renunciation. Although Garnet protested that his pen was not directed against ‘any particular person’ and vehemently denied that there was a single priest in England who ‘disagrees in this point from his reverend and worthy fellows’, it is fairly clear that the Jesuit was engaged in a desperate exercise in papering over the cracks. He sought to suppress the opinion that church-going with a protestation was either no sin at all or merely a venial offence and to correct ‘diverse venomous tongues’ and ‘grave interpreters’ who had misconstrued Allen’s letter to English Catholics as a kind of carte blanche for occasional conformity. By publishing the definitive but never before printed declaration which the fathers of the Council of Trent had made on this subject 30 years earlier, he aimed ‘to impose eternal silence unto so froward and impudent brabblers’: it was intended to put an end to the destructive divisions on the issue consuming the Catholic community, to warn the laity ‘not to be hasty to adventure the reading of every seditious pamphlet, framed for the destruction of thy soul’, and to admonish their authors ‘to amend their dangerous singularity’ and reform their ‘peevish’ and licentious opinions.93 Garnet’s fervent hopes were not to be fulfilled. The question flared again in the context of the Wisbech Stirs of 1595–9894 and similar opinions were espoused by an ejected and disaffected Jesuit named Thomas Wright, ex-professor of scholastic theology at Louvain, in 1606. In the wake of the severe legislation passed after the Gunpowder Plot, Wright revived the concept of going with a protestation of civil obedience and, drawing 91

  Bell recommended Hardesty to Justice Young as ‘very learned and well affected’ in BL, Lansdowne MS 75, fo. 42r. On Gray, see TNA, SP 12/245/138. 92  Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion, pp. 50–51, an argument now developed more fully in Lake and Questier, Trials of Margaret Clitherow, esp. chs 4, 7. 93   ‘Whether it be lawfull for Catholics to go to heretical Churches with a Protestation that they come not for liking which they have of the Religion there professed’, Treatise, pp. 149–70, quotations at 169, 161, 163. The Declaration of the Fathers of the Councell of Trent, Concerning the Going unto Churches, at such time as hereticall service is saied, or heresy preached, pp. 6–7. Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, p. xxvi comment that its publication may be seen as a sign of the attractiveness of Bell’s position. 94  Renold (ed.), The Wisbech Stirs, pp. 173, 203–6.

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on the arguments of the Spanish casuist Juan Azor, claimed that Catholics could legitimately attend not Protestant services but sermons. He denied that presence at them was a ‘sign distinctive’, saying it was no more ‘a sign than between ivy and a grapevine’ and that any evils attached to it were merely accidental. He conceded that this opinion would seem ‘novel and strange’ to those that had opposed it hitherto, but he believed that it was ‘the proper antidote for the preservation of the Catholic religion’.95 Jesuit correspondence suggests that Wright’s views found more than a few clerical supporters: ‘we are brought into that estate, that we fear in short time ne lucerne nostra prorsus extinguatur’, wrote Father Richard Holtby, ‘neither let our friends think that we speak this to amplify the matter, for no doubt the case is more lamentable than we could have imagined or expected’. By ‘the creeping of these dangerous cankers’ and the erection of this ‘new tower of Babylon’, it was reported, ‘whole countries and shires run headlong without struggle into the heretics’ churches being emboldened thereunto by the warrant of their pastors and spiritual guides’. According to Father Robert Jones, this doctrine ‘tending to liberty and terrene humours’ had instant appeal and seriously impeded attempts to ‘keep up and underprop poor afflicted souls from ruin and falling into errors and disorders’. Some laypeople even took occasion to complain about the insensitivity of exiled clerical leaders to the difficulties which confronted them daily, ‘not stick[ing] to say that there is no more care had of them there with you for directions in such weighty matters, than of dogs’. But, above all, this ‘new fangle’ called into question the cause for which many courageous martyrs had freely shed their blood: by it ‘the glory of our English church [is] obscured and defaced, which yet was held in admiration of all other Christian countries for the beauty and perfection thereof’. Like Thomas Bell’s ‘Comfortable Advertisement’ it tarnished Roman Catholicism’s dazzling public face and diminished her charisma.96 It too, therefore, called for sharp and strident censure: Robert 95   Wright’s tract on this subject ‘De adeundis Ecclesiis Protestantium’, together with letters exchanged between Persons and Wright on the subject, have only recently been discovered in the Jesuit archives in Rome by Ginevra Crosignani, as reported in ‘Thomas Wright and Occasional Conformity’, Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 71 (2002): 149–56, and discussed more fully in ‘De adeundis Ecclesiis Protestantium’: Thomas Wright, Robert Parsons, SJ, e il dibattito sul conformismo occcasionale nell’Inghilterra dell’Età moderna (Rome, 2004). The tract is printed in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 353–71, quotations at pp. 364, 370. See also p. xxxiii. On Juan Azor’s Institutiones Morales (1600), see Elliot Rose, Cases of Conscience: Alternatives Open to Recusants and Puritans under Elizabeth I and James I (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 85–8. 96   Stonyhurst College [now at Archives of the British Province of the Society of Jesus], Anglia III, fos 145r–146r, 152–153r (printed in Foley, iv. 371–4. See also iv. 284; vii, part 2, 1018–19).

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Persons wrote a strongly worded letter to correct Wright and produced an authoritative refutation in his Quaestiones Duae, to which Wright replied in turn. Pope Paul V repeated his predecessors’ interdict against church attendance in the brief Magna animi dolore.97 One striking point which emerges from a study of the evidence assembled above is that in other contexts where Catholicism found itself in the position of being a proscribed and persecuted religion the practice with regard to church papistry was far more relaxed. In this respect, the case of James Bosgrave, a priest reprimanded by missionary leaders for attending Protestant services soon after landing in England in 1580, is particularly illuminating. Bosgrave did so under the impression that the same rules pertained at home as in Germany and Poland, where presence at the church of a rival confession was not considered to be a sign of religious conformity: there he ‘never heard any such scruple, but that any man of learning might go to a church or meeting of Calvinists, Lutherans, Trinitarians, Anabaptists, &c; and hear their folly and blasphemy, the rather better to detest and refute it’.98 Martin V’s decree Ad evitanda was evidently held to be valid in other parts of Europe and to extend beyond civil intercourse with excommunicates to attendance at liturgical services, as J.G. was obliged to concede in the course of refuting Bell’s claim that the dispensation applied to the situation in England.99 More compelling still is the policy which evolved north of the Tweed. In converting Scotland the Jesuits chose a different course from their colleagues in the southern kingdom.100 There they effectively sanctioned the crypto-Catholicism which they discovered ran rife upon their arrival in 1581, permitting the faithful to attend presbyterian sermons (though not prayers and other rites), teaching that there was no sin involved except scandal, and unhesitantly admitting those who did so to the sacraments 97

 Robert Persons, Quaestiones Duae de Sacris Alienis non Adeundis ([St Omer], 1607). Persons’ letter and Wright’s response to the tract are in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 371–400. For Paul V’s brief, see Charles Dodd, The Church History of England from 1500, ed. M.A. Tierney, 5 vols (London, 1839–43), vol. iv, pp. cxl–cxliii. 98  Foley, iii. 279–82. Bosgrave retracted his error in a confession published in William Allen’s A true report of the late apprehension and imprisonment of John Nicols minister (Rheims, 1583), fos 32v–34v. His case was discussed at the synod of Southwark: McCoog, Society of Jesus, p. 145n. See also Thomas McCoog, ‘“Godly Confessor of Christ”: The Mystery of James Bosgrave’, in Marek Inglot and Stanisaw Obirek (eds), Jezuicka Ars Historica (Krakow, 2001), pp. 355–75. 99   J.G., ‘Answere’, in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 182–90. 100   See, in addition to the references cited in the following footnotes, H. Chadwick, ‘Crypto-Catholicism, English and Scottish’, The Month, 178 (1942): 388–401; Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. xxvii–xxx.

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of the Church. Thomas Wright’s ‘sermonising doctrine’ was thus by no means as innovatory as his critics insisted and he himself referred to it by way of precedent.101 Despite attempts in the late 1590s to impose the stricter principles observed in England, the practice continued and in 1602 Father Abercrombie, superior of the Scottish mission, was earnestly petitioning Father General Aquaviva that his priests be allowed to give leave to certain individuals to listen to heretical preaching where there was no danger of perversion or offence – those spiritual children to whom they judged no harm would come, and who, by noting down the errors and false doctrine of the ministers, might help to bring the less well-educated to a better understanding of the truth of the Catholic religion. This, he said, would ‘aid and console many souls currently perishing’. In Lithuania, Prussia and Poland theologians had allowed this, so surely it could also be authorised in Scotland? Abercrombie’s colleague Murdoch thought that without concessions of this kind, the Church would ‘risk losing many and reducing this country to atheism and loss of faith like Africa, Asia and certain other Catholic regions’. Four years later he warmly welcomed plans to augment the Jesuit contingent in the region, with the proviso that they came with full power to permit strongly committed members of the laity to go to Calvinist sermons occasionally – for ‘it is by such means’, he stressed, ‘that we have succeeded’ (quo medio vicimus).102 Writing in 1607, the reformed minister Francis Bunny observed that in Scotland the Jesuits taught ‘that a man might lock up his conscience, after he had hard masse, and then goe to the Protestants Churches’, ‘wherof also cometh the name of Church Papists’.103 What we are confronted with, then, is both a puzzle and the tantalising possibility of a different scenario in England. Why did those in charge of the English mission so fiercely refuse to stretch the rules regarding intercommunion with heretics? Why were they so resistant to accepting the precedent set by beleaguered Catholic communities on the Continent and to following the path adopted by the Scottish Jesuits? Such questions 101

  Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, p. 365.  See CRS Miscellanea I, CRS 1 (London, 1905), pp. 111–12; Calendar of Letters and State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Reign of Elizabeth I Preserved in the Archives of Simancas, ed. M.A.S. Hume, 4 vols (London, 1892–99), iii. 288; Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 286–8. The more relaxed line adopted in Scotland does much to account for the conduct of Anne of Denmark: see Albert J. Loomie, ‘King James I’s Catholic Consort’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 34 (1971): 303–16. Dispensations were often given to Scottish Catholics in the mid-seventeenth century: see M.V. Hay, The Blairs Papers (1603–1660) (London and Edinburgh, 1929), pp. 194–7. 103  Francis Bunny, An answere to a popish libelle intituled a petition to the bishops, preachers, and gospellers, lately spread abroad in the northe partes (Oxford, 1607), p. 115, cited in Questier, ‘Politics of Religious Conformity’, p. 27. 102

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are far easier to articulate than answer, but it looks very much like Robert Persons and his colleagues were intent upon making England a shining example of constancy in the face of Protestant terrorism and intolerance, upon recreating her in the image of the intrepid congregations of the persecuted primitive and apostolic Church – a church nourished by the blood of its martyrs.104 It also needs to be recognised that the outcome of the intense and prolonged struggle over ‘schism’, though perhaps predictable, was not necessarily inevitable: Thomas Bell and other exponents of partial and qualified conformity were not isolated marginal figures but men who represented opinions held by a substantial cross-section of the Catholic priesthood. Individually and collectively these allegedly ‘deviant’ clerics mounted a powerful challenge to the dominant (and predominantly Jesuit) view that complete segregation from heretics was a confessional obligation, a challenge which embodied a conviction that, over-strictly enforced, the doctrine of recusancy laid an insupportable burden upon the laypeople who formed the backbone of the Catholic community – a challenge which in another set of circumstances might just have prevailed. The heated and acrimonious polemical exchanges in which figures on both sides of the debate engaged have created an impression of stark polarity which probably belies a more complex reality. Writing around 1600, Robert Persons was keen to present the whole controversy as a piece of past history, a closed chapter in which errant apostates and ignorant Marian ministers had played the role of false prophets: ‘by time and by practice, zeal and authority of priests coming from the seminaries beyond the seas’, he asserted, ‘the matter hath been cleared and the negative part fully established to the confusion of heresy and edification of all foreign nations’.105 As we have seen, however, it would be improper to view clerical divisions on this issue in terms of a simple dichotomy between the ‘medieval’ and missionary priesthood. Post-Reformation Catholicism’s ‘domestical difficulties’ regarding recusancy extended well into the seventeenth century and reflected as well as aggravated more complex fractures and fault-lines which had developed within Roman Catholic clerical ranks, frictions and tensions which had been fermenting since the 1580s and which culminated in the Archpriest 104

  See Dillon, Construction of Martyrdom.  Pollen (ed.), ‘Memoirs of Father Robert Persons’, p. 62. See also Philip Caraman, Henry Garnet 1555–1606 and the Gunpowder Plot (London, 1964), pp. 109–10. This process of suppressing and editing memory might be compared with the manner in which John Foxe ‘airbrushed’ dissident tendencies within mid-sixteenth century evangelicalism from history: see Thomas Freeman, ‘Dissenters from a Dissenting Church: The Challenge of the Freewillers 1550–1558’, in Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (eds), The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 129–56, at p. 154. 105

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and Appellant controversies of 1598–1602. At the root of this ugly internecine dispute between the Jesuits and a contingent of secular priests were two conflicting visions of the purpose and priorities of the mission and the relationship of the Catholic community with the Protestant monarch and State. In part a quarrel about the internal government and hierarchical structure of the English clergy, it also enshrined a violent clash between a policy of militant activism and forcible reconversion and a policy of conciliation, amelioration and retreat from political engagement. Persuaded that Jesuit involvement in plots, conspiracies and invasion attempts was to blame for the harsh treatment of Catholics by the Elizabethan regime, the Appellants overtly professed allegiance to the crown and sought to negotiate a limited form of toleration with the authorities. In so doing they effectively accepted Catholicism’s status as a proscribed sect and dissenting minority and sanctioned the uneasy but sincere reconciliation of religious and political loyalties which so many of the laity had already reached in the guise of occasional conformity.106 While it would be wrong to superimpose the conflict about attendance at Protestant services too neatly upon this wider controversy, there can be no doubt that, not least in the eyes of contemporaries, the two were intimately, if intricately, linked. An ardent opponent of the machinations of the Spanish faction and keen advocate of the Oath of Allegiance, Thomas Wright had increasingly close connections with the Appellant cause.107 Robert Jones reported to Richard Blount that some of those who accepted Wright’s teachings on conformity had also ‘swallowed the supremacy without scruple’ and the correspondence of both with Persons in Rome reveals the existence of a body of ‘naughty priests’ who dissented from the Jesuits’ uncompromising line on recusancy – an overlap which can only have served to polarise positions on the issue yet further.108 It is also apparent that there had never been much love lost between the Jesuits and Bell and in more than one respect it is tempting to present him as a proto-Appellant. While a student at the English College in Rome (which witnessed the first stirrings of the dispute in the late 1570s), he had not hesitated to preach a sermon dissuading his companions from joining the Society of Jesus and Robert Persons would later describe him as one of 106

  On the Appellant and Archpriest controversies, see John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London, 1975), ch. 2; Arnold Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England (London, 1979); Caroline Hibbard, ‘Early Stuart Catholicism: Revisions and Re-Revisions’, JMH, 52 (1980): 1–34, at 23–8. For a summary of the literature, see Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age (Aldershot, 1977), pp. 116–26. 107   See Theodore A. Stroud, ‘Father Thomas Wright: A Test Case for Toleration’, Biographical Studies, 1 (1951): 189–219. 108  Foley, iv. 374, 377; Roland G. Usher, The Reconstruction of the English Church, 2 vols (London, 1910), ii. 182.

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the ‘fautors of that faction’ which had opposed Jesuit policies.109 There is also evidence to the effect that Bell’s initial defection was partly inspired by a resolute disapproval of the ‘dangerous purposes of … Jesuits & seminaries combining and conspiring with … men of value’ to overthrow the queen.110 In defending qualified conformity, moreover, he outlined a position attractively consistent with the doctrine of non-resistance, and, in arguing that the recusancy laws were simply a trial of political loyalty, he came perilously close to condoning the professed intention of government legislation – to echoing Cecil’s claim in The execution of justice that the Elizabethan regime was not in the business of making windows into men’s souls and punishing them for their religious beliefs, but rather of exposing traitors and enemies of the state. Indeed, J.G. thought it ‘very likely that the Lord Treasurer and our comforter in this point were both disciples to one master’ – in other words, the notorious Niccolo Machiavelli. Bell, he remarked sarcastically, spoke ‘more favourably for the Protestants than they do themselves’.111 To Jesuits and their allies committed to the total overthrow of Protestantism, his apparent willingness to reach a working arrangement with a heretical regime was utter anathema. However, the involvement of John Mush in refuting Bell and the position adopted on the issue by their Scottish colleagues (which Appellant writers were quick to exploit) suggest that the divisions over the issue were even more complex than this implies. 112 Although Jesuit propagandists bent over backwards to present it as a minor altercation, it is clear that the lawfulness of occasional conformity was one chief focus of the clerical infighting which, by the turn of the century, threatened to engulf the entire Catholic community. It was a wedge which Protestants not only recognised but became increasingly adept at exploiting. Shortly after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, for example, Lord Burghley wrote an ingenious piece of propaganda designed to widen the split emerging within English Catholicism. Disguised as a letter from the recently martyred Richard Leigh to the former Spanish ambassador Don Bernardino de Mendoza appealing for a shift away from a policy which too strongly favoured Spain, it called for an abandonment of military force 109

 Foley, vi. 16; CRS Miscellanea I, pp. 110–11; CRS Miscellanea II, p. 203.  TNA, SP 12/243/51. 111   J.G., ‘Answere’, in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 193–4. See William Cecil, The execution of justice in England for maintenaunce of publique and Christian peace, against certeine stirrers of sedition, and adherents to the traytors and enemies of the realme, without any persecution of them for questions of religion, as is falsely reported and published by the fautors and fosterers of their treasons (London, 1583). 112   See, pp. xxvii–iii, xxx. See now Lake and Questier, Trials of Margaret Clitherow, ch. 9. 110

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and suggested that, out of charity, the pope should grant a dispensation for occasional conformity so that Catholics ‘might avoid heavy fines and enjoy their livings and liberty’.113 But no one realised the potential for mutual destruction which the Appellant controversy represented more acutely than the bishop of London, Richard Bancroft. Seeking to nourish these damaging dissensions, Bancroft deliberately facilitated the printing of anti-Jesuit polemic in a sly attempt to effect a kind of double sabotage. He also commissioned Protestant publications about the scurrilous and unseemly dispute and encouraged a range of writers to expose the full extent of the internal chaos inside the enemy camp.114 It may be no coincidence that Thomas Bell seems to have numbered among Bancroft’s hacks: in his Anatomie of popish tyrannie published in 1603, Bell set out ‘to couch in a small and portable manual’ a summary of the bitter war of words which had broken out between the Jesuits and Appellants. In his preface he wrote of the ‘unspeakable solace’ and ‘rare conceived joy, which [had] environed him on every side’ as he had watched the volcano erupt. Using his accustomed technique, and with an insider’s knowledge of the ‘civil wars’ that had long troubled the church to which he had formerly belonged, the earlier phases of which had arguably precipitated his own apostasy, he produced a tract that served Bancroft’s current purposes all too effectively.115 The significance of the ongoing debate about frequenting heretical churches which this essay has reviewed should not, then, be underestimated. As we have seen, Elizabethan and Jacobean Catholicism was racked by complex and deep-seated divisions on this question that belie the façade of unity and consensus which the Jesuits in particular so strenuously attempted to present to the world. Nor do they coincide in any simple way with the boundary between the clergy and laity. Caroline Hibbard has speculated that, free of clerical interference and left to devise its own 113  Richard Leigh [William Cecil], The copy of a letter sent out of England to don Bernardino de Mendoza … declaring the State of England (London, 1588). See McCoog, Society of Jesus, p. 259. 114   On Bancroft’s activities, see Foley, i. 39, 42; BL, Royal MS 18A XIX (allegations by Henoch Clapham); H.R. Plomer, ‘Bishop Bancroft and a Catholic Press’, The Library, NS, 8 (1907): 164–76; Gladys Jenkins, ‘The Archpriest Controversy and the Printers, 1601–1603’, The Library, 5th ser., 2 (1947): 180–86; Mark H. Curtis, ‘William Jones: Puritan Printer and Propagandist’, The Library, 19 (1964): 38–66; David Kaula, Shakespeare and the Archpriest Controversy (Mouton, 1975), pp. 11–13; and esp. Patrick Collinson, Richard Bancroft and Anti-puritanism (Cambridge, 2012), ch. 10. See also Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 253–5. 115  Bell, Anatomie of popish tyrannie, sigs ¶4v, ¶2r–v. Bancroft commended the book to the young Catholic convert Francis Walsingham: Walsingham, Search, pp. 55–61.

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modus vivendi, the Catholic community might well have opted for church papistry supplemented by private heterodox rites and observances.116 But the evidence presented above suggests that widespread practice of partial and occasional conformity was not merely the result of stubborn lay resistance to the separatist tenets dictated to them by domineering priests. It may also reveal in relief the extent to which the doctrine of recusancy was modified, softened and actively resisted within missionary ranks – the tip of an iceberg of discontent with the inflexibility of the Jesuit hard-line. And here the growing dependence of priests upon the financial support, and more especially the physical protection, of conforming gentlemen and noblemen in whose homes they could shelter with less danger of detection is by no means irrelevant. Thomas Bell was not unique in believing in the necessity of ‘yielding’ a little ‘to the extremity of the time’ and in rejecting the narrow Tridentine definition of Catholic which excluded the principled conformist. Nor was he alone in becoming a scapegoat in the politics of post-Reformation confessionalism. Like church papists themselves, Bell and other ‘wayward’ priests who shared his opinions deserve to be rescued from the historiographical sidelines and credited with far more importance and influence. They draw our attention to a neglected internal narrative of clerical faction-fighting which casts the English Catholic community in a fresh and different light.

116

 Hibbard, ‘Early Stuart Catholicism’, 21.

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Chapter 3

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England’s Nicodemites: Crypto-Catholicism and Religious Pluralism* Perhaps no single issue pricked the consciences of early European Protestants more keenly than the problem of how a true believer should behave in the face of persecution. How were the godly to conduct themselves in a hostile Catholic environment? How could they maintain their ‘fidelity to the Lord pure and unpolluted’ while living amidst the ‘horrible sacrilege and Babylonish pollution’ perpetrated by the Church of Rome? The question of ‘the cohabitacyon of the faithful with the unfaithful’ greatly vexed and exercised all the major reformers, but none more so than Jean Calvin, whose own flight from France in 1535 enshrined the vehement rejection of any kind of compliance with idolatry which became a hallmark of his teaching. In a series of uncompromising letters and tracts, Calvin set out to demolish the arguments of those who disguised their inner Protestant convictions behind a façade of outward conformity to Catholic rites and justified it by reference to the biblical figure of Nicodemus, the pharisee who timidly concealed his faith in Jesus through fear and visited him under cover of night (John 3: 1–21). When his sharp strictures against these ‘pseudo-nicodemites’ met with resistance, Calvin redoubled his attack with the avowed intention of making ‘their ears tingle even more severely’. Making no concession to the human frailties of men and women reluctant to embrace exile in a foreign country, he compared dissemblers with the cleaners of latrines so inured to the stench they worked in that they found it inoffensive.1 *  An earlier version of this chapter was published under the title of ‘England’s Nicodemites: Crypto-Catholicism and Religious Pluralism in the Post-Reformation Context’, in Keith Cameron, Mark Greengrass and Penny Roberts (eds), The Adventure of Religious Pluralism in Early Modern France (Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 287–303. 1   Notable discussions of Calvin’s anti-nicodemite writings include Carlos M. Eire, ‘Prelude to Sedition? Calvin’s Attack on Nicodemism and Religious Compromise’, ARG, 76 (1985): 120–45; War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge, 1986), ch. 7; Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1990), esp. ch. 4; Nikki Shepardson,

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For Calvin, nicodemism presented a fundamental threat to the very survival of the Reformation in his native land: a subtle diabolical snare designed to dilute the Protestant message and gradually extinguish it. His intolerance of any type of camouflage or compromise embodied an attempt to forge a strong sense of confessional identity in a context of unprecedented religious pluralism and to preserve the ideological integrity of a Church under the cross. Dissimulation, in his eyes, savoured not merely of cowardice and indifference but of a hypocrisy which tarnished the external face of a fledgling faith in the process of being emblazoned by martyrs. The wide dissemination of Calvin’s tracts in the 1540s and 50s and their translation into English, German, Italian and Dutch indirectly highlight the role which furtive nicodemite dissent played in establishing the foundations of the Reformation prior to the emergence of clandestine separatist conventicles and the formation of public Churches in each of these regions. Indeed, as Andrew Pettegree has remarked, without the widespread practice of various forms of syncretism and subterfuge which characterised this early fluid period the huge surges of support for the evangelical cause which occurred in France in 1561–62 and in the Netherlands in 1566 would have been quite inconceivable.2 But conformity was a persisting feature of the contemporary religious landscape: a pragmatic, yet also often a principled response to the pressure exerted by regimes intent on enforcing uniformity and by laypeople anxious to expel heresy from their communities. Hence the ongoing complaints in Antwerp about parents who allowed their children to be baptised and married ‘in the papist fashion’; hence the Protestants in Paris, Troyes and Rouen who ‘swam between two waters’ and ‘kept themselves in the favour of the world’ by continuing to participate in the mass and attend confession at Easter; hence the mass abjurations in the wake of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre when thousands flocked to cathedrals and parish churches

‘The Rhetoric of Martyrdom and the Anti-Nicodemite Discourses in France, 1550–1570’, Renaissance and Reformation, 27 (2003): 37–61. See also M.A. Overell, ‘Vergerio’s AntiNicodemite Propaganda and England, 1547–1558’, JEH, 51 (2000): 296–318. Quotations in this paragraph are taken from John Calvin, On Shunning the Unlawful Rites of the Ungodly, in Tracts Relating to the Reformation, trans. H. Beveridge, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1844–51), iii. 361; Jules Bonnet (ed.), Letters of John Calvin Compiled from the Original Manuscripts and Edited with Historical Notes, 4 vols (New York, 1972; first publ. 1858), i. 435; Jean Calvin, Excuse aux Nicodemites, repr. in Three French Treatises, ed. Francis M. Higman (London, 1970), p. 134. A treatise of the cohabitacyon of the faithful with the unfaithful was the title of a tract by Peter Martyr Vermigli published in Strassburg in 1555. 2  Andrew Pettegree, ‘Nicodemism and the English Reformation’, in his Marian Protestantism (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 85–117, at 106.

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formally to reconcile themselves with Rome – perhaps most of these ‘converts’ were really nicodemites.3 Despite several recent discussions of Continental anti-nicodemite literature, there is still no sustained examination of the practical manifestations of this diffuse, amorphous and multi-faceted phenomenon at the grassroots. No doubt this is due in large part to its inherent invisibility: by its very nature conformity leaves little mark on the historical record. It is also slippery and difficult to identify and pinpoint with accuracy. But in this chapter I want to suggest, firstly, that nicodemism is a force to be reckoned with in post-Reformation Europe and, secondly, that it played an important role in shaping the nature of interconfessional relations in the second half of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century: in establishing preconditions for the peaceful coexistence of the adherents of rival creeds and also, rather paradoxically, in keeping alive the deadly germ of intolerance deeply embedded in European society. My analysis focuses on Elizabethan and early Stuart England – a context in which Catholics found themselves in the same unenviable position as the Huguenots, that of a proscribed religious minority. They shared with their confessional enemies the experience of professing dogmas at odds with those of their sovereign and their response to the daily moral dilemmas this posed was remarkably similar. In many cases, they too carved a delicate path between stealth and discovery, equivocation and extirpation, prudence and zeal. They too practised dissimulation, though the nicknames more frequently used to describe them were ‘schismatics’ and ‘church papists’. There was, of course, one vital difference between these English Catholic nicodemites and their French Protestant counterparts: whereas the latter were men and women taking their first faltering steps in a new religion or negotiating the ebb and flow of persecution which accompanied its halting progress, the former were individuals intent on clinging stubbornly to a set of beliefs which had hitherto held the monopoly. Their behaviour was a way of expressing protest and dissent while maintaining a pragmatic ‘toehold

3

  See Guido Marnef, ‘The Changing Face of Calvinism in Antwerp, 1550–1585’, in Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke and Gillian Lewis (eds), Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1620 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 143–59, at 148; Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth Century Paris (New York, 1991), pp. 121, 122, 144; A.N. Galpern, The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne (Cambridge, MA, 1976), pp. 151–2, and pp. 116–17, 121, 130–32; Philip Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 128–30, and ch. 5 passim. On nicodemism in the Netherlands, see also Alastair Duke, Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries (London, 1990), pp. 92–3, 114–15, 117, 277–8. For Italy, see John Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Berkeley, CA, 1993), esp. ch. 5. See also John S. Oyer, ‘Nicodemites among Württemberg Anabaptists’, Mennonite Quarterly Review, 71 (1997): 487–514.

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within the institutional structure of the national Church’.4 It was also paradigmatic of the manner in which perhaps the majority adapted to the English Reformation. Indeed, it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that most of those involuntary Protestants created by the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 were initially church papists – people, as one preacher complained, with ‘a pope in their belly’.5

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I This was a stance which was particularly prevalent in the first 20 years of Elizabeth I’s reign. As more than one commentator remarked, before 1570 ‘the Papists made no scruple of coming to our churches’: recusancy, or refusal to be present at Protestant services, was rare.6 This was largely a result of the lack of firm guidance committed Catholics received from the hierarchy of the Church of Rome itself. Although both Pope Pius IV and a committee of the Council of Trent concluded that attendance at heretical services was a mortal sin, their decisions remained poorly publicised throughout this decade, partly for diplomatic reasons.7 However, widespread conformity was also a consequence of significant continuities at the parochial level: of slow and reluctant enforcement of the official injunctions reforming worship and church interiors and of timeserving Marian priests who catered for the conservative liturgical tastes of their congregations by conducting services bearing a close resemblance to the outlawed mass. This early absence of overt opposition might, moreover, be regarded as a back-handed compliment to the Elizabethan regime’s cautious and fabian strategy for effecting Reformation. Tactful concessions to time-honoured tradition such as the retention of familiar rituals like the churching of women, of ceremonial gestures like making the sign of the cross in baptism and of old clerical vestments including the surplice did much to encourage acquiescence. So did the use of unleavened wafers reminiscent of the Catholic host during communion: in 1580 the Privy Council advised 4  Ralph Houlbrooke, Church Courts and the People during the English Reformation 1520–1570 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 249, 257. 5  Arthur Dent, The plaine mans path-way to heaven (London, 1610 edn), p. 125. 6   Quotation from Jeremy Taylor, A sermon preached in Saint Maries Church in Oxford. Upon the anniversary of the gunpowder-treason (Oxford, 1638), p. 22. 7   See C.G. Bayne, Anglo-Roman Relations 1558–1565 (Oxford, 1913), pp. 163–81, 290–91; F.W. Maitland, ‘Pius IV and the English Church Service’, EHR, 15 (1900): 530–32. For the Tridentine ruling, see Ginevra Crosignani, Thomas M. McCoog and Michael Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity in Early Modern England: Manuscript and Printed Sources in Translation (Toronto, 2010), pp. 9–25. This was first published as an appendix to Henry Garnet’s A treatise of Christian renunciation ([English secret press, 1593]).

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one bishop ‘charitabely to tollerate them (that esteem wafer bread), as children, with milke’.8 These tactics embodied a determination to create an umbrella-like Church which could embrace a wide range of opinions and standpoints, a Church in which the populace would gradually be weaned away from popish habits and persuaded to swallow Protestant precepts. The linchpin of this programme was the Act of Uniformity of 1559: making attendance at Common Prayer compulsory and absence an offence punishable by a shilling fine, it eschewed enquiry into people’s inner beliefs in favour of the minimal requirement of outward compliance. The ultimate effect of these policies was a kind of collective haemorrhage towards the status quo: as the Welsh Benedictine Augustine Baker reflected half a century later, many ‘easily digested the new religion and accommodated themselves thereto’.9 However, conformity became progressively less appealing as religious positions began to polarise and as the Calvinist temper of the Church of England and its personnel toughened. The papal bull of 1570 excommunicating and deposing the queen confronted Catholics with a stark choice between allegiance to their monarch and allegiance to the pope. Although widely ignored, it coincided with, and contributed to, the growth of recusancy and its increasing identification by the authorities with political disloyalty. During the 1560s, this form of conscientious objection had been enjoined by a small rump of recalcitrant priests, but the campaign in favour of fully fledged nonconformity did not really take off until the arrival after 1574 of bands of missionaries trained in seminaries in the Low Countries and Rome. Both in printed propaganda and through their pastoral endeavours in the field, leading Jesuits and secular priests maintained that staunch recusancy was the only stance sincere Catholics could adopt. Men and women who inwardly adhered to the religion of their forefathers but outwardly complied with Protestant ordinances were declared to be guilty of the heinous sin of ‘schism’ and threatened with eternal torment in hell. By halting between God and Baal, they not only led astray the weaker brethren and laid themselves open to infection with heresy; they committed an act of gross hypocrisy and flagrant idolatry. To conform was to shirk one’s duty to confess one’s faith without flinching in the face of persecution. According to the Counter-Reformation clergy, such timorous dissemblers were ‘Calvin’s excrements’ and, like the lukewarm

8

  Quotation from K.R. Wark, Elizabethan Recusancy in Cheshire, Chetham Society, 3rd ser. 19 (1971), p. 18n. 9   Memorials of Father Augustine Baker and Other Documents Relating to the English Benedictines, ed. J. McCann and H. Connolly, CRS 33 (London, 1933), p. 16.

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Church of Laodicea, they too would be spewed out of God’s mouth.10 The arguments that Gregory Martin, Robert Persons, Henry Garnet and other priests assembled to condemn church papists thus closely paralleled those used by Protestant reformers against the nicodemites. They too believed that symbolic segregation from the false religion that surrounded them was essential to their very survival; they too sought to foster a confessional identity rooted in heroic defiance. And in striving to eradicate the cancer of crypto-Catholicism they even made grudgingly approving reference to the teachings and writings of their polemical archenemies. Robert Persons quoted a relevant passage from a catechism by the Frenchman Jean Garnier, remarking ‘If errour finde such zeale, what zeale ought truthe to have?’ Another tract made use of examples of the stalwart nonconformity of Marian Protestants drawn from John Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’, and Robert Southwell cited Calvin’s De vitandis superstitionibus and Excuse à Messieurs les Nicodemites and the counsels of Philip Melanchthon, Peter Martyr and Martin Bucer, declaring that ‘albeit their reasons were misapplyed’, ‘yet are they very sufficient and forcible to confirme that repayring to a false church in deed, is moste sinnful and damnable’.11 In an age of militant confessionalism, dissembling behaviour was intolerable to spokesmen on both sides of the denominational fence. The ethical dilemmas that outward conformity posed to devout believers also made it a critical subject for discussion by experts in the art of casuistry. Trained in this science in the seminaries, the Catholic clergy were taught to respond compassionately to the moral predicaments faced by their flocks and permitted to exercise a degree of leniency when dealing with the sin of occasional conformity in the privacy of the confessional. While there was never any question of condoning church papistry per se or en masse, in practice the uncompromising strictures of the recusancy tracts were moderated and mitigated by consideration of the difficult circumstances in which individual laypeople found themselves. Fear of persecution could partially excuse the human frailty that had led them to succumb to the temptation of attending Protestant services. Moreover, as the reasoning deployed in two casuistical manuals prepared for the 10

 This summarises the discussion in my Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 1993), ch. 2. See also Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge, 1982), ch. 6; Zagorin, Ways of Lying, ch. 7. Quotation from Thomas Hill, A quartron of reasons of Catholike religion (Antwerp [English secret press], 1600), pp. 183–4. 11  Robert Persons, A brief discours contayning certayne reasons why Catholiques refuse to goe to church (Douai [London secret press], 1580), fos 52a–54a; H.B., A consolatory letter to all the afflicted Catholikes in England (Rouen [London secret press, 1587–88]), pp. 53–5; Robert Southwell, An epistle of comfort (Paris [London, 1587–81), fos 172r–173r. See also ‘Ordeals of Conscience’, Chapter 4, below.

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instruction of missionaries during the Elizabethan period reveals, clerical leaders recognised that some relaxation of the strictures of the recusancy literature was necessary to preserve the morale and resources of men who might well form the political backbone of a future Catholic regime: ‘it is important to keep noble and rich families in their former positions of honour and dignity, so that, after the death of the Queen, they can stand up for the faith with their full authority and protect it with their strength and power against the audacity of heretics’.12 In 1581 Sir John Petre of Ingatestone in Essex vigorously defended the practice of going to church ‘for fashion sake’ and ‘to avoide the daunger of the lawe’, insisting that many who did so ‘beare as good a mynde to god warde, as those that refuse, yes and if occasion serve wilbe able to doe better service then they which refuse to go to the churche’. Another commented tellingly ‘the tyme will come [we] will nede such fellowes’.13 But the wisdom of the serpent could only be sanctioned while hope remained of reclaiming England by means of conspiracy or invasion to the Roman fold. Consequently every effort was made to keep these casuistical concessions tightly under wraps. Heretics, moreover, could all too easily exploit them as evidence of Catholic hypocrisy. The persistence of church papistry was not simply a consequence of clerical confessors condoning the understandable lapses of their spiritual charges for pragmatic or pastoral reasons. Sometimes it seems to have testified to a spirit of lay independence and resistance to policies framed by exiled priests safely ensconsed in safe havens on the Continent. The distaste of certain members of the gentry and nobility for the treasonous machinations of the Jesuits is well documented; the frustration of others with the Tridentine hard line on ‘schism’ proceeded from a similar conviction that Persons and his colleagues had no sympathy for the straitened condition of Catholics who had remained in England. As the Suffolk gentleman Sir Thomas Cornwallis exclaimed in exasperation, ‘[t]hey be out of the way themselves and therefore do not regard what we endure’ – a curious echo of words written by the Parisian Antoine Fumée in 1543 in response to Calvin’s attack on nicodemism: ‘A number of people think your assertions are thoroughly wretched. They accuse you of being merciless and very severe to those who are afflicted; and say that 12   For the casuists’ concessions, see P.J. Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, CRS 67 (London, 1981), pp. 49, 50, 51, 84–6, 94–6, 120–21, quotation, at p. 75. These are discussed further in my Church Papists, ch. 3, and Holmes, Resistance and Compromise, ch. 8. Cf. the harsher line taken by casuists in the 1620s: Peter Holmes (ed.), Caroline Casuistry: The Cases of Conscience of Fr Thomas Southwell SJ, CRS 84 (Woodbridge, 2012), cases 3–5. 13   BL, Lansdowne MS 33, fo. 148r.

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it is easy for you to preach and threaten over there, but that if you were here you would perhaps feel differently’.14 Church papistry, then, appears to have been the modus vivendi which significant numbers of Catholics reached with the Elizabethan government. Although we should be wary of equating conformity with passive quiescence and recusancy with radical dissidence, for some at least it was a way of demonstrating their political loyalty and securing their civic position without forgoing their private beliefs. And it was a stance which arguably became more attractive as the authorities responded to the rise of overt dissent by augmenting the weapons in their legal arsenal. In the face of the statutes of 1581, 1587 and 1593 which imposed crippling fines on persistent offenders, rendered them ineligible for political office and eventually confined them within a five mile radius of their place of residence, it is not surprising that nicodemite Catholicism continued to thrive. Moreover, the boundary between conformity and nonconformity was porous and fluid and many people manipulated the grey areas in the law and moved between these two positions in response to the changing intensity of state repression and to the dynamics of local politics. In Newcastle, Catholic aldermen embraced conformity as a viable strategy for protecting the community of their coreligionists in the region.15 A wide variety of inventive compromises was devised.16 Some recusants evaded prosecution by giving plausible excuses for their absence from church, such as sickness, lawsuits or business commitments: this was a form of verbal rather than behavioural dissimulation. A Jacobean missionary recalled how one Scottish Catholic had escaped excommunication for recusancy by pretending to break his leg falling from a horse: he walked about with ‘ingenious lameness, leaning on his stick’, his ‘halting gait’ even deceiving the priest.17 In some upper class households a shrewd domestic arrangement evolved, whereby the husband and head periodically attended church in order to protect the family’s financial security and social 14  P. McGrath and J. Rowe, ‘The Recusancy of Sir Thomas Cornwallis’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology, 28 (1961): 224–71, at p. 257. Fumée is quoted in Eire, War against the Idols, p. 254. 15   On these points, see Michael Questier, ‘The Politics of Religious Conformity and the Accession of James I’, Historical Research, 71 (1998): 14–30; and ‘Conformity, Catholicism and the Law’, in Peter Lake and Michael Questier (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 237–61. For Newcastle, see Rosamund Oates, ‘Catholicism, Conformity and the Community in the Elizabethan Diocese of Durham’, NH, 43 (2006): 53–76. 16   For further discussion of such strategies, see my Church Papists, ch. 4. 17   William Forbes-Leith (ed.), Narratives of Scottish Catholics under Mary Stuart and James VI. Now First Printed from the Original Manuscripts in the Secret Archives of the Vatican and Other Collections (Edinburgh, 1885), pp. 293–4.

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respectability, while his spouse and children safeguarded its spiritual health by practising unwavering recusancy. In 1596, for instance, the Sussex JP Edmund Pelham was said to be ‘very backward in religion’ coming to church ‘but slakly’ minus his wife (except ‘twise or thrise a yeare’) and such tactics also helped the Yorkshire families of Babthorpe, Meynell and Vavasour to preserve their fortunes almost intact.18 Occasional conformity was a duty which some fathers evidently groomed their sons and heirs to assume when they reached maturity. The Jesuit Robert Wigmore recalled that his father, ‘as soon as he came of age and had succeeded to the inheritance, yielded to the times, and once or twice a year went to the Protestant church’ – ‘a practice to be deplored among many of our families of rank’.19 Others attended more regularly but ignored or disrupted the proceedings by noisily clicking their rosary beads, concentrating on primers, missals and other devotional books or chanting psalms to drown out the execrable tones of heretical worship. In 1577 James Eton, chapter clerk of Hereford Cathedral sat so far away from the preacher that he was unable to hear; a few years earlier one Thomas Stiddy of Yorkshire was presented as ‘a disquieter of the minister during divine service’ and a vile abuser of the suffragan bishop of Nottingham.20 Notwithstanding the fulminations of the missionaries, there was nothing remotely lily-livered about church papists of this kind. Many Catholics drew the line when it came to receiving communion, persuading themselves that mere churchgoing might be stomached but not Calvin’s supper. It was by no means unusual for non-communicants to use such occasions to dramatise their disapproval of the Protestant Eucharist. At Egton in 1582 Robert Burton was charged with contemptuously spitting out the wine. Others were less frank about the reasons behind their refusal to receive: a York butcher’s wife was discovered trying to make away with the sacramental wafer in her hand and a serving maid called Elizabeth Coulson alleged that she had not swallowed it ‘by reason of a pain in her side and a cough’.21 In seventeenth-century Scotland, some Catholics engaged in an even more 18

  BL, Lansdowne MS 82, fo. 103r; Hugh Aveling, Post Reformation Catholicism in East Yorkshire 1558–1790, East Yorkshire Local History Society 11 (1960), pp. 25–9; Hugh Aveling (ed.), ‘The Recusancy Papers of the Meynell Family of North Kilvington, North Riding of Yorkshire 1596–1676’, in E.E. Reynolds (ed.), CRS Miscellanea, CRS 16 (London, 1964). 19   See, for example Foley, iv. 422–3. 20   Patrick Ryan (ed.), ‘Diocesan Returns of Recusants for England and Wales, 1577’, in CRS Miscellanea XII, CRS 22 (1921), p. 78; J.C.H. Aveling, Catholic Recusancy in the City of York 1558–1791, CRS Monograph Series 2 (London, 1970), p. 168. 21  Hugh Aveling, Northern Catholics: The Catholic Recusants of the North Riding of Yorkshire 1558–1790 (London, 1966), p. 102; Aveling, Catholic Recusancy in … York, pp. 195, 197.

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elaborate pretence: ‘taking their places at the table of destruction, and lifting the bread to their lips they secretly let it fall to the ground, and taking the cup of the Calvinists in their hands, made believe to drink’. In doing so, they did not think that they were committing any kind of sin.22 It is important not to ignore the psychological discomfort which conformity often entailed. But we also need to recognise the positive forces which inhibited many Catholics from taking the plunge into total nonconformity: ties of attachment to the close-knit communities in which they resided; a sense of responsibility towards their families and neighbourhoods; the duty of upholding the established social order drummed into them from birth; and the obligation of charity imposed upon every Christian by the Bible. For more than a century after the Elizabethan Settlement, it is very hard to force English Catholicism into the straitjacket of a fully segregated sect. In many respects it is better thought of as semiseparatist.

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II All this is testimony to the richly pluralistic character of post-Reformation English society. The second part of this chapter offers some speculative suggestions about the implications which the widespread practice of church papistry may have had in the realm of interdenominational relations. It explores the possibility that conformity may provide a partial explanation both for the apparently impressive capacity of the English populace to tolerate religious heterodoxy within its midst and for the alarming but infrequent spasms of intolerance which rocked the country in this period. Although anti-popery played a crucial role in the formation of a popular Protestant and patriotic consciousness, historians have found little evidence of sectarian hatred of the strength and on the scale of that experienced in France during the Wars of Religion. The virulent apocalyptic polemic which streamed from the pens of propagandists and resounded from the pulpits seems not to have had much impact on the behaviour of the populace at the grassroots. Passionate literary denunciations of the machinations of the papal Antichrist were only rarely translated into active hostility towards individual Catholics. On the contrary, inspired partly by the work of Christopher Marsh, there is growing emphasis on the considerable capacity of contemporaries to countenance the presence of people with dissenting opinions living within their vicinity. The 22   William Forbes-Leith (ed.), Memoirs of Scottish Catholics during the XVII and XVIIIth Centuries, 2 vols (London, 1909), i. 18.

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threatening stereotypes portrayed in Protestant sermons and tracts do not appear to have precluded a significant degree of practical cooperation, not say cordial interaction, between the adherents of the Churches of England and Rome.23 In some ways this state of affairs might be regarded as a consequence of Elizabeth I’s celebrated refusal to make windows into men’s souls: of the pragmatic latitudinarianism of a Church which, despite the efforts of puritan zealots to impose more searching statutory tests of doctrinal orthodoxy, demanded only external conformity as a sign of assent. Yet it may also be a consequence of the day-to-day compromises Catholics reached with their heretical enemies: not merely the symbolic gestures of deference to the sovereign and state they offered in the guise of occasional conformity, but the numerous other concessions they made in the spheres of hospitality, commerce, law, local government and personal relations in the interests of maintaining harmony and peace and avoiding confrontation. Here the hypothetical cases of conscience studied by trainee seminary priests are very revealing. They suggest indirectly that many Catholics continued to act as godparents to the infants of Protestant friends and to entrust them with the spiritual welfare of their own children; that they paid their tithes, contributed to repairing the fabric of ecclesiastical buildings, purchased produce grown on glebe land and even participated in seasonal pastimes involving the floral decoration of parish churches now in the hands of the heretics. As magnates and landowners they held the civil offices of notary, mayor, bailiff, constable, justice of the peace and even sometimes churchwarden; as patrons they exercised their right to present ministers to benefices. On fast days they served meat to their Calvinist visitors; in assorted company they turned a tactful deaf ear to the sacrilegious prayers and graces which preceded lunch and dinner. Writing in the reign of Charles I, the Jesuit casuist Thomas Southwell advised that everyday contact with heretics and schismatics in political and civil matters was merely a venial sin and that only those specifically denounced or excommunicated were

23  On intellectual anti-Catholicism, see Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke, 1989), pp. 72–106, and Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Catholic Churches in English Protestant Thought 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995). For practical tolerance, see Christopher W. Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630 (Cambridge, 1994), esp. pp. 14–15, 187–96, 249–50; Anthony Milton, ‘A Qualified Intolerance: The Limits and Ambiguities of Early Stuart Anti-Catholicism’, in Arthur F. Marotti (ed.), Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 85–115; Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500–1700 (Manchester, 2006), pp. 269–80.

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to be shunned.24 It is also clear from parish registers and other sources that both recusants and church papists persisted in utilising other essential services supplied by the established Church, especially with regard to marking rites of passage. They baptised their babies according to the reformed liturgy to spare them the taint of illegitimacy; buried their dead by the Book of Common Prayer to ensure they were laid to rest in consecrated ground; and celebrated weddings with Protestant ceremonies to prevent rumours of adultery and fornication from spreading.25 Mixed marriages are another index of the extent to which the stark polarities etched so acidly on paper were softened by the bonds of obligation and love. The matriculation records of the English College at Rome suggest that many novice Jesuits came from families in which parents, children and siblings were torn between religious zeal and emotional attachment.26 Bill Sheils’ study of Egton on the North York moors shows that strong kinship ties ensured that confessional animosities did not disrupt or damage neighbourly relations, while in the Cambridgeshire village of Linton, Elizabethan Catholics trusted Protestants to witness their wills, appointed them to supervise the distribution of their charitable bequests and occasionally even left small legacies to their local vicar.27

24  Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, esp. part I, sections F, G, H, I, J, K; part II, ch. 2, part 2; Holmes (ed.), Caroline Casuistry, cases 5–8, 12–17, 93–4, 97, 109–11, citation from case 120. On intermingling in this sphere, see Anna Schmitt, ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Social Networks and Religious Allegiances at Lord Petre’s Dinnner Table, 1606– 1619’, RH, 29 (2009): 341–54; and my ‘Supping with Satan’s Disciples: Spiritual and Secular Sociability in Post-Reformation England’, in Nadine Lewycky and Adam Morton (eds), Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Professor W.J. Sheils (Farnham, 2012), pp. 29–55. 25  Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, part I, sections A, C, D; part II, ch. 2, part 2, cases 1, 20. See also John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London, 1975), ch. 6, §iii. On burial, see also Peter Marshall, ‘Confessionalisation and Community in the Burial of English Catholics, c.1570–1700’, in Lewycky and Morton (eds), Getting Along?, pp. 57–75. 26   See Anthony Kenny (ed.), The Responsa Scholarum of the English College, Rome: Part One: 1598–1621, CRS 54 (London, 1962). See also Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, part I, cases C2, C4, D1; part II, ch. 2, part 1, case 13, ch. 2, part 2, case 8. On the responsa, see Lucy Underwood, ‘Youth, Religious Identity, and Autobiography at the English Colleges in Rome and Valladolid, 1592–1685’, HJ, 55 (2012): 349–74. 27   W.J. Sheils, ‘Catholics and their Neighbours in a Rural Community: Egton Chapelry 1590–1780’, NH, 34 (1998): 109–33, at p. 130; see also his ‘“Getting on” and “Getting Along” in Parish and Town: Catholics and their Neighbours in England’, in Benjamin Kaplan et al. (eds), Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c.1570–1720 (Manchester, 2009), pp. 67–83; Andrzej Bida, ‘Papists in an Elizabethan Parish: Linton, Cambridgeshire, c.1560–c.1600 (unpubl. Diploma in Historical Studies dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1992), pp. 31–3.

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This culture of conciliation and compromise had a mirror image on the other side of the denominational divide. For instance, when a group of drunken soldiers plotted to extort money from two Catholic ladies at Corscombe in Devon in 1626, local people warned the household and the constable arrested the culprits.28 In many towns and villages, Protestants evidently reciprocated the gestures of good will made by their Catholic neighbours, protecting them from harassment by government pursuivants, respecting their scruples about receiving communion and winking at offences they ought to have reported to the authorities. Occasional conformity itself was sometimes an elaborate charade in which church papists and magistrates acted out pre-rehearsed parts.29 And, as the casebook of the Stratford-upon-Avon physician John Hall reveals, anti-Catholic prejudice did not prevent committed Protestants from admitting papists as patients.30 There is, then, much to suggest that far from being isolated and marginalised, early modem Catholics were often fully integrated members of their communities. Their willingness to meet the heretics halfway must have helped to defuse latent antagonism and foster a climate in which people of both persuasions felt able to condone beliefs and observances of which they disapproved. As in seventeenth-century Aquitaine, Catholics and Protestants were enclosed within ‘a cocoon of mutual relations’.31 Simultaneously, and somewhat paradoxically, however, we need to make room for the possibility that this state of de facto religious pluralism may have served in the long term to heighten rather than

28   See David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1987), p. 129. 29   But cf. the contrary evidence assembled in Michael C. Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge, 1996), chs 5–6. 30   Joan Lane, John Hall and his Patients: The Medical Practice of Shakespeare’s Son-in-Law (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1996), pp. xvi–xvii. This incorporates a facsimile and commentary on John Hall’s Select Observations on English Bodies of Eminent Persons in Desperate Diseases (London, 1679). On interactions in this realm, see now my ‘In Sickness and in Health: Medicine and Inter-confessional Relations in Early Modern England’, in Scott Dixon, Dagmar Freist and Mark Greengrass (eds), Living with Religious Diversity in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate, 2009), pp. 161–81. 31   Gregory Hanlon, Confession and Community in Seventeenth-Century France: Catholic and Protestant Coexistence in Aquitaine (Philadelphia, 1993), p. 12, and ch. 4. See also Willem Frijhoff, ‘The Threshold of Toleration: Interconfessional Conviviality in Holland during the Early Modern Period’, in his Embodied Belief: Ten Essays on Religious Culture in Dutch History (Hilversum, 2002), pp. 39–65. This accords well with research on Lollards, Familists and Dissenters. See the essays by Derek Plumb, Christopher Marsh and Bill Stevenson in Margaret Spufford (ed.), The World of Rural Dissenters 1520–1725 (Cambridge, 1995) and Marsh, Family of Love.

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inhibit the dialectical process of confessionalisation.32 In a context in which ideological differences were becoming a permanent, ineradicable and tacitly accepted feature of the contemporary landscape, the cultural practices which distinguished individuals who professed rival creeds probably became commensurately more important. Over time the trend towards social segregation seems to have sharpened and deepened, reminding us of the way in which puritans eschewed ‘familiar company keeping’ with the ‘carnal worldlings’ with whom they rubbed shoulders in the late Tudor and early Stuart Church.33 It is striking that Caroline casuists allowed far less latitude in matters of separation from Protestants than their Elizabethan predecessors, even while admitting that some heretics laboured in ‘invincible ignorance about the true religion’ and were ‘truly and properly Christians’. Where the latter had permitted a degree of occasional conformity, the former took a stricter line, insisting that recusancy was a ‘salutary practice … of great importance to the preserve the purity of faith of Catholics’ and that conformity was ‘intrinsically bad and a distinguishing sign of heresy’. This extended even to presence at rites of passage such weddings, funerals and baptisms, despite the fact that this was widely practised in Germany ‘for reason of politeness’ and ‘civility’. Even in a case of extreme poverty, it was wrong to lodge one’s children with heretical friends or relations. The material benefits were far outweighed by the danger of their perversion: this was ‘to hand them over to miseries for eternity, in a worse place than beasts’.34 Such evidence offers support for John Bossy’s suggestion that the Catholic community became increasingly insular, endogamous and sectarian in character as the seventeenth century progressed.35 It also accords well with Philip Benedict’s account of the history of Catholic-

32  The arguments articulated in this paragraph are further developed in my Charitable Hatred, pp. 302–15. Since this essay was originally written, scholars of other European contexts have developed similar insights: see Jesse Spohnolz, ‘Confessional Coexistence in the Early Modern Low Countries’, in Thomas Max Safley (ed.), A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World (Leiden and Boston, 2011), pp. 47–73; and his The Tactics of Toleration: A Refugee Community in the Age of Religious Wars (Newark, 2011); Christine Kooi, Calvinists and Catholics during Holland’s Golden Age: Heretics and Idolaters (Cambridge, 2012). 33   Patrick Collinson, ‘The Cohabitation of the Faithful with the Unfaithful’, in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel and Nicholas Tyacke (eds), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford, 1991), pp. 51–76. 34  Holmes (ed.), Caroline Casuistry, cases 117, 125, and 3–5 respectively. Southwell was also less willing to sanction concealing one’s religious identity by the use of equivocation: cases 1–2, 8. 35  Bossy, English Catholic Community, ch. 6.

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reformed coexistence in Montpellier after the proclamation of the Edict of Nantes.36 Turning full circle, it could be argued that these processes encouraged the construction and identification of English Catholics as a deviant other, a body of outsiders who, at times of communal and national emergency, could readily be transformed into scapegoats.37 It is in these terms that we need to interpret the anti-Catholic scares which periodically swept urban centres in periods of political crisis and the fear and anxiety which flared when tragic accidents and natural disasters occurred – rare but spectacular eruptions of the enmities that lay dormant beneath the surface of everyday life. Thus an outbreak of gaol fever in Oxford in 1577 was blamed on a Catholic bookseller on trial for sedition and plague epidemics were regularly attributed to divine wrath at a society which condoned the polluting presence of papists in its midst.38 Equally revealing is the vicious conduct of the London crowd in the wake of the collapse of an attic in Blackfriars in which 300 Catholics assembled for worship in October 1623, when unruly mobs went on the rampage, pelting the injured with stones and attempting to set fire to carriages in which the victims tried to escape from the scene.39 Two years later in Buckinghamshire the deputy lieutenants were reporting ‘privat meetinges’ and ‘extraordinary great postinge’ of papists to the houses of local recusants, together with the stashing of large quantities of armour, gunpowder and victuals in their cellars: this was the ‘common brute … in shopps markets & churches’. Fears that the Romanists were ‘contriving’ the overthrow of the regime were compounded by the words of a visiting soldier who had served the enemy in Flanders, ‘who tooke the boldness’ to tell a woman that the next time he came ‘he hoped to

36  Philip Benedict, ‘Un roi, une loi, deux fois: Parameters for the History of CatholicReformed Co-existence in France, 1555–1685’, in Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner (eds), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 65–93, at 84–93. On boundary-building as a critical factor in facilitating coexistence, see Keith P. Luria, Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early Modern France (Washington, DC, 2005). Marc R. Forster paints a similar picture in The Counter Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720 (Ithaca, NY, 1992), ch. 7, commenting on the ‘mania for differentiation’ (p. 225) which marked interconfessional relations in the eighteenth century. 37   See Bob Scribner, ‘Preconditions of Tolerance and Intolerance in Sixteenth Century Germany’, in Grell and Scribner (eds), Tolerance and Intolerance, pp. 39–43. 38   For the Oxford gaol fever, see Stephen Batman, The doome warning all men to the judgemente (London, 1581), p. 404. For plague epidemics, see, for example, William Gouge, A Plaister for the Plague, in Gods Three Arrowes (London, 1631), p. 79; Gloucester Cathedral Library, MS 40, fragment of a letter, c.1630. 39   Alexandra Walsham, ‘“The Fatall Vesper”: Providentialism and Anti-Popery in Late Jacobean London’, P&P, 144 (1994): 36–87.

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come to the cuttinge of hir throat’.40 Rumours about popish conspiracy similarly proliferated in the turbulent 1640s: Leicester, Lichfield and Ashby-de-la-Zouch kept night watches in the winter of 1641 following talk of ‘a plot intended to be done by the Papists upon the Protestants’ and in Liverpool a Catholic was arrested after saying that ‘the Protestants should shortly have a blow and the papists should have crosses or the like on their hats that they thereby might not be killed’.41 During these brief moments of moral panic, the possibility that England might experience a St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of its own must have seemed very real. Like puritans, Catholics were also perennial victims of persecution by words, the target of mocking rhymes, scurrilous libels and uncharitable taunts which ostracised them from their peers and temporarily turned up the heat of interpersonal relations. In Jacobean Yorkshire, for example, adults and children hissed ‘Papist, papist!’ at an elderly recusant woman set in the stocks in the market place like ‘a monster, or an owl in the daytime’.42 We should not underestimate the potential for such verbal aggression to spill over into action, or for the potent mixture of jingoism, bigotry and xenophobia ritually unleashed during annual celebrations of the nation’s providential deliverances from the Spanish Armada and Gunpowder Plot to disturb the delicate equilibrium which generally characterised CatholicProtestant coexistence. When it converged with other animosities and tensions, anti-Catholicism could turn from a mild allergy into a delirious fever and destructive force. At such junctures, there are good grounds for thinking that church papists were the focus of the most intense fear and anxiety. Protestants came to see them as far ‘more dangerous and hurtfull to the state’ than ‘symple recusants’ who stuck out like a sore thumb and displayed their colours on their sleeve: a fifth column, Trojan Horse, an insidious, unseen enemy within.43 Emasculated by mounting debts to the Exchequer and kept under close surveillance by the regime, recusants were in some respects less threatening than schismatics who put on the costume of loyal conforming Protestants. The latter were denounced as ‘deepe dissemblers’, ‘timeserving hypocrites … the bane of this lande … prickes and thornes in

40

  San Marino, California, Huntington Library, MS STTM Box 3, folder 15 [1625].   Robin Clifton, ‘Fear of Popery’, in Conrad Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War (Basingstoke, 1973), pp. 144–67, at 160, and his ‘The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution’, P&P, 51 (1971): 23–55. 42   ‘Father Pollard’s Recollections of the Yorkshire Mission’, in Morris, iii. 452. For one example of a libel, see Aveling (ed.), ‘Recusancy Papers of the Meynell Family’, p. xiii. 43   Clare Talbot (ed.), CRS Miscellanea: Recusant Records, CRS 53 (London, 1961), p. 66. The argument in this paragraph is developed further in my Charitable Hatred, pp. 202–6. 41

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our sides’.44 There was a grumbling worry that many such ‘counterfeits’ used their conformity as a smoke screen for subversive undercover activity – for spying and collecting intelligence, for housing mass priests whose very presence on English soil was an act of high treason, for insinuating themselves into positions of influence where they could intervene on behalf of their molested coreligionists. This was a phobia fed by the presence of figures like Ambrose Griffith, a Hereford lawyer and ‘halfe Recusant’ whom the government identified as particularly treacherous in 1604, noting that ‘though hee goeth to the church, yet hee runneth the Jesuite’s courses most violentlye’.45 In this sense church papists arguably assisted in inflating popery into a spectre and bogey of exaggerated proportions, albeit one that was only occasionally invoked. They instilled a fear of crypto-Catholicism into English society which found its fullest and most dysfunctional expression in alarm about the rise of Arminianism and Laudianism – developments zealous Protestants perceived as a kind of Counter Reformation by stealth and ultimately took up arms to repel. In conclusion, it is tempting to take up John Morrill’s famous throwaway remark that ‘the English Civil War was not the first European revolution: it was the last of the Wars of Religion’.46 Could it be that the pluralism nurtured by the Elizabethan Settlement helped to prevent the outbreak of a confessional war in the mid-sixteenth century but created the conditions in which one would ignite 80 years later? To this extent, there may be less of a contrast between early modem England and France than traditional historiography implied. To borrow phrases from Philip Benedict and Christopher Marsh, both countries were characterised by a paradoxical ‘mixture of tolerance and intolerance’, by ‘an almost schizophrenic religious culture, in which contradictory instincts jostled for supremacy’.47 It has been the contention of this chapter that crypto-Catholicism in a multiplicity of guises was a key ingredient in this compound – an agent of concord and integration and at the same time a recipe for suspicion, mistrust and even violent dissension.

44

  Quoted in Carol Z. Wiener, ‘The Beleaguered Isle: A Study of Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Catholicism’, P&P, 51 (1971): 27–62, at 38. 45   CRS Miscellanea II, CRS 2 (London, 1906), p. 297; Foley, iv. 370. See also BL, Harleian MS 360, fo. 25r. 46   John Morrill, ‘The Religious Context of the English Civil War’, TRHS, 34 (1984), repr. in his The Nature of the English Revolution (Harlow, 1993), pp. 45–68, at 68. 47   Benedict, ‘Un roi, une loi, deux fois’, p. 67; Christopher Marsh, Popular Religion in Sixteenth-Century England (Basingstoke, 1998), p. 191. See now Walsham, Charitable Hatred, esp. ch. 5; Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2007).

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Chapter 4

Ordeals of Conscience: Casuistry and Confessional Identity*

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I The language of conscience was in constant use in early modern England. Threatened with persecution if they refused to conform to the demands of the established Church and state, members of religious minorities often invoked it as a slogan and a manifesto. Thus in the reign of Mary I, the Protestant Elizabeth Young refused to go to mass because ‘my conscience will not suffer me’.1 The same excuse was used by a succession of Catholics examined in York in 1576 for their failure to participate in local parish services: a felt-maker by the name of Gregory Wilkinson declared that ‘he commeth not to the churche bycause his conscyens will not serve hym so to doe’, an artisan’s wife called Elizabeth Awdecorne explained her absence by saying that she was ‘certified in her conscience otherwise’ and the seamstress Anne Brymeley insisted that her conscience had prevented her from attending ‘for if she should, than she should dampne hir owne soule’.2 Dissenting Protestants too used this potent term to articulate their instinct to separate from the hordes of wicked infidels by which they were surrounded. Thus a Cambridgeshire husbandman and future familist Henry Orinell left his native village of Willingham for Colchester in 1555, anxious ‘that my conscience should not be entangled with the Popish pitch’.3 The ubiquity of the word ‘conscience’ in the records and texts of this period can beguile us into assuming that it carried the same meanings *

 An earlier version of this chapter was published under the title of ‘Ordeals of Conscience: Casuistry, Conformity and Confessional Identity in Early Modern England’, in Harald E. Braun and Edward Vallance (eds), Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe 1500–1700 (London, 2004), pp. 32–48, 191–6. (See http://www.palgrave.com/products/title. aspx?pid=267660.) 1   John Foxe, Actes and monuments (London, 1583), vol. 2, p. 2066. 2  Angelo Raine (ed.), York Civic Records, vol. 7, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series 115 (1950), pp. 131, 134, 135. 3   William Wilkinson, A confutation of certaine articles delivered unto the family of love (London, 1579), sig. 4r.

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that it does in the present. It can deceive us into supposing that modern notions of individualism and of the self informed contemporary outlooks. Respect for the integrity and sovereignty of a person’s autonomous inner moral voice is one of most precious tenets of the Western liberal tradition, a human right enshrined in constitutions and bills of rights and a principle which organisations like Amnesty International strive to defend and uphold. It is not the nature of the beliefs espoused by an individual that determines whether or not he or she acts in ‘good conscience’ but rather the sincerity with which they held. In the sixteenth century, however, the subjectivity of ‘conscience’ was only very rarely acknowledged. In a society that vehemently denied the idea that religious truth could take plural forms and insisted that God had ordained only one true Church on earth, there was little room for a relativist understanding of this concept. Conscience was widely conceived as the Lord’s lieutenant, viceroy or ‘sergeant’ implanted within the soul, as an invisible witness to give sentence against sin, as well as an instrument of divine vengeance and wrath. John Woolton described it as ‘a dayly and domestical Judge’, while in The Tempest Antonio spoke of ‘this deity in my bosome’.4 Technically, following medieval scholastic thinkers, early modern writers believed that conscience operated by means of a syllogistic dialogue between the synderesis (a storehouse of premises and precepts) and the conscientia (an active witness which applied these rules to particular cases).5 To borrow Peter Holmes’ evocative metaphor, they thought of this complex organ or faculty as a kind of radio receiver, transmitting God’s commands to each believer.6 What distinguished the early modern understanding of conscience was the assumption that it was only a fit instructor if it conformed with divine law as objectively defined – in the case of Protestantism by Scripture alone and in the case of Roman Catholicism by the Bible, in tandem with ecclesiastical tradition carried down through the ages by the Church. For Protestants conscience was 4

  William Perkins, A discourse of conscience (Cambridge, 1596), p. 140 and see pp. 7–9; John Woolton, Of the conscience (London, 1576), sig. O2v; William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1610), II. i. 278. 5   For the medieval scholastic tradition, see Timothy C. Potts, Conscience in Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1980). See also Edmund Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1988); Lowell Gallagher, Medusa’s Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance (Stanford, 1991); Meg Lota Brown, Donne and the Politics of Conscience in Early Modern England (Leiden, 1995), esp. ch. 2; Harald E. Braun and Edward Vallance (eds), Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700 (Basingstoke, 2004); Harald E. Braun and Edward Vallance (eds), The Renaissance Conscience (Oxford, 2011). 6  Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge, 1982), p. 99.

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closely tied to a predestinarian theology of grace: the knowledge contained in the synderesis was a gift from God working through the Holy Spirit. For Catholics, it was a mental machine which had to be supervised by the priesthood to ensure that it did not stray from the orthodoxies laid down by the papacy. Both sides regarded a conscience void of ‘true’ beliefs as counterfeit, deceitful and illusory – mere fancy and whim, wilful perversity and obstinacy. In the words of one Lutheran writer, ‘where there is no faith there is no conscience but only the mark of the beast’.7 This matrix of assumptions militated against any acknowledgement of an individual’s obligation to follow the dictates of an erring interior magistrate and guide. In this chapter I want to argue that contemporary debates about the issue of conformity to a false religion assisted in a very small way in forging a discourse of conscience which more closely resembles our own. In particular, I shall suggest that the moral problems posed by what Peter Martyr Vermigli called the ‘cohabitacyon of the faithfull with the unfaithfull’ contributed in various complex and contradictory ways to relativising and internalising the concept of conscience. I hope to show that the controversies generated by the practice of dissimulation served not only to stimulate interest in the relationship between inner conviction and outward conduct, private belief and public behaviour; they also revealed areas of common ground between victims and persecutors with regard to the correct demeanour of individuals caught between conflicting allegiances. Within the pages of controversial and casuistical tracts on this subject, we may detect the faint outlines of a recognition of the rights of the erroneous conscience – albeit limited, tendentious and contingent. This essay is not an attempt to chart a whiggishly linear process of development, or to offer a genealogical analysis of the origins and roots of modern liberal values. It simply highlights how such ideas were inadvertently, even accidentally, engendered by a particular set of polemical circumstances.8 Finally, in a speculative conclusion or coda, I shall explore the possibility that the emergence of a multi-denominational world in which the Erastian state abandoned its attempt to enforce complete uniformity intensified rather than alleviated the conscientious dilemmas felt by religiously committed individuals. 7

  Johannes Brenz, quoted in David Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984), p. 42 and see pp. 49–51, 89–92. 8  Here I have found Anthony Milton’s Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995) helpful conceptually. For Milton, Laudianism was a novel and distinctive synthesis of existing patterns of thought; it was constructed in part out of arguments which can be found expressed in different polemical contexts by its opponents. His comment that ‘English Protestant doctrine … was shifting and pluralistic in tone, varying in tone and content within different polemical contexts’ (p. 542) encapsulates a central argument of this chapter.

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II All over Europe the experience of persecution gave rise to much discomfort and anxiety. In England, many, perhaps most, merely swam with the tide and grudgingly complied with the ecclesiastical and theological changes imposed upon them by successive Tudor regimes, but a godly minority found the tension between their desire for salvation and their instinct for survival and self-preservation intense, if not nearly unbearable. The attempt of zealous Protestant and Catholic clergy and laypeople to reconcile these two tendencies engendered a symmetrical set of cases of conscience on each side of the Reformation divide. Could one participate in the liturgical and sacramental rites of a rival religion without betraying the faith in which one had been baptised or reborn as a convert? To what extent was one obliged to segregate from heretics and idolaters in the mundane transactions that marked everyday life? Such scruples find concrete reflection in a variety of contemporary texts. The clerical leaders of underground churches and exile movements responded directly to them in treatises they prepared for dissemination among the beleaguered laity, following in the footsteps of Jean Calvin’s scalding refutations of the arguments of French Protestant nicodemites.9 In a dialogue by Wolfgang Musculus translated into English in 1555, they are embodied in a character called ‘Temporyseur’ who is ‘wonderfully troubled’ in conscience about the legitimacy of attending the Catholic mass.10 The teasing questions which troubled earnest laypeople are also preserved in the pastoral letters of ministers to whom they turned for solutions. In Mary’s reign a certain godly man asked John Bradford ‘whether ye may lawfully in outward deeds and words resemble the papists’ as long as ‘ye reteyne the true profession of Christ inwardly in your harte?’, while a woman wondered if, while abstaining from the sacrament, she might nevertheless be present at ‘the popish mattins’ or evensong or not.11 Members of Thomas Bentham’s London congregation sought guidance about the legality of paying tithes and prosecuting cases in Catholic courts and Rose Hickman wrote to Oxford to the imprisoned 9   See John Calvin, Epistolae duae de rebus hoc saeculo cognitu necessariis (1537); Petit traicté (1543); Excuse à messieurs les nicodemites (1544). The two latter tracts were reprinted in De vitandis superstitionibus (Geneva, 1549). For discussions, see Carlos M.N. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge, 1986), ch. 7 and Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1990), ch. 4. See also ch. 3, above, n. 1. 10   Wolfgang Musculus, The temporysour (Zurich [1555?]), trans. of the French edn, Le temporiseur (London, 1550). 11   An answer to a certain godly mannes lettres … ([Strassburg], 1557), STC 658, sig. A2r; Foxe, Acts and Monuments, p. 1671.

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bishops Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley for advice ‘whether I might suffer my chylde to be baptized after the popish maner’.12 Under Elizabeth, Roman Catholics were vexed by similar moral difficulties: a paper which fell into the hands of the authorities in 1561 included the query ‘Whether the people, compelled with fear for loss of worldy goods, may receive the communion, as bread and wine, not consenting to it [internally]?’ and in the 1580s one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting requested a ruling from the missionary clergy about whether she might attend the Chapel Royal if she wore some ‘sygne about her necke’, such as a crucifix or rosary, ‘wherby she might be knowne to be a catholyke’.13 The casuistical manuals prepared for training priests in Douai provide further insight into the perplexing problems which confronted the wealthy laity in the spheres of marriage, hospitality, business, leisure, finance and local politics. Among the soul-searching questions the seminary teachers addressed were ‘Is it lawful … for Catholics in England to buy former monastic property?’ and ‘May a Catholic, out of duty as a host, prepare and serve meat to a heretic friend or relation [on a designated fast day]?’ Did parents sin mortally by marrying their children to heretics and schismatics? Was it permissible to give presents and bribes to powerful Protestants to persuade them from prosecuting Catholics for recusancy?14 At the centre of the dissenter’s conscientious dilemmas lay the issue of political obedience. How far was an individual bound to comply with the commands of a sovereign who espoused a religious creed contrary to his or her own? The Erastian nature of the English Reformation and its brief reversal after 1553 rendered the problem of competing loyalties especially acute. As John Spurr has remarked, the early modern state succeeded the

12

  John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, 3 vols in 6 (Oxford, 1822), III.ii. 134–5; Maria Dowling and Joy Shakespeare (eds), ‘Religion and Politics in mid Tudor England through the Eyes of an English Protestant Woman: the Recollections of Rose Hickman’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 55 (1982): 100. 13   John Strype, Annals of the Reformation, 4 vols in 7 (Oxford, 1824), I. i.393; St Mary’s College, Oscott, MS E. 5. 16: I. G., ‘An answere to a comfortable advertisement, with it addition written of late to afflicted catholykes concerning goinge to churche with protestants’, ch. iv. This has now been printed in Ginevra Crosignani, Thomas M. McCoog and Michael Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity in Early Modern England: Manuscript and Printed Sources in Translation (Toronto, 2010), pp. 157–243, quotation at p. 181. See Holmes, Resistance, p. 238 n.10 dates this to c.1593 and attributes it to John Gerard. Crosignani, McCoog and Questier suggest that this was a joint production of John Mush and Henry Garnet and redate it from internal evidence to May 1588. 14  P.J. Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, CRS 67 (1981). A later set of cases reveals that these remained live questions: Peter Holmes (ed.), Caroline Casuistry: The Cases of Conscience of Fr Thomas Southwell SJ, CRS 84 (Woodbridge, 2012), cases 10, 13–15, 22, 109.

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Church as the arbiter of the individual conscience.15 Legislation such as Henry VIII’s ‘Act abolishing diversity of opinions’ of 1539 embodied the Tudor monarchy’s attempt to monopolise control of the doctrinal content of people’s minds – to dictate and regulate the dogmatic precepts contained in the synderesis. The oaths of allegiance and supremacy imposed by mid-sixteenth century regimes were devised as litmus tests of political conformity, mechanisms for dividing true-hearted subjects from traitors.16 In a context in which the king had declared himself the quasi-sacerdotal head of the Church, they were simultaneously testimonials of religious acquiescence – in theological language, devices for separating the sheep from the goats. Famously, the policy of uniformity embodied in the Elizabethan settlement and later recusancy laws enshrined a deliberate refusal to ‘make windows into men’s souls’.17 Demanding only outward conformity as a gesture of assent, the regime consistently maintained that it punished individuals not for their private religious convictions but only when these spilled over into sedition and subversion. As William Cecil declared in The execution of Justice, as long as individuals remained loyal to the crown they would not be ‘searched in their consciences for their opinions that savor not of treason’.18 Echoing Burghley, a later writer insisted that the queen ‘sitteth in no mans conscience as doth the pope’.19 The government and its spokesmen claimed that mere attendance at church could be required as a ‘tollerable and convenient’ means of distinguishing human beings from ‘brute beasts’ but repeatedly resisted calls for stiffer instruments for searching ‘the very secrettes of the harte’ and sifting the seed from the cockle, such as compulsory reception of holy communion.20 When this was made a statutory requirement in 1606, the intention was

15   John Spurr, ‘A Profane History of Early Modern Oaths’, TRHS, 6th series, 11 (2001): 59. 16   For example in 25 Henry VIII. c. 22 (1534), 28 Henry VIII. c. 10 (1536), 1 Eliz. I. c.1 (1559). See John Spurr, ‘“The Strongest Bond of Conscience”: Oaths and the Limits of Tolerance in Early Modern England’, in Braun and Vallance (eds), Contexts of Conscience, pp. 150–65; Jonathan Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2012). 17   See 1 Eliz. I.c.2 (1559), 23 Eliz.I.c.1 (1581), 35 Eliz.I.c.2 (1593). 18   William Cecil, The Execution of Justice in England, ed. Robert M. Kingdon (Ithaca, NY, 1965), p. 10. 19  Perceval Wiburn, A checke or reproofe of M. Howlets untimely screeching in her Maiesties eares (London, 1581), fo. 4r. 20   See the speeches by Edward Aglionby and Thomas Norton in response to a bill which would have made reception of communion compulsory read in the parliament of 1571: T.E. Hartley (ed.), Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, vol. 1, 1558–1581 (Leicester, 1981), pp. 240–41.

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quite explicitly to smoke out church papists.21 The law was designed to operate like a mechanical lie-detector, to discover those who hid their false opinions behind the cloak of conformity. Elizabeth’s policy of pastoral latitudinarianism may well have facilitated the absorption of the indifferent majority into the Church of England, but it did not ease the anguish of highly scrupulous Catholics. For individuals committed to a religion which hinged upon the performance of ritual, the obligation to participate in Protestant worship was itself ‘a very touchstone of triall’,22 a kind of oath which they were required to swear not with their lips but with their limbs. Just as the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance can be seen not as a moderate attempt to separate political from religious allegiance but as a ‘lethal measure’ for ascertaining ideological orthodoxy,23 so too do we need to recognise that for conscientious believers the state’s demand for their attendance at church was quite literally a painful ordeal in which God was being called upon to reveal their innocence or guilt.24 Religious minorities responded to these pressures and predicaments in a variety of ways. In some the difficulty of resisting the temptation to recant or compromise one’s faith led to psychological torment. This itself was seen as an example of an individual’s conscience acting as an agent of providential wrath, as ‘the gayler to keepe man in prison in bolts and irons’, in the words of William Perkins.25 What Thomas Adams called the ‘inward and spiritual blows’ of fear, remorse and despair were part of God’s arsenal of weapons in the war against sin: as the French Protestant Simon Goulart remarked, he did not need ‘to seek far for any rods to scourge us, seeing

21   3 Jac.I. c.4. The preamble spoke of ‘divers persons popishly affected [who] do nevertheless, the better to cover and hide their false hearts … repair sometimes to church to escape the penalties of the laws in that behalf provided …’. 22  Hartley (ed.), Proceedings, p. 241. 23   M.C. Questier, ‘Loyalty, Religion and State Power in Early Modern England: English Romanism and the Oath of Allegiance’, HJ, 40 (2) (1997): 311–29, at 313. Nevertheless, it is clear that some Catholics were prepared to accept it a mechanism for creating space within which they could legally exist in a Protestant state. Questier is questioned on this point in Johann P. Sommerville, ‘Papalist Political Thought and the Controversy over the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance’, in Ethan Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005), pp. 162–84; and Stefania Tutino, Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570–1625 (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 132–7. Cf. John J. La Rocca, ‘“Who Can’t Pray with Me, Can’t Love Me”: Toleration and the Early Jacobean Recusancy Policy’, JBS, 23 (1984): 22–36, esp. 33–6. 24   On medieval ordeals, see Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal (Oxford, 1986). For the early modern period, see Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation. 25  Perkins, Discourse, p. 140.

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that we carry them in our bowels’.26 The locus classicus of the haunted conscience was the apostate Italian lawyer, Francis Spiera, whose terrible mental tribulations were immortalised in several contemporary pamphlets and plays.27 But many other individuals experienced internal turmoil. Rose Hickman’s husband ‘would lye mourning in his bed and could not sleep for greif to think that he was on the morrow to go … to that idolatrous service’ and the Norfolk recusant Francis Wodehouse was consumed by a searing thirst which felt like a ‘raging furnace’ in his soul after entering a Protestant church.28 The inner hell suffered by those who agonised about whether or not to conform sometimes had tragic consequences: in the 1550s Richard Wever of Bristol drowned himself in a mill-race rather than pollute himself by appearing at mass and a Manchester recusant similarly tried to commit suicide after agreeing to attend Common Prayer in 1583.29 But many found it possible to square the circle by practising some form of dissimulation. Under Mary and Elizabeth, many Protestants and Catholics continued to attend officially prescribed services in their parish churches, sometimes regularly and sometimes only occasionally, just enough to satisfy the authorities. Some ‘mass gospellers’ and ‘church papists’ kept their real religious convictions completely hidden but others sought to differentiate themselves from heretics and idolaters by their external gestures. Bowing one’s head or kneeling down when the priest elevated the host was apparently a common method by which Marian Protestants displayed their disapproval.30 Similar subterfuges were employed by Catholics later in the century: some attended but prayed privately on their primers; others sat at the back or behind pillars where they could not hear the minister, chanted psalms aloud to disrupt the liturgy, left ostentatiously 26  Thomas Adams, The gallants burden (1613), in Workes (London, 1630), p. 12; Simon Goulart, cited in Jonathan Wright, ‘The World’s Worst Worm: Conscience and Conformity during the English Reformation’, SCJ, 30 (1999): 113–33, at 119 and see 121–6. 27   See Matteo Gribaldi, A notable and marveilous epistle … concernyng the terrible judgemente of God, upon hym that for feare of men, denieth Christ and the knowne veritie (London, 1550 [1570?]); Nathaniel Woodes, The Conflict of Conscience (London, 1581); Nathaniel Bacon, A relation of the fearfull estate of Francis Spira, in the yeare, 1548 (1638). Michael MacDonald, ‘The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira: Narrative, Identity and Emotion in Early Modern England’, JBS, 31 (1992): 32–61 and M.A. Overell, ‘The Exploitation of Francesco Spiera’, SCJ, 26 (1995): 619–37. 28   Dowling and Shakespeare (eds), ‘Recollections of Rose Hickman’, 101; William Weston, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, ed. P. Caraman (London, 1955), pp. 148–50. 29   For Wever, see Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993), p. 229; for the Manchester recusant see CSPD 1581–1590, p. 131. 30   See John Bradford, The hurte of hering masse (London, 1561?), sig. A4r. On Marian Protestant nicodemism, see Andrew Pettegree, Marian Protestantism: Six Studies (Aldershot, 1996), ch. 4.

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before the sermon began, or made an open declaration that their presence was merely a token of their political loyalty. An even more hair-splitting solution was to send a proxy or deputy to sit in one’s private pew or closet, with the aim of deceiving the congregation into thinking one had been present oneself.31 As Lowell Gallagher has remarked, these were behavioural equivalents of the verbal practices of equivocation and mental reservation.32 Notoriously linked with the Jesuits by the end of the sixteenth century, these devices were utilised by a number of captured priests under interrogation, but they were also sometimes employed by the Catholic laity.33 ‘A briefe advertisement’ which circulated in manuscript around 1581, for instance, schooled recusants in how to answer the question ‘doe you, or will you goe to the church’ ambiguously enough to avoid prosecution. A similar text providing directions for responding to churchwardens dated May 1601 was careful to steer a course between lying and lawful dissimulation: it was not permissible to state that one had been to church if this ‘meaneth a profane going to Powles’, nor that a person had received the Eucharist ‘because he received his rents, or a piece of bread, at home’, because such senses were ‘dishonourable to God’. But it offered a range of alternatives that could be sanctioned.34 It is also now clear that, like the Lollards before them, both Henrician Catholics and Edwardian Protestants resorted to forms of ambivalent recantation.35 By means of these ingenious strategies 31  Henry Garnet, An apology against the defence of schisme ([London secret press, 1593]), pp. 61–5. For further discussion, see my Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 1993), ch. 4. 32  Gallagher, Medusa’s Gaze, p. 89 and ch. 2 passim. 33   On Catholic equivocation, see Holmes, Resistance, pp. 121–4; J.P. Sommerville, ‘The “New Art of Lying”: Equivocation, Mental Reservation and Casuistry’, in Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry, pp. 159–84; Zagorin, Ways of Lying, chs 8–9. 34   ‘A briefe advertisement howe to aunswere unto the statute for not cominge to churche both in lawe and conscience’, TNA, SP 12/136/15, printed in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, 132–42. Discussed in Elliot Rose, Cases of Conscience: Alternatives open to Recusants and Puritans under Elizabeth I and James I (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 60–64, 78–81. The 1601 advice is transcribed in the Bede Camm Files on the English Martyrs, Downside Abbey, Stratton-on-the-Fosse, Somerset (Box marked ‘Cardinal Allen to John Duckett’), folder labelled ‘Casuistry in Penal Days: How to Answer the Enemy’. 35   See Peter Marshall, ‘Papist as Heretic: The Burning of John Forest, 1538’, HJ, 41 (1998): 351–74; Susan Wabuda, ‘Equivocation and Recantation during the English Reformation: The “Subtle Shadows” of Dr Edward Crome’, JEH, 44 (1993): 224–42; Alec Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 84–5; Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation, pp. 170–71, 185–91, 196–9. On Lollard practice of these techniques, see Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988), pp. 158–9.

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III We must now turn to the controversies within and beyond the ranks of religious minorities about outward conformity. Almost without exception, the leaders of persecuted movements publicly condemned such conduct as unacceptable, as a threat to the souls of their followers and to the survival of the faith as whole, as well as a terrible stain on its collective integrity. Tracts attacking Catholic and Protestant nicodemism were addressed for the most part not to the undecided or indifferent but to committed adherents; they sought to correct moral laxity rather than doctrinal error. But they also spoke to a wider audience, engaging with the hostile regimes which forced people to dissemble their religion in ways which often provoked a stinging response from official publicists.36 Close analysis of this body of texts thus allows us to eavesdrop on a triangular conversation about conscience and confessional identity involving the defenders of conformity, its opponents and representatives of the ecclesiastical establishment. First we may consider the position of those who sought to justify dissimulation. Suppressed and censored by the advocates of uncompromising separation, the arguments used to legitimise these practices can rarely be accessed directly, but they can be partially reconstructed from works that set out to refute them. In the case of Catholicism, the arguments assembled in these illicit casuistries echoed and were echoed by those deployed by priests when counselling and absolving contrite sinners in the confessional.37 The difference was that these were particular penitential concessions rather than general moral principles. The need to find a defence for acts which might look cowardly to a detached observer engendered an understanding of conscience which bifurcated inner beliefs from outward behaviour, and prioritised the 36   For discussions of this body of literature, see Holmes, Resistance, pt 2; Eire, War against the Idols, ch. 7; Zagorin, Ways of Lying, esp. chs 4, 6, 7, 10; Walsham, Church Papists, chs 2–3; Pettegree, Marian Protestantism, ch. 4. Stefania Tutino has recently analysed how these doctrines migrated from the realm of language and hermeneutics into the sphere of moral theology in the context of the struggle against heresy and the problems of persecution. The emphasis of the texts analysed here is indicative of that significant shift: Shadows of Doubt: Language and Truth in Post-Reformation Catholic Culture (Oxford, 2014), ch.1. For the case of England, see pp. 28–32. 37   On which see Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry. The casuistical manuals used to train apprentice priests are discussed in my Church Papists, ch. 3. Note, however, the harsher line on this matter adopted by later casuists: Holmes (ed.), Caroline Casuistry, cases 3–5.

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former over the latter. Like the Lollard Thomas Broughton, who justified his attendance at mass in 1499 by saying ‘I feyned with myn hondys to honour it … but by mynd and entent was nothing therto’,38 according to John Philpot many Marian Protestants ‘fondly’ supposed that ‘the presence of the body is not material, so that the heart do not consent to their wicked doings’.39 ‘The wisdom of the world’, commented John Hooper, was that it was quite permissible to be present at the popish service as long as one inwardly detested and dissented from their idolatry.40 Thirty years later, in his tract ‘Reasons of Refusall’ the Jesuit Robert Persons likewise spurned the plea of those who said ‘I am there in body, but I consent not to them in harte’.41 The idea that God weighed only one’s innermost thoughts was a commonplace of early Christian moral philosophy – Gregory the Great’s Moralia (c.500) had asked ‘what harm is there if in the judgement of man our words differ superficially from the rectitude of truth when in the heart they are in accord with it?’42 This was a logic that could be readily extended to endorse physical as well as oral forms of dissimulation as honest ways of lying. The pressure of persecution thus pushed some Protestants in the direction of claims to an interior liberty and of a quasimystical devaluation of dogma and ceremonial. This may explain why Carlo Ginzburg believed that the nicodemites attacked by Calvin in so many tracts were members of a unified crypto-spiritualist cell headed by Otto Brunfels.43 More surprisingly, we find the same sentiments being articulated by Roman Catholics, whose experiences brought them close to elevating personal conviction above external gesture. Defences of conformity also frequently articulated the principle that attendance at the churches of a rival religion could be justified as a mark of temporal loyalty to one’s monarch and country. This assumption was implicit whenever the biblical case of Naaman the Syrian was cited. Many 38

  Cited in Pettegree, Marian Protestantism, p. 97.  Robert Eden (ed.), The Examinations and Writings of John Philpot, PS (Cambridge, 1842), p. 221. 40   John Hooper, ‘A letter sent to the christian congregation, wherein he proveth that true faith cannot be kept secret in the heart without confession thereof openly to the world when occasion serveth’, in Charles Nevinson (ed.), Later Writings of Bishop Hooper Together with his Letters and Other Pieces, PS (Cambridge, 1852), pp. 572–3. This was printed as Whether Christian faith maye be kepte secret in the heart … (Rouen [London], 1553), STC 5160.3. 41  Robert Persons, A briefe discours contayning certayne reasons why Catholiques refuse to goe to church (Douai [London secret press], 1581), fo. 31v. 42   Quoted in Zagorin, Ways of Lying, p. 25. 43   Carlo Ginzburg, Il nicodemismo (Turin, 1970). This view has been questioned by Carlos Eire in ‘Calvin and Nicodemism: A Reappraisal’, SCJ, 10 (1979): 45–69; Carlos Eire, War against the Idols, p. 239. See also Zagorin, Ways of Lying, pp. 68–9. On spiritualist and familist justifications of dissimulation, see Zagorin, Ways of Lying, pp. 111–30. 39

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Protestant nicodemites invoked the story of the courtier permitted by the prophet Elisha to assist his king at worship in the temple of Rimmon as a precedent, but it was more particularly a favourite text of Elizabethan Catholics who sought to defend church-going as a merely political act.44 It was discussed by the casuists in the seminaries and used by Thomas Bell, the foremost exponent of occasional conformity prior to his defection to the Church of England in the early 1590s, as ‘a principall grounde of all his procedinges’. Denying that the requirement to yield one’s presence at Protestant worship was a trial of internal belief, Bell tacitly endorsed the government’s claim to be able to split off religion and politics as separate spheres and effect a schism between public and private morality. Indeed, one of his opponents thought it ‘very lyklye’ that on this point he and the Lord Treasurer were ‘both disciples to one master’ – namely Niccolo Machiavelli.45 A third argument deployed by both Protestant and Catholic nicodemites was the claim that liturgical ceremonies were adiaphora or things indifferent, matters in which the Christian liberty described by Paul in the New Testament could be exercised, provided the individual carefully weighed up the hazards of scandal. The mass gospellers denounced in John Bradford’s The hurte of hering masse invoked I Corinthians 8 to suggest that out of charity to the consciences of the weaker brethren it was better for those with full knowledge to avoid provoking them by rash separation.46 Peter Martyr Vermigli was equally dismissive of those who used the passage in Romans 14 warning against placing ‘stumbling blocks’ in the path of the feeble to argue that with regard to church-going it was necessary to ‘condiscende’ and ‘yealde somwhat unto [the] infirmitie’ of those who had not yet seen the light of the Gospel.47 Similar points were made by Catholic priests who sought to legitimise church-papistry, including the author of a manuscript tract delivered to Ralph Sheldon around 1580. This may have been Dr Alban Langdale, chaplain to the 44   4 Kings 5:17–19 (Vulgate) and 2 Kings 5:17–19 (Authorised Version). For Protestant citations of Naaman, see, for example, Bradford, Hurte of hering masse, sigs A3v, D7v–r; Peter Martyr Vermigli, A treatise of the cohabitacyon of the faithfull with the unfaithfull ([Strassburg], 1555), fos 2v, 32r–v. For Catholic citations, see Walsham, Church Papists, pp. 40, 57, 64–5, 67–8, 82–3. See also Rose, Cases of Conscience, pp. 74–7, 242–50. 45  Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, p. 76. For Bell’s views, see Garnet, Apology, §§7, 35; I.G., ‘Answere’, chs. iii, iv, vi, vii, printed in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 172–82, 190–216, quotations at pp. 201 and 193 respectively. On Bell, see ch. 2, above; and Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London, 2011), pp. 59–67, 129–49. 46  Bradford, Hurte of hering masse, sigs A4v, E4v–5r. 47  Vermigli, Treatise, fo. 36r.

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Sussex nobleman Anthony Browne, though the seminary priest William Clitherow is another possible candidate. The writer insisted that the danger of disedifying other Catholics could be eliminated if one verbally dissociated oneself from the service, an argument echoed by Thomas Bell in his attempts to defend the practice of going to church with a formal protestation.48 Recusancy was only necessary where there was a risk of deceiving one’s peers or misleading waverers. These casuistical arguments implicitly recognised the right of each person to decide on a course of action in the light of a specific set of circumstances. As the writer of the 1580 discourse intended to solve the dilemmas of upper class prisoners remarked, ‘every man is to aske of his owen conscience what scandall he gevethe … yt is much material with what mynd a man dothe a thinge, for that God dothe more regard the will and intencion of the doer than the dede itselfe … the manner of doinge alterethe a case’.49 The rhetorical struggle to construct a persuasive defence of occasional or limited conformity encouraged such writers to take more account of the sincerity of a man’s motives and intentions, to move towards seeing the state of a sinner’s mind as more important than the nature of the offence itself. In a sense this had always been inherent within Catholic moral theology, which rested on a willingness to differentiate between mortal and venial sin, between the degree of fault to be assigned to a particular transgression, though it placed the responsibility for doing so in the hands of the clergy. However, in a context in which priests, casuists and confessors were scarce, the lay conscience inevitably acquired increasing autonomy. Crossing over to the opponents of conformity, we find that in their attempts to correct the misguided opinions of England’s nicodemites they simultaneously reasserted the idea of conscience as a fixed locus of absolute truth and made some tentative steps towards accepting it as a relative concept. Protestant and Catholic treatises on this subject assembled a range of arguments to convince their readers that attendance at the services of a false religion was a heinous sin which deserved damnation. They emphasised the risks of being infected by popish and heretical doctrine and insisted that conformity was an abominable act of idolatry and schism. Mass gospellers and church papists were reminded that it was the responsibility of every true believer to openly confess his or her faith in the face of persecution. On the Protestant side John Hooper stressed that this could not be kept secret in the heart, but had 48   For the tract delivered to Sheldon, see TNA, SP 12/144/69. For Bell, I.G., ‘Answere’, ch. ix; Garnet, Apology, §31. The former is printed in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 116–29, citation at p. 128; for the latter, see pp. 218–24. 49  TNA, SP 12/144/69, printed in Crosignani, McCoog and Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity, p. 128.

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to be professed openly by mouth, since every good tree was known by its fruits.50 On the Catholic side, Gregory Martin, Robert Southwell and others recalled Christ’s warning in Matthew’s Gospel: ‘He that shall denie me before men, I also wil denie him before my father which is in heaven’.51 Church-going, said these priests, was not a simple test of political probity. Nor was it a neutral act, but ‘manifestly evell’ in and of itself. It was a shibboleth or ‘sign distinctive’ between the two competing creeds, an emblem of renunciation of the oath sworn by one’s godparents during baptism.52 Even if participation in such ceremonies was a thing indifferent, St Paul’s admonitions to the Corinthians about the duty of Christians to use their liberty to edification rather than destruction would render it quite inexcusable. Turning one of the nicodemites’ chief weapons back against them, such authors declared that conformity would lead the weak astray and embolden their unreliable consciences to sin. This would leave those who had corrupted them with a double burden of blame, for as Gregory Martin declared, ‘may not the simple and ignorant people impute their damnation to such as are their rulers in the case of heresie?’53 Such reasoning echoed that employed by Peter Martyr Vermigli in his Treatise of the cohabitacion of the faithfull with the unfaithfull: not only would such behaviour confirm stubborn papists in their superstition but ‘those newly turned and not farr entered into the knowledge of Christ’ who saw ‘better lerned professors’ present themselves at mass might be taught to backslide and ‘do the lyke’.54 Above all, the advocates of recusancy and separatism set out to combat the attitude that spiritual belief could be separated from material worship. With John Hooper, they stressed that it was necessary to keep the flesh pure and unpolluted as well as the mind. The human body was a temple of the Holy Ghost and an instrument for glorifying God the Father in heaven. To conform to a religion contrary to that to which one adhered 50

 Hooper, Later Writings, p. 571.   See the annotation to Matthew 10: 32–3 in The new testament of Jesus Christ (Rheims, 1582). Gregory Martin, A treatise of schisme (Douai [English secret press], 1578), sig. A5r–v; Persons, Brief Discours, fos 35v–36v; Robert Southwell, An epistle of comfort (Paris [London, 1587–88]), fo. 176v. 52  Persons, Brief discours, fos 15r–18r; Martin, Treatise, sig. C3r; Garnet, Apology, §35. For parallel Protestant claims, see Vermigli, Treatise, fo. 36r and Bradford, Hurte of hering masse, sig. C8r. 53   Gregory Martin, The love of the soule ([Lancashire Birchley Hall press], 1619), pp. 49–50. See also Martin, Treatise, sigs B2v–B6v. 54  Vermigli, Treatise, fos 35v–36r and see 25v. See also Hooper, Later Writings, p. 575. On the Protestant imperative to use Christian liberty in ‘things indifferent’ to edification not destruction, see John S. Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford, 1970), ch. 2. 51

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in one’s heart was ‘to bear two faces in one hood’, to halt between the Almighty and Baal. The Lord was ‘not content with halfes, he will not part stakes with the dyvel’.55 ‘[W]hilest your body is with Calvin’, warned the Jesuit Henry Garnet, ‘your soule cannot be with the Catholicke Church’.56 Hypocritically dissimulating one’s inner opinions was therefore condemned as a form of perjury, as a non-verbal lie. Peter Martyr argued that ‘the doinges of men be as it were a tongue’: a man who ‘in owtwarde worckes’ and deeds betrayed Christ was no less ‘justlie called a deniar’ than one who explicitly renounced him in words.57 In the eyes of contemporaries, this was a species of atheism. As Robert Persons declared, ‘Catholiques in hartes by goinge to Protestantes Churches, must needes bee broughte … to leave of all conscience, and to care for no relygion at all’.58 According to Thomas Hide, to embrace recusancy was ‘religious … that is to say a matter of conscience’;59 to do otherwise was to ignore the dictates of the inner witness and judge which resided in the soul. Like their Protestant counterparts, both writers were working from the imperialistic assumption that a conscience which did not correspond in every intimate detail with clerical ideology was no conscience at all. But they were also expressing dissatisfaction with a shallow, skindeep type of piety which placed worldly comfort above moral rigour. This led some recusancy propagandists to assert that God actually preferred fervent Protestants to apathetic Catholics. Quoting the Lord’s warning to the Church of Laodicea in Revelation 3: 16, ‘because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spue thee out of my mouth’, the author of A consolatory letter to the Catholikes of England (1587–88) warned that God despised neutrality and indifference even more than he hated ardent Calvinism. In Ralph Buckland’s Embassage from heaven (1611), God admits that schismatics ‘are not such flat Heretickes as some are’, but adds ‘I had as liefe ye were’.60 Embedded within this commonplace was a slender strand of admiration for the conscientious behaviour of Protestant zealots. 55

 Hooper, Later Writings, p. 573; Vermigli, Treatise, fo. 24v. William Perkins echoed these arguments in his Whole treatise of the cases of conscience (Cambridge, 1606), pp. 363–7 (‘we robbe him of his due when we reserve our hartes to him, and give our bodies to Idolls’). 56  Garnet, Apology, p. 95. 57  Vermigli, Treatise, fo. 23r. 58  Persons, Brief discours, fos 44v–45r. 59  Thomas Hide, A consolatorie epistle to the afflicted Catholikes (Louvain [London], 1580), sig. A6r. 60  H.B., A consolatory letter to all the afflicted Catholikes of England (Rouen [London secret press, 1587–88]), p. 39; Ralph Buckland, An embassage from heaven ([English secret press, 1611]), p. 77.

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Pursuing this line of argument one step further, Catholic writers repeatedly invoked the example of infidels and heretics to shame church papists into abandoning their unprincipled stance. Robert Persons, for instance, devoted an entire section of his Brief discours to demonstrating that his enemies themselves endorsed nonconformity. However ‘false and erronious … their religion were’, he said, throughout history good men had ‘alwayes procure[d] to separate them selves, from them of the contrarie religion, in the acte of prayer’. In his own age, Anabaptists refused to come to Lutheran churches, Lutherans to worship with Trinitarians, and puritans to yield their presence at Church of England services. And in countries where Protestants were in the minority, they too removed themselves from the mass ‘alleginge their conscience for the same, and affirming it to be damnable hipocrisie, in them that for feare, or for any other temporal respect, doe yeld to doe the same …’. Persons quoted a lengthy passage from a catechism by the French Calvinist John Garnier to drive home his point that no true believer should entangle himself with wicked idolaters, adding at the end, ‘If errour finde such zeale, what zeale ought truthe to have?’61 Another priest made reference to the pastoral letters of the Marian martyr John Bradford preserved in Foxe’s book of ‘monsterous monuments’ and in his Epistle of comfort (1588) Robert Southwell cited Calvin’s De vitandis superstitionibus and Excuse à messieurs les nicodemites, as well as the counsels of Philip Melanchthon, Peter Martyr and Martin Bucer, declaring that ‘albeit their reasons were misapplyed in the particular churche, to which they proved it unlawfull to resorte: Yet are they very sufficient and forcible to confirme that repayring to a false church in deed, is most sinnfull and damnable’. Schismatics were guilty of a crime which, he said, ‘even the verye heretickes them-selves that caryed anye forme or shew of conscience’ condemned as ‘moste prejudiciall to the trueth’. 62 At least one layman reached the same insight: passages in Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ sustained the Northamptonshire magnate Sir Thomas Tresham through a series of imprisonments and furnished him with evidence that his stubborn recusancy was not ‘a fault but a singular commendation’.63 Once again, the authors of these texts were unwittingly moving in the direction of a recognition of the relativity of conscience. This, of course, 61

 Persons, Brief discours, fos 52r–55r. The tract from which he quoted was Jean Garnier, A briefe and cleare confession of the Christian fayth (London, 1579). 62  H.B., Consolatory letter, pp. 53–5; Southwell, Epistle, fos 172r–173v. See also Southwell, An humble supplication to her Majestie ([English secret press], 1595), p. 80; and Thomas Hill, A quartron of reasons of Catholike religion (Antwerp [English secret press], 1600), pp. 177–8. 63  HMC, Various Collections, vol. iii (London, 1904), p. 30.

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was partly a clever rhetorical ploy, a final trump card in the ideological war against dissimulation. It may also be linked with the polemical technique of refuting one’s enemies out of their own mouths, a device which the missionary priest Richard Broughton employed to powerful effect in two books published in the reign of James I: The first part of Protestants proofes, for Catholikes religion and recusancy (1607) and Protestants demonstrations, for Catholiks recusance (1615). Broughton’s first reason ‘why English Catholicks may not communicate in spirituall thinges with protestants’ was that ‘by their owne testimonies, yt would be an act and offence, unreasonable, irreligious and damnable’.64 As these examples make clear, many Catholic tracts against conformity had a second audience in mind. The arguments assembled by their writers were intended as much to impress Protestants as to persuade church papists. Indeed, some of these books read more like manifestos of religious resistance than manuals designed to help troubled individuals resolve their moral dilemmas. Robert Persons’s Brief discours is a case in point. Under the pseudonym of John Howlet, in his dedicatory epistle to the Queen, he set out to convince the English government that recusants acted ‘conscientiously’ and that they should not be punished but rather respected for it. As T.H. Clancy has demonstrated, he mounted a case for toleration on the basis of the inviolability of the individual conscience.65 Drawing on the authority of Aristotle, Gratian and Aquinas he emphasised that to act in defiance of one’s conscience was to commit the most grievous of offences in the eyes of the Almighty. As stated in Romans 14: 23, ‘whatsoever is not of faith is sin’. A regime that compelled a subject to violate the dictates of his own synderesis, even if it was misguided, was itself guilty of a diabolical crime. To require a Jew to swear to the existence of the Holy Trinity, for instance, would be unpardonable. Persons stressed the inconsistency of Protestants in forcing Catholics to dissemble their beliefs by attending heretical services when they themselves refused to do this in the same situation, ‘wherby they goe quit against their own doctrine and example’.66 In this way he was laying the foundations for a theory of 64

 Richard Broughton, The first part of Protestants proofes, for Catholikes religion and recusancy ([English secret press], 1607) and Protestants demonstrations, for Catholikes recusance (Douai, 1615), at sig. B4r. 65  T.H. Clancy, Papists Pamphleteers: The Allen-Persons Party and the Political Thought of the Counter Reformation in England 1572–1615 (Chicago, 1964), pp. 145–7 and see pp. 153–8. Peter Lake and Michael Questier make the additional point that it was paradoxically by recasting recusancy as an issue of conscience that Persons was able to wield the issue as a political and polemical weapon against the regime: ‘Puritans, Papists, and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England: The Edmund Campion Affair in Context’, JMH, 72 (2000): 587–627, at 608–10. 66  Persons, Brief discours, dedicatory epistle, sigs ±±3r– ±±4r, fos 3v–5v, 52v–53r.

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the rights and obligations of the erroneous conscience and of a subjective moral order. The same point was made by other recusant writers: in his Treatise of schisme written three years earlier Gregory Martin had said that a Calvinist who hypocritically adored the Blessed Sacrament broke divine law because in his heart he condemned it as idolatry. Likewise ‘a puritan’ who wore ‘a fryers weede’ knowing it to be ‘a most certaine badge of a papist’, ‘character bestiae’, would be guilty of mortal sin.67 It is necessary, however, to stress the contingency and limits of these glimmers of a future in which sincerity of intention was elevated above correctness of belief. At root, Persons still could not concede that Protestants had a conscience at all. While toleration could be extended to infidels and Jews on the grounds that they were acting in accordance with their own inner voice, heretics could not be accorded the same rights, since they had wilfully rejected Catholic truth. They could not be excused by a plea of invincible ignorance. It was the duty of the civil magistrate to restrain the ‘furye and pryde’ of those who corrupted the faith, by ‘runninge oute and makinge dissention’ in the body of Christ.68 In other words, if the Catholic Church reassumed a position of dominance in England, it would still be free to persecute Protestants to the point of extinction. This was later made clear in Persons’ manuscript Memoriall for the intended reformation of England, a secret scheme which remained unpublished until 1690. As Geoffrey Elton observed, Persons’ call for toleration was only a tactic.69 Here, as elsewhere, liberty of conscience was largely the creed of the losers and victims. When events fell out in their favour such groups readily reasserted an objective, absolute and indivisible concept of truth. The Protestant writers who prepared refutations of Persons’ explosive tract proceeded from precisely this position. Intent on undercutting the key struts that supported the Jesuit’s arguments, they vehemently denied that recusants were acting in conscience. According to William Fulke, Master of Pembroke Hall in Cambridge, nonconformist Catholics were motivated instead by contumacy and stubbornness, while Persons himself was ‘madde’ and ‘absurd’.70 The Northamptonshire puritan Percival Wiburn declared that their plea of conscience was nothing more than a 67

 Martin, Treatise of schisme, sigs A6r–v, C3r.  Persons, Brief discours, sig. ±±4r. 69   The Jesuit’s memorial for the intended reformation of England, ed. Edward Gee (London, 1690), pp. 32–4, where Persons advocates a temporary toleration, but opposes permanent religious coexistence. See G.R. Elton, ‘Persecution and Toleration in the English Reformation’, in W.J. Sheils (ed.), Persecution and Toleration, SCH 21 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 182–4. 70   William Fulke, A briefe confutation, of a popish discourse (London, 1581), esp. fos 6r–v, 55v–56r. 68

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‘colourable deceit’ and a ‘foolish conceit’, a mere ‘fantasie’ and pretence of words. By means of this ‘divelishe doctrine’ they ‘open a windowe … to the Libertines, and them that are leade by inspiration, and pretende the notion of the spirite …’. Rather than housing a deputy deity in their hearts, recusants were nourishing an evil ‘serpent in their bosomes’.71 ‘[T]he very Antichriste [the pope] … sitteth in [these] men’s consciences’ concluded the co-author of the Admonition to parliament, John Field.72 Re-emphasising the traditional scholastic doctrine that it was the obligation of the Church and state to re-educate an erroneous conscience, these writers firmly defended the Elizabethan regime’s prerogative to enforce attendance at Protestant services. The godly magistrate, they said, was bound by God’s law to compel sinners to come in. The ‘naughty consciences’ of Catholics were not to be respected but reformed, if necessary by force.73 And yet buried within these uncompromising Protestant restatements of the Augustinian theory of persecution there are hints of a recognition that recusants were behaving with integrity. Percival Wiburn’s passing remark that recusants were ‘Puritan Catholikes of the hotter and better sort’ was more than a Freudian slip.74 Such writers found it hard to deny that it was in fact damnable to act in defiance of a conscience which was properly instructed. In principle they were bound to support the view that hypocritical attendance at the rites of a rival religion was utterly despicable and that separation from the wicked was the correct course of action. They too saw conformity as a symptom of encroaching indifference, of a lukewarm piety which negated their vision of what constituted true ‘godliness’. The polemical difficulty they faced was compounded by the dilemmas which their coreligionists had faced during the reign of Mary I and which they themselves confronted as puritans: should they voluntarily separate themselves from a Church ‘but halfely reformed’ or were there pressing moral reasons why they should remain within its embrace? Accordingly Wiburn acknowledged that the tenet that ‘we must walke with an upright heart before him, in roundnes of conscience without limitation … or haulting’ was sound, but declared that ‘the whole is verye 71

 Wiburn, Checke, fos 5r, 6v, 13r–v, 70v, 73v, 115r, 121r, 122v.   John Field, A caveat for Parsons Howlet (London, 1581), sig. E8r. 73   See Fulke, Briefe confutation, passim, and esp. fo. 56v (‘it is the Magistrates duety to provide, by doctrine & penaltie, that their conscience may be better instructed …’); Wiburn, Checke or reproofe, passim, and esp. fos 73v–74r, 86r–87v (‘Soe doe wee tell you plainly, that her Majestie by authoritie may (and doth therein but her duetie) enforce you to haunt Church Assemblies, to heare the preaching of the Gospell, &c. Which bee the proper meanes to beginne, encrease and continue faith and godlines in you and us …’). For further discussion of this tenet, see John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558–1689 (Harlow, 2000), pp. 34–5. 74  Wiburn, Checke, fo. 117r. 72

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badlye applied to your popish divels service’. Echoing Persons, he asked: ‘If errour finde such zeale, what zeale ought trueth to have? If they be stout in fancies, and sticke so harde to their pretended consciences, how should we sticke and stande to conscience indeed?’75 Field similarly conceded ‘we agree with them, that there oughte to bee no dissimulation in the matters of God, that heretikes are to bee shunned, [and] that their service is too be avoided’. Had Persons been able to demonstrate that Protestantism had departed from the doctrine of Christ and his Apostles ‘the consequence had bene playne, that all Christians must seperate them selves from us, [and] so they had wonne their cause’. Field proceeded to accuse the Jesuit of pillaging much of his book from a French Calvinist treatise ‘wherein the protestants rendred reasons why they could not come to your idolatrous masse, which you foolishly have tourned and wrested to your purpose’.76 Here too we may detect the hazy outlines of a notion of conscience that was subjective and relative. Even if it emerged by default, even if it was essentially an ephemeral and reversible side-effect of polemical debate, it is nevertheless striking and significant.

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IV In the context in which these controversies took place, the conviction that ecclesiastical and political authorities had a duty to discipline the consciences of the ungodly remained the dominant ideology. Minority religions might momentarily insist otherwise but they did so mainly to gain a rhetorical or tactical advantage. The final section of this chapter considers what happened when this settled state of affairs began to unravel. What happened to the conscientious dilemmas which had hitherto surrounded the ‘cohabitacyon of the faithfull with the unfaithfull’ and conformity to the established Church when the state no longer intervened to punish those who held religious opinions at odds with its own? It might initially be supposed that they quickly evaporated.77 Here, however, I shall suggest that far from assuaging the moral anxieties experienced by the members of marginal churches and sects, toleration in fact enhanced them. To explore this hypothesis it is necessary to leap forward chronologically to the end of the seventeenth century, to the period after 1689 when Protestant nonconformists were granted a limited form of 75

 Wiburn, Checke, sigs Yy4r, Zz2r.  Field, Caveat, sigs A5v–6r, A7r. 77   See Keith Thomas, ‘Cases of Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England’, in John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf (eds), Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993), pp. 29–56, at 54. 76

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liberty of worship and conscience, though this license did not, of course, extend to Roman Catholics. This statutory landmark had less to do with a conviction that temporal rulers had no rights of jurisdiction over the private spiritual lives of their subjects than with the pragmatic political need of the new Williamite regime to secure a solid base of support for the Glorious Revolution. Nevertheless the effect of this development was to multiply the sources of legitimate authority, to undermine the idea of a single externally validated truth and fragment it into several parallel strands. In this poly-theological world, individuals were increasingly forced to look inside themselves for guidance. In a sense, the English Reformation itself had already put the conditions for this in place. By demanding no more than exterior conformity as a sign of consent, the Elizabethan Settlement unwittingly fostered religious diversity. Committed to an ecclesiology which believed that the visible Church should consist of both the elect and the reprobate, of both earnest professors and persons, as Richard Hooker later remarked, ‘whose profession at the first was but only from the teeth outward’, 78 it nurtured an environment in which bi- or multiconfessionalism became a fact of life. As Norman Jones has argued, it created a situation in which the individual conscience was empowered at the expense of the community and in which the soul replaced the Church as the point of contact between God and humanity.79 Paradoxically the proliferation of casuistry itself may also have played a role in promoting this climate of moral and epistemological uncertainty and in encouraging people to turn inwards to find solutions to their moral quandaries.80 Catholics and conservatives commonly blamed radical Protestantism for setting up conscience as a new pope81 but it was arguably religious pluralism that paved the way for the rise of subjectivity. Religious pluralism, de facto and de jure, also intensified the need of religious minorities to mark themselves out sharply from their confessional enemies and rivals. Against a backdrop of coercion and violence, dissimulation might be a legitimate short-term solution, a prudent strategy for ensuring an underground Church’s smooth reassumption of institutional control. But once such groups accepted their status as a minority sect, a schizophrenic split between belief and behaviour could no longer be sanctioned. Conformity was not an option; nor was it necessary. 78  Richard Hooker, The works of that learned and judicious divine Mr Richard Hooker, ed. J. Keble, 2 vols (Oxford, 1850), ii. 98. 79  Norman Jones, The English Reformation: Religious and Cultural Adaptation (Oxford, 2002), pp. 5, 39, 155, 185–7, 201–2, and ch. 7 passim. 80  Gallagher, Medusa’s Gaze, introduction, esp. pp. 11, 16. 81   See, for example, Samuel Rutherford, A free disputation against pretended liberty of conscience (London, 1649), sig. A3, pp. 5, 8, 10, 135.

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Yet licensed coexistence created a new set of ethical dilemmas for erstwhile dissenters: it stimulated fresh awareness that everyday contact with other believers jeopardised not only their distinctiveness but their very survival; that too much interaction with adherents of another religion would result in a slow death by attrition. Toleration came to be recognised as more of a threat to the identity of religious minorities than persecution. Renewed urgency was attached to separating from the infecting presence of idolatry and heresy, not so much liturgically (since attendance at church had either ceased to be compulsory or had proved unenforcable), but socially and culturally. Communities of conscientious Christians distinguished themselves ever more deliberately from neighbours of different denominations: turning in upon themselves incestuously, they became increasingly endogamous and insular. Mixed marriages declined, networks of sociability segregated along confessional lines, and ritual practices which set particular groups of believers apart from each other were invested with growing importance. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such tendencies can be detected not only among sects like the Quakers but also within the Catholic community.82 This instinct for distinction may also be discerned in the way Elizabethan and early Stuart puritans eschewed ‘familiar company keeping’ with carnal worldlings. Patrick Collinson has argued that the self-imposed apartheid of those who shunned their impious neighbours was a method by which the godly relieved the moral and psychological discomfort associated with remaining within the flawed national Church and mingling promiscuously with the reprobate in public worship. By means of this species of ‘adroit casuistry’ they negotiated the tensions engendered by the somewhat contradictory nature of their own theological principles. Puritans thereby artificially reproduced the alienation and tribulation experienced by their separatist brethren within their own minds.83 This insight deserves to be more widely applied: once the threat of real pain and oppression was removed, zealous 82

  I pursue this argument and assemble supporting evidence in Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500–1700 (Manchester, 2006), ch. 6, esp. pp. 302–15. See Richard T. Vann, The Social Development of Quakerism, 1655–1755 (Cambridge, MA, 1969), ch. 6; Adrian Davies, The Quakers in English Society 1655–1725 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 164–5, 189, 221; John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London, 1975), ch. 6. Philip Benedict has identified similar tendencies in France in the decades following the proclamation of the Edict of Nantes: ‘Un roi, une loi, deux fois: Parameters for the History of Catholic-Reformed Co-existence in France, 1555–1685’, in Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner (eds), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 65–93. See also the references in ‘England’s Nicodemites’, ch. 2, above, in nn. 32 and 36. 83  Patrick Collinson, ‘The Cohabitation of the Faithful with the Unfaithful’, in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke (eds), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford, 1991), pp. 51–76, at pp. 63, 65.

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men and women were obliged to reinvent it internally. In the mental space vacated by the cases of conscience raised by the oppressive policies of the persecuting state, they engendered new ones. In other words, with freedom and choice came guilt. In conclusion, we may perhaps see these developments as early symptoms of the passage of European society from a shame culture to a guilt culture, one which (to quote Robin Briggs) ‘placed far greater stress on the individual conscience as an instrument for moral order’.84 They may reflect the long-term decline of hell and the displacement of providence as reified concepts, the manner in which the supernatural punishments God afflicted upon sinners were increasingly internalised. 85 The torment of not behaving correctly and of dissembling one’s faith ceased to be experienced externally; instead it was imagined inwardly. These processes may also chart a gradual redefinition of the concept of conscience itself, the drawnout transition in its meaning from internal law giver to the agent and then place of vengeance itself, what John Milton called that ‘abyss of fears and horrors’.86 They may index the way in which men and women became prisoners of their own consciences.

84  Robin Briggs, Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tensions in Early Modern France (Oxford, 1989), pp. 407–8. See also Jean Delumeau’s discussion of the emergence of a ‘ministry of fear’ in ‘Prescription and Reality’, in Edmund Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 134–58. Interestingly, classicists have detected such a shift much earlier in Western culture: see E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951), ch. 2 (‘From Shame-Culture to GuiltCulture’). 85   See D.P. Walker, The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (London, 1964); Malcolm Gaskill, ‘The Displacement of Providence: Policing and Prosecution in Seventeeth- and Eighteenth-Century England’, Continuity and Change, 11 (3) (1996): 341–74; and John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford, 1991), esp. pp. 23–4, 36, 93–4. 86   See C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words (Cambridge, 1960), ch. 8, esp. pp. 191–9, 205–8 and OED, s.v. ‘conscience’. As noted above, the idea of conscience as ‘a little hell within us’ was already present in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. See also Gallagher, Medusa’s Gaze, pp. 101, 110.

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Part II Miracles and Missionaries

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Chapter 5

Miracles and the Counter-Reformation Mission*

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I Over the last decade and a half, historical analysis of the character and consequences of the Catholic or Counter Reformation has experienced a significant change of direction and emphasis. A generation ago, under the influence of Jean Delumeau, Robert Muchembled and John Bossy, it was commonplace to present the movement as part of a wider trend which resulted in the ‘triumph of Lent’, a parallel manifestation of Protestantism’s drive to eradicate vulgar ‘superstition’, correct immoral conduct and instil a more interiorised, spiritual and theologically sound piety in the populace. According to these accounts, in its campaign for ‘Christianisation’ reformed Catholicism actively distanced itself from the excesses and abuses of late medieval religious culture and made strenuous but often fiercely resisted efforts to purge it of its ‘pagan’ and magical’ features.1 This tendency to stress the coercive, disciplinary and acculturating aspects of Catholic reform has been powerfully reinforced by the work of Heinz Schilling, Wolfgang Reinhard and other advocates of the so-called ‘confessionalisation’ thesis.2

*

  An earlier version of this chapter was published under the title of ‘Miracles and the Counter-Reformation Mission to England’, Historical Journal, 46 (2003): 779–815. 1   Jean Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire (London, 1977); Robert Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400–1750 (Baton Rouge, 1985) (French edition 1978); John Bossy, ‘The Counter Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe’, P&P, 47 (1970): 51–70; John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985). 2   Heinz Schilling, ‘Confessional Europe’, in Thomas A. Brady et al, (eds), Handbook of European History, 1400–1800, 2 vols (Leiden, 1995), ii. 641–81; Wolfgang Reinhard, ‘Pressures towards Confessionalization? Prolegomena to a Theory of the Confessional Age’, in C. Scott Dixon (ed.), The German Reformation (Oxford, 1999), pp. 169–92; R. Po-Chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550–1750 (London, 1989). For a critical overview, see Ute Lotz-Heumann, ‘Confessionalization’, in David Whitford (ed.), Reformation and Early Modern Europe: A Guide to Research (Kirksville, Missouri: Truman State University Press, 2008), pp. 136–57.

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More recent research, however, has begun to revise and modify our understanding of the relationship between traditional and Tridentine religion. Studies by David Gentilcore, Trevor Johnson, Philip Soergel, Marc Forster, Louis Chatellier and others have underlined the continuities between medieval and Counter-Reformation piety and highlighted the manner in which the Catholic reformers revived and mobilised rather than simply suppressed older devotional practices. Both in the rural fringe and frontier districts of loyal Catholic countries and in formerly Protestant regions which experienced state-sponsored programmes of reCatholicisation, the clergy fuelled the desire of the laity for contact with the sacred. In these processes, the members of new and rejuvenated religious orders played a prominent role, supplementing the pastoral endeavours of the parochial priesthood and compensating for its slow emergence as a professional force capable of instructing the faithful and implanting in them true Christian values. Seeking to exploit what they perceived to be one of Protestantism’s most glaring weaknesses, officials and reformers in Bavaria, the Upper Rhine Palatinate and other areas of the Holy Roman Empire advertised Catholicism’s superior thaumaturgic capacities and zealously propagated the idea of a sacralised landscape.3 Employing strategies of accommodation similar to those used in Asia and the New World, in Southern Italy Jesuit, Lazarist and Redemptorist missionaries fostered lay fascination with the miraculous in a determination to ‘adapt themselves to the people’s capabilities’ and ‘meet popular culture halfway’.4 In provincial France and Spain, similarly subtle techniques of substitution and interchange resulted in the ‘gentle evolution’ of a reformed Catholicism

3

  The trends evident in the English-language scholarship reflect similar developments in French, German, Italian and Spanish research. See Trevor Johnson, ‘Blood, Tears and XavierWater: Jesuit Missionaries and Popular Religion in the Eighteenth-Century Upper Palatinate’, in Bob Scribner and Trevor Johnson (eds), Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe, 1400–1800 (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 183–202; Trevor Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles: The Counter Reformation in the Upper Palatinate (Farnham, 2009); Philip M. Soergel, Wondrous in his Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley, CA, 1993); Marc R. Forster, Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque: Religious Identity in Southwest Germany, 1550–1750 (Cambridge, 2001); Howard Louthan, Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (Cambridge, 2009). See also Jason K. Nye, ‘Not Like Us: Catholic Identity as a Defence against Protestantism in Rottweil, 1560–1618’ and Maria Craciun, ‘Traditional Practices: Catholic Missionaries and Protestant Religious Practice in Transylvania’, in Helen Parish and William G. Naphy (eds), Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe (Manchester, 2002), pp. 47–74, 75–93 respectively. 4   David Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d’Otranto (Manchester, 1992); David Gentilcore, ‘“Adapt Yourselves to the People’s Capabilities”: Missionary Strategies, Methods and Impact in the Kingdom of Naples, 1600– 1800’, JEH, 45 (1994): 269–94.

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at the core of which remained enduring symbols of sanctity.5 The keynotes of current interpretation of the Catholic renewal are negotiation and creative compromise rather than antagonism, confrontation and mutual intolerance.6 This shift in scholarly perception has been slower to leave its imprint upon the historiography of post-Reformation Catholicism in Britain. Placing the Catholic mission to Elizabethan and early Stuart England and Wales firmly against the backdrop of Continental developments, this essay investigates the ways in which the seminary priests and Jesuits sent across the Channel after 1574 skilfully harnessed supernatural power in their attempts to combat heresy, reinforce contested tenets, reclaim backsliders, and win converts to their cause. In their struggle to sustain and spread the beleaguered Catholic faith, I shall suggest, they too found miracles, visions and exorcisms very effective as proselytising tools. To approach the topic in these terms is not to be cynical about the sincerity of their belief in such phenomena. Convinced that the Almighty continued to intervene in the world to support his servants and to defend religious truth, they approached them as God-given opportunities to cultivate zeal and fight false belief. Closer examination of these neglected evangelical strategies not only reanimates debates about the nature, objectives and impact of the English missionary enterprise but also sheds fresh light on how confessional identities were forged in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century 5   Louis Chatellier, The Religion of the Poor: Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism, c.1500–c.1800, trans. Brian Pearce (Cambridge, 1997; first publ. in French 1993), esp. ch. 9, quotation at p. 182. See also Philip T. Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon (New Haven, 1984), esp. chs 2–3; Keith P. Luria, Territories of Grace: Cultural Change in the Seventeenth-Century Diocese of Grenoble (Berkeley, CA, 1991); E.C. Tingle, ‘The Sacred Space of Julien Maunoir: The ReChristianising of the Landscape in Seventeenth-Century Brittany’, in Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (eds), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 237–58. Henry Kamen remarks that in Catalonia the Church cultivated aspects of traditional piety in a way which ‘merely intensified and vulgarised their use’: The Phoenix and the Flame: Catalonia and the Counter Reformation (New Haven, 1993), pp. 136–7. See also William A. Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, 1981); Sarah T. Nalle, God in La Mancha: Religious Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500–1620 (Baltimore, 1992), esp. chs 4–5. 6  Influential recent surveys reflect these trends: R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal 1540–1770 (Cambridge, 1998), esp. ch. 13; Michael Mullett, The Catholic Reformation (London and New York, 1999), esp. ch. 6; Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the Counter Reformation (Basingstoke, 1999), esp. ch. 5. See now also Mary Laven, ‘Encountering the Counter-Reformation’, Renaissance Quarterly, 59 (2006): 706–20; Alexandra Bamji, Geert H. Janssen and Mary Laven (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation (Farnham, 2013), introduction, p. 6 and passim. It may be commented that the historiography of early modern Protestantism has traced a parallel path of reinterpretation.

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Europe as a whole. Simultaneously, it may help to clarify the challenges which the condition of proscription presented to a movement intent upon policing the boundary between orthodox piety and popular ‘superstition’. In England, by contrast with much of the Continent, Catholicism was a minority Church which not only lacked the episcopal infrastructure and political support enjoyed by Tridentine reformers abroad but also suffered from a chronic shortage of clerical personnel. Even after 1600, when the number of regular and secular clergy in service underwent rapid expansion, the quotient of priests per head of population remained very low. As in Ireland and the Northern Netherlands, this was a situation which provided considerable scope for lay independence.7 It was also a context in which the clergy arguably had an added incentive to make tactical concessions to the indigenous culture by which they were confronted. Such observations pose particular problems for polarised models involving the repression of ‘popular’ priorities and their replacement by ‘elite’ values and the superimposition of universal standards upon vernacular practices. Post-Reformation England is an arena in which we have an opportunity to observe a far more complex set of cultural transactions at work. Ironically, some of the evidence on which this essay rests is hostile in origin. Viciously satirical Protestant tracts designed to expose popery as the epitome of evil and falsehood yield a rich harvest of material on the Catholic culture of miracles. In their determination to uphold the axiom that miracles had ceased, polemicists like Samuel Harsnet, John Gee and Richard Sheldon devoted much space to describing the ‘lying wonders’, ‘mendacious prodigies’ and ‘egregious impostures’ by which the Jesuits 7   For the size and expansion of the mission, see John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London, 1975), ch. 10. For Ireland, see Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester, 1997). For the Netherlands, see Willem Frijhoff, ‘La fonction du miracle dans une minorité catholique: Les Provinces-Unies au XVIIe siècle’, Revue d’histoire de la spiritualité, 48 (1972), 151–78, translated as ‘The Function of the Miracle in a Catholic Minority: The United Provinces in the Seventeenth Century’, in Willem Frijhoff, Embodied Belief: Ten Essays on Religious Culture in Dutch History (Hilversum, 2002), pp. 111–36; Mathieu G. Spiertz, ‘Priest and Layman in a Minority Church: The Roman Catholic Church in the Northern Netherlands 1592–1686’, in W.J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds), The Ministry: Clerical and Lay, SCH 26 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 287–301. The following have appeared since the first publication of this essay: Charles Parker, Faith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, MA, 2008); Judith Pollmann, Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands 1520–1635 (Oxford, 2011), see esp. ch. 6. The comparisons are explored explicitly in Benjamin Kaplan, Bob Moore, Henk van Nierop and Judith Pollmann (eds), Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c.1570–1720 (Manchester, 2009). The situation in France was more ambiguous, but many similarities are apparent: see Mark Greengrass, ‘Miracles and the Peregrinations of the Holy in France during the Wars of Religion’, in José Pedro Paiva (ed.), Religious Ceremonials and Images: Power and Social Meaning (1400–1750) (Coimbra, 2002), pp. 389–414.

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and their secular brethren sought to seduce the credulous laity and prop up the reputation of the Antichristian papacy. Even as they contemptuously dismissed these ‘Popish tales’ and ‘Ignatian fables’, they preserved them for posterity in print: their scoffing claims that the events they described were faked and feigned complicate rather than invalidate the information that these tracts contain.8 The two other main sources for this study are the correspondence which the missionaries sent to their superiors in Rome and the Low Countries and the stories which circulated orally, scribally and typographically among Elizabethan and early Stuart Catholics in England. Quite apart from the fact of its haphazard survival, this material is scarcely unproblematic. The reports which leading Catholic clergy such as William Weston and Henry Garnet smuggled out to Cardinal Allen, the Jesuit General Claudio Aquaviva and other leading figures tended to be upbeat assessments of the success of their endeavours despite cruel persecution. The Jesuit Annual Letters, which start in the early part of the Jacobean period, are also tainted by a militant, triumphalist tone. Designed to highlight the Society’s achievements and bolster internal morale, a degree of optimistic exaggeration was an intrinsic feature of them. As for the narratives which travelled the channels of the Catholic underground, these too are fraught with methodological pitfalls. In an environment where clerical manpower was severely limited, Tridentine missionaries were obliged to rely on the written word as a kind of ‘dumb preacher’.9 Endorsing fundamental Catholic precepts and practices which had been abolished with the advent of Protestantism, many reports celebrating the heroic lives and deaths of martyred priests and recusants must be recognised as surrogate and supplementary instruments of indoctrination and instruction. Others emanated originally from the pens of literate laypeople, but in the long run all were afflicted by a familiar process of hagiographical accretion. Products of negotiation between the needs and beliefs of the beleaguered laity and the moral and ideological preoccupations of the clergy who served them, they grew and mutated each time they were recounted or copied. Gradually transforming themselves into a body of consoling and edifying legend, they were eventually absorbed into the collective social memory of the English Catholic community. Collated and sifted by the penitentiary Christopher Grene in the 1670s and 80s, many of these accounts were distilled into print by Bishop 8   See Samuel Harsnet, A declaration of egregious popish impostures (London, 1604); Robert Tynley, Two learned sermons (London, 1609), pp. 53–65; William Crashaw, The Jesuites gospel (London, 1610); John Gee, The foot out of the snare (London, 1624); Richard Sheldon, Survey of the miracles of the Church of Rome (London, 1616). 9   See Chapter 8, below.

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Richard Challoner 50 years later in his Memoirs of Missionary Priests.10 Like medieval miracle stories, early modern tales of thaumaturgic wonders bear witness to a series of ongoing and intricate dialogues between oral and written culture, official dogma and local custom and ecclesiastical objectives and lay instincts and opinions. They also testify to competing tendencies and divergent agendas within the ranks of the CounterReformation priesthood itself. It is probably unwise to try to disentangle too precisely the multiple participating voices in these conversations, but by listening to them carefully we may learn much about the latent tensions at the heart of Tridentine Catholicism and about the points of conflict and overlap between pre-and post-Reformation religion.11

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10

  Grene’s martyrological Collectanea are part of the collections of Stonyhurst College, Lancashire (now at the Archives of the British Province of the Society of Jesus, London), and St Mary’s College, Oscott, Sutton Coldfield. Richard Challoner, Memoirs of Missionary Priests (1741–42). All subsequent references are to the edition prepared by J.H. Pollen (London, 1924). Nineteenth-century editions of these scattered documents were no less martyrological in character. The very title of John Morris’s Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers, 3 vols (London, 1872–7) betrays its sectarian intentions; Henry Foley’s Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, 7 vols in 8 (London, 1877–83) is the work of a Victorian Foxe; and J.H. Pollen’s Unpublished Documents Relating to the English Martyrs, vol. I 1584–1603, CRS 5 (London, 1908) must be situated within the same canon of sacred commemorative literature. The latter was linked with the postulation for the beatification of the martyrs. Ironically, the apologetic purpose of these later works may have militated against the inclusion of even more material regarding the miraculous. Their editors were often distinctly uncomfortable about incorporating accounts of supernatural phenomena which might appear ‘quaint’, ‘absurd’ and ‘ridiculous’ to the readers of an age which prided itself on its liberal, humanist values and coolly rationalist outlook. The ‘nauseous subject’ of exorcism was a source of particular embarrassment. See, for example, Foley, v, p. vi; vii, pt 2, p. vii; Morris, ii. 98; Robert Persons, ‘An Observation of Certayne Aparent Judgments’, ed. J.H. Pollen, in Miscellanea II, CRS 2 (London, 1906), p. 202; William Weston: The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, ed. Philip Caraman (London, 1955), p. 29. Francis Edwards edited Henry More’s Historia Missionis Anglicanae Societatis Jesu (1660) so ‘that legend is removed and history remains’: The Elizabethan Jesuits (London, 1981), p. x. 11   For discussions of medieval miracle literature in these terms and attempts to resolve the difficult methodological issues, see Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, trans. J.H. Bak and P.A. Hollingsworth (Cambridge and Paris, 1988), p. 5 and passim; Julia M.H. Smith, ‘Oral and Written: Saints, Miracles and Relics in Brittany, c.850–1250’, Speculum, 65 (1990): 309–43; Marcus Bull (ed.), The Miracles of Our Lady of Rocamadour: Analysis and Translation (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 15–16, 32–8; Catherine Cubitt, ‘Sites and Sanctity: Revisiting the Cult of Murdered and Martyred AngloSaxon Royal Saints’, Early Medieval Europe, 9 (2000): 53–83; C.S. Watkins, ‘Sin, Penance and Purgatory in the Anglo-Norman Realm: The Evidence of Visions and Ghost Stories’, P&P, 175 (2002): 3–33.

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II The central place that belief in the constant intervention of supernatural forces in human affairs occupied in pre-Reformation English religious culture can hardly be doubted. The idea that God performed miracles upon the intercession of saints and in response to vows and promises made by the laity was a vital part of what Bob Scribner labelled the late medieval ‘economy of the sacred’. Assumptions about the immanence of the holy in the earthly world sustained a vast repertoire of ritual practices. They underpinned devotion to relics and images, fostered the widespread use (and misuse) of sacramentals and buttressed the thriving tradition of pilgrimage to prominent shrines. As elsewhere in Europe, fifteenth-century Englishmen and women seem to have displayed an immense appetite for the divine. This was one of the hallmarks of a vibrant and flourishing piety, which, on the eve of the Reformation, as Eamon Duffy has persuaded us, showed little sign of exhaustion, stagnation or decay.12 But it must not be forgotten that there was a strong reaction against the crude materialism which marked some aspects of late medieval Christianity in the circles of early Catholic evangelicals. In the context of Luther’s damaging attacks on the cult of saints and its ‘superstitious’ adhesions, humanist criticism of religious credulity exercised considerable influence. Erasmus’ acid satire of popular belief and practice in the Colloquies found much sympathetic support and Juan Luis Vives’ merciless assault on the miracle-laden Golden Legend as a book written by men ‘with mouths of iron and hearts of lead’ was likewise widely endorsed. Inaugurating a tradition which reached full maturity in the Protestant polemic already discussed, such writers accused avaricious priests of forging wonders in order to extort the unwitting populace. In his Dialogue concerning heresies of 1529, Thomas More deplored such vain fabrications as diabolical devices designed to bring true miracles into disrepute and to further infect society with ‘mysbyleve and idolatrye’. In the wake of the Henrician campaign to despoil the monasteries and discredit the papacy, the mechanical contraption which moved the eyes and lips of the famous Rood of Boxley, the priest who confessed at Paul’s Cross to pricking his fingers while celebrating mass to simulate a bleeding 12   See Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth, 1973 edn), ch. 2; Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (London, 1977); R.W. Scribner, ‘Cosmic Order and Daily Life: Sacred and Secular in PreIndustrial German Society’ and ‘Ritual and Popular Belief in Catholic Germany at the Time of the Reformation’, both repr. in his Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London and Ronceverte, 1987), pp. 1–16, 17–47; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven and London, 1992), esp. chs 5, 8.

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host and the Dominican friars of Berne burnt at the stake in 1507 for feigning a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary became notorious scandals, paradigms of popish deceit.13 Reflecting a mood of evangelical renewal infused by a commitment to returning to the pure stream of Scripture, the writings of English Catholic divines of the 1540s, 50s and 60s either made only sparing reference to these contentious features of traditional piety, or remained prudently silent.14 On the Continent, conscious of the mockery to which such abuses had already exposed them, the Catholic reforming initiatives which predated Trent were marked by attempts to restrain the insatiable hunger for miracles and signs displayed by the laity and to wean them away from practices which smacked of idolatry and witchcraft. This sense of vulnerability manifested itself in a ‘crisis of canonisation’, a hiatus in saint-making which lasted from 1523 until 1588. Thereafter the newly instituted Congregation of Sacred Rites and Ceremonies centralised and tightened the process of defining the sacred and shifted emphasis away from spectacular thaumaturgy towards heroic virtue and exemplary zeal.15 A further expression of Erasmian caution may be found in the attempt to remodel hagiography as historical biography and to rid traditional vitae of corruptions and impurities. The culmination of this concern for authoritative testimony and scholarly rigour was the ambitious project to edit the Acta Sanctorum begun by the Belgian Jesuit Herbert Rosweyde and continued (more famously) by Jean Bolland and his disciples.16

13

  See ‘The Shipwreck’, ‘The Apparition’ and ‘The Religious Pilgrimage’, in The Whole Familiar Colloquies of Desiderius Erasmus, trans. Nathan Bailey (London, 1877); The Dialogue concerning Heresies, in The Complete Works of St Thomas More, vol. 6, pts 1 and 2, ed. Thomas M.C. Lawler et al. (New Haven and London, 1981), bk I, chs 14–15. For Vives, see Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (Cambridge, 1995), p. 119. On the Rood of Boxley, see Peter Marshall, ‘The Rood of Boxley, the Blood of Hailes and the Defence of the Henrician Church’, JEH, 46 (1995): 689–96; for the simulated bleeding host, see H.G., A Gagge for the Pope (London, 1624), p. 50; for the Berne incident, More, Works, vi. 88–9, 627. For a fuller discussion, see Peter Marshall, ‘Forgery and Miracles in the Reign of Henry VIII’, P&P, 178 (2003): 39–73. 14   See Lucy E.C. Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford, 2000), pp. 116–17, 177. 15   See Peter Burke, ‘How to become a Counter Reformation Saint’, in Kaspar von Greyerz (ed.), Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe 1500–1800 (London, 1984), pp. 45–55 and Hsia, World of Catholic Renewal, ch. 8. 16   See Eric Suire, La sainteté française de la Réforme catholique (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Bordeaux, 2001), pp. 28–30; Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History, ch. 4 and his ‘Tridentine Worship and the Cult of Saints’, in R. Po-Chia Hsia (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 6 Reform and Expansion, 1500–1600 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 201–24.

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These continued to be important threads in the fabric of the Catholic revival but it should be stressed that the summoning of the Council of Trent coincided with a lively reassertion of the Church of Rome as a repository of numinous power. In its decree of 1563, the Council ordered the eradication of all ‘superstition’ associated with pilgrimages, images and relics but vigorously reaffirmed the value of venerating and invocating the saints and their remains and representations.17 As Euan Cameron has emphasised, Tridentine Catholicism did not reject the principle that words, symbols and objects could be receptacles of the divine: it simply sought to bring these resources under closer clerical control and ensure that the priesthood maintained exclusive rights to their application and use.18 Paul V’s Rituale Romanum contained blessings for vines and a form of exorcism for driving off thunder, and the spontaneous cults which sprang up around figures like Francis Xavier, Ignatius Loyola and Philip Neri were condoned if not encouraged by the papal and episcopal hierarchy prior to their formal beatification. In the 1620s, for instance, the ecclesiastical authorities sanctioned the resort of pilgrims to the shrine of the recently deceased bishop Francis de Sales, permitting them to touch rosaries and linen cloths to his coffin and carry away fragments of stone scraped from his tomb.19 Carefully authenticated accounts of the wonders worked by these holy persons circulated alongside revised versions of the lives of the medieval saints like those prepared by Laurentius Surius and Luigi Lippomani. Many pious falsehoods were excised from these new editions, but as Protestant polemicists like George Abbot were quick to point out, they still contained a vast mass of miracles.20 And in his mighty defence of Catholic theology against the onslaughts of the reformers, the Disputationes … de controversiis Christianae fidei (1586–93), Cardinal Robert Bellarmine declared that 17   H.J. Schroeder (ed.), The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (Rockford, IL, 1978), pp. 215–17. See also the endorsement of these practices in the Jesuit ‘Rules for Thinking with the Church’, in John C.Olin (ed.), The Catholic Reformation: Savonarola to Ignatius Loyola (New York, 1992). 18   Euan Cameron, ‘For Reasoned Faith or Embattled Creed? Religion for the People in Early Modern Europe’, TRHS, 6th ser., 8 (1998): 165–87. 19   Martin D.W. Jones, The Counter Reformation: Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 119, 121. Francis de Sales was not canonised until 1665. 20   Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History, pp. 124–5. In The reasons which Doctor Hill hath brought, for the upholding of papistry … unmasked (Oxford, 1604), pp. 258–9, George Abbot spoke of the continuing presence of miracles as ‘baggage rotten stuffe’ and ‘dunghill ragges’. See also Joannis Majoris, Magnum speculum exemplorum (Douai, 1605), a Jesuit-revised collection of exempla. As William Crashaw remarked in The sermon preached at the Crosse, Feb. xiiij 1607 (London, 1608), pp. 155–6, this too retained many ‘impious and ridiculous Legends’ and ‘impossible tales’.

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visible signs were necessary to confirm Christ’s Church and endorse any ‘extraordinary mission’ it launched.21 Vigorous rejection of the Protestant precept that miracles had ceased also became an increasingly prominent feature of English Catholic polemic in the course of Elizabeth’s reign. In A fortresse of the faith (1565), the Louvain exile Thomas Stapleton had declared that the working of wonders was a chief means by which God had validated the Roman faith at the time of its very first planting and taunted his upstart Protestant enemies for their inability to cite equivalent ‘tokens of their Apostleship’. But, in keeping with the dominant climate of discreet circumspection, he was distinctly defensive about claiming that this gift and grace continued to differentiate the true religion from its false and diabolical rivals and to mark out the chosen messengers of the Almighty from spurious prophets, making the point only implicitly.22 Published a decade later in 1574, however, Richard Bristow’s portable manual of ‘motives’ indexed a new spirit of neoscholastic defiance: it insisted emphatically upon the perpetuity both of ‘dogmaticall miracles’ wrought in support of disputed doctrines and of ‘personall miracles’ performed through the agency of individual people and listed visions and prophecies as other instruments by which the Lord vindicated points in controversy, approved ‘innumerable Holy Persons of our communion’ and showed his followers the way to salvation.23 Writing in 1600, the Benedictine Thomas Hill likewise cited the unbroken chain of supernatural acts from the first century AD as proof that Roman Catholicism was the sole possessor of truth.24 Miracles, declared Robert Chambers in a tract of 1606, had not only been necessary to persuade the Jews and Gentiles to embrace Christianity while it was still in its infancy; they remained a critical aid to converting the heathen and infidel peoples of the New World and the Far East, combating the atheism and 21

  Robert Bellarmine, Disputationes … de controversiis Christianae fidei (Ingolstadt, 3rd edn 1590–93), bk. 4, ch. 14, note 11 (cols 1347–54). See also the strong affirmation by Louis Richeome, Trois discours pour la religion catholique: Des miracles, des saincts, et des images (Bordeaux, 1597). 22   Thomas Stapleton, A fortresse of the faith first planted amonge us Englishmen (Antwerp, 1565), part 2, ch. 3, fos 97a–99b. See also his preface to The historie of the churche of Englande. Compiled by venerable Bede (Antwerp, 1565), pp. 4–8, in which he turns the charge of fabrication back against them, pouring scorn on the ‘miserable miracles’ which filled the pages of Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’. As Peter Marshall notes, in the early Elizabethan period there was a similar wariness about citing ghosts as proof of the existence of purgatory: Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002), p. 242. 23   Richard Bristow, A briefe treatise of divers plaine and sure waies to finde out the truth (Antwerp, 1574; repr. 1599) [hereafter Motives], fos 15a–39a. This was summarised in his Demaundes to be proponed of Catholiques to the heretikes (Antwerp, 1576). See also Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism, pp. 263–4. 24  Thomas Hill, A quartron of reasons of Catholike religion (Antwerp, 1600), pp. 33–9.

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impiety which plagued contemporary Europe, and confounding the hostile heretics by which English Catholics were surrounded. In the midst of the ‘horrible hurliburlies’ of the present age, it was hardly likely that the Lord would abandon such a powerful mechanism for comforting the faithful and confirming his persecuted Church. Those both ‘of ancient and fresh memory’, the Jesuit John Floyd told his Protestant opponents in 1613, were ‘thunderclapps that shake the foundations of your Ghospell’; according to George Musket and others the absence of ‘heavenly testifications and impressions of the soveraine hand of the Almighty’ was clear evidence that Protestantism was ‘the conventicle of Satan’.25 Miracles were held to be superior even to Scripture itself as a witness to the veracity of doctrine and practice. Every sect could wrest the biblical text to their advantage, said the Irish Jesuit Richard Archdekin in 1667, but when the Lord ‘speakes by works, they cannot be controverted’.26 It was in this sense that they spoke of miracles as the ‘very woord’ and ‘divine sentence’ of God. As Edward Worsley wrote in reply to the Restoration bishop Edward Stillingfleet, these were His ‘legible Characters’ and ‘Seals and Signatures of truth’.27 Nevertheless, as we shall see, throughout the period in question Counter-Reformation writers had to tread a perilous tightrope: miracles were a powerful weapon in the crusade against Protestantism, a religion which publicly repudiated the possibility that this category of supernatural events had continued into modern times, yet they could also backfire badly against them, laying the Roman Catholic faith open to savage ridicule and sarcasm.

25

 Philips Numan, Miracles lately wrought by the intercession of the glorious Virgin Marie, at Mont-aigue, nere unto Sichem in Brabant, trans. Robert Chambers (Antwerp, 1606), dedication to James I, esp. sigs B1v–B4v, quotation at sig. B3v; John Floyd, Purgatories triumph over hell (n. p, 1613), p. 145 and ch. 5 passim; Numan, Miracles, p. 269; George Musket, The bishop of London his legacy (St Omer, 1623), pp. 64–76, at p. 65. For further discussion of the controversy over miracles, see ‘D.P. Walker, ‘The Cessation of Miracles’, in Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus (eds), Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe (Washington, London and Toronto, 1988), pp. 111–24; Alexandra Walsham, ‘Miracles in Post-Reformation England’, in Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory (eds), Signs, Wonders, Miracles: Representations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church, SCH 41 (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 273–306. 26   Richard Archdekin, A treatise of miracles (Louvain, 1667), p. 9; Numan, Miracles, sig. B7v. 27  Numan, Miracles, sig. A4r; Edward Worsley, A discourse of miracles wrought in the Roman Catholick Church (Antwerp, 1676), sig. b2v, p. 4.

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III Spirited defence of the miraculous against Protestant attacks was accompanied by active efforts to publicise both foreign and native modern examples. Richard Bristow related the case of Margaret Jessop, a crippled Englishwoman living in Brussels cured in 1573 because of her pious devotion to three bleeding hosts preserved in the city church of St Gudila.28 In the same year there were reports that an ominous vision of Atlas bearing the world on his weary shoulders had been seen near Montpellier in France, above ‘a place whereat the hugenotes were woonte to have theyre sermones’.29 Some 700 broadsheets about the Belgian marvel were intercepted by English customs officials in 158430 and engravings of other miracles wrought by the Blessed Sacrament in Flanders seem to have been shipped over from the Continent in large quantities. Whenever one came into the hands of Edward Throgmorton in Worcestershire, he seized the opportunity to show it to his companions and urge them to forsake the ‘fables and lies’ of the heretics.31 The early seventeenth century saw the translation of a major collection of thaumaturgic wonders worked by the Virgin Mary at the chapel shrine at Mont-aigu near Sichem in Belgium assembled by the town clerk Philips Numan. Like two similar anthologies published by the humanist Justus Lipsius in Latin, Numan presented his catalogue of carefully attested cures as evidence of divine approbation for the cult of saints and a sign that God would ‘very soon [remove] the scourge of his ire and indignation’ from the Netherlands. In turn Richard Chambers hoped they would offer solace to his afflicted coreligionists in England.32 Other clerical exiles furnished their countrymen with vernacular editions of the Marian miracles associated with the Holy House of Loreto near Ancona, which had allegedly flown there from Nazareth in the late thirteenth century.33 In 1616, Pedro de Ribadeneira’s Life of Ignatius Loyola was first published in English, replete with many posthumous 28

  Bristow, Motives, fos 19a–27a.   BL, Cotton MS Vespasian A-XXV, fos 41r–42v, at fo. 41v. 30   BL, Lansdowne MS 42, fo. 174r. 31   Foley, iv. 293 32  Numan, Miracles, p. 20; Justus Lipsius, Diva virgo Hallensis. Beneficia eius et miracula fide atque ordine descripta (Antwerp, 1604); Justus Lipsius, Diva Sichemiensis sive Aspricollis: Nova eius beneficia et admiranda (Antwerp, 1605). 33   Orazio Torsellino, The history of our B. Lady of Loreto, trans. Thomas Price ([St Omer], 1608), esp. bk 1, chs 15, 17; bk 2, chs 1, 2, 7, 10; bk 3, chs 13–18, 24–33; bk 4, chs 4–12, 17–21, 26–30. See also Antonio Daza, The historie, life, and miracles, extasies and revelations of the Blessed Virgin, Sister Joane, of the Crosse, of the third order of our holy father S. Francis, trans. Francis Bell (St Omer, 1625), chs 11–13, 20 and passim. 29

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wonders reported to have been done by the Jesuit’s relics, vestments and other possessions, as well as by portraits and by slips of paper bearing his signature. Ribadeneira’s accounts of people restored to perfect health, delivered from demons and assisted in childbirth by the intercession of this holy father came from Italy, Spain, Germany, Hungary and the East Indies.34 The theater of Japonia’s constancy (1624) incorporated a fresh batch of prodigies achieved by vows, novenas and prayers to an icon of the newly canonised saint in the kingdom of Aragon, together with cures performed by the oil burning in the lamp before it and the liquid it sweated when it was placed on the altar. Similar stories filled the pages of Orazio Torsellino’s biography of Francis Xavier, translated in 1632, and 35 years later Richard Archdekin supplemented a long list of miracles associated with his relics at Mecklenberg with compelling examples from Dublin, Waterford, Kilkenny and Ross.35 News of these and other wonders was also transmitted orally: one case widely publicised by the priests of late Jacobean London concerned a Carmelite friar in Paris who, like the Italian Oratorian Philip Neri, levitated daily while elevating the host. In 1621 he was reported to have prophesied that within two years there would not be a single heretic remaining in France.36 But English Catholics had no need to turn to Europe, America or Asia to prove that miracles on behalf of their faith continued in perpetuity. Their own country was yielding an equally rich harvest of astonishing marvels. A vast number of these were linked with the Elizabethan and early Stuart martyrs. As Anne Dillon has shown, in the official, formal texts about their deaths prepared for public consumption, clerical writers were decidedly wary about including spectacular examples of the miraculous. Adamant that outward signs were superfluous testimonies to the martyrs’ sanctity, they meticulously censored sensational details which might provoke a fresh wave of scoffing Protestant attacks on ‘popish credulity’. The versions which they disseminated among the laypeople to whom they ministered in England, however, displayed no such restraint. Full of signs and wonders of a highly traditional kind, some of them would fit more comfortably between the covers of the Golden Legend than of the humanist-inspired hagiographies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Synthesising 34

  Pedro de Ribadeneira, The life of the holy patriarch S. Ignatius of Loyola, author, and founder of the Society of Jesus, trans. S.J.[M. Walpole] ([St Omer], 1616; 1622). 35   The theater of Japonia’s constancy, trans. William Lee ([St Omer], 1624). This included ‘A briefe Relation’ of miracles worked by Ignatius at Munebrega in Spain. Orazio Torsellino, The admirable life of S. Francis Xavier, trans. Thomas Fitzherbert (Paris [St Omer], 1632), esp. bk 2, chs 7, 16; bk 3, ch. 7; bk 4, ch. 3; bk 6, chs 1–4.; Archdekin, Treatise of miracles. This latter tract was intended primarily for the Irish market. 36   Gee, Foot out of the snare, ed. T.H.B.M. Harmsen (Nijmegen, 1992), p. 136; BL, Stowe MS 176, fo. 207r.

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rumour and hearsay with biblical symbols and medieval motifs, they constructed the victims of the Elizabethan and early Stuart treason laws in the mould of the courageous saints of old, presenting their heroism as an imitation of the redeeming passion of Christ.37 Many manuscript accounts, for instance, told how the disembowelled bodies of the martyrs had cried out, sat up or defied physical decomposition. Alexander Briant’s mangled corpse was said to have lifted itself from the block and Edmund Genings prayed to St Gregory even as the hangman was removing his entrails.38 Robert Southwell’s holy heart leapt in his executioner’s hands in 1596 and the pathetically crushed body of the Yorkshire matron Margaret Clitherow showed no signs of putrefaction after six weeks.39 The incombustibility of the martyrs’ remains was matched by their extraordinary immunity to capture. Father Scroop became invisible to the pursuivants who burst into a gentleman’s house to apprehend him, the door of a bolted chamber in which Robert Persons was imprisoned flew open three times and the leg irons restricting the recusant John Rigby likewise fell off miraculously.40 Future martyrs were often honoured with dreams and premonitions of their sacrificial deaths and seen surrounded by haloes on the night before being conveyed to the gallows. A bright light like a ray of glory emanated from Robert Watkinson as he celebrated his very last mass and Christopher Bayles perceived the shadow of a diadem hovering over him as he sat with a candle in his dark, filthy dungeon on the eve of his martyrdom.41 Other strange happenings signalled God’s favour towards his faithful servants. Mimicking the aberrations of nature which had accompanied Christ’s crucifixion, the Thames stood still on the day Edmund Campion made the ultimate sacrifice, horses refused to drag the hurdle bearing Edward Waterson through the streets to his place of execution in 1593 and the sea near Penzance assumed the colour of blood on the day two priests suffered

37   See Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community (Aldershot, 2002), ch. 2. On manuscript accounts of the martyrs, see also Arthur F. Marotti, ‘Manuscript Transmission and the Catholic Martyrdom Account in Early Modern England’, in Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol (eds), Print, Manuscript, and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England (Columbus, Ohio, 2000), pp. 172–99, esp. 187–90. In his printed account of the execution of Everard Hanse, The copie of a double letter ([Rheims, 1581]), Robert Persons, for instance, declared ‘we neede no miracles to trye Martyrs’ (p. 5). Cf. the similar conclusions of Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, pp. 242–5. 38  Challoner, Memoirs, p. 38; Foley, iv. 367. John Genings, The life and death of Mr Edmund Geninges Priest (St Omer, 1614), p. 85. 39   Foley, i. 375; ‘An Ancient Editor’s Notebook’, in Morris, iii. 52. 40   Gee, Foot out of the snare, ed. Harmsen, p. 137; Challoner, Memoirs, p. 242. 41  Challoner, Memoirs, p. 265; Foley, i. 326.

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in July 1612.42 Similarly, animals grazing in the courtyard of a house at Hislip refused to eat or step on a crown of grass which sprang up near the spot where Henry Garnet and Edward Oldcorne were arrested in 1606.43 The pious embellishments which accounts of the martyrs acquired as they circulated around the Catholic community clearly owed much to the laypeople by whom they were lovingly retold but the Jesuits and seminary priests energetically deployed them to teach lessons about the virtues of recusancy and the sacred powers of the priesthood. They used them to underline the glorious rewards won by men and women who resisted the temptation to bow to Baal, attend Protestant services and partake of Calvin’s impious supper. In defiance of the reformers’ claim that every believer was his own intercessor, they depicted the Catholic clergy as a consecrated caste through whom the Almighty uniquely mediated His saving grace. This process is particularly transparent in a ‘Catalogue of Martyrs’ assembled by John Gerard around 1594, which told how Robert Sutton’s quarters were taken down from display in Stafford ‘all consumed to the bones’, except for his right index finger and thumb, which remained mysteriously intact – those parts of his hand constantly hallowed by contact with the transubstantiated bread and body of Christ.44 The English Catholic missionaries deliberately fostered the cults of these saints in waiting, collaborating in a process of spontaneous beatification by popular acclamation which ironically ran counter to the attempts of the Tridentine Church to regulate and centralise the procedures for sanctification. Here, as in Ireland and Holland, lay initiative continued to play a prominent part in the creation and veneration of new members of the company of heaven. It was not until 1970 that the papacy rendered them fully legitimate by formal canonisation.45

42   Foley, iii. 623; Pollen (ed.), Unpublished Documents, p. 231 and Challoner, Memoirs, p. 187; Michael Questier (ed.), Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate of George Birkhead, CS, 5th ser., 12 (1998), pp. 188–9. 43   Foley, iv. 125; London, Archives of the British Province of the Society of Jesus, MS A. IV. 7, no. 5. 44   Stonyhurst College, MS Anglia VII, n. 26, printed in Pollen (ed.), Unpublished Documents, p. 291. 45   Gillespie, Devoted People, p. 69; Frijhoff, ‘La function du miracle’, p. 172 and passim; Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1999), pp. 301–5. Surprisingly few Counter Reformation martyrs were canonised in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, as Burke notes in ‘How to become a Counter-Reformation Saint’, p. 139. Hsia, World, p. 125 suggests that martyrs were ill-suited to the self-image of a Church which sought to present itself as triumphant and militant. In the context of England, the canonisation of convicted traitors would also have been politically insensitive, not to say provocative.

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Providential judgements visited upon persecutors were another aspect of the miraculous which the missionaries pressed into the service of casuistical instruction and confessional propaganda. Part of a tradition stretching from Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History to Foxe’s Actes and monuments, such anecdotes graphically illustrated divine anger at those who imbued their hands in the blood of the martyrs.46 Thus Sir Henry Yelverton, who presided over the trial of the Jesuit Edmund Arrowsmith in 1628 and ghoulishly watched his execution through a telescope, was said to have been struck by an insensible blow which carried him straight to his grave. In the middle of reading the indictment against Richard White, a Welsh schoolmaster who disrupted a Protestant service by rattling his shackles, the clerk of assizes was rendered temporarily blind and the constable who arrested William Davies in 1593 was seized by an inflammation of his right toe which eventually overtook his entire body, exuding a horrible smell.47 Robert Barrett reported several ‘extraordinary examples’ of ‘avenging justice’ to the Rector of the English College at Rome in 1584, including the case of Thomas Norton, ‘rackmaster and torturer in chief’ of Edmund Campion.48 Like the exempla with which medieval friars and parish priests enlivened their sermons, these stories frequently contained telling echoes of Scripture. Callous betrayers were implicitly assimilated with Judas and the punishments suffered by intolerant magistrates often corresponded with the penalties meted out in the Old Testament to those who had molested God’s chosen people, the Jews. Sometimes entire communities were deemed to have been the target of supernatural retribution. Nicholas Sander, Robert Persons and the Spanish bishop Yepez of Taraçona all attributed a major outbreak of gaol fever in Oxford in 1577 to God’s wrath at the trial of the recusant bookseller Rowland Jenkes and the epidemic of plague which devastated Dorchester in 1594 was widely interpreted as vengeance for the death of Father John Cornelius.49 Other enemies of the Catholic faith also felt the avenging hand of the Almighty upon them, particularly puritan zealots obsessed with eradicating all traces of popish idolatry. One story which circulated orally and scribally 46

  See my Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), ch. 2 for this tradition.  Challoner, Memoirs, p. 372 and Foley, ii. 53 (Arrowsmith); Challoner, Memoirs, p. 103 and Richard Simpson, ‘A True Report of the Life and Martyrdom of Mr Richard White, Schoolmaster’, The Rambler, 3rd ser., 3 (1860): 239 (White); Challoner, Memoirs, p. 196 (Davies). 48   P. Renold (ed.), Letters of William Allen and Richard Barret 1572–1598, CRS 58 (London, 1967), pp. 96–9. 49   For Jenkes, see the account in my Providence, pp. 234–5, and the references cited therein. For Cornelius, see Challoner, Memoirs, pp. 198–201. 47

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in the West Midlands towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign told of the untimely demise of a dedicated iconoclast, ‘one Mutton, sometime sheriff of Chester, [who] had no greater felicity than in the breaking of crosses and chalices’,50 while the Jesuit John Gerard recorded the sobering tale of a disbelieving Protestant visitor paralysed after deliberately polluting the thaumaturgic spring at Holywell with his dirty boots.51 As in other parts of Europe where the Reformation was accompanied by a violent assault upon traditional symbols of the sacred, the underlying theme of such punitive miracles was the capacity of desecrated images, statues and shrines to fight back against brutal attacks.52 Others defended solemn observance of the Catholic calendar. According to the district report of the Jesuit mission in Lancashire and Staffordshire for 1623, a hot Protestant widow who habitually profaned holy days by carrying out her everyday work was providentially chastised when her house caught fire on the feast of St Andrew and was nearly razed to the ground.53 As these cases reveal, it would be a mistake to ascribe the diffusion of accounts of the miserable ends of prominent heretics solely to the Catholic laity. Narratives of divine justice were clearly joint creations. Here, as elsewhere, we may detect the heavy hand of clerical intervention shaping them to serve as warnings about the dangers of sacrilege. If these cautionary tales were designed to dint Protestant pride and inflame Catholic zeal, others were employed to remind the laity of the dangers of schism and spiritual frailty. Stories about church papists who suffered psychological anguish or were otherwise punished for entering Anglican temples could be a highly effective aid in the missionary campaign to eliminate the cancer of conformity. In the memoir he wrote for the benefit of novice priests in the seminaries, William Weston remembered the searing thirst which overtook the Norfolk gentleman Francis Wodehouse when he defied his conscience and attended a Protestant service. An anecdote preserved by the Jesuits of the Worcester and Warwickshire district in 1636 as ‘a salutary warning to all similar offenders’ concerned

50   ‘An Ancient Editor’s Notebook’, in Morris, iii. 59. This is probably a reference to Edward Button, mayor of Chester in 1616: see Lawrence M. Clopper (ed.), Records of Early English Drama: Chester (Manchester, 1979), pp. 306, 526. 51   John Gerard, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, ed. Philip Caraman (London, 1951), p. 47. For another version of this story, see Albert J. Loomie (ed.), Spain and the Jacobean Catholics, II 1613–1624, CRS 68 (London, 1978), pp. 139–40. 52   See Frijhoff, ‘La function du miracle’, p. 177; Greengrass, ‘Peregrinations’, pp. 405–7. In southwestern Germany, images desecrated by Protestant soliders during the Thirty Years War likewise became the subject of legends of prodigious weeping, sweating and bleeding. See Forster, Catholic Revival, pp. 90–91. 53   Foley, vii, pt 2, 1100.

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a wealthy schismatic who fell down the stairs, fatally breaking his neck.54 Other episodes revealed the risks of eating meat during Lent and ignoring the directions of priests. In The foot out of the snare (1624), John Gee sniggered at the story of Katherine Riland of London who choked consuming a morsel of flesh forbidden by her ghostly father, dismissing it as an amusing popish fiction, but it finds more than one analogue in the pages of Jesuit internal memoranda.55 A woman who omitted to mention a grave sin during confession was tormented by a vision of reptiles crawling in and out of her mouth and a soldier from Hampshire who reviled St Ignatius with blasphemous curses was instantly afflicted with an excruciating disease of the bowels and intestines.56 Such examples are indicative of the skill with which the clergy could transform local tragedies into moral exempla. In this way, miracles became catechetical instruments, tools for educating laypeople in the ideals of Tridentine piety as well as impressing upon them God’s hatred of heresy. How far the Catholic faithful internalised the Counter-Reformation lessons enshrined in these oral and scribal texts remains, of course, a rather moot point. Without the reinforcement of regular priestly contact and guidance, it is probable that they did so only imperfectly.

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IV More positive proof that the Church of Rome was a designated channel of supernatural power came in the guise of thaumaturgic wonders worked through the medium of material objects. Some parts of Europe reclaimed from Lutheranism and Calvinism in the course of the seventeenth century had to import relics to replace the casualties of Reformation iconoclasm. In the Upper Palatinate, for instance, skeletons of the early Christian martyrs translated from the newly discovered Roman catacombs became fresh foci for Catholic piety in the wake of Maximilian I’s annexation of the formerly Protestant territory in 1621.57 English Catholicism, however, had no trouble filling the void left by the holocaust of holy items launched by Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell in the 1530s. The mortal remains of the martyrs 54

  Weston, Autobiography, ed. Caraman, pp. 149–50; Foley, vii, pt 2, 1139.   Gee, Foot out of the snare, ed. Harmsen, p. 137. 56   Foley, vii, pt 2, 1135; iii. 391. Robert Persons also compiled a catalogue of judgements on ‘divers fautors of that faction’ which opposed the Society of Jesus: ‘Observations of Certayne Aparent Judgments’, ed. Pollen, p. 203. 57   See Trevor Johnson, ‘Holy Fabrications: The Catacomb Saints and the Counter Reformation in Bavaria’, JEH, 47 (1996): 274–97. See also Louthan, Converting Bohemia, pp. 34–45, for the translation of St Norbert’s relics from Magdeburg to Prague. 55

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quickly compensated for the loss of the sacred body parts of medieval saints like Thomas Becket.58 As early as 1572, one William Tessimond was hauled before the High Commission in York for possessing hair from the beard of the disgraced Earl of Northumberland which he had cut off while the Northern Rebel’s head was displayed in the tollbooth.59 The death of Cuthbert Mayne in 1577 marked the beginning of a new traffic in relics. Every execution saw sympathetic spectators scramble to dip handkerchiefs and gloves in blood, rescue scraps of bone, muscle and flesh and gather up the discarded clothes and possessions of their heroes. A young man present at Thomas Atkinson’s martyrdom in 1616 purchased his stockings from the hangman and onlookers eagerly gathered up Hugh Green’s crucifix, rosary beads, book of litanies, spectacles and priest’s girdle at Dorchester in 1642.60 Other souvenirs included the chalices which the missionaries had used in their last mass, the ropes with which they were hanged and the bloodied aprons and sleeves of their executioners. Among the items preserved at the English College at Valladolid was ‘a piece of old Tyburne’, the scaffold upon which so many members of the Society of Jesus had died, and the whole head of John Cornelius was discovered in a cupboard by workmen clearing rubbish after the Great Fire of London in 1666.61 The Spanish noblewoman Luisa de Carvajal was a devoted rescuer of the dismembered body parts of priests hung, drawn and quartered in Jacobean London, which she meticulously preserved for veneration by the faithful at home and abroad.62 58   For further discussion of Catholic relic culture, see also now my ‘Skeletons in the Cupboard: Relics after the English Reformation’, in Alexandra Walsham (ed.), Relics and Remains, P&P Supplement 5 (2010), pp. 121–43, at 126–31; and ‘The Pope’s Merchandise and the Jesuits’ Trumpery: Catholic Relics and Protestant Polemic in Post-Reformation England’, in Jennifer Spinks and Dagmar Eichberger (eds), Religion, the Supernatural and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe: An Album Amicorum for Charles Zika (Leiden, forthcoming 2015); Arthur F. Marotti, ‘Southwell’s Remains: Catholicism, Relics and Print Culture in Early Modern England’, in his Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, 2005), pp. 9–31; Anne M. Myers, ‘Father John Gerard’s Object Lessons: Relics and Devotional Objects in Autobiography of a Hunted Priest’, in Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley and Arthur F. Marotti (eds), Catholic Culture in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, 2007), pp. 216–35. 59   Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York, High Commission Act Book 1572–74, fo. 40r–v. 60  Challoner, Memoirs, pp. 341, 423. 61  Challoner, Memoirs, pp. 464, 556; Foley, i. 565; Lewis Owen, The running register: recording a true relation of the state of the English colledges, seminaries and cloysters in all forreigne parts (London, 1626), p. 54; Foley, vi. 680. 62   See Glyn Redworth, ‘God’s Gift? Sacred Relics, Gift Giving, and Luisa de Carvajal’s Preparation of the Holy during the Long Reformation’, Nuncius: Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science, 27 (2012): 270–88.

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Figure 5.1 Garnet’s straw: ‘Miraculosa effigies R.P. Henrici Garneti’: from Andreas Eudaemon-Joannes, Apologia (Cologne, 1610). © The Trustees of the British Museum. Department of Prints and Drawings: 1861,0518.1314; AN1024564. Sometimes the very acquisition of relics was regarded as miraculous itself. The handkerchief used to rake William Ward’s heart out of the ashes did not burn and the thumb with which Edmund Genings had consecrated the host came away when touched by a pious virgin at Newgate.63 Yet more famously, an ear of straw soaked with the blood of the Gunpowder Plot martyr Henry Garnet jumped into the hand of John Wilkinson as he stood beneath the gallows. Within a few days a perfect effigy of the Jesuit appeared on one of the husks, evoking much mockery from Protestants, who alleged it was the work of an ingenious engraver, and much admiration from Catholics, who heralded it as a divine token of Garnet’s innocence of

63

 Challoner, Memoirs, pp. 390–92; Geninges, Life, pp. 93–4.

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the heinous crime of treason. The very sight of it was said to have made 500 converts (Figure 5.1).64 Like the corpses of medieval saints, the dismembered remains of early modern martyrs were often reputed to have discharged a fragrant perfume before being removed for embalming. Imitating traditional icons, a picture of Christ’s Nativity Father Peter Wright gave to a lady who visited him in prison became spotted with blood on the first anniversary of his death.65 The presence in such accounts of so many ‘secondary’ or ‘associative’ relics is indicative of the disorderly multiplication of holy objects which seems to have been a feature of this context. In Tridentine Europe the authentication, transportation and display of relics was subject to unprecedented regulation;66 in Protestant England it was impossible for the Counter-Reformation clergy to exercise anything like the same degree of control over their distribution and use. It may be argued, moreover, that the Jesuits and secular priests did less to restrain the fervent desire of the recusant laity to obtain these sacred deposits than they did to encourage it. The unruly expansion of the relic trade was perhaps a small price to pay for the flourishing cults of their heroic dead colleagues. The particular circumstances of the English mission appear to have given additional impetus to the strategy of catering for popular thirst for the sacred employed by Catholic evangelists on the European mainland. Priests were also active in advertising the extraordinary cures worked by martyrs’ relics. The Jesuit Annual Letters contain many examples of individuals released from dangerous illnesses by the application of these blessed remnants, as do the martyrological accounts which they copied, collected and eventually published. The relics of John Southworth were said to have resuscitated Francis Howard and pieces of the flesh of Thomas Garnet laid on the breast of William Atkinson did the same after physicians had relinquished all hope of saving him.67 The cord which had strangled John Kemble cured Captain Scudamore’s daughter of a violent sore throat when hung round her neck in the late seventeenth century and the holy hand of Edmund Arrowsmith had remedial effects when 64   For this episode, see Foley, iv. 121–33, 195–201; BL, Additional MS 21,203, fos 22r–23r; Stowe MS 169, fo. 27r; and R[obert] P[ricket], The Jesuits miracles, or new popish wonders. Containing the straw, the crowne, and the wondrous child (London, 1607). See also my Providence, p. 243. 65   Foley, ii. 548–9. 66   Simon Ditchfield, ‘Martyrs on the Move: Relics as Vindicators of Local Diversity in the Tridentine Church’, in Diana Wood (ed.), Martyrs and Martyrologies, SCH 30 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 283–94. 67  Challoner, Memoirs, p. 510; Foley, ii. 497.

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stroked down the backs of sick children and adolescents as late as the 1760s.68 The recovery of Robert Southwell’s sister from a severe ailment after the application of her brother’s relics in 1635 was considered all the more remarkable because she dissembled her faith and outwardly passed herself off as a Protestant.69 In this instance, the didactic gloss with which the clergy so often lacquered these miracle stories is clearly perceptible. Similarly, some underline the need for the patient to repent sincerely and to follow the correct ritual procedures prior to the application of the relic by a priest. In others, by contrast, the success of the cures brought about by fragments of the martyrs is not contingent upon ecclesiastical permission or superintendence: laypeople employ them more or less indiscriminately. In these texts, it is tempting to suggest, we are presented with evidence of popular intervention in the construction of these composite narratives. Complementing the remains of native priest martyrs were the relics of revered foreign Jesuits. A tiny fragment of Ignatius Loyola’s winter tunic cured Mary Ward of a lingering consumption in St Omer in 1614 and 20 years later another religious exile recovered after a relic of Robert Bellarmine was applied to a swelling on his head. The holy articles linked with their founder which the missionaries brought with them to England seem to have been particularly sought after. In 1633 one such object was apparently summoned from a distance of 80 miles to assist a noblewoman in childbirth whose life doctors despaired of.70 Older relics which had survived the purges of the early Reformation period were also credited with thaumaturgic powers. Pieces cut off from the fragment of the True Cross which continued to be preserved with the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London wrought medical cures for the Yorkshire Catholic Mrs Pudsey and many others in the reign of James I and Charles I. Eighteen youths were cured of smallpox when the rescued arm bone of St Thomas Cantilupe, bishop of Hereford, was exposed during a double octave of prayers and a mass for their recovery.71 Even empty reliquaries retained some of the ‘holy radioactivity’ emitted by the venerated remains they had formerly encased: William Weston recalled how a linen casket saved from Glastonbury Abbey, which had once contained one of the nails that fastened Christ to the Cross, had healed a boy with a penetrating wound in 1586.72 Detached from the elaborate shrines in which they had resided 68

 Challoner, Memoirs, p. 556; Foley, ii. 61–2.   Foley, i. 375–6. Cf. vii, pt 2, p. 1135, where it is alleged that she was skilled as a physician and applied his relics to her patients. 70   Foley, v. 425; vii, pt 2, pp. 1190, 1130 respectively. 71   Foley, v. 558–9; iv. 454. 72   Weston, Autobiography, ed. Caraman, pp. 110–11. The phrase ‘holy radioactivity’ is borrowed from Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims, p. 26. 69

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in ancient churches and cathedrals, medieval relics became part of a large mobile library of miraculous objects. Despite the constant attempts of the missionary priests to reclaim them into the Church’s possession, it is apparent that all too many remained in the hands of those who had rescued them from Protestant destruction in the 1540s and 50s. Preserved for decades in private homes, they too are a testament to the limited ability of the Catholic clergy to patrol the ‘gateways of the sacred’ in the face of continuing persecution.73 The same comments apply to sacramentals, another important component of this portable dispensary of potent religious resources. Both in the literature they produced for reading in recusant households and in their pastoral endeavours in the field, the Jesuits sought to replace traditional amulets with ecclesiastically authorised emblems and talismans. The agnus dei was promoted as a powerful symbol and many shipments of these wax tablets impressed with the Lamb of Christ managed to evade confiscation by port officials, as did consignments of rosaries and medallions linked with newly canonised saints like Francis Xavier, Teresa of Avila and Philip Neri. The indulgences attached to such objects were vital to devout laypeople with only irregular access to priestly confessors who could grant them formal absolution from their sins.74 Satisfying the hunger of the populace for healing miracles, these items also became renowned for their therapeutic and prophylactic properties. In 1641, for instance, a small portion of an agnus dei swallowed on the advice of one of the missionary Fathers healed one Suffolk invalid and there were also many reports of barn and house fires extinguished by flinging a particle of it into the flames.75 Crucifixes could be equally effective as anti-incendiary devices, as in the case of a blaze which burnt 11 dwellings in Northamptonshire in 1626, quenched when a servant of Lord Vaux threw one into its midst.76 Other devotional objects were also helpful in defending laypeople from assaults by the devil and in counteracting curses and spells. The Annual Letter for 1614 boasted that many withered limbs had been restored to full strength and dozens of domestic animals protected from attacks by adepts in the

73

  Cf. Gillespie’s comments about Ireland in Devoted People, p. 159. For examples of Jesuit attempts to reclaim medieval relics, see Gerard, Autobiography, ed. Caraman, pp. 49–50; Weston, Autobiography, ed. Caraman, pp. 111–12. For a list of relics in the possession of Anne Vaux and her sister Eleanor Brooksby (including St Stephen’s jawbone, a piece of the hairshirt of Thomas Becket, and Robert Sutton’s thumb), see TNA, SP 14/19/72. 74   For a list of such items (and associated indulgences) found in the New Prison in March 1622, see TNA, SP 14/128/8. 75   Foley, ii. 567. For the quenching of fires, see Foley, iv. 616; vii, pt 2, pp. 1100, 1136. 76   Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O. 7. 3, fo. 6v. The Protestant writer thought the story fit only to be put ‘in their lying log’.

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diabolical arts by the use of blessed candles.77 As in the rural missions they conducted abroad, the Jesuits in England also propagated their own brand of sacramental – water consecrated by contact with a medal or relic of St Ignatius. In 1637, a young woman haunted by spectres was persuaded to sprinkle her bed with Ignatius water before retiring each night and soon found herself delivered from these nocturnal terrors. Holy water also had a great capacity for discomfiting heretics: when Widow Wiseman threw some over her enemy Richard Topcliffe, his horse immediately pitched him to the ground. By the later Stuart period, it was being applied to cure all kinds of complaints, including diseases in cattle.78 Technically sacramentals did not work ex opere operato but it is clear that the laity often appropriated them as if they were automatically efficacious. Even as they recorded these miracles in the reports they sent to their Continental superiors, the clergy unwittingly revealed evidence of practices which, in the eyes of the Tridentine fathers, verged on ‘superstition’ and idolatry. No less ironically, the accounts which they circulated to advertise the efficacy of approved types of sacramental may inadvertently have promoted their unauthorised use. Similar ambiguities surround examples of cures effected by printed books. In 1615, for instance, a gentleman’s son was brought back from death’s door when a priest invoked Ignatius Loyola and placed the Rules of the Society on top of his breast. Equally strikingly, in 1624 the flow from a burst blood vessel ceased when a copy of Ribadeneira’s Life of Loyola was touched to the head of a Catholic physician. By the late 1630s so many wonders had been worked by the book in Lancashire that even illiterate persons had begun to purchase it.79 The very texts upon which the missionary clergy relied as locum preachers and teachers could all too easily become the tools of ‘a kind of popular Catholic version of the priesthood of all believers’.80 Where they evaded priestly supervision, devotional objects were prone to be treated as magical charms.81 At the same time, we must recognise the capacity of stories about miracles wrought by pious tracts and consecrated items to operate as 77

  Foley, vii, pt 2, 1071.   Foley, vii, pt 2, 1141. See also ii. 17; iii. 125, 257; v. 212; vii, pt 2, 1179. A. Hamilton (ed.), The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses (1904), i. 84. For the use of Ignatius and Xavier water in the Upper Palatinate, see Johnson, ‘Blood, Tears and XavierWater’. 79   Foley, vii, pt 2, 1097, 1107, 1142–3, respectively and see ii. 6; vii, pt 2, 1099–100. István Toth has discovered similar examples in mission records relating to Hungary: ‘Books Distributed, Books Destroyed: Books in Seventeenth-Century Catholic Missions in Hungary and Transylvania’ (unpublished paper). 80   Scribner, ‘Cosmic Order and Daily Life’, p. 12. 81   Cf. Gentilcore, ‘Adapt Yourselves to the People’s Capabilities’, 293, 295. 78

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instruments of confessionalisation. In many cases, for instance, a tacit or explicit link was made between the application of a sacred item or liturgical rite and the rejection of schism or heresy. In 1615 a boy protected from diabolic torment by an amulet sewn into his clothes suffered fresh assaults when it was confiscated by a Calvinist minister.82 Twenty years later holy water and an agnus dei cured the wife and children of a blacksmith of a wasting disease, but he himself remained dangerously emaciated after spurning such remedies as ‘Papistical figments’.83 After witnessing a similar cure in 1636, a Derbyshire man felt the first stirrings of a desire to embrace Catholicism and heard voices in his sleep threatening him with hell if he failed to abandon the Protestant faith.84 According to a late Elizabethan compilation, the heretical husband of a sick gentlewoman who recovered after receiving extreme unction turned to Rome after seeing ‘the wonderful operation’ of ‘God’s grace’ in this sacrament. And a report from the Jesuits’ Lincolnshire residence in the early 1650s recorded the conversion of the Protestant sister of a noblewoman saved from death after one of the fathers recited the Litany of Our Lady of Loreto over her.85 In these ways the missionaries not only met the continuing need for ritual protection, but invested traditional practices with a distinctly Tridentine character.

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V Nevertheless, in a context in which the ratio of priests to people was low, it was extremely difficult to keep holy objects under close clerical control. The ever-growing arsenal of relics likewise defied attempts to maintain an ecclesiastical monopoly on the sources of supernatural power. These problems were partly a function of the fact that English Catholicism lacked fixed locations where the clergy could channel, manage, and restrain popular piety. The Reformation had deprived it of the churches in which the faithful had worshipped for centuries and fostered an iconoclastic holocaust of shrines and monasteries. It also undermined the theological foundations of the practice of pilgrimage and brought an abrupt end to the flow of pilgrims to Canterbury, Walsingham and a host of other hallowed places scattered across the countryside.86 82

  Foley, vii, pt 2, 1098.   Foley, vii, pt 2, 1134. 84   Foley, vii, pt 2, 1132–3. 85   Morris, iii. 54; Foley, ii. 647. 86   For a fuller exploration of the themes in this section, see now my The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2011), ch. 3. 83

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A notable exception to the general pattern of heavy-handed repression was St Winefride’s Well in north Wales, which escaped the Tudor purges largely unscathed and to which journeys in search of thaumaturgic cures continued virtually uninterrupted. This should not be seen as a mere throwback to an earlier era, an example of Catholic survivalism untouched by the winds of the Tridentine revival. There is clear evidence that the Jesuits actively promoted the famous spring linked with the seventh-century Welsh virgin as a locus of devotion to the resurgent Church of Rome.87 One manifestation of this enterprise was the circulation of miracles witnessed at Holywell in the post-Reformation period. More than a few concerned crippled Protestants who went there as a last resort came away leaving both their crutches and the reformed faith behind them. In the 1660s, for example, a poor man who travelled there from Worcestershire became a good Catholic after having been both a Quaker and an Anabaptist.88 Following time-honoured patterns of shrine-formation, new sacred sites also sprang up to replace those that were casualties of evangelical zeal. Some were short-lived, like the cult engendered by the symbol of the Cross discovered in the trunk of an ash tree on the Glamorganshire estate of Sir Thomas Stradling in 1561, which attracted dozens of people from nearby Cowbridge and was evidently interpreted by some as a token of divine anger against the Elizabethan regime and a sign of hope of its imminent overthrow. This was briskly suppressed by the authorities, who suspected it might become a rallying point for conservative dissidence, though its memory was kept alive by Nicholas Harpsfield’s Dialogi sex (1566), which incorporated an account and image of the portent so that his ‘countrymen, divinely admonished by such miracles, would cease, after the example of St Paul, to persecute Christ in his cross, his image and his members’ (Figure 5.2).89 Similarly, a spring appeared and began to work wonders near the spot where one of the quarters of the martyred priest George Napper was hung in Oxford in 1611, until it was stopped up by order of John King, vice-chancellor and dean of Christ Church.90 Other locations at which martyrs had heroically sacrificed their lives were also spontaneously 87

  See Chapter 6, below.   Foley, iv. 518 and 528–37. For many other miracles associated with Holywell, see Annalecta Bollandiana, 6 (1887), 305–52. 89   TNA, SP 12/17/20 and 20.I (5 June 1561, Sir Roger Vaughan and Edward Lewis); Nicholas Harpsfield, Dialogi sex contra summi pontificatus, monasticae vitae, sanctorum, sacrarum imaginum oppugnatores, et pseudomartyres (Antwerp, 1573 edn; first publ. 1566), pp. 360–61 and fold-out plate attached to p. 369. See David Williams, ‘The Miracle at St Donats’, The Welsh Review, 6 (1947): 33–8. 90   Questier (ed.), Newsletters, p. 99. See also Bodl., MS Rawlinson D 399, fo. 216v. 88

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Figure 5.2 Image of the crucifix discovered in the trunk of an ash tree on the estate of Sir Thomas Stradling in Glamorganshire, 1561: Nicholas Harpsfield, Dialogi sex contra summi pontificatus, monasticae vitae, sanctorum, sacrarum imaginum oppugnatores, et pseudomartyres (Antwerp, 1573 edn), foldout plate attached to p. 369. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Pet. A. 2.8.

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transformed into places of pilgrimage by their disciples and admirers. Margaret Clitherow and other pious York women, for instance, made secret nocturnal journeys on barefoot to Knavesmire, half a mile outside the city, to pray beneath the gallows on which several clergy were executed in 1582.91 Others domesticated these devotional impulses, redirecting them into private spaces: Richard Sheldon poked fun at papists who set up in their gardens and orchards little carved images made from the wood of the oak tree associated with the wonder-working Marian icon at Sichem and made solemn daily visitations to them.92 Never formally sanctioned by the Church of Rome, such initiatives are indicative of the resilience and vibrancy of what William Christian has called ‘local religion’.93 The transience and ephemerality of these sites militated against integrating them into an official geography of the sacred. In the absence of a hierarchy of bishops and a network of parish priests, it was even more difficult to channel the enthusiasm of pilgrims in a theologically acceptable direction than it was in mainland Europe, where the authorities struggled to eliminate the dubious and unruly elements of new cults like the Jesus Oak in the Sonien Woods, which hovered on the edges of orthodoxy.94 And in a Protestant state there was little scope for turning traditional holy places into elaborate baroque shrines like those on the Continent which benefited from the patronage of the papacy or powerful rulers like the Wittelsbachs and Hapsburgs, notably Loreto in Ancona, Altötting in Bavaria and Halle and Mont-aigu in the Spanish Netherlands, though there are hints that James II and Mary of Modena endeavoured to do so in the case of Holywell.95 Where the Church of Rome was dominant it left an indelible mark on the landscape; in England and Wales, it was obliged to depend to a greater extent on sources of 91

  John Mush, ‘A True Report of the Life and Death of Mrs Margaret Clitherow’, in Morris, iii. 395–7. 92   Sheldon, Survey, p. 70. See also Lisa McClain, ‘Without Church, Cathedral or Shrine: The Search for Religious Space among Catholics in England, 1559–1625’, SCJ, 33 (2002): 381–99. Ronald Hutton identifies a similar process of domestication in relation to other proscribed Catholic rites: The English Reformation and the Evidence of Folklore’, P&P, 148 (1995): 89–116. 93  Christian, Local Religion. 94   See Craig Harline, ‘Miracles and this World: The Battle for Jesus Oak’, ARG, 93 (2002): 217–38. 95   On Loreto, see Bireley, Refashioning of Catholicism, pp. 110–11. On Altötting, see Soergel, Wondrous in his Saints; esp. ch. 6. For Mont-aigu and Halle, see n. 32 above and Pieter Geyl, The Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century, 1609–1648 (London, 1961), p. 29; Craig Harline; Eddy Put, A Bishop’s Tale: Mathias Hovius among his Flock in SeventeenthCentury Flanders (New Haven and London, 2000), ch. 6; Luc Duerloo and Marc Wingens, Scherpenheuvel: Het Jeruzalem van de Lage Landen (Leuven, 2002). See also Hsia, Social Discipline, pp. 154–7. On Holywell, see Chapter 6, below.

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supernatural power which could be carried in a missionary’s pack and swiftly conveyed out of sight.

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VI One type of ‘ecclesiastical magic’ which did lend itself well to an itinerant priesthood was ritual expulsion of demons. The most celebrated example of this form of thaumaturgy was the series of exorcisms conducted by a team of 12 seminary priests headed by the Jesuit William Weston in 1585–86, when several servants and adolescents were dispossessed at the houses of Sir George Peckham at Denham in Buckinghamshire and of Lord Vaux at Hackney.96 But many other priests were acclaimed for their skill in casting out devils, including John Cornelius, whose very approach was supposed to put them to flight. In Jacobean Lancashire, Edmund Arrowsmith freed many from their troublesome guests with the help of his brethren. The Benedictine Edward Barlow, executed in 1641, also had a talent for dealing with these unwelcome visitors and in 1708 it was said that the Dominican Robert Armstrong had made war against diabolical fiends at Hexham in Northumberland in the 1660s ‘so signally that his fame and sanctity are spoken of even to this day’.97 Demand for this rite grew against the backdrop of the Anglican campaign against John Darrell and other puritan exorcists and particularly after the canons of 1604 made it effectively illegal within the framework of the Church of England.98 Indeed, the numerous cases of successful exorcism recorded in the Annual Letters place much emphasis on the inability and unwillingness of the Protestant ministry to help people molested by unclean spirits. In 1614 it was said that the heretics ‘spare no pains to keep possessed 96   Modern historians owe their detailed knowledge of this notorious episode to Harsnet’s Declaration of egregious popish impostures. The text is edited and contextualised by F.W. Brownlow in Shakespeare, Harsnett and the Devils of Denham (London and Toronto, 1993). See also Weston, Autobiography, ed. Caraman, pp. 24–7. However, Gerard Kilroy has recently discovered a Catholic account in Bodl., MS Eng. th.b.1–2, which is discussed in his Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 25–35. 97   For Cornelius, see Challoner, Memoirs, p. 198 and Foley, iii. 446. For Arrowsmith and Barlow, see Challoner, Memoirs, pp. 364, 395. For Armstrong, R. Bracey (ed.), ‘English Dominican Papers’, in Dominicana, CRS 25 (London, 1925), pp. 109, 126. 98   See Thomas Freeman, ‘Demons, Deviance and Defiance: John Darrell and the Politics of Exorcism in Late Elizabethan England’, in Peter Lake and Michael Questier (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 34–63; Michael MacDonald (ed.), Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case (London, 1991), pp. xix–xxvi. For the canon of 1604, see Gerald Bray (ed.), The Anglican Canons 1529–1947, Church of England Record Society 6 (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 363–5.

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persons[,] whom they assert to be mere lunatics[,] from intercourse with our fathers’.99 The ambivalence of English Protestantism on this topic played directly into the hands of its Roman Catholic adversaries. Far from a hangover from the medieval past, this branch of miraculous healing must be seen as a crucial arm of the Tridentine missionary campaign to reconcile schismatics and evangelise Protestants.100 Elsewhere in Europe, exorcism was a major engine of the Counter Reformation. In Augsburg, where the Jesuit Peter Canisius dramatically expelled demons from several members of the wealthy Fugger household, it was a centrepiece of the struggle to reclaim the city from Lutheranism. In France, a succession of well-publicised possession cases were likewise transformed into ‘baroque spectacles’, powerful vehicles for vindicating the Real Presence and vociferously denouncing the Huguenots.101 In England too the clergy seem to have systematically exploited exorcism as a potent metaphor of and a practical mechanism for the expulsion of heresy. Sometimes the performance of this highly theatrical rite took on the appearance of a revivalist meeting: the demoniacs were placed in a chair where their strange contortions and writhings and the needles, pins and other foreign objects expelled from their bodies could clearly be seen by an assembled crowd of spectators. According to Protestant polemicists like Samuel Harsnet and Richard Sheldon, the aim of all these ‘lewd practices’ was ‘the gaining of soules for his Holines, and for Hell’. The exorcists ingeniously orchestrated the proceedings with the intention that the bystanders might ‘be persuaded

99

  Foley, vii, pt 2, 1071.   Cf. Bossy, English Catholic Community, pp. 266–7, who emphasises that it ‘lies not on the periphery, but somewhere near the centre of … the role of the Catholic priest in England’ until the mid-seventeenth century, yet sees it not as ‘a novel departure’ but as a persistence of a medieval tradition of clerical healing. For a different view, see now Francis Young, ‘Catholic Exorcism in Early Modern England: Polemic, Propaganda and Folklore’, RH, 29 (2009): 487–507; Francis Young, English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553– 1829 (Farnham, 2013), ch. 6. 101   Lyndal Roper, ‘Exorcism and the Theology of the Body’, in her Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London, 1994), pp. 172–7; D.P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1981), ch. 2 and pp. 75–7; Henri Weber, ‘L’exorcisme à la fin du XVIe siècle, instrument de la contre réforme et spectacle baroque’, Nouvelle revue du seizième siècle, 1 (1983): 79–101; Irene Backus, Le miracle de Laon (Paris, 1994); Sarah Ferber, Demonic Possesion and Exorcism in Early Modern France (London, 2004), esp. chs 2–3. See also István György Tóth, ‘The Missionary and the Devil: Ways of Conversion in Catholic Missions in Hungary’, in Eszter Andor and István György Tóth (eds), Frontiers of Faith: Religious Exchange and the Constitution of Religious Identities 1400–1750 (Budapest, 2001), pp. 79–87. 100

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of some point of poperie, or of the Priests power over the devills’.102 While we should be wary of accepting claims about clerical manipulation of these situations too literally, it is certainly true that they provided an excellent forum for illustrating the immense power of sacred words, symbols, relics, sacramentals and the Catholic ministry itself. An element of conscious or subconscious collusion between exorcists and demoniacs cannot be entirely dismissed. At Denham and Hackney, Campion’s girdle caused the possessing devils excruciating pain and they were no less allergic to a bone of his fellow martyr Alexander Briant. Clerical amices, stoles, gloves and stockings all played a key role in routing the demons, and in one of his trances Richard Mainy discerned ‘a glistering light’ emerging from the anointed thumbs and forefingers with which the missionaries handled the body of Christ in the mass.103 Sectarian conflict was often at the heart of such episodes. In many, the devil negatively demonstrated the veracity of the Catholic religion by aligning himself firmly with the falsehood of Protestantism. The possessed were used like ventriloquists’ puppets to reveal his approval of Queen Elizabeth and her ministers and to declare that the heretics were his friends and confederates. In 1620, the ‘Boy of Bilson’ in Staffordshire violently tore and bit his clothes to delineate the hideous torments now endured by Luther, Calvin and Foxe.104 In the course of their blasphemous ravings and during those lucid moments when the Father of Lies was compelled to tell the truth, the demoniacs also confirmed contested dogmas like transubstantiation, purgatory and the Immaculate Conception. In the midst of receiving the sacrament, Sarah Williams saw the Infant Jesus in the chalice and she later wept for her father and mother because they were not recusants, insisting that the souls of those who attended Protestant churches were damned.105 In all these instances, Satan was prevailed upon to act as a catechist. The anti-Catholic pamphleteer Richard Baddeley sought to turn this curious paradox to polemical advantage when he remarked: ‘If the devils be made … Messengers of divine truths, by the power of your Exorcismes, why doe you indeavour to expell them?’106

102

 Harsnet, Declaration, p. 150; Sheldon, Survey, p. 24. See also Gee, Foot out of the snare, ch. 6. 103  Harsnet, Declaration, pp. 55, 83–4, 163, 186, 249 (relics); pp. 64, 75, 81–2, 89 (priest’s garments); p. 272 (anointed thumb and finger). 104  Harsnet, Declaration, pp. 150–51; Richard Baddeley, The boy of Bilson (London, 1622), p. 27. 105  Harsnet, Declaration, pp. 157–8 (transubstantiation and purgatory), 162 (Immaculate Conception), 199 (Infant Jesus in chalice); 156 (attendance at Protestant churches). 106   Baddeley, Boy of Bilson, p. 46.

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Exorcism was a compelling demonstration of Catholicism’s ability to triumph over the forces of evil, and it is not surprising that it made many converts. One witness thought that no fewer than 500 persons had been reconciled to the Roman Church as a consequence of the dramatic events at Denham; others estimated 3–4,000.107 In 1598, priests in Lancashire exorcised several women in front of a large crowd drawn to this exercise by ‘the novelty thereof’, by which device, it was said, ‘they win daily many unto them’.108 A significant number of the 117 conversions listed in the reports of the Jesuit residence in Durham for the years 1638–39 seem to have been the consequence of miraculous ejections and their success in this area seems to have inspired the Fathers to extend their mission into the mountains of Westmoreland.109 The Jesuit Christopher Southworth supervised another wave of dispossessions in the county in 1612 and some 60 persons were apparently delivered from thraldom by Satan in the same region in 1626.110 By circulating news of these prodigious feats of dispossession in handwritten tracts and ‘books of miracles’, the Jesuits and their seminary colleagues sought to extend the impact of these dramatic episodes to a wider audience.111 In the process of preserving these tales of deliverance from the Archfiend, the clergy once again deftly refashioned them as lessons in the hazards of outward conformity and the joys of release from the prison of Calvinism. Thus exorcism had no effect on a lady who vacillated until she acted according to her conscience in 1639; when she lapsed once again her affliction returned. The same thing happened to a distressed student at Oxford who yielded to the temptation to attend a Protestant service not long after his formal reconciliation to Rome. In another example reported in the annual letter for 1655, a girl was so eager to be received into the Church that she prayed to God that she might be possessed because this would force her hostile Protestant father to bring in a priest.112 As with other cures, the missionaries stressed that permanent liberation from possession by demons was dependent upon a steadfast commitment to the Catholic religion.

107

 Harsnet, Declaration, p. 248.  HMC, Salisbury, VIII, pp. 213–14, 293. 109   Foley, iii. 122–3. 110   Southworth’s exploits are discussed in Thomas Potts, The wonderfull discoverie of witches in the countie of Lancaster (London, 1613); Foley, vii, pt 2, 1122. 111   Weston’s ‘book of miracles’ circulated in recusant households: Harsnet, Declaration, p. 1. Baddeley’s tract on the Boy of Bilson incorporated a manuscript tract prepared by ‘J.W.’, possibly the priest ‘Mr Wheeler’: Boy of Bilson, p. 54. 112   Foley, vii, pt. ii. 1143; Challoner, Memoirs, pp. 118–19; Foley, ii. 21–2. 108

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Nevertheless, exorcism was not a risk-free strategy. Possession cases were unstable and unpredictable and the antics of adolescent demoniacs had a disturbing tendency to invert and overturn the established age, gender and social hierarchy. In particular, such incidents held the dangerous potential to invest the victims of diabolical assault with a mystique and esteem which could rival and even eclipse the aura which accumulated around the clerical exorcists who treated them. They had the capacity to temporarily empower the laity.113 Ostentatious publicity about such thaumaturgic triumphs also had its drawbacks. Above all it might expose the Catholic faith to damaging allegations of sorcery and deceitful fabrication. This is probably why English casuistry manuals recommended circumspection and secrecy when performing the rite and it may also account for the clergy’s preference for disseminating accounts of these sensational events in the more select and less promiscuous medium of manuscript.114 These anxieties gave rise to some significant frictions and divisions within clerical ranks. ‘Divers auncient priests’ were greatly perturbed by the proceedings of the group led by Weston in 1585–56 and ‘did shake their heads’ at the introduction into England of such foreign ‘devises’. The ‘graver sort’ imprisoned in Wisbech said that ‘howsoever for a time wee might be admired, yet in the end wee would thereby marre all, and utterly discredit both ourselves and our calling’.115 Their fear that this theatrical rite might prove a double-edged sword was undoubtedly compounded by the confessions to fraud which Richard Bancroft extracted from the Denham demoniacs, the damaging revelations of the apostate Anthony Tyrrell (one of the officiating priests) and the scandal caused by their publication by Samuel Harsnet in 1603.116 The case of William Perry, the ‘boy of Bilson’, whose pretence was revealed by Thomas Morton, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, in 1620 must also have increased a sense of vulnerability to the age-old charge of miracle-mongering.117 For others, though, the potential advantages of these ‘baroque spectacles’ far outweighed their possible perils. In the midst of the Denham affair, William Thompson declared that ‘godlie credulitie doth much good … for the defacing our common enemies’ and Thomas Stamp averred that 113   See J.A. Sharpe, ‘Disruption in the Well-Ordered Household: Age, Authority and Possessed Young People’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steven Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 187–212 114   P.J. Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, CRS 67 (London, 1981), pp. 16, 89–90. 115  Harsnet, Declaration, p. 254. 116   The examinations of Sara and Friswood Williams, Anne Smith, Richard Mainy and Anthony Tyrrell are printed at the end of Harsnet’s Declaration. 117   Baddeley, Boy of Bilson, pp. 61–75.

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‘they were things of such importance, as would further the Catholique cause, more then all the bookes that had been written of late yeeres, about the controversies in Religion with the Protestants’.118 Exorcism, therefore, exposed a delicate faultline between missionaries who preferred to err on the side of humanist caution and those who were willing to take the risks linked with evangelical enthusiasm.

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VII These themes reappear when we turn to the subject of prophecies and visions. They too could be a useful instrument for proving that the Church of Rome was the institutional embodiment of Christian truth. We have already seen that it was often difficult to decide whether demoniacs were mouthpieces of the devil or envoys from heaven. Sometimes their utterances sounded very much like the doctrinal pronouncements of a preacher or the inspired speeches of a prophet or seer, and, like the latter, quite a few possessed adolescents experienced pentecostal raptures in which they saw sights that transcended the natural.119 Two Catholic maids exorcised by Edward Hands at the Gatehouse at Westminster around 1616, for instance, were said to have been corporeally possessed by the spirits of the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist, the Archangel Michael and two Tyburn martyrs. These strange symptoms were apparently infectious: shortly afterwards Hands himself was ‘cast into a deepe admirable ecstasie’ and found himself a vessel for the Blessed Trinity. While in his trances, his soul saw ‘very supernaturall and admirable joyes’ and he spoke in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Thirty years earlier, Richard Mainy had been vouchsafed an apparition of Our Lady accompanied by angels, together with a premonition of his own imminent translation to Paradise. William Weston was so impressed that he fell prostrate in Mainy’s presence, though he later became more ambivalent about the origin of the young gentleman’s pronouncements.120 Like inquisitors on the Continent, the missionary leaders were instinctively suspicious about the motives of

118

 Harsnet, Declaration, p. 251.   On the confusion between prophecy and possession, see H.C. Erik Midelfort, ‘The Devil and the German People: Reflections on the Popularity of Demon Possession in Sixteenth Century Germany’, in Stephen Ozment (ed.), Religion and Culture in the Renaissance and Reformation, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 11 (Kirksville, 1989), esp. pp. 112–18; Walsham, Providence, pp. 203–18. 120   Gee, Foot out of the snare, ed. Harmsen, pp. 131–2; Harsnet, Declaration, pp. 273–6. 119

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ordinary men and women who experienced mystical visions.121 However, the English clergy were not always so equivocal. Claims by the laity to have been privileged with divine revelations could represent a challenge to priestly authority, but they could also be very useful auxiliaries to an organisation denied access to the pulpit and the public press. In February, 1581, for instance, a young Welsh girl called Elizabeth Orton fell into a series of ecstasies during which she saw visions of the fire of purgatory and a celebration of the Eucharist by John the Baptist, attended by Christ, the Virgin Mary and the 11 apostles. These were described in detail to the inquisitive crowd which collected at her house and circulated scribally in a pamphlet probably written by the ‘vile runnagate papist’ by the name of ‘Sir Hughes’ whom she later accused of seducing her to participate in this extraordinary stratagem. Copies of this ‘true report’ were apparently sent to France, Rome and Ireland and its author was almost certainly a priest trained at Douai who had recently returned to his native county to pursue his vocation. In the course of her reveries, Elizabeth Orton exclaimed against the Protestant religion and vowed never to attend their ‘accursed Service again’. When examined afterwards about the mass she had seen in her miraculous vision, she agreed that it was in all points identical to ‘the Romaine use restored by the Counsaile of Trent, and preached by the Seminarie[s] in England’.122 The whole incident was thus finely tuned to reinforce both the doctrine of recusancy and the Tridentine liturgy. Protestant commentators drew predictable parallels between the teenager and the ill-fated ‘Holy Maid of Kent’, whose prophecies against the Henrician Reformation led to her exposure as a fraud and her execution for treason in 1534.123 121   See Mary Elizabeth Perry, ‘Beatas and the Inquisition in Early Modern Seville’, in Stephen Haliczer (ed.), Inquisition and Society in Early Modern Europe (London, 1987), pp. 147–68; Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton, 1990), ch. 5; Anne Jacobson Schutte, Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition, and Gender in the Republic of Venice, 1618–1750 (Baltimore and London, 2001); Stephen Haliczer, Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mystics in Golden Age Spain (New York, 2002); Believe not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago and London, 2007). See also Chapter 7, below, pp. 220–22. 122  Rich, True report, quotations at sigs D1r, D4r. For Hughes, see Godfrey Anstruther, The Seminary Priests: A Dictionary of the Secular Clergy of England and Wales 1558–1850, vol. i Elizabethan 1558–1603 (Ware, 1968), p. 178. I am currently working on an extended study of this episode. See also Chapter 7, below, p. 224. 123   See Alan Neame, The Holy Maid of Kent: The Life of Elizabeth Barton, 1506– 1534 (London, 1971); Diane Watt, Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 1997), ch. 3. The accounts of Catholic prophets like Elizabeth Barton and Elizabeth Orton operate within the conventions of a much older hagiographical tradition: see Ethan H. Shagan, ‘Print, Orality and Communications in the Maid of Kent Affair’, JEH, 52 (2001): pp. 21–33.

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Figure 5.3 The interior vision that led to the conversion of John Genings: John Genings, The life and death of Mr Edmund Geninges (St Omer, 1614), facing p. 94. By permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. Shelfmark C. 10.80(1). The notorious nun had several other Elizabethan imitators. In 1588, one Marie Taylor made revelations in support of the mass. Five years later a maid was imprisoned in Winchester after awaking from a 15-day coma, predicting that Elizabeth I would die before Michaelmas, and telling how she had seen Mary Tudor and Mary Queen of Scots in heaven and Henry VIII and the Earl of Leicester in hell.124 Once again it is best to sidestep the issue of how far these occasions were stage-managed by priests working with impressionable laypeople. What should rather be emphasised is the frequency with which visions served to 124

 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 154; The Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan (c.1550–1640), ed. Anthony G. Petti, CRS 52 (London, 1959), pp. 177, 180.

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incite Protestants to convert, confirm Catholics wavering in their faith or convince young women to enter a convent in the Low Countries. Many apparitions of Christ in the mass were mentioned in Jesuit memoranda and as early as 1574 Richard Bristow recounted how a recusant tempted to attend church by the threatenings of the churchwardens had seen ‘a foule blacke dogge’ at the moment the ‘naughty minister’ administered ‘to the wretched people that devilish communion’.125 According to the Society’s annual reports, a profligate soldier became a Roman Catholic in 1647 following a dream in which the Virgin Mary saved him from falling over a precipice and a heretical woman was received into the Church in 1635 after seeing the Madonna and Child during a dangerous illness.126 And John Genings attributed his decision to embrace the Church of Rome to an ‘extasy of mind’ in which he saw and heard his martyred brother and had a ‘heavenly conceipt’ of his eternal felicity (Figure 5.3).127 Once again further evidence can be gleaned by reading between the lines of Protestant polemic. John Gee devoted much of his New shreds of the old snare (1624) to exposing how the popish priesthood used ‘the engine of personated Apparitions’ to ensnare unwary Protestant girls into overseas nunneries and persuade rich young heiresses to part with their fortunes. Mary Wiltshire, for instance, became a Poor Clare after the Virgin or an angel appeared to her in a dream; the ghost of Mary Boucher’s godmother returned to instruct her in the doctrine of transubstantiation and advise that heretics had no hope of entering heaven; and St Lucy manifested herself to Frances Peard, promising that if she adopted a religious life in Brussels she would be spared the searing pains of purgatory after her death. Gee’s scurrilous claims that these illusions were produced by ‘paper lanthornes’, ‘transparent glasses’ or priests in white sheets should be treated as a colourful variation on the familiar theme of popish duplicity. However, buried beneath the polemical commonplaces around which his pamphlet was constructed lies yet more evidence of the success with which the missionary clergy cultivated the supernatural as an evangelical tool. After Francis Peard’s vision, two priests came to her saying: ‘You may see what it is to be a Catholicke and to be of our Church. Thus doth God worke his Miracles amongst us daily, and by such visions … commonly reveale himselfe unto us’.128 125   Foley, ii, 645–7, vii, pt 2, 1178; Weston, Autobiography, ed. Caraman, p. 36. Bristow, Motives, fo. 39a. 126   Foley, vii, pt 2, 1200; ii. 400. 127   Genings, The life and death of Mr Edmund Geninges, p. 100. 128   John Gee, New shreds of the old snare (London, 1624), quotation at pp. 1, 17, 13. Gee, Foot out of the snare, ed. Harmsen, p. 156. Gee’s allegations were part of a wellestablished Protestant tradition: see, for instance, the broadsheet concerning a Jesuit who

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The recurrent attempts by the ecclesiastical and civic authorities to unmask the recipients of visions as charlatans, witches or crazed fanatics may attest indirectly to the credit they won among the common people. The case of Edward Hands, for instance, was taken so seriously that he was examined by a panel of five bishops, the dean of Westminster and a doctor of laws.129 Even so, such episodes always held the potential to engender fresh charges of Machiavellian deception. For these and other reasons prophecies were a source of embarrassment to some sections of the Counter-Reformation ministry. This is particularly apparent in the case of Thomas Newton, a Lincolnshire gentleman who claimed in 1612 that the Virgin Mary had visited him in his cell in Stamford gaol and told him not to take the Oath of Allegiance. Dressed in a shining white robe, bearing a crown on her head and surrounded by resplendent light, the apparition also affirmed the validity of invoking the saints and the Bodily Assumption of the Mother of Christ. Newton’s heavenly revelation led to the conversion of his Protestant companion and bedfellow Edward Sutton and brought about a change of heart in a high-born lady who was so eager to embrace the Catholic faith that she undertook a long journey on foot to be reconciled by a priest.130 Protestant polemicists were quick to alight upon it as another blatant popish imposture: Richard Sheldon wrote an entire treatise against this Marian phantom, though it remained unpublished because the government considered Newton ‘fitter for Bedlam’.131 He languished in prison for the rest of the decade and was still being censored by the High Commission in January 1621 for feigning the vision.132 These claims were echoed by the Benedictine monk Roger Widdrington in a tract championing the oath, the publication of which was almost certainly sponsored by the Jacobean government. In it he went to great lengths to demonstrate that the apparition was either ‘the vehement imagination of a troubled braine’ or ‘a meere illusion of Satan’.133 Miracles had once more become a focus for the fractious internal politics of the post-Reformation English Catholic priesthood. dressed as a devil in 1569 in an effort to frighten an Augsburg maiden into abandoning her faith: Walter L. Strauss, The German Single-leaf Woodcut 1550–1600, vol. 3 (New York, 1975), p. 1335. 129   Gee, Foot out of the snare, ed. Harmsen, p. 181. 130   Foley, vii, pt 2, 1056. A manuscript account of the vision is printed in Roger Widdrington [Thomas Preston], A theologicall disputation concerning the oath of allegiance, dedicated to the Most Holy Father Pope Paul the Fifth ([London], 1613), pp. 257–81. See also Gee, Foot out of the snare, ed. Harmsen, p. 133 and see pp. 182–3. 131   Sheldon, Survey, p. 175. 132   See CSPD 1611–18, p. 11 and CSPD 1619–23, p. 229; APC 1613–14, p. 388; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tanner MS 290, fo. 49r. 133   Widdrington, Theologicall disputation, p. 276.

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VIII Finally, we must consider the ways in which the English Counter Reformation was accompanied by the emergence, or rather re-emergence, of a cult of living saints. Medieval Christianity had always found space for holy persons bearing Weberian charisma, individuals whose intense devotion, extreme asceticism and skill in miraculous healing made them objects of veneration by their neighbours and peers.134 Emblematic of popular involvement in the making of the sacred, this pattern of piety was not extinguished by the onset of Protestantism. Sometimes the spotlight fell on prodigious children and adolescents. Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign, a young maid with ‘a flaming or glittering apron’ which gave off little flashes of lightning was apparently ‘adored’ in the city of London; after her removal to a convent abroad, many continued to resort to her for benediction.135 A few years later, the young seventh son of a committed Catholic couple became famous for curing the deaf, blind and lame by placing his hands upon them and saying a prayer.136 The pious Northumberland widow Mrs Dorothy Lawson was another layperson who came to be honoured by her contemporaries as a figure of unique virtue and grace. Her dedication to attending upon mothers in labour led many to regard her presence as indispensable for a safe delivery. She was also said to have prophesied the rise of Arminianism and was once seen by her husband in two places at once. At her deathbed ‘melodious musick’ was heard and three years later her rosary allegedly cured a woman of a terrible fever. Refracted through the hagiographical life composed by her confessor, here is further evidence of the continuing vitality of regional devotions in a Counter-Reformation world dominated by a drive towards universalisation. Like many obscure Italian and Spanish beatas, Dorothy Lawson was never elevated to the ranks of the officially canonised.137 However, it was the clergy rather than laity who most frequently acquired an aura of saintliness. Brother Thomas Oglethorpe of Yorkshire 134

  See Aviad M. Kleinberg, Prophets in their own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago, 1992). 135   Baddeley, Boy of Bilson, p. 8; John Gee, Hold fast (London, 1624), p. 44. 136   George Roberts (ed.), The Diary of Walter Yonge … from 1604 to 1628, CS, 1st ser., 41 (1848), p. 13; Pricket, Jesuits miracles, sig. B4v; Sheldon, Survey, p. 181. 137   William Palmes, The Life of Mrs Dorothy Lawson, of St Anthony’s, near Newcastleupon-Tyne, ed. G. Bouchier Richardson (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1853 edn), p. 40; (London, 1855 edn), ch. 9. Curiously the first edition does not include several of these ‘testimonies above ordinary of her sanctity’. For beatas, see the reference in n. 121 and Gabriella Zarri, ‘Living Saints: A Typology of Female Sanctity in the Early Sixteenth Century’, in Daniel Bornstein and R. Rusconi (eds), Women and Religious in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1996), pp. 219–303.

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died ‘in the odour of sanctity’ only 16 months after being admitted a novice of the Society of Jesus in 1616. In the course of his godly life many had allegedly obtained favours by his intercession and a few days before his death he had been ‘rapt out of his senses’ by an apparition of the Virgin Mary flanked by the figures of Francis Xavier and Ignatius Loyola. Grieving admirers fought over his beads, clothes, writings and pens, believing that these items had absorbed some of his holiness.138 The Jesuit Stephen Rowsham enjoyed a reputation as a saint even before he received the crown of martyrdom in 1587. He saw many heavenly sights during a lifetime of ‘singular perfection’ and was often visited in prison by God the Father, Christ, Mary and the saints, who left behind them ‘odiferous smells’.139 In John Cornelius, executed seven years later, humility, austerity and charity were conjoined with a proclivity for visions and awesome powers as an exorcist.140 The memory of the old man who recalled how Robert Southwell’s head and face were radiant with light when he preached was probably coloured by hindsight,141 but it is clear that many missionaries were revered as sacred figures by the populace. In a case recounted by Gee, a kinswoman of Richard Conway was freed from vexation by the devil by anointing herself with oil into which a priest who had prayed for her had mingled his tears.142 Such examples are reminiscent of the reception of the Jesuits in the Kingdom of Naples, where ‘pious credulity’ led people to crowd around them during disasters in the hope of protection and cut off pieces of their habits to preserve as de facto sacramentals.143 Members of the Society were apparently no less revered in the British Isles, though our evidence here is filtered through the rose-coloured spectacles of their own internal correspondence. When John Hay arrived in the north of Scotland in the late 1570s, people apparently flocked to see and hear him. ‘Marvellous and ‘incredible reports’ were circulated about him: ‘I had seen and copied the dogmas of the Christian faith written with the finger of God upon the tables of stone given to Moses; others said, I had been carried down into hell; others, that I was clothed only in sackcloth, and gifted with such a wonderful and miraculous power of healing that there was no sickness or disease, how severe and dangerous soever, which I could not remove perfect ease’. In the Highlands and Islands, other religious orders were also held in awe: 138

  Foley, iii. 168–73; vi. 265–6.   Foley, iv. 340; ‘An Ancient Editor’s Notebook’, in Morris, iii. 41–2. 140   Foley, iii. 445–50. 141   Foley, vii, pt 2, 1136. 142   Gee, Foot out of the snare, ed. Harmsen, p. 127. 143   Gentilcore, ‘“Adapt Yourselves to the People’s Capabilities”’, 288–9. For similar examples from other contexts, see Chatellier, Religion of the Poor, pp. 102–3, 106–7. 139

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the Irish Lazarist Dermot Duggan was alleged welcomed as ‘an angel from Heaven’.144 The spontaneous cults that clustered around such missionaries tested the boundary between proper respect for the clergy as a sacred caste of intermediaries and a ‘superstitious’ veneration of them which made Roman Catholicism ripe for merciless Protestant mockery. England and Scotland had nothing to compete with the Ingolstadt visionary Jakob Rem, who levitated in front of an icon of Our Lady in 1604 or the ‘flying saint’ Giuseppe da Copertino, who lived a life of severe mortification and experienced multiple ecstasies.145 But it did have its fair share of thaumaturgic healers in the mould of the Italian Capuchin Marco d’Aviano, whose missionary tours of southern Germany in 1680 were marked by many dramatic medical miracles.146 In the 1620s one Jesuit father was said to be dispensing blessings and curing diseases in the place of his namesake, St Lawrence, after being transported in his sleep to a monastery in Spain.147 During the Interregnum an Irish priest called James Fienachty or Finnerty practised dispossession in the English capital by ‘stroaking’, and in the years preceding the appearance of the celebrated Protestant thaumaturge Valentine Greatrakes, several members of the Society of Jesus seem to have been engaged in magical healing, including a certain Father James who was commonly renowned as ‘a good man and a worker of wonders’.148 In the summer of 1663, another Irish clergyman called Blake wrought miraculous cures in London and Westminster for the space of five weeks, expelling evil spirits and restoring the sick and physically handicapped by laying his hands upon their heads, making the 144   William Forbes-Leith (ed.), Narratives of Scottish Catholics under Mary Stuart and James VI. Now First Printed from the Original Manuscripts in the Secret Archives of the Vatican and Other Collections (Edinburgh, 1885), p. 147; Peter F. Anson, Underground Catholicism in Scotland 1622–1878 (Montrose, 1970), p. 57. 145   On Rem, see Johnson, ‘Blood, Tears and Xavier-Water’, p. 200; on Guiseppe da Copertino, Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch, pp. 165–8, 176. 146   See Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles, pp. 263–70, and the broadsheet picture Vera effigies A.R.P. Marci de Aviano (1680) [BL shelfmark 1750. c.2]. The Spanish Jesuit Miguel de Ochoa was reputed to have similar gifts. See John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA, 1993), p. 268. 147   Gee, Hold fast, pp. 42–3. 148  Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine (eds), Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry 1535–1860 (London, 1963), p. 151; Anselm Faulkner, ‘Father O’Finaghty’s Miracles’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 5th ser. 104 (1965): 349–62; John Heydon, Theomagia, or the temple of wisdome (London, 1664), p. 224. See also BL, Sloane MS 1926, fo. 4r (a tract against Valentine Greatrakes), for a reference to a ‘Master Summer’. On Greatrakes, see Eamon Duffy, ‘Valentine Greatrakes, the Irish Stroker: Miracle, Science and Orthodoxy in Restoration England’, in Keith Robbins (ed.), Religion and Humanism, SCH 17 (Oxford, 1981), pp. 251–73; Peter Elmer, The Miraculous Conformist: Valentine Greatrakes, the Body Politic, and the Politics of Healing in Restoration Britain (Oxford, 2012).

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sign of the cross and reciting some sentences in Latin. Many of these cures were effected at public ceremonies at the Queen’s Chapel at St James, to which patients appear to have been admitted by ticket. Once again the clergy saw these occasions as opportunities to make fresh converts to the faith, widely publicising cases like the blind Protestant woman who regained her sight and found that her spiritual eyes had opened at the same time. After the sufferings of James Barrow from Southwark were eased with the aid of holy water, candles and a ribbon tied around his neck, friars flocked around his Protestant father and ‘bade me make the Boy a Catholick’. Banished from the city, Blake moved on to the Mitre Inn in Oxford and from thence to Chester, where thousands came to see him eject the devil from a female demoniac accompanied by a flash of fire and a strong smell of brimstone.149 But it was not always easy for the Jesuits and their secular colleagues to contain the fervour and emotion unleashed by such spectacles within the parameters of Catholic orthodoxy, or to counteract the impulse of the populace to idolise such figures as magicians and shamans. Some such healers overstepped the line with regard to the thaumaturgic techniques they employed and there was a dangerous tendency for the laity to assume that their powers were somehow transferable. In the 1660s, for instance, John Digby, son of the Catholic royalist Sir Kenelm, fell under the spell of Father Finnerty before travelling to France to work miracles on his own behalf ‘by virtue of some sanctity’ he had derived from the priest. When his skills went into decline, he set out for Ireland ‘to fetch a new stock of the gift’.150 Nevertheless, all these examples attest eloquently to a developing cult of the priest as a conduit and funnel of sacramental grace. The relative scarcity of the Catholic clergy surely enhanced their charisma, even at the same time as it encouraged the laity to break the clerical monopoly on the use of blessed objects and employ them in a quasi-sacerdotal fashion. The missionary condition of the Church of Rome in England was not conducive to the assertion of priestly control over the sacred envisaged by the delegates at the Council of Trent. Persecution fostered a strong sense of popular Catholic identity centred on the martyrs and their miracles and relics but it also facilitated the development of devotion in directions which the Counter-Reformation leaders may have regretted and lamented. It created conditions in which the tension between ecclesiastical direction and lay independence was unusually acute. As we have seen, it also helped 149   A.S., Miracles not ceas’d (London, 1663), citation at p. 22; John Barrow, The Lord’s arm stretched out in an answer of prayer (London, 1664), p. 10; Andrew Clark (ed.), The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Antiquary of Oxford, 1632–1695, vol. i 1632–1663, Oxford Historical Society 19 (1891), p. 486; CSPD 1663–4, p. 243. 150   Gillespie, Devoted People, p. 68.

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to catalyse intra-clerical quarrels, to sow the seeds of conflict between those who shied away from sensational supernaturalism for fear of scandal and those who believed that in the battle to reverse the Reformation in England the clergy could not afford to neglect anything which testified to the ongoing ability of the Catholic Church to work astonishing wonders.151 The internal debate about the uses of miraculous power should not be mapped too neatly onto the factions that emerged in the years preceding the Archpriest controversy, but it may fruitfully be paralleled with the disputes which crystallised around the use of equivocation and mental reservation, and indeed around conformity and dissimulation.152 It too revolved around the problem of balancing prudence with proselytising zeal and steering a course between high risk strategies which might stain the integrity of the Catholic religion and a policy of guarded discretion which could doom it to slow and painful extinction.

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IX The material discussed in this chapter underscores the importance of fully integrating post-Reformation English Catholic history into its wider international framework. Although they lacked the episcopal muscle and state support enjoyed by their European counterparts, the English seminary priests and especially the Jesuits creatively adapted and in some cases even anticipated the tactics that would characterise the Catholic revival on the Continent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where itinerant rural missions conducted by the regular orders played a crucial part in the renewal of parochial life. They too found the supernatural an effective vehicle for confessional apologetic and used saints, relics, sacramentals and exorcisms to rekindle enthusiasm for the renascent Church of Rome. Arguably, the divine sanction provided by miracles was especially important to a religion which found itself on the defensive. Outlawed, persecuted and struggling to avoid annihilation, English Catholicism had a particular need to prove its continuing immanence. In a context in which 151

  For the similar tensions between sober reform and charismatic revival in early modern France, see Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism, esp. 144, 149. Intraconfessional Catholic conflicts regarding supernatural intervention and their evangelical uses are further illuminated in Young, English Catholics and the Supernatural, which highlights the existence of various interwoven strands of intellectual scepticism within the Church of Rome in this period. 152   See Johann P. Sommerville, ‘The “New Art of Lying”: Equivocation, Mental Reservation, and Casuistry’, in Edmund Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge and Paris, 1988), pp. 159–84; and ‘Yielding to the Time’, Chapter 2, above.

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Protestantism had struck a sustained blow against traditional assumptions and practices, there was a strong incentive to re-emphasise the Church’s power to work wonders through the agency of holy persons, sacred rituals and consecrated objects. By extension, there is a distinct sense in which the English Catholic community was predisposed to see astonishing signs and wonders within its midst. With Bellarmine, the priesthood believed that miracles were an intrinsic feature of every ‘extraordinary mission’. Comparing themselves with the earliest Christians, they expected God to demonstrate his support for their cause in the same way that he had convinced the sceptical Gentiles and Jews and succoured the faith of the oppressed apostolic congregations addressed in St Paul’s epistles. Just as miracles had helped plant the primitive Church and underpinned Augustine’s proselytising initiatives in their own country, so too would they assist in the reclamation of England from heresy. These insights have significant implications for our understanding of the nature and aims of the movement to train priests and send them back to work in a Protestant realm. They emphasise that those involved in this enterprise saw their task as one of ‘conversion’ rather than simply ‘reconciliation’. To this extent, Christopher Haigh may be mistaken in arguing that the English Counter Reformation was ‘less a spiritual crusade’ than ‘a series of adjustments’ to the condition of proscription and that its personnel are better characterised as emissaries of a pastoral organisation than of an evangelical operation.153 As we have seen, schismatics were not the sole focus of their efforts to graft meaning onto the miraculous: clerical attempts to utilise and publicise Rome’s vast panoply of supernatural resources were directed as much at heretics as they were at church papists. In short, post-Reformation English Catholicism did regard itself as a missionary religion. William Allen intended the seminary priests to follow after the ‘example of the Apostles in their days’154 and the English Jesuits modelled themselves on their intrepid colleagues in the Americas and Indies. Their dynamic, supple and imaginative evangelism created as well as consolidated support for the Roman Catholic Church. It may be added that the fact of ecclesiastical disestablishment made the modus operandi of the Society of Jesus uniquely well suited to its endeavours in England.

153

  Christopher Haigh, ‘The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation’, in Christopher Haigh (ed.), The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 178, 194–5, 208. This view has been challenged by Michael Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England 1580–1625 (Cambridge, 1996), ch. 7, esp. pp. 178–86. John O’Malley reminds us that they saw both conditions as springing from spiritual apathy and moral inertia: First Jesuits, p. 16. 154   Robert Parsons, ‘Of the Life and Martyrdom of Father Edmund Campion’, Letters and Notices, lviii (1877): 219–42, 308–39, at 325.

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In turn these observations suggest that the historical paradigm which pits continuity against conversion and survivalism against seminarism rather distorts our comprehension of the English situation. Although they occupy opposing positions in this now rather stagnant historiographical debate, for both John Bossy and Christopher Haigh the brand of Catholicism introduced by the seminary-trained missionaries into late sixteenth-century England embodied a profound break with the medieval past. Both imply that an immense gulf existed between the Catholicism of illiterate peasants and the Counter-Reformation spirituality priests brought with them from the Continent – between a faith rooted in rote-learned prayers, pilgrimages, relics and sacramentals and an austere reformed piety which revolved around reading devotional texts, receiving the mass and regular searching scrutiny of conscience.155 However, the presumed polarity of pre- and post-Reformation Catholicism breaks down in the face of evidence that the Tridentine reformers endorsed and strengthened many characteristic traits of ‘traditional religion’ and readily harnessed pre-existing elements of popular culture in the war against Protestantism. The religiosity of the recusant community which emerged in the late 1570s may not have been as sharply distinct from the residual popery practised by many late Tudor Englishmen and women as we have been led to believe. Where the English mission succeeded in engendering a stalwart body of nonconformists, it perhaps did so not so much by cutting itself off from the familiar beliefs and observances of the ‘Old Religion’ as by embracing and building upon them. The challenges of working in an environment where Protestantism enjoyed institutional control may have stimulated clerical willingness to accommodate and reanimate older patterns of piety that were under attack. Throughout the Elizabethan period, the clergy were dealing with a populace which had been baptised as Catholics. They could capitalise on nostalgia for the ritual protection which had been supplied by the pre-Reformation Church and use survivalist feeling as a springboard in the quest to restore it to dominance. By the 1620s, however, they were tackling a generation which had grown up as Protestants. Showing that the Lord continuously endorsed its doctrine by miracles and endowed its representatives with numinous power was crucial to proving that Catholicism was the single true religion. Startling signs and wonders must have added to the allure of a religion that already enjoyed the appeal of a forbidden fruit and an exotic foreign culture. And certainly miracles do seem to have played a key role in the growth of recusancy in the early 155

  Bossy, English Catholic Community; p. 282; John Bossy, ‘The English Catholic Community 1603–1625’, in Alan G.R. Smith (ed.), The Reign of James VI and I (Basingstoke, 1973), p. 104; Haigh, ‘Continuity’, esp. pp. 200, 207.

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seventeenth century, particularly in London. In this regard, the vehemence of Protestant attacks on the Catholic culture of the supernatural cannot pass without notice. The very vigour and frequency with which reformed writers repeated the mantra that miracles had ceased embodies a candid admission that they faced an uphill struggle to combat these seductive ‘new popish wonders’. The evidence explored in this chapter may also raise questions about the extent to which the early Stuart priesthood as a whole had resigned itself to becoming a resident chaplaincy to the recusant nobility and gentry. The separation of the secular and Jesuit missions, which culminated in the appointment of the bishop of Chalcedon and the elevation of England into a full province of the Society of Jesus in 1623, reflected a parting of ways between two different conceptions of the purpose and objectives of the enterprise launched half a century earlier. While the Appellants may have accepted Catholicism’s status as a minority sect as a permanent state of affairs and sought to negotiate some form of toleration with the English government, there is reason to think that the Jesuits never completely relinquished their lingering hope that the country might once again return to obedience to Rome. After all, as events in the Upper Palatinate and Bohemia revealed, decades of Protestantism were no obstacle to the successful re-Catholicisation of these regions after 1621.156 In the context of the Thirty Years War on the Continent, the possibility of military conquest and an aggressive state-led Counter Reformation could not be ruled out. Ultimately, it remains difficult to plumb the depths of the piety to which the Catholic miracles we have examined gave rise – to assess how far respect for the Church of Rome’s thaumaturgic capacities was matched by formal understanding of its doctrinal tenets, to decide whether the thirst for relics and sacramentals disguises a commitment which was only skin-deep and to penetrate beneath the surface of the cults of holy personality surrounding martyrs and priests.157 What we can say with confidence is that they contributed significantly to the development of a Catholic confessional identity in post-Reformation England – even if this identity may have lacked the theological knowledge and self-consciousness which the clergy tried so hard to inculcate in the laity. The shortage of priests in this embattled community made the Counter-Reformation effort to restrain superstition and profanity an even more formidable task than it was in other parts of Europe.

156

  Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles; Louthan, Converting Bohemia.   Cf. Gentilcore, ‘Adapt Yourselves to the People’s Capabilities’, pp. 293–6; Gillespie, Devoted People, esp. conclusion. 157

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In these processes, the written and spoken word was critical. It was perhaps inevitable that most laypeople would experience the wonders wrought on behalf of the Church of Rome vicariously, through the media of speech and of printed and manuscript tracts – and here I have proceeded from the assumption that miracles cannot easily be unravelled from the texts by which they were transmitted and in which they are now embedded. It was largely by this means that the clergy tailored miracle stories to coincide with Tridentine priorities and to deflect the taunts of their Protestant enemies. Filtered through the sieve of their missionary training, such narratives illuminate the manner in which they tried to teach their flocks correct conduct in the face of persecution and to instil in them an awareness of their ideological differences with their heretical neighbours. In this sense at least they may indeed be labelled ‘Ignatian fables’. But, as we have seen, tales of the martyrs and of cures worked by sacred objects also bear subtle traces of shaping by the laity. They reveal interesting wrinkles on the surface of the orthodox piety which the priests sought to project through saints’ lives and moral exempla. They may be seen as both a symptom and a cause of the tensions and intersections between centre and periphery, clergy and laity, popular and elite which lay at the core of post-Reformation English Catholicism and of the Counter Reformation as a whole. Scribally copied and verbally rehearsed by zealous laypeople, such accounts defiantly eluded clerical attempts to dictate their interpretation and meaning. Like relics and sacramentals, they too sometimes became conduits and touchstones of the holy.158 Preserved as monuments of the martyrs and precious remnants of an heroic age of persecution, as time passed there was a tendency to regard these memorials as miraculous themselves.

158   On the theme of texts as relics, see Marotti, ‘Southwell’s Remains’; Kilroy, Edmund Campion, pp. 4, 36, 61 and ch. 3 passim.

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Chapter 6

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Holywell and the Welsh Catholic Revival* Today the declining industrial and market town of Holywell in Flintshire is still the destination of thousands of visitors and pilgrims. Annually on 22 June Roman Catholics from across the country assemble to celebrate the summer feast of St Winefride or Gwenfrewi, a seventh-century virgin decapitated by Caradoc, a local prince enraged by her pious resistance to his lustful advances, but miraculously restored to life by her uncle St Beuno, who reunited her severed head with her body. According to the legend, a fountain sprang up where it initially fell. Each year hundreds of people bathe in the waters of this ancient holy well in the hope that they may be cured of chronic and terminal illnesses: its reputation for thaumaturgic healing has earned it the epithet ‘the Lourdes of Wales’. Undoubtedly the pattern of devotional practice and ritual now associated with this site is in large part a consequence of its reinvention in the nineteenth century. Against the backdrop of Victorian romanticism and Catholic emancipation, Holywell was remodelled in the image of emerging shrines on the Continent. A papal indulgence was granted, a hospice erected, a convent of nuns established to care for the sick, and plans drawn up for a substantial basilica. Pilgrims came in ever increasing numbers: in 1895 alone 30,000 votive candles were lit at the well and the local railway company collected some 96,000 tickets at the station in the three years between 1894 and 1896.1 Unlike Lourdes, however, Holywell has a continuous documented history as a place of pilgrimage since the Middle Ages. The tradition of spiritual journeying to this sacred spring can be dated from written records to the twelfth century, the period from which the first extant life of the   An earlier version of this chapter was published under the title of ‘Holywell: Contesting Sacred Space in Post-Reformation Wales’, in Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (eds), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 209–36. 1   Judith F. Champ, ‘Bishop Milner, Holywell, and the Cure Tradition’, in W.J. Sheils (ed.), The Church and Healing, SCH 19 (Oxford, 1982), esp. pp. 162–4; T.W. Pritchard, St Winefride, her Holy Well and the Jesuit Mission c.650–1930 (Wrexham, 2009), chs 8–11. On Lourdes, see Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (Harmondsworth, 1999). *

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saint by Robert, abbot of Shrewsbury, survives, but it probably stretched even further back into the pre-Conquest era. Remarkably the shrine weathered the storm of the Protestant Reformation, remaining a focus for penitential fervour, festive sociability and medical expectation long after the theological and liturgical upheavals of the 1530s, 40s and 50s. Almost uniquely, it survived a process in which Catholics were literally displaced from the sacred spaces in which they had worshipped and prayed for many centuries and deprived of cathedrals, churches and shrines traditionally revered as receptacles and touchstones of the holy. This paper traces the survival and transformation of Holywell against the backdrop and in the aftermath of these religious ruptures. It treats the site not as curious relic or fossil of the medieval past, but rather as an emblem of the complex cultural changes which were a by-product of the advent of Protestantism, as a symbol of an ongoing struggle to control points of access to supernatural power, to redefine the boundaries between the sacred and the profane and to harness and refashion British history and heritage. It also proceeds from the assumption that Holywell cannot be detached from the wider sacralised landscape of which it was an integral part – from the dense network of wells, stones and trees venerated before Christianity reached these islands but were gradually assimilated by it.2 A careful reassessment of the evidence may cast new light on the nature and impact of the Counter Reformation in Wales and offer fresh insight into the processes by which early modern Britain adapted to the dramatic ideological changes of the sixteenth century and eventually became a Protestant nation. I For the purposes of this discussion, it is not necessary to enter into the longrunning debate about whether or not St Winefride was a post-Conquest fabrication – a saint created by Latin writers intent upon investing the religious innovations of the eleventh and twelfth centuries with the sanction of the past. Suffice it to say that her earliest vitae are a function of the 2

  See Francis Jones, The Holy Wells of Wales (Cardiff, 1992); and my The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2011). For other treatments of Holywell, see David Thomas, ‘St Winifred’s Well and Chapel, Holywell’, Journal of the Historical Society of the Church in Wales, 8 (1958): 15–31; Glanmor Williams, ‘St Winifred’s Well: Ffynnon Wenfrewi’, Flintshire Historical Society Publications, 36 (2003): 32–51; and Robert E. Scully, ‘St Winefride’s Well: The Significance and Survival of a Welsh Catholic Shrine from the Early Middle Ages to the Present Day’, in Margaret Cormack (ed.), Saints and their Cults in the Atlantic World (Columbia, South Carolina, 2007), pp. 202–28.

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new impulse towards hagiographical production which accompanied the reorganisation of the Welsh Church during this period and the eclipse of native monasticism by a new wave of foreign foundations. Appropriated and reshaped by the Anglo-Norman invaders of Wales, the cult of St Winefride successfully made the transition from regional to national and international status in the course of the later Middle Ages. Her relics were translated from their resting place in Gwytherin to the Benedictine abbey of St Peter and Paul in Shrewsbury in 1138, and by 1398 her major festival on 3 November was extended to the entire province of Canterbury. Liturgies in her honour were incorporated in official breviaries; a confraternity in her name was established at Shrewbury towards the end of the fifteenth century; copies of her life proliferated in Latin and English; and Welsh bards like Tudur Aled composed many cwydd or poems in praise of Gwenfrewi.3 Her well, meanwhile, remained a dependency of the nearby Cistercian house at Basingwerk, to which Pope Martin V granted the right to sell indulgences in 1427.4 This marked the beginning of the apotheosis of the shrine, which thereafter enjoyed the patronage of nobility and royalty. In 1439 Isabella, Countess of Warwick, bequeathed a gown of russet velvet to adorn the image of the saint on feast days and it was endowed with a chaplain by a succession of fifteenth-century kings, several of whom 3   For a recent attempt to unravel these issues, see Fiona Winward, ‘The Lives of St Wenefred’, Analecta Bollandiana, 117 (1999): 89–132. See also Robert Bartlett, ‘Rewriting Saints’ Lives: The Case of Gerald of Wales’, Speculum, 58 (1983): 598–613; Julia M.H. Smith, ‘Oral and Written: Saints, Miracles and Relics in Brittany, c.850–1250’, Speculum, 65 (1990): 309–43, esp. 341; and more generally R.R. Davies, Conquest, Coexistence and Change: Wales 1063–1415 (Oxford, 1987), ch. 7. For the early vitae and associated documents concerning the history of the shrine, see C. De Smedt (ed.), ‘De Sancta Wenefreda’, Acta Sanctorum, Nov. I (Paris, 1887), pp. 691–759. Late medieval manuscript copies of her life include Bodleian Library, MS Laud. Misc. 114, fos 140r–(160) (s. xii); BL, Cotton MS Claudius A.V, fos 136r–145v (s. xiv); BL, Lansdowne MS 436, fos 107r–109r (s. xiv); BL, Add. MS 35, 298 [‘Legenda Sanctorum in Englysshe’], fo. 53r (s. xv). She was also incorporated in John Mirk’s Festial of c.1401: A Collection of Homilies, ed. Theodore Erbe, EETS, extra ser. 96 (London, 1905), pp. 177–82; repr. in Karen A. Winstead (ed. and trans.), Chaste Passions: Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends (Ithaca and London, 2000), pp. 82–5. Winstead discusses the broader genre of virgin martyr tales in Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca and London, 1997). Additional material on the cult of St Winefride can be found in S. Baring-Gould and John Fisher, The Lives of the British Saints, 4 vols (London, 1907–13), iv. 185–96. For the confraternity, see Calendar of Patent Rolls, Henry VII (London, 1914), p. 158. For Welsh poetry on the saint, see E.R. Henken, Traditions of the Welsh Saints (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 141–51 and Glanmor Williams, ‘Poets and Pilgrims in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Wales’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmorodorion (1991): 69–98. Tudur Aled’s patron was the last abbot of Basingwerk, Nicholas Pennant. 4   Calendar of Papal Registers: Papal Letters, vol. vii 1417–31, ed. J.A. Twemlow (London, 1906), p. 504.

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graced it with their presence. Henry V undertook the 50-mile journey from Shrewsbury to Holywell on foot in 1416, possibly to give thanks for the victories at Harfleur and Agincourt, and Edward IV also made a personal pilgrimage to the shrine sometime after 1461. In the late 1490s, the wellhouse was rebuilt in the fashionable Perpendicular style, reputedly through the beneficence of Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII and wife of the earl of Derby, for whom William Caxton had prepared the first printed edition of St Winefride’s life in 1485. Embellished with bosses in the vaulting bearing the arms of the Tudors as well as those of Catherine of Aragon, it appears that by the early sixteenth century the shrine had become nothing less than a dynastic icon (Figures 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3).5

Figure 6.1 Exterior of the chapel over St Winefride’s Well. © Crown copyright: Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. 5   See Diana Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England (London and New York, 2000), p. 198; D.J. Hall, English Mediaeval Pilgrimage (London, 1965), pp. 32–4 (and see ch. 2 passim). Henry V’s visit was recorded in The Chronicle of Adam Usk 1377–1421, ed. C. Given-Wilson (Oxford, 1997), p. 263. For Caxton’s printed text of Robert of Shrewsbury’s vita, see The lyf of the holy [and] blesid vyrgyn Saynt Wenefryde (Westminster, 1485), discussed in M.J.C. Lowry, ‘Caxton, St Winifred and the Lady Margaret Beaufort’, The Library, 6th ser. 2 (1983): 101–17. Pritchard, St Winefride, pp. 78–80 points out that there is no explicit contemporary evidence that Beaufort or the Stanleys made a financial contribution to the building.

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Incorporated in the Bridgettine monk Richard Whitford’s Martiloge of 1526–27,6 Holywell’s popularity as a site of pilgrimage on the eve of the Reformation epitomised the vitality and resilience of traditional piety at all levels of Welsh society and its subtle transformation against the backdrop of new trends in spirituality. But its wonder-working waters also linked it with a wider penumbra of sanctified springs whose unlicensed cults were looked upon by the Church with greater ambivalence, sites which remind us of the more spontaneous and unruly features of what William Christian has called ‘local religion’.7

Figure 6.2 Bathing pool of St Winefride’s Well. © Crown copyright: Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales.

6

  Williams, ‘St Winifred’s Well’, 42–3.   See Webb, Pilgrimage, ch. 7. William Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, 1981). See also Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, ch. 1. 7

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Figure 6.3 Interior of St Winefride’s Well. © Crown copyright: Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. The Henrician Reformation seriously undermined the foundations of the late medieval system of the sacred. The polemical attacks which Protestant theologians launched upon the cult of miracles and saints coincided with a concerted campaign to destroy the physical and institutional structures which had given these beliefs their social meaning. By stripping the altars and dissolving monasteries the authorities were seeking to erase concrete artistic and architectural reminders of a false ideology. In attacking relics and icons they set out to demonstrate that mere material objects lacked the magical power which laypeople erroneously attributed to them, to show that hitherto venerated artefacts were inert, impotent and useless. Even the outreaches of Wales could not evade this iconoclastic crusade. In a letter to Thomas Cromwell in 1538, Hugh Latimer linked the famous image of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Penrhys with a similar statue (‘our great Sibyll’) at Worcester, condemning both as ‘the devil’s instrument[s] to bring many … to eternal fire’ and suggesting sarcastically that both would make ‘a jolly muster in Smithfield’. Shortly thereafter, it was secretly dismantled and

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removed to London for incineration.8 The miraculous taper of Our Lady at Cardigan was likewise dismissed as a ‘develish delusyon’ and taken away, while the wooden statue of the great Celtic warrior saint Derfel Gadarn in Merionethshire symbolically fuelled the pyre upon which the Observant Friar John Forrest was burnt for denying the Royal Supremacy in 1538. The determination of the crown’s agents to abolish all ‘antique gargels of ydolatry’ and eradicate all ‘memoryall monymentes’ of romish ‘popetry’ resulted in the desecration of St Winefride’s shrine in Shrewsbury, but it does not seem to have extended to Holywell, which escaped almost unscathed. The statues of the Virgin Mary and St Winefride inside the well chapel appeared to have been spared the general onslaught and as late as 1612 a picture and stained glass window depicting the life and death of the martyr remained. This is all the more intriguing in the light of the activities of Henry’s commissioners at Buxton, where they defaced the ‘tabernaculle’ occupied by the image of St Anne, ‘lokkyd upp and sealyd the bathys and welles’, and confiscated the ‘cruchys, schertes, and schetes’ left behind by grateful pilgrims.9 There are probably several reasons why Holywell survived the holocaust. Its recent refurbishment as a Tudor shrine undoubtedly supplied it with a certain immunity, but so too did the prospect of diverting the income of the well, estimated at £10 per annum in the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535, into the Henrician treasury. The right to collect the revenue was leased to a certain William Holcroft, who complained to the Court of Augmentations that several men pretending to be churchwardens of Holywell had sought to reclaim the offerings by telling visitors that the money they placed in the box before St Winefride would ‘never be remedy for your souls’ but merely help to fill the king’s coffers and then inviting them to put their oblations in two alternative caskets.10 These ingenious swindlers were all members of the staunchly Catholic family of Pennants, 8  Hugh Latimer, Sermons and Remains, ed. G.E. Corrie, PS (Cambridge, 1845), p. 395. For an overview of the early implementation of Protestantism in Wales, see Glanmor Williams, Wales and the Reformation (Cardiff, 1997). Our understanding of Welsh religious developments in the sixteenth century will be transformed by the work of Katharine Olson, Popular Religion, Culture, and Reformation in Wales and the Marches, c.1400–1603 (Oxford, forthcoming). 9  Thomas Wright (ed.), Three Chapters of Letters Relating to the Suppression of the Monasteries, CS, 1st ser. 26 (London, 1843), pp. 183–7, 189–91, 208–9, and p. 143 respectively. The survival of the mural and windows is attested by John Speed in The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London, 1611–12), bk 2, fo. 121. On Derfel Gadarn, see Anne Dillon, ‘John Forest and Derfel Gadarn: A Double Execution’, RH, 28 (2006): 1–21. 10   J. Hunter and J. Caley (eds), Valor Ecclesiasticus, 6 vols (London, 1810), iv. 438; E.A. Lewis and J. Conway Davies (eds), Records of the Court of Augmentations Relating to Wales and Monmouthshire (Cardiff, 1954), pp. 96–7.

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whose influence in the area, combined with that of the conservative Mostyns, the new owners of Basingwerk Abbey, must have inhibited more far-reaching reform of the site.11 This may help to explain why the Privy Council failed to implement a proposal to remove the Gothic edifice in 1579 and also why Holywell eluded the fate suffered by Capel Meugan in Pembrokeshire. The latter was ‘utterlie defaced’ in 1592 by order of local magistrates, with the workmen being instructed not to leave a single stone still standing.12 Nevertheless, over time the sacred charisma associated with the well chapel was diminished by its reappropriation for secular and political purposes. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it seems to have been used as the venue for the assize and quarter sessions.13 The annexation of this hallowed space as an arena for enacting the formal ceremonies of criminal justice and civil administration may be seen as a deliberate attempt to deconsecrate it and reintegrate it into the sprawling machinery of the monarchy and state. Even so, throughout the early modern period Holywell remained a magnet for pilgrims. The Council of the Marches made repeated attempts to prevent ‘superstitious flocking’ to the shrine and Elizabethan and early Stuart commentators repeatedly lamented the stubborn persistence of older opinions and rituals linked with the site. David Powell deplored continuing resort to the spring (fons divae Venefredae sacer) in a Latin tract of 1585. Thirty years later John Speed likewise disparaged the ‘zealous, but blind devotion’ of those who immersed themselves in the fountain firmly convinced of the sacred virtue of the waters and supposing that the red spots on the stones deposited at the bottom were ‘drops of the Ladies bloud’. He was no less scornful about the belief ‘carried for truth by tradition of time’ that the violet-smelling moss growing on the side of the well was Winefride’s hair.14 When the lawyer Justinian Paget visited the town in 1630 he too found that ‘ridiculous fables’ about the saint were still alive and well in Flintshire folklore, including the miracle that ‘her head was cutt of and sett on againe and she lived 15 yeares after’.15

11   D.R. Thomas, A History of the Diocese of St Asaph, 2 vols (London, 1870–74), ii. 467. 12   BL, Cotton MS Vitellius. C. I, fos 81v–82r; NLW, Bronwydd MS 1, no. 3 (Vairdre Book), fo. 85r; Jones, Holy Wells, pp. 59–60. 13   See Thomas Pennant, The history of the parishes of Whiteford, and Holywell (London, 1796), pp. 222–3. It was also used as a parochial school. 14   Giraldus Cambrensis, Itinerarium Cambriae … cum annotationibus Davidis Powell, pt. 2 of Pontici virunnii viri doctissimi Britannicae historiae libri sex (London, 1585), bk I, ch. 2, p. 85; Speed, Theatre, bk 2, fo. 121. 15   BL, Harley MS 1026, fo. 31v.

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Such remarks reflect a wider strand of contemporary anxiety about the remnants of popery and idolatry which lingered on in post-Reformation Wales. This was a constant refrain of the bishops of the region. In 1567, for instance, Nicholas Robinson of Bangor wrote to William Cecil that ‘ignorance contineweth many in the dregges of superstition’, complaining of the continuation of pilgrimages, as well as of vigils for the dead, relic worship and the lighting of candles in honour of the saints.16 A decade later Richard Davies of St Davids was equally scandalised by the persistence of expeditions to ‘Welles and blinde Chappelles’ in his diocese, along with other residues of ‘the kingdome of Antichrist’, and in 1587 the MP Edward Downlee told the House of Commons of the ‘supersticion’ he had seen people ‘us[e] to a springe … in castinge it over ther sholders and head’ in a speech designed to underline the consequences the ‘lacke of learned and honest ministers’ in rural Welsh parishes.17 Two years later Ellis Price wrote to the government about the intolerable and ‘abhominable Idolatrye’ practised by some inhabitants of the parish of Clynnog, where he himself had witnessed the sacrifice of bullocks to Beuno, who was also the patron saint of an adjacent well.18 Sometimes such practices were closely intertwined with nascent Welsh nationalism. A memorandum sent to Lord Burghley around the same time reported that the people ‘doe still in heapes goe one pilgrimage to the wonted welles and places of supersticion’ on ancient feast days, summoned by ‘theire Pencars or heade minstrells’. On these and other occasions ‘theire harpers and Crowthers’ recounted the lives of the Celtic saints and sang songs celebrating the victories of their ancestors in wars against ‘the English nacion’.19 While man-made structures might be mutilated or removed, it was impossible to denude the landscape of natural topographical features which operated as a mnemonic to time-honoured rituals and orally transmitted traditions and legends. As long as they remained unerased, the hagiographical and

16   TNA, SP 12/44/27, printed in David Mathew (ed.), ‘Some Elizabethan Documents’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 6 (Cardiff, 1933): 77–8. 17   Richard Davies, A funerall sermon preached the XXVI day of November … in the parishe church of Caermerthyn (London, 1577), sig. D2r–v; T.E. Hartley (ed.), Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, vol. ii 1584–9 (Leicester, 1995), pp. 390–91. 18  TNA, SP 12/224/74 (‘Information given by Mr Price of certain idolatries and superstitions practised by the people in North Wales’, May 1589). 19   BL, Lansdowne MS 111, fo. 10r–v. It may also be noted that the life of St Winefride continued to circulate in the late sixteenth century in Welsh: for example, Bucchedd Gwenfrewy, edited as an appendix in Baring-Gould and Fisher, Lives of the British Saints, iv. 397–423.

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historical myths associated with them stubbornly refused to fade from the collective memory and imagination.20 Historians have been inclined to regard these practices as evidence of the existence of a seam of pre-Christian belief in the Celtic fringes of Britain, as well as of the inability of the Protestant Church to effect anything more than the nominal conversion and outward compliance of the Welsh populace. The tenacity of such rituals in this ‘dark corner of the land’ has also often been cited in support of the contention that the Counter Reformation in Wales was itself, to quote Glanmor Williams, ‘a resounding failure’. Representing ‘the carry-over by an unchanging peasantry of a fixed round of custom and habit’, the relationship of these vestiges to the doctrinally self-conscious and morally rigorous piety which the seminary priests and Jesuits brought with them from the Continent is said to have been very tenuous indeed.21 According to Michael Mullett, this brand of diffuse survivalism acted as a positive ‘barrier to Tridentine observance’.22 Together with a panoply of lesser sacred sites, Holywell is seen as an paradigm of the resilience of indigenous religion to an exercise in coercive acculturation which closely paralleled that being pursued on the other side of the confessional divide – a drive to internalise dogma, prune away dubious magical accretions, and inculcate a sober culture of discipline. In the light of recent work, however, these analyses may be in need of reassessment. One of the keynotes of research on European Catholic renewal in the last decade has been an emphasis on the way in which its agents sought to harness and revitalise the late medieval geography of the sacred. As Philip Soergel, Trevor Johnson and Marc Forster have shown, the revival of medieval shrines and the sanctification of new holy places 20

  Cf. the comments of Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000), pp. 234, 253–5. Margaret Aston, ‘English Ruins and English History: The Dissolution and the Sense of the Past’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 36 (1973): 231–55, explores the nostalgia inspired by ruined monasteries and its role in stimulating antiquarian activity. 21   Glanmor Williams, ‘Wales and the Reformation’, in his Welsh Reformation Essays (Cardiff, 1967), pp. 25, 21 and pp. 11–33 passim; Glanmor Williams, Renewal and Reformation: Wales c.1415–1642 (Oxford, 1993 edn), p. 313 and ch. 13 passim. See also J. Gwynfor Jones, Wales and the Tudor State: Government, Religious Change and the Social Order 1534–1603 (Cardiff, 1989), pp. 102, 106–7; and Brendan Bradshaw, ‘The English Reformation and Identity Formation in Wales and Ireland’, in Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (eds), British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 43–110, for a complex and contentious argument contrasting the success of the Counter Reformation in Ireland with its ineffectiveness in Wales. 22   Michael A. Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (Basingstoke, 1998), p. 29 and see p. 97 for the suggestion that Welsh Catholicism was ‘far removed from the crusading passions of the Counter Reformation’.

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was a hallmark of the Counter Reformation in Bavaria and other parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Relics were imported to resacralise cities like Munich scarred by successive waves of Protestant vandalism, and rulers and clerical reformers collaborated in attempts to transform Marian pilgrimage sites such as Altötting into focal points of dynastic loyalty and anti-Protestant fervour. This went hand in hand with an effort to ‘create and inhabit a mythical past’, to mobilise such locations as living links with the holy history of these territories.23 Jesuit and other missionaries in Brittany and other parts of France likewise centred their evangelical activities on existing loci of sanctity. Tailoring their initiatives to the local environment and seeking to tap into the distinctive traditions of the region, they preached and catechised at wells, megaliths and wayside crosses and subtly refashioned and sanitised the rituals surrounding them.24 Similar tactics were used by their counterparts in the Low Countries and Ireland: here too, as Raymond Gillespie and others have revealed, the cults of native saints were rejuvenated and ‘a Tridentine veneer’ applied to the customs associated with ancient venerated places within the rural landscape.25 These processes of accommodation and compromise resulted in the gentle evolution of a reformed Catholicism in these contexts. There is much to suggest that the Welsh and English priests trained in Continental seminaries and sent back to reclaim their compatriots to the Church of Rome employed similar strategies, suitably modified to obviate the considerable problems posed by persecution and proscription. Expelled 23  Philip M. Soergel, Wondrous in his Saints: Counter Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley, 1993), esp. chs 4, 6, quotation at p. 229; Trevor Johnson, ‘Holy Fabrications: The Catacomb Saints and the Counter Reformation in Bavaria’, JEH, 47 (1996): 274–97; Trevor Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles: The Counter Reformation in the Upper Palatinate (Farnham, 2009), esp. chs 9–10; Marc R. Forster, Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque: Religious Identity in Southwest-Germany 1550–1750 (Cambridge, 2001), ch. 2. See now also Howard Louthan, Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (Cambridge, 2009), esp. ch. 8. 24   Louis Chatellier, The Religion of the Poor: Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism, c.1500–c.1800 (Cambridge and Paris, 1993), pp. 102–16, 182; and see Elizabeth Tingle, ‘The Sacred Space of Julien Maunoir: The Re-Christianising of the Landscape in Seventeenth-Century Brittany’, in Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (eds), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 237–58. 25   Willem Frijhoff, ‘La fonction du miracle dans une minorité catholique: Les ProvincesUnies au XVIIe siècle’, Revue d’histoire de la spiritualité, 48 (1972): 151–78, esp. 170–71. Now translated as ‘The Function of the Miracle in a Catholic Minority: The United Provinces in the Seventeenth Century’, in Willem Frijhoff, Embodied Belief: Ten Essays on Religious Culture in Dutch History (Hilversum, 2002), pp. 111–36. Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester, 1997), pp. 8, 159–60, and ch. 2. For a stimulating but flawed discussion by a sociologist, see Michael P. Carroll, Irish Pilgrimage: Holy Wells and Popular Catholic Devotion (Baltimore-London, 1999), esp. chs 3–4.

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from ecclesiastical buildings commandeered for Protestant services, they collaborated with the laity not merely in reconsecrating private houses and chambers as new arenas for worship but also in sanctifying hitherto neutral locations in the natural world – gardens, orchards, woods and fields – as spaces in which Catholics could meditate, pray and commune with their Maker.26 In Wales, the missionaries skilfully exploited the rhythms of the country’s Celtic heritage and made use of gateways to the sacred which had evaded total obliteration by Tudor iconoclasts. It is no coincidence, for instance, that Morgan Clynnog seems to have chosen an old chapel associated with the dissolved Cistercian monastery at Margam in Glamorganshire as the location for christening a Catholic infant in August 1591.27 Even in a state of neglect and decay such structures provided a powerful link with a sacred and numinous past. The case of the Skirrid near Abergavenny, a mountain supposedly cleft by an earthquake at the time of the Crucifixion, is even more compelling. An ancient destination of pilgrims, the ruined chapel erected at its summit became a centre for Counter-Reformation activity in the late sixteenth century, a venue for sermons and administration of the sacraments. In 1676, Clement X granted complete remission of their sins to all those who visited it on the feast of St Michael the Archangel and there prayed for ‘the extirpation of heresies and the exaltation of Holy Mother Church’.28 Far from a haven of unthinking traditionalism, this was a site which the missionaries actively remodelled as a beacon of militant Tridentine Catholicism. But the centrepiece of this programme to reshape sacred space was undoubtedly Holywell. From the late 1570s, priests made it the headquarters of their long and arduous circuits on foot in the remote villages of Denbighshire and Flintshire. The efforts of John Bennett, Hugh Owen and Humphrey Evans in the area bore fruit in a record of committed recusancy unmatched elsewhere in Wales. By the 1620s, the Jesuits were running a recusant school nearby at Greenfield Abbey, the home of the Mostyns, in flagrant defiance of the Protestant authorities, a situation which their secular rivals feared would ‘drawe a persecution upon … that holy place of pilgrimadge and the whole cuntrey there aboute’.29 In due 26

  See Lisa McClain, ‘Without Church, Cathedral or Shrine: The Search for Religious Space among Catholics in England, 1559–1625’, SCJ, 33 (2002): 381–99, esp. 385. 27   BL, Harley MS 6998, fo. 3r–v. 28   J.H. Canning (ed.), ‘Catholic Registers of Abergavenny, Mon. 1740–1838’, in CRS Miscellanea, CRS 27 (London, 1927), pp. 102, 108–9; Michael R. Lewis, ‘The Pilgrimage to St Michael’s Mount: Catholic Continuity in Wales’, The Journal of Welsh Ecclesiastical History, 8 (1991): 51–4. 29   See J.M. Cleary, ‘Recusant Schools in North Wales, 1626–1627’, Worcestershire Recusant, 32 (1978): 13–23, at 14. On the Catholic mission in this period, see also now Pritchard, St Winefride, ch. 4. Space does not permit an exploration of the conflicts which

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course, however, both the seculars and Jesuits set up permanent residence in two inns in Holywell, the Cross Keys and Star respectively, and it is not surprising that when the Society of Jesus formalised its missionary structures in 1670 it placed its operations in this region under the patronage of St Winefride.30 Pilgrimage to the well was actively promoted by the Tridentine priesthood and hierarchy. A stray reference in an account of a miraculous cure of 1657 reveals that a plenary indulgence had lately been bestowed on this ‘holy place’, restoring the pardon which lapsed at the time of the Reformation, before being briefly revived through the efforts of Bishop Thomas Goldwell, close associate of Cardinal Pole, during the reign of Mary I.31 A note surviving in the archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster shows that by 1664 Catholic clergy in the town had assembled a sizeable library of devotional, liturgical and controversial books in Latin, English and Welsh, including, it seems, 54 copies of the life of the seventhcentury virgin bound in leather and another 47 in vellum. It is tempting to infer that these might have been lent out to visitors. Another item in the same catalogue entitled ‘Rules of the Sodality’ may suggest that, as at major shrines on the Continent, a confraternity had become connected with the site.32 These societies were the nurseries in which the CounterReformation clergy nurtured and refined the piety of the intensely devout. Holywell was thus by no means untouched by the invigorating winds of the early modern movement for Catholic reform. arose between the seculars and Jesuits over control of the site: see Colleen M. Seguin, ‘Cures and Controversy in Early Modern Wales: The Struggle to Control St Winifred’s Well’, North American Journal of Welsh Studies, 3 (2003): 1–17, esp. 10–17. I am grateful to Andrew Thorpe for drawing this article to my attention. 30   See Foley, iv. 491–537; v. 932–46, vii, pt 1, 560; Paul Hook (ed.), ‘Catholic Registers of Holywell, Flintshire, 1698–1829’, in CRS Miscellanea III (London, 1906), pp. 105–8; D. Aneurin Thomas (ed.), The Welsh Elizabethan Catholic Martyrs (Cardiff, 1971), ch. 3, and pp. 317–21; E. Gwynne Jones, ‘Catholic Recusancy in the Counties of Denbigh, Flint and Montgomery, 1581–1625’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1945): 114–33; Thomas M. McCoog, ‘The Society of Jesus in Wales: The Welsh in the Society of Jesus: 1561–1625’, Journal of Welsh Religious History, 5 (1997): 1–27. See also Hawarden, Flintshire Record Office, MF/6 (‘A relation concerning the Millionants Moneyes in N. and S. Wales’ and ‘An abstract of Writings relating to the Star Inn in Holywell’); MF/34 (Welsh MSS 505/1, including an account book of the Star 1710–53). These are microfilm of original documents of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, held at Mount Street). 31   C. de Smedt (ed.), ‘Documenta de S. Wenefreda’, Analecta Bollandiana, 6 (1887): 340. For the renewal of the indulgence under Thomas Goldwell, see De Smedt (ed.), ‘De Sancta Wenefreda’, 736; Williams, ‘St Winifred’s Well’, pp. 43–4. The precocious character of the Marian Counter Reformation in Wales is notable: see Glanmor Williams, ‘Wales and the Reign of Mary I’, Welsh History Review, 10 (1981): 334–58. 32  AAW, XXXII/99, fo. 477r. I am greatly indebted to Thomas McCoog for this reference. The book may have been a copy of the Rules of the English Sodalitie, of the Immaculate Conception of the most glorious Virgin Mary (Mechelen, 1618).

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Figure 6.4 Robert, abbot of Shrewsbury, The admirable life of Saint Wenefride virgin, martyr, abbesse, trans. J[ohn] F[alconer] ([St Omer], 1635), title-page and frontispiece. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter. Shelfmark Syon Abbey 1635/ROB. Another important manifestation of this process was the publication in 1635 of a new printed edition of the life and martyrdom of St Winefride (Figure 6.4). Prepared by the Jesuit John Falconer, this pocket-sized book was a modernised version of Robert of Shrewsbury’s twelfth-century vita. In his dedicatory epistle and preface to the reader, the translator celebrated the Flintshire maiden as ‘the patroness of Wales’, ‘a bright morning-star’ which had not ceased to shine in this time of ‘darkenes’, even when other saints had ‘quite vanished out of living mens sights’. He mentioned that many recent miracles attested to the continuing sanctity of the waters of her well but, in keeping with the priorities of the humanist hagiography emerging in Europe, forebore to recount them ‘because they have not ben by depositions of persons sworne, and publique Instruments authentically approved’. He also strenuously deflected the objections of Protestants who might reject passages in the tract as ‘fabulous legends’ and dissociated himself from some of the more

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improbable traditions surrounding the shrine, notably those concerning the sweet-scented moss and blood-coloured stones, which he dismissed as akin to ‘Ovids Metamorphosing Fables’.33 The Tridentine revival of the medieval cult of Holywell must be seen as part of a wider attempt to recolonise the British past. The relatively smooth progress of the Reformation in Wales owed much to the success of its apologists in depicting it not as a new-fangled foreign implant but rather as the restoration of the apostolic faith once proudly practised by its Celtic inhabitants. Historians like Bale and Foxe presented Protestantism as the true heir of the pure religion professed by the ancient Britons prior to the Saxon and Norman invasions and its corruption by agents of the Antichristian papacy.34 St Winefride was one of the heroines of a rival Catholic narrative of the Christianisation of Britain which revolved around the nation’s three conversions by Rome – the first linked with St Peter and the Apostles, the second associated with Pope Eleutherius and King Lucius and the third launched by Gregory the Great and Augustine of Canterbury. She was repeatedly marshalled as part of a pantheon of saints who bore witness to the unbroken continuity of Roman Catholicism in these islands since the earliest times. She featured in the series of murals painted around the walls of the chapel of the English College at Rome which gave visual expression to this potent myth, in the book of engravings of these paintings published in 1584, generally known as the Trophaea (Figure 6.5), and in

33

  The admirable life of Saint Wenefride virgin, martyr, abbesse, trans. J[ohn] F[alconer] ([St Omer], 1635), at sigs *3v–*4r, **1r–v. Abbreviated versions of her life also appeared in the Roman martyrologe authorised by Gregory XIII (St Omer, 2nd edn. 1667), p. 317 and in John Wilson’s English martyrologe ([St Omer], 3rd edn. 1672), pp. 249–50. Elizabethan and early Stuart Catholics continued to copy her life in MS. She is included in the preceding calendar and almost certainly featured in the lost portion of the text of Nicholas Roscarrock’s ‘Alphebitt of Saintes’: Cambridge University Library, Additional MS 3041, fo. 11r. See also C. Horstmann (ed.), The Lives of Women Saintes of our Contrie of England … (c.1610–1615), EETS, OS, 86 (1886), pp. 88–91. On this text, see Catherine Sanok, ‘The Lives of Women Saints of Our Contrie of England: Gender and Nationalism in Recusant Hagiography’, in Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur F. Marotti (eds), Catholic Culture in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, 2007), pp. 261–80. 34   See Glanmor Williams, ‘Some Protestant Views of Early British Church History’, in his Welsh Reformation Essays, pp. 207–19; Peter Roberts, ‘Tudor Wales, National Identity and the British Inheritance’ and Bradshaw, ‘Identity Formation in Wales and Ireland’, both in Bradshaw and Roberts (eds), British Consciousness and Identity, pp. 8–42, 43–110. A classic statement of this Protestant version of British history was the vernacular ‘Address to the Welsh people’ in Bishop Richard Davies’ preface to the Welsh New Testament of 1567, trans. in A.O. Evans, A Memorandum on the Legality of the Welsh Bible and the Welsh Version of the Book of Common Prayer (Cardiff, 1925), appendix III, pp. 83–124.

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Figure 6.5 The martyrdom of St Winefride: Giovanni Battista de Cavalleriis, Ecclesiae Anglicanae Trophaea (Rome, [1584]). © The British Library Board. Shelfmark 551.e.35.

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the succession of ecclesiastical histories which culminated with Richard Challoner’s Britannia sancta in 1745.35 St Winefride and her spring provided a tangible point of contact with the hallowed space inhabited with a glorious but contested Catholic past, preserved, defended and perpetuated in polemical images and texts. And there may, moreover, have been a nationalist undercurrent to her revived cult. In the 1570s, the prominent Welsh exile Morys Clynnog rejected the anglocentric prejudices inherent in Bede’s ecclesiastical history and insisted that his countrymen were the upholders of the true ancient and ancestral Catholic faith. He reappropriated from Protestantism elements of the traditional British myth about Wales rooted in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae. Winefride was a symbol around which all Catholics in these islands could rally, but she may also have functioned as a focal point for expressions of Welsh identity that had an anti-English tinge.36 A further aspect of Counter-Reformation efforts to transform this pilgrimage site into an icon of resurgent Catholicism was the collection and circulation of carefully attested miracles wrought by the virgin at Holywell. By the seventeenth century the missionary priesthood seem to have been making systematic efforts to record cures experienced at the site in a central register. A manuscript apparently compiled sometime around 1675 contains nearly 50 examples of persons restored to health by its waters, the first dating from 1556 but most clustering after 1600. Others were noted in the Society’s Annual Letters. These accounts emphasise the efficacy of St Winefride’s spring for an extraordinary range of diseases and complaints, from deafness to demonic possession and from leprosy to fevers and epileptic fits, and they typically stress that doctors had relinquished all hope of assisting these patients and the failure of other forms of alternative medicine. Some of the stories, such as the tale of a pedlar saved from drowning by bending a 35

  The fullest exposition of this rival narrative is Robert Persons’s Treatise of Three Conversions, 3 vols (1603–4). Giovanni Battista de Cavalleriis, Ecclesiae Anglicanae trophaea (Rome [1584]), on which see Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot, 2002), ch. 4 and passim. Michael Alford, Fides regia Britannica sive annales ecclesiae Britannicae …, 4 vols (1663), ii, §xx–xxxvii; Serenus Cressy, The church history of Brittany, from the beginning of Christianity to the Norman Conquest ([Rouen], 1668), bk xvi, ch. 8; Richard Challoner, Britannia sancta (London, 1745), pp. 244–8. See now my Reformation of the Landscape, ch. 3, and the discussions in Jason Nice, Sacred History and National Identity: Comparisons between Early Modern Wales and Brittany (London, 2009), ch. 4. On Catholic narratives of the past, see more broadly, Simon Ditchfield, ‘What was Sacred History? (Mostly Roman) Catholic Uses of the Christian Past after Trent’, in Katherine van Liere, Simon Ditchfield and Howard Louthan (eds), Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World (Oxford, 2012), pp. 72–97. 36   See Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2008), pp. 90–91 and 94.

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threepenny piece to the saint, are decidedly old-fashioned in character, but others are imbued with a distinctly confessional flavour. There are stories of scoffing Protestants providentially punished after polluting the fountain with their dirty boots and of cures which bring about the conversion of hardened enemies of the Catholic faith, including a rigid Quaker. Other miracles follow earnest prayers that relief be granted sooner rather than later, ‘least heretiques should laugh at them for having taken so long a journey to no effect’, and a number indicate the ways in which the clergy sought to redirect popular devotion into orthodox Tridentine channels. Thus the ailing Mrs Anne Fortescue received the holy sacraments before immersing herself in the waters, while a Staffordshire youth injured while playing football ‘first cleansned his soule by general confession and also refreashed it with the most sacred Eucharist’.37 Indirectly these narratives reveal how the missionaries remoulded pilgrimage piety and publicised the site as a symbol of the ongoing ability of the Church of Rome to work thaumaturgic wonders. They also provide evidence that it was not merely the ‘meaner sort of people’ who made journeys to seek the aid of St Winefride at Holywell. Wealthy members of the Catholic gentry and nobility from all over England and Wales also numbered among her grateful clients, along with the Jesuit Edward Oldcorne, cured of cancer of the mouth by sucking one of the distinctive red stones which deposited at the bottom of the well.38 Nor was it a case of secretive visits by scattered individuals, like the three daughters and maidservant of a Jacobean man fined £10 for suffering them to go to the spring ‘in superstitious manner’ under cover of night.39 In the second decade of the seventeenth century the shrine seems to have become the focus of increasingly overt and audacious assemblies of recusants, often en masse. The Council in the Marches had only short-term success in stopping ‘the great concourse of people thither’ for daily service and for sermons on Sundays and feast days in 1617, when it adopted the tactic of administering the oaths of supremacy and allegiance to all strangers who refused to come to the Church of England.40 In November 37   de Smedt (ed.), ‘Documenta de S. Wenefreda’, 305–52, citations at 329–30, 311, 345–6, 336, 339–40, 343 respectively. For examples noted in the Annual Letters, see Foley, iv. 536–7. The story of Protestant paralysed after leaping into the spring with his boots was also recorded by the Jesuit John Gerard in his memoir: see The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, trans. and ed. Philip Caraman (London, 1951), p. 47. For further discussion, see Seguin, ‘Cures and Controversy’, 3–8. 38   For Oldcorne, see de Smedt (ed.), ‘Documenta de S. Wenefreda’, 312–15 and Gerard, Autobiography, pp. 45–8. He commended his soul to the saint in his final speech on the scaffold: Foley, iv. 242. 39   G. Dyfnault Owen, Wales in the Reign of James I (Woodbridge, 1988), p. 10. 40   BL, Royal MS 18B, VII, fo. 1r–v.

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1620, when Bishop Lewis Bayly of Bangor went to Holywell in person to arrest the priests and other papists congregated there, it was said that the countryside rose up against him, ‘handled him roughly and then threw him into a ditch’.41 According to John Gee, writing four years later, the midsummer festival of St Winefride was the occasion for an annual gathering of pilgrims from Lancashire, Staffordshire and other counties and a yearly ‘Synod or Convention’ of the missionary clergy, and not long after Charles I’s accession Sir John Bridgeman was charged by the Privy Council with stemming the flow of ‘ill affected’ visitors to the well.42 This had only a very temporary effect. In 1629 it was reported that gentlemen and women ‘to the number of fourteen and fifteen hundreth’ had been present there, together with more than 150 priests. The assembly included Lord William Howard of Naworth and the prominent convert, Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, accompanied by her chaplain Mr Everard. Seven years later the same lady and her company came thither on foot, dissembling ‘neither their quality nor their errand’.43 Still struggling to make much impact, Bridgeman talked of ‘muringe up the head of the springe’.44 He did not carry through this threat, but at the Flint Assizes of 1637 orders were issued to the local churchwardens to remove the iron bars surrounding the fountain, to close all except two hostelries in the town and to disfigure the medieval image of the saint. A statue of Our Lady was another casualty of this iconoclastic outburst, which coincided with growing puritan fury about the Laudian programme to restore and preserve the ‘beauty of holiness’. The recusant community retorted by circulating stories of the divine judgements which had befallen the perpetrators of these acts of sacrilege.45 Pilgrimages continued unabated and in 1640 the local Catholic nobleman George Petre began to erect a building in Holywell, apparently to provide more spacious accommodation for devout visitors. The government stepped in to investigate, following rumours that it was intended to house a College of Jesuits.46 During the Civil War the site seems to have suffered more damage at the hands of parliamentary soldiers and 41

 Albert J. Loomie (ed.), Spain and the Jacobean Catholics, vol. ii 1613–1624, CRS 68 (London, 1978), p. 140. 42   John Gee, The foot out of the snare (London, 1624), pp. 33–4; TNA, SP 16/38/73. 43   TNA, SP 16/151/13; J.P. Kenyon (ed.), The Stuart Constitution: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge, 2nd edn. 1986), p. 146 (Laud’s return to the king’s Instructions for 1636). 44  TNA, SP 16/346/25. Further detail of the episode is provided by Seguin, ‘Cures and Controversy’, 13–15. 45   de Smedt, ‘De Sancta Wenefreda’, 738; NLW, Great Sessions Records, Flint 4/982/1/34. The removal of the image of the Virgin Mary is dated to 1635 by Thomas Pennant, A tour in Wales, 2 vols (London, 1778–83), i. 31. 46   TNA, SP 16/459/49, 16/466/3, 16/467/41; Foley, iv. 535–6.

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other godly vandals.47 To zealous Protestants who saw themselves engaged in an apocalyptic struggle with the papal Antichrist, far from a mere hangover from an age of superstitious ignorance and darkness, Holywell was a provocative symbol of a reformed Catholicism which was making disturbing military conquests on the Continent and which might yet seek to re-extend its empire into the British Isles. Indeed, from the mid-Elizabethan period onwards, the Protestant authorities seem to have feared that the spring was becoming a rallying point for recusant militancy and conspiratorial activity. In 1586 the mayor of Chester took the precaution of arresting two gentleman from Essex who travelled to St Winefride’s well allegedly ‘to seek for ease of some infirmitye’, apparently under the impression that this was a cloak to hide more sinister motives.48 Journeys to resorts like Bath in Somerset and Spa in Germany were arousing similar suspicions.49 Nothing did more to reinforce this conviction than events which took place in the late summer of 1605, when the Jesuit Henry Garnet led a remarkable pilgrimage to Holywell involving several priests and laypeople closely implicated in the Gunpowder Plot, Fathers Tesimond and Gerard and Ambrose Rookwood among them. On its way through the Midlands the party paused at the houses of Sir Everard Digby, John Grant and Robert Winter. Rumours circulated that ‘the company went in such hostile manner for the Catholic cause’. By the time the group reached the shrine, it numbered 30, not including servants, and the last stages were completed by the ladies of the party on barefoot. Government officials retrospectively interpreted this extraordinary expedition as a journey to pray for the success of the conspiracy and invoked it as telling evidence of Garnet’s treasonous complicity, a claim denied by the priest but repeated by Protestant propagandists and by many later historians.50 The whole issue is so encrusted in myth that the truth may now be irrecoverable, but we should not rule out the possibility that some of the pilgrims did hope to invoke the support of St Winefride for 47   See Thomas, ‘St Winifred’s Well and Chapel’, 28. John Taylor noted that the chapel was ‘now much defaced by the injury of these late Wars’, in A short relation of a long journey … encompassing the principalitie of Wales (London, 1653), p. 11. 48  PRO, SP 12/193/14. 49   See Phyllis Hembrey, The English Spa 1560–1815: A Social History (London, 1990), ch. 1; Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, pp. 412–13. 50   See John Morris, The Condition of Catholics under James I: Father Gerard’s Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot (London, 1872), pp. 78, 240, 258; CSPD 1603–1610, pp. 270, 299; TNA, SP 14/216, ii, 121 and 153, transcribed in Michael Hodgetts, ‘Shropshire Priests in 1605’, Worcestershire Recusant, 47 (1986): 24–36, quotation at 31; and Philip Caraman, Henry Garnet 1555–1606 and the Gunpowder Plot (London, 1964), pp. 324–5. For later reiterations of government claims, see David Jardine, Criminal Trials, vol. ii, The Gunpowder Plot (London, 1835), pp. 200–201; Hall, English Mediaeval Pilgrimage, pp. 37–8.

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this desperate crusade. After all, medieval kings had often prayed at major shrines for victory in war and in 1620 Maximilian of Bavaria, patron and devotee of the miraculous Marian image at Altötting, made the Blessed Virgin Generalissima of his armies at the decisive Battle of the White Mountain.51 The parallels are at the very least suggestive. One other cluster of episodes at Holywell deserves our attention. On 29 August 1687, James II travelled to the well to pay his respects to St Winefride and to ask her to intercede to assist his wife to conceive and bear a son. He was presented with a sacred Stuart relic, the very shift in which his great-grandmother Mary Queen of Scots had been beheaded in 1587, and gave the shrine in return a lock of his hair plaited beneath a crystal. He also performed the royal miracle of touching for the king’s evil. Only a few months before Mary of Modena had handed the chapel over to the Jesuits, having persuaded the king to bestow it upon her as a personal gift, in blatant disregard of the legal rights of the Mostyn family, who had long been its proprietors. At the same time she expressed her intention of repairing the chapel and putting it once again to a pious use. The birth of Prince James Francis Edward the following June was attributed to the king’s prayers at the well and the queen paid for a priest to say mass at the site in thanksgiving for a child whose arrival would have ensured the Catholic succession to the throne.52 In a curious way, the miracle wrought by St Winefride may be said to have helped precipitate the Glorious Revolution. Yet what these momentous events have arguably masked is a deliberate attempt to revive Holywell as a royal shrine. It is worth engaging in a little counterfactual speculation: had the Stuart dynasty survived, might the site have become the baroque centrepiece of a British Counter Reformation, a shining exemplar of eighteenth-century Catholic confessionalisation? The politicisation of sacred and historically evocative landscapes was one of the characteristic features of this process on the European mainland. In this context it is hardly surprising that the chapel became the target of renewed Protestant outrages in 1688 and that it was transformed into a ‘Jacobite totem’ in the eighteenth century – a focus for loyalty to the ejected house of Stuart.53

51   See Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke, 1999), p. 109. 52   See Pennant, History, p. 230; Maurice Ashley, James II (London, 1977), pp. 208, 218; Lord Mostyn and T.A. Glenn, History of the Family of Mostyn of Mostyn (London, 1925), pp. 148–9. For James II, touching for the King’s evil, see London Gazette (1 September 1687). A ballad mocking the visit was published in 1688: Loretto and Winifred, or, A new way of getting of children, viz. by prayers and presents to the tune of Packington’s Pound ([London, 1688]). 53   See Colin Haydon, ‘St Winifred, Bishop Fleetwood, and Jacobitism’, in Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (eds), Saints and Sanctity, SCH 47 (Woodbridge, 2011), pp. 295–306.

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Nevertheless St Winefride’s well continued to attract Catholic visitors in significant numbers. When she visited the town in 1689, Celia Fiennes saw an ‘abundance of devout papists’ kneeling round the spring and the Blundells of Little Crosby in Lancashire made several pilgrimages to Holywell between 1702 and 1728.54 According to Philip Metcalf, the Jesuit chaplain of Powis Castle, who published a new edition of St Winefride’s life in 1712, during the ‘Travelling Season’ the town was ‘crowded with zealous Pilgrims, from all Parts of Britain’. The well was attended from sunrise until late at night and littered with barrows and crutches left behind as ex-votos, despite repeated efforts to clear them ‘by those who envy the Glory of our Saint’.55 Protestants raids on the site persisted intermittently: a detachment of dragoons was sent in to disperse the pilgrims and arrest the resident priest in 1716.56 The following year Bishop William Fleetwood launched a scathing attack on the virgin martyr at the centre of the cult, designed to arrest the ‘great concourse’ to her shrine and undeceive credulous papists who continued to swallow the ‘senseless legends’ about her decollation and resurrection recently revived by Father Metcalf. Marshalling all his skills as a historian, he set out to demonstrate that St Winefride was ‘an Imaginary Saint’ and that her medieval vita was a post-Conquest fabrication. He gave scholarly substance to the claim that these fables were, in the words the Kentish rector James Brome, nothing more than ‘the Chymical Extracts of some Enthusiastick hot-brained Monks’.57 By the late 1770s the resort of pilgrims to the spring had apparently decreased considerably, but no more than a generation later, Bishop John Milner’s publicisation of the miraculous cure of the Wolverhampton servant girl Winefrid White initiated the shrine’s nineteenth-century renaissance.58 Holywell’s reincarnation in the late Victorian period as the Lourdes of 54   Christopher Morris (ed.), The Journeys of Celia Fiennes (London, 1947), pp. 180–81; Margaret Blundell (ed.), Blundell’s Diary and Letter Book 1702–1728 (Liverpool, 1952), pp. 19, 62, 105, 146, 183. 55  Philip Metcalf, The Life of Saint Winefride. Reprinted from the edition of 1712, ed. Herbert Thurston (London, 1917), pp. 83–4. 56   The political state of Great Britain, vol. xvi (London, 1718), p. 69. 57   William Fleetwood, The life and miracles of St Wenefrede, together with her litanies, with some historical observations made thereon (London, 1713), prefaces ‘To the Reader’ and ‘the Devout Pilgrims’, at pp. 7, 22; James Brome, Travels over England, Scotland and Wales (London, 1707 edn), pp. 237–8. In the separately paginated section of The History of the Worthies of England (London, 1662) on the principality of Wales (p. 32), Thomas Fuller likewise lashed out against ‘this damnable lye’ and these ‘improbable truths’. On Fleetwood, see Haydon, ‘St Winifred, Bishop Fleetwood, and Jacobitism’. 58  Pennant, Tour, i. 37 noted the decrease ‘of pilgrims of late years to these Fontanalia’. J[ohn] M[ilner], Authentic Documents Relative to the Miraculous Cure of Winefrid White of the Town of Wolverhampton, at Holywell (London, 1805).

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the British Isles has served to efface its early modern transformation into an emblem of vibrant Tridentine Catholicism. It has eclipsed the extent to which the missionary priests successfully harnessed this medieval site, along with other sacred landmarks, as a powerful weapon in their campaign to combat and convert heretics, rouse lapsed Catholics out of their spiritual lethargy and wean the populace away from superstition and idolatry. Like pilgrimage shrines on the Continent it functioned as a focal point of anti-Protestantism and as a nexus with an heroic if spurious past. Bearing the wounds of repeated spasms of evangelical zeal, it was a visible testimony to the defiance and courage of an embattled community and to the resurgent Church of Rome to which it proudly owed its allegiance.

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II Counter-Reformation renewal is, however, only one facet of the complex post-Reformation history of Holywell. It would be wrong to suppose that the site was frequented only by Catholics in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many individuals who considered themselves upright Protestants undertook excursions to this and other springs. By way of an epilogue it may be valuable to consider the character and significance of visits to these formerly sanctified places. What they reveal is that pilgrimage survived as an important cultural phenomenon long after the reformers abolished the theology that underpinned it. When John Chamberlain spoke of Sir Dudley Carleton’s two sisters going ‘forward for a pilgrimage to St Wenefrides well’ in September 1608 he was indicating a gradual migration in the meaning of the word itself, from a journey performed in a spirit of reverence or penitence to a one carried out for pleasure, interest or adventure.59 Some such ‘pilgrims’, like Samuel Johnson and his companion Mrs Thrale, who passed through Holywell in 1774, were merely tourists, intrigued by the sheer power of a fountain which delivered 21 tons of water per minute and never froze, and which in time became known as one of the natural ‘wonders of Wales’.60 Others may have been drawn there by

59  TNA, SP 14/36/40. See Colin Morris, ‘Introduction’, in Colin Morris and Peter Roberts (eds), Pilgrimage: The English Experience from Becket to Bunyan (Cambridge, 2002), p. 10. 60  A.M. Broadley, Doctor Johnson and Mrs Thrale (London, 1910), pp. 187, 232. An account of Wales written in 1731 commented that ‘many comes there for recreation, pleasure, profit or curiosity; very few on Devotion’: AAW, MS A XXXIX, 101. I am grateful to Colin Haydon for sending me a copy of this item.

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Figure 6.6 Holywell in the early eighteenth century: engraving. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Prints and Drawings: AN128898001, Registration number: 1867,0309.638; British XVIIc Mounted Roy.

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the picturesque architecture of the Gothic chapel: by the 1690s booksellers were selling engraved prints of the elegant structure (Figure 6.6).61 This strand of nostalgic fascination with the site was fostered by pastoral verse in the mode of Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1622) and embodied in the writings of antiquarians and topographers.62 In the late seventeenth century the practices connected with holy wells in general were the subject of systematic study by Edward Lhuyd, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, who, with a band of assistants, travelled the Celtic nations of Britain to record surviving remnants of their ancient culture.63 Forerunners of the nineteenth-century folklorists, Lhuyd and his colleagues regarded these ‘druidical’ customs as evidence that the populace had never completely abandoned popery and paganism. However, their comments probably tell us more about the developing quest to recover a romantic Welsh past than they do about the degree to which rural society had embraced or evaded the Reformation.64 The polemical commonplace that these rituals were relics of heathenism obscures the extent to which such sites had been successfully absorbed first into a Christian, and then into a Protestant, universe. In this regard particular attention should be paid to the recreational nature of many early modern journeys to Holywell. Thus in the summer of 1617 one Lowry Davies of Caernarvon travelled there ‘with diverse others of her neighbours, rather out of pastime than devotion’, the same year in which the Cheshire authorities disciplined the organisers of a festive expedition to the well, involving nearly 200 inhabitants of the villages of Shotwick, Rabie, Puddington and Little Neston. Led by a hired piper, these merry-makers spent an entire September Sunday ‘in fidlinge and dauncinge to and fro’, to the irritation, not to say indignation, of

61  As noted by Pennant, History, p. 219. A number are in the Flintshire Record Office. See Derrick Pratt, ‘The Topographical Prints of Flintshire’, Flintshire Historical Society Publications, 22 (1965–6): 40–67, nos 316–49. 62   Michael Drayton, Works, ed. J. William Hebel, 5 vols (Oxford, 1931–41), iv. 74, 204–5, 483. See Margaret Aston, ‘English Ruins and English History: The Dissolution and the Sense of the Past’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 36 (1973): 231–55. 63  These were intended to be published in a work entitled Archaeologia Britannica, only the first volume of which (‘Glossography’) appeared (London, 1707). The answers to the ‘Parochial Queries’ he issued to his assistants and correspondents, which contain many references to practices at wells, are edited in Parochialia, 3 vols, supplement to Archaeologia Cambrensis (1909–11). See also the complaints of Erasmus Saunders, A View of the State of Religion in the Diocese of St David’s (London, 1721), pp. 36–7. 64   Prys Morgan, ‘From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 43–100.

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sabbatarian justices.65 Much later in the eighteenth century Thomas Pennant complained that the first Sunday after St James’ day was kept at the spring in ‘every species of frolick and excess’, but he cleared the local Roman Catholic congregation of ‘any part in the orgies, which are, I fear, celebrated by persons of our own religion only’.66 These practices may reflect the manner in which, in the wake of the liturgical upheavals of the Reformation, traditional religious rituals were slowly displaced out of their original ecclesiastical framework into the domestic and secular sphere and translated from solemn ceremonies into forms of entertainment and leisure. In turn the open spaces associated with them seem to have been reconsecrated to play. To adapt a thesis advanced by Ronald Hutton, such developments may offer insight into the ways in which British society made the protracted and difficult passage from Catholicism to Protestantism.67 It is also possible to detect signs of an emerging culture of cleanliness and health. In 1610 it was reported that Dame Dorothy Townshend and other gentlewomen of her company did ‘so sweat’ from the ‘good cheer’ of their host Sir John Wynn and ‘their ill-throwing at dice, that they must needs wash and purify themselves in the Holywell’.68 And while Celia Fiennes had no time for tales of its supernatural properties, she could appreciate the refreshing taste of a ‘good spring water’, especially when mixed with wine, sugar and lemons.69 Nor was it only Catholics who travelled to the spring in search of relief from debilitating illnesses. In a context of medical eclecticism, many Protestant invalids seem to have pinned their hopes upon its unparalleled reputation for healing. Some even went there on the advice of Catholic physicians and by the mid-1630s smocks were apparently available for hire by visiting bathers. The number of recorded conversions by erstwhile patients is one measure of the cross-confessional character of the well’s 65   de Smedt (ed.), ‘Documenta de S. Wenefreda’, 319; TNA, CHES. 24/114/2 (‘Information of Richard Holland of Little Neston, miller, c. September 1617’); TNA, CHES. 21/3, fos 9v, 12, 19, 22v (Presentments to the Grand Jury). I owe both these references to Steve Hindle. 66  Pennant, History, p. 227. He too thought these customs could be traced to ‘primaeval ceremonies’. 67  Ronald Hutton, ‘The English Reformation and the Evidence of Folklore’, P&P, 148 (1995): 89–116. 68   John Ballinger (ed.), Calendar of Wyn (of Gwydir) Papers 1515–1690 in the National Library of Wales and Elsewhere (Aberystwyth, 1926), p. 87. See Keith Thomas, ‘Cleanliness and Godliness in Early Modern England’, in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 56–83. 69   Morris (ed.), Journeys, p. 181.

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clientele;70 the callipers and hand-carts they left behind them as grateful testimonies also undermine any suggestion that it was a recusant ghetto. Especially in the summer, its reputation for effecting ‘astonishing, surprizing, stupendious, [and] wonderful cures’ drew people from distant places: some came from as far afield as the North of England and Scotland, including the spinster Catharine Young who sold off the ass that had carried her from Rockliffe in Cumberland after she was cured here in June 1721.71 The persistence of such visits into the eighteenth century suggest that they should not be seen as a sign of imperfect Protestantism, as evidence of popular resistance to the Reformation precept that miracles had ceased. Protestants did not deny that the well had remarkable sanative qualities: they simply rejected the notion that it derived its virtues from the influence and intercession of St Winefride. Instead they believed that these had been implanted there by Providence. Some attributed the cures experienced at the site to the mineral content of its waters; others stressed the salutary effects of their bracing temperature, seeing them as nothing more than ‘the experienc’d Effects of a Cold Bath’.72 Reflecting a theological ambiguity on the issue which historians have often overlooked, William Fleetwood even admitted the hypothetical possibility that they might just be truly miraculous occurrences. ‘We are no Enemies to Miracles, but we desire to be assured that they were wrought, before we believe them’. ‘[N]o understanding Protestant did ever maintain, that Miracles Ceased after the Apostles Preaching. They never did, nor ever will cease, whilst God is able to work them’. Nevertheless, he concluded that in most cases the Almighty chose to work through the medium and within the limits of nature.73 Reformed providentialism thus retained a place for the belief that interpositions of divine power at particular locations could heal human beings of conditions and diseases which the contemporary medical establishment deemed untreatable and fatal.

70

  As reflected in the miracles recorded in de Smedt (ed.), ‘Documenta de S. Wenefreda’, esp. 311, 316–17, 345–6, 350–51. For reference to the hire of smocks, see Richard James, Iter Lancastrense; A Poem, Written A.D. 1636, ed. Thomas Corser, CS, OS, 7 (1845), p. 8. 71  AAW, MS A XXXIX, nos 101 and 103 (Letter to Mr Meighan, from Holywell, 23 June 1733). 72  The quotation is from Metcalf, Life, p. 68. See also Pennant, Tour, pp. 38–9; [Daniel Defoe], A tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain, 3 vols (London, 1724–7 edn), p. 99. 73  Fleetwood, Life, pp. 11–12, 39–40, 63, 95. On Protestant attitudes towards miracles, see my ‘Miracles in Post-Reformation England’, in Jeremy Gregory and Kate Cooper (eds), Signs, Wonders and Miracles: Representations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church, SCH 41 (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 273–306; and Jane Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven and London, 2006).

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The rhetoric which developed around the many therapeutic springs which emerged and flourished in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and became fashionable resorts after 1700, notably Bath, Buxton, Harrogate, Tunbridge Wells and Epsom, was no less firmly embedded within a framework of pious assumptions. Some of these were newly discovered; others were sites with a pre-existing reputation for healing which had been resurrected and purged of their ‘popish’ and ostensibly pagan overtones. Either way the physicians who publicised their medicinal properties celebrated them as ‘precious gifts’ from God to the British nation – special dispensations from heaven to assist the sick and suffering.74 And there is at least the possibility that Holywell might have joined the ranks of these famous spas. In 1579 the Privy Council ordered its deputies in the Marches of Wales to test whether the waters of the fountain were ‘medicinable’ and if so to facilitate the admission of ‘dyseased parsons’ in an orderly manner to the same. If the result of the trial was negative they were to take steps to dismantle the chapel and to suppress the ‘vayne and superstitious use’ of the well.75 As we have seen, although the edifice was not defaced as instructed, it was the latter course of action which shaped the shrine’s subsequent fate. It is necessary, then, to resist the temptation to speak of secularisation. In the guise of healing springs Protestantism preserved, even if it redefined, the concept of a sacralised landscape. The notion that the material world could still be a channel and conduit of divine power survived the Reformation, albeit in a less potent form. This was not merely a consequence of pastors and theologians having to condone what they could not banish and eradicate; it must be seen as evidence that the Protestant religion did not entirely relinquish the idea that the created world might be a vessel of supernatural grace. Holywell, therefore, not only highlights the Counter-Reformation effort to reassert control over this ancient sacred site and its saintly patron and to utilise it as an evangelical tool to reclaim Britain for Rome. It also has much to tell us about the ‘complex mental and cultural modifications’, the dynamic processes of accommodation, exchange and negotiation which accompanied what the late Bob Scribner described as the shift ‘from

74   For further discussion, see my ‘Reforming the Waters: Holy Wells and Healing Springs in Protestant England’, in Diana Wood (ed.), Life and Thought in the Northern Church, c.1100–1700, SCH Subsidia 12 (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 246–55; ‘Sacred Spas? Healing Springs and Religion in Post-Reformation Britain’, in Ole Peter Grell and Bridget Heal (eds), The Impact of the European Reformation (Ashgate, 2008), pp. 209–30; and Reformation of the Landscape, ch. 6. 75   BL, Cotton MS Vitellius. C. I, fos 81v–82r.

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sacramental world to moralised universe’.76 A place and space within which Catholics and Protestants interacted and coexisted with each other, even as they disagreed about its significance and meaning, it illuminates the bifurcation of religious life in the post-Reformation period. It illustrates the process by which competing confessional identities and cultures of memory emerged in a religiously pluralistic environment

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  Robert W. Scribner, ‘The Impact of the Reformation on Daily Life’, in Mensch und Objekt im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit: Leben-Alltag-Kultur (Vienna, 1990), pp. 316–43, esp. 326, 340–43; Robert W. Scribner, ‘Reformation and Desacralisation: from Sacramental World to Moralised Universe’, in R. Po-Chia Hsia and R.W. Scribner (eds), Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 78 (Wiesbaden, 1997), pp. 75–92, at p. 78; Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Reformation and “The Disenchantment of the World” Reassessed’, HJ, 51 (2008): 497–528.

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Chapter 7

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Catholic Reformation and the Cult of Angels* In 1601, an angel was sighted upon an altar in England bearing a naked sword, which it ‘glitteringly brandished up and down, foyning sometimes, and sometimes striking; thereby threatning … an instant destruction to this Kingdome’. Disseminated orally and scribally at home, the story of this strange apparition soon travelled across the Channel to Catholic Europe, where it was recorded by the Italian cardinal and church historian Cesare Baronius and subsequently recounted by other Tridentine writers as a sign of divine anger at the infection of the English nation by heresy. The vision of this avenging angel was a clear warning that the Lord would very soon intervene to punish the country for abandoning the faith of its forefathers in favour of a false, new-fangled, and upstart religion. It gave vivid expression to a vein of militant anti-Protestant defiance that made it a powerful emblem of the ongoing polemical and pastoral struggle of the Church of Rome and its agents to resist and reverse the Reformation. But it also made it a focus for the mocking contempt of the Anglican bishop Joseph Hall. Hall listed it, along with ‘a thousand more [tales] of the same branne’, as evidence of the foolish credulity of the papists and the fraudulent devices by which the Catholic clergy kept them in subjugation.1 This episode provides a convenient point of entry into an essay that seeks to investigate the ways in which angels were implicated in the campaign to restore Catholicism to political dominance in England, to boost the morale and intensify the piety of its loyal and stalwart adherents, and to win fervent converts to it. It would be a mistake to imply that these sublime and mysterious celestial creatures were a major catalyst for the bitter theological controversies that divided the Protestant reformers and their Catholic *  An earlier version of this chapter was published under the title of ‘Catholic Reformation and the Cult of Angels in Early Modern England’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), Conversations with Angels: Essays Towards a History of Spiritual Communication 1100– 1700 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 273–94. (See http://www.palgrave.com/products/title. aspx?pid=280456.) 1   Joseph Hall, The great mystery of godliness … Also, the invisible world (London, 1652), pp. 55–6.

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opponents. They were not leading protagonists in a drama that revolved around the contested doctrines of salvation, purgatory, transubstantiation, and the cult of saints, but they were nevertheless significant supporting actors and accessories to it. They were involved in a series of skirmishes on the edges of the main battlefield which augment our understanding of the dissemination and reception of the Counter Reformation as a European movement, as well as the nature and influence of the missionary endeavours in which it engaged in territories where Protestantism reigned. A flourishing feature of medieval devotion, in the course of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Catholic devotion to angels acquired a distinctly confessional edge. It became one of an array of offensive weapons and proselytising tools employed by the community and its priests to combat the official attempt to persecute them into extinction. As we shall see, however, instances of angelic intercession in the earthly realm often proved to be as much of a liability as an asset, as much a source of anxiety and scandal as a useful evangelical resource to a Church under the cross. Early modern Roman Catholics were the heirs of a rich and elaborate legacy of angelology. Sifted and synthesised by Augustine in the early fifth century, the seam of Judeo-Christian belief about angels embedded in the Bible was augmented around 500 by Pseudo Dionysius’s treatise On the celestial hierarchy. This defined the role of nine ranks or orders of these heavenly creatures in the working of the universe and exerted a decisive and formative influence on later medieval thought. The study of angels as a theological and metaphysical problem flowered in the thirteenth century, when the Dominican Thomas Aquinas and the Franciscan Bonaventure (later christened the Seraphic Doctor) dedicated much intellectual energy to delineating their activities and to resolving intricate questions about their nature and existence as spirits, together with the extent and limits of their remit as instruments of divine will.2 Yet if angels were the subject of rarefied speculation by scholars, they also played an important part in shaping popular piety. Striking instances of angelic intercession in the lives of the saints, monks and laypeople filled the pages of liturgical and devotional texts like Jacobus Voragine’s famous Legenda aurea (c.1260) and Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus miraculorum (c.1220–35). Apparitions of them defending orthodox dogma and upholding conventional morality featured prominently in 2   See David Keck, Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages (New York and Oxford, 1998) and the extracts from various writers in Steven Chase (ed.), Angelic Spirituality: Medieval Perspectives on the Ways of Angels (New York, 2002). For a brief overview of the medieval background, see Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham, ‘Migrations of Angels in the Early Modern World’, in Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham (eds), Angels in the Early Modern World (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 1–40 at 3–13.

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collections of edifying exempla and sermons such as the English priest John Mirk’s well-known Festial.3 Angels were also firmly embedded in the annual liturgical cycle and the regular round of sacramental devotion. They were thought to be present during the celebration of the mass and at the death bed, where they strenuously wrestled with demons to ensure that the soul of the departed did not perish in hell, an image firmly fixed in the collective imagination by the prolific literature of the ars moriendi. Their role in the Annunciation linked devotion to them with the burgeoning cult of the Virgin Mary, and the words of Gabriel to this most highly favoured lady formed the basis of one of the most familiar prayers uttered by the late medieval laity, the Ave Maria. They were celebrated in the Church’s calendar on 29 September, the feast of St Michael and All Angels. The cult of the Archangel Michael, the great weigher of souls and captain of the Lord’s host against the fiends of hell, had particular resonance in the era of the crusades. It also engendered many church dedications and pilgrimage shrines associated particularly with mountain peaks and high places, including Mont Saint-Michel off the coast of Normandy and St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, which commemorated a vision seen there in the eighth century.4 By the end of the Middle Ages, however, Michael’s pre-eminence was being challenged by the healing archangel immortalised in the book of Tobit, Raphael. Edmund Lacy, bishop of Exeter, wrote an office in his honour and instituted a festival in his diocese in 1443.5 The same period also witnessed a surge of devotion to the guardian angels it was believed God appointed to guard each human being from birth, if not from conception in the maternal womb. The Parisian divine and conciliarist Jean Gerson wrote a collation on the topic in the late fourteenth century; votive masses addressed to them began to appear in missals; and an independent feast in their honour was introduced in Austria, Spain and Portugal in the early 1500s.6 Although the latter 3

  Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols (Princeton, 1993), ii. 201–11; Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue on Miracles, trans. H. von Scott and C.C. Swinton Bland (London, 1929); Mirk’s Festial: A Collection of Homilies, ed. Theodore Erbe, EETS, extra ser. 96 (1905). 4  Keck, Angels and Angelology, ch. 8 and pp. 201–3. On St Michael, see David Hugh Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (Oxford, 1992 edn), pp. 338–9; R.F. Johnson, Saint Michael the Archangel in Medieval English Legend (Woodbridge, 2005). For further discussion of the themes of this paragraph, see now Laura Sangha, Angels and Belief in England, 1480–1700 (London, 2012), ch. 1. 5  R.N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c.1215–c.1515 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 171; Farmer, Oxford Dictionary of Saints, p. 413. 6  Swanson, Religion and Devotion, pp. 171–2; Jean Gerson, Collatis de angelis, in Opera, pars IV (Paris, 1960); Acta Sanctorum September VIII (Antwerp, 1762), pp. 7–8; Farmer, Oxford Dictionary of Saints, p. 219.

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was not officially adopted in England, the fashionable cult of guardian angels had made considerable inroads here on the eve of the Reformation. Reflective of a wider trend towards personalised devotion, specific prayers requesting their protection were incorporated into the profusion of primers commissioned by fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century laypeople in both Latin and the vernacular. A surviving book of hours of the Guardian Angel presented to Elizabeth Woodville, queen consort of Edward IV, dating from c.1475–83, provides evidence of royal support for this avant garde strand of piety, which may fruitfully be paralleled with the more successful cult of the Holy Name patronised in the next generation by Lady Margaret Beaufort. Devotion to these celestial custodians and keepers was closely connected with the Bridgettine house of Syon Abbey: in the mid-1440s Henry VI laid the foundation stone of a chapel dedicated to the Virgin and the Nine Orders of Angels on the lands of the Abbey in Isleworth, which was later extended to a hospital and guild of brothers and sisters. The practice of invoking and worshipping guardian angels was also strongly endorsed by the humanist John Colet in his paraphrase of Dionysius’ Celestial hierarchy. Representative of a developing quest for more intimate communion with the divine, it reflected a capacity to absorb and accommodate new and revitalising religious tendencies that defies older claims that the pre-Reformation Church was in a state of terminal decline.7 One of these tendencies was late medieval mysticism. Angelic visions were a constituent feature of the revelatory experiences of figures like Henry Suso, Hildegard of Bingen, St Catherine of Siena and St Bridget of Sweden, and the intense and contemplative brand of spirituality they espoused found English counterparts in the writings of figures like Walter Hilton and Richard Rolle.8 Mystical raptures and ecstasies could be and were frequently directed into orthodox channels, but they also had the potential to shade into dissident pieties. As the trial and execution of Joan of Arc in 1431 reveals, the hearing of celestial voices could easily

7

  Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, ‘The Cult of Angels in Late Fifteenth-Century England: An Hours of the Guardian Angel Presented to Queen Elizabeth Woodville’, in Lesley Smith and Jane H.M. Taylor (eds), Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence (London and Toronto, 1996), pp. 230–65. For Colet, see p. 258, n. 30 and Feisal G. Mohamed, In the Anteroom of Divinity: The Reformation of the Angels from Colet to Milton (Toronto, 2008), ch. 1. For the cult of the Holy Name of Jesus, see Susan Wabuda, Preaching During the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2002), ch. 4. 8  Keck, Angels and Angelology, pp. 196–201. For angels in English mystical writings, see R.N. Swanson, ed., Catholic England: Faith, Religion and Observance before the Reformation (Manchester, 1993), section IV, esp. pp. 99, 138, 146–7.

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be interpreted as a sign of demonic possession, witchcraft or heresy.9 ‘Interspecies communication’ and the discernment of spirits was fraught with danger for its recipients, especially women, since it bestowed upon them an aura of authority that threatened the stability of the established ecclesiastical hierarchy.10 At a lower level, claims to have had contact with angels and other inhabitants of the occult realm could lead to allegations of dabbling in the ‘superstitious art’ of sorcery. A Suffolk maiden called Marion Clerk was indicted before the church court in 1499 for alleging that she derived her power to heal from fairies, through whose mediation she had also talked with St Stephen and the Archangel Gabriel.11 The Church had long looked askance at the summoning of angels by name, which in its eyes smacked of forbidden forms of magical divination, if not of pagan adoration.12 Nevertheless, the line between acceptable prayer and dubious spell was often blurred in texts compiled for private use by devout laypeople. Supplications and charms intermingle in the commonplace book of the late fifteenth-century Norfolk yeoman, Robert Reynes, which includes a formula for conjuring three angels onto a child’s thumbnail, while a collection drawn up for Sir John Astley a few decades later included invocations of Oriel, Ragwell, Barachiell, Pantalion, Tubiell and Rachyell, appellations ultimately rooted in the Jewish cabbala.13 Such sources offer a glimpse of facets of traditional religion which eluded canonical control 9   John Shinners (ed.), Medieval Popular Religion 1000–1500 (Peterborough, Ontario, 1997), pp. 56–60. See also Dyan Elliott, ‘Seeing Double: John Gerson, the Discernment of Spirits, and Joan of Arc’, AHR, 107 (2002): 26–54. On the problems of contact with otherworldly beings, see Walter Stephens, ‘Strategies of Interspecies Communication, 1100– 2000’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), Conversations with Angels: Essays Towards a History of Spiritual Communication, 1100–1700 (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 25–48. 10  Keck, Angels and Angelology, pp. 189–96; Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca and London, 2003). 11   Christopher Harper-Bill (ed.), The Register of John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury 1486–1500, vol. 3: Norwich Sede Vacante, 1499, Canterbury and York Society (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 215–16. 12   For the earlier medieval attempts to define and police the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable angel invocation, see Valerie I.J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1991), pp. 157–72; Bernadette Filotas, Pagan Survivals, Superstitions and Popular Cultures in Early Medieval Pastoral Literature (Toronto, 2005), pp. 99–105. See also Sophie Page, ‘Speaking with Spirits in Medieval Magical Texts’, in Raymond (ed.), Conversations with Angels, pp. 125–49. 13   Shinners (ed.), Medieval Popular Religion, pp. 337–8 and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven and London, 1992), pp. 71–4, and ch. 8, esp. pp. 269–71; M.J. Swanton, ‘A Fifteenth-Century Cabalistic Memorandum Formerly in Morgan MS 775’, Harvard Theological Review, 76 (1983): 259–61. The will of John Botewright, rector of Swaffham, Norfolk, and master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (d. 1474) also indicates his devotion to a named guardian angel (Swanton, ‘Fifteenth-Century Cabalistic Memorandum’, p. 260).

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and troubled diligent bishops and reform-minded clergymen anxious to purge away superfluous and non-Scriptural accretions. Angels thus occupied a rather ambiguous place in late medieval piety. Devotion to them was an index of the dynamism, adaptability and vibrancy of Catholicism in the years prior to the Henrician schism, but they also fostered religious beliefs and practices that hovered uncomfortably close to the margins of respectability and which exposed it to increasingly overt expressions of concern and criticism from both without and within. These were first articulated in humanist circles. In his satirical colloquy, ‘A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake’ (1526), Desiderius Erasmus poked fun at the venerable tradition of a heavenly letter engraved or delivered by an angel (‘to prevent suspicion of fraud, you shall see the very autograph’), while Sir Thomas More voiced more restrained disquiet about faked miracles involving these celestial creatures in his Dialogue concerning heresies (1529). He cited the example of the novice of Leominster priory who became the focus of a cult of holy anorexia after she enclosed herself in the rood loft and claimed she was sustained only by angels’ food and by pieces of consecrated host that flew through the air from the altar directly into her mouth. She later confessed that this deceptive illusion designed to dupe pilgrims was achieved by an ingenious device involving fine threads of her own hair.14 The case of Elizabeth Barton, the notorious nun of Kent executed for treason in 1534, also involved allegations of feigned visions of angels, many of them contrived to demonstrate divine opposition to Henry VIII’s controversial religious policies. Thus she revealed how one such messenger had commanded her to tell a certain monk to burn his copy of the New Testament in English and how another had bade her to go to the king, ‘that infidel prince of England’, to warn him against usurping the pope’s authority and patrimony and to prophesy divine vengeance if he carried out his plan to marry Anne Boleyn. Partly modelled on the revelations of St Catherine of Siena, Barton’s trances gave potent expression to a body of conservative resistance to the Reformation that was rapidly building.15 Angels were also involved in other manifestations of this nascent protest movement: in August 1538 it was reported that an angel had appeared to the monarch at Portsmouth and urged him to go

14   Craig R. Thompson (ed.), The Colloquies of Erasmus (Chicago and London, 1965), p. 289; Thomas More, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, in The Complete Works of St Thomas More, vol. 6, pts I and II, ed. Thomas M.C. Lawler et al. (New Haven and London, 1981), p. 97. 15  Thomas Wright (ed.), Three Chapters of Letters Relating to the Suppression of the Monasteries, Camden Society, 1st ser., 26 (London, 1843), pp. 14–16. See Ethan H. Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), ch. 2.

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to St Michael’s Mount on pilgrimage, a practice which successive sets of injunctions curtailed and then prohibited.16 Such episodes served not only to politicise visible interventions of these celestial creatures; they also supplied ammunition to evangelical propagandists, for whom such apparitions were further evidence of the fraudulence and forgery which underpinned the false Catholic religion. The biblical tenet that the devil regularly disguised himself as an angel of light helped them to identify these as modern examples of the spurious Antichristian wonders by which the pope and his minions had seduced mankind for so many centuries.17 Thomas Cranmer contemptuously retold the tales of the holy maids of Leominster and Kent in his Confutation of unwritten verities of 1547 with this aim in mind, along with the story of the cripple who came to St Albans with a key given to her by an angel that opened the shrine containing his bones, upon which her lameness was miraculously cured.18 Protestantism uncompromisingly dismissed such supernatural intercessions as blatant fabrications. Hallowed objects and images said to have been conveyed from heaven by angels fell into the same category and a number were casualties of the purges launched by the Henrician commissioners in the mid-1530s. Thus John London proudly reported to Thomas Cromwell that he had confiscated ‘the principall relik of idolytrie within thys realm’, a seraph with one wing which had reputedly conveyed the head of the spear that had pierced Christ’s side at Calvary to the church at Caversham.19 In various ways, then, angels were seriously compromised by their close association with the discredited cult of saints and integrated into an apocalyptic polemic that accused the Catholic hierarchy of collaborating with Satan to extinguish the light of the Gospel. Unlike several other prominent aspects of traditional piety, however, Protestants were unable to eject them from their mental universe completely. Sanctioned by Scripture and deeply rooted in early Christian tradition, reformed theology was obliged to find room for them. Angels remained a vital presence in God’s providential plan for the world, and especially in the lives of the tiny remnant he had predestined to salvation. Nevertheless, Luther, Calvin and their disciples in England did deliberately 16

  J.S. Brewer et al. (eds), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 1509–47, 21 vols (1862–1932), vol. xiii, pt 2, p. 23. 17   On this theme, see Peter Marshall, ‘Forgery and Miracles in the Reign of Henry VIII’, P&P, 178 (2003): 39–73. 18  Thomas Cranmer, A confutation of unwritten verities, in John Edmund Cox (ed.), Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, Martyr, 1556 (Cambridge, 1846), pp. 63–7. 19   Wright (ed.), Three Chapters of Letters, pp. 225–6.

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distance themselves from elements of medieval devotion to these heavenly intermediaries. They dissociated themselves from the Dionysian hierarchy and expressed caution, agnosticism, if not outright opposition to the concept of angelic guardianship, at least in the first generation after the Reformation. Even those who later sought to redeem the doctrine from being ‘clogged and branded with the odious name of Popery’ were reluctant to admit that the reprobate as well as the elect had been bestowed with personal bodyguards to protect them from visible and invisible perils.20 A more emphatic and unequivocal feature of Protestant thinking was insistence that angels were not to be venerated or invocated directly. A succession of divines from William Tyndale onwards warned that to adore or place too much trust in these subordinate celestial creatures was implicitly to derogate from the omnipotence of the Almighty and to fall into the abominable sin of idolatry. This was all too reminiscent of the ‘paultring mawmetrie and heathenish worshipping’ of familiar angels by ancient pagans and heretics.21 No less striking was the repeated claim made by reformed writers that angelic apparitions had ceased, along with other miracles and prophecies, when the apostolic Church cast off its swaddling bands. It became a commonplace that no such spectacles could now be expected and that any new sightings were almost certainly diabolical contrivances designed to lead the unwary astray. The operations of angels, most sixteenth-century Protestants declared confidently, were not now discernible by human eyes.22

20

 For Protestant attitudes to angels, see the survey in Marshall and Walsham, ‘Migrations of Angels’, 13–21; Philip M. Soergel, ‘Luther on the Angels’, in Marshall and Walsham (eds), Angels in the Early Modern World, pp. 64–82; Mohamed, Anteroom of Divinity; Joad Raymond, Milton’s Angels: The Early Modern Imagination (Oxford, 2010), esp. pt I; Sangha, Angels and Belief, esp. chs 2–4. For Calvin, see Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. H. Beveridge, 2 vols in 1 (Grand Rapids, MI, 1989), pp. 144–50, and Susan E. Schreiner, The Theater of his Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin (Grand Rapids, MI, 1991), ch. 2. Quotation from Robert Dingley, The deputation of angels, or the angell-guardian (London, 1654), p. 100, and see pp. 147–55. For the complexity and shifting character of Protestant thought on guardian angels, see Peter Marshall, ‘The Guardian Angel in Protestant England’, in Raymond (ed.), Conversations with Angels, pp. 295–316. 21   See, for example, William Tyndale, Expositions and Notes on Sundry Portions of the Holy Scriptures, Together with The Practice of Prelates, ed. Henry Walter, PS (Cambridge, 1849), pp. 169–70; The Decades of Henry Bullinger, Minister of the Church of Zurich, trans. H.I., 4 vols, PS (Cambridge, 1849–52), 344–8; Andreas Gerardus, The true tryall and examination of a mans own selfe, trans. Thomas Newton (London, 1587 edn), pp. 35–7, quotation at 36. See also the comprehensive discussion of points of difference in Andrew Willet, Synopsis papismi (London, 1614), pp. 385–97. 22   See my ‘Invisible Helpers: Angelic Intervention in Post-Reformation England’, P&P, 208 (2010): 77–130. In the second half of the seventeenth century, some Protestants relaxed their insistence on the cessation of angelic apparitions.

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Such statements sowed the seeds for a subtle but significant bifurcation between the Catholic and Protestant cultures of angels. In the short term, the scorn which the early reformers poured upon counterfeit visions and wonders performed by angelic intermediaries seems to have encouraged something of a temporary retreat from these and other aspects of enthusiasm for the supernatural. A desire for damage limitation seems to have been the dominant note of the Catholic response to the Reformation in the mid-Tudor period as it reeled from the shock of these stinging assaults. In the preface to his 1565 translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, for instance, Thomas Stapleton was distinctively defensive about passages of this kind that might seem ‘vaine, fabulous, or uncredible’ to his readers and the same wariness can be detected in the works of several Louvain exiles published during this decade.23 A sense of vulnerability on this front never evaporated entirely. Gradually, however, hesitation and circumspection gave way to a mood of rehabilitation and renewal, which was buttressed by the bullish decrees and pronouncements of the final sessions of the Council of Trent. Flourishing precisely those features of traditional Christianity of which Protestantism had self-consciously disarmed itself, the agents and patrons of Counter Reformation in Catholicism’s heartlands on the Continent reasserted the validity of devotion to angels, along with other members of the glorious company of heaven, and further elaborated the cycle of liturgical solemnity surrounding them.24 Paul V proclaimed a universal feast and office of the Holy Guardian Angels in 1608, new confraternities dedicated to them sprang up and their iconography was given a boost by a Church eager to harness the arts to enrich and enhance the experience of worship.25 The seventeenth century also saw a spirited resurgence of neo-scholastic angelology, notably in the guise of the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suárez’s commentaries on Aquinas. Robert Bellarmine’s writings also contained detailed discussion of the portfolio of roles fulfilled by these creatures, as messengers, protectors, supplicants, ambassadors 23

  The history of the church of Englande. Compiled by Venerable Bede, trans. Thomas Stapleton (Antwerp, 1565), pp. 5 and 4–12. 24  H.J. Schroeder (ed.), The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (Rockford, IL, 1978), p. 215. For increasing willingness to endorse and exploit miracles and the supernatural, see Chapter 5, above and Philip M. Soergel, Wondrous in his Saints: Counter Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley, CA, 1993). For these trends in relation to angels, see Marshall and Walsham, ‘Migrations of Angels’, pp. 21–31. Sangha, Angels and Beliefs, ch. 5, esp. pp. 139–40, traces a similar transition from the caution of Marian writers on this topic to bolder employment of angelic doctrine and piety in seventeenth-century polemic. 25  On the feast, see Acta Sanctorum September VIII (1762), pp. 7–8; for confraternities, see Louis Châtellier, The Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society, trans. J. Birrell (Cambridge and Paris, 1987), pp. 18, 264.

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and warlike avengers and he was a vigorous and valiant defender of devotion to them.26 The leading part played by the Society of Jesus in reinvigorating the cult of angels in general and of guardian angels in particular was expertly dissected by the late Trevor Johnson. Inflecting an older current of piety with distinctive new priorities, Ignatius Loyola and his followers found in angels an ideal model for the curious mixture of contemplation and action that characterised the spirituality of the order they founded. The Spiritual exercises provided a template for interpreting the decisive interpositions of these benevolent spirits in the interior struggle of the individual against worldly temptation and greatly influenced how leading Jesuits interpreted their own lives. Pedro Ribadeneira claimed that Loyola himself had enjoyed the privilege of protection by no less than an archangel. The medieval idea that angels were perfect exemplars for those who chose a monastic or mendicant vocation underwent a notable revival and figures like St Aloysius Gonzaga, who died aged 23 tending victims of plague in 1591, were upheld as the embodiment of the seraphic virtue of chastity. Treatises by later writers like Francesco Albertini and Cornelius a Lapide proved no less decisive in entrenching acknowledgement of the part angels played in guiding the soul towards salvation within the popular religious culture of Tridentine Europe. Prayers for precisely the kind of celestial mediation with the Almighty which Protestants deplored pervaded the devotional works that poured from Catholic presses in the seventeenth century.27 English Catholics were by no means isolated from these developments. The vigorous campaign of publication and translation that was a vital arm of the mission launched by Cardinal Allen and his seminary priests in 1574, and strengthened by the arrival of the Jesuits in 1580, made many of the new spiritual classics emanating from Italy, Spain and France available to the faithful. Gaspar Loarte’s Exercise of a Christian life (1579) urged Christians to make regular supplications to these heavenly intermediaries throughout the day, as they woke, before they went out of doors and as 26  Francisco Suárez, Summa theologiae de rerum omnium creatore, II De angelis (Lyon, 1620); Robert Bellarmine, Spiritual Writings, trans. and ed. J.P. Donnelly and R.J. Teske (Mahwah, NJ, 1989), pp. 143–53. 27  Trevor Johnson, ‘Guardian Angels and the Society of Jesus’, in Marshall and Walsham (eds), Angels in the Early Modern World, pp. 191–213; John O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1993), pp. 42–3. For Ignatius’ directions on the discernment of spirits, see The Text of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius (London, 1913 edn.), pp. 111–14. For angels as models of the monastic and mendicant life, see Keck, Angels and Angelology, ch. 6, and Conrad Leyser, ‘Angels, Monks, and Demons in the Early Medieval West’, in Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser (eds), Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2001), pp. 9–22.

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they prepared for bed: ‘O holy Angel, the guardian of my soule, to whom I am especially committed, have thou continually a diligent and careful eye upon me’.28 Similar prayers for celestial protection from ‘al incursions of the Divel’ were a feature of editions of Peter Canisius’s influential catechism,29 and of Francis de Sales’ Introduction to a devout life (1613). Meditating on the path to paradise, he wrote: ‘Give thy hand to thy good Angel, that hee may guide thee thither, and encourage they soule, to make this choise’. ‘O my good Angel, present me unto this glorious and sacred assemblie, and abandon me not, untill I arrive to this societie of this blessed companie …’. Against the backdrop of Protestant claims about the evils of praying to them, he stressed that ‘since God doth often times send downe to us his holie inspirations by Ministrie of his Angels: we should likewise be diligent, to send up unto him our devout aspirations by the self same heavenlie messengers’.30 Robert Persons made the point more polemically in his Warn-word against a tract by Sir Francis Hastings, stating that ‘they may piouslie be prayed unto for their assistance to their Lord & maister, without any derogation of his divine honor, but rather with much encrease therof’.31 The notion that they were ‘rightly’ and ‘profitably invocated’ was reiterated by Thomas Worthington in his Anker of Christian doctrine (1618), together with the tenet that angels deserved to be honoured with latria, a ‘spiritual religious honour farre more excellent then civil, but infinitely lesse them [sic] divine’.32 Nor did English Catholics lack access to the neo-scholastic angelology of Suarez, though ironically this was disseminated by a treatise composed by his erstwhile assistant at the University of Coimbra, the recent Protestant convert, John Salkeld.33 Meanwhile, the new office of the Guardian Angels had reached England via John Wilson’s edition of the Jesus Psalter, The key of paradise, in 1623; and in 1669, a year before Clement X reassigned the festival to 28  Gaspar Loarte, The exercise of a Christian life, trans. I.S. ([London, 1579]), fos 12r, 218v, 221v. The Spanish Dominican Luis de Granada composed many similar prayers and thanksgivings to angels, many of which were incorporated in popular and profitable Protestant editions despite reformed repudiation of direct invocations of them: see for example, A paradise of prayers containing the purity of devotion and meditation [trans. Thomas Lodge?] (London, 1614), pp. 4, 17–19 and passim. 29  Peter Canisius, An introduction to the Catholick faith containing A brief explication of the Christian Doctrine ([Rouen], 1633), pp. 171–2, 174–5. 30  Francis de Sales, An introduction to a devoute life, trans. I.Y ([St Omer], 2nd edn, 1617 [1622]), pp. 83, 81, 158. 31  Robert Persons, The warn-word to Sir Francis Hastinges Wast-Word ([Antwerp], 1602), fo. 37v. 32   [Thomas Worthington], An anker of Christian doctrine (Douai, 1622 edn), pp. 417–22 at 418. 33   John Salkeld, A treatise of angels (London, 1613).

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Figure 7.1 Jeremias Drexelius, The angel guardian’s clock (Rouen, [1630]), title-page. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Syn.8.62.6. 2 October, it was incorporated in the English primer.34 At the Jesuit church in Watten in Flanders, where many English exiles congregated, the feast was celebrated with grand and solemn ceremony in 1694 in the presence of the earl of Castlemain, an exquisitely carved and decorated silver statue of an angel taking pride of place in the procession.35 By then, devotion to the cult was apparently already widespread back at home, thanks largely to Henry Hawkins’s 1630 translation of the Bavarian court preacher and Jesuit Jeremias Drexelius’ Angel guardian’s clock, first published in Latin nine years before (Figure 7.1).

34

  The key of paradise opening the gate to eternal salvation, ed. John Wilson (St Omer, 1675 edn), pp. 245–54. This was first inserted in the 1623 edn, The primer more ample, and in a new order (Rouen, 1684 edn), pp. 225–9. 35  Foley, vii, pt 2, 1228–9.

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Part of a deliberate Counter-Reformation project to introduce the works of the German author into this country, Drexelius’ popular devotional text was an anthology of meditations and reflections on the multiple offices which angels carried out in the earthly realm. It described the tender love they bore to those under their custody, defending them from mortal dangers and the assaults of the devil, inciting them to virtue, and protecting their souls in the last combat that was the prelude to death. It emphasised the special reverence that Christian people owed to these creatures and encouraged daily recitation of litanies and prayers (including the Angelical Salutation), the performance of pious and ascetic works, the visitation of churches dedicated to them and diligent observance of their sacred feast days. Dedicated (under the cover of cryptic initials) to the prominent Wiltshire recusant Lady Anne Arundell, Countess of Wardour, ‘an eminent Patronesse’ of the sodality of Our Lady and ‘in this distressed countrie, a cherisher of the whole cause’, this was a text that reflected the insatiable thirst of the Catholic community for literary sustenance from the Continent, and the extent to which it kept abreast of the latest Counter-Reformation trends in personal devotion. The piety of such noblewomen was not merely a survivalist residue of the Old Faith; assisted by the influence exerted by their Jesuit chaplains and confessors, it was infused with a distinctly Ignatian spiritual intensity.36 Mary Ward, who founded the unenclosed order of the English Ladies as a female counterpart to the Society of Jesus after hearing ‘an interior voice’, was herself deeply devoted to angels and archangels, Michael, Gabriel and Raphael in particular. She charged one of the 28 celestial guardians to whom she prayed daily ‘to have a care of her Letters’, another to protect her during her journeys and a third ‘to prevent the misservices of God by the indiscretions of ours’. After witnessing another hovering over the bed of an endangered priest ‘in posture of deffence’ she employed an artist to paint the marvellous vision she had experienced.37 Victoria Ayray, of the English house of Sepulchrines in Liege, was similarly convinced that she had been under the faithful custody of a special celestial keeper ‘from the first instant of my birth’, and wrote a prayer during her novitiate to her ‘friendly comforter’ and ‘charitable protector’, through whose ‘safe and secure conduct’ she hoped to ‘surpass through the wearisome troubles of

36

  [Jeremias Drexelius], The angel guardian’s clock (Rouen, [1630]), quotations at pp. 7–8. The identifications of the translator and dedicatee are made in J.M. Blom, ‘The Adventures of an Angel-Guardian in Seventeenth-Century England’, RH, 20 (1990): 48–57. 37   Christina Kenworthy-Browne (ed.), Mary Ward (1585–1645): A Brief Relation … with Autobiographical Fragments and a Selection of Letters, CRS 81 (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 98–9.

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this earthly pilgrimage … [and] find eternal rest in the Heavenly paradise’.38 The renewed fascination of early modern Catholics with guardian angels epitomised ‘an optimistic anthropology whereby divine grace allows the human will to co-operate with it for salvation’; it embodied a soteriology antagonistic towards the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination.39 To Protestant readers, the direct invocations of angels and archangels which Drexelius’ book contained were a hallmark of the superstition which lay at the heart of the popish religion: the original owner of one surviving copy of The angel guardian’s clock systematically crossed out these supplications and reinstated God and Christ as the sole recipients of human suffrages.40 In a sermon printed in 1636, the Oxford divine John Prideaux warned Romanist ‘votaries’ and ‘angel-worshippers’ to take heed of their mistakes in this regard, ‘least in their unwarrantable devotions, instead of an Angel of light, they meet sometime with a worse commodity’ – in other words, the devil in one of his many Machiavellian guises. ‘It may perchance so fall out, that when … they have the familiarity of their guardian Angel, they bee fitted with a familiar, they would faine be ridde of’.41 There was indeed a darker and more dubious side to the resurgence of devotion to angels in Counter Reformation Europe. The anxieties about angelic visions that had periodically arisen in the medieval period resurfaced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, leaving their mark in a trail of cases that came before ecclesiastical courts and tribunals. Claims to have communicated with these creatures continued to be surrounded with suspicion and many aspiring saints who believed they had achieved this were dismissed as the victims of demonic delusion or as wily imposters. Once again women were especially vulnerable to denunciation and they themselves often shared the anxiety of the clerical hierarchy about the source of their visions. Initially treated with mistrust, the ecstasies of the Spanish Carmelite nun Teresa of Avila were eventually acknowledged to be of divine origin, though only after extensive investigation by the authorities. All too frequently similar mystical experiences, especially when they occurred outside the cloister, led either to prosecutions for heresy or

38

  ‘A Prayer to our good Angel’, in Caroline Bowden (ed.), English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, vol. 2 Spirituality, ed. Laurence Lux-Sterritt (London, 2012), pp. 387–8. 39   Johnson, ‘Guardian Angels and the Society of Jesus’, p. 211. As Peter Marshall shows in ‘Guardian Angel’, however, Calvin himself ambivalent on the subject and other Protestants also found ways of accommodating the concept of the guardian angel. 40   BL copy, shelfmark 4408.a.57. 41   John Prideaux, The patronage of angels. A sermon preached at court (Oxford, 1636), p. 23.

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to the summoning of exorcists.42 The angelic visitations and instructions Cecilia Ferrazi received in the 1650s and 60s, for instance, led to her denunciation and imprisonment by the Venetian Inquisition for pretence of holiness. Investigated by the Holy Office in 1680, Christina della Rovere of Palermo yielded under relentless interrogation and admitted that her visions were feigned and induced by the devil: thereafter the handsome young man with blond hair dressed in white who had appeared to her in the past was replaced by a large black dog breathing fire and threatening her. The mystical raptures of the Florentine nun Maddalena de’ Pazzi were carefully interpreted and edited by her fellow sisters and confessor to protect her from censure for simulated sanctity and to promote her cause for canonisation, which eventually succeeded in 1669.43 In seventeenthcentury France, claims of divine illumination were subjected to equally intense scrutiny: a rash of possession cases, notably those at Loudon, reflected the profound ambivalence of the Catholic hierarchy about instances of visionary charisma and its determination to redefine them as diabolical illusions. Jeanne de Anges’ interactions with a guardian angel coexisted with her sufferings at the hands of demons: some suspected the former was a diabolical spectre.44 The Tridentine Church on the Continent was no less if not more troubled by the problem of the discernment of spirits than its predecessor. In a process which Ottavia Niccoli has called ‘the end of prophecy’, across Catholic Europe it sought to exert ‘repressive

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 For an overview of this phenomenon, see R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal 1540–1770 (Cambridge, 1998), ch. 9. For Spain, see Mary Elizabeth Perry, ‘Beatas and the Inquisition’, in Stephen Haliczer (ed.), Inquisition and Society in Early Modern Europe (Totowa, 1987), 147–68; Stephen Haliczer, Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain (Oxford, 2002); Andrew W. Keitt, Inventing the Sacred: Imposture, Inquisition, and the Boundaries of the Supernatural in Golden Age Spain (Leiden, 2005), esp. ch. 3. On Teresa there is an extensive literature, but see most recently Colin Thompson, ‘Dangerous Visions: The Experience of Teresa of Avila and the Teaching of John of the Cross’, in Clare Copeland and Jan Machielsen (eds), Angels of Light? Sanctity and Discernment of Spirits in the Early Modern Period (Leiden, 2012), pp. 51–70. 43   See Anne Jacobson Schutte (ed.), Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint (Chicago, 1996), and her Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition and Gender in the Republic of Venice 1618–1750 (Baltimore, MD, 2001), pp. 13–15, and 51–2, 67, 89–90, 162, 193–4 for other examples. For Christina della Rovere, see Ottavia Niccoli, ‘The End of Prophecy’, JMH, 61 (1989): 667–82, at 680. For Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, see Clare Copeland, ‘Participating in the Divine: Visions and Ecstasies in a Florentine Convent’, in Copeland and Machielsen (eds), Angels of Light?, pp. 71–102. 44  For France, see Moshe Sluhovsky, ‘A Divine Apparition or Demonic Possession? Female Agency and Church Authority in Demonic Possession in Sixteenth-Century France’, SCJ, 27 (1996): 1039–55; Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago and London, 2007); Sarah Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France (London, 2004), esp. ch. 8, pp. 135–49.

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control over direct relationships with the supernatural that showed signs of escaping ecclesiastical mediation’. Acutely conscious of the reformers’ sarcasm about the cult of visions and living saints, it endeavoured to eliminate disorderly interactions with angels that might taint it with the brush of superstition and sorcery.45 How far can similar patterns be detected within early modern English Catholicism? Affective and mystical piety flourished anew in the hothouse atmosphere of the convents in the Low Countries and here too some women had spiritual experiences that imbued them with charisma and power, but also greatly worried their clerical confessors and mentors. The interior visions vouchsafed to Catherine Burton during a series of adolescent illnesses in the later seventeenth century which confirmed her vocation to take the veil included several apparitions of celestial creatures. One took the form of a beautiful child holding a richly adorned crown, which she understood to be a symbol of the eternal reward she would enjoy after patiently enduring her sufferings; another advised her to offer up her prayers for the recently banished King James II rather than her own health. Clothed as Mary Xaveria in 1693, the young Carmelite described her continuing ecstasies to her priestly director, who treated them with the utmost distrust, chiding her ‘grievously’, asking her if she had pretended them and commanding her to ‘resist all these motions and feelings of devotion, to neglect and slight them … [as] fancies and imaginations which might do me much harm’. Mary Xaveria’s acute conflict between her duty of obedience to a male clerical superior and her overwhelming desire to achieve intimate union with the divine was ultimately resolved in her own favour. Revered as a recipient of miraculous blessings, she became Mother Superior of her house and her holy life was celebrated in a manuscript tract by Father Thomas Hunter after her death. Nevertheless a strong undercurrent of anxiety remained. Hunter felt it necessary to stress in the preface that raptures of this type were ‘always to be suspected as dangerous, never to be desired or sought for, and not easily to be relied upon, unless accompanied with certain effects and signs which may secure a director of souls that they are the operations of the Divine Spirit’. The tenor of his message was clear: angels that appeared in the eye of the mind were more likely than not to be the artifices by which Satan led the unwary to damnation in hell.46 Tobie Matthew struck the same negative chord in 45

 Niccoli, ‘The End of Prophecy’, 682. Such difficulties find a striking parallel within the Protestant world: see my ‘Invisible Helpers’. 46   See Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke, 2002), ch. 5, esp. pp. 147–63. Thomas Hunter, An English Carmelite: The Life of Catharine Burton, Mother Mary Xaveria of the Angels, of the English Teresian Convent at Antwerp, ed. H.J.C. (London, 1876), pp. 53–6, 66, 116, 119–36, and xiii.

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his biography of the Benedictine nun Lady Lucy Knatchbull, who was also privileged with special visitations from her Angel Guardian, as well as Christ and the Blessed Virgin, ‘sent her by the hand of Heaven’. He warned his readers not ‘to itch after such extraordinary advantages as those’: to desire them was to display ‘a strange kind of secret Pride’ and a spiritual pretension that might well be diabolical in origin. Only a chosen few of impeccable virtue had true encounters with God’s celestial messengers.47 Posthumously, however, such experiences were less destabilising. After her death the spiritual director of Mary of the Holy Ghost (Mary Wigmore) assured her fellow sisters that her life had been ‘full of supernaturall favours’ and read to them an extract of her own writings about how an angel had appeared to her with a glittering crown in his hand.48 Meanwhile, in England the circumstances of Catholicism’s missionary condition have conspired against the survival of evidence of struggles to supervise and subdue destabilising apparitions of this kind. In the absence of a settled episcopal hierarchy backed by the arm of the state, it was forced to rely on informal mechanisms for internal discipline that have left little mark on the historical record. Moreover, here, there was arguably a strong incentive for the clergy to hush up such cases, lest they play into the hands of their Protestant adversaries. Ever conscious of the danger of interception, they were circumspect about what they chose to commit to writing, while the reports they sent to their superiors abroad tended to be upbeat assessments of the impact of their endeavours, from which they probably edited out such troublesome episodes. The silences of our sources may therefore be pregnant ones, hiding heterodox tendencies that strained the image of heroic unity and purity which priests sought to paint of the community. At the same time, there were some occasions on which the clergy were prepared to endorse celestial visions. Spiritual communication was surrounded by hazards, but in a context where Catholicism was oppressed and downtrodden, it could paradoxically also be turned to polemical On supernatural encounters in English convents and the controversy and doubt that surrounded them, see Nicky Hallett (ed.), Witchcraft, Exorcism and the Politics of Possession in a Seventeenth-Century Convent: ‘How Sister Ursula was Once Bewitched and Sister Margaret Twice’ (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 15–18; Nicky Hallett (ed.), Lives of Spirit: English Carmelite Self-Writing of the Early Modern Period (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 21–4. Mother Xaveria’s life is edited on pp. 135–61. See also her The Senses in Religious Communities, 1600–1800: Early Modern ‘Convents of Pleasure’ (Farnham, 2013), esp. pp. 197–9. The inner struggles of contemplatives are also discussed in Laurence Lux-Sterritt, ‘Divine Love and the Negotiation of Emotions in Early Modern English Convents’, in Caroline Bowden and James E. Kelly (eds), The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800 (Farnham, 2013), pp. 229–45. 47  Tobie Mathew, The Life of Lady Lucy Knatchbull, ed. David Knowles (London, 1931), ch. 5, pp. 57–69. 48  Hallett (ed.), Lives of Spirit, p. 11.

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and pastoral advantage. Here the case of Elizabeth Orton of Flintshire is highly suggestive: in February 1581, this 14-year-old girl saw a series of apparitions confirming the disputed doctrines of purgatory and the mass, together with the intercessory powers of the Virgin and saints. As well as various other members of the company of heaven, these involved angels. One took the form of ‘a goodly faire birde’ with a human face, which covered her with its wings and touched her on the forehead, breast and lips before declaring that it was a messenger from God. A second assumed the guise of an elderly man dressed in white who comforted her and led her to an upper chamber lit with candles where she saw Christ and his mother. In the course of her trances, which were witnessed by a crowd of local Catholics, she endorsed the necessity of refusing to attend Protestant churches and cried ‘fie uppon the naughtie Religion now used, fie uppon their wicked and accursed Churche, moste abominable in Gods sight’. Although she herself initially feared that they might come from evil spirits or goblins and eyewitnesses suspected that she was suffering from some form of sickness, concerns about the authenticity of her ecstasies evidently evaporated. An account of the incident, probably written by a local missionary, was soon being circulated widely in manuscript and sent across the sea to France, Rome and Ireland. As its author recognised, Orton’s confessionally charged visions were a propaganda gift to a persecuted Church. The power of her apparitions to sway public opinion in favour of the Catholic religion was, however, short-lived. Arrested and investigated by the bishop of Chester, under duress she confessed to having faked them, coached by a former schoolmaster turned seminary priest. Setting aside the distracting question of whether Elizabeth Orton was a genuine seer or a pious fraud, it is clear that an active attempt was made to utilise her experiences as a weapon in the ongoing war against Protestantism. In a climate in which writers like Richard Bristow were defending miracles and visions as ‘infallible marks’ of the true Church, they offered opportunities for vindicating the faith that the missionaries could ill afford to ignore, especially since their enemies insisted that such spectacles were now a thing of the past. But they simultaneously created various hostages to fortune. Drawing inevitable parallels with the disgraced nun of Kent, polemicists like Barnaby Rich leapt upon the episode as further proof of the precept that popery was nothing more than a tissue of fictions and lies. The scurrilous pamphlet he published in 1582 exposed the pitfalls of seeking to transform such supernatural intrusions into a proselytising tool, even as it revealed the depth of Protestant fears about the effectiveness of this very strategy.49 49

  Barnaby Rich, The true report of a late practise enterprised by a papist, with a young maiden in Wales (London, 1582), sigs D1r, C1v, D1v–2r and passim. The schoolmaster and seminary priest are, however, two separate people. See also Chapter 5, above, p. 163.

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Other apparitions of angels also proved to be a double-edged sword. The Denham demoniac Richard Mainy claimed that the Madonna and attendant choirs of angels had appeared to him and fixed a date for his translation to paradise and two Catholic maids exorcised at the Gatehouse in London around 1616 were possessed by the spirits of St Michael the Archangel, as well as the Virgin Mary and various martyrs. The former was famously exposed by Samuel Harsnet as an ‘egregious popish imposture’, while the latter was listed along with various other ‘muddie Forgeries and Dog-tricke Inventions’ in John Gee’s vicious Foot out of the snare (1624).50 Gee returned to the theme later the same year in his New shreds of the old snare, which provided additional evidence of how priests used ‘the engine of personated Apparitions’ to seduce young women to enter convents abroad and to convince wavering laypeople to convert to the faith. The ‘pretended divine inspirations’, ‘visible messengers’ and ‘sweet insinuations … imitating in some sort the Angell Gabriell’ by which these ‘Jesuiticall Fowlers’ lured ‘female Partridges into their Nett’ were theatrical devices fit for the playhouse, stage-effects contrived using disguised voices, ‘Paper Lanthornes’, ‘transparent Glasses’ and boys cloaked in white sheets.51 James Wadsworth lifted the lid on the story of a gentleman from Yorkshire who had been induced to enter the Society of Jesus after two fathers garbed as angels approached his bedside and scourged him, declaring that they had been sent to chastise him for his offences and for resisting the orders of his superiors. The deception had been revealed to him four years later by one of these priests, who ‘blushed not’ to acquaint him with the truth of it.52 A similar device designed to effect the conversion of a Lutheran shepherd in Germany was published for the edification of Protestants in 1676: in this instance two monks had dressed up ‘in strange and wonderfull shapes; the one very gay and beautiful, with a brave pair of wings, and other Accoutrements, fit to represent him as a good Angel; the other in a horrid and frightful Habit, personating the Devil’.53 Whether or not we take Protestant allegations of clerical legerdemain at face value, It is discussed more briefly in Lucy Underwood, ‘Recusancy and the Rising Generation’, RH, 31 (2013): 511–33.. For priestly endorsement of visions as marks of the true church, see Richard Bristow, A briefe treatise of divers plaine and sure waies to finde out the truth (Antwerp, 1599 edn.; first publ. 1574), fos 32v–39v; Thomas Hill, A quartron of reasons of Catholike religion (Antwerp, 1600), pp. 37–9. 50   John Gee, The Foot out of the Snare (1624), ed. T.H.B.M. Harmsen (Nijmegen, 1992), pp. 131–2, 133; Samuel Harsnett, A declaration of egregious popish impostures (London, 1603), pp. 273–6. 51   John Gee, New shreds of the old snare (London, 1624), pp. 1, 16–17, 23 and passim. 52   James Wadsworth, The English Spanish pilgrime (London, 1629), pp. 20–21. 53   A true relation from Germany, of a Protestant shepherd’s killing a counterfeit devil (London, 1676), p. 2.

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these tales still offer insight into the manner in which visions of angels could be harnessed to serve the ends of Catholic evangelism.54 Despite the risk they carried of attracting reformed mockery and ridicule, leading Catholic divines continued to incorporate edifying and inspiring examples of angelic intervention in the lives of both medieval and contemporary saints, priests and laity in the devotional writings they produced for the community. Persons’ Book of resolution or Christian directorie contained a number of passages from Augustine, Gregory and Bede ‘concerning apparitions of certain angels to godly people’, which, he declared, were ‘permitted for our sake which doe yet live, and maye take commoditie by the same’. It is telling that Edmund Bunny censored these from the bowdlerised version he prepared of the text for the benefit of Protestant readers.55 Drexelius’ Angel guardian’s clock included an account of the two celestial spirits of the rank of archangel which had regularly attended the recently canonised Italian saint Francesca Romana in garments of white, ‘partly inclining to the coulour of the heavens, their armes … placed upon their breast in forme of a crosse … their haire shining like gold; their countenance most bright and resplendent with a comely majesty’. It also told the story of the young Jesuit Joannes Carrera, whose guardian angel became his intimate friend and daily companion, rousing him from bed each morning in order to say his prayers.56 The favours bestowed upon Loyola’s companion Pierre Favre by angels, whom he ‘sensiblie perceaved’ to have preserved him ‘from the ambushments of the heretiks’ as he travelled around Germany were recounted by Francis de Sales, while the deliverance of the Oratorian Philip Neri by an angel, who plucked him from a ditch by the hairs of his head, was another miracle recorded in Baronius that enjoyed wide circulation.57 Other visions were reported in letters sent from Rome and Douai, including that of the aged Capuchin Franciscus de Bergamo, who had been privileged with the assistance of an angel in human shape for eight years before his death each time he recited the canonical hours. Protestants like John Gee and Joseph Hall might scoff at the ‘fondly credulous’ papists who soaked up 54

 For more on visions, see Chapter 5, pp. 162–6, above.  Robert Persons, A Christian directorie guiding men to their salvation (Rouen, 1585), fo. 14v and pp. 433–6. See also Robert McNulty, ‘The Protestant Version of Robert Parsons’, The First Book of Christian Exercise’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 22 (1959): 271–300 at 298. 56  Drexelius, Angel guardian’s clock, pp. 237, 284. On Francesca Romana, see Lyndal Roper and Guy Boanas, ‘Feminine Piety in Fifteenth-Century Rome’, in Jim Obelkevich, Lyndal Roper and Raphael Samuel (eds), Disciplines of Faith: Studies in Religion, Politics and Patriarchy (London, 1987), pp. 177–93. 57  Francis de Sales, Introduction, p. 160, as recorded in his Mémorial. For Neri, see Gee, Foot out of the Snare, ed. Harmsen, p. 137. 55

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such tales, but to the faithful they provided compelling evidence that the resurgent Church of Rome was divinely sanctioned.58 These continental cases of angelic intercession were supplemented by recent instances witnessed within their own country. Mentioned in the Jesuit Annual Letters, internal memoranda and missionary memoirs, often these bear clear traces of clerical embellishment. The story of the venerable old man who appeared to a servant in a puritan household surrounded by an aura of brilliant light in 1608 is just one example of how personal experiences were transformed into didactic conversion narratives and invested with an overtly confessional agenda: the girl remained speechless for three or four days before speaking at length in praise of the Catholics, to the evident horror of her master.59 On other occasions, angels were instrumental in inspiring the wavering to stand fast to the faith and prophesying the punishment of apostates: James Douglas, the earl of Morton, was admonished by a vision of angel that if he signed a set of Protestant articles he would lose his right hand and perish miserably. He stoically resisted the persuasions of his relatives and Calvinist ministers and in commemoration of the benevolent spirit’s timely visit had an angel depicted on his coat of arms. Subsequently, however, he gave way to the temptation of high office offered to him by the king in return for his compliance, only to meet with the desperate end foretold by the celestial messenger.60 A case dating from the end of the seventeenth century, by contrast, underlined the special care these creatures exercised towards the Jesuits: the curses uttered by the thwarted suitor of a young lady who entered the order of St Clare at Gravelines against her confessor resulted in him being flung from a horse into the mud, but he escaped serious hurt after his guardian angel stepped in to help.61 Other anecdotes incorporated into the Latin manuscript autobiographies of John Gerard and William Weston illustrated angelic support for beliefs about death and purgatory fiercely disputed by Protestants. One woman was warned by mysterious knocks on her door made by an angel to pray for her husband’s soul, while another was favoured with a vision of celestial spirits and the blissful sounds of heavenly harmony as she lay dying. After she departed, a perfect white cross appeared in the midst of her featherbed.62 A Scottish gentleman who saw a frightful 58

 Hall, Great mystery of godliness, p. 54.  Foley, vii, pt 2, 992. 60   William Forbes-Leith (ed.), Narratives of Scottish Catholics under Mary Stuart and James VI (Edinburgh, 1885), pp. 356–8. 61  Foley, vii, pt 2, 1229. 62   John Gerard, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, ed. Philip Caraman (London, 1951), p. 179; William Weston, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, ed. Philip Caraman (London, 1955), pp. 53, 55. 59

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fiend standing by his side as he lay dying recovered his confidence after a Catholic neighbour told him that his sins were blotted out by sacramental confession and penance. He described how St Michael the Archangel and his former confessor, the Jesuit John Leslie, had appeared and driven the demon away before it whisked his soul off to hell.63 Such apparition stories were skilfully adapted by the missionary clergy to teach theological lessons, though the extent to which they were internalised by ordinary laypeople remains an open question. The form in which they have come down to us is the end-product of a process by which they were moulded to fit with clerical priorities and directed into orthodox channels. Similar visions were vouchsafed to imprisoned missionaries and recusants suffering desperate persecution and facing up to imminent execution. Nicholas Horner, whose gangrenous leg had to be amputated after he was incarcerated in a foul dungeon for harbouring priests, was said to have told a devout gentlewoman how his cell had been mysteriously illuminated before the arrival of an angel sent to comfort him.64 Other martyrs were consoled and encouraged by angelic guardians: Stephen Rowsham saw ‘a most sweet and most pleasant light’ and felt three gentle strokes on his right hand during his time in gaol and an eye-witness to the death of Robert Ludham in 1588 reported that he too had been privileged with an apparition of angels just before he was tipped off the ladder.65 Echoing ancient biblical and hagiographical motifs, such stories attest to the spontaneous sanctification of those put to death by the Elizabethan and Stuart state as traitors. Shaped by the laypeople who recorded, preserved and lovingly recopied them for posterity, they bolstered the morale of a beleaguered community eager for evidence that God and the angels were on their side. Anxious to deflect gratuitous taunts from their enemies, as Anne Dillon has shown, accounts of the deaths of the English martyrs prepared for public consumption by an international audience typically excluded details of such supernatural occurrences. The martyrological material which the clergy helped to circulate secretly in manuscript, by contrast, was replete with signs and wonders.66 Even these, however, 63   William Forbes-Leith (ed.), Memoirs of Scottish Catholics during the XVI and XVIIth Centuries, 2 vols (London, 1909), i. 169. 64   Different reports of this episode can be found in Philip Caraman (ed.), The Other Face: Catholic Life under Elizabeth I (London, 1960), pp. 243–4 (from Grene’s Collectanea), pp. 247–8 (Robert Southwell to Claude Aquaviva, 8 March 1590); Richard Challoner, Memoirs of Missionary Priests, ed. J.H. Pollen (London, 1924), p. 161. 65  Challoner, Memoirs, pp. 124, 131. On Rowsham, see also Foley, iv. 340. 66  Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot, 2002), ch. 2. Cf. the similarly ambivalent attitude of the Catholic priesthood to stories of the apparition of ghosts: Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002), pp. 242–5.

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provide evidence of the hesitations that hovered around such experiences: a narrative about Anne Line, convicted for harbouring a priest in 1601, tells how on the night before her execution she saw ‘a lighte more resplendent than her owne candle lighte … which soone vanished awaye’, but told no one about it fearing that ‘yt might be an illusion’ rather than ‘a true vision’ until the eve of her death, and ‘that in secret only to two’.67 But the potential for embarrassment that stories of angels and other miracles carried with them was counterbalanced by the reassurance and resilience they could instil in the loyal supporters of an embattled religion and by the possibility that they might just persuade heretics themselves to embrace a faith endorsed by startling interventions from heaven. One other feature of the wider Counter-Reformation revival of devotion to angels deserves our attention, and that is the emergence of St Michael the Archangel as a symbol of crusading militancy against the forces of heresy. Michael’s traditional role as the Lord’s chief warrior in the battle against Satan and pagan infidels made him a natural patron of the confessional struggle to vanquish Protestantism. Bellarmine and others presented him as the head and keeper of Christ’s Church and a celestial counterpart to the pope on earth. A fresco painted by Domenichino in the treasury of Naples cathedral depicted him furiously trampling the heresiarchs Luther and Calvin underfoot.68 Reflecting the precept that every province and kingdom was designated a holy angel to protect it, in Bavaria Wilhelm the Pious adopted the archangel as the mascot of his campaign to revitalise Catholicism in the region during the 1580s and 90s. He built a magnificent church in Munich dedicated to him and commissioned art, sculpture and plays depicting him in battle with Lucifer.69 Although there was little scope for such new foundations or representations in England, it is striking that in 1676 Clement X issued a new plenary indulgence for those who made a pilgrimage to the ruined chapel of St Michael on top of a mountain near Abergavenny in Wales and prayed fervently for ‘the extirpation of heresies’.70 It is also telling that when the Jesuit mission in the district of 67

  Bodl., MS Eng. th. b.1–2 (Brudenell transcriptions of manuscripts of Sir Thomas Tresham), II.117, quoted in Gerard Kilroy, Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription (Aldershot, 2005), p. 22. 68  Bellarmine, Spiritual Writings, p. 152. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700 (London, 2003), p. 640 and plate 22. 69   Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton and Oxford, 2002), pp. 58–9, 68–75, 92–4. John Patrick, Reflexions upon the Devotions of the Roman Church (London, 1674), p. 427, mentions the dedication of churches to St Michael as being ‘now a common practice’. On angels as protectors of countries and kingdoms, see Worthington, Anker, p. 418. 70   M.R. Lewis, ‘The Pilgrimage to St Michael’s Mount: Catholic Continuity in Wales’, Journal of Welsh Ecclesiastical History, 8 (1991): 51–4.

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Yorkshire was formally instituted into a college it flew under the banner of the same archangel.71 Even more than their brethren abroad, English Catholics had special need of the protection of the prince of all angels in heaven. Champion of the chosen people of God, Israel, in the book of Daniel, it is hardly surprising that they looked to him as the potential saviour of their own nation. A final story reported in the Jesuit annual letter for 1605 may stand as an emblem of the sense of optimism and hope in the midst of adversity which the apparition of angels could serve to focus and crystallise in this society. It told how the Jesuit Julius Mancinelli was implored by an English father to beg God ‘to intimate to him the future state of the Church in England, and the final results of the persecution then raging’. After many entreaties, he promised to implore the Lord for a revelation. Following days of prayer, fasting and other bodily austerities, his guardian angel appeared to him and revealed to him a terrifying, but ultimately glorious vision: He beheld regions laid waste by all kinds of tempests, and so desolated by thunder, lightning, rain, hail, hurricanes, and dreadful earthquakes, that their wretched inhabitants knew not whither to flee for safety; even the caverns of the earth afforded them no refuge. Being thus beyond all human help, the Father saw them at length with one accord prostrate and crying to God for mercy; he next heard this voice from Heaven: ‘It is not so much your sins as the enormities of your kings and rulers that have brought you to this condition, and subjected you to such severe punishments. But now know ye that I will deal with you in mercy, and raise your Church to a dignity it has never heretofore attained. You shall win over the Turks and heretics under My protection, and with manifest prodigies from Heaven such triumphs and victories that will astonish the rest of Europe. Lastly, the central sanctuary of the world, which I first established in Jerusalem, and which at present hallows the city of Rome, shall be placed in your midst, so that all surrounding nations shall congratulate you on your happiness. These special blessings shall be bestowed upon you for the sake of the eminent merits of the saints of this kingdom, and the hardships and sufferings they have undergone for My sake’.72

Tested and tried in the crucible of fire for several generations, soon England would be restored to the true faith and exalted to a position of dominance. She would fulfil her apocalyptic destiny to lead the Catholic world into its next triumphant era of history. Angels, then, have proved an illuminating lens through which to examine some of the roots and ramifications of the Catholic Reformation 71 72

 Foley, iii. 135–67.  Foley, vii, pt 2, pp. 992–3.

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in Protestant England. A long-standing feature of traditional piety, on the eve of the Henrician schism devotion to them was developing in innovative directions. The growing cult of guardian angels reflected a trend towards introspective and quasi-mystical devotion that suggests English Catholicism was already undergoing renewal from within. But they were also implicated in strands of religious belief and practice that humanists and reformers regarded as unseemly and dubious, bordering on magic and conducive to superstition. Both elements in this equation were to become critical in the course of subsequent decades. Protestantism’s acknowledgment of many tenets of medieval angelology prevented angels from becoming a major flashpoint in the theological disputes that rocked the mid-sixteenth century. Ubiquitous in the pages of Scripture, they could not be peremptorily ejected into the wilderness of invented ‘popish’ traditions. The godly, no less than their recusant neighbours, often displayed a deep attachment to them. Nevertheless, angels were both caught up in and contributed to the process by which mutually antagonistic confessional cultures emerged. Reverence for them was not in itself a distinguishing token of loyalty to Rome; it was rather the flavour and texture of their veneration that facilitated its evolution into a symbol of commitment to it.73 The presence of angels in post-Reformation Catholic sources alerts us to the diffusion of Tridentine and especially Jesuit spirituality in the mission field of England. It also illuminates the various ways in which visions of them were harnessed to voice opposition to the official religion, to stiffen the resistance and strengthen the resolve of laypeople and to convince a new generation that Rome was the single true Church. Yet the enthusiasm of the clergy for unveiling the workings of angels in the world was always tempered by a degree of trepidation about the instability and scandal which their appearances might bring to their religion. Apparitions of them were manifestations of an unruly spiritual enthusiasm which their counterparts on the Continent were treating with increasing scepticism and branding as forms of diabolism. The allegations of forgery and fraudulence to which such ecstatic experiences had exposed Catholicism in the 1530s and 40s periodically resurfaced, threatening its integrity and transforming it into a subject for farce and an excuse for corrosive Protestant laughter. Angels cast light on the ingenuity and vitality of the Counter Reformation in England, but they also reveal its inner vulnerabilities and Achilles’ heel. Supernatural interventions by these celestial creatures were powerful weapons, but they also had the potential to unleash unpredictable forces and to backfire badly against those who deployed them without proper caution.

73

  The Rosary and associated devotions linked with the Virgin Mary were much clearer badges of Catholic commitment: see Anne Dillon, ‘Praying by Number: The Confraternity of the Rosary and the English Catholic Community, c.1580–1700’, History, 88 (2003): 451–71.

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Part III Communication and Conversion

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Chapter 8

Dumb Preachers: Catholicism and the Culture of Print*

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I ‘Eyther the pope must abolishe knowledge and Printing, or printing at length will roote him out’, declared the martyrologist John Foxe in his famous Acts and Monuments, first published in 1563. ‘God hath opened the presse to preach, whose voyce the Pope is never able to stop with all the puissance of his triple crown’. Foxe heralded ‘the excellent arte of printing, most happily of late found out, and now commonly practised everywhere to the singular benefite of Christes Church’, as a providential gift from God to the Reformation cause.1 His assertion of an intimate link between the triumph of Protestantism and the advent of print was something of a topos in the writings of the Continental reformers. Luther had proclaimed Gutenberg’s press as the Lord’s ‘highest and extremest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward’, an instrument of liberation and enlightenment which would emancipate the masses by placing in their hands the vernacular Scriptures.2 This conviction found iconographical expression in the illustrated title-page of Henry VIII’s Great Bible of 1539, which portrayed the king magnanimously dispersing the book of God’s Word, verbum dei, to a populace imprisoned in ignorance and superstition by the papacy and priesthood (Figure 8.1).3

*

 An earlier version of this chapter was published under the title of ‘“Domme Preachers”? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print’, Past and Present, 168 (2000): 72–123. 1   John Foxe, Actes and monuments (London, 1583), vol. 1, pp. 707–8; and his preface to The whole workes of W. Tyndall, John Frith and Doctor Barnes (London, 1573), sigs A2r–3r. 2   Cited by M.H. Black in ‘The Printed Bible’, in S.L. Greenslade (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Bible, iii, The West, from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 408–75, at 432. 3   See John King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton, 1989), p. 71, and ch. 2 passim; R.W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge, 1994), p. 104.

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Figure 8.1 Henry VIII distributing the word of God (verbum dei) to the English people: The bible in Englyshe [The Great Bible] (London, 1539), title-page. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Young 35. Walsham, Alexandra. Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=1718589. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-18 07:53:54.

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Dumb Preachers

Figure 8.2 The bible outweighing all the pope’s ‘trinkets’: A newyeeres-gift for the pope ([London, c.1625]). By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. Walsham, Alexandra. Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=1718589. Created from nottingham on 2021-03-18 07:53:54.

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Such statements and images find an echo in the writings of modern historians. According to A.G. Dickens and others, the Protestant Reformation was ‘from the first the child of the printed book’, a movement which ‘turned a technical invention into a spiritual obligation’, and so imaginatively pioneered its use as a mass medium that the two can almost be regarded as inseparable twins.4 The obvious corollary of this line of argument is the lingering opinion that popery and the printing press should be situated in stark opposition. This too has its roots in confessional polemic. A broadsheet dating from 1625 depicts a balance in which the Bible easily outweighs a vast conglomeration of Catholic equipment: all ‘the Popes Trinkets’ – bells, beads, crosses – and ‘the Divell to boot’ cannot tip the scales in favour of ‘falsehood’ (Figure 8.2).5 It was commonplace for Protestant preachers and pastors to equate the credulity of country congregations with their orality, and to allege that residual Catholicism would soon evaporate if ordinary people acquired the ability to read.6 This paradigm has proved remarkably resilient. It is still sometimes supposed that the Church of Rome adopted an essentially negative and reactionary attitude to the new mode of communication made possible by the device of movable type. Those at the centre of attempts to combat the Lutheran schism signally failed to exploit the spread of literacy and the nuclear weapon of print. In the context of the Council of Trent, moreover, Catholicism is alleged to have developed an inherent and even neurotic distrust of the book as ‘a silent heretic’ and ‘carrier of depravity’ – sentiments seemingly embodied in that notorious mechanism of censorship, the Index, and in the book-burning activities of the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions. Traditional accounts of these organs of the Counter Reformation not only hold them responsible for snuffing out humanism and Protestantism in the Iberian and Italian peninsulas, but also for stifling intellectual impulses, ‘fossilizing’ academic culture and creating a climate hostile to popular education and reading.7 4   A.G. Dickens, Reformation and Society in Sixteenth-Century Europe (London, 1966), 51; François Furet and Jacques Ozouf, Reading and Writing: Literacy in France from Calvin to Jules Ferry (Cambridge, 1982), 59. See also Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1979), ch. 4. 5   A new-yeeres-gift for the pope ([London, c.1625), a version of an illustration in Foxe. 6   An assumption implicit in works like George Gifford, A briefe discourse of certain pointes of the religion, which is among the common sort of Christians (London, 1581). See also Alison Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007). 7   Virgilio Pinto Crespo, ‘Thought Control in Spain’, in Stephen Haliczer (ed.), Inquisition and Society in Early Modern Europe (London, 1987), pp. 171–88, at 175, 177, 185.

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But this cluster of interrelated assumptions has recently been the subject of some serious questioning. There is growing recognition that the debate about making the Bible available in vernacular languages divided Christians on both sides of the confessional divide. In reaction against the anarchic forces released by the Peasants’ War, the reformers increasingly filtered the Scriptures to the laity through the sieve of the catechism. Clerical elites acted as mediators and ‘gatekeepers’, regulating the transmission of sacred knowledge to prevent its misappropriation, an insight that has enabled Gerald Strauss and Richard Gawthrop to argue that there is no necessary connection or causal nexus between Lutheranism and the expansion of literacy.8 The work of Bob Scribner has taught us how heavily the initial diffusion of Reformation ideas depended on oral and visual media, on preaching, pictures and plays, rousing songs and informal discussions of Scripture.9 As Patrick Collinson and Tessa Watt have shown, the first generation of English reformers likewise utilised drama, music and art in their bid to undermine the prestige of the papacy and spread their evangelical message, harnessing the services of playwrights and actors, balladmongers and minstrels, engravers and cartoonists to gain access to the uneducated.10 It was hybrid media combining text with image and sound which made most impact on a still largely illiterate populace. Some Protestant ministers, moreover, were slow and even rather reluctant to embrace print as a proselytising tool, regarding the mechanical press as the handmaiden of the pulpit and books as a poor substitute for sermons. The ‘dead letter’ of a dusty tome on a shelf, protested dozens of dedicatory epistles, was vastly ‘lesse effectual’ than the living, spoken Word. Typography could never capture its quasi-sacramental and kinetic 8   See Bob Scribner, ‘Heterodoxy, Literacy and Print in the Early German Reformation’, in Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (eds), Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1530 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 255–78, esp. 275–8; Jean-François Gilmont, ‘Conclusion’, in Jean-François Gilmont (ed.), The Reformation and the Book, trans. Karin Maag (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 469–93, esp. 473–5; Richard Gawthrop and Gerald Strauss, ‘Protestantism and Literacy in Early Modern Germany’, P&P, 104 (1984), 31–55. See also Gerald Strauss, ‘Lutheranism and Literacy: A Reassessment’, in Kaspar von Greyerz (ed.), Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe (London, 1984), pp. 109–23. 9   R.W. Scribner, ‘Oral Culture and the Diffusion of Reformation Ideas’, repr. in his Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London, 1987). See also his For the Sake of Simple Folk. See now Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge, 2005), esp. chs 2–4, though note his critique of Scribner in ch. 5. 10  Patrick Collinson, From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation (Reading, 1986); Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1988), ch. 4; Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991). See also Paul Whitfield White, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England (Cambridge, 1993).

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qualities. Others feared that the lazy and ill-informed might sit at home supposing ‘a printed paper’ would ‘suffice to get faith for salvation’, and so cease to attend services at their parish churches. If, in the end, many puritan preachers succumbed to the merits of the new medium and generated a large body of practical divinity designed to meet the needs of laypeople right across the spectrum of literacy, it should not be forgotten that, at least initially, Protestantism and print formed a somewhat uneasy coalition.11 On the other hand, it is increasingly clear that older characterisations of Roman Catholicism as intrinsically hostile to print are themselves untenable. Long before Luther and Foxe, leading churchmen like the conciliarist Nicholas of Cusa were declaring the mechanical press a ‘divine art’ of inestimable evangelical potential.12 The burgeoning of a religious book-culture predated the Protestant schism. Prelates across Europe harnessed print as a tool for bringing about liturgical uniformity and ecclesiastical reform.13 In late medieval Bavaria, printed lists of miracles acted as an ‘extended arm’ of preachers charged with promoting pilgrimage to popular shrines; in Spain, the humanist Cardinal Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros was not only the mastermind behind a massive polyglot Bible, but an enthusiastic patron of spiritual works in Spanish and Latin; and in the Low Countries the shift in the sociology of book ownership produced by printing converged powerfully with tendencies inherent in the devotio moderna, helping to foster the trend towards individual meditation, silent prayer and interior dialogue with God enshrined in Thomas Kempis’ Imitation of Christ.14 Across the Channel, print injected new life into manuscript classics like John Mirk’s Festial of sermons and Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, both of which number among the earliest 11   Quotations from John King, Lectures upon Jonas, delivered at Yorke (Oxford, 1599), sig. *4r; and John Barlow, Hierons last fare-well (London, 1618), sig. A4r. See also D.F. McKenzie, ‘Speech – Manuscript – Print’, Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin, 20 (1990): 86–109; my Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), pp. 53–7; and definitively, Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge, 2010), esp. chs 2–4. 12  Eisenstein, Printing Press as an Agent of Change, p. 317. 13  Natalia Nowakowska, ‘From Strassburg to Trent: Bishops, Printing and Liturgical Reform in the Fifteenth Century’, P&P, 213 (2011): 3–39. 14   See Philip M. Soergel, Wondrous in his Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 31–6; A. Gordon Kinder, ‘Printing and Reformation Ideas in Spain’, and Jean-François Gilmont, ‘Printing at the Dawn of the Sixteenth Century’, both in Gilmont (ed.), Reformation and the Book, pp. 292–318 and 10–20, quotations at pp. 296–8, 15, respectively. See also Anne Jacobson Schutte, ‘Printing, Piety and the People in Italy: The First Thirty Years’, and Richard Crofts, ‘Books, Reform and the Reformation’, both in ARG, 71 (1980): 5–20 and 21–36 respectively; R.N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c.1215–1515 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 59–63.

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incunabula to appear from the presses of William Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde.15 It also fed and fuelled the desire of the laity for indulgenced images of pity offering pardons that could speed their path through purgatory: these were a mainstay of the early publishing industry.16 Even more significantly, on the eve of the Reformation, some 50,000 Latin, English and bilingual texts designed to help people pray were in circulation: liturgical and sub-scriptural literature which bears testimony to the strength and vigour of what Eamon Duffy has called ‘traditional religion’. The appearance of handbooks like the Bridgittine monk Richard Whitford’s Werke for housholders (1531?) also reflected a growing demand for guidance in domestic and personal piety. In sponsoring translations of the Bible and English versions of the primer, early reformers were simply hijacking and channelling a pre-existing fashion.17 The brothers of Syon Abbey were joined by the Carthusians in producing texts to cater for this growing market, and the former also utilised vernacular printing to defend orthodoxy against the threat presented to it by Henry VIII. Other religious orders also embraced the press and its products with some alacrity, notably the Benedictines, who offered patronage to printers and deployed the technology as a key to monastic revitalisation.18 Scholars of the reign of Mary I have likewise contested the older view that her regime manifestly failed to understand the importance of the printing press and provided an unsympathetic atmosphere for

15   John Mirk, Liber festivalis and quatuor sermones (London, 1483); Jacobus de Voragine, The golden legend (London, [1483]). 16   See Robert Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England: Passports to Paradise? (Cambridge, 2007). 17  Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400– 1580 (New Haven, 1992), 7, pt 1, esp. chs 6–7; Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240–1570 (New Haven and London, 2006); Richard Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation (Basingstoke, 1993), ch. 4; G.L. Barnes, ‘Laity Formation: The Role of Early English Printed Primers: The Synthesis of Private Devotion and Public Religion in the Late Middle Ages’, JRH, 18 (1994): 139–58; Richard Whitford, A werke for housholders (London, [1531?]). For incunable Catholic bibles, see also David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven, 1994), pp. 92–3; and below, p. 294. See also Virginia Reinburg, French Books of Hours: Making an Archive of Prayer, c.1400–1600 (Cambridge, 2012). 18  On Syon, see J.T. Rhodes, ‘Syon Abbey and its Religious Publications in the Sixteenth Century’, JEH, 44 (1993): 11–25; E.A. Jones and Alexandra Walsham (eds), Syon Abbey and its Books: Reading, Writing and Religion c.1400–1700 (Woodbridge, 2010), esp. pt II; Alexandra da Costa, Reforming Printing: Syon Abbey’s Defence of Orthodoxy 1525– 1534 (Oxford, 2012). On the Benedictines, see James G. Clark, ‘Print and Pre-Reformation Religion: the Benedictines and the Press, c.1470–c.1550’, in Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (eds), The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700 (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 71–92.

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its effective exploitation.19 In fact, a number of high-ranking Marian churchmen commissioned primers, homilies and devotional treatises to assist unlearned parochial clergy, particularly in the diocese of London, and Bishop Edmund Bonner’s Profitable and necessarye doctryne (1555) has been heralded as ‘a neglected masterpiece of Tudor catechesis’.20 The official pension paid to Miles Huggarde, the London hosier best known for his prose tract The displaying of the protestantes (1554), suggests that at least some prelates were also eager to take advantage of an emerging market for lively religious polemic.21 Both in England and on the Continent, Catholic controversialists did drag their feet at the beginning, partly because they believed that engaging in a battle of books would only lend credibility and legitimacy to the heretical rebels. Yet it would be entirely inappropriate to describe Erasmian reformers and Tridentine leaders as Luddites or technophobes. The anti-Lutheran satire of Johannes Cochlaeus, Thomas Murner and John Eck militates against the notion that the Protestants monopolised the medium of print in the 1520s and 1530s, even if their opponents rarely matched them in creative brilliance.22 By the end of the century, publications about thaumaturgic sites were beginning to play a crucial part in forging a distinctive confessional identity in the lands ruled over by the Wittlesbach dynasty.23 Equally striking are statistics arising from research in France, Italy and Spain, which suggest a steady increase in the 19   J.W. Martin, ‘The Marian Regime’s Failure to Understand the Importance of Printing’, in his Religious Radicals in Tudor England (London, 1989), pp. 107–23; D.M. Loades, The Reign of Mary Tudor (London, 1979), pp. 342–3; and his ‘Books and the English Reformation prior to 1558’, in Gilmont (ed.), Reformation and the Book, pp. 264–91, esp. 285–90. 20   Jennifer Loach, ‘The Marian Establishment and the Printing Press’, EHR, 101 (1986): 135–48; A.J. Slavin, ‘Tudor Revolution and the Devil’s Art: Bishop Bonner and Printed Forms’, in D.J. Guth and J.W. McKenna (eds), Tudor Rule and Revolution (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 3–23, at 3; Gina Alexander, ‘Bonner and the Marian Persecutions’, in Christopher Haigh (ed.), The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 157–75, at 170–71; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 534–43, quotation at 534; Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven and London, 2009), ch. 3. Edmund Bonner, A profitable and necessarye doctryne, with certayne homelies (London, [1555]). 21   Miles Huggarde, The displaying of the protestantes and sondry their practices (London, 1556). Cf. J.W. Martin, ‘Miles Hogarde: Artisan and Aspiring Author in Sixteenth Century England’, Renaissance Quarterly, 34 (1981): 359–83, who regards Huggarde as the exception that proves the rule. 22   See Mark U. Edwards, ‘Catholic Controversial Literature, 1518–1555: Some Statistics’, ARG, 79 (1988): 189–205; David Bagschi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents: Catholic Controversialists, 1518–1525 (Minneapolis, 1991), esp. ch. 7 and conclusion; Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk, pp. 229–39. 23  Soergel, Wondrous in his Saints, chs 4, 6 and passim.

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output of religious books after a brief hiatus in the mid-sixteenth century. Devotional titles dominated the stock of bookshops and the contents of private libraries in early modern Castile, and they constituted some 57 per cent of publications emanating from Venetian presses by 1590 and around 48 per cent of works printed in Paris in 1643–45, figures which compare favourably with those compiled for Protestant England in the same period.24 Not only did the best efforts of the Spanish Inquisition fail to stop the circulation of censored literature in Catalonia and prevent authors from publishing abroad, but bishops can be found urging children ‘to read good and devout books’ and sponsoring the preparation of manuals to guide and nurture piety.25 And if some early Jesuits had scruples of conscience about the incompatibility of publishing with their evangelical vocation, this soon gave way to a wholehearted endorsement of the use of print for the purposes of propaganda by Ignatius Loyola and other senior members of the Society. The consequence was a vast programme of publication and a commitment to religious education which continues to this day. Shortly after the promulgation of the first papal Index of 1559, Peter Canisius wrote to the general of the order, Diego Laínez, from Germany saying that it was ‘intolerable’ and a ‘scandal’.26 The Schools of Christian Doctrine established in late sixteenth-century Italy are further testimony to the fact that Protestants were not alone in perceiving reading as a key to saving souls, reforming manners and eradicating rural superstition. The metaphor used by leading pedagogues is very revealing: their self-appointed task was to ‘print Christ on the blank minds’ of the young.27 Notwithstanding its initial anxiety that literacy might be a high road to heresy, in the long run the Counter Reformation proved no less willing to take advantage of technological advance than its Lutheran and Calvinist counterparts. 24   See Jean Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter Reformation, trans. Jeremy Moiser (London, 1971), pp. 40–41; Henry Kamen, The Phoenix and the Flame: Catalonia and the Counter Reformation (New Haven, CT, 1993), pp. 412–13; Paul F. Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540–1605 (Princeton, NJ, 1977), p. 131; Sara T. Nalle, ‘Literacy and Culture in Early Modern Castile’, P&P, 125 (1989): 84–6; R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 51. For the statistics for England, Edith L. Klotz, ‘A Subject Analysis of English Imprints for every Tenth Year from 1480 to 1640’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 1 (1938): 417–19. 25  Kamen, Phoenix and the Flame, ch. 8, quotation at p. 351; Agostino Borromeo, ‘The Inquisition and Inquisitorial Censorship’, in John O’Malley (ed.), Catholicism in Early Modern History: A Guide to Research (St Louis, MO, 1988), pp. 253–72, esp. 266. 26   John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA, 1993), pp. 114–15, 314. For the role of Jesuit printing in reclaiming Bohemia for Rome, see Howard Louthan, Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (Cambridge, 2009), ch. 7. 27   Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 (Baltimore, MD, 1989), chs 12–13, quotation at p. 341.

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With this body of research as a backdrop, this essay re-examines the relationship between post-Reformation Catholicism in England and the evolving culture of print. Drawing on decades of work by a succession of distinguished Catholic bibliographers, it suggests that the press had the potential to become a powerful surrogate for the personal pastoral discipline exercised by the Tridentine episcopate and parish clergy on the Continent, an alternative instrument of sacerdotal control for a Church struggling to resist its abolition. In a country where the very presence of priests on English soil was a capital crime, books could penetrate where a tiny band of missionaries was unable to infiltrate and tread. As the Spaniard Luis de Granada wrote in his Memoriall of a Christian life in 1586, the reading of devotional tracts was ‘verie profitable: for somuch as they be unto us as it were domme preachers’.28 Texts assumed vital importance to a faith dispossessed of the structures of authority and communication over which it had once held sway and anxious to convince foreign powers of the need for financial assistance, if not armed invasion, to reconvert heretical England. In my concluding section, however, I shall argue that dependence on print also pulled in the contrary direction. In the hands of the laity it could be an agent of autonomy, the backbone of a type of domestic piety it was possible to sustain in the virtual absence of a resident priesthood. To adapt a penetrating remark of John Bossy, I want to explore the possibility that as English Catholicism ‘became more typographical, so it became less sacramental’.29 II It would be a grave mistake to suppose that Protestants had any kind of stranglehold on religious publishing in England in the post-Reformation and pre-Civil War period. Indeed, in the early decades of Elizabeth’s reign it was arguably their Catholic enemies who displayed greater initiative. Within five years of the 1559 Settlement, the Oxford scholars who had led the exodus to the Continent had already constructed a powerful propaganda machine. Between 1559 and 1570 some 58 publications emanated from printing houses in Antwerp and Louvain, most of them engendered by Bishop John Jewel’s Challenge Sermon of 1559 and his Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1562). Thomas Harding, supported by John Rastell, Thomas Dorman, Nicholas Sander and Thomas Stapleton, mounted a formidable defence of traditional Roman Catholic theology and 28

  Luis de Granada, A memoriall of a Christian life, trans. R. Hopkins (Rouen, 1586),

p. 12. 29

  John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985), p. 102.

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a sustained attack on the doctrinal errors now upheld as orthodox dogma in England. Coinciding with the foundation of the English seminary by William Allen in 1568, the focus of the movement shifted to Douai; and in 1578 the unstable political situation in the Low Countries precipitated a hasty relocation to Rheims. The Catholic printing industry gathered momentum in the following decades as new presses were set up by the Jesuits at Seville, Valladolid and Eu in Normandy. The latter was removed to St Omer in the Spanish Netherlands in 1608.30 Back in England, Catholic publishing continued surreptitiously at secret locations in London and the country. Stephen Brinkley and his assistants, based first at Greenstreet House and later in a wood in Stonor Park, printed several books for Robert Persons and Edmund Campion in 1581 before their machinery was seized and they themselves were imprisoned for their seditious proceedings.31 It proved difficult to eradicate this problem in the capital and, according to Gee’s scurrilous Foot out of the snare, in the 1620s there was quite a community of Catholic printers and vendors lurking in the vicinity of Holborn and Clerkenwell.32 In the ‘dark corners’ of the land it was a trifle easier to avoid detection. Nineteen items were issued from the press at Birchley Hall near Wigan, the family residence of James Anderton, between 1615 and 1621,33 and in Jacobean Staffordshire and Worcestershire one Francis Ash carried on a profitable trade in pictures, manuals and tracts without being discovered.34 Others were not so lucky: in 1610 the spy William Udall claimed to have ‘taken and delivered viii printing presses’ in the same counties ‘within thees four yeares’, while Caernarvonshire justices successfully raided a cave 30

  See A.C. Southern, Elizabethan Recusant Prose, 1559–1582: A Historical and Critical Account of the Books of the Catholic Refugees Printed and Published Abroad and at Secret Presses in England (London, 1950), esp. chs 2, 6; Leona Rostenberg, The Minority Press and the English Crown, 1558–1625: A Study in Repression (Nieuwkoop, 1971), esp. ch. 2; C.A. Newdigate, ‘Notes on the Seventeenth-Century Printing Press of the English College at Saint Omers’, The Library, 3rd ser., 10 (1919): 223–42. For a survey of the works generated by ‘Great Controversy’, see Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (London, 1977), ch. 1. 31   See J.H. Pollen (ed.), ‘The Memoirs of Father Robert Persons’, in Catholic Record Society Miscellanea II, CRS 2 (London, 1906), pp. 28, 182–3; L. Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Parsons, SJ, vol. i, (To 1588), CRS 39 (London, 1942), pp. xxxi–xxxii. 32   John Gee, The foot out of the snare … whereunto is added … the names of such as disperse, print, bind or sell popish books (London, 3rd edn 1624). The first edition (quoted hereafter) included, A catalogue of such bookes as … have been vented within two yeeres last past in London, by the priests and their agents (London, 1624). 33   See STC, iii. 209; and A.F. Allison, ‘Who was John Brereley? The Identity of a Seventeenth Century Controversialist’, RH, 16 (1982–83): 17–41. 34   [Michael Sparke], A second beacon fired by Scintilla (London, 1652), p. 6.

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near Penrhyn in 1587 where Y drych Cristianogawl, a Catholic work in Welsh, had been produced a few months before.35 In provincial towns like Oxford and York recusant booksellers and binders were a constant source of irritation to the authorities.36 As well as publishing in small formats which could easily be concealed in a pocket, cuff or sleeve, many of those involved in this illicit trade resorted to subterfuge: counterfeit imprints, false dates and deceptive pseudonyms. In 1575, for instance, William Carter produced a spurious edition of an early sixteenth-century translation of the Imitatio Christi bearing a date in the reign of Mary I – 1556 – in order to deflect suspicion from a text that defended Catholic teaching on the sacrament of the Eucharist.37 The papacy itself recognised the necessity of sanctioning these devious strategies in a context of persecution, and special faculties were granted to Robert Persons and Edmund Campion, later extended to Henry Garnet and Robert Southwell, overriding the Tridentine decree Decretum de editione et usu sacrorum librorum, which forbade the printing of books anonymously.38 Such tactics have made the task of identifying ‘Catholic’ books produced between 1558 and 1640 particularly challenging. Allison and Rogers list some 932 items in English printed abroad or secretly in England, to which must be added 1,619 publications in Latin and Continental vernaculars.39 In the second half of the seventeenth century, when Catholic publishing activity declined from its pre-Civil War peak, recusant writings still outnumbered those of the Baptists and Quakers.40 While these figures represent only a small percentage of the total output for this period, they are nevertheless impressive for a church ‘under the cross’. 35   BL, Lansdowne MS 153, fo. 11r; printed in P.R. Harris (ed.), ‘The Reports of William Udall, Informer, 1605–1612’, RH, 8 (1966): 192–284, at 269. D.M. Rogers, ‘“Popishe Thackwell” and Early Catholic Printing in Wales’, Biographical Studies, 1534–1829, 2 (1953): 37–54. 36   See, for example, J.C.H. Aveling, Catholic Recusancy in the City of York, 1558– 1791, CRS Monograph Series 2 (London, 1970), 32, 75. 37  Thomas a Kempis, The following of Christ, trans. Richard Whitford (London, 1556 [1575], ARCR 803). See T.A. Birrell, ‘William Carter (c.1549–84): Recusant Printer, Publisher, Binder, Stationers, Scribe – and Martyr’, RH, 28 (2006): 22–42, at 34. 38   See TNA, SP 12/137/26, §8; printed in A.O. Meyer, England and the Catholic Church under Queen Elizabeth, trans. J.R. McKee (London, 1967), Appendix XVII; Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Parsons, i. 356. For the Tridentine decree, see H.J. Schroeder (ed. and trans.), The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (Rockford, III, 1978), p. 19. 39  ARCR supersedes Allison and Rogers’ A Catalogue of Catholic Books in English Printed Abroad or Secretly in England, 1558–1640, first publ. in Biographical Studies, 1534–1829, 3(1955–56). 40   See Thomas H. Clancy, English Catholic Books, 1641–1700: A Bibliography (Chicago, IL, 2nd edn 1996), p. xii.

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They alert us, moreover, to only one sector of English CounterReformation book culture, unduly privileging printing over the thriving tradition of scribal publication, which, as Harold Love has remarked, was a safer medium for the transmission of subversive and oppositional material.41 Syndicates of scribes, such as the one Nancy Pollard Brown has discovered in Elizabethan Spitalfields, ensured that much devotional and controversial material circulated through the Catholic underground. Manuscript copying was a critical component of Robert Southwell’s apostolic ‘mission of the written word’, summed up in a verse from Psalm 45 of which he made special note while a student in Rome: ‘My tongue is the pen of a scrivener that writeth swiftly’.42 William Carter operated as both a printer and a professional copyist, distributing the works of Nicholas Harpsfield, including an account of Thomas Cranmer’s ‘recantacyons’, prior to his arrest and execution in 1584 for publishing Gregory Martin’s controversial Treatise of schisme (1578).43 The commonplace book of the scrivener Peter Mowle contains master copies of the works he wrote out for his East Anglian gentry clients, texts ranging from the Jesus Psalter and prayers of Sir Thomas More to Laurence Vaux’s Catechisme and Robert Southwell’s St Peters Complaint. He envisaged these as ‘spiritual weapons … to gall and hurt those our enemies which continually assaulteth us’.44 The authorities were constantly intercepting short tracts outlining ‘certain papistical reasons’ for recusancy, and little pamphlets filled with scribbled ‘questions and answers concerning the Protestant religion’ were found on 41

  Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993), pp. 185, 292–3, and ch. 5 passim. See also H.R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford, 1996); Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998). 42  Nancy Pollard Brown, ‘Paperchase: The Dissemination of Catholic Texts in Elizabethan England’, in Peter Beal and Jeremy Griffiths (eds), English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700, 1 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 120–43; Nancy Pollard Brown, ‘Robert Southwell: The Mission of the Written Word’, in Thomas M. McCoog (ed.), The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits (Rome, 2nd edn, 2007), pp. 251–75, quotation at 275. See also Earle Havens, ‘Notes from a Literary Underground: Recusant Catholics, Jesuit Priests, and Scribal Publication in Elizabethan England’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 99 (2005): 505–38; Helen Hackett, ‘Women and Catholic Manuscript Networks in Seventeenth-Century England: New Research on Constance Aston Fowler’s Miscellany of Sacred and Secular Verse’, Renaissance Quarterly, 65 (2012): 1094–124. Catholic scribal activity strikingly parallels that of early Protestants: see Thomas S. Freeman, ‘Publish and Perish: The Scribal Culture of the Marian Martyrs’, in Crick and Walsham (eds), Uses of Script and Print, pp. 235–54; Mark Greengrass, ‘Two Sixteenth-Century Religious Minorities and their Scribal Networks’, in Heinz Schilling and Istvan Tóth (eds), Religion and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 317–37. 43   Birrell, ‘William Carter’. 44  Oscott, St Mary’s College, MS Shelf RZZ3, fo. 1r. Earle Havens is currently editing this text for publication.

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the person of many a missionary priest.45 Anthologies of protest songs and ballads provide further evidence of the role manuscripts played in sustaining the morale of the recusant community,46 as do eyewitness accounts of the heroic conduct of Catholic martyrs like Margaret Clitherow which passed from hand to hand among the devout. Accumulating miraculous accretions in the course of transcription, they testify to the tenacious influence of an existing repertoire of hagiographical motifs and to the Chinese-whispers effect of oral communication. Dr Humphrey Ely was only one of those who sent the lives of saintly priests, ‘fayre written in folio’, to the Jesuit John Gibbons, whose Concertatio Ecclesiae Catholicae in Anglia first appeared in 1583. Like the expanded editions of Foxe’s Actes and monuments, its enlargement by John Bridgewater later that decade bears witness to an ongoing process of verbal and scribal transmission. Lovingly copied and preserved by subsequent generations, such manuscripts became the textual memoria and relics of the Catholic community.47 Englishwomen like Dame Barbara Constable, who became nuns in contemplative orders in the Low Countries, played a key role in copying medieval texts and the treatises of the Benedictine Augustine Baker, which travelled across the Channel to the laity at home as well as to other convents and monasteries.48 A further and final testimony to the interdependence of manuscript and print is the survival of handwritten copies of politically sensitive texts like Leicester’s 45

  See, for example, TNA, SP 12/142/20 and 12/279/90; Foley, iv. 646.   See Peter J. Seng (ed.), Tudor Songs and Ballads from MS Cotton Vespasian A-25 (Cambridge, MA, 1978); Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY, 1995), 44–8. Another collection of songs can be found in William Blundell’s ‘Great Hodge Podge’, on which see Margaret Sena, ‘William Blundell and Networks of Catholic Dissent in Post-Reformation England’, in Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington (eds), Communities in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2000), pp. 54–75. 47   John Gibbons and John Fen (eds), Concertatio ecclesiae Catholicae in Anglia (np, 1583); ed. and augmented by John Bridgewater (1589). For the reference to Humphrey Ely, see BL, Lansdowne MS 96, no. 26. Much martyrological material of this kind remains in manuscript, notably in Christopher Grene’s ‘Collectanea’, preserved initially at Oscott College and at Stonyhurst College [now at the Archives of the British Province of the Society of Jesus, London], selections from which have been published in J.H. Pollen (ed.), Unpublished Documents Relating to the English Martyrs, i: 1584–1603, CRS 5 (London, 1908). Two scribal copies of John Mush’s ‘A True Report of the Life and Martyrdom of Mrs Margaret Clitherow’ survive: York Minster Library, MS T.D.I; and York Bar Convent, MS V 69. These narratives are discussed in Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot, 2002), chs 2, 5. See also Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN, 2005), ch. 3; Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism, ch. 4; and Gerard Kilroy, Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 4, 36, 61, and ch. 3 passim. 48   See Heather Wolfe, ‘Dame Barbara Constable: Catholic Antiquarian, Advisor, and Closet Missionary’, in Ronald Corthell et al. (eds), Catholic Culture in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN, 2007), pp. 158–88.

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46

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commonwealth (1585), ‘Robert Doleman [Robert Persons]’s Conference about the next succession (1595) and Edmund Campion’s famous ‘Brag’.49 And when Philip Howard, earl of Arundel, went into exile in 1585 he allegedly left a letter to the queen justifying his flight, which was ‘published and dispersed in manner of a slaunderous libell after his departure … in sondrye partes of the realme’.50 The network for distributing recusant books and news grew ever more elaborate and extensive as the period progressed. Based in Antwerp from 1589 until his death in 1620, the émigré Richard Verstegan acted as a general postmaster of information relating to English Catholic affairs, liaising regularly with key figures in Rome and leading Jesuits in Spain and expertly managing the propaganda and intelligence wings of the mission.51 Merchants were handsomely rewarded for smuggling consignments of books across the Channel and landing them in isolated coves off the Cornish, Dorset and North Sea coasts, or bribing customs officers to turn a blind eye to the forbidden contents of their holds. In May of 1592 the Privy Council ordered searches of all vessels docking in London for ‘traiterous and sedicious bookes’ brought in ‘wrapped upp amongest marchandizes’, while reports reached Sir Julius Caesar in 1609 concerning a fisherman of Barking who conducted a profitable sideline in ‘papistical’ literature concealed beneath his smelly catch.52 The cost of this high-risk enterprise was inevitably passed on to the consumer: in 1624 a Rheims New Testament sold for 12 shillings and a little octavo of St Augustine’s Confessions for no less than 16. John Gee reported that as much as six or seven shillings was ‘squeezed from some Romish Buyers’ for copies of George Musket’s The bishop of London his legacy (1623): ‘A deare price for a dirty Lie’. Richard Sheldon was no less indignant at the cheek of charging an angel for ‘a prophane Pamphlet, comprised in a sheet or two of paper’, but the expense of ‘popish’ books probably did more to hinder their circulation than it did to fill Jesuit coffers.53 49

  Thomas H. Clancy, Papist Pamphleteers: The Allen-Persons Party and the Political Thought of the Counter Reformation in England, 1572–1615 (Chicago, IL, 1964), pp. 237, 239; Brown, ‘Paperchase’, pp. 121, 128. 50  Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, pp. 52–3. 51   See Anthony G. Petti (ed.), The Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan (c.1550–1640), CRS 52 (London, 1959), introduction, and Paul Arblaster, Antwerp and the World: Richard Verstegan and the International Culture of Catholic Reformation (Leuven, 2004). 52   APC 1591–2, pp. 486–7; Harris (ed.), ‘The Reports of William Udall’, p. 260. 53   Gee, Foot out of the snare, p. 93; Richard Sheldon, The motives of Richard Sheldon, pr. for his just, voluntary, and free renouncing of communion with the bishop of Rome (London, 1612), 2nd pagination, p. 23. See also Lewis Owen, The running register (London, 1626), p. 14.

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On the domestic front, dozens of individuals assisted in dispersing books and manuscripts: from seminary priests like Thomas Awfield, who transported over 300 copies of William Allen’s True, sincere and modest defence (1584) from Flanders before being caught and sentenced to death, to servants, such as Edward Coke of Paternoster Row, who on apprehension confessed himself to be a ‘perillous person’.54 The printer Roger Heigham regularly sent his wife over to England ‘under the habite of a Duchwoman’ to disseminate his wares: two more dangerous dames than Mrs Heigham and one Mistress Daubrigscourt, wrote the spy William Udall to his superiors in 1609, could ‘hardly be found’.55 Mary Silvester, a laundry maid who served in the house of the Spanish ambassador, was another female dealer in printed works imported from ‘forraine parts’: among nearly 200 discovered in a trunk in 1640 were ‘Jesus psalters, Invectives and rimes against Luther and Calvin’.56 Such brokers in ‘naughty books’ supplied pious Catholics with townhouses in London like Lady Tresham,57 but some of their briskest trade was conducted in prisons such as the Marshalsea, where William Hartley had the audacity to do business in devotional tracts from his cell in 1585–86.58 It was common practice for undercover agents to plant them in the houses of heretics to throw government officials off the scent, and some even deposited them in reformed places of worship, as a hint to convert and a kind of Trojan horse. Campion’s ‘brag’ was daringly placed in the University Church of St Mary in Oxford on the day of the Commencement in 1581 and a year later a ‘seditious pamphlet’ was found in the church porch of St Giles Cripplegate by the sexton coming to ring the bell for the 6 a.m. lecture.59 Illegal publications were carried to the country by women pedlars, ‘who with baskets on their armes’ engaged in door-to-door sales in outlying villages: a Protestant writing in 1602 suspected that under this disguise ‘many young Jesuites, and olde Masse-priests range abroade, and drawe disciples after them’.60 Mainstream booksellers and stationers in Paul’s 54

  The life and end of Thomas Awfeeld a seminary preest and Thomas Webley a dyers seruant in London, beeing both traitours (London, [1585]), sigs A4v, A6r; Pollen (ed.), Unpublished Documents Relating to the English Martyrs, p. 27. 55   Harris (ed.), ‘The Reports of William Udall’, pp. 262, 264. 56   TNA, SP 16/453/105. 57   BL, Lansdowne MS 33, fo. 149r. 58   J.H. Pollen and W. MacMahon (eds), English Martyrs, ii, The Ven. Philip Howard Earl of Arundel, 1557–1595 (CR 21 (London, 1919), p. 75. See also BL, Lansdowne MS 33, fo. 152r. 59   For Campion’s brag, see Chapter 10, below, p. 320; Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Persons, p. 85; CSPD 1581–90, p. 62. 60   John Rhodes, An answere to a Romish rime lately printed, and entituled, A proper new ballad, wherein are contayned Catholike questions to the Protestant (London, 1602), sig. A2r–v.

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Churchyard cashed in on this lucrative trade by acting as middle-men and there was also a flourishing black market in literature confiscated and then resold by corrupt pursuivants attached to the High Commission.61 Finally, Catholic texts were carried to the English public, rather ironically, by Protestants themselves. Printed for refutation by zealous reformers, they might inadvertently reinforce the views of religious conservatives, and at least some high-ranking clerics began to think that this was rather unwise. Replying to Archbishop Matthew Parker’s advice to display Jewel’s answer to Thomas Harding in churches in his diocese, the bishop of Norwich feared that some parishioners might, ‘like unto the spider’, suck from this work material which would merely confirm them in their false beliefs.62 The enormous amount of time and effort government officials spent attempting to intercept recusant books was a back-handed compliment to the sophistication of this communications system. For Sir Francis Walsingham the seizure of chests of bibles, primers and polemical tracts went hand in hand with the capture of ‘fardels of other popish tromperie’ and ‘trash’ – icons, rosary beads and paraphernalia for performing the mass.63 One batch of literary contraband captured in 1584 included some 700 broadsheets ‘conteyning a miracle wrought uppon an englishe woman at Bruxelles’ in 1573.64 Proclamations were regularly issued against the importation of ‘venomous and lying books’, pamphlets and bulls from over the sea; Parliament exercised itself on the subject intermittently; and the Privy Council sent an endless stream of letters ordering raids on the homes of suspect persons.65 An investigation of the library of the noted antiquary John Stow in February 1569 revealed him to be ‘a great fauv[oure]r of Papistrye’, and ‘uppon searche’ of ‘the lodgeinge and studie’ of George Brome and his sisters Elizabeth and Bridget in 1586 commissioners 61   For examples of stationers as middlemen, see CSPD 1603–1610, p. 272; CSPD 1633–4, p. 481. For corrupt pursuivants, Petti (ed.), Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan, pp. 7–8; Harris (ed.), ‘The Reports of William Udall’, pp. 239, 264, 265. 62   John Strype, The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker, 3 vols (Oxford, 1821), ii. 153. See also my ‘The Spider and the Bee: Printing for Refutation in Tudor England’, in John King (ed.), Tudor Books and Readers: Materiality and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 163–90. 63  Rostenberg, Minority Press and the English Crown, pp. 43–6. 64   BL, Lansdowne MS 42, fo. 174r. 65   See, for example, Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3 vols (New Haven, CT, 1964–69), ii, nos 561, 577, 580, 598, 672; APC 1581–2, 149–54, 185–6, 298; APC 1591–2, 486–7; APC 1601–4, 412–13; APC 1616–17, 40–41. For the results of a series of searches in 1584, see TNA, SP 12/172/102, 107, 111, 113, 114. A number of lists of seized recusant libraries are included in Robert J. Fehrenbach and Joseph L. Black (eds), Private Libraries of Renaissance England, vol. 8 (Tempe, AZ, 2014), with an introduction on ‘Catholic Libraries’ written by Earle Havens and myself: 129–261.

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discovered a stash of ‘supersticious bookes’ hidden in a basket of ‘hey and pewter dishes’.66 A High Commission warrant issued to Humphrey Cross for this purpose in June 1616 ordered him to enter houses in the company of a high or petty constable in search of printed texts, together with ‘scandalous libels, seditious writings, dangerous letters, or any other stuffe tendeinge unto popish … uses’, which tended ‘to the corrupting of his Majesties subjectes’.67 According to Catholic sources, those employed as searchers were a crew of unscrupulous hooligans. They burst in on Sundays and holy days while families were at prayer and ransacked ‘every corner – even womens beds and bosomes’ with such insolence that their villainies were ‘halfe a Martyrdome’.68 Some officials were indefatigable: in 1585 the vice-chancellor of Oxford University had the city’s sewers searched for a work by William Allen which the quick-witted wife of a courier had swiftly conveyed into a nearby privy. Once recovered, the offending item was openly burnt in the street.69 Indeed, dozens of Catholic texts were publicly incinerated in the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline periods. Along with religious pictures and other liturgical items, many missals, primers and works of controversy were piled onto bonfires of vanities ignited next to Paul’s Cross and in Cheapside, Smithfield and the market squares of provincial towns.70 Overseen by the common hangman, these incidents of ritual destruction need to be seen as part of a concerted effort to erase recognised icons and symbols of Roman Catholic identity. III What were the ‘seditious’ and ‘superstitious’ books which the Elizabethan and early Stuart government was so anxious to suppress and destroy? A significant proportion of this illicit literature was political: texts enshrining the militant resistance theory of the Allen–Persons party; texts in support of Mary Queen of Scots and invasion by Spain; texts appealing for toleration and clemency; texts tackling contentious issues like the succession, the right of the pope to depose an heretical monarch, and the royal supremacy; texts like 66

  BL, Lansdowne MS 11, fos 4r–8r; printed and analysed in Janet Wilson, ‘A Catalogue of the “Unlawful” Books Found in John Stow’s Study on 21 February 1568/9’, RH, 20 (1990): 1–30, at 2; BL, Lansdowne MS 50, fos 163r–164r. 67   San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, Stowe Temple Religious Papers, folder 5. 68   Petti (ed.), Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan, p. 7. 69   Pollen (ed.), Unpublished Documents Relating to the English Martyrs, pp. 108–9. 70   See, for example, TNA, SP 12/178/36; 14/75/28; 14/116/48; APC 1597–8, p. 387; Albert J. Loomie (ed.), Spain and the Jacobean Catholics, ii, 1613–1624 CRS 68 (London, 1978), 72–4; Foley, ii. 85; vii, pt 2, 1122.

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the notorious Treatise of treasons (1572) and William Allen’s Admonition to the nobility and people of England (1588).71 Polemical theology also poured forth from the pens of clerical exiles in a constant stream, with Matthew Kellison and William Bishop succeeding Thomas Harding and John Rastell as chief protagonists in the reign of James.72 A particular landmark was the French Cardinal Robert Bellarmine’s monumental assault on Protestant doctrine, Disputationes … de controversiis Christianae fidei (1586), which learned Catholics believed to be unanswerable.73 Writing in 1625, the Huntingdon schoolmaster Dr Thomas Beard observed that ‘the Jesuites and Romish Priests, multiply Bookes and Pamphlets against us …not shaming to load us and our just cause, with impudent lyes and slaunders’. He urged his colleagues to ‘encounter them at theyr owne weapon, and vim vi pellere, set book against book, though not numero (for therein they have the vantage of us) but pondere, equall to their best’.74 Convinced that failure to reply to the belligerent taunts of the enemy was tantamount to admitting defeat, both sides believed that it was vital to have what Michael Questier has called ‘a systematic answering machine’. This was the impulse behind the establishment of the Collège d’Arras in Paris and its Protestant counterpart in London, Chelsea College.75 Designed for an academic audience well-versed in doctrinal arcana, it is perhaps doubtful that these dense and bulky tomes made much impact upon the ordinary unlearned laity. In principle, committed Catholics required a special dispensation to read heretical tracts and, according to the Council of Trent, even orthodox polemic could ‘not be permitted indiscriminately’. Unsafe in the hands of the ignorant, only the educated could be allowed to study Romanist propaganda for the sake of confirming their faith.76 71

  [John Leslie], A treatise of treasons against Q. Elizabeth, and the croune of England ([Louvain], 1572); William Allen, An admonition to the nobility and people of England and Ireland ([Antwerp], 1588). 72   For an overview, see Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age, chs 1, 3, 6; and his Religious Controversies of the Jacobean Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (London, 1978), chs 3, 4. 73   Robert Bellarmine, Disputationes … de controversiis Christianae fidei (Paris, 1586); Foley, VII.ii. 1011. 74   Thomas Beard, Antichrist the pope of Rome: or, the pope of Rome’s Antichrist (London, 1625), sig. A2v. 75   Michael Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 17–18. See also Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 32–4. 76   Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Persons, p. 356; Schroeder (ed.), Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, p. 73. See also P.J. Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, CRS 67 (London, 1981), pp. 49–50, 92–3; Peter Holmes (ed.), Caroline Casuistry: The Cases of Conscience of Fr Thomas Southwell SJ, CRS 84 (Woodbridge, 2012), p. 299.

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Contemporaries feared that controversial books ‘might do much harm to souls if not confuted’, but modern scholars have been more sceptical about the ability of these books to change the opinions of an initially hostile reader.77 Shorter manuals and ‘pamphlets of small compass’ containing clear summaries of ‘points controverted’, such as Richard Bristow’s Motives and Demaundes, were more likely to influence those ‘that hath but little will, or little leasure to read’, as the Jesuit John Sweet observed in 1617.78 Keepe your text, secretly published in Lancashire in 1619, for instance, ‘sett downe a method’ by which recusants could defend their faith against the arguments of railing Protestants, whether in informal local disputes or under legal cross-examination.79 Tables and broadsides listing Protestant heresies distilled the essence of the Reformation schism into the space of a single sheet.80 One of Richard Verstegan’s satirical prints depicted the Calvinist communion as a tavern breakfast; another was designed ‘to put an heretyke in doubte of his owne religion’. Inverting a Lutheran pictorial motif, diagrams displaying ‘the Protestants petigrew’ sought to discredit the opposition by showing it splintering into a mass of fissiparous sects (Figure 8.3).81 The scurrilous illustrations of Calvin and other reformers in the English translation of Peter Frarin’s Oration against the unlawfull insurrections of the Protestants of our time (1566) set out the

77

  ‘Relation of the English Mission in the States of Flanders’ (Jan. 1616), in Calendar of State Papers, Milan, i, 653. For scepticism, see Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion, ch. 2, esp. 36–7, 39. But cf. pp. 264–6, below. 78   Richard Bristow, A briefe treatise of diverse plaine and sure wayes to finde out the truthe in this tyme of heresie (Antwerp, 1574) (known as the ‘Motives’); and his Demaundes to be proponed of Catholiques to the heretikes (Antwerp, 1576). John Sweet, Monsigr fate voi (St Omer, 1617), p. 153; and see the remarks of George Gilbert in Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorial of Father Robert Persons, p. 336. 79   [François Veron], Keepe your text: or, A short discourse, wherein is sett downe a methode to instruct, how a Catholike (though but competently learned) may defend his fayth ([Lancashire, Birchley Hall Press], 1619). 80   See the two printed tables in Latin describing heretical sects preserved in BL, Lansdowne MS 96, nos. 51, 52. Part 6 (A breef summarie of Christian religion) of A manual or meditation (Douai [Greenstreet House Press], [1580–81]) is adapted from a lost broadsheet by Richard Bristow. 81   Petti (ed.), Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan, pp. 115, 117–18, 196. The broadsheets were Typus haereticae synagogae ([Paris, 1585]) and Speculum pro Christianis seductis (Antwerp, 1590), respectively. ‘A Showe of the Protestants Petigrew’ is a fold-out plate in The apologie of Fridericus Staphylus … intreating of the true and right understanding of Holy Scripture: Of the translation of the Bible into the vulgar tongue: Of disagrement in doctrine amonge the Protestants, trans. Thomas Stapleton (Antwerp, 1565).

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Figure 8.3 ‘A Showe of the Protestants Petigrew as ye have it before at large deducted’, in The apologie of Fridericus Staphylus … intreating of the true and right understanding of holy Scripture: of the translation of the Bible in to the vulgar tongue: of disagreement in doctrine amonge the Protestants, trans. Thomas Stapleton (Antwerp, 1565), fold-out plate, between sigs Gg4 and Hh1. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark 698.d.1.

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substance of the book ‘by expresse figure, to the eye & sight of the Christian Reader’, as well as to those ‘that cannot reade’.82 Over time, Catholic controversialists developed some clever polemical techniques, such as using misleading titles to trap the unwary, and disguising themselves as moderate Protestants or neutral observers.83 A brief but perfunctory denunciation of popery in the preface could act as an effective smokescreen and enable a recusant book to slip past an overworked censor.84 This device dates back to the mid-1520s, when Jerome Emser issued an illustrated German New Testament masquerading as a Lutheran edition but crammed full of caustically anti-Protestant glosses and notes.85 James Anderton, a Lancashire gentleman who wrote under the pseudonym John Brerely, seems to have been the first Catholic writer to make extensive use of the method of refuting the heretics out of their own mouths, a trick mimicked by the missionary priest Richard Broughton in his First part of Protestants proofes, for Catholikes religion and recusancy (1607).86 The evolution of this strategy partly reflected the cracks emerging within the Church of England itself, not least the attacks of Richard Bancroft on the ‘daungerous positions’ of the puritans in the early 1590s. Never were Calvin and Beza ‘so much defamed by their owne discyples’, Verstegan had declared triumphantly: ‘me thinckes I could oute of sundry our late Englishe hereticall bookes … drawe foorth very espetiall matter to move any indifferent Protestant’ to question their religion.87 But the tables were very soon turned: Protestants like the apostate Thomas Bell took full advantage of the unseemly squabbles between the seculars and Jesuits during the Archpriest and Appellant controversies, a quarrel they chose, to their cost, to prosecute in the public forum of print. The dissemination of tracts like William Watson’s notorious Quodlibets (1602), Christopher Bagshaw’s Sparing discoverie of our English Jesuits (1601) and Robert Persons’ Manifestation of the great folly and bad spirit of certayne in England calling themselves secular priestes (1602) was 82  Peter Frarin, An oration against the unlawfull insurrections of the Protestantes of our time, under pretence to refourme religion (Antwerp, 1566), sig. B4r and ff. 83  Clancy, English Catholic Books, 1641–1700, p. xii. 84   See Alison Shell, ‘Catholic Texts and Anti-Catholic Prejudice in the Seventeenth Century Book Trade’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds), Censorship and the Control of Print in England and France, 1600–1910 (Winchester, 1992), p. 42. 85   Martin D.W. Jones, The Counter-Reformation (Cambridge, 1995), p. 55. 86   John Brereley [James Anderton], The apologie of the Romane Church ([English secret press], 1604); Richard Broughton, The first part of Protestants proofes, for Catholikes religion and recusancy (Paris [English secret press], 1607). 87   Richard Bancroft, Daungerous positions and proceedings … for the presbiteriall discipline (London, 1593); Petti (ed.), Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan, pp. 119, 134, 142.

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distinctly counterproductive: it did nothing but cast a spotlight on the damaging rift which had developed within Catholic ranks.88 In the face of such scandals, many leading figures in the English mission began to fear that works of controversy were having a detrimental effect, filling ‘the heades of men with a spirite of contradiction and contention’ and with ‘brawles of wordes, Pugnis verborum’. Of first importance in the eyes of Robert Persons and William Rainolds was the publication of works designed to cultivate repentance and piety.89 This enterprise was well underway before the arrival of priests from Douai and Rome, but it gathered momentum with the entrance of the Jesuits upon the scene. Loyola’s influential Spiritual exercises spawned a mass of devotional paperbacks in portable formats, small godly books which sought to teach the faithful how to meditate, confess, say the Rosary and receive the Holy Eucharist.90 Many were English versions of the works of Spanish and Italian churchmen like Luis de Granada, Fulvio Androzzi and Luca Pinelli and some such texts even made their way into Irish, Scots Gaelic and Welsh.91 Nicolas Berzetti’s The practice of meditating (1613), Vincenzo Bruno’s Short treatise of the sacrament of penance (1597) and John Bucke’s Instructions for the use of the beades (1589) are typical of this voluminous genre. Compiled ‘for the benefite of unlearned’, the latter is a

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88

  Thomas Bell, The anatomie of popish tyrannie (London, 1603). Bell claimed to have invented this technique: see his Thomas Bels motives: concerning Romish faith and religion (Cambridge, 1593), sig. ¶2v; BL, Lansdowne MS 75, fo. 40r. William Watson, A decacordon of ten quodlibeticall questions concerning religion and state ([London], 1602); Christopher Bagshaw, A sparing discoverie of our English Jesuits ([London], 1601); [Robert Persons], A manifestation of the great folly and bad spirit of certayne in England calling themselves secular priestes ([Antwerp], 1602). Bancroft, then bishop of London, seems to have sanctioned Appellant publications against the Jesuits for this very reason: see Foley, i. 39, 42; H.R. Plomer, ‘Bishop Bancroft and a Catholic Press’, The Library, NS, 8 (1907), 164–76; G. Jenkins, ‘The Archpriest Controversy and the Printers, 1601–1603’, The Library, 5th ser., 2 (1947–48): 180–86. On Bell, see Chapter 2, above. 89   William Rainolds, A refutation of sundry reprehensions, cavils, and false sleightes (Paris, 1583), sig. a3v; Robert Persons, The first booke of the Christian exercise, appertaining to resolution ([Rouen], 1582), p. 2. 90  On devotional literature, see the introduction to John R. Roberts, A Critical Anthology of English Recusant Devotional Prose, 1558–1603 (Pittsburgh, 1966); and T.H. Clancy, ‘Spiritual Publications of English Jesuits, 1615–1640’, RH, 19 (1989), 426–46. Tomas de Villacastin, A manuall of devout meditations and exercises, instructing how to pray mentally. Drawne out of the Spiritual Exercises, trans. H. More ([St Omer], 1618). 91  Examples include Peter Canisius, Crynnodeb o adysc Cristnogaul … (Paris, 1609); Morys Clynnog, Athrauaeth Gristnogaul, le cair uedi cynnuys … (Milan, 1568); Griffith Robert, Ynglynion ar y pader ([Wales?, 1580–90?], STC 21077.5); Pietro Teramano, Dechreuad a rhyfedhus esmudiad eglwys yr arglwdhes fair o Loreto (Loreto, 1635); and the publications of the Irish Franciscan, Giolla Brighde Ó Heóghusa, ARCR, ii, 575–7.

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tiny octavo manual illustrated with woodcuts, which includes an elaborate folding plate to guide the reader through his or her daily devotions (see Figure 12.2).92 In the second half of the seventeenth century, coinciding with the rise of the school of piety associated with Bishop Francis de Sales, there was a shift towards translations from French. Promoted by the Benedictines, the writings of native mystics including Julian of Norwich, Walter Hilton and Augustine Baker also enjoyed a notable revival.93 It is not surprising that indigenous devotional books are somewhat thin on the ground: many missionary priests and their auxiliaries abroad had far more pressing priorities than the rigours of original composition. Much Catholic literature was liturgical or paraliturgical in character. Some intriguing examples of tables and ABCs devised to help priests consecrate the sacrament and recite the mass survive,94 together with a multitude of Tridentine primers, psalters and breviaries, probably a minute fraction of the thousands printed in this era. Nuns, friars and monks must have furnished a significant market for these manuals (some 5,000 men and women entered religious houses on the Continent between 1598 and 1642), but they were also widely used by the laity, as attested by the popularity of the Officium Beatae Mariae Virginis, a revised version of a medieval book of hours, and of the Jesus psalter, reprinted 41 times between 1570 and 1640.95 Here care must be taken not to overlook books left over from the pre-Reformation period. Many early Tudor religious works evaded the iconoclasts and were secreted away by lay conservatives waiting ‘for a day’. Among the items bequeathed to Christopher Monckton by Anthony Marston of Londesborough, in 1573, for instance, was the fifteenth-century Dominican friar Johannes Herold’s famous Sermones discipuli.96 Elizabethan casuists appear to have dealt with cases of conscience about the lawfulness of using old Roman breviaries and missals on a fairly regular basis: if the new edition authorized by Pius V 92  Nicolas Berzetti, The practice of meditating with profit the misteries of our Lord, the Blessed Vergin and saints (Mechlin, 1613); Vincenzo Bruno, A short treatise of the sacrament of penance ([English secret press], 1597); John Bucke, Instructions for the use of the beades (Louvain, 1589). 93  Clancy, English Catholic Books, 1641–1700, p. x. See also David Rogers, ‘The English Recusants: Some Medieval Literary Links’, RH, 23 (1997): 483–507. 94   An example is preserved in BL, Lansdowne MS 96, no. 58. The text of The manner how to help a priest to say masse was included in Robert Bellarmine, A short Christian doctrine, trans. Richard Gibbons ([St Omer], 1633). 95   See J.M. Blom, The Post-Tridentine English Primer, CRS Monograph Series 3 (London, 1982); J.D. Crichton, ‘The Manual of 1614’, RH, 16 (1982–83): 158–72. 96  Hugh Aveling, Post Reformation Catholicism in East Yorkshire, 1558–1790, East Yorkshire Local History Society 11 (1960), p. 14. The edition in question was probably Joannes Herolt, Sermones discipuli de tempore [et] sanctis (London, 1510, STC 13226).

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could not be obtained, they ruled, this was admissible, provided that the ‘superstitious rubrics’ regarding indulgences were systematically deleted.97 More symptomatic of the priorities of the Catholic reformers, and of the onward march of religious confessionalization in Europe, was the proliferation of catechisms. The Lancashire priest Laurence Vaux’s Catechisme or Christian doctrine (1567), written after a ‘simple and rude maner’ to meet the needs of ‘yong scollers’ and uneducated laypeople, was an enduring favourite. It made no significant concessions to the straitened condition of Catholics in Protestant England and recorded old-fashioned religious practices upon which the Council of Trent frowned, not least the anointing of women receiving extreme unction upon the bare ‘bealy’.98 More progressive and pace-setting were Robert Bellarmine’s Shorte catechisme, translated into English in 1614, and the Dutch Jesuit Peter Canisius’ Certayne necessarie principles of religion (1578–79), which also presented itself as ‘very commodious for Infants and sucking babes’, ‘little ones and younglings’.99 The professed aim of such tracts – to enlighten the ignorant poor – should not be dismissed as mere rhetoric. By the 1640s, Richard Lascelles’ A little way how to heare masse with profit and devotion could assume aristocratic readers with resident chaplains,100 but half a century earlier the social base and milieu of the movement was far more heterogeneous. The speed of the alleged contraction of the Catholic community into upper-class households should not be overstated, even in the later seventeenth century. In a context in which the vernacular Bible gave Protestant ministers a clear advantage in proselytising the laity, it was perhaps inevitable that Catholic leaders would concede the need for an English version of the Vulgate, though not without strong reservations about the dangers of degrading Holy Writ. As early as 1567 Thomas Harding and Nicholas Sander wrote to Cardinal-Protector Morone in Rome recommending that swift action be taken to counteract unorthodox editions, and in 1578 William Allen argued that while it might be ‘desirable that the sacred writings should never be translated into the vernacular, nevertheless since in these days, either because of the spread of heretical opinions or for 97

  Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, pp. 24, 93–4.   Laurence Vaux, A catechisme or Christian doctrine, necessary for children and ignorant people (Louvain, 1568, repr. 1574, [1581?], 1583, 1590, 1599, 1605, 1620, STC 24625.5–24627a.4); ed. T.G. Law (Chetham Society NS 4 (Manchester, 1885); quotations from ‘The Printer to the Reader’, ‘The Author to the Reader’ and p. 68. 99   Robert Bellarmine, A shorte catechisme … illustrated with images, trans. Richard Gibbons (Augsburg, 1614); St Peter Canisius, Certayne Necessarie Principles of Religion (Douai, [1578–79]), sig. ¶6r–v. 100   Richard Lascelles, A little way how to heare masse with profit and devotion (Paris, 1644), dedicated to Lady Ann Brudenell. 98

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some other reason, even men of good will are apt to be inquisitive, and moreover there may arise the need for reading the Scriptures in order to confute the adversaries, it is more satisfactory to have a faithful Catholic translation than that they should endanger their souls by using a corrupt one’.101 Anxiety that the laity might slide into heresy as a result of free and unsupervised reading of the Scriptures remained high, and when the Rheims New Testament appeared in 1582 the text was constrained within a cage of prescriptive annotations.102 Writing in 1581 the Protestant divine William Fulke claimed that the ‘papists’ had at last abandoned their vain attempt to prove that Catholicism was the true religion in favour of a narrower aim: ‘to reteine such as they have seduced in obstinacie of errour’.103 While this shift should not be overstated, there are grounds for thinking that some Catholic clergymen began to concentrate their energies on succouring the minority who had stoically resisted absorption into the established Church. Sometimes the intended audience could be very intimate indeed: when Sir Herbert Croft became a Catholic late in life and retired to the monastery of St Gregory, Douai, he commissioned the publication of eight copies of a series of letters to his wife and children entreating them to embrace his new-found faith.104 Anthony Batt’s A poore mans mite (1639) was a private letter about the rosary sent to his exiled sister which circulated among members of her confraternity before reaching a wider constituency with the aid of print.105 Strictly speaking, however, it is misleading to define books produced in this period as ‘recusant literature’, since many were not intended for stalwart separatists alone but for a religious community with fluid and shifting boundaries. While Thomas Wright’s Disposition or garnishmente of the soule (1596) was meant for ‘the vew and censure of three sortes of persons; Catholicks, protestantes, & demi-Catholickes … some call them Church-papistes, others Scismatiques’, the author of A myrrhine posie of 101   T.F. Knox (ed.), The Letters and Memorials of William Cardinal Allen, 1532–1594, Records of the English Catholics under the Penal Laws 2 (London, 1882), pp. 64–5, quoted in translation in Southern, Elizabethan Recusant Prose, 233. 102   The new testament of Jesus Christ, translated faithfully into English … with … annotations, and other necessarie helpes … specially for the discoverie of the corruptions of divers late translations, and for cleering the controversies in religion, of these daies (Rheims, 1582); see esp. the ‘Preface to the Reader’ by Gregory Martin. Although the translation of the Old Testament was complete at this time, its publication was delayed until 1609–10: The holie Bible faithfully translated into English, out of the authenticall Latin, 2 vols (Douai, 1609–10, STC 2207). See also Chapter 9, below. 103   William Fulke, A briefe confutation, of a popish discourse (London, 1581), fo. 1r. 104   T.A. Birrell, ‘English Counter-Reformation Book Culture’ (review of ARCR, ii), RH, 22 (1994): 113–22, at 119. 105   Anthony Batt, A poore mans mite ([Douai], 1639).

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the bitter dolours of Christ his passion (1639) wished that ‘all they who goe by the name of Christians’ would peruse this pamphlet and ‘take some benefit by it’ and to that end abstained from ‘all Controversies in Religion’, that none might be deterred from reading it.106 It may be that many ostensibly apolitical works of devotion should actually be interpreted as subtle and sophisticated exercises in sect formation. One subgenre which invites this kind of speculation is the body of treatises dedicated to convincing the laity that steadfast recusancy was the only way to avoid damnation. In denouncing ‘schismatics’ who to varying degrees conformed with the heretical regime, missionary leaders like Robert Persons were attempting to create a pristine public image for a religion coming to recognise that a measure of compromise and equivocation was vital to its long-term survival. Modelled on St Paul’s letters to the long-suffering congregations of Christians in Ephesus and Corinth, tracts like Thomas Hide’s Consolatorie epistle to the afflicted Catholikes (1580) seem to have been designed to daunt the Protestant enemy as much as strengthen the resolve of the faithful. Addressed to a heroic remnant, they celebrate and flaunt a faith which positively thrives in the face of a swelling tide of savage legislation.107 Histories too were part of a process of polemical mythmaking. Running through 15 editions within its first decade (including translations into French, Spanish, Italian and German), Nicholas Sander’s De origine et progressu schismatis Anglicani powerfully shaped Continental perceptions of the English Reformation as a ruthlessly intolerant Calvinist revolution. Augmented by Pedro Ribadeneira in 1610, it played no small part in destabilizing late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century foreign relations.108 Similarly, emotive descriptions of Catholic executions were as much an incentive to military intervention by Philip II and the cue for a papal crusade as a method of fostering the solidarity of a beleaguered community: hope never completely faded that England might return to Rome by dynastic alliance or an armed coup. Depicting Protestant atrocities in harrowing detail, the 106  Thomas Wright, The disposition or garnishmente of the soule to receive worthily the blessed sacrament (Antwerp [English secret press], 1596); Ch. M. [Matthew Kellison], A myrrhine posie of the bitter dolours of Christ his passion (Douai, 1639), p. 12. 107  Thomas Hide, Consolatorie epistle to the afflicted Catholikes (Louvain [London secret press], 1580). See my Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 1993), pp. 44–9. The most famous of such tracts is Robert Persons, A brief discours conteyning certayne reasons why Catholiques refuse to goe to church (Douai [London secret press], 1580). 108   Sander’s unfinished Latin manuscript, De origine ac progressu schismatis Anglicani, was completed by Edward Rishton and published in Louvain in 1585. Also influential was Bishop Yepez of Taraçona’s Historia particular de la persecucion de Inglaterra (Madrid, 1599).

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graphic martyrological engravings published by Verstegan and Cavalleriis were no less influential in the creation of a counter ‘black legend’.109

Figure 8.4 The execution of Margaret Clitherow at York, 1586, from Richard Verstegan, Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis (Antwerp, 1587), p. 77. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark 4570.d.21. 109

  See Dillon, Construction of Martyrdom, esp. chs 2–5; A.G. Petti, ‘Richard Verstegan and Catholic Martyrologies of the Later Elizabethan Period’, RH, 5 (1959–60): 64–90; Christopher Highley, ‘Richard Verstegan’s Book of Martyrs’, in Christopher Highley and John N. King (eds), John Foxe and his World (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 183–97. More generally, see J.T. Rhodes, ‘English Books of Martyrs and Saints of the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century’, RH, 22 (1994): 7–25. Important examples of martyr literature include: Robert Persons, De persecutione Anglicana (Paris, 1582); William Allen, A briefe historie of the glorious martyrdom of xii reverend priests ([Rheims], 1582); Thomas Worthington, A relation of sixtene martyrs: glorified in England in twelve monethes (Douai, 1601); and his A catalogue of martyrs in England: for the profession of the Catholique faith, since … 1535 ([Douai], 1608). For the engravings, see Richard Verstegan, Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis (Antwerp, 1587); and Johannes Baptista de Cavalleriis, Ecclesiae Anglicane trophaea sive sanctorum martyrum (Rome, 1584).

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Individuals caught distributing such ‘pectores of parsecusnes’ were particularly galling to a government anxious to avoid being tarred with the same brush as John Foxe had used so brilliantly on Bloody Mary Tudor.110 This vibrant book culture needs to be seen as one manifestation of a European-wide movement rivalling the brotherhood of Reformed churches scholars call ‘international Calvinism’.111 Through the efforts of ministers trained in Rome, Douai and Valladolid, the works of Tridentine giants like Bellarmine, Luis de Granada and Bishop Francis de Sales were rendered familiar to English Catholic readers; in turn their own writings were transmitted into other languages and regions. Campion’s Decem rationes went through over 60 editions before 1632 – some 45 Latin, two Czech, one Dutch, four Flemish, four French, nine German, one Hungarian, two Polish and, surprisingly, only one in English.112 And just as accounts of the ‘glorious combats’ and gruesome crucifixions of Jesuit evangelists in Japan inspired those who lived ‘in the happie danger of being partakers of the like crownes’ in England, so did the martyrdoms of Margaret Clitherow and Edmund Campion etch themselves on the imagination of French men and women who supported the Guise and the League.113 British missionaries made their mark as far afield as Goa, where Thomas Stephens brought out a catechism in Canarese, and Peru, where Catholic converts were regaled with edifying tales of imprisoned recusants and their heroic local patroness, Luisa de Carvajal.114 Printed books thus served as cultural ambassadors, cementing intellectual as well as political links between states at the forefront of efforts to re-Catholicize lost parts of Europe and Christianize the New World and the ancient civilisations of South Asia and the Far East.

110   A.G. Petti (ed.), Recusant Documents from the Ellesmere Manuscripts, CRS 60 (London, 1968), pp. 51, 89. 111   Cf. Francis Higman’s analysis of the international transmission of Calvinism in ‘Calvin’s Works in Translation’, in Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke and Gillian Lewis (eds), Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1620 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 82–99. 112   As noted by A.I. Doyle in a review of ARCR, i, in RH, 20 (1990): 146. 113   Joao Rodriguez Girao, The palme of Christian fortitude: or, the glorious combats of Christians in Japonia, trans. Edmund Neville ([St Omer], 1630), sig. *6v; The theater of Japonias constancy, trans. William Lee ([St Omer], 1624); A briefe relation of the persecution lately made against the Catholike Christians, in the kingdome of Japonia, trans. W. W[right] ([St Omer], 1619). On the use of Verstegan’s prints by the League, see Dillon, Construction of Martyrdom, chs 3–4. See also Paul Arblaster, ‘G.C., Recusant Prison Translator of the Japonian Epistells’, RH, 28 (2006): 43–54. 114   Birrell, ‘English Counter-Reformation Book Culture’, 115. On Luisa da Carvajal, see now Glyn Redworth, The She Apostle: The Extraordinary Life and Death of Luisa da Carvajal (Oxford, 2008).

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IV It is clear, then, that Catholic leaders rapidly made a virtue out of the necessity of their dependence on print, treating it not only as a valuable auxiliary but also as a creative opportunity. Likening their literary efforts to ‘the breade of Angels’, ‘good and holesome foode’, ‘sweet and savorie honie combes’, they came to regard books as the lifeblood of the scattered constituency they served, as well as a ‘soveraygne salve’ of the souls of besotted Protestants, ‘Antido[t]es whereby to repel the dispersed contagion of dangerous infection’.115 ‘[T]here is nothing which helps and has helped and will protect in the future and spread our cause so much’, Robert Persons wrote to Claudio Aquaviva, father-general of the Jesuits, in 1581. Campion closely echoed this sentiment in comparing the effect of material texts with that of martyrs’ deaths, wishing in July of the same year that ‘our books written with ink should succeed those others which are daily being published, written in blood’.116 In 1616, John Wilson, director of the St Omer press, declared confidently that ‘books penetrate where the priests and religious cannot enter and serve as precursors to undeceive many’.117 The enterprising publishing programme of the exiles was not, however, without its critics. Some lay Catholics implored propagandists on the Continent to slacken the pace of production since it stoked the fury of the authorities and excited harsher persecution. George Birkhead condemned these advocates of caution as ‘tepidi et schismatici’, but such dissenting voices deserve emphasis amid so many expressions of enthusiasm for the press.118 But just how influential were Catholic publications in the battle for hearts and minds? Prelates, preachers and privy councillors feared illicit literature might bewitch simple souls liable to be deceived by a ‘pretended shew of godlines’ and unable to ‘discerne the errors therein conteined’.119 115   Luis de Granada, Of prayer, and meditation, trans. Richard Hopkins (Paris, 1582), sig. b7v; St Peter Canisius, A summe of Christian doctrine, trans. Henry Garnet ([English secret press, 1592–96]), sig. *2r–v; Stanislaus Hosius [bishop of Worms], A most excellent treatise of the begynnyng of heresyes in oure tyme, trans. Richard Shacklock (Antwerp, 1565), sig. a7r; John Brereley, Sainct Austines religion ([English secret press], 1620), p. 4. 116   Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Persons, p. 107; Campion, quoted in Pollard Brown, ‘Robert Southwell’, p. 253. 117   Calendar of State Papers, Milan, i, 654. 118   ‘Father Persons’ Memoirs’, ed. J.H. Pollen, in Miscellanea IV, CRS 4 (London, 1907), pp. 154–5. 119   See Hughes and Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations, ii. 501–2. This particular quotation comes from a proclamation against the books of the separatists Robert Browne and Robert Harrison, but similar objections were made against Catholic texts: see, for example, Hughes and Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations, iii. 13.

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Counter-Reformation clerics shared the anxieties of reformed ministers about the corrupting potential of texts launched from across the confessional divide. To contribute to the purchase of books like Foxe’s Actes and monuments and John Jewel’s Apology for one’s parish church was to commit a mortal sin; and a parent who bought a heretical tract for his or her son or daughter which drew them from the faith could, by extension, be held guilty of spiritual murder.120 Concomitantly, both groups had immense confidence in the power of their own propaganda. Christopher Greathead, a lay Catholic evangelist hauled before the High Commission in York in the 1580s, was reputed to be ‘a great seducer of others by books’, and during his saintly adolescence Brother Edward Throgmorton purchased and dispersed primers among his father’s tenants and the children of the poor, anticipating the methods of the SPCK.121 On the Protestant side, the convert Francis Walsingham was supplied with copies of Thomas Bell’s virulent Survey of popery and Anatomie of popish tyrannie while in prison and told that ‘by the time you have read these books, and marked them well, you will have no mind to be a Papist’.122 Jesuits and seminarians made similar brags, and the potted autobiographies preserved in the matriculation registers of the English College certainly suggest that large numbers of students owed their ‘conversion’ or ‘reconciliation’ to the Church of Rome to reading Catholic tracts, as do confessions prised out of captured priests.123 It would be a mistake to ignore the significance such individuals attached, albeit with the benefit of hindsight, to print as a catalyst of religious enlightenment. It was upon ‘diligently reading’ Thomas Dorman’s Disproufe of M. Nowelles Reproufe (1565) that the Warwickshire Protestant minister John Good conceived a virulent ‘hatred of heresy’ and decided to defect.124 Under interrogation the countess of Arundel ascribed her ‘Revoulte from Religion’ to the study of ‘certeyne books’ and 19-year old Penelope Chapman, in later life the Carmelite nun Mary Margaret of the Angels, likewise attributed her conversion to reading Catholic controversial works supplied by her brother: these had sowed the seeds of ‘grave doubts that I was not in ye true religion’.125 And the future Benedictine monk Augustine Baker wrote of the divine inspiration which had infused him upon perusing various controversial 120

  Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, pp. 22, 119.  Aveling, Catholic Recusancy in the City of York, 161; Foley, iv. 292. 122   Foley, ii. 345, 348–9. 123   For just a few examples, see Foley, iv. 431, 441, 519, 603, 655, 657; vii, pt 2, 977; Pollen (ed.), Unpublished Documents Relating to the English Martyrs, pp. 31–2. 124   Foley, iv. 17. 125   Pollen and MacMahon (eds), Ven. Philip Howard, p. 55; Nicky Hallett (ed.), Lives of Spirit: English Carmelite Self-Writing of the Early Modern Period (Aldershot, 2007), p. 107. 121

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treatises he had initially taken up ‘but for recreation and divertisement of mind’.126 No single Catholic work had a greater reputation as a stimulus for religious renewal than Robert Persons’ First booke of the Christian exercise (or the Book of Resolution), originally published in 1582. Inspired by the Italian Jesuit Gaspar Loarte’s Exercise of a Christian life and drawing liberally on Luis de Granada’s The sinners guyde, this bulky duodecimo tract became an immediate bestseller.127 Catholics boasted that the 2,500 copies of the first edition had been snapped up by the spiritually starved English public and literally fingered to pieces, ‘statim distracta’: ‘the number of conversions of heretics to the faith by reading it can scarcely be believed’.128 Endorsing these self-congratulatory reports, a spy told Sir Francis Walsingham that, together with the Rheims New Testament, the book was ‘as much sought for, of the protestanttes as papistes’.129 Thomas Poulton from Buckinghamshire was only one of many apprentice priests who claimed that the book had revolutionised their lives. Upon reading it, he remembered, ‘a marvellous light broke in upon me’.130 The Book of resolution was a runaway success not so much because it pandered to a taste for forbidden fruit, but because it met a genuine need. It filled a glaring gap in the existing range of Protestant literature. Spiritual and devotional writing was a genre which the reformed ministry was slow to develop, as Counter-Reformation priests never tired of pointing out triumphantly and even godly preachers were obliged to admit begrudgingly. This was a serious shortcoming which, as Richard Rogers noted ruefully, ‘the Papists [continually] cast in our teeth’. ‘Let it be observed what advantage the common Adversarie hath gotten by their pettie Pamphlets in this kinde’, lamented John Phillips, vicar of Faversham, in the preface to a catechism entitled The Christians ABC (1629). In his Ancilla pietatis: or, the hand-maid to private devotion (1626), Daniel Featley tried hard to find a convincing excuse: ‘the Romanists for the most part exceed in 126

  J. McCann and H. Connolly (eds), Memorials of Father Augustine Baker and other Documents Relating to the English Benedictines, CRS 33 (London, 1933), pp. 75–6. 127  Persons, The first booke of the Christian exercise. Other editions appeared in 1585, 1598, 1607, 1622 and 1633 (STC 19354–19354.9). Gaspar Loarte’s Essercitatio della vita Cristiana (Venice, 1561), was translated and published by William Carter in 1579 (STC 16641.5); an English version of Luis de Granada’s Guia de pecadores (1556–57) did not appear until 1598 (STC 16918). 128   Pollen (ed.), ‘Father Persons’ Memoirs’, pp. 153–5; a letter from Persons to Aquaviva, 12 Feb. 1585, quoted in Victor Houliston, ‘Why Robert Persons would not be Pacified: Edmund Bunny’s Theft of The Book of Resolution’, in McCoog (ed.), The Reckoned Expense, pp. 209–32, at 221. 129   TNA, SP 12/168/31. 130   Foley, i. 158–9.

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bulke, but our Divines in weight. The Church of Rome (like Leah) is more fruitfull; but her Devotions (like Leah in this also) are bleare-eyed with superstition’.131 Conscious of lagging behind, Protestants copied older techniques and recycled pre-Reformation classics like the confessions of St Augustine and Thomas Kempis’ Imitation of Christ.132 Others resorted to blatant plagiarism of the writings of living Catholic priests. Thus in 1584 the Yorkshire minister Edmund Bunny produced a bowdlerized version of Persons’ First book of the Christian exercise, from which he carefully removed the passages on purgatory and free will but retained over 90 per cent of the original text intact. The Jesuit was justifiably outraged by this audacious piece of literary piracy and reissued the tract with the revised title A Christian directorie, ‘purged from M. Bunnyes corruption[s]’. Ironically, this devotional manual went through more Protestant impressions than Catholic ones: by 1600 the tally was 24 to four.133 The playwright Robert Greene attributed his death-bed repentance to it and it was through reading an old torn copy lent to his father by ‘a poor DayLabourer’ in the town of Kidderminster that Richard Baxter felt the first stirrings of his religious vocation. Thereby, he wrote, ‘it pleased God to awaken my Soul’.134 Persons was not the only Catholic writer to be kidnapped and subjected to heretical castration. Francis Meres and Thomas Lodge ruthlessly pillaged the works of Luis de Granada for the benefit of Protestant readers, and Henry Garnet’s translation of Luca Pinelli’s Meditationi brevi del santissimo sacramento (c.1600) was quickly matched by an excised edition by Christopher Sutton, canon of Westminster.135 A selection of 131  Richard Rogers, Seaven Treatises (London, 1603), sig. A6r; John Phillips, The Christians ABC: or, a Christian alphabet, conteyning grounds of knowledge unto salvation (London, 1629), sig. A4r; Daniel Featley, Ancilla pietatis: or, the hand-maid to private devotion (London, 1626), sig. A6r. 132   See Helen C. White, English Devotional Literature (Prose), 1600–1640 (Madison, WI, 1931), ch. 3. 133   A booke of Christian exercise, appertaining to resolution … perused, and accompanied now with a treatise tending to pacification: by Edmund Bunny (London, 1584); Robert Persons, A Christian directorie guiding men to their salvation (St Omer, 1607). See Brad S. Gregory, ‘The “True and Zealouse Service of God”: Robert Parsons, Edmund Bunny, and the First Booke of the Christian Exercise’, JEH, 45 (1994): 238–68, at 239, 253, and passim; Houliston, ‘Why Robert Persons would not be Pacified’. 134   Robert Greene, The repentance of Robert Greene (London, 1592), sig. B2v; Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae (London, 1696), p. 3. 135   Granados devotion, Granados spirituall and heavenlie exercises and The sinners guyde were all translated and edited by Francis Meres and published in London in 1598 (STC 16902, 16920, 16918); The flowers of Lodowicke of Granado, trans. Thomas Lodge (London, 1601, STC 16901); Luca Pinelli, Breife Meditations of the Most Holy Sacrament

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devotional writings of the German Jesuit Jeremias Drexelius prepared by the Cambridge divine Ralph Winterton was reprinted at least 15 times following its first appearance in 1632.136 At the less expensive end of the market, John Taylor’s The life and death of … the Virgin Mary (1620) was based on an old prose tract the ‘water-poet’ had picked up in Antwerp and from which, ‘like a Bee’, he had ‘suck’t the sacred hony of the best authorities of Scriptures’, leaving ‘the poyson of Antichristianisme’ behind. A kind of hybrid between a medieval saint’s life and a penny godly, it misled more than one unsuspecting reader, and can be found in both an inventory of works ‘of the Roman religion’ and the otherwise impeccably Protestant library of the Northamptonshire gentlewoman, Judith Isham.137 Catholic works also appeared from mainstream presses without being disinfected, sometimes on the assumption that their contents were sufficiently damning in and of themselves. Others were the work of stationers with ‘popish’ sympathies, including Gabriel Cawood and Valentine Simmes.138 Many commercial publishers, however, printed such books simply because they could command a high price from prospective buyers. Clement Knight’s A manual of godly prayers distributed according to the dayes of the weeke (1620), for instance, was a thinly disguised reprint of one of the most popular recusant primers.139 No fewer than 13 editions of Robert Southwell’s Saint Peters complaint were printed in the public domain between 1595 and 1640, compared with just two clandestine impressions. John Wolfe entered his rights to A short rule of good life in the Stationers’ Register in November 1598; another version was licensed to the bookseller William Barrett in the reign of James.140 Significantly these constitute a category of literature which Allison and Rogers excluded from their catalogue, and as Alison Shell has pointed out, this has had the effect of minimising the importance of certain ‘recusant’ and of Preparation, for Receving the Same, trans. Henry Garnet ([English secret press], c.I600, STC 19937); Godly Meditations upon the Most Holy Sacrament of the Lordes Supper, trans. and ed. Christopher Sutton (London, 1601, STC 23491). 136   Cited in Anthony Milton, ‘A Qualified Intolerance: The Limits and Ambiguities of Early Stuart Anti-Catholicism’, in Arthur F. Marotti (ed.), Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in England (Basingstoke, 1999), 85–115, at 92–3. 137   John Taylor, The life and death of … the Virgin Mary (London, 1620), sig. A5r–v; CUL, MS Dd. 14. 25 (3), fo. 17; Northamptonshire Record Office, Northampton, I. L. 4046. I owe both these references to Arnold Hunt. 138   Brown, ‘Paperchase’, pp. 138–9. 139   A manual of godly prayers distributed according to the dayes of the weeke (London, 1620): printed by Bernard Alsop for Clement Knight. 140  Robert Southwell, S. Peters Complaint (STC 22955–22955.5, 22955.7–22968); and his A Short Rule of Good Life (London [1597?], STC 22969). See also R. Loomis, ‘The Barrett Version of Robert Southwell’s Short Rule of Good Life’, RH, 7 (1964): 239–48.

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authors, as well as concealing the high level of Catholic seepage into a context in which Protestant writers officially enjoyed a total monopoly.141 Zealous Calvinist preachers were quite willing to exploit the ensuing confessional confusion and republish medieval devotional works with deliberately ambiguous titles, hoping, perhaps, to win over the bewildered. The compiler of the Manuale Catholicorum: a manuall for true Catholickes (1611), an anthology of meditations and prayers by the Church Fathers, was none other than the puritan divine William Crashaw.142 John Cosin’s Collection of private devotions (1627) seems to have been a calculated attempt to stem the tide of lady courtiers crossing over to Rome because of its rich liturgical tradition: modelled on the pocket office, it included a calendar of martyrs from which the Marian Protestants immortalized by Foxe were conspicuously omitted.143 In the context of concerns about the rise of Arminianism, Cosin’s prayer book was perceived as an insidious attempt to subvert the orthodox religion. William Prynne was particularly outraged by the frontispiece, which incorporated what he called ‘an undoubted Badge, and Character of a Popish, and Jesuiticall Booke’, that idolatrous emblem, the letters IHS.144 Fresh allegations of a Laudian plot to propagate popery arose after the republication in 1637 of a virtually unexpurgated version of Bishop Francis de Sales’ An introduction to a devout life, which had been translated into English by the Catholic priest John Yaxley in 1613.145 While there was probably little substance to such claims, they do warn us against assuming that the worlds of Catholic and Protestant publishing were mutually exclusive and that their readers belonged to rigidly segregated denominational groups. They also afford

141  Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge, 1990), 14, 61–3, and ch. 2 passim. 142   William Crashaw, Manuale Catholicorum … A manuall for true Catholicks (London, 1611). For an earlier example, see John Phillips, The perfect path to paradice: containing divers most ghostly and wholsome prayers (London, 1588). See also Eamon Duffy, ‘Continuity and Divergence in Tudor Religion’, in R.N. Swanson (ed.), Unity and Diversity in the Church, SCH 32 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 189–205. 143   John Cosin, A collection of private devotions (London, 1627). 144   William Prynne, A briefe survay and censure of Mr Cozen his couzening devotions (London, 1628), p. 4. See also, H[enry] B[urton], A tryall of private devotions (London, 1628); and George Ornsby (ed.), The Correspondence of John Cosin D.D., Lord Bishop of Durham, 2 vols, Surtees Society 52, 55 (Durham, 1869–72), i, pp. xix–xxi, 125–41. 145   Francis de Sales, An introduction to a devoute life (London, 1616, 1637, STC 11319, 11321), an expurgated version of Yaxley’s translation (Douai, 1613, STC 11316.5). For the controversy over its republication in 1637, see William Prynne, Canterburies doome (London, 1646), 188; J.F. Larkin (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, ii, Royal Proclamations of King Charles I, 1625–1646 (Oxford, 1983), pp. 557–8; L. Hicks (ed.), Letters of Thomas Fitzherbert, 1608–1610, CRS 41 (London, 1948), p. 407.

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oblique evidence of the skill and success with which early modern Catholics harnessed the technology of print. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of clerical endeavours to annex the new medium as a tool of Tridentine hegemony should not be exaggerated. Prescriptive tracts did not always live up to their pretensions as ‘domme preachers’. The continuing composition of treatises of ‘schism’, for instance, arguably documents a partial pedagogic failure: it indexes the persistence of church papistry despite repeated directives from the missionary hierarchy, and reveals a laity resistant to the indoctrinating efforts of an inflexible sector of the ecclesiastical elite, as well as the challenges presented by dissenters from within clerical ranks.146 Attention might also be drawn to the tension between the need to rely on books as locums for priests and intrinsic distrust of the interpretative liberties lay readers might take with their texts. Print could be a double-edged sword, promoting habits of thought which recoiled against the principle that exegesis was the preserve of the clergy.147

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V It is a commonplace that every puritan family possessed a well-thumbed Geneva Bible. Reading it and other works of practical divinity aloud was one of the prime duties of the husband, father and master, a central feature of what Christopher Hill has called the ‘spiritualization of the household’.148 Godly books figured prominently in the voluntary religion of fervent Protestants from all social levels: from pious gentlewomen such as Lady Margaret Hoby who pored over edifying tracts as they sat at their needle-work to illiterate fisherman like one Rawlins White, who absorbed the Old and New Testaments by listening to his young son read them, chapter by chapter, ‘every night after supper, summer and winter’.149 Printed texts became an integral part of their confessional identity. While ‘prayer book Protestants’ followed the service in personal copies of Cranmer’s liturgy, carrying the Bible to church and marking the lecturer’s texts was a 146

  See my Church Papists, chs 2–3, esp. pp. 26, 49, 71, and Chapter 2, above.   See Bagschi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents, esp. pp. 213–14; and Ceri Sullivan, Dismembered Rhetoric: English Recusant Writing, 1580–1603 (Madison, WI, 1995), esp. pp. 46, 48. 148   Christopher Hill, ‘The Spiritualization of the Household’, in his Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (Harmondsworth, 1964), pp. 443–81. 149   Dorothy M. Meads (ed.), The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605 (London, 1930), pp. 98, 126, 129; Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed. Cattley, vii. 29 (amend). For a critical assessment of these characterisations, see Andrew Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720 (Cambridge, 2011). 147

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Figure 8.5 Protestant laypeople following the preacher in their bibles compared with Catholics fingering their rosary beads: John Foxe, Actes and monuments (London, 1610 edn), detail from title-page. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark K*7.1.

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characteristic gesture of the self-styled elect.150 The stereotype can be found enshrined in pictures contrasting ‘superstitious’ Catholic congregations fingering their rosary beads with literate Protestant ones diligently following the preacher’s discourse in a book on their knees (Figure 8.5). But there is a strong case for suggesting that the piety of the postReformation Catholic community was no less bibliocentric than its Protestant counterpart. In the households of nobility and gentry like the Meynells of North Kilvington in Yorkshire,151 primers and manuals of prayer replaced sermons, the Scriptures and the collected works of William Perkins and Richard Sibbes, while a recusant matriarch often filled the shoes of the puritan paterfamilias. Dame Dorothy Lawson of St Anthony’s near Newcastle upon Tyne established the practice of reading pious books and saints’ lives in the company of her serving-men and chambermaids,152 and similar customs seem to have prevailed in the homes of the Babthorpes at Osgodby, the Montagues at Battle and the Wisemans at Braddocks, where religious life revolved around regular confession, frequent communion and careful perusal of devotional handbooks.153 This style of domestic piety predated the two Reformations and can be found captured in snapshot in fifteenth-century paintings of fashionable ladies poring over illuminated books.154 But it was also infused with the militant and muscular brand of spirituality patented by the Society of Jesus. The library of the Brome sisters confiscated by the authorities in 1586, for example, included Tridentine bestsellers by Robert Persons, Gaspar Loarte and Luis de Granada, as well as several old Latin psalters.155 150

  For ‘Prayer-Book Protestants’, see Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 13–14, 24–30. For carrying bibles to church as a hallmark of puritanism, see the character of the ‘she precise hypocrite’ or ‘she puritan’, in John Earle, Microcosmography: or, a piece of the world discover’d: In essays and characters (London, 1732 edn), pp. 110–13. On books as badges of belonging, see Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion, ch. 9. 151  E.E. Reynolds (ed.), Miscellanea, CRS 56 (London, 1964), pp. xxiv–v. 152   William Palmes, The Life of Mrs Dorothy Lawson, of St Anthony’s, near Newcastleon-Tyne (London, 1855), p. 48. 153   Morris, iii. 467–8; A.C. Southern (ed.), An Elizabethan Recusant House, Comprising the Life of the Lady Magdalene, Viscountesse Montague (1538–1608) (London, 1954), pp. 47–50; John Gerard: The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, ed. and trans. Philip Caraman (London, 1951), esp. pp. 28–9. See also below, Chapters 11–12, pp. 353–5, 370–71. 154   See Susan Groag Bell, ‘Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture’, in Judith M. Bennett (ed.), Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages (Chicago, IL, 1989); Sandra Penketh, ‘Women and Books of Hours’, in Lesley Smith and Jane H.M. Taylor (eds), Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence (London, 1996); and the essays in Lesley Smith and Jane H.M. Taylor (eds), Women, the Book and the Godly: Selected Proceedings of the St Hilda’s Conference, 1993 (Cambridge, 1995). 155   BL, Lansdowne MS 50, fo. 163v.

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The private meditation on texts practised by devout women like the young Mary Ward was quasi-monastic and anchoretic in character: pious ladies and gentlemen recited the hours of the Virgin in their closets and chambers in deliberate ‘imitation of Religious persons’.156 Certainly the daily cycle of worship observed by Roman Catholics who opted for a cloistered life on the Continent was increasingly predicated upon and penetrated by print. Abbesses and mother superiors are prominent among the dedicatees of English recusant literature, and inferences can also be drawn from the fact that many such tracts remain in the hands of convents originally located in the Low Countries. A manuscript note on the flyleaf of the Bibliothèque de Troyes’ copy of Andreas de Capillia’s Manual of Spirituall Exercises (1625) declares ‘This Booke belongs to the English Benedictin Nunnes of our Bll Lady of Good Hope in Paris’, and the library of the Bridgettine sisters of Syon Abbey is an extraordinary monument to religious communities which were also what Brian Stock has called ‘textual communities’.157 The ‘spiritual reading’ practised by the religious was closely akin to prayer and an important stage on the road to meditation and contemplation: it facilitated the transition to mystical union with God, who would ultimately render material texts unnecessary and inscribe the word within the mind and soul of the devout believer. As the Benedictine nun Dame Barbara Constable commented, ‘to read or heare read pious books is a great motive & spur to perfection … serious reading penetrates to the verie bottom of the hart & works great effects’.158

156

  M.C.E. Chambers, The Life of Mary Ward (1585–1645), 2 vols (London, 1882– 85), i. 49–54; Batt, Poore mans mite, p. 39. 157   Birrell, ‘English Counter-Reformation Book Culture’, 116–17; Andreas de Capilla, A manual of spirituall exercises, trans. Henry Manfield (St Omer, 1625, STC 4603); copy reproduced in facsimile in ERL, vol. 55. The library of the nuns of Syon Abbey, formerly at South Brent, Devon, is on permanent loan to the University of Exeter. See Jones and Walsham (eds), Syon Abbey and its Books, esp. Caroline Bowden, ‘Books and Reading at Syon Abbey, Lisbon, in the Seventeenth Century’, pp. 177–202. For ‘textual communities’, see Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, NJ, 1983), esp. ch. 2. 158   See Heather Wolfe, ‘Reading Bells and Loose Papers: Reading and Writing Practices of the English Benedictine Nuns of Cambrai’, in Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (eds), Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 135–53; Caroline Bowden (ed.), English Convents in Exile 1600–1800, vol. 2 Spirituality, ed. Laurence Lux-Sterritt (London, 2012), pp. 145–8, 242; Jenna Lay, ‘An English Nun’s Authority: Early Modern Spiritual Controversy and the Manuscripts of Barbara Constable’, in Laurence Lux-Sterritt and Carmen Mangion (eds), Gender, Catholicism and Spirituality: Women and the Roman Catholic Church in Britain and Europe 1200–1900 (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 99–114, at 108. See also J.T. Rhodes, ‘The Library Catalogue of the English Benedictine Nuns of Our Lady of Good Hope in Paris’, Downside Review, 130 (2012): 54–86.

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The prominence of wives, widows and spinsters in Catholic book culture is certainly striking, though it might partly be an illusion created by the natural bias of biographical sources towards staunch recusants and away from ‘schismatics’, a group which may have been disproportionately male.159 Indeed, to gloss a remark of John Bossy, ‘if we are looking for a typographical pietas practised by silent readers’, one place we are sure to find it is among occasional conformists ignoring the Protestant liturgy and studying spiritual books in their seats.160 Perusing a devotional text during sermon time was a tell-tale feature of the church papist light-heartedly sketched by the character writer John Earle, and Archbishop Grindal’s visitation articles for the province of Canterbury in 1576 enquired about religious conservatives ‘that useth to pray … upon any superstitious popish primer’.161 In one sense this practice simply represents a continuation of privatizing tendencies inherent in late medieval piety: in his Werke for housholders Richard Whitford had encouraged earnest laypeople to ‘kepe their syght in the chirche close upon theyr bokes or bedes’ during the mass.162 Yet, at another level, it was a distinctly belligerent gesture. ‘When others on their knees are at praiers’, it was reported of Sir Thomas Cornwallis, he ‘will sett contemptuously reading on a book, most likely some Lady Psalter or portasse which have been found in his pue’. John Harely of Brompton came to church, it was complained in 1577, ‘but doth there in the time of devine service reade so loude upon his latten popishe primmare (that he understandeth not) that he troubleth both the minister and people’.163 In these cases books are clearly being used as confessional emblems, stage props, so to speak, in the drama of dissent. We need to set aside the cliché that popery was an intractable enemy of the press and replace it with an awareness of the existence of two rival cultures of print. 159

  On this point, see my Church Papists, pp. 78–81; cf. John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975), pp. 153–8. 160   Bossy, Christianity in the West, p. 101. 161  Earle, Microcosmography, pp. 28–9; Edward Cardwell (ed.), Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England, 2 vols (Oxford, 1844), i, 409. 162  Whitford, Werke for housholders, sig. D1v. See Paul Saenger, ‘Silent Reading: The Impact on Late Medieval Script and Society’, Viator, 13 (1982): 367–414; and his ‘Books of Hours and the Reading Habits of the Later Middle Ages’, Scrittura e Civiltà, 9 (1985): 239–69; Colin Richmond, ‘Religion and the Fifteenth Century Gentleman’, in Barrie Dobson (ed.), The Church, Politics and Patronage (Gloucester, 1984), pp. 193–208, esp. 199; Andrew Taylor, ‘Into his Secret Chamber: Reading and Privacy in Late Medieval England’, in James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (eds), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 41–61; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, p. 121; and Marking the Hours, plays down the privatization of late medieval religion. 163   Quoted in Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 122; Patrick Ryan (ed.), ‘Diocesan Returns of Recusants for England and Wales, 1577’, in Miscellanea XII, CRS 22 (London, 1921), p. 79.

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The annual letter of the Jesuit mission for 1624 recounts the tale of a poor Warwickshire woman who embraced Catholicism after she understood a Protestant preacher to say that the illiterate could not hope to gain salvation.164 The anecdote was intended as a sideswipe against Calvinism as a creed that favoured the elite and marginalised those who could not read. However, it might be thought that the book-centred religion encouraged by the seminary priests and the Society of Jesus was no less alien to the unlearned than revisionist historians have insisted was Protestantism. Christopher Haigh has implied that while Tridentine piety found a niche in the seigneurial household, it had little appeal to a peasantry wedded to folk custom, prophylactic magic and mechanical ritual. Sternly moralistic and doctrinally rigorous, it too was doomed to fail among ordinary parishioners with survivalist sympathies residing on the fringes of England. Together with a missionary strategy which concentrated on wealthy ‘schismatics’ at the expense of plebeian ‘heretics’, it constituted another nail in the coffin of Catholicism as a popular faith.165 More than one aspect of this thesis has recently been qualified and criticised. On the one hand it is no longer so clear that the clergy focused their proselytising efforts solely upon the gentry and aristocracy.166 On the other, the notion that Roman Catholic publications served only to estrange the unlettered now seems much harder to uphold. Like the early reformers, priests made adroit use of hybrid media to communicate with the semiliterate. As Alison Shell has shown, they proved ‘exceptionally willing’ to exploit oral forms as ‘a supple and evasive means of popularizing dissident ideas’.167 They disseminated anti-Protestant prophecies and composed devotional and polemical songs set to popular tunes designed to counter godly psalms and ditties such as ‘Greensleeves Moralized’. As John Rhodes and Samuel Hieron lamented in 1602, ‘petty bayts’ and ‘toys’ like the ‘proper new ballad’ scattered abroad in various parts of the country that year were all too effective in ensnaring the souls of the simple and withdrawing them ‘unto the doctrine of Antichrist’. Patrick Forbes, bishop of Aberdeen, produced a dialogue to confute ‘a rugged Romish ryme’ inscribed ‘Catholicke 164

  Foley, vii, pt 2, 1109–10.   Christopher Haigh, ‘The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation’, in Haigh (ed.), English Reformation Revised, pp. 176–208, at 204–5, 207; and his ‘From Monopoly to Minority: Catholicism in Early Modern England’, TRHS, 5th ser. 31 (1981): 129–47, esp. 138. 166   See, for example, Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion, ch. 7; Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England’, P&P, 153 (1996): 64–107, and their ‘Prisons, Priests and People in Post-Reformation England’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), England’s Long Reformation, 1500–1800 (London, 1998), pp. 195–234. See also Chapter 11, below. 167  Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism, p. 82. 165

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questions to the Protestant’ that was evidently circulating in Scotland in 1627.168 Between 1577 and 1584, the martyred schoolmaster Richard White devised a set of Welsh carols on such subjects as the sinfulness of attending heretical services, the assassination of Prince William of Orange and the ‘black assize’ at Oxford when the judge and jury who convicted a Catholic bookseller suddenly perished of gaol fever.169 This imaginative attempt to commandeer the indigenous culture of the Celtic bards bears comparison with the way Calvinist ministers assimilated traditional ‘oral literate’ modes of transmission to convey the Reformed Gospel in the Gaelic-speaking Scottish Highlands and Islands.170 To succeed as a missionary religion, Catholicism, no less than Protestantism, had to adapt itself to a society only gradually and unevenly being infiltrated by print. The possibility that post-Reformation English Catholicism may have contained within it greater incentives to literacy than Protestantism also deserves further attention.171 In a context in which persecution enhanced the importance of the written and printed word, priests recognised the need to combine catechesis with rudimentary instruction in reading. In 1611, for example, Catholic prisoners in York Castle were discovered to be conducting a dame school for local children under the very noses of their warders. It is also worth recalling the chronic worries of the government about the influence of ‘popish’ schoolmasters upon impressionable youth.172 Nor is it insignificant that Margaret Clitherow learned to read while imprisoned for sheltering priests. For this butcher’s wife, books became a means of solace and retreat, and devotional literacy a replacement for a life of active lay evangelism.173 In assessing the role of printed artefacts in the lives of the ‘common sort’ of Catholics, we need to be particularly sensitive to the continuing centrality of the visual. The recusant priest Lewis Bennett echoed Gregory the Great’s famous dictum that pictures were ‘laymen’s books’ when 168

 Rhodes, Answere to a Romish rime, sig. A2r; Samuel Hieron, An answere to a popish ryme, lately scattered abroad in the west parts, and much relyed upon by some simply-seduced (London, 1604), sig. A2r–v; Patrick Forbes, Eubulus, or a dialogue, wherein a rugged Romish ryme (inscribed, Catholic questions, to the Protestaut [sic] is confuted (Aberdeen, 1627). For prophecies, see CSPD 1591–4, p. 184; CSPD 1580–1625, pp. 106, 108; for Protestant ballads, see Watt, Cheap Print, chs 2–3. 169   Pollen (ed.), Unpublished Documents Relating to the English Martyrs, pp. 90–99. 170   See Jane Dawson, ‘Calvinism and the Gaidhealtachd in Scotland’, in Pettegree, Duke and Lewis (eds), Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1620, pp. 231–53. 171   Cf. R.A. Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe: Culture and Education, 1500–1800 (London, 1988), pp. 147–50. 172  Aveling, Catholic Recusancy in the City of York, p. 82. For examples of concern about ‘popish’ schoolmasters, see CSPD 1547–1580, pp. 158, 258, 262; CSPD 1591–4, p. 283. 173   Morris, iii. 375, 390–94. I owe this example to Anne Dillon.

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Figures 8.6, 8.7 Books for the illiterate?: Godly contemplations for the unlearned ([Antwerp, 1575]), title-page and sig. H1r. By permission of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Shelfmark Δ.14.10.

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he declared at Barkham, Sussex, in April 1603 that images were ‘more availeable for … ignorant unlerned men’ than sermons which ‘went in att one eare and out att another’, since they were ‘better kept in mynde’ in the long run.174 Although only a handful survive, single sheet woodcuts and engravings were evidently produced in large quantities, along with tiny catechisms and meditations dominated by illustrations to which an ability to understand the accompanying text was by no means essential. One fascinating example is Godly contemplations for the unlearned (1575), a little sextodecimo bound with copies of the Jesus Psalter and Vaux’s Catechisme, which consisted of 61 miniature scenes of events in Christ’s life with only the biblical reference by way of a caption (Figures 8.6 and 8.7).175 Devotional works like A methode, to meditate upon the psalter, or great rosarie of our blessed ladie (1598) cultivated ‘habits of visualisation’, modes of mental apprehension involving the ability to ‘imprint’ images of Christ’s passion on one’s consciousness, images Calvinists abhorred as ‘idols of the mind’ (Figure 8.8).176 The ‘painted tables’ in the original French edition of Louis Richeome’s Holy pictures of the mysticall figures of the most holy sacrifice and sacrament of the eucharist (1619) were intended as ‘a peece of Tapestry’ and ‘an ornament’, ‘in beholding wherof’, the viewer might ‘take a heavenly repast’.177 Seeing, therefore, was a specialized form of reading. Moreover, as Margaret Aston and Eamon Duffy have taught us, although many of those who owned late medieval Latin primers can have had only an imperfect grasp of the words on their pages, this by no means precluded their use as mnemonic devices.178 Augustine Baker’s elderly father utilised his as an aid to the vocal recitation of prayers in which he engaged 174   J.S. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records: Sussex Indictments, James I (London, 1975), p. 1. 175   Godly contemplations for the unlearned ([Antwerp, 1575]). I am grateful to the librarian of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, for permitting me to inspect the copy in the college’s collection. 176   A methode, to meditate upon the psalter, or great rosarie of our blessed ladie (Antwerp [English secret press], 1598); Taylor, ‘Into his Secret Chamber’, pp. 43–6, quotation at 45. On ‘idols of the mind’, see Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, i, Laws against Images (Oxford, 1988), pp. 452–66. 177   Louis Richeome, Holy pictures of the mysticall figures of the most holy sacrifice and sacrament of the eucharist (Antwerp [English secret press], 1619), sig. A1r. The pictures were excluded from the English edition because the plates were too ‘over worn’ to use (sig. A2r–v). 178   Margaret Aston, ‘Devotional Literacy’, in her Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London, 1984), esp. pp. 101–33, at 115–19; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 217–32; Duffy, Marking the Hours; Reinburg, French Books of Hours, esp. pp. 87–92; On texts as mnemonics, see also Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 329–30; and Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990), esp. ch. 7.

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Figure 8.8 The literature of private prayer: A method, to meditate on the psalter, or great rosarie of our blessed ladie (Antwerp [English secret press], 1598), sigs E8v-F1r. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark 3456.aa.10. in spare moments during the day.179 Some woodcut Images of Pity explicitly acknowledged that plenary indulgence could be earned whether or not the suppliant was able to decipher the spiritual pardon they advertised.180 This was a religious culture in which texts themselves could be a kind of intercession. A young recusant scholar who owned an ancient book of hours hoped it might prompt any person into whose hands it casually fell to pray for mercy to his soul and his constancy in the Catholic religion: ‘that he swerve not from the true faith, nor renounce Holy Church, that he may eftsoons avoid the horror of schism and dissimulation’.181 For Dorothy Lawson, it was a ritual prelude to receiving the Eucharist: the evening before mass she 179

  McCann and Connolly (eds), Memorials of Father Augustine Baker, pp. 18, 53.   For images with this formula, see Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, 1987), pp. 159–60. Similar English examples can be found in Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, p. 214 and plate 85. 181   Foley, iv, 702. 180

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would peruse a chapter of the Imitation of Christ ‘so leasurely’ and ‘with so much attention and diligence, that shee rather seem’d to make a meditation than a spiritual lesson’.182 This was in keeping with the recommendations of Luis de Granada, who insisted that reading ‘ought not [to] be done lightlie & hastilie, but with deliberation and attention’; if readers were to take profit they should not engage in ‘a sleightie or negligent careles running over of bookes’, but dedicate themselves to ‘searching and digesting them a longer space of tyme’.183 For such individuals, poring over a book was an act of worship, the printed item becoming as much of an icon and object of pious reverence as an alabaster image, agnus dei, crucifix or string of rosary beads. Broadsheet pictures of English Catholic martyrs may likewise have functioned not merely as didactic narratives and polemical manifestos but also as two-dimensional relics. Elaborately bound and embellished with expensive fabric, gilt and silver clasps, stored in special cupboards and cabinets and passed on to one’s posterity as treasured possessions, primers, psalters and other pious texts might well be regarded as a special class of sacramental.184 Like amulets, medals and fragments of the host they were sometimes perceived as sources of intrinsic holiness, of a numinous power ordinary laymen and women could tap. No less than wax tapers hallowed at Candlemas or wooden crosses blessed on Palm Sunday, books and printed images could be employed as talismans and charms to ward off evil spirits or storms, ease the pains of childbirth or effect miraculous cures.185 Woodcuts of the suffering Christ or St Christopher were placed in little bags hung around the necks of late fifteenth-century parishioners to protect them from harm, and copies of the legend of St Margherita were widely supposed to help heal gynaecological complaints.186 Such magical techniques persisted long after the official Reformation, even in fervently Protestant circles. The Essex vicar George Gifford told of a villager ‘haunted with a Fairy’ who wore the text of St John’s Gospel close to her breast, and David Cressy has collected cases of patients’ faces being fanned with leaves of the Bible, of volumes being set by the bedside of women in labour, and of committed members of the Church 182

 Palmes, Life of Mrs Dorothy Lawson, 37–8.   Luis de Granada, A spiritual doctrine, conteining a rule to live wel, with divers praiers and meditations, trans. Richard Gibbons (Louvain, 1599), pp. 114–15; Luis de Granada, Memoriall of Christian life, pp. 517–19. 184   For a description of some such books, see BL, Lansdowne MS 33, fo. 149r. 185  On sacramentals, see R.W. Scribner, ‘Cosmic Order and Daily Life: Sacred and Secular in Pre-Industrial German Society’, and ‘Ritual and Popular Religion in Catholic Germany at the Time of the Reformation’, both repr. in his Popular Culture and Popular Movements, pp. 5–15, 39–40. See also, Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 231, 281–2. 186  Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk, p. 5; Richmond, ‘Religion and the Fifteenth Century Gentleman’, pp. 201–2; Aston, ‘Devotional Literacy’, pp. 112–13. 183

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of England who ate pages of the New Testament as a sovereign remedy for fits.187 In Lutheran Germany, hymnals and prayer books were believed to be incombustible, like the remains of medieval saints and portraits of the Wittenberg reformer himself.188 There is every reason to believe that such customs also continued within the Elizabethan and early Stuart Catholic community, and not merely among unlearned country folk out of the reach of missionary priests. It would be wrong to present print as an effective deterrent against what contemporaries denigrated as ‘superstition’: in some respects the press provided fresh stimulus to strands of belief and practice frowned upon by puritan and Tridentine ministers alike.189 The contention that English Catholic book culture militated against some aspects of the Counter-Reformation agenda might well be extended. The foregoing discussion has implied that the piety of recusant households was primarily inward-looking and devotional in tone, a religion perhaps rooted more in prayers and self-regulated programmes of spiritual exercise than in sacramental observances that relied on a resident chaplaincy which relatively few could afford or dared to maintain. This was probably less true of the rich nobility and gentry than of committed Catholics of humbler rank who had only intermittent access to the ministry, but it still warrants careful consideration. Without an episcopal hierarchy it was extremely difficult to carry through the policies of the Council of Trent, to reorientate the religious experience of the laity towards the mass and private confession, and to shift the focus of religion from family and confraternity to the well-ordered parish. It was challenging for an itinerant clergy to effect the revolution in pastoral care and discipline highlighted by the work of John Bossy and Philip Hoffman, and it has been argued above that in this regard print was an imperfect proxy and deputy.190 Some of the evidence assembled in this chapter appears to endorse 187   George Gifford, A dialogue concerning witches and witchcraftes (London, 1593), sig. B1v; David Cressy, ‘Books as Totems in Seventeenth-Century England and New England’, Journal of Library History, 21 (1986): 92–106. 188   Robert W. Scribner, ‘The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the “Disenchantment of the World”’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23 (1993): 475–94, at 484. 189   See the points made by Peter Burke in ‘The Uses of Literacy in Early Modern Italy’, in his The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 121–2. On this theme, see now Andrew Cambers, ‘Demonic Possession, Literacy and ‘Superstition’ in Early Modern England’, P&P, 202 (2009): 3–35. 190   John Bossy, ‘The Counter Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe’, P&P, 47 (1970): 51–70; and his ‘The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation’, TRHS, 5th ser., 25 (1975): 21–38; Philip T. Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500–1789 (New Haven, 1984); but cf. the qualifications of Marc R. Forster, The Counter-Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560– 1720 (Ithaca, NY, 1992), introduction and conclusion.

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the suggestion that English and Continental Catholicism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were moving in opposite directions.191 It might be proposed that the former continued to travel along a road leading to greater lay independence and relative freedom from clerical mediation, while the latter was diverted, with varying degrees of success, onto a track which tended towards tighter control by the priesthood and regular participation in the sacraments.192 If in Tridentine Europe household religion was regarded as ‘a seed bed of subversion’, in England it came to be the very cornerstone of a Catholic community striving to avoid its own annihilation.193 Such polarities, though, belie a more complex reality: domestic devotion remained a dimension of piety in the heartlands of the Counter Reformation, vying with parochial churches as the locus for religious practice in a similar manner. It may be best to see the English situation less as a separate species than as a distinctive variation on a wider theme. In these processes print played a pivotal role: books became both a partial substitute for rite in circumstances where public worship was a rare and risky occurrence, and a bulwark of loyalty to the besieged Church of Rome. They were a lifeline linking English Catholics with those parts of Christendom ranged against the forces of heresy and a powerful weapon in the propaganda war against Erastian Protestantism. In the production of polemical and devotional works, Jesuits, seminary priests and enterprising laymen like Richard Verstegan proved themselves no less artful and ingenious as publicists and evangelists than their Protestant adversaries. So effective were some of their methods and texts that Calvinist and conformist writers paid them the ultimate compliment of pinching them. Stimulated by conditions of persecution and exile which also acted as a catalyst to its ‘literary imagination’, English Catholicism engendered its own extensive, cosmopolitan and astonishingly rich culture of print.194 It too can lay claim to be described as a religion of the book. We may end on a note of irony, with the image of one Elizabethan Catholic appropriating and subverting the purposes of a book surpassed only by the Bible as a Protestant symbol. John Foxe would surely have been perturbed to learn that his Acts and Monuments was a source of inspiration 191

  Haigh, ‘Continuity of Catholicism’, 203–4.   See Kamen, Phoenix and the Flame, 32; A.D. Wright, The Counter-Reformation: Catholic Europe and the Non-Christian World (London, 1982), 7–8. 193   Bossy, ‘Counter Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe’, 68. 194  Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, esp. pt 2. For a discussion of the parallels between Catholicism and other religious minorities in this regard, see my ‘Preaching without Speaking: Script, Print and Religious Dissent’, in Crick and Walsham (eds), Uses of Script and Print, pp. 211–34. 192

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Dumb Preachers

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to the Northamptonshire recusant gentleman, Sir Thomas Tresham. His rousing stories of the courage of Protestants burned at the stake seem to have armed Tresham with evidence that his stubborn recusancy was not ‘a fault but a singular commendation’, and consoled and fortified him during the long periods of imprisonment he suffered stoically for his outlawed faith.195 Printing, then, at length foiled Master Foxe himself.

195  HMC, Various Collections, iii (London, 1904), p. 30; Tresham’s copy of Foxe is listed in the catalogue of his library in BL, Additional MS 39830, fo. 156r.

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Chapter 9

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Unclasping the Book? The Douai-Rheims Bible* In November 1589, news of a provocative act of vandalism reached the ears of the Elizabethan authorities. Robert Goldesborowe, an outspoken recusant who christened his children ‘in corners’ and openly affirmed that all Protestant ministers were knaves, had maliciously defaced an English Bible in three distinct places. One of the passages he chose to mutilate apparently concerned the translation of the Scriptures into the vernacular. Goldesborowe subsequently confessed to this crime of sacrilege ‘under his owne hand wrytinge’.1 The details of this intriguing case are unclear, but at first glance it could be interpreted as an example of a committed Catholic layman implicitly defending the principle that the Bible should remain forever encased in the alien language of Latin. Protestant propagandists might have alighted upon it triumphantly as evidence of the extent to which the popish priesthood had brainwashed the laity into believing that there was no need for them to have direct access to God’s Word in their mother tongue. Like the case of Thomas Fugall, the Yorkshire vicar investigated for cutting a copy of the Bible with a knife during the reign of Mary I and the ritual burning of English translations at the time of the Northern Rising in 1569, they might have seen it as symptomatic of the Church of Rome’s innate hatred of Holy Writ itself.2 *

 An earlier version of this chapters was published under the title of ‘Unclasping the Book? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Vernacular Bible’, JBS, 42 (2003): 141–67. 1  TNA, SP 12/228/39 (‘Informations against Robert Goldesborowe’, November 1589). 2   See J. Raine (ed.), Depositions and other Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham, Surtees Society 21 (1845), p. 133, though note the reluctance of some of those involved to burn and deface the Bible: pp. 185–6, 188. J.S. Purvis, Tudor Parish Documents of the Diocese of York (Cambridge, 1948), p. 206. Such incidents echo one of the revelations made to Elizabeth Barton, the Maid of Kent, in the reign of Henry VIII: according to one account, an angel commanded her to go to a monk an ‘byd hym burne the New Testament that he had in Inglyssh’. See Thomas Wright (ed.), Three Chapters of Letters Relating to the Suppression of the Monasteries, CS, OS 26 (1843), p. 16. For a full discussion of this phenomenon, see Avner Shamir, ‘Bible Burning and the Desecration of Bibles in Early

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Indeed, at the heart of the rousing democratic rhetoric employed by the early reformers was the claim that the medieval papacy had tyrannically imprisoned the common people in ignorance and superstition by concealing the Bible from their gaze. Polemicists consistently accused the Roman Catholic Church of fighting tooth and nail to preserve a clerical monopoly on the Word. For Martin Luther, this was one of the weak and tottering walls behind which Antichrist sheltered: it was ‘a wickedly devised fable’ that St Peter alone had been entrusted with the keys to unlock the mysteries of Scripture, a fable designed to hold the masses in blind devotion and humble submission.3 By keeping the light of the Gospel ‘under the bushell of a strang toong’, declared the Bedfordshire minister Edward Bulkeley, evil friars and prelates had prevented the populace from detecting their gross errors and idolatries. Had the Bible been in ‘the hands and harts of the people … that pelting and powling Priest of Rome’ could never have maintained his ‘usurped power’ for so many centuries.4 According to Edwin Sandys, the papistical hierarchy sought ‘to hoodwink the world, by conveying the scriptures out of sight’.5 Instead, Edward Dering alleged, they fed the laity with sugared tales of Bevis of Southampton and Robin Hood, intent on distracting them from discovering the truth.6 Closely guarded in cloisters and ecclesiastical libraries, the Bible had been corrupted by the monastic scribes who were its ‘ordinary Jaylers’.7 But God had preserved His Holy Word (‘even’, said John Jewel, ‘as he preserved Daniel in the cave of lions’ and ‘Jonas in the whale’s belly’) and eventually brought His people out of ‘Aegypticall darkness’ by means of the providential invention of the science of printing.8 It was John Foxe who most famously celebrated the press as an instrument of liberation and Modern England’ (unpubl. PhD dissertation, Roskilde University, 2010). See also David Cressy, ‘Book Burning in Tudor and Stuart England’, SCJ, 36 (2005): 359–74. The broader subject has been illuminated by Brian Cummings in his Clarendon Lectures on Bibliophobia. See his ‘Iconoclasm and Bibliophobia in the English Reformations, 1521–1558’, in Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson and Nicolette Zeeman (eds), Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 2002), 185–206. 3   Martin Luther, Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, in Luther’s Primary Works, ed. Henry Wace and C.A. Bucheim (London, 1896), pp. 169–71. 4  Edward Bulkeley, An answere to ten frivolous and foolish reasons, set downe by the Rhemish Jesuits and papists (London, 1588), sig. A3r. 5  Edwin Sandys, The Sermons of Edwin Sandys, D.D., ed. John Ayre, PS (Cambridge, 1842), p. 17. 6  Edward Dering, A sparing restraint, of many lavishe untruths, which M. Doctor Harding dothe chalenge (London, 1568), p. 6. 7  Thomas Cartwright, Syn theoi en christoi the answere the answere to the preface of the Rhemish Testament (Edinburgh, 1602), p. 113. 8   John Jewel, The Works of John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, ed. John Ayre, 4 vols, PS (Cambridge, 1845–50), 4: 763; Bulkeley, Answere, sig. A3v.

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enlightenment, a divine gift by which ‘the mists of popery’ were dispelled and the trumpet of salvation sounded ‘to all nations and countries under heaven’.9 He helped to nourish a myth of Protestant bibliocentricity which lingers on in modern historical thinking, alongside the idea that Roman Catholicism was inherently hostile to a new technology with the capacity to create, almost instantaneously, a priesthood of all believers and readers. Yet it would be wrong to allow these assumptions to colour our understanding of Robert Goldesborowe’s iconoclastic attack upon a book which more than any other became an emblem of the English Reformation. For it occurred some seven years after the Catholic community had acquired its own translation of the New Testament, based on the Vulgate but ‘diligently conferred’ with the original Greek. Published in Rheims in 1582, it was prepared at the behest of Cardinal William Allen by Gregory Martin, Professor of Hebrew at the Douai seminary. Although completed at around the same time, the two large tomes of the Old Testament were not to appear until 1609–10, when funds became available to defray the immense cost of printing them.10 Reassessed in this light, the incident in 1589 takes on different significance: it highlights the fact that by the mid-Elizabethan period the battle for the vernacular Bible had been displaced by a debate about the politics of translation. The issue at stake was no longer whether it was permissible to translate the Scriptures but which version most accurately captured the true meaning and purpose of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps Robert Goldesborowe would have defended his actions in the same way as the group of papists who entered a Berkshire church in 1601–2 and ‘rent and scattered’ the Bible chained to the lectern, leaving behind a letter in which they declared that since the volume was ‘false’ and ‘hereticall’ therefore ‘To cutt and mangle it is no damnation’.11 The aim of this chapter is to re-examine the decision of the English Catholic leaders to translate the Bible into English and to assess the implications which the mass dissemination of Scripture had for a Church struggling against persecution and proscription. It seeks to extricate the subject from the distorting polemical straitjacket in which it has so often been constrained, and to use it to probe both Catholic and Protestant attitudes towards manuscript, print and the spoken word in a context in which the conditions of communication were rapidly and irrevocably changing. The Bible is an apt focus for discussion of this cluster of themes 9

  John Foxe, Actes and monuments (London, 1583), vol. 1, pp. 707–8.   The new testament of Jesus Christ, translated faithfully into English, out of the authentical Latin (Rheims, 1582) and The holie bible faithfully translated into English, out of the authentical Latin (Douai, 1609–10). 11   Cited in Pauline Croft, ‘Libels, Popular Literacy and Public Opinion in Early Modern England’, Historical Research, 58 (1995): 266–85, at 281. 10

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Figure 9.1 The Rheims New Testament: The new testament of Jesus Christ, translated faithfully into English, out of the authentical Latin (Rheims, 1582), title-page. By permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. Shelfmark C.12.23.

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because the text itself was in some senses a symbol of an earlier shift from memory to written record: although encryption had always been critical to the sacred status of the Hebrew Scriptures, the enshrining of JudaeoChristian truth in a canon of sacred books towards the end of second century AD was partly a by-product of an oral culture gradually being infiltrated by the authority of writing.

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I The traditional narrative of the making of the vernacular Bible in England has been a triumphalist Protestant one. Absorbing the commonplaces of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, historians have tended to trace a line from the partial translations and paraphrases of Scripture made in Anglo-Saxon times, through the two Lollard renderings of the Vulgate prepared in the late fourteenth century, to the appearance of William Tyndale’s New Testament in 1525. From there, the story is carried forward to the various Henrician editions of the text – Coverdale’s of 1535, the Matthew translation of 1537 and the Great Bible of 1539, so-called because of its size. The next major landmark is the popular Genevan version, first issued in full in 1560, and noted for its conspicuously Calvinist and anti-Catholic annotations. The work of William Whittingham and other Marian exiles, this was a portable book designed for everyday use. Its chief rival was the official edition of the Elizabethan Church, a committee effort generally known as Bishops’ Bible, which appeared in 1568. The chronicle culminates with the publication of the Authorised Version in 1611, a masterpiece of majestic, resonant prose.12 12

  For typical surveys, see Craig R. Thompson, The Bible in English 1525–1611 (Charlottesville, 1958); F.F. Bruce, The English Bible: A History of Translation (London, 1961); A.C. Partridge, English Biblical Translation (London, 1973); Gerald Hammond, The Making of the English Bible (Manchester, 1982); Edwin Robertson, Makers of the English Bible (Cambridge, 1990). Since the first publication of this essay, there has been a surge of publication on this topic, much of it linked with the anniversary of the publication of the King James Version. Among others, see David Daniell, The Bible in English (New Haven, CT, and London, 2003); Christopher de Hamel, The Book: A History of the Bible (London, 2005); Lori Anne Ferrell, The Bible and the People (New Haven, CT, 2009); Derek Wilson, The People’s Bible: The Remarkable History of the King James Version (London, 2010); Gerald Bray, Translating the Bible: From William Tyndale to King James (London: Latimer Trust, 2010); Gordon Campbell, Bible: The Story of the King James Bible (Oxford, 2010); David Norton, The King James Bible: A Short History from Tyndale to Today (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 28–32 on Douai-Rheims; Hannibal Hamon and Norman W. Jones (eds), The King James Bible after Four Hundred Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences (Cambridge, 2010). Vol. 3 of The New Cambridge History of the Bible, which covers the early modern period, has not yet appeared. For a useful overview, see Ellie Bagley, ‘Writing the History of the English Bible: A Review of Recent Scholarship’, Religion Compass, 5 (2011): 300–313.

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For many such commentators, the advent of the Scriptures in the vernacular is also a crucial chapter in the emergence of the English language.13 It both reflected and reinforced a growing respect for the maternal tongue which eclipsed the earlier view that it was far too vulgar and barbarous to be a worthy vehicle for divine revelation. Learned exaltation of Latin, Hebrew and Greek slowly gave way to a new pride in English which was intimately linked with the growth of national identity and historical consciousness. It also engendered initiatives to translate the Bible into other languages and dialects spoken by the Celtic inhabitants of the British Isles, as anxieties about their unsuitability to function as a vessel for Holy Writ were overcome and the utility of translation as a political and evangelical tool became increasingly apparent.14 In the process Catholic opposition to Bible translation began to be regarded as unpatriotic: in 1657 Peter Heylyn would accuse the papists of claiming that ‘the heavenly treasure’ and ‘excellent wine’ of God’s word was polluted by being committed to the ‘rotten vessels’ and ‘musty bottles’ of ‘the usual Languages of the common people’.15 The rendering of Scripture in the vernacular not only played an important part in erecting ethnic barriers and eroding the foundations of Christian unity in Europe, it also contributed to the onward march of confessionalisation.16 Within this narrative, the appearance of the Douai-Rheims Bible has often been presented as something of an aberration, a mere footnote to the tale of the heroic Protestant translators who championed the dispersal of Scripture to the thirsty masses. For Henry Cotton, archdeacon of Cashel, writing in 1855, it in no way disguised the unrelenting ‘animus of the highest officer[s] of the Church of Rome’ to free Bible-reading from the Middle Ages through to the mid-nineteenth century.17 This tendency to see it as an essentially defensive and negative measure has persisted, despite James G. Carleton’s strenuous attempt to demonstrate the extent to which it silently

13

 R.F. Jones, The Triumph of the English Language (London, 1953). This has also been implicit in many publications associated with the KJB anniversary. See esp. David Crystall, Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language (Oxford, 2010); Alister McGrath, In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture (London, 2002). 14   See Felicity Heal, ‘Mediating the Word: Language and Dialects in the British and Irish Reformations’, JEH, 56 (2005): 261–86. 15  Peter Heylyn, The way and manner of the Reformation of the Church of England declared and justified (London, 1657), p. 70. 16   See, on this point, Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 359, 702. 17  Henry Cotton, Rhemes and Doway. An Attempt to Show What has been Done by Roman Catholics for the Diffusion of the Holy Scriptures in English (Oxford, 1855), p. 9.

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influenced the King James translation.18 In Gerald Hammond’s survey of 1982, it is presented as a ‘mighty concession’ to 50 years of Reformation polemic and disparaged, rather unfairly, for its ‘undeniable dependence’ on earlier Protestant versions.19 Nor has the Rheims New Testament won much praise from critics for its literary qualities: for David Lawton it is ‘horribly wooden, literal and unidiomatic’, while Hammond insists that ‘a decolloquialising of the Bible’ is one of its chief characteristics.20 Such statements do contain a grain of truth – the preface defended the distinctly Latinate tone of the text, saying ‘we presume not in hard places to mollifie the speaches or phrases, but religiously keepe them word for word, and point for point, for feare of missing, or restraining the sense of the holy Ghost to our phantasie’.21 But they also betray more than a faint echo of the barrage of accusations levelled at Gregory Martin and his collaborators by contemporary Protestant writers. The refutation of the ‘Rhemists translation’ was undertaken by some of the outstanding theologians of the age, William Fulke, John Rainolds and William Whitaker among them, and Sir Francis Walsingham promised the disgraced presbyterian leader Thomas Cartwright £100 a year to produce a comprehensive refutation of the marginal notes, suggesting that it might make ‘an overture for your further favour’.22 Condemning the Catholics’ decision to base their translation on the ‘myrie puddels’ of the Vulgate, these divines castigated their adversaries for failing to return ad fontes, to the clear fountain of the Greek, ridiculing the claim 18

  James G. Carleton, The Part of Rheims in the Making of the English Bible (Oxford, 1902). 19  Hammond, Making, p. 158. 20   David Lawton, Faith, Text and History: The Bible in English (Hemel Hempstead, 1990), p. 55; Hammond, Making, p. 161. Norton, King James Bible, p. 32, notes that it occasionally had a ‘colloquial vigour’ upon which the KJB translators drew. 21   New testament, preface, sig. c3v, and see also sig. b2r. 22   For a survey of the controversy, see Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (London, 1977), pp. 46–50. William Fulke, The text of the new testament of Jesus Christ, translated out of the vulgar Latine by the papists of the traiterous seminarie at Rhemes (London, 1589) (which printed the Catholic text in parallel with the Protestant translation in order to refute it); John Rainolds, Six conclusions touching the holy Scripture and the Church (London, 1584); William Whitaker, Ad Nicolai Sanderi demonstrationes quadaginta (London, 1583) and An answere to a certeine booke, written by M. William Rainolds (Cambridge, 1585). For Cartwright, see TNA, SP 12/154/48 (Sir Francis Walsingham to Thomas Cartwright, 5 July 1582) and BL, Lansdowne MS 64, fos 57r–58r (a letter to Lord Burghley enclosing a copy dated August 1590 insisting that he had avoided making ‘anie application unto our church, or any the governers in the same’). His Answere to the preface of the Rhemish testament appeared a year before his death in 1603, but the more comprehensive A confutation of the Rhemists translations, glosses and annotations was only published in Leiden in 1618.

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that the Latin texts used by St Jerome were actually purer than those which predated them.23 They also slated the mercenary motives of the papists in ‘aping’ the efforts of Protestant ministers ‘for their grand Masters advantage’24 and denounced them for deliberate obfuscation. Forced to abandon their policy of outlawing lay access to the Bible in the vernacular, they now sought to achieve the same end by clogging it with arcane and unintelligible terms. This strategy, said George Wither, was ‘fraudulently framed to make poore men thinke the Scriptures to be more obscure and darke … than they are’ and so deter them ‘from taking paines to read them’: it was framed ‘to strike simple persons in a maze’.25 Their ‘unsavoury silly Annotations’ likewise ‘cast mists’ before the eyes of the faithful. According to Fulke, these were ‘stings, to make way for the poyson to enter’. ‘How can we but kindle’, asked the warden of Winchester, Thomas Bilson, ‘when we see you fray the people of God from the sweete and wholesome foode of their souls, and delude them with your huskes and hogwash?’26 In short, a Bible thus translated was ‘as it were un-translated’. Despite Rome’s claim to have unlocked ‘the Lords librarie’, the book of God’s Word remained tightly clasped and sealed. The Catholic reader was still not allowed ‘to use his owne eyes without the Popes spectacles’.27 The Rheims New Testament did not represent a true reversal of the diabolical policy of suppressing the Bible; on the contrary it embodied the resurrection of it in a new and more insidious guise.28 II Recent work, however, has done much to unsettle the impression of unremitting Catholic hostility to the vernacular Scriptures conveyed by 23

  Quotation from Cartwright, Answere, p. 108. This was the main theme of Bulkeley’s Answere. 24  Bulkeley, Answere, sig. A3v; Richard Bernard, Rhemes against Rome (London, 1626), p. 47. 25   George Wither, A view of the marginal notes of the popish testament (London [1588]), sig. A3r. See also the allegations made in the preface to the Authorized Version of 1611: in Records of the English Bible, ed. Alfred W. Pollard (Oxford, 1911), pp. 375–6. 26  Cartwright, Confutation, sig. A4r; Fulke, Text, sig. A2r; Thomas Bilson, The true difference between Christian subjection and unchristian rebellion (London, 1585), p. 394. 27  Cartwright, Answere, pp. 189, 139 respectively; Bernard, Rhemes against Rome, sig. a1r. 28   For a fuller exploration, see now Ellie Bagley in ‘Heretical Corruptions and False Translations: Catholic Criticisms of the Protestant English Bible, 1582–1860’ (unpubl. DPhil dissertation, University of Oxford, 2007).

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both contemporary and twentieth-century writers.29 It has shown that attitudes towards this enterprise were far more diverse and fluid than Protestant polemicists implied. The late medieval Church was not marked by a monolithic or definitive ban on Bible translation, but by considerable scope for local initiative – by a degree of permissiveness mingled in practice with much distrust and anxiety.30 There were notable prohibitions, such as the canon issued by the Synod of Toulouse in 1229, which made it illegal for the laity to possess copies of the Scriptures; the edict of Pope Gregory XI of 1375 which forbade religious books in the vulgar tongue; and the mandate of the archbishop of Mainz, Berthold von Henneberg, which condemned German translations in 1485, on the grounds that they perverted Holy Writ. The conciliarist Jean Gerson was so convinced of their evils that he sponsored a formal proposal for their proscription at the Council of Constance in 1415, though this never became a decree.31 But when Innocent III wrote to the bishop of Metz in 1199 regarding some secret conventicles which had taken place in his diocese involving unauthorised readings of the Gospels, Psalms and letters of St Paul in French, his real concern seems to have been not with translations of the Scriptures as such, but with the way that they enabled the laity to usurp the clerical office of preaching.32 The advent and spread of popular heresy undoubtedly did much to prejudice the issue in the eyes of the authorities. But the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw fresh calls for the vernacular Bible from the Brethren of the Common Life, a movement of mystical piety which for the most part managed to escape the taint of heterodoxy. Announcing his intention of preparing a Dutch translation, one author was scandalised by the fact that ‘it torments some clerks, that men should unbind the secrets of scripture to the common people’ and countered it by observing that 29

 The subject of Catholic attitudes to Scripture in a broader European context will be illuminated by a forthcoming doctoral thesis by Daniel Cheely of the University of Pennsylvania. See also Dominique Julia, ‘Reading and the Counter Reformation’, in Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (eds), A History of Reading in the West (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 257–68. 30   See esp. the discussion in Alister McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation (Oxford, 1987), ch. 4 and Jean-François Gilmont, ‘Conclusion’, in The Reformation and the Book, ed. Jean-François Gilmont, trans. Karin Maag (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 470–76. See now the comprehensive discussion of the medieval Bible in Richard Marsden and E. Ann Matter (eds), The New Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 2 From 600 to 1450 (Cambridge, 2012), esp. Richard Marsden, ‘The Bible in English’ (ch. 12). 31   See Margaret Deanesly, The Lollard Bible and other Medieval Biblical Versions (Cambridge, 1920), pp. 36, 84, 124, 103 respectively. 32   See Leonard E. Boyle, ‘Innocent III and Vernacular Versions of Scripture’, in The Bible in the Medieval World: Essays in Memory of Beryl Smalley, eds Katherine Walsh and Diana Wood, SCH Subsidia 4 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 97–107.

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‘the apostles of Christ preached and wrote their teaching in all tongues’.33 With the rise of humanism such ideas acquired considerable respectability, though the project of placing the Bible in the hands of the masses was always in tension with an elitist ethos which privileged reading it in the original Hebrew and Greek. Erasmus’ idealistic wish that every plowman would sing it over his furrow and every weaver over his loom inspired the efforts of Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples in France, who began his translation in 1521.34 It also needs to be emphasised that in most parts of Europe the Bible had appeared in the vernacular long before Martin Luther burst upon the scene: no less than 18 editions of the Scriptures in German were published between 1466 and 1522; the first of four Italian editions was printed in 1471 and the earliest versions in French, Czech, Dutch and Spanish were issued within a year of each other beginning in 1474.35 In 1515, we find a canon of Lund Cathedral calling for the New Testament to be translated into Danish for the salvation of laypeople who, ‘unable to understand Latin, cannot read how to live by God’s commandments’.36 In the circles of the Italian spirituali these opinions were frequently articulated and in an early session of the Council of Trent the whole question was hotly debated. While archbishop Anthony Filheul of Aix, Cardinal Pacheco and the Spanish Franciscan Alphonso De Castro held firm against vernacular translations, arguing they would merely engender new heresies, Cardinal Cristoforo Madruzzo, Prince-Bishop of Trent, passionately defended them in a speech which concluded: ‘Let no age, no sex, no condition, no station be prevented from reading Holy Scripture. For the mind of each and every just man is the seat of wisdom; and every good heart that loves Christ can be the receptacle (bibliotheca) where the book of Christ rests’. In forbidding translation, he asked, do we not act like the Pharisees, who hold the key to sacred knowledge but will not permit anyone else to enter? That the Council declined to rule on this 33

 Deanesly, Lollard Bible, ch. 3, esp. pp. 68–88, quotation at p. 74.  Erasmus’ famous call to universal Bible-reading can be found in his Paraclesis (1516), which was translated into English as An Exhortation to the Diligent Studye of Scripture in 1529, and reprinted in editions of William Tyndale’s Newe Testament. On humanism, see Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ, 1983). For Lefèvre D’Etaples, see Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800 (London, 1997 edn), p. 295. 35   See Febvre and Martin, Coming of the Book, p. 250; David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven, CT, 1994), pp. 92–3. The figure for Germany is noted by Bob Scribner in ‘Heterodoxy, Literacy and Print in the Early German Reformation’, in Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1530, eds Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (Cambridge, 1994), p. 271. See now Marsden and Matter (eds), New Cambridge History of the Bible, chs 11–16. 36   Cited in Martin D.W. Jones, The Counter Reformation: Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1995), p. 32. 34

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burning issue is a point of some importance: it underlines just how intense were the divisions within Catholic ranks on this controversial subject.37 In the specific context of England, the picture is also less black and white than it has sometimes been painted. Lollardy certainly served to cement the connection between literacy and heresy, but the fate of Bishop Reginald Pecock of Chichester shows that positions in the mid-fifteenth century were more complex and nuanced than might be assumed. A keen advocate of vernacular instruction as a remedy for popular ignorance and error, Pecock cautiously defended making translations of Scripture available to select sectors of the laity, only to find himself charged with holding Wycliffite views of which he disapproved.38 The debate about vernacular translation in Oxford in 1401 likewise proves that many attitudes later identified with Lollard heterodoxy were still neutral in the early years of the movement and even Archbishop Arundel’s notorious Constitution of 1408 permitted lay ownership of English bibles which had received an episcopal licence.39 Richard Rex has argued that the sheer number of surviving manuscripts of the Lollard Scriptures suggests that they were not in practice made completely illegal and that more often than not it was the marginal glosses and accompanying commentary rather than the actual text which led to accusations of heretical deviance.40 In the sphere of vernacular religion, as Shannon McSheffrey has shown, the boundaries between heterodoxy

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  On Trent, see Hubert Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, trans. Ernest Graf, 2 vols (London, 1957), ii: 67–73, 83; Robert E. McNally, ‘The Council of Trent and Vernacular Bibles’, Theological Studies, 27 (1966): 221 and 204–27 passim; Louis B. Pascoe, ‘The Council of Trent and Bible Study: Humanism and Scripture’, CHR, 52 (1966): 18–38; Guy Bedouelle, ‘La débat catholique sur la traduction de la Bible en langue vulgaire’, in Irena Backus and Francis Higman (eds), Théorie et Pratique de l’Exégèse (Geneva, 1990), pp. 39–59. 38   See Anne Hudson, ‘Laicus Litteratus: The Paradox of Lollardy’, in Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (eds), Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1500 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 235; Margaret Aston, ‘Lollards and Literacy’, in her Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London, 1984), pp. 193–217; Joseph F. Patrouch, Reginald Pecock (New York, 1970), pp. 84, 89, 94. On the Lollard translations, see now the definitive treatment in Mary Dove, The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions (Cambridge, 2007). 39  Anne Hudson, ‘The Debate on Bible Translation, Oxford 1401’, in her Lollards and their Books (London, 1985), pp. 67–84. See also Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988), ch. 5. The 1408 Constitution is printed in Records, ed. Pollard, pp. 79–81. Cf. Nicholas Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, Speculum, 70 (1995): 822–64, which argues that Arundel’s legislation amounted to ‘a premature Counter Reformation’ that unleashed ‘decades of religious repression’ and stifled a vibrant tradition of vernacular theological writing. 40  Richard Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation (Basingstoke, 1993), p. 107; Richard Rex, The Lollards (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 75–6

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and orthodoxy were extremely porous and permeable.41 The very fact that William Tyndale approached Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall of London as a potential sponsor for his New Testament implies that he believed the authorities were not entirely inhospitable to the idea of an English Bible.42 Sir Thomas More revealed this in his lengthy reply to Tyndale, conceding that the provision of a version in the vernacular was in principle desirable, but at the same time comparing the Lutheran text with poisoned bread from which it was better to abstain than run the risk of dying of ‘rattes bane’.43 Henrician legislation is a monument both to the plurality of competing opinions on the issue in circulation in the 1530s and 40s and to the caution and tergiversation that characterised official policy, most clearly embodied in the 1543 Act forbidding private or public reading of Holy Writ by women and the meaner sort of people, but allowing it under controlled conditions for the nobility and gentry.44 Under Mary the evangelical views of Cardinal Reginald Pole, close associate of Gasparo Contarini, ensured that the Catholic revival did not include an absolute interdict on translation. Indeed, Pole’s legatine synod at Westminster in 1555 agreed to the preparation of an English edition, though it is clear from the sermon he delivered in London on St Andrew’s Day 1557 that Pole believed the sacraments and ceremonies were of equal if not greater importance as ‘pedagogues of Christ’ and conduits of grace.45 Such evidence has persuaded Eamon Duffy that ‘without the goad of the Reformation’, the advent of an English New Testament might well have been absorbed 41

  Shannon McSheffrey, ‘Heresy, Orthodoxy and English Vernacular Religion 1480– 1525’, P&P, 186 (2005): 47–80. 42  Daniell, Tyndale, pp. 83–4. 43   The Complete Works of St Thomas More, 12 vols in 18 parts (New Haven, CT, 1963–90), 9: 12. On the debate between More and Tyndale, see David Ginsberg, ‘Ploughboys versus Prelates: Tyndale and More and the Politics of Biblical Translation’, SCJ, 19 (1988): 45–61. 44   See Rex, Henry VIII, ch. 4; 34 and 35 Henry VIII c. 1. In its first draft, the bill would apparently have banned the Bible to the laity in general, as mentioned in a narrative poem written by William Palmer, gentleman-pensioner to the king in 1547: Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R3.33, fo. 140r. I owe this reference to Alec Ryrie. See also the earlier proclamation of 22 June 1530, in Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. i 1485–1553, eds Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (New Haven, CT, 1964), 193–7. The issue is discussed in Susan Wabuda, ‘The Woman and the Rock: The Controversy on Women and Bible Reading’, in Belief and Practice in Reformation England, ed. Susan Wabuda and Caroline Litzenberger (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 40–59. 45   For the legatine synod, see D. Wilkins, Concilia, 4 vols (London, 1737), iv: 132. On Pole’s views, see John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, Relating Chiefly to Religion, 6 vols in 3 (Oxford, 1822), 3: 503–5; Dermot Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter Reformation (Cambridge, 1972), esp. pp. 254–5; and Thomas F. Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 246–8.

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into the dominant devotional mood, without the doctrinal uncertainty and conflict which ensued.46 More recently, Lucy Wooding has interpreted the Douai-Rheims version as essentially a continuation of Marian policy, as a legacy of the uniquely moderate, humanist and indigenous brand of Catholicism she argues evolved against the backdrop of the Henrician break with Rome and flourished until it was stifled in the 1570s by a new climate of confessional rigidity and ideological purity more closely in line with Continental developments.47 Certainly, the considerable fluidity of opinion in the early and midsixteenth century deserves recognition. But in reaching the conclusion that the Catholic translation of 1582 was neither a complete about-face nor a bolt from the blue, we must not lose sight of the extent to which circumstances had conspired to politicise the issue. There were voices expressing support for a vernacular Bible not merely from the margins, but also within the mainstream of the medieval Church. Yet, this cannot disguise the fact that, almost uniquely in Europe, the English lacked an edition in their mother tongue until after 1500. Largely a consequence of the perceived threat of Lollardy, this had the obvious effect of intensifying the desire of laypeople to taste the forbidden fruit of Scripture themselves. Both on the Continent and across the Channel, the rise of Lutheranism served to polarise positions and to make the vernacular Bible at once a shibboleth and a catalyst of conflict between the two sides. In retrospect the Council of Trent represented a parting of ways between the spirituali and the zelanti, a repudiation of the legacy of Christian humanism in favour of the neo-scholasticism of the Dominicans and Jesuits, a retreat from tendencies which fostered individual exegesis towards a policy of tight ecclesiastical control.48 Thus the decree of 1546 which reaffirmed the Vulgate as the text for lectures, sermons and disputations and insisted upon the need for annotations in all published versions. The Index of 1564 declared that it had been proved by experience that ‘if the Sacred Books are permitted everywhere and without discrimination in the vernacular, there will by reason of the boldness of men arise therefrom more harm than good’, and accordingly charged individual bishops and inquisitors with strictly regulating their perusal, though it should be noted that this 46

 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400– 1580 (New Haven, CT, 1992), p. 80. See also the argument of F.A. Gasquet in ‘The PreReformation English Bible’, in his The Old English Bible and Other Essays (London, 1897). pp. 102–78. 47   Lucy E.C. Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford, 2000), esp. pp. 183–6, 254–5. Cf. the interpretation of Marian Catholicism presented in William Wizeman, The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor’s Church (Aldershot, 2006). 48   Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 206–14. See also Rex, Henry VIII, pp. 130–31.

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represented a softening of the flat prohibition issued by the papacy in 1559.49 This policy was defended by Fridericus Staphylus, counsellor to the Emperor Ferdinand, and by the Polish Cardinal Stanislaus Hosius in two printed treatises translated into English by the Louvain exile Thomas Stapleton in the mid-1560s. It was also energetically upheld by Thomas Harding in the controversy provoked by John Jewel’s Challenge sermon.50 How, then, can we account for the appearance of the Douai-Rheims Bible – of a text which seems so out of touch with the Tridentine decrees? For Lucy Wooding, it is an index of the distance between the priorities of English Catholic thought and the objectives of its European counterpart, a measure of the ‘insularity’ that was its strength, a monument to the ‘habit of independence’ which marked the decades preceding the arrival of the missionary priests – in short, a throwback to a distinctive native species of Catholicism which the seminary movement and the Jesuits combined to eclipse.51 In what follows, however, I offer a variant reading which places more emphasis on the consequences of the dramatic reversal of fortune which the Catholic Church suffered in England after 1559, as it lost its monopoly status and creatively adapted itself to the condition of being a harassed and hunted minority. I shall stress the profound ambivalence about biblical translation which characterised Catholic attitudes both prior to and after 1582, and the sense of unease which accompanied its publication at a time when print technology was effecting fundamental changes in the nature of mass communication. As we shall see, these changes served to accentuate deep-seated differences of opinion about the role of reading and the written word in the transmission of Christianity and about the status of the priesthood vis-à-vis the laity. III As the preface to the Rheims New Testament makes clear, its translation out of Latin was never considered to be anything other than an exceptional and emergency measure. Although it acknowledged that translations had been approved in the past and that even in Wycliffite England they were ‘not 49   The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, ed. and trans. H.J. Schroeder (Rockford, IL, 1978), pp. 17–20, 274. 50   Fridericus Staphylus, The apologie of Fridericus Staphylus … intreating of the true and right understanding of holy scripture. Of the t[r]anslation of the Bible in to the vulgar tongue. Of disagrement in doctrine amonge the Protestants, trans. Thomas Stapleton (Antwerp, 1565); Stanislaus Hosius, Of the expresse worde of God, trans. Thomas Stapleton (Louvain, 1567). Harding’s debate with Jewel can be found in Works, ed. Ayre, pp. 669–96. 51  Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism, pp. 179, 227, and see references in n. 47.

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wholly forbidden’, it strongly denied publishing the Bible ‘upon erroneous opinion of necessitie, that the holy Scriptures should alwaies be in our mother tonge’. Rather, it was ‘upon special consideration of the present time, state, and condition of our countrie, unto which, divers thinges are either necessarie, or profitable and medicinable now, that otherwise in the peace of the Church were neither much requisite, nor perchance wholy tolerable’.52 Persecution and oppression had made imperative what in other contexts would be quite inadmissable. In seeking permission from the papacy for this project in the summer of 1580, Cardinal Allen had insisted that ‘if ancient discipline still held in England’ he would never have dared to petition for an English Bible. Nor did he anticipate that its publication would be a permanent arrangement: once heresy was overthrown and the nation reclaimed to the bosom of Rome, it might be judged convenient to revoke the vernacular Bible and reimpose the Vulgate.53 This flexibility and adaptability to the exigency of the times might be seen not as a sign of weakness, but as an adept response to the challenges presented by the entrenchment of Protestantism. It embodied an astute understanding that Catholics would henceforth have to combat the heretics with their own weapon and conduct theological debate according to the rules established by their enemies. An awareness of this dates back to at least 1567, when Thomas Harding and Nicholas Sander wrote to Cardinal Protector Morone that the evils arising from Protestant bibles might be successfully counteracted by the preparation of a Catholic translation. In a context ‘seething with heresy’, they contended, the best way to persuade people to relinquish corrupt reformed versions was to offer alternative texts of Scripture rendered ‘in the spirit of the Vulgate’.54 This was not exactly a new strategy. It had been used with some ingenuity by Jerome Emser as early as 1525, when he issued an illustrated German New Testament which masqueraded as a Protestant edition but was packed with polemical notes: Johannes Cochlaeus described it as ‘a special comfort of the Catholics’ who could thereby discern Luther’s dangerous errors and as a counter to ‘the evangelical glorying and boasting of the Lutheran fools’.55 Johann Dietenberger’s popular Catholische Bibel, first printed in 1534, by contrast, did not seek to disguise its anti-heretical stance. In France, René Benoist, a prominent member of the Paris Faculty 52

  New testament, preface, sig. a2r–v.   See the crucial letter to Cardinal Sirleto in Rome printed from the Vatican Archives, in J.H. Pollen, ‘Translating the Bible into English at Rheims’, The Month, 140 (1922): 146–8. 54   Letter from the Vatican Archives printed in Appendix XII of A.O. Meyer, England and the Catholic Church under Queen Elizabeth, trans. J.R. McKee (London, 1967), pp. 475–8. 55  Jones, Counter Reformation, p. 55. 53

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of Theology, went one step further when he published a vernacular Bible in 1566, shamelessly based on the Geneva translation but purged of Calvinist lies and corruptions: pillaging from the enemy was quite legitimate, he insisted in the preface, in a context of open combat between truth and falsehood.56 The Douai-Rheims version similarly sprang from a conviction that profane heretical translations posed a terrible threat to the souls of the inquisitive. Whilst Allen would have preferred that the Bible never be translated into ‘barbarous tongues’, he argued that it was better to have a Catholic text ‘than that men should use a corrupt version to their peril or destruction’.57 In conjunction with Gregory Martin’s Discovery of the manifold corruptions of the holy scriptures by the heretickes, it was presented as an antidote to pernicious partisan translations dredged from ‘the stinking puddles of Geneva lake’.58 To this extent, there was some truth in Protestant taunts that the book was merely an exercise in damage limitation. ‘[M]oved thereunto by the desires of many devout persons’ and by compassion for the plight of ‘our beloved countrie men’, Allen and his colleagues envisaged it as a missionary tool, a key piece of artillery in the spiritual war in which they were engaged.59 This is borne out both by the massive size of the initial print run of around 5,00060 and by the fierce reaction of the Elizabethan authorities. Allen wrote to the Jesuit Alphonso Agazzari in March 1583 that the Rheims New Testament had made the Queen’s councillors ‘quite mad with rage’, while a government spy reported that it was ‘as much sought for, of the protesttantes as papistes’.61 It apparently helped make a convert of Thomas Manby, who went on to enter the Society of Jesus, and it 56   For Dietenberger, see Margaret Aston, ‘The Bishops’ Bible Illustrations’, in The Church and the Arts, ed. Diana Wood, SCH 28 (Oxford, 1992), p. 275. For Benoist, see Elizabeth Ingram, ‘Dressed in Borrowed Robes: The Making and Marketing of the Louvain Bible (1578)’, in The Church and the Book, ed. R.N. Swanson, SCH 38 (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 212–21. 57   Letter of Allen to Dr Vendeville dated 16 September 1578, translated in T.F. Knox (ed.), The First and Second Diaries of the English College, Douay (London, 1878), p. xli. 58   Gregory Martin, A discoverie of the manifold corruptions of the holy scriptures by the heretikes of our daies (Rheims, 1582). Quotation from William Rainolds, A refutation of sundry reprehensions, cavils and false sleightes, by which M. Whitaker laboureth to deface the late English translation (Paris, 1583), p. 292. 59   New testament, preface, sig. b2r. 60   See A.C. Southern, English Recusant Prose 1559–1582 (London, 1950), p. 235. In June 1581, Allen reported to Agazzari that Persons thought that at least 4,000 were needed: ‘Expetit P. Rubertus tria vel quatuor millia aut etiam plura ex Testamentis Anglicis, cum illa a multis desiderentur’. Before 1635, the standard size of an edition was around 1,500 copies. 61   Douay Diaries, ed. Knox, p. lxx; TNA, SP 12/168/31.

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boosted the flagging morale of the Lancashire recusant Andrew Hilton, who implored a friend to send it in February 1584, saying ‘I can neither eat, drink nor sleep until I see it’. The libraries of several recusants seized by the government, including the Northamptonshire magnate Sir Thomas Tresham, included copies.62 Under the supervision of her confessor John Mush, the Yorkshire matron Margaret Clitherow read it, along with other spiritual books, in pious imitation of the cloistered religious.63 But it is doubtful that this Bible was really conceived of as a devotional text for the laity. One of Allen’s strongest incentives to sponsoring it was an acute sense of the disadvantage Catholic priests were at in direct confrontations with the heretics: while their adversaries had all the key passages of Scripture ‘at their fingers ends’, he wrote to his friend Dr Vendeville in September 1578, his own trainees were obliged to translate them from Latin in their heads, with the consequence that they did so ‘inaccurately, and with unpleasant hesitation’.64 Replete with a table of controversies and a set of annotations which has been described as ‘a studied series of deliberate insults’, this was a manual for missionaries whose training in the seminaries included mock disputations upon contentious places in Scripture. The aim of these orchestrated debates was to teach novice priests ‘to spie both the advantages of the truth, and the treacheries and guiles of falshood’. Chapters of the Old and New Testament were also read to the assembled students at dinner and supper, after which they sat listening as difficult passages were explicated, ‘having their Bibles before them, and some their paper and inke’.65 If the Douai-Rheims Bible slavishly followed the Vulgate, this was not only a function of continuing reverence for the Latin text, but because (like the first Lollard version of 1382) it was primarily intended to be an accompanying work of reference, even a crib book for a Catholic clergy seeking to regain the evangelical advantage.66 In accordance with the principles enshrined in the Tridentine decrees and defended by Counter-Reformation apologists such as Hosius and Staphylus, the translators and later recusant writers remained convinced of the dangers of indiscriminate reading by unlearned laypeople. They 62

 TNA, SP 12/172/113 (inventory of books seized from various houses, including Tresham’s at Hoxton, 27 Aug. 1584). 63   Foley, iv. 603; J.H. Pollen (ed.), Unpublished Documents Relating to the English Martyrs, vol. I 1584–1603, CRS 5 (London, 1908), p. 36; John Mush, ‘A True Report of the Life and Martyrdom of Mrs Margaret Clitherow’, in Morris, iii. 393–4. 64   Knox (ed.), Douai Diaries, pp. xl–xli. In the same letter Allen describes the importance attached to reading and disputing the Scriptures in the training of the missionaries. 65  Cotton, Doway and Rhemes, p. 15. Gregory Martin, Roma Sancta (1581), ed. George Bruner Parks (Rome, 1969), pp. 115–17. 66   On the 1382 Lollard translation, see Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation (Oxford, 1992 edn), pp. 239–40.

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stressed the need to preserve the Bible from ‘abuse and prophanation’, to protect the hallowed text from the unwashed hands of the multitude who made it their ‘table talke’ on alebenches and in boats and barges.67 Allusion was made to Matthew 7:6 (‘Give not that which is holy to dogges: neither cast ye your pearles before swine, lest perhaps they treade them with their feete’) – a passage which reminds us that Scripture was seen in the same light as the sacrament of the mass itself, a holy mystery which had to be secluded from the multitude by the opaque language of the liturgy.68 This is neatly encapsulated in an anecdote included in the Jesuit Annual Letter of 1624 recording the sad fate of a puritan cobbler who sat reading the English Bible as he mended shoes and subsequently committed suicide – this was designed to ‘rebuke the rashness of heretics in handling the sacred pages’ and to warn Catholics of the dangers of the same kind of violation.69 Shrouded in Latin, the medieval populace had stood before the Scriptures in humility and awe; translated into the vulgar tongue, said Staphylus, they were liable ‘rashly and roundely [to] set upon it, as if it were Bevis of Hampton or a tale of Robin hoode’.70 Familiarity with the Bible, it was feared, might breed contempt. Harking back to a time before print had begun to transform books from expensive products of laborious copying into affordable commodities – a time when the physical artefact of Holy Writ itself was popularly supposed to have occult and magical properties71 – the laity were encouraged to regard the Scriptures as a precious jewel and treasure. Like a relic or the host itself, the Bible had to be safeguarded from desecration. Much emphasis was also placed on the need to bridle ‘the intolerable insolencie of proude, curious, and contenious wittes’ who ‘turne and toss the Scriptures’: this was a recipe for rampant heresy and anarchy. Echoing Hosius and Staphylus, Catholic propagandists reiterated the point that the Bible was not for every Tom, Dick and Harry, warning against the ‘arrogancie and presumption’ of those who manifested an ordinate appetite 67

  New testament, preface, sig. a3r. There were related debates between Catholics and Protestants about the use of the vernacular in the liturgy. Space does not permit a full consideration of these here. 68  Hosius, Of the expresse worde of God, fo. 103r–v; Staphylus, Apologie, fols 4r, 64v. The allusion was implicit rather than explicit in the preface to the New Testament. 69   Foley, vii, pt 2, 1105. 70  Staphylus, Apologie, fo. 65v. This commonplace can be found in earlier discussions: for example Thomas More, The Dialogue Concerning Tyndale, in The English Works of Sir Thomas More, ed. W.E. Campbell, 2 vols (London, 1931), ii: 246, and John Standish, A discourse wherin is debated whether it be expedient that the scripture should be in English for al men to reade that wyll (London, 1554), sig. A7r–v. 71   On such beliefs, see Margaret Aston, ‘Devotional Literacy’, in her Lollards and Reformers, pp. 106–13.

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for knowledge akin to that which had caused Adam and Eve to be expelled from Paradise. The characteristic opacity of Holy Writ was not accidental but conveyed the clear message that God meant many of its secrets to be ‘far above the reach’ of most of mankind.72 Scripture was a potent and powerful medicine, but wrongly taken it could be fatal. As the annotation to 2 Corinthians 3:6 reminded readers, the letter of the New Testament, no less than the Mosaic Law, could kill.73 Interpreted too literally, it could have awful consequences of the kind described by the Dominican Friar Robert Buckenham in a sermon in Cambridge around 1529: ‘the simple man, when he heareth it in the gospel, “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee”, may make himself blind, and so fill the world full of beggars’.74 There was also the fear that some stories in the Old Testament, particularly those concerning Leah, Rachel and Lot, might give rise to idle and light thoughts in the heads of women and adolescents.75 Commending the prudence of the Jews, who had denied access to the Canticles to every person under 30 years of age,76 Counter-Reformation writers implied that to read the Bible required much learning and a mature understanding of the faith. In short, laypeople required the expert guidance of the priests God had appointed to be their shepherds and teachers. Like infants, they had to be fed as was ‘most meete’ for their ‘capacitie and diet’, with milk, pap or with meat which had been predigested thoroughly.77 They could not be let loose to consume Scripture unsupervised. This was equivalent to giving a child a knife with which to cut bread for himself – an old commonplace which can be traced back to the fifteenth-century Strasbourg preacher Geiler von Kayserberg.78 Just as it was the duty of the laity to receive the sacraments at the hands of the clergy, so too should they accept them as faithful mediators of the mysteries of the Bible.79 To do otherwise, declared Martin Becanus in 1619, was to imitate the audacity of Eve in disputing with the serpent in the Garden of Eden.80 72

  New testament, sig. a4r.   New testament, p. 477. 74  Foxe, Actes and Monuments, vol. 2, p. 1734. 75  Staphylus, Apologie, fo. 76r. See also Thomas Harding, as refuted by John Jewel, Works, ii: 674. 76   New testament, preface, sig. A4r. 77   New testament, sigs a3v–4r; More, Dialogue concerning Tyndale, p. 244. 78  Standish, Discourse, sig. A5v. For Geiler von Kayersberg, see Deanesly, Lollard Bible, p. 107. 79   New testament, preface, sig. a4r. This too was a theme of Geiler von Kayserberg’s preaching: see Deanesly, Lollard Bible, p. 107. 80   Martinus Becanus, A treatise of the judge of controversies, trans. W. W[right] ([St Omer], 1619), pp. 61–2. 73

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Staphylus had compared such usurpers with a common craftsman who presumed to displace professional physicians and apothecaries from their shops and dispense potentially harmful drugs himself.81 The probability that this inversion of the natural social hierarchy would lead servants to disobey their masters, wives their husbands and children their parents had been one of the chief themes of John Standish’s 1554 tract opposing the vernacular Bible,82 and these concerns were never far from the surface of discussions which postdated the New Testament translation of 1582. Not until the Jansenists did Catholics actively advocate lay bible-reading and defend the universal availability of the Scriptures – and their views were condemned by the papal bull Unigenitus in 1713.83 Indeed, the marginal notes to the Douai-Rheims version were in many ways intended to counteract the perils of ‘private judgement’ and lay self-instruction.84 They were an alternative mechanism for controlling the interpretation of contentious and difficult passages, a typographical substitute for personal contact in a country deprived of an adequate number of pastors. Polemical annotations adjacent to and beneath the text alerted readers directly to Protestant errors, corrected the theological misinterpretations created by their false and ‘impudent’ translations, and cultivated a spirit of belligerent defiance towards reformed doctrine and practice. An aside to 1 Corinthians 11 read ‘The heretics Communion is the very table and cup of Divels’; those linked with 2 Corinthians 12 and 13 commented ‘Visions have no credite with heretikes’ and ‘We must sticke to the faith first planted by miracles’; and the notes to chapter 2 of Colossians castigated Protestant attacks on fasting on holy days and defended the veneration and invocation of angels (Figure 9.2). Others taught Catholics how to conduct themselves in a context of persecution and schooled them in the principles of steadfast recusancy, stressing the evils of communicating with the enemy and attending their ‘schismatical services’.85 As David Norton remarks, ‘Martin makes the margin the primary location of truth’.86 The importance Counter-Reformation writers attached to lay deference to clerical authority was closely linked with their assumption that Scripture did not contain everything necessary for salvation. The canonical books 81

 Staphylus, Apologie, fos 65v–66r.  Standish, Discourse, sig. H3r. 83   F.J. Crehan, ‘The Bible in the Roman Catholic Church from Trent to the Present Day’, in S.L. Greenslade (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Bible: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 222–3. 84   New testament, preface, sig. b2r–v. 85   New testament, pp. 448, 499–3, 540–41, 482–3 respectively. 86  Norton, King James Bible, p. 31. 82

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Figure 9.2 Anti-Protestant annotations on Colossians 2: The new testament of Jesus Christ, translated faithfully into English, out of the authentical Latin (Rheims, 1582), pp. 540–41. By permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. Shelfmark C.12.23.

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of the Bible were not the sole source of Christian revelation; the Church acted as the custodian of a supplementary deposit of tenets which had never been enshrined in Holy Writ. Whereas many medieval theologians had thought in terms of the mutual coinherence of the written text and unwritten tradition, the polemical battles provoked by the Reformation had intensified a tendency to see them as separate receptacles of sacred truth. By way of reaction against the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura and its potential to elevate the Bible into a paper pope, the Council of Trent had insisted in 1546 upon the equal parity of apostolic traditions with Scripture.87 Tridentine clergyman attached increasing importance to a corpus of teachings which had been orally transmitted to each generation of the Catholic faithful since the time of St Peter. They cited key passages such as 2 Thessalonians 2:15 (‘therefore brethren stand and hold the traditions which you have learned, whether it be by word, or by an epistle’)88 and they contrasted the ‘living voice’ of the Church with the ‘inky divinitie’ of the heretics, who revered only the ‘dumb judge’, ‘leaden rule’ and ‘dead letter’ of the text and wrested it to serve their purposes like a wax nose.89 ‘[T]he written Text’, declared Thomas Pownde, for instance, ‘is mute … uttering nothing to us from the Booke but only the wordes, and not the sense’.90 They also denied that the actual syllables of the Bible were divinely inspired and dictated by the Holy Ghost to the prophets and evangelists. Whereas the logic of the Protestants’ arguments pushed them towards the position that textuality was intrinsic to Scripture, Catholics such as Thomas Harding claimed that the Word of God was written in the hearts and minds of men long before it was inscribed on stone, vellum or 87   On Scripture and tradition, see George H. Tavard, Holy Writ or Holy Church: The Crisis of the Protestant Reformation (London, 1959); Yves M.-J. Congar, Tradition and Traditions: An Hisorical and Theological Essay (London, 1966), esp. chs 3–5; McGrath, Intellectual Origins, ch. 5; Peter Marshall, ‘The Debate over “Unwritten Verities” in Early Reformation England’, in Bruce Gordon (ed.), Protestant Identity and History in SixteenthCentury Europe, vol. 1 The Medieval Inheritance (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 60–77. For the Trent decree of 1546, see Canons and Decrees, ed. Schroeder, p. 17. It should be noted that the wording of the decree drew back from insisting on two independent sources of revelation, but this tendency later became more pronounced. 88  See New testament, pp. 559–60 (annotation to 2 Thess. 2:15). See also pp. 413–14 (annotation to Romans 12:6); p. 454 (annotation to 1 Cor. 11:34); p. 653 (annotation to James 5:17); p. 695 (annotation to Jude 5:9). 89  This was a key issue in the ‘Great Controversy’ between John Jewel and Thomas Harding in the 1560s: see Jewel, Works, esp. iv: 758–9. On the theme of Scripture as a wax nose, see H.C. Porter, ‘The Nose of Wax: Scripture and the Spirit from Erasmus to Milton’, TRHS, 5th ser., 14 (1964): 155–74. 90  Thomas Pownde, Sixe reasons set downe to shew, that it is no orderly way in controversies of faith, to appeale to be tryed onely by scriptures, reproduced for refutation in Robert Crowley, An aunswer to sixe reasons (London, 1581), sig. A4v.

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parchment. Like Sir Thomas More before him, Harding declared that it consisted not in ink and paper but in the sense.91 In discussing when and why the Lord had ceased to preach viva voce, he and his colleagues rejected the contention that, once Scripture had been pinned down on a twodimensional page, the need to rely on remembered traditions had passed completely away. Highlighting the role which oral modes had played in the dissemination of the early Hebrew and Christian religions, they repeatedly pointed out that for 2,600 years from Adam to Moses there were no holy books, that it was at least 20 years before the Gospels were penned by the apostles and that Christ himself had left nothing in writing.92 In their defence of the sacramental and evangelical quality of speech, they often referred to Romans 10:17 (‘Faith, then, is by hearing: and hearing is by the word of Christ’).93 Reacting against the impulse to anchor truth to an inert and silent text rather than regard it as an active spiritual presence, they were keen to undermine any suggestion that literacy and reading were prerequisites for entry into heaven.

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IV In the circumstances in which post-Reformation English Catholicism found itself, this attempt to preserve what Walter Ong called the audible ‘presence of the word’, to privilege sound above space as the natural habitat of the Holy Spirit, was more than a little ironic. It was ironic because in yielding a vernacular version of the Scriptures and committing it to the typographical fixity of print, missionary leaders were adopting a medium which had the potential to erode these very same features of medieval Christian experience. The invention of the mechanical press democratised God’s Word to a degree which had never been possible in a culture of scribal publication, for all the efficiency and industry we are now encouraged to accord to monastic and other scriptoria.94 Even 91

  See Robert Preus, The Inspiration of Scripture: A Study of the Theology of the Seventeenth Century Lutheran Dogmatists (Edinburgh, 1955), esp. pp. 39–73. Harding, in Jewel, Works, iii. 240; More, Complete Works, ix. 25. See also New testament, pp. 476–7 (annotation to 2 Cor. 3:3: ‘The Apostles wrote the Gospel in mens hartes much more then in paper’). 92   See John Heigham, The gagge of the reformed gospell ([St Omer?], 1623), p. 26. For their part, Protestants were obliged to agree: see William Perkins, A reformed Catholike (Cambridge, 1604), pp. 127–8. 93   New testament, preface, sig. a4r. 94   Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven, CT, 1967), esp. chs 4–5. See also the thoughtful discussions in Eisenstein, Printing Press, ch. 4; François Furet and Jacques Ozouf, Reading and Writing:

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the preface to the Rheims New Testament acknowledged that in earlier centuries there had been no ‘such easy meanes … to disperse … copies into the handes of every man, as there now is’.95 Printed texts ate inexorably away at that clerical monopoly on sacred knowledge which the Church of Rome was so reluctant to relinquish. Yet, to try to restrict readership of the Bible, whether by formal censorship or (as here) by exhortations to exercise a kind of self-denying ordinance, was to demonstrate, as Patrick Collinson has put it, ‘a Canute-like defiance of the imperatives of print technology’.96 The new mass medium at least had the capacity to bring the Book to all literate laypeople, while the English language allowed them to bypass the exegetical filter of the priesthood. Together, they did much to undermine the role of clerical middlemen – though, as we have seen, the dense undergrowth of annotations appended to each chapter was designed to fulfil this function vicariously. In seeking to use the written word as a partial replacement for personnel in a country where Catholic clergy were scarce and as a surrogate for the sermon and the spoken word, Allen and his associates were not pioneers. The idea of an ‘apostolate of the pen’ had medieval precedents: cloistered twelfth-century Carthusian monks had proclaimed the merits of ‘preaching with their hands’ and inflicting wounds on Satan by writing.97 But the leaders of the post-Reformation Catholic community were also employing something of a double-edged sword. Just as Henry VIII discovered that the vernacular Bible was not as effective a device for inculcating the creed of obedience as he had initially envisaged, so too did the Counter-Reformation hierarchy have to confront

Literacy in France from Calvin to Jules Ferry (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 59–60, 305–11; and John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 97–103. For revisionist assessments of the efficiency of medieval manuscript production, see Richard H. Rouse, ‘Backgrounds to Print: Aspects of the Manuscript Book in Northern Europe of the Fifteenth Century’, in Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (Notre Dame, IN, 1991), pp. 449–66; Paul Saenger, ‘Colard Mansion and the Evolution of the Printed Book’, The Library Quarterly, 45 (1975): 405–18; Eric H. Reiter, ‘The Reader as Author of the User-Produced Manuscript: Reading and Rewriting Popular Latin Theology in the Late Middle Ages’, Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 27 (1996): 151–69; and David D’Avray, ‘Printing, Mass Communication, and Religious Reformation: The Middle Ages and After’, in Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (eds), The Uses of Script and Print 1300–1700 (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 50–70. 95   New testament, sig. a3r. 96  Patrick Collinson, ‘The Coherence of the Text: How it Hangeth Together: The Bible in Reformation England’, in W.P. Stephens (ed.), The Bible, the Reformation and the Church, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, Supplement Series 105 (Sheffield, 1995), pp. 84–108, at p. 98. 97  Eisenstein, Printing Press, pp. 316, 373.

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the problem that print could be an agent of autonomy as much as an instrument of authority.98 As Chapter 8 argued, the Elizabethan Catholic leaders showed remarkable creativity in utilising books as ‘domme preachers’ and silent spiritual directors, but they did so at the risk of increasing lay independence.99 Indeed, the vast production of devotional and catechetical literature for consumption by this beleaguered community suggests that we need to separate the issue of translating the Scriptures into the vernacular from the wider question of Roman Catholic attitudes to the medium of printing. The two were not intrinsically linked. To echo David Bagchi, we need to set aside the twin-stranded assumption that an ideology that maintained the external clarity of Holy Writ and the priesthood of all believers would accept with alacrity the egalitarian implications of the open book, while one that endorsed the notion of a closed Bible and a priesthood of some believers would naturally reject the press.100 Instead, we need to recognise that the marriage of convenience between literacy and heterodoxy and between print and persecution transcended the confessional barrier erected by the Reformation.101 It may be, moreover, that the sheer volume of spiritual tracts which issued from clandestine and continental presses after 1559 was paradoxically a consequence of the very ambivalence of the Catholic hierarchy about making the Bible available in the vulgar tongue. It is certainly striking that the absence of an approved English translation of the Scriptures (and indeed the missal) seems to have stimulated an extraordinary outpouring of vernacular subscriptural and subliturgical literature in early Tudor England.102 As David Lawton has remarked in passing, it appears to have fulfilled ‘a creative function’, generating a body of material that offered itself to the populace as ‘a kind of imaginative substitute’ for the sacred

98   See Rex, Henry VIII, ch. 4, esp. p. 131, and the discussion in Gillian Brennan, ‘Patriotism, Language and Power: English Translations of the Bible, 1520–1580’, History Workshop Journal, 27 (1989): 18–36. The possibility that printed bibles might even render the priesthood redundant had been recognized as early as 1550 in A godly dyalogue and dysputacyon betwene Pyers Plowman and a popysh preest in which the latter was made to lament ‘If these hobbes and rusticals be suffred to be thus busy in readynge of Englysh heresy and to dyspute after this maner wyth us, which are sperytual men, we shalbe fayne to learne some other occupacion or els we are lyke to have but a colde broth’ (sig. A8r). 99   See Chapter 8, above. 100   David V.N. Bagchi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents: Catholic Controversialists, 1518– 1525 (Minneapolis, MN, 1991), p. 1. 101   See Alexandra Walsham, ‘Preaching without Speaking: Script, Print and Religious Dissent’, in Crick and Walsham (eds), Uses of Script and Print, pp. 211–34. 102   See Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, esp. ch. 2.

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text which they were not permitted to handle.103 It is also noteworthy that, although Geiler von Kayserberg believed printing a German Bible would be extremely unwise, he expressly advocated the production of works of piety in the language of the simple sort.104 And in his influential Apologie, Fridericus Staphylus emphasised that several Catholic bishops had been active in paraphrasing the Scriptures and setting them forth ‘in the forme of a Breviary or portise, to be read of the clergy by dutie, and of the laitie such as listeth’. Together with collections of the sermons and homilies of the Church Fathers, these should fully satisfy the ‘desire and appetite’ of laypeople who sought to strengthen their faith.105 The importance and popularity of texts like the Tridentine primer, which included selected excerpts from the Gospels and Psalms, attests to Roman Catholicism’s continuing preference for filtering Scripture to ordinary Catholics through a clerical sieve, thereby preserving the sacred mystery which surrounded the Word and protecting it from the indignity of irreverent handling.106 If the appearance of the New Testament in 1582 in no way stemmed the flow of devotional tracts, this was because it was never intended to be the all-sufficient source of inspiration and authority it was in the eyes of fervent Protestants. The Catholic Church did not subscribe to the view that women and men could live, as it were, by the Bible alone. Even so, this was a text which by 1621 had evolved out of a bulky and cumbersome quarto into a pocket-sized duodecimo – the format used for portable works of private devotion. The 1633 edition included a series of six fine engravings depicting the evangelists and the Holy Spirit descending upon the Apostles at Pentecost – images which brought the text a little closer to a traditional icon (Figure 9.3).107 Against the backdrop of Laudian sponsorship of illustrated Protestant Bibles, these texts helped to reignite puritan anxieties about the growth of popish idolatry.108 Furthermore, whereas silent reading has often been 103

 Lawton, Faith, Text and History, p. 58.   Cited in Scribner, ‘Heterdoxy, Literacy and Print’, p. 272. 105  Staphylus, Apologie, fos 76v–77r. 106  See A manuall of praiers (Calais [English secret press], 1599) and subsequent editions (STC 17266 et seq.); J.M. Blom, The Post-Tridentine English Primer, CRS Publications 3 (1982), pp. 15–16. In translating scriptural passages, the translator declared that ‘the direct sense (as it is most requisite) has more bin sought to be observed then any phrases in our language more affected and pleasing’. 107   The new testament … with annotations, and other helpes (Antwerp, 1621); The new testament … The fourth edition, enriched with pictures ([Rouen?], 1633). 108   See George Henderson, ‘Bible Illustration in the Age of Laud’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 8 (1982): 173–85. The Root and Branch Petition (Dec, 1640) complained of ‘the frequent venting of … popish pictures … and the placing of such in Bibles’: The Stuart Constitution: Documents and Commentary, ed. J.P. Kenyon (Cambridge, 104

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Figure 9.3 St Mark writing the Gospel: The new testament … the fourth edition, enriched with pictures ([Rouen?], 1633), illustration facing sig. A1r. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter. Shelfmark 1633/BIB. associated with Reformed styles of piety,109 there are some grounds for thinking that it had certain advantages to a Church under the cross. Private perusal probably carried fewer hazards in a context in which the boundary between public recitation of a text and preaching was blurred and in which reading a ‘popish’ book aloud might be construed as a deliberate act of dissent and provocation.110 The Protestant Bible, by contrast, may have entered into collective consciousness more often 1986 edn), p. 155. In A Second Beacon Fire by Scintilla (1652), Michael Sparke recalled the brisk trade among Catholics in illustrated English bibles in the mid-1620s: p. 184. 109  An assumption that has now been convincingly questioned by Andrew Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720 (Cambridge, 2011), which emphasises the communal and public character of reading in Protestant piety. 110   Cf. the remarks of Bossy, Christianity, p. 101.

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through the ear than through the eye. For many, even most people, it must have been primarily an aural and communal experience. It can no longer be taken for granted that print effaced these aspects of religious life and fostered interiorisation.111 Designed for speaking out loud, the powerful rhythms of the Authorised Version (as of Tyndale’s translation before it) were absorbed into everyday speech and memorised and rehearsed by the pious. The future archbishop James Ussher, for example, learnt reading from two blind aunts who knew large portions of the Scriptures by heart.112 In their own way, then, Protestants continued to value the oral presence of the Word. In the prefaces to their published works, preachers often stressed the superior benefits of listening to a sermon over reading one imprisoned in the ‘dead letter’ of a text, constantly citing St Paul’s dictum that ‘Faith cometh by hearing’. The Suffolk minister Elnathan Parr even suggested that the Scriptures were a ‘sealed booke’ that could yield no fruit until they were opened by a preacher.113 And as they negotiated the shift from revolutionary sect to institutional Church, they too came to find that both printing and the vernacular Bible were distinctly mixed blessings. This became apparent as early as 1525. Luther’s rallying cry of ‘everyman his own bible reader’ was rapidly abandoned in the wake of the Peasants’ War and the rise of ‘false brethren’ like the Anabaptists who had misconstrued the text to support ‘fleshly liberty’. The translation of the Bible out of Latin seemed to have done nothing so much as open up a Pandora’s Box of moral decadence and social revolution. And so, as Richard Gawthrop and Gerald Strauss have shown, clerical mediation returned in the guise of the catechism. The Lutheran pastor Caspar Huberinus referred to it approvingly as ‘our cabala’, comparing it with ‘the secret doctrine of the Jews, kept alive only by word of mouth’ and insisting that oral instruction was more efficient than reading, ‘being more powerfully impressed and more deeply rooted’.114 Even Calvin believed that God wanted ‘the bread to be cut for us, the pieces 111   See Cambers, Godly Reading. On the importance of oral modes of communication in transmitting Protestantism, see now Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge, 2005), esp. chs 2–3. 112  Richard Parr, The life of … James Usher, late arch-bishop of Armagh (London, 1686), p. 2. 113   See, for example, John King, Lectures upon Jonas, delivered at Yorke (Oxford, 1599), sig. *4r; Parr is quoted in Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge, 2010), p. 27. See chs 1–2 for a rich treatment of these themes and ch. 3, esp. 119–30, for discussion of the marked reluctance of many Protestants to publish sermons. 114   See Richard Gawthrop and Gerald Strauss, ‘Protestantism and Literacy in Early Modern Germany’, P&P, 104 (1984): 31–55, esp. 32–43; Gerald Strauss, ‘Lutheranism and Literacy: A Reassessment’, in Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kaspar von

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to be put in our mouths, and the chewing to be done for us’.115 Deeming direct engagement with Scripture too dangerous for the average layman, the reformers themselves increasingly sought to filter it through the sieve of marginal glosses and commentaries. Fresh emphasis was placed on approaching the Bible in its original languages, Hebrew and Greek, and on the need for scholarly training to avoid the treacherous pitfalls hidden in Holy Writ. Protestant ministers were effectively reinstated as gatekeepers, a new caste of professional exegetes responsible for controlling access to the sacred books and safeguarding them from misappropriation.116 Echoing age-old anxieties, they complained about people who irreverently discussed Scripture in inns and taverns, worried that some members of their congregations might be tempted to ‘sit at hom[e] with a printed paper, dreaming that will suffice to get faith for salvation’; and denied that they sanctioned ‘private interpretation’ according to the whim of ‘man’s private spirit’.117 This retreat from the heady democratic rhetoric of the early days of the Reformation did not go unnoticed by their confessional enemies. As Staphylus noted tellingly in his Apologie, now it was the Protestants who found themselves obliged ‘to runne to the refuge of the Catholike church’ and take steps to prevent free bible-reading.118 There were also those who thought that the Church of England could learn a lesson or two from the Romanists and emulate their ‘wise jealousy’ in censoring the press. In a sermon delivered in 1624 Joseph Hall, later bishop of Exeter, declared that nothing ‘hath so much power to poison the world’: mankind was ‘highly beholden to that witty citizen of Mentz for his invention of this nimble Art of Impression’, but in unleashing a flood of licentious ephemera upon the world it had brought shame and scandal upon the Gospel. ‘In the times of our forefathers’, he observed wistfully, ‘when every page and line was to pass the leisure and pains of Greyerz (London, 1984), pp. 109–20. Luther is quoted from Gerald Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore, 1978), p. 172. 115   Quoted in Gilmont, ‘Conclusion’, p. 475, and see pp. 474–6. Ruth Bottigheimer has argued, however, that the Reformed wing of Protestantism was more inclined than Lutheranism to allow the young to read the Bible in full: ‘Bible Reading, ‘Bibles’ and the Bible for Children in Early Modern England’, P&P, 139 (1993): 66–89. 116   Scribner, ‘Heterodoxy, Literacy and Print’. Mediation of the bible through clerical hands appears to have been part of early Henrician policy. See the illustrated title-page of the 1539 Great Bible, which shows Henry VIII passing down the Bible, verbum dei, to the acclaiming people below via Cromwell and Cranmer (see Figure 8.1). 117   See Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (New York, 1988), p. 107. John Barlow, Hierons last fare-well (London, 1618), sig. A4r; Bernard, Rhemes against Rome, p. 43. On Protestantism’s struggle to both encourage and contain lay reading, see Kate Narveson, ‘“Their Practice Bringeth Little Profit”: Clerical Anxieties about Lay Scripture Reading in Early Modern England’, in Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie (eds), Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain (Farnham, 2012), pp. 165–87. 118  Staphylus, Apologie, fo. 44v.

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a single pen, books were geason [scarce]; and, if offensive, could not so easily light into many hands to work a speedy mischief’.119 Writing after the English Revolution, Andrew Marvell satirically depicted the future Anglican prelate Samuel Parker lamenting the effects of ‘that villainous Engine’, the press: ‘Twas an happy time when all Learning was in Manuscript, and some little Officer … did keep the Keys of the Library’.120 Printing, then, posed a threat to clerical guardianship over God’s Word which the reformers first exploited and later rued, if not repudiated. And so to conclude: we have seen that the debates about vernacular translation and about the merits of oral versus written transmission of the Gospel cut across the pre- and post-Reformation landscape like a series of irregular faults and fissures. In deciding to publish the Rheims New Testament, the Elizabethan Catholic leaders were responding to a situation in which an English Bible had become a vital weapon in the struggle to resist the annihilation of the Roman faith, but also reflecting a strand of opinion within the late medieval Church that had looked more benignly upon the project of placing the laity in personal contact with the Scriptures in their native tongue. After the Council of Trent this strand of opinion was increasingly confined to the edges: as confessional boundaries hardened, Catholicism clung ever more tightly to the muchmaligned Vulgate and defended the authority of ‘unwritten traditions’, while Protestantism prided itself on emancipating the masses from the thraldom of Latin with the assistance of the ‘divine gift’ of printing. But the anxieties attendant upon unclasping the Book and disseminating it by means of the mechanical press were shared by key figures on both sides of the ideological divide. Reacting against a medium with the potential to transform physical access to God’s Word from the exclusive preserve of the clergy into the common property of an infinite and invisible readership, some began to think that scribal copying and the spoken word might just be safer methods of communicating Holy Writ after all. In the end, to quote John Bossy, perhaps ‘typography caught up with them all, imposing a Christianity of the text which none … had originally intended’.121

119

  The Works of Joseph Hall, D.D., Successively Bishop of Exeter and Norwich, ed. P. Hall, 12 vols (Oxford, 1837–39), viii. 90–92, 102. 120  Andrew Marvell, The Rehearsal Transpros’d and The Rehearsal Transpros’d The Second Part, ed. D.I.B. Smith (Oxford, 1971 edn; first publ. 1672), pp. 4–5. In Religio laici: or, a layman’s faith (1682), John Dryden contemplated a middle way between Catholic dependence on priestly guidance and Protestant insistence on private interpretation: see William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, PA, 2008), pp. 83–4. 121  Bossy, Christianity, p. 101.

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Chapter 10

This New Army of Satan: the Jesuit Mission and the Formation of Public Opinion*

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A Jesuit reprobated Is the childe of sin, who being borne for the service of the Divell, cares not what villany he does in the world; he is always in a maze, for his courses are ever out of order, and while his will stands for his wisdome, the best that falls out of him, is a foole; he betraies the trust of the simple, and sucks out the bloud of the innocent; his breath is the fume of blasphemy, and his tongue the firebrand of hell; his desires are the destruction of the vertuous, and his delights are the traps to damnation: he bathes in the bloud of murther, and sups up the broth of iniquity: plots, conspiracies, and all manner of mischiefe, are the chiefest aime of his studies: he frighteth the eies of the godly, and disturbeth the hearts of the religious; he marreth the wits of the wise, and is hatefull to the soules of the gracious. In summe, he is an inhumane creature, a fearfull companion, a monster, and a Divell incarnate; therefore to be quite packed out of this our England, to his owne proper center the whore of Rome.1

Published in 1643, this vivid pen portrait in the guise of a witty Theophrastan character encapsulated a cluster of long-standing assumptions and anxieties about the notorious religious order founded by the former Spanish soldier Ignatius Loyola and officially commissioned in 1540 under the title of the Society of Jesus. It gave graphic expression to a sobering stereotype of diabolical deviance and Machiavellian villainy that had crystallised in the English Protestant imagination over the course of the previous century. As elaborated in a vast swathe of polemical sermons, tracts, plays, pamphlets and prints, the Jesuit was a puppet of the Counter-Reformation papacy and a tool of the king of Spain, a crafty dissembler constantly dreaming up treasonous designs to subvert states and assassinate divinely anointed *

 An earlier version of this chapter was published under the title of ‘This New Army of Satan’: The Jesuit Mission and the Formation of Public Opinion in Elizabethan England’, in David Lemmings and Claire Walker (eds), Moral Panics, the Press and the Law in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 41–62. (See http://www.palgrave.com/ products/title.aspx?pid=279853.) 1   [Nicholas Breton], Englands selected characters (London, 1643), p. 12.

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princes and monarchs. ‘Fatall and ominous to all well governed Common wealths’, he was also a loyal servant of Lucifer, a chief instrument in his eternal struggle ‘to uphold his tottering Antichristian kingdome’ and to enlarge ‘his infernall dominion’ of Hell.2 Endowed with almost superhuman powers to seduce the unwary and innocent, he was ‘the Spawn of the Old Serpent’, under whose ‘gilded and spangled Skin, there lies a poisonous Sting’.3 Synonymous with hypocrisy and equivocation by the early seventeenth century, the secretive and underhand activities of these ‘Romish locusts’ and ‘pernicious caterpillars’ became a focus for renewed hostility whenever events seriously jeopardised the religious and political stability of Stuart England. Re-etched and further embellished at each fresh crisis, the image of the evil Jesuit has acquired the status of an enduring black legend.4 Forged on the double anvil of xenophobic anti-popery and Protestant patriotism, it neatly fits the mould of the classic folk devil and has been the subject of repeated episodes of ‘moral panic’. At such moments, the concerns of politicians, lawmakers, literate commentators and the populace at large have typically converged to mix a potent cocktail of hatred and suspicion and to exaggerate the magnitude of the threat which the Society of Jesus presented to the fabric of English society. As delineated by its early theorists, the ‘moral panic’ was at root a pathological phenomenon. Carrying undertones of mass hysteria and collective delusion, the very concept was predicated on a positivist confidence about the capacity of scholars to differentiate ‘fact’ from ‘fiction’ that has been rendered deeply problematic by the advent

2

  Lewis Owen, Speculum Jesuiticum, or the Jesuites looking-glasse (London, 1629), pp. 1, 20–21. 3   The character of a Jesuit (London, 1681). See also John Taylor, A delicate, dainty, damnable dialogue. Between the devil and a Jesuite (London, 1642); The Jesuits character (London, 1642); The Jesuite and prieste discovered (London, 1663). 4   See J.C. Aveling, ‘The Jesuit in Literature’, in The Jesuits (London, 1981), ch. 1; Sydney Anglo, ‘More Machiavellian than Machiavel: A Study of the Context of Donne’s Conclave’, in A.J. Smith (ed.), John Donne: Essays in Celebration (London, 1972), pp. 349–84; Geoffrey Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in NineteenthCentury France (Oxford, 1993); Peter Burke, ‘The Black Legend of the Jesuits: An Essay in the History of Social Stereotypes’, in Simon Ditchfield (ed.), Christianity and Community in the West: Essays for John Bossy (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 165–82; Eric Nelson, ‘The Jesuit Legend: Superstition and Myth-Making’, in Helen Parish and William G. Naphy (eds), Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe (Manchester, 2002), pp. 94–115; Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourse in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, 2005), pp. 42–53; Jonathan Wright, The Jesuits: Missions, Myths and Histories (London, 2005), ch. 5.

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of postmodernism.5 Recent studies, however, have adopted a more sophisticated perspective and endeavoured to recover the rationality of the spasms of anti-Catholicism that periodically rocked sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English society. Rejecting the impulse to dismiss them simply as instances of popular credulity fuelled by a sensationalist press or manipulated (if not invented) by cynical elites for their own ends, they have sought instead to reconstruct the structure, function and ideological significance of these outbreaks of prejudice. With Frances Dolan, they have fruitfully approached fear not as a cloud or fog which prevents us from apprehending an underlying reality, but rather as the main event itself.6 Following in the footsteps of these historians, this chapter re-examines the furore that surrounded England’s first real encounter with the Society of Jesus: the celebrated mission launched by Fathers Robert Persons and Edmund Campion in June 1580. Much ink has been spilt arguing about the nature and objectives of this 18-month enterprise. Sidestepping this historiographical minefield, here I shall concentrate on describing the haze of anxiety through which the regime and its subjects viewed the arrival of these Jesuit priests and on identifying the religious, political and cultural climate in which this developed. My aim is to add some additional dimensions to a story that has been told many times before and to augment the picture that is emerging from important work by Peter Lake, Michael Questier and others on the origins, dynamics and contours of the Elizabethan public sphere.7 Building on their insight that Catholics were not passive victims of the discursive processes that constituted it but active participants in them, I shall also suggest that the Jesuits themselves 5

  Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London and New York, 1972); Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (Oxford, 1994); Kenneth Thompson, Moral Panics (London and New York, 1998); Chas Gutcher, Moral Panics and the Media (Buckingham and Philadelphia, 2003). See also David Lemmings and Claire Walker (eds), Moral Panics, the Press and the Law in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2009), introduction. 6   For some classic studies, see Carol Z. Wiener, ‘The Beleaguered Isle: A Study of Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Anti-Catholicism’, P&P, 51 (1971): 27–62; Robin Clifton, ‘The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution’, P&P, 51 (1971): 23–55; Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642 (London and New York, 1989), pp. 72–106. Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca, NY, 1999), p. 5. 7   See Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Puritans, Papists, and the “Public Sphere” in Early Modern England: The Edmund Campion Affair in Context’, JMH, 72 (2000): 587–627; Natalie Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge, 2005), ch. 6. On Catholics as part of the political nation, see Ethan H. Shagan, ‘Introduction’, in Ethan H. Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005).

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played no small part in creating and fostering the impression that their entrée into England had precipitated intense alarm and trepidation about the prospects for a reversal of the still precarious and partial Reformation. They had their own reasons for perpetuating the notion that their arrival had thrown the Protestant nation into a spin of intermingled terror and anticipation.

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I It is important to emphasise that England had scarcely any direct contact with the Society for the first 40 years of its existence. Ignatius himself crossed the Channel and may have briefly visited the capital while a student in Paris in 1531, but he made no effort to initiate a Jesuit mission to the country until the accession of Mary I to the throne. For reasons which remain disputed, his earnest offers to assist with the restoration of the Catholic faith in the reign of Mary I were politely rebuffed by Cardinal Reginald Pole.8 In 1541, by contrast, two of Loyola’s followers had been sent to survey the deteriorating situation in Ireland, but they returned to Europe a mere 34 days later convinced that there was little scope for influencing the course of events in this wild and barren kingdom. Twenty years later David Wolfe undertook an expedition to his native Limerick but the efforts of himself and William Good here were aborted in 1567. In the summer of 1562 the Dutchman Nicholas de Gouda had spent three months in Scotland investigating the state of religion at the request of Pope Pius IV. The timidity of the queen inhibited the political impact of his visit and the ‘wonder of so strange a monster as a Jesuite’ in this northern kingdom blew over almost as soon as he left Edinburgh for Antwerp. It was not until 1578 that John Hay returned there with official sanction.9 A number of Englishmen joined the Society in the 1560s and 70s, but

8   See Thomas F. Mayer, ‘A Test of Wills: Cardinal Pole, Ignatius Loyola, and the Jesuits in England’, in Thomas M. McCoog (ed.), The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits (Woodbridge, 1996), pp. 21–37; Thomas McCoog, ‘Ignatius Loyola and Reginald Pole: A Reconsideration’, JEH, 47 (1996): 257–73; Thomas McCoog, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England 1541–1588: ‘Our Way of Proceeding’ (Leiden, 1996), pp. 24–39. 9   See McCoog, Society of Jesus, pp. 14–22, 52–61 for an account of these missions. On Scotland, see Michael Yellowlees, ‘So Strange a Monster as a Jesuite’: The Society of Jesus in Sixteenth-Century Scotland (Argyll, 2003), chs 2, 4. The quotation is from a letter of Thomas Randolph to Sir William Cecil of 1 August 1562: J.H. Pollen (ed.), Papal Negotiations with Mary Queen of Scots During her Reign in Scotland 1561–1567 (Edinburgh, 1901), p. 142.

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virtually all of these recruits remained stationed in Flanders, Italy or the Holy Roman Empire throughout the early decades of Elizabeth’s reign.10 Despite the absence of actual Jesuits from England a hostile discourse about the activities of this burgeoning religious order was already beginning to evolve in this period. The very word originated as a term of abuse: coined in the fifteenth-century Netherlands and Rhineland to describe devout busy bodies who practised novel devotions and spoke censoriously of the clergy and ordinary Catholics, the name Jesuit or jésuita was readily applied to early members of the Society, who only belatedly embraced the nickname as a badge of glory rather than shame.11 It was firmly fixed in the English lexicon by 1561, when reports reached Rome that Jesuits had been the subject of vitriolic Protestant sermons warning of their eagerness to enter the country and wreak havoc with heresy.12 A few years later Robert Horne, bishop of Winchester, railed against them in the course of a dispute with Abbot John Feckenham, cleverly eliding the order with the tribe of Canaanites who were the cursed seed of Cham in the Bible. Horne’s attack on the ‘monkishe Jebusites’ prompted a spirited ‘counterblast’ from the exiled controversialist Thomas Stapleton, who deftly turned the term back against his ‘ghospelling brethrene’.13 Foreign publications were also contributing to the formation of a negative visual and literary stereotype of the Society: a Bavarian broadsheet of 1569 depicted its members as filthy swine and several French, German and Polish pamphleteers had already made their false teachings (falsche lehre) the subject of diatribes by the late 1570s.14 A Dutch tract translated into English as The bee hive of the romishe church in 1579 made mocking allusion to the ‘marvellous holinesse of this newe Religion of the Jesuites, never heard of before: who have found out a way of ful perfection, which neither prophet, nor Apostle could never spie out before’.15 Reformed commonplaces about this sly and sanctimonious upstart sect were already in wide circulation. This was the backdrop against which Cardinal William Allen and Robert Persons began to urge the General of the Society Everard Mercurian 10

 McCoog, Society of Jesus, pp. 78, 101.  Aveling, Jesuits, p. 20. 12   McCoog, p. 101. See also OED, s.v. ‘jesuit’ and ‘jesuitical’. 13  Thomas Stapleton, A counterblast to M. Hornes vayne blaste against M. Fekenham (Louvain, 1567), fo. 533 [vere 541]–542r. 14   David Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825 (Berkeley, CA, 1973), pp. 31–2. Foreign publications include Lukas Osiander, Falsche Lehre der Jesuiten (1568); Johann Fischart, Fides Jesu et Jesuitarum (1573), and Jan Niemojewski, Diatribe (1577): see Burke, ‘Black Legend’, p. 181. 15  Philips van Marnix van St. Aldegonde, The bee hive of the romishe church, trans. George Gilpin (London, 1579), fos 20v–21r. 11

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to give his permission for the Jesuits to join the stream of seminary priests who had crossed over from the Low Countries into England to succour the faithful since 1574. Mercurian’s hesitations about the wisdom of sanctioning such a perilous enterprise eventually gave way late in 1579 and Persons and Campion were appointed to lead the advance guard. They travelled across Europe to Rheims with a small entourage and at St Omer adopted disguises to aid their safe passage across the Channel in June 1580. Dressed as a captain, Persons went ahead, followed by Campion ten days later wearing the attire of a jewel merchant. After a brief stay in London, the pair split up to undertake a missionary tour of the provinces. The leak (or perhaps deliberate release) of Campion’s defiant manuscript ‘challenge’ or ‘brag’ (a bold defence of his intentions and call for a public disputation intended for circulation in the event of his apprehension) made his return to the capital extremely hazardous and compelled him to lie low in Lancashire, where he compiled his Decem Rationes. Daringly deposited in the University church of St Mary on the day of the Oxford commencement in 1581, this was part of an ambitious campaign of propaganda involving both clandestine printing and scribal publication that was a central element of the Jesuit mission from the very beginning. Persons’ own Briefe discours calling upon Catholics to shun Protestant churches had proved no less inflammatory, not least because of its preface defending recusancy as an act of conscientious objection rather than political disloyalty and petitioning the queen for toleration. The capture of Campion in July of 1581 was at once a serious blow to the bold challenge which the two priests had mounted against the Protestant status quo and a new opportunity for public visibility. Humiliated, tortured and finally hung, drawn and quartered, Campion’s inexorable transformation into a martyr was a triumphant culmination of a year and a half of energetic evangelical and polemical activity. Like other priests, he turned the scaffold into a stage on which to mount a final protest against the Elizabethan state and to demonstrate the truth of his faith to the assembled spectators. Not long after his apprehension, Persons had strategically retreated to the Continent to pursue other plans for achieving the re-Catholicisation of England, but by then two other Jesuits, Jasper Heywood and William Holt, had landed at Newcastle. Others followed, but barely a dozen members of the Society would be present in the country at any one point before 1600.16

16   See McCoog, Society of Jesus, ch. 4 for a detailed account. On the way in which Catholic martyrs appropriated the scaffold, see Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England’, P&P, 153 (1996): 64–107.

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How, then, did the authorities and English society respond to the arrival of Persons and Campion? What evidence is there that this fostered a mood of anxiety, panic and fear? Even before they set foot on their native soil intelligence sources coordinated by Sir Francis Walsingham were reporting news of their journey. Officials at ports were put on high alert and apparently supplied with descriptions and mocked-up pictures of their habits and features to help identify them.17 After it became known that they had slipped through the net at Dover, attempts to detect and apprehend the twosome and their disciples and sympathisers intensified. On 6 September 1580 the Privy Council implored Lord Norris and Sir Edward Umpton to take diligent order that ‘the places of haunte and the persons of sundry Jesuites and priestes lurking within the countie of Oxon’ were diligently searched. Other letters written in the autumn suggest that the authorities suspected that more than a handful were at large in the realm. Reports from spies on the Continent, communications from magistrates and sheriffs in the provinces and intercepted Catholic correspondence between Rheims and Rome reinforced the atmosphere of urgency which gripped Elizabeth’s government.18 So too did the anonymous papers and verses that were surreptitiously being dispersed along the channels of the Catholic underground. As Campion’s ‘brag’ began to pass from hand to hand in manuscript, the houses of prominent laypeople were raided in pursuit of copies of these fly leaves and other ‘lewd and forbidden books’.19 Simultaneously, the Protestant clergy began to crank a formidable counter-propaganda machine into action. The puritan minister William Charke led the way in December 1580 with his Answere to this ‘seditious pamphlet’, which viciously blasted these ‘scorpions’ who sought to poison the ignorant laity with their ‘carnall intisements’ and compared them with the frogs and caterpillars that had plagued ancient Egypt. He appended to his tract a translation of the former German Jesuit Christian Francken’s Colloquium Jesuiticum (1578), an insider’s exposé of the ‘pharisaicall religion’ of ‘a swarme of hypocrites and superstitious men’ who hid

17   See Robert Persons, ‘Of the Life and Martyrdom of Father Edmond Campion’, edited from Collectanea P (formerly at Stonyhurst College, now in the Archives of the British Province of the Society of Jesus, London), in Letters and Notices, 57 (1877): 219–42; 58 (1877), 308–39; 59 (1878), 1–68, quotation at p. 14. All subsequent quotations are from issue 59. 18   APC, xii. 198 and see also p. 271. See also CSP Dom 1547–1580, pp. 672, 676; CSPD 1581–90, pp. 1, 4, 5, 10, 15, 21, 31. 19   CSPD 1547–1580, p. 688. See also Patrick Ryan (ed.), ‘Some Correspondence of Cardinal Allen, 1579–85, from the Jesuit Archives’, Miscellanea VII, CRS 9 (London, 1911), p. 31.

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their real intentions under the cloak of ‘a feined & painted holinesse’.20 The Welsh vicar Meredith Hanmer followed suit early in January with a fresh attack on Campion’s ‘bumbast’ and upon an order of friars that he identified as another device of the devil to inveigle the simple. He followed this up later that year with a further set of scurrilous revelations about the ‘rable of Locustes’ that comprised the Society entitled The Jesuites banner, which also contained a systematic character assassination of its founder Ignatius Loyola.21 Even more vituperative in tone was the Heidelberg professor of divinity Pierre Boquin’s Defence of the olde, and true profession of Christianitie against the new, and counterfaite secte of Jesuites, translated by a certain ‘T.G’. who declared it to be ‘very necessarie, and profitable for this present time’ to arm Englishmen and women against them. Branding the Society as the ‘newe army of Satan’, Boquin’s book spared no effort to unmask this offspring of the Romish Antichrist and whore of Babylon. ‘The parasites of wicked Popes, ignoraunt princes, and the superstitious vulgar people’, these ‘disguised Apostles’ were the insidious agents of Lucifer’s bid to nourish confusion and sow error in the last age of the Church ‘under the color of reformation’.22 Drawing on an older vocabulary of deviance that had long been employed to denounce medieval heretics, such works recombined familiar ingredients to flesh out the skeleton of this new epitome of evil. The apostasy of a former student at the English College at Rome, John Nichols, in February was a windfall for the Protestant cause which the authorities seem to have readily exploited to cast fresh aspersions on the Jesuits. Alleged to be the ‘Popes Scholer’ and a renowned and learned doctor of the Society, Nichols’ public recantation and the printed version that appeared soon after caused a considerable stir in the capital. The renegade proceeded to publish a further tract entitled his Pilgrimage, in which he ‘displaied’ the lives ‘the hypocriticall Jesuites’ alongside those of the ‘proude Popes, ambitious Cardinals, lecherous Bishops’ and ‘fat bellied Monkes’. This crude exercise in caricature added a fresh element to the mix: it incorporated bawdy and salacious revelations about the sexual misdemeanours of members of the order and their lustful liaisons with 20   William Charke, An answere to a seditious pamphlet lately cast abroade by a Jesuite (London, 1580), sigs A8r, B1v, B8v, and passim. Francken’s Conference or Dialogue discovering the sect of Jesuites, trans. W.F. (London, 1580) was appended to it: quotations at sigs F8r, F3r. 21   Meredith Hanmer, The great bragge and challenge of M. Champion (London, 1581), quotation at sig. A3r and The Jesuites banner (London, 1581), quotation at sig. A2v. 22  Pierre Boquin, A defence of the olde, and true profession of Christianitie against the new, and counterfaite secte of Jesuites, trans. T.G. (London, 1581), sigs A1v, A2v, pp. 74, 148, 160. This was an English translation of Assertio veteris et veri christianismi adversus novum et fictum jesuitismum (Heidelberg, 1579).

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courtesans and prostitutes.23 Nichols, who was in fact a man of humble abilities, was probably assisted in his literary activities by the Protestant officials who stage-managed the sermons he delivered after his conversion at the Tower of London. Even Robert Persons had to admit that the ‘tempest’ caused by this episode had caused many in the kingdom to waver and compelled him to weigh in with his own ‘discoverie’ of Nichols’ ‘rank fraud’.24 The Nichols affair followed in the wake of a royal proclamation of 10 January 1581 which called for the arrest of these ‘wicked instruments’ of the pope and his delegates, whom, it declared, had been sent under the cover of ‘a holy name’ to corrupt and pervert the populace and foment rebellion in the realm. Maintainers and abettors of these ‘vagrant persons’ would receive severe punishment.25 Later that month Parliament debated and passed a bill extending the law of treason to encompass the activities of missionaries who withdrew her Majesty’s subjects from obedience to her to the see of Rome and increasing the fines for recusancy and hearing mass to crippling sums. Sir Walter Mildmay’s vehement speech to the Commons provides a clear expression of the impassioned anxiety about the Jesuit that underpinned this extraordinarily fierce legislative initiative: he spoke of the ‘rable of vagrant fryers newly sprung upp and coming through the world to trowble the Church of God, whose principall errand is, by creeping into the howses and familiarityes of men of behaviour and reputacion, not only to corrupt the realme with false doctrine, but also under that pretence to stir sedition’. Tools of the papacy and its princely allies, it was vital that these ‘runagates’ were expunged from the country with the utmost expedition.26 Such sentiments were shared by Lord Burghley, who would later write in his famous Execution of justice (1583) of the ‘evident perils’ that would follow, ‘if these kind of vermin were suffered to creepe by stealth into the Realme and to spreade their poyson within the same, howsoever when they are taken, like hypocrites, they coloure and counterfeit the same with profession of devotion in religion’.27 23   John Nichols, A declaration of the recantation of John Nichols (London, 1581); John Nichols pilgrimage (London, 1581), esp. sigs I1v–7r. See Leo Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Persons, S.J., vol. I to 1588, CRS 39 (London, 1942), p. 85. 24   See J.H. Pollen (ed.), ‘The Memoirs of Father Robert Persons’, in Miscellanea II, CRS 2 (London, 1906), pp. 181–2, and Miscellanea IV, CRS 4 (London, 1907), pp. 7–9. Robert Persons, A discoverie of I. Nichols minister, misreported a Jesuite, lately recanted in the tower of London ([London secret press, 1581]). 25  Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3 vols (New Haven and London, 1964–69), ii. 481–4. 26   23 Eliz. 1.c.1; T.E. Hartley (ed.), Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, vol. I 1558–1581 (Leicester, 1981), pp. 504–5, and see p. 528. 27   William Cecil, The execution of justice in England (London, 1583), fo. B1r.

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The language that suffused these acts, proclamations, and official manifestoes provided a rhetorical resource that fed back into the wider anti-Jesuit discourse circulating around them: these authorised articulations of the threat presented by the sect must been seen as lying on a continuum with other hostile representations of the Society.28 They also set the agenda and supplied the justificatory framework for the public execution of Campion later that year, who was paraded down to London with a paper pinned to his hat emblazoned with the words ‘CAMPION THE SEDITIOUS JESUIT’ in capital letters.29 Such forms of street theatre were simultaneously assertive spectacles of state power and Protestant superiority and symptoms of a climate of fear about the vulnerability of England to a renewed assault by Rome’s latest set of envoys. Both strands of feeling also found expression in sermons, including those preached to Catholic prisoners in the Tower by William Fulke and John Keltridge in May of 1581 and subsequently published for wider consumption. The latter blasted the Jesuits as ‘instruments of Satan, raysed up for our sinnes, as two edged Swoordes to rent and cut in peece, the poore Church of England’, ‘flaming firebrands’ who loved the Pope as a terrestrial God.30 Preachers at Paul’s Cross such as Anthony Anderson and James Bisse joined the assault upon the ‘late upstart Jesuits’ and ‘pestilent cancre worms’ who troubled the commonwealth.31 The same message was conveyed in the anti-popish ephemera that flowed from the press over the period between June 1580 and December 1581: three halfpenny pamphlets and ballads with titles like The rooting out of the romishe supremacy; The rippinge up of the popes fardell; All shall be well, the pope is now proved vicar of hell; and A gentle jyrke for the Jesuit composed by the well-known pot-poet William Elderton.32 Such condemnations of the Catholic cause from ‘the tribunal of an ale bench’ bear witness to an atmosphere of debate and discussion about the arrival of the Jesuits that penetrated to all levels of English society.33 Sung to rousing tunes by minstrels and balladmongers 28

  Cf. Dolan, Whores of Babylon, pp. 31–2.  Ryan, ‘Correspondence of Cardinal Allen’, p. 99; Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials, pp. 92–3. 30   William Fulke, A sermon preached upon Sunday being the twelfth of March anno 1581 (London, 1581); John Keltridge, Two godlie and learned sermons (London, 1581), sigs A2v, D4v and passim. 31   James Bisse, Two sermons preached, the one at Paules Crosse the eight of Januarie 1580 (London, 1581), Anthony Anderson, A sermon preached at Paules Crosse, the 23 of Aprill (London, 1581), at sigs A7v, G5v. 32   See the entries in Edward Arber (ed.), A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London 1554–1640, 5 vols (London, 1875–94), ii. 371, 387, 397 and 388 respectively. 33  Persons, Discoverie, sig. M6r. 29

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such items both mirrored and moulded a political discourse that was by no means confined to the educated and literate. Frustratingly, few of the ‘unseemly pictures’ against the papacy and its minions that were evidently circulating at the same time have survived. But a visual satire entitled A newe secte of friars called Capichini accompanied by a stanza of verses offers us a glimpse of the flavour of this pictorial propaganda. Directed at another missionary order ‘sprong up of late’, it warned of the danger these humbly dressed evangelists (which ‘doe nowe within Andwarpe keepe their abidinge’) presented to unwary Protestants who listened to their ‘false tidinge[s]’ (Figure 10.1).34 Such broadsides helped to give shape to emerging stereotypes and the collective anxieties which they enshrined. Finally, attention must be drawn to the part played by speech in the formation of public opinion about the mission. At ‘ordinary tables and in other public meetings’ in the autumn of 1580 there was said to be ‘no other talk’ but of Campion’s brag and again in March 1581 a gentleman wrote to his cousin in Ludlow that there ‘much ado in London about papists & Jesuites’. A few months later Persons himself was reporting to his superior in Rome, Alfonso Agazarri, that ‘there is tremendous talk here of Jesuits, and more fables are told about them than were told of old about monsters. For as to the origin of these men, their way of life, their institute, their morals and teaching, their plans and actions, stories of all sorts are spread abroad … and these contradict one another and have a striking resemblance to dreams’.35 Remarkably similar rumours had apparently circulated in Scotland in 1579: when John Hay arrived in Dundee ‘the word Jesuit was in everybody’s mouth’ and ‘it was reported all over the kingdom that twelve members of the Society’ had landed there and ‘begun to prove that all the ministers were ignorant deceivers’.36 Such gossip and hearsay were critical in crystallising ideas and magnifying fears: to echo Ethan Shagan, every person in the chain of their transmission was participating in a conversation about contemporary religious politics and adding to it.37 This was something of which the Elizabethan regime itself was keenly aware: a proclamation issued in July 1580 clamped down on ‘murmurers and spreaders’ of rumours about foreign invasion and ordered 34  As mentioned by Persons: Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials, p. 60. A newe secte of friars called Capichini ([London?, 1580]). 35  Persons, ‘Of the Life … of Campion’, p. 62; CSPD 1581–90, p. 10; Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials, p. 83. 36   W. Forbes-Leith (ed.), Narratives of Scottish Catholics under Mary Stuart and James VI (London, 1889), p. 145. 37  Ethan H. Shagan, ‘Rumours and Popular Politics in the Reign of Henry VIII’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 2001), p. 31 and pp. 30–66. See also Burke, ‘Black Legend’, pp. 172–3.

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Figure 10.1 A Protestant warning to beware of false prophets: A newe secte of friars called Capichini ([London, 1580]). © The British Library Board. Shelfmark Huth 50 (43).

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that they be brought to local justices and punished as ‘sowers of sedition’ and ‘traitorous contagions’.38 One index of the sensitivities to which the arrival of Persons and Campion gave rise in English society is the willingness of individuals to report imprudent remarks made by their neighbours. The case of John Pullyver, who was indicted before the Essex assizes for saying that ‘the masse was up in Lyncolneshier very brym’ and ‘that some did saie that we had no quene’, is especially revealing: made on 23 July at Writtle, just a week after Persons had slipped into England, his statement and, more particularly, the reaction of his peers provides a tiny glimpse of the concerns and worries that were coming to a head in local communities that summer.39 No less illuminating is an episode that reached the ears of the Privy Council in May of the following year. The queen’s advisors sent a deputy, Lord North, to investigate allegations that William Shepherd, rector of Haydon on the border between Essex and Cambridgeshire, had ‘in sondry sermons’ delivered ‘verie corrupte and daungerous doctrine, especially tending to the commendacion of the Jesuites (a verie lewde and seditious sorte of Popish preistes)’ and that he remained adamantly ‘in defence of his said doctrine and hathe procured malice towards the complainaunt’. Shepherd, who had been appointed to the benefice in 1541 and weathered the storm of the repeated religious upheavals of the previous four decades, appears to have been the victim of wilful misunderstanding by a faction of zealously Protestant parishioners intent upon depriving him of his living: preaching on New Year’s Day he had innocently exhorted his hearers to aspire to new heights of spiritual virtue – ‘to study to be true Christians, true Jesuits’. But his words assumed a sinister meaning in the context in which they were uttered and his ‘ill willers’ leapt upon the opportunity and accused him of commending ‘those Jesuits that were lately entered into this land from beyond the seas’ and ‘the austerity and holiness of their lives’. Despite Shepherd’s earnest protestations to the contrary, Lord North took a severe view of the 78-year-old minister’s unfortunate blunder: he was prohibited from preaching in the future and instructed to read from the book of homilies instead; ordered to recant his speech about the Jesuits; and to pay his accusers £3 10s.40 The circumstances in which 38

 Hughes and Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations, ii. 469–71.   J.S. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records: Essex Indictments: Elizabeth I (London, 1978), p. 203. 40   APC 1581–1582, p. 56; F.S. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Disorder. Mainly from Essex Sessions and Assize Records (Chelmsford, 1970), pp. 48–9. On Shepherd’s troubles, see the extended discussion in Mark Byford, ‘The Price of Protestantism: Assessing the Impact of Religious Change on Elizabethan Essex: The cases of Heydon and Colchester, 1558–1594’ (unpubl. DPhil dissertation, University of Oxford, 1989). On North, an ally of Leicester and a stout supporter of puritan preachers, see John Craig’s entry in the ODNB. 39

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Shepherd clashed with his adversaries deserve more detailed scrutiny elsewhere; here they open a window into the mindset of the godly and of leading figures in the Elizabethan regime at this tense and troubled time.

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II We must now turn to examine the environment in which these manifestations of ‘moral panic’ occurred. As Patrick Collinson commented more than 40 years ago, this was a moment when ‘Elizabethan policy stood balanced on a knife-edge’: domestic politics converged with international issues to make the late 1570s a critical juncture. The ignominious fall of Edmund Grindal, archbishop of Canterbury, after clashing with the queen over the suppression of the prophesyings in 1576 had cast a lasting shadow over the progressive and militant Protestant party that had hitherto dominated at court. The ascendancy of moderate puritanism over which the earl of Leicester and his friends had presided now seemed in real danger of eclipse, along with their fervent hopes for intervening more proactively in the Netherlands. Changes in the composition of the episcopal hierarchy were threatening the prospects for further reform of the Church and a circle of more conservative and crypto-popish courtiers, including Edward Vere, the earl of Oxford, Lord Henry Howard and Charles Arundell, were rising in influence at the heart of government. In October 1579, when Elizabeth temporarily banished Leicester and Walsingham from her presence and considered the promotion of four Catholics to the rank of privy councillors, ‘there was the chance of a real palace revolution’.41 A key factor in the twirling of the kaleidoscope of alliance and patronage at court was the revival late the previous year of negotiations for a dynastic match between the English queen and François de Valois, duke of Alençon and now duke of Anjou. The whole notion of a marriage between the English monarch and the Catholic heir to the French throne was anathema to those of advanced Protestant views. In the eyes of men like the London lawyer John Stubbe, whose audacious protest against the engagement in The discoverie of a gaping gulf was punished by the amputation of his right hand, it was a heinous breach of divine law and a political catastrophe which opened the way for the kingdom to be absorbed into France. Stubbe’s pamphlet struck a chord with a wider body of public opinion both inside and outside court which was antagonistic to the marriage, and to the associated possibility that some kind of religious

41  Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), pp. 198, 200, and pp. 191–207 passim.

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liberty might be granted to Anjou’s coreligionists. Oxford and others of Catholic sympathy were in fact directly angling for this with the queen.42 Thomas McCoog has recently suggested that the renewal of these marital negotiations was the vital factor that persuaded the reluctant Mercurian to sanction the Jesuit mission led by Persons and Campion. Expectations of a successful French match which would fundamentally transform the situation in England were, he argues persuasively, a sine qua non for the reversal of his earlier refusal to permit such a risky expedition. Upbeat reports from informants at home made it seem like a propitious time at which to parachute the Society into the country. In this sense the mission may indeed be seen as a daring religio-political intervention.43 The leading English Catholics whom Allen and Parsons claimed had called urgently for Jesuit assistance may well have included the pro-marriage courtiers Oxford, Arundell and Henry Howard. And here the fallout from the factional jostling that resulted in Oxford’s defection from the Anjou camp at Christmas 1580 is surely significant: his confessions and the cluster of accusations he then levelled against his erstwhile friends Arundell and Howard hinted at just how serious was the current Catholic threat and how closely the Society of Jesus appeared to be implicated in it. Not only was Arundell alleged to have heard mass celebrated by a Jesuit; he was also said to have brought one to see the queen dance in her privy chamber. It is difficult to substantiate claims coloured by malice and spite and said to be ‘slanderous’, but the very fact of their articulation served to fuel the atmosphere of anxiety I have been describing here.44 Another element in the chemical equation that created this climate of acute unease was the papally financed and Spanish-backed invasion of Ireland by James Fitzmaurice in July of 1579. Accompanied by Nicholas Sander, Fitzmaurice had called upon the Irish lords to join him in a 42   See Natalie Mears, ‘Counsel, Debate and Queenship: John Stubbe’s The discoverie of a gaping gulf, 1579’, HJ, 44 (2001): 629–50; Mears, Queenship, pp. 199–203. For this context, see also Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven and London, 1996). 43   Thomas M. McCoog, ‘The English Jesuit Mission and the French Match, 1579– 1581’, CHR, 87 (2001): 185–213; Lake and Questier, ‘Puritans, Papists, and the “Public Sphere”’, 612–25. See also John Bossy, ‘English Catholics and the French Marriage’, RH, 5 (1959): 2–16. To speak of the mission as a religio-political enterprise is to open a large can of worms and to enter into a long running debate. For recent interventions, see Michael L. Carrafiello, ‘English Catholicism and the Jesuit Mission of 1580–1581’, HJ, 37 (1994), 761–74; Stefania Tutino, Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570–1625 (Aldershot, 2007), ch. 2. On Parsons, see also John Bossy, ‘The Heart of Robert Persons’, in Thomas M. McCoog (ed.), The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits (Woodbridge, 1996), pp. 141–58. 44   CSPD 1581–90, pp. 38–9. On Oxford’s defection, which was prompted by Leicester, see McCoog, ‘English Jesuit Mission’, pp. 202–3.

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rebellion against the heretical Queen Elizabeth and the repercussions of this challenge resulted in skirmishes and conflicts that were not finally extinguished until the massacre of a force of Italians and Spaniards at Smerwick in November 1580.45 The renewed fears of a general revolt and of an invasion of England itself that coincided with the Jesuits’ arrival fed into the perturbation that surrounded it. Hearing reports of these schemes at Rheims, even Persons and Campion could foresee that they would be regarded as having been privy to them and that they would render their venture all the more dangerous.46 This too served to heighten the sense that the religious integrity of the realm was in real jeopardy. A further piece in the puzzle is the nexus between the concern generated by the arrival of the Jesuits and the simultaneous surge of animus against the ‘horrible secte of grosse and wicked Heretiques’ known as the Family of Love. Chris Marsh has seen the campaign against this mysterious and secretive group (whose members included several of the queen’s own yeomen of the guard) which marked the late 1570s and 80s as product of the same worries within the puritan camp that galvanised the drive against papists. Denounced in sermons and tracts, hunted down in the provinces, targeted in a proclamation of 3 October 1580 and the subject of a parliamentary bill that nearly succeeded in outlawing them completely, the Familists, he argues, were ‘a symbolic culprit, a punch bag against which radical protestants sought to relieve their hostile anxieties’. They were a scapegoat for the myriad fears of the godly at a moment of perceived crisis and emergency.47 The chronological link between this crusade and the passions unleashed by the Jesuit mission is, I think, more than a mere coincidence. Both groups operated in a clandestine manner and deployed the printing press with ingenuity and skill; both professed an intense spirituality that their enemies dismissed as hypocritical piety. These similarities were not lost on contemporaries, who regarded these ‘sects’ on the right and the left as two sides of the same diabolical coin. William Charke yoked the Jesuits with ‘the godlesse of familie of selflove’ as enemies of the true Gospel; Meredith Hanmer was also quick to point out the ways in which the Jesuits ‘shaketh hands’ with their ‘brethren’ the Familists, a ‘detestable’ society of ‘like antiquity’; and John Keltridge mentioned them in the same breath as evidence of the trials to which the Church of Christ

45

 McCoog, Society of Jesus, pp. 116–18.   See Persons, ‘Of the Life of … Campion’, p. 11. For the rumours see Hughes and Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations, ii. 469–71. 47   Christopher W. Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630 (Cambridge, 1994), ch. 5, quotation at p. 126. 46

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was periodically subject by the permission of the Almighty.48 Both were wolves in sheep’s clothing. They were the ‘false prophets’ which Scripture warned would proliferate immediately prior to the end of the world.49 This brings us to a context for the clamour surrounding the Jesuit mission that has hitherto been overlooked by its historians. It is all too easy to dismiss the apocalyptic and demonological language in which Elizabethan polemicists couched their attacks upon the Society as mere hyperbole and empty rhetoric. We need, though, to take the eschatological tone of many of the texts that the arrival of Persons and Campion engendered very seriously. There is much to suggest that this was a moment when anxiety about providential intervention and the imminence of the final apocalypse reached one of a series of peaks of intensity. The message which some preachers conveyed from the pulpit during this period was fraught with ambivalence: their recognition of the unparalleled mercies and blessings that had been bestowed upon England was tinged with a conviction that its brazen ingratitude and manifold iniquities were drawing down the consuming wrath of God. At Paul’s Cross and Christ’s Church in January 1581 James Bisse warned his audiences that the Lord stood ‘at the doores’ and would soon turn their nation into a Sodom and Gomorrah. He would punish it with a famine of the Word and cut down the barren fig tree which, after 23 years of the Gospel, had born so little and such bitter fruit. Taking up the same parable as his text in April, Anthony Anderson was no less certain that lack of zeal combined with rampant sin and security had now tried divine patience to breaking point. The Jesuits and other ‘Papisticall spirites [who] doe streame out againste us’ were just one token that soon his sharp sentence against England would be executed.50 Keltridge too was of the view that the ‘candlesticke’ of the true religion might shortly be removed.51 The sense that all this was a prelude to the second coming of Christ found widespread expression. At Exeter on 6 December 1579, John Chardon gave voice to mounting expectation that the end was nigh, telling his auditors to trim their lamps like wise virgins and urging them to take careful note of the signs in heaven and on earth that foretold the last days. Thomas Roger’s 1577 translation of Sheltco a Geveren’s tract on this topic, enlarged in 1578, tapped into the same pocket of feeling and was

48

 Charke, Answere, ‘To the Reader’; Hanmer, Jesuits banner, sig. A3r–v; Hanmer, Great bragge, p. 3; Keltridge, Two godlie and learned sermons, sig ¶4v. John Calvin linked Anabaptists with the Jesuits: The institution of Christian religion (London, 1561), fo. 127r. 49   Matthew 7:15. 50  Bisse, Two sermons, sigs E1r, G3v–4r and passim; Anderson, Sermon, sig. A7r–v. 51  Keltridge, Two godlie and learned sermons, sig. ¶3r.

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followed by a work on The general session in 1581.52 The same sentiments underpinned Stephen Batman’s Doome warning all men to the judgemente published in March of that year. This was a translation of a voluminous compilation of prodigies by the German writer Conrad Lycosthenes printed in 1557, augmented with many further examples of portents from England and various parts of the Continent – monstrous births, celestial apparitions, thunderstorms and other strange omens. Batman refrained from deciphering the significance of these phenomena individually, but it is clear that episodes like the birth of a grotesque double-headed baby in Northumberland in January 1580 and the plague of mice and owls which invaded the marshes of Essex in May 1581 carried particular allegorical and anti-Catholic significance for him. He saw them through the same prophetic lens as the popish ass and monk calf described by Luther and Melanchthon in a tract published in England the previous year. If his book can be read as ‘a subtle sequel’ to Stubbe’s Gaping gulf – a timely warning of the dangers of the French match – it must also been seen as a product and symptom of the apocalyptic anxieties which the arrival of the Jesuits surely served to stimulate and invigorate.53 The preoccupation of clerical writers with the ‘extraordinary preachers’ which God sent from heaven to summon human beings to judgement was mirrored at all levels of lay society.54 The 18 months of Persons’ and Campion’s mission saw a stream of ballads and pamphlets relating news of providential phenomena – malformed infants delivered to mothers in Yorkshire and Huntingdonshire; menacing visions of clashing armies and personages clad in black above Brodwells Down in Somerset and the sound of wailing hounds near Blondson in Wiltshire; sightings of spectral castles and ships near Bodmin and Fowey in Cornwall; and the blazing star or meteor that streaked across the sky on 10 October

52

  John Chardon, A sermon preached in S. Peters Church in Exceter (London, 1580); Sheltco a Geveren, Of the ende of this world, and the seconde commyng of Christ, trans. Thomas Rogers (London, 1577 and 1578); Thomas Rogers, The general session (London, 1581). For the context, see Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth-Century Apocalypticism, Millenarianism and the English Reformation from John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas Brightman (Abingdon, 1978), esp. chs 8–9; Katharine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530–1645 (Oxford, 1979). 53   Stephen Batman, The doome warning all men to the judgemente (London, 1581), citations at pp. 408, 439. See John R. McNair’s introduction to his facsimile edition (Delamar, NY, 1984), p. viii. Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, Of two vvoonderful popish monsters to wyt, of a popish asse which was found at Rome in the riuer of Tyber, and of a monkish calfe, calued at Friberge in Misne, trans. John Brooke (London, 1579). On German prodigy literature in this period, see Robin Bruce Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford, CA, 1988). 54  Anderson, Sermon, sig. F7v.

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1580.55 Summarised in Anthony Munday’s anthology of recent prodigies, A view of sundry examples, and in John Stow’s Chronicles,56 these and other portents followed hot on the heels of the minor earthquake that had shaken London and the southeast on 6 April, a ‘terrible wonder’ that left a lasting impression on the collective English psyche and which was likewise seen by many as a forewarning of the final judgement. Preachers and pamphleteers like Abraham Fleming dilated on its meaning for many months afterwards and there was much ‘prophesieng of Doomes day’ among the populace. Just the day before Campion crossed over to Dover, an official order for fasting and prayer each Wedneday and Friday was set forth in an endeavour ‘to avert and turn God’s wrath from us’. The liturgy called for heartfelt repentance lest the Lord quench the light of the Gospel and cast the English people and their children ‘out into utter darkness’. 57 Re-situated in this context, it becomes apparent that for many Protestants the arrival of the Jesuits heralded the final showdown between truth and falsehood. Reinforced by the ‘pestilent seedes’ of Arianism, Anabaptism, Familism and atheism, these were the instruments by which Satan was laying the foundations for his culminating battle with Christ, the ‘laste proppe, and staye’ of Antichrist’s ‘totering and ruinous kingdome’. Buttressed with the relevant passages from Revelation and Thessalonians, this was the language T.G. deployed in dedicating his translation of Boquin’s tract on the ‘counterfaite secte’ to the Privy Councillor Francis Russell, earl of Bedford. We need to take it quite literally. He and others genuinely believed that their world might be on the verge of destruction.58 And this was an outlook which Protestants shared with many of their confessional enemies. As Ottavia Niccoli has shown, Italy was awash with apocalyptic expectancy amidst the religious ferment, internal political strife and foreign interventions that marked the three decades between 1500 and 1530. Denis Crouzet has found the same eschatological sensibility flourishing in France during the late sixteenth-century wars of religion, especially in the circles of the militantly anti-Protestant Catholic League, and it also underpinned the ‘messianic vision’ of Philip II of 55

  See Arber, Transcript, ii. 371, 372, 378, 379, 385, 392.  Anthony Munday, A view of sundry examples (London, 1580); John Stow, The chronicles of England, from Brute unto this present yeare of Christ (London, 1580), pp. 1209–15. 57   For the reaction to the earthquake, see my Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), pp. 130–35. Abraham Fleming, A bright burning beacon (London, 1580), sig. O4v and passim; W.K. Clay (ed.), Liturgical Services: Liturgies and Occasional Forms of Prayer set forth in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, PS (Cambridge, 1847), pp. 562–75, at 575. 58  Boquin, Defence, dedicatory epistle. An elaborately illustrated copy of Paul Grebner’s Latin prophecy dating from c.1574–86 includes a depiction of a snake (‘Jesuitas’) being consumed by a stork: Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R. 16. 22, fo. 365r. 56

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Spain, as recently delineated by Geoffrey Parker.59 There are tantalising hints that the mentality of some Elizabethan Catholics had striking similarities. The ‘book of painted pictures of prophecy’ Charles Arundell was said to have exhibited at court is one intriguing straw in the wind.60 Even more suggestive is Robert Persons’ recollection of the ‘great motion of minds’ that accompanied the Jesuits’ arrival in the summer of 1580 in the life he wrote of his companion in the 1590s. According to Persons, the common and ‘vulgar sort’ of people were ‘much moved’ and ‘amazed’ by their coming and uncertain about what might ensue, particularly in the wake of certain ‘strange signs and wonders that fell out at that time’ – the same set of prodigies briefly described above. Some said that the deformed births were warnings to the Protestants about the ‘monstrous doctrine compounded of all ancient heresies’ of which their religion consisted, while the ghostly argosies and galleys seen assaulting the fortification in Cornwall signified ‘these worthy champions of Christ that were newly come from beyond the seas to batter the castle of sin and heresy in England’. The hounds heard in Somerset were another sign of the power of Jesuit preachers to bark against error and falsehood and the three dozen figures in black attire and harness which did battle with a rival force could be interpreted as the combat between these priests and the ministers of England, a contention that would not cease quickly but ‘endure and every day wear hotter and hotter until at last the conquest remain on the one side or the other’.61 These may have been retrospective embellishments dictated by hagiographical convention, but it would be wrong to dismiss the possibility that some contemporaries had indeed engaged in speculations of this kind. The competing meanings which people attached to these apparitions and portents afford compelling insight into the tensions that fractured the religiously divided society in which they were seen. They reveal in sharp relief the latent anxieties and hopes for which the Jesuit mission became a focus in post-Reformation England.

59

  Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ, 1987); Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525–vers 1610) (Champ Vallon, 1990); Geoffrey Parker, ‘The Place of Tudor England in the Messianic Vision of Philip II of Spain’, TRHS, 6th ser., 12 (2002): 167–221. 60   CSPD 1581–1590, p. 38. 61   Persons, ‘Of the Life … of Campion’, ch. 20, pp. 22–7. For later confirmation of the link between the earthquake and the arrival of Persons and Campion, see John Gee, The Foot out of the snare (London, 1624), p. 54.

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III The arrival of Persons and Campion did, therefore, coincide with something approximating to the sociological model of a ‘moral panic’. In the concluding section of this chapter, I turn to examine how the Jesuits themselves consciously and carefully cultivated the idea that their first entrance to the country had greatly disturbed the English government and its subjects and how they sought to shape the historical record accordingly. Both the reports of the mission which they sent back to their superiors in Italy in 1580–81 and the subsequent histories written by Persons and other priests to defend and celebrate their activities emphasised the commotion that their appearance had occasioned. Anxious to vindicate the decision to send them at such a treacherous time, the letters Persons dispatched to the General of the order Claudio Aquaviva, the rector of the English College Alfonso Agazzari and Pope Gregory XIII highlighted the natural receptiveness of the English people to their missionary endeavours and described the measures to which the Elizabethan regime felt compelled to resort to discredit them in an attempt to stave off mass defection. Intent upon underlining the purely spiritual nature of their enterprise, they implied that it had deliberately fabricated stories about the Society and manufactured antagonisms about the seditious intentions of the Jesuits that would help to keep it in power. Thus on 17 November 1580 Persons was at pains to stress both the fervour with which the populace had responded to their arrival and the ‘false rumours’ and ‘fraud’ which the authorities sought to impose upon it. Playing up the ‘great throng’ who resorted to the two fathers and the extraordinary zeal of the Catholics despite the intensity with which they were now being persecuted, in a missive written in August 1581, he described the official campaign of calumniation – the parliamentary speeches, polemical tracts, ‘abusive edicts’ and ‘the infinity of lies’ contained in John Nichols’ recantation – only to underline its ineffectiveness. In October, he told of the ‘very large harvest of souls’ being gleaned by Heywood and Holt, adding that the more ‘their adversaries are in fear for themselves, the more savage they are’.62 Campion was no less ebullient in a letter that was destined to be frequently reprinted as a sacred relic of the martyr. Commenting on the stir that followed the circulation of his ‘brag’, he declared ‘they teare and stinge us with their venemous tonges, calling us seditious, hypocrites, yea heretikes too, which is much laughed at. The people hereupon is ours, and that error of spreadinge abroade this writting hath much advaunced the cause’. The best efforts of the Protestant establishment to engineer popular animosity towards himself and Persons, he implied, were doomed to failure: the fruit of the mission 62  Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials, pp. 54–62, 83–90, 107–8. See also the Annual Letter for 1580–81, which was probably written by Persons, printed in Foley, iii. 37–41.

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was remarkable and its momentum unstoppable. So great was the common opinion of the Society, ‘that I dare skarcely touch the exceeding reverence all Catholikes doe unto us’.63 Scribally copied for wider consumption and written with an eye to the probability that Protestants would intercept and read them, such texts contributed to the construction of a powerful legend about the vital role which the Jesuits had played in rescuing Catholicism in England from terminal decline and in creating a defiant and undaunted recusant community. The impression that their coming had caused ‘greate stormes’ and that propaganda had been cynically whipped up by Elizabeth’s councillors to ‘beguile and incense the simple against them’ was implicit in the life of Campion Persons wrote at the behest of Aquaviva and in the various memoirs about the mission he prepared in the 1590s. Perpetuated in a range of printed works in the following decades, including William Allen’s Briefe historie of the glorious martyrdom of twelve reverend priests (1582), Edward Rishton’s continuation of Nicholas Sander’s De origine ac progressu schismatic Anglicani liber (1585) and Thomas Worthington’s Relation of sixteen martyrs (1601), it can also be found at the heart of Henry More’s official history of the English province of the Society published in Latin in 1660.64 More opened his book with the comment that ‘Of all countries to the north, England was nearly the last to see the Society of Jesus for first time … it learned to hate the Society before it experienced any real reason for doing so’, and went on to detail how the Jesuits had braved ‘the fury of the Reformers to become accepted in that island as indomitable defenders of the ancient faith’. Setting the tone for the self-congratulatory account of the order that followed, he quoted a letter written by Campion on the eve of his departure from St Omer for Dover: ‘something positively like a clamour … heralds our approach. Only divine Providence can counteract this kind of publicity, and we fully acquiesce in its dispositions’.65 By the mid-seventeenth century the notion 63

 Printed in William Allen, A briefe historie of the glorious martyrdom of twelve reverend priests (London, 1908 edn; first publ. Rheims, 1582), pp. 23, 25; cf. Persons’ comment in Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials, p. 59. 64  Persons, ‘Of the Life … of Campion’; Pollen (ed.), ‘Memoirs of Father Robert Persons’, Miscellanea II, p. 177, and 177–85 passim; Allen, Briefe historie; Nicholas Sander, Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism. Published AD 1585, with a Continuation of the History, by Rev. Edward Rishton, ed. David Lewis (London, 1877), esp. pp. 309–11; Thomas Worthington, A relation of sixtene martyrs (Douai, 1601), pp. 53–4. 65   Francis Edwards (ed.), The Elizabethan Jesuits: Historia Missionis Anglicanae Societatis Jesu (1660) (Chichester, 1981), pp. 10, 41, 77. On Jesuit historiography, see John O’Malley, ‘The Historiography of the Society of Jesus: Where does it Stand Today?’, in John O’Malley et al. (eds), The Jesuits: Cultures, Societies and the Arts 1540–1773 (Toronto, 1999), pp. 3–37, esp. 4–11.

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that their advent had sparked a moral panic had become an integral part of the English Jesuits’ self-affirming myth of their own origins. And it is important to note that this developed in dialectic with a rival myth created by the Society’s Catholic as well as Protestant critics.66 It was a by-product of the bitter internecine disputes in which the Jesuits engaged with secular priests during the Appellant and Archpriest controversies at the turn of the seventeenth century. Present in embryo in the conflicts within the English College at Rome in the 1570s and flaring afresh during the socalled Wisbech stirs two decades later, the tensions between the Jesuits’ uncompromising vision of how to re-Catholicise England and the more cautious and non-provocative approach favoured by those who had more or less resigned themselves to minority status not merely provided a fertile breeding ground for the stereotypes constructed by Protestant polemicists. They also significantly augmented them. The vicious war of words that erupted between the two sides extended the black legend of the Jesuits as a ‘generation of vipers’ and evil conspirators in new directions. The stream of insults against this ‘hispaniolised’, Machiavellian and satanic Society unleashed by William Watson, Christopher Bagshaw and Thomas Bluet in tracts like the Sparing discoverie and Decacordon (better known as the Quodlibets) was no less if not more ferocious than anything launched by the Protestants, who alighted upon these texts with relish. Watson and his colleagues were also responsible for translating into English the anti-Jesuit works of Gallican Catholic writers like Etienne Pasquier and Antoine Arnauld.67 They readily exploited the hostile analogy between members of the society and puritans, Anabaptists and familists, sowing further seeds for the belief that radical Protestant sects were the stooges of the Jesuits which flowered so extravagantly in the minds of men like William Prynne in the 1640s and 50s.68 The caricature of the cunning plotter who hid his real intentions beneath a veneer of feigned sanctity which they helped to elaborate has itself been seen as ‘a personification or incarnation of the Appellants’ fears’. It was ‘a concrete embodiment’ of the ideological and psychological strains of the situation in which they found themselves at

66

  A point made by Nelson, ‘Jesuit Legend’, p. 95.   For an overview of the literature generated by this dispute, see Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (London, 1977), pp. 116–26. For a Protestant taking advantage of the controversy, see Thomas Bell, The anatomie of popish tyrannie (London, 1603). 68   See William M. Lamont, Marginal Prynne 1600–1669 (London and Toronto, 1963), ch. 6, esp. pp. 140–43. This fear is also given expression in A catalogue of the severall sects and opinions in England and other nations (London, 1647) and [John Moon], A Jesuitical designe discovered: in a piece called, the quakers pedigree (London, 1674). 67

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the end of Elizabeth’s reign which simultaneously helped to resolve them. In short, it too was a folk devil.69 In his controversial exploration of the workings of fear, myth and history in mid-seventeenth-century England, J.C. Davis proposed that the Ranters were not a real religious movement but rather a projection of a cluster of potent anxieties about political strife, religious chaos, moral degeneration and gender inversion. They were a symbol of the maxim that if deviance does not exist, it is often necessary to invent it.70 A rather different case has been argued here: the ‘moral panic’ that surrounded the Jesuit mission was not a malignant fantasy or phobia stirred up by vociferous commentators and a sensationalist press; it reflected instead sentiments and assumptions that were shared by a substantial cross-section of English society and which bore witness to a widespread and well-grounded conviction, inflected with apocalyptic feeling, of the vulnerability of this young Protestant nation to domestic rebellion and foreign intervention.71 In the process we have gained further insight into the texture and workings of the Elizabethan public sphere, and the capacity of Catholics not just to engage in but also actively to shape it. This had contemporary repercussions and it has also left lasting historiographical legacies. The echoes of the mutual conspiracy theories to which the mission gave rise that have lingered on in modern historical narratives are not merely a measure of the enduring power of confessional passions and prejudices.72 They also remind us of how far we are at the mercy of the documentary artefacts people in the past left behind, and of the spectacles through which they refracted events. This chapter has not sought to penetrate behind, so much as to describe and to analyse them.

69  Arnold Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England (London, 1979), ch. 5, quotation at p. 180. 70   J.C. Davis, Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge, 1986). 71   Cf. Jonathan Scott, ‘England’s Troubles: Exhuming the Popish Plot’, in Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie (eds), The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford, 1990), pp. 107–31. 72   For some representative Protestant and Catholic expressions, see H.R. Trevor, ‘Twice Martyred: The English Jesuits and their Historians’, in Historical Essays (London, 1957), pp. 113–18 and Leo Hicks, An Elizabethan Problem (London, 1964) and Francis Edwards, The Jesuits in England: From 1580 to the Present Day (Tunbridge Wells, 1985) respectively.

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Part IV Translation and Transmutation

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Chapter 11

Translating Trent? English Catholicism and the Counter Reformation*

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I In 1596, shortly before departing from Seville for Rome, the Jesuit Robert Persons laid down on paper a remarkably detailed and illuminating blueprint for the renewal of Catholicism in England – an England restored once more by God’s mercy to formal communion with the Church of Rome. The product of nearly two decades of reflection, this manuscript ‘Memorial’ did not concern itself with the political processes by which the demise of the current Protestant regime would be achieved: it assumed the success of a crusading invasionary force from Spain or the providential accession on Elizabeth I’s death of a Catholic claimant to the throne. Instead, intended for the edification of the Infanta Isabella or another plausible candidate, Persons’ text comprised a series of concrete and practical proposals for the ‘perfect, full and compleat’ Reformation of a country suddenly released from the heavy yoke of heresy and liberated from the ‘fiery Furnace’ of persecution. Overseen by a ‘Council’ of bishops and lesser clerics (which Persons admitted was a synonym for Inquisition) working in tandem with a pious prince and a supportive parliament, the implementation of this ‘holy designment’ would make England ‘the Spectacle of all the World’, ‘a Light and a Lantern to other Nations near unto it’, a shining example to the rest of Europe of the apostolic purity and fervour which had infused the primitive Church.1 Persons believed that, by way of concession to the general corruption of the age, the Fathers of *

 An earlier version of this chapter was published under the title of ‘Translating Trent? English Catholicism and the Counter Reformation’, Historical Research, 78 (2005): 288–310. 1   [Robert Persons], The Jesuit’s memorial for the intended reformation of England, under their first popish prince … with an introduction, and some animadversions, ed. Edward Gee (London, 1690), at pp. 13, 12, sig. A4r, p. 3. See also p. 15. The Memorial was closely linked with Persons’s notorious Conference about the next succession to the crowne of Ingland ([Antwerp], 1594 [1595]), written under the pseudonym of Robert Doleman.

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the Council of Trent had been obliged to compromise and to omit many points of rigour necessary to purge Christianity of the creeping malaise by which it had been overtaken. Nevertheless he recommended that the decrees of this body be enacted ‘without Limitation or Restraint’ and his bold vision bears all the hallmarks of the brand of ecclesiastical discipline which is now synonymous with the word ‘Tridentine’. Its keynotes were the establishment of seminaries, in conjunction with an overhaul of the entire education system; the elimination of abuses and repression of profanation, disorder and superstition; and the cultivation at parish level of a religious culture of greater intensity, doctrinal awareness and moral austerity, assisted by remodelled confraternities closely supervised by the parochial clergy. Above all it pivoted upon the rejuvenation of the episcopal hierarchy and the development of a properly trained priesthood imbued with a renewed awareness of its central pastoral vocation. Bishops were to be diligent shepherds as well as efficient administrators, men of frugal and sober demeanour who meticulously visited their dioceses and instructed their flocks, while the lives of lesser clerics with cure of souls were to be characterised by a dignity, virtue and zeal which truly befitted their role as ‘the dispensers of the mysteries of God’ and men who opened and shut ‘the Gates of Heaven’ to the laity through the sacrament of penance.2 Persons’ scheme, of course, was never to be put to the test. Despite his firm conviction that the realm would one day return to the embrace of the Holy Mother Church, Catholicism in England remained a Church under the cross, a community which eventually reconciled itself to the status of a dissident minority sect and became what John Bossy has called ‘a branch of the English nonconforming tradition’.3 Although it circulated scribally throughout the seventeenth century and was presented to the Catholic King James II, this book remained unpublished until 1690, when it was printed by the Protestant scaremongerer Edward Gee to expose to his coreligionists the grim fate that they had narrowly escaped as a consequence of the Glorious Revolution and to inspire fresh gratitude for

2  [Persons], Memorial, pp. 13–15, 201. For the Trent reform decrees, see The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, ed. H.J. Schroeder (Rockford, IL, 1978 edn), session 14 (1551) (pp. 105–14), session 22 (1562) (pp. 152–9), session 23 (1563) (pp. 164–79), session 24 (1563) (pp. 190–213), session 25 (1563) (pp. 232–50), quotation at p. 133. For discussions of the Memorial, see T.H. Clancy, ‘Notes on Persons’s “Memorial for the Reformation of England” (1596)’, RH, 5 (1959–60): 17–34; J.J. Scarisbrick, ‘Robert Persons’s Plans for the ‘true’ Reformation of England’, in N. McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in honour of J.H. Plumb (London, 1974), pp. 19–42; Victor Houliston, Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Persons’s Jesuit Polemic, 1580–1610 (Aldershot and Rome, 2007), pp. 88–93 and ch. 4 passim. 3   J. Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London, 1975), p. 7.

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this divine deliverance from the evils of ‘naked Jesuitism’ and popery.4 No opportunity arose to put into practice the Counter Reformation so carefully outlined in this controversial and provocative document, to realise Persons’ plans for a reformed Catholic commonwealth which, in his eyes, would mark a dramatic new chapter in the history of the Church in England, and go beyond the merely ‘external reconciliation’ accomplished under Mary I between 1553 and 1558. This he disdained as a deeply flawed enterprise which had been ‘shuffled up with … negligence’ and which had merely ‘plastered’ over ‘the external part without remedying the Root’.5 It may be suspected that this unflattering characterisation of the Marian restoration owed something to the fact that Cardinal Reginald Pole had rebuffed offers of help extended by the founder of Persons’ own order, Ignatius Loyola.6 Indeed, in the light of recent research, Persons’ programme for ‘Reformation’ seems increasingly less like a novel departure than a continuation of initiatives which were already manifesting themselves in England before the Henrician break with Rome. It accorded with the priorities of a new breed of proto-Borromean bishops like John Fisher of Rochester and John Longland of Lincoln, who anticipated several of the decrees which issued from Trent between 1545 and 1563 in the reforms which they sought to introduce in their dioceses in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.7 Studies by Eamon Duffy, Thomas Mayer, Lucy Wooding and William Wizeman have likewise transformed our understanding of Marian Catholicism. It is now apparent that scholars who insisted upon the sterile and reactionary nature of this short-lived experiment were misguided, overly influenced by the unflattering account of Mary’s reign embedded in contemporary confessional polemic and subsequent Protestant historiography. Ever more evidence is emerging that, led by Cardinal Reginald Pole, the regime pursued a progressive strategy of creative reconstruction which revolved around parochial visitation, preaching and devotional printing, catechetical instruction and 4

  Gee, ‘Dedication’, in The Jesuit’s Memorial, sig. A3v. By publishing it, Gee believed that he was ‘doing a greater service to the Protestant Interest against Popery’, than any of the polemic he had written during the reign of the ejected Stuart prince. 5  [Persons], Memorial, pp. 2–3, 20. 6  See Thomas F. Mayer, ‘A Test of Wills: Cardinal Pole, Ignatius Loyola, and the Jesuits in England’, in Thomas M. McCoog (ed.), The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits (Woodbridge, 1996), pp. 21–37. 7   See Michael A. Mullett, The Catholic Reformation (London and New York, 1999), pp. 19–21; A. Daniel Frankfurter, ‘The Reformation in the Register: Episcopal Administration of Parishes in Late Medieval England’, CHR, 63 (1977): 204–44; Margaret Bowker, The Henrician Reformation: The Diocese of Lincoln under John Longland 1521– 1547 (Cambridge, 1981); Richard Rex, The Theology of John Fisher (Cambridge, 1991).

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the inculcation of a spirituality orientated towards Christ’s redemptive suffering. Anticipating a key innovation of the Council of Trent, Pole’s legatine synod provided for the establishment of seminaries in cathedral schools. And underpinning all this was ‘one of the earliest and most effective renovations of the national episcopate’ anywhere in Europe.8 The debate about the geographical and theological origin of and inspiration behind these reforms, whether indigenous or international, Erasmian or Tridentine, must be sidestepped here, but in the context of new findings about the involvement of Bartholemé Carranza and other foreign theologians in shaping this reform agenda it is hard to sustain the claim that England was isolated from wider winds of change. It is increasingly clear that the policies pursued during the reign of Catherine of Aragon’s daughter paralleled, coincided with and helped to catalyse creative trends which were reinvigorating early modern Catholicism as a whole.9 Marian England was not peripheral but integral to the Counter Reformation; indeed, Duffy would argue that in some sense it ‘invented’ it.10 In the rest of this chapter, however, I want to focus on the period after 1559 and, against the backdrop of historiographical developments over the last 25 years, to offer a series of speculative reflections on the nature of the relationship between the Elizabethan and early Stuart Catholic community and the impulses for Catholic reform and renewal on the Continent and beyond. In particular I wish to revisit the key issue of how far it was possible to implement the objectives embodied in the Tridentine decrees in a country in which Catholicism had been dispossessed of the institutional framework of parishes, synods and ecclesiastical courts and deprived of the state backing and sponsorship upon which the effectiveness of this legislation in practice depended. To what extent could a reformed Catholic 8  Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400– 1580 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1992), ch. 16; Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven, CT, and London, 2009); Thomas Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge, 2000), esp. ch. 7; Eamon Duffy and David Loades (eds), The Church of Mary Tudor (Aldershot, 2006), quotation at p. xx. See also the earlier revisionist essays by R.H. Pogson, ‘Revival and Reform in Mary Tudor’s Church: A Question of Money’ and Gina Alexander, ‘Bonner and the Marian Persecutions’, both in Christopher Haigh (ed.), The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 139–56, 157–75. 9   See Lucy E.C. Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford, 2000), for the view that the reforms were essentially Erasmian and indigenous in character; and William Wizeman, The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor’s Church (Aldershot, 2006) for emphasis on their international and Tridentine flavour. John Edwards and Ronald Truman (eds), Reforming Catholicism in the England of Mary Tudor: The Achievement of Friar Bartholomé Carranza (Aldershot, 2005). John Edwards, Mary Tudor: England’s Catholic Queen (New Haven, CT, and London, 2011). 10  Duffy, Fires of Faith, p. 207.

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piety be nurtured and entrenched in a context of official proscription – in an environment in which there was a severe shortage of the very personnel which the Council’s delegates identified as the chief agents of religious regeneration, as a sacred caste without which the laity could never hope to achieve eternal salvation? Could Trent be successfully translated into a climate in which adherence to the Church of Rome was hedged about with financial hardship, if not extreme danger and peril, and in which, from 1585, the mere presence of a priest on English soil constituted a capital crime? These are hardly new questions, but it may be timely to reconsider and perhaps modify some of the traditional answers that have been offered in response to them. It will be suggested here that, if in some respects persecution inevitably inhibited and militated against the realisation of Tridentine ideals, in others, paradoxically, it aided and assisted the process of evangelical and pastoral renewal. It should be made clear at the outset that the ‘Trent’ in my title is a convenient but, as John O’Malley has reminded us, lazy and inadequate shorthand for a movement which was in fact far more diverse and multidimensional, a movement which long predated the drawn-out sessions of the Council and which possessed many different faces and divergent, if not contradictory, tendencies. The iconic status this body has acquired since the sixteenth century has served to eclipse other dimensions of the experiment in religious renewal which it ignored and omitted from its deliberations.11 In this discussion I shall be working with an encompassing definition of early modern Catholicism, which is sensitive not only to the intolerant, moralistic, coercive and acculturating aspects emphasised by such scholars as Jean Delumeau, Robert Muchembled, John Bossy and Adriano Prosperi,12 but also to the insights that have emerged from studies by historians including Philip Soergel, David Gentilcore, Trevor Johnson and Marc Forster, who have underlined the continuities rather than the discrepancies between medieval and Counter-Reformation religiosity and 11   John O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, MA, 2000). See now Simon Ditchfield, ‘Trent Revisited’, in Guido dall’Olio, Adelisa Malena and Pierroberto Scaramella (eds), Per Adriano Prosperi, vol. 1 La fede degli Italiani (Pisa, 2011), pp. 357–70. ‘Tridentine Catholicism’, in Alexandra Bamji, Geert Janssen and Mary Laven (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation (Farnham, 2013), pp. 15–32. 12   See Jean Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire, trans. Jeremy Moiser (London, 1977 edn); R. Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400–1750 (Baton Rouge, 1985; French edn 1978); J. Bossy, ‘The Counter Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe’, P&P, 47 (1970): 51–70; Philip T. Hoffman, Church and Commmunity in the Diocese of Lyon 1500–1789 (London, 1984). Adriano Prosperi, Tribulani della coscienza: Inquisitori, confessori, missionari (Turin, 1996), discussed in Ditchfield, ‘Tridentine Catholicism’, p. 20.

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highlighted the ways in which clerical reformers catered for the continuing thirst of the laity for the magical and miraculous, successfully harnessing and subtly adapting rather than simply suppressing traditional devotional practices. In turn, Catholic laypeople have begun to emerge not as either passive recipients or fierce opponents of Tridentine reforms but as active participants in a dynamic process of cultural negotiation and interaction. Much of the energy and impetus for the drive for spiritual regeneration of the Church of Rome, it is becoming apparent, came from below.13 I shall also seek to insert the English Catholic community into a historiography which is increasingly alive to the vital role played by missions conducted by the regular clergy in the refashioning of Catholicism in rural Europe (and in its dissemination across the globe),14 and to the manner in which a vibrant and self-conscious baroque piety could emerge in regions characterised by the absence both of a strong episcopal bureaucracy and of a militant centralising state intent upon enforcing religious conformity and political order. In short, this essay situates itself in the context of shifts in perspective that are displacing rigid paradigms of hegemonic confessionalisation by a fresh emphasis on cooperation, reciprocity and

13   For some notable studies in English stressing the continuities and accommodations between traditional and reformed Catholicism and the interactions between official and popular religion, see Robin Briggs, Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tensions in Early Modern France (Oxford, 1989), ch. 9; Craig Harline, ‘Official Religion-Popular Religion in Recent Historiography of the Catholic Reformation’, ARG, 81 (1990): 239–62; D. Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d’Otranto (Manchester, 1992); Philip M. Soergel, Wondrous in his Saints: CounterReformation Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley, CA, 1993); Bob Scribner, ‘Introduction’, in Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe, 1400–1800, ed. Bob Scribner and Trevor Johnson (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 11–12; Marc R. Forster, The Counter Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720 (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1992); Marc R. Forster, Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque: Religious Identity in Southwest Germany, 1550–1750 (Cambridge, 2001); Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester, 1997); Trevor Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles: The Counter Reformation in the Upper Palatinate (Farnham, 2009). See also Mary Laven, ‘Encountering the Counter-Reformation’, Renaissance Quarterly, 59 (2006): 706–20. 14   See Louis Chatellier, The Religion of the Poor: Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism, c.1500–c.1800 (Cambridge, 1997; first publ. in French 1993); David Gentilcore, ‘“Adapt Yourselves to the People’s Capabilities”: Missionary Strategies, Methods and Impact in the Kingdom of Naples, 1600–1800’, JEH, 45 (1994): 269–96; Salvador Ryan, ‘Popular Religion in Gaelic Ireland 1445–1645’, 2 vols (unpubl. PhD dissertation, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, 2002). See also Simon Ditchfield, ‘Decentering the Catholic Reformation: Papacy and Peoples in the Early Modern World’, ARG, 101 (2010): 186–208.

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exchange and recognising the intricate transactions between the official and local, universal and particular.15

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II The first observation that must be made is that the experience of being reduced to a repressed and hunted minority provided a powerful incentive for the precocious development of seminaries for training the new species of priest. The conservative and fabian strategy for Reformation embodied in the Elizabethan Settlement very effectively assimilated much of the Marian parish clergy (by contrast with the episcopate) into the ranks of the new, nominally ‘Protestant’ ministry. By modifying the prayer book rubrics to meet the desires of the laity for the traditional liturgy these vicars and curates may have helped in the short term to sustain a residual Catholicism inside the Church of England, but their conformity simultaneously deprived stalwart followers of the outlawed faith of much clerical guidance and leadership. As Christopher Haigh and Patrick McGrath have stressed, the small rump of priests who refused to subscribe supplied an important element of continuity between the mid-Tudor Church and the recusant community which evolved more clearly into view in the second decade of Elizabeth’s reign.16 Yet the fact remains that the near-mass attrition of the Marian priesthood left a glaring gap in the provision of pastoral care which it became urgent and imperative to fill. In many Catholic countries on the European mainland, insufficient funding and administrative inertia 15

  For the confessionalisation thesis and its critics, see R. Po-Chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550–1750 (London, 1989); Wolfgang Reinhard, ‘Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the Early Modern State: A Reassessment’, in David M. Luebke (ed.), The Counter Reformation: The Essential Readings (Oxford, 1999), pp. 105–28; H. Schilling, ‘Confessional Europe’, in Thomas A. Brady, Heiko A. Oberman and James D. Tracy (eds), Handbook of European History, 1400–1800, 2 vols (Leiden, 1995), ii. 641–81; Marc R. Forster, ‘With and Without Confessionalisation’, JEMH, 1 (1998): 315–43. See now Charles H. Parker, ‘Cooperative Confessionalisation: Lay-Clerical Collaboration in Dutch Catholic Communities during the Golden Age’, in Benjamin Kaplan et al. (eds), Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c.1570– 1720 (Manchester, 2009), pp. 18–32; Ute-Lotz Heumann, ‘Confessionalisation’, in Bamji, Janssen and Laven (eds), Ashgate Research Companion, pp. 33–54. Earlier surveys which reflect these historiographical developments include R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal 1540–1770 (Cambridge, 1998) and R. Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the Counter Reformation (Basingstoke, 1999). 16   Christopher Haigh, ‘The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation’, in Christopher Haigh (ed.), The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 176–208, esp. pp. 180, 187–8; Patrick McGrath and Joy Rowe, ‘The Marian Priests under Elizabeth I’, RH, 17 (1984–85): 103–20. See also J.J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984), pp. 142–5.

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combined to hinder and delay for more than a century the implementation of the Tridentine decree of 1563 concerning the establishment of diocesan seminaries; not until after 1700 did the effects of this educational revolution bear much fruit at the grassroots.17 In the case of England, as in other contexts like Germany, Hungary and the northern Netherlands where the Catholic Church had to take rapid action to resist the Protestant onslaught, institutions dedicated to grooming a zealous, professional ministry sprang up much more quickly. Founded for largely academic purposes in 1568, William Allen’s college at Douai soon transformed itself into a missionary factory, sending its first batch of priests across the Channel in 1574. Two years later the English College at Rome opened its doors and by 1580, under the governance of the Society of Jesus, it too had become an agency for training Catholic evangelists to return to their native country. The establishment of other seminaries followed in Seville and Valladolid, the latter financed by Philip II himself, and the numbers of regular clergy operating in England were supplemented in the early seventeenth century by the launching of Benedictine and Franciscan missions in 1619 and 1625 respectively.18 Space does not permit an extended analysis of the fractious disputes within the ranks of this diverse priesthood surrounding the appointments of the Archpriest George Blackwell in 1598 and the bishop of Chalcedon in 1623, which revolved in large part around the issue of how far a national Church could implement the Tridentine decrees in the absence of a hierarchy of bishops.19 However, it may be remarked that they represent variations on a wider theme of rivalry and conflict 17  Hsia, World of Catholic Renewal, pp. 116–17; Bireley, Refashioning, pp. 139–43. See also Hoffman, Church and Community, p. 5; Mullett, Catholic Reformation, p. 157; Henry Kamen, The Phoenix and the Flame: Catalonia and the Counter Reformation (New Haven, CT, and London, 1993), ch. 7. 18  See Bossy, English Catholic Community, chs 1–2, 9–10. On the Jesuit mission, see Thomas M. McCoog, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1541– 1588:’Our Way of Proceeding’ (Leiden, 1996) and now The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1589–1597: Building the Faith of Saint Peter upon the King of Spain’s Monarchy (Farnham, 2012). 19  A new study of these controversies is overdue. The earlier discussions of T.G. Law, A Historical Sketch of the Conflicts between the Jesuits and Seculars in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1889) and (ed.), The Archpriest Controversy: Documents Relating to the Dissensions of the Roman Catholic Clergy, 1597–1602 edited from the Petyt MSS of the Inner Temple, 2 vols, CS 56, 58 (1896–98); J.H. Pollen, The Institution of the Archpriest Blackwell (London, 1920); Bossy, English Catholic Community, ch. 2; Arnold Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England (London, 1979), chs 7–9 should be read in the light of Michael Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c.1550–1640 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 250–62; Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London, 2011), ch. 9.

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between secular clergy who, with the delegates at Trent, saw the revival of episcopacy as the key to Catholic renewal, and members of religious orders whose evangelical activities cut across parochial boundaries and transcended diocesan structures of jurisdiction and discipline – a theme played out in many arenas in Europe and the wider world as well as in England.20 The point to be underlined here is that persecution provided the stimulus for the unusually early emergence of a high-quality reformed Catholic clergy: some 440 were sent over from Douai between 1574 and 1603. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign around 300 were in operation and on the eve of the Long Parliament the figure stood at approximately 750. The number of Jesuits working in England rose dramatically from 18 in 1598 to some 120 in 1623, when a separate English Province was formed, and 193 in 1639.21 Nevertheless, throughout the pre-Civil War period, the ratio of priests to English laypeople remained very low. However we calculate the actual, let alone the potential size of the Catholic community,22 it remains true that, in a population of 2.5 to 3 million, the mission was always undermanned. The problem of scarcity appears to have been compounded by one of uneven distribution, by a bias away from the north and the west toward the south and the east, and by the growing tendency of the Catholic clergy to settle in the homes of recusant nobility and gentry. Some lived very privately and quietly, ‘like sparrows upon the housetop’, in the attics and garrets of their hosts, concealed from the view of inquisitive servants and visitors. Others, protected by powerful Catholic lords who dominated their neighbourhoods, enjoyed rather more mobility and liberty.23 To explain why this pattern of clerical activity emerged, it is not necessary, following Christopher Haigh, to accuse these priests of selfishly neglecting the poor and preferring the relative safety and comfort of a manor-house over the physical and psychological rigours of itinerant rural evangelism in the darker corners of the land; nor to allege that the wealthy

20   See the points made by A.D. Wright, ‘Catholic History, North and South’, NH, 14 (1978): 126–51, at 131–2, 145; Bireley, Refashioning, p. 43; Bossy, English Catholic Community, ch. 2. For similar tensions in the Spanish Netherlands, see J.D. Tracy, ‘With and Without the Counter-Reformation: The Catholic Church in the Spanish Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, 1580–1650’, CHR, 71 (1985): 547–75, at 566–7; Craig Harline and Eddie Put, A Bishop’s Tale: Mathias Hovius among his Flock in Seventeenth Century Flanders (New Haven, CT, and London, 2000), pp. 173–6. 21   Bossy, English Catholic Community, pp. 216–23. 22   For one attempt to estimate, see ibid., ch. 8. 23  As described in the Jesuit memorandum ‘Modus vivendi hominum societatis’ (1616), in Foley, ii. 6; also in vii, pt 1, p. xvii.

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laity arrogated to themselves an inappropriate share of clerical resources.24 While such claims do find a basis in contemporary comment, it should be noted that they were often a function of factional conflict: they frequently arose in the context of polemical debates between the various clerical factions about the best method of tackling the difficult pastoral task of reclaiming the realm as a whole to the bosom of Rome. More probably, to echo Patrick McGrath, the unequal spread of the clergy simply reflected the very real risks of arrest and execution and a belief that securing the support of the elite was the most effective method of bringing about the conversion of those social inferiors over whom they exercised political and seigneurial influence.25 As Thomas McCoog has emphasised, the Jesuits’ concentration upon the moral, intellectual and spiritual formation of the landed classes was a strategic decision rooted in the Society’s original constitutions and recommended by Ignatius Loyola himself. If this strategy came at the price of the sometimes ‘suffocating embrace of the gentry’, we should not overlook the attempts of many priests to evade and obviate this, by rotating personnel from one household to the next and by the setting up, from the 1590s onwards, of independent residences.26 More importantly, the heated debate on this topic has served to eclipse the fact that the peripatetic missionary remained a long-term feature of English Catholic history. Bossy suggests that in the mid-Jacobean period resident chaplaincy was still the privilege of a few and that perhaps the majority still circulated on foot or on horseback. Not until the end of the seventeenth century did the perpetually travelling priest disappear.27 Arguably, moreover, too sharp a contrast has been drawn between family chaplains and mobile evangelists and pastors. Rich households could become magnets for the recusants and church papists of the district. Lady Magadalene Browne, Viscountess Montague, for instance, employed a priest in her town house in Southwark specifically to minister to the spiritual needs of the faithful who resorted thither and so many flocked to the family mansion at Battle in Sussex to attend mass and receive the 24

 Haigh, ‘Continuity’, pp. 197–202; C. Haigh ‘From Monopoly to Minority: Catholicism in Early Modern England’, TRHS, 5th ser., 31 (1981): 132–47. 25  P. McGrath, ‘Elizabethan Catholicism: A Reconsideration’, JEH, 35 (1984): 414–28. Haigh himself makes the point in ‘The Church of England, the Catholics and the People’, in Christopher Haigh (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I (Basingstoke, 1984), p. 203. 26  Thomas M. McCoog, ‘“Sparrows on a Rooftop”: “How We Live Where We Live” in Elizabethan England’, in Thomas M. Lucas (ed.), Spirit, Style, Story: Essays Honouring John W. Padberg, SJ (Chicago, IL, 2002), pp. 237–64. See also now Michael Mullett, ‘“So They Become Contemptible”: Clergy and Laity in a Mission Territory’, in Kaplan et al. (eds), Catholic Communities, pp. 33–47. 27   Bossy, English Catholic Community, pp. 251–2. See the Jesuit memorandum cited in n. 20 above, Foley, ii. 3–6; also in vii, pt 1, pp. xvi–xvii.

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sacraments from the three fathers she maintained there that ‘even the heretics’ referred to it as ‘Little Rome’.28 As recommended by Robert Persons and Edmund Campion, such men frequently used their residences as a base for a wider perambulating ministry to Catholics living in the vicinity.29 For the purposes of this discussion, however, I want now to look briefly at these two modes of operation in turn and to consider the implications which each had for the character of the Catholicism practised by the constituencies they served.

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III To begin with those priests who resided permanently or for long periods in the homes of gentlemen and noblemen: at first sight this arrangement would seem quite inimical to the entrenchment of Tridentine ideals. The role of the private chaplain was hard to reconcile with a body of decrees that sought to shift the focus of devotion from family and voluntary fraternal societies towards the well-ordered parish and which, according to John Bossy, enshrined the assumption that ‘household religion was a seed-bed of subversion’.30 Priests found themselves in an environment in which there were ostensibly many obstacles to the reinforcement of their sacerdotal authority. The deference that the laity owed to the clergy (a separate and superior race, which in the words of Robert Persons, were the ‘peculiar Inheritance, Lot, or Portion of God’31) was inevitably compromised, if not turned topsy-turvy by the patron-client relationship that pertained between them, by the financial dependence of priests upon their gentry or noble sponsors, by their status – and indeed their external appearance, since they disguised themselves by dressing in civilian clothes – as servants and retainers. The Jesuits stressed that the secular roles which priests assumed to mask their real identity should never be allowed to interfere with the work of their calling, but in practice it was undoubtedly difficult to uphold this principle.32 The power wielded by matriarchal figures within these households may have been an additional complicating 28

 A.C. Southern (ed.), An Elizabethan Recusant House Comprising the Life of the Lady Magdalen Viscountess Montague (1538–1608) (London, 1954), pp. 42–3. See also Questier, Catholicism and Community, ch. 7. 29   See George Gilbert’s memorandum, ‘A way to deal with persons of all sorts so as to convert them and bring them back to a better way of life’ (1583), in Leo Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Persons, CRS 39 (London, 1942), p. 332. 30   Bossy, ‘Counter Reformation’, p. 68. 31  [Persons], Memorial, p. 193. 32  See Letters and Memorials, p. 332. Bossy, English Catholic Community, pp. 257–8.

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factor.33 Furthermore, the domestication of the mass that was the inevitable consequence of the attachment of priests to Catholic magnates and their wives ran directly contrary to the reforms inaugurated at Trent, which had explicitly banned the celebration of the Eucharist in private, nonecclesiastical contexts in an attempt to prevent the intermingling of the sacred and the profane and to preserve the majesty and dignity of this holy sacrifice.34 And yet in other respects it may be argued that resident Jesuits and seminarians had an unparalleled opportunity to exercise precisely the kind of intense and close pastoral care which Counter-Reformation leaders believed was the key to the religious renewal of the laity. Within these domestic settings it was possible to direct and supervise lay devotion to a degree which was beyond the capacity of even the most diligent parish priests of Catholic Spain, Italy or France to achieve. It might be suggested that it was here, in the inward-looking households of upper class recusants, rather than in meticulously reformed, model dioceses like Giberti’s Verona or Borromeo’s Milan, that the early modern Catholic clergy had the best chance of successfully effecting what Bossy describes as the transformation of communal Christians into individual ones. It was in these contexts that the missionary priesthood was able to devote itself to the task of cultivating a doctrinally self-conscious, interior religion which revolved around regular reception of the sacrament, careful perusal of devotional literature and constant, searching scrutiny of conscience. They provided the perfect arena for inculcating a culture of moral discipline and for pursuing a programme of frequent confession and systematic catechetical instruction – in short for enforcing a quasi-parochial conformity. In a very real sense, to echo the excuse that Lord Vaux offered for his recusancy in 1581, such households were indeed parishes in and of themselves.35 Taking due account of hagiographical convention and propagandist intention, missionary memoirs and biographical remains of the committed Elizabethan and early Stuart Catholic laity supply much evidence in support of these suggestions. At Battle, the secular priest Richard Smith sought to divert the penitential zeal of Viscountess Montague away from practices like excessive fasting which smacked of superstition and empty externalism. Although she grumbled that ‘she never met a confessor that would enjoin her sufficient satisfaction’ in appointing penances, even on 33   Bossy, English Catholic Community, pp. 153–8. See also my ‘Holy Families: The Spiritualisation of the Early Modern Household Revisited’, in Charlotte Methuen (ed.), Religion and the Household, SCH 50 (Woodbridge, 2014), pp. 122–60. 34  See Canons and Decrees, p. 151. Very similar problems were experienced in Ireland: see Gillespie, Devoted People, pp. 27–8. 35   Cited in G. Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden (Newport, 1953), p. 113.

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her deathbed this ‘humble and obedient lady’ apparently deferred to the admonition of her chaplain rather than insist upon ‘her own will and her most ancient and religious custom’.36 Upon his arrival at the home of the Wisemans at Braddocks in the early 1590s, John Gerard set about establishing a new devotional regime: weekly mass replaced quarterly reception of the holy sacrament, sermons were delivered on Sundays and feast days; members of the family were taught Ignatian techniques of religious introspection; and the practice of reading ascetical books aloud at meal times was also established. He effected a similar revolution in the household of Elizabeth Vaux in Northamptonshire, where, as well as nurturing the quasi-monastic devotion of the widow herself, he gradually eradicated the abuses of her servants by means of private conferences and public preaching. Gerard’s ministry to Sir Francis Fortescue and his wife led both to make ‘continuous progress towards perfection’, to devote their lives to prayer, meditation, and improving reading, and eventually to dedicate their home to the Counter-Reformation Marian cult of Our Lady of Loreto.37 The culmination of Gerard’s pastoral endeavours was often the leading of fervent laypeople through the Spiritual Exercises. By the 1620s, under the guidance of Father James Pollard, the household of the Babthorpes at Osgodby in the South Riding of Yorkshire had become a similar epitome of reformed Catholic piety. Two morning masses were celebrated every day, evensong was said at 4pm, and after supper, immediately before bed, the household assembled for litanies; in between its individual members practised meditation. The regime here was quasimonastic in character: as Pollard commented, ‘I might rather count [it] a religious house than otherwise’.38 At North Kilvington, employees of the Meynells were likewise catechized and incorporated in the daily round of worship following the liturgical cycle.39 For seven years following 1625, William Palmes supervised the equally fervent domestic piety practised by Dorothy Lawson and her children and servants at St Anthony’s near Newcastle-upon-Tyne: here too regular confession and mass were combined with solitary mental prayer and examination of conscience. The end gable of her house bore the sacred name of Jesus and each room was consecrated to a separate saint. So too was each day of the week: on 36

  Southern (ed.), Elizabethan Recusant House, pp. 37, 47–50.   John Gerard: The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, trans. and ed. Philip Caraman (London, 1951), pp. 32, 147–50, 161–3. 38   ‘Father Pollard’s Recollections of the Yorkshire Mission’, Morris, iii. 468. After her husband’s death Grace Babthorpe took the veil and became an Augustinian canoness at Louvain. 39  Hugh Aveling (ed.), ‘Recusancy Papers of the Meynell Family’, in E.E. Reynolds (ed.), Miscellanea, CRS 56 (London, 1964), p. xxiv. 37

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Monday the widow prayed to St Ignatius and St Teresa, on Tuesday to the Guardian Angel, on Wednesday to St Xavier and St Monica. The Ignatian flavour of her devotions is also evident in her membership of the sodality of the Immaculate Conception and her dedication to the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary: ‘if she took but a walk for recreation she premized the Littanies of Loretto, which were said publickly if the liberty of company permitted’ or silently if in the presence of bigoted Protestants.40 Such recusants frequently decorated their private chapels with Jesuit symbols such as the IHS, equipping them with the latest in elaborate baroque vestments and plate, ‘according to the fashion in Catholick countrys’.41 At Rushton Hall, Northamptonshire, Sir Thomas Tresham commissioned a large plaster reredos of the Crucifixion in 1577, while at Harrowden the altar was adorned with a large gold crucifix topped by the figures of a pelican, eagle and phoenix on feast days and an extravagantly bejewelled ornament in the form of the holy monogram surrounded by rays.42 At Battle, worship was conducted in an even more sumptuous setting, with an elevated altar enclosed by rails, as well as a separately carved pulpit and choir.43 Suffused by the siege mentality that surrounded adherence to a forbidden creed, the homes of such gentry and nobility were humid hothouses in which Counter-Reformation spirituality seems to have flourished exuberantly. The residence within them of clerical personnel whose presence was at once essential for the health of their souls and, simultaneously, legal grounds on which laymen and women could themselves be executed as felons must have fostered an atmosphere of peculiar intensity. It is hardly surprising that they proved such fertile breeding grounds for male and female religious vocations: for some it was a natural step from the pious claustrophobia of the recusant household to the cloister. Here in the scattered manor houses and landed estates of rural

40   William Palmes, Life of Dorothy Lawson, of St Anthony’s, near Newcastle-uponTyne in Northumberland, ed. G. Bouchier Richardson (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1855), pp. 27, 33–5, 42–4. 41  Palmes, Life of Dorothy Lawson, pp. 38–9. See Michael Hodgetts, ‘The Godly Garrett, 1560–1660’, in Marie Rowlands (ed.), Catholics of Town and Parish, 1558–1778 (London, 1999), esp. pp. 44–9; Richard Williams, ‘Religious Pictures and Sculpture in Elizabethan England: Censure, Appreciation and Devotion’ (unpubl. PhD dissertation, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2001); Richard Williams, ‘Cultures of Dissent: English Catholics and the Visual Arts’, in Kaplan et al. (eds), Catholic Communities, pp. 230–48. 42  Richard Williams, ‘A Catholic Sculpture in Elizabethan England: Sir Thomas Tresham’s Reredos at Rushton Hall’, Architectural History, 44 (2001): 221–7; Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, pp. 244–5. See also John Gerard, ed. Caraman, pp. 168–9, 195–6. 43   Southern (ed.), Elizabethan Recusant House, p. 43.

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England we may just find early examples of Louis Chatellier’s eighteenthcentury ‘Europe of the devout’ in miniature.44

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IV English historians have often been sceptical about the ability of Roman Catholicism to survive, let alone thrive, outside the privileged domain of the rich gentry and noble household. They have tended to presuppose that it was virtually impossible to nurture a Tridentine-style piety in contexts in which the laity had only intermittent and limited contact with priests. Christopher Haigh has argued that, starved of the spiritual lifeblood of the mass and deprived of clerical absolution, much survivalist sympathy for the Old Religion ‘degenerated into crude superstition’ before slowly but surely withering away.45 John Bossy likewise suggests that ‘short of instruction and sacramental provision’, the religion of poorer Catholics ‘was allowed to tick over at the level of traditionalist practice suitable to a pre-literate mentality’.46 Both emphasise the existence of an immense gulf between the vibrant new brand of piety which the seminary-trained priests and Jesuits imported from the Continent and the vestigial Catholicism of the rural masses – between the austere spirituality practised in the homes of the nonconformist gentry and an essentially medieval religious culture rooted in rote-learned prayers, pilgrimages, relics and protective magic. They assume that Counter-Reformation Catholicism represented a profound break with traditional Christianity and that, as such, it was no less alien and alienating to the unlearned populace than Protestantism itself. Hence the rapid contraction of the English Catholic community into a largely upper class sect. However, recent work has questioned received wisdom about both the speed and the extent of this process. It has suggested that we need to revise the all-too-common assumption that Catholicism invariably perished in the absence of regular access to the clerical dispensers of supernatural grace.47 The existence of a lively seam of non-gentry Catholicism in 44

  Louis Chatellier, The Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society (Cambridge and Paris, 1989 edn). 45  Haigh, ‘Continuity’, pp. 200, 207. 46   Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 282; John Bossy, ‘The English Catholic Community 1603–1625’, in A.G.R. Smith (ed.), The Reign of James VI and I (London and Basingstoke, 1973), pp. 91–106, at p. 104. 47   For an attempt to recover this, see now Lisa McClain, Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among Catholics in Protestant England 1559–1642 (New York, 2004), though her emphasis on the divergence of English Catholic practice from Continental models differs from the argument here.

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Elizabethan and early Stuart England has been one of the more important discoveries of research by Marie Rowlands and other scholars – an urban and rural, artisan, peasant and plebeian Catholicism whose partially conformist or church papist character has all too often allowed it to fall into the shadows.48 In the light of these findings, Christopher Haigh’s claim that the English mission was less an evangelical movement than a pastoral organisation, that it concentrated on stiffening the faith of wealthy schismatics and largely ignored the task of converting peasants and heretics, may be in need of revision.49 The activities of the clergy who played a key role in succouring and promoting the notable growth of this segment of the Catholic community in the early part of the seventeenth century thus deserve a fresh look. We must not lose sight of the many Jesuit and secular missionaries who continued to rove the countryside, moving from village to village to escape detection, preaching in barns and celebrating mass in the outbuildings of farmhouses – men like William Freeman, who worked diligently in the West Midlands for some years after his arrival in England in 1587, ‘travailinge ordinarily on foote to comforte the meaner sorte in wearinesse of body and sundry perrilles’, and the Jesuits and Franciscans of Northumberland and Durham, who, in the 1620s and 30s, undertook long journeys on foot to instruct local people.50 The Appellant Roger Cadwallader likewise spent 16 years tramping the uplands of Monmouthshire and adjacent parts of Wales, while in Elizabethan Flintshire, Denbighshire and Caernarvonshire, John Bennett exhibited ‘exceeding zeale & labour confirming such as he found sound in true ffaith, and reconciling others that were fallen from it’. Captured, imprisoned and banished, he later returned to his native county to spend the rest of his life ‘with greate paines & diligence in the continuall exercise of his Apostolicall function, assistinge for the most part the poore, & meaner sort of people … [who] flocked to him in such multitudes to receave the Spirituall Cordialls & Divine food wch he freely & copiously

48   See Marie Rowlands, ‘Hidden People: Catholic Commoners 1558–1625’; Michael Gandy, ‘Ordinary Catholics in Mid-Seventeenth Century London’; J.A. Hilton, ‘The Catholic Poor: Paupers and Vagabonds, 1580–1780’; and Malcolm Wanklyn, ‘Catholics in the Village Community: Madeley, Shropshire, 1630–1770’, all in Catholics of Town and Parish, pp. 10–35, 153–78, 115–28, 210–36 respectively; W.J. Sheils, ‘Catholics and their Neighbours in a Rural Community: Egton Chapelry 1590–1780’, NH, 34 (1998): 109–33. See also Scarisbrick, Reformation and the English People, pp. 156–9; G. Blackwood, ‘Plebeian Catholics in the 1640s and 50s’, RH, 18 (1986–87): 42–58; G. Blackwood, ‘Plebeian Catholics in Later Stuart Lancashire’, NH, 35 (1989): 153–73. 49  Haigh, ‘Continuity’, pp. 194–6; Haigh, ‘From Monopoly to Minority’, 132. 50   J.H. Pollen (ed.), Unpublished Documents Relating to the English Martyrs, vol. 1, 1584–1603, CRS 5 (London, 1908), p. 347; Foley, iii.2; vii, pt. ii.1112.

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ministred to them’. Bennett’s followers were so devoted to him that they called him ‘the Sainct’.51 Nor can we afford to ignore individuals like the Benedictine Ambrose Barlow who lived a humble existence among the poor Catholics of Lancashire for more than two decades prior to his execution in 1641, or Nicholas Postgate, whose evangelical efforts centred on the moorland village of Egton yielded many conversions and made him the subject of a posthumous cult after his execution in the wake of the Popish Plot.52 Equally important are priests like Henry Morse who succoured afflicted Londoners during the outbreak of plague in 1636 and those who continued to carry on their missionary activities while locked up in gaol. William Whittingham was a celebrated metropolitan evangelist before perishing in the ‘fatall vesper’ in Blackfriars in 1623: commonly known as sacerdos pauperum, ‘the Priest of the Poor’, he was renowned as a catechist of children and was said to have converted 150 people to the Catholic faith in the year of his death alone.53 More work is needed on this sector of the post-Reformation priesthood, whose historiographical neglect parallels that of the laypeople to whom it ministered. The significance, not to say size, of the wider penumbra of individuals who only occasionally and temporarily fell within the orbit of Jesuits and seminarians has been eclipsed by a persistent tendency to define the term ‘Catholicism’ narrowly, and to apply it exclusively to forms of devotional belief and practice directly led and supervised by the clergy. Undoubtedly the perilous and precarious conditions in which the missionaries worked necessitated some modifications to and dispensations from prescribed Tridentine practice. The cases of conscience which clerical trainees studied in the seminaries provide us with a revealing glimpse of some of these adjustments. They imply that the clergy were commonly excused from reciting the hours; that they were often obliged to celebrate the mass on unconsecrated portable altars in unusual locations and without proper vestments or chalices; and that where the revised Roman 51

 Richard Challoner, Memoirs of Missionary Priests, ed. J.H. Pollen (London, 1924), pp. 299–300; D.A. Thomas (ed.), The Welsh Elizabethan Catholic Martyrs (Cardiff, 1971), pp. 317–21. 52   W.E. Rhodes, in ‘The Apostolical Life of Ambrose Barlow’, in Chetham Miscellanies II, Chetham Society, NS, 63 (1909); Sheils, ‘Catholics and their Neighbours’. On Postgate, see also Elizabeth Hamilton, The Priest of the Moors: Reflections on Nicholas Postgate (London, 1980); Alison Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 141–4. 53   See Philip Caraman, Henry Morse: Priest of the Plague and Martyr of England (London, 1962 edn); ODNB, s.n.; Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Prisons, Priests and People’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), England’s Long Reformation 1500–1800 (London, 1998), pp. 195–233; Foley, i. 87. For the Blackfriars accident, see my ‘“The Fatall Vesper”: Providentialism and Anti-Popery in Late Jacobean London’, P&P, 144 (1994): 36–87.

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breviary and missal were unavailable, medieval versions could still be used, provided the ‘superstitious’ rubrics were carefully deleted.54 The Caroline casuist Thomas Southwell judged the use of women as servers in cases of necessity ‘not unreasonable or unlawful’: the canon law prohibiting their presence in chancels at the same time as the clergy did not apply in England, where there were no public churches. Priests were granted special faculties to administer the sacrament in the open air, underground, before dawn and twice a day if necessary.55 There were other ways in which the Catholic clergy had to adapt their evangelism to suit the difficult circumstances in which they found themselves. To compensate for the infrequency of their contact with the laity, the Counter-Reformation English priesthood made adept use of the manuscript tract and printed book as surrogates and locums for face-to-face catechetical instruction, disseminating small devotional books and prints which could act as ‘dumb preachers’ to the sub- and semi-literate.56 In seeking to reassess both the strategies and the impact of this strand of English missionary activity, moreover, we must take account of the striking insights that have emerged from recent work on Catholic renewal on the Continent. First, led by Louis Chatellier, scholars are coming to recognise the important part played by the itinerant rural mission in the renewal of early modern Catholicism as a whole. Paralleling the endeavours of their colleagues in the New World, short but intense campaigns of preaching and revival conducted by the regular orders, especially the Capuchins and Jesuits, were vital in reigniting zeal and intensifying and spiritualising personal piety.57 As Eamon Duffy has commented, there is a deep irony in the fact that the most effective Counter-Reformation engine and mechanism for the renewal of parochial life was in essence non-parochial in

54  P.J. Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, CRS 67 (London, 1981), pp. 17, 21, 23, 24–5, 26, 67–9, 78–84, 86, 87, 92, 93–4. Some casuists took a harsher line on such accommodations than others. 55  Peter Holmes (ed.), Caroline Casuistry: The Cases of Conscience of Fr Thomas Southwell SJ, CRS 84 (Woodbridge, 2012), case 19 and pp. 298–9, and see case 26. In Ireland, similar dispensations were permitted by the constitutions of the Synod of Dublin of 1614 and by special faculties granted by the superior of the Dominican order: Ryan, ‘Popular Relgion in Gaelic Ireland’, ii. 215, 231. 56   See Chapter 8, above. Compare the similar developments in the Netherlands, where the Catholic schoolmaster Heyman Jacobsz composed De Sondaghs-Schole (The Sunday School) for those who had no access to priests to celebrate the weekly mass: Mathieu G. Spiertz, ‘Priest and Layman in a Minority Church: The Roman Catholic Church in the Northern Netherlands 1592–1686’, in W.J. Sheils and D. Wood (eds), The Ministry: Clerical and Lay, SCH 26 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 287–301, at 297. 57  Chatellier, Religion of the Poor.

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character.58 Without the emotion unleashed by these occasional crusading initiatives, the quotidian pastoral endeavours of vicars and curates alone could never have transformed the religious outlook of the country people. In France, such missions helped bridge the long chronological gap between the foundation of seminaries and the emergence of professional clergy; in the Southern kingdom of Naples, they helped to compensate for the inherent weaknesses of the episcopal hierarchy and the lamentable defects of the parish system; and in re-Catholicised parts of the Holy Roman Empire such as Austria, Bohemia and the Upper Palatinate they were essential in assisting the state to rebuild enthusiasm for the Church of Rome after many years of Protestant domination.59 It may be suggested that the fact of ecclesiastical dis-establishment made the modus operandi of the Society of Jesus uniquely well-suited to its endeavours in England. As in America and Asia, the absence of an episcopal hierarchy gave them a freedom of movement and activity not enjoyed by those of their colleagues who conducted rural missions as a supplement to the services offered by a still inadequate parish clergy in a manner which implicitly conflicted with the jurisdiction of local bishops.60 Hence the fierce resistance of the Jesuits to the proposals championed by the secular clergy which eventually resulted in Richard Smith’s elevation to the see of Chalcedon. Secondly, such studies have highlighted the flexibility and creativity exhibited by Continental Catholic evangelists in their attempts to make an impression upon the wider populace. They have drawn attention to the ways in which Jesuits and other regular clergy in these regions sought to adapt themselves to the people’s capacities and, to borrow a phrase from David Gentilcore, ‘meet popular culture half way’.61 Rather than seeking to suppress traditional rituals and practices, they mobilised and subtly remoulded them as instruments of confessionalisation. Using strategies of accommodation and ‘counterfeiting’ similar to those employed by their 58

 Eamon Duffy, ‘The Long Reformation: Catholicism, Protestantism and the Multitude’, in Tyacke (ed.), England’s Long Reformation, p. 36. 59  Chatellier, Religion of the Poor, esp. p. xi; Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch, ch. 3; Gentilcore, ‘Adapt Yourselves to the People’s Capabilities’; Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles, pp. 145–51; Hsia, Social Discipline, p. 51; Howard Louthan, Converting Bohemia: Between Force and Persuasion (Cambridge, 2009), ch. 6. See also Hsia, World of Catholic Renewal, pp. 200–201; Bireley, Refashioning, pp. 98–101. 60   In such contexts, conflict between mission and parish was often acute: allegations of interference and usurpation in this area were used in the propaganda wars which culminated in the suppression of the Society of Jesus by Pope Clement XIV in 1773: see Chatellier, Religion of the Poor, ch. 11. For the parallels between the English mission and missions beyond Europe, see Wright, ‘Catholic History, North and South’, 144–6. 61   Gentilcore, ‘Adapting Yourselves to the People’s Capabilities’, 274. See also Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch, pp. 2–7, 70 and passim.

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counterparts in the Far East, they sought to replace dubious customs with streamlined forms of devotion. The work of Phillip Soergel and Trevor Johnson in particular has emphasised how energetically reformers in the Holy Roman Empire tapped into a vast appetite for the miraculous and magical and worked to divert fascination with saints, relics, pilgrimages and sacramentals into orthodox channels. Backed by powerful princes like Maximilian I, they utilised the existing ‘economy’ or ‘system of the sacred’ as a powerful springboard in their attempts to counteract Protestantism and imbue the laity with a clear sense of their distinctive Catholic identity.62 Historians of English Catholicism have been slower to appreciate the fact that the priests and especially Jesuits sent over to England from the mid-1570s onwards deployed equally imaginative and theatrical techniques in their efforts not merely to rally the faithful but also to bring heretics into the fold. Although they lacked the political and bureaucratic support enjoyed by reformers abroad, there is much to suggest that they too exploited the numinous and supernatural as a missionary tool. Thus, in the cells of their prisons, as Peter Lake and Michael Questier have shown, the clergy systematically evangelised convicted felons, turning the repentance they expressed in their last dying speeches into a dramatic demonstration of the salvific power of the Catholic religion. Even in their final hours on the scaffold and gallows, they sought to transform the state’s theatre of punishment into a spectacle of superhuman bravery and courage which could induce members of the curious crowds to embrace the Romanist faith.63 Research by Brad Gregory and Anne Dillon has highlighted how they condoned, not to say actively fostered the cults 62  Soergel, Wondrous in his Saints, pp. 101–3, 229 and passim; Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles, chs 8–10 passim; Trevor Johnson, ‘Holy Fabrications: The Catacomb Saints and the Counter Reformation in Bavaria’, JEH, 47 (1996): 274–97; Trevor Johnson, ‘Blood, Tears and Xavier Water: Jesuit Missionaries and Popular Religion in the Eighteenth-Century Upper Palatinate’, in Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe 1400–1800, eds B. Scribner and T. Johnson (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 183–202. For similar developments in France, see Elizabeth Tingle, ‘The Sacred Space of Julien Maunoir: The ReChristianising of the Landscape in Seventeenth-Century Brittany’, in Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (eds), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 237–58. See also Bireley, Refashioning, pp. 107–10; Hsia, Social Discipline, pp. 151–7; Hoffman, Church and Community, p. 90. On the mission to the Far East, see now Mary Laven, Mission to China: Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit Encounter with the East (London, 2011); Tara Alberts, ‘Catholic Missions to Asia’, in Bamji, Janssen and Laven (eds), Ashgate Research Companion, pp. 127–46. 63  Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England’, P&P, 153 (1996): 64–107; Lake and Questier, ‘Prisons, Priests and People’; Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, CT, and London, 2002), section II.

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which sprang up around priest and recusant martyrs, circulating inspiring hagiographical narratives about the prodigious signs and tokens which had accompanied their deaths and the providential punishments which befell ungodly persecutors and vicious heretics, adapting them to serve the ends of anti-Protestant controversy, and promoting the proliferating relics of these instant saints as a potent thaumaturgic resource. At root, they shared with the laity a deep-seated conviction that those who took up the cross of Christ and made the ultimate sacrifice earned themselves a place in heaven at the right hand of God and acquired thereby unique intercessory power.64 Like their counterparts on the Continent, English missionaries also catered for the continuing lay need for magical protection and healing by importing large quantities of reformed sacramentals – crucifixes, agni dei and ampules of water consecrated by contact with a medal or relic of St Ignatius Loyola. The Jesuit Annual Letters from the early seventeenth century are full of remarkable cures, rescues and conversions wrought by these sacred objects.65 Pilgrimage to holy sites was harder to revive against the backdrop of continuing Protestant iconoclasm, though close examination of the post-Reformation history of the wonderworking spring of St Winefride at Holywell in North Wales yields some surprising points of comparison with baroque shrines such as Scherpenheuvel in the Spanish Netherlands and Altötting in Bavaria. Here too the clergy were enterprising in their efforts to create a tangible physical focus and locus for Counter-Reformation fervour and militancy.66 Others, like Robert Southwell, sought to counteract the consequences of Catholicism’s ejection from the cathedrals and churches which had been its ancient patrimony by encouraging the laity to consecrate domestic and natural spaces to spiritual use – from the rooms of their houses to barns, fields and woods.67 Ritual expulsion of demons was a further instrument by which priests repeatedly sought to reconcile schismatics and convince Protestants that Catholicism was the single true religion: exorcism was at once a powerful metaphor and a practical mechanism for the expulsion of heresy and it is increasingly clear that the celebrated episode at Denham involving William 64

  Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1999), ch. 7; Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot, 2002), ch. 2 and passim. 65   See Chapter 5, above. 66  See Chapter 6, above. On Altötting, see Soergel, Wondrous in his Saints, chs 4–6; on Scherpenheuvel, see Harline and Put, Bishop’s Tale, pp. 93–108. 67   Lisa McClain, ‘Without Church, Cathedral or Shrine: The Search for Religious Space among Catholics in England, 1559–1625’, SCJ, 33 (2002): 381–99; McClain, Lest we be Damned, ch. 3; and my The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2011), ch. 3.

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Weston and 12 other priests in 1585–86 was not the only occasion on which the clergy tried to transform these compelling but unstable spectacles into propaganda for the Tridentine cause. Often involving the remains of newly martyred priests, they assisted in cementing and disseminating their cults. In 1615, Thomas Maxfield reported in a letter that the relics of Robert Sutton had helped to eject a furious roaring devil from a possessed person and promised to send on an ‘exact copie’ of the incident, which he celebrated as conducive ‘to the glorie of god and confusion of his enimies: hic erat digitus dei’.68 News of miraculous visions of the Virgin Mary and other saints was similarly harnessed in support of contested doctrinal tenets like transubstantiation and purgatory.69 By such means, Jesuits and seminary priests did their best to turn survivalist sentiment to their own advantage and to rehabilitate popular piety in a reformed and purified guise. One final example of missionary ingenuity may be cited and this concerns the attempts of the Jesuit Henry Garnet and other Elizabeth priests to foster Marian sodalities and to regenerate the familiar and wellloved devotion of the rosary both as a symbol of loyalty to an outlawed creed and as a vehicle for bringing Counter-Reformation dogma and practice into the heart of the beleaguered English Catholic community. Such confraternities, Anne Dillon argues, were encouraged as cells of communal solidarity, frameworks within which the laity, in the absence of regular contact with the clergy, could find spiritual sustenance and comfort and gain access to the benefits of indulgence and the Blessed Virgin’s intercession. These voluntary societies not only offered a substitute of sorts for the liturgy of the mass but also functioned as a safe haven for men and women who might have to wait weeks to receive sacramental absolution from a priest. The Rosary was ‘a subtle piece of Counter Reformation social and spiritual engineering’, skilfully adapted to the particular circumstances of the English mission.70 Ultimately it remains difficult to evaluate the success of these pastoral and evangelical strategies, to assess how far an itinerant Tridentine priesthood was indeed able to inculcate in the middling and lower class laity an interiorised piety marked by a fuller comprehension of Catholic 68   J.H. Pollen (ed.), ‘The Life and Martyrdome of Mr Maxfield, Priest 1616’, in CRS Miscellanea III, CRS 3 (London, 1906), pp. 52–3. 69   See pp. 162–6, above. 70  Anne Dillon, ‘Praying by Number: The Confraternity of the Rosary and the English Catholic Community’, History, 88 (2003): 451–71, at 471; Anne Dillon, ‘Public Liturgy Made Private: The Rosary Confraternity in the Life of a Recusant Household’, in Peter Davidson and Jill Belper (eds), The Triumphs of the Defeated: Early Modern Festivals and Messages of Legitimacy (Wiesbaden, 2007), pp. 245–70. See also Lisa McClain, ‘Using What’s at Hand: English Catholic Reinterpretations of the Rosary’, JRH, 27 (2003): 161–76. For Marian sodalities on the Continent, see Chatellier, The Europe of the Devout.

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dogma. But the religious culture which grew up in this social milieu cannot be written off as merely an amalgam of superstition and traditionalist nostalgia: here too, perhaps, the experience of persecution and proscription helped the clergy to foster a strong, even baroque consciousness of the community’s confessional antagonism towards its Protestant enemies. It may also be argued that the very scarcity of priests enhanced their status as conduits and funnels of sacramental grace. The charisma which surrounded men who daily risked their lives to sustain a prohibited faith probably did more to encourage lay reverence for the clergy as a sanctified race than any directive from Trent. No amount of seminary training or studied ascetic retreat from worldly vanities could buttress sacerdotal authority more effectively than the glamour of martyrdom.71 At the same time, the missionary condition of the English priesthood was far from conducive to the strict assertion of clerical control over the holy that was such a central objective of the Catholic Reformation as a whole. Negotiation between centre and periphery, popular and elite was a keynote of the movement for Catholic renewal everywhere in Europe. But England was a context in which the tension between priestly regulation and lay independence must have been especially acute. The realities of operating in a Protestant country thwarted the attempts of the clergy to tightly police the boundary between the sacred and profane and facilitated the development of piety in somewhat unorthodox directions. Persecution also nourished the spontaneous growth of dozens of unofficial saints’ cults in a manner which permitted a powerful resurgence of what William Christian calls ‘local religion’.72 In a context in which clerical gatekeepers were scattered and scarce, it was undoubtedly difficult to prevent the laity from appropriating and misusing holy objects in what Tridentine reformers would have regarded as a ‘superstitious’ fashion.73 Sacramentals were apt to be used not as aids to inner contemplation, but as automatically efficacious magical amulets, and particular concerns arose around the permissibility of distributing them to schismatics.74 The missionary memoirs of John Gerard and William Weston attest to the vain attempts of the Jesuits to gather images and relics into the hands of the Church and it is evident that many laypeople retained possession of medieval sacred remains and ecclesiastical vestments long after the upheavals of

71

  On priests as living saints, see above, pp. 167–71.   William Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, NJ, 1981). 73   On this theme, see Euan Cameron, ‘For Reasoned Faith or Embattled Creed? Religion for the People in Early Modern Europe’, TRHS, 6th ser., 8 (1998): 165–87. 74  The casuists argued this was acceptable, as long as there was no danger that they would abuse them: Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, pp. 17, 91–2. 72

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the 1540s and 50s.75 When Lady Isabel Hampden’s home was raided in 1584 the searchers discovered a piece of ‘old holy bread’, and ‘a relic of hair’.76 The Staffordshire yeoman Henry Hodgetts kept the relics of St Chad in his bed-head and invoked the saint in his final hours in 1615.77 Visitation articles repeatedly enquired about parishioners who were ‘noted, knowne, or suspected to conceale or keepe hidden in their houses … challices, copes, vestments, albes, or other ornaments of superstition, uncancelled or undefaced, which it is to be conjectured, they doe keep for a day …’. As in Ireland, where clerical manpower was similarly limited, it proved exceptionally difficult to exercise control over ritual objects and to supervise effectively their use.78 Other devotional practices which the Tridentine decrees strenuously sought to refocus upon the parish were similarly domesticated and redirected into private spaces. Thus the Protestant preacher Richard Sheldon commented disparagingly on Catholics who set up tiny carved images made of wood from the Marian shrine of Scherpenheuvel in their gardens and orchards and made daily visitations to them.79 Detached from the rich visual settings which had shaped it in the late medieval period, eucharistic devotion also seems to have become increasingly individualistic, focused less on the elevation of the host in the mass than on the mental images the laity conjured up as they meditated on spiritual manuals and guides in preparation for receiving the sacrament. As a result the body of Christ was in danger of becoming the personal possession of the devout. Jan Rhodes argues that this trend may have been a consequence as much of the growth of literacy as it was of English Catholicism’s condition of proscription, but repression surely helped to exacerbate it.80 In this and other respects, even the clergy’s attempts to use books as instruments of silent instruction could backfire against them. In the hands of the laity, texts 75   John Gerard, ed. Caraman, pp. 49–50; William Weston: The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, ed. Philip Caraman (London, 1955), pp. 111–12. 76  TNA, SP 12/167/47. 77   Foley, ii. 231. 78   For visitation articles, see, for example, Bishop Richard Vaughan’s enquiries about recusants and church papists in the diocese of London in 1605: Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church, ed. K. Fincham, vol. i, Church of England Record Society, i (Woodbridge, 1994), p. 37. Similar articles can be found on pp. 42, 78, 87, 105, 112, 127, 158, 193–4, 209. For Ireland, see Gillespie, Devoted People, pp. 158–63. 79  Richard Sheldon, Survey of the miracles of the Church of Rome (London, 1616), p. 70. See also McClain, ‘Without Church, Cathedral or Shrine’, esp. 381–6. 80   J.T. Rhodes, ‘The Body of Christ in English Eucharistic Devotion c.1500–c.1620’, in Richard Beadle and A.J. Piper (eds), New Science out of Old Books: Studies in Manuscript and Early Printed Books in Honour of A.I. Doyle (Aldershot, 1995), pp. 388–419. See also McClain, Lest We Be Damned, ch. 4.

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had the potential to become agents of liberation from clerical mediation and it may be commented that the decision to publish a vernacular translation of the New Testament in 1582 carried a particularly high risk of promoting a challenge to the ecclesiastical monopoly on biblical exegesis.81 There was a tendency too for the unlearned populace to use books as magical talismans: by the late 1630s so many cures had been wrought by Pedro Ribadeneira’s Life of Ignatius Loyola in Lancashire that even illiterate persons were apparently eager to purchase it.82 It may thus be argued that the straitened circumstances in which English Catholicism found itself after 1559 conspired to empower the laity. Formal and informal confraternal groups which operated as a kind of surrogate for the parish are one further manifestation of this development. Although they hide in the dim recesses of our sources, such fellowships seem to have flourished in a context chronically deprived of ecclesiastical leadership and largely immune to the forms of episcopal intervention which elsewhere in Europe were seeking to regulate the autonomy of associations perceived as presenting ‘an obstacle to uniform parochial observance’ and a tacit threat to clerical authority. In England sometimes these brotherhoods must necessarily have become a kind of ad hoc priesthood of all believers. Even those sodalities which owed their establishment to the missionary clergy could all too easily take on a life of their own and become less a substitute for ecclesiastical supervision than a rival to it, a form of religious voluntarism which had the potential to frustrate, even as it supplemented, the efforts of the Jesuits.83 As in the northern Protestant Netherlands, the same set of conditions also fostered the creation of a kind of lay deaconate. It encouraged ordinary men and women to take upon themselves a quasi-sacerdotal role – to baptise infants in danger of death, to lead improvised meetings for worship between irregular celebrations of the mass and, like John Finch of Eccleston and Dorothy Lawson of 81

  See Chapter 9, above; Gillespie, Devoted People, pp. 157–8.   Foley, vii, pt 2, 1142–3. For other examples, see vii, pt 2, 1097, 1107. Istvan Toth has noted similar problems faced by Jesuit missionaries in Hungary: ‘Books Distributed, Books Destroyed: Books in Seventeenth-Century Catholic Missions in Hungary and Transylvania’ (unpubl. paper delivered at the European Science Foundation Conference on ‘Print and Beyond’, Somerville College, Oxford). 83  See Bossy, ‘Counter Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe’, 58–60, at 60; Maureen Flynn, Sacred Charity: Confraternities and Social Welfare in Spain, 1400–1700 (Basingstoke, 1989), pp. 117–18, 135–6, and ch. 4 passim; Christopher Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 273–4; Nicholas Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge, 2002); Nicholas Terpstra, Adriano Prosperi and Stefania Pastore (eds), Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities (Turnhout, 2013); L.G. Lazar, Working in the Vineyard of the Lord: Jesuit Confraternities in Early Modern Italy (Toronto, 2005). 82

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St Anthony’s near Newcastle upon Tyne, to catechise the vulgar sort and instruct and edify their servants. Like their Dutch counterparts, the klopjes, and the Flemish beguines before them, pious women like Mistress Anne Line took voluntary vows of chastity, even while their husbands were still living. The philanthropic and proselytising activities of these devout females bear comparison with those of the members of Mary Ward’s illfated Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, suppressed by the pope in 1630, as well as organisations like St Vincent de Paul’s ‘Daughters of Charity’. They too defied and tested the Roman hierarchy’s emphatic insistence on the need for claustration, as well as exacerbating the frictions and tensions over ecclesiastical organisation that continued to rupture the Catholic community in the Jacobean and Caroline period.84 In various senses, then, the conditions of the English mission might be seen as positively subversive of the priorities enshrined in the decrees of the Council of Trent. In a brief conclusion, it is not possible to resolve the many diverse and contradictory threads of argument embedded in this chapter. But a few key points and themes may be underlined with the aim of setting an agenda for future research. First of all, we need to discard the ingrained assumption that it was impossible to carry out a Counter Reformation in a country denuded of an episcopal hierarchy and parochial clergy. Here I have endeavoured to draw attention to some of the paradoxical consequences of official intolerance, to the ways in which persecution simultaneously obstructed and assisted the attempt to pursue a programme of Catholic reform and renewal. Within the circumscribed sphere of the gentry household, it was perhaps uniquely possible to institute a quasi-parochial regime of sacramental conformity and spiritual introspection. I have also sought to emphasise both the creative manner in which Jesuits and secular priests tried to adapt policies formulated for contexts in which Roman Catholicism was dominant to an environment in which it was reduced to a proscribed minority and their active attempts to graft fresh meaning onto traditional religious practices that were under Protestant attack. Further examination of these strategies may reveal that the relationship between vestigial popery practised in outlying areas and the spirituality espoused 84   For lay people involved in baptism, see Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, p. 15. For Finch, Foley, ii. 144; for Dorothy Lawson, Palmes, Life of Dorothy Lawson, p. 40; for Mistress Line, John Gerard, pp. 82–6. For the Netherlands, see Spiertz, ‘Priest and Layman in a Minority Church’, esp. pp. 297–301. On Mary Ward, Mary Chambers, Life of Mary Ward, 2 vols (London, 1885); Henriette Peters, Mary Ward: A World in Contemplation, trans. H. Butterworth (1994), esp. pp. 3–57; and see now Laurence Lux-Sterritt, Redefining Female Religious Life: French Ursulines and English Ladies in Seventeenth-Century Catholicism (Aldershot, 2005). On the Daughters of Charity: Elizabeth Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France (Montreal, 1990). In Ireland, the Jesuits actively enlisted the laity as auxiliary catechists: Ryan, ‘Popular Religion in Gaelic Ireland’, ii. 240–42.

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by clergy trained on the Continent is far more intricate and intimate than has often been presumed. It may also suggest that just as the distinction between resident chaplains and itinerant evangelists has often been overstated, so too has the contrast between the piety practised in upper class households and the religious culture of the rural and artisan laity. In turn this may add a new twist to the now nearly stagnant debate about the relative roles played by survivalism and seminarism, continuity and missionary conversion in the making of the Elizabethan and early Stuart recusant community.

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Chapter 12

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Beads, Books and Bare Ruined Choirs: Transmutations of Ritual Life* Late medieval Christianity has aptly been described as ‘a ritual method of living’.1 It hinged upon the solemn performance of rite and revolved around the assumption that the sacraments dispensed by a spiritually elite caste of priests were conduits of an invisible grace that was essential to individual salvation. Actions had soteriological implications: they directly affected the state of the believer’s soul and its destination after death. Underpinned by the conviction that the material world was a touchstone of holiness, pre-Reformation Christianity was also a religion of immanence which engendered a vast repertoire of holy objects and a dense and complex geography of sacred places. The advent of Protestantism in England presented an acute theological threat to this system of practice and belief. Monasteries, convents and shrines were dissolved, destroyed and allowed to decay into ruin and the churches and cathedrals in which congregations had prayed for centuries were appropriated and iconoclastically purged of ‘abominable idols’ to befit them for reformed services. Hearing mass was prohibited upon pain of a crippling fine and the missionary priests whose activities were vital to the spiritual health of the faithful were hunted down, tortured and executed. In 1585 harbouring and helping them became a treasonous crime for which laypeople themselves could pay the ultimate price. Although the intolerance of the Elizabethan and Stuart state was tempered by the combination of connivance and charity that typified inter-confessional relations at the grass roots, the fact remains that English Catholic ritual life in the late sixteenth and seventeenth *  An earlier and shorter version of this essay was published under the title of ‘Beads, Books and Bare Ruined Choirs: Transmutations of Catholic Ritual Life in Protestant England’, in Benjamin Kaplan, Bob Moore, Henk van Nierop and Judith Pollmann (eds), Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c.1570–1720 (Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 103–22. 1   Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth, 1973 edn), p. 88.

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centuries was severely constrained. Catholicism’s clandestine existence as an underground Church forced it to dispense with much of the ceremony and apparatus that had hitherto shaped liturgical experience and inhibited its ability to mimic the rich baroque culture of worship that was evolving in Italy, Spain and southern Germany. Drawing on comparative material from other parts of the British Isles, this essay examines the subtle and creative transmutations in devotion and piety that took place against the backdrop of both Protestant repression and the programme for the reform and renewal of the Church of Rome encapsulated in the decrees of the Council of Trent. As we shall see, orthodox practices were reconstituted in ways that allowed them to survive and indeed to thrive as emblems of anti-heretical defiance, but also sometimes brought them into tacit conflict with Tridentine priorities, not least because they were conducted in arenas and spaces which instinctively evaded ecclesiastical oversight, notably the home and the natural environment. Close attention to these processes illuminates the mixture of cooperation and tension that marked relations between the clergy and laity and sheds incidental light on the extent and nature of interaction between the members of competing faiths in English society, who co-inhabited a landscape that remained encrusted with potent memories of the Catholic past.

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I During the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign, some committed Catholics found it possible to maintain the central ritual aspects of their faith without too much difficulty. Time-serving Marian priests contrived to ensure that the parish communion resembled the mass, despite the revised wording and rubrics of Cranmer’s liturgy, while those ejected from their livings celebrated the traditional rite for the conservative in private. By the 1570s and 80s, however, these muddled compromises were disappearing as a reformed ministry began to emerge from the universities and a new breed of Counter-Reformation missionaries entered the country. Despite the relative scarcity of the men who could perform the miracle of transubstantiation, this holy mystery remained a chief focus of lay devotion. Those who had most access to it were the members and retainers of wealthy families like the Meynells and Treshams who played such a significant role in sheltering the beleaguered priesthood. In these devout households it was quite possible to adhere to the pattern of frequent reception of the Eucharist recommended by the fathers of Trent, and to do so in settings that sought to emulate the ornate splendour of Continental oratories erected for what Jeffrey Chipps Smith has termed ‘sensuous worship’. At Battle in Sussex, for instance, the secular priest Richard Smith said mass

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for his mistress Lady Magdalen, Viscountess Montague, three times a day in a sumptuous chapel, complete with an elevated altar and separately carved pulpit and choir.2 In Scotland, Lord Seton’s house was likewise a mirror of Tridentine observance, a model Counter-Reformation parish in miniature.3 Celebrations of the Blessed Sacrament at the house of Richard Bold near Marlow were accompanied by motets and musical instruments, as if in ‘an uninterrupted octave of some great feast’.4 More notoriously, Queen Henrietta Maria’s private chapel in Somerset House, the opening of which in 1635 was marked a pontifical high mass, was lavishly decorated by Inigo Jones in keeping with the latest French trends, and included a dramatic altarpiece displaying the glories of heaven. Part of the palace itself was subdivided into cells ‘in the manner of a monastery’ and she had a sepulchre erected for her Easter week devotions in 1626 in imitation of Catholic courts on the Continent. The Capuchin friars who served it introduced the Forty Hours Devotion, a cycle of preaching and prayer centred on the Eucharist. They also used it as a base for administering communion to laypeople beyond the royal household.5 Catholics who lived in the metropolis also had access to foreign embassies – special sanctuaries where, as Benjamin Kaplan has shown, the law of the land did not reach.6 Here and in other cities they could resort to prisons in which captured priests were incarcerated, sometimes with a surprising degree of licence and freedom. The walls of these institutions were remarkably porous. In 1583, Bishop Aylmer was lamenting the leniency that had turned the Marshalsea into ‘a Colledge of Caitifes’, from which priests were able to succour confirmed papists and ‘intise the yowthe of London unto them, to my great griefe’.7 Asked by a Jacobean 2  A.C. Southern (ed.), An Elizabethan Recusant House Comprising the Life of the Lady Magdalen Viscountess Montague (1538–1608) (London, 1954), pp. 43, 47. Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton, NJ, 2002). 3   William Forbes-Leith (ed.), Narratives of Scottish Catholics under Mary Stuart and James VI Now First Printed from the Original Manuscripts in the Secret Archives of the Vatican and Other Collections (Edinburgh, 1885), p. 177. See also Margaret H.B. Sanderson, ‘Catholic Recusancy in Scotland in the Sixteenth Century’, Innes Review, 10 (1959): 87–107, at 96. 4   William Weston, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, ed. and trans. Philip Caraman (London, 1955), p. 71. 5   See Caroline M. Hibbard, ‘The Somerset House Chapel and the Topography of London Catholicism’, in Marcello Fantoni, George Gorse and Malcolm Smuts (eds), The Politics of Space: European Courts c.1500–1750 (Rome, 2009), 317–37, at 319. 6   Benjamin J. Kaplan, ‘Diplomacy and Domestic Devotion: Embassy Chapels and the Toleration of Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europe’, JEMH, 6 (2002): 341–61. 7   BL, MS Lansdowne 38, fo. 212r.

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layman where he might hear the mass that was critical to his salvation, the Jesuit William Freeman replied ‘every day at Newgate’, though he hoped ‘ere it were long’ to see it performed in St Paul’s Cathedral.8 By contrast, country Catholics outside the orbit of aristocratic and gentry enclaves had to make do with occasional visits from peripatetic missionaries. The Benedictine Ambrose Barlow could be found in humble farms, cottages and barns in the early seventeenth century, while the Jesuit William Weston once administered the sacrament in an inn, having carried a consecrated host in a pyx suspended discreetly around his neck.9 In the Welsh Marches, mass was said at secret locations under the cover of night, the equipment being conveyed to them in ‘mails and cloakbags’; unbridged streams and dense forests hindered the efforts of the missionaries to provide spiritual sustenance to the faithful in the rugged West Highlands; in some places in Ireland people had to congregate at open-air sites that became known as mass-rocks during periods of intense persecution.10 Such circumstances were difficult to reconcile with the strict regulations regarding the administration of the sacrament formulated by the Council of Trent, not least its explicit ban on celebrating the Eucharist in private, domestic dwellings. The casuistry manuals studied by trainee priests in the seminaries afford a glimpse of the ceremonial concessions and dispensations that had to be made in this environment: mass could be said on portable altars without proper vestments and using tin chalices and old missal books, provided that the ‘superstitious’ rubrics were systematically deleted. It was permissible to perform it in any location ‘except at sea or on a river’ – indeed the ‘prudent’ missionary would ‘not even shrink from a bridal chamber’ if this was ‘the most suitable place’ available, ‘because it is not polluted since it is not a church’.11 Similar faculties to celebrate the sacrament underground, out of doors and at odd times were granted to the 8   BL, London, MS Lansdowne 153, fo. 143r. On prisons, see E.D. Pendry, Elizabethan Prisons and Prison Scenes, 2 vols (Salzburg, 1974); Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Prisons, priests and people’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), England’s Long Reformation 1500– 1800 (London, 1998), pp. 195–233. 9   W.E. Rhodes (ed.), ‘The Apostolical Life of Ambrose Barlow, O.S.B’., Chetham Miscelllanies, NS, 2 (1909), p. 11; Weston, Autobiography, pp. 63–4. Often when he stopped at Catholic houses, there were no altar breads available, whereby, he commented, ‘the principal benefit of our ministry was lost’: see p. 65. 10  Philip Caraman (ed.), The Other Face: Catholic Life under Elizabeth I (London, 1960), p. 52; Michael A. Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland 1558–1829 (Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 53–4; Patrick J. Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience: A Historical Survey (Dublin, 1985), pp. 116, 129–30, 132, 156, 186–7. 11  P.J. Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, CRS 67 (1981), pp. 18–25, 78–86, at p. 23. See also Peter Holmes (ed.), Caroline Casuistry: The Cases of Conscience of Fr Thomas Southwell SJ, CRS 84 (Woodbridge, 2012), p. 298.

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Irish Dominicans, and the rules drawn up by the Catholic Synod of Dublin in 1614 took account of the same exigencies by stipulating that priests ensure that the sacred vessels were protected from wind, rain and dust.12 How far the Catholic laity were obliged to travel on feast days to avoid incurring the sin of not hearing mass was another question the casuists addressed: ‘as far as possible without suffering serious harm, danger or inconvenience’ was the answer, especially in a context when sermongadding puritans often went ‘ten or twelve miles’ to hear an edifying lecture.13 Catholics should not allow themselves to be surpassed in zeal by misguided Calvinists. Participating in the sacrament was not merely a spiritual necessity; it was also a crucial confessional marker. Devotional works composed on the Continent might stress that the clergy were the ‘sole dispensers’ of the divine sacrament and celebrate their valiant endeavours to distribute this ‘celestiall bread’ and ‘heavenlie Manna’ to those under their care in ‘this our devastated vyniarde’, who were otherwise liable ‘to perishe by famine’.14 Yet for many ordinary Catholics access to the sacraments must have remained a rarity. This did not necessarily mean a slow drift into the arms of the Protestants; the determined found ways of compensating for what the Jesuit Robert Southwell called the ‘sacred hunger’ that afflicted them.15 One method was the path of mental contemplation: deprived of the physical experience of seeing and eating the host, some reproduced it mystically and inwardly, receiving the spiritual benefit of the sacrament without recourse to human intermediaries. Jan Rhodes reminds us that this pattern of the privitisation of Eucharistic piety owed as much to the proliferation of printed texts and the burgeoning culture of reading as it did to the Reformation, which it predated. But such tendencies were arguably intensified where qualified priests were in short supply.16 12  Patrick F. Moran, History of the Catholic Arcbishops of Dublin, since the Reformation (Dublin, 1864), p. 446. 13  Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, p. 108. 14   John Heigham, A devout exposition of the holie masse (Douai, 1614), sig. †6r–v. 15   J.H. Pollen (ed.), Unpublished Documents Relating to the English Martyrs, vol. I 1584–1603, CRS 5 (1908), pp. 313–14. 16   See Lisa McClain, Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642 (New York and London, 2004), ch. 4, esp, pp. 136–7, though some of the claims made in the book are mistaken and inadequately substantiated. J.T. Rhodes, ‘The Body of Christ in English Eucharistic Devotion c.1500–1620’, in Richard Beadle and A.J. Piper (eds), New Science out of Old Books: Studies in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in Honour of A.I. Doyle (Aldershot, 1995), pp. 388–419. See also McClain’s study of how veneration of Mary Magdalene increasingly focused on her discovery of the empty tomb, as a metaphor for the loss of the corporeal body of Christ in the Eucharist: ‘“They have Taken away my Lord”: Mary Magdalene, Christ’s Missing Body, and the Mass in Reformation England’, SCJ, 38 (2007): 77–96.

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The sacrament of penance provides further evidence of how the spiritual functions of salvific rituals were preserved while their outward institutional forms evolved in accordance with the difficult conditions Catholicism confronted in the British Isles.17 Counter-Reformation writers like John Radford spoke of it as ‘a plaister and most soveraigne salve … to cure our deadly woundes’ and emphasised the ‘conveniency’ and ‘necessity’ of regular confession to a ‘lawfull Priest’.18 Vital to one’s spiritual well-being, it too depended on the presence of those vicars of Christ who alone, according to the Tridentine decrees, had been conferred with the power of the keys to bind and to loose and to absolve men and women from sin.19 Once again, this did not present a particular problem for gentle and noble recusant households in which clerical chaplains were permanent or semi-permanent residents. Supervised by William Palmes, the fervent penitential piety Dorothy Lawson practised at St Anthony’s, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in the 1620s, for example, combined frequent searching examination of conscience with a formal weekly confession.20 In such arenas, penance could become the ‘vehicle of interior change’ envisaged by leading Catholic reformers like Archbishop Carlo Borromeo of Milan with relative ease. Ironically, it was perhaps in the devout households in which Catholicism found asylum in Protestant countries rather than the conventional unit of the parish and diocese that the early modern clergy may have had the best opportunity to nurture habits of rigorous internal scrutiny. But how did laypeople who had only limited contact with missionaries safeguard their souls from the grave danger of remaining in a state of mortal sin for a prolonged period? Radford conceded that in an emergency Christ (‘who … is not so bound to his Sacramentes but that without them he can give his grace’) might directly grant absolution to penitents who displayed ‘perfecte contrition, and sorrow’, even if they had not confessed to a priest.21 Similarly, in the sermon delivered by the Jesuit Robert Drury at the ‘fatal vesper’ in Blackfriars in 1623, he apparently declared that even if the ‘meanes of the sacrament’ were ‘not always att hand’ it was

17

 McClain, Lest We Be Damned, p. 15 and passim.  Radford, Directorie, pp. 100–102, 107–12. 19  H.J. Schroeder (ed.), The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (Rockford, IL, 1978), pp. 92–3, 103–4. 20   William Palmes, Life of Mrs Dorothy Lawson, of St Anthony’s, near Newcastleupon-Tyne, in Northumberland, ed. G. Bourchier Richardson (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1855), pp. 33–5. 21   John Radford, A directorie teaching the way to the truth in a briefe and plaine discourse against the heresies of this time ([English secret press], 1605), pp. 104–5. 18

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‘alwaies in the power’ of the devout to ‘lay hould on Contrition’.22 It is easy to see how anxious individuals might latch on to these exceptions and concessions and stretch them to become an everyday rule, and how pastors sensitive to the real fears of their flocks could condone a process that simultaneously had the potential to erode their sacerdotal role. The more general shift of emphasis from communal reconciliation to intimate personal scrutiny symbolised by the invention of the confessional box arguably had the potential to carry the sacrament of penance in this same direction,23 but it cannot be denied that the particular impediments faced by Catholics in Protestant countries probably did much to encourage it. In this connection, attention should also be drawn to the development of confraternities of the rosary. Sodalities of this kind had their roots in late fifteenth-century Dominican piety but, illustrating the umbilical link that between traditional and Tridentine piety, they were reformed and revitalised by the Jesuits and other religious orders as an instrument of devotional discipline and catechesis.24 These were popular in wealthy households: the chapel of Cardigan House, the London home of the Brudenells, was the headquarters of a congregation overseen by the Benedictines, while the iconography of a painted ceiling in Provost Skene’s House in Aberdeen suggests it may have served the same purpose.25 But as Anne Dillon has shown, they were also energetically promoted by Henry Garnet and other Jesuits as a ‘spiritual safe haven’ for humble Catholics who might have to wait weeks or months to receive sacramental absolution from a priest. Modifying the ordinances of the confraternity in accordance with needs of a persecuted community, they stressed how enrolment in these societies provided men and women with access to the ‘inestimable’ treasury of merit accumulated by its members and to the benefits of indulgence and the intercession of the Blessed Virgin.26 22

  Downside Abbey, Stratton-on-the-Fosse, Somerset: Bede Camm Files on the English Martyrs: Box marked ‘Cardinal Allen to John Duckett’, folder on Robert Drury. 23   John Bossy, ‘The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation’, TRHS, 5th ser. 25 (1975): 21–38. 24   Louis Chatellier, The Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society (Cambridge and Paris, 1989 edn). 25  Anne Dillon, ‘“To Seek out some Comforts and Companions of his own Kind and Condition”: The Benedictine Rosary Confraternity and Chapel of Cardigan House, London’, in Lowell Gallagher (ed.), Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism (Toronto and Los Angeles, 2012), pp. 272–308; Fern Insh, ‘Recusants and the Rosary: A SeventeenthCentury Chapel in Aberdeen’, RH, 31 (2012): 195–218. 26  Anne Dillon, ‘Praying by Number: The Confraternity of the Rosary and the English Catholic Community, c.1580–1700’, History, 88 (2003): 451–71, at 468. Lisa McClain pursues a similar line of argument in ‘Using What’s at Hand: English Catholic Reinterpretations of the Rosary, 1559–1642’, JRH, 27 (2003): 161–76 and Lest We Be Damned, ch. 3,

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It was ‘a most holesome medicine, and comfortable sanctuary’ for those who lacked other means to insure their souls (both presently and posthumously) against the pains of purgatory, as well as a mechanism for invoking the aid of a powerful advocate for ‘rooting out heresie’ from their native country – the warrior-like queen who was the Mother of Christ. ‘[T]he beades must be to our afflicted brethren’, wrote Garnet, ‘in steed of all maner of armour or weapons’.27 If some of these self-help associations were the product of clerical initiative, others evidently sprang up independently. The ‘dozen simple women’ and three or four men discovered ‘at their beads’ in Bath in 1667 may have been one such informal voluntary society28 and there is much to suggest that in Scotland too the rosary provided a focus for spontaneous gatherings of the laity for oral prayer in between their meetings with peripatetic missionaries.29 The circumstances of persecution compelled zealous laypeople to play a more active part in directing and organising worship than they could in contexts where Catholicism was dominant.30 The very feature of these confraternities that troubled some CounterReformation bishops on the Continent – their capacity to compete with the parish and to encourage popular participation in a kind of supplementary liturgy – was a positive asset in England.31 The rosary provided scope for a form of individual devotion that was easy to conceal in a hostile Protestant climate. Small, mobile and readily hidden in a pocket or fold of one’s clothing, it could be recited in a variety of locations, including roads, woods and fields. Neither night, blindness, nor illiteracy precluded its fruitful use. Presented by missionaries as ‘the unlearned mans booke’, it was also an aspect of the solitary piety exercised

esp. pp. 90–96. For the modifications to fit the English situation, which included the recommendation to tear up the lists of members of the confraternity after enrolling them, see Henry Garnet, The societie of the rosary. Newly augmented ([London secret press], 1596– 97), pp. 16–27. 27  Garnet, Societie, sig. A5r–v, pp. 68–9. 28   J. Anthony Williams (ed.), Post-Reformation Catholicism in Bath, vol. I, CRS 65 (1975), p. 37. This was, however, a report by a hostile Protestant. 29   David McRoberts, ‘The Rosary in Scotland’, Innes Review, 23 (1977): 81–6; Mullett, Catholics, pp. 114–15. 30  The same was true in the Netherlands: see Mathieu G. Spiertz, ‘Priest and Layman in a Minority Church: The Roman Catholic Church in the Northern Netherlands 1592–1686’, in W.J. Sheils and D. Wood (eds), The Ministry: Clerical and Lay, SCH 26 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 287–301, at 297; Charles Parker, Faith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, MA, 2008). 31   John Bossy, ‘The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe’, P&P, 47 (1970): 59–60.

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by devout ladies and gentlemen in their chambers and closets.32 Its medieval function as a mnemonic persisted, but it also became ‘a manifest badge or token of the Romane Religion’: ‘when she walked abroad, by her beads or cross which she use to wear about her neck’, Lady Magdalen Montague defiantly ‘professed herself to be a Catholic, even to whatsoever heretical beholders’. For others too it was symbol of subversive resistance to Protestantism. In the Tower of London John Gerard fashioned rosaries from orange peel with his tortured hands and passed them to his fellow prisoners wrapped in paper onto which he had written invisible messages with citrus juice.33 Whether ornately crafted with gold and precious stones or crudely carved out of wood, the rosary was at once a devotional aid and a polemical object that visibly situated one in opposition to Protestantism.34 Along with medallions, crucifixes and agni dei, the rosary fell into the technical category of the sacramental. The efficacy of this class of blessed objects was not automatic (like the sacraments) but dependent on the disposition of the recipient and the difficulty they had always presented was that, once consecrated by the clergy, they could be removed and employed by the laity in ways that defied institutional control. Seminary priests might stress that they should be used as an aid to inner contemplation, but laypeople often treated them ‘superstitiously’ as direct gateways to the sacred. In an effort to contain these tendencies within the boundaries of orthodoxy, the Jesuits introduced their own approved brand in the guise of Ignatius water.35 However, the tensions that surrounded items which functioned, in Bob Scribner’s words, as ‘a kind of popular Catholic version of the priesthood of believers’ can only have been enhanced where Rome became a subjugated minority faith.36 Described (and perhaps inadvertently advertised?) in detailed diagrams which taught Protestants

32  Garnet, Societie, p. 3 and see pp. 84–5, 183–4. See also John Bucke, Instructions for the use of the beades (Louvain, 1589), esp. pp. 84–5. 33  Garnet, Societie, p. 179; Southern (ed.), Elizabethan Recusant House, p. 44; John Gerard, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, ed. and trans. Philip Caraman (London, 1951), pp. 117–20. 34   See the comments of Weston, Autobiography, pp. 51, 203. 35  For some examples, see Henry Foley, ii. 17; iii. 125, 267; v. 212; vii, pt 2, 1141, 1179. Trevor Johnson, ‘Blood, Tears and Xavier-Water: Jesuit Missionaries and Popular Religion in the Eighteenth-Century Upper Bavaria’, in Bob Scribner and Trevor Johnson (eds), Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe, 1400–1800 (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 183–202. For further discussion, see Chapter 5, above, pp. 151–3. 36  R.W. Scribner, ‘Cosmic Order and Daily Life: Sacred and Secular in Pre-Industrial German Society’, in his Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London and Ronceverte, 1987), pp. 1–16, at p. 12.

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Figure 12.1 ‘Certaine of the Popes Merchandize lately sent over into England’, fold-out plate in B[ernard] G[arter], A newe yeares gifte dedicated to the popes holiness and all the Catholikes addicted to the sea of Rome (London, 1579). © The British Library Board. Shelfmark 3932.dd.15.

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how to identify ‘the Popes wares and merchaundize’ (Figure 12.1),37 the temptation to regard such emblems as quasi-magical talismans was evidently hard to resist, and not just among the illiterate peasantry. The inventory of suspicious items found in the London house of George Brome and his sisters Elizabeth and Bridget in 1586, which included sacred grains, a long paper painted with the name of the Virgin in red and yellow letters, and ‘a box with peces of massinge cake’, hints that the well-informed laity themselves may have seen them as a potent arsenal of supernatural power.38 In some circles, it might even be suggested, post-Reformation English Catholicism was a religion less reliant on sacraments than it was on sacramentals. The ever-expanding reservoir of relics was another aspect of ‘portable Christianity’ which simultaneously attested to the vitality of postReformation Catholicism and posed potential problems for ecclesiastical discipline.39 Too numerous to bring neatly under clerical supervision, revered fragments of medieval saints saved from ransacked churches and monasteries were supplemented by the possessions and body parts of recently martyred priests such as Edmund Campion and Henry Garnet gathered from the foot of the gallows. Even the small pink flower Thomas Maxfield carried with him to his death at Tyburn in 1616 was instantly transformed into an object of veneration, in which the memory of the community and its sufferings was materialised and transmitted to posterity.40 Preserved and exploited by the laity for thaumaturgic purposes, the ‘holy radioactivity’ they emanated had a pronounced tendency to engender secondary relics. After one of the nails that had allegedly fastened Jesus to the Cross was confiscated by Bishop John Jewel, the empty linen case in which a faint impression of it was preserved began to work wonders. The spontaneous proliferation of unauthorised ritual objects provided many

37

  Bernard Garter, A new yeares gifte, dedicated to the popes holinesse, and all Catholikes addicted to the sea or Rome (London, 1579), sig. H2r–3r and fold-out diagram. 38   BL, MS Lansdowne 50, fo. 164r. 39   I borrow the phrase ‘portable Christianity’ from Karin Veléz, ‘Resolved to Fly: The Virgin of Loreto, the Jesuits and the Miracle of Portable Catholicism in the Atlantic World’ (unpubl. PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2008). 40  This is still preserved in AAW: St Edmund’s College, Ware, MS 16/9/7. The letter in which it is enclosed is printed in J.H. Pollen (ed.), ‘The Life and Martyrdome of Mr Maxfield, Priest 1616’, in CRS Miscellanea III, CRS 3 (London, 1906), p. 56. See also Anne M. Myers, ‘Father John Gerard’s Object Lessons: Relics and Devotional Objects in Autobiography of a Hunted Priest’, in Ronald Corthell et al. (eds), Catholic Culture in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN, 2007), pp. 216–35.

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Figure 12.2 ‘Lady Hungerford’s Meditations upon the Beades’, fold-out plate in John Bucke, Instructions on the use of the beades (Louvain, 1589). © The British Library Board. Shelfmark Huth 75.

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opportunities for the development of religious practices that hovered precariously on the edges, if not outside the official liturgy.41 Sacramentals and relics operated in symbiosis with pictures and books, from which they cannot always be sharply distinguished. Medieval images of pity still remained usable, even when the attached indulgences had been crossed out, and engravings of the rosary such as the one John Bucke incorporated in his Instructions (1589) might function just as well as real strings of beads where these were unobtainable (Figure 12.2).42 More generally texts were vital in securing the survival of a Church under the cross. The English missionaries made clever use of books as ‘dumb preachers’ and surrogate pastors. Recognition that ‘books can penetrate where priests and religious cannot enter’ stimulated an ambitious programme of publication, designed to teach dogma, instil discipline, bolster morale and provide inspiration.43 Writing to the Father General of his order, Claudio Aquaviva, in 1581, Robert Persons was confident that this was also the key to the success of the mission north of the border: ‘It is owing to this want of books that Scotland is much more under the influence of heresy than England’.44 Shipped from abroad, printed on secret presses at home, or copied out by hand by scribes, books undoubtedly played a critical part in shaping the devotional lives of Catholic laypeople. The York matron Margaret Clitherow delighted in reading the Rheims New Testament and Thomas Kempis’ Imitation of Christ and mimicked the religious by learning Our Lady’s Matins in Latin; in prison Philip Howard bestowed many hours on the sacred task of writing and translating works of piety as well as on perusing tracts by Luis de Granada and the Holy Scriptures.45 Lower down the social scale pocket-sized manuals of prayers contributed to creating real and virtual textual communities.46 Although they were envisaged as a mechanism for cultivating an obedient and orthodox laity, they too could be interpreted and appropriated in ways which liberated men and women from deference 41  Gerard, Autobiography, pp. 110–11. The phrase ‘holy radioactivity’ is Ronald Finucane’s: Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (London, 1977), p. 26. See also ch. 5, pp. 146–51, above. 42   See Martha W. Driver, The Image in Print: Book Illustration in Late Medieval England and its Sources (London, 2004), ch. 6. See also David S. Areford, The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe (Farnham, 2010). Bucke, Instructions. 43   See Chapter 8, above. Quotation from John Wilson, the director of the St Omer press, 1616: CSP Milan, i. 654. 44  Forbes-Leith (ed.), Narratives of Scottish Catholics, p. 174. 45   John Mush, ‘A True Report of the Life and Death of Mrs Margaret Clitherow’, in Morris, iii. 393–4; Caraman (ed.), Other Face, pp. 168–70. 46  For example, Godly contemplations for the unlearned ([Antwerp, 1575]). See Figures 8.6 and 8.7 above.

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to the clergy. Liturgical books designed to guide believers through the mass could end up functioning as a partial substitute for it and hagiographical works could likewise be put to unexpected uses: copies of Pedro de Ribadeneira’s Life of Ignatius Loyala effected so many miracles in early Stuart England that it was reported that even illiterate persons had begun to purchase it.47 Texts assumed a key role in a ritual culture in which, as in the late medieval world, devout interiority could be curiously intertwined with crypto-materialist piety.48

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II These transmutations must be examined alongside distinctive forms of behaviour that developed in response to the Elizabethan religious settlement. First and foremost is the rite of studied refusal that was recusancy. Official spokesmen like Sir William Cecil may have insisted that the demand for outward conformity did not amount to an intrusion into the conscience, but for Catholics taught that external actions could materially affect their fate in the afterlife this claim must have seemed transparently specious. No less of a predicament for the majority was the fact that in an Erastian state church attendance had ineluctable political overtones: it was a gesture of allegiance to the monarch and nation.49 By contrast with the situation in the Dutch Republic, where membership of the Calvinist Church was only voluntary, this inevitably transformed recusancy into a confessional act, ‘a peculier signe distinctive betwixt religion and religion’, in the words of Robert Persons.50 To conform, on the other hand, was to be branded with the mark or livery of the heretical Antichrist, ‘character bestiae’.51 By ‘furnishing his enimies campe with your visible presence’, one clerical author warned schismatics, they were dishonouring God, denying their faith and consenting to blasphemy and sacrilege.52 The fiscal penalties and stints in prison suffered by those who deliberately withdrew from 47

 Foley, vii, pt 2, 1142–3.   Cf. Eamon Duffy’s comments on late medieval piety: The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven, 1992), p. 256. See also now the sensitive discussion of these issues in Virginia Reinburg, French Books of Hours: Making an Archive of Prayer, c.1400–1600 (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 133–5 and pt II passim. 49   See my Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 1999 edn). 50  Robert Persons, A brief discours contayning certayne reasons why Catholiques refuse to go to church ([London secret press], 1580), fos 15r–18r, at 17v. 51   Gregory Martin, A treatise of schisme (Douai [English secret press], 1578), p. 17. 52  H.B., A consolatory letter to all the afflicted Catholikes in England (Rouen [London secret press), 1587–88), pp. 12–13. 48

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Protestant services served to nurture in them ‘a caste-like consciousness of superior purity’.53 This bold ritual of omission was both buttressed by and in turn served to reinforce the notion that the spaces in which the reformed liturgy was celebrated were contaminated and contaminating. Catholics were warned that they exposed themselves to the ‘peril of infection’ by entering Protestant churches. Polluted by the use of the Prayer Book, these were places where the souls of the faithful were in danger of being poisoned by the speech and company of false teachers: the preaching of the heretics, declared the seminary priest Richard Bristow, was liable to ‘creepe upon you like a canker’, ‘bycause that Viva vox word of mouth hath incomparably more force, then the dead pen, whether it be to edifie, or to destroy’.54 The case of the Norfolk gentleman, Francis Wodehouse, reveals that for some recusants the very buildings in which Protestants held their ‘pestilential meetings’ became a place of psychological torment. Tempted to submit after many years of stalwart nonconformity, upon entering the church he was seized with such agony that he seemed to be ‘carrying within himself an unendurable hell’.55 Recusancy, of course, coexisted with partial or occasional conformity. This often represented an attempt to reconcile spiritual purity with selfpreservation and religious principle with patriotism, though it could also provide cover for subversive activity. Church papistry persisted not just despite the strictures of the clergy but also because of the casuistical concessions they made to the human frailty of the laity. Some schismatics salved their consciences by expressing their dissent even while participating in Protestant worship. Chief among these was ritual refusal to receive the fraudulent sacrament of the reformed Eucharist. Others mentally or physically withdrew into their pews and perused devotional books, muttered prayers or fingered their rosaries. At Etwall in Derbyshire, Sir Nicholas Gerard chanted psalms when the parson commenced the liturgy; in Suffolk Sir Thomas Cornwallis sat reading while others knelt, in a provocative inversion of the rubrics; the Hereford brewer John Vicars walked up and down the outer aisles of the cathedral to avoid having to

53

  John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London, 1975), p. 109, and ch. 6. 54  Persons, Brief discours, fos 6r–9r; Richard Bristow, A briefe treatise of diverse plaine and sure ways to finde out the truthe in this doubtful and dangerous time of heresie (Antwerp, 1574), fo. 140b. 55   William Weston, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, ed. and trans. Philip Caraman (London, 1951), pp. 148–52.

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listen to the proceedings.56 As magistrates in Lancashire lamented in 1590, the presence of such Catholics in church ‘dothe more hurte, then theire absence did’.57 In Scotland, with the consent of the Jesuits, some squared the circle by differentiating between sermons and the Calvinist service: where there was no danger of scandal or perversion, it was argued, the former could safely be heard since these did not constitute formal acts of worship involving the administration of the sacrament. This ‘dangerous doctrine’ spread south to England, along with the expedient of going to church with a verbal protestation of one’s repudiation of Protestant doctrine.58 Interestingly, at least some of these compromises rested on the assumption that the ecclesiastical structures usurped by Protestants had not been so sullied that they were rendered illegitimate as locations for Catholic devotion. As in the Netherlands, where we find occasional cases of women praying in quiet corners of churches even after they had been transformed into the ‘caves of murderers’,59 many Catholics seem to have believed that these medieval buildings still in some sense belonged to them. In England, this may have been reinforced by the residues of ‘popish superstition and idolatry’ left behind by the imperfect Reformation which so aggrieved the puritans. Protestants worshipped in buildings filled with many reminders of the old religion: stained glass windows, funeral monuments, medieval fonts, stone crosses, roof angels and even statues of the saints. As Richard Bristow remarked, ‘the very forme & fashion’ of churches, chapels, sepulchres and chancels was a testimony to the Catholic faith: are they not, he asked, ‘our cognisance and badges?’60 This attitude is also apparent in the answers which some casuists offered in response to queries about whether the faithful could contribute towards the repair of their parish churches or decorate them for seasonal festivals. This was permissible because ‘the use of consecrated churches by schismatics and heretics for their sermons and other filthy practices does not prophane them’; erected and endowed by their ancestors, they remained ‘the property of Catholics’. ‘As long as there is the slightest hope of England returning 56  Adrian Morey, The Catholic Subjects of Elizabeth I (Totowa, NJ, 1978), p. 159;VCH Derbyshire, ii, ed. William Page (London, 1907), p. 24; Patrick Ryan (ed.), ‘Diocesan Returns of Recusants for England and Wales 1577’, in CRS Miscellanea XII, CRS 22 (1921), p. 79. 57  F.R. Raines (ed.), ‘The State, Civil and Ecclesiastical of the County of Lancaster, about the Year 1590’, in Chetham Miscellanies V, Chetham Society, OS 96 (1875), p. 3. 58   See H. Chadwick, ‘Crypto-Catholicism, English and Scottish’, The Month, 178 (1942): 388–401; and Chapter 2, above, pp. 78–9. 59  A.T. Van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion and Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland, trans. Maarten Ultee (Cambridge, 1991), p. 301. 60  Bristow, Briefe treatise, fo. 143a.

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to its original faith and religion’, it was their duty to ‘stop them falling into ruin’ so that in due course they could be rededicated to true liturgical use. This was ‘a good work’ and ultimately would be ‘advantageous to the Catholic religion’.61 Laypeople were likewise advised that they were under an obligation to keep former monastic land and properties purchased by their precursors in trust pending the restoration of the religious orders: they were their temporary custodians rather than permanent proprietors.62 It is clear from these examples that Catholics and Protestants in England did not live in a completely segregated landscape: they competed to define the meaning of spaces with pre-existing religious associations. Similar ambiguities emerge in relation to rites of passage. Here the process of separation from parish churches lasted well into the eighteenth century. There were several incentives for consenting to an officially recognised christening. High infant mortality might mean that a child could die unbaptised if one had to wait too long for a visit from a priest and the problem was compounded by the Tridentine drive to ensure that the ceremony was carried out as swiftly as possible. Missionaries did not always dispute the authenticity of the heretical rite: when Father Cornelius Ward reached the island of South Uist, he had to persuade the crowd that surrounded him that rebaptism was not in fact necessary.63 Bringing one’s children to be sprinkled in a Protestant church could also stave off allegations of illegitimacy and prevent attendant legal wrangles, though some split hairs by bribing their local vicars to enter their sons and daughters in the register.64 Fear of the charge of fornication and the taint of illegitimacy that would blight their offspring induced many Catholics to continue to be married by reformed ministers. The clergy were struggling to eliminate this solution to ‘the unpleasantness of being suspected of adultery’ in the 1580s, but it was still common among the ‘inferior sort’ as late as 1760, when Bishop Richard Challoner lamented that many went ‘through the whole ceremony of the Common Prayer Book, either for want of instruction … or for want of resolution’.65 61  Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, pp. 25, 110–11. A harder line was, however, taken by William Allen and Robert Persons. The last quotation is from the later casuist Southwell: Holmes (ed.), Caroline Casuistry, case 115. 62  Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, pp. 26–7, 43–4, 96–8, 100–101; Holmes (ed.), Caroline Casuistry, case 109. 63   Cited in Alasdair Roberts, ‘Roman Catholicism in the Highlands’, in James Kirk (ed.), The Church in the Highlands, Scottish Church History Society (Edinburgh, 1998), p. 69. 64  Bossy, English Catholic Community, pp. 132–44. 65  Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, pp. 117–18. Challoner quoted in Marie B. Rowlands, ‘1767 – Religious Life’, in Rowlands (ed.), Catholics of Parish and Town 1558– 1778, CRS Monograph Series 5 (1999), p. 271.

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The determination of recusants to be interred in the consecrated ground of their parish churches and churchyards was even more pronounced. While some were prepared to tolerate Protestant solemnities to secure this, others adopted the strategy of forcing entry into church buildings and sacred enclosures. In the northwest, Catholics persisted in performing traditional customs at home and pausing at wayside crosses before conveying the corpse to the church where they hastily buried it themselves, entreated the minister to omit the office, or departed before it was read.66 Elsewhere burials were more surreptitious and nocturnal events. In 1631, the church of Holton in Oxfordshire was broken into by a group of parishioners (both Catholic and Protestant) and a grave dug for the body of an excommunicated recusant, Mrs Elizabeth Horseman, under the communion table.67 At Allensmore in Herefordshire, a yeoman’s wife called Alice Wellington was buried before sunrise in Whitsun week 1605: from his bedroom window the vicar saw a procession of some 40 or 50 persons carrying bells, crosses and burning tapers, but the body was laid to rest before he had time to dress and put a stop to the illicit funeral.68 Sometimes, though, neither guile nor violence was necessary, because Catholic burials occurred by discreet arrangement with the Protestant incumbent.69 Writing of seventeenth-century Ireland, where Catholics also continued to seek to be interred in parish churches used for reformed worship and even erected their own mortuary chapels directly adjacent to them, Clodagh Tait remarks perceptively on the irony that for stalwart recusants this ‘in effect meant eternal attendance at Protestant service’.70 It was as if they were laying posthumous claim to spaces that had been unjustly annexed by the heretics. Perhaps some shared the sentiment of the Dutch priest Petrus den Hollander, who cried out with joy when he heard on his death bed that he was to buried in the church at Rhoon,

66

 Raines (ed.), ‘State, Civil and Ecclesiastical’, pp. 5–7.   David Cressy, ‘Who Buried Mrs Horseman? Excommunication, Accommodation and Silence’, in his Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 2000), pp. 132 and 116–37 passim. 68   The late commotion of certaine papists in Herefordshire. Occasioned by the death of one Alice Wellington, a Recusant, who was buried after the popish maner (London, 1605). 69  Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 142. For further discussion of this theme, see now Peter Marshall, ‘Confessionalisation and Community in the Burial of English Catholics, c.1570–1700’, in Nadine Lewycky and Adam Morton (eds), Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Professor W.J. Sheils (Farnham, 2012), pp. 57–75. 70   Clodagh Tait, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550–1650 (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 79. 67

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‘My dry bones will shout that the church occupied by the uncatholics belongs to the Catholics!’71 Once again these phenomena underline the neighbourly accommodations and mutual manifestations of tolerance that so often softened confessional divisions and enmities in both Britain, as in the Netherlands.72 There is, though, evidence of a stronger impulse for separation on the Catholic side and of greater rigidity on the part of Protestants. Many preferred their children to be christened by priests, like the Welsh mother who carried her infant to the disused chapel of a Cisterican monastery at Margam and had the rite performed by the missionary Morgan Clynnog in 1591.73 In cases where urgency was of the essence, midwives and other laypeople can be found performing the rite.74 Private baptism was clearly on the rise by the 1590s, when a draft bill drawn up by Burghley proposed levying £100 on every person who suffered their children to be baptised illicitly by the Catholic clergy. This finally became law in 1606, when it was also made an offence for papists who were not excommunicates to be buried outside their parish graveyards – a measure that reinforced the intermingling of the bodies of the members of competing faiths.75 Instances in which contumacious recusants were refused plots in hallowed ground induced the Lancashire gentleman William Blundell to enclose a piece of his own estate to provide a resting place for the blessed dead. Over 80 persons were buried there between 1611 and 1631, when the High Sherriff arrived with a posse of men to destroy the walls, deface the stone crosses and dig up some of the graves.76 Others reappropriated neglected former chantry and nunnery lands,77 while the husband of Anne Foster of York, who had died in gaol for her faith, had the grave of the executed traitor Earl of Northumberland opened and his wife’s corpse laid on top of a man

71

  Van Deursen, Plain Lives, p. 301. See also Judith Pollmann, ‘Burying the Dead; Reliving the Past: Ritual, Resentment and Sacred Space in the Dutch Republic’, in Benjamin Kaplan et al. (eds), Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c.1570–1720 (Manchester, 2009), pp. 84–102. 72   See my Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500–1700 (Manchester, 2006), ch. 5. 73   BL, Harley MS, 6998, fo. 3r–v. 74  This was explicitly permitted by the casuists in preference to baptism by a heretical minister: Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, p. 99. For Scotland, see Mullett, Catholics, pp. 118–19. 75   Caraman (ed.), Other Face, p. 283; 3 Jac. I, c. 5. 76  Philip Caraman (ed.), The Years of Siege: Catholic Life from James I to Cromwell (London, 1966), p. 28; F.O. Blundell, Old Catholic Lancashire, 3 vols (London, 1925–41), i. 32–7. 77   See Rowlands, ‘1767 – Religious Life’, p. 280; Tait, Death, p. 78.

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regarded by his coreligionists as a martyr.78 Weddings too were increasingly conducted outside church precincts – in fields and under trees, as well as in private houses– and not always in the presence of the priesthood. Extrasacramental espousal was widely accepted as valid and necessity often outweighed the efforts of the Counter-Reformation Church to eliminate clandestine marriage.79 Catholic ritual life in the post-Reformation period was thus shaped by a triangular matrix of forces: the priorities of Catholic renewal, the exigencies of Protestant oppression and the challenges of lay independence.

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III An underlying thread of the preceding discussion has been the way in which persecution compelled the faithful to create a new geography of the sacred centred on the household and the landscape. Ejected from parish churches, as Frances Dolan has remarked, Catholics developed ‘a tactical and fluid relation to space’.80 This theme may be explored further by considering how far the practice of pilgrimage proved able to survive the shock of the Reformation. Protestantism’s mocking attack on the credulity and corruption which underpinned the tradition of undertaking ritual journeys to national and local shrines precipitated a phase of humanist caution and restraint with the Catholic Church which lasted until the final quarter of the sixteenth century. Gradually, however, this gave way to a renewed Counter-Reformation enthusiasm for pilgrimage as a form of ‘spiritual medicine for heretical poison’. Assisted by the patronage of the papacy and powerful rulers like the Wittelsbachs and Habsburgs, sites like Altötting in Bavaria, Loreto in Ancona and Halle and Scherpenheuvel in the Spanish Netherlands became compelling symbols of baroque exuberance and confessional bellicosity.81

78

  Cited in McClain, Lest We Be Damned, pp. 253–4.  Bossy, English Catholic Community, pp. 136–40. 80  Frances E. Dolan, ‘Gender and the “Lost” Spaces of Catholicism’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 32 (2002): 641–65. See also Lisa McClain, ‘Without Church, Cathedral or Shrine: The Search for Religious Space among Catholics in England, 1559– 1625’, SCJ, 33 (2002): 381–99, and Lest We Be Damned, ch. 2. 81   See Philip M. Soergel, Wondrous in his Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley, CA, 1993); Marc R. Forster, Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque: Religious Identity in Southwest Germany, 1550–1750 (Cambridge, 2001), ch. 2; Luc Duerloo and Marc Wingens, Scherpenheuvel: Het Jeruzalem van de Lage Landen (Leuven, 2002); Craig Harline and Eddy Put, A Bishop’s Tale: Mathias Hovius among his Flock in Seventeenth-Century Flanders (New Haven, CT, 2002), ch. 6. 79

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English recusants of wealth and status had both the opportunity and means to participate in this resurgent international culture of religious tourism, at the centre of which was the holy city of Rome. But how did Catholics of lesser rank satisfy the combination of spiritual yearning and recreational release for which the liminal experience of pilgrimage had long proved such an effective solution? Some did so vicariously, through the medium of printed broadsides and books describing famous continental shrines and their miracles.82 Others made visitations to abandoned chapels and crumbling monastic buildings. The ‘bare ruined choirs’ immortalised in William Shakespeare’s lyrical phrase remained the focus of much covert devotion. For northern Catholics the Holy Island of Lindisfarne was a favoured destination,83 while in Somerset the dissolved Benedictine Abbey and Tor at Glastonbury exerted a magnetic attraction (Figure 12.3). In 1586 an old man who lived a mile from the place where Joseph of Arimathea and his companions had reputedly chosen to settle could be found visiting the decaying foundations, climbing up to the summit on his knees and carrying with him a reliquary rescued from the monastery as an amulet ‘against the molestation of spirits’.84 In 1614 the High Commission prosecuted 30 recusants from Yorkshire who had been caught praying on the eve of the Virgin’s feast day at the ruined Lady Chapel situated on a bare hill above the former Carthusian priory of Mount Grace. Despite the fact that it was roofless and exposed to high winds, people could be found there in silence for hours on end (Figure 12.4).85 In Elizabethan Wales, papists frequented ancient chapels linked with holy wells ‘in heapes’ and ‘very superstitiously’ on their patronal saints days, ‘by great journeys barefoot’.86 The same activities troubled Protestant officials in Ireland and Scotland, where, as at Heiloo in the United Provinces Catholics circumambulated the shrines, or the sites on which they had once stood, all visible trace of the sacred structures themselves having long

82  Orazio Torsellino, The history of Our B. Lady of Loreto, trans. T.P. ([St Omer], 1608); Philips Numan, Miracles lately wrought by the intercession of the glorious Virgin Marie, at Mont-aigue, nere unto Sichem in Brabant, trans. Robert Chambers (Antwerp, 1606). 83   ‘The Journal of Sir William Brereton 1635’, in North Country Diaries (Second Series), Surtees Society 124 (1915), pp. 21–3. 84  Weston, Autobiography, pp. 111–12, 15. 85   York, Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, High Commission Act Book 16 (1612 to 1625–26), fos 31v, 38r–v; M.C.E. Chambers, The Life of Mary Ward (1585–1645), 2 vols, ed. Henry James Coleridge (London, 1882–5), ii. 478–9. See also Anthony J. Storey, Mount Grace Lady Chapel: An Historical Enquiry (Beverley, CA, 2001). 86   BL, Lansdowne MS 111, fo. 10r–v.

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Figure 12.3 ‘The Prospect of Glasenbury Abby’: William Stukeley, Itinerarium Curiosum (London, 1724), plate 37. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Ll.11.61.

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Figure 12.4 The ruined Lady Chapel, Mount Grace Priory, a destination of Catholic pilgrims in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Samuel and Nathaniel Buck, A Collection of Engravings of Castles, and Abbeys in England, 3 vols (London, 1726–39), i. 12. By permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. Shelfmark L. 6.56–58.

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since disappeared.87 In Peebles, local Calvinist elders and magistrates lay in wait at the ruined Cross kirk for those who visited it solemnly at Beltane and Lady Aboyne undertook an annual 30-mile pilgrimage to the Chapel and Well of Grace in the parish of Dundurcas in the Scottish Highlands, walking the last two without the protection of shoes.88 Where buildings had been demolished, it was not uncommon for devotion to be displaced back onto revered spots in the natural landscape. The pattern at Hasselt, where pilgrims reverted to the sacred field (heilige stede) after the chapel dedicated to the Holy Sacrament was destroyed and the site turned into a dunghill, can be found replicated at Fernyhalgh in Lancashire: here the faithful assembled at the nearby Lady Well, the former chantry itself having been torn down during the reign of Henry VIII.89 Churchyard and wayside crosses were other landmarks with powerful associations with the medieval Church. In Jacobean Yorkshire the ecclesiastical courts made sporadic efforts to stop people praying at the mere stumps of vandalised monuments left behind by zealous iconoclasts.90 While much of the activity carried out at neglected locations was private and unsupervised, other sites were deliberately harnessed by the missionary priesthood as a polemical tool and given official sanction by the grant of papal indulgences. Several ancient Irish pilgrimage sites received this form of imprimatur by a bull of Paul V in 1607 in a process which Raymond Gillespie describes as applying ‘a Tridentine veneer’ to existing devotional customs.91 Similarly, in 1676, Clement X promised complete remission of sin to those who resorted to the chapel of St Michael the Archangel on Skirrid-Fawr near Abergavenny, a mountain supposedly cleft by the earthquake that occurred at the moment of Christ’s crucifixion, and prayed

87

 For Ireland, see Gillespie, Devoted People, pp. 91–2, and Michael P. Carroll, Irish Pilgrimage: Holy Wells and Popular Catholic Devotion (Baltimore, MA, and London, 1999), though some of the claims of the latter should be treated with caution. For Scotland, see Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, CT, 2002), pp. 205–9. There are many references to such pilgrimages in the kirk sessions records. For Heiloo, see Willem Frijhoff, ‘The Function of the Miracle in a Catholic Minority: The United Provinces in the Seventeenth Century’, in his Embodied Belief: Ten Essays on Religious Culture in Dutch History (Hilversum, 2002), pp. 115–16, 126–8. 88   Sanderson, ‘Catholic Recusancy in Scotland’, 104; James Murray McKinlay, Ancient Church Dedications in Scotland: Scriptural Dedications (Edinburgh, 1910), p. 112. 89   Willem Frijhoff, ‘The Holy Shrine of Hasselt: Forms, Values and Functions of a Revived Pilgrimage’, in his Embodied Belief, pp. 235–73; Blundell, Old Catholic Lancashire, Appendix I, esp. pp. 169–72. 90   York, Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, Visitation Court Book 1615, fo. 31r. 91   J. Hagan, ‘Miscellanea Vaticano-Hibernica, 1580–1631’, Archivium Hibernicum or Irish Historical Records, 3 (1914): 260–64; Gillespie, Devoted People, p. 8.

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for ‘the extirpation of heresies and the exaltation of Holy Mother Church’. Mass gatherings at Michaelmas were still being noted in the 1750s.92 Two sites with medieval traditions of pilgrimage, however, stand out from the rest: St Winefride’s Well in North Wales and St Patrick’s Purgatory in Lough Derg. Eagerly promoted by the Counter-Reformation clergy as important rallying points for a Catholic Church under fierce assault, both drew large and increasingly audacious crowds in the course of the period, despite recurrent efforts to suppress them.93 Such places were emblematic of doctrines vehemently condemned by the Protestant establishment: the cult of the Virgin Mary and saints and the notion that the living could make intercession for the dead and speed their path through purgatory. They were also evocative reminders of a version of British history which Reformation propagandists were busily rewriting to support their claim that a pure and uncorrupted brand of Christianity had been planted in these islands long before St Augustine’s arrival in the seventh century. The memory of hallowed locations that bore mythical witness to the triumphs and tribulations of indigenous Celtic and Anglo-Saxon saints like Patrick, Ninian, Winifred, Mildred, Piran and Neot was preserved not only by priests anxious to recolonise this past and by recusants like Nicholas Roscarrock who compiled their lives in manuscript, but also by the remembered rites carried out by pilgrims in a form which Willem Frijhoff calls ‘embodied belief’.94 A similar revival of founding saints seems to have been occurring simultaneously in the northern Netherlands, where the Apostolic Vicar Sasbout Vosmeer encouraged veneration of Saints Willibrord and Boniface.95 Here too the spaces associated with the ecclesiastical heroes of an earlier era provided a point of convergence between Tridentine confessionalism and conservative nostalgia for the settled rhythms of traditional religion disrupted by the emergence of Calvinism.96 92   M.R. Lewis, ‘The Pilgrimage to St Michael’s Mount: Catholic Continuity in Wales’, The Journal of Welsh Ecclesiastical History, 8 (1991): 51–4; James Joel Cartwright (ed.), The Travels through England of Dr Richard Pococke, Successively Bishop of Meath and of Ossory during 1750, 1751, and later Years, CS, NS 42, 44 (1888–89), ii. 216. 93   See Chapter 6, above; Bernadette Cunningham and Raymond Gillespie, ‘The Lough Derg Pilgrimage in the Age of the Counter-Reformation’, Éire-Ireland, 39 (2004): 167–79. 94  Roscarrock’s ‘Lives of the Saints’ is Cambridge University Library, MS 3041; Frijhoff, ‘Holy Shrine’, p. 241. For Catholic versions of British ecclesiastical history, see Robert Persons, Treatise of three conversions, 3 vols (1603–4) and Richard Broughton, The Ecclesiastical historie of Great Britaine (Douai, 1633). 95   Spiertz, ‘Priest and Layman’, pp. 289–93; Van Deursen, Plain Lives, p. 301. 96   See also Eamon Duffy, ‘Bare Ruin’d Choirs: Remembering Catholicism in Shakespeare’s England’, repr. in his Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations (London, 2012), pp. 233–53.

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Iconoclastic attacks on these medieval sacred sites appear to have increased rather than discouraged devotion to them. Both Holywell and St Patrick’s Purgatory were the target of repeated spasms of symbolic violence, but as at the battle-scarred shrine of Scherpenheuvel, the architectural martyrdom they suffered did more to spur than stem the flow of pilgrims. An early eighteenth-century clergyman commented of Irish Catholics that ‘when any Superstitious place is defaced or demolished, they repair it, and seem to be more inclined to Resort to it than formerly. They account it Meritorious to adhere obstinately to a Practice prohibited by Hereticks, and if any Punishment be inflicted upon them for it, they believe they suffer for Righteousness sake’.97 Reformed rites of desecration and destruction also helped to stimulate the creation and circulation of miracle stories with a distinctly anti-Protestant flavour, such as the divine judgement that befell one scoffing heretic who defiled St Winefride’s well with his muddy boots.98 Along the same lines was the rumour that the water of the holy well at Heiloo cured best when mixed with the blood of the Beggars.99 Nevertheless it was difficult for the Catholic clergy to channel lay devotion in theologically acceptable directions. It was hard enough where priests had the backing of ecclesiastical law and the civil magistrate: at Scherpenheuvel Bishop Matthias Hovius eventually had the oak tree in which the miraculous image of the Virgin hung chopped down in an attempt to stop pilgrims stripping bark from its trunk and employing this in a manner that smacked of paganism.100 In contexts which lacked a proper episcopal hierarchy, let alone political support, it was even more difficult to restrain popular enthusiasm within appropriate parameters. This was also true of the new holy places that sprang up in connection with contemporary martyrs. The site that held most allure for English Catholic pilgrims was Tyburn, where dozens of priests were hung, drawn and quartered for treason. By 1616, it had become customary to adorn the gallows with garlands, branches and flowers and to strew the ground beneath with herbs at midnight on the evening preceding an execution.101 Ten years later Queen Henrietta Maria openly displayed reverence to the place where so many had sacrificed their lives in defence of her 97   John Richardson, The great folly, superstition and idolatry of pilgrimages in Ireland (Dublin, 1727), sig. B3r. 98  Gerard, Autobiography, p. 47. 99  Frijhoff, ‘Function of the Miracle’, p. 129. 100  Harline and Put, Bishop’s Tale, p. 106. For the similar difficulties experienced at the Jesus Oak in the Soniën Woods, see Craig Harline, ‘Miracles and this World: The Battle for Jesus Oak’, ARG, 93 (2002): 217–38. 101   Pollen (ed.), ‘Life and Martyrdome of Mr Maxfield’, p. 43.

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faith, kneeling and praying there for ‘the space of five pater nosters’.102 The graves of the executed Irish Catholic bishops Dermot O’Hurley and Cornelius O’Devany outside Dublin were likewise venerated.103 Some of these sites were discovered and promoted by the Catholic clergy. The development of a holy well in County Clare, identified when a pious lady received a vision of St Michael the Archangel, was carefully managed by her confessor, while a spring in the grounds of that great sanctuary of Sussex Catholicism, Battle Park, was alleged to have been ‘found out’ in 1596 by one of Viscountess Montague’s chaplains and frequented ‘like a young pilgrimage’ by many, especially women, who called it ‘D[r] Grayes well’.104 But initiatives on the part of individual priests could also evoke the unease of their superiors, as in the case of the self-proclaimed Irish thaumaturge Father James Finnachty, who blessed several springs and proclaimed they had therapeutic powers.105 This example points to another side-effect of the circumstances in which English Catholicism found itself: the extreme dangers faced by priests who defied the law to dispense soul-saving sacraments fostered a tendency to regard them as living saints. Commenting on the crowds who travelled to the prison in Wisbech where many captured missionaries were incarcerated, William Weston recalled how they ‘came from every part of the kingdom, some as to a holy place, undertaking a kind of pilgrimage’. Mrs Jane Wiseman, who brought her two daughters to be blessed before they entered convents abroad, ‘did repent that she had not gone barefooted thither’.106 The very spaces where the holy fathers who took terrible risks to succour the faithful had lived, visited or been held captive had the capacity to become foci for cultic devotion. In the Tower of London John Gerard took comfort from the fact that he inhabited the same cell in which the Blessed Father Henry Walpole had once been locked and tortured and which Walpole had made into a miniature oratory by chalking up the names of the orders of the Angels and of Mary, Christ and God the Father (in the three sacred languages of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew). George Haydock drew the name and ensigns of ‘Pope Gregory XIII, on earth the supreme head of the whole Catholic Church’ on the walls of his prison chamber in Newgate; 100 years later Thomas Jenison derived hope for

102

  BL, MS 39288, fo. 6, in Caraman (ed.), Years of Siege; p. 96.   Mush, ‘Life and Death of Mrs Margaret Clitherow’, in Morris, iii. 395–6; Tait, Death, pp. 18, 76. 104  Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester, 1997), pp. 159–60; BL, Lansdowne MS 82, fo. 103r. 105  Gillespie, Devoted People, p. 92, and see 67–8, 70, 161. 106  Weston, Autobiography, pp. 167, 176. 103

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the official restoration of Rome from the inscription.107 The Jesuits seem to have had particular charisma in the eyes of the laity. Upon her first meeting with a member of the Society Mrs Wiseman begged him to let her kiss his feet: when he refused she kissed the floor on which he was standing instead.108 It is hardly surprising that the secret hiding places Catholics constructed for priests in their houses were revered by later generations as hallowed receptacles.109 These episodes point to a final aspect of the reconfiguration of Catholic sacred space in the wake of the Reformation, and that is the sanctification of the home itself. Some erected domestic buildings as defiant symbols of the illicit faith they professed: encrusted with emblems, Sir Thomas Tresham’s triangular lodge is an ‘unequivocally oppositional’ monument to the Trinity and to his resistance to Protestant persecution: one of the Latin texts it bears reads ‘Who will separate us from the love of Christ? (Romans 8:35).110 The rooms in which altars were erected and the Eucharist celebrated may have had a special aura of holiness, but a sense of religious intensity suffused many recusant houses in general. Although hardly invulnerable to the rude intrusions of pursuivants, these were spiritual refuges from a hostile world which some chose to consecrate to God and the saints. The Vaux household at Harrowden was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary of Loreto.111 Dame Dorothy Lawson not only placed her home under the patronage of St Michael and St Anthony, but caused the exterior gable to be decorated with the Holy Name of Jesus, to provide a visible symbol of hope to local mariners guiding their ships out to sea. Modelling her own conduct on that of St Catherine of Siena, who lived a life of cloistered perfection within her father’s house, she turned her own residence into a kind of personal convent, praying and meditating as she traversed it.112 This was in keeping with the recommendation of Jesuits like Robert Southwell, whose Short rule of good life (1596–97) 107

 Gerard, Autobiography, p. 105; Downside Abbey, Stratton-on-the-Fosse, Somerset, Bede Camm Files on the English Martrys, Box marked ‘Queen Elizabeth-Napier’, file on George Haydock. 108  Gerard, Autobiography, pp. 30–31. 109   Michael Hodgetts, ‘Loca Secretoria in 1581’, RH, 19 (1989): 386–95; and his Secret Hiding Places (Dublin, 1989). 110   See Peter Davidson, ‘Recusant Catholic Spaces in Early Modern England’, in Corthell et al. (eds), Catholic Culture, pp. 19–51, at 33; Richard L. Williams, ‘Forbidden Sacred Spaces in Reformation England’, in Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton (eds), Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 95–114. 111  Gerard, Autobiography, p. 163. 112  Palmes, Life of Mrs Dorothy Lawson, pp. 34, 42; Dolan, ‘“Lost” Spaces of Catholicism’, 662–3.

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described how the devout could make their homes ‘in a maner a paradise’ by mentally imagining or physically designating rooms to moments in Christ’s life and passion. He also advised them to take walks in their gardens and orchards ‘as it were shorte pilgrimages to visite such Saints as are patrons of the place’.113 Some sacralised these spaces by placing statues or images in them. Others did so through ritual: in the absence of cathedrals and churches, gardens could be suitable arenas for the processions that marked great ecclesiastical festivals like Corpus Christi.114 In many respects, private houses became a substitute for the ecclesiastical buildings sequestered by their confessional enemies, counterparts of the semi-tolerated schuilkerken in Dutch cities – churches concealed behind the façade of domestic residences.115 If the Counter-Reformation hierarchy regarded household religion with a degree of suspicion in those parts of Europe where the Church of Rome was triumphant,116 in Britain, like the Netherlands, it had to recognise, albeit with some reluctance and reservation, that this was one of the keys to Catholicism’s very survival.117 The ritual life of Catholics in post-Reformation England, then, had several notable features. It was often clandestine and nocturnal; it centred on the home and evocative places in the landscape; and it relied as much, and sometimes more on books, beads and blessed objects as it did on the priestly sacraments of penance and the mass. The foregoing discussion has also highlighted the negotiations between Tridentine theology and Counter-Reformation policy and the lived experience of the laity at the grassroots. It has shown how rite and space were confessionalised in a context where Catholicism lacked the muscle of the state and how, paradoxically, its minority status may have provided it with some unique opportunities to reform devotion in accordance with new priorities. It has illustrated that priests and the laypeople to whom they ministered collaborated in sustaining the faith, but that relations between them were complicated and sometimes fraught.118 But it has also illustrated that in 113  Robert Southwell, A short rule of good life ([London secret press, 1596–97]), pp. 128–33. 114  As recorded by Henry Garnet, 1605: Foley, iv. 141. 115   Benjamin J. Kaplan, ‘Fictions of Privacy: House Chapels and the Spatial Accommodation of Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europe’, AHR, 107 (2002): 1031–64, esp. 1050–51. 116   Bossy, ‘Counter Reformation’, 68. 117  On the tensions surround the home, see now Susannah Monta, ‘Uncommon Prayer? Robert Southwell’s Short Rule for a Good Life and Catholic Domestic Devotion in PostReformation England’, in Gallagher (ed.), Redrawing the Map, pp. 245–71. 118  On the ‘creative and dynamic coalitions’ between clergy and laity, see Judith Pollmann, Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands 1520–1635 (Oxford, 2011), p. 202; Parker, Faith on the Margins, p. 242.

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particular circumstances it was not always easy or possible to police the sacred effectively. A high level of lay independence coexisted with enormous respect for the missionaries who endangered their lives merely by entering the country. Such tensions and contradictions were, of course, present throughout the Catholic world, but the condition of being minority faith surely accentuated them. Finally, even as they clashed with Protestants about spaces and ceremonies, these were spheres of activity which draw attention to moments at which Catholics compromised with and were tolerated by the heretics – sometimes in the very places that had been seized from them and violently desecrated in the first phases of the Reformation.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Manuscripts Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales Bronwydd MS 1, no. 3 (Vairdre Book) Great Session Records, Flint 4/982/1/34

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Cambridge, Trinity College MS O. 7. 3 (Historical collection relating to the reign of Charles I, anonymous diary 1625–27) MS R. 16. 22 (Painted prophecy of Paul Graebner presented to Elizabeth I, 1585) MS R3.33 (William Palmer, Poem on Stephen Gardiner, 1547) Cambridge, University Library MS Dd. 14. 25 (3) (Inventory of the works of the ‘Romish religion’) MS 3041 (Nicholas Roscarrock, ‘Alphebitt of Saintes’) Gloucester, Gloucester Cathedral Library MS 40 (Fragments of a letter and other loose papers, c.1630) Hawarden, Flintshire Record Office MF/ 6, (‘A relation concerning the Millionants Moneyes in N. and S. Wales’ and ‘An abstract of Writings relating to the Star Inn in Holywell’) MF/34 (Welsh MSS 505/1, including an account book of The Star Inn 1710–53) Kew, The National Archives CHES 21/3 (Presentments to the Grand Jury, Cheshire) CHES 24/114 (‘Information of Richard Holland of Little Neston, miller, c. September 1617’) SP 12 (State Papers Domestic, Elizabeth I) SP 14 (State Papers Domestic, James I) SP 16 (State Papers Domestic, Charles I)

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London, Archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster St Edmund’s College, Ware, MS 16/9/7 (Letters relating to the martyr, Thomas Maxfield) A Series IV, no 38 (Information Bell supplied to the earl of Derby) MS A XXXIX, 101, ‘Some account of Wales’, 22 July 1731) and 103 (Letter to Mr Meighan, Holywell, 23 June 1733) MS XXXII, 99 (‘A Catalogue of books belonging to the Society of Jesus in my keeping at my lodging at H[oly] W[ell] this 12th of March 1663/4’)

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London, Archives of the British Province of the Society of Jesus MS A. IV. 7 (Modern Transcripts) [formerly at Stonyhurst College] MS Anglia III, VII (Collected manuscripts relating to the English Catholics) [formerly at Stonyhurst College] Collectanea P (Christopher Grene’s seventeenth-century collection of manuscripts and transcripts, including Robert Persons ‘Of the Life and Martyrdom of Father Edmond Campion’) [formerly at Stonyhurst College] London, British Library Additional MS 21203 (Papers relating to the English Jesuits) Additional MS 34250 (‘A trewe storie of the Catholicke prisoners in Yorke Castle … 1600, by C.J. Priest [William Richmont]’) Additional MS 35298 (‘Legenda Sanctorum in Englysshe’, mid-fifteenth century) Additional MS 39380 (Tresham Papers, vol. 3: Historical and Theological) Cotton MS Claudius A.V, nos 6–7 (Robert of Shrewsbury, Life and miracles of St Winifred) Cotton MS Vespasian A-XXV (Collection of ballads, songs, and other miscellaneous transcriptions made by Henry Savile of Banke, 1568– 1617) Cotton MS Vitellius. C.I (Documents relating to the Marches of Wales, c.1478–1607) Harley MS 360 (Collection of small tracts and papers … relating to persons distinguished from others, or remarkable upon account of religion) Harley MS 1026 (Memorandum book of Justinian Pagitt, lawyer, 1633) Harley MS 6998 (Public Transactions, 1591–95) Lansdowne MS 11 (Burghley Papers, 1568–69) Lansdowne MS 33 (Burghley Papers, 1581) Lansdowne MS 38 (Burghley Papers, 1583) Lansdowne MS 50 (Burghley Papers, 1586) Lansdowne MS 64 (Burghley Papers, 1590) Lansdowne MS 72 (Burghley Papers, 1559–92) Lansdowne MS 75 (Burghley Papers, 1593)

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Lansdowne MS 82 (Burghley Papers, 1596) Lansdowne MS 96 (Burghley Papers, c.1572–92) Lansdowne MS 97 (Papers relating to religious affairs) Lansdowne MS 111 (Papers relating to Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Jersey and Guernsey) Lansdowne MS 153 (Collection of papers relating to recusancy, reign of James I) Lansdowne MS 436, no. 2 (Vitae Sanctorum Angliae, fourteenth century) Royal MS 18A, VI (Medical collections) Royal MS 18B, VII (Causes determined before the President and Council of Wales and the Marches, 1617) Sloane MS 1926, no. 1 (‘A detection of the imposture of Mr V[alentine] G[reatrakes] his pretended gift of healing’) Stowe MS 176 (Papers of Sir Thomas Edmondes, vol. XI, 1616–32/3) Northamptonshire Record Office, Northhampton I. L. 4046 (Isham family papers)

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Oscott, St Mary’s College MS E. 5. 16. (‘An answere to a comfortable advertisement, with it addition written of late to afflicted catholykes concerning goinge to churche with protestantes’) MS Shelf RZZ3 (Peter Mowle Commonplace book) Oxford, Bodleian Library Ms Eng. Th b.1–2 (Brudenell transcriptions of manuscripts of Sir Thomas Tresham) MS Laud. Misc. 114 (Life of St Winefride, twelfth century) MS Rawlinson D 399 (Thomas Hearne’s Miscellaneous Collections) Tanner MS 290 (Miscellaneous Correspondence) San Marino, California, Huntington Library MS STTM Box 3, folder 15 Stowe Temple Religious Papers, folder 5 Stratton-on-the-Fosse, Downside Abbey Bede Camm Files on the English Martyrs York, Bar Convent MS V 69 ([John Mush], ‘The Life and Death of Mistris Margeret Clitherow’, 1654)

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Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain

York, Borthwick Institute of Historical Research HC.CP 1570/5 (examinations of George Malton and Thomas Bell) High Commission Act Book 1572–74 High Commission Act Book 16 (1612–25/6) Visitation Court Book 1615 York, Minster Library MS T.D.I (John Mush, ‘Trewe Reporte of the Life and Marterdome of Mrs Margarete Clitherowe’)

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Printed Works and Editions A.S., Miracles not ceas’d (London, 1663). Wing D1420. Abbot, George, The reasons which Doctor Hill hath brought, for the upholding of papistry … unmasked (Oxford, 1604). STC 37. Acta Sanctorum September VIII (Antwerp, 1762). Adams, Thomas, The workes of Thomas Adams (London, 1630). STC 105. Alford, Michael, Fides regia Britannica sive annales ecclesiae Britannicae, 4 vols (Liège, 1663). Clancy 1144X. Allen, William, A briefe historie of the glorious martyrdom of twelve reverend priests (London, 1908 edn; first publ. Rheims, 1582). ——— A true report of the late apprehension and imprisonment of John Nicols minister (Rheims, 1583). STC 18537. ARCR, II, 13. ——— An admonition to the nobility and people of England and Ireland ([Antwerp], 1588). STC 368. ARCR, II, 5. An answer to a certain godly mannes lettres ([Strassburg], 1557). STC 658. Anderson, Anthony, A sermon preached at Paules Crosse, the 23 of Aprill (London, 1581). STC 570. [Anderton, James, written under psuedonym of] Brereley, John, The apologie of the Romane Church ([English secret press], 1604). STC 3604. ARCR, II, 18. ——— Sainct Austines religion ([English secret press], 1620). STC 3608. ARCR, II, 24. Arber, Edward, (ed.), A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London 1554–1640, 5 vols (London, 1875–94). Archdekin, Richard, A treatise of miracles (Louvain, 1667). Wing A3605A. Clancy 33. Armstrong, R. Bracey (ed.), ‘English Dominican Papers’, in Dominicana, CRS 25 (London, 1925), pp. 95–125.

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Aveling, Hugh, (ed.), ‘The Recusancy Papers of the Meynell Family of North Kilvington, North Riding of Yorkshire 1596–1676’, in E.E. Reynolds (ed.), CRS Miscellanea, CRS 16 (London, 1964), pp. ix–xl, 1–112. B., H., A consolatory letter to all the afflicted Catholikes in England (Rouen [London secret press, 1587–88]). STC 1032. ARCR, II, 33. B[urton], H[enry], A tryall of private devotions (London, 1628). STC 4157. Bacon, Nathaniel, A relation of the fearfull estate of Francis Spira, in the yeare, 1548 (London, 1638). STC 1178.5. Baddeley, Richard, The boy of Bilson (London, 1622). STC 1185. Bagley, J.J. (ed.), The Great Diurnall of Nicholas Blundell of Little Crosby, Lancashire 1702–1728, Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 110, 112, 114 ([1968–72]). Bagshaw, Christopher, A sparing discoverie of our English Jesuits ([London], 1601). STC 25126. ARCR, II, 38. Ballinger, John (ed.), Calendar of Wyn (of Gwydir) Papers 1515–1690 in the National Library of Wales and Elsewhere (Aberystwyth, 1926). Bancroft, Richard, Daungerous positions and proceedings … for the presbiteriall discipline (London, 1593). STC 1344. Barlow, John, Hierons last fare-well (London, 1618). STC 1438. Barrow, John, The Lord’s arm stretched out in an answer of prayer (London, 1664). Wing B965. Batman, Stephen, The doome warning all men to the judgemente (London, 1581). STC 1582. Batt, Anthony, A poore mans mite ([Douai], 1639). STC 1589.5. ARCR, II, 43. Baxter, Richard, Reliquiae Baxterianae (London, 1696). Wing B1370. Beard, Thomas, Antichrist the pope of Rome: or, the pope of Rome’s Antichrist (London, 1625). STC 1657. Becanus, Martinus, A treatise of the judge of controversies, trans. W. W[right] ([St Omer], 1619). STC 1707. ARCR, II, 865. Bede, the Venerable, The history of the church of Englande. Compiled by Venerable Bede, trans. Thomas Stapleton (Antwerp, 1565) STC 1778. ARCR, II, 733. Bell, Thomas, Thomas Bels motives: concerning Romish faith and religion (Cambridge, 1593). STC 1830. ——— The survey of popery (London, 1596). STC 1829. ——— The hunting of the Romish foxe (London, 1598). STC 1823. ——— The anatomie of popish tyrannie (London, 1603). STC 1814. ——— The golden ballance of tryall (London, 1603). STC 1822. ——— The downefall of poperie (London, 1604). STC 1818. ——— The popes funerall (London, 1605). STC 1825.

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——— The woefull crie of Rome (London, 1605). STC 1833. ——— The regiment of the Church (London, 1606). STC 1827. ——— The Jesuites antepast (London, 1608). STC 1824. ——— The tryall of the new religion (London, 1608). STC 1832. ——— A Christian dialogue between Theophilis a deformed Catholike in Rome, and Remigius a reformed Catholike in the Church of England (London, 1609). STC 1816. ——— The Catholique triumph (London, 1610). STC 1815. Bellarmine, Robert, Disputationes … de controversiis Christianae fidei (Paris, 1586); (Ingolstadt, 3rd edn 1590–93). ——— A shorte catechisme … illustrated with images, trans. Richard Gibbons (Augsburg, 1614). STC 1843. ARCR, II, 342. ——— A short Christian doctrine, trans. Richard Gibbons ([St Omer], 1633). STC 1844. ARCR, II, 343. ——— Spiritual Writings, trans. and ed. J.P. Donnelly and R.J. Teske (Mahwah, NJ, 1989). Bernard, Richard, Rhemes against Rome (London, 1626). STC 1961. Berzetti, Nicholas, The practice of meditating with profit the misteries of our Lord, the Blessed Vergin and saints, trans. Thomas Talbot (Mechlin, 1613). STC 4125. ARCR, II, 744. Bilson, Thomas, The true difference between Christian subjection and unchristian rebellion (London, 1585). STC 3071. Bisse, James, Two sermons preached, the one at Paules Crosse the eight of Januarie 1580 (London, 1581). STC 3099. Blundell, Margaret (ed.), Blundell’s Diary and Letter Book 1702–1728 (Liverpool, 1952). Bonner, Edmund, A profitable and necessarye doctryne, with certayne homelies (London, [1555]). STC 3283. Bonnet, Jules (ed.), Letters of John Calvin Compiled from the Original Manuscripts and Edited with Historical Notes, 4 vols (New York, 1972; first publ. 1858). Boquin, Pierre, Assertio veteris et veri christianismi adversus novum et fictum jesuitismum (Heidelberg 1579). ——— A defence of the olde, and true profession of Christianitie against the new, and counterfaite secte of Jesuites, trans. T.G. (London, 1581). STC 3371. Bowden, Caroline (ed.), English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, 6 vols (London, 2012–13). Bradford, John, The hurte of hering masse (London, 1561?). STC 3494. Bray, Gerald (ed.), The Anglican Canons 1529–1947, Church of England Record Society 6 (Woodbridge, 1998). Brereton, William, ‘The Journal of Sir William Brereton 1635’, in North Country Diaries (Second Series), Surtees Society 124 (1915), pp. 1–50.

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[Breton, Nicholas], Englands selected characters (London, 1643). Wing B4384. Brewer, J.S. et al. (eds), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 1509–47, 21 vols (1862–1932). Bristow, Richard, A briefe treatise of divers plaine and sure waies to finde out the truth (Antwerp, 1599 edn.; first publ. 1574). STC 3800. ARCR, II, 67. ——— Demaundes to be proponed of Catholiques to the heretikes (Antwerp, 1576). STC 3800.5. ARCR, II, 69. Brome, James, Travels over England, Scotland and Wales (London, 1707 edn). Broughton, Richard, The first part of Protestants proofes, for Catholikes religion and recusancy ([English secret press], 1607). STC 20448. ARCR, II, 81. ——— Protestants demonstrations, for Catholiks recusance (Douai, 1615). STC 20450.5. ARCR, II, 89. ——— The ecclesiastical historie of Great Britaine (Douai, 1633). STC 3894. ARCR, II, 77. Bruno, Vincenzo, A short treatise of the sacrament of penance ([English secret press], 1597). STC 3941.5. ARCR, II, 329. Bucke, John, Instructions for the use of the beades (Louvain, 1589). STC 4000. ARCR, II, 95. Buckland, Ralph, An embassage from heaven ([English secret press, 1611]). STC 4007. ARCR, II, 95.5 Bulkeley, Edward, An answere to ten frivolous and foolish reasons, set downe by the Rhemish Jesuits and papists (London, 1588). STC 4024. Bull, Marcus (ed.), The Miracles of Our Lady of Rocamadour: Analysis and Translation (Woodbridge, 1999). Bullinger, Henry, The Decades of Henry Bullinger, Minister of the Church of Zurich, trans. H.I., 4 vols, PS (Cambridge, 1849–52). Bunny, Francis, An answere to a popish libelle intituled a petition to the bishops, preachers, and gospellers, lately spread abroad in the northe partes (Oxford, 1607). STC 4097. C., B., The dolefull knell, of Thomas Bell (Rouen, 1607). STC 25972.4. Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue on Miracles, trans. H. von Scott and C.C. Swinton Bland (London, 1929). Calendar of Letters and State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Reign of Elizabeth I Preserved in the Archives of Simancas, ed. M.A.S. Hume, 4 vols (London, 1892–99). Calendar of Papal Registers: Papal Letters, vol. vii, 1417–31, ed. J.A. Twemlow (London, 1906). Calendar of Patent Rolls, Henry VII (London, 1914).

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Calendar of State Papers Domestic, of the Reigns of Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I, and James I, 12 vols, ed. R. Lemon and M.A.E. Green (London, 1856–72). Calvin, John, Epistolae duae de rebus hoc saeculo cognitu necessariis (Basle, 1537). ——— Petit traicté (Geneva, 1543). ——— Excuse à messieurs les nicodemites (Geneva, 1544). ——— De vitandis superstitionibus (Geneva, 1549). ——— The institution of Christian religion (London, 1561). STC 4415. ——— On Shunning the Unlawful Rites of the Ungodly, in Tracts Relating to the Reformation, trans. H. Beveridge, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1844–51). ——— Excuse aux Nicodemites, repr. in Three French Treatises, ed. Francis M. Higman (London, 1970). ——— Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. H. Beveridge, 2 vols in 1 (Grand Rapids, MI, 1989; first publ. 1845). Cambrensis, Giraldus, Itinerarium Cambriae … cum annotationibus Davidis Powell, part 2 of Pontici virunnii viri doctissimi Britannicae historiae libri sex (London, 1585). STC 20109. Canisius, Peter, Certayne necessarie principles of religion (Douai, [1578– 79]). STC 4568.5. ARCR, II, 462. ——— Ane catechisme or schort instruction of Christian religion drawen out of the scripturs and ancient doctours, trans. [Adam King] (Paris, 1588). STC 4568. ARCR, II, 887. ——— A summe of Christian doctrine, trans. Henry Garnet ([English secret press, 1592–96]). STC 4571.5. ——— Crynnodeb o adysc Cristnogaul (Paris, 1609). STC 4569. ——— An introduction to the Catholick faith containing A brief explication of the Christian doctrine ([Rouen], 1633). STC 14123.5. ARCR, II, 919. Canning, J.H. (ed.), ‘Catholic Registers of Abergavenny, Mon. 1740– 1838’, in CRS Miscellanea, CRS 27 (London, 1927), pp. 98–235. Capilla, Andreas de, A manual of spirituall exercises, trans. Henry Manfield (St Omer, 1625). STC 4603. ARCR, II, 511. Caraman, Philip (ed.), The Other Face: Catholic Life under Elizabeth I (London, 1960). ——— The Years of Siege: Catholic Life from James I to Cromwell (London, 1966). Cardwell, Edward, (ed.), Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England, 2 vols (Oxford, 1844). Cartwright, James Joel (ed.), The Travels through England of Dr Richard Pococke, Successively Bishop of Meath and of Ossory during 1750, 1751, and later Years, CS, NS 42, 44 (1888–89).

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Cartwright, Thomas, Syn theoi en christoi the answere to the preface of the Rhemish testament (Edinburgh, 1602). STC 4716. ——— A confutation of the Rhemists translations, glosses and annotations (Leiden, 1618). STC 4709. A catalogue of martyrs in England: for the profession of the Catholique faith, since … 1535 ([Douai], 1608). STC 25771. ARCR, II, 846. A catalogue of the severall sects and opinions in England and other nations (London, 1647). Wing C1411. Catholic Record Society, Miscellanea II, CRS 2 (London, 1906). Catholic Record Society, Miscellanea III, CRS 3 (London, 1906). Cavalleriis, Giovanni Battista de, Ecclesiae Anglicanae trophaea (Rome, [1584]). ARCR, I, 944. Cecil, William, The execution of justice in England for maintenaunce of publique and Christian peace, against certeine stirrers of sedition, and adherents to the traytors and enemies of the realme, without any persecution of them for questions of religion, as is falsely reported and published by the fautors and fosterers of their treasons (London, 1583). STC 4902. ——— The execution of justice in England, ed. Robert M. Kingdon (Ithaca, NY, 1965). Challoner, Richard, Britannia sancta (London, 1745). ——— Memoirs of Missionary Priests, ed. J.H. Pollen (London, 1924). The character of a Jesuit (London, 1681). Wing C1977. Chardon, John, A sermon preached in S. Peters Church in Exceter (London, 1580). STC 5001. Charke, William, An answere to a seditious pamphlet lately cast abroade by a Jesuite (London, 1580). STC 5006. Chase, Steven (ed.), Angelic Spirituality: Medieval Perspectives on the Ways of Angels (New York, 2002). Clark, Andrew (ed.), The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Antiquary of Oxford, 1632–1695, vol. i 1632–1663, Oxford Historical Society 19 (1891). Clay, W.K., (ed.), Liturgical Services: Liturgies and Occasional Forms of Prayer set forth in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, PS (Cambridge, 1847). Clopper, Lawrence M. (ed.), Records of Early English Drama: Chester (Manchester, 1979). Clynnog, Morys, Athrauaeth Gristnogaul, le cair uedi cynnuys … (Milan, 1568). STC 5450.5. ARCR, II, 141. Cockburn, J.S. (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records: Sussex Indictments, James I (London, 1975). ——— Calendar of Assize Records: Essex Indictments: Elizabeth I (London, 1978).

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Cosin, John, A collection of private devotions (London, 1627). STC 5816.4. Cranmer, Thomas, A confutation of unwritten verities, in John Edmund Cox (ed.), Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, Martyr, 1556 (Cambridge, 1846). Crashaw, William, The sermon preached at the Crosse, Feb. xiiij 1607 (London, 1608). STC 6027. ——— The Jesuites gospel (London, 1610). STC 6016. ——— Manuale Catholicorum … A manuall for true Catholicks (London, 1611). STC 6018. Cressy, Serenus, The church history of Brittany, from the beginning of Christianity to the Norman Conquest ([Rouen], 1668). Wing C6890. Clancy 258. Crosignani, Ginevra, Thomas M. McCoog and Michael Questier (eds), Recusancy and Conformity in Early Modern England: Manuscript and Printed Sources in Translation (Toronto, 2010). Davies, Richard, A funerall sermon preached the XXVI day of November … in the parishe church of Caermerthyn (London, 1577). STC 6364. ——— ‘Address to the Welsh’, trans. in A.O. Evans, A Memorandum on the Legality of the Welsh Bible and the Welsh Version of the Book of Common Prayer (Cardiff, 1925). Daza, Antonio, The historie, life, and miracles, extasies and revelations of the Blessed Virgin, Sister Joane, of the Crosse, of the third order of our holy father S. Francis, trans. Francis Bell (St Omer, 1625). STC 6185. ARCR, II, 51. [Defoe, Daniel], A tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain, 3 vols (London, 1724–27 edn.). Dent, Arthur, The plaine mans path-way to heaven (London, 1610). STC 6630. Dering, Edward, A sparing restraint, of many lavishe untruths, which M. Doctor Harding dothe chalenge (London, 1568). STC 6725. Dingley, Robert, The deputation of angels, or the angell-guardian (London, 1654). Wing D1496. Doleman, Robert (pseudonym), Conference about the next succession to the crowne of Ingland ([Antwerp], 1594 [1595]). STC 19398. ARCR, II, 167. Drayton, Michael, Works, ed. J. William Hebel, 5 vols (Oxford, 1931–41). Drexelius, Jeremias, The angel-guardian’s clock (Rouen, 1630). STC 7234. ARCR, II, 408.5. Dryden, John, Religio laici: or, a layman’s faith (1682). Wing D2342. Earle, John, Microcosmography: or, a piece of the world discover’d: In essays and characters (London, 1732 edn).

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Erbe, Theodore (ed.), John Mirk’s Festial of c.1401: A Collection of Homilies, EETS, extra ser. 96 (London, 1905): 177–82. Featley, Daniel, Ancilla pietatis: or, the hand-maid to private devotion (London, 1626). STC 10725. Fehrenbach, Robert J. and Joseph L. Black (eds), Private Libraries of Renaissance England, vol. 8 (Tempe, AZ, 2014). Field, John, A caveat for Parsons Howlet (London, 1581). STC 10725. Fincham, Kenneth (ed.), Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church, vol. i, Church of England Record Society, i (Woodbridge, 1994). Fischart, Johann, Fides Jesu et Jesuitarum (Christlingæ, 1573). Forbes-Leith, William (ed.), Narratives of Scottish Catholics under Mary Stuart and James VI Now First Printed from the Original Manuscripts in the Secret Archives of the Vatican and Other Collections (Edinburgh, 1885). Foxe, John, Actes and monuments (London, 1583). STC 11225. Francke, Christian, Conference or dialogue discovering the sect of Jesuites, trans. W.F. (London, 1580). STC 11346. Frarin, Peter, An oration against the unlawfull insurrections of the Protestantes of our time, under pretence to refourme religion (Antwerp, 1566). STC 11333. ARCR, II, 309. Fulke, William, A briefe confutation, of a popish discourse (London, 1581). STC 11421. ——— A sermon preached upon Sunday being the twelfth of March anno 1581 (London, 1581). STC 11455. ——— The text of the new testament of Jesus Christ, translated out of the vulgar Latine by the papists of the traiterous seminarie at Rhemes (London, 1589). STC 2888. Fuller, Thomas, The history of the worthies of England (London, 1662). Wing F2440. G., H., A gagge for the pope (London, 1624). STC 20111. Garnet, Henry, An apology against the defence of schisme ([London secret press], 1593). STC 11617.2. ARCR, II, 318. ——— A treatise of Christian renunciation ([London secret press], 1593). STC 11617.8. ARCR, II, 322. ——— The societie of the rosary. Newly augmented ([London secret press], 1596–97). STC 11617.5. ARCR, II, 320. Garnier, Jean, A briefe and cleare confession of the Christian fayth (London, 1579). STC 11620.7. Garter, Bernard, A new yeares gifte, dedicated to the popes holinesse, and all Catholikes addicted to the sea or Rome (London, 1579). STC 11629.

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Gee, John, The foot out of the snare … whereunto is added … the names of such as disperse, print, bind or sell popish books (London, 3rd edn 1624). STC 11704. ——— New shreds of the old snare (London, 1624). STC 11706. ——— The Foot out of the Snare (1624), ed. T.H.B.M. Harmsen (Nijmegen, 1992). Genings, John, The life and death of Mr Edmund Geninges Priest (St Omer, 1614). STC 11728. ARCR, II, 338. Gerard, John, The Condition of Catholics under James I: Father Gerard’s Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, ed. John Morris (London, 1872). ——— The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, ed. and trans. Philip Caraman (London, 1951). Gerardus, Andreas, The true tryall and examination of a mans own selfe, trans. Thomas Newton (London, 1587). STC 11761. Gerson, Jean, Collatis de angelis, in Opera, pars IV (Paris, 1960). Geveren, Sheltco a, Of the ende of this world, and the seconde commyng of Christ, trans. Thomas Rogers (London, 1577 and 1578). STC 11804. Gibbons, John, and John Fen (eds.), Concertatio ecclesiae Catholicae in Anglia (n.p., 1583); ed. and augmented by John Bridgewater (1589). ARCR, I, 524. Gifford, George, A briefe discourse of certaine pointes of the religion, which is among the common sort of Christians (London, 1581). STC 11845. ——— A dialogue between a papist and a protestant, applied to the capacitie of the unlearned (London, 1583). STC 11849.3. ——— A dialogue concerning witches and witchcraftes (London, 1593). STC 11851. Gilbert, George, ‘A way to deal with persons of all sorts so as to convert them and bring them back to a better way of life’ (1583), in Leo Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Persons, CRS 39 (London, 1942), pp. 331–40. Girao, Joao Rodriguez, The palme of Christian fortitude: or, the glorious combats of Christians in Japonia, trans. Edmund Neville ([St Omer], 1630). STC 18482. ARCR, II, 566. Given-Wilson, C. (ed.), The Chronicle of Adam Usk 1377–1421 (Oxford, 1997). Godly contemplations for the unlearned ([Antwerp, 1575]). STC 24626.3. ARCR, II, 193. A godly dyalogue and dysputacyon betwene Pyers Plowman and a popysh preest (n.p., 1550). STC 19903. Gouge, William, A plaister for the plague, in Gods three arrowes (London, 1631). STC 12116.

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Granada, Luis de, Of prayer, and meditation, trans. Richard Hopkins (Paris, 1582). STC 16907. ARCR, II, 443. ——— A memoriall of a Christian life, trans. Richard Hopkins (Rouen, 1586). STC 16903. ARCR, II, 439. ——— Granados devotion (London, 1598). STC 16902. ——— Granados spirituall and heavenlie exercises (London, 1598). STC 16920. ——— The sinners guyde (London, 1598). STC 16198. ——— A spiritual doctrine, conteining a rule to live wel, with divers praiers and meditations, trans. Richard Gibbons (Louvain, 1599). STC 16922. ARCR, II, 345. ——— The flowers of Lodowicke of Granado, trans. Thomas Lodge (London, 1601). STC 16901. ——— A paradise of prayers containing the purity of devotion and meditation [trans. Thomas Lodge?] (London, 1614). STC 16916.7. Greene, Robert, The repentance of Robert Greene (London, 1592). STC 12306. Gribaldi, Matteo, A notable and marveilous epistle … concernyng the terrible judgemente of God, upon hym that for feare of men, denieth Christ and the knowne veritie (London, 1550, [1570?]). STC 12365. Hagan, J., ‘Miscellanea Vaticano-Hibernica, 1580–1631’, Archivium Hibernicum or Irish Historical Records, 3 (1914): 260–64. Hall, John, Select Observations on English bodies of eminent persons in desperate diseases (London, 1679). Wing H357. Hall, Joseph, The great mystery of godliness … Also, the invisible world (London, 1652). Wing H384. ——— The Works of Joseph Hall, D.D., Successively Bishop of Exeter and Norwich, ed. P. Hall, 12 vols (Oxford, 1837–39). Hallett, Nicky, (ed.), Lives of Spirit: English Carmelite Self-Writing of the Early Modern Period (Aldershot, 2007). ——— (ed.), Witchcraft, Exorcism and the Politics of Possession in a Seventeenth-Century Convent: ‘How Sister Ursula was Once Bewitched and Sister Margaret Twice’ (Aldershot, 2007). Hamilton, Adam (ed.), The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses Regular of the Lateran, at St. Monica’s in Louvain, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1904–6). Hamond, Thomas, The late commotion of certaine papists in Herefordshire. Occasioned by the death of one Alice Wellington, a Recusant, who was buried after the popish maner (London, 1605). STC 25232.5. Hanmer, Meredith, The great bragge and challenge of M. Champion (London, 1581). STC 12745. ——— The Jesuites banner (London, 1581). STC 12746.

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Harper-Bill, Christopher (ed.), The Register of John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury 1486–1500, vol. 3: Norwich Sede Vacante, 1499, Canterbury and York Society (Woodbridge, 2000). Harpsfield, Nicholas, Dialogi sex contra summi pontificatus, monasticae vitae, sanctorum, sacrarum imaginum oppugnatores, et pseudomartyres (Antwerp, 1573 edn; first publ. 1566). ARCR, I, 638. Harris, P.R. (ed.), ‘The Reports of William Udall, Informer, 1605–1612’, RH, 8 (1966): 192–284. Harsnett, Samuel, A declaration of egregious popish impostures (London, 1603). STC 12880. Hartley, T.E., (ed.), Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, vol. i 1558–1581 (Leicester, 1981). ——— Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, vol. ii 1584–9 (Leicester, 1995). Hay, M.V., The Blairs Papers (1603–1660) (London and Edinburgh, 1929). Heigham, John, A devout exposition of the holie masse with an ample declaration of all the rites and ceremonies belonging to the same (Douai, 1614). STC 13032. ARCR, II, 411. ——— The gagge of the reformed gospell ([St Omer?], 1623). STC 13033.2. ARCR, II, 414. Herolt, Joannes, Sermones discipuli de tempore [et] sanctis (London, 1510). STC 13226. Heydon, John, Theomagia, or the temple of wisdome (London, 1664). Wing H1676. Heylyn, Peter, The way and manner of the reformation of the Church of England declared and justified (London, 1657). Wing H1704. Hicks, L. (ed.), Letters of Thomas Fitzherbert, 1608–1610, CRS 41 (London, 1948). Hide, Thomas, A consolatorie epistle to the afflicted Catholikes (Louvain [London], 1580). STC 13377. ARCR, II, 430. Hill, Thomas, A quartron of reasons of Catholic religion, with as many briefe reasons of refusall (Antwerp [English secret press], 1600). STC 13470. ARCR, II, 437. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Salisbury MSS, IV (London, 1892). ——— Various Collections, iii (London, 1904). Hoby, Margaret, The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605, ed. Dorothy M. Meads (London, 1930).The holie bible faithfully translated into English, out of the authenticall Latin, 2 vols (Douai, 1609–10). STC 2207. ARCR, II, 171. (Rouen, 1635). STC 2321. ARCR, II, 172. Holmes, P.J. (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, CRS 67 (London, 1981). ——— Caroline Casuistry: The Cases of Conscience of Fr Thomas Southwell SJ, CRS 84 (Woodbridge, 2012).

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Hook, Paul (ed.), ‘Catholic Registers of Holywell, Flintshire, 1698–1829’, in CRS Miscellanea III (London, 1906), pp. 105–34. Hooker, Richard, The Works of that Learned and Judicious Divine Mr Richard Hooker, ed. J. Keble, 2 vols (Oxford, 1850). Hooper, John, Later Writings of Bishop Hooper Together with his Letters and Other Pieces, ed. Charles Nevinson (Cambridge, 1852). Horstmann, C. (ed.), The Lives of Women Saintes of our Contrie of England … (c.1610–1615), EETS, OS, 86 (1886). Hosius, Stanislaus, A most excellent treatise of the begynnyng of heresyes in oure tyme, trans. Richard Shacklock (Antwerp, 1565). STC 13888. ARCR, II, 699. ——— Of the expresse worde of God, trans. Thomas Stapleton (Louvain, 1567). STC 13889. ARCR, II, 736. Huggarde, Miles, The displaying of the Protestantes and sondry their practices (London, 1556). STC 13558. Hughes, Paul L. and James F. Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3 vols (New Haven, CT, and London, 1964–9). Hunter, J. and J. Caley (eds), Valor Ecclesiasticus, 6 vols (London, 1810). Hunter, Richard and Ida Macalpine (eds), Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry 1535–1860 (London, 1963). Hunter, Thomas, An English Carmelite: The Life of Catharine Burton, Mother Mary Xaveria of the Angels, of the English Teresian Convent at Antwerp, ed. H.J.C. (London, 1876). James, Richard, Iter Lancastrense; A Poem, Written A.D. 1636, ed. Thomas Corser, CS, OS, 7 (1845). Jardine, David (ed.), Criminal Trials, vol. ii, The Gunpowder Plot (London, 1835). Jewel, John, The Works of John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, ed. John Ayre, 4 vols, PS (Cambridge, 1845–50). [Kellison, Matthew], M., Ch., A myrrhine posie of the bitter dolours of Christ his passion (Douai, 1639). STC 17129. Kelly, Wilfred (ed.), Liber Ruber Venerabilis Collegi Anglorum de Urbe, 1, Annales Collegi … 1579–1630, CRS 37 (London, 1940). Keltridge, John, Two godlie and learned sermons (London, 1581). STC 14921. Kempis, Thomas, The following of Christ, trans. Richard Whitford (London, 1556 [1575]), STC 803. Kenny, Anthony (ed.), The Responsa Scholarum of the English College, Rome: Part One: 1598–1621, CRS 54 (London, 1962). Kenworthy-Browne, Christina (ed.), Mary Ward (1585–1645): A Brief Relation … with Autobiographical Fragments and a Selection of Letters, CRS 81 (Woodbridge, 2008).

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Kenyon, J.P. (ed.), The Stuart Constitution: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge, 1986 edn). The key of paradise opening the gate to eternal salvation, ed. Thomas Fitzsimon and John Wilson (St Omers, 1675 edn). Wing K384. King, John, Lectures upon Jonas, delivered at Yorke (Oxford, 1599). STC 14977. Knox, T.F. (ed.), The First and Second Diaries of the English College, Douay (London, 1878). ——— The Letters and Memorials of William Cardinal Allen, 1532–1594, Records of the English Catholics under the Penal Laws 2 (London, 1882). Larkin, J.F. (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, ii, Royal Proclamations of King Charles I, 1625–1646 (Oxford, 1983). Lascelles, Richard, A little way how to heare masse with profit and devotion (Paris, 1644). Clancy 13480. Latimer, Hugh, Sermons and Remains, ed. G.E. Corrie, PS (Cambridge, 1845). Law, T.G., (ed.), The Archpriest Controversy: Documents Relating to the Dissensions of the Roman Catholic Clergy, 1597–1602 edited from the Petyt MSS of the Inner Temple, 2 vols, CS 56, 58 (London, 1896–98). Leigh, Richard [William Cecil], The copy of a letter sent out of England to don Bernardino de Mendoza … declaring the State of England (London, 1588). STC 15412. [Leslie, John], A treatise of treasons against Q. Elizabeth, and the croune of England ([Louvain], 1572). STC 7601. ARCR, II, 502. Lewis, E.A. and J. Conway Davies (eds), Records of the Court of Augmentations Relating to Wales and Monmouthshire (Cardiff, 1954). The life and end of Thomas Awfeeld a seminary preest and Thomas Webley a dyers seruant in London, beeing both traitours (London, [1585]). STC 997. Lipsius, Justius, Diva virgo Hallensis. Beneficia eius et miracula fide atque ordine descripta (Antwerp, 1604). ——— Diva Sichemiensis sive Aspricollis: nova eius beneficia et admiranda (Antwerp, 1605). Loarte, Gaspar, The exercise of a Christian life, trans. I.S. [Stephen Brinkley] ([London, 1579]). STC 16641.5. ARCR, II, 63. Loomie, Albert J., (ed.), Spain and the Jacobean Catholics, II 1613–1624, CRS 68 (London, 1978). Loretto and Winifred, or, A new way of getting of children, viz. by prayers and presents to the tune of Packington’s Pound ([London, 1688]). Wing L3071. Loyola, Ignatius, The Text of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius (London, 1913).

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Luther, Martin, Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, in Luther’s Primary Works, ed Henry Wace and C.A. Bucheim (London, 1896). Luther, Martin and Philip Melanchthon, Of two woonderful popish monsters to wyt, of a popish asse which was found at Rome in the riuer of Tyber, and of a monkish calfe, calued at Friberge in Misne, trans. John Brooke (London, 1579). STC 17797. McCann, J. and H. Connolly (eds), Memorials of Father Augustine Baker and Other Documents Relating to the English Benedictines, CRS 33 (London, 1933). MacDonald, Michael (ed.), Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case (London, 1991). Majoris, Joannis, Magnum speculum exemplorum (Douai, 1605). A manual of godly prayers distributed according to the dayes of the weeke (London, 1620). STC 17278.1. A manuall of praiers (Calais [English secret press], 1599). STC 17266. ARCR, II, 205. Martin, Gregory, A treatise of schisme (Douai [English secret press], 1578). STC 17508. ARCR, II, 524. ——— A discoverie of the manifold corruptions of the holy scriptures by the heretikes of our daies (Rheims, 1582). STC 17503. ARCR, II, 514. ——— A treatyse of Christian peregrination … whereunto is adioined certen epistles written by him to sundrye his frendes: the copies whereof were since his decease founde amonge his wrytinges ([Paris], 1583). STC 17507. ARCR, II, 523. ——— The love of the soule ([Lancashire Birchley Hall press], 1619). STC 17506. ARCR, II, 519. ——— Roma Sancta (1581), ed. George Bruner Parks (Rome, 1969). Marvell, Andrew, The Rehearsal Transpros’d and The Rehearsal Transpros’d The Second Part, ed. D.I.B. Smith (Oxford, 1971). Mathew, David (ed.), ‘Some Elizabethan Documents’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 6 (Cardiff, 1933): 70–78. Mathew, Tobie, The Life of Lady Lucy Knatchbull, ed. David Knowles (London, 1931). Metcalf, Philip, The Life of Saint Winefride. Reprinted from the edition of 1712, ed. Herbert Thurston (London, 1917). A methode, to meditate upon the psalter, or great rosarie of our blessed ladie (Antwerp [English secret press], 1598). STC 17538. ARCR, II, 924. M[ilner], J[ohn], Authentic Documents Relative to the Miraculous Cure of Winefrid White of the Town of Wolverhampton, at Holywell (London, 1805).

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Mirk, John, Liber festivalis and quatuor sermones (London, 1483). STC 17957. ——— Mirk’s Festial: A Collection of Homilies, ed. Theodore Erbe, EETS, extra ser. 96 (1905). Montagu, Richard, Appello Caesarem (London, 1625). STC 18031. [Moon, John], A Jesuitical designe discovered: in a piece called, the quakers pedigree (London, 1674). Wing M2524B. More, Henry, The Elizabethan Jesuits: Historia Missionis Anglicanae Societatis Jesu (1660), ed. Francis Edwards (Chichester, 1981). More, Thomas, The Dialogue Concerning Tyndale, in The English Works of Sir Thomas More, ed. W.E. Campbell, 2 vols (London, 1931). ——— The Complete Works of St Thomas More, 12 vols in 18 parts (New Haven, CT, and London, 1963–90). Morejon, Pedro, A briefe relation of the persecution lately made against the Catholike Christians, in the kingdome of Japonia, trans. W. W[right] ([St Omer], 1619). STC 14527. ARCR, II, 869. Morris, Christopher (ed.), The Journeys of Celia Fiennes (London, 1947). Morris, John (ed.), The Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers Related by Themselves, 3 vols (London, 1872–77). Munday, Anthony, A view of sundry examples (London, 1580). STC 18281. Musculus, Wolfgang, Le temporiseur (London, 1550). STC 18311; (Zurich, [1555?]). STC 18312. Musket, George, The bishop of London his legacy (St Omer, 1623). STC 18305. ARCR, II, 557. A newe secte of friars called Capichini ([London?, 1580]). STC 4605. The new testament of Jesus Christ, translated faithfully into English . . . with . . annotations, and other necessarie helpes . . . specially for the discoverie of the corruptions of divers late translations, and for cleering the controversies in religion, of these daies (Rheims, 1582). STC 2884. ARCR, II, 173. The new testament … with annotations, and other helpes (Antwerp, 1621). STC 2923. ARCR, II, 175. The new testament … The fourth edition, enriched with pictures ([Rouen?], 1633). STC 2946. ARCR, II, 177. A new-yeeres-gift for the pope ([London, c.1625). STC 20112. Nichols, John, A declaration of the recantation of John Nichols (London, 1581). STC 18533. ——— John Nichols pilgrimage (London, 1581). STC 18534. Numan, Philips, Miracles lately wrought by the intercession of the glorious Virgin Marie, at Mont-aigue, nere unto Sichem in Brabant, trans. Robert Chambers (Antwerp, 1606). STC 18746. ARCR, II, 130.

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Olin, John C. (ed.), The Catholic Reformation: Savonarola to Ignatius Loyola (New York, 1992). Ornsby, George (ed.), The Correspondence of John Cosin D. D., Lord Bishop of Durham, 2 vols, Surtees Society 52, 55 (Durham, 1869–72). Owen, Lewis, The running register: recording a true relation of the state of the English colledges, seminaries and cloysters in all forreigne parts (London, 1626). STC 18996. ——— Speculum Jesuiticum, or the Jesuites looking-glasse (London, 1629). STC 18997. Palmes, William The Life of Mrs Dorothy Lawson, of St Anthony’s, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne, ed. G. Bouchier Richardson (Newcastle-uponTyne, 1855). Parr, Richard The life of … James Usher, late arch-bishop of Armagh (London, 1686). Wing P548. Patrick, John, Reflexions upon the Devotions of the Roman Church (London, 1674). Wing P732. Pennant, Thomas, A tour in Wales, 2 vols (London, 1778–83). Perkins, William, A Discourse of Conscience (Cambridge, 1596). STC 19696. ——— A reformed Catholike (Cambridge, 1604). STC 19737. ——— Whole treatise of the cases of conscience (Cambridge, 1606). STC 19669. [Persons, Robert], A booke of Christian exercise, appertaining to resolution … perused, and accompanied now with a treatise tending to pacification, ed. Edmund Bunny (London, 1584). STC 19359. [——— under the pseudonym of] Howlet, John, A brief discours contayning certayne reasons why Catholiques refuse to goe to church (Douai [London secret press], 1580). STC 19394. ARCR, II, 613. ——— The copie of a double letter ([Rheims, 1581]). STC 888. ARCR, II, 623.5. ——— A discoverie of I. Nichols minister, misreported a Jesuite, lately recanted in the tower of London ([London secret press, 1581]). STC 19402. ARCR, II, 625. ——— De persecutione Anglicana (Paris, 1582). ARCR, I, 875. ——— The first booke of the Christian exercise, appertaining to resolution ([Rouen], 1582). STC 19353. ARCR, II, 616. ——— A Christian directorie guiding men to their salvation (Rouen, 1585). STC 19354.1. ARCR, II, 618; (St Omer, 1607). STC 19354.5. ARCR, II, 620. [———] A manifestation of the great folly and bad spirit of certayne in England calling themselves secular priestes ([Antwerp], 1602). STC 19411. ARCR, II, 631.

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——— The warn-word to Sir Francis Hastinges Wast-Word ([Antwerp], 1602). STC 19418. ARCR, II, 640. ——— Treatise of three conversions, 3 vols (1603–4). STC 19416. ARCR, II, 638. ——— Quaestiones duae de sacris alienis non adeundis ([St Omer], 1607). ARCR, I, 893. ——— The Jesuit’s Memorial for the Intended Reformation of England, under their first Popish Prince … with an introduction, and some animadversions, ed. Edward Gee (London, 1690). Wing P569. ——— ‘Of the Life and Martyrdom of Father Edmond Campion’, Letters and Notices, 57 (1877): 219–42; 58 (1877): 308–39; 59 (1878): 1–68. ——— ‘The Memoirs of Robert Persons’, ed. J.H. Pollen, in CRS Miscellanea II, CRS 2 (London, 1906), pp. 12–218. ——— ‘Father Persons’ Memoirs’, ed. J.H. Pollen, CRS Miscellanea IV, CRS 4 (London, 1907), pp. 1–161. ——— Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Parsons, SJ, vol. i, (To 1588), ed. L. Hicks, CRS 39 (London, 1942). Petti, A.G. (ed.), The Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan (c.1550–1640), CRS 52 (London, 1959). ——— Recusant Documents from the Ellesmere Manuscripts, CRS 60 (London, 1968). Philips van Marnix van St. Aldegonde, The bee hive of the romishe church, trans. George Gilpin (London, 1579). STC 17445. Phillips, John, The perfect path to paradice: containing divers most ghostly and wholsome prayers (London, 1588). STC 19872. ——— The Christians ABC: or, a Christian alphabet, conteyning grounds of knowledge unto salvation (London, 1629). STC 19877.5. Philpot, John, The Examinations and Writings of John Philpot, ed. Robert Eden, PS (Cambridge, 1842). Pinelli, Luca, Breife meditations of the most holy sacrament and of preparation, for receving the same, trans. Henry Garnet ([English secret press], c.1600). STC 19937. ARCR, II, 337. ——— Godly meditations upon the most holy sacrament of the lordes supper, trans. and ed. Christopher Sutton (London, 1601). STC 23491. The political state of Great Britain, vol. xvi (London, 1718). Pollard, Alfred W. (ed.), Records of the English Bible (Oxford, 1911). Pollen, J.H. (ed.), Papal Negotiations with Mary Queen of Scots During her Reign in Scotland 1561–1567 (Edinburgh, 1901). ——— Unpublished Documents relating to the English Martyrs, vol. I 1584–1603, CRS 5 (London, 1908). ——— and W. MacMahon (eds), English Martyrs, ii, The Ven. Philip Howard Earl of Arundel, 1557–1595, CR 21 (London, 1919).

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Potts, Thomas, The wonderfull discoverie of witches in the countie of Lancaster (London, 1613). STC 20138. Pownde, Thomas, Sixe reasons set downe to shew, that it is no orderly way in controversies of faith, to appeale to be tryed onely by scriptures, reproduced for refutation in Robert Crowley, An aunswer to sixe reasons (London, 1581). STC 6075.5. [Preston, Thomas, under the pseudonym of], Widdrington, Roger, A theologicall disputation concerning the oath of allegiance, dedicated to the most holy father Pope Paul the fifth ([London, 1613]). STC 25603. ARCR, II, 660. P[ricket], R[obert], The Jesuits miracles, or new popish wonders. Containing the straw, the crowne, and the wondrous child (London, 1607). STC 20340. Prideaux, John, Certaine sermons preached by John Prideaux (Oxford, 1637). STC 20345. The primer more ample, and in a new order (Rouen, 1684 edn). Wing P3462. Clancy 795. Prynne, William, A briefe survay and censure of Mr Cozen his couzening devotions (London, 1628). STC 20455a. ——— Canterburies doome (London, 1646). Wing P3917. Purvis, J.S. (ed.), Tudor Parish Documents of the Diocese of York (Cambridge, 1948). Questier, Michael (ed.), Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate of George Birkhead, CS, 5th ser., 12 (1998). Radford, John, A directorie teaching the way to the truth in a briefe and plaine discourse against the heresies of this time ([English secret press], 1605). STC 20602. ARCR, II, 667. Raine, Angelo (ed.), York Civic Records, vol. 7, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series 115 (1950). Raine, James (ed.), Depositions and other Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham, Surtees Society 21 (1845). Raines, F.R. (ed.), ‘The State, Civil and Ecclesiastical of the County of Lancaster, about the Year 1590’, in Chetham Miscellanies V, Chetham Society, OS 96 (1875), pp. 1–48. Rainolds, John, Six conclusions touching the holy Scripture and the Church (London, 1584). STC 20626. Rainolds, William, A refutation of sundry reprehensions, cavils and false sleightes, by which M. Whitaker laboureth to deface the late English translation (Paris, 1583). STC 20632. ARCR, II, 668. Renold, P. (ed.), The Wisbech Stirs 1595–1598, CRS 51 (London, 1958). ——— Letters of William Allen and Richard Barret 1572–1598, CRS 58 (London, 1967). Reynolds, E.E., (ed.), Miscellanea, CRS 56 (London, 1964).

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Rhodes, John, An answere to a Romish rime lately printed, and entituled, A proper new ballad, wherein are contayned Catholike questions to the Protestant (London, 1602). STC 20959. Rhodes, W.E. (ed.), ‘The Apostolical Life of Ambrose Barlow, O.S.B’., Chetham Miscelllanies, NS, 2 (1909). Ribadeneira, Pedro de, The life of the holy patriarch S. Ignatius of Loyola, author, and founder of the Society of Jesus, trans. S.J. [M. Walpole] ([St Omer], 1616; 1622). STC 20968. ARCR, II, 782. Rich, Barnaby, The true report of a late practise enterprised by a papist, with a young maiden in Wales (London, 1582). STC 21004. Richardson, John, The great folly, superstition and idolatry of pilgrimages in Ireland (Dublin, 1727). Richeome, Louis, Trois discours pour la religion catholique: Des miracles, des saincts, et des images (Bordeaux, 1597). ——— Holy pictures of the mysticall figures of the most holy sacrifice and sacrament of the eucharist, trans. Edward Walpole (Antwerp [English secret press], 1619). STC 21022. ARCR, II, 775. Robert, Griffith, Ynglynion ar y pader ([Wales?, 1580–90?]). STC 21077.5. ARCR, II, 683. Robert, prior of Shrewsbury, The admirable life of Saint Wenefride virgin, martyr, abbesse, trans. J[ohn] F[alconer] ([St Omer], 1635). STC 21102. ARCR, II, 268. Roberts, George (ed.), The Diary of Walter Yonge … from 1604 to 1628, CS, 1st ser., 41 (1848). Roberts, John R. (ed.), A Critical Anthology of English Recusant Devotional Prose, 1558–1603 (Pittsburgh, 1966). Rogers, Richard, Seaven treatises (London, 1603). STC 21219. Rogers, Thomas, The general session (London, 1581). STC 21233.3. Rutherford, Samuel, A free disputation against pretended liberty of conscience (London, 1649). Wing R2379. Ryan, Patrick (ed.), ‘Some Correspondence of Cardinal Allen, 1579–85, from the Jesuit Archives’, in Miscellanea VII, CRS 9 (London, 1911), pp. 12–105. ——— ‘Diocesan Returns of Recusants for England and Wales 1577’, in CRS Miscellanea XII, CRS 22 (London, 1921), pp. 1–105. Sales, Francis de, An introduction to a devoute life, trans. I.Y ([St Omer], 2nd edn, 1617 [1622]). STC 11316.5; (London, 1616). STC 11319; (London, 1637), STC 11321. ARCR, II, 870–75. Salkeld, John, A treatise of angels (London, 1613). STC 21621. Sander, Nicholas, Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism. Published AD 1585, with a Continuation of the History, by Rev. Edward Rishton, ed. David Lewis (London, 1877).

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Sandys, Edwin, The Sermons of Edwin Sandys, D.D., ed. John Ayre, PS (Cambridge, 1842). Saunders, Erasmus, A View of the State of Religion in the Diocese of St David’s (London, 1721). Schroeder, H.J. (ed. and trans.), The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (Rockford, IL., 1978). Schutte, Anne Jacobson (ed.), Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint (Chicago, IL, 1996). Seng, Peter J. (ed.), Tudor Songs and Ballads from MS Cotton Vespasian A-25 (Cambridge, MA, 1978). Sheldon, Richard, The motives of Richard Sheldon, pr. for his just, voluntary, and free renouncing of communion with the bishop of Rome (London, 1612). STC 22397. ——— Survey of the miracles of the Church of Rome (London, 1616). STC 22399. Shinners, John (ed.), Medieval Popular Religion 1000–1500 (Peterborough, Ontario, 1997). Simpson, Richard, ‘A True Report of the Life and Martyrdom of Mr Richard White, Schoolmaster’, The Rambler, 3rd series, 3 (1860): 233–348, 366–88. Smedt, C. de (ed.), ‘Documenta de S. Wenefreda’, Analecta Bollandiana, 6 (1887): 305–52. Southern, A.C. (ed.), An Elizabethan Recusant House Comprising the Life of the Lady Magdalen Viscountess Montague (1538–1608) (London, 1954). Southwell, Robert, An humble supplication to her majestie ([English secret press], 1595). STC 22949.5. ARCR, II, 717. ——— A short rule of good life ([London secret press, 1596–97]). STC 22968.5. ARCR, II, 721. [Sparke, Michael], A second beacon fired by Scintilla (London, 1652). Wing S4818BA. Speculum pro Christianis seductis (Antwerp, 1590). Speed, John, The theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London, 1611– 12). STC 23041. Standish, John, A discourse wherin is debated whether it be expedient that the scripture should be in English for al men to reade that wyll (London, 1554). STC 23207. Staphylus, Fridericus, The apologie of Fridericus Staphylus … intreating of the true and right understanding of holy scripture. Of the t[r]anslation of the Bible in to the vulgar tongue. Of disagrement in doctrine amonge the Protestants, trans. Thomas Stapleton (Antwerp, 1565). STC 23230. ARCR, II, 737.

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Whether Christian faith maye be kepte secret in the heart … (Rouen [London], 1553). STC 5160.3. Whitaker, William, Ad Nicolai Sanderi demonstrationes quadaginta (London, 1583). STC 25357. ——— An answere to a certeine booke, written by M. William Rainolds (Cambridge, 1585). STC 25364. Whitford, Richard, A werke for housholders (London, [1531?]). STC 25422. Wiburn, Perceval, A checke or reproofe of M. Howlets untimely screeching in her Maiesties eares (London, 1581). STC 25586. Wilkins, D., Concilia, 4 vols (London, 1737). Wilkinson, William, A confutation of certaine articles delivered unto the Family of Love (London, 1579). STC 25665. Willet, Andrew, Synopsis papismi (London, 1614). STC 25699a. Williams, J. Anthony (ed.), Post-Reformation Catholicism in Bath, vol. I, CRS 65 (1975). Wilson, John, English martyrologe ([St Omer], 3rd edn. 1672). Wing W2926C. Clancy 1100. Winstead, Karen A. (ed.), Chaste Passions: Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends (Ithaca, NY, and London, 2000). Wither, George, A view of the marginal notes of the popish testament (London, [1588]). STC 25889. Woodes, Nathaniel, The Conflict of Conscience (London, 1581). STC 25966. Woodward, Philip, The fore-runner of Bels downefall ([Douai, 1605]). STC 25972.5. ARCR, II, 836. Woolton, John Of the conscience (London, 1576). STC 25978. W[orsley], E[dward], A discourse of miracles wrought in the Roman Catholick Church (Antwerp, 1676). Wing W3614. Clancy 1132. Worthington, Thomas, A relation of sixtene martyrs: glorified in England in twelve monethes (Douai, 1601). STC 26000.9. ARCR, II, 847. ——— An anker of Christian doctrine (Douai, 1622 edn). STC 26000.4. ARCR, II, 843. Wright, Thomas, The disposition or garnishmente of the soule to receive worthily the blessed sacrament (Antwerp [English secret press], 1596). STC 26038.8. ARCR, II, 853. Wright, Thomas, (ed.), Three Chapters of Letters Relating to the Suppression of the Monasteries, CS, 1st ser. 26 (London, 1843). Yepez, Diego de (Bishop of Tarazona) Historia particular de la persecucion de Inglaterra (Madrid, 1599). ARCR, I, 284.

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Secondary Sources Alberts, Tara, ‘Catholic Missions to Asia’, in Alexandra Bamji, Geert Janssen and Mary Laven (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation (Farnham, 2013), pp. 127–45. Alexander, Gina, ‘Bonner and the Marian Persecutions’, in Christopher Haigh (ed.), The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 157–75. Allison, A.F., ‘The Writings of Father Henry Garnet, S.J. (1555–1606)’, Biographical Studies, 1 (1951): 7–24. ———, ‘Who was John Brereley? The Identity of a Seventeenth Century Controversialist’, RH, 16 (1982–83): 17–41. Anderson, William James, ‘Rome and Scotland, 1513–1625’, in David McRoberts (ed.), Essays on the Scottish Reformation 1513–1625 (Glasgow, 1962), pp. 463–83. Anglo, Sydney, ‘More Machiavellian than Machiavel: A Study of the Context of Donne’s Conclave’, in A.J. Smith (ed.), John Donne: Essays in Celebration (London, 1972), pp. 349–84. Anson, Peter F., The Catholic Church in Modern Scotland 1560–1937 (London, 1937). ——— Underground Catholicism in Scotland 1622–1878 (Montrose, 1970). Anstruther, Godfrey, Vaux of Harrowden (Newport, 1953). ——— The Seminary Priests: A Dictionary of the Secular Clergy of England and Wales 1558–1850, vol. i Elizabethan 1558–1603 (Ware, 1968). Arblaster, Paul, Antwerp and the World: Richard Verstegan and the International Culture of Catholic Reformation (Leuven, 2004). ——— ‘“G.C”., Recusant Prison Translator of the Japonian Epistells’, RH, 28 (2006): 43–54. Areford, David S., The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe (Farnham, 2010). Armstrong, C.D.C., ‘English Catholicism Rethought?’, JEH, 54 (2003): 714–28. Ashley, Maurice, James II (London, 1977). Aston, Margaret, ‘English Ruins and English History: The Dissolution and the Sense of the Past’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 36 (1973): 231–55. ——— Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London, 1984) ——— England’s Iconoclasts, i, Laws against Images (Oxford, 1988). ——— ‘The Bishops’ Bible Illustrations’, in Diana Wood (ed.), The Church and the Arts, SCH 28 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 267–85.

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Aveling, J.C.H[ugh], Post Reformation Catholicism in East Yorkshire 1558–1790, East Yorkshire Local History Society 11 (York, 1960). ——— The Jesuits (London, 1981). Northern Catholics: The Catholic Recusants of the North Riding of Yorkshire 1558–1790 (London, 1966). ——— ‘Some Aspects of Yorkshire Catholic Recusant History, 1558– 1791’, in G.J. Cuming (ed.), The Province of York, SCH 4 (Leiden, 1967), pp. 98–121. ——— Catholic Recusancy in the City of York 1558–1791, CRS Monograph Series 2 (London, 1970). ——— The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation (London, 1976). ——— ‘Catholic Households in Yorkshire 1580–1603’, NH, 16 (1980): 85–101. Backus, Irene, Le miracle de Laon (Paris, 1994). Bagchi, David V.N., Luther’s Earliest Opponents: Catholic Controversialists, 1518–1525 (Minneapolis, 1991). Bagley, Ellie, ‘Writing the History of the English Bible: A Review of Recent Scholarship’, Religion Compass, 5 (2011): 300–313. Bagschi, David, Luther’s Earliest Opponents: Catholic Controversialists, 1518–1525 (Minneapolis, 1991). Bailey, Michael D., ‘The Disenchantment Of Magic: Spells, Charms, and Superstition in Early European Witchcraft Literature’, AHR, 111 (2006): 383–404. Baker, Geoff, ‘William Blundell and Late-Seventeenth-Century English Catholicism’, NH, 45 (2008): 259–77. ——— Reading and Politics in Early Modern England: The Mental World of a Seventeenth-Century Catholic Gentleman (Manchester, 2010). Bamji, Alexandra, Geert Janssen and Mary Laven (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation (Farnham, 2013). Baring-Gould, S. and J. Fisher, The Lives of the British Saints (London, 1907). Barnes, G.L., ‘Laity Formation: The Role of Early English Printed Primers: The Synthesis of Private Devotion and Public Religion in the Late Middle Ages’, JRH, 18 (1994): 139–58. Bartlett, Robert, ‘Rewriting Saints’ Lives: The Case of Gerald of Wales’, Speculum, 58 (1983): 598–613. ——— Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal (Oxford, 1986). Bauckham, Richard, Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth-Century Apocalypticism, Millenarianism and the English Reformation from John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas Brightman (Abingdon, 1978). Bayne, C.G., Anglo-Roman Relations 1558–1565 (Oxford, 1913).

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Index Abbot, George 137 Abercrombie, Robert, SJ 79 Aberdeen 375 Aboyne, Lady 392 Act of Toleration (1689) 25, 122–3 Act of Uniformity (1559) 89 Acta Sanctorum 136 Adams, Thomas 109 adiaphora 114 Agazzari, Alphonso, SJ 300 and n, 325, 335 Aglionby, Edward 108n agnus dei 151, 153, 280, 361, 377, 378 Albertini, Francesco 216 Aled, Tudur 179 Allen, William, Cardinal 14, 34, 60, 64, 133, 172, 245, 252, 259, 287, 299, 300, 319, 329 Admonition to the nobility and people of England (1588) 253 Briefe historie of the glorious martyrdom of twelve reverend priests (1582) 336 letter regarding conformity 69–70, 76 True, sincere and modest defence (1584) 250 Allison, A.F. 36, 246, 268 Altötting 156, 187, 197, 361, 388 America, Catholic missions to 43, 130 Anabaptists 118, 312 Anderson, Anthony 324, 331 Anderton, James (John Brerely) 245, 256 Androzzi, Fulvio 257 angels 207–31 guardian angels 209–10, 215, 217, 219–20, 221, 230, 354 and the liturgy 209, 215 and magic 211–12

Protestant attitudes towards 213–14 visions of 207, 214, 220–30; prayers to 217 Anges, Jeanne de 221 Anne of Denmark, queen consort of James I 79n anti-Catholicism 23, 45, 94, 99–101, 132–3 Antwerp 86, 244, 249 apocalypticism 331–4 Appellant controversy 81–3, 256–7, 337–8 Aquaviva, Claudio, SJ 67, 79, 133, 264, 335, 336, 381 Aquinas, Thomas 208 Aquitaine, France 97 archangels 219 Archdekin, Richard, SJ, 139 141 Archpriest controversy 80–81, 256–7, 337–8, 348–9 Arminianism 101, 167 Armstrong, Robert OP 157 Arnauld, Antoine 337 Arrowsmith, Edmund, SJ 144 as exorcist 157 relics of 149–50 Arundel, Thomas, archbishop 295 Arundell, Charles 328, 329, 334 Arundell, Lady Anne, Countess of Wardour 219, 265 Ash, Francis 245 Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire 100 Asia, Catholic missions to 43, 130 Astley, Sir John 211 Aston, Margaret 278 atheism, conformity denounced as equivalent to 70, 117 Atkinson, Thomas 147 Atkinson, William 149 Augsburg 158

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Augustine, St, of Canterbury 191 Augustine, St, of Hippo 208 Confessions 249 Austria 359 Aveling, Hugh 5, 10 Aviano, Marco d’ 169 Awdecorne, Elizabeth 103 Awfield, Thomas 250 Aylmer, John, bishop of London 371 Ayray, Victoria 219 Azor, Juan, Spanish casuist 77 Babthorpe family 93, 272, 353; Grace 353n Baddeley, Richard 159 Bagchi, David 309 Bagshaw, Christopher, Sparing discoverie (1602) 256, 337 Bagshaw, Edward 72 Baker, Augustine, OSB 89, 248, 258, 265–6, 278–9 Baker, Geoff 26 ballads 239, 248, 275, 324–5, 332 Bancroft, Richard, bishop of London and archbishop of Canterbury 73, 83, 161, 256, 257n baptism, of Catholics 96, 385, 387 in emergency by laypeople 365 Barclay, William, jurist 17 Barkham, Sussex 278 Barking 249 Barlow, Ambrose 357, 372 Barlow, Edward 157 Baronius, Cesare 207 Barrett, Robert 144 Barrett, William, bookseller 268 Barrow, James 170 Barton, Elizabeth, the holy maid of Kent 163, 212, 285n Basingwerk Abbey 179, 184 Bath 196, 204, 376 Batman, Stephen, The doome warning all men to the judgemente (1581) 332 Batt, Anthony 260 Battle, Sussex 74, 272, 350, 352, 354, 370, 395

Bavaria 130, 229, 240 Baxter, Richard 267 Bayles, Christopher, martyr 142 Bayly, Lewis, bishop of Bangor 195 Beard, Thomas 253 beatas 167 Beaufort, Lady Margaret 180, 210 Becanus, Martin 303 Becket, Thomas 147 Bede, Venerable 215 Bell, Thomas 11, 83, 61–74, 115 career and works as Protestant polemicist 72–3, 256, 265 condemned by Catholic clergy 65–7 conversion/apostasy of 70–71, 74 endorsement of occasional and partial conformity 63–5, 74–9, 114 Bellarmine, Robert, Cardinal 215–16, 229, 263 Disputationes (1586–93) 137–8, 172, 253 relics of 150 Shorte catechisme (1614) 259 Benedict, Philip 98, 101 Benedictines 241, 258, 348 Bennett, John 188, 356–7 Bennett, Lewis 276 Benoist, René 299 Bentham, Thomas 106 Bergamo, Franciscus de 226 Berkshire 287 Bernard, George 34 Berne, Switzerland 136 Berzetti, Nicolas 257 Beuno, St 185 Bevis of Southampton 286 bible, outweighing Catholic ‘trinkets’ 237, 238 Bible Act constraining reading of (1543) 296 Bishops’ Bible 289 Catholic attitudes towards 37, 259–60, 285–314; see also Douai-Rheims bible

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Index

and Council of Trent 294–5, 297 cures wrought by 280–81 defacement of 285, 287 Geneva version 270, 289 Great Bible (1539) 235, 236, 289 King James (Authorised) Version 289, 291, 312 medieval translations of 289, 293–4 Protestant reading of 270–72, 271 translation and translations of 239, 240, 256 Bilson, Thomas, warden of Winchester 292 Binkes, George, tailor 18 Birchley Hall, near Wigan 245 Birkhead, George 264 Bishop, William 253 Bisse, James 324, 331 Blackfriars accident (1623) 99, 357, 374 Blackwell, George, Archpriest 348 bleeding host miracles 135, 140 Blonsdon, Wiltshire 332 Blount, Richard 81 Bluet, Thomas 337 Blundell family 198 Nicholas 26 Blundell, William 387 Bodmin, Cornwall 332 Bohemia 46, 174, 359 Bold, Richard 371 Bolland, Jean 136 Bonaventure 208 Bonner, Edmund, bishop of London 242 books as amulets 280–81, 365 Catholic burning of 252 devotional literature 260–61; see also Jesus Psalter, primers as ‘dumb preachers’ 22, 235–83, 381, 364–5, 381–2 liturgical 258–9

475

printing and distribution of 244–52 reprinted in Protestant editions 267–70 Boquin, Pierre 322, 333 Borromeo, Carlo, bishop of Milan 352, 374 Bosgrave, James 78 Bossy, John 6–8, 13, 25, 40, 98, 129, 173, 244, 274, 281, 314, 342, 345, 351, 352, 355 Boucher, Mary 165 Boxley, rood of 135 Bradford, John 106, 114, 118 Brethren of the Common Life 293; see also devotio moderna Briant, Alexander 142, 159 Bridgeman, Sir John 195 Bridget of Sweden, St 210 Bridgettines 36; see also Syon Abbey Bridgewater, John 248 Brigden, Susan 31 Briggs, Robin 125 Brinkley, Stephen 245 Bristow, Richard 140, 165, 224, 383, 384 Motives (1574) 138, 254 Brittany 44, 187 Brodwells Down, Somerset 332 Brome, George, Elizabeth and Bridget 251–2, 272, 379 Brome, James 198 Brooksby, Eleanor 151n Broughton, Richard 119, 256 Broughton, Thomas 113 Browne family 16 Browne Anthony, Lord Montague 74, 115 family 272 Magdalene, Viscountess Montague 350, 352–3, 377, 395 Browne, David, husbandman 18 Brudenell family 375 Brunfels, Otto 113 Bruno, Vincenzo 257 Brussels 140, 251

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Brymeley, Anne 103 Bucer, Martin 90, 118 Bucke, John, Instructions for the use of the beades (1589) 257–8, 380, 381 Buckinghamshire 99 Buckland, Ralph 59, 117 Bulkeley, Edward 286 Bunny, Edmund, editor of Robert Persons’ Christian Directorie 226, 267 Bunny, Francis 79 Burdett, Mr 54 burial, of Catholics 96, 386–8 Burton, Catherine (Mary Xaveria) 222 Burton, Robert 93 Buxton, Derbyshire 183, 204 Cadwaller, Roger 356 Caernarvonshire 356 Caesar, Sir Julius 249 Cajetan, Thomas, Cardinal 65 Calvin, Jean 15, 23, 159, 312–13 Catholic satire against 254 depicted trampled by St Michael the Archangel 229 on nicodemism 85–6, 90, 91–2, 106, 113, 118 rhymes against 250 Cameron, Euan 137 Camm, Bede, OSB 35 Campion, Edmund, SJ 22, 31, 57, 245, 246, 264, 317, 320 ‘brag’ 249, 250, 320, 321, 325, 330, 335, 351 Decem rationes (1581) 263, 320 life of 336 miracles associated with 142, 144, 159, 324 relics of 379 Canisius, Peter, SJ 158, 243 catechisms of 1, 217, 259 canons of 1604 157 Cantilupe, St Thomas, bishop of Hereford 150 Capel Meugan, Pembrokeshire 184

Capillia, Andreas de, Manual of Spirituall Exercises (1625) 273 Capuchins 41, 325, 326, 358, 371 Cardigan House, London 375 Cardigan, Our Lady of 183 Carleton, James G 290 Carleton, Sir Dudley 199 Carrafiello, Michael 13 Carranza, Bartholomé 344 Carrera, Johannes 226 Carter, William 246, 247 Carthusians 36, 241, 308 martyrdom of 47 Cartwright, Thomas 291 Carvajal, Luisa de 147, 263 Cary, Elizabeth, Viscountess Falkland 195 cases of conscience; see casuistry Castile 243 Castro, Alphonso de 294 casuistry Catholic 16, 48, 60–61, 90–91, 95, 98, 107, 115, 258–9, 357–8, 372, 384–5 Protestant 106–7 Catalonia 243 catechisms and catechesis 1, 217, 242, 247, 259, 276, 278, 366 Catherine of Siena, St 210, 212, 396 Catholic League 14, 19 Catholic Record Society 5 Catholic Reformation, historiography of 27–9, 129–31, 345–7 Catholicism pre-Reformation 33–4 revival of under Mary I 46–7, 343–4 social profile of 38–9, 355–7 Cavalleriis, Giovanni Battista de, Ecclesiae Anglicanae Trophaea (1584) 191, 192, 262 Caversham, Berkshire 213 Cawood, Gabriel 268 Caxton, William 180, 241 Cecil, William, Lord Burghley 71n, 82, 185, 382, 387 The execution of justice (1583) 108, 323

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Index

Challoner, Richard, bishop 35, 134, 385 Chamberlain, John 199 Chambers, Robert 138–9, 140 Chapel Royal 107 Chapman, Penelope (Mary Margaret of the Angels) 265 Chardon, John 331 Charke, William 321, 330 Chatellier, Louis 40, 130, 355, 358 Chelsea College 253 Chipps Smith, Jeffrey 370 Christian, William 156, 181, 363 church papists 10–12, 274 Protestant anxiety about 24, 56n, 100–101 see also conformity Clancy, T.H. 119 Clare, Co., Ireland 395 Clement VIII, Pope 69 Clement X, Pope 188, 217, 229, 392 Clerk, Marion 211 Clitherow, Margaret 12, 142, 156, 248, 262, 263, 276, 301, 381 Clitherow, William 115 Clynnog, Caernarvonshire 185 Clynnog, Morgan 188, 387 Clynnog, Morys 193 Cochlaeus, Johann 242, 299 Cockerell, Percival 55 coexistence 87, 95–7, 387; see also religious pluralism Coke, Edward 250 Colet, John 210 Colford, Gabriel 44 Collinson, Patrick 19, 124, 239, 328 Concertatio ecclesiae Catholicae in Anglia (1589) 248 confession; see penance confessionalisation 42, 98–101, 123–5 conformity 54–84, 103–25 Catholic casuistry 90–91, 98 clerical campaign against 57–60, 89–90 defended as an act of civil obedience 64, 77, 113–14

477

of husband as a family strategy 40, 54, 92–3 internal Catholic debates about 11–12, 55–84 justifications of 63, 112–15 occasional and partial conformity 54–5, 92–4, 97, 274 outward conformity required by law 108–9 policy on in Scotland 78–9 providential judgements suffered by conformists 110, 145–6 role in facilitating coexistence 24 see also church papists, recusancy confraternities 189, 291, 354, 362, 365, 375–6 Congregation of Sacred Rites and Ceremonies 136 conscience 103–25 conceptions of 104–5, 119–20 Constable, Barbara, Benedictine nun 21, 248, 273 Constance, council of (1415) 293 controversy, Catholic works of 242–3, 244, 252–7 conversion 11, 30, 31, 71 brought about by miracles 153, 160, 166 Conway, Richard 168 Copertino, Giuseppe da 169 Corens, Liesbeth 21 Cornelius, John 144, 147, 157, 168 Cornish language 37 Cornwallis, Sir Thomas 91, 274, 383 Corscombe, Devon 97 Cosin, John, Collection of private devotions (1627) 269 Cotton, Henry, archdeacon of Cashel 290 Coulson, Elizabeth 55, 93 Council of the Marches 194 Cowbridge, Glamorganshire 154 Cranmer, Thomas 107, 213, 247 Crashaw, William 269 Cressy, David 280 Cripplegate, St Giles 250

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478

Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain

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Croft, Sir Herbert 260 Cromwell, Thomas 146, 182, 213 Cross, Humphrey 252 Crouzet, Denis 333 cult of saints and Council of Trent 136–7 humanist criticism and caution 135–6 living saints 167–71 Cumberland 75 Darrell, John 157 Daubrigscourt, Mistress 250 Daughters of Charity 366 Davies, Richard, bishop of St Davids 185 Davies, William, martyr 144 Davis, J.C. 338 Delumeau, Jean 7, 129, 345 Denbighshire 356 Denham, Buckinghamshire 157, 160, 361–2 Derfel Gadarn 183 Dering, Edward 286 Devlin, Eion 27 devotio moderna 240; see also Brethren of the Common Life Dickens, A.G. 10, 238 Dietenberger, Johann 299 Digby, John 170 Digby, Sir Everard 196 Dillon, Anne 20, 29, 44, 47, 141, 228, 360, 362, 375 dissimulation; see equivocation, mental reservation, conformity, nicodemism Ditchfield, Simon 19, 28 Dolan, Frances 23, 317, 388 Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri) 229 Dorchester 144, 147 Dorman, Thomas 244, 265 Douai 260 Douai, English college at 245, 348 Douai-Rheims bible 37, 249, 260, 266, 285–314, 288, 310, 365, 381 annotations in 304, 305 see also bible

Douglas, James, earl of Morton 227 Downlee, Edward 185 Drayton, Michael, Poly-Olbion (1622) 201 dreams 142, 165 Drexelius, Jeremias, SJ, 268 Angel guardian’s clock (1630) 218, 218–19, 220, 226 Drury, Robert, SJ 374 Dublin 141 synod of (1614) 358n, 373 Dudley, Robert, earl of Leicester 164, 328 Duffy, Eamon 14, 35, 47, 135, 241, 278, 296, 343, 344, 358 Duggan, Dermot 169 Dundurcas, Moray 392 Durham 160, 356 Earle, John 274 earthquake (of April 1580) 333 East India Company 45 ecclesiastical history, Catholic accounts of 34–5, 191–3 Eck, John 242 ecstasies 162, 210; see also visions Edict of Nantes (1598), revocation of 48 Edward IV, king of England 180 Edwards, Francis 12 Egerton, Sir Thomas 73 Egton, Yorkshire 96, 357 Eleutherius, Pope 191 Elizabeth I, predictions of death 164 Elton, Geoffrey 15, 120 Ely Castle 44 Ely, Humphrey 248 Emser, Jerome 256, 299 English Ladies 22, 219, 366; see also Mary Ward Epsom 204 equivocation 61, 111–12, 171 Erasmus, Desiderius 135, 212, 294 Eton, James, chapter clerk of Hereford Cathedral 93 Etwall, Derbyshire 383 Eu, Normandy 245

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Index

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Eucharist act of 1606 requiring reception 108–9 Catholic arguments for receiving Protestant rite 75 Catholic attacks on Protestant rite 254 Catholic devotion to 371 Catholic literature on 257, 259 Catholic refusal to receive in Protestant churches 54–5, 93–4, 383 miracles linked with 135–6, 140, 143, 148, 158, 159, 163, 165, 224 Protestant rite of 88–9 see also mass and masses Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 144 Evans, Humphrey 188 excommunication of Elizabeth I, bull of (1570) 89 exile 19–22 role in producing Catholic works of controversy 244–5 exorcism 137, 157–62, 225, 361–2 fairies 211, 280 Falconer, John, SJ 190–91 Family of Love 330–31, 333 fast days 95, 107 Favre, Pierre, SJ 226 Featley, Daniel 266–7 Feckenham, John, abbot 319 Ferazzi, Cecilia 221 Fernyhaulgh, Lancashire 392 Field, John 121, 122 Fienachty (or Finnerty), James 169–70 Fiennes, Celia 198, 202 Filheul, Anthony, archbishop of Aix 294 Finch, John 365 Fisher, John, bishop of Rochester 9, 343 Fitzmaurice, James 329–30 Fleetwood, William, bishop 198, 203 Fleming, Abraham 333 Flintshire 356

479

Floyd, John, SJ 139 Foley, Henry, SJ 35 Forbes, Patrick, bishop of Aberdeen 275–6 Forrest, John 183 Forster, Marc 42, 130, 186, 345 Fortescue, Anne 194 Fortescue, Sir Francis 353 Foster, Anne 387 Fowey, Cornwall 332 Foxe, John 80n, 159, 286–7 Actes and Monuments (‘Book of Martyrs’) 80n, 90, 118, 138n, 144, 235, 265, 271, 282–3 Foxwell, Henry 18 France 19, 41, 86, 158, 359 Franciscans 29, 41, 348 Francken, Christian, Colloquium Jesuiticum (1578) 321–2 François de Valois, duke of Alençon and duke of Anjou 328–9 Frarin, Peter 254 Freeman, Thomas 35 Freeman, William, SJ 356, 372 French Wars of Religion 94 Frijhoff, Willem 25, 393 Fugall, Thomas 285 Fulke, William 120, 260, 291, 292, 324 Fumée, Antoine 91 Gabriel, archangel 211, 219, 225 Gallagher, Lowell 22, 111 Garnet, Henry, pilgrimage to St Winefride’s well 196 Garnet, Henry, SJ 90, 133, 246, 267, 362, 375–6 Apology against the defence of schism (1593) 65, 70, 66, 68, 70, 117 ‘Garnet’s straw’ 148, 148–9 miracles associated with 143 relics of 379 Treatise of Christian Renunciation (1593) 76 Garnet, Thomas 149 Garnier, Jean 90, 118

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480

Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain

Garter, Bernard, A newe yeares gifte dedicated to the popes holinesse (1579) 378 Gawthrop, Richard 239, 312 Gee, Edward 342–5 Gee, John 132, 146, 165, 168, 195, 226, 249 Foot out of the Snare (1624) 225, 245, 245 Genings, Edmund 142, 148 Genings, John 164, 165 Gentilcore, David 43, 130, 345, 359 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae 193 Gerard, John, SJ 143, 196, 227, 353, 363, 377, 395 Gerard, Miles 63, 72 Gerard, Sir Nicholas 383 Germany 42, 78, 225 Gerson, Jean 209, 293 Geveren, Sheltco a 331 Gibbons, John, SJ 248 Gibbons, Katy 19 Giberti, Gian Matteo, bishop of Verona 352 Gifford, George 18, 280 Gillespie, Raymond 187, 392 Ginzburg, Carlo 113 Glastonbury Abbey 150, 389, 390 Glickman, Gabriel 26 Goa 263 Godly contemplations for the unlearned (1575) 277, 278 Goldesborowe, Robert 285 Goldwell, Thomas, bishop 189 Gonzaga, Aloysius, St 216 Good, John, Catholic convert 265 Good, William, SJ 318 Gouda, Nicholas de 318 Goulart, Simon 109 Grant, John 196 Gray, Robert 75 Greathead, Christopher 265 Greatrakes, Valentine 169 Green, Hugh 147 Gregory the Great, pope 113, 276 Gregory XI, pope 293

Gregory XIII, pope 63, 335 Gregory, Brad 29, 360 Grene, Christopher 35, 133 Grene, Martin 35 Griffith, Ambrose 101 Grindal, Edmund, archbishop of Canterbury 274, 328 Guilday, Peter 19 Gunpowder Plot (1605) 12, 100, 196 H.B., A consolatory letter to the Catholikes of England (1587–8) 117 Haigh, Christopher 8–10, 13, 29, 45, 172, 173, 275, 347, 349, 355, 356 Hall, John, physician 97 Hall, Joseph, bishop of Exeter 207, 226, 313 Halle 156, 388 Hammond, Gerald 291 Hampden, Lady Isabel 364 Hands, Edward 162, 166 Hanmer, Meredith 322, 330 Hardesty, William 75 Harding, Thomas 244, 253, 259, 298, 299, 306–7 Harely, John 54, 274 Harpsfield, Nicholas 154, 247 Harrogate 204 Harrowden, Northamptonshire 354, 396 Harsnet, Samuel 132, 158, 161, 225 Hartley, William 250 Hasselt, Netherlands 392 Hastings, Sir Francis 217 Havens, Earle 36 Hay, John, SJ 168, 318, 325 Haydock, George 395 healing by touch 169–70 Hebrides 37, 41 Heigham, John, Catholic exile 1 Heigham, Roger 250 Heiloo, Netherlands 389, 394 Heisterbach, Caesarius of, Dialogus miraculorum 208 Henneberg, Berthold von, archbishop of Mainz 293

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Index

Henrietta Maria, Queen consort of Charles I 371, 394 Henry V, king of England 180 Henry VI, king of England 210 Henry VII, vision of in hell 164 Henry VIII, king of England 235, 236 Act abolishing diversity of opinions (1539) 108 seen in hell 164 Herold, Johannes, Sermones discipuli 258 Hesketh Plot (1594) 72 Hexham, Northumberland 157 Heylyn, Peter 290 Heywood, Jasper, SJ 320, 335 Hibbard, Caroline 45, 83 Hickman, Rose 106, 110 Hide, Thomas, Consolatorie epistle (1580) 117, 261 Hieron, Samuel 275 High Commission 251, 252, 389 Highlands (of Scotland) 37, 41, 168–9, 276, 372 Highley, Christopher 34 Hildegard of Bingen 210 Hill, Christopher 270 Hill, Thomas, OSB 59, 138 Hilton, Andrew 301 Hilton, Walter 210, 258 Hoby, Lady Margaret 270 Hodgetts, Henry 364 Hoffmann, Philip 281 Holcroft, William 183 Hollander, Petrus den 386 Holmes, Peter 13, 16, 104 Holt, William, SJ 320, 335 Holtby, Richard, SJ 62, 77 Holton, Oxfordshire 386 Holy Name, cult of 210; emblem of 169, 354, 396 holy wells 185, 187, 395; see also Holywell, St Winefride’s well Holywell, Flintshire 34, 154, 156, 177–205 as headquarters of north Wales mission 188–9 see also St Winefride’s well

481

Hooker, Richard 123 Hooper, John 113, 115–16 Horne, Robert, bishop of Winchester 319 Horner, Nicholas 228 Horseman, Elizabeth 386 Hosius, Stanislaus, Cardinal 298, 301 Houliston, Victor 14 household Catholic books in 270–74 as key site for Catholic devotion 40, 282, 351–5, 370–71, 396–7 raids on 251–2, 364 Hovius, Matthias, bishop 394 Howard, Francis 149 Howard, Lord Henry 328, 329 Howard, Lord William 195 Howard, Philip, earl of Arundel 249, 381 Anne, Countess 265 Huberinus, Caspar 312 Huggarde, Miles 242 Huguenots 87, 158 Hungary 152n Hungate, William 19 Hunter, Thomas 222 Hutton, Matthew 73 iconoclasm, miracles associated with 145 of shrines 183, 195–6, 213, 394 Images of pity 279 Immaculate Conception 159, 354 incombustibility of relics 142–3, 148 Index 243, 297 indulgences 188, 241, 375 Innocent III, pope 293 Inquisition 238, 243 Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary; see English Ladies Ireland 41, 42, 132, 364, 372 attempted invasion of 329–30 Irish Rebellion (1641) 48 Isabella, Countess of Warwick 179 Isham, Judith 268 Italy 41

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482

Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain

Jacobites and Jacobitism 26, 197 James Francis Edward, Prince 197 James II, king of England, Ireland and Scotland 27, 156, 197, 342 James VI and I, king of Scotland and England 47 Jansenism 32, 304 Janssen, Geert 20 Japan 44–5, 263 Jenison, Thomas 395–6 Jenkes, Rowland 144 Jessop, Margaret 140 Jesuits 29, 41, 349 accused by Protestants of deception 132–3, 146, 158–9, 165, 225 and angels 216, 227 Annual Letters of 133, 149, 151, 157, 227, 302, 361 at Holywell 189 legislation and proclamations against 323–4 and miracles 32, 129–75 mission of 1580–81, 315–38 missions 7, 22, 41, 44, 358–9 Protestant polemic against 315–16, 319, 321–3, 324–5 venerated by the laity 168, 396 Jesus Oak, Sonien Woods 156, 394n Jesus Psalter 217, 247, 250, 258, 274, 278 Jewel, John 286, 298, 379 Answer (1564) 251 Apology (1562) 19, 244, 265 Joan of Arc, St 210–11 Johnson, Samuel 199 Johnson, Trevor 46, 130, 186, 345, 360 Jones, Inigo 371 Jones, Norman 123 Jones, Robert 77, 81 Jordan, Sally 26 Joseph of Arimathea 74, 389 Julian of Norwich 258 Kaplan, Benjamin 24, 371 Kaushik, Sandeep 17 Kayserburg, Geiler von 303, 310

Kellison, Matthew, President of Douai College 1, 253 Keltridge, John 324, 330, 331 Kemble, John 149 Kempis, Thomas, Imitation of Christ 240, 246, 267, 280, 381 Kilkenny 141 Kilroy, Gerard 36 King, John 154 Knatchbull, Lady Lucy 223 Knavesmire, York 156 Knight, Clement 268 Lacy, Edmund, bishop of Exeter 209 Laínez, Diego, SJ 243 Lake, Peter 12, 22, 23, 29, 119n, 317, 360 Lancashire 57, 62, 152, 160, 357, 384 Langdale, Alban, archdeacon of Chichester 74, 114 Langdale, Thomas, SJ 75 Laodicea, Church of 59, 90, 117 Lapide, Cornelius a 216 Lascelles, Richard 259 Latimer, Hugh 107, 182 Laudianism 47, 101, 105n Laven, Mary 40 Lawson, Dorothy 167, 272, 279–80, 353–4, 365–6, 374, 396 Lawton, David 291, 309 Lazarists 41 Lefèvre d’Etaples, Jacques 294 Leicester 100 Leicester’s Commonwealth (1585) 248–9 Leigh, Richard, martyr 82 Leominster priory 212 Leslie, John, SJ 228 Lhuyd, Edward 201 Lichfield, Staffordshire 100 Limerick 318 Lindisfarne, Northumberland 389 Line, Anne 229, 366 Linton, Cambridgeshire 96 Lippomani, Luigi 137 Lipsius, Justus 140 Lithuania 79

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Index

Little Crosby, Lancashire 26, 198 Loarte, Gaspar, Exercise of a Christian life (1579) 216–17, 266, 272 Lodge, Thomas 267 Lollards and Lollardy 111, 113 and vernacular bible translations 289, 295–6, 301 London, John 213 Longland, John, bishop of Lincoln 343 Loreto, Holy House of 37, 140, 156, 353, 388, 396 litanies of 153, 354 Loudon, France 221 Lourdes 177 Louthan, Howard 46 Louvain 244 Love, Harold 247 loyalty, of Catholic laity 12–13, 17–19 Loyola, Ignatius, St, SJ 137, 243, 318, 343, 350, 354 Ignatius water 152, 377 miracles linked with 140–41, 146, 150, 152, 361, 365, 382 Spiritual exercises 216, 257, 353 vision of 168 Lucius, King 191 Lucy, St 165 Ludham, Robert 228 Luis de Granada 244, 257, 263, 266, 267, 272, 280, 381 Lund Cathedral 294 Luther, Martin 159, 235, 286, 312, 332 depicted trampled by St Michael the Archangel 229 incombustible portraits of 281 rhymes against 250 Lutton, Robert 33 Lux-Sterritt, Laurence 22 Lycosthenes, Conrad 332 McClain, Lisa 38–9 McCoog, Thomas, SJ 14, 350 McGrath, Patrick 9, 347, 350 Machiavelli, Niccolo 82, 114 McSheffrey, Shannon 295

483

Madruzzo, Cristoforo, Cardinal, prince-bishop of Trent 294 Mainy, Richard 159, 162, 225 Manby, Thomas 300 Manicinelli, Julius, SJ 230 Manuale Catholicorum (1611) 269 Margam Abbey, Glamorganshire 188, 387 Marlow, Buckinghamshire 371 Marotti, Arthur 23, 36 marriage, of Catholics in Protestant churches 96, 385, 388 mixed marriages 96, 107 Marsh, Christopher 94, 101, 330 Marshall, Peter 19, 23, 33 Marshalsea prison 250, 371 Marston, Athony 258 Martin V, Pope 64, 179; decree Ad evitanda 64, 78 Martin, Gregory 2 as bible translator 285, 291, 300, 304 Treatise of schisme (1578) 64, 68, 90, 116, 120, 247 martyrdom 29, 141–3, 147, 175, 360–61 miracles linked with sites of 154, 156 martyrologies 29–30, 141–2, 228, 248, 360 Marvell, Andrew 314 Mary I, vision of in heaven 164 Catholic renewal under 241–2 Mary of Modena, consort of James II 156, 197 Mary, Blessed Virgin annunciation 209 miracles associated with 140, 394 visions of 136, 162, 165, 166, 168, 362 Mary, Queen of Scots, vision of in heaven 164 mass and masses 371–3; see also eucharist mass gospellers 15, 110, 114, 115; see also nicodemism

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484

Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain

Mathew, Tobie 73, 222–3 Maxfield, Thomas 1–2, 48, 362, 379 Maximilian I, king of Bavaria 146, 197, 360 Mayer, Thomas 46, 343 Mayne, Cuthbert 147 Melanchthon, Philip 90, 118, 332 Mendoza, Don Bernadino de, Spanish ambassador 82 mental reservation 111–12, 171; see also equivocation Mercurian, Everard, General of the Society of Jesus 319–20, 329 Meres, Francis 267 Metcalf, Philip 198 Metham, Jordan 54–5 Meynell family 93, 272, 353, 370 Michael, archangel 209, 219, 225, 228, 229–30, 395 Michaelangelo 47 Mildmay, Sir Walter 323 Milner, John, bishop 198 Milner, Ralph, martyr 53 Milton, Anthony 23, 25 Milton, John 125 miracles and the miraculous 30, 31–2, 129–75, 360 Catholic anxieties about 32–3, 134n linked with martyrs 142–3 Protestant attitudes to 203 Protestant polemic against Catholic miracles 132–3, 135–6, 148, 158, 165, 166 wrought by books 152, 280–81 Mirk, John, Festial 209, 240 missions role in Catholic renewal 8–9, 29–30, 40–42, 130–31, 171–5, 349–63 role of miraculous in 129–75 Monckton, Christopher 258 Monmouthshire 356 Mont St-Michel, Normandy 209 Monta, Susannah 27 Mont-aigu, near Sichem, Belgium; see Scherpenheuvel

Montpellier, France 99, 140 More, Henry, SJ 336 More, Sir Thomas 9, 247, 296, 307 Dialogue concerning heresies (1529) 135, 212 Morone, Giovanni, Cardinal 259, 299 Morrill, John 101 Morse, Henry 357 Morton, Thomas, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield 161 Mostyn family 184, 188, 197 Mount Grace Priory, Yorkshire 389, 391 Mowle, Peter 247 Muchembled, Robert 129, 345 Mullett, Michael 186 Munday, Anthony 333 Munich 187, 229 Murdoch, William, SJ 79 Murner, Thomas 242 Musculus, Wolfgang 106 Mush, John 62, 82, 301 Musket, George 139, 249 mysticism 210, 258; see also ecstasies and visions Naaman Syrus 64, 66, 68 and n, 74, 113–14 Nagasaki, execution of Christians in (1597) 44 Naples cathedral 229 kingdom of 44, 168, 359 Napper, George 154 Neri, Philip, St 137, 141, 226 Netherlands 20, 42, 86, 132, 328, 348, 358n, 365, 376n, 384, 387, 393, 397 Neville, Charles, 6th Westmorland, earl of 18 Newcastle upon Tyne 92, 272, 320, 353, 366, 374 Newgate prison 372, 395 Newton, Thomas 166 Niccoli, Ottavia 221, 333 Nicholas de Lyra 65 Nicholas of Cusa 240

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Index

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Nichols, John 322–3, 335 nicodemism 15, 85–101 arguments against 112–22 Protestant forms of 110–11 Nicodemus 85 Norris, Henry, Lord 321 North Kilvington, Yorkshire 272, 353 North, Roger, 2nd Baron 327 Northamptonshire 151 Northern Rising (1569) 285 Northumberland 356 Norton, David 86 Norton, Thomas 108n, 144 Numan, Philips 140 nuns 21, 165, 222–3, 227, 248, 258, 273 O’Devany, Cornelius, bishop 395 O’Hurley, Dermot, bishop 395 O’Malley, John, SJ 28, 345 Oath of Allegiance (1606) 17, 81, 109, 166 oaths 108, 109 Oglethorpe, Thomas 167 Oldcorne, Edward, SJ 143, 194 Ong, Walter 307 oral culture, and Catholicism 275 Orinell, Henry 103 Orton, Elizabeth 163, 224 Osgodby, Yorkshire 272, 353 Owen, Hugh 188 Oxford 154, 246, 252, 295 outbreak of gaol fever in (1577) 99, 144, 276 St Mary’s university church 250, 320 Pacheco de Villena, Francisco, cardinal 294 Paget, Justinian 184 Palmer, Roger, earl of Castlemain 218 Palmes, William 353, 374 Paris 19, 86, 243, 273 Collège d’Arras 253 Parker, Charles 42 Parker, Geoffrey 334

485

Parker, Matthew, archbishop of Canterbury 251 Parr, Elnathan 312 Pasquier, Etienne 337 Paul V, Pope 137, 215, 392; brief Magna animi dolore 78 Pazzi, Maddalena de’ 221 Peard, Frances 165 Peasants’ War (1525) 239, 312 Peckham, Sir George 157 Pecock, Reginald, bishop of Chichester 295 pedlars 250 Peebles, Scottish Borders 392 Pelham, Edmund, JP 93 penance 4, 39, 69, 228, 257, 342, 352, 374–5 Pennant family 183 Thomas 202 Penrhyn, Caernarvonshire 245–6 Penrhys, Glamorganshire 182 Penzance, Cornwall 142 Percy, Thomas, earl of Northumberland 147, 387–8 Perkins, William 109, 272 Perry, William, the ‘Boy of Bilson’ 159, 161 Persons, Robert, SJ, 8–9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 22, 31, 57, 68, 70, 80, 81, 90, 144, 217, 245, 246, 257, 261, 264, 272, 317, 319, 320, 323, 325, 329, 330, 334, 351, 381, 382 Brief discours contayning certayne reasons why Catholiques refuse to goe to church [‘Reasons of Refusall’] (1580) 15, 57, 58, 74, 113, 118, 119, 320 Conference about the next succession (1595) 249 First booke of the Christian exercise, reissued as Christian Directorie [‘Book of Resolution’] 226, 266, 267 Manifestation of the great folly and bad spirit … (1602) 256 Memorial (1596) 47, 120, 341–3

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486

Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain

miracle associated with 142 Quaestiones Duae (1607) 78 and toleration 15, 119–20 Peru 263 Petre, George 195 Petre, Sir John 91 Pettegree, Andrew 86 Philip II, king of Spain 18, 20, 47, 261, 333, 348 Phillips, John, vicar of Faversham 266 Philpot, John 113 pictures, printed Catholic 254–6, 255, 262, 276–8, 277, 280 pilgrimage 137, 153–7, 361, 388–95, 397; see also Holywell Pinelli, Luca 257, 267 Pius IV, Pope 57, 88, 318 Pius V, Pope 54, 258 plots, rumours of 100; see also Popish Plot Poland 11, 41, 78, 79 Pole, Reginald, Cardinal 47, 296, 318, 343, 344 politics, engagement of Catholics in 13–15 Pollard Brown, Nancy 247 Pollard, James 353 Pollen, J.H. 35 Pollmann, Judith 42 Popish Plot 12, 357 Portsmouth 212 Postgate, Nicholas 357 Powell, David 184 Pownde, Thomas 306 Preston, Thomas, Benedictine monk 17 Price, Ellis 185 Prideaux, John 220 primers 54, 93, 110, 210, 218, 241, 242, 251, 252, 258, 265, 268, 272, 274, 278–9, 280, 310 print Catholicism’s alleged hostility to and neglect of 238, 240 Catholic use of 22–3, 36–7, 235–83 seen as engine of the Protestant Reformation 235, 238, 286–7

prisons Catholic proselytism in 29, 360 distribution of Catholic books in 250 see also Marshalsea, Newgate, Wisbech Pritchard, Arnold 13 Privy Council 70, 88, 184, 195, 204, 249, 251, 321, 327 prodigies 332–4 prophecies 141, 163–4, 275 Prosperi, Adriano 345 providential judgements 144–6 Prynne, William 48, 269, 337 Pseudo Dionysius, Celestial hierarchy 208, 210 Pullyver, John 327 purgatory, defence of 159, 163, 224, 362, 393 Pursglove, Robert, suffragan bishop of Hull 75 Quakers 48, 246 Questier, Michael 11, 16–17, 22, 23, 29, 71, 76, 119n, 253, 317, 360 Radford, John 374 Rainolds, John 291 Rainolds, William 257 Ranters 338 Raphael, archangel 209, 219 Rastell, John 244, 253 reading, Catholic 279–80, 310–11 recusancy 10–11, 29, 53–4, 63–4, 88, 382–3 debates about within Catholic ranks 74–8, 80–83, 112–22 legislation against 67, 92, 108 miracles vindicating 143, 145, 159, 160 see also conformity Reinhard, Wolfgang 42, 129 relics 364, 379–81 miracles wrought by 141, 146–51, 149–50, 361 religious pluralism 24–6, 123–5; see also coexistence

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Index

Rem, Jakob 169 responsa scholarum of English Colleges in Rome and Valladolid 31, 96, 265 Rex, Richard 295 Reynes, Robert 211 Rheims 245 Rhodes, Jan 364, 373 Rhodes, John 275 Rhoon, Netherlands 386 Ribadeneira, Pedro de 140–41, 216, 261, 365, 382 Rich, Barnaby 224 Richeome, Louis, Holy pictures (1619) 278 Ridley, Nicholas 107 Rigby, John 142 Rishton, Edward 336 rites of passage, Catholic attitudes to Protestant 96, 98; see also baptism, marriage, burial ritual, Catholic adaptations of 39, 357–8, 369–98 Rituale Romanum 137 Robert, abbot of Shrewsbury 178 Robin Hood 286 Robinson, Nicholas, bishop of Bangor 185 Rogers, D.M. 36, 246, 268 Rogers, Richard 266 Rogers, Thomas 331 Rolle, Richard 210 Romana, Francesca, St 226 Rome 389 English College at 144, 191, 337, 348 Rookwood family 26 Rookwood, Ambrose 196 rosary and rosaries 44, 107, 151, 167, 251, 257, 271, 278, 279, 362, 375, 376–9, 380; see also confraternities Roscarrock, Nicholas 393 Ross, Ireland 141 Rosweyde, Herbert, SJ 136 Rouen 86 Rovere, Christina della 221

487

Rowland, Marie 38 Rowsham, Stephen, SJ 168, 228 Rushton Hall, Northamptonshire 354 Russell, Francis, earl of Bedford 333 sacramentals 151–2, 361, 377–9, 378; see also agnus dei, Ignatius water Sales, Francis d, St 137, 258, 263; Introduction to a devout life (1613) 217, 226, 269 Salkeld, John 217 Sander, Nicholas 14, 144, 244, 259, 299, 329 De origine et progressu schismatic Anglicani 261, 336 Sandys, Edwin, bishop 286 Scherpenheuvel 140, 156, 361, 364, 388, 394 Schilling, Heinz 42, 129 Schools of Christian Doctrine 243 schuilkerken 397 Schwarz, Stuart 16 Scotland 1, 11, 37–8, 41, 168, 318, 371, 376, 381, 392 practice of Catholic conformity in Scotland 78, 93–4, 384 Scott, Jonathan 45 Screech, Timon 45 Scribner, Bob 135, 204, 239, 377 Sega, Filippo, Cardinal 70 seminaries, establishment of 40, 348 sermons, attendance at by Catholics condoned 78–9 printed 239–40 Seton, Lord 371 Seville 245, 348 Shagan, Ethan 13, 14, 325 Shakespeare, William 104, 389 Sheils, William 24, 96 Sheldon, Ralph 114 Sheldon, Richard 132, 156, 158, 166, 249, 364 Shell, Alison 6, 23, 36, 268, 275 Shepherd, William, rector of Haydon 327–8 Shrewsbury, Shropshire 179, 183

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Sibbes, Richard 272 Silvester, Mary 250 Simmes, Valentine 268 Skirrid Fawr, near Abergavenny 188, 229, 392–3 Smith, Richard, bishop of Chalcedon 74, 352, 359 Society of Jesus; see Jesuits sodalities; see confraternities Soergel, Philip 130, 186, 345, 360 Somerset House 371 South Uist, Outer Hebrides 385 Southwark, synod of (1580) 57 Southwell, Robert 90, 116, 118, 142, 168, 246, 247, 361, 373, 396–7 relics of 150 St Peters Complaint 247, 268 Southwell, Thomas, SJ 95–6, 358 Southworth, Christopher, SJ 160 Southworth, John 149 Spa 196 Spain 20, 41, 240 spas 204 Speed, John 184 Spiera, Francis 110 Spitalfields 247 Spurr, John 107 St Albans 213 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) 48, 86 St Michael’s Mount, Cornwall 209, 213 St Omer, College and printing press at 44, 245, 264 St Patrick’s Purgatory, Lough Derg 393, 394 St Paul’s cross 324; churchyard 250–51 Stafford 143 Staffordshire 245 Stamp, Thomas 161–2 Standish, John 304 Staphylus, Fridericus, Apologie 255, 298, 301, 304, 310, 313 Stapleton, Thomas 20, 138, 215, 244, 298, 319 Stephens, Thomas 263 Stiddy, Thomas 93

Stillingfleet, Edward, bishop 139 Stock, Brian 273 Stonor Park, Oxfordshire 245 Stow, John 251, 333 Stradling, Sir Thomas 154, 155 Strange, Bridget 53 Strauss, Gerald 239, 312 Stubbe, John, The discoverie of a gaping gulf (1579) 328, 332 Suárez, Francisco 215, 217 Surius, Laurentius 137 Suso, Henry 210 Sutton, Christopher, canon of Westminster 267 Sutton, Edward 166 Sutton, Robert 143, 151n, 362 Sweet, John, SJ 254 Syon Abbey 210, 241, 273 and n; see also Bridgettines Tait, Clodagh 386 Taylor, John 268 Taylor, Marie 164 Teresa of Avila, St 220, 354 Tesimond, Oswald 196 Tessimond, William 147 Thames Valley 26 The Golden Legend; see Voragine, Jacobus, Legenda aurea Thomas, Keith 7 Thompson, William 161 Throckmorton family 18 Throgmorton, Edward 140, 265 toleration 15–16, 119–20 Topcliffe, Richard 152 Torsellino, Orazio 141 Toulouse, synod of (1229) 293 Townshend, Dame Dorothy 202 transubstantiation, defence of 143, 159, 246, 362; see also eucharist Treatise of treasons (1572) 253 Trent, Council of 28, 41, 43, 46, 342, 374 on administration of the sacrament 372 declaration regarding outward conformity 57 and n, 76, 88

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Index

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implementation of in England 341–67 on printing and reading books 246, 253 on saints, pilgrimages and relics 137 on vernacular scripture 294–5, 297 Tresham, Sir Thomas 17, 32, 53–4, 118, 283, 301, 354, 396 Lady Tresham 250 Troyes, France 86 Tumbleson, Raymond 23 Tunbridge Wells, Kent 204 Tunstall, Cuthbert, bishop of London 296 Tutino, Stefania 14, 112n Tyburn 147, 379, 394–5 Tyndale, William 214, 289, 296 tyrannicide 18 Tyrrell, Anthony 161 Udall, William 245, 250 Ulster 42 Umpton, Sir Edward 321 Underwood, Lucy 31 Unigenitus (1713) 304 Upper Palatinate 46, 130, 146, 174, 359 Ussher, James 312 Valladolid, English College at 147, 245, 348 Valor Ecclesiasticus (1535) 183 Vaux, Anne 151n Vaux, Elizabeth 353 Vaux, Laurence 57, 247, 259, 278 Vaux, William, Lord 151, 157, 352, 396 Vavasour family 93 Vendeville, Dr 301 Venice 243 Vere, Edward, earl of Oxford 328–9 Vermigli, Peter Martyr 90, 105, 114, 116, 117, 118 vernacular, use of 37–8, 257, 290 Verstegan, Richard 20, 249, 254, 256, 282 Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostril temporis (1587) 262

489

Vicars, John, brewer 54, 383–4 Vincentians 41 Vindiciae contra tyrannos 14 visions 146, 162–7, 362 of angels 207, 220–29, 214 of the Blessed Virgin Mary 136, 162, 165, 166, 168 Catholic suspicions about 162–3 in the sky 140 see also ecstasies, mysticism Vives, Juan Luis 135 Voragine, Jacobus, Legenda Aurea 135, 208, 240 Vosmeer, Sasbout, Apostolic Vicar 393 Wadsworth, James 225 Wales 177–205, 229, 356, 389 Walker Bynum, Caroline 33 Walker, Claire 21 Walpole, Henry 72, 395 Walsingham, Francis, Catholic convert 83n, 265 Walsingham, Sir Francis 251, 266, 291, 321, 328 Wanklyn, Malcolm 24 Ward, Cornelius 385 Ward, Mary 22, 150, 219, 273, 366 Ward, William 148 Warwickshire 275 Waterford 141 Waterson, Edward, martyr 142 Watkinson, Robert, martyr 142 Watson, William, Quodlibets (1602) 256, 337 Watt, Tessa 239 Watten, Flanders 218 Wellington, Alice 386 West Midlands 356 Westmorland 75, 160 Weston, William, SJ 133, 145, 150, 157, 161, 162, 227, 362, 363, 372, 395 Wever, Richard 110 Whitaker, William 291 White Mountain, battle of (1620) 46, 197 White, Rawlins 270

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Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain

White, Richard, schoolmaster 144, 276 White, Winefrid 198 Whitford, Richard, Werke for housholders (1531?) 181, 241, 274 Whitgift, John, archbishop of Canterbury 70, 73 Whittingham, William 289, 357 Wiburn, Percival 120, 121–2 Widdrington, Roger OSB 166 Wigmore, Mary (Mary of the Holy Ghost) 223 Wigmore, Robert, SJ 93 Wigmore, William 54 Wilhelm the Pious, king of Bavaria 229 Wilkinson, Gregory 103 Wilkinson, John 148 William of Orange, Prince 276 Williams, Glanmor 186 Williams, Sarah 159 Wilson, John 217, 264 Wiltshire, Mary 165 Winchester 164 Winefride (Gwenfrewi), St 34, 177, 178–9 well of 177–205, 180, 181, 182, 200, 361, 393, 394 indulgences linked with 189 miracles of 193–4 Protestant resort to 199–205 see also Holywell Winter, Robert 196 Winterton, Ralph 268 Wisbech Stirs (1595–98) 76, 161, 337 Wisbech, Norfolk 395 Wiseman, Jane 152, 395, 396; family 272, 353 Wither, George 292 Wittlesbach dynasty 242 Wizeman, William 46, 343 Wodehouse, Francis 110, 145, 383

Wolfe, David, SJ 318 Wolfe, John 268 women, role of in post-Reformation Catholicism 40, 273–4, 351–2 Wooding, Lucy 46, 297, 298, 343 Woodville, Elizabeth, consort of Edward IV 210 Woodward, Philip, Catholic controversialist 74 Woolton, John 104 Worcester 182 Worcestershire 245 Worsley, Edward 139 Worthington, Thomas 217, 336 Wright, Anthony 44 Wright, Peter 149 Wright, Thomas 260 Wright, Thomas, professor of scholastic theology at Louvain 76–7, 79, 81 Writtle, Essex 327 Wynkyn de Worde 241 Wynn, Sir John 202 Xavier, Francis, St, SJ 137, 141, 354; vision of 168 Ximénez de Cisneros, Francisco, Cardinal 240 Yaxley, John 269 Yelverton, Sir Henry 144 Yepez, Diego, bishop of Taraçona 144 York 103, 246 York Castle, Catholics imprisoned in 62, 72, 276 Yorkshire 100 Young, Catharine 203 Young, Elizabeth 103 Young, Francis 32 youth, role of in Catholic Reformation 31, 167

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