The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume I: Endings and New Beginnings, 1530-1640 0198843801, 9780198843801

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T H E OX F O R D H I S T O RY O F B R I T I S H A N D I R I S H C AT H O L I C I S M , VO LU M E I

T H E OX F O R D H I S T O RY O F B R I T I S H A N D I R I S H C AT H O L I C I S M General Editors: James E. Kelly and John McCafferty The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume I Endings and New Beginnings, 1530–1640 Edited by James E. Kelly and John McCafferty The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745 Edited by John Morrill and Liam Temple The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829 Edited by Liam Chambers The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume IV Building Identity, 1830–1913 Edited by Carmen M. Mangion and Susan O’Brien The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume V Recapturing the Apostolate of the Laity, 1914–2021 Edited by Alana Harris

The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume I Endings and New Beginnings, 1530–1640 Edited by

JA M E S  E .  K E L LY A N D J O H N Mc C A F F E RT Y General Editors

JA M E S  E .  K E L LY A N D J O H N Mc C A F F E RT Y

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2023 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted 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, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948808 ISBN 978–0–19–884380–1 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843801.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books Limited Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Acknowledgements As both the editors of this volume and the general editors of the complete Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, we are going to combine our thanks in this one section. At the start of the project, we were well aware that it would be an enterprise which relied upon the goodwill of other people but, in addition to the usual events that life throws up, nobody could quite have planned for a global pandemic and various national lockdowns. For that reason, we wish to put on record our extra gratitude than usual to all those who have been involved. The first distinct group of people we wish to thank are the editors of the volumes: Liam Chambers, Alana Harris, Carmen Mangion, John Morrill, Susan O’Brien, and Liam Temple. Editing any volume is a task that requires patience, yet they also had to work with us as general editors, through regular meetings, which no doubt required more-­than-­average forbearance. That we are all still talking at the end of this is testament to their qualities, both personal and professional, rather than ours. In particular, we wish to acknowledge the work of Liam Temple, who joined the project later and worked tirelessly alongside John Morrill on the second volume. Of course, even with the best editors in the world, there would be no volumes without the contributors. We thank those who wrote for this volume, and also across the series as a whole, which we have had the pleasure to read from start to finish. Equally, we wish to acknowledge the support of all at Oxford University Press throughout the process, including Karen Raith, who first approached us about this project but departed the Press before its completion. We thank Tom Perridge and Cathryn Steele who saw it through to publication, for all their help with the project and especially for their patience answering our regular questions. Finally, it is important that we recognize our university colleagues for giving us the space to work on such a project. In particular, we wish to acknowledge colleagues in the School of History at UCD, and the Centre for Catholic Studies at Durham University, especially Paul Murray and Tim Guinan. We are also grateful to the support of the UCD Franciscan Partnership, the Guardian and community of St Isidore’s College in Rome, the St Cuthbert’s Society of Ushaw, the Congregation of Jesus, and Sir Christian Sweeting for making such research possible.

Contents List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations List of Contributors Series Introduction

James E. Kelly and John McCafferty

ix xi xiii xvii

Introduction1 James E. Kelly and John McCafferty 1. The Break with Rome and the Early Reformation Peter Marshall

12

2. Marian Counter-­Reformation John Edwards

31

3. Elizabethan England, Wales, and Ireland Katy Gibbons

50

4. Catholicism in Scotland to 1603 R. Scott Spurlock

68

5. The Early Stuarts Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin

89

6. Mission or Church, 1570–1640? Thomas M. McCoog, SJ

107

7. Catholicism and Separatism, Conformity and the State Michael Questier

127

8. Martyrdom Clodagh Tait

145

9. Material Culture Alexandra Walsham

164

10. Catholics and Their Protestant Neighbours William Sheils

184

11. Exile Movement: Male Institutions, 1568–1640 Thomas O’Connor

203

12. English and Irish Women Religious at Home and Abroad, c.1530–c.1640223 Caroline Bowden and Bronagh Ann McShane

viii Contents

13. Music Andrew Cichy

243

14. Catholic Written Cultures Susannah Brietz Monta and Salvador Ryan

260

15. Printed Translations and Catholic Reformation Jaime Goodrich

280

16. Popery and Anti-­Popery in Britain and Ireland Peter Lake and Michael Questier / Alan Ford

298

Index

319

List of Illustrations 9.1 Opus Anglicanum chasuble

169

9.2 The Lusher shrine showing the instruments of the Passion

174

9.3 ‘Certaine of the Popes Merchandize lately sent over into Englande’

178

11.1 Arms of an unknown Scottish ecclesiastic

211

11.2 The restored library of the Irish College Paris (1776)

214

11.3 Martyrdom of St Edmund, king of East Anglia218 12.1 English foundations in Flanders and Northern France

234

12.2 Interior of the English Augustinian convent in Bruges

237

12.3 The convent of Nossa Senhora do Bom Sucesso, Lisbon

240

12.4 Bom Sucesso church view from upper choir

241

List of Abbreviations ABSI Archivum Britannicum Societatis Iesu Anstruther, Seminary Priests Godfrey Anstruther, The Seminary Priests: A Dictionary of the Secular Clergy of England and Wales 1558–1850, 4 vols. (Ware, Durham, and Great Wakering, [1968]–77) ARSI Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu BL British Library CRS Catholic Record Society Lambeth Palace Library LPL NRS National Records of Scotland OCart Carthusian ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004): https:// www.oxforddnb.com/ OFM Franciscan Minor OSB Benedictine SCH Studies in Church History SJ Jesuit WDA Westminster Diocesan Archives Who Were the Nuns? database: https://wwtn.history.qmul. WWTN ac.uk/

List of Contributors Caroline Bowden is a Senior Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, UK, ­having completed five years leading the AHRC-­funded ‘Who Were the Nuns?’ project at the same institution. More recently she has been focusing on research into the book collections and schooling in the English convents. Recent publications include an edition of The Chronicles of Nazareth (The English Convent) Bruges 1629–1793 (Woodbridge, 2017) and a number of papers in collections and scholarly journals. She has co-­edited a collection of essays, Religion and Life Cycles in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2021). Andrew Cichy is the Director of Academic Programs and Employability at St Catherine’s College (UWA and Curtin), and an Adjunct Research Fellow in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Australia, Australia. A choral conductor, organist, and musicologist, he specializes in liturgical music and repertoires before 1750. He completed a doctorate in music as a Clarendon Scholar at Merton College, Oxford, on the subject of English Catholic music after the Reformation to 1700. His research has been published by Ashgate, Brill, and Oxford University Press. John Edwards was Reader in Spanish History at the University of Birmingham, and is now Faculty Research Fellow in Modern Languages, at the University of Oxford, UK. His research and publications have been focused on British and continental religious, political, and social history in the late medieval and early modern periods, with particular interest in the Inquisition and Christian interaction with Judaism and Islam. His books include Mary I: England’s Catholic Queen (New Haven, CT, 2011), Archbishop Pole (Farnham, 2014), and Mary I: The Daughter of Time (London, 2016). Alan Ford is Emeritus Professor of Theology at the University of Nottingham, UK. An his­tor­ ian of Irish religion, he has a particular interest in sectarianism and religious hatred, and the ways in which denominational commitments have shaped the writing of modern Irish history. He is the author of James Ussher: Theology, History, and Politics in Early-­Modern Ireland and England (Oxford, 2007), and, most recently, of ‘Fishing for Controversy: W. S. Kerr and the Demise of Church of Ireland Anti-­Catholicism’, in Claire Gheeraert-­ Graffeuille and Geraldine Vaughan (eds.), Anti-­ Catholicism in Britain and Ireland, 1600–2000: Practices, Representations and Ideas (Basingstoke, 2020). Katy Gibbons is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Her research focuses on English Catholic culture, and the connections between England and continental Europe in the sixteenth century. Katy has published on Catholic exiles, Anglo-­French relations, and saints’ cults, and is currently researching the Percy family, earls of Northumberland, in the reign of Elizabeth I, a project that encompasses the family’s ac­tiv­ ities and reputation in England, France, and the Low Countries, and explores aspects of material and print culture in the period. She is editor of the journal British Catholic History.

xiv  List of Contributors Jaime Goodrich is Professor of English at Wayne State University, USA. She specializes in early modern literature, with a focus on early modern women writers and religion, especially Catholicism. Her first monograph analyses early modern Englishwomen’s devotional translations (Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England, Evanston, IL, 2014), and her second monograph discusses the philosophical implications of texts by English Benedictine nuns (Writing Habits: Historicism, Philosophy, and English Benedictine Convents, 1600‒1800; Tuscaloosa, AL, 2021). In collaboration with Laurence Lux-­Sterritt, she is finishing an edition of documents related to spiritual quarrels among the Brussels Benedictine nuns during the seventeenth century. James E. Kelly is Sweeting Associate Professor in the History of Catholicism at Durham University, UK, where he leads the History of Catholicism research strand within the university’s Centre for Catholic Studies. He was Principal Investigator of the AHRC-­funded project, ‘Monks in Motion’, and was a member of the AHRC-­funded ‘Who Were the Nuns?’ project, acting as Project Manager of its follow-­on initiative. He has written widely on the history of Catholicism and his publications include English Convents in Catholic Europe, c.1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020). He is founding co-­editor of Durham University IMEMS Press’ ‘Catholicisms, c.1450–c.1800’ book series. Peter Lake is University Distinguished Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, USA. He has published widely on the politics, culture, and religion of post-­Reformation England. His most recent book, On Laudianism, is forthcoming from CUP. He is currently working on Memory, Identity and the Experience of Revolution, a study of the godly lives of Samuel Clarke, and on the Moretons of Moreton Hall. He is also working, with Noah Millstone, on a book, tentatively, entitled 1637: Year of Destiny. Peter Marshall is Professor of History at the University of Warwick, UK. He has published on various aspects of early modern belief and culture in the British Isles and beyond, and his books include Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002), Reformation England, 1480–1642 (London, 2003), Religious Identities in Henry VIII’s England (Aldershot, 2006), Mother Leakey and the Bishop: A Ghost Story (Oxford, 2007), The Reformation: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2009), Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (New Haven, CT, 2017; winner of the Wolfson History Prize), and 1517: Martin Luther and the Invention of the Reformation (Oxford, 2017). John McCafferty is Professor of History at University College Dublin, Ireland. Educated in University College Dublin and at the University of Cambridge, he is a historian of both Catholicism and Protestantism in early modern Ireland and Britain. He is Chair of the Irish Manuscripts Commission since 2017 and has worked over several decades in ­collaboration with the Franciscans (OFM) and others on the p ­ reservation of religious archives. He is an honorary Professor of the History of Catholicism in the Theology Department at Durham University. Thomas M. McCoog, SJ, commuted for twenty years between the Jesuit Historical Institute (Rome) where he served as Editor-­in-­Chief, and the Jesuit Provincial Archives (London) where he was Archivist and now he is at Loyola University Maryland, USA. His most recent monograph is The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England 1598–1606: ‘Lest Our Lamp be Entirely Extinguished’ (Leiden and Rome, 2017). Currently he is co-­editing (with Victor Houliston and others) the complete correspondence of Robert Persons, preparing a

List of Contributors  xv monograph on the religious life of the Elizabethan/Jacobean Jesuits, and editing a collection on the history of the English Jesuit Province (1623–2000). Bronagh Ann McShane is a social historian specializing in the history of women, religion, and confessionalization in early modern Ireland and Europe at University of Limerick, Ireland. She completed her PhD (Irish Research Council-­funded) at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, in 2015. Between 2018 and 2020 she held a National University of Ireland research fellowship at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She has published articles on aspects of her research in journals including British Catholic History, Archivium Hibernicum, and the Journal of Historical Network Research; and is the author of Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530–1700: Suppression, Migration and Reintegration (Woodbridge, 2022). Susannah Brietz Monta  is Glynn Family Honors Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, USA. Her books include Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005; winner, Book of the Year award, Conference on Christianity and Literature), Teaching Early Modern English Prose (New York, 2010, co-­edited with Margaret W. Ferguson), and A Catholic Reads The Faerie Queene: Anthony Copley’s A Fig for Fortune (Manchester, 2016). She served as editor of Religion and Literature from 2008 to 2015, and is currently a co-­editor of Spenser Studies. She has published over thirty art­icles on topics including martyrology, hagiography, devotional poetry and prose, and religion and literature methodology. Thomas O’Connor is Professor in History at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and Director of its Arts and Humanities Institute. He has published on the early modern religious history of Ireland and its European diaspora. His current research projects include https://clericus.ie, a digital prosopography of Irish clergy in the early modern period. Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin is a Professor in the School of History, University College Dublin, and the Editor for History of Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. His chief research interests centre on the transformation of European Catholicism during the early modern period, in particular in a transnational context. His most recent monograph, Confessionalism and Mobility in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford, 2021), offers an analysis of the impact of different forms of mobility on the development of distinctive confessional identities in Ireland. Michael Questier  is Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Centre for Catholic Studies at  Durham University, UK. He has published on the legal and cultural meanings of ­conversion, conformity, and recusancy; on the confluence of confessional and dynastic politics in both British and European contexts; and on the power of the post-­ Reformation Catholic aristocracy. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Catholicism and  Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c.1550–1640 (Cambridge 2006) and Catholics and Treason: Martyrology, Memory and Politics in the Post-­Reformation (Oxford, 2022), as well as with Peter Lake, All Hail to the Archpriest: Confessional Conflict, Toleration, and the Politics of Publicity in Post-­Reformation England (Oxford, 2019). Salvador Ryan  is Professor of Ecclesiastical History at St Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth, Ireland, and has published widely on various aspects of the history of popular

xvi  List of Contributors belief from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Among his most recent publications are (with Laura K. Skinnebach and Samantha Smith), Material Cultures of Devotion in the Age of Reformations (Leuven, 2022); with James E. Kelly and Henning Laugerud, Northern European Reformations: Transnational Perspectives (Cham, 2020), and three volumes in the series ‘Birth, Marriage and Death among the Irish’ (Dublin, 2016‒21). He is reviews editor of Irish Theological Quarterly and a member of the editorial advisory board for British Catholic History. William Sheils is Professor Emeritus at the University of York, UK, and has published widely on Catholics, non-­conformists, and the established church from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, contributing to the recent Oxford histories of Anglicanism and of the Protestant dissenting tradition. He has been President of the Ecclesiastical History Society, 2007–8, and Chair of Council of the Catholic Record Society, 2018–21. He was subject of a festschrift: Nadine Lewycky and Adam Morton (eds.), Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England (Farnham, 2012). R. Scott Spurlock is Professor of Scottish and Early Modern Christianities at the University of  Glasgow, Scotland and Research Fellow in the Faculty of Theology at Stellenbosch University. He is a member of the Young Academy of Scotland and his research focuses on the role of religion in shaping early modern cultures. Clodagh Tait lectures at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland. She is the author of Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550–1650 (Basingstoke, 2002), and co-­editor of Religion and Politics in Urban Ireland (Dublin, 2016) and Age of Atrocity (Dublin, 2007). She is a joint editor of Irish Historical Studies. She has written numerous articles on Irish social and cultural history, including the history of violence, martyrdom, and protest; pregnancy, childbirth, (wet)nursing, and child-­rearing; religious devotion; ideas about the supernatural; and the history of emotions. She is writing a book on blessing and cursing in Ireland between c.1550 and 1950. Alexandra Walsham is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, UK and a Fellow of the British Academy. She has published extensively on the religious and cultural history of early modern Britain and Ireland, including The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2011) and Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (Farnham, 2014). The research for her most recent book, Generations: Age, Ancestry and Memory in the English Reformations (Oxford, forthcoming), was supported by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, which she held between 2015 and 2018. She was also Principal Investigator of the AHRC-­funded project, ‘Remembering the Reformation’, which ran from 2016 to 2019. Note:  When two or more contributors have co-­ authored a chapter, their names are recorded in normal list fashion. When two or more contributors have authored separate parts of a chapter, their names are divided by a forward slash and listed in order of appearance of their contribution.

Series Introduction

James E. Kelly and John McCafferty

During the 1530s Henry VIII broke with Rome, initiating a series of events that would become known as the British and Irish Reformations. In England and Wales, Tudor reform was given impetus by Edward VI and Elizabeth I, while in Scotland civil war led to a split from Rome in 1560. Ireland, meanwhile, was subject to English reform. In each of the kingdoms there were those who chose to  remain loyal to the papacy. Hand in hand with emergent official State Protestantism and deliberate fomenting of anti-­Catholic prejudice went the birth of a United Kingdom through the events of 1603, 1707, and 1801. Shortly after the completion of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, civil dis­abil­ ities against those who had remained in communion with Rome were lifted by the 1829 Emancipation Act. By the start of the twenty-­first century, according to some statistics, weekly attendance at Catholic services was set to overtake attendance at Anglican and Presbyterian services in Britain. At the same time, the Catholic population of Northern Ireland was nearing parity with that of the Protestant, and in the Republic of Ireland the vast majority identified themselves as Catholic in census returns. In other words, despite its own rhetoric and the resulting dominant historiographical view of several centuries, Tudor reform did not consign Catholicism to historical oblivion. Instead, perceptions of papists and the enduring presence of British and Irish Catholics turned out to be a serious engine of identity and State formation across both islands from 1534 to the Good Friday Agreement. Catholics and Catholicism—­directly or indirectly—­affected the lives of every single inhabitant of both islands from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. This multi-­volume series charts, analyses, and interprets this story, covering the whole period of post-­Reformation Catholicism from the sixteenth-­century reformations to the present day. The series’ volumes are ordered chronologically, in order to trace the movement from official proscription and persecution, to toleration, to strong public presence. The opening volume explores the period 1530–1640, from the start of the Reformation to the outbreak of the civil wars. It analyses the efforts to create a Catholic community after the officially implemented change in religion, as well as the start of initiatives that would set the course of British and Irish Catholicism, such as the beginning of the missionary enterprise and the formation of institutions in exile. The second volume covers the period 1641–1745, incorporating the civil wars, the restoration of the ­monarchy, the Glorious Revolution, and the final attempt at a Jacobite res­tor­ation.

xviii  Series Introduction It examines the experience of Catholics in Britain and Ireland during this period of national conflict, the hopes for toleration under the later Stuarts, as well as the religious interpretation of potential Jacobite regime change. This is followed by a volume dedicated to the period 1746–1829, which marks the end of a serious Catholic threat to the established Protestant State of Britain and Ireland. Taking in international factors, particularly the French Revolution and the subsequent wars with France, the volume explores the move towards Catholic emancipation and its final achievement through legal rather than insurrectionary means. The fourth volume, looking at the period 1830–1913, examines the methods adopted to rebuild a church and lead a community emerging from 300 years of official State proscription. It considers how these visions could frequently be at odds, embodying as they did positions then engulfing the global Catholic Church through debates over, for example, papal infallibility and accommodation to modernity. The series ends with a volume that covers 1914 to the present day. It opens with the impact of World War I and the growth of nationalism, taking account of the creation of a Free State in Ireland dominated by the Church, as well as the construction of a sectarianized Northern Ireland. Including the Second World War, the volume also interprets the effect of the major changes wrought by Vatican II on British and Irish Catholicism, exploring how the impact of this monumental international moment affected the local Church into the new millennium. Before outlining the motivations for such a series and the themes that run through the volumes, it is necessary to explain definitions and to set some parameters. Perhaps the most pressing of these is the decision to use the term ‘Catholic’ rather than ‘Roman Catholic’. By Catholic, the editors of the volumes and the contributors have understood the term to indicate those individuals who saw themselves as in communion with the pope, and were understood to be so by those based in Rome. This communion or spiritual loyalty was, to varying degrees of strength, a fundamental demarcation across the centuries covered in this series, something of a bare minimum requirement for classification as Catholic. This was at least partly recognized by their contemporaries in their being given the deliberately othering term ‘papist’ in the early modern period, as battles over the word Catholic ensued in the wake of Henry VIII’s separation from the papacy.1 Moreover, Catholics were fully aware what was being implied by the use of such terms: as one English Catholic writer noted in the eighteenth century, ‘I am no Papist, nor is my religion Popery. [Whereas] Catholic is an old family name, which we have never forfeited, the word Roman has been given to us to indicate

1  Peter Marshall, ‘Is the Pope Catholic? Henry VIII and the Semantics of Schism’, in Ethan Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005), pp. 22–48.

Series Introduction  xix some undue attachment to the See of Rome.’2 Additionally, all editors were unanimous in their opposition to the term ‘Roman Catholic’ for some more nuanced, historiographical reasons. Apart from meaning little outside a very specific Anglocentric world, and itself being a continuation of that othering that sought to portray Catholics as foreign or not fully English, Scottish, or Welsh, the term also causes problems in terms of understanding within a wider Catholic context. If Catholics are removed from the Anglosphere that is the immediate context of these volumes and placed into a wider, transnational Catholic one, then the term ‘Roman Catholic’ implies and even denotes something very different, conjuring notions of a strong papalist or ultramontane Catholicism as opposed to a Gallican or conciliar one. In other words, it implies something about the Catholics of Britain and Ireland that is not necessarily true, or at least certainly is not true for all of them across the whole chronological period covered. Of course, the emergence, or arguable rediscovery, of Anglo-­Catholicism in the nineteenth century by members of the Church of England, features in the relevant volume but, out of communion with the papacy, it does not fall within the parameters of this series. Another point to stress regarding terminology: the application of modern secu­lar terms, such as conservative and liberal, make little sense when applied to much of the history of Catholicism. One example will suffice of the inadequacy of such terms: in the nineteenth century, Cardinal Manning of England and Wales was amongst the most traditional in terms of morality, liturgy, and theology, yet amongst the most ground-­breaking in his social justice ideas and agenda, even advocating working with other Christian denominations to promote and protect certain Christian values in society. Modern secular terms serve no purpose apart from to mislead when applied to such an individual. Another issue concerning terminology is the growing use of the term ‘post-­Tridentine’ by historians and literary scholars to denote the period immediately following the Council of Trent in the mid-­sixteenth century. Yet from a theological or liturgical aspect, the term means something very different: after all, with adaptation, the Tridentine rite of the Mass remained the ordinary form until well into the twentieth century. In reality, a more accurate term to help universal understanding across the different disciplines would be ‘post-­Trent’ or something along those lines. This may sound like nit-­picking, but such slippage in terminology has masked a phenomenon that is evident across all five volumes of the History: following emancipation in 1829, British and Irish Catholics sought to fully implement the Tridentine reforms, as they now had the notional freedom and structures to do so. This was in no sense a ‘post-­Tridentine’ church or century. Such attempts were witnessed in, for ex­ample, the music of the Mass or the founding of seminaries for particular dioceses. The latter may have been an unrealistic goal, as evidenced by the closures in the

2  Quoted in volume 3 of this series, p. 281.

xx  Series Introduction twentieth century and, in Scotland, the collapse of clerical training in the country, but it did bring things full circle: Scottish Catholic clerical training once more happened abroad, in mainland Europe, as in penal times. This brings us to geographical boundaries. The series is about British and Irish Catholicism, but this creates challenges brought about by the region’s history and the different trajectories of the constituent parts. Most pertinently, there is the issue of Empire, and British and Irish Catholic involvement in this enterprise. The decision has been taken to include British and Irish Catholic presence in, for example, America or Australia, but only to cover such regions as long as they were jurisdictionally allied to the English Church, which is in line with the policy of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In other words, once they are operating with their own, independent, ecclesiastical hierarchy, then, despite the presence of numerous lay and clerical Catholics from Britain and Ireland, their continuing story is not included here. For all that, the History deliberately seeks to analyse the countries together, at first through a three kingdoms approach, which by the end of the final volume has become the five jurisdictions. Too frequently in general historiography, Britain and Ireland are treated completely separately, ignoring the influences and impacts they had on each other. This issue becomes, arguably, even more pointed in the study of Catholicism within these islands. By its very nature, Catholicism is transnational and pays little heed to geographical boundaries. That is not to say it is the same everywhere—­quite the opposite is in fact the case—­but it is a vital and oft-­neglected fact about these islands that not only, for periods, shared similar political systems, but also witnessed the movement of people between them quite freely. This raises complicated questions throughout the volumes over the ‘Britishness’ or ‘Irishness’ of Catholicism across these islands and in the dias­poras. Moreover, it is a tricky task to give due attention to the ‘four nations’—England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales—­as well as their various languages, cultures, and as­pir­ ations, especially as some areas have been far more heavily researched than ­others. It is certainly evident where more research needs to be done, with Scottish and Welsh Catholicism deserving of much more work. Nevertheless, each volume and each individual author has a different take on these questions. This, in turn, leads to the reason for why such a series is not just possible but also needed. For too long, the study of Catholicism in Britain operated in a ghetto or silo, by something of a mutual understanding. As indicated above, there was a strong historiographical tradition that held that Catholics simply disappeared at the Reformation, only popping up every now and again to be executed, before re-­appearing in the nineteenth century because of migration from elsewhere, to become, by the mid-­twentieth century, a distinct but peculiar branch on the weird fringes of life that it was still safe to mock, albeit not in quite so strong terms as previously. On the other side, at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth century, confessionally motivated Catholics began digging away at

Series Introduction  xxi their history, content for it to be separate from the mainstream in their ghettoized ‘recusant’ approach. In contrast, the opposite holds true for Irish historiography. Catholicism is so mainstream to Irish history-­writing that its specificities and dynamics have often been lost or occluded. The separating off of the history of Catholicism in Britain, or its being ­swallowed-­up in Ireland, are exactly what these volumes wish to avoid. This approach ties to scholarly trends that increasingly recognize the importance of Catholicism to British and Irish history as a whole, and these volumes bring about fresh and critical thinking to the Catholic experience since 1530. Though popular perceptions of Catholicism’s premature death may still endure, the last decades have seen major upheavals in the academic study of Catholicism in these islands, as a growing number of scholars have recognized the importance of the subject to both national and global history. This burgeoning interest is indicated by the renaming of the journal Recusant History as British Catholic History, and the start of the biennial Early Modern British and Irish Catholicism Conference organized by Durham University and the University of Notre Dame. Moreover, the archival riches of Church bodies, especially religious orders, have stimulated multiple research projects based on Catholic sources written in a non-­confessional manner.3 This means that, whereas towards the start of the millennium Ethan Shagan could lament that early modern English Catholicism remained marginalized as ‘a historiographical sub-­field or occasionally a ghetto’, only a decade later, Alexandra Walsham could note that ‘Catholicism in the British Isles has emerged from the shadows and become one of the liveliest arenas of scholarly enquiry at the current time’.4 The History builds on these recent historiographical trends, but also extends them, pointing to areas where there has been a lack of research. As well as some more specific themes, there are four main factors that run throughout the volumes. The first of these is the relevance of Catholicism within different spheres of national and international life, particularly its political significance. This is not to downplay other approaches to the topic: this series seeks to cover the full gamut 3  For example, two digital projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Who Were the Nuns? (https://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/) and the Monks in Motion (https://www.dur. ac.uk/mim/) projects, as well as the Visible Divinity: Money and Irish Catholicism, 1850–1921 project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. The AHRC-­funded Cwm Jesuit Library project was a joint venture between Hereford Cathedral and Swansea University, which recreated a Jesuit mission library in Wales. In Ireland, the Clericus digital project seeks to track Irish-­born clergy (https://clericus.ie), while the Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550–1700 project featured women religious as one of the main research strands (https://recirc.nuigalway.ie). Further afield, at Tischner European University in Krakow, the Subversive Publishing in Modern England and Poland: A Comparative Study Project, funded by the National Science Center of Poland, unearthed significant findings about the influence of English Jesuits in central Europe. 4 Ethan Shagan, ‘Introduction: English Catholic History in Context,’ in Ethan Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005), p. 1; Alexandra Walsham, Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (Farnham, 2015), p. 2.

xxii  Series Introduction of research that has been, and is being, undertaken, including those working on musicology and material culture. Indeed, the shift from institutional history towards greater awareness of gender, cultural, social, and economic factors are vital constituents of the story tracked across the volumes. Moreover, it would be remiss not to recognize that literary scholars have been at the forefront of pi­on­ eer­ing research into at least early modern British and Irish Catholicism. In short, scholarship on the topic has been truly interdisciplinary. However, there is a danger that a dominant cultural approach could, and sometimes has, led to a slight undervaluing of the political. Thus, the volumes consider the role of British and Irish Catholicism from the perspective of each of the changing polities of the two islands, recognizing similarities of experience across Britain and Ireland, as well as differences. The History examines how Catholicism interacted with the growth of the nation state but also how international Catholicism was translated in, and transferred to, Britain and Ireland. Mirroring that, it places British and Irish Catholicism within a European and global context, whether that be the Catholic Reformation in the earlier volumes, or Empire and mission in the later volumes. The second factor is very much entwined with the first: the importance of Catholicism within the wider narratives of Britain and Ireland. This is somewhat self-­explanatory but to give one example: populist suspicion of popery and the enduring presence of Catholics acted as serious engines of identity and State formation in England5 during the time of the faith’s official proscription, from the reign of Elizabeth I to Catholic emancipation in 1829. Equally, as mentioned earl­ ier, Catholicism’s role within the wider narrative of Irish history in the nineteenth and, especially, twentieth century, is so obvious that any distinction has been lost. Put simply, the history of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland does not belong in its own distinct silo. The third factor running throughout the volumes is the internationality of British and Irish Catholicism. There has been a tendency to look inwards as far as British and Irish Catholicism is concerned and, even when mentioned, to neglect the importance of the role played by the various nations’ Catholic diasporas. Until the French Revolution it was here, at these institutions in mainland Europe, that Catholic children were educated, where women religious lived their lives, where the clergy were formed. That international element is no less prevalent in the modern period; from debates about ultramontanism in the nineteenth century, to the impact of Vatican II in the twentieth century, British and Irish Catholicism did not exist in a void, separated from the rest of the world, whether Catholic or secular. It fitted into, and was influenced by, global trends, whether that be the missionary impulse or global expansionism starting in the early modern period, or the ‘second spring’ of the nineteenth century that was part of a wider 5  See, for example, 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, 1989), pp. 72‒106.

Series Introduction  xxiii movement of Christian revivalism throughout Europe, and saw increased religious volunteerism and preaching missions by male orders not far removed from initiatives more commonly associated with Protestant evangelicals. As well as the outward, exile movement in the early modern period, a constant feature throughout is migration between and into the islands, not only in terms of Irish movement, but, in more recent times, Polish immigration and even the creation of a Syro-­Malibar rite cathedral influencing the Church in these islands. Equally, as a global Church, Catholicism has increasingly become a pathway to assimilation for migrants in the modern period and an important cog within community cohesion. This very much links to the fourth major factor running through the volumes. It may seem a somewhat strange element to highlight, but these volumes stress the importance of bearing in mind the theological, spiritual, and juridical underpinnings of Catholicism as a Christian denomination. Picking up on the ex­amples given above, those individuals—­both male and female—­at the exile foundations in mainland Europe were fully exposed to Catholic Reformation ideas and, by the eighteenth century, the growing Catholic Enlightenment, not to mention in particular exile pockets the influence of Jansenism. In other words, these people were not only English, Irish, Scottish, or Welsh exiles; they were members of the global Church Militant, exposed to the ideas circulating in those arenas. This is no less true in the modern period: the impact of Vatican II, as wide-­ranging as it was, was ultimately rooted in broader Catholic theological and spiritual currents. In  an earlier period, the ultramontane movement—­that placed emphasis on a strong papalist and Roman authority—­meant the loyalty of English, Welsh, and Scottish Catholics was judged as suspect, raising once again the anti-­Catholic idea of their split loyalties. Meanwhile, British and Irish Catholics were themselves caught-­up in the global Church’s modernism crisis, with some leading Catholics in the islands chafing against what they saw as being driven back into the Catholic segregated ghetto from which they had just been given secular permission to leave following emancipation in 1829. Yet, the centrality of an Englishman in the  form of Merry del Val to the Church’s stance against modernism cannot be underplayed. In addition to the four overarching, broader themes, this last point is a gateway to one of the more specific ones running throughout the volumes, in this case the cyclical relationship between the global Church and Britain and Ireland. It was not simply a case of British and Irish Catholics receiving dictation from a centralized body, but they too fed into it, whether it be Reginald Pole co-­chairing the first session of the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, martyrs from the islands being held up as exemplars for the seventeenth-­century global Church, nineteenth-­century Marian devotions such as at Knock in Ireland or hymns from Britain spreading elsewhere, or Irish Franciscans playing a vital role in the promotion of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception—­given formal approval

xxiv  Series Introduction during the ultramontane years of the later period—­Catholics in these islands were helping shape the global Church as much as they were shaped by it. Such agency often counters popular narratives that have sprung-­up. As is made clear in Volume IV, despite current popular wisdom, the Irish bishops in the nineteenth century were serial ignorers of advice or rulings from Rome. This put them in complete opposition to, for example, positions adopted in England and Wales by the likes of Cardinal Manning in his support for universal education. Apart from underlining how, post-­emancipation, British Catholics sought a wider impact on society towards a common improvement while, if anything, the Irish bishops looked inwards, it also laid the foundations for the serious repercussions within the Irish Church in the twentieth century. Having noted that hierarchical role, the frequently limited influence of bishops is apparent across the volumes. Where a traditional, liberal historiographical approach to history led confessionalized historians tended to follow, leading to  emphasis being placed on important figures and their impact. Yet for all those bishops frequently get blamed for everything, it is clear that they were just as regularly not listened to, whether that be Richard Smith trying to stamp his authority on England’s Catholics in the first half of the seventeenth century or religious orders ignoring the ecclesiastical hierarchy in Ireland. The often-­fraught relationship between bishops and religious orders is a constant feature across the volumes. It also links to the growing scholarly recognition of the importance of those very orders, whether that be in the immediate post-­Reformation period when many were active Tridentine reformers and, in the Observant Franciscans, sources of major resistance, particularly in Ireland to Henrician and Edwardian policies, to their prominence in education in the nineteenth century, or in social justice matters in the twentieth century. Moreover, what becomes clear across the five volumes is that the strong clericalist presence of the nineteenth century was in fact an aberration. Just as the influence of what is frequently referred to as the Victorian period still impacts traditions or cultural assumptions more widely, the same is true in assumptions about the Catholic Church. Clear in these volumes is that before—­and increasingly after—­that period, the laity had a far more significant role than is usually assumed. Another very notable feature is the prominent role of women throughout. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, women played a vital part in the survival of Catholicism, running safe houses for missionary clergy, turning the authorities’ misogyny to their advantage as they practised recusancy and raised their children secretly Catholic. Moreover, further up society’s class hierarchy, there was a series of female Catholic regents throughout the seventeenth century. Into the nineteenth and then the twentieth century, women led popular devotional trends and, frequently, played an increasingly important role in the running of parishes. Indeed, the importance of this domestic environment is another theme running through the volumes, whether it be in the enforced domestic setting of the penal

Series Introduction  xxv period or the devotional learning of the modern era. In itself, this domesticity links to ideas of inculturation and accommodation, more commonly associated with global Catholic enterprises in, for example, Asia, but just as evident here. Once again, this brings us back to the connection between the local, national, and global identities at play, and the pull between international influences and local needs, contexts, and reality. This is even evident where least assumed, such as the Gothic revival movement in architecture during the nineteenth century. As much as it was about reclaiming the past and what was deemed broken at the Reformation, it also had a global influence, the likes of Augustus Welby Pugin designing churches in, for example, Australia. Equally, in this neo-­gothic revivalism can be seen the religious and the secular influencing and pushing each other. That is not to say that the two realms mixed easily throughout: as is already obvious from what has been outlined, the sparring between the secular and the spiritual is a constant theme, each regularly accusing the other of venturing into a sphere of influence upon which it had no claim. The mention of the neo-­Gothic movement also raises another specific theme; Catholic grappling with ideas of continuity and discontinuity. This is not simply in terms of looking for links to the pre-­Reformation period or a recovery of the Catholic past, but is evident in the events that define each chronological period covered in the volumes. So, as well as pre- and post-­Reformation, it becomes clear there are other markers in the British and Irish Catholic mindset, such as pre- and post-­civil war and Glorious Revolution; pre- and post-­French Revolution; preand post-­creation of the Irish Free State in 1922; pre- and post-­Vatican II. This is just a sample of the defining markers that become clear across the History and it is notable how many could also apply to the non-­Catholic story. In other words, it underlines just how entangled Catholicism was with wider events in Britain and Ireland. The history of Catholicism in these islands was not, and never has been, alone in a hermetically sealed silo. Even taking something as wide-­reaching as national identity, it is evident that for much of the period under consideration here, Catholicism was seen as anathema to true national identity in England, Scotland, and Wales, while the reverse was true in Ireland from as early as the seventeenth century. Despite that difference, what remains true is the role played by Catholicism in those nation’s psyches. Having said all that, there is one almost reassuring continuity. Whatever period may now be reminisced about as the golden time for Catholics in Britain and Ireland, those living through it never saw it as such. If there is one constant throughout the volumes, it is that, even at the heights of nineteenth-­century second spring rhetoric and twentieth-­century outward signs of growth, Catholics still complained and worried about non- or low Mass attendance and knowledge of the faith. Plus ça change.

  Introduction James E. Kelly and John McCafferty

In 1530 Christianity had been present for over 1,000 years on the islands of Britain and Ireland. Those who were alive at the time had living memories of plague, civil war, and conflict between realms, but it had been over a hundred years since the last schism had pushed England, Scotland, and parts of Ireland into different obediences. By 1640 visions of ‘popery’ sat at the heart of a greater crisis of authority and faith that would pitch all three Stuart kingdoms into dec­ ades of violence which included civil wars, conquest, invasion, and forced migra­ tions. None of this happened at once, nor did it happen in any kind of directly linear way. Henry VIII’s English Act of Supremacy was passed in 1534, followed by its close twin, the Irish Act of Supremacy in 1536. The Dublin legislation, though, followed a rebellion by the Fitzgeralds of Kildare and their many allies from across the island who had specifically invited the inhabitants of Ireland to remain loyal to the Roman obedience. On 30 November 1554 England was for­ mally reconciled to the Chair of Peter by the legate Cardinal Pole. In August 1560 the parliament of Scotland declared that: ‘the bischope of Rome callit the paip . . . haif na jurisdictioun nor autoritie within this realme in tymes cuming’.1 On 1 May 1561 Elizabeth I formally announced that she would neither receive a Papal Nuncio nor send a delegate to the Council of Trent. In May 1570, Pius V’s bull of the previous 25th of February excommunicating Elizabeth I, was nailed to the door of the Bishop of London. On 8 August following John Felton ‘publisher’ of Regnans in Exclesis was executed for his treason in St Paul’s yard. In 1574, the first four priests trained in the English College founded at Douai six years earlier left for the home mission. The first Irish college specifically intended to train priests opened at Salamanca in 1592 and eight years later the Scots College opened on Via delle Quattro Fontane Rome near the 1592 church of Sant’ Andrea degli Scozzesi. In 1599 the English Benedictine Convent at Brussels founded by Mary Percy was inaugurated. The Irish Dominican nuns established their house of Bom Successo in Lisbon four decades later in 1639.2 These, of course, are only

1  Gordon Donaldson, Scottish Historical Documents (Glasgow, 1997), p. 124. 2  For an overview of recent work on religious houses, see two digital projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the ‘Who Were the Nuns?’ (https://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/) and the ‘Monks in Motion’ (https://www.dur.ac.uk/mim/) projects. James E. Kelly and John McCafferty, Introduction In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume I: Endings and New Beginnings, 1530–1640. Edited by: James E. Kelly and John McCafferty, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843801.003.0001

2  James E. Kelly and John M c Cafferty some of the very many events which make up the overall trajectory of religious change on both islands and which serve as some indicators of the relative veloci­ ties at which things happened. The timing of every formal act whether it was ­episcopal appointment, papal bull, parliamentary statute, royal proclamation, canonical foundation, judicial execution, or ambassadorial appointment, was itself positioned within the wider conditions and considerations of dynastic pol­it­ics, theological reflections, local politics, spirituality, ideology, memory, and anxiety. Over the eleven decades from 1530 to 1640 what had been an almost universal condition of Christian life with its associated wide set of beliefs, practises, and understandings was turned into a particular choice. Communal and customary adherence to a church whose jurisdictional heart was located at Rome gave way to societies in which people had, regularly, to make windows into their own souls. Men and women now found themselves having to take notice of where their neighbours did or did not go on Sundays. The gestures they made, the places where they went to pray, the prayers they said, the languages they said them in, the books they owned, the pictures they purchased, the music they heard, the hymns they sang—­all of these things became matters of conscious choice. Time itself, whether the long duration of the ancestral Christian past or the living cycle of the seasons, became a matter of interpretation and of identification. The land­ scape in general and the streetscapes of cities and towns in particular which, from west coast of Ireland to the littoral of the North Sea and from the Scilly Isles to the Hebrides, had been marked out by the activities of monks, friars, nuns, the saints and their relics and pilgrimages, could now be interpreted as anything from a righteous erasure of superstition to a great contact reliquary of holiness. For inhabitants of both islands the Papacy itself went from being an implicit and often quite distant part of a greater European institution, to being something that was to be accepted, rejected, or even just navigated with care. The Pope himself became for some a source of salvific unity and for others a harbinger of apoca­ lypse. Once the reflexive assumption of unity was disrupted by the declaratory legislation of 1534, 1536, and 1560, the enduring language of ‘uniformity’ in reli­ gion deployed by civil and ecclesiastical authorities in England and Wales, Ireland and Scotland always rested on a presumption that there would be those who resiled from repudiations of the Roman pontiff. Those who did not commit entirely to the new bonds of the established Kirk or of the established Churches of England and Ireland on the grounds of papal primacy were faced with varying burdens of choice depending on where they lived and at what point they lived during the 110 years covered by this volume. Occasional conformity, outright recusancy, or even sporadically interrupted continuity all attracted responses ranging from neighbourly suspicion to contempt to civil disability to prison or even to death. Credit, credibility, duty, and service in late medieval and early modern so­ci­ eties were all sustained by oaths and oath-­taking. Oath-­swearing, first for London

Introduction  3 clergy, then the lay male population of the capital and afterwards more widely across England was one immediate and very visible driver of Henry VIII’s break with Rome. Henry’s successor James VI & I would return to an oath-­based strat­ egy in the time after Gunpowder Plot of 1605 as a means for testing the mettle of Catholic subjects in England. Crafted by the King to convulse that community it duly did so.3 In 1638 the National Covenant of Scotland built on the system of social relations for that kingdom to articulate, through a solemn oath-­taking, defence of the ‘true Reformed religion’. While the circumstances and effects of each of these examples were different, the extent to which solemn swearing began to reach into the interior religious lives of so many of the inhabitants of the three kingdoms during this period is striking. A device which had been a traditional generator of social stability became a marker of decision and also a driver of dif­ ference. At the same time the parliaments at Dublin, Westminster, and Edinburgh also began to busy themselves with religion. Statutes such as De Haeretico Camburendo had, in the mixed polity of the late Middle Ages, provided a mech­ an­ism for the operation of the secular arm in the realms of belief and in the patrolling of the boundaries of orthodoxy. In the new circumstances of the middle decades of the sixteenth century, just as with the oaths, a statute-­based approach to religious policy created a concomitant expansion of grounds for trea­ son. Apart from John Forest in 1539 the vast majority of those English, Irish, Welsh, and Scots declared martyrs by Rome in the nineteenth and twentieth cen­ turies were executed as traitors.4 More generally, and especially after 1570 there was an increasingly easy equation, especially in times of political tension, between non-­adherence to the established ecclesial structures and treason. In England the multiple plots of Elizabeth’s reign, especially those clustered about Mary Queen of Scots, and in Ireland the self-­proclaimed Catholic rebellions, created an enduring sense of crisis around this known Catholic minority in England and this known Catholic majority in Ireland. In effect one important part of being continuously loyal to Rome from the second half of the sixteenth century was to be tainted with treason or left open to the accusation of sedition no matter how loyal any indi­ vidual was to the monarch. Even as Catholic identities began to be shaped by their definition as aliens as a result of the expansion of legalized approaches to religious practice they also began to map onto the politico-­ religious construction of each of the three 3  For debate over this, see Michael C. Questier, ‘Loyalty, Religion and State Power in Early Modern England: English Romanism and the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance’, The Historical Journal, 40 (1997), pp. 211–29; Johann P. Somerville, ‘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; Michael Questier, ‘Catholic Loyalism in Early Stuart England’, English Historical Review, 123 (2008), pp. 1132–65. 4  For an overview, see Michael Questier, Catholics and Treason: Martyrology, Memory, and Politics in the Post-­Reformation (Oxford, 2022). For Forest in particular, see Peter Marshall, Religious Identities in Henry VIII’s England (Aldershot, 2006), p. 230.

4  James E. Kelly and John M c Cafferty kingdoms in different manners.5 Most historians agree that the 1580s and 1590s saw the growth of committed recusancy and a conscience-­based separation from the established churches. In England Catholics might be invoked as a Hispanicized threat who not only corroded the body politic but also risked contaminating a still imperfectly reformed Church of England. That latter strand of thought became increasingly important under James I and then reached a destablizing crescendo under Charles  I.  In Scotland James VI could deploy the existence of Catholic subjects as a foil to more radical elements within the Kirk (a tactic which he used regularly after 1603 in his southern kingdom). Scottish magnates who were Catholics also retained their role as mainstays of the Stewart crown due to the regionalized nature of power there to a far greater extent than their counter­ parts in a mainly Protestant England and in an Ireland where confiscatory planta­ tion became the mainstay of Crown policy. It is arguable that in the case of the kingdom of Ireland the Catholicism of the majority Old English and Gaelic Irish population had the greatest effect of all in creating what proved to be the very enduring reality of a minority Protestant regime based in Dublin Castle (later known as the Ascendancy). The disjunction between the claim inherent in the Church of Ireland’s title and the number of its adherents habituated that church to minority thinking and a theological hardline, almost providentialist, defence of that minority. The position of Catholics across Britain and Ireland was, of course, never ever stable and constantly subject to alterations by the dynastic needs of ruling monarchs right throughout the length of time covered in this volume. If Henry VIII’s need to put away his Spanish wife began, as it were, the story told here, continental spouses and continental matches from Philip II’s English king­ ship to the failed Anjou match to Anne of Denmark’s conversion through to the debacle of Prince Charles’s Spanish match and the eventual special arrangements for Henrietta Maria were at least as important, if not more so, in determining the conditions of life for British and Irish Catholics as any policy emanating from the Papal Curia. While the effect of national historiographies on writing about Catholics of both islands from 1530 to 1640 needs little rehearsal—­self-­marginalization until recently in the case of England, Wales, and Scotland and such overwhelming ubiquity as to be almost entirely devoured by political narrative history in Ireland—­the broader resurgence in studies of the early modern Catholic church, its organization, its theology, and above all its increasingly global mission have docked very effectively with the desire to break free of older forms. In these read­ ings, the influence of which is manifest throughout this volume, Rome not only influenced but was also influenced by what was going on among those still in

5 For England, see the essays in James  E.  Kelly and Susan Royal (eds.), Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-­Reformation (Leiden, 2017).

Introduction  5 communion with it on the two northern islands.6 At the very least the issues thrown up by questions of duty and obedience of Catholic subjects to a Protestant monarch attracted the sustained attention of leading theologians and theorists such as Cardinal Bellarmine.7 Pulses of state sanctioned executions created dis­ courses of martyrdom which offered the possibility of discerning in real time, as it were, the workings of divine providence especially in the struggle against her­esy.8 The institutional and jurisdictional headaches thrown up by missionary faculties along with the liturgical and devotional challenges created by covert and often semi-­formal worship outside of canonically regular settings were reminis­ cent of, and often influenced by, solutions developed for the emerging Roman communities in places like China and Japan.9 In this respect the role of the reli­ gious orders is instructive. The emergence and rapid expansion of the Society of Jesus worldwide meant that on the island of Britain the pace set for much of the Catholic community was one determined by an organization that insisted on the universal applicability of the Spiritual Exercises and the Ratio Studiorum.10 The Franciscans, largest of the male orders at the time, were continuously and pretty successfully insistent on Roman obedience in Ireland from the very outset in the 1530s. Their work in knitting together providentialist ideas about the island’s ancestral ties to the Holy See with careful inculturations of Tridentine reform provided much of the energy required for a long-­ lived post-­ ethnic Irish Catholicism. So, while historically continuous conventual life was over in England and Wales by 1541, collapsed in Scotland in the 1550s and eventually succumbed to Crown conquests in Ireland by the turn of the seventeenth century, the reli­ gious orders themselves still sustained Catholic life across both islands all through the eleven decades under examination here. The European and global reach of those regular communities not only ensured their survival but also gave them their potency. So while the solely English Gilbertines entirely vanished from the scene, the anchoritic English Benedictines were capable of mutation into mis­ sionary priests and the Bridgettines of Syon migrated to become an emblematic survival of a general wreck. The particular form that the English Benedictine Congregation took was quite an innovation. English, Irish, Scots, and Welsh Catholics found themselves at the confluence of several types of change consequent on their decision (or that of their family) to remain loyal to Rome. Over time, there was the ongoing challenge of living in increasingly Protestant realms. Simultaneously in the wake of the 6  Tadhg Ó hÁnnracháin, Catholic Europe, 1592–1648: Centre and Peripheries (Oxford, 2015). 7 For example, Stefania Tutino, Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth (Oxford, 2010), pp. 127–211. 8  See, for example, Glyn Redworth, The She-­Apostle: The Extraordinary Life and Death of Luisa de Carvajal (Oxford, 2008). 9  Thomas M. McCoog, Chapter 6 in this volume. 10  Thomas McCoog, The Society of Jesus in Ireland 1541–1588, Scotland and England: ‘Our Way of Proceeding’ (Leiden, 1996).

6  James E. Kelly and John M c Cafferty Council of Trent, Catholicism itself both defined its norms with greater precision but also engaged in fertile experimentation with new theological and philo­soph­ ic­al forms as well as responding with a burst of creativity to involvement in other new mission fields. Just as Catholicism changed so did Protestantism both in England and Scotland. The result was that Catholics were not simply a group reacting to a fact of royal supremacy or a fact of the removal of the Pope from their polities but responding to a constantly changing Protestant ‘other’. It is true that new Catholic identity might easily be mapped onto older fissures or con­fig­ ur­ations, such as that of opposition to the Campbells in Scotland, or as in the choices of the Poles in England, or those of Hugh O’Neill in Ireland. Nonetheless living out the consequences of adherence to Rome required both energy and flexi­bil­ity whatever the status of the person involved. While examination of ­sei­gneur­ial Catholicism, particularly in England, was a longstanding staple of ‘recusant studies’, another form of lay agency—­that of women—­has become increasingly appreciated in recent decades. In a similar manner, studies of Catholic spaces and materiality have moved away from priest-­holes and out to encompass an array of objects and into the broader landscape itself. Music, sacred art, liturgical plate, vestments, and devotional reading all had to be adapted to take account of various and varying forms of proscription for ownership across both islands. Three significant movements of Tudor and Stuart Catholicism—­the continental college movement, the continental convent foundations, and Mary Ward’s controversial Institute of the Blessed Virgin—­were all forged from the exi­ gencies created by conditions at home meeting with the processes of reformation codified and channelled by the Council of Trent. The English College at Douai was an exile association of Oxford and Cambridge fellows which met with the unfolding seminary movement. The reputation of English nuns in Flanders for strictness of cloister was where Tridentine enclosure met a spirituality of prayer for the domestic mission.11 The Irish Franciscans in Louvain, Rome, and Prague met with the Spanish Crown’s and their own order’s drive for definition of the Immaculate Conception while training their recruits for service in the neigh­ bourhoods of their old Observant friaries.12 Mary Ward’s ‘Jesuitesses’ were just that and by trying to adapt the structures and spirituality of the Society of Jesus were able, in due course, to make a lasting return to English soil.13 The twenty-­fifth, and last session, of the Council of Trent in 1563 crammed in a series of decrees. These included purgatory, the invocation and veneration of saints and relics and of sacred images, regular religious life of men and of women, 11 James E. Kelly, English Convents in Catholic Europe, c.1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020). 12  John McCafferty, ‘Recycling an Island’s Past for a Global Catholicism: Irish Franciscans in the Seventeenth Century’, in Cormac Begadon and James E. Kelly (eds.), British and Irish Religious Orders in Europe, 1560–1800: Conventuals, Mendicants and Monastics in Motion (Woodbridge, 2022), pp. 60–82. 13  Susan O’Brien, ‘Ward, Mary (1585–1645)’, ODNB.

Introduction  7 indulgences and directions concerning catechism, the breviary, and the missal. All of this guaranteed that Catholic life in Britain and Ireland would pursue its own reformed trajectory yet it is clear that individuals ranging from Cardinals Pole and Allen to the often unnamed people of humble status who feature in the written reports of missioners also insisted on ideas of fidelity, continuity, and ancestral connection as being vital to their confessional choice.14 Pilgrims at St Patrick’s Purgatory at Lough Derg, readers in Irish or English of translated works of the devotio moderna, members of the new Jesuit sodalities or of Dominican confraternities, just to take some examples, blended older custom with newer clerically-­led regulation. Those who collected, carried, and concealed the bodily relics of the ‘new’ martyrs of their own time connected the judicial realities of contemporary statute and oath with an evocation of the earliest Christian martyrs under the Roman Empire. Trent worked, of course, to put the resident bishop at the heart of an ordered ecclesiastical life while events during 1530‒1640 made exemplar martyrs of four bishops in the executions of Cardinal John Fisher of Rochester (1535), Patrick O’Healy of Mayo (1579), Dermot O’Hurley of Cashel (1584), and Conor O’Devany of Down & Connor (1612). This volume, as with the others in this series, begins with the narrative. Over the first five chapters (one of which looks specifically at Scotland up to the union of crowns on 1603) the authors move from Henry VIII’s break with Rome to the cusp of the crisis of the Stuart multiple monarchy in 1640. It has not always been possible to give the component polities of both islands equal or even weighted attention. This is partly due to the state of existing research. We hope that more appreciation of these gaps will inspire further work. We also hope that approaches used by contributors for a particular person or place or time might spark a new comparison with another part of the two islands. The eleven decades featured here were also those during which Wales was shired and joined to the kingdom of England.15 They were also those during which English rule headquartered in Dublin Castle extended out over the entire island of Ireland. The island’s constitu­ tional status moved from dependent lordship, based on a papal grant, to a dependent kingdom of a self-­declared imperial crown. The kingdom of Scotland moved into dynastic union with England. And England switched from a series of four monarchs with Welsh ancestry to having two kings of Scottish birth. The demands and growing pains of such a multiple monarchy shaped the experiences of the Catholic population in every conceivable manner. Peter Marshall traces the birth of the royal supremacy, the confusion it caused, and the opportunities that Catholicism without the Pope appeared to present until the emergence of ‘high-­ tempo Protestant reformation’ under Edward VI. As he shows, papal authority, which had been the guarantor of a mixed polity, and a thing mainly on 14  See, for example, Vera Moynes (ed.), Irish Jesuit Annual Letters, 1604–1674, 2 vols. (Dublin 2019). 15  Ecclesiastically, of course, Welsh dioceses were a part of the province of Canterbury.

8  James E. Kelly and John M c Cafferty clerical minds moved in a space of twenty or so years to a position of guarantor of sacramental orthodoxy for all those who chose to stay in communion with Rome. For figures such as Thomas More and Reginald Pole the workings of Tudor supremacy created the conditions for a conversion process as a part of the birth-­ pangs of Catholic England. When, after a brief wobble, Mary I acceded to the throne most people probably thought, as John Edwards argues, that she would restore things to where they had been at Henry VIII’s death in 1547. The determination of England’s first regnant queen to dismantle her half-­brother’s religious programme along with the ambitiously advanced reform programme of Cardinal Pole went far beyond the formal reconciliation of the realm. The fires that took the lives of some 300 men and women were one part of a great design to reshape the religious lives of the entire populace. Integral to that design was the Spanish King Philip of England and Ireland assisted by the Franciscan Alfonso de Castro and the Dominican Bartolomé Carranza. Mary I’s subsequent memorialization as a kind of anti-­queen not only had a bearing on the lives of Catholics in the decades after her death but occluded the busy ambition for religious aggiornamento during the five years and four months of her reign. The military assistance of her successor Elizabeth I to the Protestant Lords of the Congregation opened up the way for reformation by statute in Scotland that made Protestantism a national ‘impera­ tive’ as Scott Spurlock explains in his chapter. This sense of being a covenanted kingdom nonetheless sat with the fact that so many of the aristocracy—­an esti­ mated one-­third in the period 1587–1625—were Catholic. After the departure of Mary Queen of Scots from her kingdom in 1568 Catholicism, whose structures were already very weak, became deinstitutionalized. A frequently politicized Catholic identity created a religious parallel to the bonds of man-­rent which was further sustained by Jesuit missionary activity across the northern kingdom. Unlike his Irish subjects James VI never identified any of his Catholic com­pat­ riots as half-­subjects and, in scenes that would have been impossible in what became his two other kingdoms, a number of Catholic nobles were involved in the baptismal ceremony of Prince Henry in 1594. Those who continued to attend Mass in Scotland were considered apostates and guilty of the civil crime of treason. In England, ‘religious’ treasons expanded considerably in the years following the climacteric that was Regnans in Excelsis. As Katy Gibbons explains, the legal measures enacted in England during Elizabeth’s long reign effectively ‘imposed a new definition of what it meant to be Catholic’. The Elizabethan regime also infused fresh self-­understandings into Catholic thinking by creating a series of martyrs across both kingdoms. There may have been a commonality of spilled blood on both sides of the Irish Sea yet in the western kingdom, where a parallel Roman hierarchy took shape in the 1580s and 1590s, Catholics remained in pub­ lic social and political life and were free of the measures that so constricted their English confreres. The Armada, rebellions, and plots across both islands also

Introduction  9 ensured that over the forty-­five years of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign those who rejected the services of the Church of England or Church of Ireland to whatever degree became increasingly marked as alien, disloyal, or devious in the eyes of the State. Catholic subjects were by virtue of their very existence a threat. The succes­ sion of Mary of Scotland’s son James VI to the throne brought about a wave of re-­occupation of churches in Old English towns and cities of Ireland. If hopes of a public tolerance were misplaced, the reigns of the first two Stuart monarchs (both of whom were married to Catholics) did, as Tadhg Ó hÁnnracháin shows, sta­bil­ize the situation of Catholics across all three kingdoms to the extent that, Gunpowder Plot notwithstanding, they could engage in frequently acrimonious internal debate about their relationship to the Protestant polity without destroying their own communities. A resident episcopate of high calibre in Ireland c­ oupled with the still expanding network of exile colleges, convents, and presses solidified a reformed Catholicism which had become overwhelmingly recusant. The appre­ hension felt by James VI & I that puritans and Presbyterians might constitute a greater threat to stability played out well for Catholics during his reign and that of his son. This apparent community of interest between the Crown and its Catholic subjects joined with the worries created by avant-­garde conformity in the second half of the 1630s pushed many British Protestants into a deep suspicion that popery had begun to subvert the monarchy itself. Religious change worked itself out on the very bodies of the martyrs who, as Clodagh Tait shows were omnipresent in exile communities and colleges. Well over half of the seminary priests sent to England under Elizabeth I were captured and of these more than one hundred were executed. As Tait notes the moments of martyrdom and the keeping of their relics represented particular concentrations of emotion, of display, and of argument between Catholics and Protestants. This was a theatre of death in which the actors might be interpreted as saint or as trai­ tor. The cast members, as it were, whose bodies became relics were overwhelm­ ingly drawn from a mission directed by the Jesuits. This tension between a ‘mission’ and an episcopally managed church compounded, as Tom McCoog argues, by James VI & I’s Oath of Allegiance formed the backdrop to the revival of religious life in England and Ireland during that reign. In Ireland, though, per­sist­ ence of a hierarchy with a high number of regular incumbents meant that any internal clerical stirs were far less corrosive than those across the water. In his chapter Michael Questier examines the way in which ratcheting up of sanctions and widening definitions of treason actually affected the wider body of those who either occasionally conformed or, as from the 1580s onwards, totally separated themselves from the State church. Exemplary executions existed alongside a politique and practical consideration that there was little point in criminalizing large numbers for sedition ‘when they were not, by almost any contemporary measure seditious’. Yet there was every point in negotiating, accommodating, and channel­ ling Catholic anxieties into rumours of de facto toleration. Bill Sheils looks past

10  James E. Kelly and John M c Cafferty the well-­researched ‘great acts of defiance’ to the local religious rivalries especially in those places where Catholics continued to play a prominent role in local pol­it­ ical and social life. Across all three kingdoms people began to work with the ‘complexity of a novel form of difference’ so that all sorts of social interaction—­ contest, conciliation, connivance—­might take place between Catholics and their neighbours. Even as neighbours made their calculations about each other a vision of ‘popery’ as an anti-­religion abetted by its continental allies was fully assembled by the reign of Edward VI and proved for the remainder of the Tudor period and into that of the early Stuarts to be a fertile and flexible means for explaining pretty much all problems. Peter Lake, Michael Questier, and Alan Ford position anti-­ popery as a serious political tool whose features could even be deployed by Catholics against each other. In Ireland a matching rhetoric of coercion would have an enduring resonance. The continental foundations made by Catholics, some of which still continue, are usually treated as a part of the respective modern national historiographies. In two chapters, Tom O’Connor and also Caroline Bowden and Bronagh McShane treat, respectively, the male and female establishments of both islands together. The origins of these houses were diverse. Some were repurposed late medieval hostels while others began life as residences for religious exiles, but together they created a framework in which an array of convents, colleges, seminaries, schools, university residences across Europe provided prayers and priests for the home missions, displayed the plight of British and Irish Catholics, and made major con­ tributions to the cultural life of the various nations as well as to the intellectual life of the Roman communion. These were the places where wider Catholic reform and expatriate communities cross-­fertilized each other. These were also the places which sustained older ethnic and provincial rivalries and which varied in the nature and level of the education on offer. For women they offered almost the only opportunity to experience conventual life and for secular clergy an entry, usually under Jesuit direction, to the expanding seminary movement. Monasteries, friaries, and convents had been some of the largest buildings in the late medieval landscape. Shrines and other pilgrimage sites had been some of the most visited. Alexandra Walsham’s contribution here tracks the Catholic turn to the miniature, to the private, and to discreet visits of ruined places. A whole selection of objects, whether survivors of earlier times or the apparatus of new devotions or sacramentals, were now contraband goods yet they were also dis­ plays of adherence to papal authority and to ancestral religion. ‘Sacred music’ Andrew Cichy points out ‘is always contingent upon its circumstances’. Catholics now found themselves outside cathedrals, parish churches, and collegiate chapels. Performance shifted to domestic spaces or continental cloisters. A new missal under Pius V meant a new repertoire for which the seminary training of clerics and the wider fashions of Catholic Europe provided a new liturgical context. Where the sparse evidence allows a glimpse it is clear that the new continental

Introduction  11 institutions acted as melting pots for ‘ideas, networks and tastes’. Writing, whether disseminated in print or by manuscript, made up another melting pot in which new concerns, multiple genres, older forms, Latin, and the vernaculars all trans­ mitted Catholic messages to those remote from priests and their services. As Susannah Monta and Salvador Ryan demonstrate, poetry especially in Irish and Welsh, fulfilled an important catechetical purpose. In the English language Catholics read and appreciated Protestant poets while the Jesuit Robert Southwell (appropriately tweaked) became a bestseller in print showing that when it came to literature neat confessional boundaries are not easily drawn. In her con­sid­er­ ation of what was a golden age of translation Jaime Goodrich identifies two phases of activity. The first phase was polemical—­designed to refute Protestant tracts. After 1570 attention switched to the provision of pastoral resources in which secret and exile presses drew on medieval and contemporary materials to supply monastic rules, a large selection of hagiographical work and classics of spirituality. All of this literature furnished the Catholic reader with evocations of past glories and a sense of the constant unfolding of tradition in their own time. Henry VIII’s bid for sole jurisdiction over his kingdom of England affected, in time, everyone on the islands of Britain and Ireland. Hardly any aspect of life was unaffected. This volume attempts to recover as much of the actuality, anxiety, and creativity that choice of communion with Rome caused for men and women from 1530 to 1640. At the same time their choices created identities and structures which allowed Catholic communities to continue for centuries to come.

1 The Break with Rome and the Early Reformation Peter Marshall

The convulsions unleashed by conjunction of the marital problems and theo­logic­al pretensions of Henry VIII transformed the ecclesiastical and devotional landscapes of England, Ireland, and Wales. They did so in distinct and varying ways: in part a consequence of the different constitutional and cultural relationship each of those territories had with the Tudor monarchy; in part a result of preceding and prevailing conditions in various parts of the English king’s dominions; and in part a matter of luck and happenstance. The process we with hindsight call ‘the early Reformation’ destroyed a common Catholic culture in England and Wales, and severely damaged one in Ireland. But, paradoxically, it also created new, vibrant, and vigorous forms of Catholic identity, along with new networks of Catholic association. Ideas of a sharp break between what went before and what came after have long been central to the study of early modern British and Irish Catholicism. John Bossy’s magisterial study of an ‘English Catholic Community’ began by suggesting that it first came into existence in the years around 1570, after ‘the death of the medieval English Church’.1 Historians of Ireland, meanwhile, have usually landed in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—­or even later—­in search of answers to the question of why, numerically at least, Catholicism triumphed over Protestantism in the island, in contravention of the Reformation’s usual rule of cuius regio, eius religio.2 Yet to pass over the mid-­Tudor decades as merely the mortal agonies of medieval religious culture is a mistake.3 The ‘post-­Reformation’ 1  John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London, 1975), pp. 11–12. 2  Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Sword, Word and Strategy in the Reformation in Ireland’, Historical Journal, 21 (1978), pp. 475–502; Nicholas Canny, ‘Why the Reformation Failed in Ireland: Une Question Mal Posée?’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 30 (1979), pp. 423–50; Karl Bottigheimer, ‘The Failure of the  Reformation in Ireland: Une Question Bien Posée’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 36 (1985), pp.  196–207; Ciaran Brady, ‘Conservative Subversives: The Community of the Pale and the Dublin Administration, 1556–86’, in P. J. Corish (ed.), Radicals, Rebels and Establishments: Historical Studies XV (Belfast, 1985), pp. 11–32; Henry  A.  Jefferies, ‘Why the Reformation Failed in Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, 40 (2016), pp. 151–70. 3  For exceptions to the pattern, see Brad S. Gregory, ‘Situating Early Modern English Catholicism’, in James  E.  Kelly and Susan Royal (eds.), Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Peter Marshall, The Break with Rome and the Early Reformation In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume I: Endings and New Beginnings, 1530–1640. Edited by: James E. Kelly and John McCafferty, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843801.003.0002

The Break with Rome and the Early Reformation  13 history of British and Irish Catholicism properly begins in the maelstrom of the Reformation itself—­not least because the Reformation, in Britain and Ireland as elsewhere, was to a considerable extent an argument about what the word ‘Catholic’ might actually mean. The terminology here is something of a minefield and, as with most minefields, it is probably more sensible to skirt briskly around than to crawl gingerly through. It is sufficient to note that, for the first half of the sixteenth century at least, virtually nobody in Britain or Ireland described themselves as ‘Roman Catholics’; that reformers (not yet routinely known as ‘Protestants’) claimed to be the true Catholics, upholding the teaching of the ancient Catholic (universal) Church affirmed in the Creed; that both evangelical reformers and more conservative supporters of the Tudor regime consistently denigrated those loyal to Rome as ‘papists’, rather than real Catholics.4 In March 1534, an ‘Act forbidding papal dispensations and the payment of Peter’s Pence’ was passed by the English parliament, one of a series of measures severing economic, jurisdictional, and spiritual bonds between the English Church and Rome. A phrase in the Act, perhaps suggested by Thomas Cromwell, declared that none of its provisions should be regarded as suggesting any desire on the part of Henry or his subjects to ‘decline or vary’ from ‘the very articles of the Catholic faith of Christendom’.5 This was doubtless intended to reassure, promising stability and continuity in the midst of a political earthquake. But it was also an assertion of a revolutionary ideological claim at the heart of the Henrician Reformation: papal primacy and communion with Rome were not guarantees or conditions of a common Catholic faith. It was possible, indeed ne­ces­sary, to affirm and practice ‘Catholicism without the pope’—in spite of the pope, against the pope. Persuading the king’s subjects—­ in England, Ireland, and Wales—­of the truth of this proposition was the most pressing political task facing successive Tudor governments. The extent to which they managed to do so set terms for a Catholic presence in these islands for centuries to come.

Counter–­Reformation (Leiden, 2017), pp. 17–40; Ciaran Brady and James Murray, ‘Sir Henry Sidney and the Reformation in Ireland’, in Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben (eds.), Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550–1700 (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 14–39. 4  On these issues, see Peter Marshall, ‘Is the Pope Catholic? Henry VIII and the Semantics of Schism’, in Ethan Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005), pp. 22–48; Peter Marshall, ‘The Naming of Protestant England’, Past and Present, 214 (2012), pp. 87–128. See also Eamon Duffy, ‘Rome and Catholicity in mid Tudor England’, in his Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations (London, 2012), pp. 195–210. 5  Henry Gee and William J. Hardy (eds.), Documents Illustrative of English Church History (London, 1896), p. 225; Stanford  E.  Lehmberg, The Reformation Parliament, 1529–1536 (Cambridge, 1970), p. 192.

14  Peter Marshall

Landscapes of Late Medieval Catholicism The prospects of Catholicism in England, Wales, and Ireland in the Reformation era are without doubt connected to conditions of ecclesiastical and religious life pertaining during the preceding generations: the period historians generally designate, in blithely deterministic fashion, as ‘pre-­Reformation’. Correlations here are far from straightforward, however. Without benefit of hindsight, it would be difficult to predict which parts of the Tudor realm c.1500 were likely to prove most resilient against the allure, or imposition, of evangelical reform and most propitious for Catholic revival. Serious scholarship no longer suggests that the late medieval Church was a rotting edifice, ready to collapse in the combined face of royal assertions of political dominance and unanswerable theological challenges from reformers. For England in particular, ‘revisionist’ historiography has painted a persuasive picture of vibrant parochial piety, and of a clergy and institutional Church that—­despite undoubted failings and irregularities—­was largely doing a conscientious job and generating distinctly limited quantities of ‘anti-­clerical’ critique.6 Historical re-­assessment of religious life in late medieval Wales has been less intensive and revelatory. The Welsh Church was undoubtedly (relatively) impoverished and a core tenet of twelfth-­century Gregorian reform, that the clergy should be celibate, was much less firmly rooted in Wales than in England. De facto clerical marriage was common and many priests were themselves the sons of clerics.7 Whether this was a serious cause of lay dissatisfaction is less certain. Welsh parishes, like English ones, supply copious evidence of literal investment in Catholicism at the local level: a spate of building, extension, and adornment of parish churches across the principality in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.8 Until recently, judgements on the state of religious life in late medieval Ireland have tended to be harshest of all, many taking their cue from a report on the ‘state of Ireland and plan for its reformation’, presented to the royal council in 1515 by Sir William Darcy, a former deputy-­treasurer disgruntled with the King’s Lord Deputy, Gerald Fitzgerald, earl of Kildare. In Darcy’s view, none of the secular clergy, from archbishops to humble vicars, were willing or able to preach the Word of God, concerning themselves only with ‘covetyce of lucre traunsytory’. He adduced a revelation of St Bridget of Sweden, inquiring of her guardian angel 6 See, in particular, Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1992); and for a survey of the historiographical trends, Peter Marshall, ‘(Re)defining the English Reformation’, Journal of British Studies, 48 (2009), pp. 564–86. 7  Glanmor Williams, Wales and the Reformation (Cardiff, 1997), pp. 20–1, 164–5. 8 J.  J.  Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984), pp. 12–15; Madeleine Gray, ‘ “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-­Time”: The Pre-­Reformation Church in Wales’, in Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin and Robert Armstrong (eds.), Christianities in the Early Modern Celtic World (Basingstoke, 2014), pp. 43–6.

The Break with Rome and the Early Reformation  15 ‘of what Crystyn land was most sowlles damned?’. The angel pointed to a country in the west—­in Darcy’s view, undoubtedly Ireland—­riven by war and hatred, from which souls ‘fell downe into Hell, as thyk as any haylle shewrys’.9 Comparative damnation rates are not readily available to historians of Christianity. Yet there is little reason to think the Irish Church was in an unusual state of crisis or dysfunction. Darcy’s missive was the jeremiad of a frustrated reformer, comparable to a sermon denouncing the English Church, made about the same time by John Colet, dean of St Paul’s. Once regarded as a damning indictment of widespread pastoral failures, Colet’s oration now seems a partial and exaggerated assessment, reflecting the aspirations (and self-­regard) of a particular strand of humanist reform.10 Like England and Wales, Ireland witnessed extensive lay investment in the fabric of parish churches and while the evidence is thin for the quality of pastoral care, there is little doubt about the breadth of provision: one recent assessment concludes that ‘there were more parishes, and more parish churches and chapels per capita across late medieval Ireland than there would be again before the nineteenth century.’11 The Irish Church, like society in the island more generally, was fractured across ethnic and linguistic lines, between Gaelic regions effectively beyond the Crown’s control and English-­speaking lands held by descendants of Anglo-­Norman conquerors. A fourteenth-­century statute barred native Irishmen from benefices in English lordships and a tendency to look down on Gaelic culture was particularly marked among cathedral clergy in Dublin.12 As in Wales, the obligation of celibacy was widely ignored, particularly in Gaelic areas, where local Church or­gan­ iza­tion evinced a distinctly dynastic character, ecclesiastical lands being managed by hereditary office-­holders known as coarbs and erenaghs, often themselves priests. Little social stigma seems to have attached. On his death in 1498, the dean of Lough Erne, Cathal Óg MacManus Maguire, was described by the Annals of Ulster as ‘a gem of purity and a turtle dove of chastity’—despite being father to over a dozen children. Decades later, John Bale was told by a priest in Kilkenny that it was considered ‘an honour in this lande, to have a spiritual man, as a bishop, an abbot, a monk, a fryer or a prest to father’.13 In this, as in other respects, distinctions, and antagonisms, between native Irish and Old English can be

9  State Papers published under the authority of His Majesty’s Commission, King Henry VIII, 11 vols. (1830–52), II, pp. 11, 15–16. 10  Christopher Harper-­Bill, ‘Dean Colet’s Convocation Sermon and the Pre-­Reformation Church in England’, History, 73 (1988), pp. 191–210. 11 Henry  A.  Jefferies, The Irish Church and the Tudor Reformations (Dublin, 2010), pp. 15–25, quote at p. 25. 12  Steven Ellis, Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470–1603 (Harlow, 1985), pp. 183–8; James Murray, Enforcing the English Reformation in Ireland: Clerical Resistance and Political Conflict in the Diocese of Dublin, 1534–1590 (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 21–46. 13 S. J. Connolly, Contested Island: Ireland 1460–1630 (Oxford, 2007), p. 53; John Bale, The vocacyon of Ioha[n] Bale to the bishiprick of Ossorie in Irela[n]de (Wesel, 1553), fol. 18r.

16  Peter Marshall e­ xaggerated, and were almost certainly less intense in 1500 than they had been a ­couple of centuries earlier. Prohibitions on the appointment of Irish priests were widely evaded and, as Salvador Ryan has shown, the devotional culture of Gaelic and English Ireland was to a considerable extent a shared one.14 Nowhere was there much formal challenge to Catholic ascendancy in the first decades of the sixteenth century. Some parts of midland and southern England housed scattered pockets of dissidents known disparagingly as Lollards.15 Lollardy was a degenerated form of the academic heresies espoused by the Oxford theologian John Wyclif in the late fourteenth century—­anti-­clerical, anti-­ sacramental, and antipathetic to religious practices around pilgrimage, relics, and the saints. In a few locations, particularly towns and villages of the Chiltern Hills and along the valley of the River Thames, Lollardy proved remarkably perdurable. But (almost) everywhere, Lollards were a minority, more concerned with concealing than propagating their beliefs. There is no evidence of Lollardy in Wales or Ireland. Lollardy has often been seen as a weakness in the foundations of late medieval Catholicism and as a ‘springboard’ for the Protestant reformers whose beliefs overlapped significantly with those of the Lollards.16 But the expertise of English bishops and Church courts in dealing with Lollardy arguably made them more alert to the threat of Lutheran heresy, and quicker to react to it, than in other parts of Europe. Awareness of the presence of a heretical ‘other’ may also have fostered a more ideological, proto-­confessional, sense of what it meant to be a Catholic. Colet’s convocation sermon of 1512 warned against heretics masquerading as ‘Catholyke and faithfull men’, and sentences imposed on Lollards itemized their apostasies from ‘the universal, Catholic and Apostolic Church’.17 Another feature of the English scene, absent from Ireland and Wales, was the presence of universities. As with Lollardy, it is hard to calibrate the significance of this for reception or rejection of reform, and for subsequent affirmations of Catholic commitment. In the 1520s, Oxford and (particularly) Cambridge were nurseries of evangelical dissent: idealistic and intellectually restless young men encountered there the ideas of continental reformers and carried them into parish ministry. At the time, however, as Richard Rex has persuasively argued, the English universities were considerably more prominent as centres of Catholic 14 Jefferies, Irish Church, pp. 28–32; Salvador Ryan, ‘The Devotional Landscape of Medieval Irish Cultural Catholicism Inter Hibernicos et Inter Anglicos, c.1200–c.1550’, in Oliver P. Rafferty (ed.), Irish Catholic Identities (Manchester, 2013), pp. 62–74. 15  For a recent overview and assessment, see Peter Marshall, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (New Haven, CT, and London, 2017), pp. 98–119. 16 The classic statement here is A.  G.  Dickens, The English Reformation (London, 1989 edn.), pp. 46–60. 17 J. H. Lupton, Life of John Colet (London, 1909), p. 298; Norman Tanner, ‘Penances Imposed on Kentish Lollards by Archbishop Warham 1511–12’, in Margaret Aston and Colin Richmond (eds.), Lollardy and the Gentry in the Later Middle Ages (Stroud, 1997), pp. 245–9.

The Break with Rome and the Early Reformation  17 orthodoxy and of an orchestrated literary campaign against Luther, paralleling Henry VIII’s own effort in his Assertio Septem Sacramentorum of 1521, the text that secured for Henry a papal distinction as ‘Defender of the Faith’.18 Henry’s denunciation of Luther seems to underscore how the break with Rome, when it came, was a bolt from the blue. Before his estrangement from Katherine of Aragon, it is usual to suppose, Henry was a conventionally pious Catholic monarch and a dutiful son of the papacy. The reality is a little more complex.19 The Assertio, indeed, is remarkable for skirting around the issue at the heart of the entire Luther affair, the nature of papal authority. Henry merely declared that he would ‘not wrong the Bishop of Rome so much, as troublesomely, or carefully to dispute his right, as if it were a matter doubtful.’20 The rights of the bishop of Rome, vis-­à-­vis the king of England, were in fact a matter of some dispute, or at least negotiation, at the start of the sixteenth century. The perceived importance of the papacy—­more even than the temperature of popular piety—­was a de­ter­ min­ant of how the crisis of Catholicism would play out in the 1530s. There is little to say for a once-­prevalent notion that the success of the break with Rome shows how the great majority of people were at best totally indifferent, and at worst positively hostile, to Rome’s spiritual and jurisdictional claims. Expressions of anti-­papalism, in pre-­Reformation England, Ireland, and Wales, are conspicuous largely by their absence. Even among Lollard heretics, the pope does not seem a particularly significant focus of anti-­clerical invective.21 ‘Our holy father, the pope’ was remembered in the bedes, or intercessionary prayers, recited every Sunday at Mass. Recognition of the pope’s spiritual authority was reinforced by the prevalence of similar phrases in devotional works, by the papal arms conspicuously adorning the printed indulgences found everywhere in early Tudor England, and by church statues and paintings of St Gregory, replete with papal tiara. Rome itself was a terminus of devotional travel: the Ulster chieftain Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill (Hugh O’Donnell) went on pilgrimage there in 1511 and no fewer than 750 visitors from England were welcomed at the English hospice during the papal jubilee of 1500.22 Yet the vast majority of English and Irish people never saw the eternal city, or likely knew much about the current occupant 18  Richard Rex, ‘The English Campaign Against Luther in the 1520s’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. 39 (1989), pp. 85–106. 19 For contrasting views of this question, see David Starkey, Henry: Virtuous Prince (London, 2008), p. 3 (‘there are two Henrys . . . the one old, the other young’); G. W. Bernard, ‘The Piety of Henry VIII’, in N. Scott Amos, Andrew Pettegree, and Henk van Nierop (eds), The Education of a Christian Society: Humanism and Reform in Britain and the Netherlands (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 62–88 (detecting in the young Henry a critical attitude towards shrines and popular religion). 20 Henry VIII, Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, ed. and tr. Louis O’Donovan (New York, 1908), p. 202. 21  J.  Patrick Hornbeck, ‘Of Captains and Antichrists: The Papacy in Wycliffite Thought’, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 103 (2008), pp. 806–38. 22 Raymond Gillespie, ‘Traditional Religion in Sixteenth-­Century Gaelic Ireland’, in Ó hAnnracháin and Armstrong (eds.), Christianities, p. 29; Marshall, Heretics and Believers, pp. 69–71.

18  Peter Marshall of the throne of St Peter as an individual or a pastor—­which, given the notorious personal failings of some ‘Renaissance popes’, may have been just as well. Whether or not it was loved, Rome was certainly useful. The papal curia was Christendom’s licensing agency, providing resolution for a host of personal and professional tangles: dispensations to marry within prohibited degrees, to abandon rash pledges of pilgrimage, or to be ordained despite illegitimate birth. Over 4,000 English and Welsh petitioners have been traced in the registers of the apostolic penitentiary between 1411 and 1503, almost certainly a significant under­ esti­mate of the actual number.23 The suits of Irish supplicants also scurried to Rome in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, many of them concerned with wrangles over benefices. The papacy was the undisputed apex of a complex of jurisdictions and the ultimate arbiter of competing ecclesiastical claims. Typically, Irish cases involved ‘delation’ of ecclesiastical office-­holders for offences justifying their deprivation, in hopes the complainant might be appointed in their stead.24 The trade was predicated on a substantially greater papal involvement with patronage and promotions in the Irish Church than the English one. This was particularly the case with the more than half of Ireland’s thirty-­two bishoprics located in Gaelic areas and beyond the political control of the Crown—­though the first Tudor monarchs’ employment of ‘cardinal protectors’ at the Roman curia gradually increased royal influence over episcopal appointments throughout the island.25 Royal control over the eighteen dioceses in England and the four in Wales was more secure. Although formally ‘provided’ to their sees by the pope (to whom they swore an oath of canonical obedience), new bishops were invariably men nominated by the king and took a parallel oath of feudal obedience for the landed estates of their dioceses. Unsurprisingly, royal diplomats and administrators, of whom Thomas Wolsey is the best-­known example, often received the most lucrative sees. It has been persuasively argued that the pre-­Reformation Church in England was a ‘monarchical Church’, fundamentally under the control of the Crown.26 Yet the episcopate and higher clergy had an acute sense of their rights and privileges, manifested in periodic disputes about legal jurisdiction over men in clerical orders, so-­called ‘benefit of clergy’. The English monarchy promoted the cult of St George, patron of the chivalric Order of the Garter, but churchmen had no doubt that England’s national saint was Thomas of Canterbury, a martyr for ecclesiastical 23  Peter D. Clarke, ‘Petitioning the Pope: English Supplicants and Rome in the Fifteenth Century’, in Linda Clark (ed.), The Fifteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2012), pp. 41–60; Peter  D.  Clarke, ‘Canterbury as the New Rome: Dispensations and Henry VIII’s Reformation’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 64 (2013), pp. 20–44. 24 Jefferies, Irish Church, pp. 32–3; Ellis, Tudor Ireland, p. 191. 25 William  E.  Wilkie, The Cardinal Protectors of England: Rome and the Tudors before the Reformation (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 63–73. 26  George Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church: Vitality and Vulnerability before the Break with Rome (New Haven, CT, and London, 2012), pp. 17–48.

The Break with Rome and the Early Reformation  19 liberties.27 The ‘Church’ was in any case a variegated body, an amalgam of competing jurisdictions and interests, rather than a smoothly line-­managed organization. Some monastic communities chafed at episcopal oversight, asserting historic privileges from the papacy as a means of retaining control over their affairs. Wolsey, meanwhile, deployed his powers as papal legate as a means of bringing the recalcitrant religious to heel. In 1525, he was involved in an unedifying tussle with the Observant Franciscans of Greenwich, a house widely recognized as a sinew of spiritual vitality in the largely lethargic body of English and Welsh monasticism. The fifteenth-­century ‘Observant’ movement had limited impact in England, with only six associated Franciscan friaries.28 In Ireland, by contrast, where no fewer than ninety new mendicant communities were founded between 1400 and 1508, some two-­thirds of Franciscan houses transferred to the Observant wing of the order. The Observants enjoyed considerable prestige among both ethnicities. Even the pessimistic William Darcy admitted ‘the poore fryers beggers’ as exceptions to the dearth of preaching among the clergy.29 Starting with Luther himself, friars and ex-­friars were on the front lines of confessional conflict in Reformation Europe. In England, a striking number of evangelical activists in the 1520s and 1530s were defectors from the mendicant orders. Yet—­whether this was due to the absence of a university as a vector of heresy or to the depth of mendicant integration into Gaelic culture—­there was no mirroring of the phenomenon in Ireland. As Steven Ellis has suggested, ‘Irish Observantism was probably a significant factor shaping the eventual response to the Tudor Reformation.’30

The Break with Rome: Conformity and Resistance In its initial stages, the response to that reformation, on both sides of the Irish Sea, was framed as a matter of obedience, rather than of faith. Henry VIII hoped first to persuade, and then to pressure, Pope Clement VII into annulling his marriage to Katherine of Aragon—­a strategy which in 1531 involved charging the English and Welsh clergy, along with Archbishop John Alen of Dublin, with the crime of praemunire, for having recognized Wolsey’s authority as papal legate.31 Henry was already convinced, partly on the basis of a compendium of sources drawn up by Thomas Cranmer and other reformist intellectuals, that the pope’s 27  Peter Marshall, ‘Thomas Becket, William Warham and the Crisis of the Early Tudor Church’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 71 (2020), pp. 293–315. 28 Marshall, Heretics and Believers, pp. 53, 56–7. 29 Jefferies, Irish Church, p. 36; State Papers, Henry VIII, II, p. 15. 30  Richard Rex, ‘The Friars in the English Reformation’, in Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (eds.), The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 38–59; Ellis, Tudor Ireland, p. 189. 31  Steven G. Ellis, ‘The Kildare Rebellion and the Early Henrician Reformation’, Historical Journal, 19 (1976), p. 811.

20  Peter Marshall authority was an aberration and a usurpation. In 1533, the Act of Appeals described the realm of England as an ‘Empire’, a form of polity acknowledging no external superior, and government-­sponsored publications were thereafter careful to refer to the pope merely as ‘bishop of Rome’. Henry’s royal supremacy over the Church, in both temporal and spiritual matters, was recognized by a brow-­beaten convocation of the English upper clergy in 1532 and confirmed by parliamentary statute in 1534. It represented both a constitutional revolution and a far-­reaching redefinition of Catholicism and the Catholic Church, though Henry’s settled position was that he had always been Supreme Head (as other secular rulers were in their own territories), and that encroachment by popes was the real innovation—­a view that owed more than a little to the rewriting of ecclesiastical history undertaken by William Tyndale and other evangelicals. In the view of Eamon Duffy, before Henry VIII’s divorce, ‘nobody in England except the Lollards doubted that communion with and obedience to the Bishop of Rome were in some sense fundamental to Catholic unity and Catholic identity.’32 This seems fairly unexceptionable. Yet the crucial qualifier, ‘in some sense’, is difficult to define precisely. The pope’s elevated position was acknowledged. But this says little about the emotional texture of English and Irish Catholics’ relationship with Rome. For many churchmen, papal authority was a guarantor of the priv­il­ eges and legal immunities—­the ‘liberties’—of the Church as a corporate body within the mixed polity of the kingdom. This helps explain why Archbishop William Warham of Canterbury and the senior clergy battled hard—­harder than they are often given credit for—­to defend it in the face of royal bullying in 1529–32.33 Clergymen of all kinds were the most conspicuous critics of the break with Rome. The Observant Franciscans were especially vocal. Henry Elston, warden of the Greenwich house, and William Peto, provincial minister in England, openly condemned the King in their sermons and by the early summer of 1533 were in exile in Antwerp.34 There is also evidence of widespread lay disaffection, including examples of people condemning as heretics those (including the King himself) who attacked the pope or said he was merely bishop of Rome.35 Most lay disquiet in 1532–5 seems, however, to have focused on the divorce, rather than the royal supremacy per se, and on the callous treatment meted out to Queen Katherine. The vicar of Rye in Sussex warned parishioners in September 1533 that ‘our holy father the pope’ might be about to pronounce an interdict, with similar dire consequences as in time of King John, when corn and fruit ceased to grow. But his hearers were

32  Duffy, ‘Rome and Catholicity’, p. 197. 33 Marshall, Heretics and Believers, pp. 181–5, 191–9. 34  Peter Marshall, Religious Identities in Henry VIII’s England (Aldershot, 2006), p. 230. 35  Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 32–3.

The Break with Rome and the Early Reformation  21 reportedly relaxed: the Pope’s curse was ‘but words’, and ‘no like effect will follow in our days’.36 Many clearly disliked the direction of policy in the early 1530s, but it is harder to determine whether they really perceived the repudiation of Rome as a profoundly spiritual issue, a matter of faith and morals, and as something touching on their core identity as Catholic Christians. It is likely, in fact, that a great many did not yet know the answer to these questions, as they had never previously been asked. In 1534, the question was asked. An act of parliament confirming the validity of Henry’s marriage to his ‘lawful wife Queen Anne’, and vesting the succession in their offspring, required subjects to swear ‘a corporal oath’ in defence of its provisions. Commissioners toured the realm administering the oath to clergy and laymen (women were exempted and there was no attempt, at this stage, to impose it in Ireland). The strategy was a remarkable innovation: an attempt to bind the entire (male) population in conscience to the King’s policy through ostensibly voluntary and solemn declarations of assent. It was also, superficially at least, a huge success. Only one of the bishops refused to swear—­John Fisher of Rochester, an ardent partisan of Queen Katherine—­along with a sprinkling of lower clergy. Laymen refusing the oath can be counted comfortably on the fingers of one hand, though the number included a prominent public figure, the former lord chancellor, Thomas More. Impressive levels of conformity were partly a matter of intimidation: Londoners were summoned to take the oath on the same day that severed body parts of the clerical confederates of Elizabeth Barton, a dissident prophetess, were displayed on the city gates.37 Subsequent enquiries would reveal numerous cases of people who swore unwillingly and casuistically. Yet the strength of genuine loyalty to the Crown should not be underestimated. There was little suggestion, as yet, that much if anything was to change in the prescribed practice of religious life, and at a time of religious upheaval it must have been tempting to believe that the King could be trusted to repress heresy and protect traditional faith. This calculation was made by most of the episcopate, including the politically s­avvy bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, who was soon to pen an influential treatise, De Vera Obedientia, setting out a conservative case for the supremacy. It helped that the repudiation of the papacy in the oath offered to laymen was more implicit than explicit, albeit regular clergy were required to swear an additional, and unambiguous, Oath of Supremacy.38 Nonetheless, the oath-­swearing of 1534— alongside an energetic print-­and-­pulpit campaign, making the public case for the divorce and royal headship—­was a decisive turning point in the relationship

36  J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner, and R. H. Brodie (eds.), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 21 vols. (London, 1862–1910), VI, 1077. 37  Richard Rex, ‘The Execution of the Holy Maid of Kent’, Historical Research, 64 (1991), pp. 216–20. 38  Jonathan Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 51–65.

22  Peter Marshall between religious belief and civic participation. It had the effect of politicizing faith commitments, and of inviting people to form and express opinions (approved ones) about the identity and purpose of the Church. Inadvertently, it also created new possibilities for religion as a signifier of dissident identity and a mode of oppositional politics. That potentiality was seen first in Ireland, where rebellion erupted in the summer of 1534. The rising led by ‘Silken Thomas’ Fitzgerald, Lord Offaly (earl of Kildare on the death of his father in September), had its origins in the factionalism and aristocratic unruliness characterizing governance in late medieval Ireland. Undermined by local rivals, his father, the lord deputy, was in February 1534 summoned to London and imprisoned; before setting sail, Kildare appointed his son to deputize in his absence. Fearing his own imminent dismissal, Offaly took to arms. From the outset, his actions were extraordinarily radical. Eschewing the tropes of loyalty characteristic of medieval rebels, he renounced fealty to the King, intrigued for armed intervention by Charles V, and sent an envoy to Rome with documents purporting to prove Henry held Ireland solely by virtue of a grant from the pope, and ‘alledging the King and his realme to be heretiques digressed from thobedience of the same and the faith Catholique.’ Moreover, he provocatively inverted the strategy for binding support underway in England and required his followers to swear public oaths of allegiance to the pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, and himself.39 The Kildare Rebellion had a markedly international, as well as confessionally (Roman) Catholic, character. One of the earl’s leading clerical supporters was the chancellor of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin: John Travers, a recently-­arrived Englishman and author of a book supporting papal primacy. In a demonstration of the order’s international reach, the (French-­born) provincial of the Franciscan Observants in England, Francis Faber, departed for Ireland in April 1534, promising the Imperial Ambassador Eustace Chapuys he would ‘brew up there all he could for the preservation of the holy see’.40 There were reverberations in Wales. Cromwell was to hear that the ‘papisticall secte’ among the clergy and gentry in the diocese of St David’s had been ‘agreatt setter-­fourthe of the late rebellyon yn Ireland’. The exile James Gruffydd ap Hywel visited Ireland in September 1534, seeking common cause with Kildare. An uncle of the powerful landowner Rhys ap Gruffydd, whom Henry executed in 1531 on suspicion of plotting rebellion, James had already touted himself around the courts of Flanders, Germany, and Scotland, boasting he could raise 10,000 men in Wales. In their understandable desire to explain the differing outcomes of the Reformation in Ireland and Wales, historians have perhaps been too quick to 39  Ellis, ‘Kildare Rebellion’, pp. 807–30, quote at p. 813. 40 Murray, Enforcing the English Reformation, pp. 84–5; Colm O’Clabaigh, The Franciscans in Ireland, 1400–1534 (Dublin, 2002), 78; LP, VIII, 48.

The Break with Rome and the Early Reformation  23 assume that a serious uprising in the latter was never on the cards. Charles V and Chapuys certainly had hopes, as did the vicar of Isleworth in Middlesex, John Hale, an ardent papalist who in the early summer of 1534 declared his King to be a ‘treader under foot of Christ and of his Church’. Hale predicted the Welsh would ‘join and take part with the Irish, and so invade our realm’, adding that ‘they shall have aid and strength enough . . . three parts of England is against the King’.41 This, no doubt, was an unduly optimistic assessment and by August 1535 Kildare’s rebellion in Ireland had run its course. The most conspicuous opposition within England was publicly crushed that summer, with the executions of Bishop Fisher, Sir Thomas More, and several priests, including Vicar Hale and three ­priors from the saintly and contemplative Carthusian order. Historians of the ‘theatre of execution’ in the Reformation have shown in sophisticated detail how the judicial punishment of religious dissent was a double-­edged weapon.42 Trial and execution sought to frame the meaning of a death in a particular way—­as just, awe-­inspiring, and (for the accused) shameful. In a pattern to persist through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, those unable to accept the theological underpinnings of the royal supremacy were not to be burned as heretics but condemned for the secular crime of treason. Yet for their supporters, the victims’ deaths fulfilled long-­established criteria for Christian martyrdom. After 1535, English papalists—­like English evangelicals—­were heirs and guardians of a martyrological tradition, a powerful nutrient for an emergent separatist identity. The trauma of the break with Rome undoubtedly caused some Catholics fundamentally to rethink the place of the papacy in their conception of the Church. The premier example is Thomas More himself. Before the royal divorce, More was a conciliarist, someone who doubted the papacy’s divine origins and regarded general councils as the supreme legislative authority in the Church.43 According to a recollection of his friend, the merchant Antonio Buonvisi, even as the crisis of the 1530s loomed, More could envisage papal headship as something merely ‘inventyd of men for a political order, and for the more quyetnes of the ec­cle­si­as­ tic­al bodye’. But with Rome under attack from heretics, More rapidly changed his opinion and told Buonvisi he had come to see the primacy of the pope as that which ‘holdyth up all’.44 More’s execution, along with Fisher’s, reverberated across Europe. It had a profound effect on Henry VIII’s kinsman, Reginald Pole, a scholar and churchman originally supportive of the divorce, currently resident in Italy. Over the winter of 41  Ellis, ‘Kildare Rebellion’, p. 829; Peter Marshall, ‘ “The Greatest Man in Wales”: James ap Gruffydd ap Hywel and the International Opposition to Henry VIII’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 39 (2008), pp. 681–704; LP, VIII, 609. 42  See, for example, Thomas S. Freeman and Thomas F. Mayer (eds.), Martyrs and Martyrdom in England, c. 1400–1700 (Woodbridge, 2007). 43 John Guy, Thomas More (London, 2000), p. 201; Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300–1870 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 135–6. 44  Duffy, ‘Rome and Catholicity’, pp. 206–8.

24  Peter Marshall 1535–6, Pole composed a blistering treatise, Pro Ecclesiasticae Unitatis Defensione, condemning Henry’s actions as diabolically inspired and demanding his surrender to the judgement of the Church. Like More, Pole seems originally to have viewed the papacy as no more than a handy instrument of ecclesiastical governance. But Henry VIII’s violence turned him into an ardent, ‘providentialist’ papalist.45 Both More and Pole can fairly be considered as late medieval Catholic humanists who transformed into Reformation-­era Roman Catholics—­and as doing so through a process which might reasonably be described as a kind of conversion. Pole, a grand-­nephew of Edward IV, was a serious political threat to Henry as well as being a theological irritant. His household in Rome attracted a growing trickle of defectors at the end of the 1530s, including the son of the executed earl of Kildare. Other clusters of dissenters gathered in Scotland and in the university city of Louvain. The embrace of exile, albeit on a relatively small scale, established lines of connections between dissidents at home and overseas, and served as a public affirmation of the transnational character of Catholic faith.46 At the end of 1536, Paul III made Pole a Cardinal and shortly afterwards into a papal legate, with a brief to orchestrate collective action by the European powers against schismatic England. This was linked to dramatic developments within England itself. In the autumn and winter of 1536, the entire north of the country was convulsed by a series of popular revolts and the pope hoped Pole could return to England to assume leadership of the movement. Participants in the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ confirmed their commitment with oaths and in a set of articles drawn up at Pontefract demanded ‘the supreme head of the church towching cure animarum to be reserved unto the see of Rome’.47 Unlike the Irish rebels of two years earlier, however, the Pilgrims maintained the polite fiction of attacking wicked counsellors (principally, Thomas Cromwell), rather than the King himself. Conventional historiographical wisdom holds that the Pilgrimage actually had little to do with the papacy, strong feelings about which were confined to a small number of leadership figures: the concerns of northern layfolk and clergy were with matters of custom and tradition—­with the fate of monasteries, starting to be dissolved following an act of parliament earlier that year, and with local feast-­days, whose number had recently been curtailed by a clerical convocation under the sway of the reformers Thomas Cranmer and Hugh Latimer. There were fears too that parish churches and their treasures were on the government’s hit-­list. It is certainly true that lay protest against the break with Rome was relatively muted in 1533–4, but that may be precisely because, to many ordinary people,

45  Duffy, ‘Rome and Catholicity’, p. 203; Marshall, Heretics and Believers, pp. 236–7. 46 Marshall, Religious Identities, pp. 227–61; Frederick E. Smith, Transnational Catholicism in Tudor England: Mobility, Exile and Counter-Reformation, 1530–1580 (Oxford, 2022). 47  Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions (6th edn, Abingdon, 2016), p. 147.

The Break with Rome and the Early Reformation  25 it was not yet clear what the change might actually mean. Three years on—­after suppressions of local monasteries and waves of semi-­sanctioned heretical preaching against purgatory, images, and saints—­things looked different. There was more openly pro-­papal sentiment during the Pilgrimage than historians are sometimes prepared to allow, with demands that priests ‘bid the bedes’ in the old form and bills expressing support for the pope appearing on church doors across Yorkshire.48 For humble parishioners, as well as intellectuals like More and Pole, it had perhaps begun to seem that communion with Rome might, after all, prove the most reliable guarantor of right faith and traditional ways.

Henrician Catholicism and Edwardian Re-­Evaluation It remained imperative for Henry’s government to disabuse his subjects of this mistaken belief. The statement of doctrine known as the Bishops’ Book, issued a few months after the northern rising was put down, defined the Catholic Church, ‘dispersed and spread universally throughout all the whole world’, as a federation of individual churches, without distinction ‘in superiority, pre-­eminence, or authority’. ‘The Church of Rome is not, nor cannot worthily be called the Catholic Church, but only a particular member thereof ’.49 A brutally graphic assertion of the new orthodoxy came in May 1538, when John Forest, a former Franciscan Observant of Greenwich, was burned as a heretic for maintaining ‘the Holy Catholic Church was the Church of Rome’. Yet this innovation, which may have played badly domestically as well as internationally, was never to be repeated. Thereafter, papalists would continue to be punished for the secular crime of treason, rather than doctrinal deviance.50 Prominent victims included the kinsfolk of Reginald Pole: in December 1538 his brother, Lord Montagu, and cousin, the marquis of Exeter, were executed upon the exposure of a supposed conspiracy. Henry’s vengeance extended to Pole’s elderly mother, Margaret, beheaded in 1541 after further rumblings of discontent in Yorkshire.51 Official religious policy, reflecting the dislikes and theological idiosyncrasies of the King himself, as well as the tug-­of-­war between conservative advisers like Gardiner and reformers like Cranmer and Cromwell, was always somewhat erratic, as well as potentially violent. But in the years following the crisis of 1536–7 the King’s general instinct was to be more measured and cautious.

48  Michael Bush, The Pilgrim’s Complaint: A Study of Popular Thought in the Early Tudor North (Farnham, 2009), pp. 46–61. 49  C. Lloyd (ed.), Formularies of Faith put forth by Authority in the Reign of Henry VIII (Oxford, 1825), pp. 52–7. 50 Marshall, Religious Identities, pp. 199–226. 51 Marshall, Heretics and Believers, pp. 263, 283.

26  Peter Marshall Some reformist policies continued, notably the suppression of the monasteries. By 1540, it was complete in England and Wales, eradicating the vowed religious life for men and women which for centuries had been a core, if not always very dynamic, component of Catholic Christianity. Attendant pilgrimage shrines and votive images also disappeared. The policy was extended to Ireland, albeit more sporadically enforced: a little over half the Irish monasteries and some 40 per cent of the friaries had been suppressed by the end of Henry’s reign. An Irish parliament sitting in 1536‒7 formalized the break with Rome by enacting the relevant English legislation. At the same time, a new archbishop of Dublin, George Browne, former provincial of the English Augustinian friars, aimed to enforce the King’s Reformation, at least in his own bishopric. Oaths of Succession and Supremacy were offered to diocesan clergy, who virtually without exception took them, though the Franciscan Observants refused to recognize the archbishop’s authority over them. In 1538, Browne issued injunctions to his clergy which promoted the royal supremacy, but otherwise had little reformist content. These were superseded towards the end of the year by Thomas Cromwell’s second set of Injunctions, which vocally condemned ‘superstition’ and insisted on the removal from churches of ‘abused’ images. Within the Pale, in the dioceses of Dublin and Meath, cult images were duly destroyed and shrines suppressed, but the impact elsewhere was minimal. The most positively evangelical item in Cromwell’s Injunctions, the requirement for an English bible to be placed in parish churches, was quietly omitted from the version issued for Ireland.52 Accused by Henry of dilatoriness, Browne protested in September 1537 that he was doing more than any predecessor to promote the Gospel of Christ and to condemn the usurped power of the bishop of Rome, ‘a thing not a litle roated among thinhabitantes here’.53 Browne’s efforts received pitifully little support, however, from two conservative-­minded lord deputies, Leonard Grey (1536–40) and Anthony St Leger (1540–4), both more concerned with maintenance of pol­it­ ical order than with the promotion of divisive reforms. Indeed, a kind of ‘Catholicism without the pope’ seemed to be proving broadly acceptable to both elites and commoners in Ireland. The 1539 Act of Six Articles—­affirming transubstantiation, auricular confession, communion in one kind only, vows, private masses, and clerical celibacy—­cheered conservatives in both England and Ireland as much as it dismayed evangelicals. The fall of Cromwell in the following year was further good news. In 1541, an Act of parliament constituted Ireland as a kingdom. Although in some ways a paper reform, it sought to draw the Gaelic lords into the symbolic orbit of English rule through ‘surrender and regrant’. In return for recognizing 52  Steven G. Ellis with Christopher Maginn, The Making of the British Isles: The State of Britain and Ireland 1450–1660 (Harlow, 2007), pp. 124–7; Jefferies, Irish Church, pp. 78–81. 53  State Papers, Henry VIII, II, p. 513.

The Break with Rome and the Early Reformation  27 Henry’s sovereignty (and repudiating the pope), chiefs were offered English-­style titles of nobility and feudal charters confirming them in possession of their lands. When two Jesuits undertook a mission to Ulster in early 1542, they received short shrift from the local lords and reported back in pessimistic terms on the prospects for remaining papal loyalists among the clergy.54 In parallel with governmental reform in Ireland, two Acts of Union (1536 and 1543) aimed to incorporate Wales more firmly into the kingdom, by abolishing the old marcher lordships and imposing a pattern of county-­based local governance on the English model. It launched, in the words of Felicity Heal, ‘one of the most successful of Tudor political collaborations’: by supplying the Welsh gentry with opportunities for office, honour, and income, the regime locked them into support for its policies in ways that would ultimately prove unsustainable in Ireland, where government patronage was more limited, and ethnic hostilities and colonial mind-­sets much starker.55 Protestantism had as yet very little foothold in Wales, however, and there is evidence of popular discontent at the suppression of shrines and images.56 In the latter years of Henry VIII, the majority of the Welsh population, like that of Ireland and of England, was by some measure ‘Catholic’, but the stability and coherence of that descriptor was everywhere in flux. Politically, the achievement, perhaps even the genius, of the Henrician Reformation was that it ‘hopelessly splintered the English Catholic majority’.57 An overtly dissident ‘Romanist’ Catholicism had been called into being—­small in numbers and inchoate in organization, but energized, ironically, by the very ferocity of attempts to suppress it. Meanwhile, ‘Conformist’ Catholics obeyed the edicts of the King, whether out of instinctive loyalty, theological conviction, or a pragmatic optimism that the royal supremacy would prove on balance a force for the preservation of orthodoxy. There were grounds for hope. Henry showed no appetite for relinquishing the Latin Mass, and in 1543 a personally authorized King’s Book condemned justification by faith. To the dismay of evangelicals, an act of the same year restricted vernacular bible-­reading; more grimly still, executions for heresy restarted in 1546. Whether Henry VIII’s version of reformist, anti-­papalist, (semi-)Biblicist, and sacramentalist Catholicism represented an intelligible and inspiring religious 54  Ellis and Maginn, Making of the British Isles, pp. 104–5; Thomas M. McCoog, SJ, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland and England 1541–1588: ‘Our Way of Proceeding?’ (Leiden, 1996), pp. 18–22. 55  Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2003), p. 129; Brendan Bradshaw, ‘The Tudor Reformation and Revolution in Wales and Ireland: The Origins of the British Problem’, in Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds.), The British Problem, c. 1534–1707 (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 39–65. 56  Katharine K. Olson, ‘ “Slow and Cold in the True Service of God”: Popular Beliefs and Practices, Conformity and Reformation in Wales, c.1530–c.1600’, in Ó hAnnracháin and Armstrong (eds.), Christianities, pp. 94–6. 57 Shagan, Popular Politics, p. 59.

28  Peter Marshall vision, with the potential to root and flower in the hearts of his subjects, is a debated question. Some have seen it as offering a coherent ‘middle way’ in an era of escalating confessional conflict, drawing on traditions of Erasmian humanist reform and finding common ground with strands of moderate evangelicalism.58 The alternative view is that the policies Henry tried to impose on Church and nation amounted to no more than ‘a ragbag of emotional preferences’.59 Paradoxically, ‘Henrician Catholicism’ comes into focus with greater clarity in the years following Henry’s death. Beginning in 1547, the government of the young Edward VI committed itself to a programme of high-­tempo Protestant reform, which dazed and disorientated religious conservatives. A prescribed Book of Homilies asserted justification by faith; prayer for the dead was forbidden; images and altars were taken from churches and destroyed; in 1549, the Mass itself was replaced by a vernacular communion service. Conformist Catholics, such as Stephen Gardiner, who had publicly committed themselves to the royal supremacy, could do little but protest that the religious settlement of Henry VIII must remain in place until the young Edward arrived at adulthood and was able to exercise the supremacy on his own account.60 Amidst a welter of unwelcome changes in the parishes, the ‘good old days’ of Henry VIII exercised a rosy nostalgic appeal. When, in the summer of 1549, the south-­west of England rose in rebellion against the abolition of the Latin Mass, the protestors called for ‘the Lawes of our Soverayne Lord Kyng Henry the viii concernynge the syxe articles to be in use again’. It is notable that, unlike in 1536, the rebel articles did not include an explicit demand for restoration of Roman supremacy. Two decades of anti-­ papal preaching and pronouncements had no doubt worked an effect. But we should be wary of assuming the pope was necessarily a bogeyman for the gen­er­ ation growing to adulthood after 1534. The Devon and Cornwall rebels did demand a free pardon for Cardinal Pole and for him to return to England ‘to be first or second of the kings counsayl’, an eventuality hardly imaginable without some form of reconciliation to Rome.61 In the end, the Edwardian religious revolution exposed the fragility of ‘Catholicism without the pope’ as much as it excited hopes for its return. The constitutionalist argument against change during a royal minority was at best a holding-­position, given that the young Edward was known to be an enthusiastic advocate of ‘the Gospel’. Conservatives like Gardiner (always suspected by his enemies of secretly being a papalist at heart) began to reflect on how the royal

58  George Bernard, The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (New Haven, CT, and London, 2005); Lucy Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford, 2000). 59  Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Henry VIII and the Reform of the Church’, in Diarmaid MacCulloch (ed.), The Reign of Henry VIII (London, 1995), p. 178. 60 Marshall, Heretics and Believers, p. 308. 61  Fletcher and MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, p. 154.

The Break with Rome and the Early Reformation  29 supremacy was an impractical instrument for the preservation of sacramental orthodoxy. In Ireland, many formerly conformist bishops refused to implement the programme of Edwardian reform, imported from England without sanction from an Irish parliament. In 1551, George Dowdall, archbishop of Armagh, who had previously managed to reconcile his conservative theology with loyalty to Henry VIII, fled the country, protesting ‘that he would never be bishop, where the holy mass (as he called it) was abolished’. Yet in most parts of the island, clergy were simply unable to read the English Book of Common Prayer and must have continued, with whatever feelings of defiance or resignation, celebrating the Latin Mass.62 Ninety years ago, the ever-­acute satirists W.  C.  Sellar and R.  J.  Yeatman described exactly what happened when Henry VIII demanded a divorce from Katherine of Aragon: ‘The Pope, however, refused, and seceded with all his followers from the Church of England.’63 Although intended as an ironic comment on complacent Anglo-­centrism, there is an element of truth to this assessment. Catholicism in England, Wales, and Ireland was not a fixed entity through the tumult of the Reformation, a preponderance before and a residuum afterwards. No less than the other religious identities of the era, it was being made and remade through an interplay of pressures and opportunities: cultural and pol­it­ ical, national and international, structural and contingent. The years between 1530 and 1553 witnessed, to borrow a metaphor from the late Patrick Collinson, the ‘birthpangs of Roman Catholic England’, and of its siblings in Wales and Ireland.64 Nothing was pre-­ordained about the life-­courses to follow.

Select Bibliography Bernard, George, The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (New Haven, CT, and London, 2005). Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1992). Duffy, Eamon, Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations (London, 2012). Ellis, Steven, Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470–1603 (Harlow, 1985).

62 James Murray, ‘The “Absenting of the Bishop of Armagh”: Eucharistic Controversy and the English Origins of Irish Catholic Identity, 1550–51’, in Rafferty (ed.), Irish Catholic Identities, pp. 92–109, quote at p. 92; Jefferies, Irish Church, pp. 88–98. 63  W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 And All That (London, 1991), pp. 62–3. 64  Cf. Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (Basingstoke, 1988).

30  Peter Marshall Gregory, Brad S., ‘Situating Early Modern English Catholicism’, in James E. Kelly and Susan Royal (eds.), Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-Reformation (Leiden, 2017), pp. 17–40. Jefferies, Henry A., The Irish Church and the Tudor Reformations (Dublin, 2010). Marshall, Peter, Religious Identities in Henry VIII’s England (Aldershot, 2006). Marshall, Peter, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (New Haven, CT, and London, 2017). Ó hAnnracháin, Tadhg and Robert Armstrong (eds.), Christianities in the Early Modern Celtic World (Basingstoke, 2014). Shagan, Ethan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003).

2 Marian Counter-­Reformation John Edwards

Mary I’s reign (1553–8), which was shared with her husband Philip of Spain between their wedding in Winchester Cathedral on 25 July 1554 and the Queen’s death on 17 November 1558, may be regarded as an acid test for two distinct ­disputes in historical interpretation. The first is the question of Wales’, and in particular England’s, sense of its historic, and hence its present and future, identity. The second is a matter of terminology. In the British Isles, like much of Continental Europe, the 1550s were a time of religious convulsion, in which states and individuals frequently changed their ecclesiastical allegiance. One thing which is clear is that the subsequent hard religious divisions in Europe, now commonly referred to by historians as ‘confessionalization’, had not yet occurred, even though many of its features were already appearing.1 This means that apparently useful terms like ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ can be false friends in understanding religion in the reign of Philip and Mary, at whatever social level. Delving into the exact nature of religion on both sides of the sixteenth-­century debate will lead to as fair as possible an assessment of religious developments during the reign. The discussion will involve assessing not only the policies and achievements of the English ‘Catholic Monarchs’ (as they were known on the Continent at the time) but also the issues which actually arose between ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ Christians, during this difficult period. Concern about the historic identity of Wales and Ireland, and above all England as the most populous and dominant kingdom, has deeply influenced historical research carried out by native scholars on Mary’s and Philip’s reigns. Virtually all this work forms part of one of two historiographical orthodoxies, both of which tend to assume, falsely as it turns out, that between 1553 and 1558 it was already possible to interpret events in the set, bipolar terms—­Catholic or Protestant—­ which in reality established themselves in later decades, both in the British Isles and on the Continent. The ‘Protestant’ story assumes that Mary I rejected the ‘Gospel truth’ of the Reformation and vainly tried to restore the old ‘ungodly’

1  Ute Lotz-­Heumann, ‘Confessionalization’, in Alexandra Bamji, Geert H. Janssen, and Mary Laven (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-­Reformation (Farnham, 2013), pp. 33–40; Peter Marshall, ‘Confessionalization, Confessionalism and Confusion in the English Reformation’, in Thomas F. Mayer (ed.), Reforming Reformation (Farnham, 2012), pp. 43–64. John Edwards, Marian Counter-­Reformation In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume I: Endings and New Beginnings, 1530–1640. Edited by: James E. Kelly and John McCafferty, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843801.003.0003

32  John Edwards Church. Since 1980, however, parts of professional academe, whether of Catholic affiliation or not, have revisited the events of Mary’s (and Philip’s) reign, and this process is continuing. As a result, while no-­one can deny that the Queen failed to produce an heir, or that Elizabeth subsequently reversed her half-­sister’s religious policies, Mary is now increasingly seen as a worthy first queen regnant of England, who pioneered many of the achievements—­for example in international trade and exploratory voyages to Russia and America—­which have traditionally been ascribed entirely to her successor.2 An important part of this developing revision is to disinter the precise meaning of what Mary, soon to be accompanied by Philip, sought to do with the Church in England, Wales, and Ireland. This is where the question of terminology arises. Both sides of the historical debate about the Marian years, like the title of this chapter, assume the use of the term ‘Counter-­ Reformation’ to describe the Catholic response to militant reform, first in Germany and Switzerland and then elsewhere, including the England of Edward VI and Elizabeth. The ‘Protestant’ school, which incorporates some historians with no known denominational affiliation, or even apparent Christian belief, has tended to accuse Mary and her advisers of looking only backwards, to an imagined ‘golden age’ of English Catholicism (Eamon Duffy’s ‘traditional religion’ perhaps).3 Thus, they supposedly missed the developments, such as the foundation of the Jesuit order and the Council of Trent, which would lead to what has variously been described as ‘Counter-­Reformation’, ‘Catholic Reformation’, ‘Tridentine Catholicism’, and more.4 Those among the ‘revisionists’ who identify in the Marian ‘restoration’—which it undoubtedly was to start with—­the effects of what was happening on the Continent also tend to use the term ‘Counter-­Reformation’ and, while this may seem somewhat negative and ‘reactionary’ (in a non-­pejorative way), it will also be used here.

The 1553 Succession Crisis In order to pursue this discussion, it will be useful first to outline the main events with which it is concerned. Henry VIII’s withdrawal of his territories from obedience to the See of Rome in the 1530s was followed by the implementation by the councillors of his son, Edward VI, of a ‘reformation’ of the English Church in the direction of Swiss and German reform.5 This was brought to an 2 Alexander Samson, Mary and Philip: The Marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain (Manchester, 2020), pp. 223–4. 3  Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1992), p. 3. 4 John W. O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, MA, 2000), pp. 1–3, 142–3. 5  See this volume, Chapter 1; also Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London, 1999).

Marian Counter-Reformation  33 abrupt end by the death of the teenage king on 6 July 1553. He and his chief councillor at the time, the Lord Protector John Dudley, duke of Northumberland, had forced through the Privy Council and past the senior judges a ‘device’, framed in legal language, which removed both Mary and Elizabeth from the succession, despite their designation as heirs by both the 1543 Act of Succession and Henry  VIII’s last will, in the event that Edward died without an heir from his body. As a result, Lady Jane Grey, a descendant of Henry’s sister Mary, was ­proclaimed as queen, alongside her new husband Guildford Dudley, son of Northumberland. She had been c­ hosen as a genuinely devout believer in non-­ Catholic religious reform, but her position was highly unstable from the start.6 At the beginning of July 1553, as King Edward approached the gate of death, his council had summoned Mary from her then residence at Hunsdon in Hertfordshire, no doubt with the intention of, at the very least, preventing her from obstructing Jane’s succession, and probably of arresting and even executing her. Mary proved, however, to be in a much better position, both economically and politically, than Edward’s and Jane’s advisers had imagined. Thanks to the earlier implementation by Edward’s councillors of her father’s will, she possessed several dozen estates, most of which were in the home counties and East Anglia.7 In addition, and crucially to the present discussion, she had become well-­known as an implacable opponent of the Edwardian religious changes. Thus, when faced with the accession of Jane, she had both the ability and the determination, not only to appeal to all those who thought Henry’s will should be implemented in this case but also to draw to herself members of the gentry, and some noblemen, who wanted England as a whole to return to the Catholic faith.8 It seems probable that most, if not all, of her supporters in the home counties and East Anglia, who saw her enter London as queen in August 1553, imagined that she would restore the English Church to the state in which it had been at the end of her father’s reign. It would still be separated from Rome, but subject to Roman canon law, under episcopal, if schismatic, supervision and worshipping in a pared down Catholic way. It soon became clear, however, that the new queen, daughter of Katherine of Aragon and thus a Castilian Trastámara as well as a Tudor, had other ideas. Initially, in August 1553, she issued a proclamation for England and Wales, which professed to allow religious toleration, for example urging her subjects to avoid the use of the pejorative epithets ‘papist’ and ‘heretic’ and allowing ‘reformed’ 6  Eric Ives, Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery (Oxford, 2009), pp. 137–58; John Edwards, Mary I (New Haven, CT, and London, 2011), pp. 76–9. 7  David Loades, Mary Tudor: A Life (Oxford, 1989), p. xi (a map of Mary’s possessions in 1553); Jeri McIntosh, From Heads of Household to Heads of State: The Preaccession Households of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor (New York, NY, 2009), pp. 132, 148–9, and appendix A. 8 Anna Whitelock and Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Princess Mary’s Household and the Succession Crisis, July 1553’, Historical Journal, 50 (2007), pp. 265–87; Paulina Kewes, ‘The Exclusion Crisis of 1553 and the Elizabethan Succession’, in Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman (eds.), Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 49–61.

34  John Edwards worship to continue. Nevertheless, she also announced in this text that there would be a religious re-­ordering in the near future and it must have been clear to most that this would involve the restoration of ‘Roman’ Catholicism and the prohibition of the English Prayer Book.9 Queen Mary inherited an English Church which was not only in schism but also most definitely heretical in the eyes of Rome. Her father had not just wiped out the religious observance of monks, friars, and nuns, but had confiscated their communities’ monetary wealth and property, either for the royal treasury or as largesse for members of the English nobility and gentry. In the cathedrals, parish churches, and chapels, where worship still took place, stone altars, rood screens, statuary, and stained glass largely remained, but lights no longer burned before ‘idolatrous’ religious images. The English Church of 1553, as well as that of Wales but not, on the whole, that of Ireland, was very different, thanks to the zeal of Edward VI’s commissioners. Although Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s attempt to revise canon law foundered in parliament not long before the young king died, probably because of a quarrel between Cranmer and the duke of Northumberland, other drastic changes had by then been made.10 There had been an assault on all remaining religious imagery in churches, including much of the stained glass, while the ‘chantry’ chapels in which Masses were previously offered for departed benefactors had been abolished, with their revenues mostly confiscated by the Crown. Most significantly of all, the Roman offices in Latin had been replaced, first in 1549 by a Book of Common Prayer which preserved some semblance of the traditional liturgy, such as clerical vestments and the rite of exorcism in baptism, and in 1552 by a second Book, which removed these vestiges and corresponded much more closely to what was then being done in reformed churches on the Continent.11

A Spanish Marriage As ‘Supreme Head in Earth, after Christ, of the Church of England’, a title which she inherited with the crown, Mary theoretically had the right to restore her kingdoms to the Roman obedience immediately, but it was clear that, in England at least, such a move was politically risky. Even so, in the summer and autumn of 1553, traditional Catholic worship started to re-­appear, both in London and in the shires, using liturgical accoutrements which had evidently been hidden from Edward’s commissioners. However, while Mary was prepared to share her 9  David Loades (ed.), The Chronicles of the Tudor Queens (Stroud, 2002), pp. 17–19. 10  Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven, CT, and London, 1996), pp. 533–5. 11  Brian Cummings (ed.), The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559 and 1662 (Oxford, 2011), pp. 1–98, esp. pp. 19, 48; idem., The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI (London, 1999), pp. 319–463.

Marian Counter-Reformation  35 long-­term aims—­to end the schism and marry Prince Philip—­with imperial and papal representatives, it initially seemed to her English councillors that she was content to bring back her father’s Church of England and also that, if she was ever to be married, it would be to an English subject. Ultimately, of course, the pol­it­ ical class and the public had to be told the truth and this process began in November 1553. Some of her councillors, most notably William Paget, supported a ‘Spanish marriage’, but she was opposed in this not only by her chosen lord chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, whom she had recently restored as bishop of Winchester and who had crowned her on 1 October, but also by large numbers in both houses of parliament. With Tudor (and Trastámaran) fire, she faced down this criticism and began negotiations with her cousin, Emperor Charles V (to whom she had briefly been betrothed in the 1520s) to marry his son Philip. He was then ruling Spain and its overseas territories on behalf of his father, and at that time was negotiating to marry a Portuguese princess. Nevertheless, he was, as recent scholarship has shown, kept fully informed of the new English project and by January 1554 a marriage treaty was ready to be signed.12 In the meantime, however, a rebellion had broken out in Kent, led by Sir Thomas Wyatt. Opinion was divided at the time, and has been to this day, over whether Wyatt’s uprising was primarily anti-­Spanish, as he claimed, or anti-­Catholic, as Mary and her government supposed. In any case, his Kentish army, which was originally meant to be one of four heading to London from various parts of England, came close to the western entrance to the city, having vainly attempted to storm St James’s Palace, where the Queen held an early morning council meeting at her bedside. Afterwards, Wyatt and some of his fellow rebels were executed, as were Jane and Guildford Dudley, but not Princess Elizabeth, even though she was strongly suspected of having been involved in the rebellion and would undoubtedly have benefited from its success.13 Perhaps surprisingly, Philip seems not to have been deterred by all this from marrying Mary, though these troubles did postpone his arrival in England by several months. Meanwhile, vigorous measures were being taken to make England a Catholic country again, with Wales to follow, and the small established Church in Ireland to be returned legally, as well as morally, to the Roman fold.

Catholic Restoration and Reform Initially, in July‒August 1553, it had seemed clear that restoration of the old Church, whether nostalgically and sentimentally conceived or not, was indeed the primary concern of the new queen and her chief ecclesiastical advisers, among 12 Edwards, Mary I, pp. 144–59; Samson, Mary and Philip, pp. 52–81. 13 Edwards, Mary I, pp. 159–75; Samson, Mary and Philip, pp. 82–91.

36  John Edwards whom the most notable were two restored bishops, Stephen Gardiner of Winchester, and Edmund Bonner of London. Even though some churches, apparently spontaneously, returned to the Mass, any official attempt to restore Catholic worship in the autumn of 1553 was severely constrained by the fact that the 1552 Book of Common Prayer remained the sole legal form of public worship, on both sides of the Irish Sea. The measures taken in the cause of religious reform, by the previous monarchs’ advisers, had been enacted as parliamentary statutes and Mary’s government adopted the same method in order to reverse them. Soon after her coronation, a new parliament was summoned but, despite the fact that it contained many of her conservative and Catholic supporters, it also included survivors of the old regime, with the result that progress on Mary’s agenda was fitful. Liturgical changes were made fairly quickly, with the removal of the Prayer Book and the legalization, once again, of the Mass and other Catholic offices and devotions, but two further subjects proved to be more problematic: namely, heresy laws and the former ecclesiastical lands and financial wealth which had been confiscated under the two previous monarchs and in many cases redistributed to laymen of whatever religious persuasion. Yet, although this process appeared on the surface to be an entirely local matter, the Queen and her bishops were not left alone by the Catholic Church in their programme to restore and regain, insofar as this would prove possible, what had been lost between the 1530s and 1553. When considering Mary’s first few months as queen, it is important to remember that the Habsburgs, mainly represented by Charles V’s leading ambassador in London, the Savoyard Simon Renard, were highly influential in English affairs, well before her marriage to Philip. Both the Emperor himself and his regent in the Netherlands, his sister Mary of Hungary, had given the Lady Mary support d ­ uring her isolation in the previous reign, not least on religious grounds, even making a vain attempt, in 1550, to spirit her away to the Netherlands: she refused to go, wisely as it turned out.14 Once she was on the throne, Renard, with constant reference back to the imperial government in Brussels, become one of the Queen’s most intimate and respected counsellors. He and the rest of the imperial team in London were not, initially, very enthusiastic about the planned full restoration of Catholicism in Mary’s domains. Having hidden beneath the parapet (almost literally) during the turmoil in London in July 1553, even after Mary had emerged victorious, they still believed that the country would not accept a full return to the Roman obedience. Thus, they continued to emphasize, and even exaggerate, parliamentary opposition to the new religious policy, as well as various pro-­ Protestant demonstrations which took place, when sending negative despatches to Charles, which he seems to have trusted. Nevertheless, despite the fact that Habsburg influence would remain powerful throughout Mary’s reign, no-­one, 14 Edwards, Mary I, pp. 71–4.

Marian Counter-Reformation  37 including the Emperor, could ever afford to disregard Rome: the attitude of the Pope and the curia was always going to be crucial. In August 1553, when news of Mary’s proclamation as queen and her formal entry to London reached Rome, the response was immediate, strong, and clearly well prepared. Pope Julius III consulted the cardinal of England, Reginald Pole, whom he had narrowly beaten to the papacy in the conclave of 1549–50 and who had previously been a legate to England, as well as representing Rome in several vain attempts to remedy the conflict between the Habsburgs and France, which had convulsed Europe since before 1500: Julius now re-­appointed him to both posts.15 Pole, who, as a Plantagenet, had his own, by no means negligible, claim to the English throne, had bitterly opposed Henry and Edward’s religious reforms, and had already produced a programme for the full restoration of England, Wales, and Ireland to Catholic Christendom, which he was now authorized to carry out.16 Even before he could travel to take up his post in London, he started a written correspondence on policy with the Queen and with others, which sometimes descended to micromanagement. More specifically, Pole, as legate, was able to give a dispensation to Bishop Gardiner, in the absence in the Tower of London of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, to crown Mary as queen—­and another to her to be enthroned as a Catholic monarch.17 Then, with rich irony of which none but she could have been more aware, she proceeded to use her powers as ‘Supreme Head’ to begin to undo the work of her father and brother. While parliament restored the traditional Sarum liturgy, she removed those bishops who had worked most closely with Cranmer during the Edwardian reform: Hugh Latimer of Worcester, Nicholas Ridley of London, and John Hooper of Gloucester. Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley were tried for treason, having supported the succession of Jane and, having been found guilty, could have been executed for that offence, had not Mary wanted them to be tried additionally for heresy. Yet, since she refused to organize heresy trials until papal jurisdiction was fully restored, they and Hooper (who had in fact supported her succession militarily) were forced to remain in prison until the legate arrived.18 In the meantime she received licence from Pole to restore former Catholic bishops who had been deprived in Edward VI’s reign. In 1553‒4, she also made a start on the confiscation of former Church lands and rents in lay hands, with a view to returning them to ecclesiastical possession and use.

15  Thomas F. Mayer (ed.), The Correspondence of Reginald Pole, vol. 2 (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 129–31. 16  John Edwards, Archbishop Pole (Farnham, 2014), pp. 124–5. 17  Mayer (ed.), Correspondence, pp. 193–4. 18 Edwards, Archbishop Pole, pp. 147–9.

38  John Edwards

Wales and Ireland The Welsh Church establishment, which had been treated as fully part of England since Henry VIII’s Acts of Union were passed by parliament in 1536 and 1542, did not receive immediate direct attention from Mary and her advisers, but the same could not be said for Ireland, which in 1541 had been declared a kingdom, instead of a lordship by papal grant, which it had previously been. On that side of the Irish Sea, the process of removing reforming bishops began quickly and married clergy were offered reconciliation with Rome and the ability to function as Catholic priests, as long as they repudiated their wives. Most importantly, in October 1553, the former archbishop of Armagh, George Dowdall, who had once been a ‘crutched’ friar (of the ‘Crucified One’), and had then been named by Henry VIII to that diocese, but fled to Brabant in the face of the Edwardian reforms, was restored to his see by papal grant.19 In Ireland, the way was thus opened for Catholic restoration to take place on more fertile ground than in England and parts of Wales, though Mary, soon to be joined by Philip, had as much difficulty in governing the country as the monarchs who preceded and succeeded them. They created problems for the future by setting up ‘new’ English plantations in Laois (Queen’s County) and Offaly (King’s County), and appointing a new lord deputy, Thomas Radcliffe, Baron Fitzwalter, and earl of Sussex, who made destructive raids against Scottish settlers in Ulster, which presaged later official violence that lasted into the twentieth century.20

Cardinal Pole Returns Pole, meanwhile, fretfully awaited his recall to his homeland, but faced serious obstacles. Above all, Charles V wanted the credit for restoring England, Wales, and Ireland to the Catholic fold to go to himself and his son, and not to the legate or Pope Julius: he therefore continued to procrastinate in the face of the legate’s evident yearning. In England itself, Pole was still subject to the Act of Attainder, passed by Henry VIII’s parliament on the grounds that he had conspired against his sovereign (he had certainly urged Charles to invade England in the late 1530s), and he was thus liable to arrest and execution if he ever set foot again in his native land. This would continue to be the case until the relevant Act was repealed on 22 November 1554, by which time Philip of Spain was safely installed as king of England and the cardinal had at last been allowed to head for home.21 Once he 19  Henry A. Jefferies, ‘Dowdall, George (1487–1558), Archbishop of Armagh’, ODNB. 20  Gonzalo Velasco Berenguer, ‘Marian Ireland (1553–1558): A Point of Departure for the Irish Counter-­Reformation’, Vita transit et umbra blog, http://velascoberenguer.blogspot.com (accessed 25 November 2020). 21  Statutes of the Realm 1 & 2 Philip and Mary, c. 18; Mayer (ed.), Correspondence, pp. 362–3.

Marian Counter-Reformation  39 had formally absolved Mary and Philip’s subjects of the sin of schism in parliament on 30 November, Pole could renew the work of restoration under his own ­personal supervision. Much remained to be done and there were still serious obstacles to be overcome.22 The surviving correspondence between queen and legate, written while the ­latter travelled very slowly from Italy to the Netherlands, reveals continuing tensions between the two, despite their apparently common cause. At times Pole appeared to write as a severe spiritual director to a penitent. Given his personal history—­and that of his family—­he objected strongly to Mary’s references to her late father as being ‘of pious memory’. Perhaps more significantly, he totally rejected the notion that parliament had any business with Church matters, even when that assembly did such apparently pro-­Catholic things as banning the English Prayer Book and removing the Edwardian concession for clergy to marry. Above all, he was determined to regain from their lay ‘possessioners’ all of the goods which had formerly belonged to the Church. In December 1554, the legate held tense meetings with the monarchs and their councillors but in the end he had to admit defeat on property, in the face of opposition which came at least as much from Catholics as from supporters of the earlier reforms.23 Although Mary’s government could quickly order the restoration of Mass as well as other sacraments and devotions, it was not so easy to make churches ready to celebrate them in the proper order. The result was a patchwork of diverse practice. In London and a few other places, while in some parishes traditional services resumed, in other cases clergy and parishioners obstinately, and now illegally, continued to use the Book of Common Prayer, often meeting in private when they had been denounced and expelled from their parish churches. With Pole in his place as legate, in daily contact with government, including the restored bishops who were all now reconciled with Rome, the programme which he had agreed with Pope Julius in the summer of 1553 could be pursued and developed vigorously on all fronts. Married clergy, in England, Wales, and Ireland, were confronted with the choice of losing their benefices or renouncing their wives (‘concubines’ in Roman canon law) and going to work in another parish well away from former ties, as Catholic priests.24 In January 1555, parliament restored the heresy laws of Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V, which were originally directed against the followers of the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe, who were commonly known as ‘Lollards’, legislation which had been repealed under Edward VI.25 This meant that heresy trials could now begin in earnest under the authority of the Roman Holy Office, with the English bishops, notably Gardiner and Bonner, taking the lead. The first burnings of those found to be obstinate and 22  Mayer (ed.), Correspondence, pp. 366–7. 23  Mayer (ed.), Correspondence, pp. 228–9; Edwards, Mary I, pp. 237–8. 24 Edwards, Archbishop Pole, pp. 143–6. 25  Statutes of the Realm, 1&2 Philip and Mary, c. 6.

40  John Edwards relapsed took place at the beginning of February 1555 and would continue for the next three-­and-­a-­half years.26 In addition, Church and government acted together to restore Catholic teaching to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, by means of both parliamentary statute and royal and legatine visitation, while attempts began to be made to revive the religious community life.27 Bishops, most notably Bonner of London, began visitations of their dioceses, and catechisms and collections of homilies were issued, with the aim of reviving both clerical and lay Catholic life in the parishes. These efforts had received a powerful new boost in July 1554, when Philip and his court arrived for the royal wedding and England acquired a Spanish king.

King Philip of England The Spanish fleet, which landed at Southampton and various other south coast harbours, carried Philip’s select Spanish ecclesiastical advisers, both friars and secular clergy, some of whom would stay with him, in England and then the Netherlands, until Mary’s death and after. As so often in this period, Spain had both these countries in mind when the 1554 expedition was planned. Thus, while Philip and his immediate entourage, including some of the friars, began their business in Winchester and then London, others, including several thousand troops, who were not allowed to land in England after the usual bumpy voyage from Corunna lest they look like an invasion force, went on, as originally intended, to Flanders, to help defend that territory against France. Other court­ iers, both clerical and lay, quickly returned to Spain, after the wedding in Winchester Cathedral on 25 July 1554, the feast of St James the Greater, patron of Spain. However, the Franciscan Observant Alfonso de Castro and the Dominicans Bartolomé Carranza de Miranda and Juan de Villagarcía were to play crucial roles in the Catholic restoration. In 1555 they were joined by another friar preacher, Pedro de Soto, who had been spotted by Pole on his travels, while, having been the Emperor’s confessor, the Spaniard was helping the then archbishop of Augsburg, Otto Trüchsess von Waldburg, in the foundation of a Catholic

26  Doran and Freeman (eds.), Mary Tudor, pp. 224–71. 27  Claire Cross, ‘Oxford and the Tudor State, from the Accession of Henry VIII to the Death of Mary’, in James McConica (ed.), History of the University of Oxford, vol. 3 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 117–49; Claire Cross, ‘The English Universities, 1553–58’, in Eamon Duffy and David Loades (eds.), The Church of Mary Tudor (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 57–76; Andrew Hegarty, ‘Carranza and the English Universities’, in John Edwards and Ronald Truman (eds.), Reforming Catholicism in the England of Mary Tudor: The Achievement of Friar Bartolomé Carranza (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 153–72; Ceri Law, ‘The 1557 Visitation of the University of Cambridge’, in Elizabeth Evenden and Vivienne Westbrook (eds.), Catholic Renewal and Protestant Resistance in Marian England (Farnham, 2015), pp. 65–91.

Marian Counter-Reformation  41 university at nearby Dillingen.28 While the role of these Spaniards has trad­ition­ally been largely ignored, even by modern Marian ‘revisionists’, considerable evidence has nevertheless emerged, in the last twenty years, to demonstrate the crucial role that these four friars played in Mary’s and Pole’s efforts to make England a Catholic country again, even though, like all their compatriots, they stayed in London or the home counties, and never themselves reached Wales or Ireland. Most of what is known about this Spanish ecclesiastical involvement is ironically to be found in the records of the trial of Carranza as a suspected Lutheran, which was conducted by the Spanish and Roman inquisitions between 1559 and 1576.29 Details of Carranza’s time in England, before his departure in 1557 to join Philip in the Netherlands and be appointed as archbishop of Toledo (1558), are included in the answers of witnesses, including Philip himself, to the set of questions which the Dominican produced for the use of his defence lawyer, and which have been largely neglected by historians of the Tudors.30

Pole as Legate While, in 1554‒5, Pole had to admit defeat in his attempt to restore to the Church the great bulk of its lost goods, he was nevertheless able to give even greater im­petus to the campaign to reconcile the people of England and Wales to the Catholic Church. As legate he could, from his headquarters in Lambeth Palace, continue his strenuous effort to eliminate clerical marriages, as well as granting dispensations from the Lenten fast to individuals on health grounds. These measures, which would be repeated until the end of the reign and include Wales and Ireland, were accompanied by his direct involvement in appointments to bishoprics and canonries. He would also tackle the issues of pluralism and non-­residence in benefices, as well as dispensing young clerics from their duties in order to pursue university studies: the clergy, whether reconciled from schism or newly ordained as Catholics, were normally to carry out their pastoral duties, but as many as possible of them were also to be well educated. Meanwhile, the late winter and spring of 1555 saw a renewal of the effort, which had begun in late 1553, to reconcile the entire laity to the Church.31 The Queen herself, in February 1554, had given her bishops injunctions for this purpose, in the manner of a ‘Supreme Head’, though not using that title. Bishop Bonner had led a campaign of Catholic 28  John Edwards, ‘Introduction’, and José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, ‘Fray Bartolomé Carranza: A Spanish Friar in the Reign of Mary Tudor’, in Edwards and Truman (eds.), Reforming Catholicism, pp. 1–20, 21–31. 29  José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras (ed.), Fray Bartolomé Carranza. Documentos históricos, 7 vols. (Madrid, 1962–94). 30 John Edwards, ‘Fray Bartolomé Carranza’s Blueprint for a Reformed Catholic Church in England’, in Mayer (ed.), Reforming Reformation, pp. 141–60. 31 Edwards, Archbishop Pole, pp. 141–4 and notes.

42  John Edwards instruction, issuing a new catechism, in order to counteract similar efforts by reformers, as well as a set of officially sponsored homilies, by multiple authors, including some who had contributed to the similar collection that had been issued in the previous reign. These sermons were intended to be delivered by clergy who were either unwilling or not trusted to deliver their own material. Diocesans were instructed to work towards Catholic restoration throughout the country and measures were taken in parallel to restore a Catholic curriculum in the universities, and to begin the revival of monasticism in England, Wales as well as in Ireland, where the ground was in this respect much less stony. These measures were supported by ever-­increasing quantities of devotional and propagandistic literature. Their effectiveness will be assessed in due course, but first it is necessary to examine the phenomenon which has so damaged the reputation of Mary I in subsequent centuries: the campaign to extirpate non-­Catholic belief and practice from her realm. The undeniable fact is that, between February 1555 and November 1558, more than 300 men and women, including some clergy, people of higher rank and many with humbler status and occupations, were publicly burned to death, having been found guilty of heresy. An unknown number died in prison. In recent decades, the work of many scholars has refined understanding both of the methods used in this campaign and of their results. The earlier heresy laws, restored in January 1555, involved close cooperation between clerical and lay authorities: suspected heretics were arrested by sheriffs or their constables and then interrogated by churchmen, including bishops, diocesan officials, and theologians. If they were found guilty, they might be given penances and/or im­prisoned, but if they had previously been convicted and then relapsed, or else refused to repent and abjure their former views, they were handed over to the lay authorities in shire or borough (in terms of canon law, the ‘secular arm’) for execution by burning. Thus, the investigation of heresy resumed under both parliamentary and inquisitorial authority. From the beginning of Mary’s reign, it was assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that if a few prominent reforming clerics, such as Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, and Hooper, were taken out of circulation, the laity would quietly return to Catholic conformity. This was the Church’s traditional view of the nature of heresy, but the rest of Mary’s reign, followed by developments in that of her successor, demonstrated that the real situation was, in fact, very much more complex. The nature and the success or otherwise of the Marian restoration effort cannot be fully understood or assessed without taking into account an often-­lively underground religious life, which most definitely regarded itself as Christian and scripturally based, and which, as recently as July 1553, had at least partially corresponded to the actual beliefs and practices of the English

Marian Counter-Reformation  43 religious establishment. This was the reality at home, while a relatively small number of more prominent reformers went into exile on the Continent.32 More recent accounts of Mary and Philip’s religious policies and actions have understandably focused on the enforcement of Catholic orthodoxy by means of catechism, preaching, the publication of devotional literature and polemic, and the punishment, sometimes capital, of dissidents. Yet other aspects of the campaign were regarded, at least by the authorities, as just as important. Three of these stand out. The first of them, the reform of the universities, has already been mentioned. It took the form of visitations, under royal and legatine authority, of both Oxford and Cambridge, with the result that changes made to the curriculum in the previous reign, which had been aimed at replacing traditional scholastic teaching were reversed. In addition, Pole himself became chancellor of both universities.33 The second of these policies, which was the attempted restoration of the religious life in England and Wales (it survived in any case, to a considerable extent, in much of Ireland), involved the revival of a small number of Franciscan and Dominican friaries and nunneries—­in London and Greenwich, Oxford and Cambridge, Southampton and King’s Langley, Hertfordshire—­and also the re-­ creation of the Benedictine foundation in Westminster Abbey.34 Third, in order to consolidate the renewed and restored Catholic Church in Philip and Mary’s domains, Pole, as legate, called an English national synod, combining the trad­ ition­al convocations of the provinces of Canterbury and York, which met at Westminster between November 1555 and February 1556, when it was suspended for visitations of the dioceses and universities, and never reconvened.35 Apart from their intrinsic interest and importance, not least in influencing the outcome of the Council of Trent in 1563, all these aspects of policy raise the question of Spanish involvement in Mary and Philip’s government in general and the affairs of the Church in particular.

Dual Monarchy The marriage of the English and Spanish monarchs remains a lightning-­rod for historical interpretation of the period. Traditional ‘Protestant’ historiography, continuing into the twenty-­first century, has condemned Mary’s ‘Spanish marriage’ as a self-­destructive error and disaster, which guaranteed the failure of the

32 Peter Marshall, ‘Evangelical Conversion in the Reign of Henry VIII’, and Patrick Collinson, ‘Night Schools, Conventicles and Churches: Continuities and Discontinuities in Early Protestant Ecclesiology’, in Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (eds.), The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 14–37, 209–35. 33  See n. 27. 34 Edwards, Archbishop Pole, pp. 188–201. 35  Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. MS 5966 fols. 27r–31v (‘Reformatio Angliae’); Edwards, Archbishop Pole, pp. 169–78.

44  John Edwards Queen’s cherished Catholic restoration and opened the way to ‘England’s glory’ under Elizabeth I. According to this interpretation, the English people (the Welsh and Irish are normally ignored in this context) had a natural antipathy towards foreigners in general and Spaniards in particular, alongside a supposedly trad­ ition­al hatred of ‘oppressive’ Catholicism. Anti-­Spanish feeling is thus seen as bursting out inevitably when Mary’s plan to marry Philip became generally known. It is indeed true that Sir Thomas Wyatt characterized his abortive Kentish rebellion as anti-­Spanish and, when Philip and his court arrived in London in August 1554, there were undoubtedly outbreaks of violence between natives and Spaniards, which required an Anglo-­Spanish commission of prominent courtiers to resolve them. Nevertheless, such incidents were not recorded elsewhere in the country and, in addition, more recent scholarship has produced a far more rounded portrayal of how Philip and Mary’s subjects actually got on together.36 Before the marriage, Mary had, despite the apparent initial popularity of her accession, experienced considerable difficulties in forging her role as England’s first queen regnant and, once Philip became king, new questions and problems surfaced. After the Winchester wedding, was the Spanish prince a reigning monarch or just a royal consort? Would he be crowned king, as Mary’s mother (and Philip’s great-­aunt) Katherine had been crowned queen alongside Mary’s father, in 1509? From August 1554 onwards, all the signs were that Mary wanted her new husband to take on the vital masculine aspects of monarchy. She had been somewhat awkwardly armoured and girded with a sword during her coronation, but now Philip would be the military leader. It no longer seems plausible to suggest that he was remote from English government. Clearly, he and his father had always assumed that he would be the reigning king of England and it is now known, despite the notorious gaps in the records caused by the sinking of one of his ships during his final return to Spain in 1559, that, even though Spanish and English governmental organs met separately, he adopted a hands-­on approach from the start, despite his unequal constitutional position.37 This fact had obvious implications for the churchmen in his entourage.

Spanish Churchmen in England Although they and their activities have traditionally been largely disregarded in Tudor historiography, whether out of insularity or an inability or unwillingness to read Spanish archival and literary sources, many of which have long been 36 Samson, Mary and Philip, pp. 137–40. 37 Edwards, Mary I, pp. 206–9; Harry Kelsey, Philip of Spain, King of England: The Forgotten Sovereign (New York, 2012), pp. 93–114; Gonzalo Velasco Berenguer, ‘Philip I, King of England and Ireland: Spanish Influence under Habsburg-­Tudor Rule, 1554–1558’ (University of Bristol PhD thesis, 2017), pp. 95–197, 346–53 (appendix 3); Samson, Mary and Philip, pp. 203–8.

Marian Counter-Reformation  45 available in print, it is now clear that Philip’s ecclesiastical advisers played a crucial part in the councils of the legate and the leading English bishops, at Lambeth and Westminster. Preparatory to his departure for Brussels in the late summer of 1555 after his wife’s failed or false pregnancy, Philip formed a select English council to advise him, which included Pole. At the same time, the Franciscan Alfonso de Castro and the Dominican Bartolomé Carranza advised both on how to proceed. Thanks to the records of his later inquisition trial, it seems clear that Carranza—­ who, like Castro, had played a prominent role in the first period of the Council of Trent (1545–7), over which Pole had initially presided as a legate for Paul III—­ lodged with other Spanish ecclesiastics in the precincts of Westminster Abbey and was constantly in and out of Westminster, Lambeth, and Greenwich palaces. He was present in Bishop Bonner’s consistory when business concerning those regarded as heretics was being done, and advised both Pole and the Queen in such cases, particularly that of Cranmer. Carranza also masterminded the establishment of a new Dominican priory at St Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield, and the restoration of the former ‘Blackfriars’ in Oxford. According to numerous Spanish witnesses in the later trial, Carranza was also a highly influential adviser to the cardinal at the English synod, which the two men ran with a distinctly ‘Tridentine’ agenda, even though the Council’s canons and decrees would not be promulgated until 1563.38 In addition, two of Carranza’s Dominican brothers, the theologians Juan de Villagarcía and Pedro de Soto, were appointed to teaching posts in Oxford where, until the last dreadful moments on 21 March 1556, they believed that they had secured Cranmer’s reconversion to Catholicism.39 Although the archbishop could not in the end be reconciled, Pole succeeded him and Catholic observers of the progress of the restoration, in Britain or on the Continent, might have been pardoned for supposing that long-­term success was likely. Storm-­clouds had however begun to form after the election, in May 1555, of Gianpietro Carafa as Pope Paul IV.

An Irascible Pope To begin with, the new pope appeared to be fully supportive of the existing policy of the legate, whom he confirmed in office, and hence the work of Philip and Mary, but long-­standing tensions soon resurfaced, catching the Queen and her kingdoms in the crossfire. Pole and Carafa knew each other well—­perhaps too well. Back in 1536–7, they had both sat on the commission which Paul III set up 38 José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, ‘Bartolomé Carranza y la restauración católica inglesa (1554–1558)’, Fray Bartolomé Carranza y el cardinal Pole. Un Navarro en la restauración católica en Inglaterra (1554–1558) (Pamplona, 1977), pp. 15–118: John W. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council? (Cambridge MA, 2013), pp. 107–16. 39 MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, pp. 588–93.

46  John Edwards to produce a plan for a reformed Catholic Church that would be better equipped to roll back the threats of the German and Swiss reformers, and would perhaps even control an increasingly unpredictable Henry VIII. The next step after this commission reported was to be the holding of a general, ecumenical council. But the Farnese pope balked at the suggestion from this committee that it was best to start with major reform of the curia itself, before asking the lower clergy and laity to mend their ways, so nothing much was done. Nevertheless, Pole was eventually appointed as cardinal prefect of the papal states and formed at Viterbo a school of theology on largely monastic and partly Christian humanist lines, some of whose members and associates would eventually leave the Church of Rome to join the reformers in Germany and Switzerland. Carafa, in contrast, stayed in Rome and, at Paul III’s request, refounded the inquisition there, in 1542. He had deep and not totally unfounded suspicions that Pole and some of his friends had a more than passing knowledge of, and sympathy with, at least some of the theology of the reformers, most notably Luther’s interpretation of St Paul and St Augustine’s views on Christian justification—­by faith if not by ‘faith alone’. In the summer of 1547, Pole withdrew from his role as a presiding legate at the Council of Trent, supposedly because of illness, and thus avoided participation in the debates on justification: he refused to pronounce on the subsequent decree and canons. Then, in 1549, Carafa spread his suspicions among the cardinals in conclave in what proved to be a successful attempt to thwart the election of the ‘Cardinal of England’ to succeed Paul III as pope.40 After the death of Julius III in 1555 and the very brief papacy of Marcellus II, he became pope himself. Paul IV very probably had Pole in his sights from the start, but in the event it was his obsession—­as a patriotic yet pro-­French Neapolitan nobleman—­with the iniquities, as he saw them, wrought in Italy by the Habsburgs in general and the Spanish in particular, which brought things to a head for Philip and Mary, as well as for the legate. Between 1557 and the deaths of Mary and Pole on 17 November in the following year, Pope Paul engaged in military conflict with Habsburg armies in central Italy and threatened to excommunicate, and even depose, the Emperor and the King of England. He removed Pole’s legatine powers and recalled him to Rome, with the clear intention of having the inquisition try him for ‘Lutheran’ heresy. These actions had no immediate effect on the operation of ecclesiastical policies in England, but Paul eventually stopped replacing bishops there, thus creating what would be a crucial handicap to Catholic resistance, especially in parliament, to Elizabeth’s religious settlement in 1559. Paul’s policy also led Mary and her English council effectively to revert, at least in part, to the hostile and insular policy of her father towards the papacy. Pole, despite his strong inclination towards obedience, was forbidden to accept the papal summons to Rome and

40 Edwards, Archbishop Pole, pp. 85–108.

Marian Counter-Reformation  47 remained at the ailing Queen’s side.41 Meanwhile war broke out yet again between Philip and Henry II of France, this time in Flanders. England was, perhaps in­ev­it­ ably given Tudor-­Habsburg ties, dragged into the conflict and, in January 1558, lost its last French possession, the town and surroundings (‘Pale’) of Calais.42 By the end of that year, under the terms of the 1554 marriage treaty, Philip was no longer king of England, and Elizabeth and her closest advisers were already busy preparing a radical political and religious re-­orientation of her domains. Where did this leave the project to make the Church in England, Wales, and Ireland fully a part of the Catholic Church once again? The time has come to assess the ef­fect­ ive­ness of the policies which had been drawn up and enunciated by Mary and Pole in 1553.

Mary and Philip’s Record Inevitably, this is a controversial issue. The traditional and still largely pervasive view is that the entire Catholic project failed miserably. Yet, in the last three or four decades, a growing number of scholars, by no means all of them practising Catholics, have advocated an alternative view. According to their account, Mary and Philip took their domains back to their historic home in European Christendom, in which their imperial enterprises, which in fact began under Mary’s and not her half-­sister Elizabeth’s rule, would have developed in conjunction with those of Spain and the Netherlands. Eamon Duffy, in particular, has gone so far as to argue that, if Mary and the cardinal had lived longer, England and Wales would have become Catholic countries again, just as Ireland had very largely remained throughout. He suggests that, by the time of their deaths, the number of convictions and burnings for heresy in England (there were none in Ireland and almost none in Wales) were decreasing and he thus concludes that the Catholic monarchs’ subjects had very largely returned to the old faith.43 Intriguing support for Duffy’s view comes from a letter, written on 19 February 1558 by one of Pole’s Viterbo circle, the Florentine Pietro Carnesecchi, to another reformist Catholic in the group, Giulia Gonzaga. In this letter, which survives from his third and fatal trial as a ‘Lutheran’ by the Roman Inquisition (1566–7), Carnesecchi wrote that an unnamed friend, who had recently returned to Italy from travels through Germany and Flanders, had told him that he had met up to 150 English exiles, presumably Protestants, who were heading back to England. 41 Edwards, Mary I, pp. 239–42, 298–303, 306–7; Edwards, Archbishop Pole, pp. 202–3, 277–8; Edwards, ‘El papel del papa Paulo IV en la restauración católica en Inglaterra, 1553–1558’, Tiempos modernos. Revista de historia moderna, 9 (2018), pp. 387–409. 42 Edwards, Mary I, pp. 304–5, 309–18. 43  Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven, CT, and London, 2009), pp. 186–7.

48  John Edwards When reminded that their native country was still Catholic, they claimed that the Queen had assured them that they would come to no harm. Were they already expecting Elizabeth to succeed and change England’s religious orientation again, or was Mary’s government as confident as Duffy implies?44 It is, of course, impossible for anyone to know the true situation given the lack of statistical and other evidence in that period, though undeniably death did intervene for Mary, just as biology had prevented her from bearing a child. In any case, as the union of England and the Netherlands could, under the terms of the marriage treaty, only have happened if Philip and Mary had produced an heir, her childlessness and death meant that the Habsburg project for England was bound to fail. Thus, Mary herself was forced with the deepest reluctance, in her last illness, to admit that Elizabeth would be her successor, though she still refused to name her in the relevant document. Philip’s trusted counsellor, Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, count of Feria, who met both half-­sisters at this time, was rightly convinced that the new queen would immediately reverse Mary’s religious policies, telling his king that, when Elizabeth succeeded, the heretics would rise from their graves to greet her.45 The undeniable fact that England, Wales, and Ireland were withdrawn once again from papal jurisdiction, and that the newly separated Church of England adopted a Prayer Book which differed little from that of 1552, must suggest that Queen Mary’s efforts, fully supported as they had been by her husband and, for most of the time, by successive popes, had failed. Yet before considering the long-­ term consequences of the religious policies which were followed in those years, it is important to return to a crucial word in the title of this chapter: ‘counter-­ reformation’. The sum of research to date, allowing for the fact that this is a growing and developing subject, indicates that the traditional view, that Mary and her advisers were backward-­looking, nostalgic for a largely imagined golden age of pre-­Reformation Catholicism, is simply not justified. More recent research has conclusively demonstrated, and further evidence will no doubt emerge in the future to confirm this, that the supposed grounds for historians’ condemnation of the Queen and her advisers—­particularly their imagined failure to exploit the printing press, in comparison with their opponents, and Pole’s lack of interest in preaching and in bringing the Jesuit order to England, despite the urgings of Ignatius of Loyola—­are in fact false. The massive Marian Catholic publishing effort has been systematically investigated; Pole can be demonstrated to have preached more sermons than his Protestant successor at Canterbury, Matthew Parker; and the English cardinal and the founder of the Society of Jesus in fact

44  Archive of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, S. O., St. St. (P. C.) R 5–2, fol.44r, cited in Camilla Russell, Giulia Gonzaga and the Religious Controversies of Sixteenth-­ Century Italy (Turnhout, 2006), p. 143. 45 Edwards, Mary I, pp. 330–1.

Marian Counter-Reformation  49 had a cordial relationship and agreed on strategy. It may well be that Jesuits would have arrived in England much earlier than they in fact did if Mary had lived longer. In addition, serious research into Pole’s, and England’s, long-­standing and close links with both Italy and Spain has conclusively demonstrated that, far from being behind the curve in contemporary Catholic thought, Pole’s programme, devised in collaboration with the Spanish friars who had been with him at Trent, as well as his constant correspondence with Rome, far from making Philip and Mary’s island realm a backwater, in fact began to turn it into a laboratory for trying out plans for the future ‘Tridentine’ programme of the whole Church. At the time of the deaths of Mary and Pole, Catholic worship and leadership had undoubtedly prevailed in England and Wales, even though Elizabeth’s future Protestant Reformation seems to have had a groundswell of support among some of the population: both countries would have an established ‘Anglican’ Church for centuries thereafter. The situation in Ireland was different and would remain so. There, the Anglican and Presbyterian versions of reformed religion would be largely confined to ‘new’ English settlements in Dublin and the Pale, and to Scottish settlements in Ulster, respectively, while the Gaelic and ‘old’ English populations remained solidly Catholic. Ireland would thus become a base for Spanish operations against Elizabeth after her papal excommunication in 1570, while Catholic recusants in England and Wales received the missionary priests. By then, the Counter-­Reformation, which had been pioneered in Britain and Ireland, was fully under way in Europe and around the world.

Select Bibliography Duffy, Eamon, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven, CT, and London, 2009). Duffy, Eamon, Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations (London, 2012). Edwards, John, Mary I: England’s Catholic Queen (New Haven, CT, and London, 2011). Edwards, John, Archbishop Pole (Farnham, 2014). Samson, Alexander, Mary and Philip: The Marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain (Manchester, 2020). Wizeman, William, SJ, The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor’s Church (Aldershot, 2006).

3 Elizabethan England, Wales, and Ireland Katy Gibbons

Across the Elizabethan period, the fortunes of Catholics in England, Wales, and Ireland were transformed in different ways and to varying extents. Catholics in all three realms faced what appeared to be a shared dilemma: how to survive as Catholic subjects of a Protestant queen when the government, and the international situation, were continually altering the context in which they lived, a situation further complicated by Catholics being unable to agree upon a shared response. Whilst all Catholics ‘hoped for better times’, some went beyond traditionalism and survivalism to push for outright regime change. The latter group in most cases were a numerical minority but their presence determined the responses of the Protestant regime towards all Catholics as potential, if not already proven, traitors. Within that shared dilemma, however, the positions of Catholics in England, Wales, and Ireland were markedly specific due to a number of factors. This chapter will offer a chronological overview of English, Welsh, and Irish Catholics in the reign of Elizabeth, in the process suggesting the ways in which the situations in the three realms were distinct but connected. Before embarking on this overview, however, it is worth pausing to address three aspects of political, legislative, and ecclesiastical difference. These aspects informed the shape and character of Catholicism as it emerged in response to national and international contexts. First, as Alec Ryrie has observed, the Reformation for most of England is ‘a story of conversion’, but for Ireland and Wales ‘it is, first and last, a story of conquest’.1 Over the course of Elizabeth’s long reign, the Protestant Church and State was gradually embedded in England, and Catholicism became identified, polemically at least, as foreign and threatening. There were some key points of open contest to this process, but it nevertheless might be characterized as a slow conversion towards a Protestant nation, albeit a non-­inevitable one. In contrast, in Wales and Ireland, the advancing political claims of the Tudors informed if not determined the course of religious change. An English system of administration was still only decades old in Wales, although for the most part the ruling elite in Wales had reconciled themselves to this and had been drawn into the 1 Alec Ryrie, The Age of Reformation: The Tudor and Stewart Realms, 1485–1603 (Abingdon, 2013), p. 290. Katy Gibbons, Elizabethan England, Wales, and Ireland In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume I: Endings and New Beginnings, 1530–1640. Edited by: James E. Kelly and John McCafferty, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843801.003.0004

Elizabethan England, Wales, and Ireland  51 mechanisms by which Tudor rule was advanced. This, however, did not guarantee an enthusiastic response to the religious changes imposed by the State Church. In Ireland, conquest was more protracted, more contested, and more violent. As the English Crown’s capacity to advance a colonial claim over Ireland was tested, Catholicism became wedded to political opposition to Tudor rule and provided a potential common ground for the different ethnic populations of Ireland. The importation of Protestant plantations in the later sixteenth century may have eventually extended Tudor rule, but further pushed the populations towards sect­ar­ian­ism. The experience of Irish Catholics, whether from the Gaelic or Old English populations, was thus deeply marked by the expanding, if shaky, colonial project of the late Tudor regime: John McCafferty reminds us that ‘it is helpful to be clear about the Englishness of the Irish experience’.2 Of course, the experience of conquest was about language as well as military or administrative power. Protestants across Europe displayed an evangelical commitment towards the promotion of worship and scripture in the vernacular, the­ or­et­ic­al­ly allowing all to access the Word of God. In Wales and Ireland, this impulse was complicated by the ongoing projects of conquest. The majority of the populations of Ireland and Wales were not Anglophone, so English Protestant services were less familiar than the Latin of the Catholic Mass. In Wales, there were some efforts to produce Protestant Welsh-­language material: the appearance of a Welsh-­language Bible and Prayer Book by 1588 has been taken by some scholars as an important marker in Wales’ transformation into a Protestant territory.3 But these publications alone could not compensate for the sense amongst Welsh Catholics that the language and content of the Protestant Church was alien, Crefydd y Sais, the Englishman’s religion.4 Across the Irish Sea, as the English conquest of Ireland rolled out, associations between the English language and Protestant conquest, and the Gaelic language and Irish Catholic identity, was being forged. Even if there had been an appetite for Protestantism amongst the Gaelic populations, Gaelic translations of the New Testament and the Book of Common Prayer did not materialize until after Elizabeth’s death.5 Moreover, in both Ireland and Wales there was a lively vernacular tradition of literature and poetry, from which both laity and clergy of the old faith could draw.6 2 John McCafferty, ‘Becoming Irish Catholics: Ireland, 1534–1690’, in Angela Ellis and Robert E. Scully, SJ (eds.), A Companion to Catholicism and Recusancy in Britain and Ireland: From Reformation to Emancipation (Leiden, 2022), pp. 228–75. 3 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London, 2003), pp. 395–6. More recently, Ryrie, Age of Reformation, p. 302. 4  James January-­McCann, ‘Robert Gwyn and Robert Persons: Welsh and English Perspectives on Attendance at Anglican Service’, Recusant History, 32 (2014), pp. 159–71. 5 Ryrie, Age of Reformation, p. 307. 6  For bardic traditions in Wales, see James January-­McCann, ‘Exiles and Activists: A Comparison of the Counter-­Reformation in Wales and Norway’, in James  E.  Kelly, Henning Laugeraud, and Salvador Ryan (eds.), Northern European Reformations: Transnational Perspectives (Cham, 2020), pp. 174–5.

52  Katy Gibbons Second, the contrasting legislative contexts for Catholics across Elizabeth’s t­ er­ri­tor­ies needs to be noted. English and Welsh subjects of Elizabeth were living against a legislative backdrop that was increasingly anti-­Catholic. The introduction of the Oath of Supremacy in theory, at least, required all those holding an ecclesiastical position or public office to recognize the authority of the monarch over the English Church and State. From this point onwards, the Elizabethan regime enacted a series of legal measures which imposed a new definition of what it meant to be Catholic and placed increasing restrictions on Catholic engagement in social, political, and educational settings. Perhaps most notable were the ways in which the State refined, or redefined, the nature of treason. From 1571, treason included the conversion or reconciliation of anyone to Rome, or the publication of the claim that Elizabeth was a heretic or a tyrant. By 1585, the Protestant State determined that, as the Pope was the Queen’s enemy, Catholic clergy who swore allegiance to him were thus by definition committing acts of treason. A number of measures also limited the status and opportunities of Catholics in England and Wales. There were increasing financial penalties for recusancy and, from the early 1570s onwards, measures against those leaving the kingdom without licence or sending their children overseas. In the 1580s there were fines for those hearing Mass and higher financial penalties for recusancy. By the mid-­1580s, those abroad who did not return within a set time period were also to be treated as traitors. By 1593 a law allowed for children to be taken away from their Catholic families in order to be given a Protestant education. The ability of Catholics to maintain their usual political, social, and familial activity was thus being curtailed. However, it was one thing to legislate and another thing to implement. The practical realization of all of these measures was uneven and spor­ad­ic: both their introduction and their implementation were contingent on the wider national and international political context. Catholics of higher rank living in remote areas further from centres of national or regional government could also benefit from the lack of direct oversight, or use their existing status to protect themselves or their non-­elite co-­religionists. Nonetheless, in theory at least, English and Welsh Catholics were living in the knowledge that these anti-­ Catholic measures existed and with the possibility that they might be imposed on themselves or their kin. This contrasted markedly with the situation across the Irish Sea. The Irish parliament was made up of MPs who were overwhelmingly Catholic. They had passed a version of the Elizabethan Church settlement, and a statute in the opening years of the reign made non-­attendance at the Protestant Church punishable by fine or imprisonment. These measures were far from enforceable given the minimal uptake of Protestantism amongst the established populations of Ireland. Moreover, beyond this statute, there was no stepping-­up of legal measures against Catholic practice as there was on the other side of the Irish Sea. Catholics in Ireland were thus not contending with the cumulatively harsh legal measures that their co-­religionists in England and Wales faced in the later sixteenth century. An

Elizabethan England, Wales, and Ireland  53 ecclesiastical high commission was established in Ireland, as it has been also in the north of England. In the latter, it was actively seeking to inculcate Protestant conformity. In Ireland, however, its activity was mostly limited to imposing penalties on wealthier heads of households in areas where Tudor control was firmer. Overall, then, this lack of legislative innovation in Ireland had a direct impact on the possibilities for Catholic practice in Ireland. It did not of course prevent the Irish conquest, nor remove the potential for opposition to that conquest, but it did mean that Irish Catholics were comparatively ‘free’ to worship. Indeed, English (and Welsh) Catholics saw Ireland as a destination for migration, a place more conducive to the practice of their faith than their own homeland.7 Third, contrasting situations vis-­ à-­ vis the Church hierarchy also had an im­port­ant impact on the character and experience of Catholicism in the three territories discussed here. With the 1559 settlement, the English episcopacy was now the hierarchy of the Church of England. All but one of the bishops who had served in Mary I’s Catholic Church refused to conform. Anthony Kitchen, bishop of Llandaff, continued to administer his diocese until his death in 1563. For the rest of the reign and beyond, Catholics in England and Wales were without a permanent ecclesiastical hierarchy. This lack presented practical and logistical problems, as well as reinforcing the sense amongst some priests and laity that England was no longer the home of a settled and established Church, but a mission field. Missionary priests, both secular and Jesuit, developed their own logistical and support networks, in which the laity had a particularly important role. The attempt from Rome to address this lack of leadership in the late 1590s with the creation of the role of ‘archpriest’ exacerbated existing divisions between the secular and the Jesuit priests and their supporters. This was not just a jurisdictional spat; it was about competing visions of what the Catholic Church in England was and should be. The divisions over the future shape of the English Church were of longer-­term significance and were something that the English government could and did exploit, seemingly offering support to the appellant (broadly anti-­Jesuit) wing of the dispute.8 For all that English Catholics, particularly those high born, emphasized tradition and precedent in contrast to Protestant ‘novelty’, they could not turn to a Catholic episcopacy as part of that argument for continuity. They thus lacked the hierarchy that played such an important part in renewal in majority-­Catholic territories across Europe. In contrast, the different progress of the Irish Reformation meant that a Catholic hierarchy had not disappeared. Catholic bishops remained and new ones were appointed, to rival the Protestant appointments of the English Crown. In contrast to the one Marian bishop who stayed in post in England and Wales, only two lost 7 David Edwards, ‘A Haven of Popery: English Catholic Migration to Ireland in the Age of Plantation’, in Alan Ford and John McCafferty (eds.), The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 105–6. 8  Peter Lake and Michael Questier, All Hail to the Archpriest: Confessional Conflict, Toleration, and the Politics of Publicity in Post-­Reformation England (Oxford, 2019).

54  Katy Gibbons their sees in Ireland. Irish Catholics thus had good reason to continue to see themselves as part of a settled, institutionalized Church rather than part of the missionary project of the Catholic Reformation Church; although, importantly, this did not reduce the appeal of Counter-­Reformation crusading zeal in Ireland. The Pope continued to make new appointments to sees when they became vacant, a clear signal to the Protestant Tudor regime of the continuing strength of Catholicism in Ireland. Importantly, some of these new appointees were to join the roll-­call of martyrs created during Elizabethan rule across the three territories.

The Opening Years of the Reign Given the enduring weight of the traditional view of the Elizabethan era as a time of inevitable triumph for the Protestant Reformation, it can be easy to overlook how much was unknown in the opening years of the reign. Across all of the ter­ri­ tor­ies claimed by Elizabeth I, there was real uncertainty about the character and then about the longevity of the new Church settlement, as well as about the succession. In the opening years of the reign, it was not immediately apparent that there would be no further changes to the settlement reached in 1559; even when this became clearer, the possibility of her marriage to a Catholic prince and, as a result, some form of toleration for her Catholic subjects, remained alive until the early 1580s. In other words, the triumph of Protestantism and the establishment of a minority status for Catholics in England and Wales would not have seemed inevitable to all contemporaries, including some of the Queen’s advisors. There is scope, too, to ask whether the Catholic character of the Irish nation, or at the least the specific character that it took, was also inevitable.9 As it turned out, the changes imposed upon the Catholic populations of England, Wales, and Ireland, the extent of their engagement with international Catholicism, and the shifting priorities and concerns of each territory were closely interrelated, but in each their specific character was distinct.

1560s For much of the first decade of the reign, there was speculation about the Queen’s marriage, which for Catholics meant the possibility of a safer environment in which to practice their faith and a relative lack of explicitly anti-­Catholic measures. However, by 1568, two key developments put Catholics on a different footing. First, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots arrived in England, having been forced to

9  Ford and McCafferty (eds.), The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland.

Elizabethan England, Wales, and Ireland  55 abdicate by the Protestant Confederacy in Scotland. Mary was to spend the rest of her life in confinement in England: she was the closest Catholic claimant to Elizabeth’s throne and was to be the focus of Catholic hopes for the restoration of their faith. From the perspective of Elizabeth’s councillors, the Queen of England would not be safe for as long as the Queen of Scots lived. Second, in 1568, William Allen (1532–94) founded the Catholic college at Doaui. The foundation at Douai (which was to relocate to Reims in French territory in the 1580s) was an im­port­ ant transition away from what had been assumed to be a ‘traditionalist’, insular survivalism in England in the early years of the reign.10 Initially envisaged as a place of education for young English Catholic men while they awaited the return of Catholicism to their homeland, it was soon developed into a seminary for secu­lar priests to prepare them for mission to England. It was to be the first of a number of institutions for Catholic men in the Low Countries, France, and Spain, where they were trained before being sent back to England and Wales. According to Catholic writers, these men embarked on a mission to minister to their persecuted co-­religionists, but their Protestant adversaries claimed that their purpose was to plant the seeds of sedition in England. The fact that William Allen, Robert Persons, SJ, and others involved in these foundations also at times worked to advance plots against the regime suggests some disingenuity on their part, but also reminds us that the political situation for Catholics was continually chan­ ging, and that their public professions of obedience and opposition did, too. This model of foundations-­in-­exile overseas was taken up by Irish Catholics from the later sixteenth century onwards. From the perspective of William Cecil and others trying to ensure the con­ tinued survival of the Protestant Reformation, however, establishments like Douai were viewed as one part of a wider Catholic threat, a threat which was inter­ nation­al in character. This fear was further solidified by the close of the decade with significant rebellions in both England and Ireland. The north of England rose against the Protestant Crown in 1569. Led by the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, who had seen their traditional roles in political society in reduced, the rebellion has often been cast as the period’s last great seigneurial revolt in England. However, this tends to overlook the popular character of rebel grievances and the central importance of Catholicism for those who took up arms or supported the rebels.11 This was a point of crisis for the regime, even if the rebellion in the end fell apart and the north of England was subjected to a harsh series of reprisals. The earl of Northumberland, taken prisoner in Scotland, was handed over to the English and executed at York in 1572. Some, if not all, English

10  This older interpretation has been recently challenged by Frederick  E.  Smith, ‘The Origins of Recusancy in Elizabethan England Reconsidered’, Historical Journal, 60 (2017), pp. 301–32. 11 Krista Kesselring, The Northern Rebellion of 1569: Faith, Politics and Protest in Elizabethan England (Basingstoke, 2007).

56  Katy Gibbons Catholics began to recognize the executed earl as a martyr; others were uneasy with his open revolt against established authority. The earl of Westmorland and other highborn Catholic rebels escaped a similar fate through their flight to the Continent, proving to be a thorn in the side of the government for years to come. A few of the northern rebels fled to Ireland, where the (Gaelic) Catholic population were also mobilizing against the Elizabethan State.12 Hostility to English rule is generally taken as the main driving force for the first Fitzgerald rebellion, fronted by James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, in 1569, but a religious element was also visible: direct appeal was made to Philip II to support this Catholic uprising. The Old English and the Gaelic Irish populations had not been unified under the banner of Catholicism, but this was a point at which some Catholics in Ireland moved away from traditionalism and towards an engagement with Continental Catholic politics. Following this revolt, Irish Catholics, too, were to acknowledge their own Elizabethan martyr. The Jesuit Edmund Daniel, put to death in 1572, had established Catholic schools in Limerick and the surrounding area, and later had some involvement with the rebel Fitzgerald. Daniel was the first Elizabethan martyr in Ireland, but also the first Jesuit martyr in Continental Europe; England and Ireland were emerging as important fields of martyrdom, recognized by Catholics in Continental Europe as well as their persecuted co-­religionists at home.13

1570s Rebellion in England and Ireland at the end of the 1560s was followed closely by the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis. In 1570 Elizabeth was declared a heretic and excommunicated: her Catholic subjects were duty bound to withdraw their obedi­ence to her and her Church on pain of being excommunicated themselves. The timing of its official appearance was, for English Catholics, unfortunate to say the least. The Northern Rebellion had already collapsed: it was too late for the bull to justify and support Catholic restoration. Instead, many lower status Catholics who had taken up arms had been executed and those of higher status had fled overseas.14 Rather than providing ideological support for a Catholic restoration, the bull instead offered the English Crown further ‘proof ’ of the treasonous nature of Catholicism, an understanding reflected in the 1571 Treasons Act. The bull also, of course, presented a dilemma for Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects. 12  Edwards, ‘A Haven of Popery’, p. 110. 13  Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Cambridge, 2003); Clodagh Tait, ‘Catholic Martyrdom in Early Modern Ireland’, History Compass, 2 (2004), pp. 1–5; Clodagh Tait, ‘Adored for Saints: Catholic Martyrdom in Ireland, c.1560–1655’, Journal of Early Modern History, 5 (2001), pp. 128–59; Stephen Redmond, ‘Daniel, Edmund (1541/2–1572), Jesuit and Martyr’, ODNB; Thomas McCoog, SJ, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland and England 1541–1588: ‘Our Way of Proceeding?’ (Leiden, 1996), pp. 63, 78, 127. 14 Kesselring, The Northern Rebellion of 1569.

Elizabethan England, Wales, and Ireland  57 With the collapse of the rebellion, there was now no Catholic uprising to join; moreover, there were Catholics in England and Wales—­and in Ireland too—­who were loyal to Rome but opposed the violent removal of the Queen. For some time in the historiography of English Catholicism, the bull has thus tended to be viewed as a potential turning point without the turning: scholars assumed that most Catholics chose to overlook it, or to focus on the later mitigation offered from Rome, that Catholics were absolved from obeying, ‘as things stand’. Aislinn Muller, however, has argued that the bull was indeed more of a live issue, not only for the use to which Protestant polemicists could put it but also for its wider circulation and discussion within England. Muller also suggests that the mitigations offered in 1580–1 did not resolve the situation for Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects.15 In Ireland, the bull was to have a central place in the platform which justified armed rebellion. It also marked a sea change in Rome’s activism regarding the Irish episcopacy: the number of Catholic appointments made to Irish sees following the bull’s publication were, in John McCafferty’s phrasing, a ‘provocation’.16 For those Catholics supporting regime change in England or in Ireland, the bull strengthened and justified their developing stance against Elizabeth as il­legit­im­ ate and heretical, a Jezebel whose ignoble end was coming. The articulation of this more open and radical opposition was to be seen in the following decades, but the seeds lay in the 1570s.

1580s The years 1579–80 are often discussed as a turning point in English Catholic relations with the Crown for a number of reasons, but the connections between this shift in England and events in Ireland are usually not fully acknowledged. Whilst large-­scale Catholic rebellion against the Queen was now a thing of the past in England, 1579 saw two revolts in Ireland, signalling to the regime that the majority Catholic population might commit to radical activism. The Baltinglass rebellion took Elizabeth’s regime by surprise, given its leadership by a nobleman they considered an ally; but the Gaelic elements of this uprising were an important part of its effectiveness in undermining Tudor power. Christopher Maginn has demonstrated the potential of a crusading Counter-­Reformation ideology to make sense of the position of Catholics in Ireland, to channel Gaelic resentment against English government, and to provide the possibility of international support.17 Ultimately, the rebellion failed, but at some cost to English rule in Ireland, 15 Aislinn Muller, The Excommunication of Elizabeth I: Faith, Politics and Resistance in Post-­ Reformation England, 1570–1603 (Leiden, 2020). 16  McCafferty, ‘Becoming Irish Catholics: Ireland, 1534–1690’, p. 244. 17  Christopher Maginn, ‘The Baltinglass Rebellion, 1580: English Dissent or a Gaelic Uprising?’, Historical Journal, 47 (2004), pp. 205–32.

58  Katy Gibbons especially given that this was already weakened by the second Desmond rebellion. James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, a veteran from 1569, landed in Munster in July 1579. Under a papal banner, with clerical endorsement, and brandishing copies of Regnans in Excelsis, he declared the uprising to be a crusade against Elizabeth I. The rebels, supported by the earl of Desmond, presented the prospect of a significant rebellion against Elizabeth’s rule, where the Catholic identity of the Irish was at the heart of the challenge to Tudor authority.18 These rebellions in the middle of Elizabeth’s reign marked a point at which some at least of the Old English in Ireland were choosing their side. They were far from natural or comfortable allies with the Gaelic populations of Ireland who resisted plantation and encroaching English rule, but they continued to see loyalty to Rome as a fundamental constituent of their identity. In Ireland, Catholicism was beginning to present a potential common ground between historically divided populations. Contemporaries recognized these rebellions held significance beyond Ireland itself. An overturning of Tudor rule here might be a step towards similar in Wales and England. Moreover, some of the international support for the second Desmond rebellion was due to the lobbying of an English secular priest, Nicholas Sander, an apparently indefatigable opponent of Elizabeth. His itinerant career in the Low Countries, Rome, and Poland reflected direct commitment to the Universal Church. Probably the most pro-­papal of all English clerical exiles, Sander saw the English and Irish Catholic situation in connected and fundamentally international terms. He joined the rebellion himself, but died in Ireland as it collapsed.19 For Sander, rebellion in Ireland was part of the wider project of regime change, bringing to realization what Catholics had been enjoined to do in the papal bull of excommunication. The significance of the Irish rebellion beyond Ireland has been downplayed or overlooked in Anglocentric historiography. However, more recent scholarship has redressed this, with Gerard Kilroy arguing that it should be recognized as ‘the most serious threat to the Elizabethan state prior to the Spanish Armada’.20 Whilst there was potential for a joined-­ up approach on both sides of the Irish Sea, with support from Catholic powers overseas, this opportunity was not realized.21 Sander, it seems, was rather exceptional in his openness to considering a project that directly encompassed both Ireland and England: others who worked for the restoration of Catholicism to England did not really extend that vision to Ireland. Uprising in Ireland was fraught with consequences for the English Catholic cause and the international political landscape. The rebellions took shape just 18  Hiram Morgan, ‘Faith and Fatherland in Sixteenth-­Century Ireland’, History Ireland, 3 (1995), pp. 13–20; Gerard Kilroy, ‘ “Paths Coincident”: The Parallel Lives of Dr Nicholas Sander and Edmund Campion, SJ’, Journal of Jesuit Studies, 1 (2014), pp. 525–6. 19  Kilroy, ‘ “Paths Coincident”. 20  Kilroy, ‘ “Paths Coincident”, p. 539. 21  A point discussed by Thomas M. McCoog, SJ, ‘Resisting National Sentiment: Friction between Irish and English Jesuits in the Old Society’, Journal of Jesuit Studies, 6 (2019), pp. 606–7.

Elizabethan England, Wales, and Ireland  59 before the arrival of Jesuits in England, raising fears that the rebellion in Ireland could become a ‘back door’ into Catholic rebellion in England and Wales. This, Kilroy argues, shaped the response of the English regime to the arrival of Edmund Campion, Robert Persons, and their companions—­the first Jesuit mission in England. When the mission party arrived in England, the country was on high alert.22 And, of course, the ‘political’ character of the English mission became a key point of contention, coinciding as it did with the negotiations over the prospective marriage between Elizabeth I and François, duke of Alençon, the younger brother and heir to Henri III of France. Hopes were high that with a Catholic husband for their Protestant queen, Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects would soon be in a more secure position and that some form of toleration might be within reach. The collapse of this marriage project, coupled with the publication of Campion’s Brag and his subsequent arrest, imprisonment, and execution, had deep and long-­ lasting fallout.23 None of this stemmed the flow of priests into Elizabeth’s territories. Initially, the Jesuits were more prominent in England than elsewhere. The famous mission of Campion and Persons in 1580–1 saw activity focused within England, and this precedent was continued in the years that followed. Wales had been identified as fertile ground for missionary work and Hannah Thomas has recently suggested that the roots of a Welsh mission had been laid by Persons himself in the 1580s. However, the Society was not established in Wales until the 1590s, more than a decade after the first Jesuit mission to England.24 Nonetheless, prior to this, Welsh missionaries trained in Douai had been ministering to their co-­religionists and an established body of Welsh-­language writing, which engaged directly with the Continental Catholic Reformation, was available to Welsh Catholics.25 Overall, more than a hundred clergy, both secular and Jesuit, came to England and Wales by the close of the century. In ministering to their countrymen and co-­religionists, these priests could have divergent views about the reach and extent of their potential flock. James January-­McCann has revealed these striking differences in the work of Robert Persons, SJ, and Robert Gwyn, a Welsh sem­in­ ary priest. Both men wrote tracts at similar points in 1580 to rally ‘their’ faithful towards recusancy and away from Church papacy. Gwyn addressed his argument to all of his countrymen, apparently assuming that the majority of Welsh speakers remained Catholic. This was possibly a rhetorical tactic, but more likely it was a tendency on Gwyn’s part, seen also by other clergy, to place optimistic estimates 22  Kilroy, ‘ “Paths Coincident” ’, esp. p. 532. 23  Thomas McCoog, SJ, ‘The English Jesuit Mission and the French Match, 1579–1581’, Catholic Historical Review, 87 (2001), pp. 185–213; John Bossy, ‘English Catholics and the French Marriage, 1577–81’, Recusant History, 5 (1959), pp. 2–16. 24  Hannah Thomas, ‘Catholics in Wales’, in Ellis and Scully (eds.), Companion to Catholicism, pp. 339–67; cf. Thomas M. McCoog, SJ, ‘The Society of Jesus in Wales: The Welsh in the Society of Jesus: 1561–1625’, The Journal of Welsh Religious History, 5 (1997), pp. 1–27. 25  January-­McCann, ‘Exiles and Activists’, pp. 165–70.

60  Katy Gibbons on the numbers of Catholics and therefore the need for missionary work. At an earlier point, English Catholic clerics had done something similar: when Nicholas Sander advised the Roman hierarchy in the 1560s, he suggested that England was in essence still a Catholic country. By the 1580s, those working on the ground in England put a different view into print. Persons, like Gwyn, wrote to urge English Catholics to recusancy and separation from the Protestant Church, but his appeal to his flock was made in the assumption that they were living as a tested mi­nor­ity.26 In short, there were differences between missionaries about how the present and future of Catholicism in England and Wales was being imagined: this was influenced by, and in turn impacted, the practice of missionary work on the ground. In contrast, in Ireland, the missionaries shared their field, sometimes with bad feeling, with religious orders that predated them. The dissolution of religious houses had not been comprehensive in Ireland, so those religious orders which had been an influential part of the pre-­Reformation Church survived. In particular, the Observant Franciscans, whose friars were drawn from the Gaelic Irish population, continued to live and work across the island. Their unbroken presence across the Reformation period was another marker of continuity and an­tiquity for the Irish Church, which was lacking in its English counterpart. The friars were joined in the Elizabethan period by the Jesuits, although in smaller numbers than in England. Much is often made of the Jesuit’s vow of obedience to Rome, but the same is true for the Observant Franciscans in Ireland. Both of these orders were transnational. The very things that had concerned Henry VIII about the religious orders—­their loyalty to Rome and connections to an inter­ nation­al network—­were what informed their mission and their outlook, and gave them a resilience and confidence. Their engagement with this international, Counter-­Reformation outlook in turn shaped the ways in which the laity came to grapple with their status as Catholic subjects of a Protestant Crown. In the 1980s, Peter Holmes identified two periods when the English Catholic community shifted away from ‘compromise’ and towards ‘resistance’ in their relations with the Protestant Crown. The first was at the time of the Northern Rebellion in 1569; the second was in the mid-­1580s.27 More recent scholarship emphasizes the coexistence of these two impulses, but it remains the case that with the outbreak of the Anglo-­ Spanish war, the battle lines between the Protestant government and Catholics pushing for more radical military action were being solidified, as were the divisions between the latter and their co-­ religionists who sought to proclaim their loyalty to Elizabeth. There were a number of plots which involved plans for the removal of Elizabeth I, the landing of

26  January-­McCann, ‘Robert Gwyn and Robert Persons’. 27 Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of Elizabethan Catholics (Oxford, 1982). Holmes saw the first shift towards resistance occurring around the time of the 1569 rebellion.

Elizabethan England, Wales, and Ireland  61 foreign troops, and the accession of Mary Queen of Scots. The two most infamous plots of the 1580s are most often referred to by the name of an English Catholic protagonist who had some role in the conspiracy: the Throckmorton (1583) and the Babington (1586) plots. This tends to underplay the extent to which they were international endeavours, reliant on input, funds, and personnel from outside the country.28 They certainly involved contributions from English Catholics in England and overseas, but it was their international nature which made them a real threat. Exiles lobbied for the support of Rome, Spain, France, and the Duke of Guise amongst others, and in some cases the momentum of these plots relied upon them. This international input in turn deeply impacted the responses of the Elizabethan regime. These plots, alongside past rebellions in England and Wales, provided the regime with ‘proof ’ that Catholics were at best potential traitors and at worst actively seeking the death of the Queen. Key flash points like these plots thus saw a ramping up of anti-­Catholic measures in England and Wales. Whilst Wales is generally left out of this story of conspiracy against Elizabeth, its coastline had been recognized as fertile ground for Catholic restoration in the 1570s, including a plan promoted in Rome by Welsh clerics for a landing on the Menai Straits in Anglesey. There was also the prospect of rebellion in Ireland spreading westwards to Wales, then England. Elizabeth’s government was only too aware of how little control it could exert over all of its borders.29 In Ireland, the rebellions may have been put down, at a cost, but English plantation in Munster in the 1580s met with considerable resentment and opposition. Much of the radical Catholic writing and propagandizing against Elizabeth was misogynistic, in England and Ireland, and in those centres abroad where they found practical support and a ready audience.30 But few hesitated to recognize another female monarch, Mary Queen of Scots, as the legal, and closest, claimant to the English throne.31 Elizabeth I’s counsellors had been convinced for a long time that the Protestant Queen and the Protestant State would not be safe for as long as Mary Stuart remained alive and in England; it took Walsingham’s efforts in the Babington Plot to finally push a reluctant Elizabeth to sign the death 28  Stuart Carroll, Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Catholic Europe (Oxford, 2009), ch. 10; Stephen Alford, The Watchers: A Secret history of the Reign of Elizabeth I (London, 2013), chs. 10 and 11. 29  Welsh clerics Morys Clynnog and Owen Lewis were behind the project in 1576 for which they sought papal backing. Over time, however, their standing in Rome was diminished by their involvement in Stukely’s failed attempt at an invasion force in 1578: Thomas, ‘Catholics in Wales’, p. 6; Jason  A.  Nice, ‘Being “British” in Rome: The Welsh at the English College, 1578–1584’, Catholic Historical Review, 92 (2006), p. 11. 30  Freddy Cristóbal Dominguez, Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books During the Reign of Philip II (University Park, PA, 2020); Peter Lake, Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford, 2016); Christopher Highley, ‘The Royal Image in Elizabethan Ireland’, in Julia M. Walker (ed.), Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana (Durham, MC, 1998), pp. 60–75; Katy Gibbons, English Catholic Exiles in Late Sixteenth-­Century Paris (Woodbridge, 2011), ch. 3. 31  Michael Questier, Dynastic Politics and the British Reformations, 1558–1630 (Oxford, 2019), chs. 1–3.

62  Katy Gibbons ­ arrant for her cousin and fellow sovereign.32 By the time the Spanish Armada w sailed for England, the threat of Mary Queen of Scots had been removed, but hopes for a Catholic successor to Elizabeth had not died. The position of Catholics in England, Wales, and Ireland in the 1580s and beyond was marked by the failure of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Much ink has been spilt over the Armada as a turning point in the histories of early modern England and Spain. However unexpected English success many have been, it did serve to solidify the identification of Englishness with Protestantism. Spanish defeat in 1588 was seen by English Protestant historians as a providential victory: the ‘Protestant wind’ had protected plucky England from the might of Catholic Spanish tyranny. Despite the actions of many Catholics in support of the efforts at Tudor defence, the Armada of 1588 reinforced the association between Catholicism and foreign incursion. Yet in another sense, this armada was not transformative: the war continued and Spain did not abandon plans for an enterprise of England. In the eyes of Elizabeth’s councillors, the dispersal of the Spanish ships in 1588 did not equate to the dissolution of the Catholic threat, and anti-­Catholic measures were reinforced in England and Wales.

1590s and the Close of the Reign The closing decade of Elizabeth’s reign again saw uprising and rebellion, not to mention an urgent return to the unresolved question of the Queen’s succession. This was the point at which, Rory Rapple argues, ‘the political fates of England and Ireland . . . were more intertwined than they had been at any time since the reign of Henry VI’.33 The 1590s have long been seen as a time of crisis and factional fighting at the centre. Elizabeth, a childless and ageing monarch, had not identified her successor and the succession question dominated. In Ireland, there was large-­scale open rebellion. The Nine Years’ War (1593–1603) demonstrated the strength of Catholic opposition to Protestant rule and the advancing project of English plantations. Hugh O’Neill’s campaign in Ulster spread to most of the rest of Ireland. Significantly, there was support from Spain and Rome for this challenge to Tudor rule. Even if that support did not stretch as far as some hoped, the Pope offered an indulgence to all those who fought for the ‘crusade’ in Ireland in 1600: there was no doubt that those resisting English Protestant rule in Ireland were wedding their cause to their co-­religionists overseas and to the Universal Church. Catholicism in Ireland was marked by the political struggle that was 32 Rosamund Oates, ‘Puritans and the Monarchical Republic: Conformity and Conflict in the Elizabethan Church’, English Historical Review, 127 (2012), pp. 819–43. 33  Rory Rapple, ‘Brinkmanship and Bad Luck: Ireland, the Nine Years War and the Succession’, in Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes (eds.), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Elizabethan England (Manchester, 2016), pp. 236–56.

Elizabethan England, Wales, and Ireland  63 unique to Ireland, but it was also very much part of the Catholic international landscape. Rebellion in Ireland also served to complicate the ongoing Anglo-­ Spanish conflict, just as English involvement on the side of Protestant rebels in the Low Countries had been the main factor in the outbreak of Anglo-­Spanish war in the 1580s. In 1603, 3,000 Spanish troops landed in Ireland.34 Their defeat at the Battle of Kinsale did not detract from the association between Irish Catholics and their Continental co-­religionists, proving for the Protestant regime the lawlessness and treachery of their (Catholic) Irish subjects. The flight of the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell to the Continent did not occur until 1607, after the Queen’s death, but by this point the importance of connections to Continental Catholicism were undoubted. Irish rebellion was also connected to a crisis at the centre in England. The Earl of Essex’s failure in Ireland to deliver a decisive English victory and his unstable relationship with the Queen plunged him into disgrace. When he attempted an uprising in England in 1601, he sought to present himself as an outsider cri­tiquing the English establishment. He had adopted a sympathetic attitude to English Catholics in his entourage and even tried, prior to his surrender to Elizabeth, to secure cooperation for his cause from O’Neill himself. Nevertheless, Elizabeth lived long enough to see off Essex’s challenge and almost long enough to accept O’Neill’s surrender in 1603. At the time, her achievements may have felt rather precarious and the military conquest in Ireland had been realized at a considerable price. By this point, despite the Queen’s refusal to do so, several of her key advisors were treating the son of the executed Mary Queen of Scots, now James VI of Scotland, as the next English monarch. Some Catholics in England did likewise, hoping for the establishment of improved conditions for Catholicism. Others, though, were actively promoting the prospect of a Spanish candidate as the answer to the succession question. Robert Persons’ promotion of the Infanta Isabella as Elizabeth’s successor may not have been complete and explicit at the time of the writing of the infamous Conference about the Next Succession in 1595. Nevertheless, he was not alone: this solution to the succession question was supported by the ‘Spanish’ faction who had traditionally rejected compromise and negotiation with the Protestant Crown.35 Once again, Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects in England were divided. By 1603, a group from amongst the anti-­Spanish appellant clergy were ready to offer a declaration of loyalty to Elizabeth. As some of Elizabeth’s councillors were working towards the prospect of a Stuart succession, 34 For the battle of Kinsale, Ciaran O’Scea, Surviving Kinsale: Irish Emigration and Identity Formation in Early Modern Spain, 1601–1640 (Manchester, 2015), ch. 1; Hiram Morgan (ed.), The Battle of Kinsale (Bray, 2004). 35  Thomas McCoog, SJ, ‘The View from Abroad: Continental Powers and the Succession Crisis’, in Doran and Kewes (eds.), Doubtful and Dangerous, pp. 257–75; Victor Houliston, Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Persons’s Jesuit Polemic, 1580–1610 (Aldershot, 2007), esp. ch. 4.

64  Katy Gibbons many of the Queen’s Catholic subjects did likewise, judging that their best hopes for a Catholic future might lie with a Stuart succession. While these fundamental debates were ongoing, Catholics continued to build their international networks and draw on support overseas to establish dedicated institutions. Recent scholarship has successfully challenged the assumption that the establishment of new religious houses on the Continent, begun in 1598 with the English Benedictine convent in Brussels, reflected a post-­Armada retreat into quietism for Catholicism in Britain and Ireland. In fact, these houses had an active role in vital cross-­Channel networks, later providing political and financial support to the Jacobite cause.36 Moreover, the religious within these institutions were as much a part of the ‘mission mindset’ of English Catholicism as their (male) missionary counterparts.37 For those holding the reigns as the Tudor period came to a close, Catholics in all three kingdoms remained a potential political threat and retained a presence that could be construed as disruptive in the context of the household and local government, and in relation to con­tem­por­ary ­ideals of charity and neighbourliness. A large number of Catholic subjects of Ireland had recently proved themselves ready to take up arms against Protestant rule; the Catholic subjects of England and Wales, who were now in the minority, were perhaps less likely to turn to violent action, but the perceived threat remained. In other words, in 1603, the issues confronting the Crown relating to its Catholic subjects and their potentially, if not actually, traitorous nature remained unresolved, as did internal debates amongst Catholics about the best route to secure better times for themselves and their communities. Despite what looked like an increasingly hostile environment for Catholics, the Elizabethan State could not seal off its borders. It was not able to stem the flow of Catholic books, objects, and people into and out of its realms. Men and women from Ireland, Wales, and England travelled to Catholic territories in Europe and also often did the journey in reverse; on a smaller scale and, perhaps attracting less immediate attention, English Catholics also travelled to Ireland, often via Wales. Due to this mobility, by the close of the reign, two issues had been de­lin­ eated more clearly. First, in England, Wales, and Ireland, Catholics drew on older traditions and precedents to make sense of their plight and to strengthen their position in the present. Their identification with the Universal Church, to which they had belonged for centuries, led them to stress the novelty, divisiveness, and lack of established tradition of their Protestant governments. Importantly, the Universal Church was international and transnational: the survival of the Queen’s Catholic subjects depended on their links to the wider world and on the 36  Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke, 2003); James  E.  Kelly, English Convents in Catholic Europe, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020). 37  Laurence Lux-­Sterritt, English Benedictine Nuns in Exile in the Seventeenth Century (Manchester, 2017).

Elizabethan England, Wales, and Ireland  65 engagement of Catholics in these three territories with the newer strains of Catholic reform.38 By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, Catholics in her kingdom had not lived to see the official restoration of their faith, not even in Ireland, where Catholics were in the majority. But, in all three territories they had survived; moreover, they were more certain of their Catholic identity and had consolidated their inter­nation­al connections to build networks and establish new institutions overseas. Their presence abroad and these international networks also had a direct impact closer to home. Catholic practices adapted in response to the straightened circumstances encountered in all three of Elizabeth’s realms, but they were also informed by, and themselves informed, elements of ‘Counter-­ Reformation’ practice on the Continent. One pertinent example of this phenomenon has been revealed by Alexandra Walsham’s work on the evolving practices at and uses of the ancient shrine at St Winifred’s Well in Flintshire. Welsh Catholicism, through the work of the missionary priests, was not a backward-­ looking insular faith but one that engaged actively with Catholic Reformation practices and activity.39 And, whilst it is easy to see the translation of reform from the Continent to Catholics in England, Wales, and Ireland, the exchange was in some senses reciprocal.40 Perhaps the clearest example of this is presented by the revived significance of martyrdom in Catholic discourse: English, Welsh, and Irish Catholics continued to produce the martyrs that were in demand amongst their co-­religionists in Europe and beyond.41 Second, whilst all three groups needed the international Church to survive, in engaging with the wider Catholic world they did not present a united front. It is not that cooperation and mutual aid between these English, Welsh, and Irish Catholics did not occur: there is plenty of evidence of bonds of sympathy and practical assistance between Catholics from different parts of Elizabeth’s realms. Irish nuns entered English Catholic convents abroad42 and centres of resistance to Elizabeth’s regime, such as the entourage of Mary Queen of Scots, contained Catholics from the different nations. For example, the Welshman Thomas Morgan was a key member of the exile circle associated with Mary Stewart’s dowager council in Paris: his involvement in projects to undermine the Elizabethan 38  For more on the debate about the labelling of Catholicism and Catholic reform in this period, see John W. O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, MA, 2000); Alexandra Bamji, Geert  H.  Janssen, and Mary Laven (eds.), ‘Introduction’, The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-­Reformation (Abingdon, 2013). 39  Alexandra Walsham, Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (Farnham, 2014), pp. 177–206, esp. pp. 188ff. 40 William  J.  Sheils, ‘The Gospel, Liturgy and Controversy in the 1590s: Thomas Stapleton’s Promptuaria’, in James  E.  Kelly and Susan Royal (eds.), Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-­Reformation (Leiden, 2017), pp. 189–205. 41 Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom. 42  Marie-­Louise Coolahan, ‘Archipelagic Identities in Europe: Irish Nuns in English Convents’, in Caroline Bowden and James  E.  Kelly (eds.), The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800 (Farnham, 2013), pp. 211–28.

66  Katy Gibbons regime, despite his incarceration in the Bastille, placed him at the heart of exile activity in the 1580s. Elsewhere, the English layman Sir Francis Englefield had established a key role as advocate at the Spanish court and was able to help others, including the Irish cleric Richard Stanihurst.43 But, as Thomas McCoog argues, there were limits to this cooperation.44 Whilst some English Catholics saw Ireland as a safer place for their faith, Irish students began to turn away from the English universities as the oath became a prerequisite, and sought higher education in Catholic universities on the Continent, thus bringing to an end a traditional interaction between elite English and Old English students.45 And, as we have seen, there were successful attempts to create new institutions abroad for Elizabethan Catholics. Here, significantly, each nation tended to develop, or try to develop, their own institutions abroad. By 1603, both English and Irish had a number of foundations abroad, in France, the Low Countries, Spain, Portugal, and the Holy Roman Empire, ranging from enclosed female convents to schools for younger children to seminaries; but they tended towards a separation of the different nations.46 Most famously perhaps, the English College at Rome was riven with divisions between Welsh and English in the late 1570s, where there were competing visions for the purpose of the college and indeed of the Church. The Welsh contingent at the college viewed the institution as the means to train clergy for careers abroad until it might be safe to return home. However, they were defeated by the English, who saw the college as a training ground for missionaries who were to be deployed immediately.47 There are other examples of English mission leaders developing this attitude of separation: the actions of Persons delayed the foundation of an Irish institution in Spain as he pushed for its location in Salamanca, away from the English College in Valladolid.48 Persons’ subsequent verdict on the divisions at the English College in Rome was that both English and Welsh ‘wished well the conversion of their country, but agreed not well in the meanes or maner of consultation’,49 an analysis that might be extended to other institutions in exile. At the point of Elizabeth’s death, the Reformation struggles were not resolved and the differing fates of Catholics in England, Wales, and Ireland were deeply connected. Scholars have long since recognized the problems with trying to work out the number of Catholics, and now discuss the different ways in which Catholics were Catholic. Even this latter question however is not straightforward, 43  Ripple, ‘Brinkmanship and Bad Luck’, p. 243. 44  McCoog, ‘Resisting National Sentiment’. 45 Mary Ann Lyons and Thomas O’Connor (eds.), Strangers to Citizens: The Irish in Europe, 1600–1800 (Dublin, 2008). 46  Thomas O’Connor and Liam Chambers (eds.), Forming Catholic Communities: Irish, Scots and English College Networks in Europe (Leiden, 2018). 47  Nice, ‘Being “British” ’. 48  McCoog, ‘Resisting National Sentiment’, pp. 603–6. 49  Robert Persons, Storie of Domesticall Difficultie (1600), in M.  A.  Tierney (ed.), Dodd’s Church History of England, vol. 2 (London, 1839), p. 64; cited in Nice, ‘Being “British” ’, p. 10.

Elizabethan England, Wales, and Ireland  67 not only due to the differing experiences and priorities of Catholics in England, Wales, and Ireland but also because Catholics themselves were divided—­in some cases, seriously—­ about what membership of the Universal Catholic Church meant, and what sorts of responsibilities and behaviours it enjoined on them. In turning to the rest of the world for support, they emphasized how the fate of Catholics on Europe’s peripheries was important for those in mainland Europe and beyond, but they did not always make common cause against Elizabeth. Whilst engaging with and helping to shape international Catholicism, English, Welsh, and Irish Catholics remained deeply marked by national or ethnic divisions. There were bonds of sympathy and individual acts of solidarity, but not coordinated and united political and military action. These divisions may have helped the Elizabethan regime to some extent, although it did not render Catholics from England, Ireland, and Wales any less threatening, or at least any less of a potential threat. This chapter has tended to focus on flashpoints such as rebellions, conspiracies, and military enterprises: these were not endeavours that all Catholics in England, Wales, and Ireland supported. However, even as many Catholic lay people were keen to build accommodation and some form of tol­er­ ation rather than pursue the path of open resistance, the Elizabethan regime con­ tinued to view its Catholic subjects as a threat: this might be seen as a marker of their continued activity and presence.

Select Bibliography Dillon, Anne, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Cambridge, 2003). Doran, Susan and Paulina Kewes (eds.), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Elizabethan England (Manchester, 2016). Ellis, Angela and Robert E. Scully (eds.), A Companion to Catholicism and Recusancy in Britain and Ireland: From Reformation to Emancipation (Leiden: Brill, 2022). Ford, Alan and John McCafferty (eds.), The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2005). January-McCann, James, ‘Robert Gwyn and Robert Persons: Welsh and English Perspectives on Attendance at Anglican Service’, Recusant History, 32 (2014), pp. 159–71. Nice, Jason A., ‘Being “British” in Rome: The Welsh at the English College, 1578–1584’, Catholic Historical Review, 92 (2006), pp. 1–24. Tait, Clodagh, ‘Catholic Martyrdom in Early Modern Ireland’, History Compass, 2 (2004), pp. 1–5. Walsham, Alexandra, Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (Farnham, 2014).

4 Catholicism in Scotland to 1603 R. Scott Spurlock

This chapter offers an overview of Catholicism in Scotland from the eve of the Reformation to the Union of the Crowns in 1603. In particular, it seeks to con­ text­ual­ize the diverse experience of Catholics in relation to the particularities of Scottish political and theological ideology in the Protestant State and the Crown’s pragmatic approach to Catholics within the Commonweal to which it had been entrusted. Recent work has made strides in relation to the work of Jesuit priests and external networks that served to support Catholicism in Scotland, most not­ ably by Thomas McCoog, SJ, and Thomas McInally. Other work focused on the experience of lay people, particularly in Glasgow and the north-­east. What this chapter seeks to articulate is the space in between these two areas of research, by highlighting how the infrastructure of Catholicism within Scotland, rooted in regional networks of kinship and political power, ensured its survival within the context of Scottish religious and political theory.

Pre-­Reformation In the decades leading to the legal establishment of the Protestant Reformation in Scotland, few would have believed such significant ecclesiastical changes to be possible. The Regent Arran’s ‘godly fit’ in 1543 was short-­lived, and even as late as 1559 John Knox, in exile, remained unconvinced the reforming movement had sufficient traction to be successful. The Catholic Church in Scotland possessed distinctive elements making it both resilient to change and too factional to fully consolidate in the face of demands for reform. The system of collegiate churches developed as an intervention of powerful lay noblemen into a weak parochial framework and placed significant ecclesiastical influence in the hands of landed elites.1 Before and after the Reformation the influence of lay people in ec­cle­si­as­ tic­al appointments reflected their wider political standing, and so these rights—­ enshrined in Scots Law as heritable patronage—­were aggressively defended.2 1  Helen Brown, ‘Secular Colleges in Late Medieval Scotland’, in Clive Burgess and Martin Heale (eds.), The Late Medieval English College and Its Context (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 44–66. 2  James Kirk, Patterns of Reform (Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 283–4, 368–425. R. Scott Spurlock, Catholicism in Scotland to 1603 In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume I: Endings and New Beginnings, 1530–1640. Edited by: James E. Kelly and John McCafferty, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843801.003.0005

Catholicism in Scotland to 1603  69 Grants by the papacy in 1487 and 1535 gave the Scottish Crown powers to ­nom­in­ate to vacancies or delay nominations while retaining the incomes.3 This fostered the Crown’s expectations of influence over the national Church. Political motivations over ecclesiastical jurisdictions may have driven royal support for the elevation of St Andrews to archepiscopal status in 1472 in order ‘to achieve co-­ extensive boundaries for church and state’.4 Regardless, debates over the Crown’s relationship to the Church persisted long after the Reformation, while the prom­ in­ence of lay influence over ecclesiastical affairs weakened the authority of the bishops already suffering from rivalry between two sees with metropolitan status (Glasgow being elevated in 1492). As such, a fully effectual national structure never developed.5 Attempts to introduce a degree of reform, particularly around loose doctrine and clerical morality, came in councils held in 1549, 1552, 1556, and 1559, but these did little to impinge the coming revolution. John Hamilton, Archbishop of St Andrews from 1547, pushed for the councils and oversaw the production of a new printed vernacular catechism and a short creed. Intended to be read by clergy to gathered congregations, the catechism downplayed the authority of the pope and the pre-­eminence of the Mass, accentuating the author­ ity of scripture, ‘catholyk doctouris’ and councils. Yet these attempts did little to appease calls for more significant reform, spurred on by the formation of the Lords of the Congregation in 1557.

Impact of the Reformation In August 1560 parliament introduced a Protestant confession of faith, in ­op­pos­ition to the wishes of Mary Queen of Scots. Adopting a markedly Reformed the­ology, parliament also renounced the authority of the pope and declared the Mass and Catholic baptisms illegal, invoking biblical prohibitions against idolatry. The penalties for saying, hearing, or being present at a Catholic Mass were harsh: confiscation of goods and corporal punishment ‘at the discretion of the magistrate’ for a first offence; banishment for a second; and, the third, ‘justifying . . . death’.6 Allegedly only a schoolmaster in Leith and an anonymous priest experienced execution for saying the Mass, both in 1572.7 Lay people who attended Mass were

3  Jane Dawson, Scotland Re-­Formed, 1488–1587 (Edinburgh, 2007), p. 130. 4 D. M. Barrell, Medieval Scotland (Cambridge, 2000), p. 243. 5  L.  Macfarlane, ‘The Elevation of the Diocese of Glasgow into an Archbishopric in 1492’, Innes Review [IR], 43 (1992), pp. 99–118. 6  Records of the Parliament of Scotland [RPS], A1560/8/6, https://www.rps.ac.uk (accessed 12 March 2021 throughout). 7  Margaret  H.  B.  Sanderson, ‘Catholic Recusancy in Scotland in the Sixteenth Century’, IR, 21 (1970), p. 88.

70  R. Scott Spurlock not deemed heretics, but apostates guilty of the secular crime of treason.8 Yet despite the rigorous and potentially catastrophic statutory penalties facing Catholics, recent work by Ryan Burn argues secular and ecclesiastical policies tended towards ‘conversion’ rather than persecution.9 The drive for religious uniformity needs to be understood as being deeply rooted within the Reformed vision of Scotland, like Israel, being a covenanted nation. As such, Catholic Scots were chided towards reconciliation with the Reformed Kirk (and the nation) rather than pursued to the strict implementation of draconian statutes. If Catholics refused, they might have Protestant ministers warded in their homes, face heavy fines, be excommunicated, or potentially face (usually temporary) banishment. Scotland, like Israel, was to be kept pure. This typological vision of Scotland as a new Israel found further expression in the application of Old Testament statutes including the death penalty for persistent fornication and incest, new laws against blasphemy and violating the Sabbath, and relaxation of permitted degrees of consanguinity along biblical lines.10 Protestantism became not just a hallmark of Scotland, but an imperative. The General Assembly in 1572 declared ‘fuch hynous crymes that offendis the majeftie of God’, such as popery, murder, fornication, and recusancy should be purged from the country.11 Moreover, Protestantism became a requirement of James VI’s coronation oath of 1567 to ensure ‘the prince and the people be of one perfect religion’.12 The same parliament required a Protestant profession of faith prior to admission to public office or teaching in schools, colleges, or even as a private tutor.13 In other words, a vision of a covenanted nation came to define a Reformed interpretation of the theory of two kingdoms, articulated in Scotland as the ‘Kirk’ and ‘Commonweal’. Although William Gordon, bishop of Aberdeen and chancellor of the univer­ sity, and Robert Crichton, bishop of Dunkeld, remained in Scotland until their deaths in 1577 and 1585 respectively, they were largely inactive from the early 1570s.14 Only one of Scotland’s bishops was willing to meet with a papal ambas­ sador in 1562. The most significant figure remained James Beaton, Archbishop of Glasgow. Although he fled to Paris in July 1560, he continued to serve as a key conduit for Scottish Catholic and secular affairs as royal ambassador for Mary

8  John Knox, The Works of John Knox, ed. David Laing, 6 vols (Edinburgh, 1846–64), IV, p. 125; RPS, 1592/4/32. 9 Ryan Burns, ‘Potential Protestants: Catholics, Conformity and Conversion in Early Modern Scotland, 1560–1780’ (Northwestern University PhD thesis, 2019). 10  RPS, 1567/12/13 (Leviticus 20:10; Deuteronomy 22:22); 1567/12/14 (Leviticus 20:11–12); 1567/12/15 (Leviticus 18:6–18, 20:17–21, and Deuteronomy 27:20–23); RPS, 1581/10/24; 1568/7/21; 1579/10/23. 11  T. Thomson (ed.), Acts and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland [BUK], 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1839–45), I, p. 252. 12  RPS, 1567/12/7. 13  RPS, 1567/12/8; 1567/12/10. 14  L. Macfarlane, ‘Gordon, William (d. 1577), bishop of Aberdeen’, ODNB.

Catholicism in Scotland to 1603  71 and James to the French Court until his death in 1603. James restored him as the titular Archbishop of Glasgow in 1598, granting all ‘heritages, benefices, [and] dignities’ so long as he did not return to Scotland for more than one year.15 By the failure of the Queen’s cause in the civil war in 1573 Scotland was bereft of any active ecclesiastical hierarchy and Scottish Catholicism rapidly became deinstitu­ tionalized. Scotland’s convents, monasteries, and friaries dissipated at various speeds, already enfeebled by policies of feuing ecclesiastical lands to lay land­ holders as commendatores or bailies.16 Gradual translation of their properties into lay hands meant in many cases, the monks were left to remain but slowly die away, as in Dunfermline where they lingered into the 1580s.17 In 1587 the Crown seized monastic and other ecclesiastical lands and over the following decades transferred these into secular lordships for those who already held the feus. While politically this played an important part in James VI’s attempts to centralize the authority of the monarchy by creating a new class of landed gentry, it left the finances, properties, and inhabitants in the control of laymen.18 Where Catholics did retain or receive new rights as commendators or became lords of erection through receiving titles to ecclesiastical lands, such as Claud Hamilton, Catholic ministrations were sometimes supported. For instance, Alexander Seton, who received the abbey of Pluscarden in 1587, allegedly supported the last Benedictine to continue to administer the sacraments down to 1599.19 Similarly, monks related to the earl of Cassillis did the same at Crossraguel Abbey through most of the 1580s, while the former Cistercian brother of Sweetheart Abbey, Gilbert Brown (who Mary Queen of Scots made commendator under the title of ‘abbot’ in 1565) was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1587 and continued to minister under Maxwell protection until 1609.20 Since Trent demanded the Mass be performed in a church or oratory consecrated for that purpose, even altars damaged by iconoclasm remained sacramentally important. In New Abbey, under the Maxwell protection the altar remained intact at least until 1579.21 The ruins of Elgin Cathedral remained a location of clandestine Catholic practice well into the seven­teenth century.22 In addition, sites of devotion remained key for fostering faith, especially when access to the sacraments became a rarity. For these reasons Protestant authorities took special care to watch and prosecuted those who

15  RPS, 1598/6/17. 16  W. Stanford Reid, ‘Clerical Taxation: The Scottish Alternative to Dissolution of the Monasteries, 1530–1560’, The Catholic Historical Review, 34 (1948), pp. 129–53. 17  William James Anderson, ‘Narratives of the Scottish Reformation, I: Report of Father Robert Abercrombie, SJ in the year 1580’, Innes Review, 7 (1956), p. 31. 18  RPS, 1587/7/18; Julian Goodare, The Government of Scotland (Oxford, 2010), pp. 50–1. 19  Stephen Holmes, ‘Sixteenth Century Pluscarden Priory and its World’, IR, 58 (2007), pp. 35–71. 20  BUK, II, p. 722. 21  BUK, I, p. 429. 22  Lachlan Shaw, The History of the Province of Moray (Elgin, 1827), p. 318.

72  R. Scott Spurlock continued to frequent former monasteries and holy wells, such as the one at the Chapel of our Lady Grace on the banks of the Spey near Fochabers.23 At the local level, already weak diocesan structures usually prevented signifi­ cant public resilience for the old faith, particularly in urban parts of the country. However, since robust presbyteries were not effectively established until the 1580s, further away from the reach of central authorities established patterns of patronage influenced the pace of change. In the deanery of Elgin only four of the approximately twenty parishes were without Reformed ministries by 1574, in areas under Gordon influence, such as Strathspey, the commissioner responsible for planting Protestant ministers asked to be relieved of an impossible burden by 1572. Rothiemay (Banffshire) did not receive a Protestant minister until 1590.24 Sometimes, patrons did more than just resist change. Under the pretext of his rights as commendator of Paisley Abbey, Lord Robert Semple attempted to appoint a Catholic priest at Eastwood (near Glasgow) in 1573, for which he was put to the horn (outlawed). This act seems to have been a deliberate push back to Protestant encroachment, as the parish had a former Dominican friar serving as a Reformed ‘exhorter’ in 1563 and 1569.25 Paisley itself had no Protestant minister until Regent Morton appointed Patrick Adamson, later archbishop of St Andrews, in 1574, to a burgh noted by contemporaries as a ‘nest of Papistry’.26 As early as 1562 the visiting Papal Ambassador Nicholas de Gouda noted the  ‘nobility and wealthy Catholics hear mass occasionally with great secrecy, and in their own houses’.27 This became the norm in which many priests became chaplains in noble houses. The situation had little changed when Robert Abercrombie, SJ, reported to his superiors in 1580.28 Thomas McInally has argued Trent drove Catholicism into the homes of the nobility and gentry where rooms could be consecrated as chapels.29 Unease over the dependence on prom­ in­ent lay people may have been what prompted Abercrombie’s request for a dis­ pensation permitting Jesuits to perform the Mass in unconsecrated places, but in

23 William Cramond, Extracts from the Records of the Kirk-­Session of Elgin, 1584–1779 (Elgin, 1897), pp. 18–19. 24  Ian Cowan, Scottish Reformation (London, 1982), p. 184; Michael F. Graham, Uses of Reform: ‘Godly Discipline’ and Popular Behavior in Scotland and Beyond, 1560–1610 (Leiden, 1996), p. 245. 25  J. H. Burton and D. Masson (eds.), The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland [RPCS], 14 vols. (Edinburgh, 1877–98), I, pp. 229–30. 26  Elaine Finnie, ‘The House of Hamilton: Patronage, Politics and the Church in the Reformation Period’, IR, 36 (1985), p. 15. 27  De Gouda’s report is included as an appendix in Michael Yellowlees, ‘So Strange a Monster as a Jesuite’: The Society of `Jesus in Sixteenth-­Century Scotland (Isle of Colonsay, 2003), pp. 165–75 at p. 173. 28  Anderson, ‘Report of Father Robert Abercrombie’, pp. 32, 33; William Forbes-­Leith, Narratives of Scottish Catholics under Mary Stuart and James VI (Edinburgh, 1885), p. 197. 29 Thomas McInally, ‘Liturgical Problems on the Catholic Mission: Franciscan Mission to the Highlands in the Seventeenth Century’, in Allan  I.  Macinnes, Patricia Barton, and Kieran German (eds.), Scottish Liturgical Traditions and Religious Politics: From Reformers to Jacobites, 1540–1764 (Edinburgh, 2021), p. 57.

Catholicism in Scotland to 1603  73 1596 he confirmed the normality of saying Mass in private houses.30 Yet the link between ministerial provision and noble houses was not purely sacramental, as perhaps the General Assembly also recognized, when they noted that the lay ­people who hosted these clandestine rites were confident of the ‘favour and assis­ tance’ of others ‘in the countrey’.31 The maintenance of Catholicism had a political edge and depended on strong social links. Ministrations and Masses performed by family chaplains served as a means whereby ‘a catholic noble or laird might preserve attachment to the faith among his dependents’.32 The General Assembly affirmed this in a 1572 report that Masses continued in Old Aberdeen, Dunkeld, Paisley, and Eglinton, implying the involvement of the earls of Huntly, Atholl, Eglinton, and the Hamilton and Semple families.33 The Lords Maxwell and Seton and laird of Blackadder were also implicated in similar activities.34 By 1596 the General Assembly was more precise in naming the domestic spheres where Masses openly took place as the homes of Walter Lindsay of Balgavie (Forfarshire), James Wood, younger laird of Bonytoun (Forfarshire), the tenth earl of Angus (Bothwell Castle and Douglas Castle), the earl of Huntly (Huntly Castle and his residence in Old Aberdeen), and the earl of Erroll (Slains Castle and Logiealmond).35 From the 1580s the domestic chaplains were principally Jesuits.

Jesuits and Politics Jesuits were active in Scotland soon after the Reformation. Edmund Hay accom­ panied de Gouda in 1562 before returning to the Continent to complete his no­viti­ate along with his cousin William Crichton. They would maintain strong links with their families. Hay recruited other Scots to the order, including James Tyrie, nephew to the fifth Lord Gray. The Grays actively supported their work and preserved the rood screen and ‘ye monumentis of idolatrie painted in the Kirk of Fowles’ (Fowlis, Perthshire/Angus) into the seventeenth century.36 By the 1580s Catholic ministry relied principally on Jesuits, as the number of secular priests was small: just fifty-­five secular priests worked in Scotland from 1580 to 1655.37 The Jesuit mission was under the auspices of the English Mission, but remained staffed principally by Scots, including James Gordon Huntly, uncle of the sixth earl of Huntly. By 1585, two Jesuits were ensconced in the earl of Huntly’s home and two with John Maxwell, earl of Morton.38 The mission received financial

30  Anderson, ‘Report of Father Robert Abercrombie’, p. 41; Forbes-­Leith, Narratives, p. 227. 31  Anderson, ‘Report of Father Robert Abercrombie’, p. 41. 32  Sanderson, ‘Catholic Recusancy,’ p. 96. 33  BUK, I, p. 254. 34  Sanderson, ‘Catholic Recusancy’, p. 96. 35  BUK, III, p. 830. 36  National Records of Scotland (hereafter NRS), CH2/154/1, p. 136. 37  Brian Halloran, Scottish Secular Priests, 1580–1653 (Glasgow, 2003). 38  Forbes-­Leith, Narratives, p. 206.

74  R. Scott Spurlock backing from Spain and as a result associated with Spanish political intrigues ­pursued in the British Isles. While persistently a concern for the Kirk, Jesuit activities seized the wider imagination when authorities became aware of a series of plots. Most signifi­ cantly: the 1589 ‘Brig o’Dee Affair’ in which the earls of Huntly, Crawford, and Erroll briefly raised an army on hearing false news that a rebellion had broken out against James VI in Edinburgh; and, the 1592 ‘Spanish Blanks’, in which the earls of Huntly, Erroll, and Angus as well as Sir Patrick Gordon of Auchindoun (Huntly’s uncle) signed otherwise blank pieces of paper purportedly to be com­ pleted by William Crichton upon his arrival in Spain. William Crichton and other Jesuits believed that Scotland might be restored to the Catholic faith. They even received support from the French Crown, hoping for cooperation from Lord Seton and the duke of Lennox.39 They had the threefold motivations of restor­ ing the old faith, (in turn) securing James’ rule, and rebutting English political influence. All fuelled by a letter written by Mary Queen of Scots in 1586 ceding the Crown to the Spanish king should her son remain Protestant.40 Despite the ‘Terrible . . . feir’ these plots purportedly generated in the wake of the failed Spanish Armada, by the 1590s the political ambitions of leading Catholics clearly shifted away from international or national ambitions to regional ones.41 It is indicative of the nature of Catholic survival that the Jesuits in Scotland in 1585 resided in the homes of the Gordons in the north-­east and the Maxwells in the south-­west, both of whom used Jesuit networks to secure Spanish funding that they used primarily to secure their own regional hegemonies.42

‘Catholic Princes’? Jenny Wormald has demonstrated how the regional power bases of Scottish mag­ nates shaped their engagement with the Reformation. As she eloquently argued: the exercise of magnate power was a complex matter, very far from absolute, and genuinely contractual . . . and . . . the actions of those who found themselves on the national, and international, stage [during and after the Reformation] may be

39 J.  E.  Parish, ‘An Englishman Who Collaborated with the Spanish Armada’, Rice Institute Pamphlet-­Rice University Studies, 44 (1957), pp. 90–111. 40 Charles Burns, Archivum Arcis: Sources of British and Irish History in the Archivum Arcis Collection of the Vatican Secret Archives, 855–1789, ed. Andrew R. Nicoll (Edinburgh, 2017), p. 128. 41  Robert Pitcairn (ed.), The Autobiography and Diary of Mr. James Melvill, 2 vols. (Edinburgh 1842), I, p. 261. 42  Keith Brown, ‘The Making of a Politique: The Counter Reformation and the Regional Politics of John, Eighth Lord Maxwell’, SHR, 66 (1987), pp. 152–75.

Catholicism in Scotland to 1603  75 better understood if their position in their localities, the base from which they came, is made the basis of understanding.43

This framing is essential for understanding the religious dynamics of early modern Scotland. For example, in the Highlands and Western Isles religious identities clearly mapped onto existing clan rivalries. ClanCampbell quickly solidified their importance to the Crown as a powerful Protestant client clan.44 In 1565 the earl of Argyll secured the appointment of the Protestant John Carswell as bishop of the Isles. Carswell had translated Knox’s Reformed liturgy and Calvin’s little cat­ech­ism into Gaelic, under the patronage of Argyll. Foirm na n-­urrnuidheadh (1564) was the first book published in Scots Gaelic. By 1574 Protestant ministry had been established in every parish of the Campbell heart­ lands in Lorne, central Argyll, and Cowall. As the clan sought to expand their political dominance through securing bonds of manrent and contracts, they also pressed Protestantism. Argyll fostered partisan politics among the MacLeods, MacLeans, and MacDonalds, which included brokering deals with the ter­ri­tor­ ies of the MacLeods of Lewis which had passed into his care with the wardship of Mary MacLeod, heiress of Dunvegan. Argyll settled Protestant ministers in contested MacLeod territories in Skye (Diurnish 1566 and Trotternish 1573), Harris (1566), and Lewis (1573). Although Trotternish, Sleat, and North Uist had all been granted to Alexander Macleod of Dunvegan, they remained occu­ pied by the Macdonalds of Sleat, which heightened tensions. In 1573 the Campbell bishop of the Isles secured an obligation from Roderick MacLeod of Lewes that required him and all his heirs, kin, friends, servants, adherents, par­ takers, and dependents to uphold ‘all guid ordinances, lawis, and constitutionis and correctionis concerning the kirk, as the actis and constitutionis of the reformit Kirk of Scotland’.45 As such the activities of ClanCampbell need to be understood principally as extending their regional hegemony.46 This can be seen in the deviation of Carswell from Calvin’s catechism, where he replaced the civil magistrate’s authority with that of the ‘lord or secular noble’ to whom ‘the church ought to render obedience and honour . . . in anything that does not conflict with the will or command of God’.47 Argyll’s ambitions extended beyond his territories. He used Protestantism to le­ver­age his ambitions to fuel existing interclan tensions by making religion a new space of contestation. 43  Jenny Wormald, ‘ “Princes” and the Regions in the Scottish Reformation’, in Norman Macdougall (ed.), Church, Politics and Society: Scotland, 1408–1929 (Edinburgh, 1983), p. 76. 44  Jane Dawson, ‘Clan, Kin and Kirk: The Campbells and the Scottish Reformation’, in N.  Scott Amos, Andrew Pettegree, and Henk van Nierop (eds.), The Education of a Christian Society (Aldershot, 1999), p. 217. 45  Collectanea de Rebus Albanicis (Edinburgh, 1839), p. 6. 46  Alexander MacKenzie, History of the MacLeods (Inverness, 1889), pp. 36–49. 47 R.  L.  Thomson (ed.), Foirm na n-­Urrnuidheadh: John Carswell’s Translation of the Book of Common Order (Edinburgh: 1970), pp. 18–19; Kirk, Patterns of Reform, p. 303.

76  R. Scott Spurlock The confessionalization of the MacLeods, for example, may help to frame two of the most notorious events in Highland history. In about 1577 the MacLeods of Harris raided the island of Eigg and suffocated perhaps as many as 400 MacDonalds hiding in a cave by setting a large fire at the mouth. The following year, in revenge for this atrocity, clansmen of Clanranald of Uist burned the church at Trumpan (Waternish, Skye) while filled with MacLeod worshippers. As the MacLeods had accepted Protestantism by this time this may suggest ClanDonald viewed a heretical Church as a justified target. Certainly Catholicism remained a key aspect of corporate kin identity among ClanDonald. For during the same period Argyll advanced Protestantism, Eòin Muideartach, chief of Clanranald, actively supported Catholicism within his territories. He built new churches in Ardnamurchan, Arisaig, and Eigg in the 1570s and left a bequest for building a chapel in Uist after his death in 1584. In a similar vein, the MacLeans of Duart, influenced by ClanCampbell,48 accepted Protestantism, which served as a marker of distinction in their long-­running feud with the MacDonalds and tan­ gentially with the MacNeils of Barra, the latter who actively sustained Catholicism and continued to make pilgrimages to Croagh Patrick, Co. Mayo down to the 1590s.49 However, where Catholicism continued in the Western Isles it did so bereft of any institutional support until the seventeenth century and served, at least partially, as a means of resisting aggressive Campbell machinations. Mobilization of Catholicism can also be seen elsewhere in Scotland. In the wake of the 1592 Spanish Blanks fiasco, the sixth earl of Huntly and the other ‘Catholic earls’ took up arms against a Campbell-­led army that marched into Aberdeenshire under a royal patent at the Battle of Glenlivet. Tensions between the earls of Argyll and Huntly over regional hegemonies had been festering from the early 1500s. For the Gordons, upstart Protestant interests of regional rivals such as the Moray Stewarts and Campbells, prompted an active mobilization of Catholicism and its sustenance as a means of cementing regional hegemonies. According to a contemporary account, the Catholic earls prepared for the battle of Glenlivet with a Mass, and Huntly assured the men that, while they fought for their estates and their posterity, ‘it was God’s cause, for religioun was theyr quar­ rel, wherein he not fayle to protect them, and therefore that they would be in readiness valiantly to charge the enemy so soone as the word was given, which was the VIRGIN MARY’.50 Another first-­hand account noted Huntly—­who was at Mass when he heard news of Argyll’s approach—­completed his devotions before he ‘vanquished [the] invaders’, which in turn ‘led to many conversions, encouraged the Earl to fight for God’s cause, and many of his vassals who had 48  Jane Dawson, ‘The Protestant Earl and the Godly Gael: The Fifth Earl of Argyll [c.1538–73] and the Scottish Reformation’, Studies in Church History, Subsidia, 12 (1999), pp. 357–8. 49  John L. Campbell, ‘The MacNeils of Barra and the Irish Franciscans’, IR, 5 (1954), p. 34. 50 ‘Battle of Balrinnes’, in James Maidment (ed.), Spottiswoode Miscellany, vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 1844), p. 265.

Catholicism in Scotland to 1603  77 rebelled against him, in consequence of the censure of the ministers and the royal proclamations, returned to his service’.51 Others clearly identified with the Catholic cause, such as Andrew Gray, who purportedly charged into battle mak­ ing the sign of the cross and calling out ‘in manus tuas’ (‘Into thine hands’—Luke 23:46).52 The Gordons and their allies marked victory over a significantly larger force with a spontaneous Te Deum and a celebratory Mass in the ruins of Elgin Cathedral, 30 miles away.53 The celebration in the cathedral would have been seen as a public—­perhaps even civic—­event marking the primacy of the faith and the power of those who defended it. Other political aspects were at play, but the prominence of Catholicism as a marker of identity and cohesion is striking. From the 1570s, the earl of Huntly, as lieutenant of the north, neglected calls to pursue recusants and Jesuits travelled with impunity. Huntly also allegedly thwarted the Protestant cause by dispossessing the ministers and readers in churches within the presbytery of Fordyce in 1588: Fordyce, Rathen, Logilichan (Logie-­Buchan), Kildrynnie (Kildrummy), Cabrach, and Logie-­Mar, and prob­ ably Glenbuchat, Strathdon, Forbes, Kearn, Kinbathoch, and Auchindoir based on the names of ministers provided by Calderwood.54 In this Huntly did not act alone. Several kin groups collaborated in these activities and it is striking that, as Margaret Sanderson has noted, only eight of the twenty-­seven persons accused of aiding Jesuits in 1592/3 bore a name other than Gordon, Leslie, Hay, or Cheyne.55 These collaborations were facilitated because within districts of territorial mag­ nates’ Catholicism served as ‘knots’ between the magnate, local gentry, and ‘­vassals [who] identified themselves formally with the religion of their superiors’.56 In this respect, Catholicism worked alongside the bonds of manrent through which magnates forged regional hegemonies. This helps to make sense of the claim by Edmund MacGuaran, Archbishop of Armagh, that he administered the sacrament of confirmation to at least 10,000 people in the north-­east of Scotland in 1585.57 A report from 1579 noted rosaries could still be openly sold at the Turriff fair, no doubt due to the influence of the Hays in nearby Delgatie Castle.58 Even in the burgh of Aberdeen, Yule continued to be observed into the late 1570s. This was because leading families, including Huntly and the Gordon cadet branches of Abergeldie, Auchintoul, Letterfourie, Newton, and Gight supported these prac­ tices. It has also been argued that the architectural fingerprints of these alliances and the role of Jesuits remain in the use of Catholic imagery—­including Arma

51  Forbes-­Leith, Narratives, p. 357. 52  Alexander Gardner (ed.), Ballad Minstrelsy of Scotland (Glasgow, 1871), p. 544. 53  ‘Battle of Balrinnes’, p. 267. 54  David Calderwood, History of the Kirk of Scotland, ed. T. Thomson, 8 vols. (Edinburgh, 1842–9), IV, p. 658. 55  Sanderson, ‘Catholic Recusancy’, p. 96; RPCS, V, p. 46. 56  Donald MacLean, The Counter-­Reformation in Scotland (London, 1930), p. 66. 57  Forbes-­Leith, Narratives, p. 206. 58  Forbes-­Leith, Narratives, p. 162.

78  R. Scott Spurlock Christi—­in the masonry of Craig of Auchindoir (Gordon), Delgaty (Hay), Towie Barclay (Barclay), and Gight Castles.59 While each of the above families could be explored in detail, the Gordons of Gight make a good example. Despite being outlawed and excommunicated in the 1570s, the fifth laird of Gight remained in his castle, where he had a crucifix carved above the main entrance and persisted in the faith until his death in 1605. His son, the sixth laird, already excommunicated in 1601, forced men to carry painted crucifixes in his parent’s funeral processions.60 The elder Gight’s funeral was so notorious that even the King took time to write from London denouncing: ‘sum superstitious ceremoneis and rittes used as gif the profession of papistrie had bene specialie licenced and tolerated’. The younger Gight hosted Jesuits in Buchan. When accused by the Presbytery of Ellon of having ‘laitlye caused ane popish priest to baptise ane bairne to them’, he riposted the local minister had refused ‘ye first of ye four bairnes’.61 In 1601 the Privy Council ordered Gight to spend eight days every month in Aberdeen consulting with Kirk authorities on the points of religion.62 In 1607, along with other Gordons and some Forbeses, Gight’s younger brother formed an illegal Catholic confederacy known as the ‘Societie and Companie of Boyis’.63 The Gights forged links with co-­religionists through marriage. The sixth laird of Gight married Isobell Wood, sister of the notorious recusant James Wood, laird of Bonytoun (Boniton).64 Bonytoun and his brother William, laird of Latown, both fought at Glenlivet, after which William converted. Bonytoun served as a messenger for the Pope and Archbishop Beaton, and attended illicit Masses. In 1601 he was executed for stealing the deeds to his father’s estate after his mother threatened to disinherit him for his Catholicism. Some viewed his death as martyrdom, but Jesuit concerns over the accusations of theft tempered these voices.65 The multilateral nature of links across landed fam­ ilies in the north-­east is further evidenced by the earl of Erroll’s attempted inter­ vention to prevent the Presbytery of Ellon from prosecuting Isobell (lady Gight) and her sister for recusancy.66 These networks were very much reciprocal and represented the wills ‘of a number of powerful Catholic families in the north’

59 I.  B.  D.  Bryce and A.  Roberts, ‘Post-­Reformation Catholic Houses of North-­East Scotland’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 123 (1994), pp. 366–7. 60  J. Stuart (ed.), Selections from the records of the kirk session, presbytery, and synod of Aberdeen (Aberdeen, 1846), pp. xxxviii–­xli, 33–34; RPCS, VII, p. 345; Burns, ‘Potential Protestants’, pp. 146–7. 61 J. M. Bulloch, House of Gordon, 3 vols. (Aberdeen, 1903–12), I, pp. 235–8. 62 Bulloch, House of Gordon, p. 238. 63  Allan I. Macinnes, ‘Catholic Recusancy and the Penal Laws, 1603–1707’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 23 (1987), p. 37. 64 Bulloch, House of Gordon, I, p. 73. 65  Francis Shearman, ‘James Wood of Boniton’, IR, 5 (1954), pp. 28–3; Thomas McCoog, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1598–1606: ‘Lest our Lamp be Entirely Extinguished’ (Leiden, 2017), pp. 210, 212–13, 258–9, 309–10. 66  Sanderson, ‘Catholic Recusancy’, pp. 96–7.

Catholicism in Scotland to 1603  79 rather than simply ‘a lingering Catholicism [of magnates forced] on their dependents’.67 These networks of maintenance were not limited to the north-­east, nor were the Spanish Blanks the earliest appeals to the Spanish Crown. Along with Huntly, two other leading figures pursued Spanish support in 1586. The first was Lord Claud Hamilton, son of the Protestant second earl of Arran. He inherited his lands from his uncle, the last Catholic Archbishop of St Andrews, and benefited from the 1587 erection to a secular lordship. Despite managing to stay in the good graces of the Crown, Kirk-­authorities loathed Claud for ‘the sacrilegious bereving of the Kirk’ of the teinds of Paisley Abbey and later his open disregard for them.68 Like others, Claud’s religious activities need to be understood within his wider political connections. He collaborated with Huntly and John, eighth lord Maxwell (discussed below), in actively supporting Mary Queen of Scots in the 1570s. Along with the Catholic laird of Ferniehirst, they were viewed as her core sup­ porters which forged the foundation for their collaborations in the 1580s and beyond. Huntly and Hamilton actively agitated against the return of the earldom of Morton to the Douglases, in favour of their friend lord Maxwell who received the title in 1581.69 Maxwell in turn served as one of the sureties for Huntly, under the pain of £20,000, after his implication in the murder of the Protestant James Stewart earl of Moray in 1592.70 The motivations of John, eighth lord Maxwell, in these political intrigues were at least partly to stave off the threat of Johnstone and Douglas rivals. He sat on the 1581 assize condemning Regent Morton, James Douglas fourth earl of Morton. Four days later Maxwell received the title earl of Morton. Although stripped of the lands in 1587 he retained and continued to use the title. The political shake up in the wake of the Ruthven Raid saw him lose his charge as warden of the West Marches only to be replaced by his longstanding Johnstone rivals. Now signifi­ cantly vulnerable, Maxwell followed the advice of his uncle Sir John Maxwell, in whose home he had been fostered, and sought political support for himself in France. Travelling with his political ally Esmé Stewart, duke of Lennox, Maxwell met with Archbishop Beaton and the papal nuncio. He returned to Scotland in the autumn 1583. Maxwell’s cousin, the fifth lord Herries, openly espoused Catholicism in 1584. He caused the Mass to be publicly said in Dumfries and chased Protestant ministers from the town. In January 1586 Maxwell, along with gentry supporters, their retainers and prominent members of the burgh (includ­ ing burgesses) ‘assembled at a masse in publique manner at the Colledge aboute a myle from Dumfreis’ followed by another Mass in Dumfries itself reportedly

67  Wormald, ‘ “Princes” ’, p. 72. 68  BUK, III, p. 804. 69  William Fraser, The Book of Carlaverock. Memoirs of the Maxwells, Earls of Nithsdale, Lords Maxwell & Herries, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1873), I, p. 273. 70  Ibid., p. 288.

80  R. Scott Spurlock attended by 300 people.71 That year all holy days were kept in the burgh, with public Masses on Easter and Christmas.72 Alongside these public acts, Maxwell opened a campaign against the Johnstones and, unbeknownst to the Crown, wrote along with Huntly and Claud Hamilton to Philip II seeking financial sup­ port. His acts of violence against the Johnstones and public promulgation of Catholicism prompted the king to exile him in April 1587. Maxwell travelled to Spain, met with Philip II and later with the commander of the Spanish Armada proposing the fleet mount their invasion in Scotland. As Keith Brown demon­ strates the espousal of Catholic faith provided Maxwell access to Spanish financial support, but he used this for regional rather than national ambitions.73 Catholicism continued to serve as an essential aspect of Maxwell identity in the decades that followed, and thus it is not surprising that into the seventeenth cen­ tury the General Assembly complained of the large number of parishes bereft of Reformed ministers in Nithsdale and Annandale and the open practice of Catholicism in Dumfries.74

Catholic Noble Networks The confessional and noble alliances set out above were reflected in marriage pat­ terns as well. The sixth earl of Huntly—­grandson of the duke of Châtellerault through his mother Anne (and thus nephew of Claud Hamilton)—married the cousin of James VI, Henrietta Stewart, daughter of the Catholic duke of Lennox, Esmé Stewart—­James VI’s first cousin once removed. Henrietta proved an ef­fect­ ive agent in negotiating the reconciliation of her husband to the Kirk in the 1590s and many suspected her to have been the principal influence in Queen Anna’s conversion to Catholicism sometime before 1600.75 The second most powerful of the Catholic earls, Francis Hay, ninth earl of Hay, married his third wife in 1590: Elizabeth Douglas, daughter of sixth earl of Morton. Despite her father being a devout Protestant, Elizabeth was Catholic and participated in a network of Catholic women around the queen.76 Their daughter, Eleanor, married the earl of Linlithgow. He was noted as a nominal Catholic in 1602 before conforming to the Kirk, while she became one of the most notorious recusants in seventeenth cen­ tury Scotland. Claud Hamilton married Margaret Seton, daughter of the fifth Lord Seton who made his family’s Catholicism manifest in a striking 1572 family

71  Joseph Bain (ed.), Calendar of Letters and Papers Relating to the Affairs of the Borders of England and Scotland, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1894), I, p. 216; Brown, ‘The Making of a Politique’, p. 159. 72 Calderwood, History, IV, pp. 657–8. 73  Brown, ‘The Making of a Politique’, p. 174. 74  BUK, III, pp. 720, 997; Fraser, Book of Carlaverock, I, pp. 76, 344. 75  A.J. Loomie, ‘King James I’s Catholic Consort’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 34 (1971), p. 304. 76  Jemma Field, ‘Anna of Denmark and the Politics of Religious Identity in Jacobean Scotland and England, c.1592–1619’, Northern Studies, 50 (2019), pp. 92–3.

Catholicism in Scotland to 1603  81 portrait by Frans Pourbus the elder.77 This made Claud brother-­in-­law to the staunchly Catholic Seton brothers: Robert, first earl of Winton, and Alexander, lord Fyvie (1598) and earl of Dunfermline (1605). Lord Maxwell married Elizabeth Douglas, daughter of the seventh earl of Angus and sister of Archibald Douglas, later eighth earl of Angus and fifth earl of Morton. They too were great-­ niece and -nephew to Claud Hamilton by way of his illegitimate brother John Hamilton of Samuelston. Although the eighth earl of Angus was an ‘ultra-­ Protestant’, his sister conformed to her husband’s faith.78 With no heir, the earl­ dom of Angus passed to Sir William Douglas of Glenbervie, who became ninth earl. His son, also William, the tenth earl of Angus, had converted to Catholicism in 1577 and became one of the principal conspirators in the 1580s. It seems unlikely the tenth earl’s conversion was as spontaneous and out-­of-­step with the wider family as historians have purported, since his brother Sir Robert Douglas was misidentified in 1597 as a Jesuit in Rome.79 From 1588, while still principally resident in Angus, Mass frequently took place in his home and ‘sindrie tymes’ he sent armed men to rabble the ministers of Fetteresso and Ecclesgreig.80 As tenth earl of Angus from 1591, he maintained a staunchly Catholic household in Douglas and Bothwell Castles. These links matter because, more than just reflecting patterns of noble patri­ mony, they serve to map the Jesuit mission in Scotland. While early reports noted the original bases of the mission in the homes of Huntly and Morton, reports nearly fifty years later placed the Jesuits in the homes of the earl of Erroll, marquis of Huntly, second earl of Abercorn (grandson of Claud), earl of Winton (son of fifth Lord Seton, brother of Alexander Seton, Lord Chancellor and first earl of Dunfermline, and brother-­in-­law of Claud Hamilton), and the countess of Linlithgow (Erroll’s daughter).81 The co-­agnatic nature of Scottish households—­where women frequently kept their family name, owned property and remained firmly connected to their own kin networks—­provided a key means through which women served in sustaining Catholicism. So much so, the 1616 General Assembly discussed at some length the risks posed by women who, under the pretext of keeping schools, provided priests access to ‘catechise and pervert the youth in their young and tender age in such sort that hardlie therafter . . . can they be brocht fra their errours’.82 They noted, in particular, ‘the wyves of Noblemen, Gentlemen, and others profeffing Papiftry’ who reset priests and permit them access to their homes.83 These 77  https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-­and-­artists/5289/george-­5th-­lord-­seton-­about-­1531-­ 1585-­and-­his-­family. 78 Calderwood, History, IV, p. 657. 79  A. Francis Steuart, ‘Record Room’, SHR, 1 (1904), p. 220. 80 Calderwood, History, IV, p. 660. 81  Forbes-­Leith, Narratives, I, pp. 7–11. 82  BUK, III, p. 1120; Ian Hazlett (ed.), ‘Concilium Aberdoniense Ecclesiae Scoticanae 1616’, in A. Melloni and G. Braghi (eds.), Synods of the Churches of and after the Reformation (Turnhout, forthcoming). 83  BUK, III, p. 1118.

82  R. Scott Spurlock ­ atterns of Catholic persistence were longstanding. In 1575 Jean Gordon (by then p countess of Sutherland), lady Fyvie, and lady Aboyne, were all pursued for host­ ing Mass in their homes.84 The Kirk accused Lady Mar and Lady Atholl, rather than their husbands, of protecting priests and excommunicate Catholics.85 Jesuits recognized the importance of women to their mission. While Abercrombie briefly discussed gifts to ‘secure . . . friendship’ of men, he went on to list half-­a-­dozen suitable gifts for women including rosaries, Agnus Deis, fine pictures, statues or pottery, books (such as the Mystery of the Rosary in Pictures or catechisms) or ‘girdles or ribbons which have touche the chair of St Peter, fancy shawls, etc’.86 In the years that followed, the Kirk noted Jesuits distributing these objects.87 Women sustained the faith in closed domestic spheres, fostering their own households, or through hosting schools, catechism or Mass. Some women maintained a Catholic household while the husband conformed outwardly (and perhaps only occasion­ ally) to the Kirk. This was certainly the case for Sir Alexander Fraser of Philorth, who tolerated his wife’s Catholicism and built her a secret chapel.88 A conforming husband created complex dynamics for Protestant authorities, as he and his prop­ erty could not be seized upon for his wife’s faults. While Catherine McMillan has argued authorities frequently pursued women due to a perceived vulnerability, Ryan Burns has shown some women could effectively circumvent prosecution through dexterous manoeuvring.89 Overall, key noble Catholic households, their marriage patterns and their support of the Jesuit mission were closely bound together. Marriages of noble women were both scaffolds of dynamic aspiration and lynchpins maintaining the Catholic faith.

Facing Protestant Discipline While the observance of Yule or saint’s days, visiting pilgrimage sites or support­ ing priests led to accusations of Catholicism, the decisive test was conformity through regular church attendance, reception of the sacraments and submission

84 Allan White, OP, ‘The Regent Morton’s Visitation: The Reformation in Aberdeen, 1574’, in A.A.  MacDonald, Michael Lynch, and Ian Cowan (eds.), The Renaissance in Scotland (Leiden, 1994), p. 259. 85  Sanderson, ‘Catholic Recusancy’, p. 96; BUK, II, pp. 551, 722. 86  Anderson, ‘Narratives’, p. 42; Patricia Barton, ‘Jesuits, Mission and Gender in Post-­Reformation Scotland’, in Macinnes, Barton, and German (eds.), Scottish Liturgical Traditions, p. 41. 87 Calderwood, History, IV, pp. 398, 658. 88  William Forbes-­Leith, Memoirs of Scottish Catholics during the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries, 2 vols. (London, 1909), pp. 1, 17–18; Bryce and Roberts, ‘Post-­Reformation Catholic Houses’, pp. 368–9. 89 Catherine McMillan, ‘ “Scho refuseit altogidder to heir his voce”: Women and Catholic Recusancy in North East Scotland, 1560–1610’, Scottish Church History, 45 (2016), pp. 36–48; Ryan Burns, ‘Gender, Resistance and Conformity in Early Modern Scotland, 1560–1650’, International Review of Scottish Studies, 44 (2019), pp. 57–84.

Catholicism in Scotland to 1603  83 to discipline.90 Yet lack of capacity in many church buildings and the infrequency of communion (often only once a year) meant building a case against recusants could be tricky. The punishment for those found guilty and unrepentant was excommunication. In a spiritual sense, neither Protestants or Catholics viewed excommunication from the Kirk as damnation. Rather the sentence brought complete isolation for an excommunicate from all social interactions within the community—­ including employment, trade, entertainment, or holding public office. Kirk sessions threatened those who broke the ban on interactions with excommunicates with fines and the risk of excommunication themselves. Although the ability to resist disciplinary procedures depended heavily on social standing and resources, the majority eventually had to conform to the Church, even if only occasionally. Even Huntly, Erroll, and Angus capitulated and con­ formed in 1597, albeit not for good. But this had a significant impact on Catholics lower down the social order, for as Allan Macinnes has argued, the faith—­or at least Catholic ministrations—‘spread from the country seats of nobles to those of the gentry and from their town-­houses to the tenements of the burgesses and indwellers’.91 As a result, the conformity of the Catholic earls’ prompted the Jesuit mission to temporarily cease, while, according to the minister in Strathbogie, Huntly’s absence from direct local influence during imprisonment 1611–14 led to the number of recusants in the parish plummeting to just three. Upon his return the number swelled to seventy-­three.92 While lay Catholics employed a number of tactics to avoid prosecution includ­ ing disputing parish boundaries, subjecting themselves to further instruction, or asking for additional time to reflect on their consciences, in the end it became normal practice to conform to the Kirk to appease its disciplinary mechanisms.93 The Jesuits initially reported three kinds of Scots Catholics: those who boldly pro­ fessed the faith, a majority who ‘went to hear the heretics’ sermons . . . to preserve their fortunes and worldy goods’, and ‘neophytes’. ‘All these’, they reported, ‘were admitted by our Fathers without any difficulty or hesitation to the sacraments’.94 The Jesuits continued to permit lay Catholics to occasionally conform to the Kirk by attending services and hearing sermons. Some even feigned taking com­mu­ nion. When Jesuits in Scotland attempted to stop the practice under instructions in 1598, it proved disastrous. Scots Catholics lamented that ‘satan himself could not have devised a more effective way of impeding the salvation of souls’.95 In response, Abercrombie pleaded in 1602 to at least allow attendance at sermons, 90  Margo Todd, Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, CT, 2002), p. 114. 91  Macinnes, ‘Catholic Recusancy’, p. 30. 92 David Laing (ed.), Original Letters Relating to the Ecclesiastical Affairs of Scotland, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1851), II, p. 351. 93  For a fuller discussion, see R. Scott Spurlock, ‘Post-­Reformation Catholic Survival’, in Ian Hazlett (ed.), A Companion to the Reformation in Scotland, c.1525–1638 (Leiden, 2021), pp. 578–604. 94  H. Chadwick, ‘Crypto-­Catholicism, England and Scotland’, The Month, 178 (1942), p. 393. 95 McCoog, The Society of Jesus . . . 1598–1606, p. 63.

84  R. Scott Spurlock particularly for the well-­educated, claiming ‘it seems to me that many of our theo­lo­gians allow this without much difficulty’.96 Crichton emphasized their practice was not blanket toleration, but that they did not perceive occasional attendance at Protestants services as ‘schismatic’.97 Despite the unwavering pos­ ition of their superiors, it appears the lenient practices of Scottish Jesuits con­ tinued into the following decade, for new Jesuits arriving in 1617 reported they knew of very few Scots Catholics who had not conformed ‘and once a year, though they did not actually receive what is called the Lord’s supper, they pre­ tended to do so’, while ‘a great many went still further’ by accepting the Reformed confession of faith and ‘received the supper in reality’. According to this account, the new missionaries were aware of ‘very few Catholics . . . who were not guilty of this compliance’.98

Catholics and the Commonweal The great contradiction of Reformation Scotland is that, despite arguably boasting the most rigorous legislation in Europe, persecution of Catholics was episodic and generally mild prior to the Union of the Crowns. Approaches to discipline were frequently measured and pragmatic. Paul Goatman has demon­ strated this in the experience of Archibald Hegate, a notary and town clerk in Glasgow.99 Though excommunicated three times, and forced to undergo humiliating public penance, authorities sought to reconcile rather than con­ demn. Alan MacDonald has also argued the policies of early modern Scotland intended to reconcile Catholics.100 Much of the apathy towards thoroughly eradicating Catholicism has been placed upon James VI as either politically motivated, appeasement of foreign Catholic powers, or apathy, as the General Assembly in 1587 intimated.101 In 1590 the Kirk flat out accused him of acting favourably towards Catholics.102 The difference in the positions of King and Kirk lay in the nature of the Scottish Reformation itself. While deeply rooted in the Reformed concept of covenant, it also channelled the recently developed concept of the ‘Common weill’, or the

96 McCoog, The Society of Jesus . . . 1598–1606, p. 394. 97  Chadwick, ‘Crypto-­Catholicism’, p. 397. 98  Forbes-­Leith, Memoirs of Scottish Catholics, pp. 17–18. 99 Paul Goatman, ‘Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Jacobean Scotland: The Case of Archibald Hegate Revisited’, IR, 67 (2016), pp. 159–81. 100  A. Macdonald, ‘Religious Pluralism in Jacobean Scotland’, Aberdeen History Review, 58 (2000), pp. 313–14. 101  BUK, II, pp. 713–16. 102 Alan R. MacDonald, The Jacobean Kirk, 1567–1625: Sovereignty, Polity and Liturgy (Aldershot, 1998), p. 45.

Catholicism in Scotland to 1603  85 (political) good of the country as a whole.103 While King and Commonweal have been juxtaposed in the analysis of Scottish political theory, contemporar­ ies were much more likely to reference ‘Kirk’ and ‘Commonweal’ in a fashion akin to wider Protestant articulations of two kingdoms theologies. In the Scottish context James understood himself to have an obligation to protect both. The King’s pol­ it­ ical thinking had been shaped by his tutor George Buchanan who articulated in his Jure Regni apud Scotos (1570) the ruler’s ‘prin­ cipal function, as with the ­doctor, to maintain harmony among the members of the body politic’ or Commonweal.104 James held a similar view, advising his son in Basilikon Doron not to presume (as Catholics did) that the Kirk is ‘­bettir . . . [than] youre awin knauledge’.105 In other words, James came to view himself as having independence of thought in relation to the Kirk and his role to be a ‘louing nourish-­father to the Churche’ and State.106 The spheres of Kirk and Commonweal had a mutuality and reciprocity within his broader understanding of the monarch’s responsibilities, particularly within the covenanted context of Scotland’s self-­fashioning. As Roger Mason has pointed out, the Lords of the Congregation had themselves invoked the well-­being of the Commonweal as a principal for pursuing a covenant-­based Protestant reform.107 The fundamental challenge in Scotland is that despite a general articulation of a two kingdom theology, the more rigorously Reformed—­generally Presbyterian—­ within the Kirk tended to conflate the two. They viewed Scotland as a nation in which the population was subject to the dual obligations of kingdom and religion as the Jews were—­perceiving the demands to ultimately be coterminous. James understood such ‘pharisaicall puritanes’, as he himself termed them, to be the ‘uerrie pestis in [both] the kirke & commounueill of skotland’, rather than Catholics, whom he referenced paternalistically, but benignly.108 James held the Commonweal and the Kirk as two pillars within the kingdom over which the Crown alone had direct oversight.109 The demands of balancing the health and stability of the Commonweal and defending and supporting the Kirk were both priorities that the Crown—­and by extension the Privy Council—­refused to con­ flate to the detriment of either. This is evidenced in part by the fact that James never identified Catholics as a particular risk to the Commonweal of Scotland as he did in Ireland, famously declaring in 1614 that Irish Catholics were half-­subjects 103  Roger Mason, ‘Covenant and Commonweal: The Language of Politics in Reformation Scotland’, in Macdougall (ed.), Church, Politics and Society, pp. 108–12, 119–20; ‘Commoun weil’, in Dicitonaries of the Scots Language, https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/dost/commoun_wele (accessed 11 January 2021). 104  Roger  A.  Mason and Martin  S.  Smith (eds. and trans.), A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship among the Scots: A Critical Edition and Translation of George Buchanan’s De Iure Regni apud Scotos Dialogus (London, 2004), pp. lii, 21. 105  Basilikon Doron of James VI, ed. James Craigie, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1944, 1950), I, p. 48. 106  Basilikon Doron, I, p. 81. 107  Mason, ‘Covenant and Commweal’, pp. 110–12. 108  Basilikon Doron, I, pp. 39, 74, 78, 173. 109  Roger Mason, Kingship and Commonweal (East Linton, 1998), p. 130.

86  R. Scott Spurlock deserving half-­rights. In contrast, he sought to ensure Catholic nobles upheld their roles in governing, and resisted removing key regional players thus creating vacuums the Crown was too weak to fill. Removing magnates risked destabilizing the Commonweal, which is why James had been so reticent to forfeit the Catholic earls in 1594 and so speedy to restore them. The distinctiveness of this dynamic was reflected in the realization of an English diplomat at the Scottish Court: ‘think not as I wrote long ago that so great a house [as Huntly] can be wrecked’.110 The need for maintaining even lesser noble power is evidenced in the 1610 letter from the bishop of Moray to James asking for leniency towards the laird of Gight who, despite being a pernicious Catholic, ‘hes showin himself a great furderar and favourer of your Majestys peace in the bounds of his dwelling and residence.’111 In return, however, he expected Catholics to keep their faith within their private spheres. Just as James refused to allow sanctions in the ecclesiastical sphere to uni­lat­ eral­ly affect the political Commonweal, so too could burgh and other local authorities. This occurred in part because noble power played a prominent role in burgh political life, but also because local oligarchies sought to maintain the sta­ bility in burghs. Catholics continued to serve in burgh governance in Aberdeen throughout the period.112 Burgesses serving on Kirk sessions often resisted pur­ suing their peers for recusancy unless individual grudges came into play or pol­it­ ical situations favoured this approach. Sometimes the ban on Catholics holding public office were overlooked in preference of maintaining local oligarchies.113 Michael Graham has even argued that down to the late 1570s ‘the particular reli­ gious status quo in Aberdeen’ meant that some Catholics served on the Kirk session.114 Ultimately, however, the pillar on which Catholicism rested was the Scottish landed classes, in particular the peerage. Between 1587 and 1625 it has been esti­ mated more than one-­third of the peerage were Catholic and, remarkably, the number doubled after 1587.115 In 1596 the papal agent in Brussells compiled a list of leading Scots he deemed to be Catholic, despite their outward conformity to the Kirk. The duke of Lennox, the earls of Crawford, Morton, Cassilis, Sutherland, and Caithness, as well as Lords Hume, Seton, Sanquhar (Crichton), Herries

110 Keith M. Brown, Noble Power in Scotland from the Reformation to the Revolution (Edinburgh, 2013), p. 14. 111 Anon., The Miscellany of the Spalding Club Miscellany, vol. II (Aberdeen, 1842), p. 155. 112  See J. R. D. Falconer, Crime and Community in Reformation Scotland (London, 2013), passim. 113 Goatman, ‘Tolerance and Intolerance’, pp. 172–3; Keith  M.  Brown, ‘Toward Political Participation and Capacity: Elections, Voting, and Representation in Early Modern Scotland’, The Journal of Modern History, 88 (2016), p. 17. 114 Graham, Uses of Reform, p. 114. 115 Christina-­ Anne Boyle, ‘A Social Analysis of the Upper Ranks of the Scottish Peerage, 1587–1625’ (McGill University MTh thesis, 1998), pp. 21–2.

Catholicism in Scotland to 1603  87 (Maxwell), Livingstone, Sempill, and Gray all appeared.116 Not only did these individuals remain in the Crown’s favour, but several even held prominent roles in government. Tellingly, a number of these men participated in the baptismal ceremony of Prince Henry in 1594. While the involvement of the second duke of Lennox (James VI’s cousin) and the noted Catholic Annabella Murray, countess of Mar, can be explained by their close family ties, the King appointed other Catholics to prominent roles in the ceremony including carrying the very instru­ ments of the sacrament: Lord Semple (a lavar of water), Lord Seton (the basin), Lord Livingston (a towel), and Lord Home—­captain of the King’s Guard (a crown).117 Six years later at the baptism of Prince Charles, Henrietta, now mar­ chioness of Huntly, held the child throughout the sermon.118 The imperative for both the Kirk and the Crown was to harness the loyalty of regional magnates. The Kirk admitted this in 1602 when it ordered Reformed ministers to reside with Huntly, Erroll, Angus, Hume, Herries, Maxwell, Semple, and Sutherland for the period of three months, declaring that if they could not be converted, Protestant kirks would never be able to prosper ‘within their bounds’.119 Similarly, the pol­it­ ical nature of James’ forbearance is best surmised in the claim of the Jesuit Abercrombie in 1601 that his care for Catholics extended ‘so far as he can make use of them for the purpose of furthering his [own] design’.120

Conclusion The survival of Catholicism must be understood principally as the successful efforts of the Catholic nobility to sustain their faith and preserve their traditional powers. This depended on the lenient policy of the Jesuits that permitted them to occasionally conform outwardly to the Protestant Kirk. In turn this enabled Catholics to manipulate both royal policies seeking the political health of the Commonweal and the Kirk’s own desire to secure religious uniformity. It was a balancing act, but one that generally kept them from falling under the dis­cip­lin­ ary mechanisms of the Kirk or at least incurring the penal sanctions that might disempower them from their roles in helping a centrally weak mon­archy to govern. In so doing, Catholic nobility made themselves nearly indispensable to the Crown’s vision of a healthy Commonweal. Thus James’ leniency towards Catholics 116  Alphons Bellesheim, History of the Catholic Church in Scotland, trans. D. Oswald Hunter Blair, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1887–90), III, p. 462. 117  Henry  W.  Meikle (ed.), Works of William Fowler, Secretary to Queen Anne, Wife of James VI (Edinburgh and London, 1936), II, pp. 181–2. 118  Ruth Grant, ‘Politicking Jacobean Women: Lady Ferniehirst, the Countess of Arran and the Countess of Huntly, c.1580–1603’, in Elizabeth Ewan and Maureen  M.  Meikle (eds.), Women in Scotland, c. 1100–c. 1750 (East Linton, 1999), p. 102. 119 Calderwood, History, VI, pp. 166–7; BUK, pp. 983–5. 120  Forbes-­Leith, Narratives, p. 270.

88  R. Scott Spurlock was political and they were expected to keep their Catholicism secluded. But James did not hate Catholics. The King remained fast friends with a number of leading Catholics, in particular Huntly, and several held privileged roles at Court or in the royal household. Neither did he fear the Jesuits. He met and debated with them on at least two occasions, and even purportedly allowed one to serve in the royal household and minister to Queen Anne.121 The Crown—­and often burghal authorities—­generally preferred not to disrupt the delicate political bal­ ance of the early modern Scottish Commonweal. The King’s policies towards Catholics would change after the Union of the Crowns, particularly as he sought to appease Presbyterian critics of his episcopal innovations by increasing pressure on Catholics. Yet, even then, Alexander Seton, earl of Dunfermline and lord chancellor of Scotland from 1604 to 1622, demonstrated that Catholics could thrive and remain hidden from the Kirk in plain sight through occasional acts of outward conformity. Scotland’s nobility, whether Protestant or not, remained integral to the Commonweal.

Select Bibliography Burns, Ryan, ‘Enforcing Uniformity: Kirk Sessions and Catholics in Early Modern Scotland, 1560–1650’, Innes Review, 69 (2018), pp. 111–30. Burns, Ryan, ‘Gender, Resistance and Conformity in Early Modern Scotland, 1560–1650’, International Review of Scottish Studies, 44 (2019), pp. 57–84. Goatman, Paul, ‘Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Jacobean Scotland: The Case of Archibald Hegate Revisited’, Innes Review, 67 (2016), pp. 159–81. MacLeod, Daniel. ‘Servants to St. Mungo: The Church in Sixteenth-Century Glasgow’ (University of Guelph PhD thesis, 2013). McCoog, Thomas, SJ, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1598–1606: Lest Our Lamp Be Entirely Extinguished (Leiden, 2017). McInally, Thomas, George Strachan of the Mearns: Sixteenth Century Orientalist (Edinburgh, 2020). McInally, Thomas, The Sixth Scottish University: The Scots Colleges Abroad: 1575 to 1799 (Leiden, 2011). McMillan, Catherine, ‘ “Scho Refuseit Altogidder to Heir His Voce”: Women and Catholic Recusancy in North East Scotland, 1560–1610’, Scottish Church History, 45 (2016), pp. 36–48. Sanderson, Margaret H.B., ‘Catholic Recusancy in Scotland in the Sixteenth Century’, Innes Review [IR], 21 (1970), pp. 87–107.

121  Spurlock, ‘Post-­Reformation Catholic Survival’, pp. 583–4.

5 The Early Stuarts Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin

Catholics within the Realm of Ireland At the end of Elizabeth’s reign, Ireland marked the only area of the new King’s domains where the Reformation had made only minimal impact. The Nine Years’ War which finally wound to a close mere days after the death of the old queen marked a watershed in the history of Irish Catholicism. The defeat of what had become an island-­wide faith and fatherland insurrection ensured not merely that control of the machinery of State remained in the hands of Protestant officials and administrators, but their attitudes towards the island’s different ethnic communities, both increasingly identifiable as Catholic, had been deeply affected by their experience of the war.1 While mistrust of Hugh O’Neill and his Gaelic confederates had helped to prevent the spreading of open rebellion into the colonial heartlands of the Pale and the towns, support for the English war effort had been grudging and compromised. Recent research has argued, for instance, that Old English urban areas acted more as open towns than as bastions of English se­cur­ ity, and that their links with Gaelic Ireland were integral to the confederate war effort.2 Support even for the earl of Ormond’s attempts to muster the Pale population for defence in 1599 was weak in the extreme.3 Certainly, English officials were bitterly resentful of the weak loyalty of Old English and their criticisms fastened ever more urgently on the community’s religious dissidence. Sir Henry Wallop, for instance, in a position paper at the height of the military crisis of the war took time to insist that ‘no one cause hath given greater furtherance to all the combinations of Ireland, than the loose hand which hath been held over the government of the church’. He noted that through the whole realm, a use hath been permitted of the Romish religion, and little diligent search made at any time after Jesuits and seminaries, that these 1 Hiram Morgan, ‘Faith & Fatherland in Sixteenth-­Century Ireland’, History Ireland, 3 (1995), pp. 13–20. 2  James O’Neill, The Nine Years War, 1593–1603: O’Neill, Mountjoy and the Military Revolution (Dublin, 2017). 3 Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Europe, 1592–1648: Centre and Peripheries (Oxford, 2015), pp. 12–13. Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, The Early Stuarts In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume I: Endings and New Beginnings, 1530–1640. Edited by: James E. Kelly and John McCafferty, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843801.003.0006

90  Tadhg Ó HAnnracháin many years have roamed up and down from beyond the seas to practice ­mischief and work combinations, who have received their best harbours (no doubt) in the English Pale and the cities of the realm . . . And though I could name many towns where masses are thus used, yet do I hear of none so publicly as at Kilkenny and Clonmell. And in this very city of Dublin, there are not above twenty householders of the country birth that do come to church, and of them not more than four will communicate.4

Urban attempts to re-­institute public Catholic worship at the beginning of the new reign were resisted with vigour and in 1605–7 under lord deputy Sir Arthur Chichester and Sir James Ley, the chief justice of the King’s Bench, the government was eager to try to force conformity through the use of targeted royal letters (the mandates) demanding compliance with the Act of Uniformity, which resulted in the imprisonment and trial of prominent recusants.5 The two-­year confrontation between the government and the Catholic community, spearheaded by its Old English wing and spiritually bulwarked by clergy such as the Jesuit Superior Christopher Holywood, ultimately resulted in instructions from London to pull back lest the campaign provoke rebellion.6 New English interests, both clerical and lay, bitterly regretted the Privy Council’s pusillanimity, which they saw as undermining a genuine possibility of instituting a thorough religious reform of the kingdom. Chichester was, however, able to oversee the purging of Catholic interests from vital elements of the governmental system: Catholics, for instance, were excluded from the judiciary and (with the exception of the earl of Clanricard who elected to move to England) from the Privy Council.7 The 1613 parliament also witnessed a massive programme of gerrymandering which destroyed the Catholic majority in the lower house of parliament, inspiring fears in the wider population that English anti-­recusant statutes were to be extended to Ireland.8 Three principal factors conspired to protect the Old English community from a full attempt to make use of the State’s coercive machinery to test their

4  Ernest George Atkinson (ed.), Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Ireland of the Reign of Elizabeth, vol. 10 (London, 1905), p. 122. 5  A.  J.  Sheehan, ‘The Recusancy Revolt of 1603: A Reinterpretation’, Archivium Hibernicum, 38 (1983), pp. 3–13; Hans Pawlisch, Sir John Davies and the Conquest of Ireland: A Study in Legal Imperialism (Cambridge, 1985), p. 111. 6  David Finnegan, ‘The Influence of the Irish Catholic Clergy in Shaping the Religious and Political Allegiances of Irish Catholics, 1603–41’, in Robert Armstrong and Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin (eds.), Insular Christianity: Alternative Models of the Church in Britain and Ireland, c.1570–c.1700 (Manchester, 2012), pp. 109–10. 7 John McCavitt, Sir Arthur Chichester: Lord Deputy of Ireland 1605–16 (Belfast, 1998), pp. 78–9, 90. 8 Aidan Clarke with R.  Dudley Edwards, ‘Pacification, Plantation, and the Catholic Question, 1603–23’, in T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne (eds.), A New History of Ireland (Oxford, 1976), III, pp. 210–18.

The Early Stuarts  91 commitment to recusancy. First, the government’s hands were full with major programmes largely in Gaelic Ireland, most notably the Ulster plantation, the redevelopment of Munster, and other lesser projects. Intersecting with this were the possibilities which Ireland’s frontier status and the vulnerabilities of Gaelic landowners offered to predatory English interests, with the Villiers network particularly prominent, which allowed for a culture of profit-­seeking and personal enrichment to develop.9 This was certainly partly inspired by the belief that the entrenchment of New English power in Ireland was of itself a contribution to the security of the State, but it concentrated official attention on easy, profitable targets rather than on a programme of principled reform. Third, the desire to match the royal heir to a Catholic princess necessarily meant that London’s support for concerted pressure on recusants diminished.10 The outbreak of war at the beginning of Charles I’s reign offered renewed opportunities to the Catholic interest of Ireland to both demonstrate their loyalty and obtain concessions. In return for generous financial support, a series of royal ‘graces’ extended relief from many of the disadvantages under which Catholics had laboured and offered the hope of securing existing estates from the extension of plantation in the future.11 In the event, they were not passed into statute and a period of New English government between 1629and 1632 renewed pressure on the Catholic clergy and boded ill for the future.12 In that context, the leaders of the Catholic community were delighted by the appointment of Thomas Wentworth to the Irish governorship in 1632, but their hopes were dashed in the most comprehensive fashion by his disingenuous extortion of financial supply and subsequent refusal of the most important graces in parliament, and then his beginning the process of planting Connacht, which not only demonstrated a vindictively bullying governmental approach but opened up the prospect of the plantation of all Catholic land in the future.13 In general contrast with the urban and landed elite of Old English Ireland, many Gaelic landowners became embroiled in increasing economic difficulties in the four decades prior to 1641. While the plantation society which developed generally did not involve the complete confiscation of Gaelic estates, with the exception of those of attainted traitors, many fell victim to the corrupt operation of plantation allocations, processes on which they had little traction.14 In contrast with both New English and Old English elites, Gaelic landowners were often poorly suited to benefit from the developing economy. They were frequently 9  Victor Treadwell, Buckingham and Ireland, 1616–28: A Study in Anglo-­Irish Politics (Dublin, 2001). 10  Brian Mac Cuarta, Catholic Revival in the North of Ireland, 1603–41 (Dublin, 2007). 11  Aidan Clarke, ‘Selling Royal Favours, 1624–32’, in Moody, Martin, and Byrne (eds.), A New History of Ireland, pp. 233–42. 12  Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British (Oxford, 2002), pp. 269–75. 13 Canny, Making Ireland British, pp. 275–300. 14  See, for example, Victor Treadwell (ed.), The Irish Commission of 1622: An Investigation of the Irish Administration 1515–22 and Its Consequences 1623–4 (Dublin, 2006), pp. 693–700.

92  Tadhg Ó HAnnracháin ill-­versed in commercial practices and English law, and sometimes committed to the expensive maintenance of traditional marks of status such as retinues and praise poetry, as well as newer indicators such as English clothes and furniture. In addition, they were commonly victims of fixed incomes and badly equipped to attract more productive tenants. As a result, a pattern of debt and mortgage of lands developed across the country.15 Indeed, among the most important conspirators of the 1641 rebellion were a number of the heirs of the ‘deserving Irish’ of the Ulster plantation who had become ‘men of broken fortune’ in the following decades.16

Processes of Religious Change While the opening four decades of the seventeenth century marked the effective creation of the first genuine Irish Protestant community, it was overwhelmingly composed of migrants from Britain. The same period witnessed a consolidation of Catholic identity across the ethnic spectrum of both Gaelic and Old English Ireland. Two of the most important features of the period were the development of a wide range of Irish Continental colleges,17 and from 1618 the only resident Catholic episcopate in partibus infidelium.18 While much research has emphasized the fundamental importance of these developments in the creation not of a mission but a Church in Ireland,19 all scholars do not agree concerning the impact of these clergy on the ground. Raymond Gillespie, for instance, has emphasized the short supply of genuinely educated clergy in seventeenth-­century Ireland.20 Meanwhile, Thomas O’Connor has argued that ‘the increase in clerical numbers, particularly of regular clergy, from the 1620s, had highly ambiguous consequences and there is little hard evidence that the quality of pastoral care improved proportionately.’21 Brian Mac Cuarta’s research, on the other hand, certainly 15 Mary O Dowd, Power, Politics and Land: Early Modern Sligo 1568–1688 (Belfast, 1991), pp. 63–86. 16  This was Richard Bellings’ expression: see J. T. Gilbert (ed.), History of the Irish Confederation and the War in Ireland, 7 vols. (Dublin, 1882–91), I p. 7. 17  See this volume, Chapter 11. 18 Donal Cregan, ‘The Social and Cultural Background of a Counter-­Reformation Episcopate, 1618–60’, in Art Cosgrove and Donal MacCartney (eds.), Studies in Irish History Presented to R. Dudley Edwards (Dublin, 1979), pp. 85–117. 19 This is the formulation of Patrick Corish, The Catholic Community in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Dublin, 1981), ch. 2. 20  Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester, 1997), p. 152. 21  Thomas O’Connor, review of Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Europe, 1592–1648, in ‘Léirmheasanna/ Reviews’, Studia Hibernica, 43 (2017), pp. 163–4; see also Thomas O’Connor, ‘The Domestic and International Roles of Irish Overseas Colleges, 1590–1800’, in Liam Chambers and Thomas O’Connor (eds.), College Communities Abroad: Education, Migration and Catholicism in Early Modern Europe

The Early Stuarts  93 c­ onceptualizes the movement of Catholic revival during the early Stuart period as driven by the advent of a better educated and better disciplined priesthood, and consequently emphasizes the Old English dimensions of his area of study as the central locus of this process.22 My own work has even more insistently emphasized the critical impact of Continentally educated clergy during the early Stuart period, not least because of the effective monopoly which they came to enjoy on leadership positions within the Catholic Church.23 This was noted by figures such as Wallop and William Lyon during the last years of Elizabeth’s reign and the process picked up momentum in the decades that followed.24 The various members of the Italian nunciature who spent four years in Ireland during the later 1640s, for instance, certainly levelled criticism at aspects of the Catholicism which they encountered, but they were in no doubt that the great mass of the population was Catholic in a fashion entirely comprehensible to them. Indeed, ultimately it was in the most educated segment of the Old English community that they came to detect the most foreign and disturbing attitudes.25 Of importance in this regard is that, aside from the issue of how effective the clergy were in inculcating a sophisticated understanding of doctrine or genuine alteration in behaviours, one of the most important elements of Catholic renewal in Ireland was the cultivation of a popular identity which was consciously not Protestant, and indeed manifested a strong fear and hatred of heresy.26 Consolidating this process was a sophisticated literary engagement, mainly from the safety of Continental centres. David Finnegan has demonstrated the existence of a remarkably unified body of Irish clerical opinion which showed a clear consensus in protecting papal authority and a widespread refusal, for instance, to engage with any oath of allegiance not purged of offensive references to limitations of the pope’s powers. Despite often effusive declarations of loyalty to the monarch, sometimes indeed reflecting a conviction that only Catholics could truly be loyal, the vast majority of the Irish clergy consistently rejected as illegitimate any action by the State which impeded their free activity.27 By a curious irony, many of the (mainly clerical) texts, which posited an essentialist Irish Catholic identity dating back to (Manchester, 2018), pp. 90–114. For an excellent overview of the historiography of early modern Irish Catholicism, see John McCafferty, ‘Becoming Irish Catholics: Ireland, 1534–1690’, in Robert Scully, SJ, and Angela Ellis (eds.), A Companion to Catholicism and Recusancy in Britain and Ireland: From Reformation to Emancipation (Leiden, 2022), pp. 228–75. 22  Mac Cuarta, Catholic Revival. 23 Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Reformation in Ireland: The Mission of Rinuccini, 1645–49 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 39–68; Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Confessionalism and Mobility in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford, 2021), pp. 18–62. 24  Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Europe, pp. 12–13, 46–54. 25  Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Reformation in Ireland, pp. 212–52. 26  Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Reformation Ireland, pp. 61–8; Ó hAnnracháin, Confessionalism and Mobility, pp. 76–9. 27  Finnegan, ‘The Influence of the Irish Catholic Clergy’, pp. 107–28.

94  Tadhg Ó HAnnracháin St  Patrick, were the products of hybrid, Continentally formed and educated imaginations by figures such as Peter Lombard, Thomas Messsingham, Thomas Colgan, and David Rothe.28 Underpinning, overlapping, and sometimes contesting the episcopally directed Church which began to develop from the last decade of James’ reign was a remarkable renaissance of the regular orders, of which the Franciscans were incomparably the most important, straddling both historic communities. The Dominicans also figured as an important presence, with the Society of Jesus playing a significant but relatively circumscribed role, at least in terms of ­numbers, preponderantly in Old English Ireland.29 The squabbles between regular and secular clergy have received a good deal of attention, but it is ­possible that the salience of the surviving source material has distorted the picture on the ground. Both diocesan priests and the regular orders were in competition for the voluntary support of the Catholic laity which naturally generated tensions, but they did not prove as disruptive as in contemporary England.30 Of im­port­ance in this regard was the inclusion of many regulars among the ranks of the bishops and the emollient influence of Luke Wadding, OFM, in Rome who acted as something of an honest broker for different clerical interests.31 In addition to their important effect on the ground as preachers, confessors, and creators of devotional associations, Franciscans were also central actors in the production of the hagiographical, historical, and spiritual material which marked the consolidation of Irish Catholic identity.32 This identity would face both op­por­tun­ity and existential threat with the rebellion of 1641, the ensuing collapse of State authority and the descent of England into Civil War.33

28  Ó hAnnracháin, Confessionalism and Mobility, ch. 8. 29  Thomas Flynn, The Irish Dominicans, 1536–1641 (Dublin, 1993); Brian Jackson, ‘The Construction of Argument: Henry Fitzsimon, John Rider and Religious Controversy in Dublin, 1599–1614’, in Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 97–115; Fergus O’Donoghue, SJ, ‘The Jesuit Mission in Ireland, 1598–1651’ (Catholic University of America PhD thesis, 1981). 30  Áine Hensey, ‘A Comparative Study of the lives of Church of Ireland and Roman Catholic Clergy in the South-­Eastern Dioceses of Ireland from 1550 to 1650’ (NUI Maynooth PhD thesis, 2012), pp. 285–98. 31  Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, ‘The Regular Clergy and the Episcopate in Ireland, 1600–50’, in Cormac Begadon and James  E.  Kelly (eds.), British and Irish Religious Orders in Europe, 1560–1800: Conventuals, Mendicants and Monastics in Motion (Woodbridge, 2022) pp. 43–59. 32  Bernadette Cunningham, ‘The Culture and Ideology of Irish Franciscan Historians at Louvain 1607–1650’, in Ciaran Brady (ed.), Ideology and the Historians (Dublin, 1991), pp. 11–30; Marc Caball, ‘Articulating Irish Identity in Early Seventeenth-­Century Europe: The Case of Giolla Brighde Ó hEódhusa (c.1570–1614)’, Archivium Hibernicum, 62 (2009), pp. 271–93; Marc Caball, ‘Creating an Irish Identity: Print, Culture and the Irish Franciscans of Louvain’, in Liam Chambers and Thomas O’Connor (eds.), Forming Catholic Communities: Irish, Scots and English College Networks in Europe, 1568–1918 (Leiden, 2018), pp. 232–57. 33 See OHBIC, Volume II.

The Early Stuarts  95

England, Scotland, and Wales The accession of James VI & I followed forty-­five years of contraction of the English Catholic community which had fundamentally altered its position to that of a minority community rather than a majority Church in waiting.34 While still disproportionately represented in the higher echelons of English society, sub-­ divided into different aristocratic entourages and networks of patronage, the actual recusant population had become extremely small, although surrounded by a wider web of occasional conformity to escape the pressures of the law. Moreover, among the wider population, anti-­Catholicism had become deeply entrenched and was to remain a vital constituent of English identity.35 This was the fruit above of all of anxiety about Continental threats to England and the potential of Catholics to act as a fifth column in the event of invasion. Paradoxically, in the localities individual recusants could be personally liked and respected, often to a greater degree than the zealous Godly, but the association with foreign powers always had the potential to arouse xenophobic anxieties.36 The highest concentrations of Catholics in the population were in the north, in Lancashire, Durham, and Yorkshire, and in the west Midlands and Monmouthshire, with another nexus centred on West Sussex, Hampshire, and some parts of Wiltshire and Dorset. There was also a significant Catholic presence in London.37 This is not to suggest that Catholics in any way accepted their future as a minority. Research has emphasized the extraordinary importance of the community’s multiple connections to mainland Europe, and in particular to the southern Netherlands and northern France, which became home to a dense web of expatriate institutions which helped both to sustain and to transform English Catholicism and to influence developments in the wider Church.38 Rather than stasis, isolation, and doomed minority status, these institutions allowed Catholics to emphasize and preserve English tradition while confidently asserting their membership

34  See Michael Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 4–5; Jeremy Gregory, ‘The Making of a Protestant Nation: “Success” and “Failure” in England’s Long Reformation’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), England’s Long Reformation 1500–1800 (London, 1998), pp. 309–10. 35  Gregory, ‘The Making of a Protestant Nation’, p. 309; M. Finlayson, Historians, Puritanism and the English Revolution: The Religious Factor in English Politics before and after the Interregnum (Toronto, 1983). 36  Alec Ryrie, The Age of Reformation: The Tudor and Stewart Realms, 1485–1603 (Harlow, 2009), pp. 247–53, 285–7. 37  Marie Rowlands, ‘Harbourers and Housekeepers: Catholic Women in England, 1570–1720’, 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), p. 202. 38  Claire Walker, ‘Priests, Nuns, Presses and Prayer: The Southern Netherlands and the Contours of English Catholicism’, in Kaplan, Moore, Van Nierop, and Pollmann (eds.), Catholic Communities, pp. 139–55; Brad Gregory, ‘Situating Early Modern English Catholicism’, in James E. Kelly and Susan Royal (eds.), Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-­Reformation (Leiden, 2017), pp. 17–40.

96  Tadhg Ó HAnnracháin of the Universal Church. Although Catholics were massively outnumbered in their native land, it was not they but English Protestants who had become ‘aliens and strangers from the whole body of Christendom’.39 And rather than a passive acceptance of the status quo, these institutions abroad were conceived as instruments for the re-­Catholicization of England and the restoration of the authentic English faith. In this endeavour, the entire community was seen to play a role, not merely missionary priests, but also the nuns who prayed for the success of the project and stored precious relics, and the laity who returned to their native land to marry and produce new generations.40 In the decade prior to James’ accession, the dream of re-­Catholicization had fastened above all on the possibilities of regime change. In 1596, Robert Persons, SJ, was hopeful that a Catholic monarch could allow a disciplined and educated body of clergy to transform the general population through a vigorous programme of instruction, visitation, and pastoral responsibility.41 Such an approach would have resembled that contemporaneously being adopted in the Styrian lands of the future Emperor Ferdinand II, which subsequently were to be extended with considerable success to the other Austrian possessions of the Habsburgs, as well as Bohemia.42 However, although tightly knit in many respects, English Catholicism was deeply fissured by alternative visions of the future which were complicated by the mapping of tensions between conservatives and more radical exponents of regime change onto the developing rivalry between Jesuits and other clergy. Divisions continued into the new reign with the added complication of the effective refounding of several regular orders in the seventeenth century.43 The new king was of course the son of a queen widely celebrated as a martyr to heretical aggression and Catholics naturally hoped for a dramatic reversal in their fortunes following Elizabeth’s death, even to the extent of full toleration.44 These hopes were quickly dashed by events in February and March of 1604, culminating in James’ speech to parliament.45 While Elizabeth’s reign was remembered as a time of persecution, the ageing and childless queen had now been replaced by an

39  This formulation is from Thomas Stapleton, quoted in Marvin O’Connell, Thomas Stapleton and the Counter Reformation (New Haven, CT, and London, 1964), p. 191. 40  Laurence Lux-­Sterritt, English Benedictine Nuns in Exile in the Seventeenth Century: Living Spirituality (Manchester, 2017), pp. 101–35. 41 Alexandra Walsham, ‘Translating Trent? English Catholicism and the Counter Reformation’, Historical Research, 78 (2005), pp. 288–9. 42  Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Europe, pp. 97–118. 43  James E. Kelly, ‘Kinship and Religious Politics among Catholic Families in England, 1570–1640’, History, 94 (2009), pp. 328–43; James E. Kelly, ‘Counties without Borders? Religious Politics, Kinship Networks and the Formation of Catholic Communities’, Historical Research, 91 (2018), pp. 22–38. 44  M. C. Questier, ‘Arminianism, Catholicism and Puritanism in England’, The Historical Journal, 49 (2006), pp. 62–3. 45  Nina Taunton and Valerie Hart, ‘King Lear, King James and the Gunpowder Treason of 1605’, Renaissance Studies, 17 (2003), pp. 695–715.

The Early Stuarts  97 incipient Protestant dynasty which prompted some disillusioned Catholics to contemplate extreme measures.46 The impact of the Gunpowder Plot was undoubtedly magnified by the manner in which anti-­recusant interests, most importantly Robert Cecil, could portray its continuity with previous Catholic plots, aggressions, and treasons such as the Spanish Armada, the 1569 Northern Rebellion, and Regnans in excelsis.47 And this in turn justified a continuity of repression, with the execution of (mostly) priests under the new regime. Nor was the Jacobean State prepared to ignore the financial possibilities of mulcting Catholics for their religious disobedience and indeed ramped up the pressure in this regard so that between 1612 and 1615 a distinct pattern of rising conformity became visible as the threat and actuality of fines broke the commitment of some to continued recusancy.48 Yet although grating, the financial pressure on Catholic families was not made intolerable. An analysis of Yorkshire, for instance, indicates that Catholic families were not forced into ruin by their commitment to non-­conformity.49 Strategies were developed to mask the extent of both familial wealth and Catholic religious activity.50 Massive sums could certainly be demanded with the second Viscount Montague avoiding forfeiture only by compounding for £6,000.51 Following Charles I’s dispensing with parliament, the regime further regularized the process of compounding with recusancy commissioners which effectively allowed Catholics to purchase immunity from harassment by other agencies which had targeted them in the past. This demonstration of royal benevolence could indeed resemble an arrangement of paid toleration, of a kind that the hotter kind of Protestants were unlikely to receive.52 Despite their small numbers, English Catholics and the challenge which they represented, both to the State and to the established Church, were of central importance to the theological and political debates of early seventeenth-­century England, and indeed to Europe in general. Not only did Continental centres provide the locus and resources to support the intellectual challenge of English 46 Mark Nicholls, ‘Strategy and Motivation in the Gunpowder Plot’, Historical Journal, 50 (2007), p. 802. 47 Stefania Tutino, Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570–1625 (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 118–19; for contrasting analyses of government involvement in the plot, see Mark Nicholls, Investigating the Gunpowder Plot (Manchester, 1991), and Francis Edwards, SJ, ‘Still Investigating the Gunpowder Plot’, Recusant History, 21 (1992–93), pp. 305–46. 48  M.  C.  Questier, ‘Sir Henry Spiller, Recusancy and the Efficiency of the Jacobean Exchequer’, Historical Research, 66 (1993), pp. 251–66; Christopher Haigh, The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in Post-­Reformation England, 1570–1640 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 190–1. 49  Caroline Hibbard, ‘Early Stuart Catholicism: Revisions and Re-­Revisions’, Journal of Modern History, 52 (1980), p. 20. 50  Geoff Baker, Reading and Politics in Early Modern England: The Mental World of a Seventeenth-­ Century Catholic Gentleman (Manchester, 2010), p. 7. 51 Michael  C.  Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2006), p. 359. 52 Questier, Catholicism and Community, pp. 430–1.

98  Tadhg Ó HAnnracháin Catholics, but as Alison Shell has noted the very fact of exile could confer a daring freedom on Catholic authors.53 The issue of the relationship with Rome matched that of predestination in importance within English Protestant debate.54 As Stefania Tutino has demonstrated, both Protestant and Catholic theorists con­ tinued to link their arguments back to events and controversies of Elizabeth’s reign, but the advent of a new and unexcommunicated monarch, as well as a rad­ ic­al­ly different political environment of peace with Spain, introduced important modulations. The very fact that James devised an oath with the avowed intention of allowing Catholics to prove their loyalty55 can be seen as a demonstration of these new possibilities. Tutino’s acute analysis of these theo-­political debates demonstrates the range, diversity, and subtlety of the various conclusions reached by different authors, not merely by British Catholics such as George Blackwell, William Barclay, Matthew Kellison, and Thomas Preston, OSB, but by a similar range of Protestant opponents such as Robert Cecil, Andrew Willet, and Lancelot Andrewes. And it was not merely English protagonists who engaged in profoundly important debates concerning the nature and scope of secular power, but the Catholic issue within the Stuart multiple monarchy attracted the attention of some of the most important contemporary Continental intellectuals, including the Jesuits Francisco Suarez and Robert Bellarmine, whose work attempted to establish solid grounds for the fundamental importance of the pope as the head of a universal Catholic communion in the context of a solidifying European State system and de facto national churches.56 Furthermore, the influence of Catholicism extended far beyond the issues directly at issue between Canterbury and Rome, but in addition left a deep mark on English devotional literature, as well as on many different forms of artistic production.57 Three principal factors provided potential and actual points d’appui for the Catholic community in protecting and expanding their position within the pol­it­ ical nation across the reigns of the first two Stuart monarchs. The first related to the raging internal divisions within English Protestantism over soteriology, sacramental grace, and the beauty of holiness. While neither avant-­garde conformity nor the proponents of Laudian reform represented a crypto-­Catholic agenda, they did create a space for negotiation between Catholics and the regime which

53  Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination 1558–1660 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 194–223. 54  For a superb exploration of this point, see Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995). 55 Michael Questier, ‘Loyalty, Religion and State Power in Early Modern England: English Romanism and the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance’, The Historical Journal, 40 (1997), pp. 311–29, emphasizes the divisive intention of the oath to undermine Catholic unity in England. 56 Tutino, Law and Conscience, pp. 117–224. 57  Anthony Milton, ‘A Qualified Intolerance: The Limits and Ambiguities of Early Stuart Anti-­ Catholicism’, in Arthur Mariotti (ed.), Catholicism and Anti-­Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (New York, 1999), pp. 85–115.

The Early Stuarts  99 allowed for Puritans to be portrayed as the chief internal danger to the kingdom’s stability and to reframe the idea of episcopal government of Catholic ecclesial structures as a means to bridle the Jesuit equivalent of Puritan insolence and independence. This potential community of interest between monarch and Catholic subjects was further reinforced by the sheer cost of war, the fractious nature of Stuart parliaments, and the grain of Charles’ political instincts, which made him temperamentally unsuited to their management: the vulnerable status of wealthy Catholics made them natural supporters of royal prerogative power against parliamentary invasion, particularly when their monarchs had Catholic wives and a tradition of sociability with aristocratic Catholics. The fear that Puritans and the defence of popular liberties threatened both social hierarchy and the royal prerogative was not confined to Catholics and correspondingly provided traction for a reframing of the community’s status and perception. Finally, Stuart foreign policy, in particular relating to the negotiations for first a Spanish and then a French Catholic bride, as well as the peace which followed Charles’ disappointment by parliament during war against France and Spain in the 1620s, was of great importance to Catholics who were both brokers and beneficiaries of these unpopular initiatives.58 Under the Ludovisi papacy, certain interests in Rome were moved to wonder whether a providential conjuncture was occurring, and might another Pope Gregory emulate a predecessor by overseeing the conversion of England, as the marriage of one Spanish princess repaired the breach originally created by the rejection of another.59 During the personal rule, the forceful personality of the new French queen, Henrietta Maria, availing of religious privileges conceded in the marital negotiations, helped facilitate a new prominence for Catholics at Court, which was intensified by a highly public series of conversions to Rome. The marriage also allowed for the development of a provocative diplomatic interface between the English Court and the curia.60 The first half of the seventeenth century witnessed an increase in English cler­ ic­al numbers, particularly when the exiguous size of the general community is taken into account.61 But the organization of this increase in personnel was highly problematic. In striking contrast to Ireland, the Society of Jesus became both a vital actor and a deeply divisive force within English Catholicism. Prior to and during James’ accession, the archpriest controversy had revealed deep fault-­lines 58  See Michael  C.  Questier (ed.), Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Politics, 1621–25, Camden Fifth Series, 34 (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 1–130; Questier, ‘Arminianism, Catholicism, and Puritanism’, pp. 53–78. 59  Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Europe, p. 219. 60  Michael C. Questier (ed.), Newsletters from the Caroline Court, 1631–1638: Catholicism and the Politics of the Personal Rule, Camden Fifth Series, 26 (Cambridge, 2005); Caroline Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill, 1983); Stefano Villani, ‘Britain and the Papacy: Diplomacy and Conflict in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century’, in Maria Antonietta Visceglia (ed.), Papato e politica internazionale nella prima età moderna (Rome, 2013), pp. 312–19. 61  John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London, 1975), pp. 216–23.

100  Tadhg Ó HAnnracháin between English Catholics both clerical and lay, which reflected very different views of the nature of English Catholicism and its potential development.62 Equally savage was the approbation affair, which resulted from Rome’s decade long attempt to institute a form of episcopal direction in the English Church by appointing two successive bishops of Chalcedon. In a fashion reminiscent of Bosnian Franciscans’ contemporaneous and sustained rejection of Propaganda Fide’s attempts to establish effective episcopal authority in the Turkish Balkans, the English experiment ended with the second bishop’s flight to the Continent in 1631 amid a welter of recrimination and the vesting of some residual authority in a dean and chapter drawn from the secular clergy. As James Kelly and Michael Questier have emphasized, this was not merely a clerical squabble but the collision of different ideological and kinship networks in which the wealthy and influential Catholic laity were centrally involved.63 The peculiar characteristics of Catholic life in England meant that the mech­an­ isms which underpinned Tridentine-­style reform on the Continent were substantially inapplicable. But English Catholicism was certainly suffused with a great deal of the spiritual ardour and energy which distinguished reform activity in Catholic Europe. Indeed, enthusiastic aristocratic and gentry sponsoring of religious orders and cultivation of a spiritual sensibility were at the core of some of the most vibrant aspects of Baroque Catholicism, and England participated fully in this development, with many households clearly responding enthusiastically to the ministry of highly educated and motivated clergy.64 Moreover, printed ma­ter­ ial of many different kinds was deployed creatively by English Catholics which offered not merely a compensation for the sometimes sporadic contact with clergy but an opportunity to develop a rich interiority of spirituality. It seems probable also that English Catholicism demonstrated a particular intensity around the cult of relics of martyrs. England was not only the most richly endowed country in Europe in its early modern candidates for this particular crown, but its ecclesiastical structures were probably the least able to exert clerical control over their veneration.65 As in England, Catholics in Scotland represented at best a tiny proportion of the population, perhaps 2 per cent, heavily concentrated in regional pockets and dependent for their survival on the support of regional elite families, most not­ ably the Gordons, Leslies, MacDonnells, and Maxwells, or members of the ruling 62  Peter Lake and Michael C. Questier, All Hail to the Archpriest: Confessional Conflict, Toleration, and the Politics of Publicity in Pre-­Reformation England (Oxford, 2019). 63 Kelly, ‘Kinship and Religious Politics’; Michael  C.  Questier, ‘What Happened to English Catholicism after the English Reformation?’, History, 85 (2000), pp. 28–47. 64  Walsham, ‘Translating Trent?’, pp. 296–8. 65 James  E.  Kelly, ‘Creating an English Catholic Identity: Relics, Martyrs and English Women Religious in Counter-­Reformation Europe’, in Kelly and Royal (eds.), Early Modern English Catholicism, pp. 41–59; Alexandra Walsham, ‘ “Domme Preachers”? Post-­Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print’, Past and Present, 168 (2000), pp. 72–123.

The Early Stuarts  101 oligarchic elite of a town such as Glasgow, whose financial support and protection allowed a limited number of clergy to carry out a ministry not distinguished by any consistent pattern of organization or central direction. A report to Propaganda Fide in the 1630s reported the existence of only thirteen priests in Scotland and this number had more than halved by the 1650s, when some attempt at organization was made by the Congregation with the appointment of an apostolic prefect in 1653. Competition between Jesuits, Dominicans, and secular priests further contributed to disunity.66 Ironically, the embedding of Catholicism as a key aspect of the identity of some Scottish kin groups may well have been triggered as a form of political resistance to a threat to their regional influence through the expansion of the Stuart State’s power and the attachment to Protestantism of rival families, most notably the Campbells.67 From initially promising beginnings, Welsh Catholicism also declined sharply during Elizabeth’s reign so that in the year of the new king’s accession, Welsh dioceses produced only 808 recusants in contrast with 212,450 communicants,68 although, of course, a much wider number nourished Catholic sympathies.69 These proportions were broadly similar to England, although Llanduff actually exceeded any English diocese in its numbers of recusants relative to communicants.70 Much of Welsh religion remained intensely traditional with Godly Protestantism slow to root itself in the principality until decades into the seventeenth century.71 In sharp contrast with England, however, where numbers of clergy increased under the early Stuarts, Welsh ordinations slowed considerably.72 Appreciable Catholic concentrations remained in northern Wales in Flint and Denbigh, and to the south in Monmouthshire and Glamorgan. There the patronage and protection of the Somersets, earls of Worcester was of incalculable significance.73 Substantially under their aegis, a significant Jesuit presence developed in the principality with eighty-­three members of the Society serving in Wales

66  Paul Goatman, ‘Exemplary Deterrent or Theatre of Martyrdom? John Ogilvie’s Execution and the Community of Glasgow’, Journal of Jesuit Studies, 7 (2020), p. 54; R.  Scott Spurlock, ‘ “I Do Disclaime both Ecclesiasticke and Politick Popery”: Lay Catholic Identity in Early Modern Scotland’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 38 (2008), pp. 13–14. 67  Allan Macinnes, ‘Catholic Recusancy and the Penal Laws, 1603–1707’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 23 (1987), pp. 27–63; Daniel Szechi, ‘Defending the True Faith: Kirk, State and Catholic Missioners in Scotland, 1653–1755’, Catholic Historical Review, 82 (1996), pp. 397–411; R. Scott Spurlock, ‘The Laity and the Structure of the Catholic Church in Early Modern Scotland’, in Armstrong and Ó hAnnracháin (eds.), Insular Christianity, pp. 231–51. 68 Glanmor Williams, Recovery, Reorientation and Reformation: Wales c. 1415–1642 (Oxford, 1987), p.328. 69 Hannah Thomas, ‘The Society of Jesus in Wales, c. 1600–1679: Recovering the Cwm Jesuit Library in Hereford Cathedral’, Journal of Jesuit Studies, 1 (2014), pp. 573–4. 70  Glanmore Williams, Wales and the Reformation (Cardiff, 1997), pp. 374–5. 71  D. Densil Morgan, ‘Calvinism in Wales, c.1590–1909’, The Welsh Journal of Religious History, 4 (2009), pp. 24–5. 72  Glanmor Williams, Renewal and Reformation: Wales c.1415–1642 (Oxford, 1987), p. 478. 73  Philip Jenkins, ‘Anti-­Popery on the Welsh Marches’, Historical Journal, 23 (1980), pp. 275–93.

102  Tadhg Ó HAnnracháin between 1577 and 1663.74 Founded in 1595, the Welsh district of the English province benefitted from a cunning placement on political and ecclesiastical borders, and functioned with remarkable freedom until the Popish Plot.75

Gender and Catholicism in Britain and Ireland One of the most intriguing and problematic differences, at least in the historiography if not necessarily the historical experience of English and Irish Catholicism, relates to the role and salience of women. In England, the accumulation of excellent research has allowed the centrality of women to the survival and functioning of the Catholic community to become apparent.76 The contraction to a household-­ centred confession made it far more difficult to exclude women from involvement in all aspects of Catholic life, since the domestic sphere was accepted as their natural environment, not least in the education of servants and children. As femmes couvertes, Catholic wives could avail themselves of a certain protection from the law not always possible or practicable for their husbands, offering possibilities of religious leadership to women.77 If the husband of a family felt it necessary to offer public conformity, a non-­conformist wife could take up the responsibility of ensuring the family’s spiritual welfare.78 Paradoxically, the fact that women were subject to overlapping and actually or potentially conflicting sources of authority—­such as the law, their husbands or fathers, and their priests79—may have actually increased their agency and the importance of their choices. Such experiences may have contributed to greater clarity and determination in widowhood and certainly many nexuses of the Catholic community ultimately centred on noble widows who offered protection and patronage.80 This type of ma­tri­ arch­al power was potentially subversive of priestly authority and since priests superseded husbands as the spiritual guides of women their scarcity could also

74  Thomas, ‘Society of Jesus’, p. 577. 75  Hannah Thomas, ‘Spiritual Exercises and Spiritual Exercises: Ascetic Intellectual Exchange in the English Catholic Community, c. 1600–1794’, in James  E.  Kelly and Hannah Thomas (eds.), Jesuit Intellectual and Physical Exchange between England and Mainland Europe, c. 1580–1789 (Leiden, 2018), p. 288. 76 Bossy, English Catholic Community, pp. 153–61; Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke, 2003); Caroline Bowden and James  E.  Kelly (eds.), The English Convents in Exile 1600–1800 (Farnham, 2013); Laurence Lux-­Sterritt, Redefining Religious Female Life: French Ursulines and English Ladies in Seventeenth-­Century Catholicism (Farnham, 2008); James  E.  Kelly, English Convents in Catholic Europe, c.1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020). 77  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. 78  Frances  E.  Dolan, ‘Gender and the “Lost” Spaces of Catholicism’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 32 (2002), p. 654. 79  Rowlands, ‘Harbourers and Housekeepers’, p. 203. 80 Questier, Catholicism and Community, p. 209.

The Early Stuarts  103 promote a degree of female independence.81 Even more strikingly, however, the peculiar English environment enabled the development of intense spiritual relationships between priests and women.82 From Margaret Clitherow’s fashioning as an inspiring martyr to Richard Smith’s eulogy of Magdalen Montague, to Lawrence Anderton’s portrait of the English nun, the very urgency with which male authors strove to craft portraits of ideal and idealized female Catholic figures was testament to both their im­port­ ance and the rumbling unease which they created for patriarchal and clerical authority.83 The central importance of English female religious institutions has also become apparent through a whole series of initiatives. The records mined for the ‘Who Were the Nuns?’ (WWTN) project has made available a whole series of biographical details and a web of connections about English nuns. Work by a variety of scholars has uncovered fascinating insights into the lives, motivations, and spirituality of the women who populated these convents.84 By contrast, the role of Catholic women in Ireland in the massive renegotiation of Irish religious practice and identity in the seventeenth century has received far less attention and remains significantly more shadowy. William Lyon’s complaint from Cork in the 1590s and the sometimes vituperative testimony of figures such as Parr Lane, Barnaby Rich, and Fynes Morrison provide evidence that Protestant observers resented the influential part played by women in stalling the progress of the Reformation, but Irish Catholic women do not cast as dramatic a silhouette as their English counterparts.85 Ironically, one of the most striking figures in the Irish landscape was the dowager countess of Kildare, Mabel FitzGerald (née Brown), who was English in origin and presided over a style of seigneurial Catholicism reminiscent of her country of birth for several decades.86 Bronagh McShane’s recent pioneering work has finally shone extended light on the phenomenon of early modern Irish nuns, but the result has been to throw amazing differences with England into sharp relief.87 Between 1598 and 1650, almost two dozen English religious institutions were created on the Continent. This is in 81  Dolan, ‘Gender and the “Lost” Spaces’, p. 652. 82  Dolan, ‘Gender and the “Lost” Spaces’; Walsham, ‘Translating Trent?’. 83 Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Margaret Clitherow: Catholic Nonconformity and the Politics of Religious Change in Elizabethan England’, Past & Present, 185 (2004), pp. 43–90; Richard Smith, The Life of the Most Honourable and Vertuous Lady, the Lady Magdalen Viscountess Montague (St Omer, 1627); Lawrence Anderton, The English Nvnne (St Omer, 1642). 84  See this volume, Chapter 12. 85 Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, ‘Theory in the Absence of Fact: Irish Women and the Catholic Reformation’, in Christine Meek (ed.), Pawns or Players: Studies on Medieval and Early Modern Women (Dublin, 2003), pp. 141–54. 86 Jeffrey Cox, ‘The Reformation, Catholicism and Religious Change in Kildare, 1560–1640’ (University College Dublin PhD thesis, 2015), ch. 5. 87  Bronagh McShane, ‘The Roles and Representations of Women in Religious Change and Conflict in Leinster and South-­East Munster’ (NUIM PhD thesis, 2015); Bronagh McShane, ‘Negotiating Religious Change and Conflict: Female Religious Communities in Early Modern Ireland’, British Catholic History, 33 (2017), pp. 357–82.

104  Tadhg Ó HAnnracháin marked contrast to the almost total absence of Irish equivalents aside from a Poor Clare house flitting between the island and the Continent, and Dominic O’Daly’s Lisbon house whose links back to Ireland seem to have rapidly become far weaker than its English equivalents.88 As a result, the number of recorded Irish nuns is far smaller than for England. Between 1600 and 1650, 807 English nuns were professed at a range of different institutions on the Continent. In further contrast with Ireland, where Poor Clares were greatly predominant, less than a quarter of this much larger English cohort belonged to that order. English nuns took the habit at many different life-­stages. The widow Grace Babthorpe, for instance, professed in Louvain as an Augustinian in 1621 at the age of 50.89 Her daughter, Barbara Babthorpe, on the other hand, embraced religious life on the earlier end of the spectrum, leaving the Benedictines because of ill-­health at 16 but becoming a member of Mary Ward’s Institute the following year. No fewer than nine of Grace’s grand-­daughters subsequently became nuns, mostly as teenagers.90 Because of the lack of specifically Irish institutions, it is likely that many more as yet untraced and, perhaps, untraceable Irish women did embrace religious life in convents in France and Habsburg territories,91 but it is nevertheless probable that the much smaller English Catholic community produced more female religious than its Irish equivalent during the same period. While ultimately frustrated in its original design, English Catholicism also gave birth to one of the most radical and remarkable attempts to reconfigure the life of female religious as an active apostolate through the order founded by Mary Ward.92 The much smaller cohort of Irish nuns did not produce anything analogous.

Conclusion During the reigns of the early Stuarts, the great and inescapable difference between Catholicism in Britain and Ireland concerned the relative numbers on either side of the Irish Sea. Only in Ireland did a majority of the population still adhere to the Church of Rome and see in its clergy their primary interface with the world of the sacred. In Britain, on the other hand, Catholicism had adapted to a minority status in which gentry and aristocratic support were vital in maintaining pockets of Catholic identity and practice, and in providing support for the clergy. Seigneurial Catholicism naturally came in many different guises: the nexus

88  I am indebted to Bronagh McShane for bringing this point to my attention. 89  WWTN, LA013. 90 https://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/ftrees/Babthorpe.pdf 91  Andrea Knox, ‘Nuns on the Periphery? Irish Dominican Nuns and Assimilation in Lisbon’, in Flocel Sabate i Curull and Luis Adno da Fonseca (eds.), Catalonia and Portugal: The Iberian Peninsula from the Periphery (Berlin, 2015), pp. 311–26. 92  Lisa McClain, ‘On a Mission: Priests, Jesuits, “Jesuitresses”, and Catholic Missionary Efforts in Tudor-­Stuart England’, Catholic Historical Review, 101 (2015), pp. 437–62.

The Early Stuarts  105 which developed in Scotland around the Gordons was not necessarily identical with that of the Maxwells let alone with English recusant aristocratic families. Yet whether in Scotland, Wales, or England, Catholic survival was substantially predi­cated on the existence of a Catholic elite. Despite this, English Catholicism, in particular, probably cast a longer shadow in Europe than its Irish equivalent. Having departed from Ireland in 1649, the papal nuncio to the Confederate Catholics remarked on the relative invisibility of Ireland: ‘Poor Ireland, always obscured by English greatness, has remained as much cut off from the world as far from cognition, and dazzled by the rays of this overlying monarchy, it does not carry lights which do not appear as torches.’93 Yet in neither Britain nor Ireland was Catholicism reconciled to minority or subordinate status. During the 1640s, the Confederates Catholics of Ireland effectively demanded the establishment of their Church in a quasi-­official fashion as the price of their assistance to the King in his war with parliament. Throughout the period, Irish Catholics looked with horror at the financial penalties imposed on English recusants and were determined to avoid them. Catholics in England still aspired to the complete reconciliation of their native land to the Church of Rome and fought obstinately to gain traction on their monarchs through a presence at Court, diplomatic pressure, and the royal consorts. In both England and Ireland, and in contrast to Scotland and much of Wales, the 1630s represented a particular high point for clerical expansion as the sheer numbers of English clergy peaked and the Irish episcopacy established itself at the centre of a significant movement of Catholic reform. Ironically perhaps, the very influence which thus accrued to the Irish hierarchy was responsible for the failure of a broader pan-­archipelagic anti-­parliamentarian front, the consequences of which were borne most heavily by the Catholics of Ireland during the Interregnum.

Select Bibliography Gillespie, Raymond, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester, 1997). Kelly, James E., English Convents in Catholic Europe, c.1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020). McCafferty, John, ‘Becoming Irish Catholics: Ireland, 1534–1690’, in Robert Scully, SJ, and Angela Ellis (eds.), A Companion to Catholicism and Recusancy in Britain and Ireland: From Reformation to Emancipation (Leiden, 2022), pp. 228–75. Mac Cuarta, Brian, Catholic Revival in the North of Ireland, 1603–41 (Dublin, 2007).

93  Author’s translation from Rinuccini’s relation to the Pope, in G.  Aiazzi (ed.), Nunziatura in Irlanda di Monsignor Gio. Baptista Rinuccini arcivescovo di Fermo negli anni 1645 à 1649 (Florence, 1844), p. 402.

106  Tadhg Ó HAnnracháin Milton, Anthony Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995). Ó hAnnracháin, Tadhg, Confessionalism and Mobility in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford, 2021). Questier, Michael, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge, 1998). Spurlock, R.  Scott, ‘ “I Do Disclaime both Ecclesiasticke and Politick Popery”: Lay Catholic Identity in Early Modern Scotland’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 38 (2008), pp. 5–22. Tutino, Stefania, Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570–1625 (Aldershot, 2007). Walsham, Alexandra, ‘Translating Trent? English Catholicism and the Counter Reformation’, Historical Research, 78 (2005), pp. 288–310.

6 Mission or Church, 1570–1640? Thomas M. McCoog, SJ

In 1549 Olaus Magnus, secretary to his brother Johannes Magnus (Johan Månsson), exiled archbishop of Uppsala, bemoaned Rome’s decision to disallow the appointment of orthodox claimants to sees in Protestant countries.1 English and Scottish Catholics could have repeated his lamentation: no Catholic bishops were named in England after the accession of Elizabeth; the nomination of John Leslie to the bishopric of Ross in April 1565 was the last Scottish appointment. In Ireland, however, as Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin so aptly observed, ‘a distinct continuity was maintained with the past’.2 There, episcopal presence, however faint or impotent, prevented major alteration to the ecclesiastical landscape and curbed—­or at least tried to curb—­the activities and ministries of clergy, religious or secular.3 ‘A Mission and a Church’, the title of the opening chapter of John Bossy’s epoch-­making The English Catholic Community 1570–1850, posed a question that has transfixed early modern English Catholic historiography. Should the community be considered a mission? Or a Church? Is the post-­Reformation Catholic Church in England a successor, legitimate or otherwise, to the medieval Church? Or is it a new entity created if not ex nihilo then the next best thing? Bossy describes a gathering of former Oxbridge dons at the university in Louvain, who, in the midst of their theological controversies, gave ‘the impression of having accepted the change of scenery without much surprise or dismay; it had little effect on their manner of life, confirmed if anything their existing preconceptions, and did not necessarily prove a barrier to their advancement in the conventual sense’.4 Catholicism’s restoration was in God’s hands; their task was to be semper paratus, always ready, for official service at its return. In brief, life in the Low Countries was only slightly less appealing than that in ‘the other place’. William Allen, fabled founder of the English College, Douai, and future cardinal (1587),

1  See Oskar Garstein, Rome and the Counter-­Reformation in Scandinavia (Bergen, 1963), p. 15. 2  Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Europe 1592–1648: Centre and Peripheries (Oxford, 2015), p. 36. 3 Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin investigates some of these problems in ‘The Regular Clergy and the Episcopate in Ireland, 1600–1650’, in Cormac Begadon and James  E.  Kelly (eds.), British and Irish Religious Orders in Europe, 1560–1800: Conventuals, Mendicants and Monastics in Motion (Woodbridge, 2022), pp. 43–59. 4  John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London, 1975), p. 13. Thomas M. McCoog, SJ, Mission or Church, 1570–1640? In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume I: Endings and New Beginnings, 1530–1640. Edited by: James E. Kelly and John McCafferty, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843801.003.0007

108  Thomas M. McCoog, SJ initially shared the senior-­common-­room perspective but later, influenced by the apostolic vision of the Canonist-­Bishop Jean Vendeville and the missionary zeal of the second generation of religious refugees, he supervised the training of clergy no longer content to await future ecclesiastical preferments, but eager to stem and reverse the decline of Catholicism in their homeland. The common-­room became a training ground; controversy gave way to cases of conscience; and the ‘Spiritual Exercises’ of Ignatius of Loyola became its missionary manual.

The Twilight of the Old Order Pope Pius IV sent Jesuits David Wolfe and Nicholas de Gouda to Ireland and Scotland, respectively, to strengthen orthodoxy and episcopacy against the onslaught of Protestantism. Wolfe reprimanded incumbents and shepherded worthy candidates to the Continent and to Rome. De Gouda principally blamed bishops for the collapse of Catholicism: ‘hardly surprising if God’s flock is eaten up by wolves, while such shepherds as these have charge of it’.5 John Leslie was appointed during the brief ascendancy of Mary, Queen of Scots, but left Scotland in 1567 with her fall. Subsequently and consequently Scottish Catholicism was nearly obliterated by aggressive Presbyterian ministers. Ireland had a hierarchy, but episcopal powers varied according to location. When Elizabeth ascended the English throne on 17 November 1558 many bishoprics were vacant because of the Anglo-­Spanish war. Subsequently she removed and imprisoned eleven Marian bishops; two others fled to the Continent, and two conformed. In the early 1560s, Rome, having considered various rem­ed­ ies for the plight of the imprisoned bishops as well as the nomination of selected exiles for vacant sees, proceeded cautiously. Perhaps a lingering hope that Elizabeth would repudiate heresy and marry a Habsburg prince impeded stronger action. Hope for reconciliation ended in 1570 with the Queen’s excommunication. Instead of bishops, Pope Pius V named apostolic delegates in 1567 to deal with occasional conformity, clerical faculties, and absolution of heretics and schismatics. In 1572 in response to petitions from English Catholic priests, the newly elected Pope Gregory XIII admitted that bishops should resolve issues then treated by priests, but did not follow up this realization with any nominations. Maurice Chauncy, OCart, formerly at the London Charterhouse but then prior of the Carthusians in Bruges and a traditionalist voice, decried the absence of an episcopacy. A hierarchical remedy to England’s problems, albeit desirable, was not possible, Allen, de facto head of English Catholics, explained, because of the penal laws. These conditions were, Allen granted, deplorable, but bearable. Only 5 De Gouda to Diego Laínez, Mainz, 30 September 1562, in William Forbes-­Leith, SJ (ed.), Narratives of Scottish Catholics under Mary Stuart and James VI (Edinburgh, 1885), pp. 76–7.

Mission or Church, 1570–1640?  109 the erection of a hierarchy could prevent England from becoming a battleground fought over by antagonistic secular and religious clergy. Nonetheless, the spiritual welfare of English Catholics could not be ignored until the restoration of a hier­ archy.6 Rome still did nothing. In 1578 the Pope granted George Blackwell special faculties. In 1580 another petition asked for bishops to provide leadership and direction, and to administer the sacrament of confirmation. Rome refused out of fear that the government would target and belittle the bishop.7 Rome resolved similar ecclesiastical problems plaguing the remnants of the Catholic Church in Holland by nominating Sasbout Vosmeer, a secular priest, vicar general of the archdiocese of Utrecht, in 1583. Allen, now a zealous missionary, dismissed Chauncy’s protests that conditions were not ideal for Catholic clergy. Unless something was done to strengthen and preserve the Catholic beliefs and practices of Englishmen and Englishwomen, the penal laws would slowly corrode and eventually destroy these convictions with eternal damnation the consequence. Some priests ordained during the reign of Mary I prevented the flame of orthodoxy from being extinguished, but they needed assistance. In 1574, Lewis Barlow was the first graduate of the English College at Douai to be sent back to England on the newly launched mission. The endeavour had been made an even more perilous mission after Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570, which allowed fidelity to the Roman Church and acknowledgement of the pope to potentially be construed as treason. The England into which the seminary priests ventured lacked any mechanism or organization for the reception and distribution of arriving clergy. The Marian clergy had laid some foundations, but how secure and extensive they were remains unknown. Once inside the kingdom, again to the chagrin and disapproval of Chauncy, the priests assumed secular attire to escape detention and arrest.

Jesuit Missions In Ireland some friars and monks continued to live amidst the ruins of the houses destroyed during the reign of Henry VIII. The Jesuit mission to Ireland had ended in the early 1580s with the demise of the Baltinglass revolt. Ó hAnnracháin’s ‘distinct continuity’ had some lapses: Rome frequently failed to nominate bishops, as Thomas O’Connor makes clear, ‘for fear of provoking persecution or royal 6  Allen to Chauncy, Cambrai, 10 August 1577, in Thomas Francis Knox (ed.), The Letters and Memorials of William Cardinal Allen (1532–1594) (London, 1882), pp. 35, 36. 7  On the request, see Thomas Francis Knox, ‘Thomas Goldwell, Bishop of St. Asaph’, in Thomas Edward Bridgett and Thomas Francis Knox (eds.), The True Story of the Catholic Hierarchy Deposed by Queen Elizabeth (London, 1889), pp. 208–63, at 249. An anonymous document against the creation of bishops mentions a petition submitted c.1580 (ARSI, Angl. 31/I, fol. 418r).

110  Thomas M. McCoog, SJ objections’ and instead appointed vicars apostolic or commissaries.8 Slowly, to use Ó hAnnracháin’s descriptive phrases, a ‘shadow church-­in-­waiting’, ‘an alternative ecclesiastical establishment’, was being formed.9 In Scotland several religious remained hidden throughout the country and a few Scottish Jesuits returned briefly to their homeland for medical or family reasons, but the number of priests remained small, without proper organization and authority. The apprehensions of the Superior General Everard Mercurian regarding a Jesuit mission to England are well-­known. He consistently declined Allen’s plea for involvement. Without bishops and indeed without any ecclesiastical structure or hierarchy, he and his consultors wondered how order could prevail. How could clergy live together in one realm without some jars or disagreeing in matters of judgment at least . . . and this sometimes of ignorance, other times of passion or emulation by human frailty . . . which would be very hard to remove or end, there being no competent judge whereunto to make recourse.10

But the situation was in flux; prospects for some modified form of tolerance increased as negotiations for a marriage alliance with France progressed. Nevertheless, apprehension regarding the absence of a hierarchy remained. The inclusion of Thomas Goldwell, bishop of St Asaph, who had crossed to the Continent in January 1560, in the party accompanying the first Jesuit mission was intended to quell these fears. Robert Persons, Edmund Campion, and Ralph Emerson, the fabled Jesuit mission, left Rome in April 1580 with Goldwell, assorted laymen, and clergy. The bishop’s subsequent retreat angered Allen and threatened the Society’s continued involvement. Fortunately for Allen and for the Jesuit mission, Mercurian died on 1 August; his successor, elected in February 1581, Claudio Acquaviva, endorsed the mission, a promotion that occasionally wavered. Allen held an ambiguous authority over the entire mission including undefined jurisdiction over Jesuits in the kingdom. He held no specific title but his role is similar to that of the apostolic prefects, later developed in the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith. The prefects were ecclesiastical superiors in missionary areas without bishops, lands usually entrusted to one religious order, whose superior would ordinarily be designated ‘apostolic prefect’.11 8  Thomas O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, 1600–70: Religion and Politics in Flanders, France, Ireland and Rome (Dublin, 2008), p. 40. 9 Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, ‘An Alternative Establishment: The Evolution of the Irish Catholic Hierarchy, 1600–49’, in Robert Armstrong and Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin (eds.), Insular Christianity: Alternative Models of the Church in Britain and Ireland, c.1570–c.1700 (Manchester, 2013), p. 191. 10  Robert Persons, SJ, ‘Of the Life and Martyrdom of Father Edmond Campian’, Letters and Notices, 11 (1877), pp. 219–42, 308–39; 12 (1878), pp. 1–68, here p. 330. 11  Giovanni Pizzorusso, Governare le missioni, conoscere il mondo nel xvii secolo. La Congregazione Pontificia de Propaganda Fide (Viterbo, 2014), p. 61.

Mission or Church, 1570–1640?  111 That Allen did not reside in the land over which he was prefect does not seem to have been a concern. He approved and assigned secular clergy to the mission and, in collaboration with Persons, had some say in the selection of Jesuits, their assignment and removal. The two worked closely on the formation of clergy and, with Henry Garnet, SJ, on their distribution and support on the mission. The Pope granted Allen even more extensive powers after he was named cardinal in 1591. Allen campaigned for the Society’s participation on the English mission as a new religious order without any pre-­ Reformation associations, an order, he claimed, that had been established by God at this time to combat heresy. His preference however was exclusive: no other religious order was invited. Why were pre-­Reformation monks and especially friars not invited or involved? In 1585 Pope Gregory XIII granted the Society of Jesus a monopoly over the mission to Japan and forbade mendicants with the brief Ex pastorali officio. Had the Pope, Allen, and the Society reached a comparable agreement? Clergy on the English mission would be secular or Jesuit under the direction of the prefect, Allen. Earlier, Pope Paul III, who had approved the Society’s foundation in 1540, granted it exceptional powers and exemptions in 1549 with Licet debitum. The Pope allowed Jesuits on the missions to act as bishops if bishops were needed.12 But more important for this account was the Society’s freedom from episcopal control granted by the same bull.13 After Allen’s death in October 1594 no one oversaw the mission, resisted the growing anti-­Jesuit agitation on different fronts, or handled various canonical problems. If Persons is to be believed, Owen Lewis, former head of the English Hospice, Rome, and then bishop of Cassano and executor of Allen’s will, claimed that Allen’s authority (especially the rights to present seminarians for ordination, select priests for the mission, and grant faculties) passed to him as the senior English ecclesiastic, and he persuaded many students at the English College in Rome to support him. Pope Clement VIII decided that Enrico, Cardinal Caetani, cardinal protector of England, handle such matters. Denying this power to Lewis, according to Persons, caused even greater unrest at the college. Caetani in turn delegated the faculties to Richard Barret, Allen’s successor as rector of the English College, Douai, on 4/14 April 1595. The quest for Allen’s successor as cardinal-­prefect of the mission became a contest between opposing factions with Lewis, already a bishop well-­schooled in the Borromean tradition of episcopal-­led reform (he was Carlo, Cardinal Borromeo’s, vicar general in Milan from 1580 to 1584), Persons, and Thomas Stapleton as the

12 See Bronwen McShea, Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France (Lincoln, NE, 2019), pp. 174–5. 13  ‘Papal Documents from the Early Years of the Society of Jesus in English Translation’, trans. Philip R. Amidon, SJ, Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits, 52 (2020), p. 29.

112  Thomas M. McCoog, SJ candidates. The first died in 1595; the second was advised to dissociate himself from the post; and the third was too elderly. Within England, the so-­called ‘Wisbech Stirs’ highlighted discontent in 1595. Secular clergy and Jesuits who had lived so peacefully together in a showcased clerical paradise now contested each other in a semi-­public forum imprisoned at Wisbech Castle. The conflict made clear the need for an ecclesiastical structure for resolving disputes and disciplining the guilty. The only structure within England was the Society’s, whose superior welcomed seminary priests and Jesuits, arranged for their accommodation, and controlled the common fund. An ad hoc committee eventually resolved—­temporarily at least—­the stirs. However, Isaiah’s peaceable kingdom had vanished as the lion and the lamb glared suspiciously at each other. Many believed that permanent peace would only come with the appointment of bishops—­and the expulsion of Jesuits. In 1581 Claudio Acquaviva authorized a Jesuit mission to Scotland where very few priests ministered; in 1598 the Society rebooted its mission to Ireland where Jesuits now served along with many other religious and diocesan priests. By the late 1590s, there were many vacant Irish sees and few resident bishops. During this shortage, Rome experimented with other ecclesiastical organizations, ­spe­cif­ic­al­ly vicars apostolic who exercised their authority within the borders of trad­ition­al dioceses but without episcopal ordination. In 1592 Sasbout Vosmeer was named apostolic prefect for the Dutch mission, the first, according to Charles H. Parker, since ‘the early history of the Catholic Church’.14 Almost immediately Vosmeer solicited Jesuit assistance, a request he would later regret. Despite multiple petitions from Jesuits and secular priests in the 1590s, Rome appointed neither a bishop nor a vicar apostolic for England. Instead, in 1598 Pope Clement VIII named an archpriest. Consternation was the general reaction in England. What had prevented Rome from nominating ­bishops? Was it Jesuit intrigue? Perhaps the archpriest was a papal experiment. Ó  hAnnracháin notes Clement’s desire to nominate more bishops in Ireland because their appointment ‘would prove useful for England as well as Ireland’.15 The secular priest John Bennett claimed that Caetani followed Persons’ advice in the erection of this ecclesiastical order.16 With papal approval Cardinal Caetani announced the appointment of George Blackwell as archpriest on 25 February / 7 March 1598. As archpriest, Blackwell would govern and direct secular clergy in

14 Charles  H.  Parker, Faith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, MA, 2008), p. 31. 15  Ó hAnnracháin, ‘An Alternative Establishment’, p. 196. 16  ‘Historical Narrative of John Bennett, Priest, 1621’, in Raymund Stanfield (ed.), ‘The Archpriest Controversy’, in Miscellanea XII, CRS 22 (London, 1921), p. 141. Victor Houliston contends that ‘the appointment of an archpriest was, in the end, Persons’ idea’: Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England (Aldershot, 2007), p. 120. Others have followed his lead.

Mission or Church, 1570–1640?  113 England and Scotland, and, equally important because of the Wisbech Stirs, foster unity between them and the Jesuits.

The Archpriest Nothing signified the state of the English secular clergy more than the simple fact that Blackwell received news of his appointment from Henry Garnet, SJ, serving as a nexus between Rome (Persons) and the priests in England. Grateful to the cardinal for his efforts to restore peace, Garnet assured him that everyone, except a few recalcitrants, embraced joyfully Rome’s decision.17 Practical difficulties nonetheless remained: faculties, distribution of clergy, finances. Especially im­port­ant was the scope of the archpriest’s jurisdiction and authority. He had been granted ecclesiastical authority in Scotland where fewer than ten secular priests and Jesuits ministered, but had not been given jurisdiction over the surviving Marian clergy in England and Wales. Unless the archpriest was granted some authority over them through new letters patent, Garnet feared they would be exploited by the factious.18 As for Scotland, no attempt was made to exercise authority there. The archpriest was not as universally accepted as Garnet had proclaimed. Some wondered why their request for a bishop had not been granted. Others wondered whether the decision had been made by Cardinal Caetani, a known advocate of the Society of Jesus. Had English Jesuits poisoned the waters out of fear that a bishop would side with their opponents as discontent and disapproval festered, or that he would impede their missionary independence? In the subsequent contentious literature—­and indeed in some contemporary historiography—­the Society of Jesus in general and Persons in particular were blamed for foisting an unwanted ecclesiastical novelty on English clergy. Some, suspicious and anxious, appealed to Rome (the so-­called appellants). The first appeal resulted with a papal con­firm­ ation of the archpresbyterate in 1599 and revived antagonism; the second appeal, with active assistance from the French Crown and collusion with the English government had more success: Clement VIII published his final decision in Venerunt nuper on 25 September / 5 October 1602.19 The brief exonerated appellants of all charges of disobedience and schism, and decreed that the archpriest should no longer consult Jesuits in serious matters. No longer did the Society serve as an intermediary between the English mission and the Holy See. Moreover, 17  Garnet to Caetani, suburbs of London, 8 May 1598, Archivum Britannicum Societatis Iesu, Anglia II, 35. 18  Garnet to Persons, 10 June 1598, ABSI, Anglia II, 37. 19  See Thomas M. McCoog, SJ, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England 1598–1606: ‘Lest Our Lamp be Entirely Extinguished’ (Leiden and Rome, 2017), pp. 401–4, for a complete translation of this brief.

114  Thomas M. McCoog, SJ appellants were to be named as assistants and associates of the archpriest. Henceforth the Jesuit and secular missions were independent and frequent rivals. But the Jesuits at least were not expelled from the mission and remained in control of the English College, Rome. In Holland in the same year, Vosmeer was named archbishop of Philippi with delegated not ordinary authority over the Holland mission. Despite strong protests from Persons, Benedictines returned to England in 1603, three years after Clement VIII had ended the Jesuit monopoly in Japan with Onerosa. No longer was the Society of Jesus the only religious order in Japan and in England. The presence of the monks raised a jurisdictional problem: as religious they were not subject to the archpriest; as Benedictines they were not subject to the Jesuit superior. As their number increased—­there were nearly twenty in the kingdom by 1607—the issue became more pressing: how did the monks relate to the Jesuits and the secular clergy? To resolve intra-­religious tension the Holy Office regulated Jesuit-­Benedictine relations in late 1608. But only an episcopacy could ensure that peace continued.

Episcopacy Redivivus Anxieties over a contested succession proved as groundless as the so-­called millennium bug. For many Catholics, Elizabeth’s death on 24 March 1603 and the succession of King James VI of Scotland augured an era of freedom. Deceived by James’ ‘winks and nods’ as he forged support for his candidacy, English Catholics who had consistently advocated his succession, among whom were many appellants and few Jesuits, believed that persecution would be ended, Catholicism decriminalized, and some form of religious toleration legally established. Hope waxed and waned with every act and declaration until it finally crashed on the shoals of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. The consequent oath of allegiance redrew lines of division as Catholics debated its acceptability, a debate that was not even finished when Rome spoke. Pope Paul V who, as Camillo, Cardinal Borghese, was vice-­ protector of England, condemned the oath on 12/22 September 1606. Blackwell initially concurred but later changed his mind. Captured in late June 1607 and subjected to intense interrogation, he capitulated and pronounced the oath on 4 July. In a circular letter on 7 July, he urged the secular clergy to follow his lead. His defection resuscitated earlier proposals for a bishop. Persons’ earlier enthusiasm for a bishop waned because of fear of the appointment of an appellant. On his advice, the Pope was willing to grant the petition if all the clergy in England signed the request and agreed on a list of candidates, that is non-­appellants.20 As George Birkhead, Blackwell’s successor as archpriest, 20  Thomas Swinnerton (vere Thomas Fitzherbert) to George Birkhead, 4 October 1608, in Leo Hicks, SJ (ed.), Letters of Thomas Fitzherbert 1608–1610, CRS 41 (London, 1948), p. 40.

Mission or Church, 1570–1640?  115 deliberated sending agents to Rome to discuss the matter, a different but not unrelated mission was taking place. In January 1609, Thomas Fitzherbert, then a secular priest but a future Jesuit, accompanied Lady Manners, sister of Roger Manners, earl of Rutland, to a papal audience at which they presented the Pope with the oddly named ‘oedipus schedularum’21 that specified seven Jesuits and the churches for which they were responsible. At the time there were approximately forty Jesuits in England and Wales, but only seven were named on the list. The oedipus made clear how unnecessary bishops were. Denied traditional territorial parishes—­and indeed opposed to them—­Jesuits had organized ‘churches’ around prominent Catholic lay persons capable of providing protection and financial support. This type of organization was similar to that of contemporaneous Jesuits in China. Each Jesuit presented the opinion of his ‘church or parish’ regarding bishops. The identical phrasing and striking similarities suggest a formula submitted to each for completion. Each left the final decision to the prudent judgement of the Pope, but stressed that candidates be chosen from peaceful clergy working for union within the Church and not from fractious collaborators with the government who supported the oath of allegiance.22 Secular clergy persisted in their campaign. In March 1612 secular priest Richard Smith quoted King James’ infamous comment at the Hampton Court Conference (1604) to Thomas More, Roman agent of the secular clergy, ‘no Bishops no King’ with a caveat. Smith feared the Pope would eventually realize ‘no Bishops no Pope’: ‘For as the K thoughe present could not bridle his ministers without Bish. so neither wil the Pope keep in order so many Humors without some authority present’. The Pope should have two strings in his bow: his own authority ‘absent and an other present which by reason of the presence wold perhaps swaie more than his absent’.23 In England and Scotland nothing further was done during Paul’s pontificate. In Ireland, however, Rome nominated more resident bishops who, at different provincial synods, implemented Tridentine legislation on clerical behaviour and credal statements.

Congregazione de Propaganda Fide On 27 December / 6 January 1622, Pope Gregory XV established the Congregazione de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith). The congregation had a twofold objective: the liberation of missions from 21 This idiosyncratic expression is tentatively translated as ‘key to the records’: see Thomas M. McCoog, SJ, Pre-­suppression Jesuit Activity in the British Isles and Ireland (Leiden, 2019), p. 30 n. 48. 22  Author’s translation: ARSI, Angl. 36/II, fols. 268r, 317r. 23 Richard Orontes (vere Smith) to More, 13 March 1612 (n.s.), in Michael  C.  Questier (ed.), Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate of George Birkhead, Camden Society, Fifth Series, 12 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 140.

116  Thomas M. McCoog, SJ the colonial powers, Spain and Portugal; and the resistance and reclamation of lands and peoples lost to Protestantism. Missionary activity would follow the military victories of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). The congregation defined missions and missionary territories as ‘those [lands] in which the canon law of the Church was not in effect’.24 England, Ireland, and Scotland had been previously under the jurisdiction of the Congregation of the Holy Office which did not make their transfer to the new congregation smooth. Ireland was subject to the congregation because the penal laws prevented the complete implementation of the decrees and canons of the Council of Trent. Propaganda’s goal was the introduction (or re-­introduction) of diocesan structures as laid down by Trent, orthodox doctrine, and reformed liturgical practice. As the situation permitted, Propaganda would introduce episcopal structures with vicars apostolic with titles in partibus infidelium, so as to avoid offence to civil authorities.25 With its resident hierarchy Ireland had a clear advantage over Scotland and England. Bishops were essential, according to the Theatine Francesco Ingoli, secretary to Propaganda Fide, as the most useful and the most established means of propagating the faith, not only because the bishops operate in the dioceses through visitations, teaching and preaching, but also by ordaining priests for parishes, which is important for keeping our Christians in the Catholic faith and to propagate it among the schismatics.26

English secular clergy wondered whether a new pope and Propaganda Fide would be more receptive to requests for bishops. England was in a state of flux. Negotiations between England and Spain for a marriage treaty between James’ heir, the future Charles I, and the Spanish Infanta Maria Anna had been ongoing for some time, but the discussions had become more serious in 1619 after James’ son-­in-­law Frederick V, the Calvinist Elector Palatine, inaugurated the Thirty Years’ War with his foolish acceptance of the Bohemian Crown. During the negotiations the Spanish, who had more than once betrayed English Catholics, insisted on religious toleration and repeal of the penal laws as a condition. James could not repeal the laws without parliament’s agreement but he could suspend their execution. In this culture of expectation, papal Rome nominated an English bishop (1622) and Jesuit Rome approved the establishment of the English Province of the Society of Jesus (1623).

24 Pizzorusso, Governare le missioni, p. 42. 25 Pizzorusso, Governare le missioni, pp. 60–1. 26  As quoted in Giovanni Pizzorusso, ‘The Congregation “De Propaganda Fide” and Pontifical Jurisdiction over the Non-­Tridentine Church’, in Michela Catto and Adriano Prosperi (eds.), Trent and Beyond (Turnot, 2017), pp. 423–41, here p. 435.

Mission or Church, 1570–1640?  117 The third archpriest, William Harrison, died on 11 May 1621. In Rome, to seek a dispensation for the royal marriage, John Bennett pleaded that the Pope take advantage of the anticipated benefits and name a bishop as Harrison’s successor. He shrewdly recommended the Dominican Diego de la Fuente, then serving as confessor to Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Count of Gondomar and Spanish ambassador in England. After the marriage, Bennett predicted, normalcy would be restored to the English Church. With powerful allies, Bennett’s campaign succeeded. From a list of three candidates—­William Bishop, Matthew Kellison, and Smith—­Pope Gregory XV selected Bishop to care for Christ’s faithful in England, Wales, and Scotland. He was named titular bishop of Chalcedon in partibus infidelium on 5/15 March 1623. On his way to England Bishop visited Kellison at the English College, and English Benedictines at their abbey in Douai. Richard Blount, the English Jesuit provincial who was visiting the province’s houses in the Flanders at the time, avoided any encounter.27 Other religious orders and congregations moved into England in the 1610s. John Gennings re-­introduced the Observant Franciscans (Recollects) in either 1610 or 1614. The province was restored in 1625. Simon Stock of St Mary (Thomas Doughty) inaugurated a Discalced Carmelite mission to England in 1614. Pope Urban VIII blessed their mission in 1624. Carmelite numbers remained small. The Irish Capuchin Francis Nugent secured Pope Paul V’s approval for a Capuchin mission to Great Britain and Ireland in 1608. A few Capuchins ministered in London in the late 1610s and early 1620s. In July 1622 Thomas Middleton (alias Dade) was named vicar general of the few Dominicans in England. There were approximately five Dominicans in England in 1627. Cistercians, Carmelites, and Capuchins began ministering in Ireland between 1600 and 1615. Their arrival and the return of Jesuits after 1598 strained relations between themselves and the older religious orders and diocesan clergy. In a 1623 report it was estimated there were 800 diocesan priests, 200 Observant Franciscans, forty Jesuits, twenty Dominicans, four or five Capuchins, and a few Augustinians and Cistercians in Ireland. As Ó hAnnracháin points out, religious, specifically Franciscans, were nominated to the episcopal bench. In fact, in the 1620s Franciscans occupied three of the four Metropolitan sees. Around the same time concern was expressed to Rome regarding the increased number of regular clergy and the need to reduce them ‘to better order and discipline’.28 Significantly fewer ministered in Scotland. By the 1630s a small number of Franciscans, Benedictines, Capuchins, and Vincentians (Lazarists) laboured alongside the few secular clergy and Jesuits.

27 Superior General Muzio Vitelleschi to Blount, Rome, 16/26 August 1623, ARSI, Angl. 1/I, fol. 181r. 28  As cited in O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, p. 134.

118  Thomas M. McCoog, SJ

Building a Church Ex Nihilo Bishop formulated his plans for the Roman Church’s reconstruction after con­sult­ ation with theologians and canonists in Paris. He planned to carve Great Britain into a distinct number of districts over which archdeacons would preside. Each archdeaconry would be further divided into deaneries. More important and most contentious was the establishment of a chapter of canons to nominate and elect future bishops and govern sede vacante. The post-­Reformation English Catholic Church would look more like the pre-­Reformation version and indeed the contemporaneous Church of England than the Tridentine model. Bishop acted on the (unfounded) premise that he had the same ordinary authority as pre-­ Reformation bishops. In London in late July or early August he named arch­ deacons, vicars general, deans, notaries, and chapter canons. Bishop’s agreement with the Benedictines was formalized on 29 November 1623. A month later the Carmelites and Capuchins promised to add their signatures to the agreement. The Jesuits insisted that they could not agree to any settlement without the prior permission of their superior general. Bishop died before Muzio Vitelleschi replied. Vitelleschi advised Blount to consult the Jesuits in Ireland to see how they related to and interacted with the episcopacy. Perhaps the English Jesuits could learn from them.29 But what would they learn? The surviving annual letters, which, one must recall, were written for edification, recount no tales of conflict between Jesuits and diocesan clergy or bishops. Instead, they tell of Jesuits being summoned, requested, or invited by bishops, vicars general, and deans to assist. One unnamed bishop lauded the Society so much in 1615 that the Jesuits blushed. In 1623, as English Jesuits were adapting to the presence of Bishop Bishop, Vitelleschi complimented Irish Jesuits for giving ‘all due honour and reverence to bishops and other worthy clerics’. ‘Due honour’ must not infringe on Jesuit privileges: two years earlier Vitelleschi insisted that Jesuits did not need to secure episcopal approval in lands where the Tridentine decrees were not implemented.30 Scots were unhappy that one bishop had been named for both England and Scotland, and protested the decision. Bishop himself was not enthusiastic about the arrangement, and preferred, unless the Pope thought otherwise, that a Scot serve as bishop in the northern kingdom. Bishop died on 13 April 1624 without papal approval of his ecclesiastical restructuring. The chapter pressed Rome for official recognition of their existence. Four months after the nomination of Bishop, Pope Gregory had died and been succeeded by Urban VIII on 27 July / 6 August 1623. Memorials were addressed to him on the Scottish question. In autumn 1623, negotiations for the 29  Vitelleschi to Blount, Rome, 10/20 April 1624, ARSI, Angl. 1/II, fols. 195v–96r. 30  Vera Moynes (ed.), Irish Jesuit Annual Letters, 1604–1674 (Dublin, 2019), pp. 107, 116.

Mission or Church, 1570–1640?  119 Spanish match, which had been faltering for some time, finally collapsed. In February 1624, James initiated discussions with France for the hand of Henrietta Maria, sister of King Louis XIII. The French Court proposed Richard Smith as Bishop’s successor. Smith urged More to procure the required faculties, preferably those of an ordinarius Angliae, an ordinary bishop of England. Some Scots, Smith claimed, wanted him to exercise jurisdiction in Scotland, but he himself did not want to do so.31 He might have preferred the exclusion of Scotland, but Ecclesia Romana sollicita dated 24 January / 4 February 1625 decreed otherwise. Smith may have succeeded Bishop in England and Scotland but not with his preferred title ordinarius. The key word in Smith’s nomination was beneplacitum. A. F. Allison in his definitive analysis of the subsequent controversy explained: ‘Its purpose was to give a missionary bishop the same powers in the territory assigned to him as a diocesan bishop possessed in his diocese, while at the same time leaving the Pope free to withdraw them at will’.32 The Pope’s pleasure (beneplacitum) determined the duration of Smith’s authority. In a new clause added to the faculties otherwise identical to those given to Bishop, appeals of Smith’s authority could be made to the nuncio in France. With such ambiguous instructions, faculties, and authority—­that raised without answering crucial questions surrounding his jurisdiction and how he was to exercise it in practice33—the new bishop crossed into England on 28 April / 8 May, three days before the marriage of Henrietta Maria and Charles. Philip Hughes underlines that the new Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith played no role in the discussion of Bishop’s successor and Smith’s eventual nomination. The Holy Office investigated the petition and decided on the nominee. A decree of the Holy Office appointed Smith. As the Congregation became organized and more efficient, its role in the nomination of bishops increased without the total elimination of the Holy Office. By October English Jesuits were complaining about the bishop’s machinations.34

The Battle Commences Trouble brewed from the start. Many regulars believed that Smith had trashed them personally in reports to Rome and had sowed doubts about their ministries as he toured the kingdom. On tour he found time to complain about the Society

31  Smith to Thomas More, 20/30 January 1625, in Michael Questier (ed.), Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Politics 1621–1625, Camden Society, Fifth Series, 34 (Cambridge, 2009), p. 336. More died in Rome in April. 32  Antony  F.  Allison, ‘A Question of Jurisdiction: Richard Smith, Bishop of Chalcedon, and the Catholic Laity, 1625–31’, Recusant History, 16 (1982), pp. 111–45, here p. 112. 33  Allison, ‘A Question of Jurisdiction’, p. 111. 34  Vitelleschi to Blount, Rome, 8/18 October 1625, ARSI, Angl. 1/II, fol. 224r.

120  Thomas M. McCoog, SJ of Jesus, including his anger at their avoidance of plague-­stricken Catholics. He demanded the names of all Jesuits in England, a demand that was refused. In July 1626 he alleged that six or seven Jesuits who had been dismissed from the Society over the past five or six years, some for scandalous behaviour, had retained their faculties and continued to practice their priesthood. Smith complained that Certain Regulars, some who have fled their order and others expelled, have made their way into the vineyard, and after the fashion of the other priests sent here by the authority of the Holy See, are administering the sacraments not having received (so far as my knowledge goes) any faculties, nor approbation lawfully had.35

On 28 August / 7 September 1626, Propaganda Fide decreed that the faculties of ex-­religious expired with their dismissal. The bishop would adjudicate each case to decide whether new faculties as a secular priest would be granted. Greater surveillance and increased risk of arrest compelled Smith into hiding from the government. So well hidden was he that Catholic clergy could not obtain the approbation required to exercise their faculties. Did regulars actually need approval? Doubts arose, principally among lay penitents, regarding the validity of the sacraments performed by religious without appropriate faculties. The theological need of approbation and the practical impossibility in its obtainment sparked the so-­called ‘approbation controversy’ in April 1627, a dispute similar to one between Jesuits and the vicar apostolic in Holland. Smith met the Jesuit provincial Richard Blount and the Benedictine provincial of the south, Mark Crowder (or Crowther). Despite assurances from Vitelleschi that the bishop had nothing to do with regular clergy, Blount and Crowder reluctantly agreed to seek approbation more out of courtesy than obligation. A few days later they changed their minds: episcopal approval was not necessary because with faculties from the Pope they could function anywhere. Smith proceeded carefully; he explained that a request for approbation did not imply any wrong-­doing but simply subjected them to the same criteria as secular clergy who were not parish priests. Propaganda Fide decreed on 26 May / 5 June 1627 that religious missioners must present their credentials to Smith on their arrival in England. The bishop did not pass judgement on their suitability for ministry, but simply examined the credentials provided by their religious superiors. But even that was too much. The Benedictines led the fight back. Similarly, a Scottish Benedictine, John Silvanus Mayne, requested that his men not be required to seek approval from a bishop in London but instead from the nuncio in Paris. Subsequently and perhaps consequently Propaganda Fide established an apostolic prefecture, a structure similar 35 As quoted in Philip Hughes, Rome and the Counter-­ Reformation in England (London, 1942), p. 349.

Mission or Church, 1570–1640?  121 to the archpresbyterate presided over by a priest, in Scotland in 1627; this prefecture was elevated into an apostolic vicariate under the administration of an episcopal vicar apostolic in 1694. Smith meanwhile sought advice from Irish and Dutch bishops. Bishop David Rothe of Ossory, always ‘most anxious to clip the wings of regular autonomy’,36 reported that approbation was a persistent problem in Ireland. In his diocese, all regulars needed approval and he himself examined questionable candidates. Philip Rovenius (Filips van Rouveen), Vosmeer’s successor as vicar apostolic and archbishop of Philippi, lamented that despite papal instructions, ‘the Regulars nevertheless, according to their custom, subvert all order; nay they do this eagerly so that, order being overturned, they may themselves act as they please and make piety a traffic’.37 William Malone, Jesuit superior in Ireland, feared that the Chalcedon dispute would have repercussions in Ireland and disturb even more relations between hierarchy and religious. By 1628, Irish Jesuits bemoaned how bishops and other religious impeded their ministries; Vitelleschi pleaded that gentility and not hostility guide their attempt to work out a modus operandi. The superior general on his part did what he could to remove the barriers; by 1632 he was relieved that more bishops were speaking well of the Society. Episcopal affection was short-­lived: in 1648, in the midst of the Confederacy crisis and the vis­it­ ations of the Nuncio Giambattista Rinuccini in 1645–9, and the Jesuit Mercure Verdier in 1649–9, Irish Jesuit John Young asserted that the bishops were ‘not very well-­meaning towards the Society’.38 As religious orders contested Smith’s insistence on approbation, lay Catholics raised another issue. In early summer 1627 a group of laymen wondered whether Smith, since he claimed the rights and prerogatives of a diocesan bishop, intended to set up ecclesiastical tribunals. Did he intend to exercise his authority in foro externo, that is in the external, public sphere? If so, the laymen feared that any acknowledgement of this court and any appearance before it could make them vulnerable to charges of high treason on the basis of praemunire, that is recognition of papal jurisdiction within England. English Jesuits held a provincial congregation in London from 3–6 February 1628. These assemblies of major administrators and senior professed fathers drafted postulata (issues raised for resolution or discussion). One asked Vitelleschi’s assistance in healing the rift between Chalcedon and the religious orders, a cause of considerable scandal especially among the Catholic nobles. The assembly discussed and decided that they did not need episcopal approbation for valid sacramental ministries. The superior general promised to continue working

36  Ó hAnnracháin, ‘Regular Clergy’. 37  As quoted in Hughes, Rome and the Counter-­Reformation, p. 361. 38  Moynes (ed.), Irish Jesuit Annual Letters, p. 413.

122  Thomas M. McCoog, SJ to heal the rift, but he did not know what else he could do. He also endorsed their judgement regarding faculties.39 Subsequent to the congregation Bishop Smith summoned Richard Blount for an audience, but the provincial refused to attend. In this he was not alone because superiors of other religious orders also declined the invitation. Henceforth the Benedictines and Jesuits were allied in the contest.

The Battle Escalates The different fronts of the Chalcedon affair attracted the attention of Propaganda Fide whose secretary, Francesco Ingoli, according to Hughes, favoured ‘sending bishops to England and also for the upholding of Richard Smith’.40 Ingoli argued that the exemption of regulars from episcopal jurisdiction resulted not only in scandals but also in the concentration of religious in wealthy regions. Tension and disagreement resulted from the considerable liberty granted by the archpriests to regular clergy. Now regular clergy refused to submit to the authority of a bishop who sought to rein them in. Ingoli urged the cardinals of the congregation to support the bishop, and argued that the exemptions granted to religious orders applied only in their abbeys and monasteries, and not in the missions where they functioned ‘for the most part’ in total freedom without a proper superior.41 Propaganda Fide might have preferred the episcopacy but the Holy Office, with its partiality for religious orders, was still in control. Catholic elation occasioned by the prospects first of the Spanish marriage and later by the reality of the French marriage, collapsed as Charles I under parliamentary pressure re-­enforced the penal legislation. On 11 December 1628, a royal proclamation was issued against Smith. A second followed on 24 March 1629. As the bishop hid, his supporters advocated his cause in print, in person, and in petition; Jesuits allied with Benedictines continued their opposition, often as in the example of the Jesuit John Floyd by extolling papal power over episcopal. Reconciliations were attempted. In July 1630, the Carmelite Vice-­Provincial Simon Stock of St Mary (vere Thomas Doughty) proposed increasing the number of bishops from one to three: the additional two would be Jesuit and Benedictine. In Ireland, regular clergy were frequently appointed to the episcopal bench. John Roche, Bishop of Ferns, claimed that a proliferation of bishops had quelled

39  ARSI, Congr. 60, fols. 274r–280v; Vitelleschi to William Wright, Rome, 10/20 May 1628, ARSI, Angl. 1/II, fol. 275v; same to Henry Silesdon (vere Bedingfeld), Rome, 24 May / 3 June 1628, ARSI, Angl. 1/II, fol. 275v. 40 Hughes, Rome and the Counter-­Reformation, p. 363. 41 Hughes, Rome and the Counter-­Reformation, pp. 363–5. See also Luca Codignola, The Coldest Harbour of the Land: Simon Stock and Lord Baltimore’s Colony in Newfoundland, 1621–1649 (Kingston and Montreal, 1988), pp. 110–11.

Mission or Church, 1570–1640?  123 friction between secular and religious in Ireland. More than a year later, Rome dismissed the proposal: ‘the trouble would not be appeased, but rather increased, for there would be in addition the fights of the bishops with one another’.42 Blount, however, refused any negotiated concord until the bishop acknowledged the privileges granted to the Society of Jesus by Rome.43 Meanwhile, Smith’s Gallican supporters in France aided him with theological and anti-­Jesuit treatises. Vitelleschi exhorted English Jesuits to bear these attacks silently and patiently and not to engage in replies. Smith’s defenders descended from the theological to the personal with ad hominem attacks on English Jesuits John Gerard44 and William Baldwin for alleged involvement with the Gunpowder Plot. Vitelleschi again forbade Jesuit rejoinders.45 Smith begged Propaganda Fide to support their earlier decrees that the bishop should examine the faculties of religious missionaries sent to England. He urged Propaganda to demonstrate to the regulars that it had authority over them. The bishop confided to Ingoli that he had ‘no doubt whatever, if the issue could be decided by a vote of the Catholics of England, whether it would be the bishop or the Jesuits who would be called forth out of that country’.46 Smith may have believed that he would have won a plebiscite, but a month later, he admitted, Regulars are now boasting everywhere that His Holiness, by a recent decree, has stripped me of all episcopal power and has reduced me to the rank of an archpriest. If he has done this, I am afraid he has brought shame to himself more than to me. For that a bishop has been overthrown, not for any desserts of his, but solely because of the clamour and the impositions of certain Regulars and the factious behaviour of a few laymen, cannot be disgraceful, for punishment where there is no fault can not entail disgrace.47

Smith did not explicitly mention the reasons for regulars’ boasts, but without a doubt the principal one was the papal brief Britannia, dated 29 April / 9 May 1631 and received in England by early July. It ratified Urban VIII’s earlier judgement in favour of the religious orders. To add insult to injury the brief reprimanded Smith 42  As cited in Hughes, Rome and the Counter-­Reformation, p. 401. 43  Blount to Vitelleschi, 17 December 1630, ABSI, Anglia IV, 92; Vitelleschi to Silesdon, Rome, 13/23 November 1630, ARSI, Angl. 1/II, fol. 323v; same to same, Rome, 1/11 January 1631, ARSI, Angl. 1/II, fol. 325v; same to Blount, Rome, 15 Feb. 1631, ARSI, Angl. 1/II, fol. 326v; same to same, Rome, 12/22 March 1631, ARSI, Angl. 1/I4/I, fol. 328r. 44 See Thomas Fitzherbert to Smith, 5/15 March 1631, ABSI, Anglia IV, 92 (bis); Blount to Vitelleschi, London, 10 Feb. 1632, ABSI, Anglia IV, 93. 45  Vitelleschi to Blount, Rome, 16/26 April 1631, ARSI, Angl. 1/II, fol. 332r; same to same, Rome, 8/19 July 1631, ARSI, Angl. 1/II, fol. 335r; same to same, Rome, 22 October / 1 November 1631, ARSI, Angl. 1/II, fol. 340r; same to William Baldwin, Rome, 11/21 November 1631, ARSI, Angl. 1/II, fol. 341r; same to Blount, Rome, 8/18 December 1632, ARSI, Angl. 1/II, fol. 363v. 46  Smith to Ingoli, 14 June 1631, in Hughes, Rome and the Counter-­Reformation, p. 386. 47  Smith to Ingoli, 20 July 1631, in Hughes, Rome and the Counter-­Reformation, pp. 387–8.

124  Thomas M. McCoog, SJ for generating dissension. The brief said nothing about Smith’s dispute with the English laity, nor did it explain the bishop’s jurisdiction, but it forbade English Catholics to publish controversial books on the subject. Vitelleschi advised English Jesuits against gloating. Indeed, they should receive the verdict with modesty even though they feared that the brief would not silence their opponents. If there were attacks on the apostolic brief, Jesuits were not to reply.48 Sanctuary in the house of the French ambassador became more difficult so Smith escaped to France on 24 August 1631. He resigned his office and remained in France until his death in 1655. Rome sent Gregorio Panzani to England to resolve the disputes and investigate chimeric schemes for reunion. Jesuit scepticism played a role in their exclusion from a meeting conducted by Panzani in November 1636 at which secular clergy reached a compromise with Benedictines, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Carmelites. Jesuits never signed the agreement. Intermittent discussions regarding bishops persisted but no one was nominated vicar apostolic until John Leyburn in 1685.

Conclusion Because the canon law of the Church was not and could not be implemented, Propaganda Fide considered the three kingdoms missionary territories. Ordinarily but not necessarily, this meant the absence of an ecclesiastical structure. In England debate focused on the duration of the mission. Was it a parenthesis, a hiatus, in the history of the Church with normal service to be resumed as soon as possible? Or were the missioners settling in for the longue durée? Bossy rightly acknowledged the Jesuits preferred the second: ‘the missionary profession was their specific metier’ as illustrated by the accounts of their successes in the Indies.49 Richard Smith after his final flight to France claimed, and perhaps with more than a modicum of justification, that the religious did not oppose him personally but hierarchically: they did not want a bishop. Jesuits had a superior and did not need another one, especially one intent on the implementation of a Tridentine model of reform. Jesuits preferred a monopoly or at least exemption from episcopal interference. In 1626 as victorious Catholic rulers plotted the re-­Catholicization of territories conquered during the Thirty Years’ War, their Jesuit confessors Wilhelm Lamormaini and Heinrich Philippi proclaimed in a testimonial ‘bishops are not necessary for reform’.50 Jesuit resistance to any 48  Vitelleschi to Blount, Rome, 19/29 November 1631, ARSI, Angl. 1/II, fol. 341v; 24 December 1631 / 3 January 1632, ARSI, Angl. 1/II, fol. 343r; 10/20 March 1632, ARSI, Angl. 1/II, fol. 346r; 4/14 August 1632, ARSI, Angl. 1/II, fol. 356v. 49 Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 24. 50  See Tomáš Parma, ‘ “Bishops are not Necessary for Reform”: Religious Orders in the Catholic Reconquista of Bohemia and Moravia; Two Case Studies’, in Massimo Carlo Giannini (ed.), Papacy,

Mission or Church, 1570–1640?  125 interference from Propaganda Fide, this on-­going duel, ended only with the Society’s suppression in 1773 but was resurrected with the Society’s res­tor­ation in 1814. Some secular clergy, who in Bossy’s apt description never ‘extricate[d] themselves from a churchly nostalgia’ for a pre-­Reformation ecclesiastical order,51 were not animated solely by a longing for what once had been, but also found attractive a post-­Tridentine alternative to Jesuit missionary strategy: a Borromean emphasis on a strong, centralized, pastorally active episcopacy resting on a network of parishes. Carlo, Cardinal Borromeo, archbishop of Milan, emphasized the im­port­ ance of the secular clergy, and the rights, prerogatives, and authority of bishops. Borromeo’s Church, according to Carlo Broglia, archbishop of Turin, resembled ‘well-­ organized armies, which have their generals, colonels and captains’.52 Religious orders and congregations were tolerated once they had been domesticated. His relations with Jesuits were problematic: he employed them and other religious orders to advance his policies, but controlled their influence and restricted their independence. Indeed in 1579 he had removed the Society from the administration of his seminary. The cardinal’s influence travelled throughout Italy and France to English secular clergy to whom it served ‘as unadulterated traditionalism could not, as a light to priests who had genuinely embraced and embodied the missionary ideal’ if not the Jesuit approach.53 John Bossy’s denunciation of a Tridentine rigidity that demanded ‘parochial conformity’, a demand that strangled the life out of the Church, would have been applauded by Jesuits constitutionally forbidden to accept the curacy of souls.54 Two strategies were in conflict, and the Society of Jesus intentionally remained outside any concord between secular and religious clergy until they too were forced to accept bishops during the reign of the Catholic King James II. John Bossy characterized the ecclesiology of the Jesuit Diego Laínez as ‘papalist presbyterianism’.55 Perhaps we should extend the label to the whole Society. The vicars apostolic in England and (after 1695) Scotland, as well as Irish bishops and archbishops, struggled to control, to domesticate, religious orders to demonstrate their kingdoms were no longer missions but churches.56 The Society of Jesus did not make their task easy. Religious Orders and International Politics in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Rome, 2013), pp. 165–81. 51 Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 25. 52  As cited in John Bossy, ‘The Counter-­Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe’, Past and Present, 47 (1970), p. 59. 53 Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 27. 54  Bossy, ‘Counter-­Reformation’, p. 68; Ignatius Loyola, The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, ed. George E. Ganss, SJ (St. Louis, 1970), pp. 177–8, num. [324]. 55  H. Outram Evennett, The Spirit of the Counter-­Reformation, ed. John Bossy (Notre Dame, IN, 1970), p. 136. 56  Ó hAnnracháin puts a counter-­intuitive spin on this: diocesan clergy questioning the authority of Franciscan bishops. See his ‘Regular Clergy’.

126  Thomas M. McCoog, SJ

Select Bibliography Bossy, John, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London, 1975). Hughes, Philip, Rome and the Counter-Reformation in England (London, 1942). Lake, Peter and Michael Questier, All Hail to the Archpriest: Confessional Conflict, Toleration, and the Politics of Publicity in Post-Reformation England (Oxford, 2019). Lunn, David, The English Benedictines 1540–1688: From Reformation to Revolution (London, 1980). McCoog, Thomas  M., SJ, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England 1598–1606: ‘Lest Our Lamp be Entirely Extinguished’ (Leiden/Rome, 2017). McCoog, Thomas M., SJ, Pre-suppression Jesuit Activity in the British Isles and Ireland (Leiden, 2019). Moynes, Vera (ed.), The Jesuit Irish Mission: A Calendar of Correspondence 1566–1752 (Rome, 2017). Ó hAnnracháin, Tadhg, ‘An Alternative Establishment: The Evolution of the Irish Catholic Hierarchy, 1600–49’, in Robert Armstrong and Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin (eds.), Insular Christianity: Alternative Models of the Church in Britain and Ireland, c.1570–c.1700 (Manchester, 2013), pp. 190–206. Questier, Michael (ed.), Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate of George Birkhead, Camden Society, Fifth Series, 12 (Cambridge, 1998). Questier, Michael (ed.), Newsletters from the Caroline Court, 1631–1638: Catholicism and the Politics of the Personal Rule, Camden Society, Fifth Series, 26 (Cambridge, 2005).

7 Catholicism and Separatism, Conformity and the State Michael Questier

When historians have tried to reconstruct the relationship between the State and those who, in some fashion, made their Catholicism public, they have tended to turn, first, to the records generated by the prosecution of separatism, often referred to as ‘recusancy’. This is a rather technical topic but, in part because of the availability of the records, it has served as the bedrock of many accounts of post-­Reformation Catholicism. Those records provide a wealth of names and locations which can be followed up in both the localities and the centralized archives of successive regimes, particularly in those documents compiled by the royal exchequer.1 Indeed, this became, at one time, a kind of research industry in its own right.2 At its narrowest, the subject can look like no more than a technical sub-­field of early modern legal and administrative studies, populated by those who can cope with the tedium of combing through government administrative records written in a variety of crabbed and sometimes almost illegible hands. But it also has some serious historiographical implications and resonances. For some scholars, the punishment of Catholic recusancy demonstrates that the Elizabethan State was a persecutory one, exactly as many contemporary Catholics claimed. In other words, it inflicted severe legal penalties on those who merely exercised their rights of conscience in accordance with Church teaching about absolute avoidance of communion with those in schism and/or heresy. For others, despite the evidence of the State’s willingness to inflict harsh sanctions on those who refused to obey the relevant statutes, the fact that Catholic separatism was not extirpated proves that the early modern English State was unable, particularly in some regions of the country, to force full compliance out of the Catholic 1  For the definitive account of recusancy as a legal and financial category, see Hugh Bowler (ed.), Recusant Roll No. 2 (1593–1594), CRS 57 (London, 1965), pp. vii–­cxiv. 2  See, for example, F. X. Walker, ‘The Implementation of the Elizabethan Statutes against Recusants 1581–1603’ (University of London PhD thesis, 1961); Vincent Burke, ‘Catholic Recusants in Elizabethan Worcestershire’ (University of Birmingham MA dissertation, 1972); J. J. LaRocca, ‘English Catholics and the Recusancy Laws 1558–1625: A Study in Religion and Politics’ (Rutgers University PhD thesis, 1977); Michael O’Boy, ‘The Origins of Essex Recusancy’ (University of Cambridge PhD thesis, 1995). Michael Questier, Catholicism and Separatism, Conformity and the State In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume I: Endings and New Beginnings, 1530–1640. Edited by: James E. Kelly and John McCafferty, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843801.003.0008

128  Michael Questier minority.3 In fact, full compliance here was almost a meaningless concept since the, at times, shambolic aspects of the implementation of the Act of Uniformity made it difficult to distinguish between principled absenteeism and mere apathy on the part of those who did not attend church as the act required.4 Although the focus here is in effect exclusively on the legal penalties for non-­conformity in England—­because, in the British Isles, the English State was the only one fully to elaborate the consequences of recusant separation—­there is scope elsewhere for the writing up of the implications of separation and separatism in Ireland and Scotland in the same period.5 To some extent, of course, this depends upon historical and archival perspective. Alan Macfarlane noted the divergence between local and national studies in past historiography concerning feuding and violence. Local historians concentrated on local records which contain all manner of evidence that society was on the verge of breakdown; but central records often seem far less aware of social dysfunction and impending chaos. Scholars who explore ‘the treasure of the Public Record Office rather than local records’ have been ‘struck less by the violence and brutality and strangeness of the past than by the enormous order, centralization and continuity between past and present’.6 A view of the tidy and intricate series of court hand rolls in the Public Record Office which registered the debts of recusants, principally the Recusant Rolls (The National Archives 3  Walker, ‘Implementation’; Burke, ‘Catholic Recusants’, esp. ch. 5, pp. 183ff.; Christopher Haigh, ‘Revisionism, the Reformation and the History of English Catholicism’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 36 (1985), p. 401. 4  Peter Clark observes that ‘as towns swelled it became increasingly difficult to tell who went to church and who did not’. He calculates that up to one-­fifth of Kentish folk defied the law and stayed away from church on a regular basis in the late sixteenth century. There were some ‘atheists or extreme sceptics’, but ‘for the majority of absentees . . . it was . . . a matter of spiritual apathy and barely concealed ignorance’: Peter Clark, English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution: Religion, Politics and Society in Kent 1500–1640 (Hassocks, 1977), pp. 156–7. By contrast, Richard Clark’s lucid account of Derbyshire non-­conformity (both Puritan and Catholic) demonstrates, from ecclesiastical court material, that there were attempts to distinguish between different offenders who were hauled in to answer for their non-­conformity. He concludes that ‘the clerks of the visitation courts knew the difference between a recusant and’ a mere ‘absentee from church or a non-­communicant’; the ‘parish church failed to monopolize the attentions of its parishioners’, some of whom were presented for a multitude of other reasons, such as for working on Sundays, for being at the alehouse in time of divine service, and other offences: Richard Clark, ‘Anglicanism, Recusancy and Dissent in Derbyshire 1603–1730’ (University of Oxford DPhil thesis, 1979), pp. 30–4; see also J.  J.  Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984), p. 155. In Lancashire, a predominantly (conformist) Catholic culture made it difficult to impose the appropriate penalties on those who were disobeying the spirit as well as the letter of the law: see Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London, 2019 edn.), chs. 7, 8. 5  In Ireland, it was far from clear how the supposed penalties for recusancy were supposed to work at all. For the situation in Scotland, see esp. Allan  J.  Macinnes, ‘Catholic Recusancy and the Penal Laws, 1603–1707’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 23 (1987), pp. 27–63; Margaret H. B. Sanderson, ‘Catholic Recusancy in Scotland in the Sixteenth Century’, Innes Review, 21 (1971), pp. 87–107. 6  Alan Macfarlane, The Justice and the Mare’s Ale: Law and Disorder in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford, 1981), p. 3.

Catholicism and Separatism, Conformity and the State  129 (TNA), E 377) and the series of appeals and judgements made by and delivered on recusants and others associated with the farming of their confiscated estates, mainly in the lord treasurer’s remembrancer’s memoranda rolls (TNA, E 368), gives the impression of serious administrative efficiency. Observed from the vantage point of the offices in the royal exchequer where these documents were processed, the drawing of large numbers of Catholics into the State’s taxation system looks remarkably thorough and unrelenting.7 For William Richardson, who brilliantly examined recusancy policy from the perspective of leading members of the Privy Council (principally Lord Burghley), the measures taken seem very coherent, that is, as Burghley battled (largely successfully, at least until 1593) to ensure consistency in the way in which the legal aspects of recusancy were dealt.8 Yet others have argued that the records of recusant separatism are a guide (in their, by turns, coherence and chaos) to the complex politics of compliance during the English Reformation. Moreover, since the heyday of recusant history (c.1960–80) there has been a new awareness, though it has always been there in the literature on the topic,9 that absolute separation (that is, sufficient to trigger the new statutory penalties) was confined to a very small minority of those who were Catholics, regarded themselves as such, or were regarded as Catholic by ­others. In other words, the majority of the Catholic community was defined by varying degrees of conformist behaviour. Alexandra Walsham has argued that occasional conformists (or ‘church papists’ as they were sometimes called) had been ignored because of the concentration on the zeal of those who were unyieldingly recusant.10 Yet the case could also be made that recusancy was itself occasional non-­conformity just as church popery might also be occasional recusancy. The two cannot really be considered in isolation from each other.11 Church ­popery was not itself a stable religious identity. Equally, among those who had a tendency to go into separation, only a minority could be considered completely and unyieldingly recusant.

7  See Michael C. Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge, 1996), chs. 5, 6. 8  William Richardson, ‘The Religious Policy of the Cecils 1588–1598’ (University of Oxford DPhil thesis, 1993), esp. pp. 136–49. 9 See esp. Hugh Aveling, Northern Catholics: The Catholic Recusants of the North Riding of Yorkshire, 1558–1790 (London, 1966); Hugh Aveling, Catholic Recusancy in York, 1558–1791, CRS Monograph 2 (1970). 10  Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 1993). 11 For occasional conformity, see also Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge, 1982), chs. 7, 8; James E. Kelly, ‘Conformity, Loyalty and the Jesuit Mission to England of 1580’, in Eliane Glaser (ed.), Religious Tolerance in the Atlantic World: Early Modern and Contemporary Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2014), pp. 149–70; Ginevra Crosignani, Thomas McCoog, and Michael Questier (eds.), Recusancy and Conformity in Early Modern England (Toronto, 2010), esp. pp. 111–278.

130  Michael Questier

Recusancy and the Penalties of the Law After the passing of the Act of Uniformity in 1559, a penalty of one shilling could be levied, locally, for each absence from church or chapel on Sundays and holy days. The money raised was to be deployed for the poor of the parish.12 A trawl through the records of the diocesan Church courts which list such offences shows how they were regarded as one of a number of disciplinary offences, treated in much the same way, administratively, as failure to pay local church rates, fornication, bastardy, and so on. Even at this stage, though, the question was brought to the attention of those meeting at the Council of Trent. There was a formal pronouncement there against the practice of attending Protestant services.13 During the 1570s, attempts in parliament to legislate for more exact compliance were prevented by the Queen.14 This all changed in the parliament of 1581. New penalties were introduced and were specifically declared to be liabilities to the Crown. From 18 March 1581, central government assumed responsibility for the system of enforcement. As Hugh Bowler notes, ‘the accounts connected with the levying’ of recusancy fines ‘by the sheriffs begin immediately to appear in the Pipe Rolls’, and the ‘judges on circuit and local justices of the peace lost little time in applying this law and in certifying convictions of recusants into the exchequer’.15 The principal recusancy penalty provided in the 1581 statute was the £20 fine, levied monthly, for absence from church. Its force was greatly amplified by the 1586 statute which made the convicted recusant liable for £20 each month until he or she conformed or was discharged in some other fashion;16 and then by another recusancy statute in 1593.17 This, however, was very far from the limit of the State’s capacity to enforce compliance from Catholics. For a variety of causes,

12 Bowler, Recusant Roll No. 2, p. xi. 13 C. G. Bayne, Anglo-­Roman Relations 1558–1565 (1913), ch. 8; Robert Persons, A Brief Discours contayning Certayne Reasons why Catholiques Refuse to Goe to Church. . . . (Douai [imprint false; printed secretly at Greenstreet House, East Ham], 1580), fol. 24r. 14  Michael Questier, Dynastic Politics and the British Reformations, 1558–1630 (Oxford, 2019), p. 94. 15 Bowler, Recusant Roll No. 2, p. xv. See also TNA, SP 12/163/17, fol. 42r. 16  As Bowler points out, when the 1581 Act started to be enforced, and fines and imprisonment for non-­payment took place, the exchequer found that its ‘ancient procedures’ were not particularly well suited to dealing with the rapidly piling up notifications of fines and potential forfeitures. ‘Six years’ experience revealed inadequacies in the Act and irregularities in its execution which urgently needed to be rectified’: Bowler, Recusant Roll No. 2, p. xxi. 17  The majority of those who fell foul of a recusancy indictment under the new legislation would never be able to pay £20 a month. In the period 1581–1603 there were only thirteen gentry who ever paid the full monthly fine on a regular basis. J. T. Cliffe calculated that in Yorkshire in 1612 there were only twenty-­six heads of families who were both convicted of recusancy and were being mulcted by the Jacobean exchequer for their separatism; and yet he himself estimates that in 1604 there were 254 Yorkshire gentry families which were Catholic, and 112 families which were ‘at least partly recusant’: J. T. Cliffe, The Yorkshire Gentry: from the Reformation to the Civil War (London, 1969), pp. 222, 189.

Catholicism and Separatism, Conformity and the State  131 the authorities could imprison recalcitrant Catholics.18 Parliament had already extended the treason laws in 1571 and 1581 but principally by the act of 1585.19 The royal proclamation of October 1591 set up commissions to discover which Catholics were only superficially conformist.20 In theory, if all of the pecuniary penalties established by law struck at the same time, the impact could be cataclysmic. A paper (part of a Catholic toleration petition, in fact) in the Lambeth Palace library offers a snapshot of the situation in James I’s reign after the passing of the recusant statute of 1610. It rehearses a table of annual fines payable by a convicted recusant, married with one manservant, one maidservant, and one child. For ‘£20 per month under the 1581 statute, £260 a year’; for ‘52 Sundays absences from church, £2–12–0’; ‘for keeping a servant convicted, £10 a month, so £130 a year’; ‘for marrying (not Protestantly) £100’; for ‘his wife’s recusancy £20 a month’, ‘for the same penalty doth likewise lie upon him for her’; ‘for her weekly absence from church, £2–2–0’; ‘more for her recu­ sancy, £10 per month, unless she do lie in the gaol, by the statute of 7 Jac. cap. 6 for both statutes are in force against the wife many informations having been . . . [laid] against the husbands (being no recusants) for the £20 per month forfeited by the wife’; ‘for keeping of one maid servant recusant £10 a month’; ‘if he go to the court but once (besides toties quoties) £100’, or ‘come once to London or live within 10 miles, besides toties quoties, £100’; ‘if he have a child and christen it not Protestantly, £100’; if he ‘once practise the civil, or common law, or physic, £100’; ‘if his wife, or child die, and be not buried not Protestantly, £20’. The potential liability of such a man within a single year, the paper said, was £1,350–4–0.21 Naturally, it was unlikely that anyone would incur all these penalties. But a well-­known Hampshire gentleman, Thomas Pounde, recounted in 1609 that ‘after thirty years’ imprisonment through ten prisons, under most hungry caterpillars and many other oppressions’, he had suffered £4,000 spoil of his ‘substance’, ‘by 120li for twenty years yearly paid to the Queen and her patentees (my land for all that, by God’s strange preserving, a good esquire’s estate) worth between the king and my two nephews with my own reservations, yearly above a thousand crowns’.22 The fines paid by Sir Thomas Tresham were also very large.23 As much as the formal tax take to which the royal exchequer was entitled and which was paid in by county sheriffs, what really hit Catholic separatists was the

18  See Geoffrey de C. Parmiter, ‘The Imprisonment of Papists in Private Castles’, Recusant History, 19 (1988), pp. 16–38; Richardson, ‘Religious Policy’, pp. 132–8. 19 Leslie  J.  Ward, ‘The Law of Treason in the Reign of Elizabeth I 1558–1588’ (University of Cambridge PhD thesis, 1985). 20 Questier, Dynastic Politics, p. 196. 21  LPL, MS 930, no. 66. For the payment of the £10 fine for women’s recusancy, see for example WDA, A XII, no. 119, p. 264. 22  Thomas Pounde to Robert Persons, 3 June 1609, ABSI, Anglia III, no. 95. 23  Julian Lock, ‘Tresham, Sir Thomas (1543–1605), gentleman and recusant’, ODNB.

132  Michael Questier malign attention of those who were armed with official warrants and who secured prosecutions, and then collected the penalties. These semi-­private enforcers of the recusancy laws argued that their activities merely gave effect to the intentions of the legislators and prevented the underhand release of stubborn separatists from the proper penalties for their offences, for example, when their sequestrated estates were leased back to them or to their family and friends.24 In turn this provoked complaints from those who were targeted in this way either that this was unnecessarily heavy-­handed or, particularly, that these corrupt busybodies had turned the recusancy business into a protection racket, taking bribes for, in fact, not properly enforcing the law and for enriching themselves at the expense both of the Crown and of the monarch’s Catholic subjects.25 But there was more than a scintilla of truth in the claim that recusants did not always pay the full extent of their liabilities. Those who broke the law in this respect were frequently getting away with it. In the interrelated county communities of each shire, officials who were burdened with the task of ferreting out recusants often found, to their distaste, that they were dealing with those to whom they were connected by blood or marriage. Not surprisingly they were often reluctant to believe that the relevant statutes’ punitive sanctions should apply to their near neighbours and kin. Then again, evasion of penalties was easy (for some) because of, as Aveling described it, ‘the extreme complexity of local property arrangements, the absence of a real registry of deeds, [and] the flourishing of uses and trusts of a semi-­official or informal kind’. The gentry’s wealth was itself based on debt, frequent borrowing, rent in arrears, and so on. Equally, the ex­che­ quer was not interested in pursuing the less well-­off for huge fines which they could not possibly pay.26 In addition, the gentry’s estates were burdened with a number of charges which would invariably take priority over recusancy fines (even if the accumulating debts simply sat as another charge on the property). As Aveling puts it, the well-­to-­do were ‘long practised in legal subterfuges devised to confound their local rivals, creditors and collectors of subsidies and feudal dues’.27 Also, the way in which the law took effect against Catholic separatism was itself dependent on perceptions of what that separatism represented. The function of 24  See Thomas Cogswell, ‘Destroyed for Doing my Duty: Thomas Felton and the Penal Laws under Elizabeth and James I’, in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (eds.), Religious Politics in Post-­Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 177–92; Thomas Cogswell, ‘John Felton, Popular Political Culture, and the Assassination of the Duke of Buckingham’, Historical Journal, 49 (2006), pp. 357–85. 25  Michael  C.  Questier (ed.), Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate of George Birkhead, Camden Society, Fifth Series, 12 (Cambridge, 1998), passim. 26  J.  C.  H.  Aveling, ‘Documents Relating to the Northern Commissions for Compounding with Recusants 1627–1642’, in Clare Talbot (ed.), Miscellanea: Recusant Records, CRS 53 (1961), p. 293; Aveling, Northern Catholics, p. 201. 27  Aveling, ‘Documents’, p. 293; Aveling, Northern Catholics, pp. 122–7, and passim. For the problems associated with inflicting financial or property-­based penalties on women separatists, especially married ones, see Aveling, Northern Catholics, pp. 131–2.

Catholicism and Separatism, Conformity and the State  133 all criminal law, after all, is not, in the end, to eradicate crime but to define and control it. Such control is often dependent on a number of other factors, and especially on contemporary opinion about how unallowable the offence in question actually is, and whether and how far it can be contained. The issue for those who are interested in this branch of the post-­Reformation criminal law is that the offences codified in statute are fairly straightforward: that is, primarily, absence from church for a stated period. But what is usually less clear is why the authorities chose to prosecute specific individuals when they did. In fact, in most cases among the thousands of names inscribed on the recusancy rolls, particularly of those who were below a certain social rank, we generally have little idea of who they were or why they were there, apart from the formal charge, after 1581, that they had omitted to attend church or chapel for four Sundays in a row, or more. But in the minority of cases where more evidence survives than the bare details of the indictment for the technical offence of absence from church for a set period of weeks or months, there is sometimes enough to show what other factors influenced prosecutors to use the recusancy statute charge. The Elizabethan statutes specifically label the offence of recusancy which they penalize as ‘popish’. This implies that the offender and offences had to be perceived as popish in order to activate the bringing of charges under the statutes. The separatism of leading gentry Catholics fell squarely enough within the terms of these statutes. But, in other cases, recusancy convictions might be preceded by a complex legal process as evidence was sifted to see whether people really fell within the scope of the legal intention of the recusancy statutes.28 Did this matter in practice? We might assume that the recusancy rolls do tell us exactly what was going on here. A small minority of Catholics remained stubbornly separatist. If there were others who were not separatist in that way, they must have opted for a don’t-­ask-­don’t-­tell arrangement and merged almost seamlessly with the conformist mass of the population. Aveling comments that many church papists believed that even if someone had been formally reconciled to the Church of Rome he was entitled to ‘behave much as he had done when he was a conservative “misliker”, going to Mass and sacraments when he could, and meanwhile attending’ the liturgy of the established Church.29 Perhaps many Catholics were like James Brighouse of Gainforth who ‘lived always in such sort as no man could tell what religion he favoured for he never talked of matters of faith but

28  See for example, Hugh Bowler, ‘Further Notes on the Venerable John Bretton’, Recusant History, 15 (1979), pp. 1–10; WDA, B 28, no. 10, p. 318; see also Hugh Bowler, ‘Exchequer Dossiers, 2: The Recusancy of Venerable John Bretton, Gentleman, and of Frances his Wife’, Biographical Studies, 2 (1953–4), pp. 111–34. 29 Aveling, Northern Catholics, pp. 88. For the extent to which even the former seminarian Richard Floyd could masquerade as a conformist in front of Lord Burghley and Sir William Waad, see British Library, Lansdowne MS 64, no. 6, fol. 10r–­v.

134  Michael Questier lived as a civil worldly man with both sides suffering everyone to say what he would’. But this did not stop him from expelling the Church of England curate who came to minister to him when he reached his end, and he denounced the established religion as ‘damnable heresy’.30 Even if this was the case, we might still assume that those who served the Crown must have been solidly conformist, even if only for self-­serving reasons. But was this necessarily the case? Let us look briefly at, for example, at the Elizabethan judiciary. After all, the State’s efforts to deal with dissident Catholics depended in part upon the judges. As Leslie Ward shows, the Marian judiciary was not properly purged after 1559, and the last Marian appointment died in 1582.31 The Master of the Rolls until 1581, Sir William Cordell of Long Melford in Suffolk, while himself a conformist, was a friend of the Jesuit Edmund Campion.32 Francis Beaumont, a justice of the Common Pleas, who sat in judgement at the treason trial of the Jesuit Henry Walpole, had numerous recusant relatives, including the family of Lord Vaux. Beaumont’s wife converted to Catholicism and became a recusant. Beaumont himself was habitually absent from divine service, though of course he was never convicted of recusancy. It was rumoured that he himself was a harbourer of priests.33 The judge Thomas Walmesley was also regarded by Catholics as a sympathizer. It was said that he pronounced sentence against the Jesuit John Cornelius ‘with tears in his eyes’. Lord Sheffield remarked that ‘the papists have ever borne themselves much upon his [Walmesley’s] favour’. Walmesley’s son and heir was a Catholic.34 An even more complex case was the attorney general for over twenty years, Sir Gilbert Gerard. Gerard was alleged to have been a defender of Elizabeth during Mary’s reign. He belonged, however, to a distinctly Catholic family. His wife and two daughters were Catholics. In 1586 he was reported as being ‘a Protestant at London and a papist in Lancashire’, and ‘there is no man that so much shifts papists from the danger of the law as he doth’.35 The law serjeant and judge Sir Edmund Pelham who died in 1606 was an acquaintance of a good number of East Sussex Catholics. Pelham was known from the early 1560s to be lukewarm (at best) about the Reformation, and he was a friend of the Dowager Viscountess Montague, one of the great patrons of Sussex Catholicism. Pelham’s wife (one of 30 Aveling, Northern Catholics, p. 91. 31 Ward, ‘The Law of Treason’, ch. 2; J.  S.  Cockburn, A History of English Assizes 1558–1714 (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 192f. 32  P.  W.  Hasler (ed.), The House of Commons 1558–1603, 3 vols. (London, 1981), I, pp. 657–8; Gerard Kilroy, Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life (Farnham, 2015), p. 36. 33 Hasler, House of Commons, I, pp. 414–15; ABSI, 46/12/1–2, pp. 301–2. 34  Richard Challoner, Memoirs of Missionary Priests . . ., ed. J.H.  Pollen (London, 1924), p. 200; Hasler, House of Commons, III, p. 569; Cockburn, History of English Assizes, pp. 50, 214f; ARSI, Anglia 37, p. 303b [fol. 103r]. 35 Hasler, House of Commons, II, p. 184.

Catholicism and Separatism, Conformity and the State  135 the Darells of Scotney) was openly recusant. Even at the end of Elizabeth’s reign Pelham was observed to be unenthusiastic about the religion established by law. He turned up ‘slackly’ to church and was, apparently, a non-­communicant. Nevertheless, he was a JP and judge, and was sent to Ireland of all places, where he became chief baron of the exchequer.36 These patterns of what looked like merely occasional conformity were repeated among many of the county gentry who acted as sheriffs, deputy lieutenants, and JPs, and who served on all kinds of different commissions. Aveling demonstrated in considerable detail how many of the members of the council in the north, even late in Elizabeth’s reign, could be regarded as part of the wider Catholic community.37 In James’ reign, one of the council’s vice-­presidents had his sons educated at Catholic schools abroad!38 On the commission of the peace in the North Riding, even in 1583, nine or ten of the twenty-­four active JPs could be regarded as part of the broader Catholic community. One of them, Thomas Grimston, though a conformist, had played host to Edmund Campion, SJ. Marmaduke Wyvill, again a conformist, had at a young age taken part in the 1569 rebellion. Sir Henry Tankard had a brother who was a well-­known Jesuit. Of the sixty-­two JPs between 1603 and 1619 in the North Riding, again, as Aveling shows, ‘at least fourteen had Catholic connections’.39

Recusancy and Politics The base line for conformist compliance under the 1559 Act of Uniformity was, of course, fairly low, as it was intended to be, that is, even though the Marian b ­ ishops and many higher clergy were ejected swiftly enough.40 This was a situation that started to change in the mid- and later-­1570s when the Queen faced Puritan insistence on the reform of the Church and the demands of her councillors to do something about the Dutch revolt. The disagreements inside the Queen’s own circle came out into the open with her fury at Archbishop Grindal’s refusal to obey her and suppress the so-­called prophesyings. As Peter Lake has demonstrated, the conciliar attempt to save Grindal included drawing attention to the extent of Catholic non-­compliance in the dioceses; the survey of non-­compliance in the dioceses, done at short notice in October 1577, was almost certainly meant to show the Queen that she should be worrying principally about the extent of (both 36 Hasler, House of Commons, III, pp. 192–3; Roger B. Manning, Religion and Society in Elizabethan Sussex (Leicester, 1969), p. 163. 37 Aveling, Northern Catholics, p. 117. 38 Aveling, Northern Catholics, p. 202. 39 Aveling, Northern Catholics, pp. 117–18, 121–2, 202–3. 40 Cf. Peter Marshall and John Morgan, ‘Clerical Conformity and the Elizabethan Settlement Revisited’, Historical Journal, 59 (2016), pp. 1–22.

136  Michael Questier crypto- and more overt) Catholicism in the national Church, and not about alleged Puritanism.41 The Queen’s response to her political difficulties was to try to secure an Anglo-­ French dynastic marriage for herself, that is with Francis, duke of Anjou. The aim was in part to give him sufficient political capital to go to Flanders and unify the opposition there to Habsburg rule. Thomas McCoog has demonstrated that the sending of Jesuit clergy to England, principally Edmund Campion and Robert Persons, in 1580 cannot be considered separately from the Anjou diplomacy.42 When the regime was faced with evidence that large numbers of Catholics were now going into separation, there was an extension not just of the treason law but also, as noted above, of the penalties for recusancy, set down in the act of 1581.43 Campion and Persons, following the line taken in Gregory Martin’s Treatise of Schisme of 1578, declared, as did Persons in his Brief Discours of 1580, that all those who considered themselves to be good Catholics should separate from the national Church.44 It was a sin to go to divine service in the churches of the her­et­ ics against one’s conscience.45 It was never ‘mere’ conformity, as the former archdeacon of Chichester, Alban Langdale, had claimed it could be. For ‘it has always some such thing annexed to it as is prohibited jure naturali vel divino’, as ‘peril of infection, scandal, dissembling in faith, hearing of God dishonoured, yielding to his adversaries in religion’. On Persons’ account it was always ‘a sign distinctive’, that is, a crucial characteristic which differentiated infallibly a true Catholic from a heretic.46 The regime’s consistent response to these accusations was that church attendance was a sign of true obedience and that the Queen’s officials were concerned only with preventing the dangers of sedition. As William Fulke replied to Persons, ‘it were . . . hard to prove that every papist which comes before the commissioners is examined’ only ‘of that one article of coming to church’.47 In other words, Fulke was saying that it was not just the mere fact of attending church with which the Queen’s officials were concerned. What bothered them was separatism as a means

41  Peter Lake, ‘A Tale of Two Episcopal Surveys: The Strange Fates of Edmund Grindal and Cuthbert Mayne Revisited’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, 18 (2008), pp. 129–63, esp. pp. 130–6. 42  Thomas McCoog, SJ, ‘The English Jesuit Mission and the French Match, 1579–1581’, Catholic Historical Review, 87 (2001), pp. 185–213; John Bossy, ‘English Catholics and the French Marriage, 1577–81’, Recusant History, 5 (1959), pp. 2–16. 43  As Aveling shows, official sweeps in the north against Catholic recusants started at around the same time as the arrival of Campion and his friends, and many who had gone into separation then conformed and were not proceeded against again: Aveling, Northern Catholics, p. 59. 44  Gregory Martin, A Treatise of Schisme . . . (Douai, 1578). 45 Persons, Brief Discours, passim. 46  Crosignani, McCoog, and Questier, Recusancy and Conformity, pp. 153–4. 47 Persons, Brief Discours, fol. 16v; William Fulke, A Briefe Confutation, of a Popish Discourse (London, 1583), fol. 19r.

Catholicism and Separatism, Conformity and the State  137 of publicly expressing opposition to royal authority and to the regime as it was then constituted. By the mid-­1580s, some of the Queen’s councillors were almost in desperation making plans for, in effect, an elective monarchy if Elizabeth should die with the succession not formally settled and with Mary Stuart still alive.48 The 1585 statute against Jesuits and seminary clergy was obviously part of that process. Then the recusancy Act of 1586/7 rationalized and tightened up the 1581 statute.49 This additional piece of legislation, as noted above, instituted continuous fines against offenders which rolled up against them if no conformity was forthcoming. As is well-­known, immediately after the 1588 Armada campaign, the treason law was used against Catholic clergy and their patrons in some numbers; and the royal proclamation of 18 October 1591 (written by Lord Burghley) was designed to target and to hurt those who were occasional conformists.50 This was probably the high-­water mark of the regime’s attempts to hammer Catholic separatism. In 1593, the year in which parliament returned to the issue of recusancy legislation, there was a barely concealed war inside the Privy Council which meant that a draconian draft bill against popish recusants was redrawn into two bills, one of which hit Puritan sectaries instead. This was certainly quite contrary to the wishes of Lord Burghley who ended up, unsuccessfully, trying to save Puritan radicals from the gallows when they were prosecuted, in effect, in revenge for attempts in the House of Commons to interfere with the form of the recusancy legislation as it had come down from the House of Lords.51 Despite the slew of high-­profile cases in the mid- and later 1590s when Catholic clergy were still being arrested, tried, and executed, in 1601 during the intra-­ Catholic archpriest dispute a new recusancy bill actually failed in the Commons, though by the narrowest of margins, in circumstances which provoked suspicious godly Protestants to think that the regime was deliberately toning down the law against Catholic separatism.52 Prominent Catholics, principally clergymen, started to make the case, in public as well as private, and even in print, that the connection between Catholicism and disloyalty was not inevitable at all. It

48  Peter Lake, Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford, 2016), pt. III. 49  See also the calls at this time by the likes of Thomas Digges for the tightening up of surveillance over those who were not fully and enthusiastically conformist: Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Thomas Digges, Robert Parsons, Sir Francis Hastings, and the Politics of Regime Change in Elizabethan England’, Historical Journal, 61 (2018), pp. 1–27. 50  Lake and Questier, Trials, ch. 7. 51  Richardson, ‘Religious Policy’, pp. 101–7; Questier, Dynastic Politics, p. 200. 52  Lake and Questier, ‘Thomas Digges’; Peter Lake and Michael Questier, All Hail to the Archpriest: Confessional Conflict, Toleration, and the Politics of Publicity in Post-­Reformation England (Oxford, 2019), p. 104.

138  Michael Questier appeared that some inside the regime were prepared to believe them, even if the hardliners were not.53 The elephant in the room was of course the prospect of major changes to the existing settlement of religion after the accession of the Scots king.54 After the accession, there seemed to some people, even if rather briefly, the possibility that there would be some form of toleration, even if not a parliamentary one.55 That all came to an end with the 1604 parliament which saw another, essentially affirmatory, statute against Catholic separatism.56 But all through the early Stuart period, despite the agitations during the summer of 160557 and the Gunpowder Plot (after which there were two further anti-­Catholic statutes, one of which incorporated a controversial new oath of allegiance), it seemed that the King’s exchequer was prepared to allow convicted and sequestrated Catholic recusants to make compositions and deals with royal officials, and thus to escape the consequences of their non-­conformity.58 In 1607 Robert Persons believed, or claimed to believe, that some sort of toleration was now possible.59 Standard accounts of the mid-­Jacobean period concentrate on the, at very least, dysfunctions of royal finance; the tendency was always for the Crown to rob Peter to pay Paul, and recusant liabilities were not exempt.60 At times, Catholic commentators such as Archpriest George Birkhead and his clerical associates had no doubt that pressure to compound for recusancy debts was part and parcel of a vicious persecution.61 The new oath of allegiance was regarded by some Catholics as an engine of repression, as bad if not worse than the law relating to recu­sancy.62 As the 1610 parliament re-­assembled, some Catholics thought they were witnessing a virtual tocsin. Birkhead wrote that ‘if matters proceed in execution as parliament has defined, there will be no means for a Catholic to live in this 53  Lake and Questier, All Hail to the Archpriest, passim. The appellants did not say that limited or occasional conformity was acceptable. After the embarrassment caused by the defection of Thomas Bell, the northern Catholic priest and champion of occasional conformity, in the early 1590s, that was no longer an available position for Catholics: Lake and Questier, Trials, chs. 7, 8. 54  John Watkins, ‘ “Out of her Ashes May a Second Phoenix Rise”: James I and the Legacy of Elizabethan Anti-­Catholicism’, in. Arthur F. Marotti (ed.), Catholicism and Anti-­Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (London, 1999), pp. 116–36. 55 Albert  J.  Loomie, Toleration and Diplomacy: The Religious Issue in Anglo-­Spanish Relations, 1603–1605 (Philadelphia, PA, 1963), pp. 5, 9, 13, 14, 15, 21; David Lunn, The English Benedictines 1540–1688: From Reformation to Revolution (London, 1980), pp. 64–7. 56 Loomie, Toleration and Diplomacy, pp. 28, 32–3, 37–8, 47. 57  Wendy Brogden, ‘Catholicism, Community and Identity in Late Tudor and Early Stuart Welsh Borderlands’ (University of Birmingham PhD thesis, 2018). 58  See esp. British Library (hereafter BL), Lansdowne MS 153, no. 65, fols. 162r, 240r; TNA, SP 14/37/28. 59  ABSI, 46/12/3–6, pp. 1676, 1711A. 60  In the words of Alan Davidson, ‘a document, say a grant of recusant profits, may cover a piece of sordid persecution, or it may cover a piece of skilful protection. There is often no way of telling; the words are the same in either case’: Alan Davidson, ‘Roman Catholicism in Oxfordshire from the Late Elizabethan Period to the Civil War (c.1580–c.1640)’ (University of Bristol PhD thesis, 1970), p. 202. 61  See esp. WDA, A VIII, nos. 110, 119, 120, 130, 159, 168, 169, 186, 187, 188. 62  WDA, A IX, no. 31, p. 79; no. 42, p. 115; A X, no. 9, p. 21.

Catholicism and Separatism, Conformity and the State  139 realm’.63 In the second half of 1612, as the Court prepared to push through the marriage alliance between Princess Elizabeth and the Calvinist elector palatine, in some counties Catholic separatists were subjected to harassment. Edward Bennett wrote to his fellow Catholic priest, Thomas More, on 12 December 1612 that a ‘gentleman’s letter’ he enclosed said that ‘for the estate of recusants all things grow worse and worse’.64 By the beginning of March 1613 the priest John Jackson was saying that ‘their preachers did never so much inveigh against our religion and do even set the people’s hearts on fire against us’, while ‘men’s estates were never so much shot at’, and ‘tradesmen’s goods and merchant ships seized upon only because they have discovered that someone’ who is ‘Catholic has had a share therein’.65 But even during this period there were also Catholics who claimed that what the King really aimed at was a form of toleration.66 There were continuing rumours about a general composition for recusancy debts and fines.67 Notoriously, Lewis Baily delivered a stinging sermon in late 1612 which claimed that even some privy councillors were crypto-­Catholics. They would hear a Mass in the morning, be present at noon with the king at an English sermon, sit in council all the afternoon, and at night tell unto their wives all that had passed, who being papists would relate all again unto their confessors and they send it unto France, Spain and Italy.68

The instructions issued for the disarming of recusants in 1613 explicitly said that this applied only to those who could be credibly regarded as disaffected.69 During the 1614 parliament, Catholic commentators noted that the King seemed averse to further burdens being inflicted on Catholic separatists, and the ramping up of fines (and the stalling and reversing of composition arrangements) in and after the second half of 1614 looked, to some, like disobedience, inside government itself, to the King’s will.70 The priest Anthony Champney informed Thomas More in December 1614 that ‘the composition made by Catholics with the king under the broad seal is like to be called in question and made void’. But the

63  WDA, A IX, no. 53, p. 148. 64  WDA, A XI, no. 225, p. 649. For the arrests of Catholics in Oxfordshire in summer 1612, see Questier (ed.), Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate, pp. 189–90. 65  WDA, A XII, no. 46, p. 101. 66  Questier (ed.), Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate, p. 68. 67  WDA, A X, no. 166, p. 458; A XI, no. 1, p. 1; A XI, no. 29, p. 75. 68 Albert  J.  Loomie, ‘A Jacobean Crypto-­Catholic: Lord Wotton’, Catholic Historical Review, 53 (1967), p. 328. 69 B.  W.  Quintrell, ‘The Practice and Problems of Recusant Disarming, 1585–1641’, Recusant History, 17 (1985), pp. 208–12, 215. 70  WDA, A XIII, nos. 71, 131, 136, 244, 248.

140  Michael Questier chancellor of the exchequer himself, Sir Julius Caesar, ‘stands against [it], as they say, as derogating from the authority of the great seal’.71 In response to what may have looked like a looming de facto tolerance for Catholics, some people insisted that the penalties for recusancy (everything from the one shilling fine to the provisions of later statutes) ought to be properly enforced.72 They may also have been responding to rumours that the whole recu­ sancy business might eventually be farmed out in the way that other royal rev­ enues were.73 But while there were protests against the alleged corruptions of royal officials who dealt with convicted recusants, those officers—­notably the crypto-­Catholic long-­serving clerk in the office of the lord treasurer’s remembrancer, Henry Spiller—­could allege that it was for the good of the King to en­gin­ eer accommodations with the recusants concerned so that they were not harassed and ruined and that in effect composition for their debts went straight to the exchequer rather than being siphoned off into the pockets of those who actually deprived the exchequer of what it was entitled to receive.74 During the later 1610s and the early 1620s, as the regime negotiated with increasing seriousness with the Courts in Madrid and Paris for dynastic marriage alliances, there were indeed a number of concessions made to English Catholics.75 In 1621 James was unwilling to concede parliamentary demands for harsher treatment of recusants.76 In fact, warrants for toleration of Catholic separatists were issued during 1621–2.77 In 1624–5 the negotiations for the successful Anglo-­ French marriage treaty incorporated limited guarantees on James’ behalf concerning his Catholic subjects even if, in the end, these promises were not really honoured. But in 1624 and 1626 there were parliamentary protests at those royal officials who could be identified as crypto-­Catholics.78 Equally controversially, in the later 1620s, and then through most of the 1630s, the Crown set up commissions which were ordered to negotiate compositions with recusants for their accumulated and unpaid debts.79 This was the logical end point of a series of concessions and accommodations which had begun early in James’ reign. This was compatible also with a perception in the 1630s of a new culture of ceremonial 71  WDA, A XIII, no. 263, p. 671; see also A XIII, no. 264, p. 687; A XIV, no. 6, p. 14; no. 14, p. 39; no. 89, p. 291. 72  LPL, MS 663, fo. 50r. 73  See for example, WDA, A XIV, nos. 41, 52, 73, 81, 92, 119, 208; A XV, nos. 98, 122. 74  Michael C. Questier, ‘Sir Henry Spiller, Recusancy and the Efficiency of the Jacobean Exchequer’, Historical Research, 66 (1993), pp. 251–66. 75  Michael Questier (ed.), Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Politics, 1621–1625, Camden Society, Fifth Series, 34 (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 148–54 and passim. 76  Norman Egbert McClure (ed.), The Letters of John Chamberlain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, PA, 1939), II, pp. 344, 345; TNA, SP 14/119/106, SP 14/124/3; WDA, A XVI, no. 71, pp. 243–5. 77  WDA, A XVI, no. 72, p. 247; no. 159, p. 614. 78  Lords’ Journals, III, pp. 289–90, 291, 297–8, 304, 316, 394–6; William  B.  Bidwell and Maija Jansson (eds.), Proceedings in Parliament 1626, 4 vols. (New Haven, CT, and London, 1991–6), IV, pp. 212, 214. 79  Aveling, ‘Documents’, passim.

Catholicism and Separatism, Conformity and the State  141 conformity in the national Church, one associated primarily with the ascendancy of William Laud.80 In the early 1640s, the case against the supposed misgovernment of Charles I was prosecuted by the King’s critics in part by reference to the regime’s alleged, and in fact real enough, willingness to offer accommodations to convicted recusants.81 But, once royal power was radically curtailed during the 1640s, some Catholics identified Presbyterianism as their real enemy and made a kind of common cause with the Independents, that is, while the post-­monarchical State set up schemes for compounding to bring something like peace after the defeat of the King.82 Emerging into the Restoration, the issue of Catholic sep­ar­at­ ism remained unresolved.

Negotiation, Accommodation, and De Facto Toleration In other words, despite the apparently clear requirements in law for obedience to the conformist standards set down by parliament, and what we may assume to have been the intentions of the Elizabethan legislators, the proceedings against Catholic separatists frequently allowed for—­in fact almost invited—­negotiation and accommodation, just as perhaps the majority of Catholics had no wish to be provoked into outright non-­conformity, at least not to the extent of triggering the law’s full penalties against them.83 Even in the early 1580s, at the point when the Edmund Campion affair had pushed the regime into an arguably draconian course against those who flouted the law on conformist compliance, there were concessions of a sort, written into the 1581 recusancy statute itself (23 Eliz., c. 1). It allowed those who could to have divine service in their own house on the days that the law required, as long as they did not obstinately refuse church attendance and did attend church or chapel four times each year. Lady Winifred Barrington (of Hatfield Broadoak in Essex), a grand-­daughter of Margaret Pole, a cousin of Cardinal Pole, and sister to the Countess of Huntingdon, was included in the 1577 survey of recusants undertaken by the bishops. But in 1581 two of her friends certified to the Essex JPs that proceedings against her should come to an

80  Michael C. Questier (ed.), Newsletters from the Caroline Court, 1631–1638: Catholicism and the Politics of the Personal Rule, Camden Society, Fifth Series, 26 (Cambridge, 2005), passim; Kenneth Fincham, ‘Clerical Conformity from Whitgift to Laud’, in Peter Lake and Michael Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660 (London, 2000), p. 125–58. 81  William Prynne, The Popish Royall Favourite . . . (London, 1643; Wing P 4039). 82  Eilish Gregory, Catholics during the English Revolution, 1642–1660: Politics, Sequestration and Loyalty (Woodbridge, 2021). 83  For the situation in Scotland, see R.  Scott Spurlock, ‘ “I Do Disclaim both Ecclesiasticke and Politick Popery”: Lay Catholic Identity in Early Modern Scotland’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 38 (2008), pp. 8–9; see also TNA, SP 14/135/16, concerning toleration for English Catholics, comparing their situation with Catholics in Scotland and Ireland.

142  Michael Questier end because her absence was due to illness, and because she had procured the local minister to say the prayer book service in her own house.84 Moreover, as virtually all scholars are agreed, despite the accumulating weight of the penal legislation against separatism, the number of those who might be considered to be part of a ‘Catholic community’ (in John Bossy’s influential phrase) went up rather than down, particularly in the early Stuart period.85 Aveling shows that in spite of the hardliner Lord Sheffield’s tenure of the lord presidency in the north, there were more priests and recusants in 1619 in the North Riding of Yorkshire than there had been in 1603; and in many other areas the numbers continued to rise during the 1620s and 1630s.86 The consensus is also that known Catholics were able to integrate, despite their opinions about matters of religion. Jan Broadway has described how Thomas Habington, embroiled in the Gunpowder Plot, pursued his calling as an antiquary and, ‘although not fully assimilated’, he ‘and other Catholics were accepted as members of Worcestershire gentry society in the period immediately before the civil war’. ‘One of the themes’ of his well-­known Survey of Worcestershire was that ‘adherence to the faith of his ancestors should not debar a gentleman from acceptance into gentry society within the county’.87 In some very real sense, the mid-­Elizabethan penalization of recusancy had come out of an intense succession crisis and a controversial decision to go to war with Spain. In the context of the period up to 1640, this was simply not business as usual. For all King James’ verbal investment in the cause of pan-­European Protestantism he was not willingly going to be dragged into a war against the principal Catholic States of continental Europe. Briefly, his son Charles I did that, and came swiftly to regret it. In these circumstances, the continued operation of the recusancy statutes, and the mechanisms of detection, fining, and sequestration, simply could not mean politically what they had done back in the mid- and later Elizabethan period. Put bluntly, there was no point criminalizing a significant proportion of the population for sedition when they were not, by almost any contemporary measure, seditious. At various points in the period, on both sides of the confessional divide, the Crown’s demands for conformity to the religion established by statute could be flagged as relatively minimal, even as adiaphora. Compliance of this kind was no more than outward obedience to the commands of the magistrate. It could be rendered without offence or scandal. As Peter Lake has written of the so-­called 84  Michael O’Dwyer, ‘The Distribution of Essex Recusants throughout the County’, Essex Recusant, 5 (1963), pp. 85–6. 85  John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London, 1975), p. 123. 86 Aveling, Northern Catholics, pp. 200, 257ff. 87  Jan Broadway, ‘ “To Equall Their Virtues”: Thomas Habington, Recusancy and the Gentry of Early Stuart Worcestershire’, Midland History, 29 (2004), pp. 1–24, at p. 9. See also Richard Cust, ‘Catholicism, Antiquarianism and Gentry Honour: The Writings of Sir Thomas Shirley’, Midland History, 23 (1998), pp. 40–70.

Catholicism and Separatism, Conformity and the State  143 ‘moderate’ Puritans’ position, the function of their ‘moderation’ was to defuse ‘the issues of outward conformity, ceremony and church government with liberal applications of the language of adiaphora and obedience’. This was a ‘casuistry that enabled godly people more or less to conform to the outward rites and practices of the church, but to do so in ways, and on a conceptual basis, that left the basic orientations and commitments of their religious style intact’.88 A number of Catholics might have said something very similar. Probably the majority position among those who regarded themselves as in some sense Catholic was a conformist or occasional conformist one, though inevitably that was something that left less of a trace in the records that have come down to us. Of course, for much of the late Tudor period there was an emphasis among many Catholics on complete separation in a way which all but the most extreme Puritans would want to reject, and which a number of Catholics rejected as well, or certainly did at some points. At what one might call the high point of the Catholic reaction in Elizabeth’s reign, the spokesmen of the community said that separation was a duty which could not be shirked. Henry Garnet, SJ, insisted that recusancy was a sign of ‘the unity . . . of the Church’. This unity ‘consists in two things: in the connexion or communication of the members of the Church one with another, and in the order of all those members unto one head, that is Christ our Saviour, and he to whom he committed his sheep on earth’.89 In his Treatise of Christian Renunciation Garnet, in pursuit of this radical claim, appears to identify the elect with those who are recusant.90 The character of Catholicism, in a much broader sense than mere avoidance of Protestant liturgy recited in the local church or chapel, was still in some ways dependent on the potential for separation from the Church of England. As Bossy famously said, ‘with some qualifications it seems legitimate to treat non-­ communicating as a “first sign” of recusancy’. Even in the period after the first flush of the seminary movement, that might well be right.91 The Counter-­ Reformation in England and the British Isles, if that is what one wants to call it, incorporated a radical critique of the exercise of State control over the Church in the later sixteenth century. That critique almost demanded that Catholics dissociate themselves from aspects of the national Church, even if it was far from clear that it was necessary to reject publicly in its entirety the statute law which had defined what conformist obedience was. For this reason, the records relating to recusancy and the series of accommodations and compromises which came to define the relationship between the Catholic community and the State down to 88  Peter Lake, ‘Play It Again Solomon’ (forthcoming). 89  Henry Garnet, Apology against the Defence of Schisme . . . (np [printed secretly in England], nd [1593]), pp. 88–9. 90 Henry Garnet, A Treatise of Christian Renunciation . . . (np [printed secretly in England], nd [1593]), p. 82. 91 Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 123.

144  Michael Questier the end of the seventeenth century remain historically crucial to an understanding of the Reformation and post-­Reformation more generally.

Select Bibliography Aveling, Hugh, Northern Catholics: The Catholic Recusants of the North Riding of Yorkshire, 1558–1790 (London, 1966). Bowler, Hugh (ed.), Recusant Roll No. 2 (1593–1594), CRS 57 (London, 1965). Crosignani, Ginevra, Thomas McCoog, and Michael Questier (eds.), Recusancy and Conformity in Early Modern England (Toronto, 2010). Lake, Peter and Michael Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660 (London, 2000). Macinnes, Allan J., ‘Catholic Recusancy and the Penal Laws, 1603–1707’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 23 (1987), pp. 27–63. Spurlock, R.  Scott, ‘ “I Do Disclaim both Ecclesiasticke and Politick Popery”: Lay Catholic Identity in Early Modern Scotland’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society 38 (2008), pp. 5–22. Walker, F.  X., ‘The Implementation of the Elizabethan Statutes against Recusants 1581–1603’ (PhD, London, 1961). Walsham, Alexandra, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 1993).

8 Martyrdom Clodagh Tait

In 1681, awaiting execution in Newgate, Archbishop Oliver Plunkett of Armagh reflected on his forthcoming martyrdom. The English Jesuits (five of whom had  been executed, with others dying in prison) had, he felt, ‘gott more credit more esteem, honour and glory in all the Christian world by the death of theire bretheren here. then they gained by all other actions these many years past, and the same will happen to our Irish prelats, if they will suffer constantly and stoutly.’ He spoke of his own death as ‘but a fleabyting’, saying I ought therefore cheerfully desire it, heartily covet it, and Joyfully embrace it, It being a sure way, a smooth path by which I may in very short time pass from sorrow to Joy. from Toyle to rest and from a momentary time or duration to never ending eternity.

Plunkett understood himself as Ireland’s proto-­martyr: ‘England from St Albans day to these times was glorious for martirs. Ireland had scarse any . . . wee had none like St Alban and his comerades. or St Thomas of Canterbory . . . now tis time for us to imitate the glorious Courage of the English nation’.1 Plunkett had, apparently, forgotten the large number of people killed in Ireland during the sixteenth century and up to the 1650s who had been claimed as ­martyrs. Perhaps he had heard little of them, given that Armagh martyrs were relatively rare among those commemorated in the printed and manuscript ­martyrologies produced from the late sixteenth century.2 His words remind us that though technically it is the manner of their death that makes a martyr, ­martyrs also need to be remade in the public mind via processes of beatification and canonization, ongoing recollection, and encounters with sites and rituals of commemoration. The story of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-­century martyrs cannot be considered without its later sequels. The ebb and flow of attention and ven­er­ation towards these martyrs is illustrated by the fluctuations of Plunkett’s own cult. He himself was largely neglected, except on the sites where his relics 1  John Hanly, The Letters of Saint Oliver Plunkett (Dublin, 1979), pp. 576–80. 2  See Alan Ford, ‘Martyrdom, History and Memory in Early Modern Ireland’, in Ian McBride (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 43–66. Clodagh Tait, Martyrdom In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume I: Endings and New Beginnings, 1530–1640. Edited by: James E. Kelly and John McCafferty, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843801.003.0009

146  Clodagh Tait were kept, until the mid-­nineteenth century when several biographies sparked new interest in him: spikes in veneration followed in the 1880s, 1920s (when he was beatified), and 1970s (canonized). This chapter discusses the accounts and relics of martyrdom that were assiduously collected by early modern Catholics—­ and loudly challenged by their Protestant opponents. Catholics saw the martyrs’ fortitude in the face of ­persecution and their miraculous legacies as emblems of resistance and of divine favour. On death, these would-­be saints became a resource to the faithful. For Thomas Hide, ‘That any be a martyr, God requireth not effusion of bloud but faithe, for defence wherof a man may dewtifullie shedde his bloudde . . . And therfore wee singe and reioyse of the martyres glorious triuumphes’.3 In martyrology, persecutors are powerful and persecution all-­encompassing. But persecution was always ‘a point of contention’; it ‘varied according to specific local circumstances and contingencies, and was not always pursued consistently or even very effectively’.4 Accounts of persecution and martyrdom often gloss over the social, political, and theological differences between the martyrs and the different contexts under which they suffered. They can also tend to elide the ‘diversity and plurality’ of British and Irish Catholicism, and the extent of ‘internal debates about orthodoxy and conformity’.5 Recent work has emphasized tensions within the English Catholic mission in particular.6 For example, James Kelly has noted the attempts by Douai college and the Jesuits to poach George Gervase, whom others argued was a Benedictine.7 Sources produced by and about martyrs are inevitably tricky. Martyr texts tend to prioritize sacred over empiric truths.8 Alan Ford asks how we can ‘do justice to the power of early modern martyrdom with its complex relationship between history and memory, fact and imagination’.9 Both Protestant and Catholic martyrologies sought to stir emotions, ‘to encourage empathic engagement’ with the martyrs and the faith for which they had died.10 Martyrs aligned themselves with past examplars—­Plunkett, as noted, recalled recent Jesuit martyrs, St Thomas of Canterbury, and St Alban. John Copinger proclaimed that ‘as a man cannot live but, by the death, and blood of many beastes which are ordained for his

3  Thomas Hide, A consolatorie epistle to the afflicted catholikes (London, 1579), n.p. 4 Sarah Covington, The Trail of Martyrdom: Persecution and Resistance in Sixteenth-­Century England (Notre Dame, 2003), p. 5. 5 James  E.  Kelly, ‘The Contested Appropriation of George Gervase’s Martyrdom: European Religious Patronage and the Controversy over the Oath of Allegiance’, Journal of British Studies, 57 (2018), pp. 253–74. 6  See this volume, Chapter 6. 7  Kelly, ‘The Contested Appropriation’. 8  See Simon Ditchfield, ‘Thinking with Saints: Sanctity and Society in the Early Modern World’, Critical Inquiry, 35 (2009), pp. 552–84. 9  Ford, ‘Martyrdom’, p. 66. 10  Michael J. Braddick, ‘Political Revolutions’, in Susan Broomhall (ed.), Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction (London, 2016), p. 186.

Martyrdom  147 sustenation, so the church of Chriest, cannot well be sustained, but by the blood of holie martyrs . . . everie one martyr being made, many Christians do rise’.11 Stories of Catholic martyrdom needed to fit with established expectations of what a martyr’s life should look like, and what a martyr should do. But a holy martyr could from another point of view be an obstinate papist. From Henry VIII’s reign onwards, the question of true and false martyrdom was hotly ­debated.12 William  Allen argued that ‘The cause whereof putteth the difference between our Martyrdome, and the due and worthie punishment of Heretiques; who shedding their blood obstinatelie in testimonie of falsehood . . . are knowen malefactors, and can be no Martyrs, but damnable Murtherers of themselves.’13 Protestant pamphleteers in turn contested the cause for which Catholic martyrs died and their manner of doing it.

Counting Martyrs Papal recognition of a martyr as worthy of local or universal veneration depends on the existence of sources to confirm the claim and proof of popular veneration. While evidence survives to enable significant reconstruction of the lives of some candidates, especially those formally tried in London, details for others are limit­ed. Fewer other sources are available for the Irish than the British martyrs to round out the details provided by early martyrologies and histories. A long gap ensued before the efforts of Patrick Francis Moran and other mid-­nineteenth-­ century clerical historians revived interest in martyrs and harnessed them to the service of nationalism, victims not just of heretics, but of British heretics.14 This factor perhaps has also complicated the Irish cause for beatification making it harder to disentangle religious from political reasons for their deaths. A significant number of English martyrologies were published on the Continent from the late sixteenth century, designed both to inform international audiences of the sufferings of the English and to encourage those in power to patronize the mission.15 Moves towards the beatification and canonization of the British martyrs also benefitted from better survival of official and family archives and from the efforts of Catholic antiquarians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Christopher Grene, John Knaresborough, and Ralph Weldon, and writers like Richard Challoner, who synthesized their findings 11  John Copinger, Mnenosynum or Memoriall to the Afflicted Catholickes in Irelande (Toulouse, 1606), pp. 211–21. 12  Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot, 2002). 13  William Allen, A true, sincere and modest defence, of English Catholiques (Rouen, 1584), p. 56. 14  For example, Dennis Murphy, Our Martyrs (Dublin, 1896); Charles Patrick Meehan, The Rise and Fall of the Irish Franciscan Monasteries (Dublin, 1970). 15 Thomas  M.  McCoog, SJ, ‘Construing Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1582–1602’, in Ethan Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005), pp. 95–127.

148  Clodagh Tait into hugely influential biographical collections. Documentation available for the English and Welsh martyrs made it easier for their promoters, in Peter Burke’s words, to prove the ‘fit’ between the careers of candidates for sainthood and recognized ‘stereotypes of sanctity’.16 The initial English and Welsh process for canonization of the martyrs, initiated in 1874, included 360 names, and 316 of these were accepted for consideration. By 1895 fifty-­four had been beatified. A further 136 were beatified in 1929 and eighty-­five in 1987, making 284 in total. Another twenty-­nine have been declared venerable. John Fisher and Thomas More were canonized in 1935 and forty martyrs were canonized in 1970. Two Catholics killed in Scotland have been claimed as martyrs though only John Ogilvie, who died in 1615, is officially recognized as such. Another Scots-­born martyr, George Douglas, ministered in England before being executed in York in 1587. Mary Queen of Scots, who was incorporated in some early martyrologies, was never formally considered for beatification.17 Her case and others indicate the churn that is concealed by neat figures like the often-­cited count of 189 English and Welsh Elizabethan martyrs: names have been jettisoned along the way, but it is still possible that new sources could produce additions. The Irish hierarchy was somewhat embarrassed by the headway made by the English and Welsh cause in the later nineteenth century, and especially by its inclusion of Plunkett. After protests, Plunkett was moved to the Irish process, though some other Irish-­born men (most of low social status) were left among the English martyrs. From 1904 a thorough process whittled down a list of 460 potential martyrs to 309, 257 of whose causes were eventually introduced in 1915 (Archbishop Peter Talbot was added in 1917, and two Capuchins in 1919).18 After Plunkett’s beatification in 1920, the cause languished. He was canonized in 1975, but it was only in 1988 that a renewed cause of seventeen Irish martyrs was introduced. They were promptly beatified in 1992, but the cause of forty-­two further candidates, introduced in 1998, seems to have stalled.19

Context Geoffrey Nuttall calculates that of the 314 English and Welsh martyrs one was a cardinal, 219 were priests, one a deacon, and ninety-­three were lay people, four of 16  Peter Burke, ‘How to Become a Counter-­Reformation Saint’, in David Luebke, The Counter-­ Reformation: The Essential Readings (Oxford, 1999), p. 139. 17 J. H. Pollen, Unpublished Documents Relating to the English Martyrs (London, 1908), pp. 88–9. 18  M.  H.  MacInerny, ‘Archbishop Walsh and the Irish Martyrs’, Studies, 10 (1921), pp. 177–90, 527–44; Irish Capuchin Archives, ‘Descriptive List: Research Papers for Fr. Fiacre Tobin . . . and Fr. John Baptist Dowdall’, 2018. 19  Diocese of Dublin Cause for the Beatification and Canonisation of the servants of God: Dermot O’Hurley archbishop, and Companions . . . 1579–1654, 2 vols. (Rome, 1988); Desmond Forristal, Seventeen Martyrs (Dublin, 1990); Diocese of Dublin Cause for the Beatification and Canonisation of the servants of God: Richard Creagh . . . and Companions 1572–1655, 2 vols. (Rome, 1998).

Martyrdom  149 them women.20 There are about fifty Henrician martyrs and 189 Elizabethan m ­ artyrs (eighty-­six from 1586 to 1591). The other deaths occurred during the seventeenth century, with peaks in the early 1610s, early 1640s, and in the aftermath of the Titus Oates plot in 1679–81. In Ireland, considering the 1988 and 1998 causes only (fifty-­nine in total), there are one archbishop, four bishops, thirty-­six priests (twenty-­five regular, eleven secular), fifteen laymen, and three laywomen. The list of 258 candidates put forward in 1918 included fifteen bishops and archbishops, thirty-­seven secular priests, 149 regulars (later 151), fifty-­one laymen, and six women, two of them nuns.21 The relatively high proportion of lay people, especially laywomen, and the reduction of the proportion of regulars in the later lists compared to the 1918 one may indicate a desire to balance different categories, and to compile a band of papally sanctioned martyrs that might more closely reflect and appeal to potential devotees: to some degree each group represents the time in which they were compiled as much as the evidence available. The majority of those on the later lists died in the 1570s and 1580s, 1606–12, and the 1640s and 1650s. The legal framework under which Irish and English Catholics operated was different. Many of the statutes passed in England and Wales designed to penalize Catholic worship and intimidate Catholic clergy could not be attempted in Ireland. The failure of half-­hearted attempts at reformation meant that a majority Catholic population was unlikely to cooperate with the State on prosecutions for religion. A 1585 statute making it treason for a priest merely to be present in England and Wales was only extended to Ireland in 1653.22 It was also far more difficult for the Irish authorities to justify torture. However, use of martial law powers and practices such as packing of juries facilitated prosecutions.23 Such measures, as well as the political disturbance of the later Elizabethan period and the 1640s and 1650s, had the additional result that fewer records for the Irish martyrs have survived, or were produced in the first place. Throughout the islands lay people were less vulnerable to being killed than the clergy, though those who gave assistance to priests—­hiding, transporting, or helping them escape—­were targeted. In London, Margaret Ward was executed in 1588 for supplying William Watson with a rope, and assisting his escape from the Bridewell prison; an Irish boatman, John Roche, was also executed for providing

20  Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ‘The English Martyrs 1535–1680: A Statistical Review’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 22 (1971), p. 194. 21  Anon., ‘Canonisation of the Irish Martyrs: The Apostolic Process’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 11 (1918), pp. 311–21; Anon., ‘Beatification and Canonisation of the Irish Martyrs (with Names of Those Persecuted from 1537–1714)’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 7 (1916), pp. 287–308, 380–418. 22  Francis  X.  Martin, ‘The Beatified Martyrs of Ireland (12): Willaim Tirry, O.S.A., Priest’, Irish Theological Quarterly, 66 (2001), p. 385. 23  David Edwards, ‘Beyond Reform: Martial Law and the Tudor Reconquest of Ireland’, History Ireland, 5 (1997), pp. 16–21.

150  Clodagh Tait him with clothes and transport.24 It was, however, difficult for the authorities to act against lay abettors of priests, especially in Ireland where it was highly unlikely that harbourers of clergy could be either easily surveilled or effectively sanctioned. Officials were less inclined to pursue women, even though middling-­sort and aristocratic women were key patrons of clergy.25 Lay martyrdom can often be ascribed to poor timing, local or national conflicts, or an accumulation of offences, as in the case of John Burke of Brittas, County Clare, who had long insisted on very public profession of Catholicism, and whose violent resistance of an attempt to arrest him and a priest provoked his trial for treason.26 Peter Lake and Michael Questier argue that the death of one of the most famous English martyrs, Margaret Clitherow, in 1586, had much to do with the provocative nature of her adherence to Catholicism in the context of debates within as well as beyond the Church about issues of loyalty and obedience.27 Priests, particularly members of religious orders, ran the greatest risk of imprisonment. In Continental colleges the formation of seminarians increasingly emphasized imprisonment and martyrdom as possible fates. Students were trained to answer the kinds of questions that might be put to them, and encouraged to emulate those who had gone before. English colleges celebrated martyred students and staff in paintings, and ‘meals were taken in silence, while pupils read from the martyrology, removing their hats at the names of the English martyrs.’ Printed volumes of vividly depicted English martyrdoms also circulated, advertising their sufferings to patrons and compatriots alike.28 Members of English institutions abroad might also be reminded of the martyrs by the presence within them of their relatives—­John Mush dedicated his Life of Clitherow to her daughter Anne, an Augustinian nun in Louvain.29 As Alison Shell notes, ‘Catholic veneration of martyrs, combined with a conscious anticipation of martyrdom . . . has the effect of an apostolic succession: martyrs are quickly made, quickly recognized and quickly emulated.’30

24  E. H. Burton and J. H. Pollen, Lives of the English Martyrs (London, 1914), pp. 430–8. 25  Jennifer Binczewski, ‘Power in Vulnerability: Widows and Priest Holes in the Early Modern English Catholic Community’, British Catholic History, 35 (2020), pp. 1–24. 26  A. M. McCormack, ‘Burke (Bourke), John’, and T.S.R. Ó Floinn, ‘O’Hallaghan, Edmund (Simon of the Holy Spirit)’, in Dictionary of Irish Biography. 27  Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London, 2011). 28  Jan Graffius, ‘Identity, Education, and Mission in the English Jesuit College of St Omers’, in Liam Chambers and Thomas O’Connor (eds.), Forming Catholic Communities: Irish, Scots and English College Networks in Europe, 1568–1918 (Leiden, 2017), p. 124; Michael E. Williams, ‘Campion and the English Continental Seminaries’, in Thomas  M.  McCoog, SJ (ed.), The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early Jesuits (Woodbridge, 1996), pp. 293–8. 29  John Mush, An Abstracte of the Life and Martirdome of Mistres Margaret Clitherowe (1619). 30  Alison Shell, ‘ “We Are Made a Spectacle”: Campion’s Dramas’, in McCoog (ed.), The Reckoned Expense, p. 117.

Martyrdom  151

Imprisonment, Interrogation, and Trials The odds on priests in England and Wales coming to the attention of the au­thor­ ities were high, especially in the sixteenth century. Of the 471 seminarians who were active in England in the reign of Elizabeth, 294 were captured at some point, of whom 116 were executed and seventeen died in prison.31 While some captures depended on surveillance and intelligence, priests might also be betrayed by chance, or by their bodies or comportment. John Hambley was noticed at an inn, ‘where he met a gentleman’s servant that had once been his fellow lodger, who recognized and denounced him’. Francis Ingleby’s cover was blown when some servants of the archbishop of York noticed an individual receiving ‘greater marks of respect than were fitting towards a common person meanly dressed’.32 Trusted friends or servants sometimes betrayed priests and those who concealed them. John Gerard, SJ described how an acquaintance of the Wiseman family (who hosted him), guessed he was a priest and brought information to the authorities that led to his and his hosts’ capture. Gerard’s detailed description of the treatment of himself, his patron, Jane Wiseman, and the Wisemans’ servants and associates indicates the privations suffered in prison by those who did not go on to be martyred. He also gives vivid accounts of the hiding places used by priests (priest-­holes still exist in surviving Tudor houses), and the experience of hiding while extensive searches were carried out. Once in prison, captives were pressurized to divulge the names and locations of others—­Gerard resisted several bouts of torture aimed at forcing him to disclose the location of Henry Garnet, the Jesuit superior.33 As Sarah Covington describes, in England a range of local officials besides the justices of the peace—­sheriffs, bailiffs, constables, and others—­were increasingly relied on to keep watch on Catholic activity.34 While some suspects were released after local questioning, others might be tried or forwarded upwards for further interrogation. Transfers could be tricky. In his account of the capture of Edmund Campion and three other priests, George Elliot noted that significant security was needed to convey the prisoners to London. In Ireland it was often easy for crowds to free captured priests, and several rescues are recorded in the first decades of the seventeenth century.35 Outside the various London gaols and some provincial sites like York, and Dublin Castle, prisons designed to hold people for extended 31 Patrick McGrath and Joy Rowe, ‘Anstruther Analysed: The Elizabethan Seminary Priests’, Recusant History, 18 (1986), pp. 1–13. 32 J. H. Pollen, Acts of English Martyrs Hitherto Unpublished (London, 1891), pp. 249–78. 33 John Gerard, The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest (London, 1952); Michael Hodgetts, ‘A Topographical Index of Hiding Places’, Recusant History, 16 (1982), pp. 146–216. 34 Covington, Trail of Martyrdom, pp. 27–65. 35  George Ellyot, A very true report (London, 1581); Clodagh Tait, ‘Catholics and Protest in Ireland, 1570–1640’, in Robert Armstrong and Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin (eds.), Insular Christianity: Alternative Models of the Church in Britain and Ireland, c.1570–c.1700 (Manchester, 2013), p. 73.

152  Clodagh Tait periods were few. The civil authorities, especially in Ireland, might be uncomfortably aware of the problems of confining priests and other recusants: ‘Why, to commit a papist to pryson, is rather a grace than a disgrace to him’, exclaimed a character in Barnaby Rich’s polemical A Catholicke Conference.36 Lord Deputy Arthur Chichester objected that imprisoning Francis Barnaby, an English priest (and serial double agent), in Dublin Castle in 1611 would ‘rather glorify than correct him’.37 Martyrologies often dwell on the effect of the dark overcrowded cells, but prison conditions varied, with some gaols or parts of them being more comfortable than others: ‘the Tower and Newgate were places where special severity was shown’, and transfer there ‘was often a prelude to execution’.38 John Gerard, SJ, described his move to the Clink, where he could interact with other Catholic prisoners, receive letters, hear confessions, and say Mass as ‘a translation from Purgatory to Paradise’.39 The walls of early modern gaols were often quite permeable. Prisoners often had contact with their co-­religionists. They could be accessed and assisted by visitors, and priests often exercised their spiritual functions, with controversialists also using the opportunity (or being obliged) to engage in written disputes and even public debates with Protestant clerics and scholars.40 At the remote Wisbech Castle in the Isle of Ely, for example, prisoners met together freely. An account of 1594 claimed the clergy there had plenty of money for ‘dainty victuals’, almsgiving, and servants, and that ‘Great Resort and daily is there to them of Gentlemen, Gentlewomen, and of other People . . . And other Priests’.41 The Wisbech group also contended among themselves about how the mission itself should be conducted—­a number of them were prominent in the Archpriest Controversy. Numerous prisoners were tortured to encourage recantation or force confessions and information. Torture occupied a legal grey space. In 1563 Sir Thomas Smith claimed that the ‘custome of other countries to put a malefactor to excessive paine, to make him confesse him selfe, or of his fellows or complices, is not used in England’, but from Henry VIII’s reign torture was used increasingly ­frequently in cases of suspected treason and ‘was regarded as legal if inflicted under the authority of that extraordinary power of the crown to supersede the common law on occasion of emergency’. Elizabeth Hanson describes English torture as ‘an aberrant, quasijuridicial, quasipolitical phenomenon’, noting that ‘it occupied a

36 B. Rich, A Catholicke Conference (London, 1612), p. 2. 37 Benignus Millett, ‘James Ussher, Francis Barnaby and Blessed Conor O’Devany, January–­ February 1612’, Collectanea Hibernica, 38 (1996), p. 44. 38  McGrath and Rowe, ‘Anstruther Analysed’, p. 8. 39 Gerard, Autobiography, p. 95. 40  Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Prisons, Priests and People’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), England’s Long Reformation 1500–1800 (London, 1998), pp. 195–233. 41 J. Strype, Brief Annals of the Church and State Under Queen Elizabeth (London, 1731), p. 195; Francis Young, ‘Papists and Non-­Jurors in the Isle of Ely, 1559–1745’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 104 (2015), pp. 162–5.

Martyrdom  153 discursive space opportunistically fabricated from absences and borrowings’.42 Torture was normally authorized by the Privy Council via warrants signed by at least six privy councillors. More than eighty warrants were issued between 1540 and 1640, but two-­thirds (referring to about ninety people) date from Elizabeth’s reign. Evidence of the torture of at least 165 further victims can be found elsewhere, sometimes directly condoned by the Queen. Richard Topcliffe tortured at least fifty people, but Frank Brownlow found warrants for only nineteen of these. He concludes that Topcliffe ‘operated with considerable autonomy under some other kind of blanket authorisation’.43 In an exchange with the priest Thomas Pormort in 1591 Topcliffe boasted of his intimacy with the Queen and ‘that he did not care for the Council, for that he had his authority from her Majesty’.44 That said, Mark Rankin has recently demonstrated that the council ensured that Topcliffe was well recompensed for his ‘travaile in those her Majestie’s services and the service of the State wherein her Highenes is pleased and our selves of her Counsell often to emploie him’. Rankin has pointed out that Topcliffe’s activities did not stop at interrogation and torture: he was a ‘professional reader’ who seized books and papers from Catholics, read them closely, used them to incriminate and hector suspects, and annotated subversive texts.45 Topcliffe and his associates engaged in psychological as well as physical torment of prisoners. False information was fed to some. John Gerard was told that Robert Southwell, SJ, was going to conform, information he refused to believe. Entrapment was another tactic. Topcliffe ‘conveyed’ a woman to Francis Dickenson, ‘that he might overthrow him be the sinne of his flesh’. When Dickenson ‘repelled’ the woman, Topcliffe allegedly had him ‘hanged up’ by his hands and caused his genitals to be burned with hot irons ‘and then called in many to see his sayd priuie partes, inflamed and rankled [saying] . . . behold this chaste Priest, how he hath dressed and spoyled himselfe, with naughty women’.46 Archbishop Richard Creagh of Armagh, imprisoned in the Tower from 1575 to 1586, was accused of sexually assaulting a gaoler’s daughter.47 Scenes of torture are largely absent from Irish accounts, partly because it was less used and partly because of limited records. Martial law allowed ‘all means of examination’,48 and the numerous holders of commissions of martial law in 42 Elizabeth Hanson, ‘Torture and Truth in Renaissance England’, Representations, 34 (1991), pp. 57–8. 43  Frank W. Brownlow, ‘Richard Topcliffe: Elizabeth’s Enforcer and the Representation of Power in King Lear’, in Richard Dutton et al. (eds.), Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare (Manchester, 2003), pp. 161–78. 44  Brownlow, ‘Richard Topcliffe’, p. 165. 45  Mark Rankin, ‘Richard Topcliffe and the Book Culture of the Elizabethan Catholic Underground’, Renaissance Quarterly, 72 (2019), pp. 492–536. 46  The insinuation being that he had contracted syphilis: Thomas Fitzherbert, A Defence of the Catholyke Cause (Antwerp, 1602). 47  Colm Lennon, Archbishop Richard Creagh of Armagh (Dublin, 2000), pp. 114–16. 48 John M. Collins, Martial Law and English Laws, c1500–1700 (Cambridge, 2016), p. 37.

154  Clodagh Tait Ireland needed no further permission for torture. Such cases usually occurred outside Dublin and, as with other proceedings under martial law, were rarely documented. Those reported to have been tortured under martial law included Bishop Patrick O’Healy, who had spikes driven into his fingers, and the Franciscan John O’Dowd who had a noose tightened around his neck until he died. Few accounts of more formal torture of religious prisoners in Dublin Castle exist. The Irish Privy Council ensured that the torture of Dermot O’Hurley, archbishop of Cashel, in 1584 was authorized in London. They claimed they had no rack, so Sir Francis Walsingham recommended the ‘torture of the boots’, roasting the archbishop’s feet, buttered and clad in leather or tin boots, over a fire. A rack was acquired later, and there are some references to its use.49 It was somewhat arbitrary whether or not those captured and imprisoned on religious grounds would be formally tried and executed. Many escaped, conformed, or were released and exiled. As mentioned, executions peaked at pol­it­ic­ al­ly fraught times, but local concerns might also be influential. In May 1589, two priests and two laymen were arrested in an inn in Oxford. They were interrogated and tortured in London, and within six weeks were returned to Oxford for execution: ‘It is certain that these measures were intended specifically to intimidate the recusant community in and around Oxford’.50 The procedures used might also depend on the circumstances. Like interrogation, jury trials could be difficult to manage in Ireland. It was difficult to find amen­able juries, not just for the purposes of treason trials, but for more ordinary anti-­Catholic business. The early-­seventeenth-­century court of the Irish Privy Council, Castle Chamber, dealt regularly with cases of juries who refused to find the right verdict, especially when it came to ‘presenting recusants’.51 The alternative was to pack juries with loyalists. For example, in 1579 William Drury, president of Munster, boasted that he had executed 400 people ‘by Justice and martiall lawe’, among them ‘a fryer’ (Tadhg O’Daly) who was ‘apprehended arrayned and hanged in his habite at [Limerick] for having about him certen letters . . . importing seditious practises to be intended’. The arraignment was likely fairly sketchy—­Catholic accounts claimed O’Daly was tried before a jury of ‘heretics’.52 Bishop Conor O’Devany was only convicted by dint of the packing of the jury with poor Protestant settlers from his diocese of Down.53 The jury which convicted William Tirry and Matthew Fogarty in 1654 was, according to Fogarty, composed of 49  Clodagh Tait, ‘Adored for Saints: Catholic Martyrdom in Ireland c.1560–1655’, Journal of Early Modern History, 5 (2001), pp. 138–40. 50  James McConica, ‘The Catholic Experience in Tudor Oxford’, in McCoog (ed.), The Reckoned Expense, pp. 38–63. 51 Jon  G.  Crawford, Anglicizing the Government of Ireland: The Irish Privy Council and the Expansion of Tudor Rule, 1556–1578 (Dublin, 1993). 52 Benignus Millett, ‘A Report from the President of Munster, Sir William Drury’, Collectanea Hibernica, 46/7 (2004/5), pp. 7–15. 53  Tait, ‘Adored for Saints’, pp. 140–2.

Martyrdom  155 ‘cloones’ (clowns) and ‘base and poor churls of base condition, and trads men’, who obeyed an instruction to find the men guilty.54 The makeup and procedures of English juries might also be challenged: at the trial of Cuthbert Mayne, it was complained that little evidence had been presented and that the sheriff had illegally influenced a divided jury.55 Some defendants took advantage of the audience provided by the trial and used their training to state their loyalty and dispute the legality of the proceedings. Others were given little opportunity to say anything beyond answering to ‘interrogatories’ designed to reveal their fatally divided loyalties. John Nelson ‘pawsed a while’ before answering the question of whether Elizabeth I was a schismatic, ‘being looth to exasperate his prince . . . but yet more loth to offend God and his owne conscience, or give scandal to the world’.56 Equivocation or mental reservation might be one approach to preserving one’s conscience. Since God could see an individual’s thoughts as well as their words, no-­one was obliged to confess what might harm them, ‘enabling an individual to respond safely to questions of faith while endangering neither soul nor body’.57 Thomas Fitzherbert, describing the trial of Thomas Sprott and Thomas Hunt in Lincoln in 1600, claimed the evidence against them was slight: they could not easily be proved to be priests, ‘which though they denied not, yet they did not confesse’.58

Execution and Emotion Execution was a ‘spectacle of suffering’, where the condemned person was expected to make a public confession of their crimes, and to demonstrate courage in the face of death, thereby allowing them to turn a bad death into a good one that proffered the hope of redemption, and bolstering the power of the State that had brought a malefactor to justice and repentance.59 However, some victims refused to go along with these scripts. Catholic martyrs, while cooperating with their executioners and demonstrating their willingness to die, denied the le­git­im­ acy of the charges against them. Dying performances ‘could frame a final act of evangelization more powerful than a thousand sermons’.60 Contests over meaning

54  F. X. Martin, ‘The Tirry Documents in the Archives de France, Paris’, Archivium Hibernicum, 20 (1957), pp. 69–97. 55  John Morris, The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers, 3 vols. (London, 1872), I, pp. 88–9. 56  William Allen, A Briefe Historie of the Glorious Martyrdom of XII Reverend Priests (Rheims, 1582), n.p. 57 Todd Butler, Literature and Political Intellection in Early Stuart England (Oxford, 2019), pp. 19–44. 58 Fitzherbert, A Defence of the Catholyke Cause, p. 13. 59 Covington, Trail of Martyrdom, pp. 155–98. 60 Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1999), p. 135.

156  Clodagh Tait were a regular feature of the execution of Catholics throughout the islands. The execution of Scotland’s one Catholic martyr, John Ogilvie in 1615, was designed to ‘show Glasgow’s ruling elite . . . that Catholicism was the same as treason’, but seems to have failed in its intimidatory aims and instead ‘reinvigorated Catholicism in the Lowlands’.61 Irish executions also tended to be ineffective in getting across the State’s messages. While the full penalty for treason of hanging, drawing, and quartering was regularly carried out in England and Wales, it was more likely that Irish victims would be hanged until dead before being quartered—­if quartering happened at all—­and the body handed back for burial rather than being displayed on town walls. Irish crowds at executions were more vocally resistant, but English communities still found ways of expressing their disapproval. Despite the danger, Catholics would gather at Tyburn and other London gallows to offer support to the victim and, where possible, to collect relics. In areas where the ‘spectacle of suffering’ was played out more rarely, other methods of resistance were possible. In 1679, David Lewis was hanged on a ‘makeshift gallows, all the carpenters in Usk having mysteriously evaporated with their tools’.62 A vivid account of the death of the Welsh proto-­martyr, Richard Gwyn, in 1584, claimed the executioner had such difficulties getting the implements needed for the execution that he had to steal a ladder at night and get servants to carry coals for the fire to boil the quarters ‘for the want of a horse, which he could neither borrow nor hire’.63 Likewise in Newcastle in 1592, no-­one could be found to quarter Joseph Lambton, until ‘an old fellow, a Frenchman and a surgeon was gotten who, under pretence to see his anatomy, cut him and embowelled him.’64 Demeanour, words, and emotion were key to the performance of martyrdom. Certain lay martyrs were described as dressing carefully for the gallows to symbolize their embracing of martyrdom. In 1651 Dominic Fanning of Limerick wore ‘a new suit of white taffetty’ as if for a wedding, and ‘behaved so jocosely that he caused wonder’. Geoffrey Baron of Clonmel also dressed well, since ‘he was of belief that his soul departed at this instant from this body, did straight enjoy the pleasures of heaven . . . to bestow this last livery upon the relict companion of the soul, was the least of his duty.’65 Members of religious orders might wear their habits. The tradition of ministers being present at the gallows to pray with the condemned and to seek last minute recantations offered opportunities to dramatize 61  Paul Goatman, ‘Exemplary Deterrent or Theatre of Martyrdom? John Ogilvie’s Execution and the Community of Glasgow’, Journal of Jesuit Studies, 7 (2020), pp. 47–66; Allan I. MacInnes, ‘John Ogilvie: The Smoke and Mirrors of Confessional Politics’, Journal of Jesuit Studies, 7 (2020), pp. 34–46. 62  D. B. W. Lewis, ‘Blessed David Lewis’, The Month, 12 (1954), p. 145. 63 J.  Y.  W.  Lloyd, The History of the Princes, the Lords Archer and the Ancient Nobility of Powys Fadog, (London, 1882), III, p. 160. 64 Morris, Troubles, I, pp. 226–7. 65 Meehan, Rise and Fall, p. 232; Patrick F. Moran, Historical Sketch of the Persecutions Suffered by the Catholics of Ireland (Dublin, 1907), pp. 161–2.

Martyrdom  157 the martyrs’ rejection of Protestantism. In 1590 the priest Anthony Middleton, arriving at the gallows, ‘briskly climbed the ladder, saing to a certain minister . . . “Farewell heretic, I am now out of thy power” ’.66 Those facing execution traditionally had the right to address the crowd.67 This was not always freely allowed the martyrs: in 1581 Edmund Campion, SJ and companions were forced to deal with the interruptions of officials, but stressed their innocence and loyalty. Likewise, the following year Thomas Cottam, having been forced to watch Lawrence Richardson being quartered, prayed for the Queen as his ‘liege and sovereign Queen and chief governess’, and asserted, ‘You say I am a traitor if I deny that [the Queen’s supremacy]. No, that is a matter of faith, and unless it be for my conscience and faith I never offended her Majesty’. He then ‘pardoned all in turn, praying God mercifully to turn away His anger from this country and call its people to repentance’.68 Terence Albert O’Brien, bishop of Emly, executed after the fall of Limerick in 1651, exhorted onlookers ‘to continue true to the faith of their fathers, and hope for better days, when God would look with mercy on unhappy Ireland’.69 The Augustinian William Tirry’s execution in Clonmel, County Tipperary, in 1653 shows the difficulties of managing Irish executions. There was plenty of access to Tirry in prison, and accounts circulated of his strict devotional regime and blameless life. Matthew Fogarty claimed Tirry greeted news of his execution ‘with a fervour of divine spirit . . . and cryed in a loude voice (shedding teares aboundantlie) saying in Irish—“God Almightie be thanked who chosed me to this happie end” ’. A number of clergy were imprisoned with him and attended to him. During the walk to the gallows he blessed ‘each side of the street which was as full as it could hould of men and women all weeping and kneeling before him, and craveing his benediction.’ He embraced the gallows, prayed on each step, and at the top he preached ‘to the edification of the faithfull, to the conversion of the seduced sects that were present, men and women, who bitterlie wept for their life erroneouslie and unhappily past’. When he was hanged ‘everie one ran apase to gather his blood with their hand-­kertchers, and to get some peece of clothes or other things’.70 Other relics were given to the Irish Augustinian provincial James O’Mahony. The rest of Tirry’s remains were buried ‘with great devotion’ at the abbey of his order in Fethard.71

66 Pollen, Acts of English Martyrs, p. 317. 67 Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 153 (1995), pp. 64–107. 68  Bede Camm, Lives of the English Martyrs II (London, 1914), pp. 351–2, 394–5, 420, 559–60. 69 Meehan, Rise and Fall, p. 231; M. S. O’Brien, ‘The (Probably Not) Execution Speech of Bl. Bishop Terence Albert O’Brien’, tinyurl.com/c4a32evt, accessed 12 Jan. 2023. 70  Martin, ‘Tirry Documents’, pp. 86–9. 71 M.  B.  Hackett, ‘The Tirry Documents in the Augustinian General Archives’, Archivium Hibernicum, 20 (1957), p. 109.

158  Clodagh Tait Cheery martyrs like Tirry stirred the imaginations and tears of the faithful (and not so faithful) by their emotional and physical constancy. Given the des­tin­ ation was heaven, Plunkett said, death was something to ‘cheerfully desire’, ‘heartily covet’, and ‘joyfully embrace’. In 1584, James Bell allegedly ‘rejoyced greatly in God’, and watching his companion, John Finch, being disembowelled, he exclaimed ‘this is a most happy day’.72 Raphaële Garrod states that ‘the martyr transcends natural affects rather than suppresses them’.73 Martyrs’ ‘affective discipline’—control of inappropriate emotions—­and their expressions of cheerfulness and joy in the face of the pain that awaited them were understood not just as acts of internal resistance in the face of bodily annihilation, but as signs they had already transcended human frailty. Robert Southwell, SJ, assured his readers of the emotional as well as the spiritual rewards of martyrdom. Cruel punishment of malefactors would arouse ‘terroure, feare, and horroure of the wicked fruites, for whiche they are punished’. However, where the conscience is clear, ‘Death is looked for without feare yea desired with delight accepted with devotion . . . Our teares shalbe turned into triumphe, our disgrace into glorye, all our miseryes into perfect felicitye’.74 The stoical, transcendent emotions of the martyrs might be contrasted with the unmanly passions of their persecutors. In a time when men of standing were expected to control their emotions in public, excessive displays of negative feeling might be used to undermine and discredit opponents. Robert Persons characterized his answers in a debate with Thomas Morton as ‘a quiet and sober reckoning’, while charging Morton with choler, rage, fury, and passion. Persecuting officials were often presented as acting out of intemperate rage. According to Thomas Fitzherbert, Sir John Glanville’s ‘extraordinary malice and fury’ in condemning Hunt and Sprott to death in 1600 was punished when he was ‘within a few days after strooken by the hand of God, in such miraculous manner, as the rest may take example therby’.75 However, hostile observers might construe the martyrs’ performances of calm and cheerfulness as obstinacy in error rather than constancy in faith; or as a mechanical repetition of a script indoctrinated in Continental seminaries. Anthony Munday charged several of the May 1582 martyrs with obstinacy, saying that despite hopes that Thomas Cottam ‘would have forsaken his wickednesse’, on the gallows ‘the good opinion had of him before, chaunged into that obstinate nature, that was in them all’.76 Richard Sheldon, an apostate priest, contemptuously 72 Pollen, Documents Relating to the English Martyrs, p. 78. 73  Raphaële Garrod, ‘Senecan Catharsis in Nicolas Caussin’s Felicitas (1620): A Case Study in Jesuit Reconfiguration of Affects’, in Raphaële Garrod and Yasmin Haskell (eds.), Changing Hearts: Performing Jesuit Emotions Between Europe, Asia and the Americas (Leiden, 2019), p. 38. 74  Robert Southwell, An Epistle of Comfort to the Reverend Priestes (Paris [London], 1587). 75 Fitzherbert, A Defence of the Catholyke Cause, p. 13. 76 A. Munday, A Breefe and True Reporte of the Execution of Certaine Traytours at Tiborne (London, 1582), n.p.

Martyrdom  159 dismissed Catholic martyrdom saying ‘it mattereth not with the Pope and his Assecles, of what life and conversation their Saints be, so it can be proved that they die stoutly and obstinately, for the testimonie of his unlimited supremacie’.77 Barnaby Rich claimed that as Bishop O’Devany was brought through Dublin’s streets in 1612 he ignored those seeking his blessing and sat ‘like a block’, making no signs of devotion ‘so that he might haue bin a Papist a Turke or a Jew, for any thing that could haue bin discerned by him, either by his wordes or by his showe’.78

Miracles and Relics Sheldon and Rich also denigrated the wonders associated with the executions and remains of the martyrs. Unearthly lights, sounds, and smells were reported in the vicinity of martyrs before death or to have lingered around their remains. As Richard Gwyn was drawn to execution it suddenly started to rain ‘until body and soul were parted, at which instant incontinently the rain ceased’. The two judges lost their jobs, ‘the greater part of the jury dropped away miserably, and never lived to see the next assize following’, and the town crier ‘became a fool and a momme, and so lived a long time, and in the end died wretchedly’. John Edwards, who had apprehended Gwyn, was later taken ill at the same spot and ended his life stinking so badly that no-­one would come near him, ‘often naming the martyr and cursing the hour he took him’.79 The theme of providential vengeance commonly occurs in these stories. Bishop Terence Albert O’Brien supposedly told ‘the canting Puritan’, Henry Ireton, ‘that he would soon have to answer before the tribunal of God’; soon after, ‘Ireton was seized with the plague and died, exclaiming that the prelate’s blood hastened his death’.80 Relics were an important link between the martyrs and the faithful, a reminder of their fortitude and a channel for wonders. Many Catholics envisaged a range of benefits from contact with relics and application to the saints they represented, characterizing relics as direct workers of miracles. Robert Southwell, SJ, declared ‘what wonderfull force the Martyrs be of, the effectes that haue bene wroughte by  theyre verye ashes, bones, garmentes, and other thinges of theyres doth aboundantlye testifye . . . who by theire verye ashes cureth diseases’.81 The distribution of catacomb relics of the saints of the early Church from the later sixteenth century intensified the cult of relics and in 1583 Pope Gregory XIII approved the veneration of those who had been martyred on the English mission, 77  Richard Sheldon, A Survey of the Miracles of the Church of Rome (London, 1616), pp. 323–36. 78 Rich, Catholicke Conference, p. 5. 79 Lloyd, The History of the Princes, pp. 162–3. 80  Clodagh Tait, ‘The Just Vengeance of God: Reporting the Violent Deaths of Persecutors in Early Modern Ireland’, in David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan, and Clodagh Tait (eds.), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2007), pp. 130–54. 81 Southwell, An Epistle of Comfort, p. 166.

160  Clodagh Tait prompting a new wave of collection and distribution of their relics. Though strongly discouraged in Elizabeth’s reign, there are numerous accounts of the acquisition of relics, a process that became more organized in the Jacobean period, most famously by Luisa de Carvajal, a Spanish woman in London between 1605 and 1613.82 There was a strong trend towards the centralization of relics in the religious houses abroad.83 Relics made the new martyrs accessible to the faithful, and had special meaning when collected and venerated by those who risked martyrdom themselves.84 However, some significant English relics resisted institutional control for long periods, such as the hand of Edmund Arrowsmith, SJ, owned by a Lancashire family and widely resorted to for cures which sustained his cult even after its re­loca­tion to a chapel in 1822. In the later nineteenth century people came long distances to visit it, and various miracles were reported. Third-­class relics of cloth touched to the hand were also in demand nationally and internationally.85 Other Arrowsmith relics remained in private ownership and were used for family devotion, including protection during childbirth.86 Though the Irish authorities had less control over relic-­gathering than their British counterparts, fewer Irish relics have survived. This may in large part have been due to their dispersal into private households, as well as Irish understandings of how sacred things should be used. In a situation where each holy person was ‘firmly embedded in a social network who recognized his sanctity and whose needs he was intended to respond to’, were Irish relics used more, and used up? For example, in 1646 the head of Bishop Conor O’Devany was in the possession of a Meath gentry family who were generous with its favours, causing disquiet among the clergy. It subsequently disappeared. In the 1650s, Fr James Finnerty was using the relics of Archbishop Malachy O’Queely for  healing and exorcism.87 Only belatedly, and especially in the case of the religious orders, are there accounts of the movement of Irish relics to communities in Europe.

82  M. J. Pando Canteli, ‘Tentando Vadoes: The Martyrdom Politics of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 10 (2010), pp. 11–41. 83 James  E.  Kelly, English Convents in Catholic Europe c.1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020), pp.  129–60; Jan Graffius, ‘Relics and Cultures of Commemoration in the English Jesuit College of  St. Omers in the Spanish Netherlands’, in James  E.  Kelly and Hannah Thomas (eds.), Jesuit Intellectual and Physical Exchange between England and Mainland Europe: ‘The World is our House’? (Leiden, 2019), pp. 113–32. 84 Robyn Malo, ‘Intimate Devotion: Recusant Martyrs and the Making of Relics in Post-­ Reformation England’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 44 (2014), pp. 531–48. 85  Alexandra Walsham, ‘Mobile Martyrs and Forgotten Shrines: The Translation and Domestication of Relics in Post-­Reformation England’, in Antón M.  Pazos (ed.), Relics, Shrines and Pilgrimages: Sanctity in Europe from Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2020), pp. 181–202. 86  Bede Camm, Forgotten Shrines (London, 1910), pp. 183–201. 87  Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester, 1997), pp. 67–70.

Martyrdom  161 Repatriation of some relics in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries helped facilitate access to them. They might be deployed to assist in the establishment and promotion of communities of religious. Plunkett’s head was given to a community of Dominican nuns established by his grand-­ niece, Catherine, in Drogheda in 1722. The nuns viewed the relic as ‘a great means of grace, preservations and blessing’, duly recording cures. His arms were preserved by some English gentlewomen, and his friend Maurus Corker, a Benedictine, brought the rest of his body to Lambspringe in Germany, whence it was translated to Downside Abbey in 1881.88 From 1903 the foundation of the Tyburn convent in London provided a repository for relics of English martyrs, focusing devotion to those killed there.89 Beatifications and canonizations have prompted the further distribution of martyrs’ relics. They have also led to the expansion of the material culture of martyrdom as churches, monuments, and plaques were erected to commemorate the martyrs, and their names have been used for streets and public housing.90

The Vagaries of Veneration Some martyrs also lived on in folklore and ‘community memory’.91 Arrowsmith was a vivid presence in Lancashire—­in 1910, Bede Camm captured an array of traditions about places Arrowsmith had supposedly been, and about wondrous and miraculous events associated with him.92 But by the nineteenth century many of the candidates put forward for canonization were largely forgotten, or their commemoration was very localized or episodic, subject to periodic revival and decline. David Lewis was hanged at Usk, Monmouthshire, in 1679. In 1954 it was reported, ‘since the middle of the last century, when the famine-­years drove so many Catholic Irish to South Wales, it has become the custom to wash and deck the martyr’s flat tombstone . . . with palms and wild flowers annually on Palm Sunday’.93 However, memories of the early modern persecution of Catholics also persisted in more diffuse ways. In Ireland, folk memory of ‘penal times’ was a key element of understandings of the past, feeding into ideas of community, religious, and national identity. For example, one 47-­year-­old informant of the Schools Folklore collection in the 1930s from County Laois recounted a story told to him forty years before:

88  Séamus Bellew, ‘The Seventeenth Century Reliquary of St Oliver Plunkett at the Siena Convent, Drogheda’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 23 (2011), pp. 37–65; Clodagh Tait, ‘Relics and the Past: The Material Culture of Catholic Martyrdom in Ireland’, in James Lyttleton and Colin Rynne (eds.), Plantation Ireland: Settlement and Material Culture, c.1550–c.1700 (Dublin, 2009), pp. 209–15. 89  Bede Camm, Tyburn and the English Martyrs (London, 1924). 90  Tait, ‘Relics and the Past’. 91  Ford, ‘Martyrdom’, p. 58. 92 Camm, Forgotten Shrines, pp. 188–201.    93  Lewis, ‘Blessed David Lewis’, pp. 133–46.

162  Clodagh Tait During the penal days the Irish people suffered much to keep the faith alive. It was almost impossible to hear Mass because numbers of English soldiers roamed the country in pursuit of priests. Mass was generally celebrated in remote places . . . If a priest was caught saying Mass he was immediately put to death.

He catalogued reputed sites of Mass houses in the area, and told a gruesome story of a priest who was captured by ‘priest hunters’ while saying Mass, put in a barrel of tar, set alight, and rolled down a hill.94 Such lore sometimes drew on real events or personalities (Plunkett appears in County Louth), or broad truths. However, it also existed outside historical ‘fact’, expressing Irish Catholic understandings of the past as a movement from woe to triumph, and chiming with a well-­established tendency to present priests as specially endowed with supernatural powers—­such stories of persecuted priests often told of how persecutors died because of the priest’s curse. Revivals of the memory of documented martyrs thus easily fitted within the worldview of Irish Catholics. It has sometimes been a struggle to energize communities around the causes of the Irish and British martyrs. The twentieth-­century canonizations were not without their critics. John Davies characterized the cause for canonization of John Fisher and Thomas More as ‘a cult from above’, pushed by an elite group of ‘old’ Catholics, and carefully calibrated to stress the martyrs’ Englishness and loyalty.95 In the 1960s, the proposal for a new tranche of canonizations faced questions as to their appropriateness at a time of ecumenism and significant changes to the liturgies for which the martyrs were seen to have died. Andrew Atherstone notes the ‘ambiguity and multi-­vocality’ of the 1970 canonization, Pope Paul VI declining ‘to give the canonization one dominant meaning’.96 Plunkett, canonized in 1975 at the height of the Troubles, and the seventeen Irish martyrs beatified in 1992, were carefully marketed not as victims of colonialism and sectarianism, but as emblems of peace and reconciliation.97 The sixteenth- and seventeenth-­century martyrs have not been left there. Saints are ‘witnesses’ to both ‘the values of the age in which they lived’, and those of ‘the age in which they were canonized’.98 As symbols of orthodoxy and resistance, they are both immovable and adaptable. They have been encountered in very different contexts: on the walls of the exiled colleges, in England’s ‘forgotten shrines’, and via new technologies—­when More and Fisher were canonized in 1935, Irish audiences were able to listen live to a radio broadcast of the proceedings.99 94  National Folklore Collection, Schools Folklore Ms 828, fols. 267–8. 95  John Davies, ‘A Cult from Above: The Cause for Canonisation of John Fisher and Thomas More’, Recusant History, 28 (2007), pp. 458–74. 96  Andrew Atherstone, ‘The Canonisation of the Forty English Martyrs: An Ecumenical Dilemma’, British Catholic History, 30 (2011), pp. 573–87. 97  Tait, ‘Relics and the Past’, pp. 207–28. 98  Burke, ‘How to Become a Counter-­Reformation Saint’. 99  Evening Herald, 15 May 1935; Cork Examiner, 23 May 1935.

Martyrdom  163 The meaning of the martyrs has been debated, certainly between Catholics and Protestants, but also between centralizing institutions and popular desire to domesticate the saints. Their cults have waxed and waned, but their human and celestial bodies, conjured into being by means of spaces, relics, and graphic portrayals of physical agony and transcendent emotions, may yet have further to travel as a resource for the faithful.

Select Bibliography Covington, Sarah, The Trail of Martyrdom: Persecution and Resistance in SixteenthCentury England (Notre Dame, 2003). Dillon, Anne, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot, 2002). Ford, Alan, ‘Martyrdom, History and Memory in Early Modern Ireland’, in Ian McBride (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 43–66. Gregory, Brad  S., Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1999). Questier, Michael, Catholics and Treason: Martyrology, Memory and Politics in the Post-Reformation (Oxford, 2022). Tait, Clodagh, ‘Adored for Saints: Catholic Martyrdom in Ireland c.1560–1655’, Journal of Early Modern History, 5 (2001), pp. 138–40. Tait, Clodagh, ‘Relics and the Past: The Material Culture of Catholic Martyrdom in Ireland’, in James Lyttleton and Colin Rynne (eds.), Plantation Ireland: Settlement and Material Culture, c.1550–c.1700 (Dublin, 2009), pp. 207–28.

9 Material Culture Alexandra Walsham

On the eve of the reformations that fractured religious institutions and communities across the British Isles, material culture was interwoven into the fabric of Christian belief and practice. Physical objects, together with the structures and environments in which they resided, served as conduits of sacred power, as aids to contemplation and piety, and as tools of doctrinal and moral instruction. Powerful loci of memory, they were also stimuli to intercessory prayer for relatives and friends who had departed from this world. Their capacity to carry out these functions was closely linked with the human senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, which were understood as gateways to the soul. In turn, the body itself was a devotional instrument. The ritual gestures, actions, and movements it performed were not simply external expressions of inner spiritual convictions; they were key elements of medieval Christianity as a dynamic lived religion. Religious materiality of all kinds shaped the experience of the faithful in early sixteenth-­century England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. The landscape was sat­ ur­ated with signposts to the complex ecclesiastical past of this archipelago of islands. Topographical landmarks such as rocks, trees, caves, hilltops, and springs recalled the lives and deeds of the saints. Wayside chapels and standing crosses inspired travellers to pause and remember their maker as they traversed the countryside and brought them into proximity with the divine. Churches, cath­ edrals, and monasteries were filled with tangible objects that channelled devotion and fostered emotion: hallowed images, statues, sacrament houses, relics, and shrines, some of which drew pilgrims in search of indulgences and miracles. Wealthy and humble parishioners alike bestowed care and expense on equipping and embellishing these buildings for worship, from purchasing wax tapers and donating vestments and altar cloths to installing rood screens, fonts, murals, and pews. Donated during their lives and bequeathed in the wills they wrote or dictated before they died, some of these items were poignant personal possessions: in 1529, for instance, one Eleanor Nichol left her own wedding ring to make a silver shoe to attach to the foot of the image of St Sidwell in the Exmoor village of Morebath.1 1  Eamon Duffy, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven, CT, and London, 2001), p. 75. Alexandra Walsham, Material Culture In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume I: Endings and New Beginnings, 1530–1640. Edited by: James E. Kelly and John McCafferty, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843801.003.0010

Material Culture  165 Within the home, religious objects likewise proliferated during the fifteenth century, assisted by the growth of literacy and the advent of print: images of pity, prayer rolls, primers, and other devotional books coexisted with rosary beads, pendants, and miniature reliquaries. Designed to be worn around the neck, hung on girdles, or kept in pockets about the person, these forms of ‘portable Christianity’ supply further evidence of the vitality of traditional religion before the break with Rome.2 Indicative of its flexibility and adaptability to changing circumstances, they defy the older historiographical assumption that Catholicism had ceased to satisfy the spiritual needs of the laity and, compromised by ecclesiastical abuse and corruption, was in decay and decline. They index the continuing centrality of things in shaping religious experience, even as they hint at their capacity to defy strict clerical control and to open up space for lay autonomy and creative agency. To the consternation of bishops and humanists, sometimes the use of holy matter spilled out beyond the parameters of orthodoxy into the realm of magic, charms, and spells. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the growing propensity of some objects to erupt into life and move, weep, and bleed drew into renewed focus tensions between interior and external religion that had been intrinsic to Christianity from the beginning. It fostered anxieties that found expression in heretical critiques and foreshadowed the fuller theological assault on religious materiality launched by the Protestant reformers.3 This chapter sketches Catholicism’s relationship with material culture in the wake of its official proscription and its reduction to an underground church and a beleaguered minority. It examines the afterlives of medieval religious artefacts in early modern Britain and the part that these played in sustaining the worship and faith of people who identified themselves as Catholics during this turbulent period. It then turns to examine the resurgence of Christian materiality associated with the Counter-­Reformation movement to reclaim England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales from heresy and schism, exploring the ways in which relics, sacramentals, and other religious objects became emblems of allegiance and subversion. These processes of confessional identity formation played a key role in provoking Protestant suspicion and hostility towards ‘popish’ objects as sources of superstition, sin, and idolatry. The polemical discourse of distrust and anxiety they helped to forge has not only contributed to the long-­term neglect of physical artefacts as sources for mainstream historical enquiry. It has also perpetuated the tendency to set them in disparaging contrast to the intellectualized forms of faith that the early modern reformers and their Enlightenment successors elevated on 2  Julia Smith, ‘Portable Christianity: Relics in the Medieval West (c.700–1200)’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 181 (2012), pp, 143–67. See also Henning Laugerud, Salvador Ryan, and Laura Katrine Skinnebach (eds.), The Materiality of Devotion in Late Medieval Northern Europe: Images, Objects, Practices (Dublin, 2016). 3  See Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York, 2011).

166  Alexandra Walsham a pedestal as superior.4 The discussion that follows thus has a dual function: it reconstructs Catholic material culture in all its rich variety in tandem with tra­ cing the roots of the lingering ambivalence, if not allergy, towards materiality that came to define those parts of the British Isles that became officially Protestant societies.

Medieval Material Culture and Its Afterlives All over Europe, the early reformations were accompanied by spasms of iconoclasm, both official and clandestine, which were designed to remove idols that endangered the souls of the faithful and served as stumbling blocks to the full internalization of the reformed gospel. The dissolution of the English monasteries was a collaborative process. Initiated by the Tudor regime, it was assisted by an alliance of evangelicals and opportunists, who physically dismantled the buildings and carried off the rubble for reuse.5 At Scone in Scotland in the 1559, the fury of the crowd would not be sated until the kirk itself had been completely pulled down.6 Listed in inventories that mocked them as fakes and forgeries, the relics these institutions housed were confiscated by the commissioners and destroyed in public ceremonies. A statue of the Welsh warrior saint Derfel Gadarn was incinerated in one such spectacle of demystification in 1538.7 Monastic libraries were ransacked and sifted for valuable manuscripts, with the rest discarded as worthless chaff or sold off as wastepaper to printers and stationers. Ecclesiastical injunctions ordered the stripping of the altars and the removal of ‘monuments of idolatry and superstition’ that perpetuated beliefs about purgatory and prayer for the dead from parish churches ‘so that no memory of the same’ remained. Under Edward VI, communion plate, candlesticks, ornaments, copes, and bells came under the rapacious gaze of the state, which expropriated the liturgical objects rendered redundant by Protestant reform for their monetary value in a concerted campaign that culminated in 1552. Some were melted down; others were turned to alternative purposes and put to ‘profane use’, in a process deliberately designed to denude them of holiness. Dismissed as ‘trifles’, ‘trash’,

4  See Birgit Meyer and Dick Houtman, ‘Introduction: Material Religion—­How Things Matter’, in Birgit Meyer and Dick Houtman (eds.), Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality (New York, 2012), pp. 1–23, esp. pp. 9–13. 5 Ethan H. Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), ch. 5. 6 David McRoberts, ‘Material Destruction Caused by the Scottish Reformation’, in Brendan Bradshaw (ed.), Essays on the Scottish Reformation 1513–1625 (Glasgow, 1962), p. 431. 7  Anne Dillon, ‘John Forest and Derfel Gadarn: A Double Execution’, Recusant History, 28 (2006), pp. 1–21.

Material Culture  167 and  ‘trumpery’, the very language used to describe these items metaphorically reduced them from precious treasures to the status of rubbish.8 It echoed the savage rhet­oric deployed by John Calvin in his scurrilous mock register of Christendom’s counterfeit relics, which was translated into English in 1561.9 A Henrician edict had launched a targeted attack on all visible traces of the cult of St Thomas Becket in books, buildings, and other locations, while a proclamation of 1549 required missals, ordinals, antiphoners, and processionals to be destroyed or ‘so deface[d] and abolish[ed], that they never hereafter may serve . . . to any such use as they were first provided for’.10 This was part of a wider assault upon the many symbols of ‘false religion’ that the reformers found in the outdoor environment. The ‘plucking down’ of places to which pilgrims superstitiously gravitated was a further manifestation of godly reformation. All over the British Isles, holy wells, trees, and stones were mutilated, defaced, or cut down and visits to them prohibited on pain of punishment. Bishops and local synods ordered the demolition of crucifixes and a Scottish statute of 1581 threatened those who continued to frequent idolatrous sites and sacred springs with the death penalty for a second offence. But the campaign to eliminate visible reminders of medieval Christianity was both partial and se­lect­ ive. Much remained in situ, not least the parish churches appropriated for Protestant worship, provoking the discontent of Puritan zealots. Some were stirred to chop down standing crosses under cover of night and to shatter stained glass windows to which misguided parishioners still genuflected. The early 1640s saw a renewed drive to purge popish ‘idols’ by parliamentary soldiers and self-­ appointed iconoclasts.11 But the twin strategies of destruction and recycling deployed by official and popular reformers could not entirely efface the material remnants of the Catholic past. From the outset, resistance to the Reformation manifested itself in the impulse to protect this heritage from Protestant rage. Some conservatives rescued statues, relics, crucifixes, and alabasters from churches and concealed them in their homes; others buried them under the floor or immured them in wall cavities in the hope that they might thereby escape the approaching storm. A panel depicting the Adoration of the Magi was apparently saved from destruction by a 8  See Alexandra Walsham, ‘Recycling the Sacred: Material Culture and Cultural Memory after the English Reformation’, Church History, 86 (2017), pp. 1121–54; Eamon Duffy, Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations (London, 2012), pp. 109–29. 9  John Calvin, A very profitable treatise . . . declaring what great profit might come to al Christendome, if there were a register made of all sainctes bodies and other reliques (London, 1561). 10  Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (eds.), Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. I: The Early Tudors (1485–1553) (New Haven, CT, 1964), pp. 485–6, 275–6. 11  See Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2011), ch. 2. For the Scottish statute, see T. Thompson and C. Innes (eds.), The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland 1124–1707, 12 vols. (Edinburgh, 1814–75), III, pp. 212–13.

168  Alexandra Walsham member of the Shireburns, a Lancashire Catholic family in whose possession it remained until the 1790s.12 In Long Melford in Suffolk in the mid-­sixteenth century, William Clopton purchased redundant church furniture from the chapel and chantry endowed by his ancestors with the intent of preserving it for his posterity.13 The survival of late medieval silver reliquary pendants may provide further evidence of what Sarah Tarlow has called ‘a subtle kind of archaeology of resistance’: the miniature cameo scenes engaged their owners in meditation on Christ’s life and suffering, while the precious cargo they contained was a reminder of a proscribed tradition of piety.14 The silversmith who incorporated a medieval pyx into a communion cup crafted for the parish church of Fitz in Shropshire in 1565 may himself have been engaged in an ingenious species of dissimulation.15 Sacred vestments, utensils, books, and relics likewise migrated into domestic contexts, where lay people replaced the clergy as their custodians, concealing them in anticipation that the Reformation might soon be reversed. An ancient New Testament in parchment was in the safekeeping of an Essex gentleman in the Elizabethan period and in 1587 the Perth kirk sessions presented the former priest or friar Robert Fin for concealing his liturgical books and ‘idolatrous’ robes for nearly three decades.16 As late as 1601, Bishop Richard Bancroft was enquiring in his visitation articles for the diocese of London about people who kept breviaries, chalices, albs, and ‘other ornaments of superstition uncancelled or defaced’ in private houses, ‘which it is to be conjectured they do keep for a day’.17 Hidden in the attic chapels of recusants and church papists, this equipment en­abled the missionary priests they sustained and harboured to celebrate the Mass. It nurtured the ongoing hope that the tables might yet be turned and Catholicism restored to dominance once more. Many such objects, from ­splendidly embroidered chasubles (Figure  9.1) to elaborate silver reliquaries, were subsequently smuggled overseas. The relics of the Scottish saints, Margaret and Ninian, were probably carried abroad in the 1560s, while St Brigid’s head was conveyed from Ireland first to Vienna and then to Lisbon

12 Maurice Whitehead (ed.), Held in Trust: 2008 Years of Sacred Culture (Stonyhurst, 2008), pp. 22–3. 13  David Dymond and Clive Paine (eds.), The Spoil of Melford Church: The Reformation in a Suffolk Parish (Ipswich, 1992), p. 39. 14  For two examples, see the Portable Antiquities Scheme (www.finds.org.uk), DUR-­2DBE88 (reliquary pendant, c.1300–1500, later converted to a badge); and ID NMGW-­9E8024 (reliquary pendant, c.1500–50). Sarah Tarlow, ‘Reformation and Transformation: What Happened to Catholic Things in a Protestant World’, in David Gaimster and Roberta Gilchrist (eds.), The Archaeology of Reformation 1480–1580 (Leeds, 2003), p. 118. 15  Hugo Blake, Geoff Egan, John Hurst, and Elizabeth New, ‘From Popular Devotion to Resistance and Revival in England: The Cult of the Holy Name of Jesus and the Reformation’, in Gaimster and Gilchrist (eds.), Archaeology of Reformation, pp. 188–9. 16  William Weston, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, trans. Philip Caraman (London, 1955), p. 112; Margo Todd (ed.), The Perth Kirk Session Books 1577–1590, Scottish History Society, 6th ser. 2 (Woodbridge, 2012), p. 355. 17  W. P. M. Kennedy (ed.), Elizabethan Episcopal Administration, 3 vols, Alcuin Club Collections XXV–­VII (London and Milwaukee, 1924), III, p. 346.

Material Culture  169

Figure 9.1  Opus Anglicanum chasuble owned by Margaret Scrope (Lady Constable) of Burton Constable, Yorkshire. Originally made, c. 1330–1350, modified in the sixteenth century to conform to current fashion. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Accession number 27.162.1.

in Portugal.18 Their journeys paralleled those undertaken by people who fled into exile and sought asylum in foreign countries for the sake of the Catholic faith. The visible scars that many physical structures and objects bore only served to invest them with greater significance and to enhance their hallowed status in the eyes of those who continued to adhere to the Old Religion. The ruined shells of monasteries remained a magnet for devout Catholics eager to keep the flame of their religion alive. Undeterred by its remote location and exposure to high winds, Yorkshire recusants were still flocking to the abandoned Lady Chapel of Mount Grace Priory in 1614, when a special commission was raised to repress the ‘unlawfull Conventicles’ that gathered there on the eve of ecclesiastical feast days to perform ‘superstitious’ rites and ‘like vanyties’.19 In Somerset, an old man continued to climb Brandon Hill on his knees in the 1580s, carrying a reliquary 18  McRoberts, ‘Material Destruction’, p. 456; Catherine McKenna, ‘Gone to Ground: Relics and Holy Wells in Medieval and Early Modern Ireland’, in Elizabeth Robertson and Jennifer Jahner (eds.), Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Objects in Comparative Perspective: Translations of the Sacred (Basingstoke, 2010), p. 65. 19  North Allerton, North Yorkshire County Record Office, ZFL 56.

170  Alexandra Walsham containing one of the nails from the Crucifixion which he had rescued from Glastonbury Abbey as an amulet against ‘the molestation of spirits’. He kept a lamp suspended and perpetually burning in the part of his house that looked towards this hallowed site, which was said to have been the location where Joseph of Arimathea and his companions had settled.20 According to the ‘pious custom of their forefathers’, Scottish Catholics similarly persisted in visiting the church at Turiff dressed in penitential linen garments and imploring the aid of God and the saints in the same period.21 In Canterbury, a man who took his young son to see the remains of Christchurch retreated into a crevice in the crumbling walls to say his prayers.22 On the outskirts of Cork elderly ladies were observed mumbling to themselves near a stone bearing the footprint of St Finbar in the 1640s.23 The material environment thus helped to perpetuate a tradition of piety that Protestantism tried but failed to completely extinguish. Well into the seventeenth century, Catholics continued to regard heretical possession of ecclesiastical buildings and land as a temporary aberration. ­ Casuistry manuals advised gentlemen and noblemen that it was permissible to purchase a former monastic property and pass it on to their heirs, so that they could restore it to the Church ‘when the time comes’.24 Others took the precaution of recording the disappearing traces of medieval Christianity in writing. Catholicism and antiquarianism had a symbiotic existence. Determined ‘to preasarve . . . within thease paper walles what that strong rocke cannot keepe’, the recusant Thomas Habington described a mural of Thomas Becket painted on the walls of a hermitage carved into a cliff in Worcestershire.25 Drawings of lost shrines likewise served to revive the memory of holy places for future gen­er­ ations. British Catholics adopted the same strategies as their counterparts in the Dutch Republic and other parts of Europe where Protestantism was dominant. What was at stake was the survival of the physical patrimony of their threatened faith. A vital source of spiritual sustenance as well as a fillip to ideological fervour, tangible relics of all kinds served as an umbilical link between post-­Reformation Catholic communities and the pre-­Reformation era.

20 Weston, Autobiography, pp. 111–12, 115. 21  William Forbes-­Leith (ed.), Narratives of Scottish Catholics under Mary Stuart and James VI (Edinburgh, 1885), pp. 161–2. 22  Historical Manuscripts Commission, Twelfth Report, Appendix, Part IV, The Manuscripts of his Grace and the Duke of Rutland, G. C. B., Preserved at Belvoir Castle, vol. i (1888), pp. 311–12. 23  T. Crofton Croker (ed.), The Tour of the French Traveller M. de la Boullaye Le Gouz in Ireland, A.D. 1644 (n.p., 1837), p. 30. 24 P.  J.  Holmes (ed.), Elizabethan Casuistry, CRS 67 (London, 1981), pp. 43–44; P.  J.  Holmes, Caroline Casuistry: The Cases of Conscience of Fr Thomas Southwell SJ, CRS 84 (Woodbridge, 2012), pp. 89–90. 25  Thomas Habington, A Survey of Worcestershire, ed. John Amphlett, Worcestershire Historical Society, 2 vols. (London, 1895–9), I. pp. 17–18.

Material Culture  171

Catholic Materiality and the Counter-­Reformation The ongoing anxieties that medieval structures and objects stimulated in Protestant minds were reinforced by the resurgence of sacred things that accompanied the advance of the Counter-­Reformation. Where early-­sixteenth-­century Catholic humanists such as Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More had expressed concern about the misuse and abuse of holy objects and their capacity to expose the Church to criticism and scandal, by the 1560s and 1570s the mood was beginning to change. The Council of Trent steered a careful course between defending Christian materiality and seeking to restrain the dubious beliefs and rituals that hovered around its edges. In a decree dated December 1563 it insisted that the veneration of images and relics was a legitimate practice sanctioned ‘from the primitive times of the Christian religion’ in defiance of the Protestant assertion that this was tantamount to pagan idolatry, but it also called for the removal of ‘superstition’, the elimination of ‘all filthy quest for gain’, and the avoidance of lascivious behaviour and festive disorder associated with traditional pilgrimages.26 Across Europe, Catholic renewal was increasingly accompanied by enthusiastic endorsement of material devotion.27 The rapid restoration of altars and other apparatus of the Mass in many parishes when Mary I ascended the throne in 1553 foreshadowed a wider trend: overt and defiant celebration of the very elements of religious culture that Protestants rejected and repudiated. Sacred journeys to indulgenced shrines and miraculous images revived after a short hiatus as an antidote to heresy.28 The cults of saints underwent a parallel efflorescence, sponsored by Catholic rulers such as Philip II of Spain and fostered by the rediscovery of the Roman catacombs, which became a vast warehouse of relics from which territories battered by iconoclasm, including Ireland, replenished their arsenals of sacred resources.29 Space profaned by Protestant violence was reconsecrated and new symbols of Counter-­Reformation militancy were erected in urban and rural locations. The Virgin Mary became the figurehead of a campaign of religious reconquest and her iconography flourished anew.30 In Bohemia, Catholic priests

26  H.  J.  Schroeder (ed.), The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (Rockford, IL, 1978), pp. 215–17. 27  See Silvia Evangelisti, ‘Material Culture’, in Alexandra Bamji, Geert H. Janssen, and Mary Laven (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-­Reformation (Farnham, 2013), pp. 395–416. 28 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; Elizabeth M. Tingle, Sacred Journeys in the Counter Reformation: Long Distance Pilgrimage in Northwest Europe (Kalamazoo, MI, 2020). 29  See Trevor Johnson, ‘Holy Fabrications: The Catacomb Saints and the Counter-­Reformation in Bavaria’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 47 (1996), pp. 274–97; Howard Louthan, ‘Tongues, Toes and Bones: Remembering Saints in Early Modern Bohemia’, in Alexandra Walsham (ed.), Relics and Remains, Past and Present, Supplement 5 (2010), pp. 167–83. 30  Bridget Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Catholic and Protestant Piety, 1500–1648 (Cambridge, 2007).

172  Alexandra Walsham and evangelists eagerly satisfied the thirst for medals, rosaries, and other small religious objects. In the Upper Palatinate, edible images imprinted with tiny ­pictures of the saints baked in bread or mixed with cattle fodder were a further feature of popular devotion actively encouraged by the Church.31 So too were new sacramentals associated with the Jesuit saints Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier, including vials of holy water blessed in their name. These types of religious materiality quickly infiltrated the domain of the home and its constituent chambers. Italian casa were filled with items whose tactility made them aids to an intensely embodied style of religiosity, but whose reputed apotropaic qualities could also invite their users to stray into the terrain of heterodoxy and error.32 Even ordinary household objects bore the marks of the confessional values created by the Counter-­Reformation. On Europe’s eastern frontier, many households acquired furniture, earthenware, and gingerbread moulds in the shape of the Czech martyr John of Nepomuk.33 Material culture was a critical vehicle for the revival of the Church of Rome in what would become its modern European heartlands. The ability of Catholics in Britain and Ireland to imitate these patterns was inevitably constrained by the circumstances in which they were obliged to operate, as members of a minority faith deprived of access to churches and forced to practice their religion covertly in domestic settings and open spaces. As Robert Abercromby, SJ, wrote to Claude Aquaviva, the Jesuit Superior General in Rome in 1596, missionaries in Scotland, for fear of arrest and capture, lived ‘in caves, in secret and unfrequented places, perpetually moving from place to place, like the gipsies’.34 Mass often had to be celebrated without proper altars, sacred vessels, missals, or vestments at odd times, including before sunrise and daylight. For some, receiving the sacrament was a rare occurrence. Against this backdrop, there are grounds for surmising that material artefacts may have become more rather than less important in Catholic experience, despite the fact that their possession and use was fraught with acute danger and risk. Catholics like the unmarried Helen Wintour laboriously stitched copes and chasubles for the priests who served them, adorning them with symbolism ­associated with contested doctrines such as the Immaculate Conception.35 31  Trevor Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles: The Counter Reformation in the Upper Palatinate (Farnham, 2009), p. 233. 32 Abigail Brundin, Deborah Howard, and Mary Laven, The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 2018), ch. 4. See also Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, ‘Lambs, Coral, Teeth, and the Intimate Intersection of Religion and Magic in Renaissance Tuscany’, in Sally  J.  Cornelison and Scott  B.  Montgomery (eds.), Images, Relics and Devotional Practices in Medieval and Renaissance Tuscany (Tempe, 2006), pp. 139–56. 33 Howard Louthan, Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (Cambridge, 2009), p. 300. 34  Forbes-­Leith (ed.), Narratives of Scottish Catholics, p. 226. 35 Sophie Holroyd, ‘ “Rich Embrodered Churchstuffe”: The Vestments of Helena Wintour’, in Ronald Corthell, Frances  E.  Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur  F.  Marotti (eds.), Catholic Culture in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN, 2007), pp. 73–116.

Material Culture  173 A  mid-­seventeenth-­century chalice veil bore the name of Marian Bodenham, who made it as a thanksgiving for the thaumaturgic cure of her father-­in-­law at St Winifred’s Well in north Wales in 1606.36 The appetite for portable aids to piety like those manufactured on the Continent was evidently high. In 1586 Robert Southwell, SJ, asked Robert Persons, SJ, if papal permission could be granted for the blessing of 2,000 rosaries and 6,000 grains, ‘for here all are asking for such objects, and we are unable to gratify them’.37 Others were imported and circulated, becoming part of the large mobile library of hallowed items that sustained the faith of a geographically scattered community. The miracles with which these were often credited found their way into the Jesuit annual letters, where they were celebrated and weaponized as evidence of divine approbation of the resurgent Catholic Church.38 Albeit on a smaller scale than in Europe, pilgrimage to sacred places like Lough Derg, St Patrick’s Purgatory, and Holywell was harnessed for similar purposes. Gregory Martin’s vigorous defence of ‘Christian peregrination’ in 1583 was written from the safety of exile,39 but his co-­religionists at home defiantly continued the tradition of visiting these revered sites and invested it with growing audacity and belligerence. The chapel dedicated to St Michael the Archangel on Skirrid-­ Fawr, a mountain peak above Abergavenny in Monmouthshire even acquired its own indulgence in 1674: this was accorded to pilgrims who prayed for ‘the extirpation of heresies and the exaltation of Holy Mother Church’.40 Such locations became emblematic of the refusal of British Catholics to bow in the face of persecution. So too did the mutilated statue of the Virgin and Child desecrated by English troops in Cadiz under the command of the Earl of Essex in 1596. Transported to Valladolid and installed in the chapel of the English College there in 1601 in the presence of the Queen of Spain, the Vulnerata was venerated as a victim and martyr itself. It was explicitly envisaged as a mascot of Catholics ‘in this our solitude and tyme of banishment until the clouds of heresy be dispenced and the desyred day appear’ when the Rome would triumph once more.41 Back in Britain, some stalwart recusant Catholics built overt architectural statements of their illicit beliefs, such as Sir Thomas Tresham’s triangular lodge in Northamptonshire, which is an elaborate allegory in stone. Dorothy Lawson’s house near Newcastle-­upon-­Tyne bore the IHS symbol (a sacred monogram of 36  Whitehead (ed.), Held in Trust, pp. 84–5. 37  J. H. Pollen (ed.), Unpublished Documents Relating to the English Martyrs, vol. 1: 1584–1603, CRS 5 (London, 1908), p. 319. 38  See Alexandra Walsham, ‘Miracles and the Counter-­Reformation to England’, Historical Journal, 46 (2003), pp. 779–815, esp. pp. 794–9. 39  Gregory Martin, A treatyse of Christian peregrination ([Paris], 1583). 40  Michael R. Lewis, ‘The Pilgrimage to St Michael’s Mount: Catholic Continuity in Wales’, Journal of Welsh Ecclesiastical History, 8 (1991), pp. 51–4. 41 Venerable English College, Rome, Liber 1422, cited in Peter Davidson, ‘Recusant Catholic Spaces in Early Modern England’, in Corthell, Dolan, Highley, and Marotti (eds.), Catholic Culture, pp. 26–7.

174  Alexandra Walsham

Figure 9.2  The Lusher shrine showing the instruments of the Passion, wood, seventeenth century. By permission of the Governors of Stonyhurst College.

the holy name of Jesus) on its outer walls in an equally ostentatious display of her  confessional orientation. Particular rooms were dedicated to Counter-­ Reformation saints, so that her home became a memory palace to the holy dead.42 Elizabethan prisoners of conscience scratched spiritual graffiti on the walls of their cells, turning them into places of quasi-­monastic retreat and contemplation.43 Some of those who studied in schools and seminaries overseas crafted miniature shrines to aid their private devotions (Figure 9.2). A playing card found in the comb case of an attendant of the duke of Norfolk in the early 1570s seems to have functioned as a tiny triptych adorned with drawings of the crucifixion scene.44 The Jesuit John Gerard created makeshift rosaries out of orange peel for his fellow inmates in the Clink.45 Such objects sit on a spectrum with the substantial corpus of printed and manuscript books published and prepared for 42  Mark Girouard, Rushton Triangular Lodge, Northamptonshire (London, 2004); William Palmes, Life of Mrs Dorothy Lawson, of St Anthony’s, near Newcastle-­upon-­Tyne in Northumberland, ed. G. Bouchier Richardson (Newcastle-­upon-­Tyne, 1851), p. 27. 43  For example, Henry Walpole, SJ, in the Tower of London: John Gerard, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, ed. and trans. Philip Caraman (London, 1951), pp. 104–5. 44  Richard L. Williams, ‘Contesting the Everyday: The Cultural Biography of a Subversive Playing Card’, in Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson (eds.), Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and its Meanings (Farnham, 2010), pp. 233–56. 45 Gerard, Autobiography, pp. 117–20.

Material Culture  175 Catholics throughout the period and imported to Britain to succour their spiritual needs. Envisaged by the clergy as ‘domme preachers’, ironically they could also function as agents of lay independence from their instructions and dictates. In an environment characterized by a scarcity of clerical personnel, they could serve as surrogates and substitutes for access to the sacraments and help to create a kind of ad hoc priesthood of all believers.46 Books, beads, and other sacred artefacts became incriminating signs of adherence to the false Catholic religion. Raids on the homes of recusants frequently uncovered an array of ‘popishe stuffe’. An inventory of items found in the household of Mrs Hampden of Stoke in Buckinghamshire in 1583, for instance, included a silk picture of the Veronica, a fragment of the host, a needlework box bearing the image of Christ, a letter ‘mencioning a reconcylacion to the Pope’, a Jesus psalter, the Rheims New Testament, and diverse other ‘papystycall books’.47 The ‘Supersticious Reliques’ recovered from the residence of George Brome and his sisters three years later included a long paper painted with the name of the Virgin Mary in red and gold letters and a ‘little clout’ stained with ‘a droppe of blood’.48 In 1609, Archbishop John Spottiswoode of St Andrews burnt a cache of books, copes, chalices, and other ‘trash’ confiscated from the lodging of Gilbert Brown at Sweetheart Abbey in the marketplace at Dumfries.49 Under the nose of their warders and sometimes with their connivance, some prisoners accumulated the materials necessary for saying Mass. A search in London’s Clink in April 1626 revealed a private altar, together with an astonishing array of plate, pictures, surplices, chalices, and books; in the New Prison in Maiden Lane, so much was discovered in the chambers of the six priests incarcerated there that it took three porters to carry it away.50 Some upper-­class Catholics, including Lady Magdalene Montague of Battle Abbey in Sussex, openly displayed their rosaries as tokens of the prohibited creed to which they stoically adhered, professing their faith to ‘whatsoever heretical beholders’ might see them.51 The earl of Morton’s gold cross and agnus dei were similarly potent symbols of his reconciliation to Catholicism after seeing a vision of an angel.52 A traveller to the Irish town of Wexford in 1634 remarked on

46 Alexandra Walsham, ‘ “Domme Preachers”? Post-­Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print’, Past and Present, 168 (2000), pp. 72–123. On sacramentals, see R.  W.  Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London and Ronceverte, 1987), p. 12. 47  The National Archives, Kew, SP 12/167/47. 48  British Library, London, Lansdowne MS 50, fos. 163v–164r. 49  McRoberts, ‘Material Destruction’, p. 458. 50  Philip Caraman (ed.), The Years of Siege: Catholic Life from James I to Cromwell (London, 1966), pp. 69–70. 51  A. C. Southern (ed.), An Elizabethan Recusant House Comprising the Life of the Lady Madgdalen Viscountess Montague (1538–1608) (London, 1954), p. 44. 52  Forbes-­Leith (ed.), Narratives of Scottish Catholics, p. 357.

176  Alexandra Walsham women who no less brazenly wore crucifixes between their breasts.53 Those more fearful of detection and arrest found more discreet ways of maintaining their faith. Decade finger rings, with their ten knobs to aid with the counting of prayers, were widely used in Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Cumbria. Devotional jewellery that could easily be concealed proliferated, including tiny reliquary lockets or pendants bearing the holy name of Jesus (in the sacred monogram IHS), a symbol that had become synonymous with the Jesuits by the early seventeenth century. Designed to enclose a fragment of a relic, agnus dei or a scroll of paper inscribed with the gospel of St John, these capsules were often strung in between rosary beads. They were not only mnemonics to prayer and routes to pardon, but items that reputedly provided the wearer with a supernatural shield of protection against mortal danger.54 Many such items had been explicitly banned under an English statute of 1571, which, in the wake of Pius V’s excommunication of Elizabeth I, placed them in the same category as bulls from the bishop of Rome designed to lure her subjects to disobedience and classed those who imported them as guilty of the crime of praemunire.55 The agnus dei acquired particular political connotations as a visible embodiment of the doctrine of papal supremacy. It came to be regarded as a treasonous thing, intimately linked with the subversive projects of conversion and conspiratorial schemes. It is telling that when John Somerville rode to London in 1583 intent upon assassinating the Queen he wore one around his neck. They were also carried by some of those who participated in the Desmond Rebellion in Ireland to protect them in battle. In these instances, the agnus dei served as both an index of and incentive to radical resistance. Simultaneously, the blessing of this  form of sacramental by the pope encouraged the assumption that it had prophylactic properties.56 Other objects offer further insight into the politicization of Catholic material culture in the post-­Reformation era. The luxurious attire in which ‘silken priests’ disguised themselves became a shorthand for their venality, deceit, and idolatry, and for the notorious practices of equivocation and dissimulation which were synonymous in Protestant minds with popery by the early seventeenth century. Their ‘sartorial lies’ fuelled suspicions about the dissonance between their outward appearance and their inward intent, which quickly embedded themselves in anti-­Catholic polemic. They illuminate the double-­edged quality of the devious strategies to which the missionaries resorted to enable them to perform their 53 Sir William Brereton, Travels in Holland and the United Provinces, England, Scotland and Ireland M.DC.XXXIV–­M.DC.XXV, ed. Edward Hawkins, Chetham Society (1844), p. 156. 54  For two seventeenth-­century decade rings, see Victoria and Albert Museum, M.816–1926 and M.817–1926. For reliquary pendants and lockets, see Portable Antiquities Scheme (www.finds.org. uk), SWYOR-­817B56 and WMID-­1660BB. 55  13 Elizabeth c. 2. 56  Aislinn Muller, ‘The Agnus Dei, Catholic Devotion, and Confessional Politics in Early Modern England’, British Catholic History, 34 (2018), pp. 23–4.

Material Culture  177 evangelical work and their capacity to reinforce developing Protestant prejudices about the sinister threat presented by popish paraphernalia.57 They fed additional elements into a rhetoric that had its genesis in the early years of the Reformation and that came to full fruition in ballads, pamphlets, and prints denouncing the ‘pope’s merchandise’ and the ‘Jesuits’ trumpery’. Bernard Garter’s A new yeares gifte, dedicated to the popes holinesse of 1579 incorporated a fold-­out plate depicting a range of offending items that had lately been sent over to England (Figure 9.3), while others included crude woodcuts of the ‘packs of Popish trinkets’ peddled by priests as they moved around the countryside. It became a commonplace to present them in the same light as disreputable travelling chapmen who sold ephemeral wares and ‘childish trifles’. Sowing the seeds of the Protestant discourse of distaste for religious materiality, sacred objects were thereby equated with other cheap commodities which were flooding the market.58 Together with intoxicating substances like tobacco and alcohol, they contributed to the invention of ‘consumption’ as an economic phenomenon.59

Relics on the Run and Martyrs on the Move The same tensions and transactions can be discerned when we turn to the bodily remains of Catholics executed by the Tudor and Stuart state as traitors. The relics of priests and lay people spontaneously canonized as saints after they were hung, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn and other locations were another focal point around which this imagined community cohered. Witnesses of their heroic deaths eagerly gathered up fragments of bone and flesh and mopped handkerchiefs in the blood that flowed from their dismembered limbs. Others scurried to gather up their personal possessions and objects they had touched in their final moments, from their girdles, spectacles, stockings, and hose to the fragile pink flower that Thomas Maxfield carried with him to the gallows and held until he expired in 1616.60 The authorities took increasingly stringent steps to stop these practices in their tracks, burying the quarters of the deceased priests in dunghills and burning everything associated with their deaths. In the case of the Irish priest 57  See Sarah Johanesen, ‘ “That Silken Priest”: Catholic Disguise and Anti-­Popery on the English Mission (1569–1640)’, Historical Research, 93 (2020), pp. 38–51. 58  B[ernard] G[arter], A new yeares gifte, dedicated to the popes holinesse, and all Catholikes addicted to the sea of Rome (London, 1579); John Chassanion, The Merchandises of popish priests, Or, a discovery of the Jesuites trumpery newly packed in England (London, 1629). For a fuller discussion, see Alexandra Walsham, ‘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, 2015), pp. 370–409. 59  See Phil Withington, ‘Intoxicants and the Invention of Consumption’, Economic History Review, 73 (2020), pp. 384–408. 60  Westminster Diocesan Archives, 16/9/7.

Figure 9.3  ‘Certaine of the Popes Merchandize lately sent over into Englande’, in B[ernard] G[arter], A New Yeares Gifte, Dedicated to the Popes Holinesse, and all Catholikes Addicted to the Sea of Rome (London, 1579), fold-out plate, woodcut. Copyright The British Library Board. Shelfmark 3932.dd.15.

Material Culture  179 Ralph Corby, SJ, whose execution took place in London on 7 September 1644, the sheriff in charge ordered that ‘the very apron and sleeves of the hangman’ be destroyed so ‘that the Papist dogs . . . might have nothing to keep for relics’. Nevertheless, Catholics found means to procure his cassock in its entirety.61 The retrieval of martyrs’ remains sometimes had a quasi-­miraculous aspect, as in the case of Edmund Gennings, whose thumb serendipitously fell into the hands of Lucy Ridley in 1591. This digit had particular significance for relic hunters, because of the crucial role it played in consecrating the bread and wine that became the Eucharist: Robert Sutton’s was entrusted to John Gerard by his ­brother.62 The exquisite visage of the Gunpowder Plot martyr Henry Garnet that appeared on a blood-­stained piece of straw provides another example of the stories of supernatural intervention that accumulated around those who suffered for the Catholic religion. It too drew much sarcastic commentary from Protestant writers who roundly dismissed this ‘popish wonder’ as an attempt to exonerate the notorious Jesuit traitor.63 Such incidents illustrate the polyvalency of dead bodies in a country fatally divided by faith. Relics were sometimes implicated in intra-­confessional politics, provoking disputes between the regular and secular clergy. But their capacity to foment factional conflict with missionary ranks was overshadowed by their ability to catalyse solidarity. Catholics energetically mobilized martyrs’ remains against the Protestant enemy, proclaiming that out of their ashes would spring others and out of their dead bones a ‘huge army’ of new believers.64 The murals that adorned the walls of the English College at Rome spurred young men to emulate the heroism of those who had gone into battle against heresy before them; in turn the book of engravings it generated, the Ecclesiae Anglicanae Trophaea, was designed to inspire an international crusade to bring England back into the fold.65 Led by the indefatigable Spanish noblewoman Luisa de Carvajal, in Jacobean London operations to recover the bodies of the martyrs became highly organized. Embalmed and preserved using ointments and lotions, many were shipped over to the Continent with the help of foreign ambassadors.66 British Catholicism was a net exporter of relics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, helping to satisfy the demand for holy matter to compensate for what had been lost in the wars of religion. Many found their way into the religious houses founded by the 61  Richard Challoner, Memoirs of Missionary Priests, ed. J.H. Pollen (London, 1924), p. 466. 62  Pollen (ed.), CRS 5, pp. 207, 291; John Geninges, The life and death of Mr Edmund Geninges, priest, crowned with martyrdome at London the 10 day of November, in the yeare M.DXCI (St Omers, 1614), pp. 93–4. 63  Robert Pricket, The Jesuits miracles, or new popish wonders (London, 1607). 64  Robert Southwell, An epistle of comfort ([London], 1587), p. 196. 65  Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot, 2002), ch. 4. 66  Glyn Redworth, ‘God’s Gift? Sacred Relics, Gift Giving, and Luisa de Carvajal’s Preparation of the Holy during the Long Reformation’, Nuncius, 27 (2012), pp. 270–88.

180  Alexandra Walsham refugees in the Low Countries and Iberia. Relics sent from England as gifts bound together the diaspora of cloistered religious with their relatives still resident at home in a web of mutual obligation. Preserved in the convents in exile, their perceived spiritual potency was a focus for the ongoing hope for repatriation of these communities.67 Many of them migrated back to England after emancipation in 1829, alongside libraries of books and manuscripts.68 The material culture of martyrdom provides an important illustration of the critical contribution that minority Catholicism made to the wider Counter-­ Reformation. But, as Simon Ditchfield has observed, relics were also vindicators of local diversity in a centralizing Catholic world.69 Paradoxically, the Reformation may have brought the laity into more intimate contact with hallowed remains than had been possible in the medieval era.70 Lay people in Britain arguably had greater opportunities to possess the sacred than their counterparts abroad: the evacuation of religious materiality initiated by Protestantism created a void that was rapidly filled by new relics which circulated briskly and promiscuously around the Catholic underground. Their availability to both clergy and laity made them powerful insignia of belonging and sources of sacred charisma to the adherents of a besieged religion. People wore them close to their skin and in the folds of their clothing as talismans against the perils that beset them. The proliferation of primary and secondary relics bears witness to a process of spontaneous canonization of the missionary priests as saints that had unruly elem­ents. Preserved in household shrines, they evaded regulation. This en­abled them to be used in ways of which the clerical hierarchy did not wholly approve but usually condoned. If the domestication of holy remains was key to their survival, it also ran against the grain of the tighter ecclesiastical control of sacred objects prescribed by Tridentine reformers. In 1646, for instance, the uncorrupted head of the Irish Catholic bishop of Down and Connor, Conor O’Devany, who was executed in 1611, was still in the possession of Robert Nugent of Carlinstown in Meath, ‘his eyes, skin and hair still fresh as if [it] had 67 See Liesbeth Corens, ‘Saints beyond Borders: Relics and the Expatriate English Catholic Community’, in Jesse Spohnholz and Gary  K.  Waite (eds.), Exile and Religious Identity, 1500–1800 (London, 2014), pp. 25–38; James E. Kelly, ‘Creating an English Catholic Identity: Relics, Martyrs and English Women Religious in Counter Reformation Europe’, in James E. Kelly and Susan Royal (eds.), Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter Reformation (Leiden, 2017), pp. 41–59; Claire Walker, ‘The Embodiment of Exile: Relics and Suffering in Early Modern English Cloisters’, in Giovanni Tarantino and Charles Zika (eds.), Feeling Exclusion: Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe (London and New York, 2019), pp. 81–99. 68  See Bede Camm, Forgotten Shrines: An Account of Some Old Catholic Halls and Families in England and of Relics and Memorials of the English Martyrs (London, 1910), pp. 355–81. 69 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. 70 Robyn Malo, ‘Intimate Devotion: Recusant Martyrs and the Making of Relics in Post-­ Reformation England’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 44 (2014), pp. 531–48.

Material Culture  181 been ­severed from the shoulders that very hour’; during the following decade, another set of relics was housed in a wooden tabernacle in a house in Galway.71 In unsupervised private hands, relics had the potential to be misused in a manner that smacked of ‘superstition’ and provoked age-­old concerns about the labile capacity of sensory engagement with material artefacts to lead their users astray.72 Finally, it is necessary to recognize the extent to which the bodies of the missionaries could be regarded as hallowed objects themselves. Some lay people begged to be able to kiss the feet of Jesuits or the floor on which they stood, an impulse that reflects the reverence in which those who risked their lives to sustain Catholicism in hostile territory were held. In Scotland, John Hay was reputed to able to heal sickness and diseases by touch and was visited by ‘multitudes of people afflicted with hopeless ailments’ eager to be cured by his gift.73 The secret hiding places in which the seminary priests concealed themselves were conceived of as akin to reliquaries and the prisons in which they were incarcerated became places of pilgrimage.74 The aura of sanctity that surrounded them when they were alive seeped out into the surrounding spaces and was intensified after they died. The conditions in which Catholicism found itself in the Britain and Ireland had the effect of blurring the boundaries between holy people and holy things.

Conclusion This chapter has described the part that material culture played in the making of post-­Reformation Catholic communities across Britain and Ireland. Between 1530 and 1640 the meaning of the Christian materiality that had survived from the Middle Ages was reconfigured. The residues of the Protestant drive to eradicate physical idols were invested with new significance and integrated into a culture of self-­conscious resistance to the religious revolution that swirled around them. Catholics tenderly preserved books, vestments, and plate as mementos and fossils of a glorious past that might yet be reincarnated in an alternative future. After the fleeting five-­year reign of Mary I, the ‘day’ for which they kept them never came 71  Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester, 1997), pp. 69–70, 21. See also Clodagh Tait, ‘Relics and the Past: The Material Culture of Catholic Martyrdom in Ireland’, in James Lyttleton and Colin Rynne (eds.), Plantation Ireland: Settlement and Material Culture, c. 1550–c.1700 (Dublin, 2010), pp. 207–28. 72  See Suzanna Ivanic, ‘Early Modern Religious Objects and Materialities of Belief ’, in Catherine Richardson, Tara Hamling, and David Gaimster (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe (London and New York, 2017), p. 326. 73  Forbes-­Leith (ed.), Narratives of Scottish Catholics, p. 147. 74  Michael Hodgetts, ‘Loca Secretiora in 1581’, Recusant History, 19 (1989), pp. 386–95.

182  Alexandra Walsham again. Snatched from the iconoclasts and rescued from bonfires of vanities, other liturgical objects were transported overseas. Reduced to shadows and husks of their former selves, the monastic buildings and shrines in which famous relics had formerly resided continued to draw pious visitors determined to keep the traditions of the Old Religion alive. It would be wrong to draw a hard and fast line between the tangible residues of the medieval Catholic world and the new sacred objects, structures, and landscapes associated with the Counter-­Reformation revival of sensual worship and the intensification of individual piety. Fundamental continuities jostled with elem­ents of change, notably the transformation of holy artefacts of all kinds into emblems of theological orthodoxy, instruments of confessionalization, and symbols of political subversion. The denigrating discourses that zealous Protestants developed to discredit both categories of object continue to shape and colour scholarly thinking. Recast by reformers as popish ‘baggage’, ‘trash’, and ‘gear’, until comparatively recently they have been relegated to the side-­lines of historiographical enquiry. Their significance for the story of Catholicism’s slow but steady transition from a dominant church to a marginalized sect has been eclipsed by the derogatory language of anti-­materiality that was one of the most influential intellectual legacies of the religious turmoil that convulsed Britain and Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Select Bibliography Evangelisti, Silvia, ‘Material Culture’, in Alexandra Bamji, Geert H. Janssen, and Mary Laven (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation (Farnham, 2013), pp. 395–416. Gilchrist, Roberta and David Gaimster (eds.), The Archaeology of Reformation 1480–1580 (Leeds, 2003). Ivanic, Suzanna, Mary Laven Mary, and Andrew Morrall (eds.), Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World (Amsterdam, 2020). Muller, Aislinn, ‘The Agnus Dei, Catholic Devotion, and Confessional Politics in Early Modern England’, British Catholic History, 34 (2018), pp. 1–28. Richardson, Catherine, Tara Hamling, and David Gaimster (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe (London and New York, 2017). Tait, Clodagh, ‘Relics and the Past: The Material Culture of Catholic Martyrdom in Ireland’, in James Lyttleton and Colin Rynne (eds.), Plantation Ireland: Settlement and Material Culture, c. 1550–c.1700 (Dublin, 2010), pp. 207–28. Walker Bynum, Caroline, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York, 2011).

Material Culture  183 Walsham, Alexandra, ‘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, 2015), pp. 370–409. Walsham, Alexandra, ‘Recycling the Sacred: Material Culture and Cultural Memory after the English Reformation’, Church History, 86 (2017), pp. 1121–54.

10 Catholics and Their Protestant Neighbours William Sheils

The break with Rome under Henry VIII in the 1530s posed fresh questions of loyalty to the inhabitants of England, Wales, and Ireland; those questions were also raised in Scotland in 1560 following the death of the French Catholic regent, Mary of Guise, the subsequent proscription of the Mass and the banning of papal jurisdiction by parliament. Though these changes were especially pertinent to members of the governing classes,1 the purpose of this chapter is to examine how men and women negotiated this new environment at the local and regional level, in relation to their dealings with those of their neighbours who shared their religious beliefs and those who did not. That is not to say that politics was not im­port­ant at the local and regional level. National events such as the imprisonment and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots or the failed Gunpowder Plot disturbed relations between Catholics and their Protestant neighbours at the local level, as did events abroad such as the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day 1572 in Paris, or the assassination of William the Silent at Delft in 1584. However, a  more continuous complication lay in the fact that many Catholics played, or felt that they ought to play, a prominent role in local political life befitting their social and economic standing. The religious, the social, and the political were inextricably linked in most regions of the three kingdoms throughout the period. This chapter examines relations between Catholics and Protestants at regional and county level among the gentry and among their non-­gentry adherents in parish and town. Local religious rivalries in the reign of Henry VIII remain largely unexplored beyond those great acts of defiance which arose across the north of England following the dissolution of the smaller monastic houses in 1536 in which, under the leadership of local clergy, gentry, and lawyers, a sizeable force of peasantry briefly posed a serious challenge to the Henrician regime.2 Elsewhere at that time there were local acts of defiance; often private, like that of John Broome, vicar at Stanton Lacy in Shropshire whose actions in leaving the word papa unerased in the service books got him into trouble with some of his leading parishioners and fellow

1  Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2003), pp. 351–86. 2 R. W. Hoyle, The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s (Oxford, 2001). William Sheils, Catholics and Their Protestant Neighbours In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume I: Endings and New Beginnings, 1530–1640. Edited by: James E. Kelly and John McCafferty, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843801.003.0011

Catholics and Their Protestant Neighbours  185 clergy.3 Some disputes were more significant, however; at Salisbury, a long-­ running dispute between town council and bishop over jurisdiction was aggravated in 1535 by the arrival of a reforming bishop, Nicholas Shaxton, who set about asserting his rights over a religiously conservative corporation. Reformist preaching at the cathedral against the religious conservatism of the citizens of Salisbury further antagonized the corporation, which brought counter-­claims against the preachers and the bishop. The Easter services in 1539, especially the matter of the kissing of the cross on Good Friday, proved a flashpoint, with the conservatives enjoying support locally and the bishop having to retreat, eventually resigning his see as government policy moved in a conservative direction with the passing of the Act of Six Articles later that year.4 It is clear that relations between supporters of the papacy and supporters of royal policy were strained in many localities following the break with Rome, and religion was often a crucial element in these disputes, but it was also true that these disagreements had roots in long-­standing local political and economic rivalries. The emergence of an avowedly Protestant regime in the reign of Edward VI, with the abolition of intercessory prayers and the denial of transubstantiation, made the devotional and theological differences between Catholic and Protestant more explicit. These differences were manifest in local disputes, as well as in the regional uprising in the west of England, known as the Prayer Book Rebellion, and the more socio-­economically driven rebellion in Norfolk, known as Kett’s rebellion, though even here the spark that ignited the rising was a performance of a traditional but, by that date, illegal ‘play of St Thomas Becket’ by inhabitants of the small market town of Wymondham. In the rapidly changing and uncertain religious environment of the reigns of Edward VI and Mary I communities were divided along religious lines, which often spilled into wider differences, and these shifts of policy and loyalty are well illustrated by events in the small village of Calcott in Cambridgeshire. Asked to provide four armed men to help in the suppression of Kett’s rebellion the parish, on the advice of its most prosperous inhabitant, Robert Peck, paid for these men by selling a silver chalice used at the Eucharist. At the death of Edward VI, the lord of the manor of Calcott, with Peck as his lieutenant, supported the Protestant claimant, Lady Jane Grey, but on the accession of Mary the Catholics in the parish charged him not only with supporting Jane but also with embezzling the proceeds of the sale of their parish chalice five years earlier. Clearly, the chalice—­an essential element in the Mass but no longer thought of as such by reformers—­expressed profound divisions within the community which, while stopping short of violence, resulted in litigation.5 3 G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge, 1972), p. 131. 4 Elton, Policy and Police, pp. 100–7. 5  Ethan Shagan, ‘Confronting Compromise: The Schism and its Legacy in mid-­Tudor England’, in  Ethan  H.  Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in ­Early ­Modern England (Manchester, 2005), p. 54.

186  William Sheils Similar disputes can be found throughout England, but the precise role played by religion as a factor in them at a time of such political uncertainty, as well as economic and institutional upheaval, is hard to determine. What is clear is that many communities were divided, and they often expressed those divisions in devotional contexts or the language of religion. The degree of upheaval was reduced on the accession of Elizabeth in 1558. Although the religious settlement that followed was sufficiently Protestant to occasion the resignation of the Marian episcopal bench along with about 2,000 parish clergy, and to determine many of the younger intellectual leaders of Mary’s Church to go into exile at Louvain, its terms were ambiguous and its enforcement patchy, thus allowing many Catholics, both lay and clergy, to remain within the Church and await further developments.6 However the fathers of the Council of Trent, and the excommunication of Elizabeth I in 1570, put further pressure on English Catholics to avoid any accommodation with the regime.7 Thereafter, in terms of canon law at least, English Catholics were not permitted to participate in a heretic church or compromise with the Protestant regime. For John Bossy this event marked the start of post-­Reformation English Catholicism and, while this claim can and has been disputed, it did mark a new framework in which to set relations between Catholics and the State in those realms owing allegiance to the Crown.8 The situation in Scotland was more complex following the enforced abdication of the Catholic Mary Stuart in 1567 and her replacement by her infant son James VI, under the tutelage of a succession of Protestant regents and divines until James became King in his own right in 1579.9 After the upheavals of the years between 1530 and 1560, how did Catholics in the four nations negotiate their relations with their Protestant neighbours now that it was becoming increasingly clear that government was set in a firmly Protestant direction?

England and Wales We might begin with Church papists. On the face of it these people represented an approach to reconciling the divisions of the Reformation by drawing a distinction between public worship and private belief, reflecting the royal wish not ‘to pry into men’s souls’.10 In the early years of the reign, when many parishes were served by conservative clerics like Richard Trickhay at Morebath in Devon, and

6  Peter Marshall, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (London and New Haven, CT, 2017), pp. 464–82. 7  See this volume, Chapter 7. 8  John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975). 9  Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland 1470–1625 (London, 1981), pp. 143–8. 10  Norman Jones, Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion, 1559 (London, 1982), pp. 25–40.

Catholics and Their Protestant Neighbours  187 where local government was exercised by traditional landowning families like the Carylls and Brownes, Lord Montague, in Sussex, attendance at church was not controversial,11 or where it became so, as in Lancashire and parts of Yorkshire where numerous former Marian priests were active, action against those refusing to participate in public worship was often patchy and half-­hearted.12 This was not to last. The formulation of the Thirty-­Nine Articles in 1563 and their con­firm­ ation by parliament in 1571 removed any ambiguity about the theology of the English Church, whilst the decrees of the Council of Trent and the codification of Tridentine worship, and excommunication of Elizabeth I between 1562 and 1570, made clear the official Catholic condemnation of the English Church. The pol­it­ ical disaster of the Northern Rebellion, coinciding as it did with the plot to place the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne, only served to sharpen those differences.13 Government and Church leaders can only make laws, but they cannot enforce them: it remained for Catholics and their Protestant neighbours to work out how to respond to the demands of this new environment. Notwithstanding increasingly severe penalties against Catholics by successive parliaments throughout the period, and the public condemnation of accommodation with the regime by the missionary priests—­especially the Jesuits—­serving the Catholic community, recent scholarship has suggested that three-­quarters of all Catholics in England and Wales between 1570 and 1640 adopted a Church papist position, making it the most common experience of Catholics in this period. This rarely reflected religious accommodation, however, but was mostly a strategy for social and economic survival in difficult and precarious political circumstances. As such, Church papists were decried by their Protestant opponents as exhibiting that most dangerous and, to their eyes, Jesuitical theological crime of dissimulation, whilst to their recusant co-­religionists they were criticized for their lukewarmness in religion.14 There have been several studies of county government which have demonstrated that Church papist gentry continued to exercise some role in local administration in many parts of England into the 1580s and, in some parts of the north, they remained influential under the Stuarts.15 Among the membership of the Council in the North in the early seventeenth century were several gentry with close Catholic connections, most notably Sir Thomas Fairfax of Gilling, who was 11  Eamon Duffy, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (London and New Haven, CT, 2001), pp. 170–90; Roger B. Manning, Religion and Society in Elizabethan Sussex (Leicester, 1969), pp. 129–30, 152–4. 12 Christopher Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 240–62; Hugh Aveling, Northern Catholics: The Catholic Recusants of the North Riding of Yorkshire, 1558–1790 (London, 1966), pp. 11–50. 13  Norman Jones, The Birth of the Elizabethan Age: England in the 1560s (Oxford, 1993), pp. 78–86. 14  Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 1993), pp.73–99, esp. pp. 94–7. 15  See, for example, Aveling, Northern Catholics, p. 210.

188  William Sheils made a Vice-­President in 1609. Fairfax looks like a typical Church papist, having a recusant wife and educating his sons abroad whilst himself publicly attending church, and was dispensed from the Privy Council order forbidding those with recusant wives or heirs from holding public office. Fairfax was not one of those ‘dissimulators’ of the Puritan imagination, but a loyal servant of the Crown, despite his family’s religious persuasion. The same can be said for Sir William, later Lord Eure of Malton, who, despite being a justice of the peace was presented as a popish recusant in 1618, remaining so until his death in 1646.16 The presence of such men in local government reflects the social and political strength of Catholic families in some regions of the country throughout the period, and the confidence, sometimes grudging, which they could command among their Protestant peers. At times of particular stress, however, such as during the later 1580s when fears centred on the person of Mary, Queen of Scots and a Spanish invasion, those with Catholic connections were rooted out of local office where possible. But in counties like Yorkshire, Lancashire, Monmouthshire, and West Sussex it was impossible to keep the peace without the support of local Catholic landowners, and civil, if not necessarily cordial, relations with Protestant neighbours were crucial to both sides, as well as to the government.17 This, however, was not the case everywhere. In counties such as Suffolk, Northamptonshire, Kent, and Gloucestershire, where Protestant preachers gained an early following among the gentry, Catholics were often removed from their traditional office-­holding roles early in Elizabeth’s reign, resulting in a withdrawal from social intercourse, a more introverted domestic and recusant devotional life, and greater hostility across the religious divide. Examples of such withdrawal are easily found: in the early seventeenth century the numerous daughters of Sir John Bedingfield of Bedingfield in Suffolk became nuns in exile convents on the Continent rather than engage in local society, and the son became a missionary priest. A similar response was to be found in the household of the Blundell family of Little Crosby in Cheshire, where a strong domestic piety was accompanied by close connections with exile religious communities rather than with their Protestant neighbours. In Warwickshire the recusant Throckmorton family of Coughton were likewise excluded from local politics by the 1570s. Their house also became a centre of Catholic worship and a refuge for priests and other Catholic gentry but, in contrast to the culture at Bedingfield and Little Crosby, their recusancy was anything but quietist. Excluded from local political life because of their religion, members of the family became fatally involved in conspiracy against the State in both the mid-­1580s and in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.18 16 Aveling, Northern Catholics, pp. 102–3. 17 Haigh, Reformation and Resistance, pp. 280–96; Michael Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 30–64, 157–78. 18 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Suffolk under the Tudors: Politics and Religion in an English County 1500–1600 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 187–98; Susan Cogan, ‘Reputation, Credit and Patronage:

Catholics and Their Protestant Neighbours  189 Not all Catholics withdrew from local politics, even if excluded from office-­ holding. In Northamptonshire the later years of Elizabeth’s reign witnessed the emergence of a strongly Puritan preaching ministry supported by like-­minded gentry, which resulted in a faction-­ridden community in which Catholic gentry and their Puritan neighbours were involved, with their tenantry, in a succession of disputes, some of them violent, throughout the latter half of Elizabeth’s reign. These disputes mostly involved land but were also concerned with the appointment of clergy and schoolmasters. The central figure on the Catholic side was Sir Thomas Tresham, whose home, Rushton Hall near Kettering, became a centre for Catholic worship from the late 1570s.19 Tresham’s involvement with the Jesuit Edmund Campion in 1581 resulted in imprisonment, house arrest, and heavy fines over the next decade, but he remained steadfastly loyal to the regime in public, paying his recusancy fines assiduously. In the 1580s, however, the financial demands of his recusancy weighed heavily on his estate, thrusting it into financial crisis in 1587. Tresham nevertheless retained a substantial household which periodically provided Mass for the numerous co-­religionists among his servants and tenants, as well as those of his neighbour and brother-­in-­law, William, Lord Vaux of Harrowden.20 A man of a deeply held Tridentine Catholic piety, which he expressed in the mid-­1590s in ambitious architectural form at Rushton Lodge and Lyveden New Bield, which still adorn the landscape, he remained aloof from his more extreme co-­religionists, but did not escape the religious factionalism of the county.21 Among Tresham’s Catholic tenants was a gentleman, Gilbert Hussey of Oundle, and among Hussey’s household was a certain William Hacket. Hussey was a recusant and, from the mid-­1570s, he and his household appeared regularly before the diocesan courts for non-­attendance at the parish church; among those presented in 1577 was Hacket. Tresham and his tenants were involved in property disputes with their Protestant neighbours, which sometimes spilled over into violence, and it is clear that Catholics, mostly centred on Tresham’s estates and household, were a contentious presence in the locality.22 The neighbourhood also had a strong Puritan presence and in the later 1580s Kettering became the meeting place of a classis established by the local Puritan clergy. The discovery of the classes by the government, and the trials and imprisonment of their leaders in

Throckmorton Men and Women c.1560–1620’; and Michael Hodgetts, ‘Coughton and the Gunpowder Plot’, in Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott (eds.), Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation (Farnham, 2009), pp. 73, 79–80, 93–121; Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 143. 19 Sandeep Kaushik, ‘Resistance, Loyalty and Recusant Politics: Sir Thomas Tresham and the Elizabethan State’, Midland History, 21 (1996), pp. 37–72. 20 Mary  E.  Finch, The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families 1540–1640, Northamptonshire Record Society 19 (1956), pp. 74–83; G. Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden (Monmouth, 1953). 21  Gerard Kilroy, Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 121–45; Gerard Kilroy, Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life (Aldershot 2015), pp. 381–2. 22 W. J. Sheils, The Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough 1558–1610, Northamptonshire Record Society 30 (1979), pp. 113, 137.

190  William Sheils 1589/90, disrupted the local godly who, at Oundle, became increasingly radical.23 Among them by now was William Hacket, having moved from recusancy to a non-­conformity which attracted the attention of the diocesan courts in 1588. In  that year he also caught the attention of a local Puritan gentleman, William Palmer of Stoke Doyle, with whom he visited the Hampshire home of the Puritan MP Paul Wentworth, before returning to Oundle where his disruptive non-­ conformist behaviour landed him in Northampton gaol. Hacket’s subsequent activities in London, ending with his execution on 28 July 1591, discredited the Puritan movement thoroughly, but the extreme nature of his ‘conspiracy’ should not obscure the local support he had earlier enjoyed. A radical group formed round the person of Giles Wigginton, a deprived minister, and included the town schoolmaster as well as a local yeoman, William Bradshaw who, it was alleged, acted as Hacket’s scribe while in London. He and others were accused of harbouring Wigginton in 1590, absenting themselves from church, and participating in the clandestine burial of the schoolmaster’s infant child. They removed from Oundle to Palmer’s parish of Stoke Doyle but continued to be presented before the courts both there and at Oundle throughout the 1590s for absenting themselves from church, standing excommunicate, and conducting clandestine bur­ ials.24 Therefore, the neighbourhood in the 1590s had two competing recusant groups, Catholics based round the households of Tresham and Vaux, and radical Puritans supported by the Palmer family. The events at Oundle demonstrate the extent to which local Catholic/Protestant rivalries among the gentry could rad­ic­ al­ize each group in ways in which the gentry could not always control. Circumstances in Essex were not dissimilar, if less eccentric. Essex was noted for its Catholic activism, centred on the Jesuits and organized from the Petre household at Ingatestone.25 Among the more prominent Jesuits active in the county at the end of the 1580s and early 1590s was John Gerard, whose autobiography reveals the extent of Jesuit influence on gentry household spirituality. Operating from the home of the Wiseman family at Braddocks near Saffron Walden, Gerard conducted a nationwide ministry but remarked on the difficulties facing him in Essex, where few Catholics were drawn from the ‘ordinary people . . . surrounded as they are by most fierce Protestants’.26 He was not wrong. During the 1580s the long-­established non-­conformist tradition of the parishes in the Stour valley, centred on the towns of Braintree and Dedham in Essex, and Hadleigh in Suffolk, had come to dominate the religious culture of the region

23 Sheils, Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough, pp. 52–60; Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), pp. 403–32. 24 Sheils, Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough, pp. 136–42. 25  James E. Kelly, ‘Kinship and Religious Politics among Catholic Families in England, 1570–1640’, History, 94 (2009), pp. 328–43. 26  John Gerard, The Hunted Priest, trans. Philip Caraman (London, 1951), pp. 50–70, quote at p 50.

Catholics and Their Protestant Neighbours  191 through a group of Puritan ministers enjoying powerful gentry support.27 In January 1582 a conference of sixty Puritan ministers from these counties met at Cockfield near Bury St Edmund’s, and by the end of the year a monthly conference was initiated at Dedham. The conference comprised twenty-­two preaching ministers in its seven-­year history, of whom half were unbeneficed and, like their Catholic counterparts, were supported by ‘the people’. Just like the domestic Mass centres in gentry households, the clerical meetings were secret, and it says much for the cohesiveness of the ministers and the commitment of their congregations that they escaped detection by the ecclesiastical authorities until 1589. Essex then had two competing religious traditions working outside the established Church, the Jesuit-­inspired recusancy of the Petres and their associates, and the Puritan ministers supported by the town governors and gentry of the Stour Valley. In the face of this vigorous local Protestantism Gerard’s strategy was to concentrate his mission on the gentry and their servants and tenants, presumably those ‘many persons of less standing’ that he mentions in his account. Household Catholicism as a strategy can, in this instance at least, be seen not as a withdrawal but as a response to a strongly Puritan local religious culture, and subsequent events suggest that it was justified. The mission of Gerard and his fellow Jesuits in Essex and East Anglia in the years after the Armada met with considerable success;28 the Petre family became the principal financial backers of the Jesuits from the 1630s, and Essex gentry households became a rich source for vocations to the priesthood and to the English convents in exile in the first half of the seventeenth century.29 If these parts of Essex and Northamptonshire demonstrate the influence which the proximity of Puritans and Jesuit-­inspired Catholics had on local religious tensions, a contrasting case can be found in West Sussex.30 Early modern Sussex has recently been described as ‘an unwieldy, complicated, and often obscure region’ with a remote coastline and a ‘notoriously parlous road network’. It was a difficult place to govern, as the Elizabethan bishops discovered, and the county contained an ‘uneasy concatenation of residual Roman Catholic and Protestant communities’.31 Among the leading Catholics of the county were the Browne family, Viscounts 27  Patrick Collinson, John Craig, and Brett Usher (eds.), Conferences and Combination Lectures in the Elizabethan Church, 1582–90, Church of England Record Society 10 (2003), pp. xxxii–­iv, lix–­lxii; John Craig, Reformation, Politics and Polemics: The Growth of Protestantism in East Anglian Market Towns, 1500–1610 (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 152–75. 28 Bossy, English Catholic Community, pp. 101–2. 29 Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 233; Anstruther, Seminary Priests, II, p. 397; James E. Kelly, ‘Essex Girls Abroad: Family Patronage and the Politicization of Convent Recruitment in the Seventeenth Century’, in Caroline Bowden and James E. Kelly (eds.), The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Communities, Culture and Identity (Aldershot, 2013), pp. 33–51; James E. Kelly, ‘Counties without Borders? Religious Politics, Kinship Networks and the Formation of Catholic Communities’, Historical Research, 91 (2018), pp. 22–38. 30 Questier, Catholicism and Community, pp. 30–207. 31  Matthew Dimmock, Andrew Hadfield, and Paul Quinn, ‘Introduction: Contesting Early Modern Sussex’, in Matthew Dimmock, Andrew Hadfield, and Paul Quinn (eds.), Art, Literature and Religion in Early Modern Sussex: Culture and Conflict (Farnham, 2014), pp. 2–10.

192  William Sheils Montague, whose principal residence was at Cowdray, near Midhurst, an area of the diocese devoid of Puritan presence between 1580 and 1600 when parishes in other parts of the county, especially in the east, had vigorous preaching clergy. In these circumstances the Montague household, secure in a conservative region served by a number of Marian priests, developed an easy-­going Church papistry, expressed by the first viscount’s claim in 1592 that ‘I seeke to drawe no man to that religion [Catholicism] . . . but leave them, as I sayd before, to theyr owne conscyences’.32 Outwardly conformable, Montague’s household no doubt contained members more actively Catholic, but he was never subject to any penalty under the recusancy laws. Indeed in 1591, Cowdray was graced by a royal visit, lasting a week and ‘one of the biggest celebrations in any of Elizabeth’s progresses’.33 The first viscount died the following year and the leadership of the family was taken up by his widow, the Dowager Lady Magdalen. She made the other Montague house, Battle Abbey, her main residence. This was in the east of the county, in the deanery of Dallington where, by 1590, several Puritan ministers were active. At Battle, Magdalen established a more publicly Catholic regime served by seminary priests; her household became progressively more defiantly Catholic and she built a chapel with a choir and pulpit where there were weekly sermons, Mass on solemn feasts, and a congregation of over a hundred, with about sixty communicants. The local Protestants named it ‘Little Rome’ and such public expressions of Catholicism aroused local hostility, one commentator noting in 1597 that since Lady Magdalen’s arrival in Battle ‘religion in that country, and especially in that towne, is gretely decayed’. The ‘discovery’ of a ‘holy well’ in the grounds of Battle to which pilgrims went for evening prayer on Sundays did not ease local Protestant fears, and it is clear that, if this was a case of aristocratic ‘household Catholicism’, its reach extended well beyond the household and into the wider neighbourhood; indeed, local Puritans thought she was having a ‘cataclysmically evil effect on religious and political culture in east Sussex’.34 Despite all this, Lady Magdalen continued to enjoy protection from prosecution until her death in 1608, but the vigorous Puritanism of nearby towns like Rye and Hastings was stiffened by this example of local popery so that, by 1626, very few recusants were recorded in Battle.35 By 1600 the second viscount, Anthony Maria Browne, had assumed the leadership of Sussex Catholics, operating once again from Cowdray. The outward conformity of his grandfather had been abandoned and Anthony Maria erected a 32 Questier, Catholicism and Community, pp. 193–5. 33  Caroline Adams, ‘Elizabeth I’s Progresses into Sussex’, in Dimmock, Hadfield, and Quinn (eds.), Art, Literature and Religion, pp. 27–30; Questier, Catholicism and Community, pp. 169–78. 34 Questier, Catholicism and Community, pp. 209–18, 222–31; Manning, Religion and Society, pp. 201–2. 35 Jeremy Goring, Burn Holy Fire: Religion in Lewes since the Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), pp.  36–42; Graham Mayhew, Tudor Rye (Brighton, 1987), pp. 72–85; Anthony Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex 1600–1660 (London, 1975), p. 98.

Catholics and Their Protestant Neighbours  193 chapel at the house which, in 1603, was granted a papal breve giving an indulgence to those attending on great feast days.36 The household was served by sem­in­ary priests but, unlike the Treshams or the Petres, the family was associated with the appellant or loyalist branch of Catholicism rather than with the Jesuits.37 The parishes surrounding Cowdray were never places of Puritan activism and, in contrast to their eclipse at Battle, a flourishing community of a hundred Catholics was recorded at Midhurst in the 1620s.38 The dominance of the Montagues in west Sussex was mirrored, even eclipsed, by that of the Stanleys, earls of Derby, in Lancashire. Edward, third earl, a Catholic and a cousin of the Queen, dominated the county, with the exception of the hundred of Salford in the south-­east, until his death in 1572.39 In an area with a lack of effective leadership of the Church due to the poorly endowed bishopric, trad­ ition­al religion retained a tenacious hold on the region.40 Disruption was common in the parishes: in 1590 protestant clergy complained that members of their congregations would often say private prayers while attending church ‘with crossings and knockings of their breast, and sometimes with beads closely handled’, whilst more aggressive papists would stand outside during services throwing stones to disturb or deter the worshippers. At the beginning of James’ reign the people of Lancashire were famed for ‘signing themselves with the sign of the cross on the forehead at all prayers and blessings, and . . . to bless themselves when they first enter into the church’.41 Ecclesiastically and politically conservative it is no surprise that Church papistry was endemic in the county during the first half of Elizabeth’s reign and continued to trouble the diocesan authorities until the end of the century. From the 1580s religious divisions in the county also troubled two other clerical groups, the seminary priests active in the county from 1577 and the increasing number of preaching protestant ministers appointed by Bishop Chadderton, who set up a system of preaching exercises in Lancashire in 1582 designed to evangelize the county and combat the Catholics.42 That some of these ministers complained in 1590 about the behaviour of Catholic practices among their congregations has already been noted, but the Catholic missionaries also tried to stop this practice; the priest celebrating Mass at Agden during Holy Week 1582 felt it necessary to exhort some of his Church papist congregation to ‘forsake the service of the Church and to come home and cleave unto the masse.’43 By the end of the century, clerical pressure from both sides had made the option of 36 Questier, Catholicism and Community, pp. 250–9, 264–5. 37 Questier, Catholicism and Community, pp. 259–62, Bossy, English Catholic Community, pp. 58–9. 38 Fletcher, County Community, pp. 99–100; Questier, Catholicism and Community, p. 504. 39  Wilfred Hammond, ‘The Political Engagement of Lancashire Catholics 1558–1588’ (University of Lancaster PhD thesis, 2013), ch. 3; Haigh, Reformation and Resistance, p. 284. 40 Haigh, Reformation and Resistance, pp. 225–33. 41 Haigh, Reformation and Resistance, p. 222. 42 Haigh, Reformation and Resistance, pp. 279–80, 300–2. 43 Walsham, Church Papists, p. 89.

194  William Sheils Church papistry more difficult, though its continuation is more than hinted at by the recusants cited at Wigan in 1595; of the seventy-­eight persons named over half (forty-­five) were married women, suggesting that some of their husbands at least were conformists before the law whilst heading Catholic households.44 In the years following, the presence of these Catholics in Wigan was to cause trouble to its Puritan vicar, who was assaulted by a conformist parishioner who blamed his Puritan deviations from the Book of Common Prayer for the unwillingness of those of his neighbours ‘backward in religion’ (that is to say Catholics), to attend divine service.45 At Poulton le Fylde in 1604 Peter White, the Puritan vicar, did not use the sign of the cross in baptism, but those parishioners wishing for this could find Catholic clergy happy to oblige, just as they did twenty years later when several women in the church refused to be churched by him, some of them going ‘as it is thought’ to priests.46 At Prescot in the 1580s the Puritan vicar, Thomas Meade, tried to evangelize his strongly Catholic parish by requiring all households to purchase a catechism, but with little effect: almost two-­thirds of those purchased by the churchwardens in 1585 remained unsold. Undaunted, Meade set about catechizing the young through the parish school, only to find that parents kept their children away and sent them to Catholic schoolmasters, usually priests. Prescot retained a significant Catholic presence right up to 1640.47 John Gerard, SJ, contrasted the situation in Lancashire with his experience in Essex. In Lancashire, he wrote, ‘I have seen myself more than two hundred present at Mass and sermon. People of this kind come into the Church without difficulty, but they fall away the moment persecution blows up. When the alarm is over they come back again.’48 Such moving in and out of the church was not encouraged by Gerard or his fellow Jesuits and by the end of the century the pressure they exerted had pushed the Lancashire Catholics in an increasingly recusant direction. They had also been pushed in that direction from the 1580s by the growing presence of able Protestant preachers determined to bring the Reformation to the county. Relatively few in number, the Puritans occupied pulpits in many of the key towns of the county and, by the 1600s, had established a solid basis there. Determined to overthrow the prevailing Catholic practices which, as they understood it, the lukewarm conservatism of their predecessors had encouraged, their own godly commitment occasionally got them into trouble with the archiepiscopal if not the diocesan authorities, who recognized their value in preaching against popery.49 Paradoxically, as was the case at Wigan and

44 Walsham, Church Papists, p. 80. 45 Haigh, Reformation and Resistance, pp. 306, 313, 316. 46 Haigh, Reformation and Resistance, pp. 306–7; R.  C.  Richardson, Puritanism in North-­West England: A Regional Study of the Diocese of Chester to 1642 (Manchester, 1972), pp. 162–4. 47 Haigh, Reformation and Resistance, pp. 311–12, 318, 331; Richardson, Puritanism in North-­West England, pp. 168–9. 48 Gerard, Hunted Priest, p. 50. 49 Haigh, Reformation and Resistance, pp. 302–4.

Catholics and Their Protestant Neighbours  195 at Poulton, the non-­conformity of such men occasionally allowed Catholics to justify their own absence from the church behind the ceremonial deviations of the ministers. From the 1580s onwards clerical pressure from what were in effect two competing missionary churches—­ the seminary priests and the godly Puritans—­made these positions more difficult to maintain. But the ability of the godly clergy to curb the confidence of popular Catholicism in the parishes was hindered by the prevailing Catholicism of the local landowners, who were slow in enforcing the laws against recusants; as the exasperated Puritan vicar of Prescot, surrounded as he was by his Catholic parishioners, complained in 1586, ‘they that have the sword in their hands under Her Majesty to redress the abuses among us suffer it to rust in the scabbard’.50 Similar protection was offered to Catholics in the Welsh borders, where the Morgan family of Llantaran were at the centre of a group of Catholic gentry which dominated Monmouthshire politics up to the civil wars. They were joined from the 1620s by the marquess of Worcester. In 1605, the forcible burial with Protestant rites of a Catholic woman led to a summer of general unrest and spor­ ad­ic violence, which continued to disturb the county so that, a few years later, Lord Eure remarked of Monmouthshire that ‘few cases arise which are not made into a question between Protestant and recusant’. The county was a noted nursery of priests for the mission and in 1641 probably contained proportionally more recusants than even the northern counties.51 Puritan clergy might blame indolent or sympathetic landowners for the strength of Catholicism in their parishes, but neighbours were also sympathetic. The reporting of large numbers of married women recusants, but not their husbands, in Wigan in 1595 is suggestive, and across the Pennines the situation was similar. A diocesan visitation of 1615 was especially concerned with details of recusants beyond simple numbers, asking about age and the length of time those reported had been Catholic. Of the 511 reported from North Yorkshire, women over 30 years of age represent over 60 per cent of that cohort, and in places where recusants were especially numerous, such as the moorland settlements of Egton and Brotton, the proportion of women presented is even higher. At Egton the men presented were either the elderly or those in their 20s, possibly widowers or those not yet established as householders. There is a gap, if not a total absence, of males in the 30 to 60 age group, which suggests that their Protestant neighbours were not reporting those Catholics who were among the more prosperous yeomen and farmers in the community. Similar protection was provided for the Catholics at nearby Brotton, where the authorities thought the Catholics a

50 Walsham, Church Papists, p. 83; Haigh, Reformation and Resistance, pp. 282–90, quote at p. 285. 51 Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 97.

196  William Sheils ‘stiff-­necked’ people.52 Neighbourliness, and the need to keep parochial life ­functioning, often protected peasant Catholics from the full strictures of the law, especially in those places where they were numerous. It also reminds us that ­recusancy was not always a top-­down affair; we know of several poor ‘vagrants’ who moved among the Catholic households of the north, sometimes conveying priests or under the guise of travelling players. In the years before the civil wars the Benedictine Ambrose Barlow lived at Leigh in Lancashire as a lodger in the house of a ‘poor man’, probably meaning non-­gentry, who also housed other poor Catholics.53 The situation of Catholics living in towns was generally less comfortable. Although Durham could still seem a publicly Catholic corporation to the Protestant canons of the cathedral in the early 1580s, and Catholics in York could provide safe houses for priests travelling around the north, the Protestant au­thor­ ities were largely successful in removing Catholics from positions of influence in towns, where their numbers were usually small by the seventeenth century. The exception was London, though here too Catholics were removed from civic office early in the reign of Elizabeth. The exceptionalism came from London’s position as capital, for many Catholics were not permanent residents: they included foreigners, either engaged in trade or attached to embassies, and a number of labouring Irish servicing the rapidly expanding city; plus a number of provincial gentry kept town houses for political reasons or for use while in the capital on legal business. A series of sessions presentments of recusants for the 1630s produce figures between eighty-­five in 1631 and 244 in 1640, this last showing Catholics to cover a wide social spectrum, including gentry, luxury tradespeople such as fan-­makers and apothecaries, and lesser crafts such as chimney sweeps.54 The presence of London’s Catholics no doubt increased the fears of the Puritans on the eve of the civil wars.

Ireland and Scotland Relations between Catholics and their Protestant neighbours in Ireland and Scotland shared many of the characteristics outlined above, but there were also 52  William Sheils, ‘Household, Age and Gender among Jacobean Yorkshire Recusants’, in Marie B Rowlands (ed.), English Catholics of Parish and Town, 1558–1778, CRS Monograph 5 (1999), pp. 142–9; Emma Watson, ‘ “A Stiff-­Necked, Wilful and Obstinate People”: The Catholic Laity in the North York Moors c.1559–1603’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 77 (2005), pp. 181–204. 53  John  A.  Hilton, ‘The Catholic Poor: Paupers and Vagabonds’, in Rowlands (ed.), Parish and Town, pp. 119–21; Aveling, Northern Catholics, pp. 288–90. 54 J. C. H. Aveling, Catholic Recusancy in York, 1558–1791, CRS Monograph 2 (1970), pp. 39–82; Michael Gandy, ‘Ordinary Catholics in Mid Seventeenth-­Century London’, in Rowlands (ed.), Parish and Town, pp. 164–9; Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (Basingstoke, 1988), pp. 28–60.

Catholics and Their Protestant Neighbours  197 important differences. Throughout Ireland the vast majority of the population were Catholic, not just by tradition but also in response to Tridentine missionary activity. In those parts of Ireland with a strong presence of Old English families from the time of Henry II’s conquest, the situation was similar to that in parts of northern England. This was especially true of County Meath where a committed reforming bishop, Hugh Brady, was unable to challenge the authority of the local landowners and their priests, his diocese being poorly endowed and Protestant clergy few. In this his situation was not unlike that of his English contemporary, William Downame, bishop of Chester.55 Even in Dublin, the seat of government and, from 1592, the home of a university specifically established to promote Reformation, Catholic merchants were in control of civic affairs well into the seven­teenth century, reinvigorated by Tridentine missionaries in the 1580s and 1590s. Matters changed after 1600 and the appointment of Arthur Chichester as lord deputy in 1606. By then a vocal Protestant minority in the corporation challenged Catholic dominance but met with limited success. Catholic merchants were able to conduct economic warfare against their Protestant peers through control of imports, and into the 1630s they defended civic liberties against the encroachments of government through the Guild of St Anne, while using the resources of the guild to fund the many Catholic priests active in the region. In this they had the support of Protestant merchants who, when faced with an aggressive State, cast aside their confessional loyalty to work alongside their Catholic peers in defence of civic freedoms. Below the level of civic government conflict was frequent, if sporadic. For example, in 1609 a Protestant preacher trying to conduct a funeral was beaten up by those attending, who brought in a priest to conduct the service instead. More seriously for the government, the execution of the Franciscan Bishop Concobhair O Duibheanaigh (Conor O’Devaney) in 1612 brought large numbers of Catholics ‘not of the inferior sort alone, but of the better’ on to the streets in protest. It was said at the time that the people resorted to Mass at well-­known venues in great numbers and that ‘a man may as familiarly salute a popish priest in the streets of Dublin as a preacher’. It was a Jesuit, Richard Stanihurst, who expressed the depth of these divisions most clearly, and poignantly, in 1615 when debating with his Protestant nephew, and later archbishop, James Ussher: ‘I take my stand in defence of the Catholic faith in this spiritual duel which sees an Irishman contending with an Irishman, a Dubliner with a Dubliner and, saddest of all, an uncle with his nephew.’56

55  Helen Coburne Walshe, ‘Hugh Brady (c1527–1584)’, ODNB; C. Haigh, ‘Finance and Administration in a new Diocese: Chester, 1541–1641’, in Rosemary O’Day and Felicity Heal (eds.), Continuity and Change: Personnel and Administration of the Church in England, 1500–1642 (Leicester, 1976), pp. 145–66, esp. pp. 155–6. 56  Colm Lennon, The Lords of Dublin in the Age of Reformation (Dublin, 1989), pp. 152–67, 186–97, 218; Colm Lennon, ‘Fraternity and Community in Early Modern Dublin’, in Robert Armstrong and Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin (eds.), Community in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2006), pp. 167–78.

198  William Sheils In the province of Munster, the city of Cork had rival preaching bishops in the 1580s. William Lyon was an Oxford graduate whose preaching after the Spanish Armada attracted huge followings. He was a committed evangelist, producing bibles and prayer books for the diocese but, faced by his Catholic counterpart, Dermot Creagh, whose preaching drew ‘the whole country in general disloyalty and breaking of laws’, and hampered by a shortage of Gaelic-­speaking clergy, Lyon declared in 1596 that Catholics dominated city and county, observing ‘the young merchants of Cork flaunting their swords and pistols as they went to Mass’. By this date the plantation policy was established in Munster and popular Catholic response had led a number of older generation Church of Ireland clergy to leave and become ‘Massing priests’. The plantation brought ethnic considerations into the religious divide, and opposition to the new settlers and colonizers radicalized the native Irish further, fomenting rebellion that resulted in Catholic defeat at the Battle of Kinsale in 1601. Religious motives were at the heart of opposition to the regime, as Lord Deputy Mountjoy noted: ‘I am of the opinion that all religions grow under persecution.’57 The leader of the rebels at Kinsale was Hugh O’Neill, whose base was in the north in Ulster, an Irish-­speaking region, Gaelic in its institutions, and firmly Catholic. This was the case in the diocese of Kilmore where the Reformation made little headway and Catholics, led by Franciscan friars, dominated local society into the seventeenth century. The visit of Sir John Davies to Ulster in 1606, when he tellingly likened the situation to that of England in 1558 with a population ready for evangelization, marked the beginning of a Protestant counter-­ offensive. From 1607, however, it was accompanied by a policy of plantation; serving the new settlers rather than converting the natives came to dominate policy under the energetic leadership of Bishop Thomas Moigne, appointed in 1613. Small inroads were made among the Irish and six priests conformed to serve the native population, but what emerged were two separate Churches, one Protestant for the settlers and the other Catholic for the native Irish, but each answerable to the Protestant bishop. Tithes and recusancy fines, important sources of revenue to a poorly endowed establishment, were a constant source of dispute between the Irish and their new Protestant—­ often Presbyterian—­ neighbours in the years after 1610. The resentment felt by Catholics was recognized in 1629 by the new bishop, William Bedell, who described the church as ‘the chiefest impediment to the work we pretend to set forward’, and he set about trying to reach out to the Irish. Despite considerable effort he met with limited success; the rebellion of 1641 destroyed the Protestant church in Kilmore, but Bedell’s reputation among the Catholic population ensured that in the following

57  Henry  A.  Jefferies, ‘Tudor Reformations in Cork’, in Salvador Ryan and Clodagh Tait (eds.), Religion and Politics in Urban Ireland c.1500–c.1750 (Dublin, 2016), pp. 51–69.

Catholics and Their Protestant Neighbours  199 year he was at least allowed a decent burial, in stark contrast to the treatment of other bishops and their families at that time.58 Many of those settlers, especially in Ulster, came from Scotland, where the Reformation divided society into not two but three distinct religious groups: Catholic, Episcopalian, and Presbyterian. Those divisions were compounded by weakness at the centre of government for much of the period. The years from 1560 to 1567 were troubled by the complexities of having a Catholic queen with a newly Protestant regime, destabilized by the faction and inconsistencies which surrounded the Queen’s private life. Her flight to England ushered in a regency of twelve years in which rivalries among the Protestant lairds offered little chance of stability, and when James took on his role as king in 1579 he found himself often at odds with the Kirk even though his skilful management brought some focus to royal policy. His accession to the throne of England in 1603 and his departure for London with many of his key advisers meant that for the rest of our period the direction of policy once again lacked strong central direction.59 Local clan power was important in the Highlands where, in contrast to Ireland, the Reformation was able to make inroads into the Gaelic-­speaking region in the north-­west and the Isles under the leadership of the Campbells, earls of Argyll, and the minister John Carswell. Adapting traditional bardic cultural forms, and drawing ministers from families like the MacPhails of Muckearn who had a long clerical tradition in the pre-­Reformation Church, practices such as open-­air services and the use of travelling boy catechists provided institutional and cultural continuity, but were also a source of discord and disruption between opposing religious groups. Catholic opposition to the Campbells was led by local clan chieftains and, in a mirror image to events in Ulster, Franciscan missionaries from Antrim came over to work, sometimes under cover in great houses as bardic poets, in what they considered to be hostile Protestant territory. To avoid danger the Franciscans were constantly on the move among the clans and had to regularly withdraw back to Ulster, leaving a church not unlike that to be found in many parts of England. A community formed around local landowning households which was served intermittently by missionary priests.60 In the more settled areas of lowland Scotland it was the Kirk sessions which posed most threat to Catholics, with their much closer regulation of religious and moral life than anything experienced in other parts of Britain. In areas like Stirlingshire, where the Kirk sessions were well 58  Alan Ford, ‘The Reformation in Kilmore before 1641’, in Raymond Gillespie (ed.), Cavan: Essays on the History of an Irish County (Dublin, 1995), pp. 73–99; John McCafferty, ‘Venice in Cavan: The Career of William Bedell, 1572–1642’, in Brendan Scott (ed.), Culture and Society in Early Modern Breifne-­Cavan (Dublin, 2009), pp. 173–87. 59  Keith Brown, ‘Reformation to Union, 1560–1707’, in R. A. Houston and W. Knox (eds.), The New Penguin History of Scotland (London, 2001), pp. 182–230. 60 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. 233–7, 241–2, 248–9.

200  William Sheils established, Catholic families were regularly harassed by the local magistrates ­acting through the sessions. This oversight covered not just the ‘people’ but could extend to the leaders of local society. For example, in the Stirling presbytery in the 1580s both the crypto-­Catholic earl of Montrose and Lord Doune fell foul of the ministers: the former for failing to control the morals and behaviour of his friends, tenants, and servants; and the latter for allowing popular pilgrimages to continue in the neighbourhood. Elsewhere, figures like the earls of Huntly and Errol, and their tenants endured constant harassment and interference by the sessions as the price for their Catholicism.61 In the towns the official reformation was often swift and dramatic, as the famous story of the people of St Andrew’s waking up Catholic on 11 June 1559 and going to bed Protestant that evening suggests, but usually the narrative was more complex. Protestants made a for­mid­ able show of defiance in Edinburgh against the arrival of Mary Stuart in August 1561, but it took another decade to secure Protestant control of the burgh and it was not until the early 1580s that popular support for the Reformation was widespread. Catholics were able to hold on to office somewhat longer in Aberdeen where they continued to control the town session until the late 1580s. In Glasgow the Protestant magistrates treated their Catholic peers among the merchant class with a large degree of toleration, at least until the mid-­1610s. But this uneasy if tolerable existence of Catholics in the west was upset in the 1630s, when Calvinist suspicion of Charles I’s motives resulted in Catholics facing increased hostility from their Protestant neighbours in both town and country.62

Conclusion Relations between Catholics and their Protestant neighbours in the period ­covered all ranges of social interaction and were never constant, in either time or place, or across social groups. The physical threat posed to poor Protestants going to divine worship in Prescot in 1590 was matched among the gentry by the violent entry of the Catholic Cholmleys and their tenants into the godly household of Sir Thomas Hoby at Hackness in east Yorkshire in 1600 during family prayers.63 61  Keith Brown, ‘In Search of the Godly Magistrate in Reformation Scotland’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 40 (1989), pp. 568–74; Ryan Bone, ‘Enforcing Uniformity: Kirk Sessions and Catholics in Early-­Modern Scotland’, Innes Review, 69 (2018), pp. 111–30. 62  Jane Dawson, ‘ “The Face of ane Perfyt Reformed Kyrk”: St Andrews and the Early Scottish Reformation’, in James Kirk (ed.), Humanism and Reform: Essays in Honour of James  K.  Cameron (Oxford, 1991), pp. 413–35; Michael Lynch, ‘The Reformation in Edinburgh: The Growth and Growing Pains of Urban Protestantism’, in J. Obelkevich, L. Roper, and R. Samuel (eds.), Disciplines of Faith: Studies in Religion, Politics and Patriarchy (London, 1987), pp. 283–94; Paul Goatman, ‘Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Jacobean Scotland: The Case of Archibald Hegate Revisited’, Innes Review, 67 (2016), pp. 159–81. 63 Andrew Cambers, ‘  “The Partial Customs of These Frozen Parts”: Religious Riot and Reconciliation in the North of England’, in Kate Copper and Jeremy Gregory (eds.), Retribution, Repentance and Reconciliation, SCH 40 (2004), pp. 169–80.

Catholics and Their Protestant Neighbours  201 The generally cordial relations between Catholic and Protestant merchants in Dublin and Glasgow, at least until the mid-­1610s, was reflected in the neighbourly relations enjoyed by the inhabitants of the village of Egton in north Yorkshire. Occasionally, public demonstrations of persecution, such as the execution of Bishop O Duibheanaigh in Dublin in 1612, brought Catholics onto the streets in protest, but more common was the circumstance in Clonmel where the Catholic merchants, secure enough in their dominant position, willingly gave access to their Protestant neighbours for burial in the Franciscan friary there.64 Rites of passage were sometimes a source of friction and very occasionally Catholics withdrew to their own burial grounds, as in late Elizabethan Winchester, but, while clandestine baptisms, marriages, and burials appeared fairly regularly in reports to ecclesiastical authorities it was usually the presence of priests that aroused the Protestants, and especially the godly sort, to action. More commonly, while friction was ever-­present in Catholic/Protestant neighbourly relations, and enmity and anger sometimes flared into violence, burial practice is a reminder that, as in the case of the Lancastrian Catholic Mrs Horseman, daily life often ‘dissolved the distinction between communicant and excommunicate, Protestant and Catholic’, reflecting a common humanity.65 Religion was only one part, albeit an important one, of personal identity at this time. The history recounted above is one of individuals negotiating the complexity of a novel form of difference against the often fiercely contested claims of competing secular and ecclesiastical au­thor­ ities. In the immediate term such local and regional accommodations were to prove fragile in the face of determined government policy and, in Ireland in 1641, they collapsed into a bloody rebellion. This in turn aggravated the longstanding suspicion in England and Scotland between the Puritans and the government, in particular Charles I, over the perceived ‘popish’ intentions of the latter. The result was warfare in all three kingdoms. In the longer term the history above provides an example of the difficulties and achievements of negotiating difference, which we are still attempting to resolve in a wider faith environment.

Select Bibliography Bossy, John, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975). Brown, Keith, ‘In Search of the Godly Magistrate in Reformation Scotland’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 40 (1989), pp. 553–81.

64  Brid McGrath, ‘The Communities of Clonmel, 1608–1649’, in Armstrong and Ó hAnnracháin (eds.), Community in Early Modern Ireland, p. 119. 65 Peter Marshall, ‘Confessionalisation and Community in the Burial of English Catholics c1570–1700’, in Nadine Lewycky and Adam Morton (eds.), Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England (Farnham, 2012), pp. 70–5.

202  William Sheils Goatman, Paul, ‘Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Jacobean Scotland: The Case of Archibald Hegate Revisited’, Innes Review, 67 (2016), pp. 159–81. Lennon, Colm, The Lords of Dublin in the Age of Reformation (Dublin, 1989). Lennon, Colm, ‘Fraternity and Community in Early Modern Dublin’, in Robert Armstrong and Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin (eds.), Community in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2006), pp. 167–78. Lewycky, Nadine and Adam Morton (eds.), Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England (Farnham, 2012). Questier, Michael, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 2006). Sheils, William, ‘ “Getting On” and “Getting Along” in Parish and Town: English Catholics and their Neighbours’, in Benjamin  J.  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. Sheils, William, ‘Religious Divisions in the Localities; Catholics, Puritans and the Established Church before the Civil Wars’, in Edward Vallance, Trevor Dean, and Glyn Parry (eds.), Faith, Place and People in Early Modern England: Essays in Memory of Margaret Spufford (Woodbridge, 2018), pp. 29–42.

11 Exile Movement Male Institutions, 1568–1640 Thomas O’Connor

The early modern Continental institutions, dedicated to the education of British and Irish Catholic clergy, are commonly understood as products of the Catholic Reformation.1 Although this is largely true, it can be forgotten that, prior to the religious changes of the sixteenth century, the English, Irish, and Scots Churches were connected into Continental networks through a variety of institutions. The English hospice in Rome, the Collegium Scoticum in Paris and the Irish imperial Schottenklöster, for instance, operated as networking, pilgrimage, and educa­ tional entities long before the royal divorce. From the middle of the sixteenth century, efforts were made to retool these old institutions to provide for pastoral needs that could no longer be met domestically, including clerical education.2 Because existing infrastructure proved inadequate, entirely new establishments emerged, beginning with the English college in Douai (1568). The latter were clustered mainly in Catholic university towns in the Low Countries, and also in Iberia, France, and Rome. Although intended to ensure a supply of secular clergy, the majority were Jesuit influenced and/or fell under Jesuit management.3 From the early seventeenth century, these repurposed medieval and newer institutions were seconded by establishments associated with the religious orders, most not­ ably those of the English Benedictines and the Irish Franciscans and Dominicans. Together, they ensured that, by the 1640s, the majority of Catholic clergy active in  England and Scotland had received at least part of their education in

1 Anstruther, Seminary Priests, I, pp. ix–­xx. 2  Eamon Duffy, ‘Cardinal Pole, the Papacy, and the Founding of the Venerabile’, in Angelo Broggi et al. (eds.), The Church of the English College in Rome: Its History, its Restoration (Rome, 2016), p. 31; John Francis Allen (ed.), The English Hospice Rome (Leominister, 2005). 3  On the Jesuits, see Robert  E.  Scully, SJ, Into the Lion’s Den: The Jesuit Mission in Elizabethan England and Wales, 1580–1603 (St Louis, 2011); Thomas M. McCoog, SJ, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England 1541–1588: ‘Our Way of Proceeding?’ (Leiden, 1996); Thomas M. McCoog, SJ, 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); Thomas M. McCoog, SJ, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1598–1606: ‘Lest Our Lamp be entirely Extinguished’ (Leiden, 2017); Vera Moynes (ed.), The Irish Jesuit Mission: A Calendar of Correspondence 1566–1752 (Rome, 2017); Vera Moynes (ed.), Irish Jesuit Annual Letters 1604–1674, 2 vols. (Dublin, 2019). Thomas O’Connor, Exile Movement: Male Institutions, 1568–1640 In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume I: Endings and New Beginnings, 1530–1640. Edited by: James E. Kelly and John McCafferty, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843801.003.0012

204  Thomas O ’ Connor seminary-­like institutions.4 In Ireland, the transformation was less decisive. Despite an impressive Continental footprint, Irish Catholics continued to be served largely by clergy with little or no experience of seminary training.

International Context In England and, to a lesser extent, in Ireland, the fallout from the royal divorce threw traditional systems of clerical provision into confusion, exacerbating exist­ ing deficiencies and creating new ones.5 From the 1560s, the vulnerability of English recusants to clerical shortages was increasingly apparent, as the Marian lower clergy gradually migrated to the new Anglican dispensation.6 For non-­ conforming laity, the choice seemed to lie between making do with sporadic priestly ministrations and perhaps with none at all.7 It was thanks to their wealth and social status, and to the existence of a substantial Catholic diaspora, that a third possibility gradually came into focus: that of training selected youths for the Catholic priesthood overseas. This evolution did not occur in a tidy, insular vacuum. In fact, the question of clerical training had long preoccupied European Catholic reformers. As the Reformation had cruelly exposed shortcomings in the traditional clergy, rem­ed­ ies, including the institutionalization of at least part of the priestly formation pro­ cess, were considered. In this vein, certain Catholic leaders, like Charles Cardinal de Lorraine and Philip II, had founded new universities, with specific anti-­ Protestant educational agendas.8 Some of the most important of these, including Rheims (1548), Douai (1559), and Pont-­à-­Mousson (1572), lay along the confes­ sional boundary cutting through the Low Countries, territories well-­trodden by

4  For Ireland and England, see Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Europe 1592–1648: Centre and Peripheries (Oxford, 2015); for England, Ireland, and Scotland, see David Worthington (ed.), British and Irish Emigrants and Exiles in Europe, 1603–1688 (Leiden, 2010). 5 Peter Heath, The English Parish Clergy on the Eve of the Reformation (London, 1969); Peter Marshall, The Catholic Priest and the Protestant Reformation (Oxford, 1994). 6 Eamon Duffy, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English village (New Haven, CT, and London, 2003) is the classic account. See also Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early-­Modern England (Woodbridge, 1993); Michael Questier, ‘Clerical Recruitment, Conversion and Rome c.1580–1625’, in Claire Cross (ed.), Patronage and Recruitment in the Tudor and Early Stuart Church (York, 1996), pp. 76–94; David Loades, ‘The English Clergy in the 16th and 17th Centuries’, and John Aveling, ‘The English Clergy, Catholic and Protestant in the 16th and 17th Centuries’, in Wolfgang Haase (ed.), Rome and the Anglicans: Historical and Doctrinal Aspects of Anglican-­Roman Catholic Relations (Berlin, 1982), pp. 1–53, 55–142. 7  For England, see Leo F. Solt, The Church and State in Early Modern England, 1509–1640 (Oxford, 1990), ch. 1. 8  Violet Soen, ‘Containing Students and Scholars within Borders? The Foundation of Universities in Reims and Douai and Transregional Transfers in Early Modern Catholicism’, in Violet Soen et al. (eds.), Transregional Reformations: Crossing Borders in Early Modern Europe (Göttingen, 2019), pp. 267–94.

Exile Movement  205 British and Irish subjects. Along with well-­ established universities such as Louvain, already active in the anti-­Protestant crusade, these newer institutions funded overseas students intended for the Catholic offensive in the Low Countries and elsewhere.9 Rheims and Douai may have been new, but they generally remained attached to a model of clerical formation that conceived clerical training as a largely uni­ versity activity, with canon law and theology in pole position. More radical visions had grown up among certain Catholic reform groups. In the Netherlands, for instance, the educational activities of the Brethren of Common Life had pro­ duced a network of grammar schools, with tried and tested pedagogy, and cur­ ricula imbued with humanism.10 Moreover, the devotio moderna had already forged a link between feeder schools and their destination universities, a move soon embraced by other educational innovators.11 Inspired, in part, by the ex­ample of the religious orders, the Brethren were concerned not only with the students’ academic formation, but also with their spiritual and moral develop­ ment. Further south, in Italy, similar views circulated among the Spirituali, who included Reginald Pole and Giovanni Morone. For them, Scripture and the Fathers, interpreted by authority and obediently accepted by believers, were the context for the inner conversion at the heart of a renewed Christian life. Pole applied this vision to his own plans for Church reform, outlined in his 1546 Admonitio Legatorum ad Patres Concilii.12 A short time later, as English legate, he had a brief opportunity to move to action. His 1555 Constitutiones Legatinae, especially the eleventh ‘de pueris educandis in ecclesiis’ provided a general outline for clerical formation. He was as good as his word because by the time of his death in 1558, four seminary-­ like institutions were already in operation in England. The most innovative model for clerical formation in the Catholic world, ­however, was developed neither by the secular clergy nor by the great universities, but rather by one of the new religious orders, the Jesuits.13 For the latter, their role in priestly formation had little to do, initially, with either reform of the clergy per  se or seminary management. Ignatius’ original intention was missionary, to

9  See, for example, Lucien Ceyssens, ‘Un échange de lettres entre Michel Baius et Henri Gravius (1579)’, Ephemerides Theologicae Louvanieses, xxvi fasc. 1/2 (1950), p. 73, n. 2. 10  John Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2008), pp. 137–57; Barbara Sher Tinsley, ‘Johann Sturm’s Method for Humanistic Pedagogy’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 20 (1989), pp. 23–40. 11  Aveling, ‘English Clergy’, p. 98. 12  Causes of Christian Disunion: Cardinal Pole’s legatine address at the opening of the Council of Trent, 7 January 1546 (London, 1936), pp. 548–53; John Murphy, ‘Cardinal Reginal Pole: Questions of Self-­Justification and of Faith’, Royal Studies Journal, 4 (2017), pp. 177–95; Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven, CT, and London, 2009), p. 22. 13 For the role of colleges and schools in the Jesuit mission, see George  E.  Ganss (ed.), The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus (St Louis, 1970), pp. 171–229.

206  Thomas O ’ Connor evangelize the Holy Land.14 For mission territories, Ignatius needed well-­formed, adaptable operatives. His training model was tightly structured, centring on a process of individual conversion, refined into the Spiritual Exercises (1522–4). It is not hard to see why this missionary model became influential for territories lost to Protestant control. Adding to the attractions of the Jesuit model was its basic educational methodology, eventually systematized into the Ratio studiorum (1599).15 If it was only subsequent to their own foundation, and rather reluc­ tantly16 that the Jesuits took on the running of formation programmes and insti­ tutions for secular clergy,17 they quickly warmed to their new task. By 1551, the Jesuit Collegium Romanum, intended for the training of Society clergy, was up and running, followed quickly, in 1552, by the Teutonicum,18 established to sup­ ply clergy to the Empire. At the same time the Jesuit schools’ network was expanding dramatically.19 The Jesuit model, with its humanist underpinning, obviously chimed with Pole’s and Morone’s aspirations, providing the Catholic Church with a potentially powerful instrument for the training of a renewed clergy. Some of that potential was realized during the final session of the Council of Trent in 1563. In an effort to influence conciliar colleagues, Morone20 had had Pole’s 1555 Reformatio Angliae circulated among Council Fathers.21 At the same time, Diego Lainez, Jesuit superior general from 1558, spoke on clerical forma­ tion, helping coax the assembly to the conclusion that priestly preparation, like that of student Jesuits, should ideally take place in a structured setting, preferably segregated from the world.22 Although the Council was sketchy on detail, a con­ sensus emerged that clerical instruction should cover at least the manner of 14  Urban Fink, ‘The Society of Jesus and the Early History of the Collegium Germanicum’, in Liam Chambers and Thomas O’Connor (eds.), College Communities Abroad: Education, Migration and Catholicism in Early Modern Europe (Manchester, 2018), pp. 40–3. 15 Karl Hengst, Jesuiten an Universitäten und Jesuitenuniversitäten (Munich, 1981); Harald Dickerhof, ‘Die katholischen Gelehrtenschulen des konfessionellen Zeitalters im heiligen Römischen Reich’, in Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling (eds.), Die katholische Konfessionalisierung (Gütersloh, 1995), pp. 348–70. 16 Kathleen M. Comerford, Ordaining the Catholic Reformation: Priests and Seminary Pedagogy in Fiesole 1575–1675 (Florence, 2001), p. 85. Their hesitation was due, in part, to fear of episcopal interference. 17  Owen Chadwick, ‘The Seminary’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds.), The Ministry: Clerical and Lay, SCH 26 (Oxford, 1989), p. 11. 18  Fink, ‘Collegium Germanicum’, pp 34–54; Francesco Cesareo, ‘The Collegium Germanicum and the Ignatian Vision of Education’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 24 (1993), pp. 829–41. For its Irish con­ nections, see Fergus Ó Fearghail, ‘Irish Links with Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 22 (2009), pp. 25–50. 19  Maurice Whitehead, English Jesuit Education: Expulsion, Suppression, Survival and Restoration, 1762–1803 (Farnham, 2013), p. 10. For the influence of humanism, see J. W. O’Malley, ‘Renaissance Humanism and the Religious Culture of the first Jesuits’, Heythrop Journal, 31 (1990), pp. 471–81. 20  Adam Patrick Robinson, The Career of Cardinal Giovanni Morone (1509–1580): Between Council and Inquisition (London, 2012), pp. 152ff. 21 Duffy, Fires of Faith, pp. 205–6. 22  Trent’s twenty-­third and final session, chapter eighteen. See The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent, ed. and trans. James Waterworth (London, 1848), 170–92. See H. Jedin, Geschichte des Konzil von Trent, iv/2 (Freiburg, 1975), pp. 72–9.

Exile Movement  207 administering the sacraments; students should attend daily Mass, confess monthly, and follow the counsel of a spiritual director.23 For some time, Trent’s decree remained an aspirational ornament rather than an executed action plan, but there were early exceptions.24 Charles Borromeo’s Milanese seminary was operating from 1564; in Rome, Pius IV approved the setting up of the Seminarium Romanum in 1565. It was not all plain sailing. Established, secular-­run uni­ver­ sities such as Louvain and Paris were suspicious of the Jesuits on account of their Roman clout and entry into university provision. This nourished deep-­rooted secular-­regular tensions and such festering antipathies were destined to play a mischievous role in emerging British and Irish overseas institutions, so many of which fell under Jesuit government.25

English and Welsh Networks From the outset, English Catholics set the pace.26 This was partly because of the delicacy of their situation after Elizabeth’s accession, exacerbated by the 1568 arrival of Mary, Queen of Scots in England, the 1569 Northern Rising, and the ill-­conceived papal excommunication of 1570. As more Marian parish clergy conformed, as the English universities recovered from the Catholic haemorrhage, and as dedicated colleges and fellowships, like those in Jesus College, Cambridge, emerged for the formation of a Church of England ministry,27 fears grew that believers would fall away from the old faith. These concerns preoccupied the ­surviving English Catholic leadership, gathered around William Allen, in exile in the Low Countries.28 Among the emergency measures contemplated was the establishment of clerical residences overseas. English Jesuits agreed and the idea was also supported by Allen’s contacts, including Jean de Vendeville, who had been instrumental in setting up Douai University. Vendeville sought to yoke the exiled Oxford professorate to his fledgling university, while Allen knew he could benefit from the Belgian’s lobbying experience. The result was a proposal to 23 On seminaries, see James O’Donohoe, Tridentine Seminary Legislation: Its Sources and its Formation (Louvain, 1957); James O’Donohoe, ‘The Seminary Legislation of the Council of Trent’, in Iginio Rogger (ed.), Il concilio di Trento e la Riforma tridentina. Atti del convengo storico internazionale, Trento, 206 settembre 1963, 2 vols. (Rome, 1965), I, pp. 157–72. 24  Maurizio Sangalli, ‘Colleges, Schools, Teachers: Between Church and State in Northern Italy (XVI–­XVII Centuries)’, Catholic Historical Review, 93 (2007), pp. 815–44. 25  Kathleen Comerford, ‘The Influence of the Jesuits in the Curriculum of the Diocesan Seminary in Fiesole, 1636–1646’, Catholic Historical Review, 84 (1998), pp. 662–80. 26  Tim Cooper, The Last Generation of English Catholic Priests: Parish Priests in the Diocese of Coventry and Lichfield in the Early Sixteenth Century (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 39–93; Margaret Bowker, The Secular Clergy in the Diocese of Lincoln 1485–1520 (Cambridge, 1968). 27  A similar urgency gripped certain Irish clergy when Dublin’s Trinity College was established in 1592: see Irish Jesuit Archives, MSS B 21, ‘Articuli quidam . . .’ [1595–8]. See Vera Orschel (ed.), The Jesuit Irish Mission: A Calendar of Correspondence 1566–1752 (Rome, 2017), p. 454. 28  Eamon Duffy, ‘William, Cardinal Allen, 1532–1594’, Recusant History, 22 (1995), pp. 265–90.

208  Thomas O ’ Connor establish a papally approved, dedicated English residence at Douai.29 According to Allen’s 1578 ‘Instructions for the erecting of seminaries’, his establishment, ori­ gin­al­ly conceived as an old-­style university hall, had already evolved into a priest training facility of Tridentine inspiration.30 Needless to say, politics was a prob­ lem. Although Allen publicly eschewed overt political activism,31 the very idea of sending clergy back to certain danger suggests that for him, as for Robert Persons, SJ, and Nicholas Sanders, military solutions to the English emergency were not excluded. Zealotry of this sort chaffed with students of more accommodationist persuasions.32 It remains unclear to what extent student decisions to travel to Douai were influenced by Allen’s or Persons’ putative plans for the reconquest of England.33 Perhaps some students were radicalized in seminary. Whatever the case, for the recusant households they returned to serve, clerical politicking was risky. Maintaining a balance between missionary fervour and accommodationist prudence proved an enduring challenge for college administrations.34 In the meantime, Douai grew and, by the late 1570s, the student population was eighty strong, fed by Allen’s generous open-­door policy. Early recruits came straight from England or from exile groups on the Continent; they included gen­ tlemen’s sons in search of a sound education, and seekers, often practical schis­ matics or heretics, in search of their credal home.35 From an early stage, ordination numbers stood at about twenty annually, with the first four priests leaving for England in 1574. In these early years, Douai was in heroic, expansion­ ist mood. If returning missionaries won converts and the hoped-­for Catholic renewal materialized, who could tell how many students would be enticed across the Channel. Anticipating a growing demand for college places, Allen’s eye fell on the English Hospice in Rome. It had been handed over to Reginald Pole in 1538 and, since 1565, was governed by Morys Clynnog, his erstwhile secretary. Initially, the Welsh factor worked to Allen’s advantage, but as English students arrived from Douai, relations with the Welsh administration deteriorated.36 In the ensu­ ing row, Gregory XIII took the English side. In its first seventeen years, the Rome college produced more than 300 priests. By the 1590s, the Scots and the Irish too were warming to the notion of a Roman foothold. The Scots, well viewed by the 29  See Thomas Francis Knox, Letters and Memorials of Cardinal Allen (1532–1594) (London, 1882), pp. 56–67. 30  Aveling, ‘English Clergy’, pp. 124–32. 31 A. C. F. Beales, Education under Penalty: English Catholic Education from the Reformation to the Fall of James II, 1547–1689 (London, 1963), p. 41. 32  Thomas McCoog, SJ, ‘Construing Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1582–1602’, in Ethan Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005), pp. 95–127. 33  Lucy Underwood, ‘Youth, Religious Identity, and Autobiography at the English College in Rome and Valladolid, 1592–1685’, Historical Journal, 55 (2012), pp. 349–74. 34 Michael Questier, ‘Seminary Colleges, Converts and Religious Change in post-­Reformation England 1568–1688’, in Chambers and O’Connor (eds.), College Communities Abroad, pp. 142–73. 35  Questier, ‘Clerical Recruitment’, p. 89. 36  Jason A. Nice, ‘Being “British” in Rome: The Welsh at the English College, 1578–1584’, Catholic Historical Review, 92 (2006), pp. 1–24.

Exile Movement  209 papal authorities, got theirs from Clement VIII in 1600,37 but the Irish had to wait until the 1620s, making do in the meantime with tail-­coating on the English38 or lodging with their own cardinal protector, Girolamo Mattei.39 Prior to the treaty of Vervins (1598), Douai was vulnerable to French invasion. This helps explain the concern to obtain additional, more secure, facilities else­ where.40 Persons seized the initiative, first in Valladolid where, in 1589, with the assistance of the Irish Jesuit, John Howling, he set up an English house. A little later the Englishman ventured south to Seville where he set up another house in 1592,41 with a pied à terre in the repurposed English residence in San Lucar.42 A college in Lisbon followed in 1626.43 Like Rome, the Iberian network, fed from Douai, catered for divinity students. Within three years, Valladolid was home to more than seventy students, the odd Irishman among them, but numbers fell thereafter.44 The Spanish houses began with something of a flourish but later tended to stagnate.45 Arguably, Persons’ most significant foundation was not in Spain but back in the Low Countries, where threatened Elizabethan restrictions on Catholic home-­schooling in England necessitated the establishment of an overseas feeder school for the Continental houses.46 By 1593, he had secured Spanish aid for the establishment of a grammar school at St Omer, which com­ menced with twelve students in late summer 1593. By 1635, student numbers reached 140. Back in England, some Catholic grammar schools operated but rather sporadically. Laxer legislation and a proportionally larger Catholic popula­ tion facilitated the maintenance of Catholic schools in Ireland, but this was almost impossible in most of Scotland.

Scottish Networks The Scottish nobility’s rejection of their Catholic queen and the rapid dismantling of long-­established Catholic structures destroyed traditional systems of clerical 37  Raymond McCluskey (ed.), The Scots College Rome, 1600–2000 (Edinburgh, 2000). 38  Hugh Fenning, ‘Irishmen Ordained at Rome, 1572–1697’, Archivium Hibernicum, 59 (2005), pp. 7–8. 39  For Mattei, see Brian Mac Cuarta, SJ, Henry Piers’s Continental Travels, 1595–1598, Camden Society, Fifth Series, 54 (Cambridge, 2018), p. 15. 40  Victor Houliston, ‘The Most Catholic King and the “Hispanized Camelion”: Philip II and Robert Persons’, in James  E.  Kelly and Hannah Thomas (eds.), Jesuit Intellectual and Physical Exchange between England and Mainland Europe c.1580–1789: ‘The World is our House’? (Leiden, 2019), pp. 67–90. 41  Martin Murphy, St Gregory’s College, Seville 1592–1767, CRS 73 (London, 1992). 42  Michael  E.  Williams, ‘The English Hospice of St George at Sanlucar de Barrameda’, Recusant History, 18 (1987), pp. 263–76. 43  Simon Johnson, The English College at Lisbon: From Reformation to Toleration (Bath, 2014). 44  Mac Cuarta, Henry Piers, pp. 28–9. 45 Beales, Education under Penalty, p. 45. 46  Jan Graffius, ‘ “Bullworks against the furie of Heresie”: Identity, Education and Mission in the English Jesuit College of St Omers’, in Liam Chambers and Thomas O’Connor (eds.), Forming Catholic Communities: Irish, Scots and English College Networks in Europe, 1568–1918 (Leiden, 2018), p. 95.

210  Thomas O ’ Connor provision.47 By the 1580s, few papal clergy remained in the kingdom.48 However, like their English contemporaries, Scots Catholics had overseas options. Exiled Scots Catholics carried diplomatic weight in the French, Spanish, and papal courts, thanks in large part to the Stuart-­Guise/Stuart-­Valois marriages, and also to Philip II’s Scottish Enterprise, which, prior to James VI’s 1585 understanding with Elizabeth, ambitioned his return to Catholicism and accession to the English throne. The Paris-­educated James Beaton, archbishop of Glasgow, leveraged these dynastic considerations to lobby for Scottish Catholic interests. Foreseeing the imminent extinction of the Scottish hierarchy, he convinced Gregory XIII to grant an indult permitting French bishops to ordain priests for Scotland, without the usual letters dismissorial.49 Seizing the opportunity to repurpose the medieval Scots college in the University of Paris for clerical education, Beaton re-­endowed it as a seminary in 1603 (Figure 11.1).50 He was not the only enterprising Scot on the Continent. Another episcopal exile, John Leslie of Ross, lobbied busily in Rome, petitioning for a Scots institu­ tion, modelled on Allen’s Douai or the Teutonicum. Gregory XIII was persuaded, sanctioning an establishment in Tournai in 1580, under the secular priest, James Cheyne.51 It transferred to the newly founded Guise controlled university at Pont-­à-­Mousson (1581), with William Crichton, SJ, as first superior. Initially, papal support was conditional on the admission of Irish students. The project did not prosper. Mary’s execution, the Armada debacle, and the accession of the unsympathetic Sixtus V combined to frustrate the venture, although Crichton managed to re-­establish in Douai in 1594. There, funding challenges curtailed but did not completely stymie activities. The Scots were well-­integrated into overseas networks in Paris, Flanders, Spain, and Rome but enjoyed an equally strong presence in northern and central Europe, especially in Poland. Due to historic trading links to the Baltic and an atmosphere of relative religious tolerance in the area, Scots Catholics and reformers alike were drawn there. It was hardly surprising then that, when Stanislaus Hosius, bishop of Ermland (and student acquaintance of Pole at Padua), set up a college in Braniewo/Braunsberg, initially as a grammar school, a Scottish Jesuit, Robert Abercrombie was sent from Rome to assist. Thirty years later, more than forty Scottish students had attended, although the Scots presence declined in the 1620s.

47  Tom McInally, The Sixth University: The Scots Colleges Abroad, 1575 to 1799 (Leiden, 2012); Mark Dilworth, The Scots in Franconia (Edinburgh, 1974); Maurice Taylor, The Scots College in Spain (Valladolid, 1971); Brian  M.  Halloran, The Scots College Paris, 1603–1792 (Edinburgh, 2003); McCluskey (ed.), Scots College Rome. 48  Brian Michael Halloran, ‘The Scots College, Paris, 1653–1792’ (University of St Andrews PhD thesis, 1996), p. 14. 49 Halloran, The Scots College Paris, p. 4. See Diocesan Registers of Glasgow (London, 1875), I, pp. 229–33. 50  Halloran, ‘The Scots College Paris’, p. 38. 51  Halloran, ‘The Scots College Paris’, p. 30.

Exile Movement  211

Figure 11.1  Arms of an unknown Scottish ecclesiastic from a Flemish Psalter c. 1500, originally in the Scots College Paris, now in the library of the Irish College Paris. Image courtesy of Centre Culturel Irlandais and Fondation Irlandaise.

Moves had long been afoot to follow the English example and convert the Scottish hospice in Rome into a Tridentine-­style seminary. Beaton’s Paris venture diverted papal interest from this but, in 1597, the question of a Scots college was revisited. In part, Clement VIII’s interest was piqued by the forlorn hope of a Catholic Stuart succession to the English throne, all duplicitously encouraged by

212  Thomas O ’ Connor James himself, and bolstered by the conversion of Anne of Denmark.52 A papal endowment ensued. In the early 1600s there was nearly a dozen Scots students in residence, all attending the Collegio Romano. From 1615, the college was under Jesuit management and enjoyed the favour of powerful cardinal protectors, including the future Urban VIII.53 This helped Scots Catholics maintain a prom­ in­ence they might not otherwise have enjoyed and made their overseas college network, despite religious differences, a significant element of the Stuarts’ European diplomatic network. It was from this milieu that figures like George Conn, papal agent to the Court of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, would later emerge. Nevertheless, the colleges’ diplomatic usefulness to the regime was not enough to spare Scottish Catholics either the martyrdom of John Ogilvie in 161554 or the terrible persecutions of the late 1620s.55

Irish Networks A combination of government weakness and Catholic resilience made the Irish crisis in clerical supply, so acutely felt in England and Scotland, and so strong a justification for overseas institutions, significantly less severe. On one hand was the fact that, under Elizabeth, the weakened Anglican establishment allowed native Irish secular clergy to serve as ministers without shedding their Catholic credentials.56 On the other hand, the survival of some Catholic structures, not­ ably the episcopacy and the religious orders, coupled with Jesuit missionary for­ ays, encouraged Gregory XIII’s extravagant expectation that the country might support a domestic seminary network. This cocktail of ambiguities and delusions later became more difficult to sustain, notably from the 1580s. In the aftermath of the second Desmond (1579–83) and Baltinglass Risings (1580), government atti­ tudes towards Catholics hardened, deepening Irish alienation from the Dublin regime. At about the same time, the increased circulation of English recusant clergy into the country and the activities of papal bishops at home and abroad served to conscientize certain Catholics, notably those of Old English back­ ground, about the doctrinal risks of accommodation with the nascent Anglican establishment. This process, however, was so gradual and piecemeal that, for the period up to the 1590s, most Catholic communities in Ireland were content to make do with domestically produced clergy, in general an unimpressive lot. For

52  Halloran, ‘The Scots College Paris’, p. 23. 53 Adam Marks, ‘The Scots Colleges and International Politics, 1600–1750’, in Chambers and O’Connor (eds.), College Communities Abroad, p. 126. 54  Paul Goatman, ‘Exemplary Deterrent or Theatre of Martyrdom? John Ogilvie’s Execution and the Community of Glasgow’, Journal of Jesuit Studies, 7 (2020), pp. 47–66. 55  Michael Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 33–54. 56  Alan Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590–1641 (Dublin, 1997), p. 195.

Exile Movement  213 more demanding Irish laity and students, accommodation was already available overseas, in the English and Scots colleges, for instance, or in the Teutonicum. In fact, the earliest Irish attempts to institutionalize clerical formation overseas occurred not in response to clerical needs in Ireland but, rather fortuitously, to concern among the Irish diaspora for the increasing numbers of compatriots arriving in Continental ports. In Lisbon, John Howling, SJ, who had assisted Persons in setting up the English college in Valladolid and ministered in the Casa dos Catecumenos,57 worked among newly arrived Irish youths. Many of these, he found, were not only impoverished but also uncatechized, prompting him to provide both instruction and accommodation. In 1590, with the help of some Irish and Portuguese merchants, he set up the Confraternity of St Patrick, which proved a step towards a permanent hostel.58 Within two years a premises was acquired, initially run by a board composed of confraternity members.59 Howling’s hostel began with about twenty students.60 Many of its alumni joined the Jesuits and never saw service in their homeland: for most their college train­ ing was a route out of Ireland rather than a preparation for the domestic mission. At about the same time, in Douai, efforts were made to gather Irish students, scattered across several institutions, hostels, and lodging houses into an organ­ ized collegial corps. These early endeavours suffered not only from insufficient financial backing but also from the conditionality of available funding, often limit­ed to students from particular dioceses, towns, or families. In 1592, for instance, a foundation funded by Jeanne de la Motte, the widow of the chevalier of Hourchin, was reserved to students from the town of Cashel.61 Despite these challenges, the Irish secular priest, Christopher Cusack, with help from local Jesuits and David Kearney, future Archbishop of Cashel, managed to set up an Irish house in Douai in 1594. The monarquía made a modest contribution, whose maintenance required constant and frequently unsuccessful lobbying in Spain. Douai catered mostly for well to do students of Old English background. Some came with no priestly vocation, content to acquire a secular education in a con­ genial religious environment. Others were recruited to religious orders such as the Jesuits and Capuchins. A few returned to Ireland, mostly as senior clergy in the embattled but rapidly re-­organizing Jacobean Church. Early growth saw the extension of Cusack’s network, always on a shoestring, to small houses in Antwerp (1600), Tournai (1616), and Lille (1610). Some of Cusack’s Belgian network were attracted to Paris, where, with the support of lay patrons like the parlementaire

57 McCoog, Building the Faith of Saint Peter, p. 118. 58 Karin Schüller, Die Beziehungen zwischen Spanien und Irland im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert: Diplomatie, Handel und die soziale Integration katholischer Exulanten (Münster, 1999), p. 159. 59  Patricia O Connell, The Irish College at Lisbon, 1590–1834 (Dublin, 2001), pp. 25–30. 60  O Connell, The Irish College at Lisbon, p. 56; Thomas O’Connor, Irish Voices from the Spanish Inquisition (Basingstoke, 2016), pp. 35, 52–3, 58–9, 62, 68. 61  Archives du Nord, Lille, 22D1 (23 November 1592).

214  Thomas O ’ Connor

Figure 11.2  The restored library of the Irish College Paris (1776), designed by François-Joseph Bélanger (1744–1818). With a collection composed mainly of salvaged volumes from the dispersed English and Scots college libraries, it is the only British or Irish seminary library in the city to survive the Revolution. Photo courtesy of Centre Culturel Irlandais/Fondation Irlandaise and Ros Kavanagh.

Jean de L’Escalopier, they founded a small house to accommodate students and clergy, again mainly from the east of the country (Figure  11.2). It faded in the 1630s. Douai’s flourishing was similarly short-­lived, with the college falling vic­ tim to gross mismanagement following Cusack’s permanent return to Ireland in the late 1610s. In Spain, student groups had initially formed around exiled bishops, William Walsh of Meath, Pole’s protégé, setting an early example in Alcalá. Later, in the 1580s, Thomas White, a relative of the exiled bishop of Ossory (the latter then ministering in Santiago de Compostela), brought a number of Munster students to Galicia.62 They were initially supported by the local Jesuits and moved on to Valladolid, apparently in the hope of finding accommodation in Persons’ newly founded college there.63 The Jesuit, possibly recalling Welsh-­English stirs in 1570s Rome, baulked at the prospect of sharing with the Irish. But White did secure a 62  Thomas Morrissey, ‘The Irish Student Diaspora in the Sixteenth Century and the Early Years of the Irish College at Salamanca’, Recusant History, 14 (1977–8), pp. 242–60. 63  See Javier Burrieza Sánchez, ‘Escuelas de Sacerdotes y Mártires. Los Colegios del Exilio Católico’, in Enrique García Hernán et al. (eds), Irlanda y la Monarquía Hispánica. Kinsale 1601–2001. Guerra, Política, Exilio y Religión (Madrid, 2002), p. 41.

Exile Movement  215 royal foundation in nearby Salamanca, under Jesuit management.64 Habsburg approval may have brought prestige but it did not ensure financial security. Student numbers were modest, rarely more than a dozen and Salamanca never matched Douai’s early success. By 1605, another small Irish institution had emerged in Santiago, principally to cater for the sons of Munster nobility exiled after the Kinsale debacle (1601). Originally under the secular cleric Eugene McCarty, it fell controversially under the Jesuit government of Richard Conway, SJ, in 1613.65 Another college, founded in Seville in 1612 by the Munster secular priest, Theobald Stapleton, also passed to the Jesuits.66 In Spain, in fact, only the Irish hostel and chapel in Madrid,67 and the college in Alcalá68 remained outside the Society’s control. Across the Pyrenees, the archbishop of Bordeaux, Cardinal de Sourdis, supported the foundation of an Irish house in 1603 under Diarmuid MacCarthy, catering mainly to a Munster clientele.69 Another small house was set up in Toulouse, also under secular management.70 This diverse set of institutions, the fruit of individual and sectional opportunism rather than coherent pastoral vision, proved as profitable to the universal as to the domestic Irish Church.

Regulars’ Networks The emergence of the overseas colleges imposed a new formation regime on the secular clergy, universally in the case of English and Scottish clergy, more patchily in the case of the Irish. Institutions dedicated to the secular clergy were heavily marked by Jesuit practice and usually under Jesuit management. The traditional religious orders, however, retained their own training networks. For monks, like the Benedictines, the shared common life of the monasteries had traditionally provided a ready-­made formation environment, all undone by the confiscations. Mendicants, principally the Franciscans and Dominicans, were similarly unhorsed, but only in England and Scotland. In Ireland, deficiencies and inconsistencies in the implementation of state policy, combined with lay-­clerical connivance, permitted some domestic mendicant communities to continue receiving novices. Because the papacy, in response to the pastoral emergency, exempted them from ordinary episcopal jurisdiction, mendicants often operated autonomously 64  Monica Henchy, ‘The Irish College at Salamanca’, Studies, 70 (1981), pp. 220–7. 65  Patricia O Connell, The Irish College at Santiago de Compostela, 1605–1769 (Dublin, 2007). 66  John J. Silke, ‘The Irish College, Seville’, Archivium Hibernicum, 24 (1961), pp. 13–47. 67  Enrique Garcia Hernán, ‘Irish Clerics in Madrid, 1598–1665’, in Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons (eds.), Irish Communities in Early Modern Europe (Dublin, 2006), pp. 267–93. 68  It was originally founded in 1627; refounded 1630 and 1645. 69 T.  J.  Walsh and J.  B.  Pelette, ‘Some Records of the Irish College at Bordeaux’, Archivium Hibernicum, 15 (1950), pp. 92–141; T. J. Walsh, Irish Continental College Movement: The Colleges at Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Lille (Cork, 1973), pp. 88–119. 70  Patrick Ferté, ‘Étudiants et Professeurs Irlandais dans les Universités de Toulouse et de Cahors (XVIIe–­XVIIIe siècles). Les Limites de la Mission Irlandaise’, in O’Connor and Lyons (eds.), Irish Communities, pp. 69–84; Walsh, Irish Continental College Movement, pp. 120–39.

216  Thomas O ’ Connor on the mission.71 Many of them argued that these exemptions were canonically transmissible,72 a cause of jurisdictional conflicts, particularly after the 1580s, when exempted mendicants interacted with returning seminary seculars and their Jesuit mentors. In Ireland, tensions were most evident between Franciscans and seculars. In England, they involved broils between, on the one hand, certain seculars and the Jesuits, and, on the other, between the Jesuits and the Benedictines. Organizationally, the Jesuits set the pace for the other orders, not only through the international college network they managed for the seculars but also in the restructuring of their own English and Irish missions. From 1598, a Jesuit prefect, resident in Rome, oversaw the English colleges abroad, and the Jesuit college and ministries in the Low Countries. From 1623, English Jesuits enjoyed provincial status, with a tertianship at Ghent, novitiate at Watten, college at St Omer, and a philosophate/theologate at Liège, together with more than a dozen colleges and residences throughout England and Wales. In Ireland, condi­ tions were only slightly less propitious for Jesuit activity. Although it failed to achieve provincial status, the Irish Jesuit mission, under a ‘Superior’ belonging to the German Assistancy, was enormously influential. In 1627, it briefly established a university, novitiate, and school in Dublin (supressed in 1629)73 and, later, a short-­lived seminary in Confederate Kilkenny.74 Nothing like this was possible in Scotland where the Society was active on a more limited scale.75 It was perhaps because they thrived best in unstructured, mission conditions that the Jesuits viewed the clerical remnants of traditional Catholicism, particu­ larly the monks and the mendicants, with a somewhat jaundiced eye.76 In return, the Society’s disdain was resented and its hegemony contested by both the English Benedictines77 and the Irish Franciscans.78 For the Jesuits, the English Benedictines proved particularly troublesome. From the 1590s, small numbers of English students had already begun to transfer from the Jesuit-­run colleges in Rome and Valladolid to Monte Cassino, creating the possibility of a Benedictine 71  Luise Schorn-­Schütte, ‘Priest, Preacher, Pastor: Research on Clerical Office in Early Modern Europe’, Central European History, 33 (2000), p. 11. 72  The canonical term is comunicatio privilegiorum. See Benignus Millett, The Irish Franciscans, 1651–1665 (Rome, 1964), pp. 321ff. See also A.  Matanis, OFM, ‘Bulla missionaria “Cum hora iam undecimal” eiusque iuridicum “Directorium apparatus” ’, Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, l (1957), pp. 364–78. 73  George  A.  Little, ‘The Jesuit University of Dublin c.1627’, Dublin Historical Record, 13 (1952), pp. 34–47. 74  Moynes (ed.), Irish Jesuit Annual Letters 1604–1674, I, p. xvii. 75  Michael Yellowlees, ‘So Strange a Monster as a Jesuiste’: The Society of Jesus in Sixteenth-­Century Scotland (Isle of Colonsay, 2002); Alasdair Roberts, ‘Jesuits in the Highlands: Three Phases’, Journal of Jesuit Studies, 7 (2020), pp. 103–16. 76  The Jesuits Memorial for the Intended Reformation of England, ed. Edward Gee (London, 1690). 77  David Lunn, The English Benedictines, 1540–1688: From Reformation to Revolution (London, 1980); Geoffery Scott, Gothic Rage Undone: English Monks in the Age of Enlightenment (Bath, 1992); Dominic Aidan Bellenger, Monks with a Mission: English Benedictine History (Bath, 2014). 78 Edel Bhreathnach, Joseph MacMahon and John McCafferty (eds.), The Irish Franciscans, 1534–1990 (Dublin, 2009).

Exile Movement  217 role on the English mission. This aspiration was encouraged by some influential English secular critics of the Jesuits, priests like Christopher Bagshaw, Henry Constable, and William Gifford. Papal indulgence helped. In 1602, Clement VIII, in the teeth of Jesuit opposition, authorized the Monte Cassino and Spanish Benedictines to send missionaries to England.79 They were careful to establish contact with survivors from the old English abbeys, securing succession to the surviving English Benedictine tradition. They also laid claim to their own mar­ tyrs (Figure 11.3).80 As a token of their ambitions, they went on to set up priories in Douai (1606), Dieulouard (1608), St Malo (1611), Paris (1616), and an abbey in Lamspringe (1643). In 1619, Paul V confirmed the English Benedictine Congregation.81 By 1621, there were fifty-­seven monks active in England and these numbers were stable for the rest of the century, buoyed up by papal support. In 1633, Urban VIII officially recognized the English Benedictine Congregation as the legitimate successor to the ancient congregation.82 These developments necessitated the division of the English Benedictine mission into two mission provinces, the north, including Scotland, and the south, including Wales.83 Like a faction of seculars, several Benedictines believed in the possibility of some degree of Stuart toleration for Catholics and were willing to pay for it, if only a price could be agreed.84 The Scots Benedictines enjoyed a more modest revival, suc­ cessfully assuming control of a number of the Irish Benedictine Schottenklöster. In contrast to their mission-­oriented English counterparts, they dedicated them­ selves largely to contemplation and scholarship.85 In Ireland, it was the Franciscans and Dominicans, rather than the Benedictines, who led the revival of the regulars. The Franciscans maintained domestic footholds throughout the sixteenth century but, with the conquest of Ulster in the early seventeenth century, sought a dedicated Continental refuge. In 1607, Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire (Florence Conry), after an unhappy spell under the Jesuits in Salamanca,86 successfully petitioned Philip III to fund a friary in Louvain. The result, St Anthony’s, operated not only as a clerical training college, like its Jesuit-­run contemporaries, but also as a cultural powerhouse, standing at 79  See ‘Rationes propter quas expediat Benedictorum missionem in Angliam prohiberi’ (ARSI, Anglia VI, 74); Lunn, English Benedictines, pp. 23–8. 80 James  E.  Kelly, ‘The Contested Appropriation of George Gervase’s Martyrdom: European Religious Patronage and the Controversy over the Oath of Allegiance’, Journal of British Studies, 57 (2018), pp. 253–74. 81  Ex incumbenti (23 Aug. 1619). 82  Plantata in agro Dominico veneranda Congregatio monachorum Anglorum. 83 Scott, Gothic Rage Undone, p. 10. 84  For some, that price was quite high. See James E. Kelly, ‘Political Mysticism: Augustine Baker, the Spiritual Formation of Missionaries and the Catholic Reformation in England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 72 (2021), pp. 300–22. 85 McInally, The Sixth University, p. 16. 86  Maynooth University, Russell Library, Salamanca Archive leg. 52/9; Andrés de Prada, Orden del Consejo al conde de Miranda, 7 July 1604; Archivo General Simancas, Estado Corona de Castilla, leg. 199.

218  Thomas O ’ Connor

Figure 11.3  Unknown artist (late seventeenth century), Martyrdom of St Edmund, king of East Anglia. Oil on canvas, 312 × 198 cm. This painting was originally in the English Benedictine priory of St Edmund the Martyr, Paris. In 1805, it was brought to the Irish College Paris, following the amalgamation of the English-speaking colleges by order of Napoleon Bonaparte. Image courtesy of Centre Culturel Irlandais and Fondation Irlandaise.

Exile Movement  219 the head of a Gaelic literary and historical revival.87 Burgeoning numbers encouraged a second Franciscan foundation, in Prague, facilitated by Cardinal Ernst Adalbert von Harrach.88 It was the indefatigable Luke Wadding, OFM, perhaps the greatest of all the Irish college founding intellectuals, who was key to the establishment of the Irish Franciscan presence in Rome, in St Isidore’s (1625). It quickly established itself as an intellectual centre in its own right, not only for Irish Catholicism but also for the international Franciscan order. Another Irish friary was set up, briefly, in Wielun in Poland in 1645. The health of their overseas and domestic institutions, and the encouragement of Propaganda Fide, permitted an Irish Franciscan mission to Gaelic Scotland. In England, the Observant Franciscans cut a less impressive figure. Revived about 1610, with the restoration of the province by the General Chapter in Salamanca in 1618, they established a seminary in Douai named St Bonaventure’s, with a friary at Gravelines. In 1629, the English Franciscan province was restored but did not survive the Civil War.89 Paul V approved a Capuchin mission to Britain and Ireland in 1608. The key figure here was Francis Lavalin Nugent, a cousin of Christopher Cusack, and the indomitable founder of the Irish and Rhenish branches of the order.90 Nugent had joined the Flandro-­Belgian province in 1589, founding houses in Metz and Charleville. His relationship with Cusack facilitated his participation in the run­ ning of Cusack’s small college in Lille (1610), which provided basic education to Capuchin aspirants,91 some of whom subsequently entered the Irish Capuchin college in Charleville. In 1615, Nugent was appointed vicar apostolic and com­ missary general with authority to establish the order in Ireland, using the Charleville friary to train Irish friars. He returned to found a friary in Dublin in 1624, and another in Slane, County Meath, in 1626.92 The English Capuchins made less of a pastoral splash but did replace Henrietta Maria’s banished Oratorian chaplains in 1630, losing, however, their mission status in the process.93 During the 1590s, the Dominicans retained a presence in Ireland, mostly in the north and west. By 1626 they had twelve domestic houses with 110 friars (includ­ ing fifty-­one priests), and a friary in Louvain (1624). Expansion continued in the 1630s, with a studium generale in Lisbon (1634) but no dedicated Roman house until 1667.94 In comparison, their English Dominican confrères fared rather

87  Tadhg Ó Dúshláine, An Eoraip agus litríocht na Gaeilge 1600–1650 (Baile Atha Cliath, 1987); Nollaig Ó Muraíle (ed.), Micheál Ó Cléirigh, his Associates and St Anthony’s College, Louvain (Dublin, 2008). 88  Jan Pařez and Hedvika Kuchařová, The Irish Franciscans in Prague, 1629–1786 (Prague, 2015), pp. 25–94. 89  Father Thaddeus, The Franciscans in England, 1600–1850 (London, 1898). 90 F. X. Martin, Friar Nugent: A Study of Francis Lavalin Nugent (1569–1635), Agent of the Counter-­ Reformation (London, 1962). 91 Jason McHugh, ‘Documents Relating to the Irish College in Lille, 1634–c.1647’, Analecta Hibernica, 45 (2014), pp. 207–30. 92  Brian Mac Cuarta, SJ, Catholic Revival in the North of Ireland, 1603–41 (Dublin, 2007), p. 228. 93 Father Cuthbert, The Capuchins: A Contribution to the History of the Counter Reformation, 2 vols. (London, 1929). 94  Thomas Flynn, The Irish Dominicans, 1536–1641 (Dublin, 1993).

220  Thomas O ’ Connor poorly. Re-­established in 1622, under Thomas Middleton as vicar general, their numbers were minuscule.95 The English Carmelites opened a college in Louvain in 1621 as part of the Belgian province, but numbers were small, rarely reaching a dozen, and they were not always destined for England.96 Congregational pride seems to have been a powerful motivating factor in the foundation of some of these smaller houses. Their pastoral impact on the domestic missions was slight.

Conclusion By the early 1640s, English, Irish, and Scots Catholics, like their Dutch and Maronite contemporaries,97 had established important exterritorial institutions. In conjunction with domestic establishments, they provided a range of pastoral services to the insular missions, their diasporas and to the international Church.98 For England and Scotland, they produced one of the first, seminary-­trained cler­ic­al cohorts in Counter-­Reformation Europe.99 At the price, perhaps, of restricting their pastoral activity to what were, in effect, glorified domestic chaplaincies. For the Irish, it was thanks, in great part, to its overseas colleges that the kingdom, by the 1640s, boasted a learned episcopal bench, seconded by a sprink­ling of Continentally trained secular and regular clergy.100 Their learning, however, counted for little in managing their unschooled underlings, who ­ remained unbridled by seminary discipline.101 Various vulnerabilities and contradictions characterized the overseas n ­ etworks. The passing of the foundational generation occasioned financial and governance challenges. With Allen’s death, English secular entente with the Jesuits broke down and Douai fell prey to internal disputes; Cusack’s demise brought an even worse fate on its Irish counterpart. Intellectually, few houses were theo­logic­al­ly and culturally significant.102 Exceptionally, the Irish Franciscan friary in Louvain spearheaded an attempt to give international Counter-­Reformation piety a Gaelic 95  Godfrey Anstruther, A Hundred Homeless Years: English Dominicans 1558–1658 (London, 1958). 96  Benedict Zimmerman, Carmel in England: A History of the English Mission of the Discalced Carmelites, 1615–1849 (London, 1899). 97  See Willem Frijhoff, ‘Colleges and their Alternatives in the Education Strategy of Early Modern Dutch Catholics’; Aurélien Girard and Giovanni Pizzorusso, ‘The Maronite College in Early Modern Rome: between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Letters’, in Chambers and O’Connor (eds.), College Communities Abroad, pp 55–89, 174–97. 98  For a recently published example, see Matteo Binasco, Remaking the Irish Missionary Network: Ireland, Rome and the West Indies in the Seventeenth Century (Cham, 2020). 99  John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975), p. 279. 100  Donal Cregan, ‘The Social and Cultural Background of a Counter-­Reformation Episcopate, 1618–60’, in Art Cosgrove and Donal MacCartney (eds.), Studies in Irish History: Presented to R. Dudley Edwards (Dublin, 1979), pp. 85–117. 101  The Irish experience was not exceptional: see Kathleen Comerford, ‘What did Early Modern Priests Read: The Library of the Seminary of Fiesole, 1646–1721’, Libraries and Culture, 34 (1999), pp. 203–21. 102  Ana Sáez-­Hidalgo, ‘English Recusant Controversy in Spanish Print Culture: Dissemination, Popularisation, Fictionalisation’, in Chambers and O’Connor (eds.), Forming Catholic Communities, pp. 201–31.

Exile Movement  221 voice. Overall, however, the colleges remained intellectually modest, with an emphasis on practical rather than speculative training.103 All remained financially vulnerable, a circumstance that generally limited access to scholarship boys or students of moneyed backgrounds. Accordingly, if the period before 1640 saw any change in the social profile of British or Irish clergy, the overseas colleges’ contribution was probably modest. Their poverty also exposed them to foreign interference, which in turn provided xenophobic Protestant critics with an easy target. For so-­called ‘Tridentine’ institutions, they were curiously free of that signature hallmark of the Council, episcopal jurisdiction.104 Their domination by the Jesuits, however understandable circumstantially, caused clerical resentments that were ably exploited by hostile administrations in Dublin, Edinburgh, and London. None of them was purely a seminary, obliged, as they often were, to accommodate waves of refugees and, more durably, to fulfil diplomatic and social functions, not only on behalf of the diaspora but also in service to foreign patrons. Within individual colleges, private endowments and sectional interests influ­ enced recruitment and probably compromised the optimal pastoral deployment of clergy. Differences in theological opinion were probably less important than those concerning politics, but both were destructive of institutional serenity, as the early-­seventeenth-­century history of the English colleges in Douai and Lisbon illustrates. For the Irish network, there were ethnic issues too, particularly in the early years, and notably in Douai and Salamanca. For all the talk of the universal mission of the Counter-­Reformation Church, the three ‘national’ networks not only failed to cooperate, apart from some half-­hearted, externally imposed excep­ tions, but actually competed for scarce patronage and funds.105 If the colleges did serve the universal mission it was indirectly, and not uncontroversially, through the many students recruited to the Jesuits, Franciscans, Benedictines, and Dominicans. More durably, perhaps, the overseas colleges, by helping to impose, over time, a standardized formation on the clergy and a formalized piety on the laity, contributed, in England and Scotland, to the ghettoization of Catholic life and, in Ireland, to its marginalization. One doubts if either result would have pleased their founders.

Select Bibliography Binasco, Matteo, Remaking the Irish Missionary Network: Ireland, Rome and the West Indies in the Seventeenth Century (Cham, 2020).

103  Salvador Ryan, ‘Seminary Formation since the Council of Trent’, in Declan Marmion, Michael Mullaney, and Salvador Ryan (eds.), Models of Priestly Formation: Assessing the Past, Reflecting on the Present and Imagining the Future (Collegeville, 2019), pp. 1–20. 104  Aveling, ‘English Clergy’, p. 87. 105  Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2008), p. 140.

222  Thomas O ’ Connor Chambers, Liam and Thomas O’Connor (eds.), Catholic Communities Abroad: Education, Migration and Catholicism in Early Modern Europe (Manchester, 2017). Chambers, Liam and Thomas O’Connor (eds.), Forming Catholic Communities: Irish, Scots and English College Networks in Europe, 1568–1918 (Leiden, 2018). Halloran, Brian, The Scots College Paris 1603–1792 (Edinburgh, 2003). Lunn, David, The English Benedictines 1540–1688 (London, 1980). McCluskey, Raymond (ed.), The Scots College Rome 1600–2000 (Edinburgh, 2000). McCoog, Thomas, 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). McInally, Tom, The Sixth University: The Scots Colleges Abroad, 1575 to 1799 (Leiden, 2012). Worthington, David (ed.), British and Irish Emigrants and Exiles in Europe, 1603–1688 (Leiden, 2010).

12 English and Irish Women Religious at Home and Abroad, c.1530–c.1640 Caroline Bowden and Bronagh Ann McShane

The history of English and Irish women religious during the period covered in this volume divides into two phases: the first covering the period following the closure of the convents with the passing of legislation in 1536 and 1539, and the second encompassing the foundation period, when new houses were opened on the Continent. For English women religious, a new phase began in 1598 with the foundation of the English Benedictine convent of Our Lady of the Assumption in Brussels, in the southern Netherlands, under the leadership of Mary Percy, daughter of the executed earl of Northumberland.1 Women from Ireland waited longer for dedicated Irish convents to emerge: in the absence of any foundation for Irish women in Europe until 1639, those who travelled abroad were accommodated in English and local European convents in France, Spain, and the southern Netherlands. The first dedicated convent for Irish women—­the Dominican convent of Nossa Senhora do Bom Sucesso—­was established in 1639 in Lisbon, Portugal. This chapter explores the impact of the Henrician dissolution legislation on English and Irish women who had been members of convents. It then considers evidence of domestic religious practices that led some devout women to profess in local convents in Europe or to join the exiled English Bridgettine community during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Finally, it charts the creation of new institutions specifically for English and Irish women on the Continent. In the first two decades of the seventeenth century, fifty-­eight Englishwomen joined the English Benedictines in Brussels, forty-­one—­including five Irish women—­ joined the English Poor Clares in Gravelines (established in 1608/9), and thirty became Augustinian Canonesses at St Monica’s, the new English convent at Louvain (established in 1609).2 The establishment of the Dominican convent in Lisbon as a refuge specifically for Irish women wishing to follow cloistered ­religious life heralded a new phase in the history of Irish female religious. 1  For an overview of the foundation of the English convents, see the analysis on WWTN. 2  Figures taken from WWTN. Caroline Bowden and Bronagh Ann McShane, English and Irish Women Religious at Home and Abroad, c.1530–c.1640 In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume I: Endings and New Beginnings, 1530–1640. Edited by: James E. Kelly and John McCafferty, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843801.003.0013

224  Caroline Bowden and Bronagh Ann M c Shane In  addition to these enclosed English and Irish convents, Yorkshire-­born Mary Ward established a new active form of religious life for women based on an Ignatian model at St Omer in 1609. In spite of controversies surrounding its existence, Ward’s Institute of Mary continued to attract members and survived the papal suppression order of 1631. The popularity and the success of these newly opened female institutions in Europe owed much to the ongoing domestic religious observance, often in difficult circumstances, by English and Irish Catholics during the Elizabethan era and the extensive support networks cultivated by Catholic families that facilitated travel by their female members to convents overseas. By contrast to the English and Irish experience little evidence has been found regarding the presence of Welsh or Scottish women in convents in exile, particularly during the period under consideration here. Taking names with connections to Wales and Monmouthshire from the ‘Who Were the Nuns?’ database, there are only eleven members who professed before 1640 in a range of convents. For instance, Frances Herbert of Powis Castle on the Welsh border professed at St Ursula’s, Louvain, in 1598, later transferring to the English foundation of St Monica’s in 1609. Several women from different branches of the Morgan family in Monmouthshire professed before 1640, including Sara in 1635 at the English Augustinians, Paris. Scottish women appear to have been less likely to enter convents in exile than their counterparts from elsewhere in Britain.3 Four daughters of Archibald Campbell seventh earl of Argyll and his English second wife, Anne Cornwallis, can be associated with convents in the early seventeenth century. The couple fled abroad in 1618: the earl announced his conversion to Catholicism and they remained in Flanders until 1627. One daughter, Barbara, was sent to school in 1628 at the English Benedictines in Brussels aged 3 and she entered the community fourteen years later.4 Two other sisters joined local cloisters in the city: Victoria professed at the Augustinians at Berlaymont and Constance joined the Cistercians at La Cambre, also in Brussels. A fourth sister entered another house as a widow later. Fr Gilbert Blackhall arranged with much difficulty for Lady Isabel Hay, daughter of the Constable of Scotland, to enter a local convent of Canonesses at Mons, c.1635. On their journey to find a suitable place they met a second Scottish canoness with the surname Meldrum at Mauberge, near Mons.5

3  Our thanks to Jane Stevenson for confirming this point. It is likely that a few more women will be found once more names from the indigenous convents founded in Paris in the sixteenth century are located. Paris was an area where Scottish exiles gathered round Mary Stuart. No proposals were made for separate convents for either Scottish or Welsh Catholics in this period. 4 Anon, Chronicles of the first Monastery founded for Benedictine Nuns, 1597 (Bergholt, 1898) p. 138. 5  Gilbert Blackhall, A breiffe narration of the services done to three noble ladyes…, ed. J.  Stuart (Aberdeen, 1844), pp. 31, 37, 50. The authors are indebted to Jane Stevenson for drawing our attention to this text.

English and Irish Women Religious at Home and Abroad  225

England, 1540–c.1600 The dissolution of the religious houses for men and women as a result of the Acts of 1536 and 1539 signalled the official end of monasticism in England, Wales, and Ireland.6 Although considerable research has been carried out on the dissolution campaigns, the majority of work has focused on the impact on male houses while the experiences of female religious communities have been largely overlooked. However, Kathleen Cooke has shed important light on women religious in England in this period.7 The ‘Valor Ecclesiasticus’ (1535) ordered by Henry VIII, included reports on the financial and moral state of 660 religious houses and revealed substantial differences in the value of monastic houses for men and women.8 Cooke’s analysis showed that in 1535 the convents for women were worth considerably less than those for men: only twenty-­one houses for women were valued at above £200 and 112 houses for women were worth less than £200. At the top of the scale, valued at between £1,000–£2,000 per annum, were the two largest communities for women, the Bridgettines of Syon Abbey to the west of London and the Benedictine community of Shaftesbury in Dorset; with Syon worth £600 per annum more than Shaftesbury.9 By contrast, in the top band of monastic houses there were seventeen male institutions. At the other end of the scale Cooke found that nearly half the convents had incomes less than £50 per annum. The size of female communities in England varied greatly with five convents of thirty-­sixty nuns and six convents between twenty and thirty: the majority were much smaller with Cooke estimating a total of 1,900 nuns compared with 8,780 monks, friars, and canons regular.10 In order to justify closure, criticism of the religious houses focused on perceived wrongdoing in the smaller houses which were closed down by 1536. Nuns over the age of 24 who did not wish to give up religious life were offered the possibility of transferring to one of the larger houses (those under the age of 24 were dismissed) while superiors of houses were granted a pension if they chose to leave. Although nearly half the convents for women (sixty-­five) were dissolved as a result of this Act many nuns chose to remain in religious life. Cooke’s study of 6  ‘Act for the Suppression of the Lesser Monasteries, 1536’ and ‘Act for the Suppression of the Greater Monasteries, 1539’. The 1536 Act also applied to Ireland. The second Act was not passed for Ireland until 1541. For a discussion, see Brendan Bradshaw, Dissolution of the Religious Orders under Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 71–4, 184. 7  Kathleen Cooke, ‘The English Nuns and the Dissolution’, in John Blair and Brian Golding (eds.), The Cloister and the World (Oxford, 1996), pp. 187–301; Claire Cross and Noreen Vickers, Monks, Friars and Nuns in Sixteenth Century Yorkshire (Yorkshire, 1995); Peter Cunich, ‘The Dissolutions and their Aftermath’, in Robert Tittler and Norman Jones (eds.), A Companion to Tudor Britain (Oxford, 2004), pp. 221–34. 8  Cooke, ‘The English Nuns’, records that 183 friaries were excluded: see p. 288. 9  The Bridgettines were a dual house and included Brothers in their number. They lived and worshipped separately in the community but came under the authority of the abbess. 10  Cooke, ‘The English Nuns’, p. 291.

226  Caroline Bowden and Bronagh Ann M c Shane the registers of those applying for dispensation from their vows shows that only a hundred nuns applied to leave their communities in 1536 and 1537 out of a total of 800 or 900: the rest opted for transfer to a larger house. By contrast, the number of monks choosing to leave was higher. The difference might be explained by the lack of alternative options for women and the absence of a pension, but for some, religious life was undoubtedly the preferred option. The Act of 1539 closed all remaining monasteries. It provided pensions for all nuns at varying amounts depending on the endowment of each house: often as low as 16s. 8d. but for wealthy houses like the Bridgettines at Syon, £8 or £10 with the majority under £5 per annum. This time there was no choice of outcome for individuals. What happened to former nuns? Pensions were often too small for them to survive on, but it is difficult to find evidence of how they fared. Cooke unearthed little evidence of ex-­nuns marrying. However, historians have found evidence of small groups of women remaining together to follow a communal religious life for some years after 1540. For instance, Elizabeth Shelley, last abbess of the Benedictine convent at Winchester, Hampshire kept a small community together until 1547.11 Former abbess, Elizabeth Throckmorton with two nuns from the Poor Clare house at Denny in Cambridgeshire retired to her family home at Coughton, Warwickshire, where they followed a monastic regime and continued to wear their habits.12 Of particular interest are two communities who survived to be reinstated by the Catholic queen, Mary  I.  Twenty Dominican nuns from Dartford in Kent stayed together and received pensions during the reign of Edward VI, but by the time that Letters Patent to revive the community were granted in June 1557 by Queen Mary, there were only seven survivors with Elizabeth Cressener as prioress. They went first to temporary premises and finally returned to their old house at Dartford.13 In 1540 at Syon Abbey a community consisting of fifty-­two choir sisters, four lay sisters, twelve priests, and five lay brothers were reluctant to give up religious life.14 From these, groups of nuns formed with at least one priest attached to say Mass: one small group was led by Abbess Agnes Jordan who with six sisters lived a monastic existence at Denham, Buckinghamshire, until her death in 1546.15 Another group led by Catherine Palmer fled to Flanders at some 11 Peter Cunich, ‘The Ex-­Religious in Post-­Dissolution Society: Symptoms of Post-­Traumatic Stress-­ Disorder?’, in James  G.  Clark (ed.), The Religious Orders in Pre-­ Reformation England (Woodbridge, 2002) p. 235. 12  Peter Marshall, ‘Crisis of Allegiance: George Throckmorton and Henry Tudor’, in Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott (eds.), Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation (Farnham, 2009), pp. 53–6. 13  ‘The Dominican Nuns of Dartford’, in William Page (ed.), A History of the County of Kent, vol. 2 (London, 1926), pp. 181–90. 14 E. A. Jones, England’s Last Medieval Monastery: Syon Abbey 1415–2015 (Leominster, 2015), p. 50. 15  Peter Cunich, ‘The Syon Household at Denham, 1539–1550’, in John Doran, Charlotte Methuen and Alexandra Walsham (eds.), Religion and the Household, SCH 50 (Woodbridge, 2014), pp. 174–87, esp. p. 180. Another group went to the Yate family home; Jones, Syon Abbey, p. 53.

English and Irish Women Religious at Home and Abroad  227 point in the 1540s until she returned to gather the community on Agnes Jordan’s death. Cunich argued that it was the Denham community that was essential to the survival and continuity of the Bridgettines.16 At the formal restoration of the community by Mary I on 1 March 1557 eighteen sisters and three brothers returned to Syon Abbey and resumed their monastic life. However, the revival was short-­lived and following the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558, the Bridgettines once more departed for the Continent. Their destination this time was Dendermonde in the southern Netherlands, then ruled by Spain. The Dominican community from Dartford joined them on the journey and suffered similar hardships on arrival; however, unlike the Bridgettines, they were unable to recruit new members and in 1585 Elizabeth Exemewe, the last Dominican nun from England died in Bruges.17 In spite of their peripatetic existence on the Continent, the Bridgettines attracted several new English brothers and sisters, but the outbreak of wars locally caused them increasing problems. Poverty and distress led to the clandestine return in 1578 of several members of the community to England in search of help.18 Letters, including accounts of the bravery and sacrifice of those involved in this enterprise, were circulated among networks of their supporters and served to underline the attraction of the cause of the suffering Bridgettines.19 With the end of the Dominicans, this sole surviving English community in exile enduring suffering for the faith, provided inspiration for English Catholic women at home who were considering the religious life. One commentator wrote in a letter received at the English College, Douai, in February 1579: ‘For there passinge greate constancy in there fayth, singuler modesty in ther behaviour and wise and discreete awnswers the[y] are thorow owte the Realme talked of and commended yea, even of ther enemies.’20 In 1580, the community travelled to Rouen in search of stability and peace. From this point, key to their survival was the recruitment of Fr Seth Foster who was persuaded by Abbess Bridget Rooke to join them in 1584.21 Foster’s arrival strengthened the convent and by 1587, the community consisted of twenty-­four

16  Cunich, ‘The Syon Household at Denham’, p. 185. 17  Sister Mary Benvenuta, ‘The Nuns’, in The English Dominican Province (1221–1921) (London, 1921), p. 282. 18 J. R. Fletcher, The Story of the English Bridgettines of Syon Abbey (Bristol, 1933), p. 52. 19  See numbers and names in Exeter University Library, Syon Abbey Archive, MS Chantress book, EUL MS262/add1/35; Ann Hutchison, ‘Beyond the Margins: The Recusant Bridgettines’, in James Hoog (ed.), Studies in St Birgitta and the Brigittine Order, vol. 2 (Lampeter, 1993), pp. 267–84; Ann Hutchison, ‘Syon Abbey Preserved: Some Historians of Syon’, in E. A. Jones and Alexandra Walsham (eds.), Syon Abbey and Its Books: Religious Communities and Communication in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2010), pp. 228–51. 20 Anon. (ed.) [Fathers of the congregation of the London Oratory], with an introduction by T. F. Knox, The First and Second Diaries of the English College, Douay, and an Appendix of Unpublished Documents (London, 1878), p. 149. 21 Jones, Syon Abbey, p. 66.

228  Caroline Bowden and Bronagh Ann M c Shane sisters and six brothers. Sadly for the Bridgettines the impact of war on the city once more drove them to seek security elsewhere. Foster was ultimately re­spon­ sible for the plan to take the community to Lisbon where they settled in 1594. How did the Bridgettines manage to attract candidates to an impoverished, dangerous, and largely hidden existence in exile? It was partly the inherent strength and reputation of the community even with small numbers: Syon was a late foundation (1415) and at the time of their suppression still experiencing a reformatory spirit, plus they were well supported by significant patrons. They imposed high standards on members, enjoying a reputation for strict adherence to the Rule, and a love of books and learning. For instance, they had their own Breviary and accompanying text, The Myroure of Our Ladye first printed in 1530 which they carried with them on what they called their ‘wanderings’ through Flanders and France, together with other important items from Syon.22 In exile, they piously continued their version of religious life against their intended return. Bridgettine survival in Elizabeth’s reign indicates the ability of a community with strong leadership to draw on the developing Catholic networks for support in adversity. Their reputation continued to attract members while they were in Lisbon in spite of its distance from England.

Individuals Following a Religious Life and Their Connections in England The closure of monasteries was only one element of the increasing restrictions on the practice of Catholic liturgy and devotion in England. It is important here to understand ways that women were involved in the religious life of the family and household, which not only contributed to the survival of the Catholic Church but gave continuity to their own religious practice on a daily basis. Such commitment led some of them to enter religious life on the Continent and others to assist in the foundations in different ways, such as acting as benefactors and supporters. In the years after the dissolution in England, some women seeking the monastic life followed the example of Elizabeth Woodford, who had originally professed as a canoness at Burnham Abbey, Buckinghamshire in 1519. In 1548, she entered the Flemish Augustinian convent of St Ursula’s in Louvain, a city which received many religious émigrés from England.23 It was a movement that was slow to

22  The Myroure of Our Ladye was a devotional treatise on the Bridgettine Office with a translation of the Offices as used at Syon. For an explanation of the organization at Syon, see ‘Introduction’, pp. xx–­xxi in The Myroure of Our Ladye, ed. J. H. Blunt (London, 1873). The items taken to Lisbon in 1594 were listed by the nuns in a MS History of Syon’s Wanderings, p. 176: EUL, Special Collections, EUL MS 262/add1/26. 23 F.  E.  Smith, ‘Life after Exile: Former Catholic Émigrés and the Legacy of Flight in Marian England’, English Historical Review, 133 (2018), p. 831.

English and Irish Women Religious at Home and Abroad  229 develop, but it gained momentum once news of the qualities of Margaret Clement, elected prioress at St Ursula’s in 1570 over a community of nearly eighty nuns, had spread among the extended English Catholic community.24 Seventeen English candidates professed at St Ursula’s between 1593 and 1606, including Ann Clitherow daughter of Margaret, executed in York in 1586, and Helen and Catherine Allen, nieces of Cardinal William Allen, whose widowed mother had harboured priests and then escaped the authorities by fleeing abroad with her two daughters.25 Other candidates for profession were likely inspired by the experiences of male members of their family. Several members of St Ursula’s at Louvain were closely related to English Jesuit priests and martyrs; for instance, John Gerard, SJ, was a cousin to Elizabeth Shirley, while Margaret and Helen Garnet were sisters of Henry Garnet, SJ. Dorothy Rookwood was directed to St Ursula’s by Gerard and her brother Ambrose, later executed for his role in the Gunpowder Plot.26 Dorothy Clement, Margaret’s sister, entered a Poor Clare convent at Louvain in 1571. The names of several other women who joined local convents in the sixteenth century have been traced because of their later connection to English communities: for instance, Joanna Berkeley, who left home in Gloucestershire and entered a French Benedictine convent in Rheims in September 1580. She remained there for seventeen years before being approached to act as abbess for the new English cloister in Brussels where she died in 1616.27 Before the end of the sixteenth century, four Englishwomen professed at the Walloon Poor Clares at St Omer in Spanish Flanders, all of whom moved to the new convent for Englishwomen in Gravelines in 1608; one of their number, Mary Gough, later became abbess.28 Although young at the time of her election, Mary Gough demonstrated strong leadership qualities which, in turn, attracted significant numbers of postulants to the Gravelines convent. Support for Catholics in England grew with the establishment from 1568 of male institutions on the Continent.29 Not only did the missioners trained in these houses support household worship, they also brought news from the Continent and ­facilitated networks across the channel. Some of the convent life-­writing acknowledges the influence of family chaplains as well as parents over the life choices of the children of the house. All four daughters of Thomas Wiseman and Jane née Vaughan of Braddocks in Essex joined convents before 1600: two became Bridgettines and 24  Victoria Van Hyning, ‘Clement, Margaret (1539–1612)’, ODNB. 25  For details of the members of the English convents, see WWTN. 26  Hamilton in his commentary on the Chronicle makes much of these connections: see Adam Hamilton, Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses Regular . . . , 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1904), I, pp. 17–23. 27  Jaime Goodrich, ‘Berkeley, Joanne [name in religion Joanna] (1555/6–1616)’, ODNB. 28  Margaret Fowler, professed at St Omer, 1593; Mary Gough, professed 1597; Elizabeth Darrell, entered 1605; Anna aka Susanna Campion, lay sister, entered 1606. 29  See Chapter 11 in this volume.

230  Caroline Bowden and Bronagh Ann M c Shane two joined the Augustinian canonesses in Louvain.30 Their mother, Jane Wiseman, as a widow was known as a priest harbourer and actively assisted priests in prison. Her strength and courage bolstered others and, according to Claire Walker, affirmed ‘the potency of Catholic symbols and holy figures’ in convent recruitment. Stories of the heroism of such women feature in the life-­writing of the convents thus reinforcing the reputation of the new institutions.31 Historians such as John Bossy showed how significant large households were in preserving domestic devotional practices for Catholics in the Elizabethan period even after the passing of penal laws.32 Ongoing research is uncovering more evidence of families where women played a key role in sustaining the faith of households who were continuing to practice informal devotions and reading at home, often using devotional texts in English that were being circulated through the underground networks.33 For instance, Elizabeth Patton has revealed an active apostolic community of up to eighty Catholics following a daily spiritual regime of prayer, meditation, and doctrinal education at Chideock, Dorset, between 1590 and 1594, after which Dorothy Arundell and her sister, Gertrude, participated in the foundation of the first English convent in exile in 1598 in Brussels.34 Dorothy instructed single ladies in the parish and when John Cornelius, SJ, was seized by the authorities took responsibility for his presence in the castle. Dorothy Arundell wrote at least two versions of his life, which underline the importance of women to the survival of the Catholic faith. Another group of women in Yorkshire based round the Babthorpe and Constable family networks developed strong mutual support in the face of severe penalties when they were jailed for religious activities. Chaplains, priests, and schoolteachers attached to the families provided role models and their encouragement drew others into their orbit.35 Mary Ward, who went on to establish her own 30  Claire Walker, ‘Wiseman [née Vaughan], Jane (d. 1610)’, ODNB. Jane and Bridget Wiseman professed at St Ursula’s, Louvain: Anne and Barbara professed with the Bridgettines sometime before they left Rouen in 1594. 31  See the conversion narrative of Catherine Holland, in C. S. Durrant, Flemish Mystics and English Martyrs (London, 1925), pp. 271–305. Many of the lives featured by Nicky Hallett refer to maternal influences on religious practice: Nicky Hallett, Lives of Spirit: An Edition of English Carmelite Auto/ Biographies of the Early Modern Period (Aldershot, 2007). 32  For discussion of the debate over the relative contributions to the survival of Catholicism, see John Bossy, ‘The Character of Elizabethan Catholicism’, Past and Present, 21 (1962), pp. 39–59; Peter Marshall, Reformation England, 1480–1642 (London, 2012), pp. 202–6; William J. Sheils, ‘The Catholic Community’, in Susan Doran and Norman Jones (eds.), The Elizabethan World (London, 2011), pp. 254–68. 33  Earle Havens and Elizabeth Patton, ‘Underground Networks, Prisons and the Circulation of Counter-­Reformation Books in Elizabethan England’, in James E. Kelly and Susan Royal (eds.), Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-­Reformation (Leiden, 2017), pp. 165–88; Caroline Bowden, ‘Building Libraries in Exile: The English Convents and their Book Collections in the Seventeenth Century’, British Catholic History, 32 (2015), pp. 357–63. 34 Elizabeth Patton, ‘From Community to Convent: The Collective Spiritual Life of Post-­ Reformation Englishwomen in Dorothy Arundell’s Biography of John Cornelius’, in Caroline Bowden and James E. Kelly (eds.), The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Communities, Culture and Identity (Farnham, 2013), pp. 19–32; Kate Aughterson, ‘Arundell, Dorothy (1559/60–1613)’, ODNB. 35 J.  T.  Cliffe, ‘Babthorpe family (c.1501–1635)’, ODNB: See also Claire Walker, ‘Lawson [née Constable], Dorothy (1580–1632)’, ODNB; Sarah Bastow, ‘ “Worth Nothing, but very Wilful”: Catholic

English and Irish Women Religious at Home and Abroad  231 institute, in her autobiographical writing acknowledged the influence of the women of this family group in her religious formation.36 Writing an account of her prison experience twenty-­nine years later, Grace Babthorpe, one of those imprisoned in Sheriff Hutton Castle, included a graphic account of what she described as cruel and barbarous persecution in York Castle, where Catholic prisoners were forced to listen to anti-­Catholic sermons.37 Her husband, Ralph, conformed outwardly until, persuaded by his wife, he was fully reconciled to the  Catholic Church. As penalties for refusing to take the oath of allegiance increased, the Babthorpes fled to the Continent. Sir Ralph died in 1618 and his widow Grace professed at Louvain aged 50 in 1621 on the same day as her grand-­ daughter, Frances.38 The number of women in the extended family entering religious life is particularly striking in this period: one of Grace’s daughters, Barbara entered religious life, trying out as a Benedictine in Brussels before becoming a founder member of the Mary Ward Sisters in 1609, while eight other grand-­ daughters became nuns.39 One further factor driving the movement to establish cloisters specifically for Englishwomen came at the end of the century, as it became clear that the Protestant succession was to continue on Elizabeth’s death under James VI of Scotland. This added impetus to create an appropriate Catholic religious life for women. In spite of laws forbidding Catholics to send children abroad for education or to join religious houses, individuals had already been crossing the channel for just these purposes as we have seen above. In the process, English Catholicism was being drawn further towards Continental Counter-­Reformation influences, for women as well as men.40

Irish Women Religious at Home, c.1530–c.1600 In Ireland, as in England, the dissolution of religious houses was viewed as ­integral to the Henrician reform programme.41 In Ireland, the suppression Recusant Women of Yorkshire, 1536–1642’, Recusant History, 25 (2001), pp. 591–603; Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow (London, 2011). 36 Susan O’Brien, ‘Ward, Mary (1585–1645)’, ODNB: Mary Ward lived with the Babthorpes at Osgodby and Babthorpe, 1600–6. 37  John Morris, The Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers Related by Themselves (London, 1872), pp. 228–36. Michael Questier, ‘Sermons, Separatists, and Succession Politics in Late Elizabethan England’, Journal of British Studies, 52 (2013), pp. 1–27. 38  Grace Babthorpe (1621–35); Frances Babthorpe (1621 [aged 17]–1656). 39 Daughter—­ Barbara Babthorpe (1609–54): grand-­ daughters—(Constable) Grace (1625–73), Frances entered aged 14 in 1630 died 1632, Barbara (1633–83): (Babthorpe) Ursula (1642–62), Elizabeth (1630–53), Marie (1629–54), and Frances: (Palmes or Palmer) Ursula (1631–79), Grace (1630–79). First date given is profession date. Details from WWTN. 40 James  E.  Kelly, English Convents in Catholic Europe, c.1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020), ­particularly ch. 6. 41  The most comprehensive study of the dissolution campaigns in Ireland to date is Bradshaw, Dissolution of the Religious Orders. However, Bradshaw’s analysis of the female experience of

232  Caroline Bowden and Bronagh Ann M c Shane c­ ampaigns were inextricably linked to the Crown’s strategy to extend effective government jurisdiction on the island. The majority of monasteries within the orbit of English government influence (in the east and south-­east) were suppressed during the late 1530s and early 1540s. A systematic visitation of religious houses resulted in the resignation of heads and communities (who were pensioned off), and confiscation of their real estate and chattels. In Gaelic Ireland (in the north and west), where the Crown’s jurisdiction was more limited, the suppression campaign was less exhaustive. Despite official suppression of religious houses in these regions, several male communities, including groups of Dominican and Franciscan friars, continued well into the beginning of the seventeenth century.42 In the case of female religious, however, the suppression campaigns heralded a more devastating blow; with the exception of one or two isolated female foundations in Gaelic territories, the dissolution campaigns resulted in the complete eradication of medieval female monasticism in Ireland. The lack of surviving documentation relating to monastic personnel in Ireland in the period immediately prior to the closures makes it difficult to assess the size and state of female religious communities on the eve of the dissolutions or the subsequent impact of the closures on their members. Unlike in England, where records of continuous pension payments to individual women survive well into the Elizabethan era, there are no equivalent records for Irish nuns. We know that at least twenty-­three nuns from seven separate foundations were granted life-­time pensions when their houses closed. How they went about claiming their entitlements or for how long is less clear. At least two female religious assigned pensions at the dissolution were still in receipt of payments as late as 1562. Two members of the wealthy Augustinian priory of Lismullen in County Meath, Mary Cusack, the former prioress, and Anne Weldon, a nun, are named in a list of ten religious from Ireland who claimed a pension from the Crown that year.43 Cusack was sister to Thomas Cusack, an influential government official and a member of the Crown-­appointed commission for the suppression of the monasteries in Ireland. The payments made to Cusack and Weldon in 1562 indicate that while Cusack’s pension remained unchanged since 1539—she continued to receive the unusually high annual payment of £16 awarded to her at the closure of her house—­Weldon’s remuneration had increased. The 1562 list records that Weldon was in receipt of a pension worth 60s. per annum, 20s. more than the original sum awarded.44 It is suppression is brief and, in some cases, inaccurate. A comprehensive account of the female experience of suppression in Ireland is provided in Bronagh Ann McShane, Irish Women in Religious Orders: Suppression, Migration and Reintegration (Woodbridge, 2022), pp. 19–60. 42  On the survival of male religious communities in the aftermath of the Henrician suppression campaigns, see Bradshaw, Dissolution of the Religious Orders; Colmán Ó Clabaigh, The Friars in Ireland, 1224–1540 (Dublin, 2012), pp. 326–8. 43  Charles McNeill (ed.), ‘Rawlinson Manuscripts (Class A)’, Analecta Hibernica, 1 (1930), pp. 70–1. 44  James Morrin (ed.), Calendar of the Patent and Close Rolls of Chancery in Ireland in the Reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth, 3 vols. (Dublin, 1861), I, p. 63.

English and Irish Women Religious at Home and Abroad  233 possible that Weldon negotiated a higher rate of payment during the intervening period, perhaps through the intervention of the politically influential Thomas Cusack. Although a traditional monastic life for women was no longer officially avail­ able in Ireland after 1539, other modes of religious observance offered women an alternative form of vocation and pious expression. For example, in Limerick, in the south-­west of Ireland, a group of women known as the ‘Mena bochta’ (‘Mná Bochta’/‘Poor Women’) was operating in the city as early as 1563. The group consisted of several unmarried women drawn from Limerick’s civic elite, among them Helen Stackpole, the widow of John Stackpole, a former mayor of the city, and mother of David Stackpole who joined the Jesuit novitiate at Tournai in 1564.45 Under the direction of the Irish Jesuit priest, David Wolfe, who acted as the group’s confessor and spiritual adviser, the women maintained a regular round of spiritual observance that involved receiving communion and undertaking regular confession. In the east of the island, the Irish Jesuit Henry Fitzsimon reported the existence of several groups of ‘virgins’ who had ‘dedicated themselves to god and eagerly cultivate a sanctity of life’.46 This included one group in Dublin who in 1598 were living under Fitzsimon’s spiritual care; the women in question had reportedly ‘consecrated themselves to God in a vow of perpetual virginity’ and awaited ‘an opportunity of sailing, to join a religious order on the continent’.47 In the town of Drogheda in County Louth, another group of pious women were living together under the ‘rule and special care’ of Franciscan friars from at least the early years of the seventeenth century (although it was probably much earlier than that).48 Central to the ongoing success of these informal groups of religious women in Ireland in the Elizabethan and early Stuart era was the support they received from elite Catholic families and members of male religious orders who provided necessary financial resources and spiritual guidance. This support was to prove crucial in enabling Irish women to travel overseas for religious vocations in the seventeenth century.

New Foundations for Englishwomen (c.1600–c.1640) By the final decades of the sixteenth century in England and Ireland, there was evidence of increasing numbers of devout religious women seeking to enter 45  ‘Mná Bochta’ translates as ‘Poor Women’. On Helen Stackpole, see Proinnsias Ó Fionnagáin, The Jesuit Missions to Ireland in the Sixteenth Century (Dublin, 1978), pp. 18–19, 45. 46  Vera Moynes (ed.), Irish Jesuit Annual Letters, 1604–1674, 2 vols. (Dublin, 2019), I, p. 141. 47 Edmund Hogan, Distinguished Irishmen of the Sixteenth Century (New York and London, 1894), p. 209. 48  Reginald Walsh (ed.), ‘Persecution of Catholics in Drogheda, in 1606, 1607 and 1611: From a Contemporary Manuscript preserved in the Irish College Salamanca, Carton 40’, Archivium Hibernicum, 6 (1917), pp. 67–8.

234  Caroline Bowden and Bronagh Ann M c Shane

Figure 12.1  English foundations in Flanders and Northern France. Reprinted with permission from James E. Kelly, English Convents in Catholic Europe, c.1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020). Reproduced with permission of The Licensor through PLSclear.

English and Irish Women Religious at Home and Abroad  235 monastic life in Europe (Figure  12.1). The only option available specifically for Englishwomen was the growing Bridgettine community, which by 1594 had moved to Lisbon, Portugal, yet there were no Irish convents. In the late 1590s, a group of young women under the leadership of Mary Percy gathered in Brussels in the southern Netherlands.49 The Archdukes Albert and Isabella, who governed the area for Spain from 1598, were sympathetic to facilitating the foundation of convents for women. Lady Mary Percy was well placed to make a successful foundation. As the daughter of the executed earl of Northumberland, she attracted the attention of English Catholic exiles, thus securing financial backing for the foundation, and she had support from the Infanta Isabella. She was also supported by three Jesuits: she had been assisted in her journey to Brussels in 1593 by John Gerard, and Robert Persons and William Holt facilitated contacts with the papacy and local Church officials once the process of obtaining permissions was under way.50 The foundation was able to begin with a spectacular public clothing ceremony and feast when eight postulants received their habits one week after Joanna Berkeley was consecrated as abbess in November 1599.51 Percy secured the right for the community to choose the abbess and she kept the Infanta at arm’s length while securing her support for the community. From the outset the new house attracted recruits in spite of the challenges posed by its situation in exile. Twenty further foundations of enclosed convents followed in the seventeenth century, at first in the Spanish Netherlands and, from 1634, in France. Many of these had connections with older foundations. For instance, the Poor Clares founded at Gravelines in 1608 came from the earlier local community at St Omer, when a small group of Englishwomen inspired by Mary Ward left to form an English house.52 St Monica’s at Louvain was formed in 1609 by English members of the Flemish Augustinian community of St Ursula’s in the same town. By 1665, four daughter houses of Benedictines had been founded from the first convent at Brussels.53 Three daughter houses of Poor Clares were founded from Gravelines by 1645. The Antwerp Carmelite foundation of 1618 attracted five English nuns from local houses and later went on to establish two daughter houses by 1678. These connections strengthened bonds between communities, allowing them to share expertise in a variety of ways: for instance, sending advisers in the early years of a foundation, or sharing key texts such as constitutions, which governed the framework of community life. The founders understood the importance of securing formal approval for the legal foundation of the convent and achieving good relations with the local 49  This area is referred to by several different names in this period: part of the Low Countries it was also described as the Spanish Netherlands since it was part of the Hapsburg dominions ruled by Spain. 50 Kelly, English Convents in Catholic Europe, pp. 24–5. 51  Printed in Nicky Hallett (ed.), ‘Life Writing I’, English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, gen. ed. Caroline Bowden, vol. 3 (London, 2012), p. 255. 52  Mary Ward left the convent shortly afterwards to form her own congregation. 53  At Ghent (1624), Dunkirk (1662), Boulogne moving to Pontoise (1652), and Ypres (1665).

236  Caroline Bowden and Bronagh Ann M c Shane ecclesiastical hierarchies and secular authorities. Their aim was to secure the future for English Catholicism for women until the time it would be safe to return to their homeland and practise their religion without fear of persecution. This long-­term ambition explains the emphasis on attracting English candidates as members and maintaining English culture, while at the same time ensuring good relations with their neighbours and local communities for the well-­being of the community. Convent chronicles exist for many of the convents which indicate that there were hard times when communities had to approach their neighbours for assistance, for instance dealing with fires and floods, and received generous support.54 Establishing the firm governance that enabled a community to flourish and survive the bad times threw up some serious challenges, particularly in the early years. One key issue was establishing the external authority over the convent: in other words, who would be responsible for seeing that the convent followed the Rule; should it be the bishop or a representative of the Order?55 It was an im­port­ ant question to be resolved, ideally at foundation. There are several examples where it led to difficulties; at the Poor Clares, Gravelines, it became very bitter and led in 1629 to a permanent division when two of the English Poor Clare convents accepted the external authority of the English Franciscan friars, but the other two remained under the local bishop.56 The dispute at the Brussels Benedictines began, as Jaime Goodrich describes it, ‘as a clash of personalities’ between the confessor and the abbess, but escalated to become a dispute which dragged on for twenty years, wrecking recruitment and as a result damaging convent finances.57 Earlier commentators tended to blame the nuns for the rows, but more recently scholars have argued that a careful reading of the documents indicates many layers to the disputes. In some cases, it seems that the male religious involved with convents as spiritual directors, confessors, or visitors saw how important these communities were and made determined efforts to control or direct events.58 Equally, the efforts of the members of the communities to identify their rights according to the Rule, and their determination to protect them, should be noted. Such strength of purpose on the part of convent leaders enabled their convents to flourish once the problems had been resolved: a reputation for good governance would attract candidates.

54 See, for example, events in 1635 in Caroline Bowden (ed.), Chronicles of Nazareth (English Convent (Bruges)) 1629–1793, CRS 87 (Woodbridge, 2017), p. 14. 55  A choice was not possible where there was no male equivalent Order established: for instance, for the early Benedictine foundations. 56  Caroline Bowden, ‘Les Clarisses anglaises d’Aire-­sur-­la-­Lys (1629–1799). Stratégies d’une survie’, Etudes Franciscaines, Nouvelle série, 5 (2012), fasc. 2, pp. 268–70. 57 Jaime Goodrich, ‘Authority, Gender, and Monastic Piety: Controversies at the English Benedictine Convent in Brussels, 1620–1623’, British Catholic History, 33 (2016), pp. 91–114. 58  See, for example, Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke, 2003); pp. 138–42; Peter Guilday, English Catholic Refugees on the Continent, 1558–1795 (London, 1914), pp. 259–64.

English and Irish Women Religious at Home and Abroad  237

Figure 12.2  Interior of the English Augustinian convent in Bruges, along the cloister (author’s photograph).

It is important not to overlook the significance of the Institute of Mary, otherwise known as the Mary Ward Sisters in this period. Mary Ward herself began her religious life in the Poor Clare convent at St Omer in 1608 but was convinced that she was called by God to a different form of religious life. Her vision was for an active apostolic religious life for women, living unenclosed, teaching and ­cat­ech­iz­ing girls, and like the Jesuits, coming under the direct authority of the papacy.59 In doing so, she, like the Ursulines founded in 1535 by Angela de Merici, challenged the Tridentine regulations for women religious requiring enclosure, although the Ursulines accepted enclosure in 1572.60 Mary Ward planned small communities to teach girls and established schools for girls in  several countries, including the southern Netherlands, Italy, and most importantly for their subsequent history, in 1627 in Munich, Bavaria. However, they were officially suppressed in 1631. Nevertheless, by living as lay teachers in informal communities and with the strong support of the duke of Bavaria, they were able to continue their educational work with girls in their schools 59  For an account of the foundation, see, for example, Mary Wright, Mary Ward’s Institute: The Struggle for Identity (Sydney, 1997); Henriette Peters, Mary Ward: A World in Contemplation (Leominster, 1994). 60  For a comparative discussion of the Mary Ward Sisters and the Ursulines, see Laurence Lux-­ Sterritt, Redefining Female Religious Life: French Ursulines and English Ladies in Seventeenth-­Century Catholicism (Farnham, 2005).

238  Caroline Bowden and Bronagh Ann M c Shane from 1635 onwards. The institute continued to attract members and survived, becoming the first community to directly challenge anti-­Catholic laws in England when they successfully opened two houses with schools attached in 1669 and 1686.61

Irish Women Religious Abroad, c.1600–c.1640 In the absence of monastic foundations in Ireland, some women travelled to the  Continent in order to pursue formal religious vocations. Of course, as for Englishwomen, this option was available only to those with the requisite finances to bear the costs involved such as travel expenses, dowry fees, as well as language tuition fees. Because no dedicated foundation for Irish women religious existed in Europe until 1639, Irish women joined both local European and English convents on the Continent.62 One of the earliest records of Irish women joining a convent abroad is the group of five who were professed at the English Poor Clare convent at Gravelines between 1620 and 1625; Martha Cheevers, Eleanor Dillon, Cecily Dillon, Alice Nugent, and Mary Dowdall.63 The women were all of Old English origin with family links in the east of Ireland (Dublin, Meath, and Westmeath). In the case of those whose family backgrounds can be traced, not surprisingly one finds a strong tradition of Catholic recusant activity among their relatives. English convents in Europe continued to attract Irish recruits during the ­seventeenth century. Between 1620 and 1650, approximately thirty-­two women identified as of Irish origin were professed in four English convents on the Continent; of these, approximately ten were professed before 1650 with the remaining twenty-­two professed during the second half of the century.64 But since the English convents were established specifically for Englishwomen, the presence of Irish members could lead to tensions.65 In 1626, led by Eleanor Dillon, the five Irish Poor Clares professed at the English convent at Gravelines 61  The Mary Ward Institute opened houses at Hammersmith in 1669 and in York in 1686. 62  Helena Concannon, The Poor Clares in Ireland, A.D.  1629–A.D.  1929 (Dublin, 1929); Helena Concannon, Irish Nuns in the Penal Days (London, 1931); Marie-­Louise Coolahan, Women, Writing and Language in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford, 2010), esp. ch. 2; Bernadette Cunningham, ‘The Poor Clare Order in Ireland’, in Edel Bhreathnach, Joseph Mac Mahon, and John McCafferty (eds.), The Irish Franciscans, 1534–1990 (Dublin, 2009), pp. 159–74; Andrea Knox, ‘The Convent as Cultural Conduit: Irish Matronage in Early Modern Spain’, Quidditas: The Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, 30 (2009), pp. 128–40; Honor McCabe, A Light Undimmed: The Story of the Convent of Our Lady of Bom Sucesso Lisbon, 1639–2000 (Dublin, 2007); Bronagh A. McShane, ‘Negotiating Religious Change and Conflict: Female Religious Communities in Early Modern Ireland, c.1530–c.1641’, British Catholic History, 33 (2017), pp. 357–82. 63  For details, see WWTN. 64  Identified in WWTN. An analysis is provided in McShane, Irish Women in Religious Orders, pp. 108–9. 65  Marie-­Louise Coolahan, ‘Archipelagic Identities in Europe: Irish Nuns in English Convents’, in Bowden and Kelly (eds.), The English Convents in Exile, pp. 211–28.

English and Irish Women Religious at Home and Abroad  239 left that foundation and established a separate house at Dunkirk for reasons which are not entirely clear. The group remained at Dunkirk for one year, where they accepted two more novices among their number. In 1627, they relocated briefly to Nieuport and by 1629 this cohort of seven sisters had returned to Ireland. Motivated by the emergence in Ireland of a Catholic revival precipitated by less stringent measures against Catholic practice during the 1620s, the Irish sisters established in Dublin the first convent for women in Ireland since the Henrician dissolutions of a century earlier.66 The foundation of the Poor Clare convent at Dublin in 1629 remained tenuous owing to continued coercion campaigns and clampdowns against Catholic practice by government authorities in Ireland, and the community were forced to disband within two years of their arrival. Although the Poor Clares ultimately managed to re-­establish themselves through financial assistance from family networks, migration to the Continent remained a necessary channel for Irish women wishing to pursue monastic vocations. Andrea Knox has pointed to the im­port­ ance of the Iberian Peninsula as a destination for Irish women religious during the seventeenth century.67 By the early 1630s, plans were afoot to establish the first dedicated convent for Irish women on the Continent—­the Dominican convent of Nossa Senhora do Bom Sucesso in Lisbon (Figure 12.3). Established by the Irish Dominican and diplomat, Daniel O’Daly, and funded through a bequest by a wealthy Portuguese noblewoman, Dona Iria de Britto, Bom Sucesso was officially opened on 12 November 1639.68 While records of its early membership are scant, the convent attracted several women from Ireland with connections to elite and staunchly Catholic Anglo-­Irish families in the south-­west of the island (especially counties Limerick and Cork). They included Eleanor Burke, daughter of the renowned Catholic martyr, Sir John Burke of Brittas, County Limerick; Jeanne Mac Carthy, described as of an ancient Irish family; and Sr Iria Barry, who belonged to one of the most politically powerful Anglo-­Irish families in Munster.69 Whereas Bom Sucesso was founded specifically for ‘noble people from the most Christian kingdom of Ireland’, the foundation also recruited Portuguese members.70 Indeed, the convent appears to have attracted Portuguese sisters in such significant numbers that by the beginning of the eighteenth century the Irish Dominican friars feared that it might be lost to the Irish province. These concerns 66  For discussion, see McShane, Irish Women in Religious Orders, pp. 163–72; Cunningham, ‘The Poor Clare Order in Ireland’, pp. 161–4. 67  See for example, Knox, ‘The Convent as Cultural Conduit’, pp. 128–40. 68  For a comprehensive history of the Irish Dominican convent of Bom Sucesso from foundation to the twentieth century, see McCabe, A Light Undimmed. 69  Bom Sucesso archive, 03A/13, ‘Accounts of the Lives of the Early Sisters of Bom Sucesso compiled by Sr Cecilia Murray from Dominican Sources’. The convent archive was recently (July 2019) transferred to the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon. 70  Bom Sucesso archive, 01/2, ‘Copy of the will of the Countess of Atalaya, 13 Aug. 1639’.

240  Caroline Bowden and Bronagh Ann M c Shane

Figure 12.3  The convent of Nossa Senhora do Bom Sucesso, Lisbon (author’s photograph).

did not materialize, however, and Bom Sucesso continued to operate as a distinctly Irish foundation until its closure in August 2016. The convent played a pivotal role in sustaining religious vocation options for Irish women at a time when cloistered living in Ireland was proscribed.

Conclusions This chapter starts at a low point in the history of women religious in England and Ireland with the closure of their convents and the dispersal of the members. However, it demonstrates that not only did small pockets of resistance survive in the immediate aftermath of the dissolution, but domestic religious activities, often generated by women, kept the Catholic faith alive in spite of attempts by successive regimes to eradicate Catholic religious life. Although only the English Bridgettines survived as a community and continued to recruit members during the sixteenth century, some English and Irish women were motivated to travel overseas in order to enter local European convents. By the end of the century, such was the interest in religious life among women that the first of the new foundations saw high numbers of entrants from England (and to a lesser extent from Ireland) in the early seventeenth century, providing a solid basis for future development.

English and Irish Women Religious at Home and Abroad  241

Figure 12.4  Bom Sucesso church view from upper choir (author’s photograph).

What is striking is the ability of the women discussed here to endure and even embrace conditions of hardship and discomfort in order to pursue religious vocations. At the same time, these English and Irish convents became significant cultural institutions generating texts, as well as commissioning buildings with fine artwork and objects to adorn them, while continuing to attract patrons and benefactors from the highest echelons of society on the Continent and at home.

Select Bibliography Bowden, Caroline (gen. ed.), English Convents in Exile 1600–1800, 6 vols. (London, 2012 and 2013). Bowden, Caroline and James E Kelly (eds.), The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Communities, Culture and Identity (Farnham, 2013). Concannon, Helena, The Poor Clares in Ireland, A.D. 1629–A.D. 1929 (Dublin, 1929). Coolahan, Marie-Louise, Women, Writing and Language in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford, 2010). Jones, E.  A. and Alexandra Walsham (eds.), Syon Abbey and Its Books: Reading, Writing and Religion, c.1400–1700 (Woodbridge, 2010). Kelly, James E., English Convents in Catholic Europe, c.1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020).

242  Caroline Bowden and Bronagh Ann M c Shane Lux-Sterritt, Laurence, English Benedictine Nuns in Exile in the Seventeenth Century: Living Spirituality (Manchester, 2017). McCabe, Honor, A Light Undimmed: The Story of the Convent of Our Lady of Bom Sucesso Lisbon, 1639–2000 (Dublin, 2007). McShane, Bronagh Ann, Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530–1700: Suppression Migration and Reintegration (Woodbridge, 2022). Walker, Claire, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke, 2003).

13 Music Andrew Cichy

Sacred music is always contingent upon its circumstances. The development and growth of a coherent Catholic repertoire require three elements to remain more or less stable, namely: unified texts, gestures, actions, and practices that combine as an established pattern of worship we call ‘liturgy’; institutions in which the liturgy is enacted and preserved; patronage, allowing sufficient resources to be committed to the teaching and development of music. Within a matter of decades, Catholic music across Britain had lost all three: the ancient liturgical usages were replaced, in England with a new Book of Common Prayer, and John Knox’s Book of Common Order in Scotland, the monasteries and convents were dissolved and, with the dissolution of their assets, long-­established patterns of artistic patronage were destroyed. The damnatio memoriae was completed through projects of iconoclasm, described in graphic detail by Eamon Duffy,1 and a raft of laws was enacted to ensure that what had been eliminated from public life across Britain was never revived. The forces for radical change, however, were not entirely imposed from without: the Council of Trent, convened in sessions between 1545 and 1563 in a belated response to the Reformation, also visited changes on the liturgy, which were, in turn, to affect Catholic liturgical music across all of Europe.2 As it became increasingly evident that Protestantism was not a temporary presence, the li­tur­ gic­al usages of pre-­Reformation Britain were replaced with the newly reformed and codified missal of Pope Pius V. With a new generation of English, Scottish, and Irish clergy being trained in seminaries in Continental Europe,3 a profusion of printed editions of the Tridentine Missal easily available, and closer interactions with local Catholic institutions, the adoption of the new liturgical lingua franca must have seemed far more pragmatic than attempting to preserve diocesan usages in dioceses that had, in effect, been suppressed. The immediate consequence 1  Eamon Duffy, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven, CT, and London, 2001). 2  Noel O’Regan, ‘The Counter-­Reformation and Music’, in Mary Laven, Geert H. Janssen, and Alex Bamji (eds.), The Ashgate Companion to the Counter-­Reformation (Aldershot, 2013), pp. 337–54. 3  Welsh students appear to have studied at the English colleges—­see for instance Jason  A.  Nice, ‘Being “British” in Rome: The Welsh at the English College, 1578–1584’, Catholic Historical Review, 92 (2006), pp. 1–24. Andrew Cichy, Music In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume I: Endings and New Beginnings, 1530–1640. Edited by: James E. Kelly and John McCafferty, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843801.003.0014

244  Andrew Cichy of this change was that certain parts of the pre-­Reformation repertory were rendered obsolete. The parts that were not disqualified for textual incongruity ultimately fell victim to changes in aesthetic priorities that followed the Council, whereby new ideas about musical duration and textual intelligibility imposed a new discipline on the composition of polyphony. Not even plainchant was left unscathed, with almost all dioceses and religious orders revising and re­issu­ing their books to conform with new humanist principles of textual declamation—­ which represented a radical departure from the previous order.4

Extant Research When published in 1967, Peter Le Huray’s research on English sacred music and the Reformation broke new ground in musicology.5 The first scholarly text to examine the musical changes in English ecclesiastical institutions from the time of the Henrician reforms through to the Restoration, it was very much a history of place, standing still inside buildings and observing the changes as they unfolded within them. This key strength was also the text’s weakness, insofar as by standing within the established institutions, it excluded the music of those who for various reasons no longer worked and worshipped in them. Among these, we may include English Catholics. If a comprehensive scholarly rejoinder has not been published in the succeeding fifty years, it is not difficult to understand why: the post-­ Reformation history of English Catholic music is one of radical change, disruption, and discontinuity. While this has long been familiar territory for historians, it has not translated thoroughly into musicological assessments of the period. It is also not difficult to see how, even as recently as the 1970s, English Catholic music could have been described in the Oxford Companion to Music as ‘all but non-­existent’ between the Reformation and Catholic Emancipation in 1829.6 It was certainly inaccessible using the research methodologies of mainstream mu­sic­ology at that time. Stevenson in his study of Spanish cathedral music,7 as much as Le Huray in examining English Protestant music, was driven by sources derived from liturgy, institutions, and patronage—­and rooted in significant collections of manuscript and printed scores. The gravitation of musical scholarship towards the life and work of William Byrd is consistent with the research methodologies of the time, given the significant amount of his output—­including his Catholic liturgical music—­that has survived. Indeed, interest in Byrd’s life and Catholicism appears to have followed, rather than preceded, critical editions of his works. 4  Theodore Karp, An Introduction to the Post-­Tridentine Mass Proper (Middleton, 2005). 5  Peter Le Huray, Music and the Reformation in England, 1549–1660 (Oxford, 1967). 6  Percy Alfred Scholes and John Owen Ward, ‘Roman Catholic Church Music in Britain’, in Percy Alfred Scholes and John Owen Ward (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Music (London, 1970), pp. 886–7. 7  Robert Murrell Stevenson, Spanish Cathedral Music in the Golden Age (Westport, 1976).

Music  245 Criticism of musicology’s apparent blind spots came in the work of historian Michael Hodgetts who provided a wealth of work-­around solutions to the paucity of traditional sources.8 How could English Catholic music have been extinct, for instance, when the inventory of a private English chapel contained a thurible and dalmatic, both of which would and could only have been used at a liturgical function at which there was singing? What of the references in biographies and the accounts of missionary priests to Mass being sung in Catholic households? Hodgetts goes on to show how the existence of music can be proven from a wide range of sources well outside the usual domain of musicology. Unfortunately, published outside usual historical and musicological forums, these interesting findings appear to have escaped the attention of the academy. Research on the fate of Catholic liturgical music in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales has also been hampered by an apparent paucity of sources of the type that have traditionally provided grist for the musicological mill. Research methodologies used in evaluating the English Catholic situation do not translate well either: differences in socio-­political structures and patronage, implementation of the Reformation, and cultural divergencies seem to require rather different approaches to understanding Catholic liturgical music in post-­ Reformation Ireland and Scotland. This is, quite emphatically, not to say that Catholic music was ‘all but non-­existent’ in the British Isles apart from England—­only that much evidence for it has not, as yet, come to light. That fragments of sacred music manuscripts were found as recently as September 2020 in a seventeenth-­century rats’ nest at Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk would suggest that hope does indeed spring eternal. At present, however, the state of research would admit little more than a haphazard series of vignettes, the occasional mention of music or a composer—­ but none of the breadth of context that can be provided for Catholic liturgical music in the English context. In other words, the Irish and Scottish contexts for Catholic liturgical music in this period are at present characterized by what Donald Rumsfeld famously termed ‘unknown unknowns’. In focusing on the ‘known knowns’ and ‘known unknowns’ of the English context, the following discussion surveys the breadth of extant research on post-­Reformation Catholic music in Britain; the latest word, but certainly not the last.

Paradigm Shifts: From the Ecclesiastical to the Domestic The universal certainties that held English Catholic music together disappeared with the English Reformation. As the liturgy retreated into the safety of Catholic 8  Michael Hodgetts, ‘Recusant Liturgical Music’, The Clergy Review, 61 (1976), pp. 151–6; Michael Hodgetts, ‘Recusant Liturgical Music’, in Christopher Francis and Martin Lynch (eds.), A Voice for All Time: Essays on the Liturgy of the Church since the Second Vatican Council (Bristol, 1994), pp. 168–94.

246  Andrew Cichy households and became a concealed, private affair, experiences of liturgical music became localized and fragmented. The consequences were far reaching. In  religious institutions, worship had stood at the centre of community life. Until 1540—when the statutes of the Society of Jesus were approved—­all religious communities were required to sing the Divine Office.9 The day in, day out accumulation of services, liturgy, and customs were central to the development of musical repertoire and practice. The domestic context was quite different. Here, religious services were sheltered within an institution that served a fundamentally different purpose. Long at the centre of religious institutional life, liturgy (and as a consequence, music) now moved to a new place on the periphery; a vast shift in emphasis. Although a household might support a priest, he now had to fit around their pattern of life, rather than the household adapting to become a pseudo-­religious institution.10 Liturgical life now lived alongside domestic prayer and devotions. It shared domestic space, domestic objects—­ and domestic resources. William Weston remarked upon the use of female singers during a Mass on one occasion in an English household precisely because this was remarkable: in the absence of singing boys, the liturgical law was relaxed to allow for women to sing in their place.11 Even where some pre-­Reformation gentry households did have dedicated chapels, these were not resourced in the same way as the chapels of the king, queen, and their close relatives. The consequences for Catholic liturgical music in England were considerable: now shoehorned into domestic settings, music for the liturgy was limited to the broader interests of the household and the resources available there at a particular time. Even in the vast collection of Catholic Norfolk gentleman, Edward Paston, repertoire appears to have been collected haphazardly (Milsom refers to it as a ‘chocolate-­box’ collection)12 without apparent regard for the Tridentine liturgical calendar and its requirements. Instead, it fitted within a broader devotional and recreational context which, while adaptable for liturgical use incidentally, was not developed with this purpose in mind. That many works in the collection appear in a range of lute intabulations points to both the recreational uses of

9  Thomas D. Culley and Clement J. McNaspy, ‘Music and the Early Jesuits (1540–1565),’ Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 40 (1971), pp. 213–45. 10  Rare exceptions exist, including recusant widow Dorothy Lawson (1580–1632) who transformed her household into a quasi-­religious institution: see William Palmes, The Life of Mrs Dorothy Lawson, of St Antony’s, near Newcastle-­on-­Tyne (Newcastle-­upon-­Tyne, 1851). On difficulties faced by religious in adapting to life on the English Mission, see James E. Kelly, ‘Political Mysticism: Augustine Baker, the Spiritual Formation of Missionaries and the Catholic Reformation in England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 72 (2021), pp. 300–22. 11 William Weston, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, trans. Philip Caraman (London, 1955), p. 71. 12  John Milsom, ‘Sacred Songs in the Chamber’, in John Morehen (ed.), English Choral Practice 1400–1650 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 161–79.

Music  247 the  collection and possibly also the range of musicians that might attend the household on different occasions.13

William Byrd Even Byrd’s Gradualia with its vast range of liturgical propers seems to bear the marks of domestic pragmatism. Unlike Palestrina’s 1593 Offertoria Totius Anni with its consistent scoring for five voices, the Gradualia gives anything but the impression of being composed for a single performance context. In the dedication of the second volume to his patron John Petre, Byrd wrote that the works ‘mostly proceeded from [John Petre’s] house, which is most friendly to me and mine’. In describing the collection as ‘little flowers are plucked as it were from [John Petre’s] gardens and are most rightfully due to [him] as tithes’, Byrd underscored the intimate relationship between these works and the Petre household at Ingatestone Hall.14 Clearly, if Byrd was plucking blossoms from John Petre’s garden, he was constrained by whatever happened to be growing in the garden at the time. The contrasts in scoring and repertoire in the Gradualia on three consecutive liturgical days is particularly striking: Good Friday and Easter Saturday are most economical in their demands, scored for only three voices; Easter Sunday is scored for five voices. Of all times in the year, one might have expected these three days to have the most consistent scoring. Perhaps, however, these discrepancies point to a larger cohort of musicians on Easter Sunday. We know that Byrd and other musicians provided music at Ingatestone Hall for Christmastide in 1589.15 Could it be that local Catholics (and therefore additional musicians) could only afford to slip away to the Petres’ estate once across these days if they were to avoid arousing suspicion? In particular, might it have been easiest for Catholics to attend the Petres’ chapel on Easter Sunday, while their Protestant neighbours repaired to the parish church at Ingatestone for the Easter Day service? Monson has observed that much of the three- and four-­voice repertoire in the Gradualia belongs to the Office (and therefore the Primer, which was said by some lay Catholics out of devotion) rather than the Mass.16 This would link it more intimately with the day-­to-­day, unaugmented resources of the Petre family. 13  Hector Sequera, ‘House Music for Recusants in Elizabethan England: Performance Practice in the Music Collection of Edward Paston (1550–1630)’ (University of Birmingham PhD thesis, 2010). 14 For further discussion of the connections between Byrd and the Petre household, see James E. Kelly, ‘Learning to Survive: The Petre Family and the Formation of Catholic Communities from Elizabeth I to the Eve of the English Civil War’ (King’s College London PhD thesis, 2008), pp. 113–17. 15  Philip Brett, William Byrd and his Contemporaries: Essays and a Monograph by Philip Brett, ed. Joseph Kerman and Davitt Moroney (Berkeley, CA, 2006), p. 210. 16 Brett, William Byrd.

248  Andrew Cichy That repertoire for the most important days in the liturgical year was scored for these resources is uncharacteristically austere of the collection as a whole—­and certainly points to the bespoke nature of Byrd’s compositions, making the best of whatever resources were available to him at the time. Byrd’s three Masses reflect a similar pragmatism, with one each composed for three, four, and five voices respectively. Each Mass has come to be identified with the number of voices it uses, and Byrd himself seems to have left them so, instead designating the number of voices beside the opening of the highest voice in each printed movement. The domestic context for Byrd’s works would also seem to account for the  occasional liturgical fumble. The Kyrie from his three-­voice Mass is one example of this. The single recitation of each invocation is not consistent with  the triple Kyrie-­Christe-­Kyrie structure of the Tridentine Mass. We can discount notions of brevity as no movement in either this or any of the other Byrd Masses takes such a perfunctory approach to the text. The mistake does make sense when viewed in the context of his other three-­voice liturgical repertoire, which includes Good Friday and the Easter Vigil. The gestural parallels between the Voces Turbarum of Good Friday and the Kyrie of the three-­voice Mass suggest the two works are related. The case for the Mass for Three Voices as Byrd’s Mass setting for the Easter Vigil is strengthened further with ­reference to the Missal rubrics for the Kyrie for the Easter Vigil, which read as follows: Hic Cantores solemniter incipient Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison: et ter singula repetuntur. To a composer who had never witnessed the Tridentine Easter Vigil, it might seem that this text directs the choir to sing Kyrie-­Christe-­Kyrie three times, as opposed to the usual practice of singing each invocation thrice before moving to the next section. This suggests either that there are two further sets of the Kyrie-­Christe-­Kyrie that were not printed by Thomas East, or that the set as printed was repeated thrice when it was used for the Easter Vigil. How and why would Byrd have made this mistake? To date, there have been no discoveries of books on liturgical ceremonial from the period that can be linked to English Catholic households, including the Petres at Essex. As Byrd’s only two sources of liturgical information were the Missal and the clergy, the final arbiters of liturgical propriety could only have been the latter: they were the only people on the Mission who had any experience of the Easter Triduum, from their participation in it at seminaries on the Continent. Perhaps Byrd’s mistake reflects their inexperience and memory lapses: one might expect the clergy to be familiar with the regular ceremonial of the Mass, but the ceremonial of a unique, once-­in-­a-­ year liturgy might have been beyond their capacity. Given Byrd’s strong connections to the Society of Jesus, it certainly lends some weight to the old simile ‘to be as lost as a Jesuit in Holy Week.’

Music  249

Clergy and the Continent The role of the clergy in the development of post-­Reformation liturgical music among English Catholics requires careful examination. Recalling that the Tridentine rite was an innovation in England (where public worship had been according to the ancient liturgical usages of Salisbury, Hereford, and York inter alia until the Reformation), it fell to England’s missionary clergy not only to take their part in the rites, but to train all the other ministers and musicians—­who had never witnessed or participated in this liturgy—­to do the same. The newly founded English seminaries in Continental Europe, which stepped into the breach created by the destruction of the great Catholic institutions of pre-­ Reformation England, were hardly the replacement of ‘like with like’: unlike a priest in the normal circumstances of a pre-­Reformation institution, who was a more or less equal participant in an institution of carefully cultivated and allocated responsibilities, this new ‘seminary priest’ would have to be omnia omnibus. Although liturgical and musical training were (at least in theory) mandated parts of training in any seminary, they acquired a greater significance in the context of the English seminaries. Perhaps this accounts for Propaganda Fide’s seemingly stubborn insistence that English seminarians study music at Douai,17 while at the Venerable English College in Rome, detailed manuscript instructions for the liturgy (including for scholars, clergy, and canons) survive in the college’s sixteenth-­century Regulae.18 From surviving sources, however, it is clear that musical experiences of English students in the Continental colleges were far from uniform, varying across time and place, competing with priorities and personalities for institutional space.19 At Douai, the college diaries attest to the early comings and goings of a succession of English musicians, including some from the Chapel Royal, seeking William Allen’s help in securing patronage in exile. We find musicians coming and going to the English Jesuit college at St Omer, to Rome, and to Brussels. Notably, students met Peter Philips in 1582 who stopped by the college for twelve days on his way to Rome20 and in 1628 welcomed Hugh Facy, a convert who appears to have been brought up at Exeter Cathedral before fleeing to St Omer, who became their organist and master of music. Rather than becoming a preservationist enclave,

17  Andrew Cichy, ‘Lost and Found: Hugh Facy’, Early Music, 42 (2014), pp. 95–104. 18  Archivum Venerabilis Collegii Anglorum de Urbe, SCR 6/25/9. 19  See Andrew Cichy, ‘Out of Place? The Role of Music in English Seminaries during the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, in David J. Burn et al. (eds.), Music and Theology in the European Reformations (Turnhout, 2019), pp. 455–69. 20 Anon. (ed.) [Fathers of the congregation of the London Oratory], with an introduction by T. F. Knox, The First and Second Diaries of the English College, Douay, and an Appendix of Unpublished Documents (London, 1878), p. 190.

250  Andrew Cichy Douai college kept abreast of the latest musical developments: Facy’s stylistic transformation from a style not far removed from that of Orlando Gibbons to a Continental-­Italianate idiom seems to have been aligned with the reception of the Council of Trent and its musical reforms.21 At St Alban’s College Valladolid, the public-­facing nature of the college’s li­tur­ gic­al observances—­not least of all weekly public devotions in honour of La Vulnerata, a Spanish statue desecrated by English Protestants during the sacking of Cadiz in 159622—had the students singing and playing in styles that would demonstrate an affinity with their local audiences.23 The college’s Diarios de los Costumbres attest to an especially rich range of instruments and repertoires in use. Combined with other sources, the college’s accounts demonstrate however that musical offerings at St Alban’s waxed and waned according to the college’s financial position at the time. Fees paid to an organist and cantors become more irregular around 1662. Unfortunately, the names of the ‘cantores’ and ‘organista’ do not appear in the accounts—­apart from a single reference to one ‘Luis Fejas’ between 1627 and 1632. This suggests that students at the college were taught by local musicians when funds permitted. There is no need for speculation with respect to local influences on music at the Venerable English College in Rome: Casimiri documented the succession of Italian Maestri di Cappella and organists engaged by the college during the sixteenth century, including Felice Anerio, who replaced Palestrina as the official composer to the papal choir in 1594.24 Nonetheless, the position of music here was not always secure: offering his opinion in 1587 to Paul Hoffaeus (the Jesuit assistant general of the German provinces, which at that time included England), Robert Persons cited a range of factors—­including ‘wicked’ boy sopranos—­for restricting the college’s musical offering to plainchant.25 From the foregoing, several key findings emerge. First, it is clear that the English seminaries did not act to preserve pre-­Reformation English repertoires or even to adapt these for use in the newly adopted Tridentine liturgy. Instead, the  evidence points to these institutions keeping up with Continental, 21 See Andrew Cichy, ‘Scheming Jesuits and Sound Doctrine?: The Influence of the Jesuits on English Catholic Music at Home and Abroad c.1580–1640’, in James  E.  Kelly and Hannah Thomas (eds.), Jesuit Intellectual and Physical Exchange between England and Continental Europe, c.1580–1789: ‘The World is our House’? (Leiden, 2019), pp. 133–51. 22 See Michael  E.  Williams, St. Alban’s College Valladolid: Four Centuries of English Catholic Presence in Spain (London, 1986). 23  See Andrew Cichy, ‘ “Changing Their Tune”: Sacred Music and the Recasting of English Post-­ Reformation Identity at St Alban’s College, Valladolid’, in Daniele V. Filippi and Michael Noone (eds.), Listening to Early Modern Catholicism (Leiden, 2017), p. 182. 24  Raffaele Casimiri, ‘ “Disciplina musicae” et “Maestri di Cappella” dopo il Concilio di Trento nei maggiori ecclesiastici di Roma. Seminario romano—­Collegio germanico—­Collegio inglese (Sec. XVI–­XVII)’, Note d’Archivio per la Storia Musicale, 20 (1943), pp. 1–17. 25  Cichy, ‘Out of Place?’, pp. 458–60.

Music  251 Counter-­Reformation trends whether directly, through the engagement of local musicians, or as mediated by English musicians such as Philips and Facy. Second, musical cultures varied between places and times so that even with the surviving fragmentary evidence, it is clear that English seminarians’ musical training and ex­pos­ure was diverse, making any generalizations about competence, experience, and, crucially (for musicologists), repertoires difficult. The links between particular clerics, institutions, their musical practices, and the transmission of ideas to the English Mission remain elusive. While some general conclusions can be made—­especially around exposure to reformed plainchant and the range of liturgical repertoires that returning priests had experienced—­more specific and localized findings are difficult as so few sources have survived. Anyone looking to reconstruct the musical lives of these institutions with the same rich range of sources as Noone and Stevenson brought to bear upon El Escorial will be disappointed.26 Musical sources such as manuscripts and prints are especially rare, ruling out score-­based methods of analysis. This, perhaps, helps account for the scant attention English Catholic music received until more recent years. There is not a single missionary seminary in Continental Europe that survived unscathed either the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773 or the French Revolution. The scale of dispersals and destruction is inestimable. At Valladolid, St Alban’s College was seized by troops on the night of 2 April 1767, when Charles III expelled the Society of Jesus from Spain. At Douai, the college library—­which included both new acquisitions on the Continent and documents that had been smuggled out of England—­met its fate at the hands of the Douai magistrates who ordered its books to be taken in wagons to an arsenal where they were used to make military cartridges.27 The Venerabile did not fare any better, sacked and commandeered by Napoleon’s troops in 1798, when he invaded Rome. Despite the far-­reaching destruction, however, the veil lifts to occasionally bring further fragmentary evidence of clerical influence on the Mission. Returning once again to Byrd’s liturgical repertoire for Holy Week, Philip Brett determined that setting of the Voces Turbarum for Good Friday must have been composed with a Roman edition of the passion chants to hand.28 This raises a host of interesting questions, not least of all because surviving printed liturgical texts of the period in England appear to originate predominantly from Antwerp where Richard Verstegan acted as a buying agent for some of the English Jesuit colleges on the Continent.29 26 Michael J. Noone, Music and Musicians in the Escorial Liturgy under the Habsburgs, 1563–1700 (Rochester, NY, and Woodbridge, 1998). 27 Knox, The First and Second Diaries, p. iv. 28 Brett, William Byrd, pp. 169–70. 29  Paul Arblaster, ‘The Community of the Glorious Assumption: The English Benedictine Nuns of Brussels’, English Benedictine History Symposium, 17 (1999), p. 66.

252  Andrew Cichy

Jesuits Music and Jesuits make odd bedfellows at the best of times: Ignatius eschewed the use of music in the Society’s houses as a pleasant but unnecessary distraction. After its begrudged introduction into Jesuit houses around 1555 (and only then in response to a perceived threat from Paul IV to bind the Society to the choral office),30 the extent of liturgical music varied widely. As Robert Persons was attempting to set polyphonic music aside completely at the Venerabile, a few blocks away at the Jesuit-­run Germanicum, Rector Michele Lauretano was so supportive of musical pursuits that the college’s regulations needed to be modified to prevent the students’ academic work from suffering. What English Jesuits did not seem to want consistently for clergy—­whether their own or the seculars they were training for the Mission—­they did for others. The reputation for music at St Omers, a school founded by Robert Persons to educate the sons of the English Catholic gentry, was remarkable. Under the rectorship of Gilles Schondonck, SJ, students sang and played a range of musical instruments, evidently with sufficient skill to keep entertained the Spanish Infanta—­whose husband the archduke had a formidable musical establishment, including a number of English exiles, at Brussels—­at the college over several days in 1625.31 The priority of liturgical music is also clear with the college’s new chapel, dedicated in 1610, having a choir loft large enough to accommodate all the boys and an organ. This fact, combined with accounts of sung litanies on Sunday evenings being so well attended by both English exiles and townsfolk as to be packed to the door and occasionally overflowing onto the street,32 points to a thriving culture of liturgical music at St Omers. Owing to fires in 1684 and 1725, however, these are the only ways the college’s musical tradition is recoverable. Apart from a single Latin-­texted Magnificat by Hugh Facy (which may or may not have been performed at the college), no musical sources are known to have survived from the first fifty years of the college. Whereas the Germanicum and Romanum seem to have been pleased to support musicians directly through patronage, the attitude among the English Jesuits seems to have been to keep musicians ‘outside the tent’—or at least, as far as possible, ‘out of the ledgers’. It has been posited that Peter Philips does not appear in the account books of the Venerabile (despite reportedly having been the college’s organist) because the cardinal protector, Alessandro Farnese, whose palace was a  short stroll away, paid his bills. This seems to be a common theme among almost all the notable English Catholic musicians of this period: moving in Jesuit 30  Culley and McNaspy, ‘Music and the Early Jesuits’, p. 223. 31  See Peter Leech and Maurice Whitehead, ‘ “In Paradise and among Angels”: Music and Musicians at St Omers English Jesuit College, 1593–1721’, Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 61 (2011), pp. 57–82. 32  Hubert Chadwick, St Omers to Stonyhurst (London, 1962), p. 48.

Music  253 networks but not paid out of Jesuit pockets. William Byrd, John Bolt, Richard Mico, Daniel Norcombe, and Hugh Facy all knew Jesuit clergy. Yet, unless they were working at St Omers (in which case they were paid out of the students’ fees), they all earned their living from people and institutions with some connection to the Society, but not directly from the clergy. Clearly, the English Jesuits, while not in a position to be artistic patrons themselves, were capable of opening doors for musicians they wished to support. Recent research on English nuns demonstrates the importance of Jesuit clergy for the recruitment of young women to particular Continental convents;33 a pattern of connections to favourably disposed patrons also seems to exist for English Catholic musicians. John Bolt, who moved in John Gerard’s social network, lived out his exile at St Monica’s convent, Louvain, to which the Society referred some twenty women. That Peter Philips ended up in the employ of the cardinal protector of England could not have come about without appropriate introductions—­which, no doubt, would have been made only after the Jesuits at the Venerabile were satisfied with his suitability. William Byrd lived on the Petre estate in Essex, where John Petre his patron was a Church papist and the rest of the family appear to have been recusant—­with strong connections to Jesuits and their supporters in England and abroad. Richard Dering’s successor as organist to Henrietta Maria was Richard Mico, erstwhile musician to William Petre at Ingatestone Hall, another strong patron of the Society.34 His brother, Walter, entered the English College and became a Jesuit, and his son, Edward, studied at the Jesuit college at St Omer. Whether the Jesuits were the preeminent musical cross-­pollinators of this period or whether at four centuries’ distance, it merely appears so through the lens of the Society’s rich archives is debatable. The impact of the Society’s institutions and networks in the development of liturgical music across seminaries, convents, and the private residences of English Catholics, however, is clear. In  many ways, the Society stood at the hub of many networks—­financial, ­religious, and cultural—­and brought elements into dialogue with one another that might not have occurred otherwise. The impacts in the development of musical styles after the Reformation are particularly significant, providing the English Catholic community with a range of stylistic influences that were not readily available to their Protestant counterparts, not least of all because many of these styles were demonstrated in the context of the Counter-­Reformation Catholic liturgy.

33  James E. Kelly, ‘Conformity, Loyalty and the Jesuit Mission to England of 1580’, in Eliane Glaser (ed.), Religious Tolerance in the Atlantic World: Early Modern and Contemporary Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2014), pp. 149–70; James  E.  Kelly, English Convents in Catholic Europe, c.1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020), pp. 24–5. 34  On Mico’s association with the Petre household, see Kelly, ‘Learning to Survive’, p. 151.

254  Andrew Cichy

The Continental Convents While the position of music in the English seminaries seems to have been in a more or less constant state of flux, the situation in convents established for Englishwomen in Continental Europe was altogether different. First, the membership of these institutions, unlike the seminaries, was relatively stable. Provided a woman stayed long enough to make her perpetual vows—­and barring any extraordinary event, such as leaving to help establish a new convent, as happened, for example, in 1629, when a group of canonesses from the English Augustinian convent at Louvain left for Bruges to establish a new foundation there—­she usually remained at the convent for life. Second, convent life as reformed by the Council of Trent centred upon the choir nuns’ daily prayer of the Mass and Divine Office. This was a rather different rhythm of life to a seminary, where the day was crowded with lessons and large sections of the Office might be recited in private. Indeed, for seminarians the obligation to recite it did not bind until they had received minor orders, beginning with tonsure. Stability in membership of English convents was also matched by consistency in social standing: to become a choir nun, a woman was required to bring her own dowry, which was invested to support her upkeep. For this reason, choir nuns were normally of higher social standing than the lay sisters in a convent—­ who undertook the convent’s manual labour instead. Higher social standing also brought a particular range of skills, the result of education and opportunities open to those of financial means. While the achievements of English nuns as writers and translators during this period have already been well documented, not as much has been said of them as musicians. Yet for a woman of social standing in sixteenth-­century England, musical ability was a highly prized skill. Yael Sela’s research on women and keyboard music demonstrates that playing keyboard instruments was of particular importance to young women who, as far as can be determined, seem to have given it up after getting married.35 This points to the importance of music in the social world these women inhabited before entering the convent—­and crucially, to the musical skills they brought to these institutions. Convent chronicles are usually sparing in their details of nuns’ musical abilities but even so, a picture begins to emerge in at least some institutions of singers, organists, and viol players who must have supplemented the usual plainchant repertoire with instrumental and polyphonic works.36 Despite the gaps, some interesting findings still emerge. First, it is clear that in this early period, the nuns employed male organists to play in their chapels and, 35  Yael Sela, ‘An Examination of Virginal Manuscripts owned by Women in the Context of Early Modern English Keyboard Music Culture Ca. 1590–1660’ (University of Oxford DPhil thesis, 2010). 36  Andrew Cichy, ‘Parlour, Court and Cloister: Musical Culture in English Convents during the Seventeenth Century’, in Caroline Bowden and James E. Kelly (eds.), The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Communities, Culture and Identity (Farnham, 2013), pp. 175–90.

Music  255 in some instances, to also provide music lessons to the nuns. In surviving records, they are seldom named, but those who are were English exiles. Richard Dering is known to have been organist to the Brussels Benedictines from at least 1617 to 1625, and John Bolt, a favourite of Elizabeth I, lived out his years as chaplain and music teacher at the Louvain Augustinian convent, after fleeing England and converting to Catholicism. The importance of these links cannot be underestimated. Unlike seminaries, where a constant tide of people coming in and going out meant that musical trends came easily, the regulations around enclosure were not conducive to hearing—­and far less to learning—­the latest musical trends. In Brussels at least, the nuns seem to have held their own in the musical sphere (as Matthew Kellison asserted in 1622)37—quite an achievement, not least of all when they were situated directly across the road from the well-­supplied collegiate church of St Gudula, where their fellow exile, Peter Philips, was composing fashionable few-­voiced motets for the Confraternity of Our Lady of the Assumption from 1623.38 Without an intermediary to the outside world, it seems unlikely the Brussels Benedictines—­who, in any event, appear to have been preoccupied with internecine conflicts39—could have developed their repertoires very much beyond what was happening in English Catholic households on the other side of the Channel. Having a musician who could bring the developments of the outside world into the cloister was therefore crucial. At Louvain, Ann Evans’ obituary demonstrates that these relationships were not merely transactional and left significant cultural legacies: having studied music with John Bolt, she and others were able to take up the reins after his death and lead the convent’s musicians for many years thereafter.40 While the picture that begins to emerge of musical practices in English convents is promising, like the seminaries, the devil is in the detail. Only two English convents survived the ravages of the French Revolution: Our Lady of Nazareth, Bruges, and Syon Abbey, Lisbon. As for the rest, the nuns were forced out at short notice, taking with them only what they could carry. In most instances, not even their buildings remain. Surviving musical sources—­especially from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—­are fragmentary, liturgical, and usually plainchant. Nonetheless, they do provide occasional glimpses of a larger repertoire that has not survived. In the seventeenth-­century manuscript profession and clothing rituals of the Brussels Benedictines and Louvain Augustinians, there are references 37  Edwin H. Burton and T. L. Williams (eds.), Douay College Diaries: Third Diary, 1598–1637, CRS 10 (London, 1911), p. 203. 38  Anne E. Lyman, ‘Peter Philips at the Court of Albert and Isabella in Early Seventeenth-­Century Brussels: An Examination of the Small Scale Motets, including an Edition of Deliciae Sacrae (1616)’ (University of Iowa PhD thesis, 2008). 39  Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke, 2003), p. 137. 40  Adam Hamilton, Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses Regular . . ., 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1904), I p. 151; II, p. 185.

256  Andrew Cichy to instrumental music at various parts of the ceremony, and occasionally the motet to be sung is even named, although the music has long since perished. At other times, an association with a composer whose works survive—­even if these cannot be connected directly with a convent—­can be helpful. Richard Dering is one such example. At the same time as Dering was organist to the Brussels Benedictines, he published three volumes of mixed-­voice motets through Phalèse in Antwerp. He dedicated the 1618 collection to the abbess, Lady Mary Percy. In their published form, however, none of these works could have been performed at the Brussels convent, having been written for mixed voices and continuo. His surviving few-­ voice motets, composed later for the London chapel of Queen Henrietta Maria (discussed further below) survive in manuscript collections. Several works within this collection give some idea of his capacity as a composer in the equal-­voice genre, and therefore how his output for the Brussels nuns may have sounded.

Institutions by Exception In a country where Catholicism and, in particular, the Mass were outlawed, it is unsurprising that the imperatives of diplomacy required that exceptions be made. The Catholic embassies in London, of course, were permitted to continue holding Catholic services, although English Catholics risked arrest if they attended. Again, surviving sources are fragmentary, but the dismissal in 1623 of some of the Prince of Wales’ musicians for helping to sing Mass at the Spanish embassy on Christmas Day41 points to goings-­on warranting further research—­and a longer historical legacy of music and musical networks involving the London embassy chapels than recognized in extant scholarship, which focuses on the (far later) contributions of John Francis Wade and the publications of Vincent Novello.42 Of all the exceptions of the period, the most public—­and in some ways, the most notorious—­was the chapel of Henrietta Maria, queen consort of England from 1625 to 1649. Contemporary descriptions of her Somerset House chapel leave the impression of a building so lavishly fitted out as to border on the theatrical—­complete with an altarpiece of moving pieces and musicians concealed behind a carved choir of angels, to give the impression of heaven itself singing during the services.43 If Elizabeth’s Protestant divines had been

41  Mary Anne Everett Green (ed.), Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series of the Reign of James I, 1619–1623, Preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office, vol. 10 (London, 1858), p. 483. 42  See for instance Bennett Zon, The English Plainchant Revival (Oxford, 1999). 43  Cyprien de Gamache, ‘Memoirs of the Mission in England of the Capuchin Friars of the Province of Paris, from the Year 1630 to 1669’, in Thomas Birch (ed.), The Court and Times of Charles the First (London, 1848), pp. 310–12.

Music  257 scandalized by the reappearance of candlesticks and a crucifix on the communion table of her private chapel,44 it is not much of a stretch to imagine English reactions to the Queen Consort’s very public Catholic chapel and its practices as spanning the bemused to the apoplectic. Clearly, this was a cultural institution that was designed to be exceptional in every respect—­not least of all in its music. Until now, English service music ‘for the comforting of such that delight[ed] in music’45 had been in quite a different vein: Henrietta Maria’s arrival in England coincided with Orlando Gibbons’ death, by which time English Protestant polyphony, with its characteristic rhythms and imitative language, had developed an orthodoxy of its own. In its place, Henrietta Maria’s musical establishment—­ which included Richard Dering and, later, Richard Mico—­set itself up in London, with the pointy tip of the Catholic Counter-­Reformation’s aesthetic spear aimed squarely at the city. Dering’s few-­voice motets, with their Italianate coloratura and rhetorical structures, give some idea of what greeted curious onlookers. Works by Italians composers including Grandi, Trabbattone, Merulo, and Aloisi, inter alia, filled out the repertoire.46 Any theological objections by English Protestants to the Queen Consort’s chapel evidently did not extend to its musical aesthetics: even Oliver Cromwell, utterly intractable in his opposition to ‘popery’, is reported to have enjoyed listening to Dering’s three-­voice motets at Hampton Court Palace despite, at the same time, having forbidden singing or organ music in churches across all of England.47

Conclusions The post-­Reformation experience of English Catholics defies simplistic aesthetic definition. Indeed, it is utterly unlike the experience of any other religious group—­Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise—­in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Fragmented and concealed in the shadows, brought out into the light of sympathetic circumstances again before scattering in multiple directions, it is difficult to see how any aesthetic consistency could emerge in circumstances such as these. References to Spanish missionary architecture elicit images of plain stucco and clay walls topped with red tiles, blazing in the heat of the midday sun; references to Spanish missionary music conjure the sounds of traditional South American instruments deployed in traditional European forms. 44  Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, 1547–1603 (Basingstoke, 1990), p. 29. 45  Edward Cardwell (ed.), Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1844), p. 196. 46  For a discussion of this repertoire, see J. P. Wainwright, ‘Sounds of Piety and Devotion: Music in the Queen’s Chapel’, in Erin Griffey (ed.), Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 195–215. 47  Sister Joseph Damien Hanlon, ‘Richard Dering, Catholic Musician of Stuart England’, Catholic Historical Review, 46 (1961), p. 451.

258  Andrew Cichy Both reference their common cultural and stylistic sources in Spanish Baroque aesthetics. In English Catholic music after the Reformation, the common strands are missing: there are networks, of course, but these do not seem to culminate in stylistic schools. McCarthy has commented that Byrd’s three Masses have ‘few real precedents and no real successors’.48 The same could be said of much English Catholic music composed during this period. It is ‘without precedent’ insofar as it responds to unprecedented circumstances and ‘without successor’ through the inherent difficulties of bequeathing any kind of musical legacy at a time when it could be snatched away by pursuivants or swept away by superiors. All that remains to unify understandings of English Catholic music is its new institutions: these vast melting pots for networks, ideas, and tastes. Whether these were households, seminaries, convents, or colleges, it was only in these circumstances that there could be any kind of musical development. This was not an age of ecclesiastical troubadors and trouveres, though the connections made between households through musicians remain interesting and warrant further research.49 It would be tempting to think of the resulting music as contingent, piecemeal, and perhaps also derivative. The reality is, of course, more complex: repertoires and styles for English Catholics were fluid and dynamic, responding to the needs of specific times and places, and the resources available within these constraints. A bespoke repertoire, it is best understood in terms of the communities and individuals for whom it was written. This is not an approach that sits comfortably within aesthetic theory, which tends to prioritize stylistic congruency and notions of developments within a given ‘school’. Localized, disparate, and temporally contingent responses to varying circumstances do not lend themselves readily to the kinds of analysis that musicology so often employs: too fragmented to constitute a ‘school’, not enough unique notated sources left to constitute a repertoire, insufficient evidence to extrapolate and make generalizations about practices over time. Historians have not been hemmed in by the same restrictions: particular interactions need not always be related to (or distinguished from) the general, and a rich and expanding range of sources are used to help fill gaps in the narrative, which are not measured against larger narratives and defining figures. Particular and narrowly construed historical studies, however, do not provide a solution: the surviving sources do not lend themselves to this kind of treatment easily. Fittingly, wresting British and Irish Catholic music from the depths of the archive may well require the same level of creativity from scholars today as exercised by the composers, musicians, and others who put it into liturgical use some four centuries ago. 48  Kerry McCarthy, Byrd (New York, 2013), p. 146. 49  See, for instance, Gašper Jakovac, ‘A Dancer Made a Recusant: Dance and Evangelization in the Jacobean North East of England’, British Catholic History, 34 (2018), pp. 283–4; Emilie K. M. Murphy, ‘Music and Catholic Culture in Post-­Reformation Lancashire: Piety, Protest, and Conversion’, British Catholic History, 34 (2015), pp. 499–500.

Music  259

Select Bibliography Arblaster, Paul, ‘The Community of the Glorious Assumption: The English Benedictine Nuns of Brussels’, English Benedictine History Symposium, 17 (1999), pp. 54–77. Brett, Philip, William Byrd and his Contemporaries: Essays and a Monograph by Philip Brett, ed. Joseph Kerman and Davitt Moroney (Berkeley, CA, 2006). Casimiri, Raffaele, ‘ “Disciplina musicae” et “Maestri di Cappella” dopo il Concilio di Trento nei maggiori ecclesiastici di Roma. Seminario romano—­ Collegio germanico—­ Collegio inglese (Sec. XVI–­ XVII)’, Note d’Archivio per la Storia Musicale, 20 (1943), pp. 1–17. Cichy, Andrew, ‘Parlour, Court and Cloister: Musical Culture in English Convents during the Seventeenth Century’, in Caroline Bowden and James E. Kelly (eds.), The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Communities, Culture and Identity (Farnham, 2013), pp. 175–90. Cichy, Andrew, ‘Music, Meditation, and Martyrdom in a Seventeenth-Century English Seminary’, Music & Letters, 97 (2016), pp. 205–20. Leech, Peter and Maurice Whitehead, ‘ “In Paradise and among Angels”: Music and Musicians at St Omers English Jesuit College, 1593–1721’, Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 61 (2011), pp. 57–82. McCarthy, Kerry, Byrd (New York, 2013). Milsom, John, ‘Sacred Songs in the Chamber’, in John Morehen (ed.), English Choral Practice 1400–1650 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 161–79. Sequera, Hector, ‘House Music for Recusants in Elizabethan England: Performance Practice in the Music Collection of Edward Paston (1550–1630)’ (University of Birmingham PhD thesis, 2010). Wainwright, J. P., ‘Sounds of Piety and Devotion: Music in the Queen’s Chapel’, in Erin Griffey (ed.), Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage(Aldershot, 2008), pp. 195–215.

14 Catholic Written Cultures Susannah Brietz Monta and Salvador Ryan

The circulation of Catholic texts in print and manuscript proved a lifeline for English and Irish Catholics in the early modern period. Written devotional, polemical, martyrological, and historical works shaped Catholic identity, religious praxis, and connections to co-­religionists across the European Continent. Leaders of the English mission hoped that Catholic books printed abroad and on secret domestic presses could stand in for the voices of priests, whose presence in England was both scarce and dangerous.1 Scribal publication also persisted as a way to circulate texts. Together, manuscripts and printed books proved crucial for building and maintaining a sense of an English Catholic collective, persistent through time and space despite legal prohibitions on the practice of Catholicism in England. Yet given its many connections to Continental Catholics, English Catholic written culture was not simply insular. Continental printers produced books for English Catholic readers; these were smuggled into England or used on the Continent by English Catholic exiles.2 Some books by and about English Catholics were designed to engage a Continental readership. Books about English Catholics martyrs, for instance, were popular on the Continent, as the publication of martyrologies in Latin and numerous European vernaculars makes clear.3 Furthermore, although written works played a key role in sustaining the faith in the face of harsh recusant laws, and although possession of Catholic books or manuscripts often proved risky, English Catholic written culture was not recusant in the sense of firmly separated.4 As Susan Royal has noted, print was a major arena in which the battle against Protestantism was waged.5 Some writers 1 Alexandra Walsham, ‘ “Domme Preachers”? Post-­ Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print’, Past and Present, 168 (2000), pp. 72–123. 2  Brad Gregory, ‘Situating Early Modern English Catholicism’, in James E. Kelly and Susan Royal (eds.), Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory, and Counter-­ Reformation (Leiden, 2017), p. 25. 3  For example, the most ambitious English Catholic martyrology was the Concertatio Ecclesiae Catholicae in Anglia, compiled by John Gibbons and first published in Trier in 1583. 4  On the danger of possessing these books, see Earle Havens and Elizabeth Patton, ‘Underground Networks, Prisons, and the Circulation of Counter-­Reformation Books in Elizabethan England’, in Kelly and Royal (eds.), Early Modern English Catholicism, p. 175. 5  Susan Royal, ‘English Catholics and English Heretics: The Lollards and Anti-­Heresy Writing in Early Modern England’, in Kelly and Royal (eds.), Early Modern English Catholicism, p. 122.

Susannah Brietz Monta and Salvador Ryan, Catholic Written Cultures In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume I: Endings and New Beginnings, 1530–1640. Edited by: James E. Kelly and John McCafferty, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843801.003.0015

Catholic Written Cultures  261 deliberately countered influential Protestant texts—­ most notably John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments—­or worked to shift popular literary forms—­like Petrarchan lyric, romance epic, and the complaint poem—­to Catholic religious ends. Yet manuscript copies of Catholic prose and poetry circulated among networks of Catholics and beyond, some printed Catholic works proved popular with Protestant as well as Catholic readers, and some Catholic writers sought out broad, cross-­confessional literary audiences. To study English Catholic written culture, then, is to uncover both its importance for shaping and preserving English Catholic communities and its many complex connections to Continental, mainstream, and Protestant literary cultures. This was also a very formative period for Irish Catholicism. With the influx of new, mostly Protestant, English settlers, it would see efforts to construct an Irish Catholic identity, incorporating the Anglo-­Norman settlers (known as the ‘Old English’) and the Gaelic Irish community under the new category of Éireannach (Irish person), which emphasized their common Catholicism.6 In tandem with this, Irish emigrés on the Continent considered it important to stress Irish Catholicism’s place at the Catholic Reformation table, arguing that, in fact, Irish Catholic figures were Tridentine avant la lettre, and that Irish Catholicism possessed an unblemished reputation when it came to heresy.7 Nonetheless, while these claims were largely aimed at a Continental readership, the perceived need for catechetical and instructional works—­and the levels at which these were pitched—­ suggested considerably less confidence about the state of Irish Catholicism at home. The difficulties involved in circulating these texts, especially in a largely oral culture, were many, and the modes in which they circulated noteworthy; for instance, the verse summaries of portions of catechesis were often more likely to be found copied in manuscript form, detached from their print original, as in some English examples. While Catholic written culture has enjoyed increasing scholarly attention in recent years, English and Irish Catholic works have seldom been studied alongside each other. In what follows, we subdivide our large subject according to three broad generic categories—­devotional prose; devotional poetry; and hagiography, martyrology, and sacred biography—­comparing English and Irish work as we do so, and, to a lesser extent, concurrent literary developments in Wales and 6  The introduction to Robert Rochford’s lives of Patrick, Bridget, and Columba (St Omer, 1625), in the words of Marc Caball, ‘boldly, but confidently, presented Irish nationality and Roman Catholicism as complementary elements in a binary composition’: Marc Caball, ‘Creating an Irish Identity: Print, Culture, and the Irish Franciscans at Louvain’, in Liam Chambers and Thomas O’Connor (eds.), Forming Catholic Communities: Irish, Scots and English College Networks in Europe, 1658–1918 (Leiden, 2018), p. 232. 7  See Salvador Ryan, ‘Holding up a Lamp to the Sun: Hiberno-­Papal Relations and the Construction of Irish Orthodoxy in John Lynch’s Cambrensis Eversus (1662)’, in Peter  D.  Clarke and Charlotte Methuen (eds.), The Church on its Past, SCH 49 (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 168–80.

262  Susannah Brietz Monta and Salvador Ryan Scotland. We do not aim to be comprehensive, an impossibility in a chapter such as this one, but to suggest broad patterns (literary, material, religious, and generic) important for the study of early modern Catholic written cultures, and to model, we hope, the benefits of a comparative approach.

Devotional Prose and Pastoral Care Much early modern Catholic writing takes the form of devotional prose intended to aid prayer, meditation, religious education, and religious commitment. For English Catholics, devotional prose could help constitute Catholic community, bonded by common reading and devotional practices, and connect those communities to Catholics on the Continent (as many translated Continental devotional texts evince).8 Among Irish speakers in Ireland, readers of devotional texts were comparably fewer, and an emphasis on catechisms suggests a perceived need for basic education in the faith.9 Still, Irish devotional literature, much like its English cousins, bears witness to the close ties between Irish and English writers and Continental Catholicism. The dual purpose of fashioning an English Catholic community and maintaining its connection to Catholic devotional practices abroad is evident in George Flinton’s Manual of prayers newly gathered out of many and divers famous authours as well auncient as of the tyme present, first published in Rouen in 1583. The Jesuit Robert Persons established presses abroad for printing devotional works; the Manual was the most prominent of these.10 Early in Elizabeth I’s reign, the production and circulation of Catholic devotional texts were relatively neglected compared to works of apologetics and controversy: between 1559 and 1574, among sixty-­six surviving Catholic titles, ‘there was not a single prayerbook or devotional text’.11 The Manual would go through at least eighty-­three editions between 1583 and 1800, proving to be ‘the most important work of English Catholic devotion next to the Tridentine primer’.12 Much of the Manual’s content derives from a Continental compilation of prayers, Simon Vereept’s Enchiridion Precationes Piarum (first ed. 1565). But Flinton trimmed Vereept’s book to make it more suitable for lay use and added material oriented towards English readers. For instance, Flinton included selections from John Fisher (whose work was only 8  See this volume Chapter 15. 9  Sixteenth- and early-­seventeenth-­century Gaelic Ireland remained predominantly an oral rather than a textual culture: Raymond Gillespie, ‘The Louvain Franciscans and the Culture of Print’, in Raymond Gillespie and Ruairí Ó hUiginn (eds.), Irish Europe, 1600–1650: Writing and Learning (Dublin, 2013), p. 106. 10  See J. M. Blom, The Post-­Tridentine English Primer, CRS Monograph 3 (London, 1982), p. 130. 11 Eamon Duffy, ‘Praying the Counter-­Reformation’, in Kelly and Royal (eds.), Early Modern English Catholicism, p. 210. 12  Duffy, ‘Praying the Counter-­Reformation’.

Catholic Written Cultures  263 lightly excerpted by Vereept), Thomas More, Richard Whitford, and Cuthbert Tunstall, all prominent Tudor Catholic writers.13 Flinton’s inclusion of this ma­ter­ial links Elizabethan Catholics with a tradition of Catholic devotion, from the early Church fathers whose prayers Vereept excerpted to sixteenth-­century English writers. Flinton’s work aims to connect historical Christianity, a popular Continental devotional text, early sixteenth-­ century English religion, and Elizabethan Catholicism. Other devotional texts seek to distinguish the English Catholic community from the established Protestant Church of England. Robert Persons’ Christian Directory urges readers towards greater resolution in their religious lives and discusses motives and obstacles for that resolution. It encourages Catholic readers to embrace recusancy, or separation from the Church of England. In the 1580s and early 1590s, intra-­Catholic controversies persisted over whether Catholics could or should attend Church of England services once per month, as required by law.14 Though it was designed to deepen Catholics’ commitment to their faith and promote recusancy, the book was quickly adapted for Protestant use by the minister, Edmund Bunny, who recognized its devotional power. Aiming to defang Persons’ push for recusancy, Bunny’s adaptation implies that English Catholics could find a devotional home in the Church of England.15 As the different versions of the Christian Directory suggest, the controversy over recusancy—­a controversy over the boundaries and definition of English Catholic community—­continued to inflect Catholic devotional writing throughout the later sixteenth century. In 1587, the Jesuit Robert Southwell’s Epistle of Comfort, his first major work in English, was published on an illegal English press.16 The treatise has its roots, its introduction hints, in pastoral letters written to the imprisoned earl of Arundel, Philip Howard; Southwell then broadened his advice to reach a wider readership.17 Offering comfort and encouragement, the Epistle argues that through their suffering English Catholics participate in the suffering of Christ himself. The work also encourages recusancy, as did many of Southwell’s fellow Jesuits; for Southwell, the Catholic community should be strictly separated from the English Protestant Church.

13  On Flinton’s Manual and Henrician religion, see Susannah Monta, ‘The King’s Psalms—­or the Pope’s? Katherine Parr’s Psalms or Prayers, Scriptural Collage, and English Catholic Devotion’, Reformation, 26 (2021), pp. 8–22. 14  See this volume, Chapter 7. 15  Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom, and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London, 2011), pp. 67–76. 16  It is possible that the press might have been sheltered in a property owned by Anne Howard, countess of Arundel; on her relationship with Southwell, see Susannah Monta, ‘Anne Dacre Howard, Countess of Arundel, and Catholic Patronage’, in Micheline White (ed.), English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625 (Burlington, VT, 2011), p. 65. 17  Robert Southwell, An Epistle of Comfort (London, 1587), A2.

264  Susannah Brietz Monta and Salvador Ryan Like Persons’ Christian Directory and Southwell’s Epistle of Comfort, English Catholic rosary treatises intertwine devotion with religious controversy. The practice of rosary prayer, promoted by English Jesuit missionaries for pastoral and catechetical purposes, aimed to consolidate Catholic identity and connect English Catholics with Continental practices.18 In his 1593 treatise The Society of the Rosary, the Jesuit Henry Garnet stresses the ease of the society’s requirements (one need only pray the rosary once per week) and that those who participate share in the good works of society members as a whole: the rosary becomes a simple way to maintain spiritual community.19 Garnet also adapted his Italian and Latin sources so that English Catholics might be part of a religious collective despite the legal prohibition of their faith. For instance, Garnet’s sources require confraternity members to give public signs of their participation, something impossible for English Catholics. Garnet instead suggests that English Catholic readers can join the international confraternity simply by practicing rosary devotion in the relative safety of their own homes.20 This is not to say that rosary devotion was somehow private in the sense of pertaining only to the domestic sphere; for Garnet, rosary prayer could combat the ‘deluge of heresie and of all maner of iniquitie’ threatening the English nation.21 In his hands, Mary is the scourge of heretics; the rosary prayer invokes her aid, builds Catholic community at home and abroad, and challenges English Protestant ‘heresy’. The most significant developments in early modern Irish Catholic devotional and pastoral literature can be traced to the extensive networks of Irish emigrés across Continental Europe. In the wake of the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603), which culminated in the Battle of Kinsale, many avenues of secular patronage previously open to members of traditional hereditary learned families dried up, leading a number of native Irish literati to seek new futures in the service of the Church.22 Some of these would become members of the Franciscan order, such as Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire (Florence Conry) who established a college dedicated to St Anthony at Louvain in 1607, which would, over time, lead to Flanders becoming something of a catechetical laboratory for a number of religious works produced there. The period from 1586 to 1621 saw the first generation of Irish military service on a grand scale in Continental Europe.23 From the very beginning, there were close ties between the Irish regiment and the Irish Franciscans. 18  Anne Dillon, ‘Praying by Number: The Confraternity of the Rosary and the English Catholic Community, c. 1580–1700’, History, 88 (2003), pp. 451–71. 19  Henry Garnet, The Society of the Rosary (London[?], 1593), pp. 26, 12. 20 Garnet, The Society of the Rosary, pp. 16–21. 21 Garnet, The Society of the Rosary, A2r. 22 Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Catholic Intellectual Culture in Early Modern Ireland’, in Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin and Robert Armstrong (eds), Christianities in the Early Modern Celtic World (London, 2014), p. 152. 23  Mary Ann Lyons, ‘St Anthony’ College Louvain: Gaelic Texts and Articulating Irish Identity’, in Edel Bhreatnach, Joseph MacMahon, OFM, and John McCafferty (eds.), The Irish Franciscans, 1534–1990 (Dublin, 2009), p. 22.

Catholic Written Cultures  265 The Guardian of St Anthony’s, Aodh Mac Aingil, appointed in 1607, had been assigned chief chaplain of the Irish regiment in Flanders the previous year, and many of its men had near relatives in this Irish Franciscan house.24 From the late sixteenth century, a number of Irish translations of Tridentine catechetical texts were produced on the Continent, each with its own format, approach, and degree of detail. A question-­and-­answer catechism compiled by Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire in 1593 was a translation of a work by the Spanish Jesuit Jerónimo de Ripalda, and, at just twenty pages in manuscript form, was most likely designed for use by children and adults with little education.25 Although we have little evidence of the level of success such catechisms had in Ireland, a report from Lord Deputy Chichester to the Privy Council in 1607 conveys a degree of anxiety regarding the influx of Catholic clergy whose aim it was to catechize: ‘They [priests] land here secretly in every port and creek of the realm . . . Children and servants are wholly taught and catechised by them, esteeming the same a sound and safe foundation of their synagogue’.26 Bonaventura Ó hEodhasa’s Irish language catechism, An Teagasg Críosdaidhe, printed by Jacob Mesius of Antwerp in 1611, was the first of a series of printed works produced by friars of St Anthony’s, and is likely to have been the text spotted by one Richard Morres who, on making his way through the Low Countries, recorded how he ‘saw one of the books among the Irish soldiers printed in Irish at Antwerp and set forth by the Irish friars at Louvain confirming their own religion, and to the contrary infirming and refusing that of the Protestants’.27 This catechism was soon reprinted, this time by a printing press at St Anthony’s itself around 1614, before enjoying a third printing by Propaganda Fide in Rome in 1707. Morys Clynnog produced a Welsh adaptation of the Jesuit Diego de Ledesma’s catechism in 1568, known as the Athrawaeth Gristnogawl, printed in Milan, the first Counter-­Reformation prose text in Welsh which, Angharad Price contends, was ‘one of the few Counter-­Reformation publications known to have reached Welsh readers’.28 But this text had its critics. Robert Gwyn of Penyberth regarded it as unsuitable to the Welsh mission, as it did not devote sufficient space to apologetics, and he further stated that he knew better what kind of text was needed, as he was still living in Wales whereas Clynnog was an exile who had long lost touch

24  Lyons, ‘St Anthony’ College Louvain’, pp. 31–3. 25  Salvador Ryan, ‘Continental Catechisms and their Irish Imitators in Spanish Habsburg Lands, c.1550–c.1650’, in Raymond Gillespie and Ruairí Ó hUiginn (eds.), Irish Europe, 1600–1650: Writing and Learning (Dublin, 2013), p. 167f. 26  Thomas S. Flynn, OP, The Irish Dominicans 1536–1641 (Dublin, 1993), p. 134. 27  Gillespie, ‘The Louvain Franciscans and the Culture of Print’, p. 110. 28  Angharad Price, ‘Welsh Humanism after 1536’, in Geraint Evans and Helen Fulton (eds.), The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature (Cambridge, 2019), p. 189.

266  Susannah Brietz Monta and Salvador Ryan with their native land.29 And yet the reality remained; Jane Stevenson, referring to Scotland, remarks that ‘Catholic literary culture thrived on the continent, but not at home’.30 The efforts of the Catholic reform movement in Scotland have been, to date, understudied, and yet there are important survivals such as the 1552 catechism by John Hamilton, archbishop of St Andrews. It was printed in Scots and, in addition to the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Seven Sacraments, it instructed its readers in ‘the maner how christin men an wemen suld mak their prayer to God’.31 Directed, in the first instance, at the instruction of clergy themselves, it was to be read to the laity by their curates for half an hour every Sunday and holy day. The catechism is noted for its moderate approach and goes out of its way to avoid offending Protestant sensibilities, mentioning the papacy only once, and avoiding use of the term ‘Mass’ when referring to the Eucharist; this makes it a curiously hybrid composition.32 Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire’s Desiderius, a part translation of a Catalan devotional work (with significant additions directed at the plight of Irish Catholics at home), was published in 1616, and Aodh Mac Aingil’s Scáthán Shacramuinte na hAithridhe, a treatise on the Sacrament of Penance, in 1618, both at Louvain.33 In 1645, Antoin Gearnon would produce Parrthas an Anma (The Paradise of the Soul), a catechism-­cum-­prayerbook, after having recently returned to Louvain from a period of mission in Ireland, which likely provided him with a keen insight into the particular needs of Irish Catholics on the ground.34 Although these works staunchly defended traditional Catholic beliefs and devotional practices against the criticisms of the reformers, there are nonetheless instances in which they also seek to curb some of the excesses of late medieval piety. For instance, in his discussion of the Last Judgement, Gearnon introduces a curb on the intercessory powers of the Virgin Mary and the saints. In asking whether God favours a person on account of their intercession, he responds that ‘he doesn’t, except to the 29  James January-­McCann, ‘Exiles and Activists: A Comparison of the Counter-­Reformation in Wales and Norway’, in James  E.  Kelly, Henning Laugerud, and Salvador Ryan (eds.), Northern European Reformations: Transnational Perspectives (Cham, 2020), p. 169. Also James January-­ McCann, ‘ “Y gwysanaeth prydwysaidd yn y gwledydd yma”: Portrayals of Continental and English Catholicism in Sixteenth Century Wales’, in Raimund Carl and Katharina Möller (eds.), Proceedings of the Second European Symposium in Celtic Studies (Hagen and Westf., 2018), p. 12. 30  Jane Stevenson, ‘Catholics in Scotland: Overview and Literary Culture’, in Robert E. Scully, SJ, with Angela Ellis (eds.), A Companion to Catholicism and Recusancy in Britain and Ireland: From Reformation to Emancipation (Leiden, 2022), p. 289. 31  Stephen Mark Holmes, ‘The Scottish Reformation was not Protestant’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, 14 (2014), p. 121. 32 Alec Ryrie, ‘Reform without Frontiers in the Last Years of Catholic Scotland’, The English Historical Review, 119 (2004), pp. 34–5. 33 Aodh Mac Aingil, Scáthán Shacramuinte na hAithridhe, ed. Cainneach Ó Maonaigh, OFM (Dublin, 1952). 34  Salvador Ryan, ‘A Wooden Key to open Heaven’s Door: Lessons in Practical Catholicism from St Anthony’s College, Louvain’, in Bhreatnach, MacMahon, and McCafferty (eds.), The Irish Franciscans, 1534–1990, pp. 221–32.

Catholic Written Cultures  267 extent that [the person’s] deeds deserved’.35 This marks a radical departure from the message found in many medieval Marian exempla. Likewise, Aodh Mac Aingil, in his tract on penance, asks whether it is more beneficial to possess an indulgenced medal or crucifix, or to join a confraternity. He replies that it is far better to be a member of a confraternity since, apart from receiving indulgences, one shares in the good deeds of all the confrères, frequenting the sacraments and performing works of mercy.36 Yet, despite efforts to reform certain aspects of Catholic practice in the light of higher Tridentine standards, such measures needed to be couched in the reassuring language of continuity, not change. Indeed, Mac Aingil introduces this same work by reminding his readers that ‘I do not give you new teaching but [instead] the old tune of repentance that Patrick played, and that came down from saints in our own land through deed and word; this is [the tune] I play’.37 Works of devotional prose or catechetical instruction produced on the Continent, or translated from Continental models from which they drew their inspiration, required a degree of adaptability if they were to be effective among the communities for which they were ultimately destined. What it meant to be a confraternity member in England or Ireland could be quite different to the ex­peri­ence on the Continent. Doubts expressed by Robert Gwyn about the s­ uitability of Morrys Clynnog’s Welsh catechism on account of the author’s long-­term exile might be contrasted with the confidence of Antoin Gearnon in compiling his Irish catechism on the Continent, fresh from a period of ministry in Ireland. Likewise, the textual fashioning of Catholic communities was hardly a straightforward exercise, and these, sometimes fictive communities, often meant different things, depending on where one lived and practised one’s Catholicism.

Devotional Poetry Devotional poetry was critically important for early modern Catholic written culture. It can serve as an archive of Catholic devotional thought and practice, polemical and apologetic work, and literary engagement with both Catholic trad­ itions and Protestant culture. In recent years much work has been done on the religious works of Irish bardic poets whose compositions date from the thirteenth to the early seventeenth century. Despite their highly stylized form, a close study of their content can help chart the borrowing and growth of particular devotions over time throughout the late medieval period.38 Just as native Irish poets consistently responded to the development of devotions in England and the Continent, 35  Parrthas an Anma, ed. Anselm Ó Fachtna (Dublin, 1953), p. 187. 36  Mac Aingil, Scáthán, p. 196. 37  Mac Aingil, Scáthán, p. 5. 38  Salvador Ryan, ‘A Slighted Source: Rehabilitating Irish Bardic Religious Poetry in Historical Discourse’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 48 (2004), pp. 75–100.

268  Susannah Brietz Monta and Salvador Ryan which, in turn, reflected the evolving religious tastes of their patrons, so too did they engage with the confessional disputes of their day. A highly polemical poem, c.1583, attributed to Eoghan Ó Dubhthaigh, whom Richard Stanihurst described as ‘a preacher and maker in Irish’, addresses itself to three individuals who had fallen into heresy, namely Matthew Sheyne, Protestant bishop of Cork (1572–82), William Casey, appointed for the second time as Protestant bishop of Limerick in 1571, and Miler McGrath, Protestant bishop of Cashel and a former Franciscan. Among other slurs, he contrasts the Virgin Mary with Sheyne’s (non-­virginal) mother who gave birth to a son who took Beelzebub as his lord, and looks forward to the day when ‘Jesus shall drive the uxorious clergy, who say no office, from His right hand, each with his wife beside him, reciting vespers in hell along with him’.39 In another poem, A Bhanba, is truagh do chor (Ireland, pitiful is your plight), he  pitted the figures of Luther and Calvin (representing Protestantism) against St Patrick, Irish Catholicism’s bulwark, underlining the Reformation’s alien nature.40 Poetry would serve an important catechetical function in the religious works of the Irish Franciscans at Louvain, many of whom were sons of poetic, learned families. Each section of Bonaventura Ó hEodhasa’s An Teagasg Críosdaidhe was prefaced by verse summaries of the principal points, and these summaries, detached from their host, would circulate in manuscript form as late as the nineteenth century, this dual dissemination combining tradition and innovation.41 The use of verse as a mnemonic device in catechizing was hardly an innovation, and can be found widely employed from the later Middle Ages into the early modern period.42 In Wales, Gruffydd Robert, nephew of Morys Clynnog who was first rector of the Seminarium Britannicum in Rome, produced a grammar of the Welsh language in 1567 and appended a metrical catechism which included the Creed, the Ave Maria, the Ten Commandments, the Seven Sacraments, and the Beatitudes.43 Moreover, between 1577 and 1584, the Catholic priest and later martyr Richard White (also known as Richard Gwynn) composed a series of easily memorized Welsh carols aimed at a non-­literate audience. Among other things, these dealt with topics such as the rosary and the evils of the Reformation, and warned hearers against attending Protestant services. Owing to the slow impact of print in Welsh and Irish society, Counter-­Reformation efforts were ‘multimedia in their outreach’.44 39  Cuthbert Mhág Craith (ed.), Dán na mbráthar mionúr, 2 vols (1967–80), poem 27, vv. 24, 85. 40  Cunningham, ‘Catholic Intellectual Culture’, p. 156. 41  Caball, ‘Creating an Irish Identity’, p. 240. John McCafferty asserts that ‘manuscript transmission in Irish was markedly more vigorous and vital than for most other European vernaculars’: see John McCafferty, ‘Becoming Irish Catholics: Ireland, 1534–1690’, in Scully with Ellis (eds.), A Companion to Catholicism and Recusancy, p. 250. 42  See discussion of this in Ryan, ‘Continental Catechisms’, pp. 168–70. 43  January-­McCann, ‘Exiles and Activists’, p. 166. 44  Patrick Collinson, Arnold Hunt, and Alexandra Walsham, ‘Religious Publishing in England, 1557–1640’, in Richard Gameson et al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. IV (Cambridge, 2002), p. 55. We are grateful to James January-­McCann for drawing our attention to these carols.

Catholic Written Cultures  269 While traditionally the compositions of Irish poets were gathered into poem-­books produced at a local level, and contained the works of that particular family, by the early decades of the seventeenth century a greater sense of an emerging natio among emigré Irish Catholic elites gave rise to the production of manuscript collections such as the Book of the O’Conor Don. This poem-­book was commissioned by the Antrim privateer Somhairle MacDomhnaill in Ostend in 1631. It originally comprised a collection of some 371 bardic poems, both ­secular and religious, from poetic families across the island, and spanning the full range of bardic composition.45 While many of the poems feature common themes of late medieval spirituality, others were more recent compositions, incorporating contemporary concerns. The collection contains a number of poems by the Donegal poet Fearghal Óg Mac and Bhaird, who sought patronage from the Irish Franciscan Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire at Louvain in the early seventeenth century.46 In 1580, Mac an Bhaird had spent some time in Scotland and enjoyed the patronage of James VI.47 And yet, in the poem Dursan m’eachtra go hAlbuin (‘Hard my journey to Scotland’), composed during his stay there, he laments that he has left ‘clergy and Mass’ behind for ‘worldly treasures’, and states that had he all Alba’s gold and silver, it would be ‘better once to hear Mass than it all’. His commentary becomes overtly confessional when he declares that ‘Alba, alas! believes not as she should that the High-­King’s blood flows into the Host; but I hold by his ordinance’. What is noteworthy is that, to copper-­fasten his doctrinal point, he draws from a well-­known medieval exemplum, the story of the Jew who enters a church and stabs the Eucharistic host, and recounts how the city is thereafter flooded with Christ’s blood.48 The redeployment of older religious sources, such as medieval exempla, to engage with current polemical issues would be a feature of many early modern Irish Catholic writers, including figures such as Bonaventura Ó hEodhasa, Aodh Mac Aingil, Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire, and, later, Geoffrey Keating. It also helps explain why poem collections such as the Book of the O’Conor Don, containing many older compositions, could find fresh relevance in the seventeenth century. While English Catholic poets too could draw on medieval materials—­such as Aquinas’ hymns for Corpus Christi—­they also sought to engage deeply with English Protestant political, religious, and literary cultures. As Alison Shell has explained, the boundaries and definitions of early modern English Catholic

45  Lyons, ‘St Anthony’ College Louvain’, p. 42; Salvador Ryan, ‘Florilegium of Faith: The Religious Poems in the Book of the O’Conor Don’, in Pádraig Ó Macháin (ed.), The Book of the O’Conor Don: Essays on an Irish Manuscript (Dublin, 2010), pp. 61–87. 46  Pádraig Ó Macháin, ‘The Flight of the Poets: Eoghan Ruadh and Fearghal Óg Mac an Bhaird in Exile’, Seanchas Ard Mhacha, 21/2 (2007/8), pp. 39–58. 47  Marc Caball, ‘Mac an Bhaird, Fearghal’, Dictionary of Irish Biography. 48 Lambert McKenna (ed.), Aithdioghluim Dána, 2 vols. (Dublin and London, 1939–40), II, pp. 120–2.

270  Susannah Brietz Monta and Salvador Ryan poetry are often murky, in our field and in our bibliographic tools.49 Must English Catholic poetry concern distinctively Catholic doctrines, for instance, or boast a known Catholic readership? Even Catholic authorship is not a clear-­cut guide, for writers such as Henry Constable, William Alabaster, Ben Jonson, and John Donne all converted to or away from Catholicism during their poetic careers.50 Catholic poetry also crossed religious lines, and Catholics read and appreciated Protestant poets such as George Herbert and Edmund Spenser. And the range of positions that English Catholic poetry takes with respect to English literary culture is broad. Richard Verstegan’s 1599 English translation of the Tridentine Primer includes poetic translations of hymns used in the Offices of the Church. His translations bring those Latin hymns into one of the most important vernacular works of daily devotion; there, poetry shapes and voices contemporary Catholic prayer in keeping with centuries of tradition. Other Catholic poetry looks both inward, towards the consolidation of the Catholic community, and outward, vigorously chal­len­ ging Protestant literature. Examples include some of William Alabaster’s fiery religious sonnets and Anthony Copley’s A Fig for Fortune, which evinces both his admiration for Edmund Spenser and his determination to rewrite the religious terms of Spenser’s romance epic.51 Some Catholic poetry laments Reformation-­era changes, such as an anonymous poem mourning the destruction of Walsingham’s Marian shrine.52 Other poems explicate Catholic beliefs, such as Constable’s sonnet on ‘The Blessed Sacrament’.53 Addressed to a group of exile English nuns, Richard Verstegan’s collection Odes in imitation of the seaven penitential psalmes, with sundry other poems and ditties tending to devotion and pietie (Antwerp, 1601) exemplifies the range of Catholic poetry: the volume includes a sequence of twelve-­line sonnets on the rosary, lyrics in praise of Mary, poetic translations of the seven penitential psalms, religious ballads, and anti-­Protestant poems. As a consequence of Catholic poets’ efforts at broad engagement, some found readers both within and beyond the Catholic community. The period’s most prominent English Catholic poet, Robert Southwell, was a best-­seller in print. His  work circulated in manuscript among Catholic readers and found a cross-­ confessional readership through legally printed editions in which the most overtly 49 Alison Shell, ‘What is a Catholic Poem? Explicitness and Censorship in Tudor and Stuart Religious Verse’, in Andrew Hadfield (ed.), Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 95–111. 50  Constable, a Catholic convert, wrote secular and religious sonnets. Jonson wrote a poem during his Catholic period protesting the ‘destruction of churches by government decree’: Robert S. Miola, Early Modern Catholicism: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Oxford, 2007), p. 167. The serial convert Alabaster wrote religious sonnets during his Catholic period. Donne was born into a Catholic family, but eventually embraced a complex conformity: Dennis Flynn, John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility (Bloomington, IN, 1995). 51  Susannah Monta (ed.), A Fig for Fortune by Anthony Copley: A Catholic Response to The Faerie Queene (Manchester, 2016). 52 Miola, Early Modern Catholicism, pp. 172–3. 53 Miola, Early Modern Catholicism, pp. 190–1.

Catholic Written Cultures  271 Catholic material was cut and the common manuscript order of the poems re­arranged.54 Southwell used the Jesuit principle of sacred parody to adapt popular poetic forms. While Southwell is rightly credited with importing Counter-­ Reformation tears poetry, his poetry also shows his familiarity with the English literary culture he seeks to enter and reshape. For instance, in his longest and most complex poem, Saint Peters Complaint, Southwell adapts his Italian precedent (Luigi Tansillo’s Le lacrimi di San Pietro) to the English genre of the complaint, and redirects Petrarchan conceits to describe Peter’s remorse after his denial of Christ.55 Perhaps responding to contemporary interest in poetic psalm translation, his ‘Davids Peccavi’ begins with images found in Psalm 101/102 and contains a possible allusion to the work of Philip Sidney, that famous translator of the psalms.56 Southwell’s work, especially in its manuscript circulation, clearly aims to minister to English Catholics. Indeed, the differences between the manuscript and print collections point up the complexities of studying English Catholic ‘written culture’. In the manuscript collections, the opening sequence of poems focuses on Christ and the Virgin Mary. The sequence is built around Catholic liturgical feasts for the virgin—­no longer publicly celebrated in post-­Reformation England. Only selected poems from this sequence appear in the printed editions. Manuscript collections boast as well his translation of Aquinas’ hymn ‘Lauda Sion Salvatorem’ (a celebration of the Eucharist) and Southwell’s hagiographical poem on the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots at the hands of Elizabeth I’s government. Southwell’s verse insists on commitment to religious causes above all; because we are, as one poem that appears in both manuscript and print collections puts it, only ‘At Home in Heaven’, love for anyone over God is ‘base’. It is not hard to see in these lines Southwell’s habitual call for English Catholics to practice strict recusancy. Yet in its printed forms Southwell’s work, with its determined reorienting of popular secular genres, had immediate impact with Protestants also. His ‘[Epistle to the reader]’ asserts that only religious verse is worthy of poets’ attention, and as Shell has suggested it hit hard with Protestant readers: Southwell’s volumes stimulated the print market for devotional poetry and encouraged no less a writer than George Herbert to take up his call for exclusive dedication to religious verse.57 Even Scottish Presbyterians such as Alexander Hume read and imitated Southwell.58 54  Robert S. Miola, ‘Publishing the Word: Robert Southwell’s Sacred Poetry’, The Review of English Studies, 64 (2013), pp. 410–32. 55 Emily Ransom, ‘Redeeming Complaint in Tudor and Stuart devotional Lyric’ (University of Notre Dame PhD dissertation, 2016). 56  See ll. 19, 23, 27, 30. 57 Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge, 1999), ch. 2; see Herbert’s sonnet ‘My God where is that ancient heat’. 58 Susannah Monta, ‘Martyrdom in Print in Early Modern England: The Case of Robert Waldegrave’, in Johann Leemans and Jurgen Mettepenningen (eds.), More Than a Memory: The Discourse of Martyrdom and the Construction of Religious Identity in the History of Christianity (Leuven, 2005), pp. 271–93.

272  Susannah Brietz Monta and Salvador Ryan In its manuscript and print forms, then, Southwell’s verse both reinforces and crosses religious boundaries, challenging the idea of a separated or recusant literary culture even as that verse also seeks to minister to a beleaguered Catholic community. As Southwell’s example suggests, in comparison to Irish writers, English Catholic writers felt more keenly the pressures from Protestant literary culture and responded accordingly, using medieval precedent to a lesser extent and favouring instead direct engagements with dominant literary forms, habits, and movements. Yet they shared with their Irish contemporaries a desire to engage with polemical debates and to foster devotion through the resources of verse.

Hagiography and Biography In Irish and English hagiography and sacred biography, the impact of Tridentine reforms, a desire to highlight historical continuity, and the defence of Catholic teaching concerning saints are readily visible. Developments in the realm of hagiography and sacred history during this period must also be considered against the backdrop of contemporary debates surrounding Christian origins, and confessional claims to authentic Christianity as exemplified in the early Church. While this subject cannot be fully explored here, navigating these issues necessitated a series of careful balancing acts between ideas of continuity and change on the part of all protagonists.59 For English Catholics, hagiographical writing took three major forms: new versions of saints’ lives from earlier eras; biographical writing about con­tem­por­ ary Catholics who, while not saints or martyrs, were presented as worthy of praise and imitation; and martyrologies, or narratives about contemporary Catholic martyrs celebrating them as heroes of the faith despite the treason charges under which they suffered. In the wake of the Council of Trent’s reforms, Catholic hagiographers both defended and revised traditional saints’ lives. Alonso de Villegas’ Flos Sanctorum (first ed. Madrid, 1586), one of the most popular vernacular collections of saints’ lives, was first translated into English in 1609 by Edmund Kinesman. Organized according to the liturgical calendar, this collection suited saints’ lives to Counter-­Reformation emphases. Thus, in the life of St George, patron saint of England, his famous dragon fight is mentioned only briefly in a headnote; his life focuses instead on his witness as a martyr in Rome. Both Alonso’s original and Kinesman’s popular English translation are aware of Protestant attacks on Catholic hagiography and adopt a relatively sober Tridentine 59  See especially Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2008); Katherine van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan (eds.), Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World (Oxford, 2012).

Catholic Written Cultures  273 stance. In his Historiae Catholicae Hiberniae (1621), Philip O’Sullivan Beare highlights what he considers to be the miscomprehension of Protestants regarding the Catholic cult of the saints. In a story relating to the city of Derry (under the patronage of St Columcille/Columba), he recounts how English soldiers entered and desecrated some churches in the town, including one in which gunpowder was kept. The sudden appearance of a mysterious wolf with sparks showering from his mouth caused the church to catch fire, resulting in the loss of many Englishmen in the conflagration. Some of the survivors were heard to cry ‘The Irish god Columba killed us all!’, which attracts the following riposte from the writer: Mark the words of the barbarous heretics! As if the Irish worshipped St Columba as a god and not as a faithful servant of God who, because he observed the commandments of his creator, and because of his holy and innocent life, is noted in the calendar of saints for many miracles.60

There was also a demand among the Irish for new and more acceptable versions of saints’ lives. Richard Stanihurst’s De Vita S. Patricii, published at Antwerp in 1587, heavily used biblical and patristic sources as hermeneutical keys to the life of St Patrick. But the renewed interest in hagiography at this time had several motivations: a recognized need to locate and preserve older hagiographical ma­ter­ial, existing in manuscript or oral form, from oblivion in a period of great upheaval;61 the redeployment of saints’ lives to edify and instruct the faithful62 (which often involved the recasting of traditional figures in Counter-­Reformation dress); a reclaiming of the lives of early Irish saints to directly counter Protestant polemic in cases where it had co-­opted these figures as champions of the reformers’ cause;63 and, finally, the need to remodel the lives of Irish saints to bring them in line with the more stringent standards of Trent, and not least to showcase to Continental readers that Irish saints could confidently compete with their European counterparts. The frontispiece of Thomas Messingham’s Florilegium sanctorum seu vitae et acta sanctorum Hiberniae (1624) depicts St Patrick in baroque vestments to underline his Tridentine credentials, while Robert Rochford’s The Life of the Glorious Bishop S. Patricke (1625) explicitly identified many features of his life that ‘would sound very harshly in Protestant eares’, 60  Ireland under Elizabeth: Chapters Towards a History of Ireland in the Reign of Elizabeth, ed. and trans. Matthew J. Byrne (Dublin, 1903), pp. 4–5. 61  For example, the Franciscan John Colgan’s Triadis Thaumaturgae of 1647 contained seven lives of Patrick, six of Brigid, and five of Columcille: Canice Mooney, ‘Father John Colgan OFM: His Work, Times, and Literary Milieu’, in Terence O’Donnell (ed.), Father John Colgan OFM, 1592–1658 (Dublin, 1959), p. 35. 62 See Salvador Ryan, ‘Steadfast Saints or Malleable Models? Seventeenth-­ Century Irish Hagiography Revisited’, The Catholic Historical Review, 91 (2005), pp. 258–9. 63  See Ryan, ‘Steadfast Saints’, p. 264.

274  Susannah Brietz Monta and Salvador Ryan including ‘quires of sacred virgins . . . troupes of holy monkes . . . holy water . . . vessels of holy oyles . . . the signe of the crosse’.64 This approach had a precedent in the Irish poetry of Eoghan Ó Dubhthaigh, discussed above, who contrasted the lives of reformed clergy with the life of St Patrick: ‘if the clergy of the present day attain heaven, that son of Calpurn [Patrick] was a nincompoop!’65 The impetus to depict the Irish as suitably subscribed to the ideals of the Catholic Reformation is evident in the writing of notable biographies in the early seventeenth century. A good example is Lughaidh Ó Cléirigh’s Beatha Aodha Ruaidh Uí Dhomhnaill (The Life of Red Hugh O’Donnell), which Mícheál Mac Craith argues was composed as a work of propaganda in favour of Hugh O’Donnell (nephew of Red Hugh) leading a military invasion of Ireland in September 1627, and was intended to be translated into Latin for a Continental audience.66 In this case, particularly, it was important that its subject be regarded as an exemplary Counter-­Reformation Catholic. To that end, he is depicted as fully observing his Easter duties in 1595 with his troops, and as having a ‘prudent, pious cleric’ with him at all times ‘to offer Mass and the pure, mysterious sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ’. Before each expedition, he would fast for three days and confess his sins to his confessor. Moreover, Tridentine observance ran in the family. His brother, Manus, was portrayed as having ‘confessed his sins without any concealment’ in the days leading up to his death, and having ‘received the Body of the Lord’ before dying on 22 October 1600.67 The work itself is written in a highly archaic style, but despite this, in the words of Hiram Morgan, ‘it succeeds in making contemporary Catholic Reformation aspirations appear mainstays of tradition’.68 Brendan Kane argues something similar in the case of the writings of Geoffrey Keating.69 This is a significant point and is key to understanding a wide range of Irish Catholic literature during this period.70 English Catholics also produced biographies praising contemporary figures as  witnesses of the faith and/or models for imitation. Philip Howard, earl of Arundel, spent the last ten years of his life in prison; convicted of treason in 1589, he lingered in the Tower until his death of apparently natural causes in 1595. A manuscript biography of his life insists on his post-­conversion exemplarity and twice repeats Cornelius á Lapide’s generous conclusion that he was ‘a Glorious 64  Ryan, ‘Steadfast Saints’, p. 262. 65  Ryan, ‘Steadfast Saints’. 66  Mícheál Mac Craith, ‘The Beatha in the Context of the Literature of the Renaissance’, in Pádraig Ó Riain (ed.), The Life of Red Hugh O’Donnell: Historical and Literary Contexts (London, 2002), pp. 36–53. 67  Lughaidh Ó Cléirigh, Beatha Aodha Ruaidh Uí Dhomhnaill, ed. Paul Walsh, 2 vols. (London, 1948–57), pp. 89, 225, 277. 68  Cited in Cunningham, ‘Catholic Intellectual Culture’, p. 154. 69 Brendan Kane, ‘Domesticating the Counter-­Reformation: Bridging the Bardic and Catholic Traditions in Geoffrey Keating’s The Three Shafts of Death’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 40 (2009), pp. 1029–44. 70 Marc Caball points to the ‘seamless linkage of native tradition to Counter-­ Reformation Catholicism’, which contrasts with Protestantism ‘presented as an alien imposition’: Caball, ‘Creating an Irish Identity’, p. 241.

Catholic Written Cultures  275 Confessor, yea a Martyr’.71 A manuscript biography of his wife Anne Howard, countess of Arundel, urges readers to ‘imitate her vertues’ so that ‘they may come to be partakers of the Glory which she doth possess in heaven’.72 Similarly, in the preface to his 1609 biography of Lady Magdalene Browne, the priest Richard Smith disagrees with those who think only saints’ lives should be recorded, asserting that God’s ‘lesser stars’ are important exemplary models: ‘they who despair to imitate the admirable sanctity of St Mary Magdalene may see themselves capable to attain the piety of Magdalen Viscountess Montague’.73 Smith’s biography draws on hagiographic models such as Augustine’s remarks about his mother St Monica and Jerome’s epistolary biography of St Paula to assimilate his ‘lesser star’ to Catholic tradition.74 The largest category of English Catholic hagiographic writing was concerned with contemporary martyrs. Texts and images commemorating martyrs proved popular within and beyond the English Catholic community, appearing in Latin and European vernaculars.75 English Catholic martyrologists faced two daunting tasks: turning those executed under treason laws into religious martyrs and contesting John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, which proclaimed a continuous witness of martyrs for the Protestant cause, from the early Church to those executed under the Catholic Mary  I.  Written in Latin for an international audience and revised and expanded throughout the period, the collection entitled Concertatio Ecclesia Catholicae in Anglia (first ed. Trier, 1583) offered the fullest English Catholic response to Foxe’s work. Robert Persons’ A Treatise of Three Conversions (St Omer, 1603–4) systematically challenges Foxe’s historiography, discredits his martyrs, and proclaims a continuous English history of Catholic witness. To contest treason charges and proclaim their faith’s historical continuity, Catholic martyrologists linked their subjects to biblical and hagiographical trad­ ition. In the anonymous ballad ‘A Complaint on Campion’, the Jesuit priest Edmund Campion’s treason conviction is likened to the false accusation (in Luke 23:2) that Jesus forbade his followers to pay tribute to Caesar: They . . . say he is not Caesars frende, accusing him of treasone. But shal we mutche lament the same, or shall we more rejoyce, Such was the case with Christ our lord . . . 71  Arundel Castle Archives, MS BN 8, 95, 97. 72  Arundel Castle Archives, MS BN 9, 104. 73 Richard Smith, An Elizabethan Recusant House, Comprising the Life of the Lady Magdalen, Viscountess Montague (1538–1608), ed. A. G. Southern (London, 1954), pp. 4–5. 74 Jerome’s posthumous biography of Paula is Letter no. 108. Smith’s last two chapters quote Augustine’s praise of Monica in Book 9 of the Confessions (Smith, An Elizabethan Recusant House, pp. 68, 70–1). 75 See, inter alia, Diego de Yepez, Historia Particular (Madrid, 1599); and Adam Blackwood, Histoire de la martyre de la royne de royne d’Escosse (Paris, 1589).

276  Susannah Brietz Monta and Salvador Ryan In the first Elizabethan Catholic martyrology, Thomas Alfield’s A true reporte, Campion begins to address the crowd at his execution before he is quickly silenced: ‘We are made a spectacle, or a sight unto God, unto his Angels, and unto men: verified this day in me, who am here a spectacle unto my lorde god, a spectacle unto his angels, & unto you men.’76 Campion quotes I Corinthians 4:9, a key verse in martyrological discourse at least since Origen’s early-­ third-­ century Exhortation to Martyrdom.77 In William Cardinal Allen’s A Briefe Historie (1582) the soon-­to-­be-­martyred Thomas Cottam echoes the verse—‘O Lord, what a spectacle hast thou made unto me?’—as he views the head of Laurence Richardson, executed before him.78 In both instances, the priests connect their deaths to hagiographic tradition, despite the treason charges under which they suffer. As the biographies of Anne Howard and Magdalene Browne illustrate, women were critical to the English Catholic mission: they sheltered priests in their homes, hid materials for liturgies, and, early in the period, were less vulnerable to recusancy’s financial penalties. Hence, Catholic martyrologists also addressed what we might call petty treason: the religious rebellion of wives. The Yorkshire butcher’s wife Margaret Clitherow, executed in 1586, was celebrated by her martyrologist John Mush as both a holy martyr and an ideal housewife. Clitherow was flagrantly defiant in her Catholicism;79 while Mush portrays her as staunchly faithful, he  also suggests that she was meekly submissive to her confessor and that her husband praised her as ‘the best wife in all England’.80 For Mush, her martyrdom crowns her faithful behaviour during her life; the latter gets most of his attention, as he urges others to imitate her ‘first martyrdom’ of a virtuous (and firmly recusant Catholic) life. Mush’s account reached insular and Continental audiences, though in different forms. One Yorkshire manuscript combines Mush’s version of Clitherow’s arrest, trial, and execution with Southwell’s treatise A Short Rule for Good Life, on the ideal governing of a Catholic household.81 This com­bin­ation links domestic virtue to the fidelity of a martyr. An excerpted version of Mush’s account, published in 1619, cut his narration of her domestic life, including only events from her arrest to her death.82 For Continental readers, her patience in the face of execution was paramount; in the English manuscript tradition, domestic fidelity to Catholicism was just as important. In both cases, her life is to model and shape Catholic identity, and to encourage support for the English mission. As noted in Clodagh Tait’s chapter on martyrs, fewer sources exist for Irish martyrs than for their British counterparts, yet those that do exist are significant. 76  A true reporte of the death & martyrdome of M. Campion Jesuite and preiste, & M. Sherwin, & M. Bryan, preistes . . . (1582), B4v‒C1r. 77 Helen C. White, Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs (Madison, WI, 1963), p. 220. 78  A Briefe Historie of the Glorious Martyrdom of XII Reverend Priestes (1582), fviir. 79  Lake and Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow, esp. chs. 1–3, 5. 80  The life and Death of Mistris Margarit Clitherow, Bar Convent (York) MS, 91. 81  York Minster Add. MS 151. 82  An Abstracte of the Life and Martirdome of Mistres M. Clitheroe (Mechlin, 1619).

Catholic Written Cultures  277 Alan Ford has identified four stages in the development of early modern Irish martyrology. The first stage involved the inclusion of the names of significant Irish martyrs in works produced by Catholic writers outside Ireland, such as the English Franciscan Thomas Bourchier, and the Dutch-­English Catholic Richard Verstegan. His Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum of 1587 included the martyrdom of Archbishop Dermot O’Hurley of Cashel who died just three years before. The second stage involved the collection of accounts of Irish martyrs, both in manuscript and printed form, by Irish writers such as the Wexford Jesuit John Howlin, whose Pebreve Compendium (c.1590), recorded the names of forty-­six Irish individuals who had suffered for the faith. Others such as Conor O’Devany, bishop of Down and Dromore (later himself martyred in 1612), had compiled lists of Irish martyrs. The Catholic bishop of Ossory, David Rothe, would combine lists from Howlin, O’Devany, and the English Catholic priest Nicholas Sander, to produce a catalogue of eighty-­seven names of Irish confessors and martyrs in 1619. In turn, writers such as John Coppinger, Henry Fitzsimon, and Philip O’Sullivan Beare would include further lists of martyrs in their published work. Alan Ford’s third and fourth stages of early modern Irish martyrologies saw the use of these more complete lists by Catholic writers abroad in the first and second half of the seventeenth century.83 What is most notable for Ford, however, is the change of political and religious context which ensued as soon as James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald unfurled his papal banner in Ireland in 1579, launching the Second Desmond Rebellion. The resultant Irish Catholic deaths were quickly absorbed into Continental Counter-­ Reformation rhetoric.84 The situation in Scotland was different again. Jane Stevenson reminds us that few Catholics were killed for their faith there and that Church papistry was largely tolerated. David Chalmers’ De Scotorum fortitudine, doctrina et pietate (Paris, 1631), mentions a Dominican killed in Aberdeen, a Catholic apologist executed in Edinburgh, and the Jesuit missionary priest John Ogilvie, executed in Glasgow for celebrating Mass.85 In both English and Irish contexts, then, martyrologies and hagiographies were key means by which exemplary lives were synchronized with Counter-­ Reformation culture, including the perceived need to respond to Protestant attacks on the cult of the saints. In both contexts too, martyrs’ lives made an implicit argument about the desirability of firm religious commitment despite official proscription of Catholic practice. Although we do not have space to discuss it here, hagiographic and martyrological narratives formed an important

83  Alan Ford, ‘Martyrdom, History and Memory in Early Modern Ireland’, in Ian McBride (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 46–50. 84  Ford, ‘Martyrdom, History and Memory’, pp. 57–8. 85  Stevenson, ‘Catholics in Scotland’, p. 280.

278  Susannah Brietz Monta and Salvador Ryan strand in historical writing of the period as well, serving to ground Irish and English Catholicism in a continuous narrative of religious practice and witness.86

Conclusion This chapter has made several broad points about early modern British and Irish Catholic written culture. First, the study of written work along generic axes allows for a view of that work’s literary and religious features; as early modern writers were keenly aware of the many ways genre interacted with and shaped content, so too should we be. Second, even as we have restricted ourselves to three generic strands, we hope to have illuminated the vibrancy of English and Irish Catholic writing in this period, especially in its labours to align Catholic tradition with Counter-­Reformation thought, and to respond to Protestant polemic and Protestant literary culture more broadly. Irish and English Catholic writers did not willingly cede literary territory to Protestant writers; nor should our mainstream literary and religious histories. Third, the technologies by which Catholic work circulated matter tremendously. English and Irish Catholic writers were often dependent upon Continental presses and extensive smuggling networks to get their work into their intended readers’ hands; significant differences appear in manuscript and print traditions of the same author, as we saw with Southwell; medieval manuscripts do not obey period limitations, and found new readers and new treatments in the early modern world; and the importance of both oral and manuscript cultures persist even within the so-­called age of print.87 Fourth, English and Irish Catholic written work was intricately connected to the Continent through both its production and its content. Fifth, English and Irish Catholic writing flourished in Latin and in the vernaculars both; attention to Catholic writing’s easy crossing of linguistic boundaries remains vital. Finally, we hope to encourage more comparative studies of British and Irish Catholic writing such as this one, preliminary as it necessarily is.

Select Bibliography Caball, Marc, ‘Creating an Irish Identity: Print, Culture, and the Irish Franciscans at Louvain’, in Liam Chambers and Thomas O’Connor (eds.), Forming Catholic Communities: Irish, Scots and English College Networks in Europe, 1658–1918 (Leiden, 2018), pp. 232–58. 86 See for example the contrast between the virtues and authority of Bede with the ‘suspect . . . reports’ of Bale and Foxe, and the ‘lives’ and miracles of holy men and women in Catholic trad­ition with the ‘miserable miracles’ of Foxe’s ‘stinking Martyrs’: The history of the Church of Englande. Complied by Venerable Bede, Englishman, tr. Thomas Stapleton (Antwerp, 1565), pp. 3, 5, 9. 87  Alison Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007).

Catholic Written Cultures  279 Gillespie, Raymond, ‘The Louvain Franciscans and the Culture of Print’, in Raymond Gillespie and Ruairí Ó hUiginn (eds.), Irish Europe, 1600–1650: Writing and Learning (Dublin, 2013), pp. 104–20. Houliston, Victor, ‘Recusant Literary Culture in England and Wales’, in Robert  E.  Scully, SJ, with Angela Ellis (eds.), A Companion to Catholicism and Recusancy in Britain and Ireland (Leiden and Boston, 2022), pp. 507–34. January-McCann, James, ‘Exiles and Activists: A Comparison of the CounterReformation in Wales and Norway’, in James  E.  Kelly, Henning Laugerud, and Salvador Ryan (eds.), Northern European Reformations: Transnational Perspectives (Cham, 2020), pp. 161–88. Shell, Alison, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge, 1999). Stevenson, Jane, ‘Catholics in Scotland: Overview and Literary Culture’, in Robert  E.  Scully, SJ, with Angela Ellis (eds.), A Companion to Catholicism and Recusancy in Britain and Ireland (Leiden and Boston, 2022), pp. 276–302. Walsham, Alexandra, ‘ “Domme Preachers”? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print’, Past and Present, 168 (2000), pp. 72–123.

15 Printed Translations and Catholic Reformation Jaime Goodrich

In 1642, Tobie Matthew capped a prolific career as a translator of Catholic works by publishing the translation for which he is best known today: an English ­version of St Teresa of Ávila’s autobiography (The Flaming Hart, or the Life of the Glorious S. Teresa).1 Matthew undertook this venture at the request of the English Carmelite nuns in Antwerp, who sought a replacement for an occasionally obscure English version by Michael Walpole, SJ, printed in 1611. The genesis of Matthew’s publication reflects the eagerness among British Catholics for translations of spiritual texts associated with Catholic reform. Indeed, Matthew himself had long catered to this audience by publishing translations of Italian and Spanish books that represented the ferment of Tridentine spirituality: devotional treatises by Spanish preacher John of Ávila, Francisco Arias, SJ, and Alfonso Rodríguez, SJ, as well as texts about Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi, a Carmelite mystic, and Troilo Savelli, an Italian bandit and convert.2 Meanwhile, Matthew’s translation of Augustine’s Confessions made this masterwork available in English for the first time (The Confessions of the Incomparable Doctour  S.  Augustine, 1620). In its diversity, Matthew’s output reflects the twin imperatives that guided British and Irish Catholic translators after the Elizabethan Settlement. First, translators responded to the Protestant Reformation by translating medieval and patristic works that had been appropriated or dismissed by English reformers. Second, translators imported Counter-­Reformation spirituality by popularizing cutting-­ edge texts from the Continent. Catholic reform in Britain and Ireland was thus as

1 Danielle Clarke, ‘Life Writing for the Counter-­ Reformation: The English Translation and Reception of Teresa de Ávila’s Autobiography’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 50 (2020), pp. 75–94; Roy Norton, ‘Sir Tobie Matthew’s Flaming Hart: Translating St Teresa for the English Catholic Exiles’, Translation and Literature, 27 (2018), pp. 1–24. 2  John of Ávila, The Audi Filia, trans. Tobie Matthew (St Omer, 1620); Francisco Arias, The Judge Wherein Is Shewed, How Christ Our Lord Is to Judge the World, trans. Tobie Matthew (St  Omer, 1621); Alfonso Rodríguez, Two Treatises, trans. Tobie Matthew (St Omer, 1627); Vincenzo Puccini, The Life of the Holy and Venerable Mother Suor Maria Maddalena de Patsi, trans. Tobie Matthew (St Omer, 1619); Giuseppe Biondi, A Relation of the Death, of . . . Troilo Savelli, trans. Tobie Matthew (St Omer, 1620). Jaime Goodrich, Printed Translations and Catholic Reformation In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume I: Endings and New Beginnings, 1530 –1640. Edited by: James E. Kelly and John McCafferty, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843801.003.0016

Printed Translations and Catholic Reformation  281 much a matter of salvaging a past demonized by Protestant polemicists as it was of introducing current developments from mainland Europe. Significantly, Matthew published his translations for a broad audience rather than preparing manuscript copies for smaller readerships such as the Antwerp Carmelites. This decision reveals the special importance of printed translations in advancing Catholic reform within England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Scholars have long realized that printed translations were crucial to the success of both the Protestant Reformation in England and the Counter-­Reformation in Europe. As Carlos Eire has observed, ‘Translations matter so much in the history of early modern Catholicism that one might easily argue “no translations, no spiritual renewal, no Catholic Reformation” ’.3 Yet printed translations were particularly important in raising awareness of Catholic reform within Britain and Ireland, which lacked the religious infrastructure necessary to implement the mandates of the Council of Trent. Even before the first missionary priests arrived on English soil in 1574, the clandestine circulation of books from the Continent had begun to disseminate Tridentine spirituality. While Alexandra Walsham has analysed the ways that translation allowed English Catholics to participate in a transregional Counter-­Reformation, most scholars have showed little interest in the relationship between Catholic reform and printed translations in Britain and Ireland.4 This chapter will fill that critical gap by providing a historical overview of the printed translations composed by British and Irish Catholics between Elizabeth’s accession in 1558 and the outbreak of the English Civil Wars in 1640. Over the course of these eighty-­odd years, British and Irish Catholics published over one hundred translations, which fit roughly into two distinct categories: devotional texts and polemics. Taken together, these works offer vital insight into the ways that Catholic translators from Britain and Ireland adapted the tenets of Catholic reform for a very specific context: nations where Catholicism had been banned by Protestant regimes. Looking backward to the past glories of the Catholic Church and forward to Continental innovations, these translations responded to the unique needs of British and Irish Catholics, who faced governmental oppression as they sought to find their place within the wider Catholic Church.

1560–1600: From the Polemical to the Pastoral At the start of Elizabeth’s reign, British Catholics pursued a reform agenda by advocating for a reversal of the Protestant Reformation. While Catholic polemicists 3  Carlos M. N. Eire, ‘Early Modern Catholic Piety in Translation’, in Peter Burke and R. Po-­chia Hsia (eds.), Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 83–100, at p. 83. 4  Alexandra Walsham, ‘Religious Ventriloquism: Translation, Cultural Exchange, and the English Counter-­Reformation’, in Violet Soen, Alexander Soetaert, Johan Verberckmoes, and Wim François (eds.), Transregional Reformations: Crossing Borders in Early Modern Europe (Göttingen, 2019), pp. 123–55.

282  Jaime Goodrich levelled direct attacks on the Elizabethan Settlement and the Scottish Reformed Confession of Faith, translators invoked the authority of leading Catholic theologians, past and present, in order to refute Protestant tenets. Translations of patristic and medieval texts in particular served two aims: first, to convey official Catholic doctrine, and second, to demonstrate the historical le­git­im­acy of the Catholic Church. Ninian Winzet, a Scottish priest at the court of Mary, Queen of Scots was among the first British Catholics to deploy translation for controversial purposes. In 1563, Winzet translated the Commonitorium of the fifth-­century monk, St Vincent of Lérins, from Latin into Scots in order to define the true faith for his readers and intervene in a polemical exchange between Quentin Kennedy and John Davidson over the legitimacy of Catholicism.5 While dedicating this translation to Mary, Winzet comments that Vincent’s identification of various heresies seems to anticipate and condemn Davidson’s Calvinism: ‘this my auctour, as he had foresein the vanitie or rather impietie of this man, makis al thir materis almaist, sa cleir aganis him: that M. Quintine neidis na wthir Apologie nor nane wthir man to waist paper and ink for yis porpose’.6 Similarly, Thomas Stapleton prefaces his translation of Bede’s History of the Church of Englande (1565) with an assertion that this work would lead Queen Elizabeth, his dedicatee, to perceive the fundamental truth of Catholicism: ‘In this history your highnes shall see in how many and weighty pointes the pretended refourmers of the church in your Graces dominions have departed from the patern of that sounde and catholike faith planted first among Englishemen by holy S. Augustin our Apostle’.7 For both Stapleton and Winzet, Catholic writings from the past offered a natural platform for encouraging religious reforms that would reinstate Catholicism within Britain. Most British Catholics of this era, however, chose to translate polemical works by contemporary authors associated with Tridentine reform in order to support the efforts of English Catholic polemicists in Louvain.8 Richard Shacklock and Stapleton, for example, both translated anti-­ heretical treatises by Stanislaus Hosius, a cardinal and papal legate at the final session of Trent. Each cites Hosius’s high-­profile role at Trent in order to establish his impeccable religious credentials as a promoter of Catholic orthodoxy. Stapleton identifies Hosius as ‘the light of this our age, the most vertuous and lerned Father, Hosius, nowe Cardinall, and one of the Presidentes in the late general Councell holden at Trident’.9 Shacklock 5 Quintin Kennedy, Ane Compendius Tractive Conforme to the Scripturis of Almychtie God (Edinburgh, 1558); John Davidson, Ane Answer to the Tractive . . . be Maister Quintine Kennedy (Edinburgh, 1563). 6  St Vincent of Lerins, Vincentius Lirinensis of the Natioun of Gallis, for the Antiquitie and Veritie of the Catholik Fayth, trans. Ninian Winzet (Antwerp, 1563), sigs a1v–­a2r. 7 Bede, The History of the Church of Englande, trans. Thomas Stapleton (Antwerp, 1565), sig. *3r. 8  Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2008), pp. 42–6. 9  Stanislaus Hosius, Of the Expresse Worde of God, trans. Thomas Stapleton (Louvain, 1567), sig. *2v, emphasis in text.

Printed Translations and Catholic Reformation  283 likewise links Hosius’ learning with his service at Trent: ‘for hys divine knowledge and incomparable learnyng, [he] was made president of the moste Catholyke and Christian Councell lately holden at Trent’.10 While Hosius’ tracts attacked Protestantism at large, translations of works by Jerónimo Osório, a sixteenth-­ century Portuguese bishop, intervened more directly in English religious policy. In 1565, Shacklock translated an open letter from Osório to Elizabeth that sought to convert the Queen to Catholicism. Praising the Catholic Church’s redoubled commitment to fighting the Protestant Reformation after Trent, Shacklock explains in the preface to the reader that one of his aims was to gyve God thankes . . . that it hath pleased hym, to make greate learned men, which dwell on the hygh hylles of the Catholyke fayth, a farre of[f] to discrye the flames which dayly consume England, and not onlye to discrye them, but also to send holy water of moste godly councell to quenche them.11

Three years later, John Fen translated Osório’s rebuttal of a response to his letter written by Walter Haddon on behalf of the English government. Much like Shacklock, Fen presents Osório as an exemplar of proper ecclesiastical reform, in implicit contrast to Protestants such as Haddon: thanke God . . . in that it hath pleased him . . . to move the heart of this grave Father and reverent Bishop (whose learned writinges have deservedly obteined so great authoritie throughout al the Churche of Christ) to pitie the lamentable state of our most miserably decaied Church, and to laie his helping hand to the repairing of it.12

Catholic translators thus viewed the publication of their work as an essential contribution to the larger international effort to advance a Catholic reform agenda that could supersede the Protestant Reformation in England, Scotland, and elsewhere. As the 1560s drew to a close, a series of major political setbacks made it increasingly clear that Protestantism would not be overturned in England and Scotland through persuasion or force: most notably, Mary’s abdication in 1567, the failure of the Northern Rising in 1569, and Pope Pius V’s excommunication of Elizabeth in 1570. In response, English translators offered an alternative vision of religious reform by turning to pastoral source texts that could disseminate the 10  Stanislaus Hosius, A Most Excellent Treatise of the Begynnyng of Heresyes In Oure Tyme, trans. Richard Shacklock (Antwerp, 1565), sig. A6r. 11  Jerónimo Osório, An Epistle of the Reverend Father in God Hieronymus Osorius, trans. Richard Shacklock (Antwerp, 1565), fols 2v–3r. 12  Jerónimo Osório, A Learned and Very Eloquent Treatie, trans. John Fen (Louvain, 1568), sigs *3v–*4r.

284  Jaime Goodrich best of medieval piety and convey more recent developments associated with the Catholic Reformation. This development offered crucial support to seminary priests who sought to undo the Reformation.13 William Carter, who was martyred in 1584 for publishing a book deemed treasonous, helped facilitate this shift by establishing a secret press that emphasized translation.14 Carter’s press issued classic works by medieval writers such as Thomas á Kempis and Henry Suso, as well as continental bestsellers by Peter Canisius, SJ, and Gaspar Loarte, SJ. Many of these publications contain devotional material intended for daily use in a domestic setting, thereby suggesting that the household could serve as a locus of reformed spirituality in line with Tridentine practice. While Suso’s Certayne Sweete Prayers of the Glorious Name of Jesus (1575–8) supplies a template for saying the Divine Office outside of a monastic community, Canisius’ Certayne Devout Meditations (1576) similarly offered support for household prayer by providing a meditation on Christ’s virtues for each day of the week.15 The translator of Canisius’ exceptionally popular Parvus catechismus Catholicorum explicitly hoped to provide English readers with an up-­to-­date catechism that could educate children in the tenets of the Catholic faith.16 Referring to a 1568 Louvain edition of a catechism produced by Laurence Vaux, the translator observes, there was such scarsitie of Englishe bookes, that we had none except M. Vauces Catechisme, that breefly comprised the principal partes of our Christian and Catholike fayth. Because  M.  Vauces booke was somewhat rare, and of some weldisposed persons not thought so fitte for the capacitie of little ones and younglings . . . I thought this Pamphlet would not be unfit for them both.17

Many of Carter’s publications introduced English readers to the distinctive ­spir­itu­al­ity of the Society of Jesus who were so strongly identified with the Counter-­Reformation. A translation of Loarte’s Godie Garden of Gethsemani (1576; reprinted c.1580) presents a series of meditations on the Passion that involve imaginative recreations of biblical scenes much as in the Ignatian Spiritual

13  Eamon Duffy, ‘Praying the Counter-­Reformation’, in James E. Kelly and Susan Royal (eds.), Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory, and Counter-­Reformation (Leiden, 2017), pp. 210–11. 14  On Carter, see Duffy, ‘Praying the Counter-­Reformation’, pp. 214–16; T.  A.  Birrell, ‘William Carter (c.1549–84): Recusant Printer, Publisher, Binder, Stationer, Scribe—­and Martyr’, Recusant History, 28 (2006), pp. 22–42; A. C. Southern, Elizabethan Recusant Prose 1559–1582 (London, 1950), pp. 350–3. 15  Henry Suso, Certayne Sweete Prayers of the Glorious Name of Jesus (London, 1575–8); Peter Canisius, Certayne Devout Meditations (London, 1576). 16  On Canisius’ British reception, see Alexandra Walsham, ‘Wholesome Milk and Strong Meat: Peter Canisius’s Catechisms and the Conversion of Protestant Britain’, British Catholic History, 32 (2015), pp. 293–314. 17 Peter Canisius, Certayne Necessarie Principles of Religion, trans. T.  I.  (London, 1579), sigs ¶5v–¶6r.

Printed Translations and Catholic Reformation  285 Exercises.18 Meanwhile, Stephen Brinkley, the translator of Loarte’s Exercise of a Christian Life (1579), situates his work within a larger missionary programme, noting that Jesuit priests provided him with ‘both the copie, the counsail, and other commodities, to translate this woorthie Treatise into our English tongue’.19 Though ultimately short-­lived, Carter’s secret press encouraged readers to in­corp­ or­ate the principles of Catholic reform on both an individual and a familial level. The 1580s saw the partial publication of arguably the most important Catholic translation produced after the accession of Elizabeth: the Douai-­Rheims Bible, translated from the Vulgate into English largely by Gregory Martin. While the New Testament was issued in 1582 during the English College’s sojourn in Rheims, Martin’s version of the Old Testament would remain unpublished until 1609–10, when the English College had returned to Douai and was enjoying greater financial stability. Undertaken at the invitation of Cardinal William Allen, founder of the English College, this translation provided a biblical basis for approaching Catholic reform. According to the preface to the reader that accompanied the New Testament, the Douai-­Rheims Bible aimed to supplant Protestant translations that contained heretical material: We therfore having compassion to see our beloved countrie men, with extreme danger of their soules, to use onely such prophane translations, and erroneous mens mere phantasies, for the pure and blessed word of truth, much also moved thereunto by the desires of many devout persons: have set forth, for you (benigne readers) the new Testament to begin withal, trusting that it may give occasion to you, after diligent perusing thereof, to lay away at lest such their impure versions as hitherto you have ben forced to occupie.20

While these Protestant versions were based on Hebrew and Greek versions of the Bible, the Douai-­Rheims translators opted instead to work from the Vulgate Bible, thus aligning their translation with the Council of Trent: ‘The holy Councel of Trent . . . hath declared and defined this onely of al other latin translations to be authentical’.21 In keeping with this anti-­ heretical orientation, annotations appended to each chapter offer interpretations of the New Testament that buttressed Catholic theology. For example, an annotation on Christ’s pronouncement ‘This is my body’ (Matthew 26:26) advances the Catholic doctrine of real presence in order to rebut Protestant understandings of the sacrament as figurative: ‘He said not, This bread is a figure of my body: or, This Wine is a figure of my bloud: but, This is my body, and, This is my bloud’. A marginal gloss concisely 18  Gaspar Loarte, The Godlie Garden of Gethsemani (London, 1576); Gaspar Loarte, The Godly Garden of Gethsemani (London, 1580). 19  Gaspar Loarte, The Exercise of a Christian Life, trans. Stephen Brinkley (London, 1579), sig. **2r. 20  The New Testament of Jesus Christ (Rheims, 1582), sig. B2r. 21  The New Testament of Jesus Christ, sig. B3r.

286  Jaime Goodrich sums up the implications of this contention: ‘No figurative but a real presence’.22 As a source of authoritative dogma that could be exploited for theological disputes, the Douai-­Rheims Bible represented a major effort to sustain Catholic orthodoxy and communicate Tridentine ideals within England. Meanwhile, Richard Hopkins, another expatriate on the Continent, brought Catholic reform to a cross-­confessional audience through a highly successful translation of a spiritual treatise entitled Of Prayer and Meditation. Written by the famous Dominican preacher Luis de Granada, this work contained a series of daily meditations for morning and evening use. After Hopkins’ translation was printed abroad in 1582, it became popular enough for six bowdlerized Protestant editions to appear in London before 1640 (in 1596, 1599, 1601, 1602, 1611, and 1634).23 In addition to demonstrating the wide appeal of contemporary Catholic works of devotion, the publishing history of this particular translation indicates that Catholic reform could reach a broader audience in England than might other­wise be expected. Certainly, Hopkins believed that translation of spiritual treatises would be an effective means of restoring Catholicism, stating in the dedicatory preface to Of Prayer and Meditation that it is nowe about foureteene yeares agoe, since the time that Master Doctor Hardinge . . . perswaded me earnestlie to translate some of those Spanishe bookes into our Englishe tounge, affirminge, that more spirituall profite wolde undoutedlie ensewe thereby to the gayninge of Christian sowles in our countrie from Schisme, and Heresie, and from all sinne, and iniquitie, than by bookes that treate of controversies in Religion.24

Since Thomas Harding himself is best known today for his polemical exchanges with Bishop John Jewel during the 1560s, these comments indicate that leading Catholics in exile were already attempting to shift their textual production towards devotional works as early as 1568. Contributing to this effort, Hopkins dedicated this translation to the Inns of Court, which was recognized by the late 1570s as a hotbed of Catholicism although it also had many Protestant members.25 22  The New Testament of Jesus Christ, p. 79. 23 On Granada’s English reception, see Miriam Castillo, ‘Catholic Translation and Protestant Translation: The Reception of Luis de Granada’s Devotional Prose in Early Modern England’, Translation and Literature, 26 (2017), pp. 145–61, Alexandra Walsham, ‘Luis de Granada’s Mission to Protestant England: Translating the Devotional Literature of the Spanish Counter-­Reformation’, in Teresa Bela, Clarinda Calma, and Jolanta Rzegocka (eds.), Publishing Subversive Texts in Elizabethan England and the Polish-­Lithuanian Commonwealth (Leiden, 2016), pp. 129–54; Southern, Elizabethan Recusant Prose, pp. 197–206. 24  Luis de Granada, Of Prayer, and Meditation, trans. Richard Hopkins (Paris, 1582), sig. A6v, emphasis in text. 25  Geoffrey de C. Parmiter, Edmund Plowden: An Elizabethan Recusant Lawyer, CRS Monograph Series 4 (Southampton, 1987), pp. 129–31; Geoffrey de C. Parmiter, Elizabethan Popish Recusancy in the Inns of Court, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research Special Supplement 11 (London, 1976).

Printed Translations and Catholic Reformation  287 Even as printed translations of devotional works by Continental authors sustained Catholic readers by conveying fundamental aspects of Tridentine piety, they offered a potential basis for converting Protestants and thus pursuing a broader agenda of restoring Catholicism. During the 1590s, the secret presses established by Henry Garnet, SJ, sought to capitalize on the missionary applications of printed translations, especially of recent works by Continental authors associated with Catholic reform. Garnet’s first press, which operated from 1592 to 1596, published two translations: Philip Howard’s English version of An Epistle or Exhortation of Jesus Christ to the Soule (1592–3), written earlier in the century by Johann Justus Landsberger, a German Carthusian celebrated for his pious wisdom; and a catechism by Canisius that Garnet himself helped translate (A Summe of Christian Doctrine; 1592–6). His second press issued an additional nine translations. In addition to reprinting two translations of Loarte previously published by Carter’s press (The Exercise of a Christian Life; 1596–7; Meditations of the Life and Passion of Our Lord; 1596–8, which had been issued by Carter under the title The Godlie Garden of Gethsemani), Garnet also published a new translation of Vincent of Lérins (The Golden Treatise of the Auncient and Learned Father Vincentius Lirinensis, 1596). At the same time, Garnet sought to popularize Ignatian spirituality through printed translations of Jacobus Ledisma, SJ, and Vincenzo Bruno, SJ.26 When viewed as a whole, the translations printed by Garnet’s secret presses served the larger agenda of providing readers with necessary guidance on fundamental aspects of the Catholic faith after Trent. Besides publishing catechisms by Canisius and Ledisma that re­spect­ ive­ly addressed adults and children, Garnet issued a volume that contained Bruno’s treatises on confession and the sacrament of penance (A Short Treatise of the Sacrament of Penance; 1597). Devotional texts by Loarte and Bruno offered practical guidance on how to pray according to Ignatian practices. Of these works, the four-­part publication of Bruno’s Meditations of the Passion . . . of Christ (1599) is particularly notable for its adherence to the Ignatian schema in which contemplation of specific scenes from Christ’s life rouses the individual’s will and in turn promotes spiritual advancement. Building on the foundation laid by Carter, Garnet employed printed translations to familiarize English readers with the basics of Tridentine spirituality even as he attempted to further the Jesuit mission. Translations printed between 1560 and 1600 thus helped ­preserve Catholicism in England by offering beleaguered readers reformed models of devotion that were based on contemporary developments as well as medieval practices.

26 Vincenzo Bruno, A Short Treatise of the Sacrament of Penance (secret press, 1597); Jacobus Ledisma, The Christian Doctrine (secret press, 1597); Vincenzo Bruno, The First Part of the Meditations of the Passion . . . of Christ (secret press, 1599).

288  Jaime Goodrich

1600–1640: A Golden Age of British and Irish Catholic Translation As the seventeenth century dawned and toleration of Catholicism seemed no closer to being realized, many British Catholics turned towards the Continent in order to sustain their religious identity. While colleges and seminaries for men had been founded decades earlier, now a fresh crop of religious institutions for men and women sprang up across Europe.27 At the same time, the number of printed translations soared after British and Irish exiles established presses and publishing houses in Douai, Louvain, and St Omer. As exiled printers, publishers, and translators experienced Catholic reforms at first hand, they sought to familiarize their compatriots abroad and at home with innovative works by con­tem­ por­ary Catholic writers as well as medieval classics in line with current spiritual trends. Printed translations were especially important for British and Irish members of religious orders, particularly the Benedictines, Franciscans, and Jesuits. Translations of rules and hagiographies provided religious communities with necessary guidance on the fundamentals of monastic life and the charisms of their order. At the same time, these works raised awareness of religious life and even of particular monastic institutions among British Catholics in general, thereby attracting potential benefactors and new recruits. As the following ana­lysis of this golden age of British and Irish translations will demonstrate, translation played an essential role in the cultivation of distinctly British and Irish versions of Catholic reform that drew on the past as much as they did on the present. The seventeenth century witnessed a resurgence of polemical translations as British Catholics responded to ongoing political developments by articulating the theological stance of the Catholic Church after Trent. English translators were especially drawn to controversial texts that might aid the missionary effort. William Wright, SJ, for example, became a prolific translator of polemics after being sent to England in 1609. In 1614, the English Jesuit press at St Omer issued five separate volumes that consisted of Wright’s translation of selections from Controversiarum epitomes (1612), a defence of Catholic dogma written by Scottish Jesuit James Gordon.28 Most of these works were octavo volumes of around thirty leaves in length, making them ideal for clandestine circulation within England. Other translators of controversial texts responded more directly to events in England, particularly James I’s 1606 mandate requiring all English subjects to take the Oath of Allegiance. It sparked a lengthy polemical battle that pitted James 27  See Chapters 11 and 12 in this volume. 28  James Gordon, A Treatise Concerning the Church, trans. William Wright (St Omer, 1614); James Gordon, A Treatise Concerning the Ground of Faith, trans. Wright (St Omer, 1614); James Gordon, A Treatise Concerning the Properties and Offices of the True Church of Christ, trans. Wright (St Omer, 1614); James Gordon, A Treatise of the Unwritten Word of God, trans. Wright (St Omer, 1614); James Gordon, A Treatise of the Written Word of God, trans. Wright (St Omer, 1614).

Printed Translations and Catholic Reformation  289 and his supporters against prominent Catholic figures. For English Catholics, translations of Continental attacks on the Oath provided much-­needed encouragement to remain steadfast in the face of persecution. As one anonymous translator observed, some Priestes . . . have not beene ashamed to take it [the Oath], and more lay Catholikes have beene led on by their bad example. This action of theirs, hath implied a kind, of disloyalty in them that refused the same; and the State hath not beene a little carefull to publish the brute thereof . . . to the extreme disadvantage, and discomfort of all sincere and solide Catholikes.29

The Oath remained highly controversial well into the reign of Charles I. In 1630, Elizabeth Cary published her translation of The Reply of the Most Illustrious Cardinall of Perron in hopes of converting English readers, particularly at the universities: ‘I was mooved to it [publication] by my beleefe, that it might make those English that understand not French, whereof there are ma[nie], even in our universities, reade Perron’.30 Although both James and his opponent Jacques Davy Duperron were long dead, Cary’s translation was burned by the authorities upon its arrival in England.31 This reaction demonstrates the government’s awareness that translated polemics could furnish Catholics with material in line with the Church’s emphatically anti-­heretical stance after Trent, thereby encouraging further opposition to the Stuart regime. Devotional translations, meanwhile, provided another means of fostering Catholic resistance to official religious policies in Britain and Ireland, particularly by returning ad fontes to assert a Catholic understanding of religious reform. During the previous century Protestant translators had co-­opted key medieval texts for the Reformation. Thomas Rogers, a Puritan divine who prepared English recensions of Kempis’ Imitatio Christi and several works attributed to Augustine, claimed that his 1580 translation of the Imitatio had only omitted four sentences that ‘savor of superstition’.32 Yet like other Protestant translators, Rogers removed the entire fourth book of the Imitatio, which conveys Catholic theology about the Eucharist.33 In 1613, Anthony Hoskins, SJ, made the complete text available to

29  Jacques Davy Duperron, An Oration Made on the Part of the Lordes Spirituall (St Omer, 1616), sig. *3v, emphasis in text. 30  Jacques Davy Duperron, The Reply of the Most Illustrious Cardinall of Perron, trans. Elizabeth Cary (Douai, 1630), sig. ā2v, emphasis in text. 31  Heather Wolfe (ed.), Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: Life and Letters (Cambridge, 2001), p. 141. On this work, see Karen  L.  Nelson, ‘ “To Informe Thee Aright”: Translating Du Perron for English Religious Debates’, in Heather Wolfe (ed.), The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613–1680 (New York, 2007), pp. 147–63. 32  Thomas à Kempis, Of the Imitation of Christ, trans. Thomas Rogers (London, 1580), sig. 10v. 33 Maximilian von Habsburg, Catholic and Protestant Translations of the Imitatio Christi, 1425–1650: From Late Medieval Classic to Early Modern Bestseller (Farnham, 2013).

290  Jaime Goodrich English readers for the first time in decades. In addition to restoring the fourth book in its entirety, Hoskins notes in his preface that his version has been ‘purged from many mistaken sentences which were in the former Translation’.34 Several new English versions of Pseudo-­Augustine printed in 1621 offer a particularly fascinating example of the ways that translations of medieval works both reflected and reinforced confessional attitudes towards reform. While a London printer reissued Rogers’ bowdlerized translations of three works often associated with Augustine (Manual, Meditations, and Prayers), the Douai press of Laurence Kellam printed a rival compendium containing the Meditations, Soliloquies, and Manual, all of which had been translated afresh by Anthony Batt, OSB.35 At the same time, John Floyd, SJ, published yet another new English version of the Meditations and Manual with the St Omer press.36 As these duelling translations indicate, there was a strong, cross-­confessional market for classic spiritual treatises from the medieval period. Yet at the same time, the translators’ divergent attitudes towards Kempis and Pseudo-­Augustine reveal strikingly different perceptions of reform. While Protestant translators attempted to purify medieval texts by removing material without an obvious biblical basis, Catholic translators offered unexpurgated versions of these same works in order to demonstrate the unbroken continuity of the Catholic Church. In a similar fashion, Protestant reformers had dispensed with saints, yet British Catholics suddenly began to translate hagiographical source texts during the seven­ teenth century. This surge of hagiographical translations reflected the broader renewal of the Catholic cult of saints after Trent even as it provided British readers with a framework for understanding their own persecution. William and Edward Kinsman, for example, dedicated their translation of Flos Sanctorum, The Lives of Saints (1609) to Luisa Carvajal y Mendoza, a Spanish woman who took a vow of martyrdom before travelling to England for missionary purposes. As Edward Kinsman, a secular priest, notes in the dedicatory preface, Carvajal’s very presence in London offered readers a model of sacrifice that was congruent with earlier martyrs: ‘Saints require imitation of mortall men in their vertues. Through your Ladiships handes therefore, this booke shal best passe, to al devoute, or wel disposed persons, who must needes be more encouraged to prayse, pray unto, and imitate the glorious Saints, seeing your most honorable example before their eyes’.37 Arranged according to the liturgical calendar, this massive compilation of saints’ lives contained a wide variety of saintly models for British readers to imitate as they, like Carvajal, endured ‘the reproch of Christ, 34  Thomas à Kempis, The Following of Christ, trans. Anthony Hoskins (St Omer, 1613), sig. *2v. 35  A Pretious Booke of Heavenly Meditations, trans. Thomas Rogers (London, 1621); A Heavenly Treasure of Confortable Meditations, trans. Anthony Batt (Douai, 1621). 36  The Meditations and Manuall of the Incomparable Doctour, trans. John Floyd (St Omer, 1621). 37  Alonso de Villegas, Flos Sanctorum, The Lives of Saints, trans. William and Edward Kinsman (Douai, 1609), sig. *2v.

Printed Translations and Catholic Reformation  291 and of Catholique faith’, in Kinsman’s words.38 At the same time, translations of material documenting recent martyrdoms suggested that British persecution was part of a broader con­tem­por­ary phenomenon. For example, A Briefe Relation of the Late Martyrdome of Five Persians Converted to the Catholique Faith by the Reformed Carmelites appeared in 1623. The only hint of the anonymous translator’s motivation occurs at the end of the title (‘translated into English for the good of the Church’), but the overall speed of his work suggests an urgent desire to reach English-­speaking readers who would presumably identify with their Persian brethren.39 Martín Garayzabal, the superior of the Carmelite mission in Persia, had only finished writing the original version of this text on 11 April 1622. Thus, even as translated hagiographies kept British readers in touch with an important spiritual trend in the Tridentine Church, these publications also provided a basis for this same audience to view itself as part of a tradition of Catholic martyrdom and persecution that was transhistorical and transnational. During this golden age of translation, religious orders proved to be the single most important generator of translations linked to Catholic reform, with the English Jesuits taking the lead. Indeed, Ignatian piety was so popular that trans­ lators who did not belong to the Society of Jesus often chose source texts by Jesuits. The output of Welsh translators alone demonstrates this trend. While Robert Gwyn translated texts by two Jesuits, Francisco de Toledo and Robert Persons, Morys Clynnog rendered a catechism by Ledisma into Welsh (Athravaeth Gristnogawl; 1568) and Roger Smith produced an important Welsh translation of a catechism by Canisius (Crynnodeb o adysc Cristnogaul; 1609).40 English Jesuits themselves, however, were the most frequent translators of works related to their order. The establishment of the Jesuit press at St Omer provided a stable conduit for disseminating translations that could acquaint British readers with the Society of Jesus and its influential form of piety. In addition to publishing the lives of prominent early Jesuits such as Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier, the St Omer press also issued translations documenting recent persecutions of the Japanese mission, founded by Francis Xavier, that offered a parallel to English experiences.41 As William Wright explains in a preface dedicating one such Jesuit account of Japanese Christians ‘To All That Suffer Persecution in England’, he translated this work ‘by reason of the great likenesse and similitude betwixt their case and

38 Villegas, Flos Sanctorum, sig. *1v, emphasis in text. 39  Martín Garayzabal, A Briefe Relation of the Late Martyrdome of the Five Persians (Douai, 1623), emphasis in text. 40  On Welsh translators, see James January-­McCann, ‘Exiles and Activists: A Comparison of the Counter-­Reformation in Wales and Norway’, in James E. Kelly, Henning Laugerud, and Salvador Ryan (eds.), Northern European Reformations: Transnational Perspectives (Cham, 2020), pp. 161–88. 41  Pedro de Ribadeneyra, The Life of B. Father Ignatius of Loyola, trans. Michael Walpole (St Omer, 1616); Orazio Torsellino, The Admirable Life of S. Francis Xavier, trans. Thomas Fitzherbert (St Omer, 1632); The Theater of Japonia’s Constancy, trans. William Lee (St Omer, 1624).

292  Jaime Goodrich yours’.42 At the same time, English Jesuits translated numerous devotional works that outlined the fundamental elements of Ignatian meditation and prayer, which had become staples of Tridentine religious culture. Thomas Everard and Richard Gibbons were especially prolific in this regard.43 Translations of this kind served markedly pastoral aims, as demonstrated by Gibbons’ dedication of a manual of Ignatian meditation by Luis de la Puente, SJ, to Cecily Morgan: ‘the cause I first tooke it [the translation] in hand . . . [was] your often, and fervent calling uppon me, to aford you sufficient matter for meditation, with the manner how to performe the same’.44 Similarly, Everard dedicated his translation of a text on the sacrament written by Fulvio Androzzi, SJ, to his cousin ‘Mistris K. B.’ in order to prepare her for communion: ‘sith it is a consideration how we ought to come worthely to the B. Sacrament of the Aultar; I also considered that now your yeares required some directions therein’.45 Everard and Gibbons likewise addressed other translations of Ignatian works to Mary Ward and superiors at the Brussels Benedictine, Lisbon Bridgettine, Gravelines Poor Clare, and Antwerp Carmelite convents.46 Thus, as English Jesuits sought and received official recognition of their missionary efforts through the establishment of an official province in 1623, printed translations offered essential guidance on the order’s charism, which was closely associated with the Counter-­Reformation in the popular imagination. English Franciscans, meanwhile, turned to the past in order to pursue an agenda of Catholic reform that was particular to their own order: a renewed commitment to the ideals of St Francis and St Clare. Fourteen translations with Franciscan connections were published on the Continent between 1618 and 1636, a period that also witnessed the establishment of the first English friary (1618), two convents (1619, 1629), and the English Franciscan Province (1629).47 The timing of these publications indicates that Franciscans viewed printed translations as part of their larger campaign to restore the English branch of their order.

42  Pedro Morejon, A Briefe Relation of the Persecution Lately Made Against the Catholike Christians, in the Kingdome of Japonia, trans. William Wright (St Omer, 1619), sig. A3v. 43  On Everard, see A. F. Allison, ‘An Early Seventeenth Century Translator: Thomas Everard, SJ’, Biographical Studies, 2 (1954), pp. 188–215. 44  Luis de la Puente, Meditations uppon the Mysteries of Our Holy Faith with the Practise of Mental Praier, trans. Richard Gibbons (St Omer, 1610), sig. A2v. 45  Fulvio Androzzi, Certaine Devout Considerations of Frequenting the Blessed Sacrament, trans. Thomas Everard (Douai, 1606), sigs *2r, *5r, 46  Luca Pinelli, The Virgin Maries Life, trans. Richard Gibbons (St Omer, 1604); Bruno Vincenzo, An Abridgment of the Meditations of the Life . . . of Our Lord, trans. Richard Gibbons (St Omer, 1614); Luca Pinelli, The Mirrour of Religious Perfection, trans. Thomas Everard (St Omer, 1618); Francisco de Borgia, The Practise of Christian Workes, trans. Thomas Everard (London, 1620); Luca Pinelli, Meditations of the Most B. Sacrament of the Altar, trans. Thomas Everard (St Omer, 1622). 47 A.  F.  Allison, ‘Franciscan Books in English, 1559–1640’, Biographical Studies, 1534–1829, 3 (1955), pp. 16–65; Jaime Goodrich, ‘Translation and Genettean Hypertextuality: Catherine Magdalen Evelyn, Catherine of Bologna, and English Franciscan Textual Production, 1618–40’, Renaissance and Reformation, 43 (2020), pp. 235–61.

Printed Translations and Catholic Reformation  293 English Franciscans consequently prioritized translations of hagiographies and rules, which emphasized the order’s medieval roots. While Catherine Magdalen Evelyn, a member of the Gravelines and Aire Poor Clares, translated the lives of St Clare and St Catherine of Bologna, the friars republished an earlier translation of the life of St Francis made by Anthony Maria Browne.48 Francis Bell, confessor of the Third Order convent in Brussels, arranged for the publication of a hagi­og­ raphy of St Elizabeth of Portugal that had been translated from Flemish by Abbess Catherine Greenbury to mark the saint’s canonization in 1625.49 At the same time, the Franciscans printed English versions of the Rules associated with the three branches of their order, with translations of the Rules for the Third Order and the Friars Minor appearing respectively in 1617 and 1635.50 A cluster of translations related to the Rule of St Clare reveals the intensity with which one faction of English Franciscans advocated for reform. An English version of this text was included in a translation of Marcos da Lisboa’s Chronicle and Institution of the Order of the Seraphicall Father S. Francis (1618), which was undertaken by William Cape, a layman, for the Gravelines convent. In 1621, the St Omer press issued a new translation of the Rule in an apparent effort to provide the Gravelines nuns with a version that was both more accurate and more stringent.51 The following year, Evelyn published a commentary on the Rule made by St Colette of Corbie, who had reformed the Poor Clares in the fifteenth century according to a much more austere understanding of the Rule.52 Since Gravelines was not a Colettine house, this publication indicates that some reform-­minded Franciscans believed that the 1621 Rule was still too lax. Internal tensions over the spiritual identity of the Gravelines house eventually came to a head during the 1620s, leading to the foundation of a new convent in Aire that observed Colettine practices.53 For the most zealous English Franciscans, printed translations thus offered a means of advancing the cause of reform among a dual readership: secular contemporaries and other English friars and nuns. Although fewer in number, translations by Irish Franciscans reveal a similar interest in popularizing medieval spirituality as an alternative to Protestant reform,

48 Dionisio Paleotti, The Admirable Life of S.  Catharine of Bologna, trans. Catherine Magdalen Evelyn (St Omer, 1621); François Hendricq, The History of the Angelicall Virgin Glorious  S.  Clare, trans. Catherine Magdalen Evelyn (Douai, 1635); St Bonaventure, The Life of the Most Holy Father S. Francis, trans. Anthony Maria Browne (Douai, 1635). 49  Franciscus Paludanus, A Short Relation of the Life, Virtues, and Miracles, of S. Elizabeth, trans. Catherine Greenbury (Brussels, 1628). 50  William Stanney, A Treatise of Penance (Douai, 1617). 51  Faustina Grealy and Jaime Goodrich, ‘New Light on Seventeenth-­Century Translations of the Rule of St Clare: Part I’, Archivium Hibernicum, 72 (2019), pp. 7–49. 52  St Colette, The Declarations and Ordinances Made upon the Rule of Our Holy Mother, S. Clare, trans. Catherine Magdalen Evelyn (St Omer, 1622). 53  Jaime Goodrich, ‘ “Ensigne-­Bearers of Saint Clare”: Elizabeth Evelinge’s Translations and the Restoration of English Franciscanism’, in Micheline White (ed.), English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625 (Aldershot, 2011), pp. 83–100.

294  Jaime Goodrich particularly in relation to the Franciscan order. In 1607, the Irish Franciscans founded a college at Louvain, where they set up a printing press with Irish font in order to publish vernacular texts that could combat Protestantism.54 Although this press issued only two translations, these publications continued the Irish Franciscans’ longstanding history of translating religious works into the Gaelic language for pastoral purposes.55 The first translation to be printed at Louvain was a short pamphlet for lay brothers that contained a paraphrase of the Rule along with brief devotional texts such as the beatitudes, ten commandments, and prayers for the dead (Suim riaghlachas San Phroinsias, 1611–14). The friars sought a broader audience with their publication of Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire’s (Florence Conry’s) Irish translation of Desiderius in 1616, a Catalan devotional work first published an­onym­ous­ly in 1515 and later attributed to Miguel de Comalada. Conry was the founder of the Louvain college and his missionary zeal can be discerned even in this translation. As its modern editor Thomas O’Rahilly observes, ‘Conry’s object in writing Desiderius was . . . to provide his oppressed fellow-­ countrymen with a book of moderate compass which would strengthen them in their faith’, which he undertook by adding new material ‘encouraging the Irish Catholics of his day to remain steadfast in the bitter religious persecution which was then raging’.56 Finally, in 1625 Robert Rochford published a translation of the lives of three medieval Irish saints: St Patrick, St Bridget, and St Columba.57 The only English translation to emerge from the Irish Franciscans, this volume reminded Irish readers of their nation’s glorious medieval past in order to increase opposition to the English occupation of Ireland and its Protestant policies. As Rochford asks in a preface addressed to Irish Catholics, in these turbulent times, wherein the fury of armed heresy hath thrust her violent hands to the stelth of your choisest treasure, the Roman faith I meane, . . . what is more powerfull to stirre up in your breasts the zeale of Catholike Religion . . . Then to offer unto your intellectuall view, S.  Patricke the Abraham from whome you descended.58 54 John McCafferty, ‘Franciscan Rules Printed in the Spanish Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century’, Canterbury Studies in Franciscan History, 3 (2009), p. 203. 55  Benignus Millett, ‘The Translation Work of the Irish Franciscans’, Seanchas Ardmhacha: Journal of the Armagh Diocesan Historical Society, 17 (1996–7), pp. 1–25. 56  Thomas F. O’Rahilly (ed.), Desiderius, Otherwise Called Sgáthán an Chrábhaidh (Dublin, 1941), p. xvi. Also see Salvador Ryan, ‘A Wooden Key to Open Heaven’s Door: Lessons in Practical Catholicism from St Anthony’s College, Louvain’, in Edel Bhreathnach, Joseph MacMahon, and John McCafferty (eds.), The Irish Franciscans 1534–1990 (Dublin, 2009), pp. 221–32; Mícheál Mac Craith, ‘Literature in Irish, c.1550–1690: From the Elizabethan Settlement to the Battle of the Boyne’, in Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (eds.), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 191–231. 57  On this publication, see John McCafferty, ‘Brigid of Kildare: Stabilizing a Female Saint for Early Modern Catholic Devotion’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 50 (2020), pp. 53–73. 58 Jocelin, The Life of the Glorious Bishop  S.  Patricke, trans. Robert Rochford (St Omer, 1625), sig. a2r.

Printed Translations and Catholic Reformation  295 For the Irish Franciscans, then, printed translations in Irish and English responded to English colonialism, encouraging Irish Catholics to reject the Reformation imposed on their country by maintaining the religion of their ancestors. Drawing equally on the past and the present, translations produced by English Benedictines employed both of the reformist strategies used by their Franciscan and Jesuit contemporaries. Anthony Batt, for example, introduced English r­ eaders to medieval exemplars of Benedictine spirituality by translating St Bernard of Clairvaux and Johannes Trithemius.59 For Batt, the Catholic Church’s past offered a template for restoring English Catholicism. In dedicating his 1621 translation of Pseudo-­Augustine to Gabriel Giffard, OSB, Batt pointedly links Giffard’s recent appointment as coadjutor bishop of Rheims with the medieval conversion of England led by Benedictines: ‘the order of S. Bennet gave the first Bishop, & first English Bishop unto our nation before ever it had any; and now againe hath given the first consecrated English Bishop, that the nation hath had after so long an interruption, as heresie hath made in that dignitie’.60 The Benedictine convents, however, generated by far the most published translations associated with this order, revealing the nuns’ simultaneous engagement with medieval Benedictinism and Tridentine piety. In 1632, Alexia Grey of the Ghent Benedictines arranged for the publication of the Benedictine Rule and the Statutes of the Brussels Benedictines, two texts that had circulated in manuscript for decades.61 Meanwhile, in 1638 Cuthbert Fursdon dedicated Batt’s translation of St Gregory’s Dialogues and his own English version of the Benedictine Rule to Anne Cary.62 Three of Cary’s sisters were novices at the Cambrai Benedictines and Anne herself would enter this house a year later. Yet even as Benedictine nuns attempted to revive the charism outlined by their order’s founder, they also helped disseminate forms of piety associated with the Counter-­Reformation. Lucy Knatchbull, abbess at Ghent, orchestrated the 1627 publication of A Treatise of Mentall Prayer, which was written by Alfonso Rodríguez, SJ, and translated by Tobie Matthew.63 Meanwhile, Mary Percy of the Brussels Benedictines and Potentiana Deacon of

59  Pseudo-­Bernard, A Hive of Sacred Honie-­Combes, trans. Anthony Batt (Douai, 1631); Johannes Trithemius, A Three-­Fold Mirrour of Man’s Vanitie, trans. Anthony Batt (Douai, 1633); Bernard of Clairvaux, A Rule of Good Life, trans. Anthony Batt (Douai, 1633). On Batt, see David Rogers, ‘Anthony Batt: A Forgotten Benedictine Translator’, in G. A. M. Janssens and F. G. A. M. Aarts (eds.), Studies in Seventeenth-­ Century English Literature, History, and Bibliography: Festschrift for Professor T. A. Birrell (Amsterdam, 1984), pp. 179–93. 60  Heavenly Treasure, sigs §ā6r–­ā6v. 61 Benedict, The Rule of the Most Blissed Father Saint Benedict (Ghent, 1632); and Statutes Compyled for the Better Observation of the Holy Rule (Ghent, 1632). On Grey’s role as editor, see Jaime Goodrich, ‘Nuns and Community-­Centered Writing: The Benedictine Rule and Brussels Statutes’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 77 (2014), pp. 287–303. 62  The Second Booke of the Dialogues of S.  Gregorie the Greate, trans. Cuthbert Fursdon (Douai, 1638). 63  Alfonso Rodríguez, A Treatise of Mentall Prayer, trans. Tobie Matthew (St Omer, 1627), sig. *2v.

296  Jaime Goodrich the Cambrai Benedictines published translations of devotional works offering guidance on the spiritual methods recently developed respectively by the Society of Jesus and Francis de Sales.64 Benedictine translations thus embody the full complexity of British Catholic attitudes towards religious reform, combining Counter-­Reformation piety with the best of medieval spirituality.

Conclusions As this chapter has demonstrated, British and Irish Catholics utilized translation in order to cultivate reform agendas that met the needs of their nations. Protestant reformers had reconfigured the cultural memory of medieval Catholicism by dissolving the monasteries, undermining the cult of saints, and censoring key texts. While British and Irish Catholics were naturally drawn towards the reformed piety that reshaped the Catholic Church after Trent, they also faced the unique challenge of recuperating a Catholic history that had been appropriated by Protestant polemicists. Translators thus contributed to reform efforts that responded to a twofold need: to recover the Catholic past and to participate in the Catholic present. The resulting corpus of translations reveals that British and Irish Catholics turned to reform in order to construct religious identities that could address the difficulties posed by governmental attempts to eradicate Catholicism. While uncensored translations of patristic and medieval texts supplied a Catholic template for religious reform and allowed British and Irish readers to view themselves as part of an unbroken Catholic tradition, translated hagiographies emphasized a key element of Tridentine piety even as they suggested that persecution in England and Ireland was part of a broader pattern of Catholic suffering. Translations of contemporary devotional texts by Jesuits and other Continental Catholics conveyed innovative spiritual methods, offering such a compelling alternative to Reformation piety that Protestants themselves co-­opted some of these works for their own purposes, as in the case of Hopkins’ translation of Granada. Finally, British and Irish friars, monks, and nuns used translation to advocate for a reformed understanding of monasticism that reflected the charism of their orders and rebutted Protestant vilifications of religious life. Translation was therefore crucial to the development of British and Irish Catholic identities between 1560 and 1640, providing models of reform intended to support the spiritual lives of an oppressed minority and, ideally, to supplant the Protestant Reformation itself. 64  Isabella Bellinzaga and Achilles Galliardi, An Abridgement of Christian Perfection, trans. Mary Percy (St Omer, 1612); Francis de Sales, Delicious Entertainments of the Soule, trans. Potentiana Deacon (Douai, 1632). On these translations, see Jaime Goodrich, Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England (Evanston, IL, 2014), pp. 145–83. For the British reception of de Sales, see Mary Hardy, ‘The Seventeenth-­Century English and Scottish Reception of Francis de Sales’ An Introduction to a Devout Life’, British Catholic History, 33 (2016), pp. 228–58.

Printed Translations and Catholic Reformation  297

Select Bibliography Allison, A.  F., ‘Franciscan Books in English, 1559–1640’, Biographical Studies, 1534–1829, 3 (1955), pp. 16–65. Eire, Carlos M. N., ‘Early Modern Catholic Piety in Translation’, in Peter Burke and R.  Po-chia Hsia (eds.), Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 83–100. Goodrich, Jaime, ‘Translation and Genettean Hypertextuality: Catherine Magdalen Evelyn, Catherine of Bologna, and English Franciscan Textual Production, 1618–40’, Renaissance and Reformation, 43 (2020), pp. 235–61. Goodrich, Jaime, Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England (Evanston, IL, 2014). Grealy, Faustina and Jaime Goodrich, ‘New Light on Seventeenth-Century Translations of the Rule of St Clare: Part I’, Archivium Hibernicum, 72 (2019), pp. 7–49. McCafferty, John, ‘Franciscan Rules Printed in the Spanish Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century’, Canterbury Studies in Franciscan History, 3 (2009), pp. 199–226. Millett, Benignus, ‘The Translation Work of the Irish Franciscans’, Seanchas Ardmhacha: Journal of the Armagh Diocesan Historical Society, 17 (1996–7), pp. 1–25. Nelson, Karen  L., ‘ “To Informe Thee Aright”: Translating Du Perron for English Religious Debates’, in Heather Wolfe (ed.), The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613–1680 (New York, 2007), pp. 147–63. Rogers, David, ‘Anthony Batt: A Forgotten Benedictine Translator’, in G. A. M. Janssens and F.  G.  A.  M.  Aarts (eds.), Studies in Seventeenth-Century English Literature, History, and Bibliography: Festschrift for Professor T. A. Birrell (Amsterdam, 1984), pp. 179–93. Walsham, Alexandra, ‘Religious Ventriloquism: Translation, Cultural Exchange, and the English Counter-Reformation’, in Violet Soen, Alexander Soetaert, Johan Verberckmoes, and Wim François (eds.), Transregional Reformations: Crossing Borders in Early Modern Europe (Göttingen, 2019), pp. 123–55.

16

Popery and Anti-­Popery in Britain and Ireland Peter Lake and Michael Questier / Alan Ford

The relation between anti-­popery and what we might call ‘real Catholics’ is a complex and difficult subject. It is tempting to avoid the issue entirely by claiming that as an ideological form, a settled stereotype or series of stereotypes, indeed as a species of prejudice, anti-­popery has far more to tell us about those who developed and performed it, i.e. Protestants, than about any sort of Catholic. Such an approach tends to relegate anti-­popery to the realm of the irrational, where it operates as a mere prejudice, rooted in the psyche of a wanna-­be or actual ­in-­group—­Protestants, of various stripes—­at the expense of an out-­group—­ Catholics—­with whom it has nothing much to do. To argue otherwise seems to risk blaming the victim, recapitulating long standing anti-­Catholic stereotypes as a form of historical analysis; something not entirely unprecedented in the historiography of the English Reformation and post-­Reformation.1 In much of the recent historiography that is how anti-­popery has been discussed; a trend that reached its height in the revisionism of the 1970s and 1980s, which relegated anti-­ popery to the realm of the irrational and fantastical, a source of conspiracy the­or­ ies, and spurious plots, panic, and hostility in times of crisis, the virulence and falsity of which were intense enough to explain the outbreak of a civil war, when the actual differences between the two parties to that war were, in reality, negligible. In reaction against that view, Peter Lake sought to explicate the internal structures of anti-­popery not as a mere prejudice, a mélange of slogans and stereotypes, but rather as an ideology, rooted in some of the core beliefs and structuring assumptions of post-­Reformation English or even British Protestantism.2 It was as though what Jean-­Paul Sartre said of the Jews—­that if they did not exist the anti-­Semite would have had to invent them—­applied with equal force to the ­anti-­papist and his hate-­object. That is to say that, out of the complex nexus of beliefs, 1 Cf. A.  G.  Dickens, The English Reformation (London, 1964); K.  V.  Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1970). 2  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 (New York, 1989), pp. 72–106. Peter Lake and Michael Questier / Alan Ford, Popery and Anti-­Popery in Britain and Ireland In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume I: Endings and New Beginnings, 1530–1640. Edited by: James E. Kelly and John McCafferty, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843801.003.0017

Popery and Anti-Popery in Britain and Ireland  299 practices, institutional structures, and political interests that constituted the Catholic Church, a certain sort of Protestant had invented or constructed ‘popery’, as the epitome of everything that they were not, the more easily to justify their own position and to interpret the messiness of the world created by their own act of schism. While such a view might serve to rescue anti-­popery from the realm of the irrational, rendering it susceptible to various sorts of situational analysis, as a political and religious response to particular circumstances and events, it also implied that anti-­popery still had little or nothing to tell us about Catholicism and everything to tell us about the beliefs and anxieties, the susceptibilities and assumptions of various stripes of Protestant. And for a shamingly long time at least one of us continued to believe that anti-­popery could legitimately be addressed as part of the study of Protestant ideology, rather than as a function of the dynamic relations between different sorts of Protestant and different sorts of Catholic. Between us we have now come to regard that as a mistake, and this section is an attempt to explain why. The debates between the revisionists and post-­revisionists of the 1980s took place in relation to events in the early to mid-­seventeenth century. As such they started in medias res. But if we want to get to the bottom of this question, we need to return to the beginnings of what became anti-­popery, that is to say to the later Middle Ages and the early Reformation. And when we do that, it emerges that, from the outset, anti-­popery was integrally connected to the doings and beliefs of real Catholics. Indeed, it owed its origins to the extreme reactions of people who had themselves once been, indeed in many ways still were, ‘Catholics’, that is de­votees of the traditional religion of the later Middle Ages, against what they now took to be the excesses, corruptions, superstitions, hypocrisies, false claims, and oppressions of their contemporaries. Thus, when in 1510 and 1511 the Lollard Margaret Sampson derided the image of Our Lady of Willesden as ‘a burnt-­arse elf and a burnt-­arse stock’, she was most decidedly not denouncing practices she had been taught were distinctive of a Catholic false religion of which she had no experience, but rather turning on an object which she had seen held in veneration, in her view, ‘worshipped’, by her contemporaries, indeed which she had perhaps once venerated or worshipped herself, but which she now saw in a completely different light. Through the most basic of language, she was now outing that image as anything but a source of supernatural or spiritual power, or even a fit subject for respect, still less of worship, but rather as an inanimate object, powerless to protect itself from exigencies of sub-­lunary existence: ‘For if she might have helpen men and women which go  unto her of pilgrimage, she would not have suffered her tail to have been burnt.’  The same might be said for Sampson and other Lollards or early Protestants, who accused Catholics of bread worship, maintaining of the ­consecrated host, as Sampson did in 1510, that ‘thyself could make as good bread as that was and that it was not the body of our Lord, for God cannot be in heaven

300  Peter Lake and Michael Questier / Alan Ford and earth’.3 Here, then, were what would become central tropes in later anti-­popery being used to describe and excoriate religious practices of which these people had personal experience, and which they now wished to repudiate in the strongest pos­sible terms. During the Henrician Reformation another central strand of anti-­popery was added in the obsession with the usurped jurisdictional claims of the papacy, now denounced as a foreign power with claims on the allegiance of the King’s subjects sufficient to free them from obedience to said prince and thus to depose him; claims of Catholic sedition which seemed to be confirmed by events like the Pilgrimage of Grace and the excommunication of Henry VIII by the Pope in 1539. And so by 1539 we find in John Bale’s play King Johan, the King ranged against a series of adversaries, Sedition, Usurped Power, Private Wealth, Dissimulation all of whom emerge in the course of the play as different em­an­ ations of popish conspiracy; the popish clergy are revealed as the very essence of Private Wealth and Dissimulation, Usurped Power is unmasked as the Pope and at one point Sedition morphs into Stephen Langton, the archbishop of Canterbury at the centre of King John’s dispute with the papacy. Here is anti-­popery being wrenched out of, and read into, some of the central experiences of being Catholic in late medieval England. From the outset, therefore, there was an integral relation between practices and beliefs central to traditional religion, an emergent anti-­popery, and the responses thereto of the orthodox, ‘Catholic’ authorities and their spokesmen and agents. This was as true of the first reformers as it had been of the Lollards. For as Richard Rex has quite rightly insisted, all of the first Protestant reformers had started out, not as Lollards, but rather as orthodox devotees of traditional religion.4 Thus Hugh Latimer admitted that well after his first arrival at Cambridge he had remained ‘as obstinate a papist as any was in England’. As for John Bale, he had been a Carmelite friar. For both men what emerged as ‘anti-­popery’ was deeply grounded in their own experience. When they sought to reduce central elements in traditional piety and religious observance to so much gobbledygook, risible superstitions, and delusions, spread amongst the people by a rapacious and corrupt clergy, they were not merely repeating tropes learned by rote, in order to dismiss practices and beliefs of which they had no direct experience. On the contrary, they were reflecting upon, and violently reacting against, things they had once done and believed themselves, in and through parodies and stereotypes of ‘traditional, orthodox religion’ that were intended to be instantly recognizable to their contemporaries. The close correlation between the organizing conceits of anti-­popery and ­central features of ‘Catholic’ belief and practice does not mean, as some historians 3  Quoted in Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989) pp. 91–5. 4  Richard Rex, The Lollards (Basingstoke, 2002).

Popery and Anti-Popery in Britain and Ireland  301 may perhaps unwisely have assumed, that the testimony of such individuals can be accepted as evidence for the true nature of late medieval Christianity, or even of ‘popular superstition’. It does, however, surely constitute evidence of the tight, not merely oppositional, but dialectical and dialogic relationship between anti-­ popery and the beliefs and practices of the orthodox, aka ‘Catholics’. And so while the classic anti-­popish account of Church history, organized around the relations between the true and false Churches, the Synagogue of Satan and the Church of Christ, pioneered by John Bale in the 1540s and then perfected by John Foxe in his Acts and Monuments, was composed out of existing elements to be found amongst the Lollards and other late medieval heretics and foreign reformers, it was also worked out, at least in part, in response to what became the standard Catholic accusation of schism, and the incessant and insistent question of ‘where was your church before Luther?’. As Catherine Davies has comprehensively shown, by the reign of Edward VI, all of the central features of what subsequently came to be known to historians as anti-­popery had been assembled.5 The result was a vision of popery as an anti-­ religion, a perfectly symmetrical negative image of ‘true Christianity’, which ‘had allowed merely human authorities, traditions and practices to take over the Church’.6 The usurped power of the pope and clergy had then been ‘used to set up and confirm in the Church a whole series of ceremonies, forms of worship and beliefs which were of entirely human origin’.7 While these were wholly empty forms, they were expressly designed to appeal to the carnal, fleshly side of human nature, and thus to enthrall the laity in a miasma of idolatrous false worship and potentially damning error. Through doctrines like purgatory and the cult of the saints, and practices like pilgrimages, and the saying of prayers and Masses for the souls of the dead, the laity were parted from their money, and the wealth and status of the clerical estate massively enhanced. Moreover, papal claims to authority over secular rulers and national Churches meant that papists professed ‘allegiance to a foreign ruler (the pope)’ and accepted ‘his right to excommunicate and depose Christian princes’.8 Popery was, therefore, politically subversive, and thus represented a threat to all order in Church and State.9 This vision of popery set up a series of binary oppositions between the authority of the Church and that of the scripture, and, in England at least, between the authority of the Christian prince and that of the pope, and between the light of the gospel and the miasma of superstition spread by the popish clergy in order to keep the people in their thrall. There was therefore built into anti-­popery a notion 5  Catharine Davies, A Religion of the Word: The Defence of the Reformation in the Reign of Edward VI (Manchester, 2002), ch. 1. 6  Lake, ‘Anti-­Popery’, pp. 72–3; see also Robin Clifton, ‘Fear of Popery’, in Conrad Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War (Basingstoke, 1973), p. 146. 7  Lake, ‘Anti-­Popery’, p. 74; Clifton, ‘Fear of Popery’, pp. 146–7. 8  Lake, ‘Anti-­Popery’, p. 76. 9  Lake, ‘Anti-­Popery’, p. 79.

302  Peter Lake and Michael Questier / Alan Ford of gradual enlightenment and a vision of a progressive process of Reformation, the idea being that as the light of the gospel spread, and the authority of scripture was applied to the practices and beliefs of the true Church with increasing exactitude and insight, so the spiritual condition of the people, and, on some (Puritan) views of the matter, the structures and practices of the visible Church itself would reach greater and greater pitches of purity and even perfection. Subject to not only the claims of the popish Church and clergy, but those of any claimant to spiritual authority and power in and over the Church or the laity, to the dictates of scripture, and only good things could happen. Superstition and error would disappear, reformation both spiritual and moral would ensue, the cause and kingdom of Christ would be advanced and that of Antichrist and the devil be diminished. To refuse the test of scripture-­based disputation and critique became in and of itself a sign of popish presumption and even tyranny.10 Deployed at first against the claims of the Catholic Church and the beliefs and practices of its adherents, such values had obvious applications to those aspects of the post-­ Reformation English Church deemed by certain hot Protestants to be too popish, and thus a species of anti-­popery became integral not only to vindications of the English national Church against popery, and hence to the maintenance of Protestant unity and obedience to the authorities in Church and State, but also to various Puritan critiques of that Church and the current spiritual and indeed political condition of England. Thus, practices and institutions, whose defenders denied that they were popish at all, fell under the rubric of popery and the topic of who or what was ‘popish’ became the subject of intermittently virulent intra-­ Protestant debate. Most obviously this applied to institutions and ceremonies, like episcopacy or kneeling to receive the communion, but it also applied to persons. The formal definition of Catholicism, pushed both by the Protestant State and Catholics like Robert Persons, SJ, involved recusancy, namely a principled and consistent refusal to attend the services of the heretical national Church. But the recusancy statutes incentivized a certain sort of person of Catholic sympathies to attend the church just enough to evade the penalties of the law, while remaining Catholic, not only in the privacy of his or her own heart, but also of his or her own home. There ensued a debate about the nature and extent of what became known as Church popery, which at moments of actual or incipient political crisis became an issue of some considerable political as well as religious significance. This syndrome was compounded by the tendency of the most zealous Protestants—­the Puritans—­to assimilate to the same status as Church papists people who did not meet their standards of orthodoxy or zeal. Here the language of anti-­ popery invaded ­relations between Protestants and various sorts of ‘conforming’ members of the

10  Lake, ‘Anti-­Popery’, p. 76.

Popery and Anti-Popery in Britain and Ireland  303 national Church, both ‘Protestant’ and ‘papist’.11 Indeed, this syndrome could lead to people who were by no conventional definition Catholic being denounced for popery; a propensity that reached its apogee, in godly circles at least, in the reaction to the rise of Arminianism and Laudianism in the 1620s and 1630s. Nor was there anything obviously irrational or paranoid about this, for ‘popery’ was operating here not as a mere synonym for, or even as a straightforward emanation of, the Church of Rome, but rather as a free-­standing principle of iniquity, demonic and antichristian in its origins and ends, of which the Church of Rome was but the most obvious outward instantiation. At this point one might think that anti-­popery had achieved a life of its own; had ossified into a set of pre-­programmed assumptions and stereotypes, of knee-­ jerk reactions, that had little to do with anything actual Catholics believed or did. While there is a good deal of truth to such a view, at no point down to the outbreak of the English Civil War did the development or deployment of anti-­popery lose contact with the doings of actual Catholics. This had a great deal to do with the entangled nature of the geo-­political, dynastic, and confessional forces configuring relations between States, and with the often intense and sometimes directly causal relationships between what we might (somewhat anachronistically) call international relations, and domestic politics and policy.12 As with much else, these complex interactions dated back to when Henrician religious policy had been, if not determined, then seriously influenced by Henry VIII’s relations with Charles V, Francis I, and the papacy.13 Things only intensified under Elizabeth, with the emergence of what came to look to a certain sort of Protestant English person—­Puritans certainly, but not only Puritans—­like an international Catholic threat centred on Rome, Madrid, and Paris, operating in France, the Low Countries, and, through a variety of con­spir­ acies and plots, both real and imagined, in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Indeed, the course of Elizabethan anti-­popery has to be seen as a species of dialogue, a series of challenges and responses, exchanged between the regime and its supporters, on the one hand, and a variety of Catholic political agents, both foreign and domestic, on the other.14 Here, as Freddy Dominguez has shown, a certain sort of émigré zealot—­the likes of Cardinal Allen, Robert Persons, or Nicholas Sander played crucial roles mediating between the concerns and condition of English Catholics, as they understood them, and the interests and priorities of a series of foreign powers and interests, centred in Madrid, Paris, and Rome.15 11  For Church popery and recusancy, see Questier’s Chapter 7 in this volume. 12  See Michael Questier, Dynastic Politics and the British Reformations (Oxford, 2019). 13 For example, see Rory McEntegert, Henry VIII, the League of Schmakalden and the English Reformation (Woodbridge, 2002). 14  For the nature of that dialogue, see Peter Lake, Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford, 2016). 15 Freddy  C.  Dominguez, Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books during the Reign of Philip II (University Park, PA, 2020).

304  Peter Lake and Michael Questier / Alan Ford The interconnections could be quite complex and have often defeated what has, until very recently, been a highly compartmentalized, not to say confessionalized, historiography. Thus, for example, the Vestiarian disputes in the 1560s need to be seen in the context of the surge of print coming from the English exiles at Louvain at the same point.16 The controversy over the prophesyings was deeply intertwined with an assault on provincial Catholicism, undertaken by elements in the regime to turn the Queen’s attention from the Puritan to the papist threat.17 The first really serious deployment of anti-­popish rhetoric against the Court, in John Stubbs’s Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf, was occasioned by the furore over the Anjou match, and the prospect of the incorporation within the counsels of the Queen of at least certain sorts of Catholics, and all that might entail for religious and diplomatic policy.18 This was the same conjuncture that produced the Jesuit mission of 1580, which was intended to push the envelope in precisely the op­pos­ ite direction from that intended by Stubbs and his backers.19 Despite the complexity of these transactions, there emerged two rival conspiracy theories. On the Protestant side, we have a narrative of antichristian duplicity and aggression, organized around the aspirations of the King of Spain and the Pope towards different sorts of (temporal and spiritual) universal monarch. Here the established account of antichristian tyranny and oppression, indelibly inscribed into the heart of English anti-­popery by Foxe’s narrative of the Marian persecution was compounded by the black legend of Spanish ambition and cruel­ty, and increasingly pressing worries about what were assumed to be the divided loyalties of all English Catholics, both recusant and Church papist, as well as the subversive activities of an activist sub-­set thereof. Such views were fuelled by a number of plots, ranging from the Ridolfi, to the Throckmorton, Babington, and Lopez conspiracies, to various invasion scares—­of which the greatest involved the Spanish Armada—­many of which became central features in the discourse of anti-­popery for decades or indeed centuries to come.20 On the Catholic side, there was an equal and opposite version of events organized around the Elizabethan regime conceived as the rogue State of western Europe, behind most of the heretical revolts and rebellions then tearing apart both the Low Countries and France, and, domestically, as a persecuting tyranny, hell-­bent on the violent repression, if not the extirpation, of English Catholics.21 16 Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England 1525–1590 (Cambridge, 2014), p. 13; Questier, Dynastic Politics, pp. 46, 49–50. 17 Peter Lake, ‘A Tale of Two Episcopal Surveys: The Strange Fates of Edmund Grindal and Cuthbert Mayne Revisited’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 18 (2008), pp. 129–63. 18 Questier, Dynastic Politics, pp. 123–4 and ch. 2 passim. 19 Thomas McCoog, ‘The English Jesuit Mission and the French Match, 1579–1581’, Catholic Historical Review, 87 (2001), pp. 185–213; Gerard Kilroy, Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life (London, 2015), esp. chs. 6–11. 20  See Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999). 21  On this, see Lake, Bad Queen Bess; Dominguez, Radicals in Exile.

Popery and Anti-Popery in Britain and Ireland  305 Of course, neither account can be accepted as simply true, but equally neither side was simply making it up. On the contrary, both parties were drawing on the actions and claims of the other, as those actions and claims appeared when viewed in terms of their own ideological presuppositions, and indeed geo-­political interests and anxieties. The accession of James I and the coming of peace with Spain did not make anti-­popery go away, not least because the Gunpowder Plot could scarcely have been better calculated to confirm all of the core assumptions and prejudices of English anti-­popery. And so the Powder Plot took its place alongside the Armada as one the two great providential deliverances of the English from the spectre of popery, and thus as both a validation of their standing as God’s own people and a terrifying reminder of what would happen if the Protestant nation let down its guard or deserted the service of its God. Thus, at least in certain circles, the virulence of anti-­popery was not reduced by the reign of rex pacificus. Indeed, the essentially politique line taken by James towards both Puritanism and popery, which he insisted on seeing as in essence equivalent threats, ensured that anti-­ popery did not only play an integrative role in the political and religious culture of his reign—­forging James’ Protestant subjects into a common opposition to the popish other, and confirming their support for the quintessentially Protestant prince that James put such effort into appearing to be. On the contrary, precisely because of the gap between the demands of that role and many of James’ de­cided­ly equivocal policies and preferences, anti-­popery came to play a thoroughly corrosive role in the critique of the Jacobean Court and regime.22 Concerns about both financial and sexual corruption at the Jacobean Court lent themselves to discussion under the rubric of popery, especially given the presence of Catholics and crypto-­Catholics close to the centre of the Jacobean regime—­and here, to persons of a Puritan persuasion, the decidedly sinister figure of Henry Howard, earl of Northampton, bulked large.23 From the 1610s, these concerns were compounded by James’ pursuit of a Catholic match for his son Charles, and the presence at Court of the, again to a certain sort of Protestant on-­looker, even more sinister figure of the Spanish ambassador, Gondomar. By the early 1620s, then, in the works of someone like Thomas Scott we find anti-­ popery acting as the carrier for a whole set of political and religious attitudes, connecting the foreign threat of popery, personified by Gondomar, with the corruption of the Court, and the prevalence of self-­servingly absolutist evil counsellors, pressing pre-­rogative rule on the prince and attempting, at every turn, to suppress the reforming role of parliament. Here was the internal dynamic of anti-­popery being mobilized for political as well as religious ends. Here was the 22  Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I’, Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), pp. 169–207; Michael Questier, Dynastic Politics, chs. 5, 6. 23  Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2002).

306  Peter Lake and Michael Questier / Alan Ford ‘light of the gospel’ in action, as all true Protestant Englishmen, were urged, through parliament and under the influence of preachers and Commonwealthmen dedicated to the cause of the gospel and the common good, to purge the State and Church of corruption, superstition, popery, and perhaps even incipient tyranny.24 As ever, the influence of anti-­popery was Janus-­faced. The impulse inscribed within it towards the application of scriptural standards of right belief and conduct to even the most powerful elements in Church and State pushed towards ideals of free speech and open critique.25 But that impulse was balanced by anti-­ popery’s equal and opposite tendency to generate conspiracy theories, based on the covert machinations of the agents of Antichrist, both at home and abroad. The two tendencies were, of course, integrally linked, since anti-­popery’s great appeal resided in its capacity to produce a critique of, and explanation for, everything that ailed us, centred on an out-­group whose excoriation and expulsion could be undertaken while affirming the essential soundness, orthodoxy, and godliness of the ‘real’ (Protestant) England. This dynamic was compounded when the ‘rise of Arminianism’ seemed to confirm the presence at or near the centre of the regime of a clique of ‘popishly’ affected churchmen, busy undermining the orthodoxy of the English Church from within. Here was anti-­popery being used against people who by no formal definition of the term could be regarded as Catholic. Quite remarkably, something of the same was also happening amongst Catholics. At least since the so-­ called Archpriest Controversy, some of the central tropes of anti-­popery had been used by one faction of English Catholics to denounce other Catholics. The appellant side in the controversy accused the Jesuits and their supporters of a range of characteristics and activities: populist theories of power, and appeals to the people, various claims to spurious charisma and spiritual power designed to win them support amongst the laity for their schemes for a form of world domination, sponsored by Spain. Many of these claims self-­consciously echoed accusations made by central elements in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean regimes against both Catholics and Puritans, the aim being, with the likes of Archbishop Bancroft and James I, to equate the Jesuits and their allies with the Presbyterians, thus creating room for an alliance between a certain sort of loyal and moderate Catholic and the Elizabethan or Jacobean regime, in a common front against the Presbyterian and Jesuit extremes.26 Such claims continued to animate later disputes about the rights and wrongs of appointing a bishop to preside over the 24  Peter Lake, ‘Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition in the 1620s: Thomas Scott and the Spanish Match’, Historical Journal, 25 (1982), pp. 805–25. 25  See David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 2005); Peter Lake, ‘ “Freedom of Speech” in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, in Robert Ingram, Jason Peacey, and Alex Barber (eds.), Freedom of Speech, 1500–1800 (Manchester, 2020), pp. 63–95; Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2012). 26  Peter Lake and Michael Questier, All Hail to the Archpriest: Confessional Conflict, Toleration, and the Politics of Publicity in Post-­Reformation England (Oxford, 2019), esp. ch. 9.

Popery and Anti-Popery in Britain and Ireland  307 English Catholic community, thus bringing the excesses of the Jesuits and their followers—­widely blamed for such enormities as the Powder Plot—­under control and making a rapprochement with the Stuart State, and hence some form of toleration, possible. By this point, we might assume that anti-­popery had taken on a life of its own, one almost entirely separate both from the interconfessional disputes that had first called it into being and anything that English Catholics might be doing or saying now. But that was not the case. As it seemed to Sir Richard Grosvenor in 1624, the papists had ‘(as it were) made open proclamation to the world that the times are now come that they have so long hoped for and that they expect at the least a public toleration of their religion’. Grosvenor noted, regretfully, ‘that favour which it has pleased his Majesty to afford them out of his innate goodness and peaceable disposition through the intercession of foreign princes and their ambassadors’. But given an inch, the papists had taken a mile, having ‘assumed to themselves a toleration of their religion without authority’, frequenting ambassadors’ chapels in the city and generally exercising ‘their religion in a more public fashion than men of a discreet temper would do’. They would not stop at that: ‘if the papists once get a toleration, they will not cease till they obtain an equality with us’ and ‘from an equality they will aspire to a superiority’ and eventually extirpate ‘our religion’.27 In January 1625, Grosvenor insisted Catholics were locusts which eat up and devour the seeds of loyalty and religion, and who labour to seduce our wives and children from their profession whereby the latter proves disobedient to their parents, the former inconstant to their husbands, and both of them (with all such others over whom they prevail) disloyal to their prince and country: for these are the effects of popish lectures and blind obedience.28

Grosvenor was not some Puritan zealot, but a leading Cheshire gentleman serially elected as knight of the shire to the parliaments of the 1620s, and these remarks were made in a speech given at an election and in charges made to the Cheshire grand jury. Grosvenor was as agitated by Court corruption, monopolies, and the rise of Arminianism as the next parliamentarian, but in detailing the popish threat, his emphasis was on the actions of real Catholics. None of this was made up, and his claim that these levels of Catholic visibility and activism were enabled by a de facto toleration, and by the hope, indeed, the prospect of a more formal arrangement were also true enough.

27  Richard Cust (ed.), The Papers of Sir Richard Grosvenor, 1st Bart. (1585–1645) (Stroud, 1996), pp. 3–4. 28 Cust, Papers, p. 10.

308  Peter Lake and Michael Questier / Alan Ford As the Stuarts’ responded to the European crisis by seeking marriage alliances with one after another of the great Catholic powers, the restraints on Catholic activity were necessarily, if not abolished, then almost wholly suspended. For if a papal dispensation to allow either of the projected marriages to take place were to be acquired, there could be no trace in England of the active persecution of Catholics. The result was an increase in the volume of Catholic activity, ranging from Court conversions and theological disputation, conducted first in public and then in print, to increasingly daring recourse to various foreign embassies to attend Mass, to populous and well-­publicized pilgrimages to St Winifred’s Well.29 The response on the street, and in print, to the famous fatal vesper, in which a house in Blackfriars collapsed to reveal a Catholic service in full swing within,30 the publication of John Gee’s Foot out of the Snare,31 which purported to reveal in shockingly precise detail the activities of Catholics in and about the capital, not to mention speeches like Grosvenor’s both in parliament and in far-­away Cheshire, were thus far more than expressions of an anti-­popery based on mythologized versions of the Armada or the Powder Plot, pretty much devoid of roots in contemporary reality. Rather, they were closely tied not merely to the course of international and Court politics, but to the actions of English Catholics, performing their Catholicism if not in full public view, then certainly with increasing daring and insouciance, in a grey area strategically located between the illicit and the covert, on the one side, and the bare-­facedly public, on the other. These fears were compounded by the papal appointment of a bishop to preside over the English Catholic community. Here were Catholics setting out their stall for a full-­on toleration, a settlement in England not a million miles away from the situation that obtained in Ireland. When all this was combined with the rise of Arminianism, and with the increasingly disastrous conduct of what a sizeable portion of Charles’ subjects thought ought to be a war of religion, the result was an unholy mess that anti-­popery seemed uniquely capable of explaining in satisfyingly binary ways. We are a million miles away here from the revisionist version of these events which discussed anti-­popery under the rubric of irrational prejudice and paranoia. Building on the work of Robin Clifton,32 Conrad Russell came to see anti-­ popery as something like an irrational prejudice, a very large part of a religion-­induced red mist that blinded contemporaries to the large areas of ­agreement about secular political values that otherwise united them.33 In Kevin 29  For the Holywell pilgrimage in 1605, see Philip Caraman, Henry Garnet 1555–1606 and the Gunpowder Plot (1964), pp. 324, 325. 30  Alexandra Walsham, ‘ “The Fatall Vesper”: Providentialism and Anti-­Popery in Late Jacobean London’, Past and Present, 144 (1994), pp. 36–87. 31  John Gee, The Foot out of the Snare (London, 1624). 32  Robin Clifton, ‘The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution’, Past & Present, 52 (1971), p. 34. 33  Conrad Russell, ‘Introduction’, in Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War, pp. 17–27; Conrad Russell, ‘Arguments for Religious Unity in England, 1530–1650’, Journal of Ecclesiastical

Popery and Anti-Popery in Britain and Ireland  309 Sharpe’s phrase anti-­popery was a form of ‘paranoia’.34 For John Morrill the English Civil War was not the first modern revolution, but the last of the wars of religion, while Anthony Fletcher held that the Civil War broke out between two groups who had been misled into hating one another through two mutually reinforcing conspiracy theories centred on anti-­Puritanism and anti-­popery. Caroline Hibbard’s classic work, Charles I and the Popish Plot, underwrote this view through an essentially high-­political narrative centred on the activities of a few decidedly odd Catholic agitators at the Court, who together with the Catholic Queen and the papal agent, George Con, provided just enough justification for the burgeoning rumours of a Popish Plot; a view of events which left the bulk of English Catholics sunk in somnolent provincial obscurity.35 That latter view was based on the localist county community school of local studies, which had its equivalent of the classic county study in the equally county-­ based recusant hunting and counting school of Catholic studies. More recent work of the political history of English Catholics has challenged that vision of English Catholics as the politically passive victims of State repression. There was a Catholic politics, and various versions of a Catholic cause running through the period. Catholic hopes of radically improved terms of allegiance, up to and including de facto or indeed de jure forms of toleration, and fears of renewed repression rose and fell according to the tergiversations of Court, dynastic, and international politics. In the 1630s the Catholic clerical networks echoed with a good deal of chatter about what the Laudian Reformation of the Caroline Church might mean for relations with at least the right sort of Catholic,36 and connections of various kinds were established between a certain sort of Church of England cleric and a certain sort of Catholic.37 Different visions of the nature of the English Catholic enterprise—­was it a Church crying out for the norms and forms of episcopal government, or a mission field best left to the evangelical zeal of the Jesuits and their allies?—emerged, and were canvassed amongst English Catholics with vigour and venom. Here was the locus for the Catholic anti-­popery that had characterized the Archpriest Controversy, being once again deployed against the Jesuits and their followers by the adherents of episcopacy.38 As Katharyn Marshalek’s researches are showing, originating in what we might want to term History, 18 (1967), pp. 201–26; Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, ‘Introduction: After Revisionism’, in Cust and Hughes (eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart England, p. 3. 34  Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (1992), pp. 846, 847, 938. 35  Caroline Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill, NC, 1983). Hibbard’s work followed on from Gordon Albion’s Charles I and the Court of Rome: A Study in 17th Century Diplomacy (London, 1935). 36 Albion, Charles I. 37 Anne Davenport, Suspicious Moderate: The Life and Writings of Francis à Sancta Clara (1598–1680) (Notre Dame, IN, 2017), chs. 6–7; John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558–1689 (Harlow, 2000), pp. 124–6. 38  Michael Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c.1550–1640 (Cambridge, 2006); Lake and Quester, All Hail to the Archpriest.

310  Peter Lake and Michael Questier / Alan Ford the private Catholic public sphere—­that is, canvassed by and for solely Catholic audiences and interests—­these disputes increasingly emerged into the public sphere as changing political circumstances allowed and Protestant alarm dictated.39 The course of Protestant anti-­popish discourse through the 1620s, closely tracked not only the rise of Laudianism and Arminianism but also these developments amongst Catholics, which, viewed from within the structures of conventional anti-­popery, could appear very threatening and sinister indeed, as the philippics delivered to various Cheshire audiences by Sir Richard Grosvenor, as well as myriad speeches in parliament and various tracts by the likes of Thomas Scott and John Gee all showed. To see the politics of the period thus, is to put the sayings and doings of English Catholics back into the mainstream, and to cast the Court, diplomatic, public, and parliamentary politics of the period into a quite different light. Such are the benefits of setting anti-­popery in its proper Catholic as well as Protestant setting.

Protestant Attitudes to Catholicism in Ireland In the 1590s Irish Catholics began collecting the names of those who had died for the faith in the struggle with the Protestant Church and State. The task went on into the seventeenth century, and finally culminated in the beatification of seventeen Irish martyrs in 1992. But what we are interested in here is the dates of the deaths that were recorded in these unofficial martyr lists: just four from 1536 to 1569; then eighteen in the decade 1570‒9, and an even more dramatic increase in the 1580s, to seventy-­four martyrs, after which the totals fall back—­twelve in the 1590s, nineteen in the 1600s, and eighteen in the 1610s—­before dropping to three in the 1620s and none in the 1630s. The pattern is suggestive. It is sometimes assumed that the Reformation initiated a period of intense hostility and violence towards Catholicism in Ireland, an antipathy which fuelled Irish sectarianism and persisted for centuries. The historical reality, though, as these lists suggest, is messier and more complicated. Official policy towards Irish Catholics shifted markedly across the period 1536 to 1641, from informal toleration, to persecution, torture, and death, and then back again to toleration. And the intellectual approach to Catholicism similarly ranged from a stark antichristian ‘othering’ to a pragmatic acceptance of the need to coexist. The simplest way of unpacking this range of approaches is to trace the ­chronological development of official attitudes to Catholicism in Ireland from the Reformation to the outbreak of the 1641 Rising. During the initial stages of 39  Katharyn Marshalek’s research will transform our knowledge of the role of Catholic public pol­it­ ics in the religious and political crises of the 1620s and 1630s. We draw here very closely on her unpublished work.

Popery and Anti-Popery in Britain and Ireland  311 the Irish Reformation, following the passing of the Reformation legislation in 1536 and during the remainder of the reign of Henry VIII, the primary emphasis of official policy was on replacing the authority of the Pope by that of the King. There were, it is true, some consequent religious changes, but generally speaking, the secular clergy serving in the Church in the Pale, who were subject to the closest government control, saw little change in the way they went about their ministry. This was of course true also in England, where Henrician religious policy was by the end of the reign relatively conservative. But there the Reformation was underpinned both by a Protestant underground, feeding off Lutheran ideas imported from the Continent which infiltrated the universities and the wider public sphere, and maybe (or maybe not) also by a continuing medieval tradition of anti-­clerical heterodoxy. Moreover, England was a united country with a central and local government apparatus which could be used to spread and enforce religious uniformity. None of these conditions applied in Ireland, which was ethnically, linguistically, and politically divided, and lacked a native university until Trinity College Dublin opened its doors in 1594. The civil and ecclesiastical authorities were thus for much of the sixteenth century caught in a double bind when it came to Reformation policy. On the one hand, they lacked the resources to build up a Reformation ‘from below’. They struggled to provide for a committed preaching ministry—­there was no Irish seminary, no Irish White Horse Inn where reformed ideas were discussed and taken up by young academics, no public sphere where Continental ideas and Lutheran books were passed round and discussed; nor was it possible to ‘import’ ready-­ made reformers, as impoverished Irish benefices were unattractive to university-­educated clergy from England. On the other hand, because of the weakness of the Dublin government, and the constant fear of rebellion, throughout the crucial period of the sixteenth century the State was in no position to impose the Reformation ‘from above’, even in that area of Ireland it directly controlled. Hence the scarcity of Catholic martyrs during the early decades of the Irish Reformation. Hence, the lack of martyrs when Ireland returned to the Catholic fold under Queen Mary—­the fires remained unlit for want of Protestants to burn. However, during the reign of Elizabeth, as conflict escalated, there was a significant change in official attitudes towards Catholicism. A key catalyst was the decision of Pope Pius V to excomunicate Elizabeth in 1570. The impact can be seen in the 1579 Desmond Rising, when James Fitmaurice landed in Ireland with Spanish and Italian troops under a papal banner, and sought to persuade his countrymen to rise against the Queen, arguing that they had a stark choice between ‘Christ’s banner . . . in the field on the one side, and the banner of heresy on the other side’.40 Not only was rebellion turned into a religious crusade, it 40  J. B. Wainewright (ed.), ‘Some Letters and Papers of Nicholas Sanders, 1562–1580’, in Miscellanea 13, CRS 26 (London, 1926), p. 21.

312  Peter Lake and Michael Questier / Alan Ford could also now attract the support of the Catholic nations on the Continent, as  Ireland became another battleground in the Europe-­wide struggle between Reformation and Counter-­Reformation. The response of the Irish State was, as a result, not just military and political; it now took a new religious—­indeed, apocalyptic—­turn, as Catholicism was seen as the antichristian enemy of godly Protestantism. The most dramatic example of this shift was the response of Sir Arthur Grey, lord deputy from 1580 to 1582, to the arrival of a 600-­strong Spanish force in late 1580 to support the Desmond Rising. He besieged them at Smerwick, and, when they surrendered, massacred them. Violent English responses to an Irish rebellion were, of course, not unfamiliar, but the justification for the slaughter was new: the invading force did not deserve the respect due to soldiers sent by a legitimate power, since it was sent by the Pope, ‘a detestable shaveling the right Antichrist and general ambitious tyrant over all right principalities’. 41 Grey was part of a new generation of English military men—­what has been termed the Calvinist military international—­that saw contemporary diplomacy and warfare in confessional terms. Shaped by events such as the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in France and the attempted invasion of England by the Spanish Armada in 1588, they viewed contemporary conflict as part of the final apocalyptic battle between the Protestant forces of Christ and those of the Catholic Antichrist. And, as further efforts were made by Irish Catholic leaders such as Baltinglass and Hugh O’Neill, the earl of Tyrone, to gain Counter-­Reformation support for Irish rebellion, the violence and hatred grew. Hence the latter part of the sixteenth century has been labelled by Irish historians as an ‘Age of Atrocity’.42 Hence too the dramatic rise in the number of unofficial Catholic martyrs in the 1570s and 1580s. Close inspection of the names on these lists reveals the stark antithesis: clergy and lay people who had been killed or executed by the Protestant State as traitors and rebels were now being honoured as Catholic martyrs. Even as religious hostilities were reaching new and highly visible heights, there was at the same time another equally significant development taking place. In England during the latter part of the sixteenth century it is now recognized that there was a slow generational shift from religious conservatism to Protestant commitment. In Ireland in the areas under the direct control of the Dublin government there was a similar move over the same period, but there nominal conformity was transformed, with the help of Catholic seminary priests and Jesuit missionaries, into commitment to a separate Catholic Church. Given that the majority of these Catholics also asserted their continuing loyalty to the State, this posed a dilemma for the authorities, who were understandably anxious that they should not join in the endemic rebellions. The result was paradoxical: as the 41  The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA), State Papers Ireland, 63/78/29. 42  David Edwards, Padraig Lenihan, and Clodagh Tait (eds.), Age of Atrocity, Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2002).

Popery and Anti-Popery in Britain and Ireland  313 Protestant State saw itself as engaged in a desperate struggle with the forces of the Catholic Antichrist, they were forced to tolerate Catholicism within the Pale in order to secure the population’s civil loyalty. Thus, at the very time when they wanted to suppress the nascent Counter-­Reformation-­inspired Church, anti-­ recusancy measures—­fines and imprisonment—­were suspended. This despite the thunderings of Protestant leaders such as Archbishop Loftus of Dublin, and Bishop Lyon of Cork, who complained to the lord deputy about this triumph of pragmatism over religious principle: ‘there is no time unfit . . . to set forth God’s truth and to maintain the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ, and to suppress Antichrist and his adherents. God can and will defend his own cause, let man do his duty, men’s policy must not be joined with God’s truth.’43 Lord Deputy Mountjoy’s defeat of Tyrone and his Spanish allies at Kinsale in 1602 brought to an end the late-­sixteenth-­century rebellions and ushered in a new era of peace when, for the first time, the authority of the Dublin government extended to the whole country. When James came to the throne in 1603 he was therefore faced with a crucial decision: what was to be his policy towards Catholics, not so much in England, where they were a small minority, but in Ireland where they constituted the vast majority of the population. Rulers across Europe greatly valued religious uniformity. This was, of course, partly a matter of principle: in the zero-­sum game of the Reformation and Counter-­Reformation, only one religion could be right. But even more important was the need for pol­it­ ical unity, and the not unjustified horror of dividing the loyalty of citizens, given the viciousness and destructiveness of the early modern ‘wars of religion’. Catholics who had supported the Dublin government during the Nine Years’ War hoped that James, the Protestant son of a Catholic mother, would grant them toleration as a reward for their loyalty. James was indeed not particularly attracted to religious compulsion, but was concerned with what he saw as the dual loyalties of his Catholic subjects, and was quite prepared, in the aftermath of events such as the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, to give vent to the demands of hardline Protestants in parliament for tougher measures against recusants. His chief minister, Robert Cecil, was the ultimate political pragmatist, with no interest whatsoever in letting religious policy be driven by apocalyptic anti-­Catholicism. On the other hand, a significant proportion of the English clergy, officials, and military leaders that made up the Dublin administration believed peace offered a golden opportunity finally to use the full force of the State to suppress Catholicism. We have a number of surviving treatises and publications by English soldiers and officials such as Ralph Birkenshaw, Barnaby Rich, and Sir Parr Lane and the an­onym­ ous author of that searing indictment of royal policy, The supplication of the blood of the English most lamentably murdered in Ireland crying out of the earth for

43  TNA, State Papers Ireland 63/183/47/I.

314  Peter Lake and Michael Questier / Alan Ford revenge, which took a strong line in arguing that, once military victory had been achieved, the next essential step if the Irish were to be brought into full obedience was the imposition of religious uniformity through the use of overpowering force. Without this, they argued, Ireland would never be brought under complete English control. In January 1603 the leaders of Church and State in Dublin revived the anti-­ recusant legislation seeking to force Catholics to come to church. They were peremptorily stopped by Lord Deputy Mountjoy, no friend of religious compulsion. Returning after a trip to Connacht to find the measures in place in Dublin, he immediately suspended them, furious at the Protestant zeal of his fellow governors: ‘If you did but walk up and down in the cold with us you would not be so warm in your religion.’44 This set the pattern for religious policy during the remainder of James’ reign: the Irish Protestant Church and State pressed for the use of the full power of the law to suppress Catholicism, seeking to take advantage of any anti-­Catholic pol­it­ ical turns in royal policy in England to push their case for imposing religious uniformity on Ireland. In England, though, those directing Irish policy, concerned at the danger of alienating the majority of the Irish population and driving them into yet another expensive revolt, counselled caution and urged the use of persuasive rather than coercive means to win them over to the Church of Ireland. The crucial confrontation came in 1605‒6 when the Dublin authorities, led by Lord Deputy Chichester, along with the president of Munster, Sir Henry Brouncker exploited the anti-­Catholic backlash following the Gunpowder Plot to impose religious conformity in the Pale and Munster. On the ‘ordinary sort’ they imposed the 12d. fine under the Act of Uniformity. Pushing the very limited Irish anti-­recusancy legislation to its limits they fined the more prominent Catholics much larger sums and imprisoned them when they refused to pay. They pressed the English authorities for power to banish and even, in Brouncker’s case, execute priests. Brouncker’s right-­hand-­man, Sir Parr Lane, another hardline Protestant ex-­soldier, was sent to England with an elaborate rationale for the forcible suppression of Catholicism, as the leaders in Dublin supported his case by sending over encouraging reports of the number of Catholics attending church. But the authorities in England were not prepared to risk such a strategy. Pressed by Irish Catholics, Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, ordered Brouncker and Lord Deputy Chichester to suspend proceedings, which they reluctantly did. Irish anti-­ Catholicism was not just political: as the seventeenth century ­progressed, it was increasingly underpinned by the writing and teaching of the fellows and clerical graduates of Trinity College Dublin. From the disputation between the Jesuit Henry Fitzsimon and the young student, James Ussher, in 1600,

44  TNA, State Papers Ireland 63/212/124a.

Popery and Anti-Popery in Britain and Ireland  315 when they debated whether or not the Pope was Antichrist, to the regular works of controversial theology published by Trinity fellows and graduates across the first four decades, the college focused its intellectual energy almost exclusively upon anti-­Catholic religious controversy. And in 1615, when Ussher, by now Professor of Theology, helped draw up the Church of Ireland’s new confession, the Irish Articles, they unsurprisingly took a much harder line towards Catholicism than that of the English Thirty-­Nine Articles, defining the Pope as ‘that man of sin’—Antichrist. Ussher, who went on to become archbishop of Armagh from 1625 to 1656 and the leading intellectual figure in the Church of Ireland, in his 1631 A discourse of the religion anciently professed by the Irish and British, provided the Church of Ireland with a new vision of its history; in effect, an ‘origin myth’, which was used by the Church until well into the twentieth century. The Church founded by St Patrick had been pure and, in effect, ‘Protestant’, differing from Rome in many respects. It was not till the twelfth century when Malachy brought the Irish Church into closer alignment with the antichristian papacy that corruption set in, thus justifying the sixteenth-­century Reformation and the established Church’s claim to be the Church of Ireland. The Irish State and the established Church thus remained intellectually and politically committed to a coercive approach to Catholicism in the second and third decades of the seventeenth century, even though it was by now clear that the authorities in England would never countenance the forcible imposition of uniformity. Nevertheless, whenever political circumstances permitted, they clamped down on Catholics. In 1612, perhaps in an effort to cow Catholic opposition before the forthcoming parliament, Chichester had Bishop Conor O’Devaney and a fellow priest executed for treason in Dublin. He soon rued his decision: Catholic crowds flocked to pay their respects and immediately venerated them as martyrs. In 1621 former lord mayor of Dublin, Francis Taylor, died in prison in 1621 after he refused to attend Protestant services: his name too was added to the martyr rolls. But the harsh zeal of Brouncker and Chichester had gradually faded. Hence, there were just three Catholic martyrdoms recorded in the 1620s. Church and State continued to press to use the Act of Uniformity when they were allowed to, and to fine Catholics for failure to come to church, but by the 1620s this was, as in England, more a matter of raising revenue than a serious attempt to impose conformity. The continuing strength and persistence of this Irish anti-­Catholicism, and the stark contrast to the approach on the other side of the Irish Sea, became even more apparent in the early years of the reign of King Charles. The tolerant husband of a Catholic wife, Charles had no interest whatsoever in hardline reformed anti-­Catholicism. His archbishop of Canterbury William Laud rejected the identification of the Pope with Antichrist and accepted that the Catholic Church was a true Church. When, in 1626, Charles began negotiations with Irish Catholics, seeking a financial contribution from them in return for toleration and other

316  Peter Lake and Michael Questier / Alan Ford concessions called ‘the Graces’, including a new oath of allegiance which left out those clauses to which Catholics had objected, there seemed to be a possibility of creating an Irish polity where Protestants and Catholics could join together. The Church of Ireland reacted with horror, a horror that was vehemently expressed in 1627 in the pulpits of Dublin by the two leading archbishops in the Church of Ireland, James Ussher and Malcolm Hamilton: The religion of the papists is superstitious and idolatrous, their faith and doctrine erroneous and heretical; their church, in respect of both, apostatical. To give them therefore a toleration . . . is a grievous sin: and that in two respects . . . First, it is to make ourselves accessory . . . to all the abominations of popery; but also . . . to the perdition of the seduced people, which perish in the deluge of their Catholic apostacy, Secondly, to grant them toleration, in respect of any money to be given . . . is to set religion to sale, and . . . the souls of the people . . .45

The implications of this for public policy was spelled out by Hamilton. He attacked those who argued, ‘Oh this is an unfit time . . . for the suppression of idolatry, it will make a rebellion’, and pointed to the biblical analogy of Samuel criticizing King Saul for disobeying God’s command to kill King Agag ‘because he feared the people and so obeyed their voice’. Hamilton then cited Joshua 22, which relates how God had punished the whole people of Israel for the sin of two tribes in setting up an idolatrous altar: ‘What shall we then fear against the whole kingdom of Ireland where all the realm is full of altars not to the worship of God but to Baal.’46 The Graces were never formally endorsed. Instead, there followed a lengthy three-­year period of ‘home rule’ by the two lords justices, the earl of Cork and Adam Viscount Loftus which saw a final attempt to put into effect the hardline policy of Irish Protestants, as Catholic churches and religious houses were shut and firm measures again taken against the Catholic clergy and laity. But the arrival of Thomas Wentworth as lord deputy in 1633 marked a change of direction. Forceful and determined, Wentworth made it clear he had no time for repressive measures against Catholics and initiated a long period of de facto toleration, amply reflected in the fact that there were no martyrs’ deaths recorded during the 1630s.Working closely with Bishop Bramhall of Derry and Archbishop Laud he reconfigured religious policy so that its primary focus was on restoring the property and income of the Church of Ireland and bringing it into closer 45  The protestation of the archbishops and bishops of Ireland against the toleration of popery (London, 1641). 46  Alan Ford, ‘Criticising the Godly Prince: Malcolm Hamilton’s Passages and Consultations’, in V. P. Carey and U. Lotz-­Heumann (eds.), Taking Sides? Colonial and Confessional Mentalities in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2003), pp. 134–5.

Popery and Anti-Popery in Britain and Ireland  317 alignment with the Church of England. Though not above fomenting divisions in the Catholic Church, Wentworth for the most part left it alone, enabling it to consolidate its resident episcopate and create a church structure parallel to that of the established Church. The change in tone and focus can perhaps best be seen in Trinity College Dublin where Laud instituted a thorough reform, putting in an Arminian provost, weeding out Calvinist fellows, and rewriting the statutes to remove the reference to Catholicism as an ‘antichristian religion’. With no official support for aggressive anti-­popery and the suspension of recusancy measures, this was, by and large, a period of peace and prosperity for Irish Protestants and Catholics. Indeed, that irenic historian, Robert Ware, wrote in 1633 of his optimism that, in these ‘halcyon days’ the inhabitants of Ireland would leave behind them the previous turbulent times and join together as one people.47 The 1630s can be seen, therefore, as one of those periods, often ignored by historians who focus upon the vortices of antagonism, when Protestant and Catholic just got on with the everyday challenges of living together in the same country. It was not, of course, to be. The 1641 Rising exposed the latent religious and political tensions which remained underneath the surface. On the Catholic side, a significant factor which led to the revolt was the fear, following the fall of Wentworth (now the earl of Strafford), that the English parliament—­the natural ally of hardline Irish Protestants as far as religious policy was concerned—­would suspend toleration and try to extirpate Irish Catholicism. On the Protestant side, there was a resurgence of apocalyptic conspiracy theories, as the Rising was ascribed to papal plots and antichristian Jesuits. In particular, the Rising, with its greatly exaggerated death toll, was interpreted as a punishment by God—­precisely what Hamilton and other Irish Protestant writers had previously warned about—­ for the State’s sinful toleration of an antichristian religion and refusal to impose uniformity. As one Protestant clergyman put it, by putting ‘politic ends before pious’, the English government in Ireland had discovered in 1641 ‘how dearly the Israelites paid for their cruel mercy in not extirpating the idolatrous Canaanites . . . teaching us . . . that policy without piety is a damnable discretion.’48 The history of Protestant attitudes towards Irish Catholicism in this period is, therefore, one of vacillation, one of repeated shifts and changes. Caught between the uncompromising anti-­Catholicism of Irish Protestant soldiers, clergy, and officials, intellectually reinforced in the early seventeenth century by Trinity College Dublin, and the pragmatic refusal of the authorities in England to risk further rebellion by alienating the vast majority of the Irish population, official policy zig-­zagged between short-­term coercion and de facto toleration. Neither was effective: Catholic pressure always ensured that forceful measures were suspended, and informal toleration, as was seen in 1641, failed to reassure Catholics 47  Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland (Dublin, 1633), sig. ¶3v. 48  Daniel Harcourt, A New Remonstrance from Ireland ([London], 1643), 3.

318  Peter Lake and Michael Questier / Alan Ford when faced with the fear of Protestant religious intolerance. It was, in short, an experience that left all sides dissatisfied. Irish Catholics suffered economically through repeated fines and imprisonment; politically, by being excluded from office and influence; and ultimately, as witnessed by the martyr lists, with their very lives. Irish Protestants felt betrayed by the authorities in England, complaining privately and publicly about their pusillanimity, warning about inevitable providential punishment for their failure to act firmly against Catholic heresy. The government in England was equally frustrated with the Church of Ireland’s repeated demands for the support of the civil sword and its reluctance to engage culturally and pastorally with the Irish population and win them over through preaching, teaching, and example. The legacy of the first hundred years of the Reformation thus cast a long shadow as far as Irish Protestant attitudes were concerned, as the memory of 1641 continued to fuel the latent hostility of the Irish Protestant tradition of anti-­Catholicism across the subsequent centuries.

Select Bibliography Clarke, Aidan, ‘The 1641 Rebellion and Anti-Popery in Ireland’, in Brian Mac Cuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641: Aspects of the Rising (Belfast, 2007). Clifton, Robin, ‘Fear of Popery’, in C. Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War (Basingstoke, 1973), pp. 144–67. Ford, Alan, ‘Criticising the Godly Prince: Malcolm Hamilton’s Passages and Consultations’, in V. P. Carey and U. Lotz-Heumann (eds.), Taking Sides? Colonial and Confessional Mentalities in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2003), pp. 116–37. Ford, Alan and John McCafferty (eds.) The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2005). Hibbard, Caroline, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill, NC, 1983). Lake, Peter, ‘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 (New York, 1989), pp. 72‒106.

Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abercrombie, Robert, SJ  72–3, 81–4, 86–7 Acquaviva, Claudio, SJ  110–12 Acts, of Appeals 1533  19–20 Attainder 38–9 Concerning Peter’s Pence and Dispensations, 1533  13 Six Articles  26, 184–5 Succession  21–2, 32–4 Supremacy 1–2 Uniformity  90, 127–8, 130, 135–6, 314–15 Union 27 Alabaster, William  269–70 Alfield, Thomas  276 Allen, William, Cardinal  6–7, 54–5, 107–11, 207–8, 276, 303 Archpriest Controversy  99–100, 112–15, 117–24, 306–7, 309–10 Arrowsmith, Edmund, SJ. See, martyrdom. Arundell, Dorothy  230 Babthorpe, family  103–4, 230–1 Babthorpe, Grace  104–5, 230–1 Baldwin, William, SJ  122–3 Bale, John  300–1 Barlow, Ambrose, OSB  195–6 Batt, Anthony, OSB  289–90, 295–6 Beaton, James, Archbishop  70–2, 78–80, 209–10 Bedingfield, family  188 Bellarmine, Robert, Cardinal, SJ  4–5, 97–8 Benedictine monks colleges 203–4 Dieulouard, St Laurence’s  216–17 Douai, St Gregory’s  216–17 England, mission to  114, 117–18, 216–17 English Benedictine Congregation  4–6, 216–17 Lamspringe, SS Adrian and Denis  216–17 Monte Casino  216–17 Paris, St Edmund’s  216–17 Schottenklöster  203–4, 216–17 St Malo, St Benedict’s  216–17 Birkhead, George, Archpriest  114–15, 138–9

Bishop, William, Bishop  117–19 bishops appointment of  68–72, 107–9, 112–13, 115, 118 Blackwell, George  97–8, 109, 112–13 see also, Archpriest Controversy. Blount, Richard, SJ  117–18, 120–2 Blundell, family  188 Bonner, Edmund, Bishop  35–6, 39–42 Bourchier, Thomas, OFM  276–7 Browne, family see also, Protestant, Catholic relations with, Sussex, West. Browne, Anthony Maria  192–3, 292–3 Browne, George, Archbishop  26 Browne, Magdalene  274–6 Byrd, William  244, 247–8, 251 Gradualia 247–8 Ingatestone Hall, Essex, music at  247–8, 253 Masses  247–8, 257–8 see also, chapter 13. Caetani, Luigi, Cardinal  111–13 Campbell, family  75, 199–200, 224 Campion, Edmund, SJ. See, martyrdom. Carmelite friars England, mission to  117 Carnesecchi, Pietro  47–8 Carranza, Bartolomé, OP  7–8, 40–1, 44–5 Carter, William. See, martyrdom. Cary, Elizabeth  289 Castro, de, Alfonso, OFM  7–8, 40–1, 44–5 Catholic, reformation  100, 143–4, 281–2 Marian  32–6, 38–45, 47–8 convents 226–7 England, in  100 Ireland, in  38, 90, 198–9, 274 legislation  39–40, 42–3 Scotland, in  186 Wales, in  64–5 liturgy  243–4, 249 music  10–11, 238, 243–5, 256–8, 268 collections of  246–7

320 Index Catholic, reformation (cont.) historiography of  244–5 influences on  257–8 Trent, Council of  5–7, 32, 43, 243–4, 249–50, 287, 289 convents 254 saints, cult of  290–1 spirituality  273–4, 280–7, 295–6 see also, chapter 13; education. Catholicism anti, popular  95, 298 medieval, nature of  14–19, 68–9, 301 popery, anti-  298, 300–3, 306, 317–18 examples of  307 performances and publications  300, 304–6, 308, 313–16 historical context to  307–8, 311–14, 316–18 historiography of  298–301, 308–10 Ireland, in  310, 314–15, 317–18 responses to  8–9, 302–3 Vestiarian disputes  304 see also, chapter 16 Catholics, crypto  139–41, 305–6 Champney, Anthony  139–40 chapels  15, 34, 68–9, 72–3, 164, 168–9, 173, 191–2, 243–5, 256–7 erection of  160, 192–3 London, Embassy Chapels  256–7 Somerset House  256–7 Charles I, King  3–4, 97, 140–2, 211–12, 289 marriage 98–9 Chauncy, Maurice, OCart  108–9 China  4–5, 114–15 clergy England, in  59–60, 104–5, 109, 114–15 hiding of  151, 172, 181, 188 imprisonment of  151–2, 154–5, 230–1 Ireland, in  60, 92–4, 112, 117, 198 numbers of  99–100, 104–5, 115–17, 219 Regular conflict, with Seculars  8–9, 215–17, 220–1 jurisdiction 215–16 see also, chapter 8. Scotland, in  72–3, 117 seminary priests  109, 203–4, 208–9, 283–4 training of  203–7 Wales, in  59, 101–2 Wisbech Stirs  112–13 Clement, Dorothy  229 Clement, Margaret, Prioress  228–9 Clitherow, Margaret. See, martyrdom. Clynnog, Maurice  208–9, 265–6, 268, 291–2

conformity, to Established Churches  82–4, 86, 134–5, 140–3, 186 church attendance  82–3, 127–9, 134–5, 186–7 Church papists  129, 133–4, 168–9, 186–7, 191–4 see also, chapter 7. Conry, Florence, OFM. See, Ó Maolchonaire, Flaithrí. Corby, Ralph, SJ. See, martyrdom. Constable, family  230–1 Constable, Henry  216–17, 269–70 convents  10, 103–4, 223, 231, 235–6, 240 Augustinians Bruges 254 Lismullen 232–3 Louvain  223–4, 228–30, 235, 253–4 Benedictines Brussels  1–2, 64, 223–4, 229–31, 233–5 dispute at  236 music at  254–5 Cambrai 295–6 Ghent 295–6 Bridgettines Syon Abbey  4–5, 225–8, 233–5, 291–2 Carmelites Antwerp 235 written cultures  280–1, 291–2 chaplains to  229–30, 236 dissolution of  225–6, 228, 231–3 Dominicans Lisbon, Bom Sucesso  1–2, 223–4, 239–40 English foundations  233–5 Franciscans Brussels 292–3 Ireland, in  231–3 Irish  103–4, 223–4 Mary Ward Sisters  5–6, 223–4, 230–1, 237–8 music in  254–5 nuns, numbers of  103–4, 223–4, 228–9, 238–9 Poor Clares Aire 292–3 Dublin 238–9 Dunkirk 238–9 Gravelines  223–4, 229, 235–9, 291–3 St Omers  229 recruitment to  233, 237–40 Ursulines 237–8 written cultures in  228, 230 see also, chapter 10. Copley, Anthony  269–70 Coppinger, John  276–7 Cordell, William, Sir  134 Cornelius, John, SJ  134, 230

Index  321 Creagh, Richard, Archbishop. See, martyrdom. Crichton, William, SJ  74, 83–4, 210 Crowder, Mark, OSB  120–1 Cusack, Christopher  213–14, 219–21 Cusack, family  232–3 Daniel, Edmund, SJ  56 Darcy, William, Sir  14–15, 18–19 Dering, Richard  254–7 de Villegas, Alonso  272–3 devotion confraternities and sodalities  6–7, 212–13, 254–5, 264, 266–7 devotio moderna 205 music 245–8 women, role of  81–2, 230, 246 Dillon, Eleanor  238–9 dioceses bishops, appointment to  53–4, 56–7, 108–9 Ireland, in  107, 122–3 structures  8–9, 72, 99–100, 115–16, 120–1 England, in  110–12 Ireland, in  108 Scotland, in  113, 118 Wales, in  101–2 see also, Archpriest Controversy. Dominican friars English  117, 219–20 numbers of  219–20 Irish  94, 217–19 numbers of  219–20 written cultures  286 see also, education, Continental Colleges. Donne, John  269–70 Dowdall, George, Archbishop  28–9, 38 education 65–6 Brethren of Common Life  205 Brussels, Jesuits  252 convent schools. See, convents. Continental Colleges  8–10, 203–5, 207–8, 212–14, 220 Alcalá de Henares, Irish College  214–15 Antwerp, Irish College  213–14 Bordeaux, Irish College  214–15 Douai, English College cursus 249 foundation of  5–6, 54–5, 203–4, 207–9 music in  249–51 priests  1–2, 109 written cultures  285, 288–90 Douai, Irish College  213–14 Douai, St Bonaventure’s  217–19 see also, Benedictine monks.

Douai, Scots College  210 failure of  210, 213–14 Lille, Irish College  213–14, 219 Lisbon, Corpo Santo  219–20 Lisbon, English College  209 Lisbon, Irish College  212–13 liturgy and music in  249–52 Louvain, St Anthony’s  5–6, 217–19 written cultures  265, 268, 288, 293–4 Paris, Irish College  213–14 Paris, Scots College  209–10 Pont-á-Mousson, Scots College  203–4 pre-Reformation 203–4 Rome, English College  65–6 foundation of  209 martyrdom, murals  179 music at  63–4, 250–1 Rome, Scots College  1–2, 17 Salamanca, Irish College  214–15 Santiago de Compostela, Irish College 214–15 Seville, Irish College  214–15 students numbers in  208–10, 213–14 Toulouse, Irish College  214–15 Tournai, Irish College  213–14, 233 Valladolid, English College  209, 212–13, 251 music at  250 Leuven. See, Louvain. Liège, Jesuit Academy  215–16 Louvain  185–6, 204–5 see also, individual colleges. St Omers  209–10 music at  249–50, 252 written cultures  288–92 universities, continental  204–7 see also, chapter 11. Edward VI, King  7–10, 28, 32–4, 301 Elizabeth I, Queen  1–2, 54, 60–2, 66–7, 311–12 ascension of  48–9 marriage 54–5 recusancy, and  135–7 see also, chapters 3 & 7; Reformation, Protestant. Emerson, Ralph, SJ  110–11 Evelyn, Catherine Magdalene  292–3 Everard, Thomas, SJ  291–2 Exemewe, Elizabeth  132–3 Fairfax, Thomas, Sir  187–8 Fisher, John, Bishop. See, martyrdom. FitzGerald, Mabel, Countess  103–4 Fitzgerald, ‘Silken Thomas’, Lord Offaly  22 Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, James  57–8, 276–7

322 Index Fitzsimon, Henry, SJ  233, 276–7, 314 Flinton, George  262–3 Foster, Seth  227–8 Foxe, John, Actes and Monuments  260–1, 275, 300–1, 304 Franciscan friars Capuchins 117 Britain and Ireland, mission to  219 Observant colleges  203–4, 217–19 see also, education, Continental Colleges. England, mission to  117, 217–19, 236, 292–3 written cultures  292–3 Irish, mission to  5–6, 60, 94, 217–19, 233 see also, education, Continental Colleges, Louvain, St Anthony’s. Scotland, mission to  217–19 Gardiner, Stephen, Bishop  21–2, 25, 28–9, 35–7 Garnet, Henry, SJ  110–11, 113, 143, 264 written cultures  287 Gearnon, Antoine  266–7 Gerard, Gilbert, Sir  134–5 Gerard, John, SJ  122–3, 151–2, 173–5, 190–1, 194–5, 228–9, 233–5 Gibbons, Richard, SJ  291–2 Giffard, Gabriel, OSB  295–6 Gordon, family  74, 76–9, 81–2 Gouda, de, Nicholas, SJ  72–4, 108 Gough, Mary, Abbess  229 Greenbury, Catherine, Abbess  292–3 Grey, Alexia  295–6 Grindal, Edmund, Archbishop  135–6 Grosvenor, Richard, Sir  307, 309–10 Gruffydd, Robert  268 Gwyn, Richard. See, martyrdom. Gwyn, Robert, SJ  59–60, 265–6, 291–2 Hamilton, Claud  70–2, 79–81 Hamilton, John, Archbishop  261–2 Harding, Thomas  286–7 Harrison, William  117 Hay, Edmund  73–4 Henrietta Maria, Queen  3–4, 98–9, 253, 255–7 chapel of  253, 255–7 Henry VIII, King  3–4, 7–8, 12, 17, 19–20 reform, see Reformation, Protestant. Herbert, Frances  224 Herbert, George  269–71 Holt, William, SJ  233–5 Holywood, Christopher  90 Hopkins, Richard  286–7, 296

Hoskins, Anthony, SJ  289–90 Howard, Anne  276 Howard, Henry, earl of Northampton  305–6 Howard, Philip, earl of Arundel  263, 274–5 Huntly, family  72–4, 266–7 Huntly, James Gordon  73–4 Ignatius, of Loyola  205–6, 252, 284–5 see also, Jesuits, spirituality, Ignatian. Irish, language ministry 60 revival, literary  217–21 written cultures  261–2, 265–7, 293–4 Isabella, Infanta  63–4, 233–5 James VI, King  3–4, 7–8, 63–4, 84–6, 96–7, 140, 199–200, 305, 313–14 court of  305–6 Japan  4–5, 111, 114 Jesuits colleges and education  4–5, 203–6, 209–10, 214–17, 252 see also, education, Continental Colleges. conformity, attitudes to  83–4 England, mission to  58–60, 99–100, 107–8, 110–14, 116, 118, 121–2, 136, 190–1, 194–5, 215–16, 291–2, 304 Ireland, mission to  26–7, 56, 60, 90, 94, 108–10, 121, 215–16 music  248, 252–3 Scotland, mission to  68, 72–4, 77–8, 81–3, 109–10, 112, 172 spirituality, Ignatian  4–5, 107–8, 284–5, 287, 291–2 Wales, mission to  110–11 see also, chapter 8. written cultures  263–4, 270–1, 284–5, 291–2, 296 Jonson, Ben  269–70 Jordan, Agnes, Abbess  226–7 Katherine, Queen, of Aragon  17, 19–21, 32–4 Kearney, David, Archbishop  213–14 Kinesman, Edmund  272–3 Kinsman, Edward and William  290–1 Knatchbull, Lucy, Abbess  295–6 laity, Catholic  114–15 ecclesiastical appointments, role in  68–72 imprisonment of. See, chapter 8. martyrs 148–9 nobility England 95–7

Index  323 Scotland  80–2, 86–7, 100–1, 199–200 see also, chapter 4. women  5–6, 102–4, 246 communities of lay women Drogheda 233 Dublin 233 Mena bochta, Limerick  233 devotion, figures of  103, 276 see also, chapters 10 & 11; devotion; Protestant, Catholic relations with. Laud, William, Archbishop  140–1, 315–16 legislation, Catholic, anti. See, recusancy, laws relating to. Lewis, Owen, Bishop  111–12 Mac Aingil, Aodh, Archbishop, OFM  264–7, 269 MacCleod, family  75–6 MacGuaran, Edmund, Archbishop  77–8 MacManus Maguire, Cathal Ó  15–16 Malone, William, SJ  121 Martin, Gregory  136, 285 martyrdom  2–3, 8–9, 25, 39–42, 311 Arrowsmith, Edmund, SJ  159–61 Campion, Edmund, SJ  110–11, 136, 141–2, 157, 275–6 Carter, William  283–5 Clitherow, Margaret  149–50, 228–9, 276 Corby, Ralph, SJ  177–9 Creagh, Richard, Archbishop  153 Elizabethan  56, 148–9 execution 155–8 Fisher, John, Bishop  6–7, 21, 162, 262–3 Gwyn, Richard  156, 159, 268 martyrs, creation of  146–52, 155–7, 162 martyrs, numbers of  148–9 martyrologies  147–8, 150, 152, 260–1, 276–8 Mayne, Cuthbert  154–5 memory  161–2, 315 More, Thomas, Sir  7–8, 21, 23–4, 162 nature of  145–6 O’Brien, Terence Albert, OP  157, 159 O’Devany, Conor, Bishop, OFM.  6–7, 154, 158–60, 180–1, 196–7, 276–7, 315 Ogilvie, John  155–6, 211–12, 276–7 O’ Hurley, Dermot, Archbishop  6–7, 153–4, 276–7 Plunkett, Oliver, Archbishop  145–6, 148, 162 relics  159–61, 177–81 see also, chapter 8. Southwell, Robert, SJ  10–11, 153, 158–9, 263, 270–2, 276 see also, material culture, written cultures.

Taylor, Francis  315 torture, methods of  152–4 Topcliffe, Richard  152–3 Mary, Queen of Scots  54–5, 61–2, 74 Mary I, Queen  7–8, 31–4, 47–8 reform, see also Catholic, reformation, Marian. marriage  34–7, 40–1, 43–5 material culture  10–11, 164–6, 171–3, 181–2 Bible 285–6 Catholic Reformation, and  171–2, 182 churches, as places of pilgrimage  6–7, 169–70, 173 devotional aids  77–8, 81–2, 100, 165, 171–6, 228 see also, material culture, written cultures. houses, private  173–5 liturgical items  172–3, 177, 245 relics. See, martyrdom, relics. safekeeping of  168–70, 180–1 statues 173 written cultures  10–11, 260–2, 278, 280–1, 288 biographies and lives of saints  274–5, 291–4 women, of  276, 280–1 catechisms  10–11, 41–2, 81–2, 262, 265–7, 283–4 devotional writing  262–4, 281 English Catholic identity, formation of  262–4, 287 hagiography  272–3, 275, 290–3 Ireland, and  261–2, 264–5, 272–4, 276–7 martyrologies. See, martyrdom. poetry  10–11, 267–71 printers, continental  260–1 readership, continental  260–1 Scotland, in  266, 276–7 translations, printed  280–96 Wales, in  265–6, 268, 291–2 see also, chapters 14 & 15. vestments  168–9, 172–3 Wintour, Helen  172–3 see also, chapter 9; convents, publications; reformation, Catholic, music; reformation, Protestant, iconoclasm. Matthew, Tobie  280–1, 295–6 Maxwell, family  74, 79–80 Mayne, Cuthbert. See, martyrdom. Mayne, John Silvanus, OSB  120–1 Messingham, Thomas  273–4 Mico, Richard  253, 257–8 Monasteries, Suppression of  24–5 More, Thomas, Sir. See, martyrdom.

324 Index Morgan, Thomas  65–6 Morone, Giovanni, Cardinal  205–7 Mush, John  276 music see also, chapter 13; Catholic, reformation Nugent, Lavalin, Francis, OFM Cap  219, 223 Oaths, of Allegiance  8–9, 114, 138–9, 288–9 Supremacy 21–2 O’Brien, Terence Albert, OP. See, martyrdom. Ó Cléirigh, Lughaidh  274 O’Daly, Daniel, OP  239 O’Devany, Conor, Bishop, OFM. See, martyrdom. Ó Domhnaill, Aodh Ruadh  17–18 Ó Dubhthaigh, Eoghan  267–8, 273–4 Ogilvie, John. See, martyrdom. Ó hEodhasa, Bonaventure, OFM  260–1, 268 O’Hurley, Dermot, Archbishop. See, martyrdom. Ó Maolchonaire, Flaithrí, Archbishop, OFM  217–19, 264–7, 293–4 O’Neill, Hugh, earl of Tyrone  5–6, 62–3, 89, 198–9, 312 O’Sullivan Beare, Philip  272–3, 276–7 Palmer, Catherine  226–7 Papacy  2, 23 bulls, papal Regnans in Excelcis  1–2, 8–9, 56–8, 96–7 Venerunt nuper 113–14 Paston, Edward  246–7 Percy, Mary, Abbess  223, 233–5, 255–6, 295–6 Persons, Robert, SJ  59, 65–6, 96, 158, 302–3 Archpriest Controversy  114–15 colleges, relationship with  207–10, 214–15, 250 convents, and  233–5 England, mission to  110–11, 136 Isabella, Infanta, support for  63–4 written cultures  262–3, 275 Petre, family  247–8 Philip II, King  7–8, 40–1, 43–4, 47–8 Phillips, Peter  249–50, 252–3 Plantation, Ireland of  90–2, 198–9 plots, Catholic Babington  60–2, 304 Gunpowder  2–3, 8–9, 96–7, 114, 123, 138, 142, 188, 228–9, 305, 313–14 Lopez 304 Ridolfi 304 Throckmorton  60–1, 304 Titus Oates  148–9

Plunkett, Oliver, Archbishop. See, martyrdom. Pole, Reginald, Cardinal  1–2, 6–8, 23–4, 37–43, 45–7, 205–9 polemical debates  97–8, 260–1, 281–2, 286–9 populations, Catholic  95–6 England, in  95, 97–8 Scotland, in  100–1 Wales, in  101–2 print culture. See, written cultures. Propaganda Fide, Congregation of  99–100, 115–16, 120, 124–5 Protestant, Catholic relations with  184–5, 189–90, 192–3, 200–1 Durham 196 Essex 190–1 Ireland 196–8 Lancashire 194–6 London 196 Northamptonshire 189–90 Puritans  192–6, 301–3, 305–6 regional experiences of  187–92 rivalries 184–7 Scotland 199–200 Sussex, West  191–4 Tresham, Thomas, Sir  189–90 Yorkshire 195–6 Wales 195 see also, chapters 10 & 16; conformity, to Established Churches; rebellion, Kett’s and Prayer Book rebellion and war Baltinglass  57–8, 212–13, 312 Brig o’Dee Affair  74 Desmond  50, 212–13, 311–12 England, South West  28 Glenlivet, Battle of  76–7 Grace, Pilgrimage of  24 Kent 34–5 Kett’s 185–6 Kildare  1–2, 22–3 Kinsale, Battle of  198–9 Nine Years War  62–3 North, Rising of  55–7, 60–1, 96–7, 184, 186–7 Prayer Book  185–6 recusancy  2–4, 82–3, 128–9, 133–7, 139, 187–8, 190–1, 194–5, 204, 308 laws relating to  52–3, 130–1, 133, 137–41, 149, 237–8, 314 music  247–8, 253 see also, chapter 13. penalties for  127–8, 130–2, 140, 142 politics 135–6

Index  325 printing, see, material culture, written cultures. Rolls  128–9, 133 separatism  7–8, 141–3, 186, 188, 190–1 tactics employed  8–9, 97, 132–3, 138, 141–2, 150, 289–90 see also, chapter 7. reformation, Protestant  13, 16, 19–23, 26, 50–1, 69–70, 184, 243 Edwardian  7–8, 25, 28–9, 34, 185–6 Elizabethan  8–9, 50–3, 281–2 Henrician  25–8, 244, 311 iconoclasm 166–8 Irish  92–4, 310–11 Lollardy  16–18, 20, 299–300 Scottish  2–3, 69–70, 72, 75, 84–6, 281–2 Rinuccini, Giambattista, Archbishop  121 Roche, John, Bishop  122–3 Rochford, Robert  293–4 Rooke, Bridget, Abbess  227–8 Rookwood, Dorothy  228–9 Rothe, David, Bishop  92–4, 121, 276–7 Sander, Nicholas  58–60, 303 Schondonck, Gilles, SJ  252 Scotland, Commonweal  85–8 Semple, Robert, Lord  72–3 Seton, Alexander  70–2, 87–8 Seton, family  72–4, 80–1 Smith, Richard, Bishop  115, 118–24 Spanish Armada  8–9, 58, 62, 305 Spanish Blanks  76–7, 79 Stackpole, Helen  233 Stanihurst, Richard, SJ  65–6, 196–7, 267–8, 273–4 Stapleton, Thomas  281–3 state, relationship with. See, chapter 7. Stock, Simon of St Mary  117, 122–3 Stuart, monarchs. See, chapter 5.

Suarez, Francisco, SJ  97–8 Succession Crisis, 1553  32–4 Taylor, Francis. See, martyrdom. Trent, Council of  5–7, 32, 43, 243–4, 249–50, 287, 289 convents 254 spirituality  273–4, 280–7, 295–6 saints, cult of  290–1 Tresham, Thomas, Sir. See, Protestant, Catholic relations with. Throckmorton, family  188 Topcliffe, Richard. See, martyrdom, torture, methods of. Trent, Council of. See, Catholic, Reformation. Ussher, James, Archbishop  196–7, 314–16 Vereept, Simon  262–3 Verstegen, Richard  251, 269–70, 276–7 Vitelleschi, Muzio, SJ  118, 122–4 Vosmeer, Sasbout  112–14 Wadding, Luke, OFM  94, 217–19 Walpole, Michael, SJ  280–1 Ward, Mary  230–1, 237–8 see also, convents, Mary Ward Sisters. Wentworth, Thomas, earl of Strafford  90–1, 189–90, 316–17 White, Richard. See, Gwynn, Richard. Winzet, Ninian  280–1 Wisbech Castle. See, clergy, imprisonment of. Wiseman, family  229–30 Wolfe, David, SJ  108, 233 Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal  18–19 Wright, William, SJ  288–9, 291–2 written cultures. See, material cultures, written cultures.