The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II: Uncertainty and Change, 1641-1745 0198843437, 9780198843436

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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 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 II Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745 Edited by

J O H N M O R R I L L A N D L IA M T E M P L E 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: 2022948810 ISBN 978–0–19–884343–6 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843436.001.0001 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 Covid has much to answer for, and for many it has been a time of bereavement and suffering. In that context, the problems it has thrown up for this volume are minor, but they are real. Several of the team originally assembled for this volume were forced to withdraw for a host of reasons—­health, inaccessibility of libraries, or restrictions on travel. In recommissioning chapters, the editors also had to adjust the content and, despite their best efforts, there are (we hope minor) gaps which simply could not be covered. Several authors rewrote or extended their chapters to reduce the scale of this, and the editors are deeply grateful to all of them. They need to give special thanks to three authors who wrote from scratch within the final six months of the project—­Matteo Binasco, Andrew Cichy, and Claire Marsland. The most grievous loss to the effects of the pandemic was my initial co-­editor Liesbeth Corens, who did much to help the early design of the volume. The loss of her expertise before the editing stage, as well as the loss of her chapter, is much regretted. So, I was truly grateful for the cheerful willingness of Liam Temple to step into the breach and to undertake a huge amount of work in finding new authors, getting draft chapters slimmed down, following series guidelines, and generally getting the volume ready for the press. His contribution is very substantial. John Morrill Shrove Tuesday 2022

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

James E. Kelly and John McCafferty

ix xi xiii xvii

Introduction 1 John Morrill and Liam Temple 1. Civil Wars and Interregnum John Morrill

10

2. Restoration Mark R. F. Williams

35

3. The Catholic Moment Eoin Devlin

53

4. The Penal Laws Charles Ivar McGrath

74

5. Empire and Overseas Missions Gabriel Glickman

97

6. Missionary Activity and Religious Houses Matteo Binasco / Hannah Thomas

117

7. Religious Houses: Devotional Life Laurence Lux-­Sterritt

136

8. Religious Houses: Spirituality Claire Walker

152

9. Anti-­Popery Adam Morton

170

10. Political Theology Christopher P. Gillett

189

11. Material Culture Sarah Johanesen and Claire Marsland

209

12. Architecture Eoin Devlin

228

viii Contents

13. Catholic Music Andrew Cichy

245

14. Vernacular Catholic Literature Mícheál Mac Craith / James January-­McCann / Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart

257

15. Jacobitism and Catholic Loyalists Éamonn Ó Ciardha

278

16. European Mercantile Networks Paul Monod

292

Index

311

List of Illustrations 11.1. The Esh Burse, Fifteenth Century

213

11.2. Silver chalice, c.1650218 11.3. Silver chalice in three sections, c.1650219

List of Abbreviations 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]–1977) ARSI Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu CRS Catholic Record Society 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 WWTN ‘Who Were the Nuns?’ database: https://wwtn.history. qmul.ac.uk/

List of Contributors Matteo Binasco  is Adjunct Professor in Early Modern History at the Università per Stranieri di Siena/Universidad Pablo de Olavide and principal investigator in the project ‘The Anglo-­Irish Communities in the Spanish Caribbean during the Early-­Modern Period’, financed by the Programa Operativo Feder Andalucia. His research interests are the Anglo-­Irish communities in Rome and in the Caribbean, as well the missionary networks developed between the British Isles and the Holy See. He has authored and edited six books and published forty articles and essays. His current research project seeks to unveil the connections between the Anglo-­Irish communities in the Spanish Caribbean and the British Isles during the eighteenth century. 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. Eoin Devlin is Director of Studies in History at Hughes Hall, Cambridge, and a Bye Fellow and Teaching Associate of Downing College, Cambridge, and the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge; UK. He is Assistant Lecturer at the Department of English, Maynooth University and Teaching Fellow at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. His PhD was completed at Cambridge on ‘English Encounters with Papal Rome in the Late Counter-­Reformation, c.1685–c.1697’, which he is preparing for publication. Christopher P. Gillett is Assistant Professor of the History of Britain and Its Empire at The University of Scranton, USA. He completed his PhD at Brown University in 2018, where he wrote a dissertation entitled ‘Catholicism and the Making of Revolutionary Ideologies in the British Atlantic, 1630–1673’. He has held several research fellowships, including a Mellon-­CES Dissertation Completion Fellowship and a Thoits Visiting Fellowship at the Durham Residential Research Library. He has published several essays about Catholic political thought and activism regarding liberty of conscience in the mid-­seventeenth-­ century British world. Gabriel Glickman is Lecturer in Early Modern British History at Cambridge University, and a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College. His research concentrates on politics and religion in Britain and its overseas colonies c.1660–1750. He is the author of two books: The English Catholic Community 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology (Boydell & Brewer, 2009) and The Making of an Imperial Nation: Colonization, Politics and English Identity 1660–1702 (Yale University Press, 2022), and has written articles in publications including the Journal of Modern History, Historical Journal, and English Historical Review.

xiv  List of Contributors James January-­McCann is Place Names Officer at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, Wales. His research interests include Counter-­ Reformation literature in Welsh and Welsh place names, and he has published several articles on both fields, particularly on the life and work of the sixteenth century Welsh author Fr Robert Gwyn. Sarah Johanesen  is Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Manchester, UK. She completed her PhD on the politicization of Catholic material culture in post-­ Reformation England at King’s College London in 2020. Her article, ‘ “That Silken Priest”: Catholic Disguise and Anti-­Popery on the English Mission (1569–1640)’ won the IHR’s Sir John Neale Prize in Early Modern British History in 2019. She is currently developing her thesis for publication and hopes to pursue research into the twentieth century, to consider the changing attitudes to the Catholic community and the afterlives of the Reformation. Laurence Lux-­Sterritt  is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Aix Marseille Université, LERMA, Aix-en-Provence, France, and a member of the Laboratoire d’Études et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA). She is coordinator of the LERMA’s early modern research programme (https://britaix.hypotheses.org/). Her work focuses on early modern English Catholicism, and especially on exiled nuns. She is currently working with Jaime Goodrich on a scholarly edition of manuscripts documenting decades of strife amongst the English Benedictine nuns at Brussels. Mícheál Mac Craith  is a Franciscan priest and Professor Emeritus of Modern Irish at University of Galway, Republic of Ireland. He is particularly interested in the pivotal role played by the Continental colleges in the development of early modern Irish Catholicism, and in the highly significant contribution made by exiles, lay as well as clerical, to literature in the Irish language during the seventeenth century. Contemporary literature in Irish is also one of his specialties. He has published extensively in these areas. Charles Ivar McGrath  lectures in history at University College Dublin, Ireland. His ­publications include The Making of the Eighteenth-­Century Irish Constitution: Government, Parliament and the Revenue, 1692–1714 (Dublin, 2000), Ireland and Empire, 1692–1770 (London, 2012), and Lansdowne FC: A History (Dublin, 2022). He has co-­edited three essay collections and published articles in Irish Historical Studies, Parliamentary History, Eighteenth Century Ireland, The English Historical Review, and History of European Ideas, and chapters and entries in a range of edited collections and biographical dictionaries. With Suzanne Forbes and Patrick Walsh, he has produced a website and online mapping of army barracks in eighteenth-­century Ireland (www.barracks18c.ucd.ie). Claire Marsland is a part-­time PhD student at Durham University, UK researching Catholic ma­ter­ial culture, 1560–1700. She is also the curator at Ushaw Historic House, Chapels & Gardens, a historic Catholic seminary in Durham. Claire assisted on the British Academy funded project ‘Material Culture Under Penalty’ which examined church textiles used by English Catholics during penal times and resulted in the online exhibition ‘Fabric of Resistance’. Paul Monod is Hepburn Professor of History at Middlebury College, USA. His first book was Jacobitism and the English People (1989). He has also written a comparative study of

List of Contributors  xv kingship in early modern Europe, the history of an eighteenth-­century murder in the English port of Rye, and an analysis of occult and magical beliefs in England and Scotland from 1650 to 1815. A textbook, Imperial Island: A History of Britain and its Empire, 1660–1837, appeared in 2009. He is currently writing an examination of English national identity and is editing a volume of the New Cambridge History of Britain. John Morrill  is Emeritus Professor of British and Irish History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Selwyn College. He has wide interests across the early modern period. He has authored and edited more than thirty books and one hundred essays and articles, and has overseen many digital humanities projects including the Irish Depositions relating to the 1641 Rising (https://1641.tcd.ie) and most recently a three-­volume edition of The Letters, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (OUP, 2022). Since 1996 he has been a permanent deacon in the Roman Catholic Diocese of East Anglia. Adam Morton  is Senior Lecturer in the History of Britain at Newcastle University, UK. He has published articles on anti-­popery, laughter, and visual culture in early modern England. He is the co-­editor of several essay collections, including The Power of Laughter and Satire in Early Modern Britain (Boydell & Brewer, 2016), Queens Consort, Cultural Transfer, and European Politics 1500–1800 (Routledge, 2016), and Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England—­ Essays in Honour of W. J. Sheils (Routledge, 2012). His current research focuses on representations of popery in early modern England. Éamonn Ó Ciardha is Reader in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Ulster and has taught History, English, Irish, and Irish Studies at the University of Toronto, the Keough Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame, the University of the Saarland, the University of Vienna, Framingham State University, and the University of Ulster. His research is primarily focused on Irish Jacobitism, the outlaw, the early modern Irish diaspora, Irish military history, Irish popular politics and culture, language and literature, and Irish book history. Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart is Senior Lecturer at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, University of the Highlands and Islands, UK. He has published widely on the history, literature, material culture, ethnology, folklore, and popular culture of the Scottish Gàidhealtachd from the seventeenth century onwards. His current research investigates the work of the Hebridean traveller and ethnologist Martin Martin (c.1665–1718), the Scottish Enlightenment as mediated through networks of Highland clergy, the re-­creation of the Scottish Gaelic language during the mid-­eighteenth century, and the collection and classification of Gaelic folklore and material culture from John Francis Campbell (1821–85) to the present. Liam Temple  is the Capuchin Fellow in the History of Catholicism at the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University. His first book, Mysticism in Early Modern England, was published with Boydell & Brewer in 2019. He has published articles on mysticism and Catholic spirituality in the seventeenth century, especially among English Benedictines and Poor Clares, in British Catholic History and Church History, among others. Working in partnership with the Capuchin Franciscans of Great Britain, his current research seeks to recover the influence of the Capuchins in Britain from the seventeenth century to the present day.

xvi  List of Contributors Hannah Thomas is Special Collections Manager and Research Fellow at the Bar Convent, York, UK the oldest living convent in England. Her second book, Jesuit Libraries in Early Modern England and Wales, will be published by Brill in 2023. She has written several art­ icles on Jesuit book history, a historiographical survey of the Jesuit English Province for Jesuit Historiography Online, and the first comprehensive survey of Welsh Catholicism for The Companion to Catholicism and Recusancy in Britain and Ireland (Brill, 2021). Her research interests also include Catholic burial practices, Welsh Catholicism in the post-­ Reformation era, and Catholic uses of libraries. Claire Walker is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She is the author of the first modern analysis of the post-­Reformation English religious houses for women, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Palgrave, 2003), and she has published many articles on nuns’ intellectual, political, and spiritual practices. Her current research explores emotions and the materiality of exile and religious practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Mark R. F. Williams is Reader in Early Modern History at Cardiff University, UK. His work has ranged widely across experiences of mobility in the early modern world, focusing on ex­peri­ences of exile, displacement, travel, and global trade. His book The King’s Irishmen (Boydell & Brewer, 2014) was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize in 2015. He has published in The English Historical Review, Historical Journal, and Journal of British Studies, including articles shortlisted for the RHS’s Alexander Prize and David Berry Prize. He is currently working on a cultural history of the English East India Company in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. 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 John Morrill and Liam Temple

On 4 November 1641, at his armed camp in Newry, County Down, Sir Phelim O’Neill—­a heavily indebted Ulster Catholic landowner—­held aloft and read out what he said was a commission from King Charles I, which had been sealed with the Great Seal of Scotland and signed by the king, then resident in Edinburgh. That commission read that Charles: doe[s] hereby give unto you full power and authority to assemble and meet together with all the speed and diligence . . . for the ordering, settling and effecting this great work . . . to use all politick ways and means possible to possess yourselves (for our use and safety) of all the forts Castles and places of strength and defence within the said Kingdom, (except the places, persons and estates of our Loyal and loving subjects the Scots) and also to arrest the and seize the goods, estates, and persons of all the English protestants within the said kingdom to our use.1

The appeal to Irish Catholics to assist him against an English parliament ‘that hath not onely presumed to take upon them the government and disposing of those princely rights and prerogatives that have justly descend upon us from our predecessors’ was a fake. Almost certainly the work of O’Neill himself, Charles I did not authorize the Ulster Rising, let alone the massacres of Protestants by Catholics that took place over the next few months across Ireland.2 But O’Neill thought that it would be taken seriously, and it was.3 Many of the themes for the volume are revealed in this: the loyalty of many Catholics of all three kingdoms to the House of Stuart as their protectors against a hostile Protestant political establishment, the necessity of seeing the story of all Catholics in an archipelagic context, and the relentlessness of unsystematic oppression that hindered religious liberty and prevented any form of political 1  Trinity College, Dublin, MS 836, fols. 018r–­v. 2  There are excellent overviews of the first weeks of the Rising. See for example Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 469–92; Sean Connolly, Divided Kingdom: Ireland 1630–1800 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 35–51; Michael Perceval-­Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 (Montreal, 1994), pp. 213–39. 3  For Phelim O’Neill, see Jerrold I. Casway, ‘O’Neill, Sir Phelim Roe [Felim Ruadh]’, ODNB. John Morrill and Liam Temple, Introduction In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II: Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745. Edited by: John Morrill and Liam Temple, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843436.003.0001

2  John Morrill and Liam Temple equality. The 1641 Rising, like the 1745 rebellion (the ’45) which marks the end of this volume, was a doomed howl of protest. It brought down on the Catholic population—­more than 80 per cent of the peoples of Ireland and less than 5 per cent of the peoples of England, Wales, and Scotland—­new oppressions. English Catholics paid a heavy price for what happened in Ireland in the winter of 1641–2. Catholic experience in each of the kingdoms was different, but what happened in each of the kingdoms had consequences for Catholics in all the kingdoms. Thus, seventeen months after the Ulster Rising, it was a New English planter Sir John Clotworthy, with his vast acres of plantation land confiscated from native Catholic families in Armagh, who led an assault on the Queen’s London residence, Somerset House, in March 1643.4 After his fellow MP Henry Marten had ordered the soldiers to batter down the doors of the Capuchin friary situated there and to arrest any friars they found, Clotworthy climbed up onto the altar of the royal chapel and, taking a halberd, destroyed a valuable Rubens portrait of Christ’s crucifixion. His men then destroyed paintings of the Virgin Mary and Francis of Assisi, before breaking statues, burning books, and taking hammers to the altar.5 Such a literal shattering of the Catholic presence in England mirrored a shattering of the status quo for many Catholics in the country. For years the chapel in Somerset House had been one of the places, along with foreign embassies, that provided Catholics with relatively secure access to Mass and the sacraments in England. This leniency had contributed to the whipping up of paranoia about popish plots and the belief that Catholics had infiltrated both Court and government.6 But it was the relentless press coverage of atrocities in Ireland, much promoted by Clotworthy, that triggered violence such as that seen at Somerset House in March 1643.7 By the spring of 1642 several hundred depositions by survivors of the massacres in Ireland had been gathered by commissioners and made available to a voracious English press, who printed the least reliable and most extreme accounts of events. Most sensational of all were the woodcuts of the atrocity which were included in pamphlets as having happened in Ireland, when in fact they were bought in from Germany where they had been part of the religious polemics of the Thirty Years’ War.8 All the attempts at accommodation 4  See Sean Kelsey, ‘Clotworthy, John, first Viscount Massereene (d. 1665), politician’, ODNB. See also Andrew Robinson, ‘Deconstructing the Reputation of Sir John Clotworthy, Viscount Massareene’, in John Dooher and Brendan Scott (eds.), Plantation: Aspects of Seventeenth-­Century Ulster Society (Belfast, 2013), pp. 89–120. 5  Albert  J.  Loomie, ‘The Destruction of Rubens’s “Crucifixion” in the Queen’s Chapel, Somerset House’, The Burlington Magazine, 140 (1998), pp. 680–1. 6  See Caroline Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill, 1983), chs. 8 and 9. 7 Keith Lindley, ‘The Impact of the 1641 Rebellion upon England and Wales, 1641–5’, Irish Historical Studies, 18 (1972), pp. 143–76; Eamon Darcy, The Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (Woodbridge, 2013), esp. pp. 48–77; Joseph Cope, England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion (Woodbridge, 2009), esp. chs. 2–4. 8 Darcy, The Irish Rebellion, ch. 3; discussion of the woodcuts in James Cranford’s The Teares of Ireland (1642) is at pp. 106–8.

Introduction  3 that had been built up in the preceding years, including the efforts of the regular and secular clergy to preach prayerful endurance under slowly relaxed persecution, had been in vain. There would be nothing like the iconoclasm of the 1640s in England and Ireland again in the period covered by this volume. There was plenty of anti-­ Catholic violence in the decades that followed: Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland in 1649–50 and the subsequent dispossession of Irish landowners of three-­quarters of the land they possessed in 1641, new burdens on English Catholics during the Exclusion Crisis of 1678–81 when thirty-­ five Catholics were tortured to death, the Jacobite uprisings in Ireland and Scotland in the 1690s which brought new and harsher anti-­Catholic laws, and the brutal aftermath of the suppression of the ’45 in Scotland. For most of the period after 1650 in England and Scotland the penal laws were not revoked, but enforcement was lax and most Catholics, most of the time, could gain access to the sacraments and were well instructed on forms of household prayer that inculcated distinctively Catholic patterns of piety and belief, above all in relation to the communion of saints in this life and the next. It was a different story in Ireland, where the amount of land owned by Catholics shrank from around 60 per cent in 1641 to less than 10 per cent in 1745. John Pocock, writing about early modern Britain and Ireland, spoke of the nations of the islands ‘interact[ing] so as to modify the conditions of one another’s existence’.9 This is especially true for the Catholic ­peoples. They had separate histories—­a persecuted majority in Ireland with a clear parish structure and a full complement of resident bishops, a less fiercely persecuted minority in England where seigneurial authority vied with clerical authority, and a dwindling number of clan leaders in Scotland who found keeping the faith troublesome but not devastating, at least until the ’45. Common themes and shared experiences emerge from each of these however, cutting across geo­ graph­ic­al divides. The history of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland is both one history and three, or more, histories. The terminus of this volume, 1745, marks the beginning of another doomed uprising, this time in the Highlands of Scotland. A much less exclusively Catholic affair—­although the Catholic component included troops from Ireland—­it was nevertheless another archipelagic story. The end date of 1745, rather than 1746, is significant. On 8 November 1745, Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, crossed from Scotland into England. On 5 December he was in Derby, begging his supporters to push on to London, still hopeful that the promises he thought had been made to him by English Jacobites, both Catholic and non-­juring, would be honoured and that he would find there the promised French army of 10,000 primed and ready in Boulogne, an army which could and perhaps should, have

9  Cited and contextualized in John Morrill, ‘The Fashioning of Britain’, in Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (eds.), Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485–1725 (London, 1995), p. 9.

4  John Morrill and Liam Temple landed in Kent between 20 and 24 December.10 The fateful decision taken in Derby to retreat to Scotland and not to march on London revealed all the stress fractures in Jacobitism, of which religious divisions were not the least. Here ethnic and religious considerations coalesced. Charles-­Edward’s declarations of 9 and 10 October sought to optimize Scottish support by denouncing the ‘pretended Union of the Kingdoms’ and promising to replace it and by implication restore separate parliaments to Scotland and England. Yet many Scottish Catholics recognized that their chances of securing legal protections were far less from a Scottish parliament than from a British one, and those declaration were distressingly vague, even silent, about Catholic rights. Catholics might have felt some comfort in hearing that he would reinstate ‘all his subjects in the full enjoyment of their religion, laws, and liberties’, but they would have been much more disturbed by a more categorical promise to protect the established Church and clergy.11 These declarations made his prospects of turning English politics-­of-­nostalgia Jacobitism into active support even less than they had been, and they also failed to optimize support from Catholic clans in Scotland. The invasion of England was based on the assumption that there would be a general rising on his side. Just as in Scotland, there were cheering crowds as he entered towns like Preston and Manchester, but those cheering, largely Catholic, were not going to convert their delight at seeing him into putting their lives on the line. Because he took Catholic support for granted, and had to appease the anti-­Catholicism of his more numerous Protestant clan leaders such as Lord George Murray, he alienated Catholic supporters. The decision to turn back from Derby was a mistake. As Frank McLynn put it ‘a man playing poker for high stakes cannot expect a watertight guarantee of success’ and that is what the Protestant leaders had demanded.12 In 1745 many thought of rebelling, but few came close to it.13 The political will of Irish Catholics had been broken, at least for this period, and the political will of English Catholics was generally hostile, or at least not as committed as Charles Edward had fantasized it to be, leaving a small number of Scottish clan leaders to rise up and to pay a heavy price. A new age of persecution for Scottish Catholics would begin on Culloden Moor on 16 April 1746. The lives of English and Irish 10  Frank McLynn, The Jacobites (Boston, 1985), ch. 7; Frank McLynn, The Road Not Taken: How Britain Narrowly Missed a Revolution (London, 2012), pp. 214–50; Alasdair Maclean, ‘Highlanders in the Forty Five’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, 59 (1997), pp. 314–40. For sceptical comments on how Catholic the ’45 was, see Murray Pittock, The Myth of the Jacobite Clans (Edinburgh, 1995). 11  Joel H. Wiener (ed.), Great Britain: The Lion at Home, 4 vols. (New York, 1974), I, pp. 234–7. 12  The most balanced analyses of the Jacobite campaign in England are Murray  G.  H.  Pittock, Jacobitism (Hampshire, 1998), ch. 4; and McLynn, The Jacobites, ch. 7. The best account of the arguments at the Council in Derby is in Frank McLynn, Bonnie Prince Charlie (London, 1988), pp. 256–70. 13  For the failure in Ireland, see Éamonn Ó Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685–1766: A  Fatal Attachment (Dublin, 2002). For England, see Eveline Cruickshanks, Political Untouchables: The Tories and the ’45 (London, 1979), ch. 6 and appendix 1.

Introduction  5 Catholics would remain one of limited liberty but with no equality in law, opportunity, or public life. The hopes of a new Catholic confessional state, or at least the restoration of a Catholic monarchy, ended even for those Catholics who had clung to it until then. A new era had indeed dawned with the retreat from Derby. Catholics did take part in wars of religion in this period, and each cast its own long shadow. But there are other insistent themes. Catholics were divided at all times over how far they should isolate themselves from wider society, and as in other periods there were feuds between seculars and regulars, and between what can be termed ultramontanes and Gallicans (or cisalpines). Despite this, all Catholics were bound together by a strong sacramental awareness, a devotion to the Blessed Virgin and to the saints, and a deep knowledge of the sufferings of the martyrs and their obligation to honour their memory. Access to the sacraments could be difficult at some times and in many places, but Catholic homes, although they were without bibles, were often equipped with prayer manuals, rosary beads, and crucifixes.14 The demand for new and reprinted ‘manuals of prayers’ resulted in at least half a million copies being produced in the period.15 This was before the 1740 publication of Challoner’s Garden of the Soul, which was never out of print for the next 200 years.16 The violently polemical works of the Elizabethan period by such theological lions as Thomas Stapleton, Robert Persons, and William Allen had become much shorter and less provocative by the 1630s and 1640s, and in Catholic publications in the years around 1641 there was very little that was not devotional in nature.17 In fact, there was a very considerable dip in the amount emerging from Catholic printing presses in English, Irish, and Latin, reaching barely double figures in 1640–2 and with only two titles in 1643. Indeed, the 1630s and 1640s saw fewer books printed by and for the Catholics of Britain and Ireland than in any other decades since 1560 or since 1660. Half the titles were books of prayers (such as for the dead, or for Pentecost), while others were translations of Continental European classics such as Bonaventure, Teresa of Avila, and Thomas à Kempis. Catholics petitioned parliament for relief from the penal laws in 1641, arguing that they were no longer needed. While no further appeals of this kind were printed once news of the Ulster Rising reached England, 14  The Elizabethan Douai-­Rheims translation was deliberately a literal translation to help priests with weak Greek and Hebrew to contest Protestant translation. It was not readily available and lay people were strongly discouraged from reading it, let alone the Protestant translations. This was partially remedied by Richard Challoner’s revised version, published in and after 1750 in five volumes. 15 Eamon Duffy, Reformation Divided: Catholics, Protestants and the Conversion of England (London, 2017), ch. 7. 16  Richard Challoner, The Garden of the Soul: A manual of spiritual exercises and instructions, for Christians who, living in the world, aspire to devotion (London, 1741). Challoner was Vicar Apostolic for the London district from 1739–81. Theologically and pastorally, it draws most heavily on the work of Francis de Sales. See Eamon Duffy (ed.), Challoner and His Church: A Catholic Bishop in Georgian England (London, 1981). 17 See John Saward, John Morrill, and Michael Tomko (eds.), Firmly I Believe and Truly: The Spiritual Tradition of Catholic England (Oxford, 2011), esp. pp. 95–160.

6  John Morrill and Liam Temple no attempt was made to deny the exaggerated tales of atrocity and Catholics went very quiet.18 Catholic chapels bore the brunt of Puritan rage, but with a few exceptions, Catholic homes were spared.19 There was no equivalent of the Gordon Riots in 1640s Britain. Devotional and irenical works dominated thereafter. By the 1740s, what was being printed both for Catholic communities and for non-­Catholic readers was almost entirely devoid of political theology, except for a strongly cisalpine retelling of Catholic history. The most notable example of this was the three-­volume Church History of England, covering 1500–1688, by Fr Hugh Tootell (writing as Charles Dodd).20 This challenged not only the much-­repeated Anglican historical account of the period, but the stentorian ultramontane one too. As Gabriel Glickman has explained, ‘Dodd did not discern a church springing up in isolation from the Holy See, but neither did he genuflect to the ultramontane idea adumbrated in Persons’s Treatise of Three Conversions (1603) or Vestergan’s Restitution of Decayed Intelligence’. Instead, Dodd put more emphasis on Joseph of Arimathea than Augustine, and stressed how pious princes had always protected the Church so that there flowered ‘the constant tradition of the British Church [free of] ­foreign influence or jurisdiction’, a British patriarchy, indeed.21 The situation of Catholics in the three kingdoms led not only to creative responses, but also to a continuation of the tensions and disagreements between central elements of Catholic communities, such as lay and clerical disputes, or conflicts between secular and religious priests, and so on. We have opted for ‘uncertainty and change’ as the subtitle for this volume, but it also could have been ‘conflict and endurance’. Both get to the heart of the matter, revealing the efforts of British and Irish Catholic communities to contain the competing forces of dynamism and conservatism within them in a period of uncertainty and rapid change. Despite the paradoxes, polarities, and competing forces at work in British and Irish Catholicism in the period, more scholarly attention has been paid to the years 1530–1640, as scholars focused on the aftershocks of the Reformation and the challenges faced by Catholic communities.22 Indeed, many works found the 18  Based on an analysis of the titles listed in A. F. Allison and D. M. Rogers, A Catalogue of Catholic Books in English printed abroad or secretly in England 1558–1640 (Bognor Regis, 1964) and Thomas H. Clancy, SJ, English Catholic Books 1641–1700: A Bibliography (Chicago, 1974). 19  A major exception, in which anti-­Catholicism was an important but not complete trigger, is explored in John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999), esp. ch. 6. 20  Charles Dodd, Church History of England from the year 1500 the year 1688: chiefly with regard to Catholicks . . . in 8 parts (Brussels [London], 1737–42). 21  Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology (Woodbridge, 2009), pp. 210–7, 226, 256–7; Gabriel Glickman, ‘Gothic History and Catholic Enlightenment in the Works of Charles Dodd (1672–1743)’, The Historical Journal, 54 (2011), pp. 347–69. 22 See OHBIC, Volume I.

Introduction  7 year 1640 or thereabouts to be a natural cut off point for their studies, even if few have found it a good date to start.23 Yet the questions often asked of that earlier period, such as the relationship between Catholics and Protestants, the evolution of the penal laws, the relationship between Catholics and the monarchy, the establishment of missions and religious houses, and questions of conformity and oath-­taking, were not settled by 1641. As this volume shows, they continued to play central roles in debates throughout the period and beyond. That is not to say that the period has gone unnoticed by scholars, however. Those who have sought to give a much wider overview of Catholic experience across the centuries have engaged with the period, including established classics by John Bossy, J. C. H. Aveling, and Patrick Corish.24 More recent work by Eilish Gregory, Geoff Baker, Gabriel Glickman, and others has also highlighted the rich research that can be done.25 Chapters in this volume by Sarah Johanesen and Claire Marsland, Andrew Cichy, and Eoin Devlin, for example, reveal the ways in which the study of material culture, music, and architecture are expanding our understanding of the period. This volume, as with the series in general, has attempted to balance the Catholic experience across the three kingdoms, exploring and acknowledging the variety, or indeed similarity, of experience in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England. There has been much written about English and Irish Catholicism in the period.26 Welsh and Scottish Catholicism have also received modest accounts.27 Despite this, scholars have long lamented that studies of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland often suffer from a ‘relative lack of cross-­fertilization’, each often being 23  For example, Michael Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 2006). 24  John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975); J. C. H. Aveling, The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation (London, 1976); Patrick Corish, The Catholic Community in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Dublin, 1981). For a more recent example, see Michael A. Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (Basingstoke, 1998). 25 Eilish Gregory, Catholics during the English Revolution: Politics, Sequestration and Loyalty (Woodbridge, 2021); Geoff Baker, Reading and Politics in Early Modern England: The Mental World of a Seventeenth-­ Century Catholic Gentleman (Manchester, 2010); Glickman, The English Catholic Community; Chelsea Reutcke, ‘Catholic Print Networks in Restoration England, 1660–1688’ (University of St Andrews PhD thesis, 2020). 26  For England, see above n. 24 and 25. For Ireland, see also, for example, Corish, The Catholic Community; Maureen Wall, Catholic Ireland in the Eighteenth Century: Collected Essays of Maureen Wall, ed. Gerard O’Brien (Dublin, 1989); Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Reformation in Ireland 1645–1649 (Oxford, 2002). 27  For Scotland, see Peter F. Anson, Underground Catholicism in Scotland, 1622–1878 (Montrose, 1970); 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. 5–22; Ryan Burns, ‘Unrepentant Papists: Catholic Responses to Cromwellian Toleration in Interregnum Scotland’, History, 103 (2018), pp. 243–61. For Wales, see T. P. Ellis, The Catholic Martyrs of Wales, 1535–1680 (London, 1933); Hannah Thomas, ‘Missioners on the Margins? The Territorial Headquarters of the Welsh Jesuit College of St Francis Xavier at The Cwm, c.1600–1679’, Recusant History, 32 (2014), pp. 173–93; Philip Jenkins, ‘ “A Welsh Lancashire”? Monmouthshire Catholics in the Eighteenth Century’, Recusant History, 15 (1980), pp. 176–88.

8  John Morrill and Liam Temple written entirely separately from the other.28 In England, this can be traced back to the Victorian ‘Second Spring’, which was determinedly and romantically English, while the study of Catholic Ireland was framed within a rival national narrative equally indebted to nineteenth-­century influences.29 Each chapter of this volume discusses, as much as possible, the chosen topic from the perspective of both British and Irish Catholics. Opening chapters by John Morrill, Mark Williams, Eoin Devlin, and Ivar McGrath plot key events and legislation across the three kingdoms, highlighting the similarities and differences in the Catholic experience. As the general editors observe in their Introduction, Catholicism, by its very nature, is transnational. Chapters in this volume show that the story of British and Irish Catholicism was not insular, but was constantly connected to France, Spain, the southern Netherlands, Italy, and beyond. Paul Monod traces the extent of European mercantile networks in the period, revealing the industrious capitalists to be found among British and Irish Catholics who sought a better life for themselves elsewhere in Europe through trade and commerce. Because of their experience of forced exile and exclusion, Catholics in the period were less averse to crossing boundaries, whether political, legal, or technological, to forge a new life. Gabriel Glickman expands on this to discuss how Catholics from Britain and Ireland entered overseas dominions, becoming governors, planters, merchants, and military officers. Far beyond the reach of penal laws, Catholics harnessed opportunities in the empire that brought them power and profit. As waves of settlers, migrants, and adventurers outpaced the authority of the Anglican Church and parliament in the Atlantic world, the colonies became spaces of unintended religious pluralism. Matteo Binasco takes this approach from a different perspective, looking at the missions into Britain and Ireland from the perspective of Rome. As a result, we see how the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide viewed the three kingdoms, with Ireland taking priority, then Scotland, and finally England. Yet in all three we see a great concern for bolstering ecclesiastical authority, as Rome sought to strengthen the bishops in Ireland and the vicars apostolic in England and Scotland. To Rome, all three kingdoms were problematic for the infighting between seculars and regulars, and decrees towards the end of the period show just how determined they were to address the issue. Another change in perspective is offered by Mícheál Mac Craith / James January-­McCann / Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart in their chapter on Irish, Welsh, and Scottish Gaelic literature. They reveal the cultural impact of works written in the period, as well as the Continental links much of this literature had. 28  Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, ‘Catholicism in Early Modern Ireland and Britain’, History Compass, 3 (2005), p. 1. 29  Gabriel Glickman, ‘A British Catholic Community? Ethnicity, Identity and Recusant Politics, 1660–1750’, in James  E.  Kelly and Susan Royal (eds.), Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter–­Reformation (Leiden, 2016), p. 61.

Introduction  9 Several chapters highlight the transnational element of cultural and intellectual trends within British and Irish Catholicism. Éamonn Ó Ciardha traces the cultural influence of Jacobitism across the three kingdoms and across a much wider ‘Jacobite diaspora’, exploring Jacobite literature as a multilingual literary phenomenon. Christopher Gillett, in his exploration of political theology, shows how hotly contested conceptualizations of individualism, rationality, and spiritual and temporal authority were influenced and informed by Continental movements such as Gallicanism and Jansenism. Rather than being the preserve of abstract theory, Gillett argues that political theology was enmeshed with Catholic activism in the period. The study of British and Irish religious houses on the Continent has further highlighted the transnational nature of Catholicism. Hannah Thomas explores the structure and organization of these houses for men and women, tracing the expansion and consolidation which took place. All of these houses relied on an interconnected web of finance and patronage systems which included family networks, benefactors, and agents in England. The chapter by Laurence ­Lux-­Sterritt reinforces this by arguing for close links between the devotional life of religious houses and that of Catholics in Britain and Ireland. Lux-­Sterritt reveals the ‘sacralization’ of time and space in Catholic domestic spaces was directly influenced by that of religious houses. This provided regularity and guidance in the absence of priests in England; and, in Ireland, the printing of rules, translations, and catechisms, especially by Irish Franciscans and Poor Clares, was increasingly associated with resistance to the English Crown at home. Claire Walker highlights the richness of spirituality across the exiled houses through the survival of devotional treatises, diaries, letters of advice, and personal com­pil­ ations, revealing how some spiritual trends were common across all the religious houses, while others were distinctly influenced by the charism of a congregation’s founder. As the research in this volume shows, scholarship of this period is thriving. No longer viewed as a time of stagnation or settlement, the period 1641–1745 was one of uncertainty, change, opportunity, and risk for British and Irish Catholics. The competing forces of dynamism and conservatism within these communities saw them constantly seeking to re-­situate or re-­imagine themselves as their relationship to the state, to Protestantism, to Continental Europe, as well as to the wider world beyond changed and evolved. The growing body of research addressing the period will undoubtedly continue to bring insight and nuance to our understanding of a tumultuous period in the history of British and Irish Catholicism.

1 Civil Wars and Interregnum John Morrill

The Catholic Rising which began in late October 1641 began a war of liberation for the Catholics of Ireland, helped to precipitate a civil war in England, and intensified the persecution of Catholics across Britain. In due course there were Irish Catholics fighting in Scotland and England and overwhelming force brought by the Puritan victors in England against the Catholic people of Ireland. So the period between 1641 and 1660 was shaped by extreme violence. It is necessary to recognize that the nature of conflict and its resolutions was completely different in Ireland, with its large majority Catholic population, from that in England, with its tiny minority Catholic population, and different again from Scotland with an even smaller Catholic population confined to a few regions. Other issues impacting on Catholics also greatly varied across the three kingdoms, including the level of persecution experienced, the freedom allotted to Catholics to live out their sacramental lives, their relationships with their diasporas in dozens of religious houses around Europe, as well as the clergy’s relationship with the papacy and its global mission. It is also necessary to recognize how these distinct conflicts, wars of religion within each of the three kingdoms, were in another sense one great crisis of early modernity fought out in interlocking theatres, with troops from each kingdom engaged in the wars in the others. Events in each kingdom had powerful effects on the others, especially after the Regicide and the attempt of Interregnum governments to create a unitary system of government, with implications for limited Catholic freedom. This chapter will explore these themes by taking the distinctiveness of the experience of Catholics in each of the kingdoms as the organizing principle, while also remaining alert to the interactions and ­synergies between them. This chapter starts by examining the organization of mission in each of the kingdoms before and after the creation of the Commonwealth and the rather centri­pet­al actions of Rome. As we will discover, Rome resolutely treated the mission situation in each of England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland differently and had little or no joined-­up thinking about how to support the different Catholic populations. The chapter then addresses how war impacted different Catholic communities across the 1640s, first in Ireland, then England, and then Scotland. It then looks at the partial recovery of Catholic communities in Britain, as well as the devastation in Ireland, across the years of the Commonwealth and John Morrill, Civil Wars and Interregnum In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II: Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745. Edited by: John Morrill and Liam Temple, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843436.003.0002

Civil Wars and Interregnum  11 Protectorate. The chapter will chronicle the impact on public and private witness to faith in each of these contexts and explore parallels and contrasts. By 1660, Catholics in Britain could look with anxious confidence to the future, while in Ireland there had been an irreversible transformation in the confessional distribution of wealth and power. English Catholics had high hopes of succour from a king who owed so much to English Catholics for his very survival during his weeks on the run after his defeat at Worcester in September 1651.1 Irish Catholics had little to hope for from a king who, during the Cromwellian conquest, had turned his back on them and preferred to work with Scottish Presbyterians.

Structures under Stress In Britain and Ireland, Catholicism at the end of the 1630s was in a settled place. England and Wales were missionary lands directly under the control of the recently created Propaganda Fide in Rome, but with their own cardinal protector. In addition, an envoy of the Pope Urban VIII, officially accredited to the Court of the Queen, was on excellent terms with the King and with many of his Court, and he secured many favours for Catholics, including an end to violent persecution. This special relationship ended when the latest envoy, the Scot George Conn, returned to Rome a dying man at the end of 1639.2 He was not replaced. There was an exiled bishop, Richard Smith, who had failed to establish his authority over the religious orders or the nobility. He left behind a chapter of twenty-­four secular priests, in effect a self-­perpetuating oligarchy, and a rudimentary structure of informal county brotherhoods on the eve of the Civil War.3 The Jesuits, although mainly serving as chaplains in noble and gentry households, were now firmly established as a province with more than a dozen regional ‘colleges’ and ‘residencies’ and around 200 priests.4 Successive provincials were prudently stationed in the Spanish Netherlands, but they always had a vice-­provincial carrying out their orders in England.

1  Jonathan Scott, ‘England’s Houdini: Charles II’s Escape from Worcester as a Metaphor for His Reign’, in John Morrow and Jonathan Scott (eds.), Liberty, Authority, Formality: political ideas and culture 1600–1900 (Exeter, 2008), pp. 67–89, esp. 79–82. 2  Malcolm R. Smuts, ‘Conn, George (d. 1640), diplomat’, ODNB. 3 John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London, 1975), pp. 56–8; J.  C.  H.  Aveling, The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation (Colchester, 1976), pp. 118–19; T.  A.  Birrell, ‘English Catholics without a Bishop, 1655–1672’, Recusant History, 4 (1958), pp. 142–4; Joseph Bergin, ‘Smith, Richard (1567–1655), vicar apostolic of the English church’, ODNB. 4 Francis Edwards, The Jesuits in England from 1580 to the Present (Tunbridge Wells, 1985), pp. 69–79; Thomas McCoog, ‘The Society of Jesus in the Three Kingdoms’, in Thomas Worcester (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 94–5; Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 419.

12  John Morrill While Wales was treated as part of the ‘English mission’, Scotland was wholly separate and wholly neglected with rarely more than ten priests in the country. Much of the energy was provided by Irish Franciscan missionaries in the highlands and islands.5 For the first time, in 1653, Rome appointed an ‘apostolic prefect’, Fr William Bannatyne, but no members of the religious orders were willing to accept his authority, and clergy and laity referred even the simplest questions to the nuncio in Paris.6 In 1655, reporting ‘the persecution against Catholics ­ceasing’, he asked Rome for an injection of men and money. Nothing happened. The sole Jesuit in 1655 optimistically claimed that ‘our ministry carryeth as much goodwill to Catholics as before but praised be God who hath given one evill heady cow [the Kirk] short horns’, a clumsy but instructive metaphor as we will see.7 In England, Rome was careful to limit the claims of clerical ordinaries to jurisdiction even over lay Catholics in England. William Bishop and Richard Smith had been ordained bishops in partibus infidelium, after all, and Rome declined to name a new bishop after the death of Smith in Paris in 1655.8 By contrast, the realities of limited royal power and the sheer preponderance of Catholics in Ireland (at least 85 per cent of the population in 1641), had led Rome to appoint to all ancient Irish sees by 1641, with most of the bishops being resident. They had no cathedrals, no consistories, and no seminaries within Ireland. The majority of the clergy were members of religious orders, mainly Franciscans with itinerant ministries from more than sixty friaries. Like the Jesuits, they were tightly organized within Ireland and internationally. The seculars were able, with circumspection, to hold regular regional synods. At least fourteen were called by one or more of the four archbishops in the 1630s and 1640s,9 while the regulars were increasingly able to report annually to headquarters.10 In Britain, much of this organization was disrupted in the 1640s and there was only a partial recovery in the 1650s. Twenty-­four priests were executed in England and Wales between 1641 and 1653, although many more were imprisoned and deported. The total number of active priests in England and Wales fell by about 5  Robert Armstrong and Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, ‘Alternative Establishments? Insular Catholicism and Presbyterianism’ 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. 1–23; Alasdair Roberts, ‘Jesuits in the Highlands: Three Phases’, Journal of Jesuit Studies, 7 (2020), pp. 103–16; Scott Spurlock, ‘Ireland’s Contribution to Scottish Catholic Revival in the Seventeenth Century’, Recusant History, 31 (2016), pp. 171–94; Cathaldus Giblin, Irish Franciscan Mission to Scotland, 1619–1646 (Dublin, 1964). 6 M. V. Hay, The Blairs Papers (London, 1929), pp. 181–90. 7 Hay, The Blairs Papers, p. 207. 8  In partibus infidelium (in regions with no Catholic faithful). Bishops were ordained to such sees so that they had the sacramental charisms of a bishop but had no jurisdiction other than the right to ordain and confirm. It did not challenge secular authority, conferred no rights over religious orders, and gave no right to establish canon law courts to discipline anyone, even Catholics. 9  Alison Forrestal, Catholic Synods in Ireland 1600–1690 (Dublin, 1998), ch. 4 and appendices A and B. 10  Vera Moynes (ed.), Irish Jesuit Annual Letters 1604–74, 2 vols (Dublin, 2019).

Civil Wars and Interregnum  13 one-­third before a partial recovery under the Protectorate (c.750 in 1641; 500 in 1653; 600 in 1659). But the organization of this disrupted mission faltered: most of the chapter left the country, and they did not convene again until 1649 and then only fitfully through the 1650s. They did keep an agent in Rome, and they attempted to reach an accommodation with successive regimes as detailed below. The Jesuits’ regional network collapsed and they were even more targeted than before, leading them to an unusual willingness to work with, rather than against, the seculars in seeking an amelioration of persecution, accepting binding oaths of political obedience in return for a measure of freedom to worship in private.11 The contrast with Ireland is very stark. From soon after the outbreak of the Ulster Rising in October 1641, the Catholic clergy seized the initiative, both to limit the extent of popular violence and to create a semi-­theocratic Catholic government. The constitution of the Confederate Catholics of Ireland was forged at assemblies of bishops and the ordinaries of religious orders, and the bishops in particular assumed a prominent, but not dominant, role in its structures. All Catholic bishops sat of right in the General Assembly of the Confederation, and they made up at least a quarter of its Supreme Council. They were able to control the administration of a national oath ‘pro fide, rege et patria hiberni unanimes’ in 1642–3, to be taken by every Catholic after confession and communion, and archived at diocesan, metropolitical, and national levels, itself a sign of their ambition to be a fully functioning Church in a confessional nation.12 One particular mark of their power was that they were able to organize ten national ­synods of senior clergy between 1641 and 1651. These synods contributed significantly to the creation of a Catholic nation state and developed strategies for the full implementation of a Tridentine sacramental and pastoral programme. The religious orders were not as effective, however, with the Jesuits sending no annual report until one covering the years 1641‒50. Overconfidence resulted in a terrible day of reckoning in and after 1649. Five bishops were killed, others fled the country, and all diocesan governance ceased. Seventy priests were killed and several hundred were deported. There was a partial recovery once Henry Cromwell took over as lord deputy from his Baptist brother-­in-­law Charles Fleetwood, and there was a solitary provincial synod in Tuam in 1658. The Jesuits managed to pull together a grim provincial report for Rome each year from 1651 to 1654 and then failed to report again until 1662. The Franciscans were unable to hold more than vestigial chapters as their sixty friaries were seized and most of their friars were killed, imprisoned, or deported. A full list for the Irish province in 1639 contains 568 names, including lay brothers, 11  See below pp. 24–5 and Antony F. Allison, ‘An English Gallican: Henry Holden, (1596/7–1662), Part I (to 1648)’, Recusant History, 22 (1995), pp. 319–49. 12 John Morrill, ‘An Irish Protestation? Oaths and the Confederation of Kilkenny’, in Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington (eds.), Popular Culture and Political Agency in Early Modern England and Ireland: Essays in Honour of John Walter (Woodbridge, 2017), pp. 243–66.

14  John Morrill while a less reliable list for 1654 contains the names of just eighty-­nine priests.13 The number of priests in Ireland certainly fell from as many as 2,000 in the late 1640s, to about 200 by 1653 and perhaps 500 on the eve of the Restoration. Some added significantly to the number at work in Gaelic Scotland, but most were absorbed into Continental houses. Some were transported to Barbados and the Americas as indentured servants. The Protestant authorities there wanted them no more than the colonial government in Ireland did however, and quietly paid shipmasters to take them back and drop them off in Spain.14 Did persecution bring warring factions together? Occasionally yes, as in the secular-­regular responses to Independent approaches in 1647. But when Bishop Smith died in 1655, having refused to resign and failed to regain any respect from clergy or laity in England, there was a prolonged battle over the succession. The chapter was divided and sent in separate ternas. Henrietta Maria opposed the names on the majority list and offered one of her own. The Jesuits opposed any appointment, fearing any bishop might renew the campaign to control the licensing of regular priests. Pope Alexander VII was unwilling to agree any of the terms for toleration negotiated by Kenelm Digby and his Blackloist friends,15 but he could see that any episcopal appointment might well make Cromwell less willing to persist with an unpopular policy of de facto toleration. The chapter, now with a dean, soldiered on, and was to do so right up to James II’s reforms in 1686‒7.16 This last point, of course, demonstrates the new fault-­lines within the Catholic community. In England down to the end of the first Civil War, virtually no Catholics abandoned Charles I and threw in their lot with the parliamentarians. But from 1647 onwards, there was always the possibility of more freedom to be achieved via a deal with the Army Grandees and their parliamentary allies, and this was much more obvious once the Protectorate was established. But the Queen Dowager had her own party, strong amongst the exiles, the nobility back in England, and in Continental religious communities. She also had the cautious ear of some in Rome. The Irish situation was different. A large group amongst the Catholic Confederates of Ireland were from the outset distrustful of the King’s vacuous promises to Irish Catholics and looked to a series of alternative futures for Ireland. They were not willing to join the Ormondists without cast-­iron guarantees of political power—­ an Irish Catholic lord lieutenant or lord deputy, Catholic bishops not Protestant bishops in the Irish parliament, no bar on 13  Benignus Millett, The Irish Franciscans 1651–1665 (Rome, 1964), pp. 96–105. 14  Heidi Carlson, ‘Irish Emigration and Involuntary Migration to Barbados, 1649–1660’ (University of Cambridge PhD thesis, 2013). Some sent back to Spain did not survive the journey. 15  The Blackloists were a ‘cabal’ of intellectuals, clerical and lay, led by Thomas White, codenamed ‘Blackloe’. He combined Aristotelianism and progressive scientific enquiry with a willingness to seek toleration for Catholics in Britain and Ireland by making peace with Protestant rulers, modifying papal claims over the consciences of Catholics in formally Protestant states and even papal infallibility. 16  Birrell, ‘English Catholics without a Bishop’.

Civil Wars and Interregnum  15 Catholic participation in both houses, but without a guarantee of the restoration of all land taken from the Church at and since the Reformation, something that alarmed many of the Old English nobles who had come into possession of it. So in England, there were royalist and Cromwellian factions and there was widespread alarm at the Gallican ecclesiology and distinctly heterodox so­teri­ ology of Thomas White and his fellow ‘Blackloists’. In Ireland there were loyalist and anti-­loyalist factions. Some, close to native Irish lords in Ulster, were even willing to make a deal with the Cromwellians in return for pardons and the quiet enjoyment of their faith, and there were also pro-­ French and pro-­ Spanish factions. One has to conclude that it was beyond many Catholics to stick together in the harshest of times and they became their own worst enemies. Bishop Richard Smith was thirty-­two years a priest before he was sent to serve as a bishop in England with, as it turns out, a further thirty-­one years in front of him. But for most of those years he lived in exile, having fallen out with almost everyone except for certain cardinals at the French Court, dying ‘disrespected’ by those he was called to lead. His tombstone lacked charity but spoke no less than the truth: ‘a falsis fratribus vendito’ (sold out by false brethren). All too many English, and for that matter Irish, though not perhaps Scottish, Catholics, in the mid-­ seventeenth century must have felt the same.17

The Irish Rebellion and Its Consequences 1641‒1649 On the eve of the Catholic revolt on 22 October 1641, the Catholic Church in Ireland was in a far stronger position than at any time since the 1550s.18 There were perhaps 2,000 priests serving a Catholic population of just below two ­million. Resident bishops or vicars apostolic were well established in all dioceses, most of them from noble families who they expected to feed and house them, and significant progress had been made with restoring and developing a parish system and a regular sacramental life and basic catechetics. Annual Jesuit reports commented on the strength of faith, rooted in the sacralization of places and objects as well as sacramental devotions.19 The outbreak of Catholic violence across Ulster on and after the night of 22  October 1641 had dramatic consequences across Britain as well as Ireland.

17  Bergin, ‘Smith, Richard (1567–1655)’. 18  See for example Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Reformation in Ireland 1645–1649 (Oxford, 2002); Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, ‘Conflicting Loyalties, Conflicted Rebels: Political and Religious Allegiance among the Confederate Catholics of Ireland’, English Historical Review, 119 (2004), pp. 851–72; Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, ‘Lost in Rinuccini’s Shadow’, in Micheál Ó Siochrú (ed.), Kingdoms in Crisis: Ireland in the 1640s (Dublin, 2001), pp. 176–91. 19  Moynes (ed.), Irish Jesuit Annual Letters, I.

16  John Morrill The Rising began as a failed noble coup in Dublin linked to an attempt to disarm the Protestant community of Ulster and to occupy strongholds across the north. The aim, at a time of maximum political paralysis in England, was to place the Catholic nobility in an invulnerable position to dictate an Irish-­Catholic version of what the Presbyterian Scots had just achieved: an effective self-­governing kingdom under nominal royal authority that would privilege the rights of the majority ethnic and religious interest. But the Dublin plot was betrayed and the seizure of noble strongholds in the north then unleashed pent-­up popular fury at decades of dispossession and impoverishment. This in turn resulted in the deaths of several thousand Protestants, albeit more died of exposure than from shots, stabbings, or bludgeoning.20 This popular uprising gradually spread across the whole of Ireland and provoked significant levels of retaliatory Protestant-­on-­Catholic violence. There is little evidence of coordination at this stage. Although many Protestants in sworn depositions21 were quite clear that much of the violence was orchestrated by the Catholic clergy, there is also substantial evidence in those depositions of Catholic clergy urging restraint and even of sheltering Protestant neighbours and offering to look after their valuables.22 Archbishop Malachy O’Queely of Tuam even raised troops to curtail the looting of Protestant homes in Mayo.23 The desecration of recently built Protestant churches, and of English language prayer books and bibles, was widespread.24 The insurgents reclaimed pre-­ Reformation churches and reconsecrated them. By March 1642 there was a nationwide insurrection and fears of a social revolution as well as an anti-­British one. Since the Rising began in Ulster and the violence was worst there, it was the bishops and heads of religious orders from the north at a synod in Armagh in March who proposed a national plan for an alternative Catholic State to be established. This was further developed at a national synod of all the senior clergy from across the nation two months later, which in turn led to the creation of the Catholic Confederation.25 It was Catholic in that it was open to all Catholics of any ethnic or social background resident in Ireland. The Confederation had a sophisticated network of local elected officials, elections to a general assembly which acted just like a parliament but which, out of respect for the prerogatives of the Crown, was not called a parliament, and that assembly 20  Eamon Darcy, The Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (London, 2013) is the best of many recent discussions. 21  See Michael Perceval-­Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion (Montreal, 1994); Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 461–550. For the c.8,000 depositions, see the ‘1641 Depositions’ Project, https://1641.tcd.ie/ (accessed 30 November 2021). 22  Joan Redmond, ‘Popular Religious Violence in Ireland,1641–1660’ (University of Cambridge PhD thesis, 2016), ch. 6 and esp. pp. 195–9. 23  Raymond Gillespie, ‘Mayo and the 1641 Rising’, Cathair na Mart, 5 (1985), pp. 38–44. 24  Redmond, ‘Popular Religious Violence’, chs. 2 and 3. 25 Micheál Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland 1642–1649: A Constitutional and Political Analysis (Dublin, 1999); Donal Cregan, ‘The Confederate Catholics of Ireland: The Personnel of the Confederation 1642–9’, Irish Historical Studies, 29 (1995), pp. 490–512; Morrill, ‘An Irish Protestation?’.

Civil Wars and Interregnum  17 then chose a succession of executive bodies (above all the Supreme Council) in both of which the bishops had a significant but not dominant role. Since they controlled more than three-­quarters of the land of Ireland, the Confederates believed that the only threat to their position would come from a complete military defeat for the King in England and vindictive British parliaments sending armies to Ireland to punish and indeed expropriate the Catholic population. Parliament had committed to do so by the Adventurers Act of the spring of 1642, pledging the redistribution of a quarter of the land of Ireland from ‘rebel’ Catholics to those who had underwritten the armies sent to Ireland to protect their co-­religionists and avenge the massacres.26 From the beginning, the Confederation was riven and, at two points in 1645 and 1648, was literally in warring factions. There were personality clashes, feuds based on past perceived wrongs, tensions produced by the behaviour of the army of one province in another, and tensions between Old English and Gaelic Irish groups. But the biggest single source of division and destructive internal strife was over the terms on which the Confederation could make peace with the King’s representative and provide him with Irish armies for his wars in Britain. By far the most contentious of the disputed terms was the future of churches and Church lands seized during the early months of the Rising. This pitted most of the upper clergy and those—­especially Gaelic—­lords who had lost most since 1536 or 1560 against the Old English lords and townsmen who had often themselves secured much of the land confiscated from the Church. All Catholics wanted guarantees that they would be free to hold office and in effect control the government of the kingdom of Ireland together with guarantees of full freedom of worship and religious assembly. One party was willing to leave the question of churches and Church lands until after the wars in the three kingdoms were completed. Many Catholic lords, merchants, and lawyers believed that forcing the King to give too much to Irish Catholics would cause him to haemorrhage Protestant support in Britain and be self-­defeating.27 All these tensions were made much worse by the arrival of GianBattista Rinuccini as papal nuncio to Ireland in November 1645. A gifted canon lawyer, and deeply pastoral Tridentine archbishop of Ferma, he had no political experience or ability. He threw himself into improving clerical standards and the more complete implementation of the reformed Tridentine sacramental system, but he also opposed all suggestions of an agreement with the King himself or his party in Ireland without the complete restoration of Church property and jurisdiction. Following a legatine synod in August 1646, he excommunicated all those who

26  David Brown, Empire and Enterprise: Money, Power and the Adventurers for Irish Land during the British Civil Wars (Manchester, 2020). 27  This and succeeding paragraphs rest on the work of Ó hAnnracháin (n. 18) and Ó Siochrú (n. 25).

18  John Morrill had signed up to the ‘Ormond Peace’, the public and private treaties with the King’s lord lieutenant, and he set about creating a new Confederate supreme council in his own image. The result was a slow descent into civil war within the  Confederacy. Forced to give ground, and with the withdrawal of Ormond from Ireland and a more straightforward confrontation between a shaken Confederation and forces controlled by the English parliament, history repeated itself in 1648. New attempts at some sort of unstable compromise settlement led to another round of excommunications. As bishops who had supported him in 1646 changed sides, Rinuccini accepted the failure of his mission and returned to Rome in early 1649. By then the King was dead, Cromwell’s expedition was being planned, and a new coalition of former Protestant and Catholic royalists and most of the old Confederates came together to confront a very dark future.

English and Welsh Catholics in the British Civil Wars The Ulster Rising and its ensuing violence heightened anti-­Catholic panic across England. Nearly 30 per cent of all publications in the six months following the Rising described alleged atrocities in Ireland.28 While some were based on the depositions of ‘massacre’ survivors, more came from the fevered imagination of journalists or included woodcuts of extreme violence bought in from German presses. The claimed number of killings grew exponentially, finally settling at 150,000.29 From late 1642 it was widely believed that Charles intended to bring over a Catholic army from Ireland to help him to defeat his enemies there and re-­impose an authoritarian crypto-­Catholic regime. Although priests had regularly been imprisoned throughout Charles I’s reign, most had been quietly pardoned and released, in some cases banished, and none executed between 1628 and 1641. But after that, the King was powerless to prevent trials and executions, and twenty-­four priests were hanged, drawn, and quartered between 1641 and 1653. This was less than 5 per cent of all the priests in the country, but others were imprisoned or moved abroad and none could move around as freely as in the previous twenty years.30 Nonetheless, if sacramental life became less secure and more episodic, most Catholics still managed to attend Mass and to make confession. It was rites of passage that became much more hazardous, at least until 1653, when the introduction of civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths left Catholics free to baptise and wed without much scrutiny—­although the burial of their dead remained fraught and contested. 28 Keith Lindley, ‘The Impact of the 1641 Rebellion upon England and Wales, 1641–5’, Irish Historical Studies, 18 (1972), pp. 143–76. 29  Still Worse News from Ireland (London, 1641); [James Cranford], The teares of ireland wherein is lively presented as in a map a list of the unheard off [sic] cruelties (London, 1642). 30 Bossy, The English Catholic Community, p. 422, fig. 1.

Civil Wars and Interregnum  19 Second, in 1641 the Long Parliament ordered a new and more comprehensive listing of Catholic recusants and the imposition of fines for non-­attendance at church. These recusant rolls listed about 31,000 heads of households,31 or perhaps 150,000 men, women, and children who wilfully absented themselves from Protestant services. These rolls were then made available to justices of the peace, deputy lieutenants, and indeed to vigilante groups to ransack Catholic houses looking for arms. There were a few occasions when large crowds descended on the houses of leading Catholics and sacked them, the best attested being the work of the ‘Colchester plunderers’ or ‘Stour Valley riots’ at Long Melford in Suffolk.32 In 1643 a new and more crushing burden emerged for Catholics in the form of the Oath of Abjuration. This was an oath designed to make Catholics choose between hell in this life or in the life to come: I A.  B.  Do abjure and renounce the Popes Supremacy and Authority over the Catholick Church in General, and over my self in Particular; And I do believe that there is not any Transubstantiation in the Sacrament of the Lords Supper, or in the Elements of Bread and Wine after Consecration thereof, by any Person whatsoever; And I do also believe, that there is not any Purgatory, Or that the consecrated Hoast, Crucifixes, or Images, ought to be worshipped, or that any worship is due unto any of them; And I also believe that Salvation cannot be Merited by Works, and all Doctrines in affirmation of the said Points . . . So help me God.33

A refusal of this oath, evidence of attendance at any Mass after 26 March 1642, or evidence of the education of one or more child or grand-­child in the Catholic faith, made all Catholics liable to ‘the seizure and forfeiture of two thirds of all their goods and estates real and personal’. Being a papist in arms for the King made a Catholic liable to the loss of all his property.34 There has been much heated debate about the role of the Catholic community during the Civil Wars and the scale of persecution under the Ordinance of August 1643 and its subsequent refinements. Catholic gentry had a visible presence in the officer corps of some royalist armies. Catholics made up more than 40 per cent of royalist officers in Lancashire, a third of the officers across the six counties north 31 Bossy, The English Catholic Community, pp. 181–2. 32  John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999). 33  ‘An Ordinance for Explanation of a former Ordinance for Sequestration of Delinquents’ Estates’, in C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (eds.), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum 1642–1660, 3 vols. (London, 1911), I, pp. 254–60. Terence Stephen Smith, ‘The Persecution of Staffordshire Roman Catholic Recusants’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 30 (1979), pp. 327–51, is the best local study. 34  Firth and Rait (eds.), Acts and Ordinances, I, pp. 254–60. For the latest research in this area, see Eilish Gregory, Catholics during the English Revolution, 1642–1660: Politics, Sequestration and Loyalty (Woodbridge, 2021).

20  John Morrill of the Mersey and the Trent, and about one in six of the 1,600 who were general officers and regimental colonels, lieutenant colonels and majors across the country. This would suggest a higher proportion than in the population and even amongst the gentry. A minimum of 204 Catholic officers died in battle or of wounds sustained in battle, at least double the rate for Protestant officers on the royalist side.35 Yet it is also true that perhaps as many as 80 per cent of Catholic gentry in England and Wales36 did nothing to support the King beyond paying royalist taxes, if they resided in royalist-­controlled areas, or simply taking shelter in a royalist garrison to escape marauding parliamentarian troops with a deep hatred of ‘popery’.37 One study, based on official parliamentary and Commonwealth sources for nine counties, concluded that only 40 per cent of known Catholics were considered ‘royalist’ and 60 per cent ‘mere’ Catholics or neutrals.38 Why might this be so? Although Charles I had prevented the execution of priests and significantly reduced the physical harassment of Catholic laymen in the late 1620s and 1630s, he had intensified the financial pressure on them, increasing ‘recusancy’ fines. This greatly reduced their love of their king. Of course, in the 1640s they had much more to fear from a parliamentarian victory, at least until 1647, but it was prudence not passion that brought Catholic recruits into his armies. From the outset, the Long Parliament sought greater enforcement of anti-­ Catholic laws as well as the creation of new laws, culminating in the Oath of Abjuration. The penalties on Catholics who actively supported the King—­ especially ‘papists in arms’—were intended utterly to destroy them. Protestant royalists, upon conviction, would be made to pay fines which were equivalent to finding a dowry for an extra daughter, i.e. two years’ income. The fines on Catholics however started at two-­thirds of the value of all their property and for papists-­in-­arms extended to the complete confiscation of all their estates. This placed Catholics in a very difficult situation. This probably explains why Catholics in solidly royalist areas signed up in large numbers and in parliamentarian areas hardly at all.39 35  P. R. Newman, ‘Catholic Royalist Activists in the North, 1642–46’, Recusant History, 14 (1977), pp. 26–38; P. R. Newman, ‘Catholic Royalists of Northern England, 1642–1645’, Northern History, 15 (1979), pp. 88–95; J.  M.  Gratton, ‘The Earl of Derby’s Catholic Army’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire & Cheshire, 137 (1988 for 1987), pp. 25–53. 36  For Wales, see Robert Matthews, ‘The Allegiance of the Welsh Catholics during the First Civil War, 1642–1646’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 20/1 (2000/1), pp. 86–97. 37  Keith Lindley, ‘The Part Played by Catholics’, in Brian Manning (ed.), Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (Manchester, 1973), pp. 126–76; Gordon Blackwood, The Lancashire Gentry and the  Great Rebellion (Manchester, 1978), pp. 39–45; John Morrill, ‘East Anglian Catholics in the Seventeenth Century, 1603–1688’, in Francis Young (ed.), Catholic East Anglia: A History of the Catholic Faith in Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough (Leominster, 2016), pp. 61–92. 38  Lindley, ‘The Part Played by Catholics’, esp. pp. 174–6. 39  See Morrill, ‘East Anglian Catholics’, pp. 66–70.

Civil Wars and Interregnum  21 Catholics in England and Wales thus had to make tough choices in the 1640s. Fewer men entered the seminaries, and fewer women joined religious houses than in previous decades. Yet there is no evidence that they were deserted by their priests.40 Access to books may have been more restricted—­the average annual total of Catholic titles was less than half the average for most years in the preceding fifty years, before almost fully recovering in the 1650s.41 That said, new publications included aids to daily prayer in the home, guides to confession and penance, and reprints of devotional classics. What was largely missing were apolo­get­ics and anti-­Protestant polemics.42

Scottish Catholics: Better Times? The situation in Scotland was different again. By 1641, the Kirk had succeeded in suppressing all forms of Catholic defiance. Recusancy, except under the protection of a few elite families, above all the Gordon earls and marquesses of Huntly, had been stamped out. Catholics, mainly in the north-­east and south-­west of Scotland and in parts of the Highlands, went to the kirk with closed ears and huddled together in secret for the sacraments and household prayers. In 1641 the Catholic mission across the whole of Scotland may have consisted of little more than four Jesuits, a Capuchin, and three secular priests. The Kirk had also made extensive progress in preventing all devotion at more than 1,000 holy wells and springs. The Scottish parliament had passed penal laws even more draconian than the English laws—­the 1560 Act ‘Anent the Mass’ prescribed the seizure of all property of any Catholic attending Mass, with banishment for a second offence and death for a third, and this act was reissued every few years. As the Presbyterian minister Robert Baillie put it in 1646, ‘though the letter of the Act of Parliament be heavy, yet few or none have been hurt in their goods, imprisoned or [banished]’.43 The Crown put no energy into enforcement and the Kirk preferred another form of coercion. Anyone suspected of being a Catholic, even if they attended the kirk, was subject to regular interrogations and indoctrination by the elders, which ended only with a grovelling recantation in the kirk during divine service, sitting barefoot on a ‘repentance stool’. At the very least the ‘converts’ had 40  For this section, see William Sheils, ‘English Catholics at War and Peace’, in Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby (eds.), Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester, 2006), pp. 137–57; Aveling, The Handle and the Axe, pp. 164–80; Michael Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland 1558–1829 (Harlow, 1998), pp. 70–101. 41  See Thomas H. Clancy, SJ, English Catholic Books 1641–1700: A Bibliography (Chicago, 1974), p. xvi. The numbers estimated by Clancy are as follows: 1611–20 = 194; 1621–30 = 195; 1631–40 = 183; 1641–9 = 88; 1651–60 = 186. 42 Clancy, English Catholic Books. For an index of titles, year by year, see p. 151. 43  Robert Baillie, An historicall vindication of the government of the Church of Scotland (London, 1646), p. 52.

22  John Morrill to weep bitterly, plead for forgiveness, and manifest joy at their deliverance.44 Woe betide any backsliders—­second and subsequent periods of re-­education were yet more extended. This process was tried and tested by the 1640s and was then applied with greater consistency and rigour. When Margaret Hamilton failed to satisfy the Paisley elders of the sincerity of her conversion, her children were taken from her and fostered.45 The Kirk boasted that, unlike the Spanish Inquisition, it did not need torture and the threat of agonizing death to achieve its objectives, and indeed it was effective in making many Catholics give up on their faith. Religious objects, occasionally found in graves, were never on display.46 In and after 1648, the Covenanting movement fell apart and the Scots were hopelessly divided over whether or not to support the insincerely covenanted Charles II, and unsure how best to deal with an English regime that had abandoned both its expedient League and its solemn Covenant with God. This infighting aided Cromwell’s conquest of Scotland and its incorporation into an enhanced English State. Scottish Catholics now took the opportunity to overthrow what they had experienced as the tyranny of the Kirk.47 By the end of 1651, the English army was in control of much of Scotland. Major General George Monck, now in charge of security there, took action which protected Catholics from the Kirk. In the name of religious liberty, he issued what Ryan Burns calls ‘cease-­and-­desist orders’ to presbyteries, forbidding the kirk sessions to discipline those who chose not to be part of their congregations. Catholic beneficiaries, such as Alexander Irving of Drum, publicly mocked his former tormentors and circulated copies of Monck’s injunction. Crucially they proclaimed the legitimacy of the Commonwealth regime in England and its right by conquest to rule in Scotland. In at least some places, the stools of repentance ‘were thrown down by the English soldiers’.48 Fr Francis Spreul, one of the new missioners to Scotland, wrote incredulously in August 1652 ‘it hath pleased Alm[ighty] God to drawe goode out of evill, in the fatall and unhappie revolutions of our countrye, the persequation against Catholiques ceasing and the

44  Ryan Burns, ‘The Demand for Tears: Catholics, Conformity and Conversion in Early Modern Scotland’ (Northwestern University PhD thesis, 2019), pp. 14–15. 45  Burns, ‘The Demand for Tears’, p. 43. 46  P. McAdam Muir, ‘The Ruthwell Cross’, Transactions of the Scottish Ecclesiological Society, vol. 1 (1904–5), pp. 135–40. 47 Burns, ‘The Demand for Tears’; Ryan Burns, ‘Unrepentant Papists: Catholic Responses to Cromwellian Toleration in Interregnum Scotland’, History, 103 (2018), pp. 243–61; Alan Macinnes, ‘Catholic Recusancy and the Penal Laws, 1603–1707’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 33 (1987), pp. 27–63; 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. 15–22; Scott Spurlock, ‘Confessionalisation and Clan Cohesion: Ireland’s Contribution to Scottish Catholic Renewal in the Seventeenth Century’, Recusant History, 31 (2012), pp. 171–94. 48  Burns, ‘The Demand for Tears’, p. 168 (quoting the Ellon Kirk Sessions minutes).

Civil Wars and Interregnum  23 Presbyterians power and tyrannie queld by the Independents’.49 Rome promised to consider a bigger budget for the Scottish mission, while Philip IV of Spain underwrote the opening of a new Scottish college or seminary in Madrid. The number of priests in Scotland increased for a while as a result, with some refugee priests crossing from Ireland. For the first time for decades Masses were held openly and there was some imprudent, if understandable, triumphalism.50 One startling scholarly view from 1929 has survived the test of time: ‘one of the paradoxies of seventeenth-­century history is the appearance of Cromwell in Scotland as the saviour of the Catholics’.51 Still, this inevitably produced a reaction. The Kirk was impotent in the face of the English military occupation of Scotland, but it seethed rather than capitulated. In late 1655 Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell set up an English Council in Edinburgh to soften the impact of army rule and he chose Roger Boyle Lord Broghill as the president of this council, a man who had been instrumental in helping him to secure Munster. He had a New English contempt for Catholics and first-­hand memories of the 1641 Rising, and he did not like what he knew of the increased movement of Catholics between Ireland and Scotland. Yet he was also no fan of clerical power and so decided on a new approach. He did not seek to enforce the Acts of 1560 and 1593 nor to lift the cease-­and-­desist orders, but instead sought to introduce into Scotland the Abjuration Oath which had been imposed on Catholics in England under a Long Parliament Ordinance of 1643. He ordered JPs at the recently instituted quarter sessions to tender the oath. However, with English army officers on many commissions of the peace and with many Scots alarmed at the unprecedented imposition of an English law on Scotland, enforcement remained patchy. Furthermore, it was not Broghill’s intention to expropriate Catholics but to ensure that they played no part in public life and to force them into a prudent submissiveness.52 Catholicism in 1660 was certainly not weaker than it had been. Although after most of the internal wars in Scotland in the period (the rebellions of 1644–5, 1648, 1650–1, 1654), the losers were subject to huge financial penalties, there was no singling out of Catholics. Although the spectacular rise and fall of Montrose in support of the King in 1644–5 was greatly assisted by the arrival of Irish Catholic troops and although Irish prisoners were routinely slaughtered during that campaign, Catholics were if anything underrepresented in subsequent Scottish parliamentary reprisals. Neither Charles I nor (before 1660) Charles II had done

49  Burns, ‘The Demand for Tears’, p. 167. 50  Cathaldus Giblin, ‘The Acta of Propaganda Archives and the Scottish Mission, 1623–1670’, Innes Review, 5 (1954), pp. 39–76; Macinnes, ‘Catholic Recusancy’, pp. 28–9. 51 Hay, The Blairs Papers, p. 32. 52  Patrick Little, Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union with Ireland and Scotland (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 112–15.

24  John Morrill anything to earn the loyalty of Scottish Catholics. They thus represented one of the groups saddest to see the end of the Protectorate.

English Catholics and Cromwell Scottish Catholics were not the only ones to see the advantage of showing loyalty to the Interregnum regimes. English Catholics were still subject to the Ordinance of August 1643, even if it was much more spasmodically enforced. But there were glimmers of hope that many in the army (together with leading Levellers and their fellow travellers in the gathered churches) were committed to a religious liberty for all with a tender conscience, including Catholics.53 The generals might have felt contempt and disgust for what they saw as papist idolatry and priestcraft, and they certainly wanted to prevent Catholic pros­elyt­ iza­tion, but they thought that all forms of persecution were counter-­productive. They feared Catholic internationalism and the claims of the Pope to command Catholics to political action. But they believed there were deals to be made, including permission for religious practice in private in return for binding oaths of political acquiescence. In 1647, 1648, 1649, and again in 1654–5 it was the Independents, and most particularly Cromwell himself, who initiated contact with Catholics they thought they could do business with. On the Catholic side too, there were those, both amongst the greater landowners and amongst the clergy, who were willing to deal on those terms. At the height of the political crisis in 1647, the army leadership and its allies in parliament were prepared to include an offer of the inclusion of Catholics within a general toleration. This led to separate sets of negotiations at their instigation. The first was with a group of Jesuit priests and the other with a large group of Catholic peers and gentry, whose coming together suggests networks maintained or developed even in the years of war. Both negotiations came up against stumbling blocks—­the concept of a new oath that committed Catholics to political obedience was agreed, but the form of words proved elusive. Certainly, some of the ideas put forward by the noble Catholics would never have been accepted in Rome, such as that the Pope would agree to accept bishops nominated by parliament to control and discipline the Catholic community.54

53  Norah Carlin, ‘Toleration for Catholics in the Puritan Revolution’, in Ole Peter Grell and Robert William Scribner (eds.), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 216–30. 54  For these paragraphs, see Thomas H. Clancy, ‘The Jesuits and the Independents: 1647’, Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 40 (1971), pp. 67–90; Jeffrey Collins, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Blackloist Conspiracy of 1649’, The Historical Journal, 45 (2002), pp. 305–31; Stefania Tutino, ‘The Catholic Church and the English Civil War: The Case of Thomas White’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 58 (2007), pp. 232–55.

Civil Wars and Interregnum  25 In 1648 Cromwell sent his scoutmaster Leon Watson to Paris, ostensibly to join in discussions about the non-­materiality of the soul, but in fact to look for a way to bring the Catholics onside within a broad republican settlement. These discussions involving ‘Blackloist’ clergy around Kenelm Digby, ran in parallel with discussions between leading figures in the army, Cromwell at the fore, for a deal with Irish Catholics that would allow Cromwell to prioritize an assault not on Catholic Irish, but royalist Irish. Watson’s instructive letters home report progress was being made towards a deal in which the Catholics would give public promises of loyalty in return for a right to private worship and a relaxation of the financial burdens. But talks foundered on the detail. Once Cromwell became lord protector negotiations were resumed, and Kenelm Digby now returned to England, restored to his lands and frequenting Cromwell’s Court. Both the French and Venetian ambassadors, as well as Cardinal Mazarin, were convinced of the Protector’s desire to come to a settlement. In the end this only meant a large number of individual Acts to help particular Catholics, but we should not dismiss Cromwell’s protests that his hands were tied by a council and parliament less willing to take what would be an unpopular stance. In this context it made sense for Commonwealth and Protectorate governments to allow a measure of religious liberty alongside relentless financial pressure. The 1643 Act remained in force, but by the early 1650s county committees, and specifically sequestration committees made up of prominent gentry, were a shadow of their former selves, now run by minor officials mainly concerned with collecting arrears. Most Catholics who had not been active royalists had now compounded and paid their fines, meaning the financial pressures, severe as they had been, were much eased between 1650 and 1657. In addition, in 1650 the Rump Parliament had abolished all those laws requiring attendance at services in parish churches and had revoked the Elizabethan Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity. Recusancy was no longer an offence and recusancy fines were no longer collected. And although the penal laws against priests and those harbouring priests remained, they were rarely enforced. John Southworth was the only priest executed during the Protectorate. Despite having a death sentence commuted to banishment for life in the 1620s, he was caught again in 1654 and rejected opportunities given to him to escape the penalty imposed a quarter of a century earlier. Startlingly, following his execution, Cromwell had his body embalmed and sent, at Cromwell’s expense, to Douai, where it remained until Douai closed in the 1920s and the embalmed body was sent back to England where it is still on display in Westminster Cathedral. Such an event perfectly demonstrates Cromwell’s dislike of persecution.55

55  John Morrill, ‘Southworth, John [St John Southworth] (1592–1654), Roman Catholic priest and martyr’, ODNB.

26  John Morrill Catholics thus had severe laws hanging over them, but these were rarely enforced. As Hugh Aveling put it in 1976: ‘The years after the civil war (1646‒60) provided most English Catholics with a strange mixture of freedom and repression. On the whole, for the majority, the freedom was probably greater and the repression more severe than under the Crown before the war’.56 Foreign ambassadors consistently said the same thing. Thus, the Venetian ambassador in the autumn of 1655 observed that ‘though the present government deprives the Catholics of their goods . . . it allows them to hear as many masses as they wish’.57 Occasionally those attending Mass in the chapels of ambassadors were rounded up, but they were invariably let out the following day, having been fined.58 It was intimidation more than persecution. For the minority of Catholics who had their lands confiscated for failure to take the Abjuration Oath, the consequence was normally that they bought back or rented their own lands from the State and at rates well below market value. In a large number of cases, leading figures in the regime such as Sir Thomas Fairfax and Major General John Lambert, and most notably Cromwell himself, can all be found reaching out to protect even the remotest of relatives and neighbours;59 while the secretary to the army council, John Rushworth, was a major player as a land agent in the 1650s, negotiating on behalf of northern Catholic families and securing their lands for them. The Constables, whose estates straddled Yorkshire and Lincolnshire are the best known for this.60 Even more startling, however, was the case of the Eyres, whose estates straddled the Derbyshire High Peak and Staffordshire. Leading parliamentarians like the earl of Rutland, hardline army officers and Regicide Colonel Francis Hacker and John Wildman, erstwhile Leveller, as well as John Rushworth, secretary to the New Model High Command, can be found lending money, helping to set up fraudu­lent trusts, lobbying for reduced valuations, and generally blowing smoke in the eyes of overworked committees so that Rowland Eyre’s lands, which were supposed to be sold in their entirety, were in fact sold for less than a quarter of their real value and were quickly back under his effective control.61

56 Aveling, The Handle and the Axe, p. 170. 57  Calendar of State Papers Relating To English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, vol. 30: 1655–1656 (London, 1930), p. 129. 58 Albert  J.  Loomie, ‘Oliver Cromwell’s Policy toward the English Catholics: The Appraisal by Diplomats, 1654–1658’, Catholic Historical Review, 90 (2004), pp. 35–6. 59  For Lambert, see D. N. Farr, ‘Lambert [Lambart], John (bap. 1619, d. 1684), parliamentary soldier and politician’, ODNB. For Fairfax, see Aveling, The Handle and the Axe, pp. 172–4; and p. 176 for Cromwell and his willingness to invite prominent Catholics to dine with him. 60  Peter Roebuck, ‘The Constables of Everingham: The Fortunes of a Catholic Royalist Family during the Civil Wars and Interregnum’, Recusant History, 9 (1967), pp. 75–87; Gregory, Catholics during the English Revolution, ch. 5. 61  Rosamond Meredith, ‘A Derbyshire Family in the Seventeenth Century: The Eyres of Hassop and Their Forfeited Estates’, Recusant History, 8 (1965), pp. 12–77.

Civil Wars and Interregnum  27 Officials rarely contested requests for leniency from members of the regime. Priests were fewer but Catholic books now entered the country freely. New editions of devotional works were in circulation, and many works previously only in manuscript circulation were now printed. All these had a manifest sub-­text obedi­ence to and of accepting the need to work with those who, with divine permission, were in power.62 Cromwell wrote to Cardinal Mazarin in December 1656, claiming to have ‘made a difference’ through his toleration of Catholics, and apologizing that he was unable to do more. He concluded ‘it is my purpose, as soone as I can remove impediments, and some weights that presse me downe, to make a further progresse, & discharge my promise to your Eminency in relation to that.’63 How sincere was Cromwell about granting liberty to Catholics despite his contempt for Catholicism as a system? It is hard not to put weight on his willingness to grant Lord Baltimore—­a Catholic who had shown he could live in peace with Protestants—­his lands and offices back in Maryland, and he was willing to make generous concessions to Catholics in Ireland who were useful to him.64 The main problem with accepting that he believed in allowing Catholics freedom to practice religion privately is that he signed off on an Act of his second parliament (28 June 1657). This reintroduced an expanded version of the Oath of Abjuration, adding to the 1643 version a long section requiring a renunciation of the Pope’s claim to excommunicate and remove rulers, and it also transferred to Assize judges and JPs the responsibility for securing lists of all suspected papists and administering the oath to them. In reality, it narrowed the definition of Catholic practice, removed manor houses from the property that could be confiscated, and created long periods of negotiation that gave Catholics respite. It also left completely open ended their freedom to take the oath at any future point and to have their land restored to them.65 So while it gave the Protectorate more potential power, it was yet another example of menace rather than action. Cromwell may not have approved of the Act, but he felt unable to prevent it. He had had many battles with his second parliament and did not need another one. It is also pos­ sible that it gave him a new freedom by non-­enforcement to appear as the best friend they could expect to find.

62  A good example is Alban Crowther and Thomas Vincent, Jesus, Maria, Joseph; or the devout pilgrim of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Amsterdam, 1657). 63  See John Morrill (gen.ed.), The Letters, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (3 vols., Oxford, 2022), esp. item 1656 12 26. 64  J. W. Vardaman, ‘Lord Baltimore, Parliament, and Cromwell: A Problem of Church and State in 17th Century England’, Journal of Church & State, 4 (1962), pp. 31–46; J.  D.  Krugler, English and Catholic: The Lords Baltimore in the Seventeenth Century (London, 2004), pp. 193–212. For the role of Lord Baltimore, see John Cunningham, ‘Lay Catholicism and Religious Policy in Cromwellian Ireland’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 64 (2013), pp. 780–1. 65  Firth and Rait (eds.), Acts and Ordinances, II, pp. 1170–80.

28  John Morrill

The Reckoning in Ireland: Conquest It is probable that nearly 20 per cent of the Irish Catholic population died of plague or starvation in the years 1649–54,66 another 3 per cent (34,000) chose voluntary exile on the Continent under the terms of a number of surrender art­ icles during the ‘Cromwellian Conquest’ and perhaps another 2 per cent were sent to the Caribbean and North America as indentured servants, rarely to return.67 The number of priests shrank from perhaps 2,000 in 1641 to perhaps 200 in 1653/4 and no more than 500 or 600 on the eve of the Restoration.68 The amount of land owned by Catholics born in Ireland shrank from something like 54 per cent in 1641 to less than 15 per cent by the late 1650s (returning to around 23 per cent by 1670).69 And yet, the English conquerors would say, no Catholic was forced against his or her conscience to attend any worship they did not wish to attend. What is more, the English conquerors would say, our real enemies were supporters of the House of Stuart, not of the Pope in Rome, and real efforts were made, some of them would say, to reach agreement with Catholics willing to work with them to establish peace. At few, if at any, times in history were there so many paradoxes and shades of grey. But at no point either, except perhaps in the later 1840s, did the Catholic people of Ireland suffer more at the hands of the English. The largely Protestant Old English ‘Ormondist’ royalists merged with the wholly Catholic Confederates on the eve of the Regicide. After underfunded attempts in 1642–3 and 1647–9 to send English armies to reconquer Ireland, the Rump Parliament sent Oliver Cromwell to do it properly, now in the name of the Commonwealth of England. He was sent to re-­establish Protestant hegemony, to effect the incorporation of Ireland into an enhanced English State, and to confiscate and redistribute enough Irish land to compensate the Adventurers (the venture capitalists and committed Puritans) of 1642–3, and also underpaid Commonwealth’s soldiers.70 Cromwell recognized the need to divide and rule his

66  Pádraig Lenihan, ‘War and Population 1649–1652’, Irish Economic and Social History, 24 (1997), pp. 1–21. 67 Patrick  J.  Corish, ‘The Cromwellian Regime 1650–1660’, in T.  W.  Moody, F.  X.  Martin, and F. J. Byrne (eds.), A New History of Ireland: Early Modern Ireland 1534–1691 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 362–4. 68  Raymond Gillespie, Seventeenth-­Century Ireland, p. 206. Benignus Millet, OFM, A History of Irish Catholicism: Survival and Reorganisation, 1650–95 (Dublin, 1968), pp. 1–12, presents a harrowing if rather insouciant overview. 69  Micheál Ó Siochrú and David Brown, ‘The Down Survey and the Cromwellian Land Settlement’, in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), The Cambridge History of Ireland, vol. II: 1550–1730 (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 584–607, esp. p. 605. 70 For the best account, see Micheál Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London, 2008). Also vital is Brown, Empire and Enterprise; John Morrill, ‘The Drogheda Massacre in Cromwellian Context’, in David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan, and Clodagh Tait (eds.), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2007), pp.  242–65; John Morrill, ‘Oliver Cromwell, Priestcraft and the “Deluded and Seduced People” of Ireland’, in Patrick Little (ed.), Ireland in Crisis: War, politics and religion 1641–1650 (Manchester, 2020), pp. 193–210.

Civil Wars and Interregnum  29 enemies. In particular, he sought to detach many of the Catholics who had been supporters of the nuncio/clericalist party—­i.e. those most Catholic and least royalist. He colluded with George Monck, senior parliamentarian commander in Ulster, in the spring and summer of 1649 in reaching a truce with Owen Roe O’Neill which extended to arming him and using him against the Scots.71 And he encouraged his deputy Henry Ireton in detaching the marquis of Antrim from the royalist cause and in disclosing top-­secret information about Charles I’s negotiations with Irish Catholics back in 1641.72 This was not a blind ­ anti-­Catholicism.

The Reckoning in Ireland: Settlement Following the initial massacre of garrisons and some civilians at Drogheda and Wexford, Cromwell concentrated on balancing threat and intimidation with apparently sincere offers of a degree of compromise, especially in religion, for those who surrendered to him. In December 1649, the Catholic bishops and or­din­ar­ies of religious orders met in the ruins of Clonmacnoise, and called for the unity of all Catholics in the face of English threats to expropriate ‘the estates of the inhabitants of this Kingdom’ and to ‘root out the commons also, and plant this land with colonies brought hither out of England’ and ‘the extirpating the Catholic religion, which is not to be effected without the massacring or banishment of the Catholic inhabitants.’73 Cromwell’s response the following month was written in cold fury. It was bitterly anti-­clerical (‘yours is a covenant with death and hell’), but it sought to distinguish the ways the clergy had instigated the massacres of the past decade and to keep their people in thrall to idolatry and ig­nor­ ant of the scriptures, from the rights of ‘mere Catholics’. He assured them that while he would proscribe the Mass, he would not compel anyone to attend Protestant services or subscribe to Protestant beliefs but ‘walk patiently with them’.74 He went on to make clear distinctions between those involved in the original ‘rebellion’ and others. There would be degrees of guilt, and land confiscations

71  Jerrold Casway, ‘George Monck and the Controversial Catholic Truce of 1649’, Studia Hibernica, 16 (1976), pp. 54–62. 72 Jane Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration in three Stuart Kingdoms: The Career of Randal MacDonnell, Earl of Antrim (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 230–40. For the debate that followed, see Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘The “Antrim Plot” of 1641—A Myth?’, The Historical Journal, 35 (1992), pp. 905–19; M. Perceval-­Maxwell, ‘The “Antrim Plot” of 1641—A Myth? A Response’, The Historical Journal, 37 (1994), pp. 421–30. 73  Certain Acts and Declarations made by the Ecclesiasticall Congregation of the Arch-­bishops. Bishops and other Prelates. Met at Clonmacnoise the fourth day of December 1649 (London, 1650), pp. 1–6. 74  See Morrill (ed.), The Letters, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, doc. 1650 01 31.

30  John Morrill would follow the pattern set in England. ‘He came to punish rebels, to destroy politically malevolent clergy and to destroy Irish Royalism, but he did not come to extirpate the Catholic religion or the Irish people’.75 This was to be the hallmark of his policy for the remainder of his life,76 and it left him at odds with powerful groups who had a stake in the subjugation of the Irish, the Catholics of Ireland, and the royalists of Ireland. Those who had the day-­to-­day management of se­cur­ ity in Ireland (at least until Henry Cromwell was unshackled as lord deputy in 1657), pushed for the greatest degree of land seizure, as did the soldiers for whom this was the only hope of receiving the arrears for their service in Ireland, and as did the ‘Adventurers’, the immensely powerful group of London merchants whose loans had made possible successive English expeditions to Ireland since 1642.77 They all wanted land and the ability to sell it on. This meant that they were only interested in the removal of Catholic landowners, not the tenants and labourers. Thus, the misnamed ‘Cromwellian’ settlement saw the creation in south, east, and central Ireland of a dominant Anglo-­Irish landowning elite above an overwhelming Catholic peasantry. Cromwell, obsessed with honouring the relatively generous terms granted in well over one hundred sets of surrender articles he and his army colleagues had negotiated to shorten the war, can be found regularly across the decade granting pardons and restitutions to Catholics who petitioned him, especially in person, to the despair of the authorities in Dublin. But the Lord Protector was a constitutional monarch, not an absolute one, and he did not seek to repeal legislation he disapproved of.78 So the Catholics of Ireland were radically disempowered. They were also largely stripped of their clergy. Cromwell was less squeamish about this. A minimum of seventy clergy, including three bishops, were killed by English soldiers during the Interregnum, almost all during the military operations between 1649 and 1653.79 Many more were imprisoned and deported. Hundreds took advantage of articles that provided free passage to the Continent for anyone in surrendered towns and an unknown number were sent as indentured servants to the Caribbean islands. Reports from clerical leaders to Rome and to France (some of the self-­exiled ­bishops gathered at Nantes) spoke of equal punishments being meted out on priests and on those who sheltered them, and gave harrowing accounts of priests hiding in caves and bogs.80 By the end of 1652, something like 80 to 90 per cent of 75  Morrill, ‘Oliver Cromwell, Priestcraft and the “Deluded and Seduced” People of Ireland’, p. 206. 76  John Morrill, ‘Cromwell, Parliament, Ireland and a Commonwealth in Crisis: 1652 Revisited’, Parliamentary History, 30 (2011), pp. 193–214. 77 Brown, Empire and Enterprise, chs. 4–6. 78 John Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian Settlement” of Ireland’, The Historical Journal, 53 (2010), pp. 919–37. 79  Corish, ‘The Cromwellian Regime’, pp. 380–5. 80  Éamon Ó Ciosáin, ‘A Pamphlet in French on the Banishment of the Catholic Clergy from Ireland in 1653’, Archivium Hibernicum, 65 (2012), pp. 209–21; Moynes (ed.), Irish Jesuit Annual Letters, II, pp. 844–6, 859–62.

Civil Wars and Interregnum  31 all the clergy had died, were in prison, or were (by far the greatest number) in exile. A declaration issued in January 1653 by the commissioners in Dublin requiring all priests in the country to leave within twenty days was thus a cleaning up operation.81 This was the nadir, and in fact exceptions were made for the elderly and sick, including for at least one bishop. From that time on, and certainly from the time Henry Cromwell took over effective control, the numbers of clergy slowly increased again, reaching perhaps 500 on the eve of the Restoration. Although the Mass was proscribed, there is very little evidence that anyone was penalized for attending a Mass, and attendance at other rites including Catholic baptisms and funerals was allowed. Opinion is divided about how much pressure was exerted across the 1650s on lay Catholics to abstain from traditional Catholic practice (visits to holy sites, etc.). Scott Spurlock concluded that ‘a significant degree of leniency was granted to the general lay populace’,82 but John Cunningham has found evidence of patchy vindictiveness.83 The Dublin administration was split over how comprehensively to herd Catholics into Connacht, a fault-­line revealed in print in the bitter exchanges between the Vincent Gookin, a close ally of the Lord Protector and Richard Lawrence, a soldier much closer to Lord Deputy Charles Fleetwood, hinging on whether Irish Catholics were capable or incapable of being converted to Protestant truth.84

The Reckoning in Ireland: Restraint The land confiscations were the severest penalties visited upon any of the Catholic communities in these islands. But with the repeal of the Elizabethan statutes in 1650, Catholics incurred no penalties for failing to attend Protestant worship and no new burdens were added until 1657, when the English Act re-­imposing and strengthening the Oath of Abjuration of 1643 (which had not been previously applied in Ireland) was deemed by the hardliners in the administration to apply across the whole of Britain and Ireland. Supporters of the latter pushed for enforcement, Henry Cromwell pushed back, wishing that ‘this extrame course had not been so suddenly taken, comeing like a thunderclapp uppon them’.85

81  King’s Inn Library, Dublin, Prendergast Papers, vol. 2, pp. 99–100. 82  Scott Spurlock, ‘Cromwell and Catholics: Towards a Reassessment of Lay Catholic Experience in Interregnum Ireland’, in Mark Williams and Stephen Paul Forrest (ed.), Constructing the Past: Writing Irish History, 1600–1800 (Woodbridge, 2010), pp. 157–79. 83  Cunningham, ‘Lay Catholicism’. 84 John Cunningham, ‘The Gookin-­ Lawrence Pamphlet Debate and Transplantation in Cromwellian Ireland’, in C. Breathnach, L. Chambers, C. Lawless, and A. McElligott (eds.), Power in History: From the Medieval to the Post Modern World (Dublin, 2011), pp. 63–80; Toby Barnard, ‘Crises of Identity among Irish Protestants, 1641–1685’, Past & Present, 127 (1990), pp. 39–83. 85  Thomas Birch (ed.), A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, 7 vols. (London, 1742), VI, p. 527. For some evidence of enforcement, see Cunningham, ‘Lay Catholicism’, pp. 783–5.

32  John Morrill Yet, in Ireland as in England, attempts at a high-­level agreement did take place. The lead figure was Patrick Crelly, a Cistercian abbot close to the marquis of Antrim, and his proposals were certainly taken sufficiently seriously by the Council of State for them to be referred to a specially convened committee. Both Cromwell and Ireton were heavily involved. Negotiations lasted several months including direct talks with those Irish leaders who had resisted the alliance of Ormond and leading Confederates. Negotiations petered out but contacts were never completely broken. Crelly continued to provide Cromwell with useful intelligence across the 1650s. Oliver and Henry Cromwell also continued to grant safe conduct for clergy to meet so as to respond to government demands. When Rome appointed Edmund O’Reilly to be archbishop of Armagh, he headed not for his archdiocese but rather for London, where, again under safe conduct, he entered into talks with the Protector, on this occasion jointly with Lord Baltimore.86 Of course, the Act for the Settling of Ireland, by dividing the State’s enemies into nine categories with differing levels of guilt, created a bureaucratic nightmare. The resulting administrative and judicial process placed thousands of ‘rebels’ (Irish, English, Scottish), both Catholic and Protestant, into those nine categories. The records are largely lost, but two points can be made: that some attempt was made to act justly, and that it was degrees of royalism, not degrees of Catholicism, that governed the outcome. In her reconstruction of the fragmentary records of the High Court of Justice for the years 1652–4, Jennifer Wells makes two crucial points. The first is that, in the surviving cases, while fifty-­six men and women were found guilty and executed, thirty-­nine were acquitted or pardoned. She also notes the unusual grant to the accused of the right to call witnesses. It says much for the courage and cohesion of the Catholic community that so many witnesses did appear. Some degree of justice was done. The second point she makes is that while the English High Court of Justice operated under the treason laws, with religion often an aggravating factor, the Irish trials were for unlawful killing, where it was not.87 Once more, we see that that a leading group amongst the English conquerors of Ireland in the 1650s were much more anti-­ royalist than anti-­Catholic. Indeed, in the 1652 Act of Settlement, six of the first thirty-­five names on the list of those ‘excepted from pardon of life and estates’ were Protestants, including a bishop (John Bramhall) and Scottish Presbyterian planters (e.g. Viscount Montgomery of the Ards).88 Cromwell pardoned and 86 Casway ‘George Monck’, pp. 65–7; Jerrold Casway, ‘The Clandestine Correspondence of Fr Patrick Crelly, 1648–49’, Collecteana Hibernica, 20 (1978), pp. 7–20; Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration, pp. 191, 212–35; Collins, ‘Thomas Hobbes’, pp. 319–22; Cunningham, ‘Lay Catholicism’, pp. 778–85; Corish, ‘The Cromwellian Regime’, pp. 384–5. 87  Jennifer Wells, ‘Proceedings at the High Court of Justice at Dublin and Cork 1652–1654 [part 1, with index]’, Archivium Hibernicum, 66 (2013), pp. 63–260; Jennifer Wells, ‘Proceedings at the High Court of Justice at Dublin and Cork 1652–1654 [part 2, with index]’, Archivium Hibernicum, 67 (2014), pp. 76–274. 88  ‘An Act for the Setling of Ireland’, in Firth and Rait (eds.), Acts and Ordinances, II, pp. 598–603.

Civil Wars and Interregnum  33 worked with leading Catholics, recruited Catholic soldiers, and throughout his time as lord protector was receptive both to petitions for mercy from Catholic landowners who had not been involved in the Rising of 1641–2 or who came seeking a deal on behalf of the Catholic population. Cromwell blamed the King and the Catholic clergy for the massacres, not the population at large and he was keen to treat different groups differently. It was small comfort, and there were others, including his son-­in-­law Charles Fleetwood, and other military and civil leaders who took a harsher view.

Conclusion Catholics across the Stuart kingdoms suffered greatly in twelve years of war within and between the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland that lasted from 1641 to 1653, and under the Commonwealth and Protectorate that brought them into a political, religious, and legal union more complete than at any time before or after. But Catholics’ experience differed greatly between the three ‘kingdoms’. The majority Catholic population in Ireland suffered far more than the minority Catholic populations of Britain, but the choices that Catholics had to make across the archipelago were difficult ones everywhere. Those choices included seeking to mitigate the vindictiveness of successive regimes not only by defiance, but also by elements of collusion. This produced divisions and wounds within Catholic communities which, as part of traumatized memory, would not be easily repaired or healed in the decades to come.

Select Bibliography Collins, Jeffrey, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Blackloist Conspiracy of 1649’, The Historical Journal, 45 (2002), pp. 305–31. Cunningham, John, ‘Lay Catholicism and Religious Policy in Cromwellian Ireland’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 64 (2013), pp. 769–86. Darcy, Eamon, The Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (Woodbridge, 2013). Gregory, Eilish, Catholics during the English Revolution, 1642–1660: Politics, Sequestration and Loyalty (Woodbridge, 2021). MacLean, Heather, Ian Gentles, and Micheál Ó Siochrú, ‘Minutes of Courts Martial Held in Dublin in the Years 1651‒3 [with index]’, Archivium Hibernicum, 64 (2011), pp. 56–164. Morrill, John, ‘Oliver Cromwell, Priestcraft and the “Deluded and Seduced” People of Ireland’, in Patrick Little (ed.), Ireland in Crisis: War, Politics, and Religion 1641–1650 (Manchester, 2020), pp. 193–210.

34  John Morrill Ó hAnnracháin, Tadhg, Catholic Reformation in Ireland 1645–1649 (Oxford, 2002). Ó Siochrú, Micheál, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London, 2008). Sheils, William, ‘English Catholics at War and Peace’, in C.  Durston and J.  Maltby (eds.), Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester, 2006), pp. 137–57. Spurlock, 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.

2 Restoration Mark R. F. Williams

There was some cause for hope at the outset of the Restoration for the Catholic population of Britain and Ireland: the prospect of stability in the aftermath of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms; appeals to ‘tender consciences’ under the Treaty of Breda (though not with Catholics in mind); and perhaps, if nothing else, the thought that those whose sufferings in the previous decades had been mitigated through Catholic support and interventions might have sufficiently long mem­or­ ies to temper their suspicions. A deeper, although temporary, wariness of dissent­ ers among supporters of the State churches arose in the immediate years after Charles II’s return to the throne, placing Catholics in a nebulous position between relative loyalists to the Stuart dynasty in the short term and historic enemies in the past. Such ambiguities presented opportunities for some Catholics to offer renewed attestations of loyalty, to refashion themselves before more sympathetic audiences, and to deepen roots in the event that tides once again turned. Empire, now pursued with increasing vigour after two decades of militarization and the aggressively Protestant regimes of the 1650s, offered some Catholics a means by which to find prosperity abroad and a release valve in the face of persecution. Connections to the wider European political and religious scene simultaneously gave rise to fears of foreign invasion and influence, while also affording a vital degree of latitude in articulating ideas of belonging. Nevertheless, as in much of late-­seventeenth-­century Europe, the possibility of constructing multi-­layered identities capable of accommodating local, national, and global change jarred with the shifting priorities of the State and the turbulence which acute incidents could create.1 In this sense, while the death of Charles II in 1685 and the acces­ sion of James II might have forced new expressions of Catholicism, the Restoration itself can be characterized not as an interlude between major conflicts, but as a period of remarkable adaptation and experimentation among Catholics in Britain and Ireland. Sweeping overviews of these sorts of changes and adaptations do little, ­however, to illustrate the richness and variety of Catholic experiences in the 1  See, for instance, Nicholas Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation (Cambridge, 2015); Tadhg Ó hAnrracháin, Catholic Europe 1592–1648: Centre and Peripheries (Oxford, 2015). Mark R. F. Williams, Restoration In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II: Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745. Edited by: John Morrill and Liam Temple, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843436.003.0003

36  Mark R. F. Williams Restoration period. Political change in London and the intrigues of the Stuart Court may have demanded the articulation of new terms of loyalty and reset boundaries for the lives of many Catholics, but they were not the single gravita­ tional point around which life rotated. Questions of loyalty and survival were a quotidian affair for many Catholics across Britain and Ireland during the Restoration period, shaped as much by the demographics, cultural practices, and historical background of their community as by the whims of politicians and clergy. To be a Catholic in Restoration Britain and Ireland was not solely a matter of political and religious (re)definition in the face of elite policymaking and imposition, it was a constant process of navigation between the contingencies of being seen and not seen, heard and not heard, mobile and sedentary. One example of this comes to us by way of a walk which the Church of Ireland archbishop of Armagh, Michael Boyle, evidently took through the streets of Dublin in June 1682. Boyle had been appointed lord chancellor in Ireland in 1665 and elevated to the archbishopric in 1679, benefitting from his reputation for unimpeachable loyalty to the Stuarts and to James Butler, duke of Ormond (until recently lord lieutenant of Ireland) in particular. He was, however, not beyond wider suspicions. Marriage into the O’Brien family had brought Catholics into his personal circle (some of whom, like Murrough O’Brien, earl of Inchiquin, were noteworthy converts), and some sneered at Boyle’s apparent willingness to admit Catholics into local governance, regardless of claims to necessity.2 These consid­ erations clearly weighed on Boyle’s shoulders during his walk through Dublin. In a letter to Ormond, Boyle noted that, in the course of walking ‘through ye streets to ye Church uppon [sic] Sunday morning’, he ‘scarce miss[ed] one day from see­ ing the papists stand in ye streets in numbers and goeing in to mass . . . without any shyness or indeed prudence’. Concerned that he would appear to be indulging Dublin’s Catholics in such practices, Boyle pointed to the apparent culprit: these Catholics were celebrating Mass in a house ‘believed S[i]r William Talbots’. Talbot and his family were also no strangers to suspicion: William was the nephew of the former Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Peter Talbot (who had died only two years earlier in Dublin Castle at the height of the Popish Plot), and of Richard Talbot, favourite of the Duke of York and a longstanding ally of the Stuarts during their exile.3 In search of a diplomatic end, Boyle later confronted and warned Talbot against ‘ye indiscretion’ of such activities. Yet, reported Boyle, ‘they continue as formerly and rather more sham[e]less’. What worried Boyle more acutely, however, was not the simple reality of Catholics in Dublin celebrating Mass in a private home in such a ‘shameless’

2  Toby Barnard, ‘Boyle, Michael’, ODNB. For the Boyles more generally, see Danielle McCormack, The Stuart Restoration and the English in Ireland (Woodbridge, 2016). 3 Mark R. F. Williams, The King’s Irishmen: The Irish in the Exiled Court of Charles II, 1649–1660 (Woodbridge, 2014), chs. 4–5.

Restoration  37 manner, as this had long been the case in the city and many devout Protestants, Ormond among them, would have made little issue of it for the sake of maintain­ ing peace.4 Rather, what worried the archbishop was the potential scandal that might arise should it be known that he, as ‘ye Ld Primate should see those meet­ ings publickly to Mass every Sunday morning in his way to Church, and not endeavour to remove them’.5 The careful balance to be struck was not between active persecution and wholesale toleration, but between what could be seen, what should be said, and what might be written and read. Boyle’s concerns were tied to a larger question across the three kingdoms dur­ ing the Restoration as to the delicate balance of religious coexistence. The occa­ sion for Boyle’s letter was not only the walk itself, but how that weekly walk, his encounters with familiar Catholics, and the cautious asides they entailed would appear if ever revealed by an antagonistic observer to an unsympathetic audience. At the time of his writing, Boyle had one such potential onlooker in mind. Only one day before, a copy of Sir John Davys’ Letter to a Friend Containing Certain Observations Upon Some Passages had been left ‘uppon the booksellers stal[l]’ and brought to Boyle personally for his inspection.6 The book itself was essentially innocuous: it had been written by a friend of both Boyle and Ormond who had been charged with being a Catholic sympathizer and cleared by the efforts of the two men. What worried Boyle were the comments in the margins of this particu­ lar copy, which Boyle described as ‘inconsiderable but reflecting animadversions’. Where Davys refuted claims that ‘priests and fryers are tollerated to swarme and openly tolerate mass in Ireland’, the anonymous commentator remarked ‘and so they are in all Townes in ye Kingdom’. Davys’ assertion that any offending Catholics were ‘severely punish[e]d’ was simply refuted with ‘not one’. Where Davys reassured his reader that there ‘has not beene any such open celebration of ye Mass heard of amongst us’, the commentator quipped ‘as open as any time these 20 yeares’. These were the notes of an individual for whom the Restoration had been two decades of indulgence and undesirable tolerance, facilitated by the Dublin government and Stuart State. The reality of the situation, which Boyle knew, was such that dragging the suspected writer of the marginalia into the pub­ lic eye for punishment bore risks not worth taking. If the author ‘owne[d] the thing’ and was asked to justify his statements about Mass being ‘openly sayd in severall places in Dublin every Sunday’, he could easily prove it, whether through citing Boyle’s own knowledge of Talbot or ‘many other places in Dublin’. The mat­ ter of the book and its marginalia was dropped, left to ‘fall silently’.

4  Sean Connolly, Divided Kingdom: Ireland, 1630–1800 (Oxford, 2008), p. 152. 5  Bodleian Library, Oxford (hereafter Bodl.) Carte MSS, vol. 39, fols. 560–1. 6  [John Davys], A letter to a friend, containing certain observations upon some passages, which have been published in a late libell intituled, the third part of No Protestant-­plot (Dublin, 1682).

38  Mark R. F. Williams Boyle’s Sunday walk may seem at first innocuous, but the letter which framed it and the concerns which Boyle articulated speak to a number of the defining fea­ tures of the Catholic experience in Restoration Britain and Ireland. Long framed within national historiographies as an inevitable descent into confessional entrenchment and the divisions of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, the Restoration set­ ting of Boyle’s letter is suggestive of the more complex interplay between tol­er­ ation and antagonism to which historians have increasingly turned their attention in recent decades. Like Boyle, historians have been less inclined to take the printed polemics of the period as transparent indicators of lived Catholic experi­ ence, looking instead to the ways in which Catholics in Britain and Ireland seized opportunities to redefine themselves not only in printed discourse and the cor­ ridors of Court, but also in daily interactions between and across confessions. The advent of the penal laws in Ireland, the initial tremors of Jacobite support in Scotland, and the determined recusancy of Catholics in England ahead of post-­1688 stagnation have all been read back into the period, making for awk­ ward historiographical inevitabilities. Only recently have historians started to treat the period as something more than an interlude between more turbulent acts in (primarily) the defining of Protestant hegemony across the three king­ doms. Greater attention to Catholic mobility (across Britain and Ireland and fur­ ther afield), more serious consideration of private lives and intellectual endeavour among Catholics, and the reappraisal of the simplistic category of ‘otherness’ in functional contemporary terms has meant a move away from triumphalist, secu­ lar understandings of decline in the face of (largely Protestant) modernity.7 The Catholic experience in the Restoration—­like that of the ‘Long Reformation’ generally—­has likewise benefitted immensely from a ‘decentring’ approach which looks beyond the ferment of London politics: studies of individual families able to weather confessional storms or being capsized by them, biographies of the dis­ placed or returned, and the consideration of regions of activity and imagination rather than homogeneous nations.8 Few historians have endeavoured to chart these experiences through and beyond the Civil Wars and Interregnum. The period often represents an odd breakwater in the Catholic experience whereby the ‘Counter-­Reformation’ pauses or is resolved in 1640, and Catholics emerge in 1660 unwittingly at the outset of revolution and the Enlightenment to begin

7 See, for example, Liesbeth Corens, Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-­ Reformation Europe (Oxford, 2019); Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community 1688–1745: Politics, Culture, and Ideology (Woodbridge, 2009); Ethan H. Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005). 8  See, for instance, Geoff Baker, Reading and Politics in Early Modern England: The Mental World of a Seventeenth-­Century Gentleman (Manchester, 2010); James  E.  Kelly, English Convents in Catholic Europe, c.1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020); Williams, The King’s Irishmen; Thomas O’Connor, Irish Voices from the Spanish Inquisition: Migrants, Converts and Brokers in Early Modern Iberia (Basingstoke, 2016).

Restoration  39 further historiographical travails.9 There also remains a regrettable tendency for the historiographies of Britain and Ireland’s composite parts to ignore one another, compartmentalizing one majority Catholic population from minority Catholic populations for the sake of cohesive national narratives rather than threading together clear connections across the Stuart kingdoms. Histories of the Restoration period have been at their richest when pushing beyond these out­ moded historiographical boundaries, asking questions of common experience and speaking to the movement and variations which characterized the region as a whole.10 As Boyle’s walk suggests, understanding Catholicism in Ireland and Britain in the decades after the Restoration demands that we look at the full range of scales available to us: from the margins of a single book to the early rumblings of revolution across the three kingdoms.

Memory and Restitution The most pressing question facing Catholics across Britain and Ireland at the time of Charles II’s restoration was not necessarily the possibility of toleration or fur­ ther persecution, but rather one of recollection. Among the Protestant population of the restored Stuart kingdoms, loyalties were most often calibrated through questions of immediate utility rather than the dredging up of longer term sins. In Ireland and Scotland, for instance, the cold truth remained that the Stuart return had been facilitated by those whose particular brand of Protestantism, combined with varied notions of governance and self-­interest, had set them on the other side of the Civil Wars only a decade earlier. Thus, prominent Irish Protestant magnates such as Roger Boyle, whose engagement with the Commonwealth and Protectorate regimes had included being elected as an MP and sitting in Cromwell’s ‘second chamber’ while personally benefitting from the appropriation of Irish Catholic lands, could find themselves quickly elevated with new titles (in Boyle’s case, the earldom of Orrery). Royal favour could easily be found in the immediate effervescence and convenient amnesia of Charles’ restoration.11 Such recognition reflected the real compromises lying beneath the triumphalist Stuart veneer. Yet, there were signs in the early stages of the Restoration that memories of previous decades could be employed to the restitution, if not advancement, of 9  For instance, Michael Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion c. 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 2006); Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’; Steven Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, 2009). 10  Recently exemplified in Gabriel Glickman, ‘A British Catholic Community? Ethnicity, Identity and Recusant Politics, 1660–1750’, in James  E.  Kelly and Susan Royal (eds.), Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-­Reformation (Leiden, 2017), pp. 60–80. 11 Patrick Little, Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union with Ireland and Scotland (Woodbridge, 2004).

40  Mark R. F. Williams Catholics across the three kingdoms. Promises of toleration made while in exile to help leverage support disintegrated remarkably quickly. Some, like the prom­ ises made during flirtations with Spain around the Treaty of the Pyrenees, were simply no longer politically expedient. Others, like the promises for toleration in England made to Abbess Mary Knatchbull and the Benedictine nuns of Ghent in exchange for years of covert correspondence and counsel, simply dissolved into silence as audiences with the restored King were deferred or ignored.12 Still, another Stuart marriage alliance with a Catholic kingdom, this time Portugal, through Catherine of Braganza in 1662 after lengthy negotiations (including brief discussions of a marriage favouring Spain instead), suggested that Charles II’s diplomatic relations with the Catholic world would soften compared to the hard­ ened Protestant ethos of the Protectorate. By April 1663 Charles had reputedly told the French ambassador that he thought ‘no other creed matches so well with the absolute dignity of kings’ as Catholicism did, though he typically qualified the point by noting that he would engage in persecution if forced.13 At a more per­ sonal level, Stuart gratitude, expected more often than shown, was owed as much to those who had persevered with the young Charles II through more than a dec­ ade in Continental exile among predominantly Catholic powers, as to Protestants at home. Charles himself, largely under the advice of more politic courtiers like Edward Hyde, newly minted earl of Clarendon, appeared to push away Catholic presence in his Court. Yet figures such as George Digby, earl of Bristol, who had converted to Catholicism while in exile, maintained sufficient sway that rumours of Catholic influence in Whitehall never truly abated. In the longer term, this would prove to be part of the Stuarts’ undoing. For the moment, however, it sug­ gested a certain openness born of a sense of dynastic loyalty. The Catholic laity had further cause to believe that restitution might be in the making if Stuart overtures were to be trusted. The devastation wrought in Ireland cast a long shadow over the celebrations of the Restoration.14 Depositions and petitions accumulated from 1642 onwards established the categories into which Irish Catholics were variously thrust or had placed themselves in the aftermath of the Civil Wars, contesting their role in the 1641 rebellion, their subsequent asso­ ciation with the Confederacy of Kilkenny, and the subsequent effects of the Adventurers Act.15 The Restoration presented an opportunity to revisit these 12  ‘Edward Hyde to Charles II, 31 Oct 1661’, in W. D. Macray (ed.), Notes which Passed at Meetings of the Privy Council between Charles II and the Earl of Clarendon, 1660–1667 (London, 1896), p. 43. On Knatchbull, see Kelly, English Convents, pp. 125–6; Caroline Bowden, ‘The Abbess and Mrs. Brown: Lady Mary Knatchbull and Royalist Politics in Flanders in the late 1650s’, Recusant History, 24 (1999), pp. 288–308; Claire Walker, ‘Prayer, Patronage, and Political Conspiracy: English Nuns at the Restoration’, The Historical Journal, 43 (2000), pp. 1–23. 13  Ronald Hutton, Restoration (Oxford, 1985), p. 200. 14  See John Morrill’s exploration of these events in Chapter 1 of this volume. 15  Joseph Cope, ‘The Experience of Survival during the 1641 Irish Rebellion’, The Historical Journal, 46 (2003), pp. 295–316; Charlene McCoy and Micháel Ó Siochrú, ‘County Fermanagh and the 1641 Depositions’, Archivium Hibernicum, 61 (2008), pp. 62–136.

Restoration  41 memories and, optimistically, to return Catholic Ireland to its pre-­war landscape. Initially, the distinguishing line for Irish Catholic merit in order to receive royal favour in these restitutions was, like that of the Commonwealth, their participa­ tion in ‘the unnatural insurrection begun in the year 1641’ rather than the simple fact of being ‘a papist’. What seemed at first blush an easy demarcation of the loyal and disloyal quickly narrowed however. Subscription to the second ‘Ormond’ peace of 1648 (which had been unacceptable to a significant portion of the Catholic Confederates), and opposition to transplantation itself, became requisite qualities of the ideal, loyal Irish Catholic.16 Indeed, only those who had been exiled by the Cromwellian regime or had voluntarily joined the Stuarts in exile were granted ‘favour’ in any definite form; among them the Taaffe, Talbot, and MacCarthy families. Anxious onlookers could read of the proceedings through printed reports: Mercurius Hibernicus or Ireland’s Intelligencer was established in January 1663 at the outset of the hearings with the expressed purpose of docu­ menting what had happened within the court of claims.17 In such instances, the perceived merits and loyalties of individuals proved a more important measure than the articulation of any meaningful abstract sense of a ‘loyal Catholic’. Protestant anxieties in both Ireland and England could quickly puncture even the most coherent story. Commemoration of the violence enacted by Catholics on the Protestant population of Ireland—­real or imagined—­quickly entrenched itself in the social life of the newly established Protestant hegemons of Ireland. While Stuart hints at a sort of rapprochement in Ireland over the land settlement creaked into motion, congregations in the Church of Ireland were reminded of the 1641 Rebellion and the imminent threat of further conspiracy; 23 October was, by 1662, instituted as a day of commemoration to mark Protestant survival. Only four years later, 5 November entered the Protestant calendar—­something which the Jacobean government had stifled but the Cromwellian regime had instituted in 1656.18 Readers across Britain and Ireland, eager to remind one another of such events and encourage further entrenchment, could point to works like Temple’s History of the Irish Rebellion—­printed in 1646 but very much in circulation after the Restoration—­to solidify and sharpen what were now con­ venient memories. Those prominent Protestants whose lives spanned multiple kingdoms were best placed to act upon these anxieties, scuppering Catholic hopes of restitution through tactical remembrances in the halls of power. Individuals such as Sir Nicholas Plunkett, whose credentials during the 1650s among the exiled royalists had brought him an appointment as spokesperson for the Irish 16  For context and analysis of the 1648 peace, see Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Reformation in Ireland: The Mission of Rinuccini, 1645–49 (Oxford, 2002). 17 Karl Bottigheimer, ‘The Restoration Land Settlement in Ireland: A Structural View’, Irish Historical Studies, 18 (1972), p. 12. 18  Toby Barnard, ‘The Uses of 23 October 1641 and Irish Protestant Celebration’, English Historical Review, 106 (1991), p. 892.

42  Mark R. F. Williams Catholic lobby for restitution, had their actions in the 1640s dredged for immedi­ ate political ends (in this case, his efforts in 1648 on behalf of the Confederates to find a Catholic protector for Ireland).19 Others found means of working around such antipathies, benefitting variously from high-­level patronage from sympa­ thetic figures at Court, personal favours, and more cynical manoeuvrings between courtiers. Nevertheless, the court of claim’s hearings—­ spanning only eight months in 1663—were far from methodical. When the hearings finally con­ cluded, more than 700 decrees of innocence had been granted to 566 Catholics and 141 Protestants, and a further 113 Catholics found guilty of ‘rebellion’.20 Even with such categories established, however, implementation was far from straight­ forward. The process of detailing reallocations and working around the exercise of royal favour prolonged the settlement scheme into a legal torpor, carrying on through the end of the decade. In immediate terms, however, the fact remained that, for Catholics in Ireland, the promises of the Restoration in terms of righting the perceived injustices of the 1650s came slowly or not at all and rested almost entirely on the claims one could make on loyalties past and present. Recollections of their actions during the Civil Wars remained common to English Catholics just as in Ireland. However, Catholics in Britain were not sub­ ject to such radical shifts in either landholding or the security of their estates. One simple reason for this was their relatively small demographic within the three kingdoms. While figures are, largely by nature of the openness with which most Catholics acknowledged their confessional ties, imprecise, estimates of between 1 and 2 per cent of the English population and, in Scotland, numbers in the low thousands are dwarfed by an Irish Catholic population of more than one million (approximately 85 per cent of the total). In most instances, this demo­ graphic difference continued to force a life of relative reclusiveness compared to Catholics in Ireland; however, this was by no means uniform in the changing cir­ cumstances of the Restoration. The growing diversity in London made relatively easy not just the survival of Catholics within the city but a widening connection to Catholicism further afield. The chapels of foreign ambassadors—­in addition to those of the Catholic queens—­provided sanctioned and well-­known locations for worship and social connections, while the growing number of merchants and labourers from across Europe afforded opportunities not just to blend into the city, but to thrive through the import of devotional literature, art, music, and of course news.21 Catholic networks across Britain and Ireland, once the agents of Stuart survival during the 1650s, became the conduits through which familial and confessional bonds operated at a quotidian level. As recent studies of the Blundell

19 Williams, King’s Irishmen; Connolly, Divided Kingdom, p. 134. 20 Connolly, Divided Kingdom, p. 134. 21  See, for instance, Giada Pizzoni, British Catholic Merchants in the Commercial Age, 1670–1714 (Woodbridge, 2020).

Restoration  43 family of Lancashire have illuminated, awareness of the wider Catholic condition in the Restoration period could span great distances not only through printed works, but through correspondence, rumour, and the movement of friends and family over vast distances. William Blundell, for instance, could privately ru­min­ ate on the blame being allocated to the Catholics of Ireland for the 1641 Rebellion; solicit and exchange books with fellow Catholics within the three kingdoms and on the Continent; while also lobbying for Catholic toleration in the London press.22 While leaving one of the richest sets of records of Restoration Catholic life in England, the sense remains that Blundell was one among many Catholics whose hope was tempered by caution. In Scotland, the inveterate anti-­Catholicism of the Kirk remained the defining feature of Restoration confessional politics. In functional terms, however, the limit­ed control wielded by Edinburgh over the highlands and islands, along with the comparatively lax interest of the Stuart regime in evangelizing in contrast to the efforts of James I decades earlier, meant that Catholicism beyond the Lowlands could achieve some measure of renewal. Little interest was shown in Scottish Catholicism on the part of Rome in the wake of the Reformation prior to the establishment of an apostolic prefecture in 1653. Even then, Catholic survival across Scotland rested on ‘the belligerent resistance of lay Catholics to conform­ ity’ rather than paternalistic oversight or concern.23 The relative demographic strength of Catholicism in Ireland and the mobility of its clergy meant that smaller communities in the three kingdoms could be supported or reinforced and their connections to the Continent strengthened alongside their own missions. In the Western Isles, for instance, the preaching of Irish Franciscans in Gaelic served the Catholic laity of the region until the political manoeuvring of figures like Angus MacDonnell (elevated at the Restoration to Lord Glengarry and Aros) to become the head of ClanDonald made necessary the patronage of priests and the support of an ‘illicit school’ at Glengarry for Catholic children by 1665.24 Rare investigations into Catholicism in Wales during this period speak to similar trends. The Jesuit College of St Francis Xavier at the Cwm, which has recently been highlighted for its importance to the wider English province, survived in no small part through the Restoration period because of the topography of its loca­ tion and the ability of its priests to move across borders.25 Those areas understood by the Protestant State as being at the margins of their influence were certainly not so in the revitalization of the Catholic Church after the Restoration. Rather, 22 Baker, Reading and Politics, pp. 52–3, 81–2, 88–9. 23  R. Scott Spurlock, ‘The Laity and the Structure of the Catholic Church in Early Modern Scotland’, 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. 232. 24  R.  Scott Spurlock, ‘Confessionalization and Clan Cohesion: Ireland’s Contribution to Scottish Catholic Renewal in the Seventeenth Century’, Recusant History, 31 (2012), pp. 171–94. 25  Hannah Thomas, ‘Missioners on the Margins? The Territorial Headquarters of the Welsh Jesuit College of St Francis Xavier at the Cwm, c. 1600–1679’, Recusant History, 32 (2014), pp. 173–93.

44  Mark R. F. Williams the ‘marginal’ status of the Highlands, of the Welsh borders, and indeed of Ireland in the eyes of the Stuart State, was precisely what made them central to these efforts. In practical terms, however, the reality remained that Stuart concern being pri­ marily for stabilization and the rewarding of the loyal, however tendentiously, facilitated a relatively relaxed environment across the three kingdoms for the Catholic population as a whole in the first years after the Restoration. This did not last. As personal loyalties faded and memories were interrogated, new adapta­ tions were needed to facilitate something approaching a sustainable balance.

Adaptations With the waning of Restoration hopes came the necessity to adapt and reconfig­ ure Catholic life in ways more suited to a regime clearly less interested in these restitutions and remembrances than initially thought or wished. By the end of the 1660s calls were again being made by the Privy Council to enforce the penal laws which had effectively lapsed during the early years of the Restoration. Fears mounted about potential rebellion and a French invasion aided from within. Old solutions to the ‘Catholic problem’ began to crop up in familiar places: oaths, con­ versions, and expulsions. Yet, whatever the fears of Protestant Britain and Ireland might have suggested, and as the processes of revisiting of the 1640s and 1650s have also shown, the Catholic population was far from homogeneous in its com­ prehension of and response to these changes. For many Catholics, the prospect of again being required to swear an oath (an idea posited at numerous junctures by the Stuarts at times of Protestant unease) was met not only with exasperation but also with the hope of accommodation. Alongside attempts to undo the Cromwellian land settlement in Ireland, groups of Catholics in Ireland also aimed to resuscitate and adapt old formulations of the Stuart Oaths of Allegiance, thereby resolving the question of loyalty for those willing to take it up and hoping to ease deepening fears of persecution. In late 1661 this began to take form as the ‘Remonstrance’ or ‘loyal formulary’, a state­ ment intended to clarify the loyalties of Catholic Ireland in a way thought to be amenable to Stuart (particularly Protestant) governing interest and responding to the ‘present deplorable condition’ of the Catholic population.26 Not coinciden­ tally, this was framed by numerous stalwarts of both the Stuarts in exile and Ormond’s supporters during the Civil Wars more than a decade earlier: the law­ yer Richard Bellings and the Franciscan Peter Walsh. Like their contemporaries, the two men were keen to shed the charges of disloyalty levelled against many 26  Anne Creighton, ‘The Remonstrance of December 1661 and Catholic Politics in Restoration Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, 34 (2004), p. 29.

Restoration  45 Irish Catholics on grounds of their association with the Confederates in the 1640s. With Ormond as incoming lord lieutenant from 1662, there was again cause for hope that sympathetic patrons could be found to gain the King’s protec­ tion. Again, there were echoes here of past attempts: for instance, ideas were bor­ rowed from the ‘Graces’ which Old English representatives had negotiated with the King in the late 1620s, exchanging temporal authority for a relaxation of some penal laws, only to have the implementation of them disappear amid Caroline chaos.27 For Walsh and Bellings, however, the primary touchstone came from France (the ‘Gallican’ tradition), which had historically established the temporal authority of the monarchy while sustaining the spiritual supremacy of the ­pap­acy.28 Again, exile and broader patterns of mobility had played a central role in expanding the language available to Catholics in these circumstances. Not only had Walsh and Bellings been personally immersed in French theological and political controversies during the 1650s, but they had some cause to believe that those Protestants who had encountered alternate formulations of Catholicism while in exile might be more sympathetic.29 In the months and years which followed Ormond’s appointment to the lord lieutenancy, rumours swirled across Ireland, England, and through Europe about who had subscribed to this proposed oath. These ranged from former royalist exiles to old supporters of the papal nuncio in the 1640s, Giovanni Battista Rinuccini. However, by the time Walsh returned to Ireland from London in 1666 with the Remonstrance in hand in hopes of persuading a synod of the Catholic clergy to subscribe to it, it had become an intensely divisive political issue rem­in­ is­cent of the most heated debates of the Civil Wars. The synod proposed an alter­ nate version of the oath, aligned with Sorbonne theologians, but this proved unpalatable to Ormond, for whom the 1661 version had become a litmus test for trustworthiness. To this was added a broader campaign in the streets of Ireland: anti-­Remonstrance preaching was reported in numerous towns and pamphlets. Walsh wrote that allies were being accused of crypto-­Protestantism for expressing support for the Remonstrance, though did not hesitate to place those who—­in his understanding—­opposed it as being among ‘Calvin’s crew’.30 When even those with otherwise strong links to the Stuarts in past decades voiced discomfort and disapproval of the Remonstrance, momentum collapsed, once again leaving the question of loyalty hanging in the air, awaiting combustion. 27  Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland, 1625–42 (London, 1966). For wider Catholic responses to these changes, see Clodagh Tait, ‘Riots, Rescues, and “Green Bowes”: Catholics and Protest in Ireland, 1570–1640’, in Armstrong and Ó hAnnracháin (eds.), Insular Christianity, pp. 75–6. 28  Creighton, ‘The Remonstrance of December 1661’. 29 Mark  R.  F.  Williams, ‘Translating the Jansenist Controversy in Britain and Ireland’, English Historical Review, 134 (2019), pp. 59–91; Thomas O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, 1600–70: Religion and Politics in Flanders, France, Ireland and Rome (Dublin, 2008). 30 Williams, ‘Translating the Jansenist Controversy’, p. 84; Creighton, ‘The Remonstrance of December 1661’, pp. 39–40.

46  Mark R. F. Williams In many respects the Remonstrance debate in Ireland set the tone for the wider attempts at adaptation and reimagination in the rest of the Stuart kingdoms, bor­ rowing from wider European examples and attempting to employ intermediaries to leverage toleration. The Benedictine monk and (before his conversion to Catholicism) member of the Great Tew Circle, Hugh Serenus Cressy, took it upon himself in the late 1660s to rework the Oath of Supremacy into a form ‘which includes as much, even of that Oath of Supremacy, as can be allowed by a Catholick’.31 Cressy was perhaps well placed to offer this reworked oath: a convert to Catholicism from the Church of England in the wake of the Civil Wars, he had been a witness to debates over Irish Catholic loyalty while resident in Dublin in the 1630s. In his 1647 Exomologesis, which partly defended his conversion, Cressy had argued for the compatibility of Catholicism and loyalty to a Protestant mon­ arch. By the time of the Restoration, he had attached himself to the household of Thomas Clifford, the comptroller of Charles II’s household. In the process, Cressy had become an important connection for Clifford, providing access to Catholic writings and insights into doctrine and theology. Though Clifford himself did not convert, Cressy helped stock Clifford’s library at Ugbrooke in Devon with Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, the works of St Bernard, a seventeen-­volume Bibliotheca Patrum, and other devotional texts.32 The oath Cressy suggested to Clifford in 1671 acknowledged the civil power of the king over ‘all persons and in all causes, both Ecclesiastical and Temporall’, condemned regicide, and did not ‘admitt of any Absolution from this Profession and Oath . . . from the Pope or any person whatsoever’.33 Here, too, there were borrowings from Continental examples, drawing from a deep well of alternative forms of Catholic loyalty stretching from the Treaty of Westphalia through to the theological fissures of the medi­ eval church. As Gabriel Glickman has pointed out, however, there was a wider opportunity being pursued by Cressy and Clifford: the attempted conversion of Charles II himself and, through him, the uniting of Christendom.34 By the early 1670s, cause for such hope was not wholly unreasonable. The negotiations around what became known as the Treaty of Dover between Charles II and Louis XIV are far from clear; however, the negotiators included now familiar names like Sir Richard Bellings (son of the aforementioned royalist and remonstrant) and Thomas Clifford, as well as Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington (whose confessional ties had been suspect since the 1650s), and Henry Arundell, Lord Wardour (from an 31  British Library, London (hereafter BL) Add MS 65139, fol. 5. 32  BL Add MS 65139, fol. 2. For Cressy’s life and his polemical works concerning spirituality and mysticism in the Restoration period, see Liam Peter Temple, Mysticism in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2019), ch. 4. 33  BL Add MS 65139, fol. 7. 34 Gabriel Glickman, ‘Christian Reunion, the Anglo-­French Alliance and the English Catholic Imagination, 1660–72’, English Historical Review, 128 (2013), pp. 263–4.

Restoration  47 unimpeachably Catholic lineage). The ‘secret’—though only for a time—­terms of the treaty were unequivocally geared towards not only the survival but the propa­ gation of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland. This included a (probably cynical) commitment on Charles II’s part to convert in exchange for significant financial support. High political manoeuvrings aside, the fact remains that the vision for Christian unity posited in the treaty by this group was, like the Remonstrance, the product of extensive engagement with a broader European understanding of Catholicity capable of incorporating heterodox beliefs under a more tolerant State. As the wider confessional politics of Europe shifted, such adaptations afforded moments of real agency in the shaping of Christendom. For individuals, however, adaptation to the shifting tides of tolerance and antipathy meant not just a reconfiguration of these constellations of loyalty, but also change at a more quotidian scale. As the penal laws creaked back into Protestant consciousness towards the end of the 1660s, and in the midst of refor­ mulations of loyalty on the part of people like Bellings and Cressy, William Blundell read of and discussed with friends the pamphlets and news reports which reached him in Lancashire regarding political change at home and the Catholic Church abroad. Through such changes, Blundell remained convinced that awareness was ‘essential to his survival in England’.35 With perennial threats to his estate and anxieties over stabilizing his family’s interests came a compulsion to provide reinforcement wherever opportunities appeared: as Geoff Baker has shown, Blundell relied especially on the efforts of his wife, daughters, and sister to maintain social bonds with other families—­Catholic and otherwise—­in order to ensure survival.36 Such strategies proved helpful for other families across Britain and Ireland. Where lands could not otherwise be guaranteed, marriage across Catholic families could at least provide a sense of mutual support and interest (along with hopes of succession). In 1671, for instance, Sir Richard Bellings, the eldest son of the aforementioned lawyer, married Frances Arundell of the emi­ nent Catholic Devonian family, thereby creating a powerful Catholic link span­ ning Irish and English interests. Catholicism, in such instances, remained a social bond adaptive to and strengthened by hardened circumstances. While for most Catholics adaptation in the Restoration period was geo­graph­ic­ al­ly contained within the three kingdoms, opportunities to not only survive but thrive were afforded by deepening connections abroad. As Chapters 5 and 16 by Gabriel Glickman and Paul Monod, respectively, detail, the exiles and disloca­ tions of the previous decades, combined with broadening imperial expansion, meant that Catholics could adapt to circumstances at home by looking further afield. Blundell was not alone in attempting to afford an education for his daugh­ ter among the convents of the Continent: as an increasingly rich strand of 35 Baker, Reading and Politics, p. 40.

36 Baker, Reading and Politics, p. 45.

48  Mark R. F. Williams scholarship has shown, Catholic women have left the strongest archival traces of their lives in this period among these convents. These have helped to reveal a deep engagement with contemporary political and theological debates alongside a vital role in maintaining familial connections at home and abroad.37 But beyond these more familiar circulations can be found Catholic engagement in the early formulations of the Grand Tour, whereby they would come into direct contact not only with the Continental Catholic ‘other’ against whom their British Protestant neighbours were supposed to have defined themselves, but they could also become familiar with other varieties of Catholicism. Mercantile networks like­ wise afforded the opportunity to expand not just profits but also the mechanisms of survival and resistance as tensions rose at home.38 Families such as the Aylwards employed Catholic networks at home (in London, Bristol, Weymouth, and elsewhere) and abroad (in Spain especially) to elevate themselves from the 1670s onwards, even amid broader anti-­Catholic sentiment, through the expand­ ing market for consumables in Britain and Ireland.39 Key acquisitions in the course of the 1660s also afforded new avenues for Catholics, often in locations where religious policy at home was simply impractical abroad. The port of Tangier and the city of Bombay, acquired with the Portuguese alliance in 1662, witnessed relative degrees of tolerance for Catholic soldiers (many of them Irish) and mer­ chants whose role within the expanding British Empire afforded something of a release from persecution at home through the twin pragmatisms of profit and distance.40

Polarization? (c.1670s–1685) Where the Catholic population of the three kingdoms had sought to adapt and reimagine the terms of their loyalties during the course of the 1660s, the 1670s witnessed a sharper retreat among the Protestant population into restrictive legis­ lation. The 1673 Test Act in England, for instance, required all office-­holders to receive the sacrament in the Church of England, imposed the oaths of supremacy and allegiance, and make a declaration against transubstantiation. This marked a stark reversal from Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence only one year earlier, which—­though more tolerant of non-­conformists—­nevertheless had granted

37  See Kelly, English Convents, and the literature cited therein. 38 David Dickson (ed.), Irish and Scottish Mercantile Networks in Europe and Overseas in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Ghent, 2006). 39 Pizzoni, British Catholic Merchants. 40  Tristan Stein, ‘Tangier in the Restoration Empire’, The Historical Journal, 54 (2011), pp. 985–1011; Gabriel Glickman, ‘Empire, “Popery”, and the Fall of English Tangier, 1682–1684’, Journal of Modern History, 87 (2015), pp. 247–80; G. J. Ames, ‘The Role of Religion in the Transfer and Rise of Bombay, c.1661–1687’, The Historical Journal, 46 (2003), pp. 317–40.

Restoration  49 Catholics permission to worship in private houses.41 The 1678 Test Act reiterated this exclusionary policy by requiring those in the House of Commons and House of Lords to make a declaration anathema to most Catholics. In Ireland, a brief period of tolerance under the viceroyalty of first Lord Berkeley—­himself married to a Catholic—­and then the earl of Essex collapsed alongside deepening anxieties in Britain. In October 1673 Essex formally expelled bishops, regulars, and those practising ecclesiastical jurisdiction generally from Ireland by the end of the year.42 This veneer of persecutory legislation should not be confused, however, for either the means or even the will to enact it. Though the corridors of power were, at least nominally, closed to Catholic advancement, the fact remained that these policies were far easier to legislate in the name of political positioning than to enforce on the ground. In Ireland, for instance, as Sean Connolly has argued, the knee-­jerk expulsion of bishops and other clergy was more often a performative gesture than a precursor to deepened persecution.43 However, as Michael Boyle undoubtedly recalled in the course of his walk, low-­ level anxieties could easily be translated into outright fear and panic capable of stoking real fires. The Great Fire of London was only the most recent among the conflagrations and conspiracies to spark anti-­Catholic and xenophobic sentiment within the three kingdoms. It took remarkably little to rekindle these flames. The ‘Popish Plot’ of the late 1670s spanned Britain and Ireland in its effects—­including exiles, imprisonments, and the execution of prominent Catholics—­while also being famously grounded on little more than rumour and outright lies. Titus Oates, reasonably dubbed one of the ‘great liars in British history’, had relied upon suspicion of James, duke of York’s potential succession as a recently revealed Catholic (having been forced from office as lord admiral by the 1673 Test Act) to once again revisit the old trope of a ‘popish plot’ against the government.44 The sub­ sequent incrimination of prominent figures within the Stuart government relied on a familiar cast of characters: lurking Jesuits, shadowy French cor­res­pond­ents, and the looming threat of a large-­scale bloodbath akin to the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre or 1641 Rebellion (neither of which were ever far from the Protestant imagination). The high-­water mark of anti-­Catholic frenzy witnessed show trials of dozens of English Catholics, including the execution of the ‘Five Jesuits’ at Tyburn in June 1679. Ironically, the stoicism and principled suffering of the victims of such persecutions, especially when related through the popular press which had stoked the fires, may well have helped to subdue the anxieties.45

41  John Spurr, England in the 1670s:‘This Masquerading Age’ (Oxford, 2000), pp. 29–42. 42 Connolly, Divided Kingdom, ch. 4. 43 Connolly, Divided Kingdom, pp. 152–3. 44  George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell, Restoration Politics, Religion and Culture: Britain and Ireland, 1660–1714 (Basingstoke, 2010), p. 46. 45  Andrea McKenzie, ‘God’s Tribunal: Guilt, Innocence, and Execution in England, 1675–1775’, Cultural & Social History, 3 (2006), pp. 121–44.

50  Mark R. F. Williams Ireland, too, saw victims of these fears, but more often as the consequence of older and broader animosities. The response to the Popish Plot under Ormond’s government was to search homes of Catholics (many long-­since thought suspi­ cious anyway), limit the Catholic presence in garrison towns, and other familiar measures such as the expulsion of bishops and regular clergy. Father Peter Talbot, archbishop of Dublin, was apprehended in early October 1678 at his brother Richard’s home in Luttrellstown as part of a supposed plot to assassinate the duke of Ormond and facilitate a French invasion. Talbot, who had resided in France and then England (staying with the Poole family of Cheshire) in the wake of the aforementioned expulsions, had returned to Ireland in dire health, having unsuc­ cessfully pursued the lord lieutenant’s permission to do so before the latter finally agreed to leave him in peace given his health. When finally apprehended, the sickly Talbot was interrogated as to his knowledge of dozens of Catholic ‘conspir­ ators’ across the three kingdoms and the Continent including the rector of the College of St Omer, priests connected to the Blundell family, Lord Powys in Wales, Jesuits supposedly residing in Dublin, and rumoured ‘papists’ in the stand­ ing army in Ireland.46 With little evidence to convict, anti-­Catholic sentiment and lingering suspicions of Talbot from previous decades ensured he remained locked in Dublin Castle, where he died in November 1680. Talbot’s erstwhile neighbour in prison from December 1678, Oliver Plunkett, archbishop of Armagh, adminis­ tered the former’s last rites. Plunkett, however, would fall victim to similar an­tip­ athies, and was executed in London in July 1681 despite an abject failure to muster meaningful evidence of conspiracy beyond the claims of suspended Irish Catholic clergy and antipathetic Protestants.47 Rather, the deaths of Plunkett and Talbot rested on the threads of anti-­Catholicism spanning multiple kingdoms. Tense as the circumstances were, however, methods of survival and capacity to adapt among many Catholics remained in place even at the height of anti-­Catholic sentiment. The Arundell of Lanherne and Bellings families alternatingly saw their patriarchs, John and Richard, flee for France amid fears of anti-­Catholic reprisal during the Popish Plot despite (or due to) their close affiliation with the Queen’s household. Family correspondence during the course of these years witnessed both informed reportage of affairs in London and Ireland as well as intimate expressions of abiding affection and deeply felt absence. Anne Arundell, for instance, could write to her husband noting the tedium of delay in his letters and worries for his welfare in Paris, while also recalling a harrowing encounter with anti-­Catholic mobs in London:

46  Bodl. Carte MSS, vol. 38, fols. 722r, 724rv, 726rv–727r. 47 John Gibney, Ireland and the Popish Plot (Basingstoke, 2009); Connolly, Divided Kingdom, pp. 152–3.

Restoration  51 wee poor wemen got together to consider whether itt were best to run away or to stay itt out, but att last wee resolved knowing our own Inocencye & recommend­ ing our selves to ye protection of our gratious god wee all stayed . . . wee would not goe to bed before yt ye Pope Cardinalls & fryers were all burnt & ye Rabble quite gon[e] . . .48

Distance nevertheless also facilitated opportunity. The young Charles Bellings, for instance, could be kitted out in Paris in 1683 for an upcoming tour of France as part of his education: French and Latin dictionaries, ‘2 books to write theames in’, and a catechism were bought for him at a price of more than £12 total.49 Shifts in Court politics ultimately helped to facilitate returns, but with the continued bene­ fit of broader connections. When Lord Arlington voiced early enthusiasm for Bellings to return from Paris, he added that the latter should also bring ‘some of the products of the wits of thos[e] parts’ for entertainment.50 As with many other Catholics in this period, the family found opportunity in adversity.

Conclusion It is within contexts such as these that we must understand Archbishop Boyle’s walk through Dublin: not only the observation and comment on swirling ten­ sions in the city and the three kingdoms at large, but also his resolution towards tactful silence in the reporting of Catholic activity there. Against the wider back­ drop of the Restoration period, his choices appear less surprising than the assumed inevitability of later conflicts might otherwise permit. There undoubt­ edly remained those whose hostility towards Catholics—­and in particular their incorporation into public life—­had shown little sign of erosion in the course of the Restoration; indeed, Stuart experiments with toleration and political realign­ ments could and did reinforce such fears. Even when those who had actually wit­ nessed and taken part in the conflicts of the 1640s and 1650s faded from public life, memories of Catholic transgressions, real or imagined, proved resilient across the three kingdoms. Print often offered the veneer of historical truth to these re­col­lec­tions, but also provided potential touchpaper for larger conflicts. Boyle clearly knew this, and (at least on this occasion) opted for a model of coexistence which would afford stability and prosperity in Dublin and the three kingdoms, if only for a time. Prominent Catholics mourned the death of Charles II in 1685—Richard Bellings wrote to John Arundell of precisely that in February of that year and expected ‘a most melancholic return’. But while the accession of James II offered 48  Cornwall Record Office (hereafter CRO)/AR25/44. 50 CRO/AR33/7/21.

49 CRO/AR33/8/1/86.

52  Mark R. F. Williams some measure of hope for Catholics, the previous decades had only reinforced the need to divorce themselves from dynastic interventions.51 As Boyle’s example neatly illustrates, dynastic upheavals and shifts in government policy translated into a wide array of quotidian interactions far beyond London: with polemical print and word of mouth; the wider geographies of European Catholicism, but also the animosity or conviviality of local life; the interests of a broadening, adap­ tive Catholic identity and the inner workings of families concerned with not sim­ ply enduring, but potentially thriving. Nevertheless, Stuart interventions would continue to pull at the seams of Catholic identity across the three kingdoms in the years which followed. Where economic prosperity (especially for anxious Protestants) and the mitigating effects of Civil War memory might have afforded breathing space for Catholics during the Restoration, James II’s accession quickly rekindled fires only barely controlled for those twenty-­five years. Far from ‘blood­ less’, the ‘Revolution’ which ended James II’s reign was a Restoration inheritance. Beyond the high political, however, the Restoration had seen questions posed by and of the Catholic population of Britain and Ireland which, regardless of the successes and failures of the answers given, brought its adherents into new latitudes.

Select Bibliography Baker, Geoff, Reading and Politics in Early Modern England: The Mental World of a Seventeenth-Century Gentleman (Manchester, 2010). Connolly, Sean, Divided Kingdom: Ireland, 1630–1800 (Oxford, 2008). Corens, Liesbeth, Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-Reformation Europe (Oxford, 2019). Glickman, Gabriel, The English Catholic Community 1688–1745: Politics, Culture, and Ideology (Woodbridge, 2009). Harris, Tim, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (London, 2005). Kelly, James E., English Convents in Catholic Europe, c.1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020). Kelly James  E. and Susan Royal (eds.), Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-Reformation (Leiden, 2017). McCormack, Danielle, The Stuart Restoration and the English in Ireland (Woodbridge, 2016). Pizzoni, Giada, British Catholic Merchants in the Commercial Age, 1670–1714 (Woodbridge, 2020). Southcombe, George and Grant Tapsell, Restoration Politics, Religion and Culture: Britain and Ireland, 1660–1714 (Basingstoke, 2010).

51 CRO/AR33/7/48.

3 The Catholic Moment Eoin Devlin

The accession of James II & VII was the most anticipated succession in British history. His prospective reign had been a source of immediate concern since James, as duke of York, had publicly acknowledged his conversion to Catholicism in 1673.1 The likelihood of a Catholic monarch contributed to the resurgence of intense anti-­Catholicism across the Stuart territories, calcifying most conspicuously in the Popish Plot conspiracy theory and, with greater refinement, the Exclusion Crisis.2 While the Exclusionists in parliament failed to prevent James’ succession or modify his sovereign prerogatives, their efforts demonstrated widespread concern that a Catholic monarch posed a challenge to the fundamental character of the State, the interests of its elites, and the fate of the Stuarts’ Protestant subjects. For a much longer period of time, James’ accession had been anticipated as an abstraction: the return of Catholicism through tyrannical government, the establishment of a Counter-­Reformation Church, and the destruction of the British territories’ proud independence from foreign influence, had all been underlying anxieties amongst Protestants of various stripes since the beginnings of Reformation in the 1530s. While the reckoning began in 1685, the long-­feared Counter-­Reformation challenge to Protestant hegemony had been directly opposed for years, reflecting an intersection between the abstract and the specific: James as the popish tyrant long foretold. Of course, the history of Catholicism in the Stuart territories is not just the story of one man, but James II & VII was a powerful architect of this Catholic moment. His policies shaped the experience of Catholic individuals and communities in the 1680s and later, and he was a conduit through which the hopes and anxieties of his subjects were channelled. The experience of James’ reign shaped, perhaps blighted, the lived experience of Catholics for decades, and coloured the reception of Catholic history in England, Ireland, and Scotland, for centuries.3

1  John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1973), ch. 7; John Miller, James II: A Study in Kingship (New Haven, CT, 2000), ch. 6. 2 Miller, Popery and Politics, ch. 8; Miller, James II, ch. 7. 3  Steven Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (London, 2009), pp. 5–8. Eoin Devlin, The Catholic Moment In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II: Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745. Edited by: John Morrill and Liam Temple, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843436.003.0004

54  Eoin Devlin James’ reign falls into three phases: the first, of relative moderation from his accession in February 1685 to early 1687; the second, of accelerated Catholicization and active Counter-­ Reformation from 1687 until the failed counter-­revolution in Ireland in 1690; and the third, from his return to France and exile until his death in September 1701.4 Given the circumstances of James’ removal from power in 1688, it is unsurprising that the history of the reign has conventionally been told as a story of Protestantism defeating the Catholic challenge. The Glorious Revolution is the foundation stone of Whig teleology which continues to cast a long shadow on the historiography of the reign.5 The re-­ establishment of Protestant monarchy under William and Mary, and the ultimate defeat of Jacobitism, can make Catholic failure seem inevitable. However, influential research on the reign has complicated this approach and suggested that James opened a different potentiality for his kingdoms. Steve Pincus has argued that James’ reign must be understood as a process of modernization, with Catholicism central to that agenda: ‘James fashioned a modern Catholic polity’.6 Scott Sowerby has seen reform, more than revolution, at the heart of James’ ambitions, arguing that the king ‘saw an opportunity to transform the English nation and to liberate his co-­religionists by leading a public campaign for liberty of conscience’.7 For Alasdair Raffe, James’ Scottish reign was trying to find ‘solutions to the same fundamental problems’ of a multi-­confessional State which the Revolution Settlement would address in 1689.8 These assessments are shaped by the complexity of the broader political, religious, and geo-­political contexts informing the development of the reign, and they share a commitment to thinking seriously about its radical implications. They all recognize, in some way or other, that the central tenet of the reign was the reconfiguration of Catholicism’s place within the Stuart ter­ri­tor­ ies, primarily through changing the confessional character of the polity. At the core of any accurate understanding of the reign must be recognition that James’ aspirations for Counter-­Reformation were bound up in the long-­term restructuring of the State’s personnel and institutions, and consequently indelibly joined with his dynastic hopes. There is a temporal context here, which is to say that James’ ultimate vision was to facilitate the long-­term restoration of Catholicism to the Stuart territories, for the Stuart monarchy to preside over a Catholic State as a Catholic dynasty, and to encourage the conversion of the Crown’s subjects to the one true faith within this civic and dynastic framework.

4  Of course, whether James was really a reigning king after November 1688 was disputed then and ever since, but it is necessary to accept James’ argument in order to clarify his intentions. 5  Most influentially set out in Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England (1848). For a critique of Macaulay’s work, see Pincus, 1688, pp. 5–6. 6 Pincus, 1688, p. 6. 7  Scott Sowerby, Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2013), pp. 3, 23. 8  Alasdair Raffe, Scotland in Revolution, 1685–1690 (Edinburgh, 2018), p. 157.

The Catholic Moment  55

The Challenges of Catholic Succession Charles II died on 6 February 1685. He was buried as a Protestant, a celebrated monarch and supreme governor of the Church of England. He was remembered as ‘a living Temple of the Holy Ghost, a Patron of Christianity, and a most tender Nursing Father of the Church and People of England’.9 James II & VII was the first Catholic monarch to succeed to the throne since Mary I. But the idea that Charles II had converted to Catholicism was soon commonplace, and encouraged by James’ regime.10 Papers found in Charles’ own hand, and then printed, proclaimed that ‘Christ can have but one Church here upon Earth . . . That none can be that Church, but that, which is called the Roman Catholick Church’.11 Most historians regard Charles’ conversion to Catholicism as an agnostic’s deathbed opportunism rather than authentic spiritualism or long-­term closet Catholicity.12 For James, this conversion was an important bridge between the two reigns, and he was keen to maximize its rhetorical and political impact. Charles had been a relatively popular and well-­liked king, at least with the Tories.13 If he was also a Catholic, this might serve to dilute the faith’s negative associations. More im­port­ ant­ly, Charles’ conversion offered James a rich rhetorical prize: the legitimacy of continuity. Under the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, if Charles had died a Catholic then James was the inheritor of Catholic dominions, and his policies simply defended this inheritance.14 This puts a specific emphasis on James’ early commitment to ‘endeavour to follow his [Charles II’s] example, and . . . make it my endeavours to preserve this government both in Church and State as it is now by law established’.15 A Catholic inheritance redefined Charles’ ‘example’. James, duke of York, had publicly revealed himself to be a Catholic when he resigned as lord high admiral following the passing of the Test Act in 1673. The reasons for James’ conversion and the precise character of his engagement with Catholicism before the early 1670s remain difficult to discern.16 During the 1650s James had served with the Spanish and French armies and was living amongst

9  Henry Anderson, A Loyal Tear Dropt on the Vault of the High and Mighty Prince, Charles II, of Glorious and Happy Memory (London, 1685), p. 13. 10  For a detailed account of the conversion from a contemporary Protestant commentator, see John Spurr (ed.), The Entring Book of Roger Morrice, II: The Reign of Charles II, 1677–1685 (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 510. 11  Copies of two papers written by the late King Charles II (London, 1685), p. 1; Patricia Gael, ‘Kingship and Catholicism in Posthumous Representations of Charles II, 1685–1714’, The Seventeenth Century, 29 (2014), pp. 173–96. 12  For example, Ronald Hutton, Charles the Second: King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Oxford, 1989), pp. 443–4, 455–7. 13  George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell, Restoration Politics, Religion, and Culture: Britain and Ireland, 1660–1714 (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 73–4. 14  Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2003), pp. 3, 424. 15  An Account of What His Majesty Said at His First Coming to Council (London, 1684). 16 Miller, James II, ch. 5.

56  Eoin Devlin Catholics, including a group of English Benedictines, for many years.17 He was certainly more familiar with the lives of ordinary European Catholics, as well as regular clergy, than most of his subjects. He had been surrounded by Catholics at the Court of his mother, Henrietta Maria, and Charles II’s marriage to the Portuguese infanta, Catherine of Braganza, ensured a Catholic presence in the decades following the Restoration.18 Perhaps this familiarity ignited a Catholic spirituality, slow burning in James’ soul. Personality and political ideologies also intersected to form a distinctively regal, perhaps unique, Catholic consciousness. James valued his time serving in hierarchical and well-­ordered Catholic armies and, as high commissioner of Scotland and later as king, clearly revealed his authoritarian instincts.19 This authoritarian confidence might have drawn him towards Catholicism, not only on the basis of religious conviction, but through its political associations with arbitrary government. James had certainly encountered recent Catholic history through a Protestant lens. His first wife, Anne Hyde, had converted to Catholicism following her reading of Protestant histories of the Reformation which only validated her religiosity.20 It is quite probable that James understood the Catholic Church to be an authoritarian, illiberal, and belligerent institution—­as per the norms of anti-­Catholic rhetoric and historical in­ter­pret­ ations of Protestant Britain—­and that his enthusiasm for these forms of government opened the door to conversion. Authoritarian instincts led to Catholic conviction and the strands of personality, politics, and faith became integrated in a true embodiment of popery. The Catholic moment of the late 1680s must be understood as a product of this intersection of Catholic subjectivities within a Protestant context. At the outset of the reign, the Catholic communities of England, Ireland, and Scotland welcomed the accession of a Catholic monarch, but the event also disrupted the broader shape of Catholic expectations and political strategizing.21 While Catholics had faced fierce persecution in the Popish Plot, culminating in the execution of the Irish Archbishop Oliver Plunkett in July 1681, the last years of Charles II’s reign were more strongly defined by the regime’s attacks on radical Protestantism.22 Charles had been sensitive to Catholic calls for toleration, and had held reasonably good relations with various Catholic powers, most notably

17 Miller, James II, ch. 2. 18  Stephen Taylor, ‘Afterword: State Formation, Political Stability and the Revolution of 1688’, in Tim Harris and Stephen Taylor (eds.), The Final Crisis of the Stuart Monarchy: The Revolutions of 1688–91 in their British, Atlantic and European Contexts (Cambridge, 2013), p. 285. 19 Gillian H. MacIntosh, The Scottish Parliament under Charles II, 1660–1685 (Edinburgh, 2007), pp. 179–211; Clare Jackson, Restoration Scotland, 1660–1690: Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas (Woodbridge, 2003); Alastair  J.  Mann, James VII: Duke and King of Scots, 1633–1701 (Edinburgh, 2014). 20  Copies of two papers written by the late King Charles II (London, 1686), pp. 9–14. 21 J. G. Simms, Jacobite Ireland, 1685–91 (Toronto, 1969), p. 19; Alison Forrestal, Catholic Synods in Ireland, 1600–1690 (Dublin, 1998), p. 92. 22  Grant Tapsell, The Personal Rule of Charles II, 1681–85 (Woodbridge, 2007).

The Catholic Moment  57 Louis XIV’s France.23 Relations between the papacy in Rome and the London Court were also mainly affable, and Catherine of Braganza’s courtiers often acted as papal agents. In 1662, Ludovic Stuart d’Aubigny, the King’s scion, was appointed as Catherine’s grand almoner.24 D’Aubigny was succeeded by his nephew, Philip Thomas Howard, who was created cardinal in May 1675, and took up permanent residence in Rome as the self-­styled ‘cardinal of Norfolk’.25 Howard was well regarded in Rome and allied himself with the interests of the papacy and the curial Court, while also retaining a deep commitment to the spiritual traditions of his Dominican order, as well as the challenges faced by English, Irish, and Scottish Catholics in their homelands and elsewhere.26 As protector of the English College in Rome he sought to end the cult of the martyr, he encouraged the use of English rather than Latin, and was generally a moderating presence among the more extreme counsels of English Catholics committed to contesting the le­git­im­ acy of the Protestant State, and aspiring to profane execution to achieve posthumous sanctification.27 He reflects one strand of English Catholicism in the last decades of the seventeenth century, working to consolidate a rapport with Protestant government and dilute the sacrificial militancy of a model of Counter-­ Reformation established by the Jesuit mission in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. But not all Catholics agreed with this emphasis, and Howard was fiercely resisted within the English College and elsewhere.28 One of the ironies of James’ reign is that it exacerbated tensions between Catholic ‘moderates’ and ‘militants’.29 The more militant Catholics were associated with the Jesuits, represented at Court by James’ favourite Edward Petre, and his confessor, John Warner, who, proud of their long lineage of suffering and martyrdom, resisted all efforts to moderate James’ more belligerent instincts. These tensions were apparent to Protestant observers; Roger Morrice observed how ‘the Anti-­Jesuiticall faction, . . . [are] of this milder counsell, though they are as reall Papists as the Jesuits themselves, but would togeather with the rich Papists have things carryed on with more temper, and as the Nation can be gained upon’.30 The Court Jesuits sought to encourage Catholic monarchy to push through religious toleration and challenge the 23  J. F. Bosher, ‘The Franco-­Catholic Danger, 1660–1715’, History, 255 (1994), pp. 5–30. 24  Godfrey Anstruther, ‘Cardinal Howard and the English Court (1658–94)’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 28 (1958), pp. 315–61. 25  For Howard’s career, see Eoin Lorcan Devlin, ‘English Encounters with Papal Rome in the Late Counter-­Reformation, c.1685–c.1697’ (University of Cambridge PhD thesis, 2010), pp. 60–80. 26  Devlin, ‘English Encounters’, p. 66. 27  Devlin, ‘English Encounters’, pp. 72–8; Maurice Whitehead, ‘ “Established and Putt in Good Order”: The Venerable English College, Rome, under Jesuit Administration, 1579–1685’, in James E. Kelly and Hannah Thomas (eds.), Jesuit Intellectual and Physical Exchange between England and Mainland Europe, c. 1580–1789 (Leiden, 2018), pp. 315–36. 28 Michael  E.  Williams, The Venerable English College, Rome: A History, 1579–1979 (London, 2008), p. 62. 29 Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745: Politics, Culture, Ideology (Woodbridge, 2009), pp. 40–3. 30  Stephen Taylor (ed.), The Entring Book of Roger Morrice, IV: The Reign of James II, 1687–1689 (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 246–7.

58  Eoin Devlin Protestant establishment as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. The moderates cautioned against antagonizing those same Protestants and warned about pol­it­ ical overreach.31 Both the strengths and weaknesses of James’ kingship were exposed in the early months of the reign. A stable succession was welcomed by most his subjects, still traumatized by memories of civil war. James was the legitimate successor and, though a Catholic, there was a general sense that he would not seek to challenge the Protestant settlement. Even if he were to do so, James was an old man with a Protestant heir, so the Catholic moment was not expected to last long. James openly worshipped as a Catholic, and the taking of communion was tactfully removed from his coronation ceremony to avoid public confrontation.32 But the rebellions of Archibald Campbell, earl of Argyll, and James Scott, duke of Monmouth, in Scotland and England respectively, demonstrated there was still real grist in the anti-­Catholic mill. Monmouth, James’ nephew and the il­legit­im­ ate son of Charles II, had long been cultivating a popular powerbase as a rival claimant, and he opposed his uncle on the basis of: his having invaded the Throne; and usurped the Title of a King. . . . hath call’d in multitudes of Preists & Jesuits (for whom the Law makes it treason to come into the Kingdom) and hath impower’d them to exercise their Idolatries, and besides his being dayly present at the worship of the Mass, hath publickly assisted at the grossest Fopperios of their superstition.33

Argyll, who had spent the 1650s rebelling against the Cromwellian regime in Scotland, failed to lose the habit of insurrection and moved into opposition against the Stuarts in the early 1680s. He now argued that ‘the whole reign of the aforsaid Charles the 2d. (through the sinistrous and subtile influences of a wicked and popish party, now manifestly discovered) was a constant & uniform course of perjury apostacy, and violence’.34 Both Argyll and Monmouth were defeated and executed.35 The rebellions indicated there was some resistance to Catholic rule in England and Scotland, though this was also bound in the personal ambitions of the rebel leaders. Their defeat demonstrated the majority of the body politic, and most ordinary people, remained loyal to James despite his Catholicism.36 In the longer term, the 31  Devlin, ‘English Encounters’, pp. 118–19. 32  Carolyn  A.  Edie, ‘The Public Face of Royal Ritual: Sermons, Medals, and Civic Ceremony in Later Stuart Coronations’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 53 (1990), p. 318. 33  The declaration of James Duke of Monmouth, & the noblemen, gentlemen & others, now in arms (London, 1685). 34  The Declaration, and Apology of the Protestant People . . . within the Kingdom of Scotland ([Edinburgh?], 1685). 35  Anna Keay, Royal Rebel: The Life and Death of James, Duke of Monmouth (London, 2016), ch. 20. 36  Mark Goldie, ‘The Damning of King Monmouth: Pulpit Toryism in the Reign of James II’, in Harris and Taylor (eds.), The Final Crisis, pp. 33–56.

The Catholic Moment  59 rebellion was a boon for the King; he had demonstrated his military power and was provided with invaluable financial supply.37 The rebellion also encouraged James to begin a process of Catholicizing the army, and he dispensed the obligations of the Test Act when he appointed nearly a hundred Catholics as officers.38 The so-­called ‘Bloody Assizes’, led by James’ ally George Jeffreys, became an important part of the case against James in 1688, and the Revolution became a kind of posthumous revenge for the defeated rebels of 1685.39 Although Jeffreys was a Protestant, the brutal punishment of rebels emphasized assumptions about the ingrained injustice of popery, and the inescapable links between Catholicism and political authoritarianism and violence. James lived and worshipped openly as a Catholic, and his personal religious commitments were apparent in his public demonstrations of faith. He regularly attended Catholic Mass at the newly restored chapels at Whitehall and Windsor, which also acted as centres for Catholic preaching and music.40 James refused to attend Anglican services in London or when on progress, and would receive Catholic communion privately when away from the city. He embraced the rituals of sacred kingship, most notably touching for the king’s evil, and although these had been preserved through the Reformation decades, he specifically saw them as continuous with the pre-­Reformation medieval past. The crowds were large—­at Wilton in 1686 he was recorded as touching about 250 people. During such events ‘his Majestie use[d] none of the Church of England Priests, but those of his own perswasion’.41 Whether those touched were specifically looking for contact with Catholic sanctity or simply accepted the sacred power of monarchy, there was nevertheless popular enthusiasm for the experience, and perhaps tens of thousands were touched during the reign.42

Returning to Rome James was crowned in London on 23 April 1685, and his coronation also affirmed his position as supreme governor of the Church of England. The new king had

37 Miller, James II, p. 142; Tim Harris, ‘Scotland’, in Harris and Taylor (eds.), The Final Crisis, p. 123. 38 Miller, James II, p. 143. 39 Melinda Zook, ‘ “The Bloody Assizes”: Whig Martyrdom and Memory after the Glorious Revolution’, Albion, 27 (1995), pp. 373–96. 40  Peter Leech, ‘Music and Musicians in the Catholic Chapel of James II at Whitehall, 1686–1688’, Early Music, 39 (2011), pp. 379–400; Matthew Jenkinson, ‘Preaching at the Court of James II, 1685–1688’, The Court Historian, 17 (2012), pp. 17–33. 41 Tim Harris (ed.), The Entring Book of Roger Morrice, III: The Reign of James II, 1685–1687 (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 352. 42 Stephen Brogan, The Royal Touch in Early Modern England: Politics, Medicine and Sin (Woodbridge, 2015), pp. 116–17; Matthew Martin, ‘Infinite Bodies: The Baroque, the Counter-­ Reformation Relic, and the Body of James II’, in Lisa Bevan and Angela Ndalianis (eds.), Emotion and the Seduction of the Senses, Baroque to Neo-­Baroque (Kalamazoo, 2018), p. 177.

60  Eoin Devlin fought keenly for his due prerogatives during the Exclusion Crisis, and at the heart of James’ Catholic agenda was a commitment to asserting that these prerogatives would not be effectively challenged, even by the leadership of the Catholic Church. This was not just authoritarian unwillingness to cede power, but a key aspect of his aspirations for an idiosyncratic form of Counter-­Reformation. James had no particular interest in shoring up the position of Anglican theology and worship within his territories. Rather, he was looking to a dynastic future when the Church as an ecclesiastical infrastructure might be used as an effective instrument of Catholic evangelism, perhaps even as the means of governing the Catholic Church in the Stuart territories. Early in the reign he was already toying with the idea of appointing Catholics as bishops of Anglican dioceses, and the establishment of the Ecclesiastical Commission under the leadership of George Jeffreys in April 1686 offered another framework for royal control.43 James worked to bend Anglican structures to his agenda, while also supporting the English Catholic community through the establishment of a new hierarchical form of Catholic leadership which would exist parallel to the Church of England. Historians of James’ reign have often suggested this enthusiasm for national Catholic churches derived from his emulation of Louis XIV, and the Gallican absolutism of late-­seventeenth-­century France which gave the Crown nominating powers over episcopal appointments.44 But by the 1680s Louis’ defence of the Gallican prerogatives had brought France into conflict with Rome, and the Régale crisis was a central and long-­running conflict which destroyed presumptions of confessional alliance in late-­seventeenth-­century geo-­politics.45 Despite the parallels between James’ commitments to the Church of England, and Louis’ defence of the Gallican Church in France, it is unlikely the latter was a direct influence on the former. Indeed, James expressed bafflement that any true Catholic could resist papal instruction.46 This response to the Régale demonstrates he did not see his own confrontation with Rome as its analogue, and it also highlights the King’s profound lack of self-­awareness, his inability to identify contemporary parallels, and his particularly narrow understanding of confessional politics. Rather than looking to France as a model for a pseudo-­Gallican English Church, James embraced the shape of his ecclesiastical inheritance and fought to preserve his position within the Church of England, defending the ‘new rights [of the Royal

43  Jacqueline Rose, Godly Kingship: The Politics of the Royal Supremacy, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 251–67. 44 For accounts of the apparent influence of Gallicanism on James II, see Steve Pincus, ‘The European Catholic Context of the Revolution of 1688–89: Gallicanism, Innocent XI, and Catholic Opposition’, in Allan I. Macinnes and Arthur H. Williamson (eds.), Shaping the Stuart World, 1603–1714: The Atlantic Connection (Leiden, 2006), pp. 79–114. 45  Paul Sonnino, Louis XIV’s View of the Papacy (1661–1667) (Berkeley, CA, 1966). 46  J.  P.  Kenyon, ‘The Earl of Sunderland and the Revolution of 1688’, The Historical Journal, 11 (1955), p. 281.

The Catholic Moment  61 Supremacy] and a just claime to peculiar method towards the Settlement of our Kingdoms’ in his dealings with Rome.47 Although Pope Innocent XI and the papal curia welcomed the accession of a Catholic monarch, this development also introduced new complications. The most obvious concern was that James, although personally Catholic, was g­ ov­ern­or of a heretical church whose original sin was the break from Rome’s ecclesiastical oversight. Regardless of the theological character of such a church, its ec­cle­si­ ology marked it as heretical, and Rome made it clear it wished, and expected, James to abdicate his ecclesiastical responsibilities as supreme gov­ern­or.48 James refused, and ultimately Rome found an opportunity to recraft the relationship between the Church and the Catholic communities of the Stuart ter­ri­tor­ies.49 A  new Catholic ecclesiastical settlement was agreed. The appointment of vicars apostolic, Catholic bishops in partibus infidelium, offered a framework for Church leadership which both James and Rome could support.50 On 6 August 1685, John Leyburn, an English-­born Catholic and former president of Douai College, was appointed vicar apostolic of all England and in September was made titular bishop of Adrumetum. He arrived in London in October 1685.51 Leyburn’s national authority was narrowed to the newly created London district on 20 January 1688, when four new districts of Catholic episcopal administration were established. Bonaventure Giffard became vicar apostolic of the midland district and bishop of Madaura; James Smith, vicar apostolic of the northern district and bishop of Callipolis; and Philip Ellis, OSB, vicar apostolic of the western district and bishop of Amasia.52 These were the first newly consecrated English ­bishops since 1625, even if their nominal dioceses were in the Levant or Asia, a mech­an­ ism for establishing episcopal authority used in other missionary ter­ri­tor­ies. The vicars apostolic were papal appointees, but James received them enthusiastically. He welcomed the restoration of some form of Catholic episcopal hierarchy, and their role was central to the re-­establishment of Catholic ecclesiastical authority. Crucially, the establishment of the vicars apostolic did not obviously compromise James’ leadership of the Church of England and he continued to appoint high Anglicans as bishops.53 Consequently, two parallel Christian episcopates lived alongside each other, and the King claimed influence over both. The vicars apostolic openly asserted their presence and their responsibilities towards their Catholic flock. Their arrival was enthusiastically welcomed. Indeed, the vicars were powerfully effective at facilitating further public conversions to 47  British Library, London (hereafter BL), Lansdowne MS 1152 II, fol. 260r. 48  Devlin, ‘English Encounters’, pp. 150–1. 49  Devlin, ‘English Encounters’, pp. 121–31. 50  Devlin, ‘English Encounters’, pp. 121–2. 51  Andrew Clark (ed.), The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Antiquary, of Oxford, 1632–1695 (Oxford, 1894), p. 171. 52  Basil Hemphill, The Early Vicars Apostolic of England, 1685–1750 (London, 1954), pp. 16–26. 53  John Stoughton, Ecclesiastical History of England: The Church of the Restoration, vol. 2 (London, 1870), p. 109.

62  Eoin Devlin Catholicism and re-­establishing Catholic sacramental ceremonialism as public events. Bishop Leyburn reportedly confirmed many people of all ages into the Church, presumably a mixture of cradle Catholics and more recent converts.54 In 1688 the four vicars apostolic in England issued a pastoral letter. Acknowledging James’ role in their episcopal authority, they openly encouraged Catholic evan­gel­ ism: ‘now you are in Circumstances of letting it [Catholicism] appear abroad, and of edifying your Neighbors by professing it publicly, and living up to the Rules prescribed by it’.55 The bishops warned against treating Protestants badly, for ‘as they profess themselves to be Christians, they may become Members of the Catholic Church’, and held James up as the model Catholic whose ‘assiduousness at the Divine Service . . . cannot but invite you, both as good Catholics and good Subjects, to a Conformity with so Emminent a Pattern’.56 The bishops concluded by exhorting Catholic office-­holders ‘to behave themselves . . . , that neither His Majesty may have occasion to repent, nor His other Subjects to repine at the choice he hath made of them’.57 Such a sentiment demonstrates the obvious importance of Catholicization as an instrument of State by 1688. The process of establishing a new episcopal framework was an important ecclesiastical innovation which consolidated lines of communication between Rome and London. However, tensions between the papacy and the Stuart monarchy were only further exacerbated when James insisted that a formal diplomatic ­mission be sent to the papal Court, against the Pope’s wishes. Roger Palmer, earl of Castlemaine, arrived in Rome in April 1686. He was later succeeded by Sir John Litcott and then Thomas Howard as James’ agents in the city.58 But the Castlemaine mission was on a different scale, becoming one of the most ­expensive diplomatic events in early modern British history. Castlemaine commissioned a fleet of expensive carriages to travel through the city, patronized banquets and operas, and was the recipient of musical, dramatic, and poetic ­com­mem­or­ation.59 Much of this cultural output was in the baroque style, deliberately intended to demonstrate that ‘the Artificers in England were superlative’ and prove the Stuarts’ cultural credentials.60 The grandiosity of the mission was well received by ordinary Romans and many of the curial elite who delighted in its extravagant splendour, but Castlemaine had misjudged the Pope’s character. Innocent XI, an ascetic who had closed Rome’s public theatres and introduced new sumptuary laws in the papal states, regarded this cultural output as gross bombast, and

54  J. A. Hilton (ed.), Bishop Leyburn’s Confirmation Register of 1687 (Wigan, 1997). 55  John Leyburn, Bonaventure Giffard, James Smith, and Philip Ellis, A pastoral letter from the four Catholic bishops to the lay-­Catholics of England (London, 1688), p. 2. 56  Leyburn, Giffard, Smith, and Ellis, A pastoral letter, pp. 4, 5. 57  Leyburn, Giffard, Smith, and Ellis, A pastoral letter, p. 7. 58  Devlin, ‘English Encounters’, chs. 2 and 3. 59  Devlin, ‘English Encounters’, ch. 3. 60  John Michael Wright, An account of His Excellence, Roger Earl of Castlemaine’s embassy from His Sacred Majesty James II (London, 1688), p. 53.

The Catholic Moment  63 received Castlemaine coolly.61 Castlemaine’s primary purpose in Rome was to secure the ecclesiastical promotions of James’ uncle-­in-­law, Rinaldo d’Este, and his favourite Jesuit, Edward Petre. Innocent reluctantly acquiesced to make d’Este a cardinal, but he remained adamantly opposed to Petre’s promotion, and James ultimately made him a privy counsellor.62 When Castlemaine published a public memorandum setting out his differences with the Pope, Innocent succeeded in securing his recall to London in February 1687, and James was obliged to apologize to the Pope for the ambassador’s belligerence.63 The publication of John Michael Wright’s history of the mission in Rome and London suggests that it was regarded as a success despite these setbacks.64 Castlemaine’s appointment as ambassador had forced the Pope to nominate a nuncio, Ferdinando d’Adda, who was received by James in July 1687, and remained at Court until the Revolution. D’Adda was a moderate, counselling James against antagonizing his Protestant subjects, and calling for a slower pace of Catholicization and Counter-­ Reformation activity. His advice was rebuffed, another example of James’ general disinclination to follow Rome’s guidance.65

Consolidating Catholicism While James’ reign might primarily be seen as a restoration and renewal of Catholic activity in England and Scotland, the third Stuart kingdom had retained a predominantly Catholic population. For Ireland, consolidation, not restoration, was the key theme. Unlike England and Scotland, Ireland was not formally recognized as missionary territory by Rome, and it had preserved its established episcopal structures in the aftermath of the Reformation. It did not experience a rebellion against Catholic rule in 1685. Unsurprisingly, the Catholic majority welcomed their co-­religionist as monarch, and they experienced a resurgence of civic and military opportunities.66 Many of the legal restrictions which had prevented Catholics from holding public office or joining the army were abrogated. In the early years of the reign, the Protestant lord lieutenant, Henry Hyde, earl of Clarendon, allowed the Catholic bishops to publically wear clerical dress, without a pectoral cross, and they received a State subsidy.67 Diocesan and provincial ­synods were held at Dublin, Cavan, and Cashel (with ten synods occurring between 1685 and 1689) and the regular orders established a presence in new 61  Per Bjurström, Feast and Theatre in Queen Christina’s Rome (Stockholm, 1966), p. 103. 62  Devlin, ‘English Encounters’, pp. 113–14. 63  Devlin, ‘English Encounters’, p. 117. 64 John Michael Wright, Ragguaglio della solenne comparsa, fatta in Roma gli otto di gennaio MDCLXXXVII: all’illustrissimo (London, 1688). 65  Devlin, ‘English Encounters’, pp. 238–9. 66  John Miller, ‘The Earl of Tyrconnel and James II’s Irish Policy, 1685–1688’, The Historical Journal, 20 (1977), p. 805. 67 Simms, Jacobite Ireland, p. 27.

64  Eoin Devlin schools and religious houses.68 Many of them came from Irish Catholic communities in Continental Europe. Jesuits were appointed as teachers in schools which were not nominally Catholic. James himself was an enthusiastic supporter of these developments, providing financial assistance and actively intervening to secure his preferred appointments. In the wake of the renewal of Stuart-­papal diplomacy, James successfully lobbied the Pope to appoint his favoured candidates as bishops of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise, Meath, and Limerick. He appointed a Catholic dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin, exacerbating fears that it would be reclaimed for Catholic worship. But the King’s instructions to allow Catholics to join the fellowship of Trinity College were successfully resisted by the Protestant fellows in a controversy which anticipated later developments at Magdalen College, Oxford.69 In November 1687, the English secretary of state, Sunderland, reported that ‘some persons have been decided by the Pope with Benefices in Ireland, without his Majesty’s knowledge, and contrary to His intentions, which are, that no person whatsoever should be promoted to any Benefice in His Dominions, but at his nomination or the recommendation of His Minister in His name’.70 Not all Catholics understood their primary allegiance was to James over the Pope or other Catholic authorities, while some felt their own clerical privileges were being encroached by the King.71 Irish Catholicism experienced a surge of confidence and confessional activism, exacerbating Protestant alarm across the three kingdoms. Remembering the rebellion of 1641, the prospect of Catholic revenge against the Irish Protestant minority remained a perennial concern, and English and Scottish Protestants feared an Irish Catholic army might enforce James’ ambitions. For contemporary Protestants, there was real cause for concern. The character of the Irish State as ‘Protestant’ was already being weakened before James became king. In the dying days of Charles II’s reign, Richard Talbot, earl of Tyrconnell, and Justin MacCarthy, had been given regimental commands in the Irish army, despite being Catholics.72 Although the earl of Clarendon was appointed as James’ Protestant lord lieutenant in 1685, the King’s favour and Clarendon’s influence diminished over the first eighteen months of the reign as Tyrconnell’s star shone brighter. Initially elevated to lieutenant general and head of the Irish army, Tyrconnell succeeded Clarendon as lord deputy in January 1687. Under Tyrconnell the process of Catholicization in Ireland gathered pace. He appointed a number of Catholic judges and privy counsellors. Quo warranto 68 Forrestal, Catholic Synods, p. 196. 69 Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy 1685–1720 (London, 2006), p. 130. 70  The National Archives, Kew, SP 63/340, fol. 131. 71 Harris Revolution, p. 120; Robert Armstrong, ‘Establishing a Confessional Ireland, 1641–1691’, in Jane H. Ohlmeyer (ed.), The Cambridge History of Ireland, vol. 2: 1550–1730 (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 241–2. 72 S. J. Connolly, Divided Kingdom: Ireland, 1630–1800 (Oxford, 2008), p. 173.

The Catholic Moment  65 proceedings were used to issue new charters to corporations to establish Catholic majorities throughout the island and facilitate the election of a Catholic parliament. While Tyrconnell was regarded as an immoderate and dangerous Catholic by many of his co-­religionists, he held James’ ear, and was an extension of the militant Catholics represented in England by the Court Jesuits, and in Scotland by the brothers Drummond.73 James and Tyrconnell disagreed on the thorny question of the Restoration land settlement, with the latter calling for confiscated land to be returned to its earlier Catholic owners, and James unwilling. The King recognized such a move could trigger a confrontation with rich and influential Irish Protestants who, despite Tyrconnell’s aggression, remained loyal to the Crown.74 This was a rare instance of James’ caution, and highlights his focus on long-­term confessional state-­building: to shore up the Catholicization of State institutions, rather than to implement a land revolution.

Counter-­Reformation and Toleration At the beginning of James’ reign, most of the King’s Protestant subjects, including the episcopal leadership of the Church of England, had accepted his sovereign right to rule. Parliament had supported him against the rebels of 1685, and the government was dominated by ministers appointed in the preceding reign. But concern soon grew as James’ Catholicizing agenda became more obvious. The Test Act of 1673 denied Catholics civil and military appointments, but James claimed the right to dispense his subjects from its requirements on an individual basis.75 Godden vs. Hales, the test case heard at King’s Bench in 1686, recognized the legality of the dispensing power, and this became the fulcrum of James’ Catholicizing policy in the remaining years of the reign.76 Through the use of this power, three-­ quarters of English justices of the peace were replaced with Catholics, while other local offices and judicial appointments followed.77 They spanned the breadth of the kingdoms, and the spectrum of offices from low to high. In 1685 in Scotland, George Gordon, duke of Gordon, was made governor of Edinburgh Castle, and Alexander Stuart, earl of Moray, became high commissioner. Both were recent Catholic converts. John and James Drummond, re­spect­ ive­ly earls of Melfort and Perth, converted to Catholicism and were appointed lord chancellor and secretary of state.78 Throughout the three kingdoms, the dispensing power was the means of achieving an extraordinarily thorough reconstitution of the State. Quo warranto proceedings were used to strip corporations of 73  Taylor (ed.), The Entring Book, p. 217. 74 Harris, Revolution, pp. 131–2. 75 Miller, James II, p. 154. 76  Taylor, ‘Afterword’, p. 289. 77  G. A. Fallon, ‘The Catholic Justices of Lancashire under James II’, North West Catholic History, 8 (1981), pp. 3, 6. 78 Raffe, Scotland in Revolution, p. 19.

66  Eoin Devlin their legal identity and privileges and install Catholic appointees in an effort to manage parliamentary elections.79 Catholic schools opened across England and Scotland and proved very popular for both Catholics and Protestants.80 The pushback in Scotland was notably more violent than elsewhere, and celebration of Mass in Edinburgh triggered anti-­ Catholic riots. The fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford, refused to accept a Catholic, and then the Anglican bishop of Oxford, as James’ candidate for president. Exasperated, the King used the Ecclesiastical Commission to deprive them of their fellowships, and Bonaventure Giffard, the vicar apostolic of the midland district, was appointed for a presidential tenure curtailed by the Revolution. For a few months, Magdalen operated as a Catholic college once again, and such examples of resistance remained rare.81 The most ambitious and controversial of James’ policies was his effort to establish permanent religious toleration for Catholics and Dissenting Protestants through royal decree and parliamentary statute.82 Such efforts had a long history in post-­Reformation Britain, and most recently Charles II had failed in his as­pir­ ations for reform in the 1670s.83 Historians have long debated whether James was a ‘sincere’ supporter of religious toleration, and of course, he was. It was his policy after all. But it would be wrong to see the creation of an open religious society as separate from Catholic evangelism, or to suggest that James would have been happy to see Catholicism remain as a legally tolerated minority faith. Toleration was a necessary precursor to the prospective flowering of popular Catholicism in the Stuart territories, and the ultimate establishment of Catholic dominance. It would prevail in a free market of religious ideas.84 Catholic renewal was a process and not an event. Historians have often emphasized James’ pursuit of toleration to defend him against claims of political absolutism or militant Catholic evangelism. John Miller has argued that James’ ‘main concern was to secure religious liberty and civil equality for Catholics. Any “absolutist” methods, any extensions of his authority, were essentially means to that end.’85 Similarly, Sowerby argues that ‘everyone in the nation, from the monarch at Whitehall to a milliner in Whitechapel, would benefit from the growth in national wealth that [religious] liberty would bring’.86 While this might sound benign, for contemporaries there was a conjunction between toleration, Counter-­Reformation, and authoritarianism. Many regarded toleration as a sign of despotism, a conditional state based on the power and whim of the monarch. For Catholics, toleration of some form was 79 Harris, Revolution, pp. 134–5, 233. 80 For instance, A.  C.  F.  Beales, Education under Penalty: English Catholic Education from the Reformation to the Fall of James II, 1547–1689 (London, 1963), pp. 248–54. 81 L. W. B. Brockliss, Magdalen College and the Crown: Essays for the Tercentenary of the Restoration of the College (Oxford, 1988). 82  For a summary of the campaign, Sowerby, Making Toleration, p. 13. 83 Hutton, Charles the Second, pp. 284–5. 84  Taylor, ‘Afterword’, p. 295. 85 Miller, James II, p. ix. 86 Sowerby, Making Toleration, p. 61.

The Catholic Moment  67 a necessary move to guarantee their legal standing and influence, and to facilitate evangelism and the conversion of the Stuarts’ Protestant subjects. In the context of a Catholic reign, toleration was understood as a mechanism of Counter-­ Reformation. In his famous assessment of Charles II’s government, An account of the growth of popery and arbitrary government in England, Andrew Marvell weaves together an interpretation of the political history of the 1670s connecting absolutist government and toleration: [Charles II] was pleased to Cancel [the Indulgence of 1672], and Declare, that it should be no President for the Future: For otherwise some succeeding Governour, by his single Power Suspending Penal Laws, in a favourable matter, as that is of Religion, might become more dangerous to the Government, than either Papists or Fanaticks, and make us Either, when he pleased[.]87

Such a view characterized the response of many Protestant subjects to James’ efforts in the 1680s. Including Dissenting Protestants in the policy of toleration might have served James’ purpose in denying it was an essentially ‘Catholic’ policy but did little to diminish the opposition which became apparent in 1687 and 1688. His wooing of Dissenters and his friendship with the Quaker William Penn only raised suspicions that James was trying to divide and conquer.88 Robert Ferguson, responding to the introduction of toleration in Scotland, argued that James’ motives ‘do not in the least flow or proceed from any kindness and goodwill to Protestant Dissenters’.89 The debate over toleration led to the militant Court Catholics arguing that James should only ‘give a Temporary Liberty in point of Religion to the Wiggs or Protestant Dissenters. But Liberty by Law without limitation of time to the Papists, and so make that perpetuall, and so this other for Dissenters would expire of it selfe.’90 The debate acquired a party-­political dimension, dividing the counsels of James’ Catholic advisors.91 But these debates were curtailed by the Dutch invasion, and a more pressing concern regarding the relative loyalties of the Tories and Whigs overtook these deliberations. In February 1686, Quakers and Catholics in Scotland were granted the right to private worship.92 In May 1686, James presented to the Scottish parliament his desire to implement ‘the entire abrogation of the sanguinary laws against the 87 Andrew Marvell, An account of the growth of popery and arbitrary government in England (London, 1677), pp. 44–5. 88 For James and the Dissenters, see Mark Goldie, ‘James II and the Dissenters’ Revenge: The Commission of Enquiry of 1688’, Historical Research, 66 (1993), pp. 53–88. 89  Robert Ferguson, A representation of the threatning dangers, impending over Protestants in Great Brittain (Edinburgh, 1687), p. 21. 90  Mark Knights (ed.), The Entring Book of Roger Morrice, V: The Reign of William III, 1689–1691 (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 569. 91  Knights (ed.), The Entring Book, p. 569. 92 Harris, Revolution, p. 166.

68  Eoin Devlin Papists’.93 Scottish parliamentarians were disquieted, and failed to support the toleration agenda. Its opponents were deprived of appointments, sometimes replaced by Catholics.94 On 12 February 1687, James issued a Declaration of Indulgence suspending all laws against Catholic worship in Scotland, as well as making concessions for Dissenting Protestants.95 On 4 April 1687 a similar suspension of penal laws was introduced to England.96 In this first phase, toleration was being established through royal proclamations of indulgence, a blanket extension of the dispensing power. The next phase would be parliamentary repeal of penal legislation, including the Test Act.97 Disappointed by the results of ‘closeting’ members of parliament, and spooked by William of Orange’s encouragement of hostility, James dissolved the English parliament and began a campaign to elect a more supportive body. In both Scotland and Ireland, a similar process of parliamentary packing had already begun. Corporations were investigated and pliant personnel, including Catholics, set up as members following the invocation of quo warranto proceedings. Public office holders were sent a ‘questionnaire’ to gain a sense of their support for the policy.98 Against this backdrop, James re­issued his Declaration of Indulgence in April 1688, but was now confronted with the open opposition of the episcopal leadership of the Church of England. The bishops refused to read the Declaration from their pulpits and printed a petition opposing this instruction.99 Imprisoned in the Tower for a week, the bishops were brought to trial for seditious libel but were found not guilty.100 The popular clamour supporting their resistance portended badly for the ultimate success of the toleration agenda.

Dynasty and Revolution The acceleration of Catholicizing policies and the toleration campaign re-­ energized the conventional tropes of anti-­popery and exacerbated growing alarm among James’ Protestant subjects. But until the end of 1687 it was still common presumption that he would be succeeded by his Protestant daughter, Mary, married to the Calvinist Dutch stadholder, William of Orange. Although James had been married to Mary of Modena since 1673, no healthy heir had emerged to redirect the Protestant inheritance. While James never doubted that God would give him a son, the politique response from most Protestants was to live out the 93 Harris, Revolution, p. 154. 94 Raffe, Scotland in Revolution, pp. 17–19. 95 Raffe, Scotland in Revolution, pp. 20–1. 96 Sowerby, Making Toleration, pp. 24–5. 97 Harris, Revolution, pp. 178–9, 229–35. 98  Peter Walker, James II and the Three Questions: Religious Toleration and the Landed Classes, 1687–1688 (Pieterlen, 2010). 99  Roger Thomas, ‘The Seven Bishops and their Petition, 18 May 1688’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 12 (1961), pp. 56–70. 100  William Gibson, James II and the Trial of the Seven Bishops (London, 2009).

The Catholic Moment  69 reign and reconsolidate Stuart Protestantism at Mary’s accession. The announcement of Mary of Modena’s unlikely pregnancy, and the birth of a son in June 1688, transformed these calculations and the context of Catholicization and toleration. Public suspicion that the Queen was not really pregnant, or had suffered a miscarriage, focused on delegitimizing the Prince’s claim to the throne by suggesting there was no royal child. The establishment of these conspiratorial narratives, and their popularity, testify to the increasing strength and centrality of anti-­popery in the late 1680s.101 Dormant since the failure of Exclusion, popular anti-­Catholicism had bubbled away since James’ accession, and now reasserted itself in print with campaigns against toleration, as well as calls for an international Protestant intervention to save the Stuart territories.102 When Protestants claimed the Prince of Wales’ true father was the papal nuncio, or the Jesuit Edward Petre, they were emphasizing the child’s literal embodiment of Catholic succession, a corporeal Counter-­Reformation.103 It was certain he would be brought up to rule as a Catholic. The subjects of the Stuart dynasty now faced the prospect of untrammelled Catholic succession and a permanent reorientation of the State’s confessional identity. James’ son-­ in-­ law, William of Orange, launched a successful invasion of England in November 1688. It had been anticipated by the Stuart government, and in the weeks preceding William’s arrival, James, in a panic, had begun to undo many of his earlier decisions, restoring Protestants to their old offices and abandoning his allies.104 The collapse of the regime was not preordained, and James might have been expected to survive if he had remained in England. The precise motivations of the Dutch invasion of November 1688 remain opaque. Did William intervene in support of the seven Protestant nobles who called for his assistance to defend against popery and arbitrary government? Were William and Mary just interested in defending their royal inheritance? Was William’s only concern to coerce James to join the League of Augsburg, his international, transconfessional alliance against Louis XIV’s France? It remains uncertain whether William and Mary even intended to remove James from power, or if this was the accidental outcome of his anxious escape to France in December 1688. James’ flight corroborated all the tropes of popery linking political absolutism and Catholicism, for it suggested a synergy between James and Louis which had not really existed before. Worse, Pope Innocent XI’s antipathy towards France allowed James’ enemies to depict him as more Catholic than even the Pope, and

101 Rachel  J.  Weil, ‘The Politics of Legitimacy: Women and the Warming-­ pan Scandal’, in Lois  G.  Schwoerer (ed.), The Revolution of 1688–89: Changing Perspectives (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 65–82. 102 Pincus, 1688, pp. 306–8. 103 For discussion of these tropes in contemporary culture, see Devlin, ‘English Encounters’, pp. 273–80. 104 Harris, Revolution, pp. 276–8.

70  Eoin Devlin apparently aligned William and Rome in common cause.105 Even the King’s close allies in Court were caught out by James’ departure; contemporary reports observe that Papists that were his [James II] great confidents complaine most bitterly of him that he has betrayed them and utterly ruined them in that he gave them no notice neither to provide for the Security of their persons nor for any part of their estates, so that they are exposed to utter poverty as well as perill of life.106

Many of these Catholics had to find their own way to France to rejoin the King at his new Court-­in-­exile at St Germain-­en-­Laye, and faced peril, arrest, and hu­mili­ ation on their way.107 But in France, James found renewed confidence, and prepared to reclaim his kingdoms. In Ireland, the most securely Catholic of James’ territories, Tyrconnell, the lord deputy, initially toyed with recognizing William and Mary. The emergence of French support for James’ restoration torpedoed negotiations between Dublin and London, and Tyrconnell committed himself to James.108 In March 1689, the King arrived in Ireland to lead a multinational army against his enemies. He was cheered in the streets of Dublin, and assembled the Irish parliament.109 It was dominated by Catholics, mainly of Old English descent, but the King now dis­ covered that Irish Catholic leaders were not prepared to simply oblige him on the basis of common Catholicism. Instead, they insisted their military support would be conditional on institutional, specifically parliamentary, reform. James agreed to a Declaratory Act decreeing the English parliament could not legislate for Ireland, but he refused to repeal Poynings’ Law which gave the English Privy Council oversight of Irish legislation. He reluctantly acquiesced to the repeal of the Cromwellian land settlement. When James abandoned his troops at the Battle of the Boyne and returned to France in July 1690, this was seen as a betrayal by many Irish Catholics.110 The fate of the Jacobite armies in Ireland did not in the first instance curb James’ desire for restoration. But this required international support, and most of the rest of Europe—­Catholic and Protestant—­was now at war with France, his only ally.111 Without James, the concessions wrung by parliament in 1689 had no standing, and the Protestant parliaments of the 1690s established a new penal code against Catholics, a programme of retribution and defence inspired by the experience of Catholic rule, and its defeat.112 105 Pincus, 1688, pp. 343–6. 106  Taylor (ed.), The Entring Book, p. 376. 107  Taylor (ed.), The Entring Book, p. 394. 108 Connolly, Divided Kingdom, p. 179. 109 Simms, Jacobite Ireland, chs. 4–5. 110 Simms, Jacobite Ireland, p. 153. 111 John A. Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667–1714 (Abingdon, 1999), ch. 6. 112  D.  W.  Hayton, ‘The Emergence of a Protestant Society, 1691–1730’, in Ohlmeyer (ed.), The Cambridge History of Ireland, vol. 2, pp. 144–69.

The Catholic Moment  71 In the years after 1688, James sought political and financial support from Rome but was generally dismissed with paltry donations and empty words from a series of popes and the curial elite. Efforts to persuade Rome to support a Jacobite res­ tor­ation effectively ended in 1697.113 At the core of this diplomatic failure was James’ inability to recognize that the old confessional assumptions of the post-­ Reformation period were no longer valid. This error was compounded by his reliance on recent converts to Catholicism, too zealous for their own good, and the French influence which saw the Stuart territories as a cog in the broader geo-­ political machinery of war and peace.114 At St Germain-­en-­Laye James’ religiosity intensified. Gradually his life was taken over by Catholic sacramentalism and self-­ recrimination. His ‘papers of devotion’ reveal the intensity of his religious ru­min­ ations, while his self-­mortification reflected his understanding that God had deprived him of his kingdoms through his own personal failings.115 Nevertheless, James had succeeded in creating a Catholic dynasty of sorts, and his death in September 1701 passed the hopes of Catholic restoration to the younger gen­er­ ation of Jacobite claimants. The threat they represented to Protestant Britain and Ireland played out over the next fifty years, the last great legacy of James’ Catholic moment.116

Conclusion By the end of 1687, James II & VII had succeeded in turning his kingdoms into Catholic polities in personnel and policy. By mid-­1688 these were the inheritance of a Catholic son, and these dynastic implications extended the Catholic moment indefinitely into the future. As a committed absolutist, the tremendous impact James had on his kingdoms during his own lifetime, and beyond, proves that absolutism is no myth, and demonstrates the capacity of person and programme to interact in transformative ways. Both his father and great-­grandmother had been martyred for their (different) faiths, and while James’ exile was less dramatic, it was still a notable defeat for Catholicism within the Stuart territories. Indeed, the failure was long term, for James’ reign gave further credence to the tropes of anti-­popery, and buoyed them for further generations. In his Pastoral letter of 1689, Gilbert Burnet found in the post-­revolutionary moment:

113  Devlin, ‘English Encounters’, ch. 4. 114  See Edward Corp (ed.), A Court in Exile: The Stuarts in France, 1689–1718 (Cambridge, 2004). 115  Trinity College Dublin Archives, Dublin, TCD MS 3529; G. Davies (ed.), Papers of Devotion of James II: Being a Reproduction of the Ms. in the Handwriting of James the Second, Now in the Possession of Mr. B.R. Townley Balfour (Oxford, 1925). 116  Daniel Szechi, The Jacobites: Britain and Europe, 1688–1788 (Manchester, 1994).

72  Eoin Devlin the three things in the World; which, if they were asunder, ought to give us the greatest terror; but being now all joined together, if they do not both unite and awaken us against so dreadful an appearance, it looks like a Curse from God upon us, that is the certain forerunner of our Ruine; and these are, Popish Tyranny, An Irish Conquest and Massacre, and French Barbarity and Cruelty.117

If James was ‘trying to re-­orientate public debate of his policies away from the division between Protestant and Catholic to focus instead on support for, and opposition to, toleration’, he failed, and his primary legacy was the validation and retrenchment of popery as a key religio-­political concept, whose efficacy he had proved in living memory.118 More positively for Catholics, James left behind an ecclesiastical infrastructure in the vicars apostolic in England who continued as papal appointments until the restoration of normal episcopacy in the nineteenth century. In 1694, Thomas Nicholson became bishop of Peristachium and vicar apostolic of Scotland. There were now Catholic bishops in all three kingdoms, presiding over a renewed sacramental life. Nicholson was disappointed with what he found in Scotland, noting ‘the advancement of the Catholic faith [is] far short of my expectations . . . there were but few converts . . . and a greater aversion in the people’.119 This might be a fair epitaph for James’ reign, but it neglects a crucial dimension of his legacy. As he and his descendants inspired fear and trepidation at the prospect of popish restoration, Catholics across the three kingdoms gained another sacred martyr whose reign, though a kind of ruin, signified the pos­si­bil­ ities of Catholic renewal and offered a strange kind of survivalist hope.

Select Bibliography Anstruther, Godfrey, ‘Cardinal Howard and the English Court 1658–1694’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 28 (1958), pp. 315–61. Harris, Tim and Stephen Taylor (eds.), The Final Crisis of the Stuart Monarchies: The Revolutions of 1688–91 in Their British, Atlantic and European Contexts (Woodbridge, 2013). Jackson, Clare, Restoration Scotland, 1660–1690: Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas (Woodbridge, 2003). Mann, Alastair, James II, Duke and King of Scots (Edinburgh, 2014). Miller, John, James II: A Study in Kingship (New Haven, 2000).

117  [Gilbert Burnet], A pastoral letter writ by the Right Reverend Father in God Gilbert, Lord Bishop of Sarum, to the clergy of his diocess, concerning the oaths of allegiance and supremacy to K. William and Q. Mary (Edinburgh, 1689). 118  Taylor, ‘Afterword’, p. 296. 119 Harris, Revolution, p. 180.

The Catholic Moment  73 Miller, John, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1973). Raffe, Alasdair, Scotland in Revolution 1685–1690 (Edinburgh, 2018). Simms, J. G., Jacobite Ireland 1685–91 (Toronto, 1969). Sowerby, Scott, Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2013).

4 The Penal Laws Charles Ivar McGrath

In the summer of 1692 correspondence arose between the governments in England and Ireland over the use and abuse of the phrase ‘reputed Papist’. On the one hand, it was argued that in the English Disarming Act of 1689 the word ‘reputed’ had resulted in the subjection of some non-­Catholics to ‘the malice or revenge of a troublesome neighbour or informer’. But as the viceroy of Ireland, Henry, Viscount Sidney, argued, it was essential to include the phrase in a proposed Irish Disarming Act, ‘since in this Kingdom it is well known by the neighbourhood who are Papists, and who are not, though few or none of them are legally convicted as such’. Unless the bill extended ‘to the disarming of reputed Papists, as Papists, it will be of little or no effect’.1 Beyond the semantics of this episode lay a much more fundamental point which is central to any consideration of the penal laws in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. In England in the seventeenth century probably less than 1.5 per cent of the population was Catholic, while for Scotland by the mid-­ eighteenth century the figure is estimated at close to 2 per cent at best.2 In the officially Protestant kingdom of Ireland, however, at least 70–80 per cent of the population was Catholic.3 This difference did not overly impact upon the types of penal laws imposed in each of the three kingdoms—­there were variations at times, but much of what was put in place was, at least at face value, similar in meaning and intent. But the confessional allegiance of the different populations did have a direct and significant impact upon the timing of the imposition of penal laws and upon the approaches to enforcement of those laws. While the English and Scottish parliaments started imposing a body of penal laws from the 1560s‒70s onwards, the introduction of a penal code to Ireland by the Irish parliament did not commence until more than a hundred years later in the 1690s. 1  ‘Sidney to Nottingham, 3 Sept. 1692’, Calendar of State Papers Domestic: William and Mary, 1695 Addenda 1689–1695 (London, 1908), p. 199. My thanks to John Bergin and Eoin Kinsella for their advice in the researching and writing of this chapter. 2  John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London, 1975), pp. 182–94; John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 9–12; Daniel Szechi, ‘Defending the True Faith: Kirk, State, and Catholic Missioners in Scotland, 1653–1755’, The Catholic Historical Review, 82 (1996), p. 399. 3 S.  J.  Connolly, Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1992), p. 151. Charles Ivar McGrath, The Penal Laws In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II: Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745. Edited by: John Morrill and Liam Temple, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843436.003.0005

The Penal Laws  75 This was wholly owing to continued Catholic political power and influence within Ireland up to the end of James II’s reign in 1689–91. Hence Sydney’s allusion to the fact that few if any Catholics in Ireland were ever ‘legally convicted as such’— it was never truly viable for a Protestant-­led government in Ireland to enforce recusancy fines and convictions in the manner that was practised at times in England, Wales, and Scotland.4 Likewise, it was also safely assumed in Ireland that most people were Catholic, even if they were only reputed to be so. This demographic difference must always be borne in mind when considering the penal laws of early modern Britain and Ireland.

England and Wales From the 1570s through to the 1620s the English parliament enacted a comprehensive body of penal laws which penalized Catholics in both the spiritual and temporal realms, by trying to kill off the Church on the one hand and looking to secure the kingdom against more worldly threats to State security on the other. These laws banished Catholic clergy and outlawed the celebration of Mass while also imposing upon English and Welsh lay Catholics economic, social, and pol­it­ ical restrictions which covered education, office-­holding, the professions, property, the right to bear arms, place of residence, and travel, among other things.5 In the later 1620s and again in the 1640–50s a series of intermittent tax-­based penalties or ‘double assessments’ were also introduced.6 The enforcement of all these laws depended upon a range of variables which could, and often did, fail to live up to expectations. In the absence of a police force and correctional facilities, the onus fell upon local justices of the peace and other magistrates to implement the law. Ties of friendship, kinship, or social, economic, or professional dependence could all get in the way of enforcing such coercive measures. An absence of pol­it­ ical will at the centre could also lessen the impact of the laws, many of which fell into abeyance over time. Hence short-­term proclamations were utilized at times of crisis to try to revitalize enforcement.7

4  John McCavitt, Sir Arthur Chichester: Lord Deputy of Ireland 1605–16 (Belfast, 1998), pp. 111–28. 5  The Statutes at Large, 8 vols. (London, 1763), II, pp. 583–85, 624–25, 633–35, 673–75; III, pp. 3–4, 39–46, 46–51, 78–80, 125; J. C. H. Aveling, The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation (London, 1976), pp. 155–8; M. A. Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 1–2, 10, 13–4; Miller, Popery and Politics, pp. 52–5; Edward Norman, Roman Catholicism in England (Oxford, 1986), pp. 12–15, 33–4. 6  The Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols. (London, 1819; reprinted, 1963), V, pp. 10, 40, 58; Mullett, Catholics, pp. 25–6, 70–6; Miller, Popery and Politics, pp. 8–9; Aveling, Handle and the Axe, pp. 164–79. 7 Aveling, Handle and the Axe, pp. 158–63; Mullett, Catholics, p. 102; Robert Steele (ed.), A Bibliography of Royal Proclamations of the Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns and of others published under authority 1485–1714, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1910), I, pp. 223, 247, nos. 1832, 2039.

76  Charles Ivar M c Grath No new penal laws were imposed in England in the first half of Charles II’s reign. In the aftermath of the Civil Wars and Interregnum, the Cavalier parliament was more interested in clamping down on Protestant Dissenters, as evidenced by the Clarendon Code. Charles II’s proclivity towards a greater toleration of Catholics may have aided somewhat in that regard as well, at least in the early years.8 However, the double assessment of Catholics, aliens, and strangers was resurrected on a one-­off basis in the 1663 Subsidy Act at the same rates as before, charging 5s. 4d. in the pound instead of 2s. 8d. on their personal estate and 8s. in the pound instead of 4s. on their real estate, to be collected in four subsides over a six-­month period.9 Likewise the intermittent pressure from parliament for greater enforcement of the existing penal laws was seen in the occasional issuing of proc­ lam­ations, such as in 1663 and 1671 for banishing Catholic clergy and in 1666 for a general enforcement of the penal laws, or in late 1667 when the Privy Council ordered that instructions be sent to all justices of the peace for putting all the penal laws in execution.10 But in reality, such activities were more a reaction to an existing laxness in law enforcement rather than evidence for rigorous or actual enforcement. The adverse Protestant political reaction in England to Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence of 1672 altered the landscape dramatically however and led directly to the 1673 Act ‘for preventing Dangers which may happen from Popish Recusants’. Better known as the First Test Act, it required that all holders of public office, both civil and military, take the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy and the Declaration against Transubstantiation, while also providing a certificate of having received the Sacrament according to the usage of the Church of England.11 The First Test Act also coincided with renewed focus on enforcement of the existing laws through proclamations for banishing Catholic clergy and removing Catholics 10 miles beyond London.12 The Second Test Act, aimed at ‘the more effectual preserving the King’s Person and the Government by disabling Papists from sitting in either House of Parliament’, was passed in 1678.13 It was part of the culmination of heightening anti-­Catholic hysteria personified by the Popish Plot of 1678 and the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81, a time which also saw another rash of penal proclamations for disarming Catholics, expelling them from London, capturing Jesuits and for further general enforcement of the penal laws.14 This anti-­Catholic hysteria certainly did result in stricter enforcement of the penal laws at times. The Popish Plot saw the last significant period of executions

8 Miller, Popery and Politics, p. 51; J. A. Williams, ‘English Catholicism under Charles II: The Legal Position’, Recusancy History, 7 (1963), pp. 131–2. 9  Statutes of the Realm, V, p. 453; Miller, Popery and Politics, p. 55. 10  Williams, ‘English Catholicism’, pp. 132–3. 11  Statutes at Large, III, pp. 377–9. 12  Williams, ‘English Catholicism’, pp. 133–4. 13  Statutes at Large, III, pp. 395–7. 14  Steele (ed.), Proclamations, I, pp. 443–5, 499, nos. 3660, 3662–3, 3676, 3705; Miller, Popery and Politics, pp. 55–63; Williams, ‘English Catholicism’, pp. 135–7.

The Penal Laws  77 of Catholics in England. In total twenty-­five people were put to death, of whom eighteen were clergy, including the archbishop of Armagh, Oliver Plunkett. A further twelve priests died while in gaol during that time. It was also the case that large numbers of English Catholics were convicted of recusancy during the 1670s, though the levying of the associated fines or confiscation of lands was less evidently enforced, or indeed enforceable. Some local magistrates took op­por­tun­ ities to coerce and extort money from Catholics upon the threat of enforcing the laws, while those keen to profit personally from Catholic lands pursued the laws in that regard. At the other extreme, there is much evidence that local magistrates actively sought to avoid enforcing the laws or looked to ameliorate the most coercive of financially punishing elements of them. Obstructionist activities at local quarter sessions hindered presentments for recusancy, legal loopholes abounded within the courts, and at times mob action was used to intervene on a Catholic’s behalf. For the most part, the State and its functionaries operated somewhere in between these two extremes. As a result, for Restoration Catholics, as John Miller has argued, ‘the psychological strain was probably greater than the financial one’.15 Catholic fortunes changed dramatically for the better when Charles’ Catholic younger brother succeeded to the throne in 1685. James II looked to turn matters relating to the penal laws on their head, as exemplified by the 1687 ‘gracious declaration . . . for liberty of conscience’. Among its various related provisions, the Declaration suspended all penal laws ‘in matters ecclesiastical’ and granted a free pardon to all non-­conformists and Catholics ‘for all crimes against the late penal laws’.16 But both his reign and his policies of Catholicization were brought to a grinding halt by the events of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9. The reassertion of Protestant hegemony through the accession to the throne of James’s Protestant daughter, Mary, and his son-­in-­law and nephew, William of Orange, brought with it a renewed backlash against English Catholicism. Suspicion of being a Jacobite—­of plotting to restore to the throne the exiled James or, in time, his Catholic son, the titular James III—­became the latest security risk associated with Catholics and the justification for a whole new body of penal laws.17 The process commenced almost immediately in 1689 with Acts for vesting in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge the power of presentation to any benefices previously controlled by any Catholics and ‘for removing Papists and reputed Papists from the Cities of London and Westminster and Ten Miles distance from the same’.18 A third penal Act of that year was also evidently a security measure, with a renewal of the law ‘for better securing the Government by 15 Miller, Popery and Politics, pp. 58–63, 168; Mullett, Catholics, pp. 77–8; Aveling, Handle and the Axe, pp. 214–21. 16  Steele (ed.), Proclamations, I, p. 465, no. 3843. 17 Aveling, Handle and the Axe, pp. 245–6; Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology (Woodbridge, 2009), pp. 55–9. 18  Statutes at Large, III, pp. 420–1, 434–5.

78  Charles Ivar M c Grath ­ isarming Papists and reputed Papists’, which now included provision for confisd cation of horses worth more than £5.19 The premise for such confiscation was that horses of greater value were deemed suitable for military service, with a correlating failure of enforcement outside times of war or threatened invasion.20 The early-­seventeenth-­century concept of double assessment of Catholics for taxation purposes was another penal measure reintroduced in England after the Glorious Revolution. The 1692 Act ‘for granting . . . an Aid of Four shillings in the Pound for one year for carrying on a vigorous war against France’ imposed d ­ ouble taxation of 8s. on Catholics.21 But unlike before, the annual renewal of such tax­ ation in the 1690s and beyond and its transformation into a perpetual land tax meant that thereafter Catholics were liable to this double assessment in perpetuity.22 The prohibition of Catholics from the legal profession, first introduced in 1606, was reiterated in the 1695–6 Act ‘for requiring the Practitioners of Law to take the oaths and subscribe the Declaration’ as required in the 1678 Test Act.23 But the most comprehensive Williamite penal law was passed in 1699–1700. The Act ‘for the further preventing the Growth of Popery’, ostensibly prompted by an increase in the number of Catholic clergy coming into England, inter alia increased to £100 the reward for apprehending such clergy and prohibited both inheritance by Catholic heirs upon reaching the age of 18 and the purchasing of land by any Catholic in their own name or in trust for them.24 It has been argued that this penal law was in part politically motivated in order to embarrass William III and his government. William, like other English monarchs before him, was more open to toleration than many of his Protestant subjects, including a smaller group of opportunists who wanted to profit from Catholic land.25 Wartime and other security crises resulted in the continued issuing of proc­ lam­ations for enforcing the penal laws during the reigns of Queen Anne and George I, as well as further legislation in 1714–16 and 1722–3. In 1706 concern was evident in an address from the House of Commons about Catholic clergy converting Protestants to Rome. In March 1708 a more immediate threat of a French-­assisted invasion by the titular James III prompted orders for disarming Catholics and confining them to their homes.26 More dramatically, in 1714, in the

19  Statutes at Large, III, pp. 422–3. 20  C. I. McGrath, ‘Securing the Protestant Interest: The Origins and Purpose of the Penal Laws of 1695’, Irish Historical Studies, 30 (1996), p. 44; Anthony R. J. S. Adolph, ‘Papists’ Horses and the Privy Council 1689–1720’, Recusant History, 24 (1998), pp. 55–75. 21  Statutes of the Realm, VI, p. 366. 22  Statutes of the Realm, VI, pp. 436, 555; VII, pp. 56, 181, 360, 492, 573, 705; Donald E. Ginter, A Measure of Wealth: The English Land Tax in Historical Analysis (London, 1992), pp. 52–75. 23  Statutes at Large, III, p. 614. 24  Statutes at Large, IV, pp. 41–2. 25  P.  A.  Hopkins, ‘The Commission for Superstitious Lands of the 1690s’, Recusant History, 15 (1980), pp. 275, 279. 26  Steele (ed.), Proclamations, I, pp. 524, 527, nos. 4407, 4437.

The Penal Laws  79 final months of Anne’s reign, parliament passed an Act for amending and making more effectual the 1689 Act regarding appointments to benefices and, most significantly, the 1606 Act ‘to prevent and avoid the dangers which may grow by Popish Recusants’, which had imposed the fullest range of disabilities on Catholics within the entire penal code up to that point in time. In light of the 1707 Anglo-­ Scottish Union, the 1714 Act also explicitly empowered the judges in Scotland to impose the same penalties upon Catholic clergy and ‘trafficking Papists’ as had been allowed by a Scottish Act of 1700 for preventing the ‘growth of Popery’.27 The Hanoverian succession in 1714 and the ensuing Jacobite rebellion of 1715–16 in Scotland and the north of England saw another spate of proc­lam­ ations.28 Likewise, the first parliament to meet in the reign of George I in 1715–16 was dominated from a security perspective by the rebellion. The passing of a law for punishing anyone—­ but especially Catholics—­ who seduced soldiers into deserting from the army and for prohibiting Catholics from enlisting, was very evidently concerned with fears about Catholic loyalty to the State.29 Two other Acts—­one for a commission to inquire into the estates of traitors, Catholics, and lands given to superstitious uses, and the other for obliging Catholics ‘to Register their Names and real Estates’—were both tied to the expressed desire of parliament to impose a levy of two-­thirds of the rents and profits of Catholic estates towards the cost of putting down the rebellion.30 The commissioners ultimately returned a value of £384,950 for the rents of those estates registered by February 1720, though parliament appeared to believe they were worth more.31 In reaction to the Atterbury Plot, the 1722–3 session of parliament passed an Act ‘for granting an Aid to his Majesty by laying a Tax upon Papists’, which imposed a tax of £100,000 on Catholic estates. The amount imposed was deemed reasonable on the basis of the 1722 commissioners’ report on the value of rents and on the grounds that payment thereof would serve to discharge Catholic estates of any obligations owing from the 1715–16 Act. The £100,000 was to be levied on top of the existing and ongoing annual double land tax.32 A related measure was also enacted for obliging all Catholics in Scotland and Great Britain more generally to register their names and real estates on pain of forfeiture of lands, which seemed intended to ensure registration of all those Catholic estates not covered by the 1715–16 Act.33 As before, a range of proclamations and orders were also issued at the same time, including by the Westminster and Middlesex 27  Statutes at Large, IV, pp. 638–41. 28  Handlist of Proclamations issued by royal and other constitutional authorities 1714–1910 (Wigan, 1913), [unpaginated] columns 3–5. 29  Statutes at Large, V, pp. 84–5. 30  Statutes at Large, V, pp. 86, 93–6, 164–5; Glickman, Catholic Community, p. 58; Ginter, Measure of Wealth, p. 64. 31  Statutes at Large, V, pp. 450–1; Hopkins, ‘Commission for Superstitious Lands’, pp. 277–8. 32  Statutes at Large, V, pp. 450–1; Glickman, Catholic Community, pp. 147–8. 33  Statutes at Large, V, pp. 465, 476–7.

80  Charles Ivar M c Grath Courts of Sessions, for putting the laws in execution against Catholics.34 The last period in which proclamations and orders were issued for enforcing the penal laws occurred during wartime in 1744–5 and in light of the Jacobite rebellion of late 1745.35 However, there were no new penal laws enacted on that occasion or thereafter during the eighteenth century. The various early-­eighteenth-­century intended levies upon Catholic land were at face value draconian and excessive by any standards. Catholics certainly complained of them as being so, yet also proved adept at ameliorating or avoiding the full rigours of the law. Few Catholic estates would have survived such sanctions if they had been enforced as was at least in theory officially intended. Yet many not only survived, but also thrived. Some placed their estates in trust in the hands of Protestant protectors, with several generations being nominally tenants for life. Others availed of Protestant legal professionals to protect their position in the courts of law. The pressures on landholdings were also lessened by the diverting of younger sons into commerce, trade, and the financial world in order to improve their position in life. Likewise, many Protestant justices of the peace and other local magistrates were disinclined to enforce the laws, especially those who had Catholic friends, neighbours, or relatives. It was also the case that the eighteenth-­ century State lacked the necessary institutional coercive infrastructure to fully enforce the penal laws. Hence those Catholics who lived quietly and demonstrated loyalty to the eighteenth-­century British State were generally left alone.36

Scotland Despite the very small number of Catholics in Scotland, as in England fear of the greater international Catholic Counter-­ Reformation threat ensured regular recourse to anti-­ Catholic polemic and government reaction throughout the period. From the outset, Scottish penal laws focused primarily upon the Catholic clergy and those who protected them, as well as upon attendance at or celebration of Mass. Penalties included confiscation, banishment, and death, with recusants being excommunicated not just from the Church, but also from their community more generally. In the early seventeenth century, the overseas education of Catholic children became an additional matter of concern. The wide range of Scottish laws and proclamations demonstrated both the apparent zeal for eradicating the core practices and practitioners of Catholicism in Scotland and the evident inability of the State to fulfil the stated intentions of the various Acts.

34  Handlist of Proclamations, columns 21, 24–5. 35  Handlist of Proclamations, columns 59, 62, 66. 36 Aveling, Handle and the Axe, pp. 247–52, 279–82; Glickman, Catholic Community, pp. 58–64; Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England 1689–1727 (Oxford, 200), pp. 221–2.

The Penal Laws  81 Likewise, the ongoing repetition of the same stated aims but with new additional coercive measures signalled the failure of earlier measures.37 Regardless of such failure, following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 the emphasis of the Scottish State remained the same. In January 1661 the Scottish parliament passed an Act ‘against Papists and priests’, which was necessitated ostensibly by the ‘increase of Popery, and the number of Jesuits, priests and Papists which have of late and do now abound in this kingdom in far greater numbers than ever they did’.38 A month later a proclamation was issued for the Act’s enforcement. With the focus as before ‘against saying Mass, Jesuits, Seminary and Mass priests, and trafficking Papists’, it was ordered that all Catholic clergy were to leave the country within one month, on pain of death. All magistrates were to search for any clergy remaining after 31 March. Lists of all lay Catholics or suspected Catholics were to be compiled and the education of Catholic children was to be put in the hands of ‘some well-­affected and religious friend’.39 However, it still proved necessary to reissue similar orders for enforcement of the Act in November, suggesting either problems regarding effective enforcement or successful resistance and avoidance by Catholic clergy, or a bit of both.40 The focus upon enforcing the laws against Catholic clergy remerged in another proclamation in January 1670. On this occasion the clergy were to leave the country by 1 March, while magistrates were empowered to break open houses where Mass was being said. No Catholic was to hold any public office after 28 February, and all who were suspected of being Catholic were to be deemed such unless they produced a certificate of conformity and had received the sacrament from a Protestant bishop within forty days.41 Within two years, however, all such penal laws against Scottish ‘nonconformists and recusants’ were, as in England, suspended by Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence.42 The ensuing Protestant backlash in England was also replicated in Scotland. In December 1673 the Scottish Privy Council was once more spelling out the penal laws to be enforced, including the prohibition of the saying of Mass or the performance of marriages and baptisms by Catholic clergy, and a fine of 1,000 marks for any Catholic found serving in public office. All sheriffs were to send in accounts of their endeavours to enforce the proclamation.43

37  The Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707, URL: https://www.rps.ac.uk (accessed 19 January 2022) (hereafter RPS), A1567/12/4, 1581/10/27, 1587/7/13, 1592/4/32, 1593/4/30, 1594/4/14–15, 1600/11/40, 1607/3/13, 1609/4/16, 19; Steele (ed.), Proclamations, II, pp. 264, 294, 298, 318, 353, nos. 890, 1433, 1496, 1767, 1768, 2136; Mullett, Catholics, pp. 37–41; Allan Macinnes, ‘Catholic Recusancy and the Penal Laws, 1603–1707’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 23 (1989), pp. 27–9, 35–54. 38  RPS, 1661/1/56. 39  Steele (ed.), Proclamations, II, p. 359, no. 2200. 40  Steele (ed.), Proclamations, II, p. 361, no. 2215. 41  Steele (ed.), Proclamations, II, p. 374, no. 2336. 42  Steele (ed.), Proclamations, II, p. 376, no. 2353. 43  Steele (ed.), Proclamations, II, p. 378, no. 2377.

82  Charles Ivar M c Grath The ongoing replication in Scotland of English Protestant reactions was also seen with regard to the Popish Plot. In January 1679 a proclamation was issued for deporting all Catholic clergy and for those that remained to be convicted of treason. At the same time, all lay Catholics were to hand in their weapons, sheriffs were to search for priests and weapons, no noble was to be allowed to send his children abroad, and Catholics were to forfeit control over the education of their children. All Catholics were also to appear before the Protestant ecclesiastical hierarchy by 20 March for a ‘conference on religion. Those who do not appear [to be] denounced as rebels and [to] forfeit their estate.’44 This multi-­layered reaction to the Popish Plot highlighted a new focus upon the security of the State in Scottish penal provisions, a focus which had long been evident in England but which now heralded a greater identification of Scottish Catholics as disloyal in temporal as well as spiritual matters. It has been argued that this closer cross-­ border aligning of penal law policy during the Restoration period was evidence that Scotland ‘was inexorably becoming an English satellite’.45 With James, duke of York, sent to Scotland to be out of harm’s way, the period of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis concluded with the passage in the summer of 1681 of two related Scottish Acts, one for ‘ratifying all former laws for the security of the Protestant religion’, which included the penal laws against Catholics, and the other ‘anent religion and the Test’.46 Both were enforced by a proclamation in August which ordered that the ‘laws against Popery and fanatics are to be strictly enforced’. Thereafter, lists of all Catholics in parishes were to be compiled in October each year by church ministers and the Protestant bishops were to give the lists to local magistrates who were to account for their proceedings thereupon on an annual basis. All office-­holders were required to take an oath ‘swearing confession of faith, repudiating Papist and fanatical principles’ and ‘the covenants’, and declaring their loyalty to Charles II. Those not taking the oath were to forfeit all their goods and life rents.47 However as Allan Macinnes has argued, the primary purpose of the Scottish parliament at that time was to ‘secure the passage of a Scottish Test Act, not so much to exclude papists and Dissenters, as to facilitate the accession of James by requiring all members of the political establishment’ in Scotland ‘to subscribe an oath to the hereditary succession of the royal house of Stewart’.48 As in England, the succession of the Catholic James II in 1685 brought renewed hope for Scottish Catholics, as exemplified by the King’s 1687 Declaration of Indulgence. In that regard, the Declaration was quickly followed up by a proc­lam­ ation ‘for the further liberty of conscience in Scotland’, which placed all Catholic clergy under royal protection, suspended ‘all penal and sanguinary laws’, and was 44  Steele (ed.), Proclamations, II, p. 387, no. 2447. 45  Macinnes, ‘Catholic Recusancy’, p. 54. 46  RPS, 1681/7/17, 1681/7/29. 47  Steele (ed.), Proclamations, II, p. 394, no. 2513. 48  Macinnes, ‘Catholic Recusancy’, pp. 57–8.

The Penal Laws  83 imposed by the King’s ‘Sovereign Authority, Prerogative Royal, and Absolute Power’.49 But such liberty of conscience was of course short-­lived. Although Episcopacy was the State religion in Scotland from 1606 to 1639, and again from 1660 to 1688–9, the Glorious Revolution brought with it the return of the Presbyterian Kirk as the official church. Thereafter Episcopalians, like Catholics, became subject to a series of penal laws. Many of the Episcopalian ministers who were removed from parishes took refuge in the Highlands and were given protection by the leading families there, while many of the wider Episcopalian community began to be referred to as non-­jurors owing to their refusal to take the Oath of Allegiance and Assurance as required by a Scottish Act of 1693. Indeed, Scottish Jacobitism was backboned by such people rather than the much smaller Catholic community, with only one in seven Scottish Jacobite supporters being Catholic. Scottish Jacobitism remained a very real threat until 1746, fuelling the fear of Catholics and non-­jurors in terms of loyalty to the State and sustaining the desire for the implementation of further penal laws.50 The change in regime in 1688–9 was quickly evident, as was the newer concern with matters of temporal loyalty. In December 1688 a proclamation was issued for searching all Catholic houses and seizing all their arms and ammunition apart from what was required by men of ‘quality’, or their servants, for self-­defence.51 In March 1689 a more comprehensive proclamation was issued for removing Catholics from all public offices, both civil and military, and for disarming all Catholics other than the gentry, who were allowed to retain a sword. All non-­ resident Catholics were to remove 10 miles from Edinburgh or to their homes.52 Focus on Catholic inheritance arose in 1695, with an Act ‘discharging Popish persons to prejudge their Protestant heirs in succession’.53 The following year an Act was passed ‘anent Protestant servants in Popish families’, which highlighted on­going fears about conversions to Catholicism.54 The continuing focus on temporal security matters was seen again in 1696 at the time of a rumoured French invasion attempt. Mimicking a series of similar proclamations issued in England, in March the Scottish government proclaimed that all Catholics and anyone else who had not taken the new Oath of Allegiance and Assurance were to be, in accordance with the 1693 Oath Act, disarmed of all weapons and ammunition, while any horses belonging to them worth more than 49  Steele (ed.), Proclamations, II, p. 418, nos. 2692, 2693. 50  F.  C.  Mather, ‘Church, Parliament and Penal Laws: Some Anglo-­Scottish Interactions in the Eighteenth Century’, English Historical Review, 92 (1977), pp. 540–3; Michael Lynch (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Scottish History (Oxford, 2001), pp. 349–52, 503, 524. For the 1693 Oath Act, see RPS, 1693/4/50. 51  Act of Council Anent Papists, Edinburgh, 14 December 1688 (Edinburgh, 1688); Steele (ed.), Proclamations, II, p. 425, no. 2754. 52  A Proclamation Against Papists, 20 March 1689 (Edinburgh, 1689); Steele (ed.), Proclamations, II, pp. 428–9, no. 2786. 53  RPS, 1695/5/172. 54  RPS, 1696/9/144.

84  Charles Ivar M c Grath 100 marks were to be seized.55 The original Oath Act had not been specific as to the religious denominations of those who failed to subscribe to the oath and assurance, but the 1696 proclamation prioritized ‘all Papists’ in its instructions.56 Following a further proclamation against ‘Seminary Priests, Jesuits and trafficking Papists’ in March 1698,57 in 1700 the Scottish parliament passed a more general Act ‘for preventing the growth of Popery’. The more varied focus of the State now covered the usual issues of banishing Catholic clergy and controlling the education of Catholic children, while also including new provisions for excluding Catholics from teaching and other professions, for prohibiting Catholics from purchasing or inheriting land, and for preventing the disinheritance of Protestant heirs or the granting of legacies to Catholic organizations.58 The accession of Queen Anne in 1702 provided the opportunity for the Scottish parliament to ratify all existing laws against Catholics as part of the Act ‘for securing the true Protestant religion, and Presbyterian government’.59 Proclaimed publicly in June 1702, this Act ‘of Security’ was renewed again in 1703.60 Two years later, in February 1705, another ‘Proclamation Against Papists’ was issued for disarming Catholics and seizing their horses worth more than 100 marks. If the head of a clan was Catholic, the whole clan was to be disarmed.61 In all respects, these provisions were very clearly security-­focused in light of the ongoing Jacobite threat in Scotland.62 However, even after the Anglo-­Scottish Union of 1707, the long-­enduring focus on Catholic clergy in Scotland remained strong. In March 1708 as news of an intended Jacobite invasion of Scotland spread, members of the Scottish Privy Council warned of ‘the increase in Popery and swarming of priests’ in the north.63 Later that year a proclamation was issued ‘For Putting the Laws in Execution against Popery’, whereby all magistrates were to seize, prosecute, and banish all Catholic clergy under pain of death. The names of any judges who proved to be deficient in their duty were to be notified to the government.64 Practical security fears were more evident in 1714–15 in circumstances of heightened political instability and fear of a Jacobite invasion. As the Hanoverian succession loomed large in July 1714, a proclamation was issued on the basis of an address of the Westminster House of Lords that ‘the laws against Papists and non-­jurors (who are enlisting men to serve against [the queen] . . .) should be put

55  Adolph, ‘Papists’ Horses’, pp. 59–60. 56  A Proclamation for Seizing the Horses and Arms of Papists, and Persons above the Degree of Commons, not Qualified according to the Act of Parliament (Edinburgh, 1696); Steele (ed.), Proclamations, II, p. 463, no. 3085. For the 1693 Oath Act, see RPS, 1693/4/50. 57  A Proclamation Anent Seminary Priests, Jesuits and Trafficking Papists (Edinburgh, 1698); Steele (ed.), Proclamations, II, p. 470, no. 3147. 58  RPS, 1700/10/73; Statute Law of Scotland Abridged (2nd Edition, Edinburgh, 1769), pp. 239–42. 59  RPS, 1702/6/30. 60  Steele (ed.), Proclamations, II, p. 480, no. 3235; RPS, 1703/5/189. 61  Steele (ed.), Proclamations, II, p. 484, no. 3277. 62  Macinnes, ‘Catholic Recusancy’, pp. 61–2. 63  Szechi, ‘Defending the True Faith’, p. 397. 64  Steele (ed.), Proclamations, II, p. 493 no. 3360.

The Penal Laws  85 in force’. The Oath of Allegiance was to be tendered to all Catholics and non-­ jurors and, if refused, they were to be disarmed and confined to their homes.65 This ongoing penalizing of Scottish Catholics in the first half of the eighteenth century was the result of the widely held belief, even among the General Assembly of the Kirk, that Catholicism was spreading through the country like a ‘disease’. Fuelled by reports of Catholic clergy and mobs acting with impunity and taking retribution against Scottish Protestants, such perceptions continued down through the 1740s.66 The effectiveness of the Scottish penal laws is a wholly different matter, however. The renewal and updating of existing penal laws and the reissuing of proc­ lam­ations at times of crisis was clearly intended to galvanize magistrates into enforcing the law. This demonstrated both the fact that the early modern State lacked the apparatus and infrastructure for ensuring laws were always enforced and adhered to and that proclamations were not always readily adhered to or acted upon locally. Enforcement in Scotland, as in England and Ireland, depended heavily upon local magistrates from within the nobility and gentry. And similarly, outside of crisis periods, such magistrates could be tardy at best and wholly in­active at worst. Ties of friendship, family, and neighbourhood softened the worst excesses of the law for Catholics, as did the sheer inability of local magistrates to fully enforce such coercive legislation and proclamations. Unless supported by the army, which in Scotland was small and widely dispersed, magistrates had few men to back up searches and arrests of clergy. The efforts of enthusiastic or zealous individual magistrates aside, in general Catholics who went quietly about their business were usually able to avoid harassment.67 It was also the case that had the State been able—­or truly willing—­to enforce the laws to their full extent, then no Catholics, be they clergy or laity, would have remained—­or survived—­in Scotland. But the reality was different, as evidenced by the increase in the number of secular priests coming to Scotland from the Scottish colleges in Paris and Rome from the 1650s through to the 1750s. Although commencing from a base level of almost no seculars at all in the 1650s, there were about forty or so in Scotland by the 1750s. During that time the numbers of regulars arriving in the country from a wide range of religious orders also increased, though exact figures are unknown.68 The overall smallness of clerical numbers, despite evident growth, was reflected in the actual size of the Scottish Catholic community more generally. Although the number of lay Catholics in Scotland increased from the 1690s onwards, it was from a base level of a paltry 6,000 or so in 1690 to probably around 16,500 in the 1760s. It was therefore not 65  Steele (ed.), Proclamations, II, p. 496, no. 3394. 66  Szechi, ‘Defending the True Faith’, pp. 397–8. 67  Szechi, ‘Defending the True Faith’, pp. 402–4. 68 Szechi, ‘Defending the True Faith’, pp. 398–9; Mullett, Catholics, pp. 41–3, 51–4, 105–14; Macinnes, ‘Catholic Recusancy’, pp. 29–35, 59–63.

86  Charles Ivar M c Grath surprising that for the Scottish Catholic hierarchy, sustaining their existing community rather than winning converts remained the priority.69 The evidence for arrests of Catholic clergy substantiates these various perspectives. If priests were being deported following their arrest, then either some were not being apprehended at all or others were coming into the country thereafter, or both. Out of 103 secular priests known to have been in Scotland between the 1650s and 1750s, twenty-­three are known to have been arrested at some point in time, four of whom were arrested more than once. Most were imprisoned for less than a year and then banished. Some clearly returned, given that four seculars were arrested a second time. According to the law these four priests should have been executed for treason, though unlike in the later sixteenth century, none of them were. Instead, they were banished once again. Indeed, no priests were executed in Scotland during this hundred-­year period, though two seculars and three regulars did die while in prison.70 The figures for arrests are skewed by the fact that it is only secular numbers that are known in full. They are also skewed by the fact that the most sustained period for arrests was immediately after the Glorious Revolution. Of twenty-­four seculars in Scotland at that time, six were arrested and imprisoned for more than a year alongside at least seven Jesuits. The relative success of the 1689 clamp-­ down compared to other times was owing to the fact that the government had much better knowledge of who and where the Catholic clergy were at that time as a result of James II’s endeavours to openly re-­establish the Catholic Church in Scotland in the preceding years. At other times, Catholic clergy remained more cautious and better obscured from the State’s sporadic and fitful attempts at enforcing the laws against them. Even at the time of the Jacobite rebellion in 1745–6, only four out of twenty-­nine secular clergy in the country were arrested.71 Given the particular emphasis by the Scottish State on the banishment of Catholic clergy from the Reformation parliament of 1560 right through to the early eighteenth century, this snapshot of the lived experience of the clergy in the ­seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seems a fair reflection of the actual impact of the Scottish penal laws more generally.

Ireland As highlighted at the outset of this chapter, the fundamental difference between the kingdom of Ireland and those of Scotland and England was the fact that a body of penal laws did not begin to be legislated for in the Irish parliament until 69  Szechi, ‘Defending the True Faith’, p. 399; Mullett, Catholics, p. 104. 70  Szechi, ‘Defending the True Faith’, pp. 404–5; Mullett, Catholics, p. 38. 71  Szechi, ‘Defending the True Faith’, pp. 403–4.

The Penal Laws  87 the 1690s. With the vast majority of the population being Catholic, the history of the Irish penal laws had a very different timeline and trajectory. As in England, Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity were passed at the outset of the reign of Elizabeth I, but thereafter the norm was for fitful repression by temporary proc­ lam­ations which reflected elements of English penal laws and were often issued in response to English crises or security concerns. The only exception occurred during the short-­lived period of direct rule from London in the 1650s, when Irish Catholics were directly impacted by English statutes.72 However, the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the end of direct rule meant that there were still no actual penal laws on the Irish statute books.73 The kingdom reverted to a situation wherein the re-­imposed Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity constituted the two key components of restrictions placed upon Catholic worship and socio-­economic and political power and position. Central to such power was land ownership, and the Irish Catholic political elite had seen their holdings decimated during the 1650s under the Cromwellian Acts of Settlement. Having held about 61 per cent of the land in Ireland in 1641, even with the return of property under the 1662 Act of Settlement and 1665 Act of Explanation only about 22 per cent of land was in Catholic hands by the later 1660s. This reduction in Catholic political power was seen most vividly in the absence of Catholic MPs from the Irish House of Commons. However, a number of Catholic peers remained in the House of Lords, a fact which, alongside the influence exerted by the wider Catholic lobby in London and Dublin, ensured that no penal laws were enacted during the Restoration parliament of 1661–6. It was therefore the case that Irish Catholics during the Restoration period were, as before, subject primarily to occasional and fitful repression via short-­ term proclamations. In the absence of specific penal laws, at times the coercive component arose from more generic law and order legislation, as in a proc­lam­ ation of November 1662 against unlawful assemblies, the impetus for which arose from the fact that ‘masses have been lately said publicly in Dublin’. As a result, all Catholic clergy were to be arrested and sent before the Privy Council.74 More usually, however, Irish Restoration proclamations tended to be issued in reaction to crises originating in England, such as Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence, the Popish Plot, and the Exclusion Crisis. It was also the case that the focus and purpose of Irish proclamations replicated the main thrust of those being issued in England. Hence in October‒November 1673 orders were issued for banishing Catholic clergy, for the arrest of the Catholic archbishop of Dublin, for closing all seminaries, convents, schools, and other Catholic religious institutions, and for 72  Steele (ed.), Proclamations, II, pp. 22, 63, nos. 222, 509; C. I. McGrath, ‘The Penal Laws: Origins, Purpose, Enforcement and Impact’, in Kevin Costello and Niamh Howlin (eds.), Law and Religion in Ireland, 1700–1970 (Cham, 2021), pp. 13–17. 73 Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, pp. 17–24. 74  Steele (ed.), Proclamations, II, p. 86, no. 692.

88  Charles Ivar M c Grath disarming Catholics. In April 1674 the order for banishing clergy, arresting the archbishop, and closing institutions was reissued because the previous one had not been obeyed.75 The 1678 Popish Plot resulted in a more sustained effort by the Irish government, with a wide range of penal proclamations issued between October 1678 and November 1680. Such proclamations covered the banishing of clergy, disarming of Catholics and removing them from garrison towns and cities, prohibiting public assembly and rooting out converts in the army. But once again the government were obliged at times to reissue the same proclamations, on one occasion going so far as to publicly declare that they ‘highly resent[ed] the slackness of the justices . . . in executing the late proclamation’ for disarming Catholics.76 The need to reissue proclamations reflected the experience at times in both England and Scotland. In Ireland, however, the absence of any statute law to back up such orders may also have undermined their effectiveness. Hence in 1678–9 a short-­lived proposal for convening parliament included draft penal laws for banishing clergy and prohibiting Catholics and Protestant Dissenters from sitting in the Irish House of Commons. It was also the case that, as in England and Scotland, local magistrates in Ireland lacked any of the modern State apparatus necessary to implement such coercive measures. But unlike in England and Scotland, Irish officials also had to operate in a society where the majority of the population was the intended target of the orders. Hence it was not surprising that many local magistrates proved unwilling to stir up discontent among a majority Catholic population that included their tenants, neighbours, and professional and commercial connections, as well as friends and relatives in some instances. With the accession of James II in 1685, the absence of any Irish penal laws made it much easier to reintegrate Catholics into the mainstream of government and political power. There was no need for a dispensing power when there was nothing to dispense with. The appointment in 1685 of Richard Talbot, earl of Tyrconnell, James II’s Irish Catholic favourite, as commander in chief of the army in Ireland signalled the commencement of a policy of Catholicization within the armed forces. Once Tyrconnell became lord deputy in early 1687, that policy was extended to other areas including the judiciary and local government. Likewise, parliamentary boroughs were reconfigured in order to facilitate the election of Catholic MPs, the result of which was a Catholic-­dominated parliament that convened in the presence of James II in Dublin in May 1689. Not surprisingly, a central endeavour of that parliament was to turn back the land settlement to its pre-­1641 status, a process undertaken via an Act for attainting over 2,000 Irish Protestants and a new Act of Settlement.77 75  Steele (ed.), Proclamations, II, p. 106, nos. 844–5, 850. 76  British Library, London, Add. MS 27382, fols. 20–1; Steele (ed.), Proclamations, II, pp. 112–13, 116, nos. 889, 897, 891, 895, 917. 77 J. G. Simms, Jacobite Ireland, 1685–91 (Dublin, 2000), pp. 19–94.

The Penal Laws  89 Such an intended reversal of the balance of landownership depended upon James II winning the Irish war of 1689–91. In reality, William III’s eventual victory heralded the final collapse of Catholic political and socio-­economic power in Ireland. Although the main articles of surrender promised Catholics the right to practise their religion as they had under Charles II, this aspect was quickly reneged upon. The English Act of late 1691 for abrogating the Oath of Supremacy and appointing new oaths ensured that thereafter the Irish parliament was a wholly Protestant assembly. In 1695, that parliament commenced the process of enacting a penal code against Irish Catholics.78 The main body of the Irish penal code was enacted over a period of fourteen years, from 1695 to 1709. The various laws reflected much of what was already in existence in England and Scotland and had already been applied in Ireland via short-­term proclamations. In Ireland, however, contemporaries referred to them as Popery Laws, in direct reference to the perceived problem within a Protestant kingdom of a section of the populace giving their allegiance to the foreign power and jurisdiction of the pope.79 The fear of a foreign Catholic power aiding and abetting the Irish Catholic majority in rebellion against the ruling Protestant minority was greatly increased in real terms by ongoing war against France from 1689 to 1697 and again from 1702 to 1713. Such fear was fuelled by the presence of the exiled Stuarts on the Continent, the many thousands of exiled Irish Catholics serving in the French and Spanish armies, the ongoing recruitment from Ireland of soldiers for those armies, and the continuing contact and inter­ action between foreign privateers and Catholic outlaws within Ireland.80 It was therefore unsurprising that temporal security matters loomed large from the outset. The first penal law enacted in 1695, ‘to restrain foreign education’, was primarily aimed at preventing contact with Catholic Europe and, in theory at least, encouraging conversion to the established Church of any Catholic educated overseas. Catholic schools in Ireland were also outlawed.81 The second Act of 1695 was ‘for the better securing the government, by disarming Papists’. As in England, the maximum value of horses allowed to Catholics was £5.82 However, the policy of double land tax assessment of Catholics that gathered momentum in England in the early to mid-­1690s was only briefly, and rather opaquely, applied in Ireland in two poll taxes enacted in 1695 and 1697, with double assessment of any above a certain income who failed to take the oaths and declarations as required by the 1691 English Oath Act.83 78  McGrath, ‘Protestant Interest’, pp. 25–46. 79 Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, pp. 263–4; James Kelly, ‘The Historiography of the Penal Laws’, in John Bergin, Eoin Magennis, Lesa Ní Mhunghaile, and Patrick Walsh (eds), New Perspectives on the Penal Laws (Dublin, 2011), pp. 29–35. 80  McGrath, ‘Protestant Interest’, pp. 25–6, 28–42. 81  The Statutes at Large passed in the Parliaments held in Ireland, 21 vols. (Dublin, 1765–1804) (hereafter Stat. Ire.), III, pp. 254–60. 82  Stat. Ire., III, pp. 260–7; McGrath, ‘Protestant Interest’, pp. 39–41. 83  Stat. Ire., III, pp. 295, 374–5.

90  Charles Ivar M c Grath The inclusion in the 1695 Poll Tax of specific assessment for Catholic clergy facilitated the Irish government utilizing those tax returns to calculate the number of such clergy in Ireland in 1697. That they could do so demonstrated the extent to which such clergy were publicly visible and, presumably, had paid their taxes.84 The reason they did so was because the 1697 session of parliament had looked to address the long-­standing concern over the presence of the Catholic hierarchy and regular clergy in Ireland. As in England, the Irish Banishment Act targeted the leaders of the Catholic Church and the wealthy, well-­educated, and internationally connected religious orders, explicitly blaming them for previous rebellions and accusing them of being the promoters of sedition, strife, and treason. Any banished clergy who returned were to be deemed guilty of high treason while new arrivals were to be imprisoned for a year and then deported. The Act also renewed the Henrician provisions for suppressing all Catholic monasteries, friaries, convents, and other religious establishments.85 Again, as in England, the secular clergy were left unmolested, a loophole that was to be regularly exploited by the very clergy that were meant to be banished. The 1697 session also enacted a law for the prevention of ‘Protestants inter-­ marrying with Papists’, while in 1699 an Act was passed requiring all practicing solicitors to take the oaths and declarations in the 1691 English Oath Act, on pain of £100 fine for each offence.86 Both of these Acts proved to be just the first in a series of laws related to these matters. When the Irish parliament reconvened in 1703–4, three new penal laws were enacted, two of which directly related to the ability of Catholic clergy to circumvent the 1697 Banishment Act. The first was for preventing new Catholic clergy from coming into Ireland, while the second required the registration of all existing secular clergy. This latter law was intended to help the government identify any of the regular clergy or hierarchy who were masquerading as parish priests. Provision was also made for Catholic clergy to convert to the Church of Ireland with the offer of £20 annual income. The Registration Act was renewed in 1705 and made perpetual in 1709.87 The other penal law of 1703–4 was of a very different ilk. The 1704 Act ‘to prevent the further growth of Popery’ was a multi-­faceted measure covering a wider range of concerns, including education, guardianship, employment, the franchise, religious shrines, and conversion. But it was most significant in relation to landownership: Catholics were thereafter prohibited from buying land and from inheritance by primogeniture. Instead, they were restricted to thirty-­one-­year leases, while inheritance by gavelkind required that land was divided equally

84 W. P. Burke, The Irish Priests in the Penal Times (1660–1760) (Shannon, 1969), p. 120. 85  Stat. Ire., III, pp. 339–43; J. G. Simms, ‘The Bishops’ Banishment Act of 1697 (9 Will. III, c. I)’, Irish Historical Studies, 17 (1970), pp. 185–99. 86  Stat. Ire., III, pp. 349–53, 512–14. 87  Stat. Ire., IV, pp. 5–6, 31–3, 71–2, 199.

The Penal Laws  91 among all sons, or if there were no sons then among daughters or collateral ­kindred. The Act also imposed a Sacramental Test for those holding public office, which was aimed at excluding both Protestant Dissenters and Catholics.88 In 1707, in light of the continuing evidence of Catholic solicitors practicing in the Irish courts, the 1699 Solicitor Act was amended so as to increase the fine to £200. This ongoing need to amend existing penal laws was seen again in 1709, but in even more dramatic fashion with the passage of an Act for ‘explaining and amending’ the 1704 Act to prevent the further growth of popery. The 1709 Act was as comprehensive and multi-­faceted as its predecessor and addressed various loopholes relating to landownership and the Sacramental Test, while also introducing wholly new elements, in particular two types of ‘Discoverer’: the first were those who received financial rewards for turning in illegal Catholic hierarchy or regular clergy—­the priest catchers; and the second were those who uncovered illegal land transactions and were rewarded with ownership of the dis­ covered land.89 The 1709 Act concluded the regular cycle of penal legislation initiated in 1695. Thereafter, further penal laws were enacted more intermittently. Aside from a 1728 Act denying Catholics the franchise, for the most part these new laws were aimed at addressing loopholes in the existing corpus of legislation and were evidence that both Catholics and Protestants were readily able and willing to ignore or circumvent the intended restrictions. The endeavours to prohibit Catholics from working in the law required the imposition of further restrictions in 1728 and 1734 because the legal profession was dominated by occasional conformists who avoided prosecution and were instrumental in the ongoing evasion of the penal laws via the judicial system. Likewise, further Acts were required in 1726, 1746, and 1750 to combat ongoing interdenominational marriage, thereby demonstrating the continuing willingness of both Protestants and Catholics to marry across the confessional divide, be it a matter of social standing, economic advantage, or otherwise. The War of the Austrian Succession led to a final flurry of activity: a 1740 amendment to the 1695 Disarming Act aimed at addressing the issue of Catholics arming their Protestant servants was sandwiched between laws in 1738 and 1746 relating to foreign enlistment.90 The enforcement and impact of these laws varied. The fact that the Irish penal laws were imposed over a much shorter period of time than those in England and Scotland suggests that the ensuing use of penal proclamations in Ireland had a different purpose. While in all three countries proclamations were utilized to advertise recent enactments, to galvanize local magistrates into action, or to admonish them for inaction, in England and Scotland they also served as a 88  Stat. Ire., IV, pp. 12–31. 89  Stat. Ire., IV, pp. 121–5, 190–216. 90  Stat. Ire., IV, pp. 522; V, pp. 148–50, 222–6; VI, pp. 13–21, 410–12, 495–504, 695–7, 744–6, 765–6; VII, pp. 42–4.

92  Charles Ivar M c Grath method for the re-­enforcement of older laws fallen into abeyance. Such a necessity did not exist in the Irish context, where failure of enforcement was the primary concern. The 1695 Disarming Act was a prime example, with at least sixteen proc­lam­ ations issued between 1699 and 1719 aimed at tackling various loopholes including Protestants keeping horses for Catholic owners, negligent magistrates, and forged licences for arms.91 The experience of the Catholic clergy was also ­revealing.92 On the basis of the 1695 Poll Tax returns it was estimated that there were at least 1,387 Catholic clergy in Ireland at the time of the passage of the 1697 Banishment Act. Of these, 495 were identified as regulars liable to transportation, with 892 seculars legally allowed to remain. The official number of clergy transported in early 1698 was 444, suggesting that only fifty-­one regulars avoided banishment.93 However, it would seem a higher number avoided detection, as evidenced by the fact that there were still at least 246 Franciscans alone in Ireland in 1698.94 Therefore, on the grounds that the regulars and hierarchy were masquerading as parish priests, a proclamation was issued in June 1698 requiring all secular clergy to register with the county high-­sheriffs. Just over a year later, the government saw fit to announce new financial inducements for the apprehension of regulars in the belief that many who had been transported had since returned. It was also reported that there were significant numbers of new clergy coming into the country as well. In 1701 proclamations were issued again for registering the seculars and for doubling the financial rewards on offer for regulars.95 The evident failure of these various proclamations had resulted in the 1704 Registration Act, by which 1,089 seculars were officially registered throughout the country. This increase in numbers was in part owing to regulars and hierarchy posing as seculars, but it also intimated that the hierarchy were still carrying out ordinations even though officially banished. Thereafter, the numbers of Catholic clergy steadily increased throughout the country despite intermittent attempts to enforce the Banishment and Registration Acts, the occasional arrests of clergy, and the activities of individual priest catchers. Catholic reprisals against, and intimidation of, local magistrates also ensured that the laws against clergy were not rigorously enforced.96 By 1731, when an official census of the clergy was ­carried out, there were 1,445 secular clergy and 254 regulars recorded in Ireland. 91  James Kelly and Mary Ann Lyons (eds.), The Proclamations of Ireland, 5 vols. (Dublin, 2013), II, pp. 455–7, 470, 481–5, 493, 504–5, 535, 568, 574–8, 605, 645–6, 682–9; III, pp. 4, 22, 28, 37, 94. 92  For more detail on what follows, see McGrath, ‘Penal Laws’, pp. 33–43. 93 Burke, Irish Priests, pp. 120–9, 132, 144; Simms, ‘Banishment Act’, p. 198. 94  Joseph McMahon, ‘The Silent Century, 1698–1829’, in Edel Bhreathnach, Joseph McMahon, and John McCafferty (eds.), The Irish Franciscans 1534–1990 (Dublin, 2009), p. 77. 95  Kelly and Lyons (eds.), Proclamations, II, pp. 410–11, 463–5, 505–6, 523–8. 96 Tomás Ó Fiaich, ‘The Registration of the Clergy in 1704’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 6 (1971), pp. 48–69; Burke, Irish Priests, pp. 182–4, 207–453; Kelly and Lyons (eds.), Proclamations, II, pp. 605, 655, 657–8, 665–7, 690; III, pp. 11, 55; Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, pp. 150, 276, 280.

The Penal Laws  93 The real number, especially of regulars, was certainly higher, as four of twenty-­ nine dioceses made no returns at all, while many others returned incomplete results. The census also recorded the existence of 892 chapels or ‘mass houses’, a further hundred or more huts, sheds, ‘and moveable altars’, fifty-­four private chapels, fifty-­one friaries, nine nunneries, and 549 Catholic schools.97 Such statistics demonstrated that by that time the Catholic Church was in the process of firmly re-­establishing itself in Ireland.98 It was also true, however, that clergy remained liable to harassment and arrest, especially at times of security crisis or war. The last major clamp-­down in that regard occurred in 1743–5.99 In many ways, the most significant impact of the penal laws in Ireland related to Catholic landowning. Indeed, it has been forcefully argued that, in reality, the question of landownership was the key motivation for the Irish penal laws—­not so much in order to further reduce Catholic landholding, but to ensure that there could be no resurgence in the percentage of land in Catholic hands. This was evidenced by the fact that by 1703, the year before the first penal law impacting upon landownership, the percentage of land in Catholic hands had already dropped to 14 per cent owing to the final large-­scale confiscation undertaken after the war of 1689–91. Over the following seven decades that percentage decreased further, to somewhere between 5 and 10 per cent. The reduction was not however through further confiscation, but primarily by conversion of landowners to the Church of Ireland. In that respect, the conversionary aspect of the Irish penal laws, often dismissed by historians, was actually to the forefront of the 1704 Act and, in this instance at any rate, had significant success. The Act had allowed for an eldest son who converted to inherit the whole estate intact and made the Catholic father tenant for life. A potentially divisive facility, it seems for the most part to have been undertaken strategically to maintain the family lands. Yet some of those Catholics who retained land also managed to ensure inheritance by primogeniture through various other guises, be it accidents of birth with only one son surviving over several generations or the voluntary removal of younger sons to other countries as merchants, soldiers, and to other walks of life.100

97  A Report made by His Grace the Lord Primate, from the Lords Committees appointed to enquire into the present state of Popery in the Kingdom of Ireland (London, 1747), pp. 4–6; ‘Report on the State of Popery, Ireland, 1731’, Archivium Hibernicum, 1 (1912), pp. 10–11. 98 P.  J.  Corish, The Catholic Community in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Dublin, 1981), pp. 73–139; Ian McBride, Eighteenth-­Century Ireland (Dublin, 2009), pp. 215–70. 99 Kelly and Lyons (eds.), Proclamations, III, pp. 317–8; Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, pp. 291–3. 100  McGrath, ‘Penal Laws’, pp. 43–8; W.  N.  Osborough, ‘Catholics, Land and the Popery Acts of Anne’, in T. P. Power and Kevin Whelan (eds.), Endurance and Emergence: Catholics in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1990), pp. 26–51; L.  M.  Cullen, ‘Catholics under the Penal Laws’, Eighteenth Century Ireland, 1 (1986), pp. 27–8; Emma Lyons, ‘Morristown Lattin: A Case Study of the Lattin and Mansfield Families in County Kildare, c. 1600–1800’ (University College Dublin PhD thesis, 2011), pp. 209–47; Karen Harvey, The Bellews of Mount Bellew: A Catholic Gentry Family in Eighteenth-­Century Ireland (Dublin, 1998).

94  Charles Ivar M c Grath The issue of gavelkind was also potentially divisive, but the surviving evidence from court records suggests it rarely arose. The impact of the Protestant Discoverer was more pronounced, but again was less straight-­forward than might be presumed. While illegally purchased lands were certainly discovered by individuals who took possession of them thereafter, the surviving evidence suggests that many if not most such discoveries were collusive, while others were simply intended to facilitate clear ownership for a Protestant purchasing from a Catholic.101 The Irish Catholic landowning elite was therefore the community most regularly impacted by the penal laws. As the traditional leaders within society, they were the most likely to be targeted by the State at times of political unrest or se­cur­ity crisis. Liable to incur great costs in protecting their landholdings, they were a community under siege, which in the early eighteenth century could also include occasional incarceration, as in April 1708 when twenty-­nine leading Catholic gentry were taken into temporary custody owing to the short-­lived threat of Jacobite invasion.102 It is therefore the case that the very real psy­cho­ logic­al impact of the penal laws in Ireland, as in England, Wales, and Scotland, remains for the most part hidden. In that regard, Irish vernacular literature provides a wealth of evidence regarding Catholic anxiety, anger, loss, and resentment at the penal laws, and offers an alternative view to that derived from the official English-­language records.103 However, it is still the case that a lot more research needs to be carried out before a more complete picture emerges of the enforcement and impact of the penal laws upon Irish Catholics.

Conclusion As highlighted at the outset, in relation to the penal laws the fundamental difference between Ireland on the one hand and England, Wales, and Scotland on the other was confessional demography. While many aspects of the penal laws in all parts of Britain and Ireland were similar in meaning and intent, the presence of a majority Catholic population in Ireland resulted in a wholly different timeline and trajectory for the imposition of penal laws. The slow build-­up of laws in England, Wales, and Scotland from the 1560–70s onwards, and their intermittent enforcement, renewal, and expansion over more than a hundred years resulted in 101 T.  P.  O’Neill, ‘Discoverers and Discoveries: The Penal Laws and Dublin Property’, Dublin Historical Record, 37 (1983), p. 2; G. E. Howard, Several special cases on the Laws against the further Growth of Popery in Ireland (Dublin, 1775), pp. 35, 108, 135, 272, 275; Richard Fitzpatrick, ‘Catholic Inheritance under the Penal Laws in Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, 44 (2020), pp. 224–47. 102  Kelly and Lyons (eds.), Proclamations, II, pp. 606–7. 103 Vincent Morley, ‘The Penal Laws in Irish Vernacular Literature’, in Bergin, Magennis, Ní Mhunghaile, and Walsh (eds.), New Perspectives, pp. 173–96; Morley, The Popular Mind in Eighteenth-­ Century Ireland (Cork, 2017).

The Penal Laws  95 the emergence of a variety of motivations and outcomes. In Scotland, the ­banishing of all Catholic clergy, including the lowly secular parish or ‘massing’ priest, held sway as the dominant concern for much of the time before practical State security issues began to interpose themselves in the later seventeenth century. In England such security concerns were prominent from the beginning, while the secular priests were overlooked in the concomitant targeting of the Catholic clergy. And in Ireland security concerns were also dominant from the outset and, likewise, the seculars were also allowed remain, though monitoring was put in place. It was also the case that the number of clergy to be dealt with in Ireland was much greater than in England, Wales, and Scotland, which would suggest that in all three jurisdictions it was not fundamentally a numbers game, but rather a matter of allegiance: for all three kingdoms, the Catholic clergy exercised, and answered to, a foreign power—­that of Rome and the numerous Continental colleges and religious orders that were to the forefront of the European ­ Counter-­Reformation. It was also the case that in all three jurisdictions land was recognized as a significant source of power, but the numbers of Catholic landowners in England, Wales, and Scotland were never sufficient to fully focus the legislators’ concentrated attention in the manner that occurred in Ireland. The English and Scottish land-­related enactments, if not basic applications of existing aspects of treason law, seemed to be after-­thoughts, or simply ways for raising additional tax income. But unlike their co-­religionists in England, Wales and Scotland, landowning Catholics in Ireland remained a significant political and socio-­economic force until the end of the seventeenth century and were therefore more aggressively targeted within the Irish penal laws as part of the more concentrated timeline of enactment in the period 1695–1709. Yet as the evidence for enforcement and impact demonstrates throughout Britain and Ireland, the law was only as useful as its application was constant and consistent. It is therefore probable that the survival of Catholicism throughout Britain and Ireland during the period of the penal laws was testament as much to the failings of State infrastructure for imposing and enforcing coercive legislation as it was to the resilience and resourcefulness of the communities—­both Catholic and Protestant—­impacted by those laws.

Select Bibliography Aveling, J.  C.  H., The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation (London, 1976). Bergin, John, Eoin Magennis, Lesa Ní Mhunghaile, and Patrick Walsh (eds.), New Perspectives on the Penal Laws (Dublin, 2011). Bossy, John, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London, 1975).

96  Charles Ivar M c Grath Connolly, S. J., Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1992). Macinnes, Allan, ‘Catholic Recusancy and the Penal Laws, 1603–1707’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 23 (1989), pp. 27–63. McBride, Ian, Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2009). McGrath, C. I., ‘The Penal Laws: Origins, Purpose, Enforcement and Impact’, in Kevin Costello and Niamh Howlin (eds.), Law and Religion in Ireland, 1700–1970 (Cham, 2021), pp. 13–48. Miller, John, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1973). Mullett, M. A., Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829 (Basingstoke, 1998). Szechi, Daniel, ‘Defending the True Faith: Kirk, State, and Catholic Missioners in Scotland, 1653–1755’, The Catholic Historical Review, 82 (1996), pp. 397–411.

5 Empire and Overseas Missions Gabriel Glickman

In January 1661, an English priest in Lisbon essayed a case for ‘Peace and Commerce with Portugal’, conceived to advance negotiations for the marriage of Charles II and the Princess Catherine of Braganza. Richard Russell, secretary and chaplain to the Princess, presented the English ambassador with his own concep­ tion of the ‘joynt interest of the Portuguese and English kingdoms’, culled from eight years of service to the house of Braganza, and founded ‘upon the selfe same state motives’ that he considered ‘common to both natyons’. The vision articulated by Russell was commercial and colonial. If the house of Stuart would assent to a dynastic alliance, he suggested, the Portuguese could open up ‘the most pretyous of their Conquests to this Kingdome’, creating new channels for merchants into the markets of ‘Madeira and Cape Verde, Guinea, St Thomas, Brazill’. By stimulat­ ing English trade and navigation, these opportunities would provide footholds for the Stuart Crown as it sought to ‘establish its owne dominions’, across ‘all the foure parts of the world’. Protecting and preserving the newly independent kingdom of Portugal would, above all, strike a blow against the power of Spain, setting up a permanent ‘bulwarke’ against its bid to become ‘Master of the Seas’. The result would bring the English Crown closer to an old strategic objective: cracking open ‘those riches of the Indies which the Castillians have ingrossed to themselves . . . to satisfy their vaine glory with the title of Lords of the New World’.1 On this premise, a Catholic clergyman appropriated a colonialist manifesto more commonly associated with militant Protestant tendencies in English politics and presented a Catholic royal marriage as the way to advance ambitions voiced and dashed in the voyages of Walter Raleigh, the Providence Island campaign, and the Cromwellian Western Design. Russell’s ideas adumbrated the principal terms of the eventual alliance—­a pledge of ‘money, men, horses, Armes and shipping’ from Charles II for the defence of Portugal, in return for access to the sugar trade of Brazil, and the transference of Bombay and Tangier into English hands. The presumption, made explicit by the Portuguese Crown, was that the ‘first p ­ eople to  be employed’ by Charles II in both cities would be Catholics; likewise the ­merchants licensed to enter into Brazilian markets, ‘for the better union and

1  Ushaw College, Durham (hereafter UC) LC/P6/54. Gabriel Glickman, Empire and Overseas Missions In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II: Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745. Edited by: John Morrill and Liam Temple, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843436.003.0006

98  Gabriel Glickman correspondence with the inhabitants’.2 For Richard Russell, the marriage ne­go­ti­ ations represented only one phase of a long association with European colonial initiatives, which increased when he returned to Portugal in 1671, to take up the bishopric of Portalegre. Connections with missionaries, soldiers, and traders pro­ vided his window onto the world, enabling him to acquire a grant of 1,000 acres in Maryland, hire a Royal Navy surgeon as physician for the English College at Lisbon, and reach into the West African slave markets to supply the Carmelite nuns in his diocese with female attendants.3 Russell’s networks cast a mirror over a growing strand in English and Irish Catholic society that was entering into the Stuarts’ project of plantation and colonization—­involved in its political and terri­ torial strategies, invested in its commerce, and implicated in its moral compromises. The notion of English overseas expansion creating locales to advance the Catholic interest sits at odds with an older scholarly picture, which presented the Reformation and the genesis of a Protestant national consciousness as essential building blocks for the pursuit of empire. In the reigns of Elizabeth and James I, the public promotion of English colonial endeavours certainly put religious mo­tiv­ations to the forefront, following an ideological tone set by the Protestant clergymen-­scholars Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas. Into the eighteenth century, British overseas ventures would be retailed and received in the political domain as laying foundations for an empire that would be morally and in­tel­lec­ tual­ly distinct from its Catholic rivals: ‘Protestant, commercial, maritime and free’.4 Correspondingly, Catholic populations within the English colonies have been captured by many historians as a subaltern class—­socially and politically marginal to the functioning of the emerging powerbase. The Irish contingent in particular has been placed on a spectrum of subjugation alongside African slaves, Amerindians, and other peoples conscripted, legally and physically, into the enlargement of a Protestant realm.5 Yet a more complex reality is beginning to gain recognition in colonial and Atlantic historiography. Through the seventeenth century, Catholics from England and Ireland entered in growing numbers into the Stuarts’ overseas dominions and helped to shape their social and political development, as gover­ nors, planters, merchants, and military officers. Some Scottish co-­religionists 2  Bodleian Library, Oxford (hereafter Bodl.), Clarendon MS 74, fols. 111–12. 3  J.  W.  M.  Lee (ed.), The Calvert Papers, 3 vols. (Baltimore, 1889), I, p. 246; UC LC/P7/85 and LC/P7/95. 4  David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 61–3, 173; Carla Gardina Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia, 2009). 5  Seamus Deane, ‘Introduction’, in Terry Eagleton, Frederick Jameson, and Edward Said (eds.), Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (Minneapolis, 1990), pp. 3–19; Hilary Beckles, ‘A “Riotous and Unruly Lot”: Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644–1713’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 47 (1990), pp. 503–22.

Empire and Overseas Missions  99 were present alongside them, though the northern kingdom offered up a far smaller proportion of colonists altogether, prior to the Union of 1707. Recent studies by Maura Farrelly, John Krugler, and Helen Kilburn have illustrated the intellectual vitality of the experiment in Catholic governance in Maryland, and its contribution to larger contemporary discussions over religion, law, and political economy in the English Atlantic world.6 Jenny Shaw, Kristen Block, and Donald Akenson have highlighted the influence of Irish Catholic elites in the making of the English Caribbean.7 Giada Pizzoni has shown how many of the same net­ works of Catholic merchants found their way into the Mediterranean, West Africa, and the East Indies, on the back of English imperial endeavour.8 Much of this work has drawn upon the recent scholarly shift towards an ‘entan­ gled’ rather than purely comparative history of European empires.9 Rival powers, it has been shown, drew upon the same pool of strategies and ideas, and com­ peted for the services of settlers, merchants, mercenaries, and privateers. Porous boundaries between English, French, Dutch, and Spanish dominions allowed otherwise marginal communities to turn territorial competition to their own advantage, capitalizing on the demographic needs of most colonial provinces, and the weaknesses of State sovereignty in environments remote from the metro­pol­ itan centres of power. The expansion of early modern England was not mapped out by a homogenous cadre of officials, united by shared values or common administrative training. Because of the unending difficulties of coaxing subjects into precarious overseas ventures, the governance of the plantations hinged on an eclectic array of private agents who, as Alison Games has put it, ‘served sim­ul­tan­ eous­ly their sovereign, their pocketbook, their employer, and whatever personal satisfaction they derived in their global ventures’.10 Adventurers like Anthony Briskett, the Irish-­Italian projector who organized the settlement of the Leeward Islands under Charles I, or Henry Gary, the Maltese-­Venetian merchant made governor of Bombay in 1662, characterized the crop of cosmopolitan figures, with often opaque identities and allegiances, who gave shape to English colonial enterprises.11

6  Maura Jane Farrelly, Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity (Oxford, 2012); John Krugler, English & Catholic: The Lords Baltimore in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore, 2004); Helen  A.  Kilburn, ‘Catholics in the Colonies: Nation, Religion and Race in Seventeenth-­Century Maryland’ (University of Manchester PhD thesis, 2019). 7  Jenny Shaw and Kristen Block, ‘Subjects without an Empire: The Irish in the Early Modern Caribbean’, Past & Present, 210 (2011), pp. 33–60; Donald  H.  Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat 1630–1730 (Liverpool, 1997). 8  Giada Pizzoni, British Catholic Merchants in the Colonial Age, 1670–1714 (Woodbridge, 2019). 9  See especially Jorge Cañizares-­Esguerra (ed.), Entangled Empires: The Anglo-­Iberian Atlantic, 1500–1830 (Philadelphia, 2018). 10  Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 15–16. 11  British Library, London (hereafter BL), Add MS 40712, fol. 40; Akenson, Montserrat, p. 31.

100  Gabriel Glickman This essay shows how Catholic activities in the overseas dominions accelerated in the wake of the Restoration. These advances sprang first out of the Braganza match and the reorientation of English colonial interests into the Mediterranean, where Catholics of the three kingdoms had maintained confessional and com­ mercial investments since the later sixteenth century. Second, Catholics bene­ fited from a turn in Crown policy that challenged the martial, Protestant ethos behind Elizabethan and Cromwellian colonialism. An alliance with Portugal and after 1667, peace with Spain, pushed the Crown towards new strategies that priv­ il­eged the expertise of merchants able to open gateways into the trade of the Iberian empires. Finally, the Court of Charles II used colonial promotion and preferment as means to recover the services of Catholic soldiers, otherwise liable to drift towards careers in foreign armies. The result was to provide openings for power and profit overseas: habituating Catholic leaders to the experience of pub­ lic office in places set far beyond the dictates of parliamentary penal laws. In the three kingdoms, the opportunities of empire awakened missionary hopes, informed Catholic political strategies, and became part of the hidden springs of commerce and credit that enabled co-­religionists to withstand the pressures of a Protestant realm. Such developments did not go unnoticed in colonial or domes­ tic politics. The chapter shows how local controversies over Catholic promotions in Tangier, New York, and the West Indies echoed back across the Atlantic and contributed to the crises that destabilized Stuart rule between 1675 and 1688. Yet Catholic colonial interests endured beyond the upheavals of the 1688 Revolution, and, as the final part of the chapter indicates, offered ways for some individuals to reach a modus vivendi with the reinvigorated Protestant State. The effect was to stir lingering anxiety in eighteenth-­century commentaries over the weaknesses of the Established Church in the overseas territories, and the potential disjuncture between the Protestant and the colonial interests harboured by the British kingdom.

Commerce, Settlement, and the Opportunities of the English Empire Catholic associations with the English colonial experiment long preceded the reign of Charles II. In 1578, a circle of recusant squires mobilized by Sir Thomas Gerrard and Sir George Peckham entered into negotiations with the adventurer Sir Humphrey Gilbert for a grant of over eight million acres, planned to extend over parts of Newfoundland, the Acadian mainland, and other unspecified islands within the northern reaches of the New World.12 While these designs remained 12 Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 190–1.

Empire and Overseas Missions  101 unfulfilled, English Catholicism had reached America in more tangible form by 1610, when the Virginian Captain Gabriel Archer—­offspring of Essex recusant parents—­went to his grave at Jamestown accompanied by a silver reliquary.13 Catholic colonial ventures increased perceptibly in the reign of Charles I, under­ pinned by lobbying from sympathetic courtiers and privy councillors. The earl of Arundel acquired a grant of lands in Virginia’s southern back country and sank resources into a Court-­backed design for the seizure of Madagascar.14 In 1634, Sir Edmund Plowden secured proprietary rights for the creation of ‘New Albion’: conceived to cover a considerable tract of the emerging ‘Middle Colonies’ on both sides of the Delaware River.15 Most of these schemes exemplified the haphazard, privately funded processes of trial and error that conditioned the beginnings of English overseas expansion. But in the face of sundry financial and logistical disappointments, the proprietary charter to Maryland, bestowed upon Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore in 1632, con­ ferred a more enduring opportunity for Catholic political and economic advance­ ment. While Catholics constituted no more than 10 per cent of seventeenth-­century migrants into Maryland, Baltimore’s network of kinsmen and co-­religionists fig­ ured disproportionately among the wealthiest inhabitants, accounting for almost two-­thirds of the twenty-­eight assemblymen of known religious identities in 1638. Enshrined in the baroque skyline of the city of St Mary’s, the experiment possessed a symbolic significance for English Catholics, which heightened as it outlasted the storms of Civil War and Interregnum.16 Maryland acted as a magnet for Catholics dotted across the New World—­Jesse Wharton and Thomas Notley both crossed the seas from Barbados to serve as governors in the 1670s.17 For others, the colony provided a springboard for expansion over wider tracts of the English overseas dominions. George Brent, a Gloucestershire squire pushed into Maryland by the pressures of Civil War, speculated subsequently in land invest­ ments in northern Virginia, and rose through the public domain to gain promo­ tion as attorney general of the province in 1686.18 America was yielding up prospects for preferment and enrichment in a manner unthinkable within the 13  Revealed after archaeological excavation in 2015. Adrienne LaFrance, ‘A Skeleton, a Catholic Relic, and a Mystery about American Origins’, The Atlantic, 28 July 2015. 14 Mary Hervey, The Life, Correspondence and Collections of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (Cambridge, 1921), pp. 417–18; Lambeth Palace Library, London (hereafter LPL), Fulham Papers, ii, pp. 16–17. 15 Edward  C.  Carter and Clifford Lewis, ‘Sir Edmund Plowden and the New Albion Charter, 1632–1785’, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 83 (1959), pp. 150–79. 16  Lee (ed.), Calvert Papers, I, pp. 131–40; Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (London, 1662), p. 202; An epitome of Mr. John Speed’s theatre of the empire of Great Britain (London, 1676), pp. 216–17. 17  David W. Galenson, ‘Economic Aspects of the Growth of Slavery in the Seventeenth-­Century Chesapeake’, in Barbara  L.  Solow (ed.), Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Cambridge, 1991), p. 287. 18  B.  E.  Steiner, ‘The Catholic Brents of Colonial Virginia: An Instance of Practical Toleration’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 70 (1962), pp. 387–409.

102  Gabriel Glickman three kingdoms. Colonization, as the second Lord Baltimore argued, offered an environment for Catholics to advertise their long-­professed capability as loyal subjects, by acting outside the penal constraints of a Protestant kingdom, for ‘the enlargement of His Maty’s Empire’ overseas.19 In many provinces, Catholic colonization rested on a partnership between English and Irish co-­religionists—­cutting against the cultural divisions that had driven wedges between co-­ religionists from different parts of the Stuarts’ domains.20 Planning for the first voyages into Maryland, Cecil Calvert drew upon the financial and demographic resources of his County Longford plantations, and enticed cohorts of Irish squires into migration or investment in the Chesapeake.21 Irish involvement with the Stuart empire was even more pronounced within the West Indies. In the later 1620s, the plantation of the Leeward Islands (Montserrat, St Christopher’s, Nevis, and Antigua) supplied the crucible for an Irish Caribbean population that would rise to approximately 50,000 by the end of the century. An older historiography linked the growth of this community primarily to unfree labour and prisoner transportations, especially under the authority of the Commonwealth and Protectorate. In reality, however, the Irish experience mir­ rored the diverse patterns of English colonization, mixing together coerced or indentured servants with voluntarist movements among individuals from Old English and Gaelic backgrounds, and incorporating a large cohort from the ranks of the gentry.22 By the 1670s, Ireland accounted for a purported 65 per cent of all adult Europeans in the Leeward Islands, with Catholics outnumbering Protestants by a ratio of six to one on Montserrat, according to the governor. In the same decade, the Irish occupied a reputed 10 per cent of all property holdings in Jamaica.23 These inflows fell within the frame of a larger Irish diaspora, sustained by pat­ terns of international commerce, which would grow after 1649 in response to the legal and political pressures placed on Catholic estates. Confessional training and education, military service, and political exile pushed Irish men and women across the expanding global networks of Catholic Europe.24 By the 1660s, a web of commercial exchanges connected the ports of Galway and Waterford to the

19  A moderate and safe Expedient (London, 1646), pp. 3, 6, 7. 20 Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2008). 21  Lee (ed.), Calvert Papers, I, pp. 46, 271, 305. 22 Aubrey Gwynn, ‘Documents Relating to the Irish in the West Indies’, Analecta Hibernica, 4 (1932), pp. 139–286, esp. 233–4, 252–7; Natalie Zacek, Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670–1776 (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 45–8. 23  Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, vol. 10: 1677–1680 (London, 1896), 574, 741; Akenson, Montserrat, p. 111. 24  Louis M. Cullen, ‘The Irish Diaspora of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Nicholas Canny (ed.), Europeans on the Move: Studies in European Migration, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 113–52.

Empire and Overseas Missions  103 business of Malaga, Lisbon, Seville, and Cadiz.25 The opportunities of the Spanish and Portuguese wine trade proved similarly enticing to many younger sons of the English Catholic squirearchy.26 With Protestant traders hindered by the religious restrictions imposed in some Spanish and Portuguese markets, the importance of the Mediterranean commerce represented one of the strongest reasons for the Crown to extend liberty and opportunity to Catholics, argued the Scottish priest William Leslie. Catholic merchants, he warned, would otherwise be absorbed into foreign realms, and ‘deprive us of infinite sumes of money wch they would otherwise bring home wth ym & spend amongst us’.27 Involvement in the Mediterranean opened up routes for mobile Catholics into a wider commercial and colonial world. Shadowing the passage of Spanish and Portuguese fleets, Catholic merchant houses organized shipments of European commodities into Panama and Mexico, and funnelled back the produce of the Brazilian sugar mar­ kets into England and Ireland. Prising their way into the Stuarts’ dominions, members of the same kinship networks—­Gages from England, Lynches, Gallways and Blakes from Ireland—­purchased plantations in the Leeward Islands.28 These individuals showed themselves at ease within the fluid realities of the early colo­ nial Atlantic and, in view of the complexities of Catholic life in Britain and Ireland, adept at entering into complex negotiations of subjecthood with rival States and kingdoms. Irish settlers and mercenaries manned the successful Spanish defence of Hispaniola against its Cromwellian assailants in 1654‒5. Later, they swelled the ranks of Caribbean privateers and spearheaded the growth of the contraband trade between English and Spanish islands that became central to the early prosperity of Jamaica.29 Such free-­flowing activities made the Caribbean Irish subject to some suspi­ cion within the English colonies, and even in the territories governed by Catholic States. Some 150 families were banished from St Christopher’s under the Cromwellian Protectorate, and petitioned the Crown for urgent restitution in 1661, having fled to the French island colonies, ‘where they have lived in great misery & want’, unsupported by the civil authorities.30 Protestant misgivings 25  Karin Schuller, ‘Irish-­Iberian Trade from the Mid-­Sixteenth to the Mid-­Seventeenth Centuries’, in David Dickson, Jan Parmentier, and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), Irish and Scottish Mercantile Networks in Europe and Overseas in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries (Ghent, 2006), pp. 175–96; Louis M. Cullen, ‘Galway Merchants in the Outside World, 1650–1800’, in Louis M. Cullen, Economy, Trade and Irish Merchants at Home and Abroad, 1600–1988 (Dublin, 2012), pp. 169–81. 26  Suffolk County Record Office, Ipswich, Mannock MSS, HA246, G/1; Francis Young, The Gages of Hengrave and Suffolk Catholicism, 1640–1767 (Woodbridge, 2015), ch. 5. 27  The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA) SP/9/203/7, fol. 12. 28  R. C. Nash, ‘Irish Atlantic Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 42 (1985), pp. 329–56; Pizzoni, British Catholic Merchants, ch. 2. 29  William O’Reilly, ‘Ireland in the Atlantic World’, in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), The Cambridge History of Ireland, vol. 2: 1550–1730 (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 385–408; Nuala Zahedieh ‘The Merchants of Port Royal, Jamaica, and the Spanish Contraband Trade, 1655–1692’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 43 (1986), pp. 570–93. 30  TNA PC 2/55, fol. 141.

104  Gabriel Glickman appeared to gain vindication in 1667, when pockets of Irish unrest assisted the French invasion that wrested half of St Christopher’s out of English hands. Perturbed by the rate of migration from Ireland into Barbados, Governor William Willoughby urged the Crown instead to privilege ‘the downright scott, who I am certaine will fight without a Crucifix about his neck’.31 Yet for all these anxieties, Irish manpower was increasingly appreciated by English authorities as a poten­ tially vital asset to redress the social and economic vulnerabilities of nascent plant­ations. In mainland America as well as the Caribbean, the appeal rose through the later seventeenth century, as projectors ran up against growing pol­it­ ical discouragement of English migration, while supply from Scotland was stunted after the passing of the Navigation Acts by the legal exclusion of the northern kingdom from colonial commerce. The provisioning trade of the English Leeward Islands was steered by a close-­knit cadre of Galway families—­ the ‘fourteen tribes’ who had dominated the city’s corporation since the later fif­ teenth century. By the 1670s, supplies of Irish livestock, beef, butter, cheese, and pork to America were encouraged even by some Protestant Caribbean governors as a politically safer alternative to dependence on the merchants of Puritan Boston.32

Catholic Colonization and the Stuart Crown After 1660, English and Irish Catholics could operate with greater confidence that their colonial activities carried the support of Stuart governments. The Braganza match had refigured the geography of English imperialism, and the resultant turn towards the east and the Mediterranean took soldiers and settlers into many regions hitherto remote to the Protestant imagination. Tangier—­for Samuel Pepys ‘the most considerable place the king of England hath in the world’—was placed at the centre of a plan to magnetize the traffic of the Mediterranean, disrupt the markets of Cadiz and Seville, and provide a safe haven for English vessels on the East India sea-­road.33 Catholicism was already the prevailing religious influence in the city by 1660, with a confessional landscape dominated by Franciscan and Capuchin churches. Thereafter, the Crown encouraged Irish settlement, aiming to bind into Tangier all the decades of expertise accumulated by émigré merchant houses in Spain and Portugal. English and Irish Catholics dominated the lists of victuallers, creditors, and contractors at Tangier—­often, as the earl of Sandwich lamented, in absence of adequate funding from London. The same communities 31  BL Stowe MS 755, fol. 17. 32  Martin Blake (ed.), Blake Family Records (London, 1905), pp. 228–43; BL Add MS 11410, fol. 301; Thomas M. Truxes, Irish-­American Trade, 1660–1783 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 23–4. 33  R. Latham and W. Matthews, (eds.), The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11 vols. (London, 1970–83), III, p. 319; Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World (London, 2002), pp. 23–42.

Empire and Overseas Missions  105 supplied successive holders of the Tangier mayoralty, and by 1678 contributed half of the aldermen who staffed the city corporation.34 Under the aegis of Bishop Richard Russell, funds and intelligence for Tangier were channelled secretly through the English College at Lisbon.35 The logic of these relationships was to challenge the militarized, Protestant ideolo­gies that had ushered the pursuit of empire into the English consciousness. Within a decade of the Restoration, new alterations in the diplomatic landscape were working further to the benefit of colonial Catholics. Faced with the growth of French and Dutch competition in the Caribbean, the Crowns of England and Spain began to drift towards a defensive alliance. The treaties signed in Madrid in 1667 and 1670 offered the landmark recognition from the Habsburgs of the English right to ‘Empire, Territory and Dominion’ in the New World.36 The impli­ cation, voiced on the Privy Council by Anthony Ashley Cooper, was that the old strategic plan ‘to gett all the Spaniards riches’ into the English dominions could now be achieved ‘with their consent’ by peaceful trade, rather than any lingering reflexes towards ‘rapin and plunder’.37 Under these arrangements, the same trans­ national Catholic connections that had once aroused suspicion could now be exploited for political advantage—­Irish merchants became potential agents and brokers in the attempt to break into the trade of the Spanish empire and obtain new markets for English exporters. In Madrid, Ambassador William Godolphin argued that commercial and colonial opportunities offered ways for the Crown to manage the Irish Catholic population and turn ‘to the use of our National Interests . . . those whose abilities might have entitled them to much more prof­it­ able employments, if their Religion were not a barre to them at home’.38 The Catholic tinge over colonial life became more visible as the Crown sought to build up larger military establishments in environments that bristled with international tension. The governance of empire highlighted a permissive climate within parts of the armed forces, which allowed certain individuals to maintain confessional identities that were ambiguous, if not explicitly divergent from the Church of England. Colonel Richard Nicolls, the first governor of the New York colony, furnished his Catholic counterpart in Maryland with a communion chal­ ice and seven devotional books in 1668—pleasing evidence, for the latter, that ‘you may be as greate a practiser of the Religion as you are a master of the honor of Ancient Rome’.39 The civil and military administration of Tangier became a 34  TNA SP 94/53, fols. 100–1; BL Sloane MS 3511, fol. 67; BL Sloane MS 3512, fol. 250; TNA SP 94/63, fol. 122. 35  Bodl. MS. Eng. Lett. c. 328, fols. 9–10, 67–8. 36  TNA SP 94/57, fol. 117; Barbara H. Stein and Stanley J. Stein, Silver, Trade and War: Spain and America in the making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, 2000), pp. 63–4, 122. 37  Robert M. Weir (ed.), The Shaftesbury Papers (Charleston, 2000 edn.), p. 327. 38  Longleat Library and Archives, Coventry, MS 60, fol. 257. 39 The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, BL59. I am indebted to Mark Williams for this reference.

106  Gabriel Glickman particular magnet for Catholic of all three kingdoms. Appointed in 1662, the Scottish veteran Andrew Rutherford, earl of Teviot, was the first of three Catholic governors to hold office within the opening decade of English rule. By 1666, it was reported that half of the city’s military officers were of the same religion.40 In the West Indies, the Crown turned simultaneously to Irish Catholic commanders to provide control over societies of compatriots and co-­religionists. Separated from the jurisdiction of Barbados in 1670, the Leeward Islands developed under the governance of the Tipperary soldier Sir William Stapleton, who staffed the councils with networks of kinsmen, Galway merchants, and fellow veterans of the 1650s royalist diaspora.41 Under these influences, the colonies became recruiting grounds to call Catholic officers out of the pay of the Bourbon, Habsburg, and Braganza armies, and tether them back into English service, in places where their religion was not perceived to present a public disadvantage. Crossing the seas from Tangier to take up office as governor of New York in 1683, the Irish veteran Sir Thomas Dongan was flanked by a deputy, Anthony Brockholes, of Lancashire Catholic extraction, and a Catholic collector of customs, with two other co-­ religionists seated alongside him on the provincial council.42

Catholic Religion in the English Colonies Set against the openings available to Catholic individuals, the strength of Catholic religious life in the colonies was more erratic. In the earlier seventeenth century, colonial ventures in and beyond the New World had excited missionary hopes, to which English and Irish priests were as susceptible as their counterparts across Tridentine Europe. English Franciscans served on the mission in New France. In the eastern theatres of English activity, colonizing Catholics benefited from the presence of well-­staffed, Portuguese-­backed missions, in which a smattering of English and Irish clergymen were able to participate. Catholic worship in Tangier was open, public, and unmolested even by the more resolutely Protestant civil authorities.43 By 1676, the Catholic presence in Madras was sufficiently estab­ lished to win East India Company permission for a new chapel: consecrated with a salute fired on the orders of Sir William Langhorne, as president of the factory.44 40  Bodl. Clarendon MS 84, fols. 406–10. 41  William Stapleton, ‘Answers to the Council for Plantations’, John Rylands Library, Manchester (hereafter JRL), Stapleton MS, 2/2; Akenson, Montserrat, pp. 127–30. 42  TNA CO 5/1112/33; Jason K. Duncan, Citizens or Papists: The Politics of Anti-­Catholicism in New York 1685–1821 (New York, 2005), pp. 3–8. 43  BL Add MS 10118, fol. 34; Bodl. Rawlinson MS, C423, fols. 71–2; William J. Bulman Anglican Enlightenment: Orientalism, Religion and Politics in England and Its Empire 1648–1715 (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 66–8. 44 Thomas Secombe, ‘Langhorne, Sir William, baronet (c. 1634–1715), administrator in India’, ODNB; ‘Streynsham Master to Samuel Master, 9 December 1678’, in Michael Hunter, Antonio

Empire and Overseas Missions  107 Early foundations in Maryland drew upon the labour of Jesuits trained for evan­ gelical work in the Iberian colonies, attracting priests from English colleges in Rome, Seville, and Valladolid.45 The Society of Jesus provided Baltimore’s prov­ ince with one of its most energetic promoters in the person of Andrew White, whose printed accounts of the plantation and the mission among the Yaocomico Indians were pitched simultaneously before English and papal audiences between 1634 and 1640.46 Extending his interests beyond matters spiritual, White’s vision for Maryland looked towards the economic template provided by the grand duchy of Tuscany: envisaging the production of wine, oil, and fruit delicacies, intra-­regional trade (in this case, furs and skins purchased from the Indians) and exports shipped across the Atlantic, through free ports along the Chesapeake coastline.47 Yet service in English America brought moral and political snares for the clergy, even in domains governed by Catholics. The Calverts, in common with many Catholic imperial authorities, became disenchanted with Jesuit activities: agitated that the control of the Indian mission was giving rise to a clerical self-­ aggrandisement that would, in the words of the second Lord Baltimore, render laymen ‘the basest slaves and most wretched creatures upon the earth’.48 After the 1640s, Maryland governors’ proclamations imposed restrictions on contact with Amerindians, and sought to regulate religious life by exporting the seigneurial structures that governed Catholic worship in England, with responsibility for the priesthood devolved onto lay patrons.49 Secular clergymen, brought in especially from the English College Lisbon, focused less on missionary outreach than on reconstituting Christian beliefs among existing Catholic settlers in Maryland: influenced in part by a Jansenist-­tinged scepticism of ‘cheap grace’ and false con­ versions.50 For many other clergymen, the appeal of America was rivalled by an older conception of the Stuarts’ three kingdoms as themselves constituting virgin mission territory, and offering a more immediate call on the conscience of the devout.51 The spiritual needs of the Caribbean Irish were familiar to the Holy See, and for much of the 1630s, the community on St Christopher’s fell within the jurisdiction of the archbishop of Tuam. But, as Matteo Binasco has shown, Clericuzio, and Lawrence M. Principe (eds.), The Correspondence of Robert Boyle 1636–1691, 6 vols. (London, 2004), VI, p. 446. 45  John Bossy, ‘Reluctant Colonists: The English Catholics Confront the Atlantic’, in David Quinn (ed.), Early Maryland in a Wider World, (Detroit, 1982), pp. 149–64, esp. 154–5. 46  James Axtell, ‘White Legend: The Jesuit Missions in Maryland’, Maryland Historical Magazine, 81 (1986), pp. 1–7. 47  Lee (ed.), Calvert Papers, I, pp. 208–11, 263. 48  Lee (ed.), Calvert Papers, I, pp. 217–8; Farrelly, Papist Patriots, pp. 89–90. 49  Lee (ed.), Calvert Papers, I, pp. 281–2; John Krugler, ‘The Calvert Vision: A New Model for Church-­State Relations’, Maryland Historical Magazine, 99 (2004), pp. 269–86. 50  Lee (ed.), Calvert Papers, I, p. 289; Timothy B. Riordan, The Plundering Time: Maryland and the English Civil War 1645–1646 (Baltimore, 2004), pp. 284–6. 51  Bossy, ‘Reluctant Colonists’, pp. 149–64.

108  Gabriel Glickman Caribbean missions struggled to break into the supply lines emanating from the European colleges and Propaganda Fide, and relied overwhelmingly on a small handful of individual priests, labouring independently to maintain the resources necessary for Catholic worship.52 While a purported seven clergymen resided in Jamaica by 1684, receipt of the sacraments in the English West Indies depended for most of the century on Capuchins and Jesuits slipping discreetly across from the French or Spanish islands.53 Most Catholics in the English colonies eschewed the confessional visions and ideologies of overseas expansion, or the conceptions of ‘dominion by grace’, that had informed the political culture of the Iberian empires. The third Lord Baltimore spelt out his rights over contested territory in northern Maryland with reference to the ‘agriculturalist’ argument, enunciated by John Winthrop and John Locke, which identified ownership of the soil with the cultivation of vacant wastelands, and foregrounded the divine command to make the earth fruitful before any obligation towards the conquest and conversion of pagans.54 Governor Stapleton fortified his own allegiances by sending his children for education at the English College, Douai, but clashed with the Spanish Episcopate at Cuba, which demanded jurisdiction over all congregants within the Caribbean.55 Ruling over dominions with mixed confessional populations, Catholic governors tended instead to try and pin religion back from the public domain, nourishing private devotion where possible among their own co-­religionists, but placing blocks on the power of all clerical authorities, of any Christian denomination. It would ‘endanger insurrections or a general dispeopling’, maintained the third Lord Baltimore, if subjects were obliged to ‘maintain Ministers of a contrary persuasion to themselves’.56 It was no coincidence that many of the first secular clergymen chosen for Maryland harboured associations with the ‘Blacklowist’ theological and intellectual heterodoxies that had entered into the English College, Lisbon, foster­ ing suspicion of papal power, and encouraging worshippers to frame more rigor­ ous dividing lines between temporal and spiritual estates.57 The Maryland ‘toleration’ law of 1649 aimed to preserve tranquillity between different believers by banning certain notorious terms of religious invective—‘heretic’, ‘idolater’, 52  Matteo Binasco, Making, Breaking and Remaking the Irish Missionary Network: Ireland, Rome and the West Indies in the Seventeenth Century (London, 2020), pp. 165–6, 176, 180; Akenson, Montserrat, pp. 35, 44. 53  Francis Xavier Delany, History of the Catholic Church in Jamaica (New York, 1930), p. 24; JRL Stapleton MS 8/2, Philippe de Nogle to William Stapleton, 1684. 54  Mary Maples Dunn and Richard S. Dunn (eds.), The Papers of William Penn, 5 vols. (Philadelphia, 1981–6), II, pp. 498–9 and III, p. 61; Armitage, Ideological Origins, pp. 96–7. 55  TNA CO 153/3/114–5; TNA SP 78/150, fols. 135–6. 56  Calendar of State Papers Colonial, vol. 10, p. 121. 57  Stefania Tutino, ‘The Catholic Church and the English Civil War: The Case of Thomas White’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 58 (2007), pp. 232–55; Riordan, ‘Plundering Time’, pp. 284–6.

Empire and Overseas Missions  109 ‘Puritan’, ‘Papist’—from the public domain. This measure was echoed in Montserrat, where William Stapleton proscribed a long list of ‘opprobrious’ words likely to feature in confrontations between English and Irish settlers.58 For most of the seventeenth century, Catholic allegiances endured within the English colonies not as the result of organized missionary establishments, but as the product of an environment in which all churches were weak, clergymen in short supply, and private opinions harder to police, with authorities forced to seek out other, non-­religious credentials to judge the loyalty of subjects.59 Catholics, English, and Irish could be subsumed within a common colonial or creolean identity—­deepened, as Jenny Shaw and Kristen Block have shown, by the devel­ opment of the slave system, and the gradual racialization of Caribbean society, as governors’ reports foregrounded ‘white’ or ‘black’ identities, over any distinctions within the free population.60 Above all, Catholics seized upon ambiguities in the  constitutional status of the dominions. Maryland was insulated from ­parliamentary statute, believed the first Lord Baltimore, since it was not a public possession of the ‘crown of England’, but a private dominion of the King as an  individual, acquired ‘by conquest’.61 Similarly, the grant of New Albion to Sir Edmund Plowden was held by knight’s service from the Crown of Ireland.62 With the physical expansion of the English realm unaccompanied by legal inte­ gration, Crown colonies, as well as privately governed proprietaries, such as Maryland, existed beyond the reach of penal laws passed in Westminster. While the Test Act of 1673 caused ripples of alarm through some colonial communities, it failed in practice to dislodge Catholic office-­ holders—­ a logical oversight, believed the Anglican Tangier official Hugh Cholmley, since there could be ‘no reason’ for confessional scruples to impinge upon the process of ‘building a Citty in Affrica’.63 Instead, in Maryland and the Leeward Islands, Catholic governors were at liberty to devise alternative oaths of allegiance for office-­holders, with affirmations of loyalty to the Crown coming free of any mandatory commitments to the reformed religion.64 Catholic worship may have been thin on the ground in the English colonies, but it did at least possess the space to persist.

58 Akenson, Montserrat, pp. 93–5; Krugler, ‘Calvert Vision’, pp. 269–71. 59  Jeremy Gregory, ‘ “Establishment” and “Dissent” in British North America: Organizing Religion in the New World’, in Stephen Foster (ed.), British North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford, 2013), pp. 136–69. 60  Shaw and Block, ‘Subjects’, pp. 33–6. 61 Farrelly, Papist Patriots, p. 38. 62  Carter and Lewis, ‘Sir Edmund Plowden’, p. 153. 63  North Yorkshire County Record Office, Northallerton, Cholmley MS. V, 1/1/3, fols. 115, 281. 64  JRL Stapleton MS 2/2; JRL Stapleton MSS (uncatalogued), Minutes of the Council of Antigua, 27 April 1681; John Leeds Bozman, History of Maryland (Baltimore, 1837), p. 110; Lee (ed.), Calvert Papers, I, p. 137.

110  Gabriel Glickman

Transatlantic Instability and the Experience of Revolution Legally and geographically distanced from the mother kingdom, the development of the English colonies nonetheless carried influence over its political, economic, and religious life. Through the seventeenth century, many members of the Maryland elite arranged for their bodies to be borne back into the Old World after death—­the symbolic indication that colonial leaders saw themselves not as refugees from the domestic realm, but as continuing participants in its affairs.65 The development of Maryland strengthened Catholic society at home, adding to its roll-­call of patrons and promoters a new cohort of wealthy landowning con­ verts, including the Darnall family, who presided over some of the province’s lar­ gest tobacco plantations, and the Diggeses, offspring of a Protestant governor of Virginia.66 Much of the organization of the Calvert proprietary relied upon a web of lawyers, bankers, and merchants in London, drawn principally from younger sons of Catholic gentlemen. Catholic tenants were mobilized for migration, American rarities dispensed as gifts through the households of co-­religionists, and indigent Calvert kinsmen supported with the proceeds of the tobacco crop.67 Concurrently, the export trade to the West Indies enlarged the resources that kept alive an ‘underground gentry’ in Ireland, in defiance of the post-­Cromwellian ter­ ritorial settlement: entrenching Galway as a particular locale of Catholic power and influence.68 In England and Ireland, the colonies became part of the under­ girding behind Catholic religious life—­releasing funds to support the domestic mission and to sustain émigré colleges and convents, while nurturing public ambitions in otherwise unpromising political conditions.69 The rise of certain Catholic individuals into colonial high office, when they were denied access to the same opportunities at home, contained political impli­ cations that registered sharply in Old-­World commentary. One promotional pamphlet for Maryland, issued in 1646, maintained that colonial ventures could create new ‘bonds of fidelity’ between Catholics and their native country. The  author spoke of colonization as part of the same politique ‘reason of state’ that in other fields of foreign affairs had produced dynastic marriages and 65 Farrelly, Papist Patriots, p. 236. 66  Elizabeth Duhamel, ‘Colonel Henry Darnall and His Family’, Records of the Columbia Historical Society, 26 (1924), pp. 129–45; John Beverley Riggs, ‘Certain Early Maryland Families in the Vicinity of Washington’, Records of the Columbia Historical Society, 48 (1946), pp. 249–63. 67  Lee (ed.), Calvert Papers, I, pp. 237, 267–71, 277–80, 288. 68 Blake, Blake Family Records, pp. 107, 112–14; Patrick Melvin, ‘The Galway Tribes as Landowners and Gentry’, in Gerard Moran and Raymond Gillespie (eds.), Galway History and Society (Dublin, 1996), pp. 319–74; Kevin Whelan, ‘An Underground Gentry? Catholic Middlemen in Eighteenth-­ Century Ireland’, Eighteenth-­Century Ireland, 10 (1995), pp. 7–68. 69 Akenson, Montserrat, pp. 114–15; Frank Tyrer and J.  J.  Bagley (eds.), The Great Diurnal of Nicholas Blundell of Little Crosby, Lancashire, 3 vols. (Preston, 1958–62), I, pp. 4, 8, 28.

Empire and Overseas Missions  111 defensive alliances with Catholic powers, tempering the Protestant interests of the English kingdom. The pursuit of overseas empire was incompatible with narrow confessional restrictions on service, the tract surmised, since America had already yielded up ‘much more Land then all the Kings Protestant Subjects . . . would be able to possesse’.70 This idea amplified in commentary after the Restoration. The creation of a shared interest between Protestant England and Catholic Portugal was warranted, believed Richard Russell, because ‘tradeing’ rather than religion represented the ‘principall propp’ of the English kingdom, and the means by which it would advance within the world.71 Commerce, agreed the Irish Catholic legal scholar Charles Molloy in 1676, was now the ‘only object and care’ of princes seeking to enlarge their own dominions.72 For Catholic authors, the needs of overseas expansion had afforded a completely different conception of the English interest, at home and abroad. Ancient Rome itself had risen to greatness, opined the playwright and former Jamaica merchant Henry Neville Paine, when its emperors ‘Tolerated all sorts of Religions . . . and introduced all sorts of Gods of all Nations’ into its dominions.73 The Stuarts’ project in North Africa and the New World was presented as an enterprise calling for large-­scale mobilization of the British and Irish population: an endeavour that could not viably exclude individ­ uals on grounds of private religious opinions. Yet in the fissile world of later Stuart politics, the expression of these hopes exposed Catholic interests to growing peril. In America, and, increasingly, in England itself, Catholic promotions added to the ideological tensions kindled over the colonial experiment, and the questions raised over its management by the Court of Charles II. The reputation of Stuart colonial policy was made espe­ cially precarious by association with the Catholic duke of York—­the most ener­ getic Court champion of overseas expansion, as proprietor of New York, chair of the Tangier commission, and a director the Hudson’s Bay and Royal African com­ panies. It was in Tangier that Titus Oates claimed to have picked up the first whis­ pers of a ‘popish plot’ against the life of Charles II. By 1678, a stream of reports dispatched to Whig leaders by disaffected settlers in the Mediterranean fuelled the image of a city corrupted into a ‘nursery for popish solders’, and ‘seminary for popish priests’, under governors ‘who have made it their business to undermine the Protestant religion’. The result was to usher events in North Africa to the ­centre of the emerging firestorm over ‘popery and arbitrary government’. English Tangier—­evacuated in 1684—was a casualty of the Exclusion Crisis, denied the lifeline of parliamentary funding against a major Moroccan siege, after Charles II

70  Moderate and safe expedient, pp. 3, 6–7. 71  UC LC/P6/54. 72  Charles Molloy, De Jure Maritimo et Navali (London, 1676), sig. A3. 73  Henry Neville Payne, The persecutor expos’d (London, 1685), pp. 37, 39.

112  Gabriel Glickman refused to accept the prior condition of removing his brother from the line of royal succession.74 At the end of the decade, the same currents of anti-­popish feeling ignited opposition in America towards the centralization programme devised by the Court of James II, with its planned reorganization of New England, much of the Middle Colonies, and the West Indies according to the model of Spanish viceroyalties. Pamphlets, sermons, and calls for mobilization among colonial opponents focused on the power of ‘popish’ military officers promoted by the King, and stirred rumours of covert associations formed between French and Indian assail­ ants outside English borders, and the Catholic fifth column within. Major revolts breaking out in Boston and New York in the spring of 1689 were legitimized not merely as defences of local privileges, but as contributions by colonial Protestants to a greater global battle against the forces of Catholic universal monarchy. In June 1689, the consequences of the Revolution in England erupted into Maryland, when Protestant Associators stormed the state house, routed an army hastily raised by the Irish governor, William Joseph, and prepared the ground for a com­ prehensive purge of the Catholic influence within the colony.75 These events marked a bitterly ironic conclusion to the career of the third Lord Baltimore, who had voiced such trenchant ‘antiJesuiticall’ opposition to the autocratic and Francophile predilections of James II as to spark false rumours in London that he was set to turn Protestant.76

Survival and Consolidation, 1689‒c.1750 The Revolutions of 1688/9 unleashed new appeals to uproot the Catholic influ­ ence that had grown within the English overseas world—­calls to cleanse and rem­ oralize the colonies, voiced by newly appointed Protestant governors in partnership with transatlantic networks of Anglican clergymen.77 Government attentions focused initially on the West Indies where, between 1689 and 1690, the Irish Catholic communities provided the beating heart of a Jacobite resistance that outlasted by some months the Battle of the Boyne.78 By the middle of the decade, the governor of Jamaica still fretted over a core of 500 Catholic families within his own domain, whom he considered liable to aid and abet a French ­invasion.79 But even in more stable parts of English America, the reports of 74  Gabriel Glickman, ‘Empire, “Popery”, and the Fall of English Tangier 1662–1684’, Journal of Modern History, 87 (2015), pp. 247–80. 75  For the fullest accounts of these events, see Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (Philadelphia, 2011); David. S.  Lovejoy, The Glorious Revolution in America (New York, 1972); Richard Dunn, ‘The Glorious Revolution and America’, in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 445–66. 76  Stephen C. Taylor (ed.), The Entring Book of Roger Morrice IV (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 382. 77 Stanwood, Empire Reformed, pp. 207–19. 78  CO 153/3, fols. 426, 438–9. 79  BL Add MS 12430, fol. 4.

Empire and Overseas Missions  113 Catholic perseverance dramatized wider fears over the weaknesses of the Anglican ministry, and over the Protestant disunities that stifled collaborative work for the support of ‘true religion’ in the New World. The eye of the Crown was fixed upon office-­ holders such as the Bermuda chief justice, Henry Hordesnell—­considered ‘more Popish than Protestant’ when he had served as mayor of Tangier. ‘What his religion is, the people at home, in Ireland and in Tangier know best’, remarked the speaker of the Bermuda assembly in 1689, for ‘he never used our church’.80 Wrested formally out of the hands of the Calvert family in 1691, Maryland became a particular focal point for the missionizing and church-­building programmes developed by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, backed by a latticework of new laws conceived to clamp down on ‘popish’ worship, bar Catholics from public office and legal practice, and stifle the supply of migrants from Ireland.81 Yet in the face of these pressures, the Catholic interest survived in English America, and the Catholic presence even expanded through the early eighteenth century in its old pockets of influence and activity. While Irish planters were purged from public office in the Caribbean, the more pragmatic post-­Revolution governors proved successful at reintegrating the community into the lawful life of the islands. Spared the expected wave of confiscations and expropriations, Catholic settlers retained a stake in the tranquillity of the English West Indies. A smattering served loyally in the Caribbean militias through the reign of Queen Anne, when war returned to the region, and governors were compelled to mo­bil­ ize against French attacks upon the Leeward Islands in 1710, 1711 and 1712.82 Accordingly, colonial resources gave some Catholics the space to make a quiet accommodation to post-­Revolutionary conditions. In 1698, the merchant James Burghill attested that he had come to Nevis to avoid the apprehension ‘of being ill affected to the government of the nation . . . hee thought it the best way to transport himselfe into some where hee might have quiet and [be] free from all suspicion’.83 Relatives of the planting elites of Montserrat, Nevis, and St Christopher’s were heav­ ily represented within the roll-­call of those who struck terms with William III through the 1691 Articles of Limerick.84 By carving out a quiet arena for themselves in the West Indies, Irish colonists enlarged the social and commercial space avail­ able to their co-­religionists at home. Planters and East India merchants kept the Irish walk buoyant as a feature of the Royal Exchange, and exploited their City 80  Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, vol. 13: 1689–1692 (London, 1901), p. 114; BL Sloane MS 3512, fol. 283. 81  LPL Fulham Papers, Maryland, I, fols. 51–2; Evan Haefeli, ‘Toleration and Empire: The Origins of American Religious Pluralism’, in Foster (ed.), British North America, pp. 103–35, esp. 128–30; Brent S. Sirota, The Christian Monitors: The Church of England and the Age of Benevolence 1680–1730 (Yale, 2014), pp. 223–47. 82 Akenson, Montserrat, pp. 137–51. 83  TNA CO 152/3 fol. 3. I owe this reference to Rebecca Hickman. 84  Staffordshire County Record Office, Stafford, D641/2/K/2/4; John Oldmixon, Memoirs of Ireland from the Restoration to the present times (London, 1716), p. 251.

114  Gabriel Glickman footholds to lobby the Crown against the excesses of the penal laws and the restric­ tions on the trade of their kingdom. In 1724, one Protestant political economist warned of the perils of creating a Bank of Ireland, in view of its likely domination by Catholic merchants and financiers enriched by overseas trade.85 The persistence of Catholicism in Maryland owed to subtler manoeuvres and machinations. The restitution of proprietary rights to the Calvert family in 1715 was conditional on the confirmation of the fourth Lord Baltimore into the Church of England. But, through the decades after the Revolution, the 3,000 resident Catholics still included ‘some of the richest Men in the Province’, as one report warned the archbishop of Canterbury, and most proved ill-­inclined to surrender their old spiritual affinities.86 In the Chesapeake, as in eighteenth-­century Ireland, the defence of the Catholic religion was made possible by a recondite world of church papistry, covert financing, and selective family conversions, with the result that nominally Protestant governors, councillors, and assemblymen all col­lab­or­ ated in the protection of priests, schools, and chapels. Catholicism was sustained by supplies of funds and books from the office of the vicar apostolic in London.87 As Maura Farrelly has shown, its endurance could be glimpsed in the devotional motifs (fountains, pearls, and roses) imported into gentry portraiture, and in the longevity of certain tell-­tale names—‘Henrietta Maria’, ‘Francis Xavier’— among apparently conformist landowning families.88 Catholics in Maryland, together with growing congregations in neighbouring Pennsylvania, benefited from the reluctance of the Williamite and then Hanoverian Crown to create Episcopal establishments in America—­primarily for fear of sowing dissension with other Protestant congregations.89 But for all their public professions of loyalty to George I and George II, Catholic communities were making their slow and latent transition towards a more ‘American’ identity. By the mid-­eighteenth century, Maryland cler­ gymen and their patrons were pinpointing rights written into the colonial charters as the foundations of civil and religious liberty for Catholics in the New World: pro­ tective buttresses against penal laws passed in Westminster.90 Perhaps the most dis­ tinguished product of this evolving culture was the French-­educated planter and polymath Charles Carroll of Carrollton, grandson of Irish migrants, regarded by

85  John Bergin, ‘Irish Catholics in Eighteenth-­Century London and Their Networks’, Eighteenth-­ Century Life, 39 (2015), pp. 66–102; James Livesey, Civil Society and Empire: Ireland and Scotland in the Eighteenth-­Century Atlantic World (New Haven, 2009), pp. 94–8. 86  LPL Fulham Papers, I, fols. 100–3. 87 Elizabeth  L.  Roark, Artists of Colonial America (Westport, 2003), pp. 77–81; Luca Codignola, ‘The Holy See and the Conversion of the Indians in French and British North America, 1486–1760’, in Karen O. Kupperman (ed.), America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750 (Chapel Hill, 1995), pp. 195–242, esp. 208–19; Westminster Diocesan Archives, London, Series B, 45, no. 135. 88 Farrelly, Papist Patriots, pp. 157–8, 179–80. 89  Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, vol. 16: 1697–1698 (London, 1905), p. 593. 90 Michael  D.  Breidenbach, Our Dear-­Bought Liberty: Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America (Cambridge, MA, 2021), pp. 169–230; Farrelly, Papist Patriots, pp. 197–8, 202, 207.

Empire and Overseas Missions  115 1776 as one of the wealthiest men in the overseas dominions, and the single Catholic signatory behind the Declaration of Independence.91

Conclusion As the realm of early modern England expanded geographically, so its confes­ sional identity fragmented. With waves of settlers, migrants, and adventurers outpacing the authority of Church and parliament in the Atlantic world, the English colonies became spaces to exhibit and enlarge the unintended religious pluralism of the mother kingdom. By the middle of the eighteenth century, ­different congregations of Protestants in Britain and its empire had begun to rally behind a unifying rhetoric of religion and nationality. The Catholic influence was cast to the margins of the triumphalist narratives, both imperial and American, that valorized the creation of the English-­speaking world as a providentially sanctioned global endeavour for the Protestant religion. Yet, beneath the public surface, Catholics had flourished within the colonial setting; prospering in places where the terms of subjecthood were open to negotiation, and where the Crown and its agents governed without the aid of monopolistic church estab­ lishments. For more ambitious Catholics, the colonies figured not simply as protective spaces for the persecuted, but as the training ground for alternative systems of allegiance, which could be imported into the case for civil compre­ hension in the Old World. Catholic colonial activity cast light upon the legal and ideological uncertainties that attended on the English pursuit of empire. Elizabethan promoters had im­agined colonization as a quest to bring about the everlasting glory of the reformed religion. Conversely, Richard Russell and successive Lords Baltimore argued that commercial and territorial needs called upon the English Crown to temper the Protestant identity of the realm, reduce the religious obligations upon the civil magistrate, and widen the range of subjects drafted into royal service. In the shadow of these debates, the Catholic presence within the empire grew solidly through the eighteenth century. The Treaty of Utrecht conferred British sover­ eignty upon multi-­ confessional societies in Gibraltar and Minorca that mirrored—­rather too closely for some critics—­the profile of English Tangier.92 By the 1750s, an estimated 7,000 Scottish Catholics served with the British army in North America, as the northern kingdom deepened its foothold in the overseas dominions.93 In 1774, confessional tensions spread out through the Atlantic 91  Michael  D.  Breidenbach, ‘Conciliarism and the American Founding’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 73 (2016), pp. 467–500. 92  Jesuits in Britain Archives, London, Notes and Fragments, Section II, 93, Parker to Plowden, 15 January 1714; A letter to the Independent Whig (London, 1720). 93  William Forbes Leith, Memoirs of Scottish Catholics during the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries, 2 vols. (London, 1909), II, p. 360.

116  Gabriel Glickman world, when the British government legislated for the religious liberties of newly acquired French subjects in Quebec and extended a public footing for the Catholic religion within a considerable part of the empire. Physically displaced from Old England, the colonies were nonetheless part of its ideological domain, freighted with the same historic memories and the same abiding moral pressures. In building up new worlds beyond Europe, British and Irish Catholics carried with them all the old, unresolved questions, dilemmas, and predicaments that impinged upon their place within a Protestant kingdom.

Select Bibliography Akenson, Donald  H., If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat 1630–1730 (Liverpool, 1997). Binasco, Matteo, Making, Breaking and Remaking the Irish Missionary Network: Ireland, Rome and the West Indies in the Seventeenth Century (London, 2020). Breidenbach, Michael D., Our Dear-Bought Liberty: Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America (Cambridge, MA, 2021). Cullen, Louis M., ‘The Irish Diaspora of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Nicholas Canny (ed.), Europeans on the Move: Studies in European Migration, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 113–52. Farrelly, Maura Jane, Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity (Oxford, 2012). Glickman, Gabriel, ‘Catholic Interests and the Politics of English Overseas Expansion 1660–1689’, Journal of British Studies, 55 (2016), pp. 680–708. Krugler, John, English & Catholic: The Lords Baltimore in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore, 2004). Pizzoni, Giada, British Catholic Merchants in the Colonial Age, 1670–1714 (Woodbridge, 2019). Shaw, Jenny and Block, Kristen, ‘Subjects without an Empire: The Irish in the Early Modern Caribbean’, Past & Present, 210 (2011), pp. 33–60. Spurlock, R. Scott, ‘Catholics in a Puritan Atlantic: The Liminality of Empire’s Edge’, in Crawford Gribben and Scott Spurlock (eds.), Puritans and Catholics in the Trans-Atlantic World 1600–1800 (London, 2015), pp. 21–46.

6

Missionary Activity and Religious Houses Matteo Binasco / Hannah Thomas

Mission to Britain and Ireland The aim of this section is to provide an examination of how and to what extent the missionary links developed between the British Isles and the Holy See changed and evolved from the accession to the throne of King William III in 1689 to the Jacobite rising of 1745.1 The seismic events of the Glorious Revolution had no significant impact on how Propaganda Fide—­the Roman ministry founded in 1622 to oversee missionary activity in non-­Christian and Protestant countries—­ viewed the British Isles. The most tangible aspect of the congregation’s attitude is demonstrated by the fact that, during both the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, it never treated England and Wales, Ireland, and Scotland as a single administrative unit. Therefore, the cardinals of Propaganda continued to view the nations as three separate kingdoms with their own laws and specific problems.2 The congregation paid close attention to events in all three kingdoms, but Ireland continued to retain its priority in the strategies of Propaganda throughout the eighteenth century. A good, albeit rudimentary, way to confirm this aspect is to look at the volume of business devoted by Propaganda to each of the three kingdoms. This shows Ireland remained the highest focus, followed by Scotland, and finally England. The structure of this chapter will follow this scheme, and it will begin with the Irish scene.

Ireland The accession to the throne of William III and the defeat of James II dealt a lethal blow to the hopes of his Catholic supporters in the British Isles and Continental Europe.3 William III’s victory and the rise of the Protestant ascendancy 1  For the organization of the mission in the period 1641–88, see Chapters 1 and 3 by John Morrill and Eoin Devlin, respectively. 2  Hugh Fenning, OP, ‘The Three Kingdoms: England, Ireland, and Scotland’, in Joseph Metzler (ed.), Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide Memoria Rerum, 5 vols. (Rom-­Freiburg-­Wien, 1971–6), II, pp. 604–5. 3  John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1973). Matteo Binasco / Hannah Thomas, Missionary Activity and Religious Houses In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II: Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745. Edited by: John Morrill and Liam Temple, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843436.003.0007

118  Matteo Binasco / Hannah Thomas inaugurated a period of legislation against the Catholic clergy in Ireland which would officially last until 1829.4 From 1697 the Irish parliament approved acts which banished all Catholic bishops, and indeed all regular clergy, with heavy restrictions on secular priests and persistent efforts to prevent the arrival of missionaries from Continental Europe.5 The effects were immediate: by 1704 only four bishops were resident in Ireland. It took until 1748 for Propaganda to return to the position that had been achieved across the period from 1657 to 1684, that is, the filling of all Irish sees.6 Yet the strong commitment displayed by Propaganda clashed with the right granted by Innocent XI in 1687 to James II, and afterwards to his son and successor James III, to appoint Irish bishops.7 To the eyes of the Roman congregation, the right of the Stuarts was a heavy burden for the Irish bishops, and a solution was found at the end of June 1715. Propaganda agreed that all the future appointments would require two papal briefs: one for the bishop elected in which no mention was made of the royal participation in the appointment and the other, addressed to James III, which explained that the omission did not derogate from his royal rights.8 If we consider that, between 1687 and 1765, James II and James III appointed 129 bishops in Ireland, it is clear that Propaganda navigated a minefield by exercising extreme caution.9 Given that Jacobitism remained a prominent factor in Irish episcopal appointments until the mid-­eighteenth century, Propaganda’s role in the process of selection remained very limited.10 They did succeed in appointing a few prominent bishops who, thanks to their personal links, succeeded in strengthening the networks between Ireland and Rome. One of these bishops was Hugh MacMahon, who was appointed to the see of Clogher in 1707 and was then translated to Armagh in 1715 upon Propaganda’s direct nomination, thus bypassing Stuart control.11 MacMahon had been educated at the Irish College of Rome where he

4  Ian McBride, Eighteenth Century Ireland. The Isle of Slaves (Dublin, 2009), pp. 215–45; Patrick Fagan, Divided Loyalties: The Question of an Oath for Irish Catholics in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1997). 5 Liam Chambers, ‘Rome and the Irish Catholic Community in the Eighteenth Century, 1691–1789’, in Matteo Binasco (ed.), Rome and Irish Catholicism in the Atlantic World, 1622–1908 (Cham, 2018), pp. 239–40. 6  Fenning, ‘The Three Kingdoms’, p. 606. On Propaganda Fide’s role in the reconstruction of the Irish episcopate during the Restoration, see Benignus Millett, ‘Survival and Reorganization, 1650–1695’, in Patrick J. Corish (ed.), A History of Irish Catholicism, vol. 3 (Dublin, 1968), pp. 13–63. 7  Cathaldus Giblin, OFM, ‘The Stuart Nomination of Irish Bishops, 1687–1765’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 105 (1966), pp. 35–47. 8 Archives of the Sacred Congregation ‘de Propaganda Fide’ (hereafter APF), Congregazioni Particolari (hereafter CP) 85, fol. 3, 26 June 1715. 9  Laurence J. Flynn, ‘Hugh MacMahon, Bishop of Clogher 1707–15 and Archbishop of Armagh 1715–37’, Seanchas Ard Mhacha, 7 (1973), pp. 114–20; Edward Corp, The Stuarts in Italy, 1719–1766: A Royal Court in Permanent Exile (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 211–39. 10  Fenning, ‘The Three Kingdoms’, pp. 606–7. 11  Giblin, ‘The Stuart Nomination’, pp. 35–47.

Missionary Activity and Religious Houses  119 had remained from 1683 to 1689.12 The few years that he spent in Rome had a deep influence on MacMahon. He became an important source of information to Propaganda and to the nunciature of Flanders, through which the Holy See constantly monitored the political and religious situation in the British Isles.13 MacMahon’s prominent career was not an isolated one, as other students at the Irish College of Rome came to be appointed bishops. According to an undated memoir—­probably written by Alexander Roche, the Jesuit rector of the Irish College of Rome—­between 1650 and 1736 another six former students became bishops, a figure which markedly contrasted with the seventy-­five Irish bishops trained in the colleges in France between 1685 and 1800.14 MacMahon remained an exception; the overall pattern of the relationship between Propaganda and the Irish episcopate was that many of the problems which had existed in the seventeenth century persisted throughout the eighteenth. One of these problems was that the Irish bishops had less extensive faculties than the vicars apostolic in England, though the latter were lower in rank. A particular thorny issue was that Propaganda granted the Irish bishops the set of faculties known as ‘Formula 6’, which impeded them from granting matrimonial dispensations to parties related within the second degree of consanguinity or affinity. This meant that many Catholics turned to the Protestant clergy.15 A solution appeared to have been found in 1711 when the congregation agreed to grant more extensive faculties, but apparently the Holy Office rejected Propaganda’s decision, claiming that the Irish bishops already had enough faculties.16 A further issue emerging during the first half of the eighteenth century was that the Irish bishops held no national or provincial synods which were required to deal with urgent political and theological problems.17 This was in sharp contrast to the seven­teenth century when forty synods—­ten nationals and thirty provincials—­were held.18 Another crucial dimension played an instrumental role in the missionary networks developed between Rome and Ireland: the relationship between the secular or diocescan and regular clergy. Compared to the early decades of the seventeenth century when Rome was isolated from the fast-­growing Continental network of Irish colleges, the situation was radically different at the onset of the

12 Matteo Binasco and Vera Orschel, ‘Prosopography of Irish Students Admitted to the Irish College, Rome, 1628–1798’, Archivium Hibernicum (hereafter Arch. Hib.), 66 (2013), p. 57. 13 See Archivio Apostolico Vaticano (hereafter AAV), Segreteria di Stato, Fiandra, 5, fols. 359rv–361v. 14  Archives of the Pontifical Irish College, Rome (hereafter PICR), Liber IV, fols. 208v–213r, 215v. 15  APF, Acta, 81, fol. 572. 16  APF, Acta, 95, fol. 387; Bernard Dompnier, ‘L’administration des sacrements en terre protestante à la lumière des facultates et des dubia des missionnaires (XVIIe–­XVIIIe siècles)’, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome-­Italie et Méditerranée, École Française de Rome, 121 (2009), pp. 23–38. 17  Fenning, ‘The Three Kingdoms’, pp. 608–9. 18  Alison Forrestal, Catholic Synods in Ireland, 1600–1690 (Dublin, 1998), pp. 195–6.

120  Matteo Binasco / Hannah Thomas eighteenth century.19 By then there were four colleges for missionary formation—­ three for the regular clergy and one for the diocesan—­in the city and one noviciate located 35 miles north of it.20 With few exceptions, it is still difficult to provide precise figures on the number of students admitted in each of the colleges per year, and for the overall clerical population for the eighteenth century. Hugh Fenning’s studies have demonstrated that during the eighteenth century there was an increase in the number of Irish clerics ordained in Rome to 507, an increase from the 338 recorded in the seventeenth century.21 It appears that the capacity of the Irish Colleges in Rome to admit students had ebbs and flows. In 1742 St Isidore’s had thirty students while Capranica hosted twenty-­five novices.22 The figures for San Clemente indicate that it fared quite well between 1710 and 1797 when it accepted 170 Dominicans.23 While there are no precise figures for the Irish Augustinians, the evidence for the college for the formation of secular clergy indicates that, in the 1730s, it remained an underfunded institution which could support only nine students.24 The differences emerging in the capacity to admit and form a certain cohort of students played in favour of the regular clergy which—­ particularly the Dominicans and Franciscans—­could enjoy a wider network of support both in the Italian peninsula and across Continental Europe. If at the beginning of the eighteenth century there were about 750 secular priests in Ireland, it must be noted that the overwhelming majority of them had been educated in the colleges in France, especially in Paris. The limited role played by the Irish College of Rome did not go unnoticed. For example, Giacomo Quirici, Propaganda’s agent in London, wrote to Rome in 1719 to remark that he had never met a secular Irish priest trained in the Italian peninsula.25 Given its slender resources, Propaganda had few alternatives to offer to the Irish seculars who went to Rome. The only concrete form of support provided by the congregation was to create four places for Irish secular students at the Urban College, Propaganda’s diocesan college, in 1719. The number of places would be 19  Matteo Binasco, Making, Breaking, and Remaking the Irish Missionary Network. Ireland, Rome, and the West Indies in the Seventeenth Century (Cham, 2020), pp. 23–41. 20  The three structures for the regular clergy were respectively: St Isidore’s College, founded in 1625 for the Irish Franciscans; the college of San Matteo in Merulana for the Irish Augustinians, which was opened in 1656 but which became active only in 1739; and the college of SS Sisto and Clemente for the Irish Dominicans, established in 1677. The noviciate was opened at Capranica in 1656 for the Irish Franciscan province. The only structure for the diocesan clergy was the Irish College established in 1628. 21  Hugh Fenning, OP, ‘Irishmen Ordained at Rome, 1698–1759’, Arch. Hib. 50 (1996), pp. 29–49; Fenning, ‘Irishmen Ordained at Rome, 1760–1800’, Arch. Hib. 51 (1997), pp. 16–37; Fenning, ‘Irishmen Ordained at Rome, 1572–1697’, Arch. Hib. 59 (2005), pp. 1–36. 22  Fenning, ‘John Kent’s Report on the State of the Irish Mission, 1742’, Arch. Hib. 28 (1966), p. 82. 23  Leonard Boyle and Hugh Fenning, A San Clemente Miscellany (Rome, 1971), pp. 55–6. 24  PICR, Liber IV, fols. 222r–223r. 25  APF, Scritture riferite nei Congressi Originali (hereafter SOCG), 618, fols. 304–5.

Missionary Activity and Religious Houses  121 increased to just eight in 1794.26 The limited number of places available in the colleges combined with a worse problem: the poor quality of the diocesan priests. A common issue which weaved through all the complaints addressed to Propaganda during the eighteenth century was the widespread ignorance of the seculars, the majority of whom had a rudimentary knowledge of Latin and insufficient training in philosophy and theology. This problem was heightened by the fact that, prior to the departure for Continental Europe, most of the priests were already ordained ad titulo missionis.27 Most of the Irish bishops accepted this noxious practice as it was the only means for the priests to rely on Mass stipends during their years abroad.28 Though this thorny matter was already known to the congregation, a temporary solution was only found in late May 1741, when it was agreed that each bishop could ordain only twelve candidates ad titulo missionis during his lifetime, a limit which they often disregarded.29 The extent to which the Irish priests educated in Rome experienced a process of ‘Romanization’ that impacted on their return to Ireland and their subsequent activity remains unclear. In some cases, the students from the Gaelic areas who prolonged their stay in Rome tended to forget the Irish language. A telling ex­ample was that of James Barry—­a secular student admitted to study at the Collegio di San Biagio at Montecitorio—­who in 1741 petitioned Propaganda to have Francis O’Molloy’s doctrine and grammar in Irish reprinted, as it had been by the congregation in 1676 and in 1677 respectively, for he had forgotten the language.30 Within the troubled context of the Irish mission, the regulars were also a thorn in the side of Propaganda. Like the seculars, their numbers were a source of concern as, in 1750, they were recorded to be around 700, with almost all of them trained in the Continental colleges.31 With the noteworthy exception of the Irish pastoral college of Louvain—­founded in 1623 and in which Propaganda kept the right to appoint the rector—­the congregation had little control over the other sem­ in­ar­ies.32 In the case of the colleges in Rome, the situation progressively de­teri­or­ ated during the eighteenth century with the outbreak of continuous squabbles between the rectors and the students, whose quality seems to have declined since the seventeenth century. A visitation made at St Isidore’s College in 1724 revealed considerable insubordination and poor educational attainment in the students, a

26  APF, Acta, 89, fol. 360; Acta, 164, fol. 599. 27  ‘ad titulo missionis’ can be roughly translated as ‘ordained for the mission’. 28  Hugh Fenning, OP, The Undoing of the Friars (Louvain, 1972), pp. 92–109. 29  APF, CP, 85, fols. 15–81, 131–2; APF, Acta, 111, fol. 238; Acta, 145, fol. 2. 30  APF, Congressi Irlanda, 10, fols. 38rv–39. 31  Fenning, ‘The Three Kingdoms’, pp. 610–12. 32  Ralph M. Wiltgen, ‘Propaganda is Placed in Charge of the Pontifical Colleges’, in Metzler (ed.), Memoria Rerum, I/1, p. 496; T.  J.  Walsh, The Irish Continental College Movement (Dublin, 1973), pp. 64–5.

122  Matteo Binasco / Hannah Thomas dire consequence of the fact that most of them had been scholars and soldiers who had joined the order in rushed noviciates.33 All this was compounded on the mission by disputes over the issuing of faculties, especially the faculty to bind and loose sins in the confessional. The regular clergy across Britain and Ireland wanted these to be granted by their superiors and not by the bishops. This came to a head with a submission to Propaganda in 1730.34 Yet the congregation’s reply was categorical as it ruled that in all matters relating to the care of souls the regulars were subject to the bishops. In early 1742 Benedict XIV, a key figure of the Catholic Enlightenment, decided to send a vis­ it­or to review all the persistent problems of the Irish mission.35 He appointed John Kent, rector of the Irish College of Louvain, who spent the summer and early autumn of 1742 visiting a good part of Ireland.36 In 1743 Kent addressed a relation to Propaganda in which he complained about the large number of priests who could not be supported by the Catholic population.37 Kent’s report resulted in the promulgation of a set of reforming decrees—­eight for the regular and twelve for the secular clergy—­in early 1751. The decrees markedly reinforced the bishops’ authority, stating they could deploy regulars and seculars in any location they needed. Moreover, the decrees had a tangible and crucial impact on the regu­lar clergy for two clear reasons. First, they forbade the regular clergy to accept novices in Ireland, thus forcing the young candidates to turn to Continental Europe. Second, any regular arriving in Ireland without letters of obedience to the bishops could be removed and expelled from the country.38 The decrees of 1751 remained the most significant intervention of Propaganda over the structure of the Irish mission. They were a watershed in the struggle which pitted the seculars and the regulars against one another, with the latter paying the highest price in terms of a drastic decline from a numerical and pastoral point of view.39

Scotland The situation of the Catholic Church in Scotland had four key similarities with that of England and Ireland: a Protestant government, subjection to the penal 33  Biblioteca Corsini, Rome, MS. 933, fols. 109–17; APF, Congressi, Irlanda, 8, fols. 258–61; Joseph MacMahon, OFM, ‘The Silent Century, 1698–1829’, in Edel Bhreathnach, Joseph MacMahon, OFM, and John McCafferty (eds.), The Irish Franciscans, 1534–1990 (Dublin, 2009), pp. 77–101. 34  APF, Acta, 94, fol. 8; Acta, 143, fols. 232–46. 35  Rebecca Messbarger, Christopher  M.  S.  Johns, and Philip Gavitt (eds.), Benedict XIV and the Enlightenment: Art, Science, and Spirituality (Toronto, 2017). 36  Fenning, ‘The Three Kingdoms’, pp. 613–14. 37  Fenning, ‘John Kent’s Report’, pp. 59–102. 38  APF, CP, 32, fol. 63; Acta, 100, fol. 177, Fenning, ‘John Kent’s Report’, pp. 59–102; Fenning, ‘The Three Kingdoms’, pp. 612–15. 39 Fenning, The Undoing of the Friars, p. 236.

Missionary Activity and Religious Houses  123 laws, constant oversight by Propaganda, and damaging disputes between the regu­lars and seculars. Yet the Scottish mission appeared a more radical and difficult context than its English and Irish counterparts. The available figures speak for themselves: the overall number of Catholics—­estimated to be about 20,000—were served by forty priests (thirteen regulars and twenty-­seven seculars), in 1688.40 In 1694 Propaganda sought to impose greater unity on the Scottish mission by appointing Thomas Nicholson as the first apostolic vicar of Scotland.41 Up until 1705, when the congregation granted him a coadjutor, Nicholson supervised the entire Scottish mission on his own, a task which proved exhausting. The visitation of the Highlands made by Nicholson during the summer of 1700 revealed many of the challenges he had to face. The relation submitted to Propaganda portrayed a situation in which Catholics lived in scattered and remote settlements which exposed the inhabitants of that area to the risk of persecutions or forced conversion. Nicholson reported that he had introduced ten Scottish and Irish missionaries, both regulars and seculars, with the latter able to speak the Gaelic  language. In doing so, Nicholson followed in the footsteps of the Irish Franciscan mission in the seventeenth century.42 In his relation, he also so­li­ cit­ed Propaganda to grant a subsidy of 500 crowns so that more missionaries could be despatched, and for seminaries for native priests in the Highlands to be founded.43 In 1704 Nicholson’s proposal was accepted by the congregation, but the first seminary would only open in 1714 on Loch Morar, located on the western coast of Inverness. During the Jacobite rising in 1715 the seminary was relocated at Glenlivet in an even more remote spot.44 With the establishment of the Highland vicariate in 1731 there seemed to be room for the opening of new seminaries. In that year Hugh MacDonald, the first vicar apostolic of the Highlands, reopened the seminary at Loch Morar. During the Jacobite rising of 1745 it was destroyed together with that at Glenlivet, causing the plans to establish new seminaries to be postponed until the 1770s.45 Nicholson and MacDonald’s plan aimed to provide a basic educational standard for young Catholics with a view for their future enrolment in one of the Scots Colleges located in Continental Europe. Yet, in Nicholson’s opinion, the

40  APF, Acta, 64, fols. 34–7; Fenning, ‘The Three Kingdoms’, p. 623. 41  APF, Acta, 74, fols. 248–53. 42 On the Irish Franciscan mission to the Highlands, see Jason Harris, ‘The Irish Franciscan Mission to the Highlands and Islands’, in David Edwards and Simon Egan (eds.), The Scots in Early Stuart Ireland: Union and Separation in Two Kingdoms (Manchester, 2015), pp. 203–29. 43  APF, Congressi, Scozia, 2, fols. 28rv–31rv. 44 APF, Acta, 83, fol. 377; Peter  F.  Anson, Underground Catholicism in Scotland (Montrose, 1970), p. 111. 45 Anson, Underground Catholicism, p. 111.

124  Matteo Binasco / Hannah Thomas experience abroad only accustomed them to a life of ease which clashed with the harsh reality of the mission.46 For its part, Propaganda gave no financial support towards the seminaries project. The congregation’s limited resources were offset by the decision made in 1708 by Cardinal Giuseppe Sacripante, protector of Scotland, who ordered that the Scots College of Rome should provide 30 crowns to underwrite the costs of each individual student’s journey from Scotland to the city. Yet the cardinal’s proposal was largely inadequate as the sum simply covered the costs of the trip from Paris to Rome.47 Not surprisingly, the persistent financial weakness of the congregation prevented the arrival of a larger cohort of students. The figures for the eighteenth century show a tangible decline in the number of students entering the Scots College of Rome, with a hundred admissions recorded—141 less than the seventeenth century.48 The congregation’s inability to provide steady financial support towards the Scottish mission was further aggravated by some ill-­fated plans. One of these plans was its rash attempt in 1707 to unite the Irish, the English, and the Scots Colleges of Rome under the title of ‘British Colleges’, a move that met with concerted opposition from the staff and seminarians of the colleges, as well as from James II. The plan was abandoned.49 A further troubled matter was the quarrel over the Jansenist dispute which involved the Scots College in Paris, the trad­ ition­al stopover for the students travelling from Scotland to Rome. From the early 1730s until the late 1740s continuous disputes and accusations made against the rectors and the staff of the Scots College in Paris impacted this traffic, disrupting a missionary route which had connected Rome with the Scottish mission.50 The much smaller Scottish mission faced the same problems as the Irish mission in terms of missionary faculties and their abuse. Between 1700 and 1704 Nicholson devoted himself to drawing up a set of statutes with the key aim of ensuring uniformity of practice throughout the Scottish mission and to prevent the abuses made both by regulars and seculars who too easily administered the sacraments to people living ‘in continuous scandals’.51 Propaganda had decided as early as 1697 to extend to Scotland the decrees of the English mission which placed the regulars under the bishops’ jurisdiction in all aspects pertaining to the

46  APF, Acta, 82, fols. 454–5; Fenning, ‘The Three Kingdoms’, p. 626. 47  James F. MacMillan, ‘Development 1707–1820’, in Raymond McCluskey (ed.), The Scots College Rome, 1600–2000 (Edinburgh, 2000), pp. 43–5. 48  Records of the Scots colleges at Douai, Rome, Madrid, Valladolid and Ratisbon, vol. I: Registers of Students (Aberdeen, 1906), pp. 101–46. 49  APF, CP. 34A, fols. 92, 109. 50  James F. McMillan, ‘Scottish Catholics and the Jansenist Controversy: The Case Reopened’, Innes Review, 33 (1982), pp. 23–33; James  F.  McMillan, ‘Jansenism and Anti-­Jansenism in Eighteenth-­ Century Scotland: The Unigenitus Quarrels on the Scottish Catholic Mission, 1732–1746’, Innes Review, 39 (1988), pp. 12–45. 51  APF, Acta, 74, fol. 103; CP, 32, fols. 325, 337–47 (‘in continui scandali’).

Missionary Activity and Religious Houses  125 administration of the sacraments and care of the souls.52 In the early 1700s Nicholson further reasserted these rules by adding that all disputes between regu­lars and seculars had to be addressed to him, and eventually by him to the Holy See. Another seminal point of the decrees was that all missionaries were to remain in a fixed place and could not move without the bishop’s consent.53 Though in the late 1730s there were some disputes with the Jesuit missionaries for the Highland missions, Propaganda stood firm on its decisions and in 1751 it reaffirmed that, as in Ireland, all the regulars and seculars were subject to the authority of the bishop and vicars apostolic.54

England In the eighteenth century the Catholic Church in England shared with Ireland and Scotland the reality of being under a Protestant government and subject to penal laws. A substantial difference between the Irish mission and the English mission was the great power granted by Propaganda to the vicars apostolic. Their role was further strengthened by the congregation’s decision, in 1688, to divide England and Wales into four districts, each of which was entrusted to a vicar apostolic.55 Though the English vicars apostolic enjoyed more extended faculties than the Irish bishops, it must be remembered that they had to administer larger areas in which Catholics were scattered. The process of selecting and appointing the vicars apostolic proved extremely difficult for Propaganda for two key ­reasons. The first was that, prior to any appointment, it had to consult (at least in the early decades of the eighteenth century) the Stuart court, as well as the agent of the English clergy in Rome. The second was the widespread reluctance of the secular clergy to accept the appointment of regulars as vicars apostolic. In the 1720s Propaganda managed to find a compromise by deciding to appoint a regu­lar to the Western district—­the poorer and most desolate vicariate—­and three seculars to the other three districts.56 The task of the vicars apostolic was extremely challenging as they operated without a parochial system and with heavy taxation imposed on many Catholics. The situation was exacerbated by widespread anti-­Catholic and anti-­Roman feeling. Yet the support provided by Propaganda towards the structure of the vicars

52  APF, Acta, 120, fols. 188–9. 53  APF, Acta, 87, fols. 482–5. 54  APF, Acta, 120, fols. 188–9; Congressi, Scozia, 2, fols. 367rv–368rv; Alastair Roberts, ‘Jesuits in the Highlands: Three Phases’, Journal of Jesuit Studies, 7 (2020), pp. 103–16. 55  Fenning, ‘The Three Kingdoms’, pp. 616–17; Nicholas Schofield and Gerard Skinner, The English Vicars Apostolic, 1688–1850 (Oxford, 2009). 56  APF, Acta, 77, fols. 17–19; Acta, 81, fols. 260–1; Acta, 87, fols. 419–24; Acta, 82, fols. 455–7; CP, 85, fol. 163.

126  Matteo Binasco / Hannah Thomas apostolic remained steady throughout the eighteenth century.57 In particular, the congregation kept a keen eye on the Western district, providing a series of sub­sid­ ies and seeking to direct more priests to that area. Moreover, in 1722, Propaganda made an agreement with the rectors of the English Colleges of Douai and Rome to have a quota of reserved places for seminarians from the Western district.58 Two commonalities between the Irish and the English mission were the number of the clergy, both regular and secular, and, once again, disputes over the use (or most of the times abuse) of missionary faculties. Like in Ireland in the first half of the eighteenth century, most of the priests active in England were regular clergy. Though it is difficult to provide a precise number, a fair and likely estimate suggests that the seculars were only one-­third of the overall clergy active in England and Wales.59 In 1723 the superior of the English Benedictines asserted that there were only thirty or forty seculars active at home.60 This scant presence inevitably contrasts with the capacity to admit and train students displayed by the English Continental colleges. The college in Rome, for example, during the first half of the eighteenth century, accepted 226 new seminarians.61 The numbers of regulars are also rough estimates. For example, the English regulars claimed that, in 1764, they accounted for 220 of the 300 missionaries operating in England and Wales.62 The numerical preponderance of the regular clergy was also associated with a series of accusations on their mediocre quality. The archives of Propaganda contain many examples of these accusations. In 1710 James Smith, vicar apostolic of the northern district, suggested that the superiors of the regular orders should henceforth send the best educated candidates to England.63 In 1746 Benjamin Petre, vicar apostolic of the London district, went even further by stating that most of the regulars performed poorly and undermined the mission. He also lamented the scandalous behaviour of the Irish chaplains attached to the embassies in London.64 Even the authorities of the Holy See were aware of the low quality of the returning regulars. This is demonstrated by the accusation made by Giuseppe Spinelli, internuncio at Brussels, who, in 1723, confirmed to Propaganda that the superiors of the regular orders often sent their worst elements to England.65 Given that the regulars outnumbered the seculars, it is no wonder that there were persistent disputes about faculties, especially those related to preaching and the administration of sacraments. During the eighteenth century, Propaganda received and processed a consistent flow of complaints from the vicars apostolic

57  Fenning, ‘The Three Kingdoms’, p. 617. 58  APF, Acta, 89, fols. 419–20; Acta, 92, fols. 498–500; Acta, 94, fols. 124–6. 59  Fenning, ‘The Three Kingdoms’, p. 618. 60  APF, Acta, 93, fols. 456–70. 61 Wilfrid Kelly (ed.) Liber Ruber Venerabilis Collegi Anglorum de Urbe. Annales Collegii, Pars prima. Nomina Alumnorum II. A.D. 1631–1783, CRS 40 (London, 1943), pp. 129–207. 62  APF, Acta, 134, fol. 270. 63  APF, Acta, 80, fols. 313–14. 64  APF, Acta, 116, fols. 176–82. 65  APF, Acta, 93, fols. 456–70.

Missionary Activity and Religious Houses  127 about regulars who wandered away from their assigned locations or who even dared to collect tithes in areas entrusted to other priests.66 The turning point in this war between regulars and seculars was the intervention of Benedict XIV who—­with the support of Propaganda—­elaborated and promulgated a series of decrees beginning with the brief Emanavit Nuper on 2 September 1745. The brief stated that the vicars apostolic had the right to investigate the moral conduct of the regulars and, in cases of immoral conduct, to withdraw their faculties. The vicars also had to prevent the regulars from leaving their assigned posts of activity. The brief was the natural prelude to the drafting and approval, in 1753, of the Regulae Observandae in Anglicanis Missionibus, a set of rules which endorsed the decisions made in 1743, and which reaffirmed the authority of the vicars apostolic over the regulars, thus following what had been made for Ireland in 1751.67 By contrast to the Irish and Scots mission, the English mission covered a geographical area which went beyond the borders of England and Wales. Indeed, throughout the eighteenth century the officials of Propaganda came to ac­know­ledge that the vicar apostolic of the London district was also in charge of the missions in the British colonies of North America and five Caribbean islands.68 Though Petre claimed from 1722 to have authority over these vast territories, it was only in 1757 that Propaganda formally accepted the authority of the vicar apostolic of London by granting him permission to exercise his jurisdiction for a six-­year period. This permission was renewed—­albeit with some slight changes—­until 1784 when the congregation appointed John Carroll, archbishop of Baltimore, as the head of the missions in the new-­born United States. This put an end the jurisdiction of the London district on the American mainland, but not on the Caribbean, which would continue until 1804.69 At first glance the relationship between the Holy See and the British Isles from 1688 to 1745 was characterized by a steady level of intervention from Propaganda Fide. In particular, the congregation demonstrated a proactive attitude towards the Irish mission which, as in the seventeenth century, was a major source of concern for the Roman authorities given the sheer preponderance of the Catholic population. Though there was an evident disproportion in the volume of affairs treated, it is possible to conclude that the strategy elaborated and carried out by Propaganda for the three kingdoms during the first half of the eighteenth century had many points in common. The strong support provided to the bishops in Ireland and to the vicars apostolic in England and Scotland illustrates how the 66  Fenning, ‘The Three Kingdoms’, pp. 620–1. 67  APF, Acta, 115, fols. 228–41; Edwin H. Burton, The Life and Times of Bishop Challoner (1691–1781), 2 vols. (London, 1909), II, pp. 245–69, 306–24. 68  The five islands were Antigua, Barbados, Jamaica, Montserrat, and St Christopher. 69  APF, Acta, 126, fols. 352–8; Acta, 146, fols. 33–52; Thomas A. Hughes, SJ, ‘The London Vicariate Apostolic and the West Indies, 1685–1819’, The Dublin Review, 134 (1904), pp. 66–93.

128  Matteo Binasco / Hannah Thomas congregation sought to strengthen and implement ecclesiastical authority as a means to stem the persistent and toxic conflicts between regulars and seculars. The set of decrees promulgated from 1741 to 1753—albeit specifically designated for each kingdom—­contributed to a weakening of the role played by the regular clergy who, as a result, entered a period of tangible decline.

Religious Houses: Organization By the 1640s, the British Catholic diaspora had settled into a period of organized consolidation. Building on the foundations laid by antecedents in the early years of the exile movement, by 1641 the male and female orders were able to focus on strengthening, consolidating, and expanding their positions abroad. Several decades of delicate diplomatic negotiations with their host nations in the first half of the century meant that, during the second half of the century, properties could be extended, the numbers of recruits expanded, and new foundations created. Prior to 1641, a number of English convents had been founded in mainland Europe, in addition to the unenclosed members of the Mary Ward Institute, and the Bridgettines in Lisbon, who were a continuation from pre-­ Reformation times.70 To this number were now added several daughter houses as well as new English foundations from other orders. For the English female Benedictines, following the initial foundation at Brussels and daughter houses at Cambrai and Ghent, this period saw an add­ition­al four English houses created in exile: at Paris (1651), Boulogne (1652) which relocated to Pontoise in 1658, Dunkirk (1662), and Ypres (1665).71 The indefatigable Mary Knatchbull was the driving force behind three of these foundations, personally overseeing practical, spiritual, and pastoral arrangements for the new houses at Boulogne and Dunkirk, and laying much of the ground work for the convent at Ypres though this would subsequently be handed over to the Irish.72 During her forty-­six years as abbess, Knatchbull also worked to improve the financial position of the convents, particularly Ghent, and maintained a wide and influential cor­res­ pond­ence with prominent figures across Europe, including royal courtiers, the bishop of Boulogne, and the English royal family. She even offered financial as­sist­ ance to the latter at a time when the convent could least afford it, and played a significant role in the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660.73

70  See Chapter 8 on ‘Religious Houses: Spirituality’, in this volume. 71 WWTN, ‘Convent Notes’. For an overview of the foundations of the English convents, see James E. Kelly, English Convents in Catholic Europe, c.1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020), pp. 1–7. 72  WWTN, GB118. See also Caroline M. K. Bowden, ‘Knatchbull, Mary (1610–1696), Abbess of the Convent of the Immaculate Conception, Ghent’, ODNB. 73  See Caroline Bowden, ‘The Abbess and Mrs Brown: Lady Mary Knatchbull and Roylist Politics in Flanders in the Late 1650s’, Recusant History, 24 (1999), esp. pp. 292–307; Claire Walker, ‘Prayer,

Missionary Activity and Religious Houses  129 The English Carmelite convents underwent a similar development, expanding the original foundation at Antwerp with a daughter house at Lierre (1648) to deal with rapidly increasing numbers, and another at Hoogstraten (1678). The Lierre convent in particular had strong ties with the Welsh Catholic community, listing amongst its founder members the redoubtable Margaret Mostyn and her sister Elizabeth, daughters of Sir John Mostyn and Ann Fox of Greenfield, Flintshire, the seat of the Jesuit mission in North Wales; and Mary Vaughan, daughter of Sir Richard Vaughan of Courtfield, headquarters of the Jesuit mission in South Wales and Herefordshire after 1678.74 Both Mostyn sisters served as prioresses of the Lierre house: Margaret Mostyn from 1654 until her death in 1679, succeeded by her sister in 1679 until Elizabeth’s death in 1700. During this time the convent navigated particularly perilous periods of war during which access to the usual streams of financial support was made very difficult. The situation was certainly not helped by the convent offering shelter to an entire regiment of cavalier soldiers, putting considerable strain on the nuns’ already stretched resources, but skilful management of both people and finances held the community together through difficult times, whilst providing renowned spiritual guidance to their fellow sisters.75 Following on from foundations at Gravelines and Aire, the English Poor Clares also expanded in this period with the addition of daughter houses at Rouen (1644) and Dunkirk (1652).76 The Rouen house was under the guidance of Margaret Bedingfield of Redlingfield, a cadet branch of the Bedingfields of Oxburgh in Norfolk.77 Alongside Margaret Bedingfield’s ten siblings who also joined religious orders, her family had close links with other new foundations in this period. These included that of her sister Frances Bedingfield, who assisted with the foundation of the Mary Ward Institute in Paris (1650). Frances also founded the only seventeenth-­century convents in post-­Reformation England in London (1669) and York (1686), and had facilitated the sending of vital funds to her sister at Rouen to assist with its foundation in 1644.78 Her cousins, Margaret Downes, another founder member of the Carmelite convent at Lierre, and Elizabeth Timperley, founder member of the Conceptionist convent at Paris, were also influential.79 Patronage and Political Conspiracy: English Nuns and the Restoration’, Historical Journal, 43 (2000), pp. 1–23. 74  WWTN, AC095, AC096, AC122. 75  WWTN, AC095. 76  The main foundation dates from 1652, though the house had been founded in 1625 with only Irish members, they returned to Ireland to establish new convents in 1629: WWTN, Convent Notes’. 77  WWTN, GP027. 78  Ann M. C. Forster, ‘The Chronicles of the English Poor Clares of Rouen—­I’, Recusant History, 18 (1986), p. 64. 79 WWTN, AC041, BF241; ‘Family Tree (Bedingfield of Bedingfield and Redlingfield)’, https:// wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/ftrees/Bedingfield.pdf (accessed 28 January 2022); Gregory Kirkus, CJ, An IBVM Biographical Dictionary of the English Members and Major Benefactors (1667‒2000), CRS 78 (London, 2001), pp. 2–4.

130  Matteo Binasco / Hannah Thomas Three independent English convents were also founded in this period. In 1642, Susan Hawley founded in Liège the only English convent of the canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre.80 Following her novitiate at the Belgian Sepulchrine convent in nearby Tongres, Hawley deliberately chose Liège as the location of her convent owing to the English Jesuit house being already in the city. Hawley noted that the sisters ‘have the comfort to have an English Coledge [sic] of the Society of Jesus in the same city . . . which is no small benefit in extern countries’.81 Hawley fully util­ized the by now established diasporic network to achieve her aim, using the influence of Emmanuel Lobb, alias Joseph Simons, SJ, to negotiate the necessary permissions from local authorities for establishing the English convent in the city, and for providing the essential services of confessor and celebrant of the first Mass in the convent chapel.82 An English female Dominican house was founded by Cardinal Thomas Howard at Brussels in 1661, building on his successful revitalization of the English Dominican Province. His niece, Antonia Howard, was the first Englishwoman to join the community there, a few months before her death in October 1661, aged only 16.83 In Paris, the daughter house of the English Franciscan convent at Nieuport was refounded as a convent of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady by 1661. Known as the Conceptionists, or the Blue Nuns, owing to the colour of their habits, the diplomacy and politics required in transition from Franciscan daughter house to autonomous Conceptionist convent was achieved under the watchful eye of Abbess Angela Jerningham with guidance from Richard Mason, OFM.84 Two Irish convents on the Continent were also added to the diasporic network.85 In addition to the Dominican convent of Bom Sucesso established in Lisbon in 1639, an Irish Franciscan convent was established at Richebourg, Nantes, in 1650. Later on, in 1684, the English Benedictine convent at Ypres was transferred to the Irish.86 The English Conceptionists also investigated the 80 WWTN, LS101. See also Caroline Bowden, ‘Hawley, Susan [Name in Religion Mary of the Conception] (1622–1706)’, ODNB. 81  Susan Hawley, A Brief Relation of the Order and Institute of the English Religious Women at Liège (Liège, 1652), p. 55. 82  Sydney Smith, SJ (ed.), History of the New Hall Community of Canonesses Regular of the Holy Sepulchre (Roehampton, 1899), pp. 20–2. 83  WWTN, BD036. See Anon (ed.), Dominicana: Cardinal Howard’s Letters, English Dominican Friars, Nuns, Students, Papers and Mission Registers, CRS 25 (London, 1925), pp. 177–80. The convent was established at Vilvorde before relocating to Brussels in 1669 to ‘The Spellikens’. 84  WWTN, BF101. See Joseph Gillow and Richard Trappes-­Lomax (eds.), The Diary of the ‘Blue Nuns’, or Order of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady, at Paris 1658–1810, CRS 8 (London, 1910), pp. vii–­x. 85  Bronagh McShane, ‘Negotiating Religious Change and Conflict: Female Religious Communities in Early Modern Ireland, c.1530–c.1641’, British Catholic History, 33 (2017), esp. pp. 378–82. 86  See James E. Kelly, ‘Bringing It All Back Home: Mary Butler (1641–1723), Benedictine Abbess of Ypres’, in Salvador Ryan (ed.), Treasures of Irish Christianity, vol. 3: To the Ends of the Earth (London, 2016), pp. 64–6. The convent at Nantes was short lived and most of the members of the small community seem to have died by 1660: See Eamon O’Ciosain and Alain Loncle de Forville, ‘Irish Nuns in Nantes, 1650–1659’, Arch. Hib., 58 (2004), pp. 167–73.

Missionary Activity and Religious Houses  131 possibility of an Irish daughter house around this time, sending a small party of nuns from Paris to Ireland in September 1688. The mission was however largely unsuccessful, not least because of the political events which unfolded that year, and the party, including Catherine Rice and Jane Sanders, soon returned to Paris without having achieved their aim.87 In contrast, few new colleges for the clergy were founded after the 1640s, the focus instead being on making existing colleges a more visible and influential part of the diaspora. In particular, Paris was a key location for strengthening existing collegial life and networks for the English, Scottish, and Irish clergy during this period, with all three finding new permanent homes in the city. For the English secular clergy, a new college dedicated to St Gregory was established in the city in 1667, in place of the short-­lived institution that had been briefly present earlier in the century, and was intended to give English and Welsh students the opportunity of attending the Sorbonne, with a view to obtaining a doctorate in divinity.88 Similarly, although the Scottish College had been operational in the city since 1603, a move to a new larger site on Rue des Fossés-­Saint-­Victor in 1662, which opened in 1665, and was expanded again in 1672, increased the size and prom­in­ ence of the Paris site, making it the keystone of the Scottish secular colleges, and therefore of the Scottish Catholic network.89 Similarly, for the Irish secular clergy, a previously precarious existence in Paris, even despite official recognition in the 1620s, was totally revitalized in this period by the purchase of a permanent base at the vacant Collège des Lombards in 1676. It too became the centre for the most prominent Irish institution on the Continent, particularly following State approval as the legitimate Irish College in Paris, a status granted in 1685.90 For the English clergy, many of the colleges focused on improving their phys­ ic­al environments during this period. Major rebuilding projects were undertaken at the English secular colleges at Rome, Douai, Valladolid, and Lisbon. Building work was undertaken at the Venerable English College in Rome from 1658 onwards, eventually finished under the watchful eye of Cardinal Thomas Howard by 1685, and included a new location for the extensive library, along with a rediscovered undercroft, newly acquired adjoining land, and a palatial residence for

87  WWTN, PC090, PC094. See CRS 8, p. xii. 88  Dominic Aidan Bellenger, English and Welsh Priests 1558‒1800: A Working List (Stratton-­on-­ the-­Fosse, 1984), p. 6. 89 Now Rue du Cardinal Lemoine. See Liam Chambers, ‘Introduction—­College Communities Abroad: Education, Migration and Catholicism in Early Modern Europe’, in Liam Chambers and Thomas O’Connor (ed.), College Communities Abroad: Education, Migration and Catholicism in Early Modern Europe (Manchester, 2018), p. 13; Tom McInally, The Scots Colleges Abroad: 1575 to 1799: The Sixth Scottish University (Leiden, 2011), pp. 44–7. 90 Chambers, ‘Introduction’, p. 10; Liam Chambers, ‘Irish Fondations and Boursiers in Early Modern Paris, 1682–1793’, Irish Economic and Social History, 35 (2008), pp. 1–22; Liam Chambers, ‘The Irish Colleges in Paris, 1578–2002: History’, Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris, https://www.centreculturelirlandais.com/content/files/History-­CCI-­English.pdf (accessed 28 January 2022).

132  Matteo Binasco / Hannah Thomas Howard himself.91 Similarly, the English secular college at Douai underwent extensive rebuilding in the 1720s under the guidance of President Robert Witham, with the cornerstone of the new college being laid in February 1723; and at Valladolid, major building work was also undertaken from 1739 to 1756.92 A similar building programme was also initiated at the English College in Lisbon in 1706, as part of Edward Jones’ grand plans for revitalization, but was significantly hampered by several problems, not least of which was a distinct lack of interest from within their diasporic network and therefore a lack of the necessary financial support to undertake the renovations.93 The English male orders also continued a programme of growth. For the Dominicans, the conversion to Catholicism of Philip Howard, later Cardinal Thomas Howard, in 1642, was particularly important for revitalizing the or­gan­ iza­tion and missionary endeavours of the order in this period.94 His indefatigable work in establishing a Continental training house for English, Scottish, and Irish Dominican friars culminated in the foundation at Bornhem in Flanders (1657) of a new house, church, and school which became the intellectual centre of their missionary activities, and from whence the Dominican English Province was officially re-­established in 1685. From Bornhem, a house was established in Rome (1675) for English Dominican students to use as a base, soon relocating to Louvain (1695). Two new Irish Dominican foundations were made at Lisbon (1659) and the college of San Clemente in Rome (1677).95 Elsewhere, following on from the revival of the English Benedictine congregation in 1619, the order added a fourth Continental base at Lamspringe in Germany (1643).96 In Paris, the English Benedictine community of St Edmund was put on more solid foundations with a move to a new permanent home at the rue Saint Jacques in 1642. 91 Michael  E.  Williams, The Venerable English College Rome: A History (Leominster, 2008), pp. 65–77. 92  Edwin  H.  Burton and Edmond Nolan (eds.) The Douay College Diaries: The Seventh Douay Diary 1715–1778, CRS 28 (London, 1928); Peter Guilday, The English Catholic Refugees on the Continent 1558–1795 (London, 1914), p. 338; Michael E. Williams, St Alban’s College, Valladolid: Four Centuries of English Catholic Presence in Spain (London, 1986), p. 71. 93 Simon P. Johnson, The English College at Lisbon: From Reformation to Toleration (Stratton-­on-­ the-­Fosse, 2014), pp. 265–6; Simon P. Johnson, ‘The English College at Lisbon from 1622 to 1761: A Missionary College from the Reformation to the Age of Enlightenment’ (University of York PhD thesis, 2006), pp. xii–­xxi. 94  Allan White, ‘Howard, Philip [Name in Religion Thomas] (1629–1694)’, ODNB. 95  John J. Hanly, ‘The 1678 Manuscript History of the Ludovisian Irish College, Rome’, in Thomas O’Connor and John J. Hanly (eds.), The Irish College, Rome 1628–1678: An Early Manuscript Account of the Foundation and Development of the Ludovisian College of the Irish in Rome (Rome, 2003), p. 38; Patricia O’Connell, ‘The Early Modern Irish College Network in Iberia, 1590–1800’, in Thomas O’Connor (ed.), The Irish in Europe 1580–1815 (Dublin, 2001), p. 52. 96 Geoffrey Scott, Gothic Rage Undone: English Monks in the Age of Enlightenment (Bath, 1992), p. 10.

Missionary Activity and Religious Houses  133 For the Jesuits, a network of English Colleges had been firmly established in the first half of the seventeenth century.97 However, several of the Jesuit houses were particularly concerned with the potential threat of the Jacobite campaign to their already established activities and networks. To counter some of these concerns, the Jesuit-­administered college in Rome became something of a hub of news and information, particularly after 1715 as the city also became the per­man­ ent residence of James Francis Edward Stuart.98 Thomas Eberson, SJ, rector of the English College, met with his counterparts at the Irish and Scottish Colleges within the city, and along with the cardinal protectors of the home nations, drew up a plan to be put before the Pope that aimed to protect their interests. In a letter to Thomas Parker, SJ, Eberson noted that ‘we cannot meddle with anything that concerns the persons of those gentlemen that were taken in arms . . . the thing we aim at is to get the princes who have ambassadors at London but the thing must be don very secretly’.99 Many of the English male institutions were beset with difficulties during this period, and generally experienced some serious financial concerns. The English Benedictines house at St Malo was handed over to French Maurists in 1669.100 The colleges at Valladolid and Lisbon suffered heavy financial losses due to a changing relationship with the Spanish Crown, and diminishing importance of Spanish links for the British and Irish Catholic community more widely.101 At Valladolid, a serious complaint was lodged with Propaganda Fide in 1735 that the English College had been resting on the laurels of previous generations, sending too few students on the mission, and those who were sent were poorly trained for the job. The college repudiated the claims as best they could, but the damage had already been done: the college was empty of students for nearly twenty years between 1739 and 1756.102 Similar complaints were regularly made in Rome about the students at the English College; the result of some three decades of complaints against the college was an official visitation in 1739.103 At Douai, accusations of Jansenism from 1705 onwards had a serious impact on its reputation and on student numbers. An official visitation, combined with the imminent danger of Marlborough’s invasion of the city in 1710, led to declining student numbers.104 97 See Thomas  M.  McCoog, SJ, Pre-­Suppression Jesuit Activity in the British Isles and Ireland (Leiden, 2019). 98  Geoffrey Holt, SJ, The English Jesuits in the Age of Reason (Tunbridge Wells, 1993), p. 61. 99  Cited in Holt, SJ, The English Jesuits, p. 62. 100  David Lunn, The English Benedictines 1540–1688: From Reformation to Revolution (London, 1980), p. 178. 101  See Johnson, The English College at Lisbon, pp. 126–68; Williams, St Alban’s College, Valladolid, pp. 52–60. 102 Williams, St Alban’s College, pp. 55–7. 103 Williams, The Venerable, pp. 69–77. 104  CRS 28, pp. vii, 18–23 and 26–7.

134  Matteo Binasco / Hannah Thomas In contrast, both the Scottish and the Irish clergy experienced something of a boom during this period. Although there were no new foundations after 1641, the period witnessed noticeable coordination between the various Scottish secular colleges, particularly steered by Robert Barclay.105 Barclay’s vision, and acquisition of the necessary funds, meant that the Paris college became the first port of call for all Scottish visitors and exiles arriving in the city from the 1660s onwards.106 More widely, the consolidation of the influence and importance of the Paris college led to closer collaboration between the Scottish houses, providing a solid network of education and missionary training for Scottish Catholics across Europe, and a recognizable Scottish Church in exile.107 Notably, many of the Scottish Colleges were under the administration of Scottish Jesuits, particularly those at Douai, Rome, and Madrid.108 An ever-­present feature of life in the Scottish Colleges for much of this period was the Jacobite cause, perhaps best illustrated by the statistic that more alumni of the Scots College Paris fought in the Jacobite wars than entered ministry.109 Jansenism was also a problem—­ whether a reality or not, accusations of it threatened to undermine the Scottish collegiate network.110 Similarly, the Continental presence of the Irish male religious orders prospered and expanded in this period, and by 1689 at least twenty-­nine Irish religious houses had been established on the Continent, of which twelve were set up by the religious orders to train their own students.111 Alongside the new Dominican houses, and the expansion of the secular college in Rome, the Irish Franciscans were particularly active in this period. Following on from the existing foundation of St Anthony’s College at Louvain, and additional houses at St Isidore’s in Rome, the College of the Immaculate Conception in Prague, and a small residence in Paris, the Irish Franciscan network was expanded with a new friary in Wielun, Poland (1645), and a novitiate at Capranica near Rome (1656). A Franciscan retreat house was also added at Bolay near Metz by the end of the century.112 The Irish Augustinian friars joined their fellow male religious with a new college in Rome (1656), and two Irish Carmelite houses were established in this period at La Rochelle (1665) and Aix-­La-­Chapelle (1677). Along with the changes in Paris, new colleges for the Irish secular clergy were also established at Toulouse (c.1645), 105 McInally, The Scots Colleges Abroad, pp. 20–51. See also Chambers, ‘Introduction’, pp. 9–10. 106  Brian M. Halloran, ‘Barclay, Robert (1611/12–1682)’, ODNB. 107 McInally, Scots Colleges Abroad, pp. 31, 47. 108  Thomas M. McCoog, SJ, ‘The Society of Jesus in the Three Kingdoms’, in Thomas Worcester, SJ (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 98–9. 109  Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology (Woodbridge, 2009), p. 203. 110 McInally, Scots Colleges Abroad, pp. 122, 199, 212. 111  O’Connell, ‘Irish College Network in Iberia’, p. 52. 112  Mary Ann Lyons, ‘The Role of St Anthony’s College Louvain in Establishing the Irish Franciscan College Network 1607–60’, in Bhreathnach, MacMahon, and McCafferty (eds.), The Irish Franciscans, p. 28.

Missionary Activity and Religious Houses  135 Alcala de Henares (1649), and Nantes (1689).113 Successes with the revitalization of the Irish College in Paris in the 1670s under the guidance and vision of Malachy Kelly, chaplain to Louis XIV, and Patrick Maginn, chaplain to Catherine of Braganza, led swiftly to the foundation of a further four Irish secular colleges at Nantes (1680), Bar sur Aube (1685), Wassy (1685), and Boulay (1700).114 The Irish Jesuits also added an additional base to their network at Poitiers (1674), increasing missionary reach beyond Iberia from the existing bases at Lisbon, Salamanca, Santiago de Compostella, Seville, and Rome.115

Select Bibliography Bhreathnach, Edel, Joseph MacMahon, OFM, and John McCafferty (eds.), The Irish Franciscans 1534–1990 (Dublin, 2009). Binasco, Matteo (ed.), Rome and Irish Catholicism in the Atlantic World, 1622–1908 (Cham, 2018). Chambers, Liam and Thomas O’Connor (eds.), College Communities Abroad: Education, Migration and Catholicism in Early Modern Europe (Manchester, 2018). Chambers, Liam and Thomas O’Connor (eds.), Forming Catholic Communities: Irish, Scots and English College Networks in Europe, 1568–1918 (Leiden, 2018). Fenning, Hugh, ‘The Three Kingdoms: England, Ireland, and Scotland’, in Joseph Metzler (ed.), Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide Memoria Rerum, 5 vols. (Rom-Freiburg-Wien, 1971–6), II, pp. 604–29. Kelly, James E., English Convents in Catholic Europe, c.1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020). McInally, Thomas, The Sixth Scottish University. The Scots Colleges Abroad: 1575 to 1799 (Leiden, 2011).

113  O’Connell, ‘Irish College Network in Iberia’, p. 52. 114 Thomas O’Connor, ‘The Domestic and International Roles of Irish Overseas Colleges 1590–1800’, in Chambers and O’Connor (eds.), College Communities Abroad, p. 102. 115  McCoog, ‘Society of Jesus in the Three Kingdoms’, pp. 97–8.

7 Religious Houses Devotional Life Laurence Lux-­Sterritt

For British and Irish Catholics, the long seventeenth century was a time of adaptation and transformation, a time to reclaim bonds with a happier past whilst designing a new brand of Catholicism which bore the distinctive marks of a faith under siege. Since no convents remained in England, Scotland, or Wales in the 1640s, women who hoped to become nuns entered exiled cloisters, often in Flanders or northern France. The first English convent in exile was founded in Brussels in 1598, and by 1678 its example had been followed by a further twenty foundations. Nearly 4,000 women entered those new establishments, which testified to the dynamism of English Catholicism.1 The situation was a little different for Ireland. There, convents were subject to idiosyncratic cycles of dispersion and revival reflecting the relative leniency or stringency of law enforcement at various times. In the seventeenth century, Augustinians, Benedictines, Dominicans, and Poor Clares all attempted new foundations, either prior to the 1653 Cromwellian banishment of all clergy or later, in the 1680s. Irish patterns of conventual exile were also different from those of their British counterparts. Irish nuns tended to enter cloisters of other nations and did not secure their own stable foundations in the northern regions; instead, they favoured Spain, where they benefitted from the Spanish King’s funding of dowries and pensions.2 The existence of the convents owed much to the efforts of both lay and clerical patrons working in their homeland. In Ireland, the nobility had been instrumental in the exceptionally slow process of the dissolution of the monasteries, and they were to prove equally essential to their return.3 Similarly, for the convents in exile, zealous patrons were key to recruiting new postulants and building networks of 1 WWTN; Katherine Keats-­Rohan, English Catholic Nuns in Exile, 1600–1800: A Biographical Register (Oxford, 2017). To cloistered nuns must be added the Mary Ward Institute of English Ladies, who formed an informal Society of Jesus for women and remained unenclosed. 2  Marie-­Louise Coolahan, Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford, 2010), esp. ch. 2. 3  See John McCafferty, ‘A Mundo Valde Alieni: Irish Franciscan Responses to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, 1540–1640’, Reformation & Renaissance Review, 19 (2007), pp. 50–63; Bernadette Cunningham, ‘The Poor Clare Order in Ireland’, in Edel Bhreathnach, Joseph MacMahon, and John McCafferty (eds.), The Irish Franciscans 1534–1990 (Dublin, 2009), pp. 159–74. Laurence Lux-­Sterritt, Religious Houses: Devotional Life In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II: Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745. Edited by: John Morrill and Liam Temple, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843436.003.0008

Religious Houses  137 financial, political, and religious support.4 It is therefore no surprise that the circumstances which affected British and Irish Catholic communities at home also impacted on convents abroad: during the period covered in this volume, their fortunes ebbed and flowed with those of their families. Just as the day-­to-­day running of the convents in exile depended on the ­circumstances of their friends and families, their spiritual lives were also intricately linked. This chapter will explore the devotional lives of British and Irish Catholics between 1641 and 1745, paying particular attention to the women who became nuns. It will show that the convents embodied and preserved some of the wider hallmarks of Catholic practice under penalty. Beleaguered Catholic communities often adapted their worship to compensate for the scarcity of priests. At home, domestic time and space were sacralized, traditional rituals became invested with new militancy, and images, sacramentals, and relics at times acquired super­nat­ ural powers which exceeded those defined by the decrees of the Council of Trent.5 When they entered religion and continued to practise in those specific ways, religious women brought some of their lay recusant past with them into their new cloisters. In doing so, they not only bridged the traditional gap between lay and religious life, but also the geographical distance between the British Isles and the Continent. The continuity of their customs thus invites the questioning of the paradigm of separation between devotional practices at home and in exiled convents.

The Sacred in Daily Life The sacralization of time in religious houses was designed to help nuns remain mindful of God’s presence in everyday life. The day followed a strict horarium, at the heart of which were the daily offices of Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sexte, and Nones, Vespers, and Compline. The rest of the time was distributed according to a pattern which varied little from convent to convent, alternating moments of

4 See 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, Cultures and Identity (Farnham, 2013), pp. 33–52; Claire Walker, ‘Prayer, Patronage, and Political Conspiracy: English Nuns and the Restoration’, The Historical Journal, 43 (2000), pp. 1–23. For Irish convents, see Bronagh 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. 5  See for instance Anne Dillon, ‘ “To Seek Out Some Comforts and Companions of His Own Kind and Condition”: The Benedictine Rosary Confraternity and Chapel of Cardigan House, London’, in Lowell Gallagher (ed.), Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism (Toronto, 2012), pp. 272–308; Robyn Malo, ‘Intimate Devotion: Martyrs and the Making of Relics in Post-­Reformation England’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 44 (2014), pp. 531–48; Aislinn Muller, ‘The Agnus Dei, Catholic Devotion, and Confessional Politics in Early Modern England’, British Catholic History, 34 (2018), pp. 1–28.

138  Laurence Lux-Sterritt private recollection with communal work. In 1652, the canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre in Liège published a handbook for potential members, revealing the daily routine of the nuns: 4:00: arise and meditate 5:00: say the first three offices 6:00: prayer, then work in the workhouse whilst listening to a reading 7:30: retire to one’s cell 8:00: Terce, followed by Mass and the next two offices 9:00: return to the workhouse 10:30: examination of conscience 10:45: lunch whilst listening to a reading before communal recreation 12:00: retire to one’s cell 13:00: once more to the workhouse 15:00: Vespers, followed by a meditation on a station of the Cross, set daily for the whole community 16:00: one last time to the workhouse 17:00: Compline 18:00: supper and recreation 19:30: examination of consciences, Litanies of Our Lady and exposition of the points set for the next day’s meditation, followed by the De profundis for the souls in purgatory; retire to one’s cell to read and pray privately before a third examination of conscience. Silence to be kept until the next day.6

Such a distribution of time left little room for levity. The aim was to keep the religious on their spiritual path and to anchor daily conventual life within its very raison d’être: its dedication to God. The sacred was to permeate every moment and accompany every action. The presence of spirituality in the quotidian was not, however, the preserve of the convents. At home, Catholic practice had retired behind the closed doors of private houses and zealous recusants endeavoured to imitate contemplative life as much as possible within the constraints of their situation. Imitation of the cloister was one of the main features of the spiritual revival of the clandestine Catholic community. When she was a young girl, Mary Ward had stayed with the Babthorpe family at Osgodby and observed their quasi-­religious lifestyle and horarium.7 On working days, their resident priest said two morning Masses, one 6 Caroline Bowden, ‘ “A Distribution of Tyme”: Reading and Writing Practices in the English Convents in Exile’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 31 (2012), p. 101. For a Benedictine timetable, see Laurence Lux-­Sterritt, English Benedictine Nuns in Exile in the Seventeenth Century: Living Spirituality (Manchester, 2017), p. 40. 7  Mary Ward tried as a Poor Clare in 1608 and left in 1609 to found an Institute for Englishwomen modelled on the Society of Jesus. See Henriette Peters, Mary Ward, A World in Contemplation, trans. H. Butterworth (Leominster, 1994), pp. 44–54.

Religious Houses  139 for the servants at 6 o’clock and the other at 8 o’clock. Every afternoon at 4, he said Vespers and Compline for the gentry members of the household. On Sundays and holy days, they all heard Mass and sermons behind closed doors, and the children were later taught the catechism. The locking of the doors before Mass, although primarily a practical precaution, could also be seen to symbolize the mental shutting out of the world during times devoted to contemplation. Moreover, most members of the Babthorpe family meditated and prayed daily, followed the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises, and retired to bed at 9 o’clock after their evening litanies. The  family’s spirituality was further enhanced by fortnightly confession and communion.8 For households in penal times, the regularity of a well-­structured day was a marker of confessional belonging; it was a badge of devotion and a personal statement of one’s commitment to a Catholic way of life.9 In both recusant and monastic life, the quotidian was so imbued with the sacred that staple prayers were used as a measure of time, as can be seen when Kenelm Digby advised the reader of his recipe book to stir or cook various ingredients for ‘an Ave Maria while’.10 In the same vein, a 1717 Poor Clares recipe book mentioned that ‘the obedience bell for dinner & supper should be rung for the space of a De Profundis’.11 Of course, those prayers also measured devotional activities and, in 1631, Mary Ward advised Elizabeth Cotton to take the discipline ‘for a De Profundis noe more’. Examples such as these show a continuum between the devotional practices of British and Irish Catholics in and out of the convent. As the communities’ schedules show, nuns spent much of their time reading and hearing books being read aloud to them. In Protestant Britain and Ireland, where Catholic clerical advice was difficult to access, books took on a particular importance. Recent studies have dispelled the Protestant trope which long described Roman Catholicism as more material than bookish. Devout reading was instrumental to the building of a domestic piety which could remain vibrant even when the faithful enjoyed only rare access to priests. As Alexandra Walsham points out, ‘texts assumed vital importance to a faith dispossessed of the structures of authority and communication over which it had once held sway’.12 Printed works helped individuals and groups to develop their spiritual lives in accordance 8 Adam Hamilton (ed.), The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses Regular of the Lateran, at St Monica’s in Louvain: Now at St Augustine’s Priory, Newton Abbot, Devon. A Continuation 1625 to 1644 (London, 1906), p. 180. 9  For Irish examples, see McShane, ‘Negotiating Religious Change’. 10  The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digby, Kt. Opened whereby is discovered several ways for making of metheglin, syder, cherry-­wine, &c.: together with excellent directions for cookery (London, 1669), p. 219. I am grateful to Alison Shell for this suggestion. 11 Ursula Dirmeier (ed.), Mary Ward und ihre Gründung. Die Quellentexte bis 1645, 4 vols. (Münster, 2007), III, p. 166; Nicky Hallett (ed.), English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, Part I, vol. 3: Life-­Writing (London, 2012), p. 334. I am grateful to Gemma Simmons, CJ, and Victoria Van Hyning for pointing out these references to me. See also Nicky Hallett, ‘ “So Short a Space of Time”: Early Modern Convent Chronology and Carmelite Spirituality’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 42 (2012), pp. 539–66. 12  Alexandra Walsham, Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (Farnham, 2014), p. 244.

140  Laurence Lux-Sterritt with methods and models sanctioned by the Church. They also allowed the promotion of various brands of spirituality, and both male clergy and nuns were keen to produce, translate, analyse, and distribute texts which furthered their specific religious identities. Conventual sources testify to the efficacy of militant publications in effecting conversions. Susan Brook converted to Catholicism after reading a ‘book of controversy [in which] she found all heretical objections so clearly confuted, and Catholic religion so manifestly proved in all points, that she fully resolved to become a Catholic’. Her fellow canoness, Bridgit Golding, had travelled down a comparable path—­in her case, books of controversy injected newfound zeal into her otherwise tepid worship.13 Aware of the power of reading upon spiritual orien­ta­tion, many convents produced, copied, translated, and distributed devotional works to be used both by their lay co-­religionists at home and by the nuns themselves.14 They often focused on works which best conveyed their specific brand of spirituality. For instance, the Benedictines of Cambrai and Paris were known for copying and distributing Augustine Baker’s treatises to publicize their particularly mystical bend. Their strategy strengthened the community’s spiritual identity and attracted some readers to the convent, as was the case of Clare Newport, who took her vows at Cambrai after reading Baker’s Book D at her sister’s house in London.15 Similarly, the translations and editions of the Rules specific to each order were of paramount importance to assert a community’s spiritual heritage.16 When the Irish Poor Clares at West Meath (and later Galway) made provisions for the translation into Irish of the foundational texts of their order, the use of the vernacular served more than just practical or educational purposes.17 It displayed the abbess’s ­a mbition to be part of the broader movement of nuns’ writing and translating activities in Continental convents, and also restated her

13 Both women became Augustinian canonesses at Louvain. See Adam Hamilton (ed.), The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses Regular of the Lateran, at St Monica’s in Louvain: Now at St Augustine’s Priory, Newton Abbot, Devon. 1548–1625 (London, 1904), pp. 191–2, 198. 14  Jaime Goodrich, Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender and Religion in Early Modern England (Evanston, IL, 2014). 15  Some of Baker’s writings were attributed letters of the alphabet; Book D is a compilation of directions for contemplation. See Reverend Mother Prioress of Colwich and J.  S.  Hansom (eds.), ‘The English Benedictines of the convent of our Blessed Lady of Good Hope in Paris, now St. Benedict’s Priory, Colwich, Staffordshire’, in Catholic Record Society Miscellanea VII (London, 1911), p. 369. See also Liam Peter Temple, ‘Mysticism and Identity amongst the English Poor Clares’, Church History, 88 (2019), pp. 645–71. 16  See 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; Coolahan, Women, Writing, and Language, pp. 63–101. 17 The Blessing and the Testament of St Clare, the Constitutions of St Colette, as well as the Rule of St Clare and other texts essential to the convent’s life were translated into Irish. See Helena Concannon, ‘Historic Galway Convents, Part I: The Poor Clares’, An Irish Quarterly Review, 38 (1949), pp. 439–46.

Religious Houses  141 convent’s belonging to the same political and religious persecution and fortitude as the Irish laity.18 As they ordered their day, read holy books, and prayed according to a ­prescribed method, British and Irish nuns and their fellow Catholic compatriots followed established patterns which provided regularity, guidance, and reassurance.19 Such devotional practices kept the faith alive as they allowed the faithful to walk a well-­trodden spiritual path which met their needs whilst at the same time serving as a testimony to their devotion.20 The obituaries and Lives of many of the women who became nuns highlight the role of individual and communal reading in the daily development of a Catholic conscience. It was by reading the lives of the English martyrs that a young Mary Ward, in her native Yorkshire, had felt drawn to the service of God on the mission.21 Jane Wiseman became an Augustinian canoness after she experienced daily communal reading during meals and a quasi-­monastic lifestyle at her Braddocks household (Essex).22 Margaret Mostyn, who became a Carmelite in 1644, remembered catechizing her grandmother’s Welsh household. As a youth, she read the lives of the saints to the servants and reportedly effected the conversion of two of them.23 Some nuns were themselves the embodiment of such conversions: Elizabeth Hone had been raised a Protestant, but she converted during a stay at her aunt’s house, where Fr Georges Fisher, alias Muscote, gave her the Life of St Catherine of Bologna to read. Inspired by that holy exemplar, she decided to join the order of the Poor Clares. That biography had been translated by Elizabeth Evelinge, a Poor Clare at Gravelines, proving that the religious were aware of the power of such books to achieve conversions and bring new recruits.24 There was much in common between reading at home (whether communally or alone) and in the convent. The Lives of saints acted as a powerful tool for personal reform and presented the faithful with inspirational models.25 Whether 18 Coolahan, Women, Writing, and Language, ch. 2. 19 For more on methods of prayer and trends in spirituality, see Claire Walker’s Chapter  8 in this volume. 20  Caroline Bowden, ‘Building Libraries in Exile: The English Convents and Their Book Collections in the Seventeenth Century’, British Catholic History, 32 (2015), pp. 343–82. 21 See The Painted Life, painting 10, ‘When Mary was sixteen she read the lives of the holy martyrs. She was taken up with such a burning desire to follow their example that she felt only martyrdom itself could satisfy her longing until God revealed to her interiorly that what was required of her was spiritual rather than bodily martyrdom’. These paintings are usually displayed in the Mary Ward Hall in Augsburg, Germany. 22  She initially professed at the Dutch convent of St Ursula’s, Louvain. See Hamilton (ed.) The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses . . . 1548–1625, p. 80. 23  H.  J.  Coleridge (ed.), The Life of Margaret Mostyn (Mother Margaret of Jesus), Religious of the Reformed Order of Our Blessed Lady of Mount Carmel (1625–1679) (London, 1878), p. 15. 24  Caroline Bowden (ed.), English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, Part I, vol. 1: History Writing (London, 2012), pp. 136–7. 25 Laurence Lux-­Sterritt, ‘ “Virgo becomes Virago”: Women in the Accounts of Seventeenth-­ Century English Catholic Missionaries’, Recusant History, 30 (2011), pp. 537–53; John McCafferty, ‘The Communion of Saints and Catholic Reformation in Early Seventeenth-­Century Ireland’, in

142  Laurence Lux-Sterritt they were beautifully decorated or simpler volumes, primers, psalters, and other sacred texts were treasured possessions. They acted as bridges between the old and the new. As they were passed on from generation to generation, at home and in the convents, they embodied the continuity of an uninterrupted Roman practice which had survived the Reformation.

Places and Objects between the Domestic and the Sacred In Britain and Ireland, where the circulation of books was crucial to compensate for a lack of priests, the domestic nature of devotion also heightened the im­port­ ance of sacralized places of worship. While in Yorkshire, Mary Ward brought the spirit of the cloister into her secular space by placing each room of the house under the protection of a particular saint.26 Catherine Burton sacralized her Suffolk home garden, often kneeling, praying, lifting her hands and eyes to heaven, and kissing the ground as she walked its private paths. She had dreaded being reported to the authorities, but later, in the cloister, she was free to enjoy her practice without fear. Although entering a convent entailed a break from one’s secular life, Burton highlighted continuity rather than change in terms of devotional practice. She wrote: ‘what I had practised in the world, made all things in religion easy to me’.27 In the same way that Burton had created her own private pilgrimage on her property, the Louvain Augustinians commissioned a small Mount Calvary to be built in their garden, once more highlighting a continuum between lay and religious devotional practices. Shrines held a particular importance both for Catholics at home and for exiled nuns. They provided a means of connecting with the divine in a specific spot; even after the Reformation had officially suppressed Catholic holy sites, the faithful continued to resort to time-­honoured places such as Station Island in Ireland, or the Holy Well of St Winefride in Holywell, Wales.28 The miraculous cures Robert Armstrong and Tadhg ÓhAnnrachàin (eds.), Community in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2006), pp. 199–214; Tonya Moutray, ‘Through the Grate; Or, English Convents and the Transmission and Preservation of Female Catholic Recusant History’, in Leigh Eicke, Jeana DelRosso, and Ana Kothe (eds.), The Catholic Church and Unruly Women Writers (New York, 2007), pp. 105–21; Salvador Ryan, ‘Steadfast Saints or Malleable Models? Seventeenth-­Century Irish Hagiography Revisited’, The Catholic Historical Review, 91 (2005), pp. 251–77. 26  Dirmeier (ed.), Mary Ward und ihre Gründung, I, p. 24. Convents also sacralized their more domestic spaces; for instance, the Bruges Augustinians erected altars in their workhouse, their in­firm­ ary, and their dormitory. See Caroline Bowden (ed.), The Chronicles of Nazareth (The English Convent), Bruges: 1629–1793 (Woodbridge, 2016), p. 225. 27  Thomas Hunter (ed.), An English Carmelite. The Life of Catherine Burton, Mother Mary Xaviera of the Angels, of the English Teresian Convent at Antwerp (London, 1883), pp. 23–8. 28  For others, the site was to be a miraculous conduit to their religious vocation: Anne Somerset became a nun at Antwerp in 1643 when passing through the town on her way to Sichem, and Gertrude Aston professed at Lierre in 1671 after a similar revelation. See Katrien Daemen-­de Gelder (ed.), English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, Part II, vol. 4: Life Writing II (London, 2013), p. 193; Nicky

Religious Houses  143 which occurred at Holywell were recorded in a manuscript compiled c.1675 and a sodality was formed on the model of major Continental shrines. For English and Welsh recusants of all social classes, the well was a tangible portal between the sacred and the profane, and between a present under penalty and a glorified Catholic past.29 Young Catherine Burton went there at least twice with her ­fam­ily.30 British and Irish Catholics on the Continent were often also drawn to the Sharp Hill (or Scherpenheuvel) at Sichem. On occasion, even enclosed nuns were allowed to visit the holy site, as was the case for a group of Augustinian canonesses from Bruges who stopped there on their way to the spa of Aix-­la-­Chapelle.31 The shrine was so significant to nuns in Flanders that Lady Lovell bequeathed the  Antwerp Carmelites a statue of Our Lady of Sichem, which they held in veneration.32 As a child of 6 in her native Wales, Margaret Mostyn had ‘a great devotion to a pictur of our Bd Lady with letle Jesus in her armes, spending much time in adorning it with her braseletes, and what other lettle criossities she had’.33 For over ten years, she ‘said her beads & other little devotions’ in front of that statue, which, to her, marked the precise spot where she could best express her devotion and where, in return, she could most tangibly feel the immanence of the sacred. In a Protestantized country where hearing Mass and receiving the sacraments were rare occasions, such personal devotions were key to accessing the holy. Hallowed places and objects acted, as it were, as portals between the earthly plane and the divine. They built bridges between an enshrined past and the resourceful adaptations of a present under penalty. Margaret Mostyn’s sister, Elizabeth, used to take her younger siblings to visit the ruins of an old chapel of Our Lady and to pray there. She also taught her siblings ‘their beads & devotions to Our Lady’. In the narrative, the correlation of saying the beads with visiting the ruins of an old Welsh chapel showed both activities as remnants of a past to which Catholics hoped one day to return. As tokens of a continued faith, they carried both nostalgia for their sacred heritage and a determination not to allow that past to be forgotten or fall into disuse.34 The  same applied to conventual communities with a history of dislocation and revival. In the case of the Galway Poor Clare convent, it seems that a statue of the Virgin and Child, venerated as ‘Our Lady of Bethlehem’, was given such im­port­ ance that it was kept safe through the tribulations of the 1690‒1 wars, even when Hallett (ed.), Lives of Spirit: English Carmelite Self-­Writing of The Early Modern Period (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 211–12. 29 This point did not escape James II when, on 29 August 1687, he visited the well himself. Walsham, Catholic Reformation, p. 197. 30  Hunter (ed.), Life of Catherine Burton, p. 85. 31  Bowden (ed.), The Chronicles of Nazareth, p. 39. 32  Daemen-­de Gelder (ed.), Life Writing II, p. 330. 33  Hallett (ed.), Lives of Spirit, p. 180. 34  Nicky Hallett (ed.), Witchcraft, Exorcism and the Politics of Possession in a Seventeenth-­Century Convent: ‘How Sister Ursula was Once Bewiched and Sister Margaret Twice’ (Aldershot, 2007), p. 52.

144  Laurence Lux-Sterritt most of the community’s books, altar fittings, and altar plate were lost. It is still in use today.35 Blessed objects and sacramentals focused the soul on the sacred but were also loci of the divine. Like holy books, they were part and parcel of everyday Catholic life. When Carmelite Magdalen Leveston died, her deathbed was surrounded with devotional paraphernalia and she was ‘incompassed round about her parsone with relects, medalles, beads & bages of picturs, her Crucifix in one hand, & a pare of beads in the other & a holoued candell under her pillow’.36 She had been ill for some time and unable to take part in the house’s devotional life. In the morning, when her community discovered her lifeless body, they were moved not only by her passing but also by the fact that she had arranged her own posture and displayed all those objects herself. Such material tokens were the vessels of a very personal, affective devotion and the vectors of deep spirituality.37 Sacramentals also accompanied British and Irish Catholics at home and en­abled them to adapt their devotions to circumstances in which the liturgy and rites could not easily be observed. Travellers smuggled them in, friends sent them by post, they were passed on from one generation to the next or given in bequests or as gifts. When they made their way into private homes, those proscribed objects attenuated the geographical gap between exiles nuns and their countryfolk. They also conveyed continuity between tradition and the adaptations of a practice fighting unfavourable odds. Beads provided a traditional method which structured prayers and took away the risk of erring too far from orthodoxy. The faithful walked an approved path, guided on the road to salvation by the pre-­set number of prayers as they focused on scenes of the lives of both Jesus and Mary. The rosary was particularly suited to British and Irish circumstances since it was easy to conceal in one’s garments and to carry on one’s person. It could be used in the private setting of one’s closet or in a prison cell, and it was portable enough to be carried whilst travelling on the road or fingered during Protestant services as a gesture of resistance. Beads could be personalized, thanks to the malleability of the prayers’ text. Once blessed, they constituted a flexible medium to the sacred but also a lay substitute

35  Cunningham, ‘The Poor Clare Order in Ireland’, p. 166. Today’s sisters refer to the statue as the Black Lady, also known as ‘the Athlone Madonna’ in art networks. See https://poorclares.ie/our-­lady-­ of-­bethlehem-­athlone-­madonna (accessed 25 October 2021). 36  Hallett (ed.), Lives of Spirit, p. 217. 37  See Jennifer Jahner (ed.), Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Objects in Global Perspective: Translations of the Sacred (Basingstoke, 2010); Sylvia Evangelisti, ‘Material Culture’, in Alexandra Bamji, Geert Janssen, and Mary Laven (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-­ Reformation (Farnham, 2013), pp. 395–416; Suzanna Ivanič, Mary Laven, and Andrew Morrall (eds.), Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World (Amsterdam, 2019); Abigail Brundin, Deborah Howard, and Mary Laven (eds.), The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 2018).

Religious Houses  145 for the Liturgy of the Hours, which was much less accessible to British and Irish Catholics in the absence of a priest.38 The rosary provides an eloquent example of redesigned usage of an otherwise universal Catholic sacramental, as it came to express the fighting spirit of a Catholicism under siege. In the late sixteenth century Henry Garnet, then Jesuit superior of the English mission, called it ‘a manifest badge or token of the Romane Religion’.39 The newly formed confraternity gradually transformed the use of the rosary, giving it a more combative nature in keeping with the spirit of the Counter-­Reformation. Where, on the Continent, Mary was praised as a mild and modest mother retired from the world, English discourse on the Mother of God evolved to highlight her more militant nature. As she became restyled as the ‘Mother of Power’, the Virgin kept her traditional role as an effective intercessor for the salvation of sinners but also became a warrior-­like Mary, able to protect those who venerated her. Clerics advertised Mary’s special ability to destroy heresy and to terrify the devil, and in so doing, they weaponized rosaries in the on-­ going religious conflict.40 The new face of Mary was illustrated in the accounts of the life of Carmelite Margaret Mostyn. In 1651, while fighting demonic possession, she resorted to her rosary as a shield. The beads she used had originally belonged to ‘a deceased and very holy religious in [the Ghent Benedictine] monastery’. Having acquired special power from that saintly ownership, they were reputed to be highly effective against the devil. Mostyn reported that the Virgin Mary ‘promis[ed] her that as often as she took her beads into her hands’, she would be granted her protection. If the devil tempted her to leave the monastery, all she had to do was take her beads into her hands to feel Mary’s support. For Mostyn, like for many of her contemporaries, the Virgin was a personal protector but also a valiant warrior in the battle against evil; moreover, each time she intervened and proved the efficacy of Catholic worship, she vindicated the long-­held devotional practices of the Roman Church.

Devotional Lives and the Supernatural The portability of sacramentals made them ideal for personal use, which was both a strong asset and a challenge. Since private worship was difficult to control, practices could easily slide beyond militancy and into the realm of questionable 38 Lisa McClain, ‘Using What’s at Hand: English Catholic Reinterpretations of the Rosary, 1559–1642’, The Journal of Religious History, 27 (2003), pp. 161–76. 39  The Societie of the Rosary (London, 1593), quoted in Anne Dillon, ‘Praying by Number: The Confraternity of the Rosary and the English Catholic Community, c. 1580–1700’, History, 88 (2003), p. 453. 40  McClain, ‘Using What’s at Hand’.

146  Laurence Lux-Sterritt orthodoxy. In the above example, the narrative made it clear that Mostyn’s beads derived their efficacy from the Virgin Mary’s intercession. Yet they also spread their effectiveness to others, as if through ‘holy contagion or radioactivity’, as Walsham put it.41 If ‘used with faith’, any rosary which they touched would acquire the same properties. Moreover, these beads also endowed Mostyn with super­nat­ ural abilities of her own, which was more unusual. By handling them, she was able ‘to know the infallible truth’, to detect lies and defeat the devil’s plotting in her convent.42 This example shows that rosaries sometimes exceeded their roles as devotional structuring tools to a method of prayer. They could acquire systematic miraculous abilities which were not ordinarily given to sacramentals. Mostyn refrained from telling anyone but her confessor about the beads. Should this be the devil’s work, she would disgrace herself and her community and she feared ‘she would be burned as a witch’.43 Her reluctance to acknowledge both the power of the beads and her own derived potency indicates that she understood their unorthodox nature. Her use of the rosary represented an ontological shift. The beads no longer derived their efficacy from liturgical consecration and no longer acted as vehicles of the sacred, but rather possessed an inherent miraculous nature. This shift departed from the proper use of sacramentals. Such liberties may have been difficult to avoid in Britain and Ireland, where domestic settings and the shortage of clerical supervision at times allowed dubious utilization of sacramentals, but it was more subversive to find those practices in a convent. Other objects like statues, pictures, and relics, with their evident links to saints, could also acquire numinous fame and be called upon to effect supernatural results. Margaret Mostyn’s niece entered the convent in 1693, bringing with her a special devotion to a little statue of Our Lady of Cluse, which she dressed in clothes she made herself, as was common practice at the time.44 As prioress, she later oversaw the extension of the building, and she tied the foundation stone to the statue and took it on a procession around the garden, with the nuns wearing their mantles and veils and carrying candles whilst singing litanies.45 Similarly, when the Antwerp Carmelites sought to enlarge their garden, they fought their neighbours’ opposition by taking an image of St Joseph on a procession around their garden and then tying it onto a ladder and flipping it over the wall of their enclosure, ‘desiring the Blessed Saint to take possession of the piece of ground for [them], which the Saint did so efficaciously that contrary to all expectation [they] accomplished it’.46 The nuns of both Lierre and Antwerp trusted their holy images to provide miraculous protection for their designs. In York, where Mary Ward’s

41  Alexandra Walsham, ‘Introduction: Relics and Remains’, Past & Present, 205 (2020), p. 12. 42  Hallett (ed.), Witchcraft, p. 82. 43  Hallett (ed.), Witchcraft. 44  Hallett (ed.), Lives of Spirit, pp. 191–2. 45  Hallett (ed.), Lives of Spirit. 46  Hallett (ed.), Lives of Spirit, p. 97.

Religious Houses  147 legacy lived on at the Bar Convent, the sisters reported being saved from the ­violence of an angry anti-­Catholic mob by hanging a picture of the Archangel Michael above the front door.47 Images could also protect people who wore them about their persons like amulets, and they were deemed effective procurers of miraculous cures.48 In 1669, Mary Caryll, abbess of the Dunkirk Benedictines, travelled to Bruges to consult a renowned doctor for her breast cancer. She stayed with the Augustinians there and was indeed cured, although not by the doctor. A relic of St François Xavier was placed in her chamber, and it was the saint’s miraculous intercession which brought about the cure.49 Some accounts tell us more about the use of healing relics. In the early 1650s for example, when Margaret Mostyn fell dangerously ill, her community at Lierre applied a picture of the Jesuit Henry Morse, ‘a holy martyr of England’, to her chest and laced her wine with some of the martyr’s blood. The external application of a holy picture as a poultice and the internal ingestion of a relic effected a quick and miraculous cure.50 Such practices transcended time and space, since nearly forty years later, in Suffolk, a young Catherine Burton followed similar customs. For six years she had been bedridden with a disease which caused the dislocation of her joints and withering of her members. After medical doctors proved of no use, her parents sought supernatural help. A piece of the true Cross and several other relics were procured, which the patient applied to her body and dipped into her drinks.51 Yet in this case, the material efficacy of the objects was supplanted by the spiritual intercession of a saint. As Burton became particularly dedicated to St Xaverius, she pledged to become a nun if he healed her, which he did. Her recovery was so extraordinary that she later recorded that ‘though the parson of the place had declared from the pulpit, not long before, that miracles were ceased, yet the Protestants themselves looked on my cure as miraculous’.52 Burton entered the Antwerp Carmelite convent in 1693. Amongst British and Irish Catholics, there remained a keen popular interest in thaumaturgic miracles, and Burton’s story circulated an essential account of a Catholicism which offered miracles when Protestantism had declared them dead. It was not rare for the people who had been cured by such divine intervention to become relics themselves after their death. In the same way as holy relics suffused their reliquaries with holiness—­to the point that once-­simple containers became revered in their own right—­the miraculously healed became in turn miraculous healers. Such transfers of holy efficacy blurred the line between orthodox practice and the magical use of relics. For instance, both Margaret 47 Gregory Kirkus, An  I.  B.  V.  M.  Biographical Dictionary of the English Members and Major Benefactors (1667–2000) (London, 2001), p. 44. 48 Walsham, Catholic Reformation, p. 39. 49  Bowden (ed.), Chronicles of Nazareth, p. 61. 50  Hallett (ed.), Witchcraft, p. 111. 51  Hunter (ed.), The Life of Catherine Burton, pp. 43 and 70 respectively. 52  Hunter (ed.), The Life of Catherine Burton, p. 84.

148  Laurence Lux-Sterritt Mostyn and Catherine Burton had gained such repute that they were treated like saints after their deaths, without any of the necessary official accreditations. The populace flocked to the gates of the Lierre convent to view Mostyn’s body as it lay at the choir grill and they begged for pieces of her habit or any of her belongings to keep ‘as rellickes’. They also prayed for her intercession to be granted miracles too.53 At Antwerp, Catherine Burton’s gangrenous remains turned sweet-­smelling after death, inducing her fellow nuns and her doctor to make relics by touching medals and beads to her body. They treated her like a saint, praying for her intercession and begging her for miracles.54 Similarly, when Irish Poor Clare Catherine Browne died at the Conceptionist convent of Caballero de Gracia in Madrid, her sister Mary, chronicler of the dissipated Galway community, sent back to Ireland some of her veil and scapular, which became relics.55 For some nuns, miraculous fame came long after death. In 1716, at Antwerp, the remains of Margaret Wake were discovered incorrupt in the crypt where they had lain for thirty-­eight years. Those of Catherine Burton were also found incorrupt after remaining in the same crypt for two years. Doctors testified ‘that no corruption had ever entered that body’, which they deemed ‘beyond the course of nature’.56 However, as men of medicine, they left it to the divines to determine whether this turn of events should indeed be termed miraculous. When the news spread through the town, crowds gathered at the convent gates. People came from Antwerp but also neighbouring towns to witness the supernatural wonder, and when the convent gates were opened to receive deliveries, the crowd rushed inside. In the end, the community had to enrol soldiers to guard their enclosure. For several days, two nuns were entrusted with touching people’s beads, medals, pictures, or pieces of cloth to the body and returning them through the grill.57 A similar process followed the death of Margaret Clare Jonyne, an Irish Poor Clare who died in her Madrid convent and whose devotional objects were divided amongst unnamed persons who had come begging for them. The demand was such that the stones of her beads were distributed individually. In the case of Clara Colette Christian Blake, another Irish Poor Clare, it was her very body which was to be fragmented—­her ‘dead carkas’ had acquired immediate public appeal and provoked the same crowds as described in the cases of Burton or Wake. Five years later, when it was found partially incorrupt, a decision was taken to have her teeth pulled out and distributed.58

53  Hallett (ed.), Lives of Spirit, p. 187. 54  Hunter (ed.), The Life of Catherine Burton, pp. 255–62. 55  A. Holloway and R. Wray, ‘ “Oh Daughter . . . Forget Your People and Your Father’s House”: Early Modern Women Writers and the Spanish Imaginary’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies: Hispanic Studies and Researches on Spain, Portugal and Latin America, 93 (2016), pp. 1387–413. 56  Hunter (ed.), The Life of Catherine Burton, p. 274. 57  Hallett (ed.), Lives of Spirit, p. 168. 58  Galway Chronicle, fols. 8r–9r cited in Coolahan, Women, Writing, and Language, p. 95.

Religious Houses  149 Events such as these manifested the laity’s keenness for relics. In the context of the Catholic Reformation, when the Church carried out strict authentication pro­ ced­ures, communities kept lists of their holy relics and recorded their provenance and particular use.59 Conventual documents emphasized decorum and orthodoxy regarding those precious remains. For instance, in 1694, Mary of Modena donated locally authenticated relics of St Justin to the Augustinian canonesses of Paris. Yet the Parisian documentation was sent to Rome, to be confirmed there on 12 July 1695. Only then could the relic, freshly approved by the Holy See, be carried from the choir to the nave in a solemn public procession that became an annual event.60 The canonesses made choices which were congruent with Tridentine policies; they adhered to reformed practices and hoped to gain in repu­ta­tion both for holiness and for conformity with the Church’s line of conduct regarding relics. Yet in the cases of Wake and Burton, the public were trying to access the divine through a more personal interaction with the bodies. To them, the incorruptibility of those corpses was tangible proof of divine favour: they could smell it, see it, and touch it for themselves. They made relics of their own, hoping to tap into their holy properties at home. More than mere mementos of departed companions, those sisterly remains claimed a body politic around the holy female body, distributed and shared amongst their countryfolk. Soon, stories about miracles obtained through the nuns’ intercession circulated. Their relics had travelled to England, where it was reported that a boy was ‘instantly cured’ of his debilitating eye disease by the application of a piece of linen which had touched Margaret Wake’s own eyes.61 Thus, British and Irish Catholics circumvented some of the official strictures regarding the cult of relics, precisely at the time when the Holy See was tightening its control. The rule was that relics must be approved in Rome and must carry their documents of authentication when they travelled.62 Yet as missionaries were martyred and nuns died holy deaths, there was a plentiful supply of new relics, whose cult started long before any process of canonization. This happened wherever new saintly bodies became available to nurture the public devotion of any given locality.63 More specific to Britain and Ireland was the fact 59  For the Pontoise Benedictines, see The Lady Abbess of Teignmouth and the Archivist (eds.), ‘Registers of the English Benedictine Nuns of Pontoise OSB, etc.’, in Catholic Record Society Miscellanea X (London, 1915), pp. 263–65. For a detailed account of relics in the convents, see James  E.  Kelly, English Convents in Catholic Europe (Cambridge, 2020), esp. pp. 148–58. 60 F.  M.  Th. Cédoz, Un Couvent de religieuses anglaises à Paris de 1634 à 1884 (Paris, 1891), pp. 159–62. 61  Hallett (ed.), Lives of Spirit, p. 169. 62  Urban VIII’s Bull Caelestis Hierusalem Cives (1634) reserved the right both to canonization and beatification to the Apostolic See. In 1642, the pontiff published additional regulations in his Decreta servanda in beatificatione et canonizatione Sanctorum. Between 1734 and 1738, five volumes of pro­ ced­ures were published by Prospero Lambertini, before he became Pope Benedict XIV in 1740. 63  See Simon Ditchfield, ‘Martyrs on the Move: Relics as Vindicators of Local Diversity in the Tridentine Church’, SCH, 30 (1993), pp. 283–94.

150  Laurence Lux-Sterritt that those remains were often entrusted to the custody of lay people for lack of sufficient clerical structures, thereby making their tracking and the control of their cult much more delicate. In 1666, as workmen were clearing out a London house in the wake of the Great Fire, they discovered the head of John Cornelius, SJ, stored in a cupboard, without a reliquary.64 This sacred skull had been tidied away like any other household item, in a manner which evokes a domestic worship without ceremony, but which could be all the more intimate and immediate for its lack of grandeur. The domestication of relics allowed for a range of popular uses which, at times, took liberties with the official line. Thus, Catholic worship endured and even flourished despite the absence of public ceremonies and without the full guidance and structure usually provided by the combination of liturgy and accessible cler­ ic­al advice. In the context of a minority faith, the sacralization of time and space, the reading of devout books, and the cult of sacred objects acted as tangible channels to the divine.

Conclusion The spiritual and devotional lives of the cloisters were intricately linked with those of their families and friends. Because the foundations belonged to enclosed orders, it could be tempting to see them as self-­contained units, or as more permeable to the culture of their host nations than to their geographically remote native lands. Yet the communities in exile interacted with both their Continental neighbours and their networks across the Channel. Their devotional lives had roots in Britain and Ireland. When they entered the cloister, women brought with them their devotions and their customs, some of which were universal to the Church whilst others were local or even very personal indeed. The convents’ patrons also played a very important role in specifying the observance of certain devotions for which they bestowed gifts, either in money or in kind. These were absorbed into the spiritual life of the communities and became part of the lived religion of each individual house. In turn, the convents fed the spirituality of those Catholics who stayed at home. They shared devotional printed works and more private spiritual correspondence, they sent blessed objects and sacramentals, which often carried indulgences, and (perhaps even more importantly) they provided their compatriots with home-­grown models of sanctity to imitate and venerate within their own domestic settings. Convents were official institutions with rules, constitutions, and statutes, under the authority of either their local bishops or the male religious of their order, they did not lack in hierarchy or 64  Alexandra Walsham, ‘Skeletons in the Cupboard: Relics after the English Reformation’, Past & Present, 205 (2010), p. 129.

Religious Houses  151 clerical supervision as their lay friends did. Yet despite their belonging to the body of the Church, they also partook in some of the more adaptable, sometimes even debatable, practices which characterized British and Irish clandestine networks. They displayed the same resourcefulness as their compatriots. The devotional lives of nuns had much in common with members of the lay recusant circles many of them knew before they took the veil. British and Irish convents bridged the geographical distance between both sides of the Channel. They mingled some of the national specificities they adopted from their lay backgrounds with universal Catholic practices. As they reclaimed a glorified past, they also actively took part in sanctifying the present, and gave hope for a return to the Roman faith in the future.

Select Bibliography Bhreathnach, Edel, Joseph MacMahon, and John McCafferty (eds.), The Irish Franciscans 1534–1990 (Dublin, 2009). Bowden, Caroline (ed.), English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, 6 vols. (London, 2012–2013). Bowden, Caroline and James E. Kelly (eds.), The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Communities, Cultures and Identity (Farnham, 2013). Coolahan, Marie-Louise, Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford, 2010). Keats-Rohan, Katharine, English Catholic Nuns in Exile, 1600–1800: A Biographical Register (Oxford, 2017). Kelly, James E., English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020). Kelly, James  E. and Susan Royal (eds.), Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-Reformation, c. 1570–1800 (Leiden, 2017). Lux-Sterritt, Laurence, English Benedictine Nuns in Exile in the Seventeenth Century: Living Spirituality (Manchester, 2017). Walker, Claire, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke, 2003). Walsham, Alexandra, Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (Farnham, 2014).

8 Religious Houses Spirituality Claire Walker

The spirituality of British and Irish religious houses reflected the complexity of seventeenth- and eighteenth-­century politics and society. Indeed, the period’s ‘spiritualities’ were ‘baroque’ in their different styles, and in the heated debates surrounding them. By 1641 most religious houses were practising spiritual ­methods grounded in their order’s established forms of prayer and devotion, inflected by the imperatives of the post-­Reformation world. Many male regulars eschewed the cloister for active engagement on the missions to succour Catholics and restore the faith in their homelands. Others engaged in more traditional roles as monks, friars, and priests, but also served the growing expatriate communities as spiritual directors, confessors, preachers, and educators. Nuns, consigned at Trent to a cloistered life of prayer, directed their devotions towards supporting the missionaries—­and any secular authority willing to assist their quest to return to Britain and Ireland. They also provided education, refuge, and liturgies for exiled lay Catholics.1 In these tasks the religious orders drew upon their own spiritual traditions, but within the broader context of early modern Catholic devotion which was invariably influenced by the spirituality of Ignatius Loyola. The Society of Jesus’s prom­in­ ence on the mission and its success in establishing colleges where British and Irish exiles settled in Europe ensured that many joining religious houses had prior experience of Ignatian piety. This often proved a double-­edged sword for monastic communities which debated the merits of Jesuit prayer and direction. It was a particularly thorny issue for female communities where proponents of the Society’s methods clashed with sisters who preferred alternative spiritual archetypes. However, disquiet about the Society’s spirituality was by no means limited to the convents. Many male religious took issue with the ubiquity of the Jesuits and Ignatius’ tightly structured meditational practice. Although some of these battles 1  This chapter discusses male and female religious orders but focuses on cloistered women. For further discussion of male orders and spirituality, see Cormac Begadon and James  E.  Kelly (eds.), British and Irish Religious Orders in Europe, 1560–1800: Conventuals, Mendicants and Monastics in Motion (Woodbridge, 2022); Edel Bhreathnach, Joseph MacMahon, OFM, and John McCafferty (eds.), The Irish Franciscans, 1534–1990 (Dublin, 2009). Claire Walker, Religious Houses: Spirituality In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II: Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745. Edited by: John Morrill and Liam Temple, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843436.003.0009

Religious Houses  153 had been fought before 1641, many remained unresolved and flared periodically. Moreover, the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century also witnessed the rise of Jansenism in France and it infiltrated certain religious communities.2 Ignatian techniques were not the only points of contention. The contemplative method developed in the Cambrai Benedictine cloister by Augustine Baker, OSB, which explicitly challenged Loyola’s practices, generated conflict in the English Benedictine Congregation. This had ostensibly ended in 1633 with the removal of Baker and his Benedictine opponent, Francis Hull, from the convent, but the nuns at Cambrai continued to copy and circulate Baker’s spiritual advice which continued to court controversy. Yet the history of spirituality in the period was not only about conflicting ideologies. A thriving publishing and scribal industry instructed religious and lay people about how to achieve a life of perfection through mental prayer and daily devotions. Certain monastics guided by spiritual directors achieved recognition as mystics. In British and Irish colleges, monasteries, and convents communal prayer, liturgical ceremonies, and private devotions were increasingly infused with political intent as the Civil Wars, Protectorate, Restoration, Revolution of 1688, and subsequent Jacobite insurgencies engaged the exiled religious’ participation. This chapter considers the range of spiritualities practised in the religious houses and their context. Defining spirituality is complex. David Lonsdale argues it is twofold, encompassing lived belief or faith, experience, and practice, which is translated into texts, rituals, music, and material culture.3 Joseph Bergin observes that studying spirituality through printed texts risks losing sight of practitioners. His ‘elastic’ methodology accordingly encompasses the full range of spiritual experience.4 This is pertinent for early modern Catholicism, where the spaces and artefacts of religious devotion were arguably as significant as its intellectual culture. Baroque Catholicism is renowned for its appeal to the senses and many meditation techniques employed images, ritual, and physical engagement with devotional objects. However, applying Bergin’s methodology to British and Irish religious houses is complicated. Many lost religious artefacts when fleeing the revolutionaries in the 1790s. With some exceptions, their spiritual practices are 2  Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community 1688–1745 (Woodbridge, 2009), pp. 175–87; David Lunn, The English Benedictines 1540–1688: From Reformation to Revolution (London, 1980), p. 141. This chapter does not discuss Jansenism. For useful discussions, see Ruth Clark, Strangers and Sojourners at Port Royal: Being an Account of the Connections between the British Isles and the Jansenists of France and Holland (Cambridge, 2014); Thomas O’Connor, Irish Jansenists 1600–70: Religion and Politics in Flanders, France, Ireland and Rome (Dublin, 2008); Thomas Palmer, Jansenism and England: Moral Rigorism across the Confessions (Oxford, 2018); Mark R. F. Williams, ‘Translating the Jansenist Controversy in Britain and Ireland’, English Historical Review, 134 (2019), pp. 59–91. 3 David Lonsdale, ‘English Spirituality, Volume I: from Earliest Times to 1700’, and ‘English Spirituality, Volume II: From 1700 to the Present Day (Review)’, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, 3 (2003), pp. 129–30. 4 Joseph Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change in France, 1580–1730 (New Haven, 2009), p. 310.

154  Claire Walker primarily accessible through the written word. So, like other accounts of early modern exilic religiosity, this chapter concentrates on the orders’ intellectual culture.5 However, wherever possible it pays attention to the materiality of devotion referenced in texts. The chapter first considers the religious houses’ spiritual traditions articulated in books and objects. The second section examines points of difference and conflict regarding prayer and meditation. The final part explores the spiritual quest to return Britain and Ireland to the European Catholic fold.

Spiritual Texts and Direction A rich range of spiritual methods were practiced across the British and Irish exile diaspora. The Benedictine, Franciscan, Augustinian, Dominican, and Bridgettine orders had long-­established traditions, grounded in the writings of their founders and later reformers. The newcomer Jesuits and Teresians provided equally fruitful devotional templates. Most religious exercised a piety based in their order’s charism, but many found Ignatian methods useful and combined them with practices recommended by spiritual directors. Books were fundamental in the articulation of contemplative techniques, so well-­stocked libraries were vital. The need for accessible meditation manuals in the vernacular for religious and lay piety saw many priests, monks, friars, and nuns engage as authors, translators, copyists, and scribes. Although spirituality was gendered, monastic women participated in this dissemination of pious literature, on occasions taking the lead in the promotion of particular techniques.6 British and Irish Catholic literature centred upon early modern devotional classics. Universal favourites, like the Imitation of Christ, stemming from pre-­ Reformation trends, were supplemented with translations of popular sixteenthand seventeenth-­century Spanish, Italian, and French authors. In the eighteenth century, the prolific Bishop Richard Challoner revised classics like the Imitation of Christ and the works of Teresa of Avila and Francis de Sales, as well as composing his own spiritual oeuvres. Many texts, like the widely read Garden of the Soul 5 Nancy Bradly Warren, The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700 (Notre Dame, 2010); Nicky Hallett, The Senses in Religious Communities, 1600–1800: Early Modern ‘Convents of Pleasure’ (Farnham, 2013); Laurence Lux-­ Sterritt, English Benedictine Nuns in Exile in the Seventeenth Century: Living Spirituality (Manchester, 2017); James E. Kelly, English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020). 6 Thomas  H.  Clancy, SJ, ‘A Content Analysis of English Catholic Books, 1615–1714’, Catholic Historical Review, 86 (2000), pp. 259–61; Anna Battigelli and Laura M. Stevens, ‘Eighteenth-­Century Women and English Catholicism’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 31 (2012), pp. 7–32; Jenna Lay, ‘Devotional Culture and Intellectual Community in the English Convents in Exile’, Literature Compass, 14 (2017); Jaime Goodrich, Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender and Religion in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2013), pp. 145–83. See also Caroline Bowden and James E. Kelly (eds.), The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Communities, Culture and Identity (Farnham, 2013).

Religious Houses  155 (1740), were directed towards lay devotion, but their ubiquity suggests they also found a religious readership.7 The orders catered for the growing market in lay piety with the Dominicans producing texts on the rosary and the Franciscans providing manuals for confraternities. They also continued to generate texts for their own consumption, including rules, liturgical books, and biographies of eminently pious religious, which suggests the significance of exemplars in shaping monastic devotional lives.8 Yet it was not only male religious that penned spiritual works. The Augustinian prioress in Bruges, Teresa Joseph Herbert, published three devotional texts which were reissued in fifteen impressions during the seventy years from 1722.9 Scribal production remained important, with unpublished devotional treatises, diaries, letters of advice, and personal compilations confirming the richness of spirituality across the exiled houses. The industrious reproduction of Augustine Baker’s guidance in the Benedictine abbeys at Cambrai and Paris is well-­known, but other religious similarly authored, copied, and collected religious writing.10 Those employing Ignatian techniques composed digests of readings, prayers, and meditations. Hannah Thomas shows how such spiritual commonplace books were used by fathers of the Society on the mission in England and Wales, as well as within a monastic context by the canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre in Liège. The Sepulchrine texts include biographical material and meditations by Jesuits from the English College in Liège, and the multiple hands within each one points to their collective composition and use over time.11 The significance of individual pious reflections, committed to paper upon the advice of spiritual directors, is evident in unpublished community documents like monastic annals. In the eighteenth century, Prioress Mary Howard compiled the Antwerp Carmelites’ chron­ icle in the form of ninety-­five vitae of community members. She included devout reflections and meditations, preserved by the convent after sisters had died, with biographical details and spiritual achievements. The individual entries attest to the centrality of reading and writing in spiritual practice. Nuns noted the formative role of devotional texts in propelling them into the cloister, in resolving 7  Frans Blom, Jos Blom, Frans Korsten, and Geoffrey Scott, English Catholic Books 1701–1800: A Bibliography (Brookfield, 1996), p. xiii. 8  Blom, Blom, Korsten, and Scott, English Catholic Books, pp. xiv–­xv. 9  Blom, Blom, Korsten, and Scott, English Catholic Books, p. xv. 10  Heather Wolfe, ‘Reading Bells and Loose Papers: Reading and Writing Practises of the English Benedictine Nuns of Cambrai and Paris’, in Victoria  E.  Burke and Jonathon Gibson (eds.), Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 135–56; Goodrich, Faithful Translators, pp. 168, 169; Liam Peter Temple, ‘Mysticism and Identity among the English Poor Clares’, Church History, 88 (2019), pp. 645–71; Jan Rhodes, ‘The Library Catalogue of the English Benedictine Nuns of Our Lady of Good Hope in Paris’, Downside Review, 130 (2012), pp. 62–5; Lux-­Sterritt, English Benedictine Nuns, p. 120. 11  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:‘The World is our House’ (Leiden, 2018), pp. 287–314.

156  Claire Walker spiritual crises, and in assisting prayer.12 They documented personal spiritual journeys to explicate the Carmelite charism practiced at Antwerp for later ­gen­er­ations. Annals were created specifically for a religious community, but their contents were often disseminated among other houses too. The spiritualities of the exilic diaspora were grounded in each order’s traditions, articulated primarily in religious rules. Benedictine monasticism centred upon performing the opus dei, as well as private meditation, scholarship, and strict adherence to the rule. An English version of Benedict’s rule published at Douai in 1700 exhorted monastics to follow its tenets closely and thereby ‘share in the Passion of Jesus-­Christ; and hereafter deserve to be pertakers with him in his Kingdome’.13 Some versions of an earlier translation by Cuthbert Fursdon, OSB, contain a frontispiece of a monk kneeling before a crucifix on the two steps of ‘prayer’ and ‘mortification’.14 The Paris Benedictines’ library held a manuscript translation of their rule, but also contained Augustine Baker’s exposition of it and a book on how to practice it, translated by the Benedictine prior of St Edmund’s, Henry Joseph Johnson.15 As part of their spiritual and regular formation in the novitiate, aspiring monks were required to make manuscript copies of the English Benedictine Constitutions.16 If obedience and prayer characterized Benedictine charism, poverty underpinned Franciscan spirituality. The Poor Clare abbey founded at Gravelines in 1609, with Jesuit spiritual direction, was not permitted to follow reformed Franciscan poverty. Following the establishment of the English Franciscan province, the friars controversially attempted to reform the convent in 1618. The sisters who supported their vision of a ‘pure’ Franciscan spirituality eventually left in 1629 to found a new convent at Aire. During the dissension, Elizabeth Evelinge published texts aligning the Gravelines convent with a quintessentially Franciscan religiosity, and the order’s founders St Francis and St Clare, and its reformer St  Colette.17 The significance of such foundational documents for Poor Clare

12  ‘Short Colections of the beginings of our English monastery of Teresians in Antwerp with some few perticulars of our dear deceased religious’, in Katrien Daemen-­de Gelder (ed.), English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, Part II, vol. 4: Life Writing II (London, 2013); Claire Walker, ‘The Intellectual World of Catholic Piety’, in Amanda  L.  Capern (ed.), The Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe (London, 2020), pp. 240–1; Jessica McCandless, ‘Mysticism and Emotional Transformation in a Seventeenth-­Century English Convent’ (University of Adelaide PhD Dissertation, 2020), pp. 122–59. 13  The Rule of the Holy Father Saint Benedict, Translated into English (Douay, 1700), pp. 8–9. 14  The second book of the dialogues of S. Gregorie the Greate . . . containing the life and miracles of our holie father S.  Benedict, to which is adioined the rule of the same holie patriarche translated into the English tongue by C.  F.  priest and monke of the same order, 2 vols. (Douai, 1638); Dame Margaret Truran, ‘Spirituality: Fr Baker’s Legacy’, in Anselm Cramer (ed.), Lamspringe: An English Abbey in Germany (York, 2004), p. 85. 15  Rhodes, ‘Library Catalogue’, pp. 67, 77, 78. 16 Geoffrey Scott, ‘A Long Exile’, in Daniel Rees (ed.), Monks of England: The Benedictines in England from Augustine to the Present Day (London, 1997), p. 185. 17  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. 90, 93, 96, 97, 100; Dionisio Paleotti, The Admirable Life

Religious Houses  157 s­ pir­itu­al­ity is evident in the translation of St Clare’s rule into Gaelic by the Irish sisters from Gravelines, who founded a convent in Dublin in 1629.18 Other orders similarly sought vernacular instruction, with Thomas Carre, chaplain to the Augustinian nuns in Paris, translating their rule.19 In 1657, Bridgettine Charles Dimock provided an English version of the Latin rules the nuns had adopted upon settling in Lisbon.20 The devotional orientation of an order’s founder was similarly influential in shaping spirituality. In Lisbon, a brother translated the life of St Bridget from French into English for the community.21 The Paris Benedictines had a manuscript digest of St Benedict’s chronicles, as well as lives of worthy monks and nuns and other influential luminaries, like Teresa of Avila.22 While communities necessarily collected the exemplary lives of people associated with their order, their libraries contained other holy biographies. Most held the vitae of popular medi­ eval saints like Francis, Clare, and Catherine of Siena, but also more recent archetypes, such as Ignatius and Teresa.23 They likewise collected stories of admirable priests, brothers, and sisters whose spiritual success might inspire future gen­er­ ations. Occasionally these accounts were published, but they commonly circulated in manuscript to assist communal solidarity and individual prayer.24 The Poor Clares in Aire had ‘A Short Compendium of the Lives of the Saints of our Holy Order for Every Day of the Year 1720’.25 The prolific Thomas Carre composed twenty meditations on the colourful life and conversion of St Augustine, which he bound with contemplations for Paris nuns to undertake at significant moments. Before her profession, a novice reflected on her impending ‘setled and permanent state, wherin your body is tyed to stabilitie in a certaine place; and all your actions are marked out, and limited . . . according to S. Augustins Rule’.26 of the Holy Virgin  S.  Catharine of Bologna (Saint-­Omer, 1621); St Colette, The Declarations and Ordinances made upon the Rule of our Holy Mother S. Clare (Saint-­Omer, 1622); François Hendricq, The History of the Angelicall Virgin Glorious S. Clare (Douai, 1635). 18 Aodh Ó Raghailligh, Sémus Ó Síaghail, Séamus Ó Siaghail, Dubháltach Mhac Fir Bhisigh, Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh, Duald MacFirbis, and Eleanor Knott, ‘An Irish Seventeenth-­Century Translation of the Rule of St. Clare’, Ériu, 15 (1948), pp. 1–187; Marie-­Louise Coolahan, Women, Writing and Language in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford, 2010), pp. 63–78. 19  Thomas Carre, S. Austin’s Rule Together with the Constitutions (Paris, 1636). 20  Caroline Bowden, ‘Building Libraries in Exile: The English Convents and their Book Collections in the Seventeenth Century’, British Catholic History, 32 (2015), p. 368. 21  ‘The Admirable Life of Saint Bridgett, and the Order of Our Saviour, and of the Most Holy Virgin’ Exeter University Library (hereafter EUL), Exeter, MS 262/add 1/9. 22  Rhodes, ‘Library Catalogue’, pp. 72–3. 23  Bowden, ‘Building Libraries in Exile’, pp. 380–1. 24  ‘A Relation of some Remarkable Things that happened to my Lady Abbesse in her Latter Dayes, Together wth ye perticulars of her happie death’, Westminster Diocesan Archives (hereafter WDA), London; Tobie Matthew, The life of Lady Lucy Knatchbull (London, 1931); ‘The Life of Margaret Clement by Elizabeth Shirley, from a Transcript of the Manuscript; Held at the Convent of the Blessed Lady of Nazareth, Bruges, Belgium’, in Nicky Hallett (ed.), English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, Part I, vol. 3: Life Writing I (London, 2012), pp. 1–34. 25 Durham University Library Archives & Special Collections Catalogue (hereafter Durham), Durham, PCD MS 24. 26  Thomas Carre, A Proper Looking Glasse for the Daughters of Sion or St Augustines Life Abridged, and Reduced into Points of Meditation (Paris, 1665), p. 236.

158  Claire Walker This literature was supplemented by a house’s material culture which c­ ommemorated its spiritual orientation in devotional images and objects. For those destined for missionary work and its attendant risk of death for treason, the focus was on sacrifice. The English College in Rome was adorned with Niccolò Circignani’s frescoes of saints and martyrs to inspire seminarians.27 Likewise the Benedictines at St Gregory’s in Douai had a collection of martyr portraits to arouse monastic missionary fervour. At the Benedictine abbey of Lambspring in  Lower Saxony the focus was on heroic Anglo-­Saxon progenitors, including St Augustine of Canterbury and St Boniface.28 This historical orientation was supplemented in 1693 by the interment of Popish Plot martyr Oliver Plunkett’s ­relics in the abbey church crypt.29 The sisters of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary possessed a visual hagiography of their founder, Mary Ward, in fifty paintings detailing her visionary spirituality, evolving vocation, and struggle against English Protestants and a Catholic Church suspicious of her Jesuit-­inspired apostolic ambition. Held in Munich and later Augsburg, the painted life documented Ward’s effort to redefine monasticism for early modern Catholic women.30 Other religious houses were more catholic with objects reflecting diverse devotional foci. The Carmelite nuns in Antwerp were gifted a piece of St Teresa’s heart in 1642 which was greatly treasured, but they also amassed an impressive relic collection of other saints associated with their order: the holy family, medieval holy men and women, as well as more recent martyrs.31 The Augustinian canonesses in Louvain had Thomas More’s hair shirt.32 In the eighteenth century, the Poor Clares at Rouen had gifted cloth relics of St Francis and St Colette which were displayed in reliquaries in their choir and used in liturgical rituals.33 More curiously, Jesuit Lewis Sabran was devoted to the sixth-­century Welsh saint, Melangell. Sabran acquired her relics and in 1714 secured a special feast with an indulgence for her at St Omers College, commissioning a crown of silk flowers for her statue from the Ghent Benedictine nuns.34 Reading about saintly forebears and praying

27  Carol  M.  Richardson, ‘The English College Church in the 1580s: Durante Alberti’s Altarpiece and Niccolò Circignani’s Frescoes’, in The Church of the English College in Rome: Its History, Its Restoration (Rome, 2016), pp. 34–51. 28  Scott, ‘Long Exile’, pp. 191–2. 29  Truran, ‘Spirituality’, p. 91. 30  Lowell Gallagher, ‘Remembering Lot’s Wife. The Structure of Testimony in the Painted Life’, in Arthur F. Marotti and Chanita Goodblatt (eds.), Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts: Catholic, Judaic, Feminist, and Secular Dimensions (Detroit, 2013), pp. 77–104. 31 ‘Short Colections’, pp. xvi, xxiv, 30; 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 (Abingdon, 2019), pp. 81–99. For the use of objects, see Hallett, Senses, pp. 180–92. 32  ‘Life of Margaret Clement’, pp. 6–7. 33  ‘Chronicles Poor Clare Sisters Book II Rouen 1701–1780’, in Caroline Bowden (ed.), English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, Part I, vol. 1: History Writing (London, 2012), pp. 236, 256, 270. 34  Geoffrey Holt (ed.), The Letter Book of Lewis Sabran, S.J. (London, 1971), pp. 8, 36, 66, 101, 109, 110, 112.

Religious Houses  159 and working in the presence of holy artefacts augmented monks and nuns understanding of their orders’ spirituality and facilitated its performance.35 We can see this in practise in accounts of religious observance. A popular focus for piety was Christ’s Passion, the subject of many treatises and artefacts. Franciscan dedication to imitatio Christi could be traced back to St Francis and featured prominently in the friars’ and nuns’ devotional orientation. In the eighteenth century, Aire Poor Clare Mary Michael Mylott translated various texts on the Passion. She dedicated ‘The Stations of the Passion of our D/r Redeemer Jesus Xt’ to the community in the 1730s, terming her sisters ‘Faithfull adorers of y/r Crucifyd Lord Jesus! & Devout Contemplators of the Dreadfull Misterys of Mount Calvary’.36 While there is no evidence of how such texts influenced individual devotional lives, Liam Temple argues the nuns likely engaged in mystical contemplation upon receiving the Eucharist or in front of a crucifix.37 Other houses offer clearer evidence. The Carmelite convent in Antwerp was adorned with multiple crucifixes and mementoes of Christ’s death, therefore it is no surprise that over a quarter of the annals’ ninety-­five biographies note particular devotion to the Passion, Christ’s wounds, and his suffering.38 The nuns were directed by Jesuits and aspired to the mystical piety of their founder, St Teresa, so these devotional props supplemented their reading. Similarly, the Bridgettines in Lisbon practiced their founder’s Christocentric devotion, literally embodying it with both the sisters’ and brothers’ habits adorned with motifs signifying crosses and the five wounds.39 The nuns’ library possessed various texts on suffering, including St Bridget’s prayers on the Passion and devotion to the five wounds.40 How such devotional guides might be used is evident in a Bridgettine meditation on Christ’s steps to Calvary. Nuns were guided on a sensory journey through fourteen contemplations from Pilate’s house to Calvary, ending at the sepulchre. Graphic illustrations and evocative textual descriptions were supplemented by the physical and emotional engagement of ‘walking’ between stations and witnessing Christ’s pain through the eyes of his mother. The apex of sentiment came at the eleventh station ‘whereunto our . . . sweetest Saviour of the World being come, his armes were streched forth, and his sacred hands and feet nailed unto the Cross, . . . his blessed Mother hearing the first blow of the hammer became 35 Claire Walker, ‘ “Hangd for the True Faith”: Embodied Devotion in Early Modern English Carmelite Cloisters’, Journal of Religious History, 44 (2020), pp. 494–512; Kelly, English Convents, pp. 78–98. 36  Durham, PCD MS 52. This text was bound with others on the same theme. 37  Temple, ‘Mysticism and Identity’, p. 670. 38  ‘Short Colections’, pp. 108, 118, 140, 154, 159–60, 162, 174, 188, 214, 217, 225–6, 248, 289. 39  E.  A.  Jones and Alexandra Walsham, ‘Introduction’, in E.  A.  Jones and Alexandra Walsham (eds.), Syon Abbey and its Books: Reading, Writing and Religion c. 1400–1700 (Woodbridge, 2010), pp. 13–14. 40  St Bridget, The Most Devout Prayers of St. Brigitte: Touching the Most Holy Passion of Our Saviour Jesus Christ (Antwerp, 1686); Devotion to the Five Sacred Wounds of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Ghent, 1717).

160  Claire Walker allmost dead with grief ’.41 The text scrupulously enumerated Christ’s falls, kicks, punches, and injuries, droplets of blood shed and his sighs of pain and anguish. The devotee not only meditated on Christ’s suffering, but they could also perform it imaginatively and physically. They reflected on its role in salvation: ‘his Passion being my antidote, his wounds may be my nourishment, his blood my drink, his death my life, his Cross my glory, that traveling in this exercise . . . I may come to enjoy him for ever in his glory’.42 The manuscript reveals how the techniques of affective piety might function in monastic spirituality. It could be used by men and women of differing spiritual capacity, guiding the less proficient with how to pray upon specific biblical scenes literally step by step; for others the contemplation of Christ’s suffering could act as a springboard for mysticism. The popularity of devotion to the Passion reveals commonalities between orders. The exiled religious houses drew upon one another’s traditions. Although each house had particular devotional emphases, they recognized the utility of wider spiritual trends, ranging from late medieval piety through to popular Tridentine practices. Guiding them were their confessors who had the care of individual souls but were also responsible for creating the community’s spiritual ethos. In the late seventeenth century, an Augustinian nun in Paris acknowledged this, writing that in the library books may be added according to the advice of our confessors, who being the best acquainted with the state of our consciences, can commonly judge best, what is most proper for us, for t’is certain, all good books are not proper for all sorts of persons souls, no more then all sorts of meat are for the body.43

However, clerical oversight was also imperative in a Church wary of erroneous belief and practice. Confessors not only oversaw monastic book collections and guided the religious along appropriate spiritual pathways, but they also discerned whether any ecstatic religious behaviours were divinely inspired. There were not many incidences of this in the exiled British and Irish cloisters, so most clerical guides focused on what the Cambrai Benedictine constitutions described as ‘directing them in their devotions and exercises’.44 Ironically, this seemingly uncontroversial role was at the core of spiritual conflict in the exiled houses.

41  ‘The Stations of our Saviour’s Passion Commonly Called Via Sacra in English Holy Way’, EUL MS 262/add1/24, fol. 37. 42  EUL MS 262/add1/24, fols. 43–6. 43  ‘Augustinians: A Retreat upon the Regulation of Our Dayly Duties’, in Laurence Lux-­Sterritt (ed.), English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, Part I, vol. 2: Spirituality (London, 2012), p. 146; Bowden ‘Building Libraries’, pp. 364–70. 44  Bowden, ‘Building Libraries’, p. 365.

Religious Houses  161

Spiritual Conflict Most dissension centred upon the place of Jesuit spiritual practice in houses belonging to the older monastic traditions. Like the Franciscans, other orders took issue with the ubiquity of Ignatian piety and the dominance of the Society in guiding prayer. The significance of Jesuit missionaries and the popularity of their school for boys at Saint-­Omer ensured that many monks, nuns, and friars had experience of The Spiritual Exercises before entering the religious life. The Exercises were formulated with action in mind, and they aimed to prepare the soul for salvation through examination of conscience, set prayers, and guided contemplation. Designed to be conducted over four weeks, excitants first con­ sidered their sinfulness, with the remaining three weeks focused on Christ’s life, Passion, and resurrection. Ignatius explained they aimed to cleanse the soul in order to seek and find ‘God’s will in the ordering of our life for the salvation of our soul’.45 Grounded in the late medieval spirituality of the devotio moderna, the Exercises encouraged excitants to use material prompts to engage their senses and feel themselves present in the setting. Critics argued that they were too prescriptive and unsuitable for contemplatives in cloisters, designed as they had been for missionaries active in the world. However, many monastic men and women found Ignatian methods helpful, and the Exercises’ simplicity and flexibility ensured adjustment for individual preferences and diverse spiritual capabilities. Thus, Jesuits were prominent in the exiled houses as extraordinary confessors and directors. This created pockets of Ignatian spirituality within communities of rival orders and proved contentious. There were various conflicts between the Society and regular orders. Not all were spiritually grounded. Conflict over Jesuit supervision erupted in 1675 among the Paris Conceptionists.46 In 1697 the Pontoise Benedictines were divided over access to extraordinary confessors, with the Society again at the ­centre of the controversy.47 Antipathy towards Ignatius’ order went well beyond the Exercises and spiritual direction, and became entangled with political rivalries and other secular factors, but spirituality proved a common flashpoint. That said, Jesuit prayer and supervision were not without their supporters, and even those against them often drew upon Ignatian methods. Caroline Bowden’s analysis of convent libraries shows the popularity of Jesuit texts. Nathanial Bacon’s A Journal of Meditations for Every Day in the Year (1669) was a popular title, held by several religious houses with the Cambrai Benedictines alone owning ten copies of the 45  Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises (1548), cited in John Patrick Donnelly, SJ (ed.), Jesuit Writings of the Early Modern Period, 1540–1640 (Indianapolis, 2006), p. 10. 46  ‘Narrative of the Transaction between The English Conception Nuns and Fr Warner, SJ’, WDA Series A XXXIV, no. 91, fol. 349; Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke, 2003), p. 137. 47  WDA Series A XXXVI, fols. 645–50; Walker, Gender and Politics, pp. 137–8.

162  Claire Walker 1669 edition, as well as later ones.48 Given that the Exercises were not fully translated into English until 1736, abbreviated versions like Bacon’s were essential for English speaking practitioners. In 1714 Abbess Mary Knatchbull of the Ghent Benedictines requested a set of the Spanish Jesuit Alfonso Rodriguez’s devotional books as payment for making the silk flower crown for Lewis Sabran’s statue of St Melangell.49 Given concern about the suitability of Loyola’s techniques, the prom­in­ence of Jesuit texts in monastic libraries is puzzling. Jaime Goodrich reveals certain Jesuits associated their publications with monastic communities to suggest Ignatian compatibility with the regular life.50 Mary Percy’s dedication of her translation of An Abridgement of Christian Perfection ‘to the religious Men and women of our Nation’, coupled with her anonymous identification as a member of a religious community, implied the text was ‘representative of English monasticism’.51 Although divisive, with their detractors accusing them of ­fostering spiritual confusion at least, and insubordination at worst, many religious men and women found their methods spiritually fulfilling. Paris Conceptionist lay sister, Agnes Didacus Latham, reputedly declared ‘religion could not stand with out them’ while her abbess, Elizabeth Anne Timperley, begged to differ.52 The exiled religious houses’ other controversial spirituality was avowedly anti-­ Ignatian, although grounded in the same medieval traditions.53 It was developed by the English Benedictine Congregation, although not all monks and nuns found it useful, with some fearing it had heretical tendencies. Although most closely associated with the nuns at Cambrai and Paris for whom it was developed, the spiritual approach of Augustine Baker was employed by many Benedictine monks too. Baker’s mysticism was grounded in medieval authors like John Tauler, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and Jan van Ruysbroeck, but he also encouraged those under his direction towards Blosius, Teresa of Avila, and Benet of Canfield, among other post-­Reformation writers. He was determined to provide the nuns with a spirituality more in tune with their Benedictine heritage, one which prescribed lengthy periods of silent meditation, as opposed to Ignatius’ vocal prayer and structured sensory reflection. Baker argued that reading spiritual books facilitated contemplation and provided digests of his favourite authors to assist the nuns. In fact, he believed the nuns themselves could discern the method which best suited their capacity.54 Cambrai was rent with spiritual dissension in 48  Bowden, ‘Building Libraries’, pp. 370–1. 49  Letter Book of Lewis Sabran, pp. 78, 95, 118. 50 Goodrich, Faithful Translators, pp. 152. 51  Achille Gagliardi and Isabella Berinzaga, An Abridgement of Christian Perfection (Saint-­Omer, 1626), p. 3; Goodrich, Faithful Translators, pp. 157–67, quote at p. 160. 52  WDA Series A XXXIV, no. 91, fol. 349. 53 For a useful comparison between the two, see Lux-­Sterritt, English Benedictine Nuns, esp. pp. 250–2. 54 Augustine Baker, Secretum, ed. John Clark (Salzburg, 1997), p. 5; Victoria Van Hyning, ‘Augustine Baker: Discerning the “Call” and Fashioning Dead Disciples’, in Claire Copeland and Johannes Machielsen (eds.), Angels of Light? Sanctity and the Discernment of Spirits in the Early

Religious Houses  163 1629 when Francis Hull, OSB, arrived as official confessor and attempted to implement Ignatian meditation. Those using Baker’s techniques were unhappy and Hull found his rival’s influence insupportable, leading to his denunciation of Baker for Quietism, Illuminism, and anti-­ authoritarian teaching in 1632. Although the English Benedictine Congregation did not find Baker guilty, in 1633 he and Hull were removed from the convent to quell further friction.55 Following Baker’s departure, the nuns at Cambrai committed to secure his teaching, transcribing his manuscripts and developing his method in works of their own. Some of the copyists, like Barbara Constable and Catherine Gascoigne, have been recognized as spiritual writers in their own right.56 The texts were created for the Cambrai and Paris cloisters, but some were sent to friends and family disseminating Baker’s ideas beyond monastic circles. Yet, like the recurrent ruptures over Jesuit direction, questions about Baker’s orthodoxy resurfaced in 1655 when the head of the Congregation decided to purge the monk’s autograph manu­scripts of erroneous teaching. Abbess Catherine Gascoigne at Cambrai refused to relinquish the documents, ensuring Baker’s legacy, which was consolidated in 1657 with Serenus Cressy’s digest of his voluminous treatises.57 The devotions of Baker’s prominent Cambrai disciple, Gertrude More, were published the same year.58 In print, through Sancta Sophia and The Spiritual Exercises, the Benedictine spirituality declared by its proponents as more efficacious for contemplative life than Ignatian piety prevailed. Baker’s method was practised by Benedictines from St Gregory’s at Douai to Lambspring in Lower Saxony. It was also not limited to British circles, with three nuns from Cambrai transporting it to the French monastery of St Lazare.59 Copies of Baker manuscripts were also sent to the English Carmelites in Antwerp; and the Poor Clares in Aire had extracts in a manuscript of mystical writing, as well as a work he had written specifically for them.60 The prolific monk also wrote spiritual advice for those Modern Period (Leiden, 2012), pp. 144–52; Liam Peter Temple, Mysticism in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2019), pp. 19–44. 55  Claire Walker, ‘Spiritual Property: The English Benedictine Nuns of Cambrai and the Dispute Over the Baker Manuscripts’, in Nancy  E.  Wright, Margaret  W.  Ferguson and A.  R.  Buck (eds.), Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England (Toronto, 2004), pp. 239–41; Walker, Gender and Politics, p. 146. 56 Wolfe, ‘Reading Bells’; Jenna Lay, ‘An English Nun’s Authority: Early Modern Spiritual Controversy and the Manuscripts of Barbara Constable’, in Laurence Lux-­ Sterritt and Carmen M. Mangion (eds.), Gender, Catholicism, and Spirituality (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 99–114. 57  Walker, ‘Spiritual Property’, pp. 241–9; Liam Peter Temple, ‘The Mysticism of Augustine Baker, OSB: A Reconsideration’, Reformation and Renaissance Review, 19 (2017), pp. 224–6; Van Hyning, ‘Augustine Baker: Discerning the “Call” ’, pp. 166–7; Augustine Baker, Sancta Sophia: Or, Directions for the Prayer of Contemplation Methodically Digested by R. F. Serenus Cressy (Douai, 1657). 58  Gertrude More, The Holy Practises of a Devine Lover or, The Sainctly Ideots Devotions (Paris, 1657). Reissued as The Spiritual Exercises of the Most Vertuous and Religious  D.  Gertrude More (Paris, 1658). 59 Lunn, English Benedictines, p. 208; Geoffrey Scott, ‘James [name in religion Maurus] Corker (1636–1715)’, ODNB; Truran, ‘Spirituality’, pp. 83–92; Walker, Gender and Politics, p. 145. 60 Walker, Gender and Politics, p. 145; Temple, ‘Mysticism and Identity’, pp. 652–3.

164  Claire Walker labouring as missionaries, positing suitable training in prayer and contemplation would prepare monks for its rigours and distractions.61 The dissemination of Baker’s method, the ongoing prevalence of Ignatian meditation, and the widespread popularity of particular religious authors illustrate the spiritual commonalities across the exile diaspora. While there were differences in traditional charism between orders, monks, friars, and nuns participated in the vibrant transnational Catholic culture of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They interacted not only with one another but also with French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Flemish, and German religious, and through these contacts and the printing presses they not only absorbed and transmitted Tridentine devotions, but also developed their own particular versions. It is these specifically British and Irish spiritual trends that are addressed in the final section.

Spiritual Politics As exiles from Protestant countries where family, friends, and priests practised their faith in breach of the law, it is hardly surprising that the religious houses’ spiritualities were inflected by tropes of dislocation, persecution, and martyrdom. This was evident in their foundational documents and formed a consistent theme in annals and devotional writing which emphasized banishment and suffering. A culture of martyrdom was particularly pertinent in houses which sent priests on the mission. As Alison Shell has shown, college pedagogies were infused with a culture of sacrifice, and students performed dramatic renditions of dying for their faith.62 Communities collected stories of kin and brethren imprisoned or martyred, and some even compiled their own martyrologies.63 They likewise amassed images and relics of co-­religionists who had sacrificed their lives for the faith.64 Men and women wrote of their own persecution and framed their stories within biblical motifs of expulsion and homelessness. Edward Lutton’s 1675 funeral sermon for Thomas Carre compared the Paris Augustinian nuns’ confessor with Moses, who crossed the Channel multiple times ‘to bring you into this happy Solitude, this spiritual desert . . . & fed you with the heaven Manna of the holly Sacraments, and pious Instructions in Solid Christianity’.65 Thus, spirituality often 61  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. 62  Alison Shell, ‘ “We are Made a Spectacle”: Campion’s Dramas’, in Thomas M. McCoog (ed.), The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits (Woodbridge, 1996), pp. 103–18. 63  Claire Walker, ‘ “When God Shall Restore Them to Their Kingdoms”: Nuns, Exiled Stuarts, and English Catholic Identity, 1688–1745’, in Sarah Apetrei and Hannah Smith (eds.), Religion and Women in Britain, c.1660–1750 (Aldershot, 2014), p. 93; Kelly, English Convents, pp. 137–8, 144. 64  Walker, ‘When God Shall Restore Them’, pp. 93–4; Kelly, English Convents, pp. 129–60. 65 Edward Lutton, The Funerall-­ Sermon of Mr Miles Pinckeney alias Thomas Carre (Paris, 1675), p. 11.

Religious Houses  165 represented the devotional expression of exclusion, sacrifice, and pain, embedded in biblical and early Christian archetypes. Spiritual practices were couched within these terms of reference. In an age of religious change, dislocation, warfare, and missionary enterprise, the imitatio Christi was especially favoured by British and Irish expatriate houses, particularly those unable to participate as missionaries. When it was not possible to become an actual martyr, imitatio provided innumerable opportunities for spiritual sacrifice. Stories of those who had died valiantly for Catholicism provided an alternative template to Christ’s suffering. Peter Wright, SJ, was executed at Tyburn in May 1651 and the Jesuit Annual Letters of 1651–2 detailed his travails. The greater part of Wright’s vita was dedicated to his imprisonment, execution, and mi­racu­ lous interventions. Bystanders at the gallows witnessed his smiling last moments ‘for he exhibited no signs . . . of any frightful distortion of the face’ and fortuitously managed to collect his dismembered body as ‘sacred relics’. This included his ‘charred and burnt’, but nevertheless recognizable, ‘holy heart’. These were spirited away, and the body was kept at the St Omers College before its transfer to Liège in 1762. Smaller relics found their way into other religious houses.66 The Carmelites at Antwerp had a portrait of Peter Wright, brought by Mary of the Holy Martyrs Gifford when she entered around 1680. It was one of ten miniatures painted by her father, Walter Gifford. The sisters acquired a relic of Wright which was later framed with his likeness, along with the pictures and relics of other contemporary martyrs.67 While specific devotional practices focused on these objects do not survive, the presence of Wright’s image and body fragment, as well as those of  other martyrs, attest to a culture of suffering, reflected in the convent’s spirituality.68 Missionary hagiography and the material culture of persecution infused communal and individual spiritual orientation. Thomas Worthington, OP, variously prior of Bornhem and provincial of the English province, documented the mi­racu­lous death in 1619 of his great-­grandfather and namesake. The English Augustinian nuns’ confessor in Louvain and two nuns who nursed him during his final illness testified that before he died a red cross appeared on Worthington’s forehead and stigmata were found on his back, shoulders, and arms. In 1708 Worthington gathered evidence of the wondrous event, including images, presumably with a view to initiating a canonization process.69 Whatever the reason, 66 Foley, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, Series II, III, IV (London, 1875), pp. 506–64, references at pp. 515, 547, 548, 549, 550. 67  Douai Abbey Library and Archives, Upper Woolhampton, Miniature Portrait Collection of the English Martyrs, Lanherne, c. 1850; MS CA/I/B, Annals, vol. I, fols. 118, 127, 129, 138; ‘Short Colections’, p. 269. 68  Walker, ‘Embodiment of Exile’, pp. 81–99; Walker, ‘ “Hangd for the true faith” ’. 69  Robert Bracey, OP (ed.), ‘Authentication of Miraculous Appearance of Cross at Death of Thomas Worthington—­Oct. 1619’ and ‘Worthington Pedigree’, in Dominicana: Cardinal Howard’s Letters, English Dominican Friars, Nuns, Students, Papers and Mission Registers (London, 1925), pp. 96–9.

166  Claire Walker it points to the importance of accounts of sacrifice and death to an order’s spiritual orientation. The prior’s great-­grandfather had been imprisoned as a boy and went to Flanders as religious émigré in the 1580s. He settled in Louvain and patronized its Augustinian convent where two of his daughters took the veil. The nuns’ chronicle recorded his miraculous death, suggesting the stigmata signified ‘that he had carried the cross of persecution all his life’.70 Similar stories of suffering were woven through other religious houses’ annals. They provide evidence that British and Irish Catholics did not have to be literal martyrs; they could perform pain in other ways too. This spirituality of suffering cut across religious orders, genders, and rival methodologies. As Laurence Lux-­Sterritt notes, practitioners of Ignatian piety, those following St Francis, and Benedictines applying Baker’s contemplative approach were all in agreement that in illness and death ‘fortitude, patience and resignation, as well as . . . the purgative virtues of suffering’ were paramount.71 Obituaries reflect this with many religious men and women applauded for mirror­ing Christ’s and the martyrs’ suffering. The Franciscan, James Clifton, who had been a missionary and held various positions at St Bonaventure’s in Douai before spending his last years as confessor to the Franciscan nuns in Bruges, bore his final infirmity in 1738 with ‘perfect resignation to the Divine Will’.72 Franciscan and Poor Clare death notices were not known for their extravagance.73 Like Clifton’s, the memorials of nuns who had suffered intense pain and discomfort were understated, with Mary Austin Paston’s ‘continual lingering Infirmities from the Twentieth year of her Age’ described as ‘a great share of the Cross’ and Margaret Laurence Holt’s life of ‘almost Continuall Sickness’ earning her praise for showing ‘a Couragious hart and mind to suffer for God’.74 The Benedictines more explicitly imbued pain with Christological significance. When Ghent Benedictine Magdalen Digby died from cancer in 1659, she likened the lesions in her breast to Christ’s five wounds and died kissing her crucifix.75 However, the Carmelite annals present unequivocal links between the Passion, contemporary martyrdom, and monastic suffering. The nuns’ spirituality drew upon Ignatian and Teresian piety and various sisters had mystical experiences, including visions and levitation. The intensity of their religiosity mirrored their devotion to Christ’s 70 Adam Hamilton (ed.), The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses Regular of the Lateran, at St Monica’s in Louvain: Now at St Augustine’s Priory, Newton Abbot, Devon. 1548–1625 (London, 1904), p. 197. 71  Lux-­Sterritt, English Benedictine Nuns, p. 228. 72  Richard Trappes-­Lomax (ed.), The English Franciscan Nuns 1619–1821 and the Friars Minor of the Same Province 1618–1761 (London, 1923), pp. 213–14, 305–6. 73  Caroline Bowden, ‘Collecting the Lives of Early Modern Women Religious: Obituary Writing and the Development of Collective Memory and Corporate Identity’, Women’s History Review, 19 (2010), pp. 7–20. 74  Trappes-­Lomax (ed.), The English Franciscan Nuns, pp. 218, 185. 75  Lady Abbess Ward and Community (eds.), ‘Obituary Notices of the English Benedictine Nuns of Ghent’, in Catholic Record Society Miscellanea XI (London, 1917), p. 78.

Religious Houses  167 agony and the torments of the martyrs. Anne of St Teresa Leveson, who left Antwerp for convents in Düsseldorf, Münstereifel, and Neuburg, wrote spiritual letters to her former community urging them to ‘embrace the Crosses which occur for that is the way to heaven’.76 Many did so, mortifying their bodies and adopting adversity or discomfort as their Calvary or martyrdom. Thus, Joseph Frances of the Blessed Trinity Howard had practised rigorous bodily penances before she became a nun aged 38. In the cloister her devotion to the Passion encouraged her to seek additional self-­punishments and she ‘allways prayd to Suffer’, getting her wish with an excruciating final illness in 1719 which she embraced as Christ’s agony in the garden of Gethsemane.77 Howard is typical of many Carmelites who configured personal affliction with the convent’s spiritual emphasis on Christ’s torment. The prominence of anguish in spirituality intersected with the experiences of expatriation and turbulence in Britain and Ireland from the Civil Wars in the 1640s to the Jacobite uprisings of 1715 and 1745. As John McCafferty argues, amidst the turmoil, religious writers produced Irish saints’ vitae to refigure their country as implacably committed to the Catholic cause.78 Bonaventure Browne who entered the Franciscan convent at Lough Ree, near Athlone, in 1632 and was abbess in Galway from 1647 to 1650 before the sisters were forced to flee, wrote the Irish Poor Clares’ history from exile in Madrid during the late 1660s. Marie-­Louise Coolahan notes the chronicle, which documents the convent’s 1629 foundation in Dublin, its persecution during the Cromwellian wars in the 1640s, and exile in Spain in 1653, affirms the community’s Irish Catholic royalist identity, while emphasizing the nuns adherence to their strict Franciscan and Colettine charism.79 Browne’s account reveals how the religious houses’ spirituality was tightly interwoven not just with their exile identity but also with the objective to return to their homelands. They worked towards this goal by sending male regulars on the mission, praying, and conducting liturgies for Catholic triumph over Protestants, with some even engaging in espionage. The role of the émigrés in assisting the royalists in the 1650s and the Jacobites in the 1690s and beyond has been well documented.80 Benedictine and Dominican nuns assisted Charles II and James Francis Stuart with their postal services, and the Benedictine monks’

76  ‘Short Colections’, p. 118. 77  ‘Short Colections’, pp. 299–300. 78  John McCafferty, ‘The Communion of Saints and Catholic Reformation’, in Robert Armstrong and Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin (eds.), Community in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2006), pp. 199–214. 79 Coolahan, Women, Writing and Language, pp. 78, 81–2, 96–7. 80  Caroline Bowden, ‘The Abbess and Mrs Brown: Lady Mary Knatchbull and Royalist Politics in Flanders in the Late 1650s’, Recusant History, 24 (1999), pp. 288–308; Claire Walker, ‘Prayer, Patronage and Political Conspiracy: English Nuns and the Restoration’, Historical Journal, 43 (2000), pp. 1–23; Glickman, Catholic Community, pp. 191–220; Claire Walker, ‘Crumbs of News: Early Modern English Nuns and Royalist Intelligence Networks’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 42 (2012), pp. 635–55; Walker, ‘When God Shall Restore’, pp. 79–97, Lux-­Sterritt, English Benedictine Nuns, pp. 101–35.

168  Claire Walker assistance to Charles in the 1650s led to their later appointment as the Queen’s chaplains.81 Tangible assistance was supplemented by spiritual aid. The Dominican provincial in Rome sent an annual new year’s gift to James II and nominated a patron saint to help instil religious devotion to God in his subjects.82 The nexus between politics and suffering is most evident, however, in devotions centred upon relics. When James died in 1701, the Benedictine monks in Paris received his body, establishing St Edmund’s as a pilgrimage site for Jacobites, and encouraging the community to keep a record of miraculous happenings with a view to canonization.83 Jacobite martyrs were similarly ­ revered.84 Even relics from earlier ages might be enlisted for political purposes. In 1694 Mary of Modena gave the Augustinian nuns in Paris the remains of the second-­ century philosopher Justin the Martyr, and the house celebrated an annual feast with an exposition of the relics, as well as Masses, processions, and an indulgence. The event became a Jacobite rallying point for British and Irish expatriates, particularly at moments of heightened political tension, such as in 1715.85 While other communities also offered prayers and liturgies for the Stuart cause, the Augustinian event was unashamedly political, and attracted large numbers of expatriates, pointing to the spiritual need in the wider exile community for devotions sponsored by the religious houses. Thus, the monasteries’ spirituality not only sustained them, but it also succoured the piety of lay exiles and, through texts, was transmitted to Catholics in Britain and Ireland.

Conclusion It is evident that despite differences based upon religious order, gender, and individual preference, the spiritualities of the exiled religious communities generally had more in common than not. Men and women wrote, translated, transcribed, and read similar spiritual literature. Monasteries and friaries were adorned with images and objects exhibiting their order’s heritage, but also devotional foci reflecting international Catholic influences. These books and artefacts not only manifested religious identity but were significant in shaping communal and individual piety. While there were certainly differences regarding how prayer might best be practiced, most obviously in disagreements over Jesuit techniques and Baker’s method, there was less division regarding its purpose. Across the religious 81 Lunn, English Benedictines, pp. 130–1, 133–6. 82 Bede Jarrett, OP (ed.), ‘Letter of F.  Vincent Torre, Provincial, to King James II’, in Dominicana, p. 175. 83 Glickman, Catholic Community, p. 199. 84 Glickman, Catholic Community, p. 200; Walker, ‘When God Shall Restore Them’, pp. 93–6. 85  Claire Walker, ‘Political Ritual and Religious Devotion in Early Modern English Convents’, in Merridee Bailey and Katie Barclay (eds.), Emotion, Ritual and Power in Europe, 1200–1920: Family, State and Church (Cham, 2017), pp. 221–39.

Religious Houses  169 houses there was tacit agreement that their charism was first and foremost directed towards the restitution of Catholicism in their homelands. Religious practices and devotional orientation signalled this goal, but they were also fashioned by the experience of persecution, martyrdom, and exile.

Select Bibliography Bowden, Caroline, ‘Building Libraries in Exile: The English Convents and their Book Collections in the Seventeenth Century’, British Catholic History, 32 (2015), pp. 343–82. Coolahan, Marie-Louise, Women, Writing and Language in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford, 2010). Glickman, Gabriel, The English Catholic Community 1688–1745 (Woodbridge, 2009). Goodrich, Jaime, Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender and Religion in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2013). Kelly, James E., English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020). Lunn, David, The English Benedictines 1540–1688: From Reformation to Revolution (London, 1980). Lux-Sterritt, Laurence, English Benedictine Nuns in Exile in the Seventeenth Century: Living Spirituality (Manchester, 2017). Temple, Liam Peter, Mysticism in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2019). Walker, Claire, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke, 2003). Walker, Claire, ‘ “Hangd for the True Faith”: Embodied Devotion in Early Modern English Carmelite Cloisters’, Journal of Religious History, 44 (2020), pp. 494–512.

9 Anti-­Popery Adam Morton

Anti-­popery told Protestants a simple story about themselves—­they were the ­special benefactors of providence. Protestants in all three of Charles I’s kingdoms inherited a generations-­old conviction that their Reformations had been a deliverance. God had liberated them from the political and spiritual tyranny of Rome, and he had done so because they would play a starring role in the final battle against anti-­ Christian error. Anti-­popery, then, possessed the captivating force of an origin story of the recent past. Being a part of the unfolding teleos of the divine plan for history was a huge source of confidence for these Protestant societies—­it justified the Reformation as an unfolding of the truth rather than a schism. But in setting a pattern of history as a perennial battle between darkness and light, that origin story was also a source of anxiety. Antichrist had always raged against the true Church and had done so more fiercely since its exposure at the Reformation. The Marian burnings, papal excommunication of 1570, Armada of 1588, Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and the Irish massacres of 1641 marked a pattern of unfolding rage that showed victory over popery to be precarious. The problem with being special was that it made you a special target. Anti-­popery was a collision of confidence and anxiety. The moral imperative of this story was gleaned from the stark binaries of Christ against Antichrist, truth against error, and freedom against tyranny that made it a truism, an everyday lesson of history learnt through the absorption of everyday tales of popery, powder, and plot that anointed those binaries as received ­wisdoms: assumed and un-­budgeable. Early modern British and Irish people knew a lot about popery. They knew that popery was a bloody religion, they knew that it sanctioned regicide, and they knew that it was a false religion that would lead them to hell. They knew all of this because those were the lessons of the enormous media of anti-­popery. Vast and varied—­from single-­sheet exposés to his­tor­ies spanning hundreds of pages, crude woodcuts of cruelties to lavish engravings of conspiracies, short and snappy soap-­ box invective to weighty sermonizing—­tales of deliverance touched every nook and cranny of early modern society.1 This sense was explicit in almanacs, tatty records of what this 1  Adam Morton, ‘Glaring at Antichrist: Anti-­Papal Images in Early Modern England c.1530–1680’ (University of York PhD thesis, 2011); Colin Haydon, Anti-­Catholicism in Eighteenth-­Century England, c.1714–80 (Manchester, 1993), ch. 2. Adam Morton, Anti-­Popery In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II: Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745. Edited by: John Morrill and Liam Temple, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843436.003.0010

Anti-Popery  171 culture thought its inhabitants ought to know, where we find anti-­popery scorched into the calendar; 5 November, 17 November, 30 January, and the accession days of the current monarchs were dates on which to remember and give thanks for deliverance in raucous acts of national celebration.2 Ringing church bells and lighting bonfires on those days was an annual ritual of belonging, the provision of wood to burn, food to eat, and ale to drink marking a community’s coming together to re-­enact the historical defeat of popery by burning the pope in effigy.3 Anti-­popery, then, was rooted in the mentalities of early modern Britain. Easy explanations of that rootedness will not do, however. Anti-­popery was never as blinkered or as feral as characterizations like ‘fanatical’, ‘paranoid’, or ‘irrational’ suggest—­it was regularly contested, often constrained, and routinely contra­dict­ory. Consequently, it was rarely straightforward. Historians often present Catholicism as the great ‘other’ against which national, confessional, and party identities were constructed.4 But both Catholics and Catholicism were woven so tightly into the fabric of early modern culture that they could never be definitively or unilaterally ‘other’.5 In parishes across England and Ireland, Catholics and Protestants lived in relatively peaceful, if often begrudging, coexistence, not sustained enmity. In treating one another as family, kin, and neighbours, not enemies of clashing confessional blocks, those parishioners showed themselves to be a long way from irrational. They distinguished between ordinary Catholics and malevolent popery—­between difference and danger.6 Anti-­popery, then, is easy to find but hard to assess. Fear of popery was a conspicuous feature of the major events of this period—­no history of the Civil Wars, Restoration, 1688/9 Revolution, 1707 Union, and early-­Georgian Britain could fail to give it a prominent place. And it was a significant factor in the period’s principal political and religious developments, articulating the strains between conforming and dissenting Protestants, emerging Whig-­Tory party politics, and the development of nascent national identities. But evaluating the roles anti-­ popery played in those events, and in the period more broadly, belies precision. Characterizing it as ‘cause’ or ‘effect’ of events, or as ‘motivation’ of leading actors 2  I.e., anniversaries of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, the death of Mary and accession of Elizabeth in 1558, and the execution of Charles I (1649). B.  S.  Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800 (London, 1979), pp. 19, 49, 71, 75–84, 216–20, 250. 3  David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Stroud, 1989). 4  Peter Lake, ‘Anti-­Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Ann Hughes and Richard Cust (eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–1642 (Harlow, 1989), pp. 72–106. 5 Anthony Milton, ‘A Qualified Intolerance: The Limits and Ambiguities of Early Stuart Anti-­ Catholicism’, in Arthur  F.  Marotti (ed.), Catholicism and Anti-­Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 85–115. 6  Nadine Lewyky and Adam Morton (eds.), Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England: Essays in Honour of W.  J.  Sheils (Farnham, 2012); W.  J.  Sheils, ‘Catholics and Their Neighbours in a Rural Community: Egton Chapelry 1590–1780’, Northern History, 34 (1998), pp. 109–33.

172  Adam Morton or groups is too neat because anti-­popery never pulled in one direction. It often shaped all sides of an argument at once. Anti-­popery was central to attacks on the Stuart Crown and Church as tyrannous; but was also central to how defenders of the same Crown and Church attacked its critics as treasonous. Similarly, anti-­popery articulated values—­limited monarchy, parliamentary sovereignty, and religious liberty—­that became inherent in national identities of England, Scotland, and Protestant Ireland, and, following 1707, Britain. But it also articulated strains in the relationships between those kingdoms and became a means by which Scotland and Ireland defended their position under the mantle of Britishness. The ideology’s presence in Britain’s cultures was pervasive, not precise. An aspect of attack and defence, opposition and loyalty, at any given moment, anti-­popery was a contrary impulse to both unity and disunity.

Definitions and Contours Anti-­popery was a slippery ideology. ‘Popery’ was pliable, pressed into new shapes as context required or polemical momentum dictated. The term had no definitive subject. No one group was the focus of its animosity, and the ideology ‘anti-­popery’ was consequently bewilderingly protean. Promiscuity was a strength and a weakness. It made anti-­popery polemically and ideologically vital, enabling it to be used in a wide range of contexts, by a wide range of groups, for a wide range of ends; enabling it, in short, to shape how Protestants of all stripes viewed their world. But it also made that ideology contradictory and unstable. Anti-­ popery expressed both loyalty to the Crown (as the agent of England’s break from Rome) and opposition (as the barrier to completing that Reformation). It celebrated the English Reformation as a providential high point of English history, and condemned it as a ‘popish’ half-­measure. It positioned conformity to the English Church as a bulwark against popery, and damned it as a ‘popish’ persecution of conscience. This was a legacy of Puritan agitation for further reformation that began in the 1560s. If the Reformation was unfinished then the escape from ‘popery’ was incomplete—­the other was an enemy within England rather than wholly outside it. Anti-­popery was therefore concerned with much beyond binary Catholic/ Protestant divisions. ‘Popery’ might refer to the Roman Church specifically, but it could also encompass that Church and all Episcopal Churches (including England and Scotland) more broadly. It might also extend to the Stuart State that supported those ‘popish’ Churches, and the ‘popish’ Protestants loyal to that Crown and Episcopal Church who blocked further reform. It might also encompass actions and institutions—­Church courts, censorship, and uniformity—­as ‘popish’ persecution of Puritan non-­conformity. But from the 1580s, anti-­popery was

Anti-Popery  173 used against Puritans with equivalent force. Puritans were ‘popish’ because, like Jesuits, they sought to undermine royal supremacy and the established Church, the two institutions that by establishing the Reformation in England had freed the realm from popish tyranny.7 Ideological contrariness increased from the mid-­ century. We find ‘popery’ bandied around to abuse almost all of the ever-­growing number of independent groups of the 1640s and 1650s. Quakers, for example, accused the Church and State that denied them religious liberty of ‘popish’ persecution, and were in turn branded ‘popish’ by that State and Church for refusal to take oaths of loyalty to the Crown, an action that smacked of ‘Jesuitical’ sedition.8 The contours of anti-­popery shifted because it was a language with which rival types of Protestants contested the boundaries of Reformation. It often shaped both attack and defence in an argument.9 Despite these inconsistencies, anti-­popery was a coherent ideology. All it­er­ ations of anti-­popery stemmed from four roots: ‘popery’ was idolatrous, tyrannous, foreign, and seditious. Instances of ‘popery’ were variations of one of those roots (or a combination of several). Popish idolatry was a corruption of Christianity. Unscriptural Roman doctrine and liturgy was an affront to the Word, a worship of the Pope and his false traditions as an idol that demeaned Christ as the Church’s only head and source of salvation. Popish tyranny was spiritual and political. Spiritual tyranny referred to clerical control (Catholic or ‘popish’ Protestant) over worship as an assault on liberty of conscience (compelling lay attendance at services known to be idolatrous) or believers’ relationship with Christ (claiming that these priestly practices were necessary for salvation). Spiritual tyranny was maintained by persecution—­the English Church’s Episcopal courts’ oppression of Puritans were on a spectrum ending with the Inquisition.10 Popery’s political tyranny encompassed arbitrary rule. A Reformation critique of papal tyranny over the Church developed into a critique of monarchical tyranny over subjects. Papal claims to absolute authority over the Church were tyrannous because they usurped the sovereignty of princes in their realms. Arbitrary government was ‘popish’ tyranny because it usurped the sovereignty of parliament and subjects of that realm. Popery’s idolatry and tyranny made it foreign, an imposition on ancient Christianity and political sovereignty in England and

7  Peter Lake, ‘Anti-­Puritanism: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, Religious Politics in Post-­Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 80–97. 8 Rosemary Moore, The Light in Their Consciences: Early Quakers in Britain, 1646–1666 (University Park, 2000), p. 92. 9 Adam Morton, ‘Fighting Popery with Popery: Subverting Stereotypes and Contesting Anti-­ Catholicism in Late-­Seventeenth Century England’, in Koji Yamamoto (ed.), Stereotypes and Stereotyping in Early Modern England: Puritans, Papists, and Projectors (Manchester, 2023), pp. 184–217. 10  For an overview, see Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 33–77.

174  Adam Morton Scotland increasingly deemed antithetical to ‘British’ liberties.11 Finally, popish sedition aimed to subvert the institutions guaranteeing those liberties—­Protestant monarchy and Church. The regicides of William of Orange and Henry IV, the excommunication of Elizabeth I, and the Gunpowder Plot were part of a myth of papal claims to depose monarchy. Tyranny, idolatry, foreignness, and sedition were the roots of anti-­popery in all periods of British history. Variations in the ideology were caused by variations in the weighting of those roots in definitions of ‘popery’ according to context and intention. Idolatry became a less active concern of anti-­popery in the period 1640–1746 than it had been in the preceding century. Although condemnation of Roman error continued to thunder from pulpit and press with vehement ubi­quity, there was now much less fear of the papacy as an idolatrous external threat to the three kingdoms than there was of the Stuart Crown as a tyrannical internal one. How far Church and State had been corrupted by a conspiracy to impose ‘popery and arbitrary government’ was a defining problem of British politics between Charles I’s personal rule and the Hanoverian succession. Stuart ‘popery’ was ­doubly tyrannous. It constrained Protestant liberties under a tyrannical Church and subjects’ liberties under a tyrannical Crown. Opposition to those constraints were the occasion for three crises of ‘popery and arbitrary government’: 1638–46 (the Civil Wars), 1678–83 (the Succession Crisis), and 1688–91 (the Revolution).12 Tyranny was the active root of anti-­popery during those crises. Alongside clas­ sic­al republicanism, the ideology was a critical language through which broader debates about sovereignty, liberty, and the proper bounds of Church and State were contested in the explosive expansion of popular politics. The case for pol­it­ ical and religious liberty was articulated in part against a negative image of ‘Popery’. Fears of ‘popery and arbitrary government’ were alleviated—­through far from banished—­by the 1688 Revolution. Protestant non-­conformists enjoyed tol­er­ ation (if not equality), the Protestant succession was secured, parliamentary authority increased under a limited monarchy, and a Protestant Ascendency was secured in Ireland. Popery became increasingly foreign in the face of that ­constitution. Superstitious, not rational, bloody, not tolerant, and arbitrary, not representative, it was un-­English, un-­Scottish, and, latterly, un-­British.13 From the 1690s anti-­ popery articulated fears that the foundations of Protestant Britain—­the 1688 constitution and 1707 Union—­were precarious cornerstones of liberty. Those fears fell on Catholic Ireland (represented as seditious), on English 11  Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-­Century English Political Instability in a European Context (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 24–33, 57–62, 165–8, 176–90. 12 Scott, England’s Troubles, pp. 24–31, 94–7, 125–9, 185–6, 205–10. 13 Colin Haydon, ‘Eighteenth-­ Century English Anti-­ Catholicism: Contexts, Continuity, and Diminution’, John Wolffe (ed.), Protestant-­Catholic Conflict from the Reformation to the Twenty-­First Century: The Dynamics of Religious Difference (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 48–53.

Anti-Popery  175 and Scottish Catholic minorities (represented as potential fifth columns), and, above all else, on Jacobitism.14 Jacobitism made the return of Stuart absolutism a live issue, and the spectre of popery’s foreignness and tyranny were consequently never far away, prodding suspicions about Catholics in the three kingdoms that were rarely far from the surface of public life. At times of tensions, the undoing of Protestant Britain loomed in rumoured invasions. The worries of one Oxfordshire parson, noted in 1739, were typical: ‘If France or Spain . . . would venture 1000 men . . . upon our English shore [they] would quickly have 10000 [Catholics] to joyn them . . . from ye beck of their popish spiritual superiors’.15 Talk of fifth columns, invasions, and conspiracies might easily cause us to dismiss anti-­popery as hysterical or irrational. But those fears were shaped by the simple fact of the international context in which they occurred. The reason why troubles in the Stuart Church and State became so troubling was because the seven­teenth century was a Catholic century. The Thirty Years’ War’s balance sheet saw Catholic Europe expand considerably and Protestant Europe contract significantly. The mid-­century saw a baroque papacy rejuvenated in defence of the faith and strident about winning souls in Europe, Latin America, and the Far East as fathers of the first world religion, and the century ended with the rise of Louis XIV’s France as its Catholic superpower.16 Louis terrified Protestant opinion. Gilbert Burnet’s denunciation of the programme of tyranny behind his ‘unjust and cruel wars’ in the Netherlands, Franche-­Comte, and the Palatinate, and castigation of the ‘new and unheard of persecution’ of his Protestant subjects after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) were typical of presentations of the French King as the archetype in which popery’s twin tyrannies—­absolutism (political) and persecution (religious)—met.17 The Exclusion Crisis and 1688/9 Revolution occurred under the long shadow cast by that archetype. William III’s regime sold Britain’s involvement in wars against France as a Protestant crusade, and eighteenth-­century Whig historians presented French popery and tyranny as the monstrous anti-­type of British liberty.

Civil Wars Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, remembered ‘a deep silence’ falling over the parliamentary session of 1 November 1641. The lords and MPs were stunned by

14 Haydon, Anti-­Catholicism, pp. 33, 45, 59–65, 76–164, 169–71, 198–9. 15 Oxfordshire History Centre, Oxford, MS Oxf. Disc., c.651, fol. 68. Quoted in Haydon, ‘Eighteenth-­Century English Anti-­Catholicism’, p. 48. 16  See Jonathan Scott, ‘England’s Troubles: Exhuming the Popish Plot’, in Tim Harris, Paul Seaward, and Mark Goldie (eds.), The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford, 1990), pp. 107–31. 17 Quoted in Tony Claydon, Europe and the Making of England, 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 198.

176  Adam Morton reports of the Irish Rebellion, ‘a wicked and damnable conspiracy’, an outraged and terrified Dublin Castle reported in its dispatched to parliament, ‘plotted . . . by some evil affected papists here’. Shock soon gave way to panic. Silence was followed by ‘a kind of consternation’. The MPs perception of the Rebellion, which began the Confederate Wars that freed Catholic Ireland from English Protestant rule for much of the 1640s, were coloured by eyes darkened with generations-­old stereotypes of ‘popery’ as a bloody and seditious religion to which the new violence seemed to conform. But more immediate conspiracy, not ancient stereo­types, were at the root of MP’s consternation. ‘Most men’s heads’, Clarendon remembered, were ‘intoxicated . . . with imaginations of plots and treasonable designs through the three kingdoms’.18 The Irish Rebellion confirmed suspicions about there being a plot to impose popery and arbitrary government with the Stuart Church and State.19 Fear of popery was palpable in 1641 because it had a human cost. News of the Rebellion in England was filtered through the exaggerated conventions of atrocity literature, describing the ritual humiliation, rape, and killing of Protestants by Catholics in close detail and gruesome images. Protestant babies were cut from Protestant wombs. Protestant bodies were tortured and broken. Protestant communities were forced to flee, naked, from their homes to die of exposure in the winter cold.20 The propaganda heightened fear of ‘popery and arbitrary government’ by putting flesh on the bones of that abstraction—­this is what popery unchecked meant for Protestants in practice; and it presented parliament, not the Crown, as best placed to stamp out that ‘popish’ threat. But even here, at its most simple and direct, anti-­popery was not uncontested because the Rebellion was invested with conflicting significance by different groups. For the opposition it was evidence of a popish plot against Protestants with which the Crown connived; for conformists it was a popish attack on royal authority which demonstrated the need for Protestant loyalty.21 Anti-­popery was a prominent feature of the Civil Wars. It was also a contradictory one. A blaze of anti-­popish polemic accompanied the collapse into civil war. Much of this focused on crypto-­Catholicism at Charles’s court, or the popish plot

18  Edward Hyde, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England Begun in the Year 1641, vol. 1, ed. W. Dunn Macray (Oxford, 1988), p. 397; John Nalson, An Impartial Collections of the Great Affairs of State [. . .] vol. II (London, 1683), p. 514. 19  Kathleen M. Noonan, ‘ “Martyrs in Flames”: Sir John Temple and the Conception of the Irish in English Martyrologies’, Albion, 36 (2004), pp. 223–55; Pádraig Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, 1641–49 (Cork, 2001); Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1995). 20 Henry Jones, A remonstrance of divers and remarkeable passages (London, 1642); Sir John Temple, The Irish rebellion (London, 1646). 21  Ethan H. Shagan, ‘Constructing Discord: Ideology, Propaganda, and English Responses to the Irish Rebellion of 1641’, Journal of British Studies, 36 (1997), pp. 4–34.

Anti-Popery  177 around the Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria, supposedly Charles’s puppet-­master.22 ‘Popery’ was at its most plastic here, an emotive catch-­all for a broad spectrum of perceived corruptions that wove a range of opposition to the Stuart regime together into one language of complaint.23 ‘Popish’ tyranny was exposed in Charles I’s personal rule (the King’s use of prerogative powers was deemed an arbitrary assault on parliamentary liberty and popular sovereignty) and unmasked in the Church (the censoring of Puritans in press and pulpit, and prosecution of non-­conformity in the Church courts, was damned as embodying the antichristian spirit of persecution). ‘Popish’ idolatry was also exposed in the Laudian innovations in the English Church, whose heightened clericalism, anti-­ predestinarian soteriology, and ornate liturgy were condemned by Puritans as a betrayal of the Reformation and a conspiracy to return England to papal tyranny.24 Fear of that conspiracy was not limited to England. In Scotland the Kirk had long bridled against interventions by the Stuart Crown. Charles exacerbated those resentments by imposing the ‘popish’ English Book of Common Prayer on Scottish Protestants in 1637. Those acts were decried as a conspiracy against the liberties of the Kirk and truth of the word, and provoked outraged covenanters to oppose the King. In Ireland, New English and Scottish Protestants were outraged by the ‘popery’ of the lord lieutenant, Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford. Wentworth’s clampdown on Irish Protestant support for the Scottish covenanters and imposition of anti-­Calvinist bishops in the Church of Ireland smacked of the English State’s campaign against the godly being replayed on Irish soil.25 In 1641, then, the ‘popish plot’ was a three kingdom’s phenomenon, with the plot against Protestant liberties presented as being evident in the systemic corruption of the Stuart State and Church. This sense of their being a conspiracy for popery and arbitrary government within the Stuart State became a commanding aspect of anti-­popery between the mid-­seventeenth and mid-­eighteenth centuries. Fear of that plot was present in parishes across England during the early 1640s. Reports of popish conspiracies to massacre local Protestants, act as a fifth column to larger plots or invasions, or otherwise endanger life and liberties were rife, and provide an index of everyday fear of popery as order collapsed into war. That fear caused even mundane activities of local Catholics to be read as mendacious, exposing darker impulses towards distinction that lay beneath the thin barrier of begrudging toleration in England’s multi-­confessional parishes. In May 1640, a 22  Frances Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-­Century Print Culture (Ithaca, 1999), pp. 9–13, 95–156. 23 Michael  J.  Braddick, ‘Prayer Book and Protestation: Anti-­Popery, Anti-­Puritanism, and the Outbreak of the English Civil War’, in Charles W. A. Prior and Glenn Burgess (eds.), England’s Wars of Religion, Revisited (Farnham, 2011), pp. 125–46. 24 Michael J. Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London, 2009), pp. 47–9, 100–3, 116–29, 139–42, 145–6, 160–84, 195–200. 25  Alan Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590–1641 (Dublin, 1997), pp. 161–2.

178  Adam Morton gathering of Catholics in a local house in Chislehurst, Kent, provoked a panic only resolved after two searches of the property by the local JP. In Oxford, recusants assembling at an inn sparked rumours of seditiousness.26 In such ways ideol­ogy made neighbours appear to be enemies. The pattern of those reports—­ present in all but three English counties between 1640 and 1642—and their repetitive, scripted nature bear witness to the fact that local fears of popery were microcosms of a national picture. The phenomenon was short-­lived—­rumours of popish conspiracies dwindled once war exposed Catholic weakness and loyalty—­ but they reappeared during moments of crisis during the next century. Fears of local Catholic conspiracies were commonplace in 1688, 1715, and during the Catholic scare of the 1730s.27 In Ireland those fears were more significant in scale and consequence. The Confederate Wars (1641–53) were brutal and exposed the fragility of Protestant rule. Their legacy was bleak—­confirming ‘Irish’ and ‘papist’ as synonyms in the minds of the Protestant authorities, who consequently imposed harsher penalties against Catholics. Cromwellian reassertion of English control (1649–60) over Catholic Ireland was partially motivated by anti-­popery. The combination of ethnic stereotypes, anti-­ popery, and the godly Protestantism of the English Republic skewed how the wars of the 1640s were understood, with real world consequences for Irish politics and culture, and the disadvantaged lives of the majority Irish population, for the next two centuries. Anti-­popery was conspicuous during the Civil Wars and Republic. But capturing its significance is tricky because it was a varied and contradictory phe­nom­enon. Anti-­popery united disparate threads of opposition to Charles I. But that unity was too unwieldy to be singular—­those who opposed ‘popery’ were not opposing the same thing to the same end. Covenanters justified opposition on religious grounds, seeing this as a war against popish idolatry. Despite its fears of popery, parliament’s propaganda justified opposition on constitutional, not religious, grounds.28 Anti-­popery became more fractious in the 1640s. Parliament claimed to oppose Charles’ ‘popish’ tyranny and idolatry. But its actions were just as readily presented as ‘popish’ sedition by Episcopal royalists, Jesuitical attacks on the two institutions—­Crown and Church—­that had delivered England from popery in the first place. Anti-­popery encompassed competing impulses to conserve and oppose, towards unity and fracture. It was a moral language which articulated multiple and competing conceptions of Church and constitution which all asserted that they best represented the Protestant interest. Strained and contrary, 26  Robin Clifton, ‘The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution’, Past & Present, 52 (1971), pp. 25–6. 27 Haydon, Anti-­Catholicism, p. 127; Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London, 2006), pp. 112 and 426. 28 Glenn Burgess, ‘Was the English Civil War a War of Religion? The Evidence of Political Propaganda’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 61 (1998), pp. 173–201.

Anti-Popery  179 that language nevertheless shaped ideas about liberty and tyranny in the middle decades of the seventeenth century.29 Equally, when uniformity to the English Church was re-­established in 1662 it was presented as both a guarantor of English Protestant liberties and a tyrannous persecution of them.30 That moment, like many in the preceding twenty years, was doubly anti-­popish.

Restoration to Revolution The next crisis of popery and arbitrary government occurred between 1678 and 1683. The occasion of this ‘Exclusion’ or ‘Succession’ crisis was the conversion of Charles II’s brother and heir James, duke of York, to Catholicism and his subsequent marriage to a Catholic consort, Mary of Modena. But the crisis was never about James. His succession presented England with a constitutional contradiction—­a Catholic head of a Protestant State, and a ‘popish’ head of a Protestant Church—­that spoke to unresolved tensions in the Restoration settlement about the respective powers of Crown and parliament in the constitution and the uneasy ‘Protestant’ status of England’s Church. In short, it was about popular sovereignty. That Charles’ subjects had no say as a Catholic was to be thrust on their State and Church exposed the true author of popery in Britain: arbitrary royal power. The Succession Crisis was concerned with attempts to curtail that power, proposing to either exclude the duke from the throne or to reduce his authority upon succeeding to it. These hostile negotiations for the reduction of royal prerogative before popular sovereignty championed parliament, not the Crown, as the watchmen of political and religious liberties. The Restoration settlement was saved not because fear of popery and arbitrary government was too low, but because it was trumped by a greater fear—­a return to civil war. That fear—­expressed pithily in the slogan ‘’41 is come again’—allowed Charles, the Church, and the Tories to regain control of politics from 1682.31 The anti-­popery of these years emerged in panted bursts of hyperbole in which exceptions of history were misremembered as commonplaces. The ghosts of perceived Catholic aggression past—­the Marian burnings, Armada, Gunpowder Plot, and Irish Rebellion—­fed fears of a looming ‘popish’ present in the prospect of the first Catholic succession since 1553.32 In this sleight of memory, persecution, pyres, and flames became shorthand images for the essence of popery that

29  Clement Fatovic, ‘The Anti-­Catholic Roots of Liberal and Republican Conceptions of Freedom in English Political Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 66 (2005), pp. 37–58. 30  Richard Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660–1663 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 74, 95–102. 31  Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (London, 2005), chs. 3–5. 32  John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–88 (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 67–83.

180  Adam Morton would come again, a crude historical logic captured in An Appeal from the Country to the City (1679): Imagine you see the whole Town in a Flame, occasioned this second time by the same Popish Malice which set it on Fire before. At the same Instant Phansie that among the distracted Crowd you behold Troops of Papists Ravishing your Wives and Daughters; dashing your little Children’s brains out against Walls, Plundering your Houses, and Cutting out Own Throats by the name of Heretick Dogs.33

Some of this was cheap sensationalism. Much was a cynical manipulation of popular feeling for political traction—­an accusation regularly made against the Whigs.34 But fear tolled like a minute bell through the succession crisis. And that fear, however unseemly, was a reaction to Catholicism’s dominance in late-­ seventeenth-­century Europe, a dominance that James’s imminent ‘popish’ succession brought unnervingly near. While England’s Catholic minority did not justify fears of slaughter and tyranny, elsewhere ‘popery’ was a live concern. Ireland’s Catholic population had been a source of fear since the 1641 Rebellion. Anti-­ popery did not need to be sustained by centuries-­old martyrdoms, legends, and revelations of the Whore of Babylon when the Thirty Years’ War and Louis XIV offered more immediate examples of Catholic aggression. English and Scottish Protestants thought they faced an immediate spectre of popery and arbitrary government, not an historical one. The Popish Plot (1678‒81) brought that spectre home. Popery saturated press, pulpit, and parliament, and revelations from the plot trials were told, spun, and dissected in an ever-­expanding print media. The Whigs exploited the plot to pressure Charles to call parliament and address ‘popery’ in the constitution. Charles’s refusal to do so—­no session sat between May 1679 and October 1680—led to accusations that the Crown and Church (its principal ally) were popish, acting arbitrarily, and denying the sovereign will of the people. Partisan newspapers including The Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome and The Domestick Intelligence trumpeted this line, presenting the Whigs as the true defenders of English liberties from Stuart ‘popery’.35 This was an old charge in a fresh dress. It had been used against Charles I a generation earlier and had gained new traction since the early 1670s in response to the parliamentary management of Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, whose corruption had been skewered in Andrew Marvell’s An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary

33  An Appeal from the Country to the City (London, 1679), p. 2. 34  Roger L’Estrange, History of the Plot (London, 1679); Roger L’Estrange, L’Estrange’s Narrative of the Plot (London, 1680), pp. 13–15; Roger L’Estrange, Discovery upon Discovery (London, 1680), pp. 9, 23–7; Roger L’Estrange, An Answer to the Appeal from the Country to the City (London, 1679), pp. 10–11, 14–23. 35 Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1987), chs. 5–6; Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–81 (Cambridge, 1994), ch. 6.

Anti-Popery  181 Government (1677). The Tories countered these accusations with charges that the Whigs were the real agents of popery here. Exploiting the Popish Plot to undermine Crown and Church exposed the Whigs as ‘papists in masquerade’, attacking monarchy in a Jesuitical manner. The Whigs’ charges of ‘popery’ against Charles recalled those of the parliamentarians to undermine his father and presaged the return to the chaos of the 1640s and 1650s. Toryism and Anglicanism were the pillars of the Stuart Crown, allowing Charles to regain control of politics from 1682.36 James’s reign was a one-­act tragedy of a king wrecking each pillar of that support base in turn after dreadful turn. His desire to secure toleration for Catholics—­ and his alliance with non-­ conformists to secure it—­ alienated Anglicans committed to uniformity. His use of prerogative powers in pursuit of that policy angered Tories and Whigs. His promotion of Catholics in politics and the army, and support for Catholics in Ireland were easily skewed as confirmations of a plot for arbitrary government.37 Panegyric celebrating the accession of William and Mary hailed the 1688 Revolution as a deliverance from popery and arbitrary government. It was no simple clash of a Protestant nation and a Catholic king, however. Tories and non-­jurors were unwilling to endorse William’s protestant regime fully because doing so meant abandoning other principles—­hereditary monarchy, an established Church—­that mattered just as much, or more, than anti-­popery. The constitution was a last-­minute fudge.38 But it defined England as an anti-­ Catholic State: ‘it hath been found by experience, to be inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this Protestant Kingdom to be governed by a Popish Prince’.39 Anti-­popery made positive statements about the Revolution that its constitution could not. Those statements became more bullish with time. The Act of Settlement (1701) made Protestantism a condition of the English Crown, disbarring all Catholic heirs to the throne.40 By granting freedom of worship to non-­ conformists, the Toleration Act (1689) ended a century and a half of uniformity to the established Church as a mark of political loyalty that had damned Protestant dissent as seditious. Catholics were denied toleration—­loyalty to the papacy was deemed irreconcilable with loyalty to the Crown. As John Locke explained in his first Letter on Toleration (1689), Catholics could not be tolerated because of the pan-­national nature of the Catholic Church, which ‘is so constituted that all who enter it ipso facto pass into the allegiance and service of another prince’, the

36  Grant Tapsell, The Personal Rule of Charles II, 1681–85 (Woodbridge, 2007). 37  Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603–1714 (London, 1996), pp. 266–79. 38 Kishlansky, Monarchy Transformed, pp. 292–302. 39  Journal of the House of Commons, vol. 10: 1688–1693 (London, 1802), p. 15; Journal of the House of Lords, vol. 14: 1685–1691 (London, 1767–1830), p. 110. 40 W. A. Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishman and the Revolution of 1688 (Oxford, 1988), chs. 5 and 7, pp. 233–40; Kishlansky, Monarchy Transformed, pp. 310–13.

182  Adam Morton Pope.41 The ‘two masters’ argument was a longstanding anti-­popish stereotype and had been the logic of the penal code since Elizabeth I. But its re-­expression in the Toleration Act was symptomatic of the regime’s anxiety in the face of two Catholic political realities: Louis XIV’s France (which had revoked the Edict of Nantes four years earlier) and Jacobitism. 1688 formalized anti-­popery as a red line of the English State. It was also used to inspire consensus. Anglican clerics presented 1688 as providence unfolding to reveal William III as a champion of European Protestantism. Such polemic defined 1688 as a point of continuity, not change. Dressing the Revolution in images of providential anti-­popery absorbed William and Mary into apocalyptic readings of history that had championed the monarchy as deliverers since Henry VIII, and which appealed to Anglican and non-­conformist, Whig and Tory alike.42 Apocalyptic readings were dramatic but uncontroversial, presenting the new order as the next act in an old drama, not the beginning of a new one to distract from deep divisions about the constitution. In the hands of Burnet, Stillingfleet, Tension, Tillotson, and others, William was a reformer, not a revolutionary. The reformation of manners his court advocated was presented as a restoration of a Protestant equilibrium broken by James. Anglican polemic of this sort became a feature of the public face of the new regime. Thanksgiving on dates long associated with anti-­popery—5 November, 30 January, and 29 May—­ trumpeted the royal household as Protestant paragons and proclaimed their rule as a necessary barrier against popery. Providential anti-­popery was directed to manufacture unity, legitimizing 1688, easing Whig-­Tory division over the constitution, and locating the Nine Years’ War in the cause of international Protestantism.43 Its success was questionable, however. Polemic could not make England’s involvement in the Nine Years’ War popular—­loud proclamations of a Protestant crusade were met with loud castigations of ruinous costs and condemnations of William’s abusing the interests of his new realm to safeguard those of his old one.44 In Scotland and Ireland, theatres of much bloodier revolutions, anti-­popery provoked fractures, not unity. English attempts to engender broad-­ based Protestant consensus were not repeated in Scotland, where revolution exacerbated hostile relations between Episcopalians and Presbyterians. In Ireland, it began three years of war. William’s victories at the Boyne (1690) and Aughrim (1691) established over a century of Protestant Ascendency rule over a majority Catholic population heavily burdened by the penal code and loss of lands.45 41 John Locke, A Letter on Toleration, ed. Raymond Kilbansky, trans. J.  W.  Gough (Oxford, 1968), p. 133. 42  Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge, 1996), chs. 1 and 4. 43 Claydon, Godly Revolution, pp. 90–110. 44 Kishlansky, Monarchy Transformed, pp. 304–10. 45  David Hayton, Ruling Ireland, 1685–1742 (Woodbridge, 2004), ch. 1; Patrick Kelly, ‘Ireland and the Glorious Revolution: From Kingdom to Colony’, in Robert Beddard (ed.), The Revolutions of 1688 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 163–90.

Anti-Popery  183 Anti-­popery was common to England, Scottish, and Irish Protestantism, but it remained somewhat distinct in tone and tradition across the three kingdoms. Scotland remained dismissive of England’s ‘popish’ Church. The Williamite Wars had provided Irish Protestants with its own calendar of anti-­popish celebration. Anti-­popery distinguished the Protestant nationalism of the three kingdoms just as strongly as it articulated what they shared.46

Union and Resistance The 1707 Union was a marriage of convenience secured by an English State that hoped to undercut the threat of Jacobitism to the Hanoverian succession. Public opinion in Scotland initially ranged from grudging acceptance at the Union, to disappointment that the promised prosperity had failed to materialize, and bitter opposition from Presbyterians and Jacobites.47 The ‘Britain’ that union created was a tangle of contrasting cultures, distinct histories, separated legal traditions and, in many instances, languages—­a new nation in search of a common heritage. Linda Colley argued that during the long eighteenth century, the common Protestant histories in England, Scotland, and Wales became ‘the foundation that made the invention of Great Britain possible’. Protestantism was ‘a powerful cement’ that allowed eighteenth-­century Britain’s economic and foreign policy to be conceived as a crusade against French autocracy, with Protestant liberty and prosperity contrasted against French tyranny and poverty.48 Pronounced dissatisfaction with elements of the Union were ever present in Scottish society, but a strident belief in Protestantism as a force for liberty—­and investment in the constitutional monarchy and popular sovereignty protected by the 1688 Revolution—­ became a powerful ideological root of Britain.49 Popery was now a markedly foreign phenomenon. In this context, Jacobitism was the primary concern of anti-­popery in the early eighteenth century. Despite only a tiny proportion of Britain’s Catholic supporting the 1715 and 1745 rebellions, popery and Jacobitism elided in popular perception. The distortion was a matter of visibility. Three of the seven noble ­supporters of the ’15 were Catholic, Catholic gentry provided rebel leadership in 46 See Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (eds.), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland c.1650–c.1850 (Cambridge, 1998). 47 Karin Bowie, ‘Popular Resistance, Religion and the Union of 1707’, in T.  M.  Devine (ed.), Scotland and the Union, 1707–2007 (Edinburgh, 2008), pp. 39–53; Allan I. Macinnes, ‘The Treaty of Union: Made in England’, in Devine (ed.), Scotland and the Union, pp. 54–76. 48  Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992), ch. 1, pp. 57–8. See also Clare Jackson, ‘Conceptions of Nationhood in the Anglo-­Scottish Union Debates of 1707’, Scottish Historical Review, 87 (2008), pp. 61–77; Colin Kidd, ‘North Britishness and the Nature of Eighteenth-­ Century British Patriotisms’, The Historical Journal, 39 (1996), pp. 361–82. 49 Christopher A. Whatley, The Scots and the Union: Then and Now (Edinburgh, 2014), pp. 419–20.

184  Adam Morton Lancashire and Northumberland, and over two-­thirds of Jacobite troops were Catholic.50 Parliament, pulpit, and press responded to this ‘popish’ threat with consternation. Effigies of the Pretender were burnt alongside those of the pope in public displays of Protestant solidarity. Stock reports of Catholic conspiracies to murder local Protestants or support rumoured French invasions fed into the panic. Crowd violence against Catholic chapels in Newcastle, Gateshead, Durham, Sunderland, Hartlepool, Ormskirk, Preston, and Liverpool demonstrated the heat of popular feeling. Catholic Britons feared the worse when parliament met in 1716—root and branch destruction. That did not happen, but new laws against Catholics who did not take oaths of loyalty gave new vigour to the perception that ‘papists’ were treasonous and foreign. The response to the ’15 seems to demonstrate anti-­popery’s capacity to ­gal­van­ize. But that capacity was more apparent than real. Tarring Jacobitism with ­popery, however loudly and brazenly, did not eradicate it. Jacobitism was a central part of post-­1688 British society, not least with the Tories. Support and op­pos­ition did not sit neatly along confessional lines, and it was possible to be resolutely Protestant and pro-­Stuart.51 Contradictions in the elision of ‘popery’ and ‘Jacobite’ were shown by the Atterbury Plot (1722), a conspiracy to restore the Stuarts led by Francis Atterbury, bishop of Rochester. The anti-­popish outrage that followed was ferocious. Catholics in communities across England were fearful of the State’s response. Those fears were heightened by parliament’s imposition of a £100,000 levy on Catholics who would not swear allegiance to George I, a sum that spelt ruin if implemented with vigour. Yet the plot’s main players were Protestants—­Catholics were barely involved.52 This made the anti-­popery that followed, with its easy divisions of Protestant loyalty and Catholic perfidy, ‘Protestant Britain’ and ‘Foreign Popery’, nonsensical. The Protestant establishment knew this. The levy was the subject of fraught debate in both houses, with MPs showing themselves far from hidebound by anti-­popery.53 Anti-­popery was a fact of eighteenth-­century British identity, then, but it was not a simple one. Attitudes to Catholicism came in many hues—­it was no monolithic ‘other’. J.  C.  D.  Clark has noted that an ideological commitment to anti-­ Catholicism did not prevent the British State making alliances with Catholic powers.54 At an elite level, confessional hostilities were softened by a growing recognition of diversity in the Catholic Church. Anglican sympathy for Gallicanism was such that in 1717 the archbishop of Canterbury, William Wake,

50  Haydon, ‘Eighteenth-­Century English Anti-­Catholicism’, pp. 49–50. 51  Paul Kléber Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1989). 52  Eveline Cruickshanks and Howard Erskine-­Hill, The Atterbury Plot (Basingstoke, 2004). 53 Colin Haydon, ‘Parliament and Popery in England, 1700–1780’, Parliamentary History, 19 (2000), pp. 53–4. 54  J.  C.  D.  Clark, ‘Protestantism, Nationalism, and National Identity, 1660–1832’, The Historical Journal, 43 (2000), p. 261.

Anti-Popery  185 proposed a union of the English and Gallican Churches.55 By celebrating the common humanity of all peoples as descendants of Noah, biblical scholarship complicated national and confessional impulses by emphasizing kinship, not difference.56 Militant images of Roman tyranny remained pervasive, but existing alongside these other impressions of the Catholic Church made them less convincing that they had been fifty years earlier. This was equally true of Francophobia. Anti-­ French stereotypes were a stock-­ in-­ trade of eighteenth-­ century British culture, the antonyms ‘French tyranny / British liberty’ being axio­mat­ic. But as Colin Kidd has shown, scholarship on the Gothic origins of parliamentary sovereignty showed eighteenth-­century elites that such British/ French binaries were not absolute, but contingent on recent history.57 That its stereo­types could ring hollow qualifies anti-­popery’s place in British society. Anti-­popery remained pervasive, however. Its commonplaces and clichés were part of the bric-­a-­brac of popular culture on which mentalities are built. The bonfires and bells of the Protestant calendar, and ghoulishness of the pulp literature that bastardized Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ into a morality play, were pulses of a consciousness of the Reformation as a triumph over tyranny that defined their history. But that consciousness also quickened alertness to popery’s dangers, inspiring moral panics that rivalled the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in zeal. The Catholic scare of the 1730s—­in which Anglicans and Dissenters were united in concerns about the growth of popery—­is indicative, as was the ambition of the charity school movement to produce children who were tiny fortresses against popery.58 Anti-­ popery continued to be a feature of intra-­ Protestant rivalry. Dissenters used anti-­popery to parry accusations that they were ‘popish’ or inveighed against perceived corruptions in Church and State. Collective ‘no popery’ campaigns were most notable during periods of Jacobite hostility or French aggression and, alongside a chorus of complaint in pulpit and press from groups like the SPCK featured urgent calls to extend the penal code to protect Protestant Britain.59 That those calls were rarely heeded, however, means that labelling eighteenth-­ century popular culture ‘anti-­Catholic’ requires qualification. The penal code was severe but, as William Blackstone noted in his Commentaries on the Laws on  England (1765–9), they were ‘seldom exerted to their utmost rigour’.60 Commissioners bemoaned their inability to enforce the code in the face of 55  Colin Kidd, ‘Integration: Patriotism and Nationalism’, in H. T. Dickinson (ed.), Companion to Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Oxford, 2002), pp. 373–4. 56  Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 9–33, 34–72. 57  Kidd, ‘Integration’, pp. 371–3; Kidd, British Identities, pp. 211–49, 250–86. 58 M. G. Jones, That Charity School Movement (Cambridge, 1938), pp. 14, 35. 59 Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, pp. 41–2, 56–66, 127–9, 135–8, 178–85. 60 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1765–9), IV, pp. 56–7.

186  Adam Morton communities protecting Catholics they knew to be peaceful or because of the clout of local gentry families—­in 1717, locals in Ormskirk laughed at commissioners who tried to summon recusants to account.61 After the collapse of Jacobitism in the 1740s, the code was viewed in many quarters as an embarrassing hangover of a time when popery was a real danger or as a persecution of a religious minority out of kilter with Protestant conceptions of liberty. Parliament was consistently reluctant to add new strictures against Catholics, however vehement the campaigns of Protestant societies in their favour. When it did pass them, it was with the knowledge that those new strictures would not, and could not, be enforced because of the reality of de facto toleration of Catholics in parishes across England, parishes that were both far from harmonious and far from ­sectarian. The softening of the code in the 1770s was not a dawning of a new age of toleration, but a moment when the law moved in line with life on the ground.62

Conclusion The period of 1641–1745 was a high watermark of anti-­popery in British history. It saw the formalization of Britain as an anti-­Catholic State and the situation of anti-­popery as a centrepiece of popular culture. The constitution that emerged from the 1688 Revolution and 1707 Union amplified Catholicism’s otherness. Catholics suffered a double bind of the future and the past. They were denied the freedoms other subjects enjoyed following the Revolution and branded the villains of history from which the Revolution had set those subjects free. The ex­pli­ cit­ly Protestant nature of William III’s wars against Louis XIV, heightened ‘no popery’ of resistance to Jacobitism, and entrenched sectarianism of the Protestant Ascendency in Ireland extended this sense of ‘popery’ as not just malign, but foreign: fundamentally un-­ British. That status was displayed in the Protestant nationalism that followed the 1707 Union. We have seen that this nationalism was contested and did not lend itself to an easy unity. But anti-­popery was un­deni­ably a conspicuous and noisy part of the rhetoric of the new nation. Its generations-­old tropes—­deliverance, liberty, toleration—­were refashioned, creating an ideological cement of Britishness in the absence of a political or cultural one. The best that an ideology can do is simplify and sensationalize, fabricating coherence in the face of its absence. But we must take care that anti-­popery does not fool us. When its sensationalism is read as pathology, it is easy to explain away its ubiquity in early modern 61  Patrick Porcell, ‘The Jacobite Rising of 1715 and the English Catholics’, English Historical Review, 44 (1929), p. 429. 62  Haydon, ‘Parliament and Popery’, pp. 62–3.

Anti-Popery  187 society, to dismiss fear of popery as simpler than it was. Anti-­popery was shot through with opposing images of good and evil, but the subject of those neat oppositions did not equate to distinct ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ binaries—­ anti-­popery tells us much less about the simple othering of Catholics in early modern society than it does about the complicated relationships between different types of Protestants. Although anti-­popery was prominent during the Civil Wars, Succession Crisis, 1688 Revolution, and Union, its role in those events was muddy because it was never static—­denunciations of ‘popery’ were a consistent feature of early modern society, but the subject of the popery denounced was not. Anti-­ popery’s role in politics and culture was never straightforward because, however visible, it was too inconsistent to pull in one direction. Anti-­popery was thought with and fought with. That is the opposite of a pathology. Anti-­popery is best understood as a bundle of assumptions and principles that steered how early modern people saw their world. That steering had much to do with providential readings of history. Understanding the Reformation as a deliverance from popery, a defining—­and divine—­interruption of their history, was an intuitive tick of English, Scottish, and Irish Protestants of all stripes. That those Protestants spent so much time and energy commemorating that deliverance showed it to be a defining aspect of their sense of self. But providence was a wobbly foundation for an ideology. What the English/Scottish/Irish/British had been delivered from and to—­the foundations of what was popish and what was not—­ was an open question. For that reason, anti-­popery allowed groups across the religious and political spectrum a means of articulating the contours of the period’s defining concerns—­the relationship between monarchy and popular sovereignty, the legacies of the Reformation, the boundaries between conformity and intolerance, and the shape of religious and political liberty. ‘Popery’ was an open term that could be put to various ends by the various sides of these changing debates. Anti-­popery was important not as a document of real relationships between Catholic and Protestants, but as a means of expressing strains in the relationships between real groups of Protestants. It was a political language that helped to define, defend, and contest the strained ideals in Britain’s Churches and States.

Select Bibliography Claydon, Tony, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge, 1996). Clifton, Robin, ‘The Popular Fear of Catholics During the English Revolution’, Past & Present, 52 (1971), pp. 23–55. Dolan, Frances, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca, 1999).

188  Adam Morton Haefeli, Evan (ed.), Against Popery: Britain, Empire, and Anti-Catholicism (Charlottesville, 2020). Harris, Tim, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration to the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1987). Haydon, Colin, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c.1714–80 (Manchester, 1993). 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 (Harlow, 1989), pp. 72–116. Miller, John, Popery and Politics in Restoration England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1973). Milton, Anthony, ‘A Qualified Intolerance: The Limits and Ambiguities of Early Stuart Anti-Catholicism’, in Arthur F. Marotti (ed.), Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 85–115. Scott, Jonathan, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English History in a European Perspective (Cambridge, 2000).

10 Political Theology Christopher P. Gillett

In 1678, the English Jesuit John Gavan described the loyalist conundrum facing Catholics. The papal deposing power was a ‘probable opinion’, supported by some Catholic theologians, but not an essential article of faith. Thus, Catholics could defend their king from deposition, even if ‘the Pope himself should . . . come in person’, but they could not condemn the deposing power itself as heretical, as the State’s Oath of Allegiance maintained.1 When the Protestant State tried Gavan for treason in 1679, his nuanced views did not save him. After Gavan’s execution, the Privy Council interviewed John Sergeant, an English Catholic secular priest, to corroborate the Jesuit’s purported treason.2 Sergeant, described by his Protestant recruiter as ‘a Roman Catholic but no papist’, was associated with an anti-­papalist Catholic movement called Blackloism.3 Both men claimed the Pope had limited temporal power, but Protestant authorities judged Gavan a threat and Sergeant an asset.4 Why were these men treated so differently? Partly, it was because their political theologies were actually quite different, despite apparent similarities. Gavan used the moral theology of Probabilism to deny papal temporal power, but nevertheless upheld the Pope’s spiritual authority. Sergeant’s anti-­papalism was more thoroughgoing, questioning papal infallibility in spiritual matters like his mentor Thomas White (whose alias ‘Blacklo’ gave rise to the term ‘Blackloism’).5 These distinctions may seem fine, but to seventeenth-­century Christians they were obviously meaningful enough to contribute to divergent outcomes. This episode illustrates the broader reality that political theology was not simply an abstract intellectual exercise. Indeed, it was frequently inseparable from the political projects different (and often mutually antagonistic) British and Irish Catholic interests undertook between 1640 and 1745 to persuade Protestants of their loyalty and tolerability. These projects incorporated a number of interrelated

1  Henry Foley (ed.), Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, 8 vols. (London, 1879), V, pp. 460–62. 2  Journal of the House of Commons, vol. 9: 1667–1687 (London, 1802), p. 710. 3  Sir Henry Sidney, Diary of the Times of Charles II . . ., 2 vols. (London, 1843), I, p. 165. 4  Dorothea Krook, John Sergeant and His Circle: A Study of Three Seventeenth-­Century English Aristotelians (Leiden, 1993), p. 159. 5 Foley, Records, pp. 460–2; John Sergeant, Sure-­footing in Christianity . . . (London, 1665), p. 203. Christopher P. Gillett, Political Theology In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II: Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745. Edited by: John Morrill and Liam Temple, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843436.003.0011

190  Christopher P. Gillett subsidiary issues: the derivation of authority, ecclesiology, political loyalty, and matters of conscience. This chapter considers each of these themes, examining both the theory and practice of political theology and contextualizing the contours of rival arguments. It begins with a discussion of Christian dualism, which concerned fundamental questions about the derivation of spiritual and temporal authority. The second section addresses the related issue of ecclesiology, outlining alternative understandings of the Catholic Church’s structure and the appropriate scope of papal authority. How these matters informed Catholic attempts to reconcile their faith with loyalty to a Protestant State that sought to exercise jurisdiction over interior conscience is the subject of the third section. The last section explores how distinctively Catholic arguments for liberty of conscience emerged between the mid-­ seventeenth century and the early Catholic Enlightenment. Recovering the complexity of these political theologies offers greater insight into Catholics’ place within the ‘mainstream’ political history of Britain and Ireland between the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.

Christian Dualism Early modern British and Irish Catholics drew upon an older tradition of Christian dualism when considering the relationship between spiritual and temporal authority. Within this tradition, two alternative hierarchical models predominated: clericalism and statism. Clericalists maintained that God gave authority to the Church, which then mediated that authority to temporal rulers. Medieval papal monarchists, who adopted this view, believed the pope could depose wayward rulers. Contrastingly, statist traditions, like caesaropapism in the eastern Church, claimed that the clergy derived their authority from the State. But scholars also use ‘Christian dualism’ more specifically to describe a third alternative. This ‘particular dualism’ argued that both spiritual and temporal authority derived immediately and separately from God, thereby avoiding claims about a hierarchical relationship between the two. Thomas Aquinas was an influential proponent of this view. His position also encapsulated the inherent ambiguities about how issues that had both spiritual and temporal implications were to be navigated. Aquinas ultimately advocated a papal authority empowered to organize temporal affairs when they impinged on spiritual ones. Early modern scholastic theologians, such as Robert Bellarmine, followed Aquinas’s lead. Bellarmine justified the papal deposing power not in straightforwardly clericalist terms, but as an indirect power in temporals (potestas indirecta) that was an expression of the pontiff ’s supreme spiritual authority.6 As this 6  Jeffrey Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2005), pp. 15–16; Anthony Brown, ‘Anglo-­Irish Gallicanism, c. 1635—c. 1685’ (University of Cambridge PhD thesis, 2004) (hereafter

Political Theology  191 ex­ample illustrates, understandings of papal authority inherently intersected with Christian dualism. Nevertheless, clericalist and particular-­dualist visions did not dictate specific positions on the pope’s power. Particular-­dualists could hold papalist positions, like Bellarmine or anti-­papalist positions, like many French Gallicans. Gallicanism, which emerged in the Middle Ages as a defence of nebulously defined liberties of the French Church, encapsulates the complex array of potential alignments between dualist and papalist positions. In the fourteenth century, Gallicans rejected papal deposition and papal jurisdiction in domestic matters, aligning themselves with the conciliarist movement, which emphasized the spiritual authority of ecumenical councils. This position was anti-­papalist but not necessarily anti-­clericalist. Over time, statist theories also entered Gallican thought. By the sixteenth century, Gallicans disagreed about whether the king or French clergy should supersede papal control of religion.7 Rival understandings of Gallicanism became influential among British and Irish Catholics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.8 As British and Irish Catholics interacted with Protestant regimes that rejected papal authority outright, the State’s claims to spiritual authority proved chal­len­ging. Protestant disagreements further complicated matters, but the statist, or Erastian, position (after the Reform Protestant theologian known as Erastus) proved popular with Tudor and Stuart monarchs, who asserted a royal supremacy over the Church of England.9 Stefania Tutino argues that the scope of royal supremacy was broadened by the Jacobean regime’s Oath of Allegiance, which gave the king coercive jurisdiction over interior conscience. The Oath imposed a theological judgement about the papal deposing power, condemning it as ‘im­pious and heretical . . . [a] damnable doctrine and position’. While some Catholics had long rejected papal deposition, many in Britain and Ireland refused to swear that the doctrine—­and those who defended it—­were heretical.10 Some reasoned that swearing this position was tantamount to severing communion with Rome, supplanting the pope’s spiritual authority with that of the king. Consequently, these Catholics lobbied to have the Oath revised; others, however, advocated

‘AIG’), pp. 16–20; J.  A.  Watt, ‘Spiritual and Temporal Powers’, in J.  H.  Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350 – c. 1450 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 367–423; J. P. Sommerville, Royalists & Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (London, 1999), p. 177; Stefania Tutino, Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth (Oxford, 2010), p. 42. 7  Jotham Parsons, The Church in the Republic: Gallicanism and Political Ideology in Renaissance France (Washington, DC, 2004), pp. 4–13; William  J.  Bouwsma, ‘Gallicanism and the Nature of Christendom’, in Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi (eds.), Renaissance: Studies in Honor of Hans Baron (Florence, 1971), pp. 809–30. 8  Antony F. Allison, ‘An English Gallican: Henry Holden (1596/7–1662) Part I (to 1648)’, Recusant History, 22 (1995), pp. 319–49; Brown ‘AIG’; Stefania Tutino, Thomas White and the Blackloists: Between Politics and Theology during the English Civil War (Aldershot, 2008). 9 Collins, Allegiance, p. 18. 10 Stefania Tutino, Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570–1625 (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 132–7, quotation at p. 133; Tutino, Empire, pp. 127–30.

192  Christopher P. Gillett swearing it.11 Catholic activism regarding the Oath endured into the eighteenth century, increasingly shifting away from clericalism towards particular-­dualist and statist political theologies. This activism is a recurrent theme of this chapter, as it encapsulated a variety of politico-­theological issues, including ecclesiology, political loyalty, and conscience.

Ecclesiology Between 1640 and 1745, British and Irish Catholics contested the precise contours of papal authority, competing ecclesiologies, and rival visions for the relationship between Church and State. A wider European context had long informed these archipelagic debates. This section outlines some of the alternative positions. Regarding the vexed question of papal authority, a consideration of a range of ‘strict’, ‘moderate’, and ‘anti’-papalist positions is beneficial. By the mid-­ seventeenth century, even strict papalists, like the English Jesuits Edward Knott and Edward Courtenay, articulated their positions with reference to the particular-­dualist arguments of early modern scholastics such as Bellarmine and Francisco Suárez.12 While these traditional conceptions endured, the persistent desire to reframe the Oath of Allegiance increasingly marginalized them pol­it­ ical­ly. Scholars of this period have therefore emphasized the rising significance of Catholic anti-­papalist arguments, especially Gallicanism.13 Care is needed in applying this label, however, as the mutability of this tradition in France itself during the seventeenth century meant that people with quite disparate understandings of papal authority could claim its influence. The English Benedictine Thomas Preston, for example, denied the pope had temporal authority while still maintaining he was ‘the supreme pastor in spiritual matters’.14 This particular-­ dualist distinction became characteristic of a moderate papalist position that endured throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1647, a group of English Catholics led by Thomas Lord Brudenell and the Jesuit Henry More generated an alternative loyal formulary that maintained such a stance. Yet, those 11  Michael Questier, ‘Catholic Loyalism in Early Stuart England’, English Historical Review, 123 (2008), pp. 1132–65. 12  ARSI, Rome, Angl. 34, fols. 129r–32v; [Edward Knott], Mercy and Truth . . . (Saint-­Omer, 1634), pp. 58–9. 13  Eamon Duffy, ‘Joseph Berington and the English Cisalpine Movement, 1772–1803’ (Cambridge University PhD thesis, 1973); Allison, ‘English Gallican’; Brown ‘AIG’; Tutino, Blackloists; Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology (Woodbridge, 2009) (hereafter ECC); Anne Ashley Davenport, Suspicious Moderate: The Life and Writings of Francis à Sancta Clara (1598–1680) (Notre Dame, IN, 2017); Christopher  P.  Gillett, ‘Catholicism and the Making of Revolutionary Ideologies in the British Atlantic, 1630–1673’ (Brown University PhD thesis, 2017). 14  Quoted in Stefania Tutino, ‘Thomas Preston and English Catholic Loyalism: Elements of an International Affair’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 41 (2010), p. 104.

Political Theology  193 who were more aggressively anti-­papalist also invoked Gallican influences.15 The Blackloists condemned the Brudenell-­More group for their moderation on papal authority and insisted that ‘no act of . . . authority either Spirituall, or temporall from the Pope’ should be admitted to England without the approval of the civil magistrate.16 The limitation of papal spiritual authority was also a characteristic of Jansenism, which emerged after 1640 and informed political theologies in Britain, Ireland, and France. Thomas O’Connor has demonstrated that Irish theologians in Leuven, such as John Sinnich and John Callaghan, contributed to the development of Cornelius Jansen’s posthumously published work Augustinus (1640). In 1642, the Holy Office condemned Augustinus, precipitating an anti-­papalist backlash among Jansen’s supporters, especially those already sympathetic to Gallicanism.17 In 1648, the Irish theologian Peter Walsh, whose Leuven thesis was dedicated to Jansen, deployed what was to become a distinctive line of Jansenist critique of the papacy’s authority in a theological complaint against the papal nuncio to Ireland, Giovanni Battista Rinuccini. The nuncio had excommunicated those Catholics who supported a truce with the Protestant royalists.18 Walsh penned the Queries, which noted that the pope—­and by extension his representative to Ireland—‘might erre in controuersies of fact’. Consequently, Rinuccini’s actions were illegitimate because he had tried to frame the factual question of the lawfulness of the Truce by defining the matter as an ‘article of Faith’.19 The French Jansenist Antoine Arnauld highlighted a similar distinction in his response to the apostolic constitution Cum occasione (1653), in which the papacy condemned five points abstracted from Augustinus. Arnauld suggested that the papacy had factually misrepresented Jansen’s teachings, and that therefore the Pope had not infallibly condemned Jansen’s real teachings as matters of faith.20 Controversy about the Irish and French contexts endured for decades. In Ireland, the nuncio’s behaviour in the 1640s continued to serve as a fault-­line in Catholic politico-­theological opinion. Rinuccini’s defenders, including Richard O’Ferrall and Robert O’Connell, upheld traditional understandings of papal

15  Thomas  H.  Clancy, ‘The Jesuits and the Independents: 1647’, Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 40 (1971), pp. 67–90; Christopher  P.  Gillett, ‘Probabilism, Pluralism, and Papalism: Jesuit Allegiance Politics in the British Atlantic and Continental Europe, 1644–1650’, 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. 235–60. 16  Robert Pugh, Blacklo’s Cabal ([Douai?], 1680), p. 37. Emphasis original. 17  Thomas O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, 1600–70: Religion and Politics in Flanders, France, Ireland and Rome (Dublin, 2008). 18  Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Reformation in Ireland: The Mission of Rinuccini, 1645–1649 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 198–231; Davenport, Moderate, p. 292. 19  Queries concerning the lawfulnesse of the present Cessation . . . (Kilkenny, 1648), p. 39. Emphasis original. 20 Mark  R.  F.  Williams, ‘Translating the Jansenist Controversy in Britain and Ireland’, English Historical Review, 134 (2019), pp. 59–91.

194  Christopher P. Gillett authority into the 1660s. Walsh and Redmond Caron came to interpret the nuncio’s actions as symptomatic of the broader problem of exaggerated papal au­thor­ity. This informed their attempts in the 1660s and 1670s to organize support across Catholics of the three kingdoms for a new loyal formulary called the Remonstrance that took a relatively aggressive stance in delimiting papal au­thor­ity.21 In France, Jansenist anti-­papalism became deeply enmeshed in debates about the nature of Gallicanism occurring during the reign of Louis XIV. Like their French counterparts, British and Irish Gallicans had to contend with the ecclesiological implications of limiting papal authority: if the pope was not in charge, who was? There was no single unifying alternative. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-­century Gallicans generally agreed that the universal Church was just the assemblage of the world’s particular Churches, rather than somehow more than the sum of its parts. Many considered the bishop of a particular see, the local Ordinary, to be the chief unit of ecclesiological authority. Some bishops might have additional administrative responsibilities as the over­ seers of provinces, national Churches, or patriarchates, but these positions did not give those bishops Ordinary authority in another bishop’s diocese. While Gallicans generally resisted the view that the pope held universal authority as head of the Church, they disagreed on precisely what role the papacy should have vis-­à-­vis local Ordinaries.22 The French tendency to prioritize the spiritual authority of Ordinaries over that of the pope, called ‘political Gallicanism’, influenced French-­based Blackloists like Henry Holden. In 1647, he wrote that Ordinaries held authority ‘immediatly from Iesus Christ . . . So that all immediate influence from the Pope . . . is cut of[f] by this meanes’.23 Walsh likewise decried papal authority in favour of the ‘parity of Bishops’.24 In the eighteenth century, Thomas Innes, the principal of the Scots College (Paris), explained that Roman decrees were not binding because ‘the supreme authority of bishops’ was ‘derived immediately from Christ’.25 Other Gallicans who still opposed robust interpretations of papal

21 James Brennan, ‘A Gallican Interlude in Ireland: The Irish Remonstrance of 1661’, Irish Theological Quarterly, 24 (1957), pp. 219–37; Patrick J. Corish, ‘John Callaghan and the Controversies among the Irish in Paris, 1648–54’, Irish Theological Quarterly, 21 (1954), pp. 32–50; Patrick J. Corish, ‘Two Contemporary Historians of the Confederation of Kilkenny: John Lynch and Richard O’Ferrall’, Irish Historical Studies, 8 (1953), pp. 217–36; Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, ‘ “Though Hereticks and Politicians Should Misinterpret Their Goode Zeale”: Political Ideology and Catholicism in Early Modern Ireland’, in Jane H. Ohlmeyer (ed.), Political Thought in Seventeenth-­Century Ireland: Kingdom or Colony (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 167–74. 22  Francis à Sancta Clara, Systema Fidei (Liège, 1648), pp. 522–3; Sergeant, ‘Preface’, Sure-­footing, pp. 101, 115–6; Peter Walsh, Four Letters on Several Subjects ([London], 1686), pp. 306, 313–14; John Gother, An agreement between the Church of England and the Church of Rome (London, 1687), pp. 13–5; Thomas Innes, The Civil and Ecclesiastical History of Scotland, A.D. 80 to 818 (Aberdeen, 1853), pp. 78–9, 266; Davenport, Moderate, p. 332; Brown, ‘AIG’, pp. 116–19, 228–31, 253. 23 Pugh, Cabal, p. 37. 24  Peter Walsh, The History and Vindication of the Loyal Formulary, or Irish Remonstrance (London, 1673), p. 345; and p. 50 of subsection ‘The Second Treatise’. 25 Innes, History, pp. 73, 226.

Political Theology  195 authority, took more circumspect positions. The English Franciscan Francis à Sancta Clara explained that the pope helped preserve iure divino episcopacy.26 The English Benedictine Serenus Cressy argued that the pope mediated bishops’ divine authority.27 Another traditional Gallican argument upheld ecumenical councils as an alternative spiritual authority. In the mid-­seventeenth century, however, some British and Irish Gallicans cautioned against too readily substituting the infallibility of councils for that of the papacy. In the 1630s and 1640s, the Blackloists Thomas White and Sir Kenelm Digby argued that only those things that all Catholics had believed at all times and in all places were infallible. Councils could serve as a useful indicator of this Universal Tradition. But as the Blackloist John Sergeant observed in 1665, councils were only infallible if they proceeded upon Tradition.28 This helped explain problematic conciliar decrees such as the fourth Lateran Council’s apparent endorsement of the deposing power. Other British and Irish Gallicans dealt with such challenges differently. Sancta Clara, Cressy, and Walsh all offered variations of the argument that conciliar decisions were only infallible insofar as the world’s particular Churches ‘received’ them.29 The Benedictine James Maurus Corker and the secular priest Robert Manning offered similarly cautious views of conciliar infallibility in the 1680s and 1720s, respectively.30 Between the mid-­seventeenth and mid-­eighteenth centuries, some Catholics proposed a more prominent role for the State in ecclesiological matters. In the 1640s, the Supreme Council of the Catholic Confederation of Kilkenny and the Irish bishops clashed with Rinuccini over the State’s role in episcopal appointments.31 Likewise, in their negotiations with English Protestant authorities, Blackloists welcomed the Protestant State’s consultation with the English chapter of the secular clergy in appointing bishops.32 While Anthony Brown has argued that the Blackloists maintained a particular-­dualist position akin to that of Marsilius of Padua, it is clear that contemporary Erastian (statist) positions also influenced elements of Blackloist ecclesiology.33 The re-­ emergence of a ‘royal Gallicanism’ under Louis XIV in France, seeking to strengthen the position of the king vis-­à-­vis the Church, also contributed to the development of more statist 26  Sancta Clara, Systema Fidei, pp. 526–36; Davenport, Moderate, p. 333. 27  Serenus Cressy, Roman-­Catholick doctrines no novelties (s.l., 1663), p. 40. 28  Brown, ‘AIG’, pp. 148–83, 224; Davenport, Moderate, p. 285; Tutino, Blackloists, p. 44; Sergeant, Sure-­footing, p. 115. 29  Sancta Clara, Systema Fidei, pp. 253–4; Francis à Sancta Clara, An Enchyridion of Faith (Douai, 1654), pp. 293–6; Davenport, Moderate, pp. 316–17, 319–20, 346, 445; Hugh-­Paulin de (Serenus) Cressy, Exomologesis (Paris, 1647), pp. 368–71; Peter Walsh, ‘An Answer to the Third Treatise’, in Peter Walsh, An Answer to Three Treatises . . . (London, 1678), p. 17, irregular pagination. 30 [James Maurus Corker], Roman-­ Catholick Principles, in Reference to God and the King ([London], 1680), pp. 8–9; Robert Manning, The case stated between the Church of Rome and the Church of England, 2 vols. ([Rouen?], 1721), I, pp. 92–108. 31  Ó hAnnracháin, Rinuccini, p. 233–5.    32 Pugh, Cabal, p. 37. 33  Brown, ‘AIG’, pp. 89–97; Tutino, Blackloists, p. 78.

196  Christopher P. Gillett attitudes among British and Irish Catholics. Louis secured statements summarizing Gallican liberties from the Sorbonne in 1663 and the Assembly of the French Clergy in 1682. When the Catholic James II ascended the thrones of the three kingdoms in 1685, he attempted to implement some aspects of French-­style royal Gallicanism, securing a royal voice in the appointment of Catholic bishops in Ireland and vicars apostolic in England and Scotland. Catholic Jacobites con­ tinued to defend this right after the Revolution of 1688. In 1727, the Scottish Catholic Lewis Innes complained of the papacy’s plan to appoint a new Scottish cardinal as an ‘encroachment upon your Majesty’s indisputable right’.34 Likewise, the English secular priest Charles Dodd crafted a multi-­volume Church History of England (1738–42), which supported the exiled King’s right to direct ec­cle­si­as­ tic­al affairs with reference to ‘gothic’ English precedents.35 British and Irish Catholic political theology encompassed a range of positions on papal authority and ecclesiology that drew inspiration from Christian dualism and contemporary Continental European developments. Clericalism and strict papalism continued to wane in significance. The moderate and anti-­papalists—­ who predominated among Catholic overtures to the Protestant State—­nevertheless found consensus elusive.

Loyalty, the State, and Jurisdiction of Conscience Between 1640 and 1745, British and Irish Catholics continued searching for ways to demonstrate that their spiritual commitments were compatible with political loyalty. In the century or so between the advent of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, however, British and Irish Protestants were also contesting how the State was to be (re)constituted. This provided Catholic loyalists, or ‘patriots’, with unique opportunities and challenges, including the chance to address the State’s jurisdiction of conscience.36 Catholics developed competing positions on these issues, described chronologically in this section. Catholic political theology informed the ideological experimentation that characterized this period in various ways. For example, both Protestant royalism and parliamentarianism of the 1640s and 1650s were underpinned by Catholic thought on the derivation of temporal authority. Two major positions on this question emerged in the Middle Ages. The first, the mediate argument, posited that God bestowed authority upon a temporal regime through the people’s (or Commonwealth’s) approval at some 34  Quoted in Glickman, ECC, pp. 204–9, at p. 209. 35 Glickman, ECC, pp. 210–11, 256; Gabriel Glickman, ‘Gothic History and Catholic Enlightenment in the Works of Charles Dodd (1672–1743)’, The Historical Journal, 54 (2011), pp. 347–69; Charles Dodd, Church History of England, 4 vols. ([London], 1738–42). 36 Glickman, ECC.

Political Theology  197 historical moment. Within this tradition, a smaller number of theologians described the ongoing relationship between rulers and ruled as contractual. Even fewer justified resistance if the regime breached the compact. In the mid-­ seventeenth century, a few radical Irish Catholic thinkers, including Philip O’Sullivan Beare, the Jesuit Connor O’Mahony, and the Franciscan John Punch, used mediate theory to justify rebellion against the Protestant Stuarts. While many parliamentarians in the early 1640s avoided the term ‘resistance’ precisely because of these Catholic associations, prominent figures, including John Pym, John Selden, Robert Mason, and William Bridge, nevertheless invoked Catholic theologians in their own contractualist arguments against Charles I. By 1649, the Puritan John Canne defended Charles’s execution with reference to the Spanish Jesuit Juan de Mariana, one of the very few early modern Catholic theologians to uphold tyrannicide under restricted conditions. The second major medieval Catholic position regarding the derivation of temporal authority, the ‘immediate’ tradition, argued that God directly ordained particular forms of government and rulers. Theories of divine right kingship developed within this tradition and proved influential on Protestant royalism.37 While both parliamentarianism and royalism drew upon older Catholic pol­it­ ical theologies, British and Irish Catholics did not fit comfortably within either camp. During the English Civil Wars, parliamentarian hostility alienated Catholics, many of whom consequently joined the royalists. Nevertheless, Catholics remained ideologically uncomfortable with Protestant royalist understandings of kingship’s divine origins and absolute nature. Absolutism remains a contentious topic in early Stuart studies. Tim Harris, navigating rival historiographical claims, concludes that at a minimum, early-­ seventeenth-­ century Protestants broadly agreed that the King was absolute insofar as he was subject to no other authority (not even the law) and did not share his sovereignty. Many Protestants (including some of the King’s opponents) accepted these ideas because they served to eschew papal spiritual authority in the three kingdoms.38 Consequently, this understanding tended towards statist views of the relationship between spiritual and temporal authority. Protestants disagreed about the extent of control the State should exert in spiritual matters, but James I went so far as to

37  Harro Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought: The Society of Jesus and the State, c. 1540–1630 (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 224–34, 314–33; Ian W. S. Campbell, ‘John Punch, Scotist Holy War, and the Irish Catholic Revolutionary Tradition in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 77 (2016), pp. 401–21; Ó hAnnracháin, ‘ “Though Hereticks” ’, pp. 155–75; Sommerville, Ideology, pp. 9–11, 58, 63–78, 222, 253; William Bridge, The Truth of the Times Vindicated (London, 1643), pp. 2, 4, 7, 11; John Canne, The Golden Rule (London, 1649), p. 11; Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven, 1996), p. 96; Tim Harris, Rebellion: Britain’s First Stuart Kings (Oxford, 2014), pp. 13, 479. 38 Harris, Rebellion, pp. 12, 14; Burgess, Absolute; Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke, 1992). See also Sommerville, Ideology.

198  Christopher P. Gillett claim jurisdiction of conscience in his Oath of Allegiance.39 Not even moderate papalist Catholics, who were eager to demonstrate their loyalty to the King and accepted the particular-­dualist position that the pope’s authority was purely spiritual, could accept such a jurisdiction while the King remained Protestant. The establishment of the Catholic Confederation of Kilkenny after the Irish Rebellion of 1641 illustrates the politico-­theological untidiness of Catholic royalism. In their Oath of Association, Irish Catholics strongly professed their loyalty to Charles I. Nevertheless, some members advocated policies that attenuated the exercise of royal authority—­such as the repeal of Poynings’s Law and the institution of a Catholic viceroy—­in pursuit of their parallel objectives of establishing Ireland as a true peer kingdom to England and Scotland, and restoring Catholicism as a State religion. This example also demonstrates that Catholic political activism adopted a ­constitutionalist character in the mid-­seventeenth century. Catholics, including Catholic royalists, tried to delimit the State’s spiritual authority through mechanisms that would enshrine permanent protections in law, rather than relying on the royal prerogative. Catholic colonial experiments in Avalon, Maryland, and New Albion formed part of this loose initiative, as did mid-­seventeenth-­century attempts to get proposed revisions of the Oath of Allegiance passed through parliament or included in the proposed constitutional settlements of the late 1640s.40 In the early 1640s, Catholics determined that their objectives could best be achieved in alignment with the Crown but, as the parliamentarian cause splintered at the end of the first Civil War, this began to change. Some English Catholics recognized a narrow, and ultimately ephemeral, ideological common ground with increasingly disgruntled Independents and sectaries, who also resented State interference in matters of conscience. In the abstract, Catholics could justify reconstituting England as a republic if they determined that was best for the patria. During the Interregnum, this determination hinged on two issues: whether the new regime would abandon the jurisdiction of conscience; and whether Charles I’s execution fundamentally discredited the republican establishment.41 Some, like the Jesuit Thomas Courtney, concluded that col­lab­or­ at­ing with the Commonwealth was illegitimate. He claimed their promises of liberty of conscience were false and that Charles I had been slain ‘barbarously’. Courtney recommended seeking concessions from the new de iure king, Charles II, but  the exiled monarch’s alignment with the stridently anti-­Catholic Scottish

39 Tutino, Conscience, pp. 132–7; and Tutino, Empire, pp. 127–30. 40  Gillett, ‘Catholicism’, pp. 126–76; John Morrill, ‘An Irish Protestation? Oaths and the Confederation of Kilkenny’, in Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington (eds.), Popular Culture and Political Agency in Early Modern England and Ireland: Essays in Honour of John Walter (Woodbridge, 2017), pp. 243–66; Micheál Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland 1642–1649: A Constitutional and Political Analysis (Dublin, 2008), pp. 47–8; Ó hAnnracháin, Rinuccini, p. 125, n. 11. 41  Clancy, ‘1647’, pp. 67–90; Gillett, ‘Catholicism’, pp. 240–84, 424–86.

Political Theology  199 Presbyterians complicated matters.42 After the defeat of this alliance at the Battle of Worcester in 1651, the Scottish Jesuit Robert Gall explained to Charles that God had preserved him so that he could ‘become . . . Catholike himself ’ and protect Scottish Catholicism.43 Other Catholics sought liberty of conscience from the Interregnum regimes. For example, John Austin’s multi-­part Christian Moderator (initially published between 1649 and 1653), aimed to assure the Commonwealth of Catholic loyalty while also arguing against State intrusion in Catholic consciences. Nevertheless, some Catholics remained circumspect about the justness of parliament’s cause, offering only de factoist support. In 1651, Thomas Carre wrote that subjects needed to accept that ‘God hath transferred the Government’. Avoiding moral justifications, he explained that parliament could overthrow Charles I, because England was ‘not an absolute, but a mixed Monarchy’. Contrastingly, Thomas White’s Grounds of Obedience (1655) dealt in ‘abstract notions onely’, arguing from a contractualist perspective that a regime’s legitimacy depended upon its ability to protect the common good of its subjects in this life. Nonetheless, White’s work was probably intended, and certainly construed, as a justification of loyalty to the Interregnum establishment. Scholars have therefore compared it to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. White’s political theology proved controversial among seventeenthand eighteenth-­century British and Irish Catholics. For some, it represented an authoritative Catholic legitimation of de factoism; for others, an example of its dangers.44 During the Restoration, Catholics unsurprisingly distanced themselves from de factoist political theology. Roger Palmer, the earl of Castlemaine, explained that White’s theories had been ‘sharply used by the Catholicks of England’ and condemned by the Pope; indeed, in 1661 the Holy Office condemned White’s opera omnia and his writings were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books. That year, Catholics unsuccessfully petitioned the House of Lords to repeal the penal laws. After this, Castlemaine and others resurrected older loyalist traditions, focusing on convincing the King to use his royal prerogative to suspend the penal laws because the record of British and Irish Catholic service to the Stuarts revealed that their principles—­including spiritual loyalty to the pope—­were not ‘inconsistent with Government’.45 Throughout the 1660s and 1670s, proponents 42 Westminster Diocesan Archive, London (hereafter WDA), A series, XXX, no. 136. My translation. 43  Scottish Catholic Archives, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Blairs Letters, BL 1/6/9. 44  Gillett, ‘Catholicism’, pp. 424–86; Thomas Carre, A treatise of subiection to the powers (London, 1651), pp. 5–7, 12, 41–2; Thomas White, ‘Dedicatory Epistle to Sir Kenelm Digby’, in Thomas White, The Grounds of Obedience and Government (London, 1655), unpaginated; Tutino, Blackloists, pp. 65–81; Brown, ‘AIG’, pp. 77–84; Collins, Allegiance, p. 180. 45  [Roger Palmer], The Humble Apology of the English Catholicks (London, 1666); A reply to the answer of the Catholique apology (s.l., 1668), quotations at pp. 62, 91, and The Catholique Apology, with a Reply to the Answer (s.l., 1674). Emphasis original.

200  Christopher P. Gillett of the Irish Remonstrance also hoped the King would make a prerogative intervention to institute a revised loyal formulary and resolve the constitutional issue of Catholic exclusion from the Irish parliament. But the revocation of both Charles II’s Declarations of Indulgence of 1662 and 1672 after vocal parliamentary opposition revealed the inherent weakness of prerogative solutions.46 Throughout the 1670s, parliament increasingly challenged Catholic loyalist arguments, passing Test Acts in 1673 and 1678 that introduced oaths abjuring the Catholic doctrines of transubstantiation and Purgatory, in addition to the deposing power. This extended the Protestant State’s jurisdiction of conscience even further. In 1674, Catholics again revised the Oath of Allegiance, hoping to counteract parliament’s attempts to instruct Catholic conscience and demonstrate their loyalty. In the furore accompanying the Oates Plot in 1678, the politico-­theological ambiguities of Catholics’ relationship to Protestant authority became a matter of life and death, as in John Gavan’s case. Lay and clerical Catholics died because they scrupled at the Oath of Allegiance’s implicit claims about spiritual and temporal authority.47 The prospect of a Catholic succession in the 1670s precipitated Catholic reconsiderations of royalism and the nature of kingship itself. English Gallicans cast French-­style royal Gallicanism as potentially beneficial to the whole kingdom, protecting against both papal confessional politics and the Protestant State’s jurisdiction of conscience. Beginning in 1670, a small number of English Catholics had occasion to reflect upon these matters with renewed urgency, when Charles II promised in the secret treaty of Dover to convert to Catholicism in exchange for French aid. Serenus Cressy and his courtly patron, Sir Thomas Clifford, discussed the implications of a reunion. For Cressy, the result would have to be based upon ‘the Modell of the French’, in which the king would grant ‘Liberty of Conscience to all his Subiects’. While Cressy envisaged the Catholic king as possessing jurisdiction in ecclesiastical affairs, he would not have authority over ‘purely Spirituall’ matters.48 In 1673, the possibility of a Catholic king garnered wider attention after Charles’s heir apparent, the duke of York, revealed his conversion to Catholicism. In response, Castlemaine heralded the benefits of Gallican kingship for French Protestants during the reign of Henri IV, who in 1598 had issued the tolerationist Edict of Nantes. Both Cressy and Castlemaine were less clear on what the absolutism of the French Crown might portend for kingship in the archipelagic context. Cressy argued that the Stuart monarchy was as absolute as any other, but maintained some highly circumscribed remit for papal spiritual authority.49 Yet, when parliament threatened the hopes of a Catholic succession in 46  Gillett, ‘Catholicism’, pp. 535–628. 47  John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 154–88. 48  British Library, London [hereafter BL], Add MS 65139, fols. 11v, 21r. 49 Glickman, ECC, p. 38; [Palmer], Catholique Apology, pp. 9–10, 25, 27–8, 336; Cressy, Roman-­ Catholick, p. 287; Hugh-­Paulin de (Serenus) Cressy, An Epistle Apologetical ([London], 1674), p. 114;

Political Theology  201 the wake of the Oates Plot, English Catholics began articulating more straightforwardly royalist political theologies. During the height of the Exclusion Crisis, one Catholic broadsheet proclaimed that ‘the Crown of England . . . at all times hath been . . . in no earthly subjection, but is immediately subject to God’. In 1680, James Maurus Corker described kings as the ‘Vicegerents of God’.50 These Gallican-­inflected divine right arguments were added to the legacy of royalist military service to form a powerful strand of legitimist Catholic political the­ology, upholding York’s hereditary right to the throne. When York succeeded his brother as James II in 1685, a group of devot converts advocated a Catholic absolutism informed by more-­recent French developments and at odds with ‘old recusant’ political theologies. Chief among the devots were two of James’s main Scottish allies, John and James Drummond, the earls of Melfort and Perth, respectively. Both imbibed the political theology of Jacques-­ Bénigne Bossuet, the bishop of Meaux, who emphasized a king’s duty to persecute non-­Catholics into conversion. In 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, initiating a stridently statist turn in French royal Gallicanism. The devots advised James II to adopt similar policies, circumventing Protestant objections through prerogative authority if necessary. In Ireland, where the devots secured the appointment of Richard Talbot, the earl of Tyrconnell, as lord deputy, the prospect of a statist Catholic regime enjoyed more support from Irish Catholics who saw the appointment as an opportunity to rectify longstanding dispossession, exclusion, and persecution.51 Despite Catholic Jacobitism’s general legitimist concern with a Stuart res­tor­ ation, the competing visions of Catholic monarchy offered by the ‘old recusants’ and the devots had followed James into exile after the Revolution of 1688. Devots articulated ‘Noncompounding’ positions, advocating an invasion of the three kingdoms and the forced conversion of Protestants. ‘He that hates not heresy’, Perth explained, ‘is not a fitt instrument to sett up ye Catholick religion’.52 In 1709, Thomas Sheridan, an Irish Catholic courtier, condemned mixed monarchy as an ‘empty, false republican notion’, demanding passive obedience from Protestants living under a restored, absolutist Catholic ruler.53 Other Catholic Jacobites were less concerned about the confessional character of a restored Stuart monarchy, but were nonetheless committed to absolutism. Prior to his death in 1711, the English Catholic convert Sir Richard Bulstrode emphasized that the king was

Gabriel Glickman, ‘Christian Reunion, the Anglo-­ French Alliance and the English Catholic Imagination, 1660–72’, English Historical Review, 128 (2013), pp. 263–91. 50  The Case of Several English-­Catholicks in Communion with the Church of Rome (London, 1680); [Corker], Principles, p. 16. Emphases original. 51 Glickman, ECC, pp. 40, 93–4; Éamonn Ó Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685–1766: A Fatal Attachment (Dublin, 2002), pp. 57–60. 52  Bodleian Library, Oxford [hereafter Bodl.], Carte MS 208, fol. 204. 53  Quoted in Glickman, ECC, p. 101.

202  Christopher P. Gillett ‘in  no earthly Subiection but imediately to God’. While the king’s rule was constrained, he was not subject to the laws.54 By contrast, some ‘old recusant’ Jacobites revived a Catholic constitutionalist mind-­set. By 1693, they had secured James’s support for The Gracious Declaration to His Loving Subjects. It offered a reconciliatory agenda for a Stuart restoration, including a commitment to free parliaments, an act indemnifying those involved in the revolution, a pledge to protect the Church of England, and guarantees of freedom of worship to Catholics and Protestant Dissenters. The authors maintained a particular-­dualist position that shared patriotic civil bonds should transcend religious difference. Henry Browne, the viscount Montagu, affirmed that James had to commit to rule as a ‘Protestant King though a Catholick Man’.55 Browne’s allies argued that a Catholic king could serve as the protector of England’s ‘Ancient, Legal, Limited and Hereditary Monarchy’.56 James Radclyffe, the earl of Derwentwater, captured during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, claimed that he fought for the ‘ancient and fundamental constitution of these Kingdoms’.57 The Revolution of 1688 created another Catholic politico-­theological fault-­line between committed Jacobites and those who accepted the Revolution settlement. Initially, Catholics justified accommodation along de factoist lines. Some argued the right of conquest gave the Williamite regime a degree of legitimacy. Others counselled passive obedience, explaining that ‘ye undoing of tyrants’ was ‘ye hand-­work of God alone’.58 Around 1700, an anonymous editor republished White’s Grounds of Obedience, explaining that the author had ‘so little Regard to Hereditary Right’ that he made ‘it a Duty  .  .  .  upon a Supream Governor, dispossess’d of his Dominions, to acquiesce with a new Settlement’.59 During Queen Anne’s reign, Sir Robert Throckmorton began developing new language for a future loyal formulary.60 After the failed Jacobite uprising of 1715, some Catholics prioritized reaching an accommodation with the Hanoverian regime. Between 1716 and 1722, Bishop John Stonor spearheaded the development of an Oath of Allegiance that might enjoy both English Catholic and papal approval. Stonor’s approach, including his alleged ‘cloak and dagger’ tactics, engendered controversy.61 In support, Charles Dodd argued that continued adherence to the Stuarts was a doctrinal error, a ‘private conceit’ masquerading as a ‘Dogma of

54  Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, MS 3224, Box 3, Folder 15, pp. 2, 18–19. 55 Glickman, ECC, pp. 103–9; WDA, Browne MSS 244. 56  Bodl., Carte MS 210, fols. 411–14. 57  T. B. Howell (ed.), A Complete Collection of State Trials, 34 vols (London, 1809–28), XV, col. 802. 58  BL Add. MS 10118, pp. 652–3. 59 Tutino, Blackloists, pp. 144–5; White, Grounds (London, [1700]), unpaginated. Emphasis original. 60 Glickman, ECC, p. 130. 61  Eamon Duffy, ‘ “Englishmen in Vaine”: Roman Catholic Allegiance to George I’, in Stuart Mews (ed.), Religion and National Identity, SCH, 18 (1982), pp. 345–65, quotation at p. 361; compare with Glickman, ECC, pp. 121–57, at pp. 122 and 156.

Political Theology  203 Faith,’ though he later retreated from this position.62 Some Irish Catholics also accepted the Hanoverians. In the 1720s and 1730s, Cornelius Nary outlined Catholic willingness to swear allegiance to the new regime in exchange for toleration.63 The diversity of eighteenth-­century Catholic political theology helps explain the reduced role Catholics played in the 1745 Jacobite uprising. Catholic Jacobites disagreed about the benefits of a military reconquest. Moreover, a growing Catholic constituency found the Hanoverians acceptable enough as rulers. Richard Challoner, the vicar apostolic of the London district, continued to consult the Stuarts in ecclesiastical matters even after discouraging participation in the Rebellion.64 But confessionally motivated loyalism to the Stuarts evaporated after Charles Edward Stuart’s apparent conversion to Protestantism in 1750 and the death of his Catholic father, James Francis Edward Stuart, in 1766. Catholics strove to demonstrate their loyalty between 1640 and 1745. Across this period, they also consistently tried to uncouple the jurisdiction of conscience from the Protestant State. They consequently took nuanced positions on a range of intersecting issues that these overarching goals encompassed.

Liberty of Conscience From the mid-­seventeenth to the mid-­eighteenth century, Catholic political theologies concerning ecclesiology and the State outlined alternative structural arrangements regarding spiritual and temporal authority. This section considers how Catholics incorporated theological subjects concerning the individual into their political theology, formulating distinctive arguments for liberty of conscience. Scholars of religious liberty in Britain and Ireland have traditionally excluded Catholics, citing the Roman Church’s commitment to Augustinian principles of coercion when confronting heterodoxy. Indeed, certain Catholic theologians maintained that religious pluralism’s origins were infernal, and the Roman curia rejected permanent settlements that would benefit an ‘heretical’ monarch.65 Yet, disqualifying Catholic arguments for liberty of conscience on these grounds presumes a hierarchist conception of the Church that overlooks contemporary Catholic understandings of obedience, the rationality of faith, and the working of conscience. British and Irish Catholics argued for liberty of conscience per­sist­ent­ly

62 P.R.  [Charles Dodd], A Roman Catholick System of Allegiance in Favour of the Present Establishment (London, 1716), p. 4; P.R. [Charles Dodd], The Freeman, or Loyall Papist (1718). 63 Patrick Fagan, Dublin’s Turbulent Priest: Cornelius Nary, 1658–1738 (Dublin, 1991); Patrick Fagan, Divided Loyalties: The Question of the Oath for Irish Catholics in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1997), pp. 38–67. 64 Edwin H. Burton, The Life and Times of Bishop Challoner, 2 vols. (London, 1909), I, pp. 237, 241. 65  John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (Harlow, 2000), p. 54.

204  Christopher P. Gillett and inventively, informing their Protestant interlocutors’ views and contributing to a growing religious individuation that would become characteristic of the Catholic Enlightenment. Any discussion of ‘the individual’ in this period must be contextualized within medieval and early modern theologies of obedience and conscience. Modern ‘individualism’ had not yet emerged, but Catholic theology did define and even emphasize obligations and roles incumbent on every distinct Christian. Catholic soteriology, for instance, prioritized each soul’s responsibility to cooperate with God’s salvific grace through good works. Yet, subjecting oneself to the commands of God’s moral law, which enjoined further obedience to spiritual and temporal authority, was a key dynamic in this process. Ideally, one internalized the precepts of moral law and conformed one’s conscience to its dictates.66 For Aquinas, conscience was fundamentally an act in which the intellect, will, and synderesis (a soul’s vestigial divine spark that infused a natural understanding of good and evil) co-­ mingled to apply universal moral principles to particular circumstances. Following one’s conscience—­even when it contradicted Church teaching—­was obligatory because the individual was ultimately accountable to God.67 Catholic theology recognized individual experience, but held conscience in tension between personal accountability and obedience to a series of external authorities. By early modernity, Catholics treated both obedience and conscience in more individuated ways. Jesuit theoreticians advanced a more consultative vision of obedience, building upon older arguments about ‘blind’ obedience within religious orders that maintained that the act of obeying was itself virtuous. Therefore, if one overcame a lack of desire to perform an objectively good deed purely out of ­obedience, one had effectively performed two good acts. This theology recognized a subjectivity of experience, to which the Jesuits added their distinct understandings of the importance of discerning subjective spiritual movements. While the superior retained the last word, some Jesuits explained that a superior’s discernment of a situation could usefully be informed by a subordinate’s alternative perspective. The Jesuit practice of accommodatio, in which general principles were adapted to the needs of particular conditions, exemplified this dialectic understanding of obedience, as did developments in casuistry and moral theology.68 The moral the­ ology of Probabilism that emerged in the sixteenth century well encapsulates the increased emphasis on case-­specific moral reasoning. In cases of uncertainty, Probabilism stipulated the moral safety of following a well-­reasoned, or ‘probable’,

66  Nicole Reinhardt, ‘How Individual Was Conscience in the Early Modern Period? Observations on the Development of Catholic Moral Theology’, Religion, 45 (2015), pp. 409–28; Silvia Mostaccio, Early Modern Jesuits between Obedience and Conscience during the Generalate of Claudio Acquaviva (1581–1615) (Farnham, 2014), p. 5; Höpfl, Jesuit, pp. 26–30. 67  Stefania Tutino, Uncertainty in Post-­Reformation Catholicism: A History of Probabilism (Oxford, 2018), pp. 5–9. 68 Mostaccio, Obedience.

Political Theology  205 opinion even if the opposite position were more probable. This could give the individual greater flexibility in determining the morality of available options, but certain varieties of Probabilism emphasized the importance of defining probability with reference to extrinsic authority. Some scholars have therefore concluded that Probabilism kept the individual conscience ‘between tutelage and liberty’.69 While developments in Catholic understandings of obedience and conscience offered increased autonomy to the individual, neither entirely overturned conventional views of the relationship of the individual to outside authority. Nevertheless, the Brudenell-­More Catholics used Probabilism to construct a new loyal formulary designed to secure liberty of conscience from the New Model Army in 1647. To resolve Protestant concerns about the deposing power without offending the papacy, they bifurcated the agreement. In the first part they  glossed the deposing power as only a probable opinion. This enabled them  to frame an Oath of Allegiance (the second part) that avoided the theo­ logic­al condemnations of the Jacobean oath. While the agreement excluded the most aggressive papalist positions, it enjoyed broad support among moderate Catholics because it did not impose a single alternative ecclesiological opinion. Moreover, by presenting themselves as independent moral actors, the Brudenell-­ More Catholics apparently convinced some within the Army that longstanding Protestant concerns about unthinking Catholic subservience to papal tyranny were unfounded. Later radical tolerationist writing testifies to this point. Catholics asked to be judged on their individual behaviour and, along with Protestant dissenters, to enjoy the freedom of private worship.70 The anti-­papalist Blackloists, who disagreed with the Brudenell-­More strategy, predicated their claims for liberty of conscience on a rationalist understanding of faith. In Grounds of Obedience, White argued that one could never surrender the exercise of one’s reason. Each individual was allowed to ‘governe in his little spheare of activity’, including matters of conscience.71 White maintained that beliefs about the next life were rationally determined and formed the basis for the trustworthiness of an individual’s oath. Therefore, if the State tampered with conscience to achieve security through confessional unity, it would likely have the reverse effect by weakening the bonds of loyalty. The Blackloists nevertheless distinguished between interior belief and matters of exterior religious discipline, in which they made broad concessions to State oversight.72 A similar distinction between private conscience and public ecclesiastical organization characterized the way Jansenism and Quietism, theologies that emphasized individual piety, informed the conciliatory turn in Catholic 69  Rudolf Schuessler, The Debate on Probable Opinions in the Scholastic Tradition (Leiden, 2019), p. 411; Tutino, Probabilism, pp. 69–72, 84–8; Reinhardt, ‘Individual’, pp. 418–24. 70  Gillett, ‘Probabilism’; and Gillett, ‘Catholicism’, pp. 240–84. 71 White, Grounds (1655), p. 62. 72  Brown, ‘AIG’, pp. 85–8; Tutino, Blackloists, pp. 78–9.

206  Christopher P. Gillett Jacobitism in the 1690s. Jansen’s ‘Augustinian’ soteriology, diminishing free will and elevating the significance of God’s predetermined grace, catalysed a tradition of moral rigourism. Many Jansenist rigourists criticized undue emphasis on confessional politics. After 1693, the ‘old recusant’ Jacobites, including the royal chaplain, John Betham, developed a programme to educate James II’s son, James Francis Edward Stuart, in the Jansenist rigourism of Pierre Nicole, Antoine Arnauld, and Blaise Pascal. Betham argued that personal moral reform would prepare James to rule in conjunction with ‘ye methods and constitution of England’ and would prove a better means of securing Protestant conversions than persecution. At the Stuart Court, the Jansenist emphasis on individual moral reform converged with a similar Quietist emphasis on the significance of ­interior contemplation of religious truth.73 In 1710, Catholic Jacobites continued forming the pretender’s conscience in a tolerationist and constitutionalist mould by securing an audience for the French Quietist, Archbishop François Fénelon. In this meeting, Fénelon advocated the benefits of a parliamentary constitution and impressed upon James that he should ‘never compel his ­subjects to change their Religion’.74 This Catholic lobbying was seemingly effective. In 1718, the pretender explained that though a Catholic king, he was  ‘not an apostle’ and that ‘subjects of whatever religion . . . should also be protected’. His obligation to convert his subjects extended no further than doing so by example.75 After the papacy and Louis XIV united against heterodoxy in the 1690s, British and Irish Catholics magnified their use of Jansenism and Quietism as politico-­ theological critiques of authorities that impinged on free conscience. In 1713, the papal bull Unigenitus condemned Jansenism, which put those with suspect theo­ logic­al leanings on the defensive. In 1732, for example, Thomas Innes left the Scots College (Paris) to prevent a full ecclesiastical visitation. Responding to mounting pressure, Catholic reformers including Simon Berington, Robert Manning, and Andrew Michael Ramsay repurposed Quietist arguments about the inviolability of individual conscience to frame critiques of coercive spiritual authority. Ramsay, in particular, condemned the institutional mechanisms used against individual conscience as ‘abominable Infractions against human Liberty’. He believed the Catholic Church to be the institutional shell containing the surest way to God, but nevertheless thought it feasible that adherents of other faiths, guided by the ‘inner light’ of true religion, might also enjoy salvation. Later 73 John Betham, Brief Treatise of Education . . . (Paris, 1693); WDA, St Gregory’s Seminary MS, fol. 237; Glickman, ECC, pp. 116–17, 225. 74 Andrew Michael Ramsay, Life of François de Salignac de la Motte Fénelon  . . . (London, 1723), p. 307. 75  Historical Manuscripts Commission (ed.), Calendar of the Stuart Papers Belonging to His Majesty the King, Preserved at Windsor Castle, 7 vols. (London, 1912), V, p. 515. My translation.

Political Theology  207 Catholic Enlightenment thinkers like Irish theologian Luke Joseph Hooke echoed Ramsay’s universalism.76 Taken together, the theologies discussed in this section indicate a shift in British and Irish Catholic thinking about conscience, towards greater in­di­vidu­al­ isa­tion. This tendency was not universal within the Catholic world: even in the most orthodox cases, these developments required a dialectical understanding of obedience in relation to ecclesiastical hierarchy. Nevertheless, the articulation of this individuating tendency by adherents of such mutually antagonistic theologies as Probabilism and Jansenism indicates that it was not an entirely isolated development either. These political theologies enabled British and Irish Catholics to make arguments for liberty of conscience to both their co-­religionists and Protestant compatriots, diminishing the Augustinian principles of religious coercion with which Catholicism was associated.

Conclusion Britain and Ireland’s religio-­political struggles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced political theologies that explored religious individualism, the rationality of faith, anti-­papalist ecclesiologies, and particular-­dualist separation of spiritual and temporal authority. Scholars describe all of these features as characteristic of the Catholic Enlightenment in the British context. While Catholic Enlightenment is often thought to have emerged in the mid-­eighteenth century, some of its core tenets had lineages extending back (at least) to the century between 1640 and 1745.77 Seventeenth-­century Catholic disputes regarding papal authority and political loyalty continued into the controversies between Ultramontanists and Cisalpinists in the late eighteenth century.78 The political theology of British and Irish Catholics of the period considered in this volume was not simply a context for future developments. Nor was it merely the preserve of abstract theory. It was enmeshed with Catholic activism, thereby informing Protestant politics and thought in ways that have sometimes gone unappreciated. Understanding Catholic political theology, therefore, enriches the study of the larger movements and crises that characterized British and Irish history in this period, during which Catholicism was hotly contested.

76  [Andrew Michael Ramsay], An Apology for the Free and Accepted Masons . . . (Frankfurt, 1748), reprinted in Jonathan Scot, The Pocket Companion and History of Free-­masons . . . (London, 1754), p. 257; Glickman, ECC, pp. 230, 257. 77 Ulrich  L.  Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement (Oxford, 2016), pp. 16, 19. 78 Glickman, ECC, p. 257.

208  Christopher P. Gillett

Select Bibliography Brown, Anthony, ‘Anglo-Irish Gallicanism, c. 1635—c. 1685’ (University of Cambridge PhD thesis, 2004). Davenport, Anne Ashley, Suspicious Moderate: The Life and Writings of Francis à Sancta Clara (1598–1680) (Notre Dame, IN, 2017). Fagan, Patrick, Divided Loyalties: The Question of the Oath for Irish Catholics in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1997). Glickman, Gabriel, The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology (Woodbridge, 2009). Höpfl, Harro, Jesuit Political Thought: The Society of Jesus and the State, c. 1540–1630 (Cambridge, 2004). O’Connor, Thomas, Irish Jansenists, 1600–70: Religion and Politics in Flanders, France, Ireland and Rome (Dublin, 2008). Ó hAnnracháin, Tadhg, ‘ “Though Hereticks and Politicians Should Misinterpret Their Goode Zeale”: Political Ideology and Catholicism in Early Modern Ireland’, in Jane H. Ohlmeyer (ed.), Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Kingdom or Colony (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 155–75. Tutino, Stefania, Thomas White and the Blackloists: Between Politics and Theology during the English Civil War (Aldershot, 2008). Tutino, Stefania, Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth (Oxford, 2010).

11

Material Culture Sarah Johanesen and Claire Marsland

The mid-­seventeenth to early eighteenth century was a period of continuity and change for Catholics across Britain and Ireland. On the one hand, there were moments of great crisis in which everything seemed to revert to the very worst years of persecution. On the other, there were periods in which an official and workable legal toleration, and briefly even a return to State dominance, seemed within their grasp. It is perhaps no surprise that Catholic material culture in Britain and Ireland, especially the objects which facilitated the Mass, reflected this uncertainty and diversity—­the great optimisms and pessimisms of the age. This chapter will focus on materials which are explicitly Catholic in nature, including the devotional and liturgical materials required for religious practice and the decorative schema which expressed Catholic beliefs. Aside from the substantial amount of work done by scholars of Jacobite material culture, which was by no means an exclusively Catholic phenomena, the wealth of sources from this period have prompted a diverse range of longitudinal studies, primarily concerned with continuity and change in British and Irish Catholic identities and religious experience.1 Few of these studies have placed their findings in close dialogue with the contemporary political situation. In doing so, this chapter seeks to complicate historical narratives around persecution, toleration, and its effects on Catholics in Britain and Ireland. It is divided into three key political periods: the Civil Wars and Interregnum, the Restoration and reign of James II, and finally, the period of Jacobite opposition up to the rising of 1715.

Civil Wars and Interregnum The Civil Wars endangered everyone’s material belongings. English Catholics did send relics to the Continent to protect them from parliamentary forces, though 1  For example, Geoffrey Scott, ‘Cloistered Images: Representations of English Nuns, 1600–1800’, in Caroline Bowden and James E. Kelly (eds.), The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Communities, Culture and Identity (Farnham, 2013), pp. 191–208; Clodagh Tait, ‘Art and the Cult of the Virgin Mary in Ireland, c.1500–1660’, in C.  Ó Clabaigh, S.  Ryan, and R.  Moss (eds.), Art and Devotion in Late Medieval Ireland (Dublin, 2006), pp. 163–83; Clodagh Tait, ‘Irish Images of Jesus, 1550–1650’, Church Monuments, 16 (2001), pp. 44–57. Sarah Johanesen and Claire Marsland, Material Culture In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II: Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745. Edited by: John Morrill and Liam Temple, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843436.003.0012

210  Sarah Johanesen and Claire Marsland more were actually sent after 1660.2 Lynching during the conflicts doubtless discouraged the wearing of Catholic objects openly.3 Moreover, the discovery of Catholic material culture upon one’s person could draw intense scrutiny from authorities—­endangering Catholic priests as well as politically opposed laity.4 Consequently, missionary priests returned to using more concealable and port­able liturgical items, like those used under Elizabeth  I.  Reduced persecution in the 1620s and 1630s had encouraged some silversmiths to confidently mark and date their work for Catholic households, whilst also designing more elaborate Catholic silverwork than previously attempted.5 However, Catholic silverware created in the 1640s and 1650s was rarely sent to Goldsmiths Hall, and reverted to small, lightweight designs.6 A particular chalice form dominated Catholic liturgical silver in the mid-­seventeenth century, attributed to the workshops of Arthur Manwaring and Andrew Moore of Brideswell in London.7 The form was smaller than the chalices dating from the 1630s and much simpler in design, following the traditional form of unscrewing into three sections for transportability. The characteristic feature was a baluster stem which was broken by a knot set, with three cast cherubs and wings raised above their heads.8 While Catholics cautiously adapted to uncertainty, war also disrupted, and broke down, the authority and institutions through which Catholic material culture was attacked. The Oath of Abjuration condemned ‘the consecrated Hoast, Crucifixes, or Images’, but oath-­takers did not need to desecrate the actual objects to prove their loyalty.9 Taken as a whole, parliamentary acts and ordinances in England and Wales were far more concerned with the materials of alleged

2 James  E.  Kelly, English Convents in Catholic Europe, c.1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020), ch. 5, esp. p. 91. 3  Richard Challoner, Memoirs of Missionary Priests and other Catholics of both Sexes, that have Suffered Death in England on Religious Accounts, from the year 1577 to 1684, 2 vols. (Manchester, 1803), II, pp. 142, 174; Robin Clifton, ‘The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution’, Past & Present, 52 (1971), p. 26. 4 Challoner, Memoirs, II, pp. 133, 136–7, 143–4. 5  One example was made for Wardour Castle Chapel dating to 1637 with the makers mark ‘RM’ over a rosette. It is also highly engraved with detailed symbols of the Passion on a ten-­lobed foot. 6 Examples of this type of chalice can be found in the collections of Ushaw Historic House, St Mary’s College, Oscott, and Stonyhurst College. Some are listed in Charles Oman, English Church Plate 597–1830 (London, 1957), pp. 269–71. 7  Charles Oman identified the silversmith with the mark ‘AM’ as having produced both Protestant and Catholic plate, see Oman, English Church Plate, p. 270. David Mitchell, ‘Marks, Manwarings and Moore: The Use of the AM in Monogram Mark 1650–1700’, The Silver Society Journal, 11 (1999), p. 175; Theo Deelder, ‘Andrew Moore of Brideswell: Almost Forgotten and Disguised?’, The Silver Society Journal, 11 (1999), p. 178. 8  Whilst medieval depictions of angels focused on the whole body, iconography focusing only on the head and wings was prominent in Counter-­Reformation art: see Alexandra Walsham, ‘Angels and Idols in England’s Long Reformation’, in Alexander Walsham and Peter Marshall (eds.), Angels in the Early Modern World (Cambridge, 2006), p. 154. 9  C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (eds.), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–60, 3 vols. (London 1911), British History Online, http://www.british-­history.ac.uk/no-­series/acts-­ordinances-­interregnum (accessed 19 January, 2022) (hereafter A&O), 18 August 1643, pp. 254–60; 26 June 1657, pp. 1170–80.

Material Culture  211 Laudian ‘popery’ than that of Catholics.10 Indeed parliament did not pass new legislation against Catholic material culture in England and Wales, nor did it revive the 1572 ‘Act Against Bulls from Rome’, which punished the possession of hallowed objects with praemunire. Parliament also did not push local authorities to thoroughly implement the Jacobean statutes, which permitted the confiscation and destruction of any recusant-­ owned property deemed ‘unmeet for such Recusant . . . to have or use’.11 Instead, parliament marginalized Catholic material culture, and encouraged the implementation of the Jacobean statues, through public example, particularly in London. Henrietta Maria’s belongings faced particular censure, with images, crucifixes, and books from her London palaces publicly burned in 1643.12 Months later, parliament celebrated surviving a conspiracy by publicly burning popish materials. Like most Catholic materials confiscated and destroyed by parliamentary authorities, these were collected incidentally through sequestration and searches of suspected royalists.13 Sequestration was the formal process developed by parliament during the Civil Wars and Interregnum to seize a portion of the lands, money, and goods of those deemed a threat in order to fund the war efforts. Based on the systems developed to collect the fines which recusant Catholics had faced since the sixteenth century, parliament expanded those facing sequestration from convicted recusants to also include bishops and royalists.14 The goal of sequestration, however, was to raise money, an activity which went smoother when officials spent less time searching for hidden objects, when local Committees collaborated, and when Catholics were prepared to compound, or willingly pay a reduced lump sum up front, rather than the full amount over time. Moreover, as Julie Spraggon has argued, ‘the issue of iconoclastic reform lost its sense of urgency’ after 1644.15 In the context of royalist plots, the Oath of Abjuration, discussions of toleration, and financial crisis, devotional materials could be a useful way of identifying Catholics, rather than something to fear. Discretion remained important as Protestant responses remained unpredictable, but war-­ time pragmatism and toleration debates diversified public opinion on the politics of Catholic display and concealment. This shift in atmosphere, particularly under the English Commonwealth of the 1650s, is somewhat reflected in Catholic women’s confidence in not only

10  A&O 26 August 1644, pp. 489–96; 27 May 1648, p. 1143. 11  The Statues of the Realm, vol. IV: Part II (London, 1819) (hereafter SR), p. 1082, 3 Jac. I c.5, s.25. 12  Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 71–4. 13 John Vicars, Magnalia Dei Anglicana. Or, Englands Parliamentary chronicle (London, 1646), Part  4, p. 183. Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm, pp. 83–4; Journal of the House of Commons, vol. 3: 1643–1644 (London, 1802), p. 368, as referenced in Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm, p. 87, n.73 and p.119, n. 70; Mary Anne Everett Green (ed.), Calendar, Committee For the Advance of Money: Part 1, 1642–45 (London, 1888), pp. v–­xviii, 317. 14  Eilish Gregory, Catholics during the English Revolution: Politics, Sequestration and Loyalty, 1642–1660 (Woodbridge, 2021). 15 Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm, p. 97.

212  Sarah Johanesen and Claire Marsland maintaining, but creating and enriching, the liturgical textiles within their households. While silversmiths continued to keep a low profile until the 1680s, Agnes Meynell confidently embroidered her name and the date (1658) into the red silk border of a burse, a bag used to keep the linen on which the Host and chalice are placed during the Mass.16 This burse reworked an image of King David playing a harp, cut down from a panel of the Tree of Jesse from a fifteenth-­century ecclesiastical textile (see Figure 11.1). This tradition of reworking and preserving pre-­Reformation liturgical textiles by Catholics originated with the outbreak of persecution in the sixteenth century, but its continuation into the 1650s indicates the significance of such textiles for Catholic communities both materially and spir­itu­al­ly.17 Not only were such items physical links with ancestors, making important claims about the truth and continuity of their faith, but more crucially, medieval Mass plate and vestments were consecrated at the time they were made. With no Catholic bishops in Scotland or England to consecrate new Mass items, pre-­Reformation survivals held intangible sacred importance. Helena Wintour also started work on a distinctive set of church vestments during the 1650s, marking her work with her initials and family emblem.18 Embracing the layered messaging of Jesuitical devotional teaching, the Wintour vestments are a physical example of the strong connections formed with the Continental Church. Helena used floral emblems to symbolize aspects of Catholic devotional theology, a practice promoted in Continental Jesuit publications and specifically by the English Jesuit Henry Hawkins in Partheneia Sacra (1633).19 Helena’s role as a harbourer and supporter of Jesuit missionary priests exposed her to Tridentine practices and theology, influencing her vestment design. She also had connections on the Continent through friends and relatives.20 These connections may explain the professional, Continental embroidery work seen on the ‘Alleluia’ chasuble, with friends, relatives, or priests gifting it to Helena, or bringing it over on request.21 In the aftermath of the Civil Wars, Wintour and Meynell both 16  The Esh Burse, Ushaw Historic House Collections, see Frances Pritchard, ‘The Esh Maniple Panels’, in James  E.  Kelly (ed.), Treasures of Ushaw College: Durham’s Hidden Gem (Durham, 2015), p. 56. 17  There are also examples of the reuse and reworking of medieval textiles by Catholics in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and in English Continental institutions. See Mary Brooks, ‘ “Rags of Popery”: Dressing and Addressing Disrupted Faith in the Material Culture of Roman Catholics in Early Modern England’, in B.  Marin-­Aguilera and S.  Hanss (eds.), In-­Between Textiles: Weaving Subjectivities and Encounters, 1400–1800 (Forthcoming). We are most grateful to Dr Brooks for supplying us with a preview of this chapter. 18  Curator Jan Graffius dates the Allelluia chasuble to c.1655: Maurice Whitehead (ed.), Held in Trust: 2008 Years of Sacred Culture (Stonyhurst, 2008), p. 80. 19 Henry Hawkins, Partheneia Sacra. Or The Mysterious and Delicious Garden of the Sacred Parthenes ([Rouen], 1633); Maximillianus Sandaeus, Theologica Symbolica (Mainz, 1626); Maximillianus Sandaeus, Aviarium Marianum (Mainz, 1628); Maximillianus Sandaeus, Maria Flos Mysticus (Mainz, 1629). 20  Helena’s sister, Mary, attended St Monica’s, Louvain, alongside their third cousin Lucy Tresham. 21  Sophia Jane 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), p. 101.

Material Culture  213

Figure 11.1.  The Esh Burse, Fifteenth Century (Reproduced with permission from the Trustees of Ushaw Historic House, Chapels & Gardens. Photograph by Carl Joyce Photography).

appeared confident that personally identifying with these sacred Catholic objects was worth the risk. They not only invested significant time, energy, and expense in these objects, but were able to complete and preserve them, suggesting that even in the context of gentry homes associated with past Catholic plots, the authorities had little interest in seeking such objects out.22 This speaks to the practical effect which the debates of the 1650s were having on the application of anti-­papal measures.23

22  Helena’s father had been a Gunpowder Plotter. 23  On these debates, see Stefania Tutino, ‘The Catholic Church and the English Civil War: The Case of Thomas White’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 58 (2007), pp. 232–55; Alexandra  K.  Tompkins, ‘The English Catholic Issue, 1640–1662: Factionalism, Perceptions and Exploitation’, (University of London PhD thesis, 2010), esp. ch 5.

214  Sarah Johanesen and Claire Marsland In contrast, the Scottish authorities’ approach to Catholic material culture had always been quite different to that in England. The Kirk, rather than secular ­powers, decided what restrictions would apply to Catholicism and idolatry. The 1641 Act for Abolishing Monuments of Idolatry was the first secular law against privately held Catholic objects, and it reinforced the Kirk’s leadership, though it also retained the long-­held right of secular authorities to implement fiscal and capital punishment, which typically resulted in the mitigation of anti-­ papal laws.24 So, despite being widely censured as idolatrous in Scotland, Catholic material culture’s political importance was highly unstable. The concept of Catholics as a traitorous fifth column in Scotland, whose idol­ atrous materials encouraged loyalty to a foreign power, never gained the traction it did in England.25 Even amidst widespread fears of papist conspiracy, the 1641 Act framed the threat of Catholic devotional materials primarily in terms of angering God by ignoring sin. Like the parliamentary legislation in England, it focused on removing Laudian innovations from public spaces.26 When the law was applied to Catholics, it was used against high-­profile royalists-­at-­arms, like George Gordon, second marquess of Huntly. During military action in 1640 the Covenanter army destroyed idolatrous imagery at Huntly Castle.27 Yet it was not until 1647 that the General Assembly appointed brethren ‘to visit the Idolatrous Monuments’ they brought from Huntly’s estates to Edinburgh.28 Legal process began a year after the King’s surrender, three years after Huntley’s excommunication, and his exemption from the general pardon of March 1647. Following Cromwell’s conquest, English law was proclaimed in Scotland but appears to have been generally underused.29 Cromwellian attempts to protect dissenting Protestants by dismantling the Kirk’s authority effectively granted Catholics unprecedented freedoms in the 1650s.30 Despite attempts to secularize Scottish anti-­papal activity, legislators and policymakers in England and Wales were, by 1660, increasingly approaching Catholic devotional materials as the Scots always had. Instead of pursuing them as an immediate threat to the State, they were

24  Allan I. Macinnes, ‘Catholic Recusancy and the Penal Laws, 1603–1707’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 33 (1987), pp. 27–63. 25  Paul Goatman, ‘Exemplary Deterrent or Theatre of Martyrdom? John Ogilvie’s Execution and the Community of Glasgow’, Journal of Jesuit Studies, 7 (2020), pp. 50–1, 60. 26  The Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707, https://www.rps.ac.uk (accessed 19 January 2022), REF: 1641/8/46. 27 Ian  B.  D.  Bryce and Alasdair Roberts, ‘Post-­ Reformation Catholic Houses of North-­ East Scotland’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 123 (1994), p. 365. 28  Alexander Peterkin (ed.), Records of the Kirk of Scotland: containing the Acts and Proceedings of the General Assemblies, from the year 1638 downwards, vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 1838), p. 146. 29 Daniel Szechi, ‘Defending the True Faith: Kirk, State, and Catholic Missioners in Scotland, 1653–1755’, The Catholic Historical Review, 82 (1996), p. 405. 30 Ryan Burns, ‘Unrepentant Papists: Catholic Responses to Cromwellian Toleration in Interregnum Scotland’, History, 103 (2018), pp. 243–61.

Material Culture  215 increasingly framing Catholic material culture as correctable religious errors which did not merit severe secular penalties. In Ireland Catholic devotional material fell under the jurisdiction of the beleaguered Church of Ireland, whose high commissions had expansive powers but struggled against widespread opposition. While secular governors periodically applied English statutes through martial law, this often backfired and was soon reversed.31 Catholic material culture was therefore simultaneously quotidian, and capable of heightening political tensions, with the public reinstatement of Catholic material culture playing an important role in the 1641 Rebellion.32 In areas held by the Catholic-­led Confederacy for most of the 1640s, devotional materials made an important public statement of independence and about Catholicism’s role within the State. Confederate banners proudly displayed Catholic imagery, like the Coronation of the Virgin.33 Religious processions like those of 1643 or 1651 in Galway elevated the consecrated sacrament, reconsecrated churches, and erected altars on the street.34 As elsewhere, parliamentary armies used martial law to authorize iconoclastic attacks against popish materials in public spaces. Unlike Scotland, England, and Wales, however, this meant Irish targets were not primarily Laudian, but Catholic. Pilgrimage sites like St Patrick’s Purgatory, medieval monuments, wayside chapels and crosses, whose public use had been revitalized by the Confederacy, were all targeted.35 In victory, parliament still had to deal with a Catholic-­majority population in Ireland, therefore punitive legislation and proclamations focused on Catholic clergy and landowning laity.36 As elsewhere, however, Cromwell’s army sought to dismantle the powers of any State church that might demand surface-­ level conformity and punish dissenting Protestants.37 Despite being marginalized in public life, Catholic material culture therefore remained a common part of everyday Irish experience.

31  K. Bottigheimer, ‘The Failure of the Reformation in Ireland, a Question Bien Posée’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 36 (1985), esp. 199–203; Tait, ‘Irish Images of Jesus’, pp. 48–9. 32  Joan Redmond, ‘Popular Religious Violence in Ireland: 1641–1660’ (University of Cambridge PhD thesis, 2016), ch. 2. 33  Tait, ‘Art and the Cult of the Virgin Mary’, p. 170. 34  Tait, ‘Irish Images of Jesus’, p. 53; Tait, ‘Art and the Cult of the Virgin Mary’, p. 172. 35  Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2011), pp. 136–7, 141; Herbert  F.  Hore, ‘An Account of the Barony of Forth, in the County of Wexford, Written at the Close of the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of the Kilkenny and South-­East of Ireland Archaeology Society, 4 (1862), esp. pp. 67–9. 36 A&O 12 August 1652, pp. 598–603; 26 September 1653, pp. 722–53; 16 December 1653, pp. 813–22; 19 January 1653/4, pp. 831–5; 23 June 1654, pp. 924–9; 9 June 1657 (pp. 1100–10); 26 June 1657 (pp. 1170–80); 26 June 1657 (pp. 1250–62); 7 July 1659, pp. 1298–9; 25 February 1659/60, pp. 1418–22; Robert Steele (ed.), Bibliography of Royal proclamations of the Tudor and Stuart sovereigns, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1910), I, pp. 57–74. 37  R. Scott Spurlock, ‘Cromwell and Catholics: Towards a Reassessment of Lay Catholic Experience in Interregnum Ireland’, in Mark R. F. Williams and Stephen Paul Forrest (eds.), Constructing the Past: Writing Irish History, 1600–1800 (Woodbridge, 2010), pp. 171–6.

216  Sarah Johanesen and Claire Marsland

Restoration and Catholic Monarchy The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 increased Catholic confidence that their material culture was safer from confiscation and destruction than ever before. The year 1662 alone saw several promising signs, including the return of the Dowager Queen Henrietta Maria for a three-­year stay, and the marriage of Charles II to Portuguese Catholic, Catherine of Braganza. Moreover, in December that year, the King issued a Declaration of Indulgence, suspending all laws against Catholics and Protestant non-­conformists. Despite the push-­back against the Declaration, the King’s clearly tolerationist stance, and the conversion of courtiers such as Barbara Villiers and later the duke of York, created a stronger network of high-­profile allies. The strength of Court Catholicism meant Catholic material culture was more politically important than at any time since 1558.38 Beyond the Court, curious men like John Greenhalgh spent 1662 visiting non-­conformist places of worship in London, from Catholics to Anabaptists and Jews.39 That these groups felt confident enough to admit an outsider suggests their optimism regarding toleration. This optimism may have encouraged Helena Wintour to openly leave church textiles, financial support, and even land to the Society of Jesus upon her death; bequests which could be disputed by Wintour’s kin fairly openly in the 1670s without drawing the ire of local authorities.40 English Catholics who visited the embassies and royal chapels in the period experienced the full extent of Counter-­Reformation liturgy, music, and aesthetics. The Portuguese embassy chapel, for example, contained elaborate suites of vestments in each liturgical colour. Gold brocade was used in these vestments to materialize God’s glory, just as monarchs materialized their own. The reflection of candlelight on the gold during the Mass provided a theatrical, heightened experience of divinity at key moments, such as the elevation of the Host.41 When Samuel Pepys first attended the Queen’s newly restored royal chapel at St James’ in September 1662, he noted ‘the fine altar, ornaments and the fryers in their habits, and the 38 Adam Morton, ‘Sanctity and Suspicion: Catholicism Conspiracy and the Representation of Henrietta Maria of France and Catherine of Braganza, Queens of Britain’, in Helen Watanabe-­O’Kelly and Adam Morton (eds.), Queens Consort, Cultural Transfer and European Politics, c.1500–1800 (London, 2016), pp. 172–201; Eilish Gregory, ‘Catherine of Braganza’s Relationship with Her Catholic Household’, in Valerie Schutte and Estelle Paranque (eds.), Forgotten Queens in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Political Agency, Myth-­Making, and Patronage (London, 2018), pp. 129–48; Erin Griffey, ‘Picturing Confessional Politics at the Stuart Court: Henrietta Maria and Catherine of Braganza’, Journal of Religious History, 44 (2020), pp. 465–93. 39 Emily Vine, ‘ “Those Enemies of Christ, if They Are Suffered to Live Among Us”: Locating Religious Minority Homes and Private Space in Early Modern London’, The London Journal, 43 (2018), p. 204. 40  ‘Bond and Inventory of goods, May 9th 1671’, Worcester Records Office, Worcester, WRO Will series 008.7; Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, Stonyhurst MSS A.I.22, no. 2. Her ‘will’ is reproduced in full in Henry Chadwick, ‘Helena Wintour and Her Vestments’, Stonyhurst Magazine, 29 (1948), pp. 249–50. 41  See Whitehead (ed.) Held in Trust, p. 96.

Material Culture  217 priests come in with their fine copes and many other very fine things’.42 He most likely saw the chapel plate created by English and Dutch silversmiths, Robert Smither and John Cooqus, who were commissioned to create candlesticks, ciborium, flagons, patens, and a 10 inch chalice, together with several smaller chalices engraved with the sacred heart.43 Catherine of Braganza’s chapels also contained a range of specifically English Catholic items which emphasized her newly adopted national identity. A silver processional cross, for example, was commissioned by the Queen from an unknown English silversmith, to contain a relic of wood from the pastoral crozier of St Thomas of Canterbury.44 Pepys also refers to a crucifix in the Queen’s possession which was once given by the papacy to Mary, Queen of Scots.45 These relics, however, were not uncontentious ­demonstrations of national or dynastic identity. Given St Thomas’ international reputation, it was unlikely Braganza was not aware of the way the Henrician Reformation had vilified him as a traitorous papal agent. She must also have been aware of Mary Stuart’s reputation in Protestant Britain. She was, therefore, publicly aligning herself with figures who were internationally famous victims of Protestant heresy, as well as with the British Catholics who revered them. In contrast to the opportunities afforded London Catholics, rural priests largely continued to use equipment stockpiled since the reign of Elizabeth. Nicholas Postgate was known to carry a small slate portable altar stone during his mission in the East Riding of Yorkshire.46 The two silver chalices associated with him, dating to the 1630s and 1640s, both unscrewed into three sections for easy transport and concealment, like chalices made during the peak of persecution (for an example of such a chalice, see Figures 11.2 and 11.3).47 In Wales, the vestments and plate used by David Lewis and Philip Evans in the Gunter Mansion, Abergavenny, included reworked fifteenth and sixteenth century vestments, as well as simple unmarked chalices.48 Postgate, Lewis, and Evans were all later executed as a result of the Titus Oates Plot. The Oates Plot, revealed in 1678 and its aftermath, demonstrated that despite the King’s tolerant attitude, Catholic material culture could still be used to make an example of them in moments of political tension. London-­based justice of the 42  Robert Latham (ed.), The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A Selection (London, 2003), p. 225. Diary entry 19–27 September 1662. 43  Peter Leech, ‘Musicians in the Catholic Chapel of Catherine of Braganza, 1662–92’, Early Music, 29 (2001), p. 573. 44  Augusto Cardoso Pinto, ‘The Processional Cross of the Chapel of Catherine of Braganza’, The Burlington Magazine, 99 (1957), pp. 76–8. 45  Latham (ed.), Diary of Samuel Pepys, p. 716. Diary entry 22–3 January 1667. 46  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. 282, 283. The altar stone resides within St Joseph’s Church, Pickering. 47  T.  M.  Fallow, ‘Yorkshire Plate and Goldsmiths’, Archaeological Journal, 61 (1904), pp. 74–83; Camm, Forgotten Shrines, p. 290. 48 R.  H.  D’Elboux, ‘Pre-­ Reformation Vestments in Catholic Churches in Monmouthshire’, Archaeological Journal, 81 (1924), pp. 21–30.

218  Sarah Johanesen and Claire Marsland

Figure 11.2.  Silver chalice, c.1650 (Reproduced with permission from the Trustees of Ushaw Historic House, Chapels & Gardens. Photograph by Carl Joyce Photography).

peace, Sir William Waller, for example, pointedly seized a cartload of Catholic objects from the Benedictine community at the Savoy in February 1679 and burned them in public, just as his predecessors had in the Civil War. Though he was following the Jacobean statutes, the public attention this incident garnered suggests such bonfires were uncommon. Waller publicized his bonfire through a small pamphlet, emphasizing first the vestments, ‘silk embroidered with silver and gold lace’ depicting ‘effigies . . . and other Popish Hieroglyphicks’, then the ‘Popish Pictures with frames and without, together with Crucifixes and Images of brass and ivory, Beads of innumerable quantity, one or two Popish Bulls’ and ‘many Popish Trinkets and Reliques, and bones of Saints, or such presumed’. Despite being prioritized in the Jacobean legislation, the texts were relegated to the final category of note, described as ‘tending to the subversion of the Protestant and promoting of the Popish Religion and Interest’.49 Waller’s actions were 49 SR, p. 1082, 3 Jac. I c.5, s.25; ‘WALLER, Sir William II (c.1639–99), of Strutton Ground, Westminster’, History of Parliament Online, https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/16601690/member/waller-­ ­ sir-­ william-­ ii-­ 1639-­ 99 (accessed 18 January 2022); Sir William Waller, An impartial and exact accompt of the divers popish books, beads, crucifixes and images, taken at the Savoy (London, 1678).

Material Culture  219

Figure 11.3.  Silver chalice in three sections, c.1650 (Reproduced with permission from the Trustees of Ushaw Historic House, Chapels & Gardens. Photograph by Carl Joyce Photography).

subsequently celebrated in the playing cards produced to decry popish treason which not only indicates political support, but perhaps also a need to counter the framing of his opponents.50 While the Oates Plot perhaps scared Catholics out of their increasing confidence and back into exercising greater discretion, the fright was relatively short-­lived, given James’ accession to the throne in 1685. Much of the most vociferous anti-­papal activity against Catholics and their material culture following the Oates Plot did not come directly through State officials, but via popular demonstration. For two years in a row, in 1679 and 1680, there were processions around London’s boundaries, ending at Temple—­the place where Catholics supposedly started the Fire of London. Both took place on Elizabeth I’s accession day, 17 November, during parliamentary sessions, and close to the 5 November.51 Both ended with the burning of papal effigies and shared much of their visual language, attacking Catholic vestments and monastic robes, crosses, relics, rosary beads, pardons, and agni dei. Despite being a moment of explicitly anti-­papal State persecution, however, the State was careful about the Catholics it prosecuted and more so about the ones it executed. The Crown successfully rejected the implication of Queen Catherine in any ‘Popish Plot’, undermining the plot’s credibility.52 The public outcry against popery was not politically strong enough to drive a broader, more persistent, or 50  Waller appears on the 7 of Diamonds, see ‘Complete pack of 52 playing-­cards depicting the Popish Plot (1679)’, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1841-­0403-­138-­189 (accessed 18 January 2022). 51  The Solemn Mock Procession of the Pope, Cardinalls, Jesuits, Fryers &c. through the City of London, November the 17th, 1679 (London, 1680); The Solemn Mock Procession of the Pope, Cardinalls, Jesuits, Fryers, Nuns exactly taken as they marcht through the Citty of London November the 17th, 1680 (London, 1680). 52  Morton, ‘Sanctity and Suspicion’, pp. 190–1.

220  Sarah Johanesen and Claire Marsland more bloody campaign. Indeed, the Irish archbishop, Oliver Plunkett, would be the last recognized Catholic martyr executed in England in 1681. The seditious danger of Catholic practice (and materiality) in private homes had become a matter of debate in England, not a generally accepted concept, and the Oates Plot was a moment of contention over this principle. It is telling that the Irish victims were significant members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy; that so few Irish priests were given up; and that Plunkett was brought to England to be tried and executed. Equally, it is no surprise that Scotland was the only nation where no Catholic convictions were made in relation to the Plot, given their scepticism regarding Catholic treason. The duke of York’s conversion in the late 1660s, and its public notoriety in the 1670s, had a particularly significant effect on the meanings of Catholic material culture in Britain. Not only could Catholics reasonably expect the open practice of their faith under James’ rule—­one of the many contributing factors to the exclusion crisis of 1678–81 and the fear of popery that surrounded it—­but their claim to true dynastic loyalty could be expressed through their Catholicism more con­vin­ cing­ly than ever before.53 As king, James’ own navigation of Catholic material ­culture sat at the thorny juncture between an opulent display commonly associated with absolutist France, and a distinctly British Catholic approach emphasizing a private, quiet faith. On the one hand, how could a Catholic monarch in Europe not openly display their faith in ways commensurate with their status? On the other, how could a Catholic monarch who promised to defend the status of the Church of England be trusted? As Kevin Sharpe observes, while James did not leave Protestant places of worship to rot, his construction of a Catholic chapel at his principal palace of Whitehall unnerved many.54 He had effectively created a competing Chapel Royal which fully reversed the Reformation. Though James added to Christopher Wren’s cautious initial designs, the in­ter­ ior of James’ Catholic chapel, as well as his use of overtly Catholic religious art in the palace, could have been far more stridently Catholic than it was. The enormous altarpiece which depicted the annunciation was replaced soon after with a depiction of the nativity—­both Christocentric subjects. The figures described include two apostles and allegorical figures, but no other saints. Catholic contemporaries pointed out that similar images existed in Protestant churches. Even in the early seventeenth century Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, had adorned his Protestant chapel with the annunciation and other depictions from the Bible, as well as the apostles, inspiring James I’s chapel at Holyrood.55 The altarpiece depicted a pelican in her piety—­a representation of the bird wounding its own 53  Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–81 (Cambridge, 1994). 54  Kevin Sharpe, Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–1714 (London, 2013), pp. 285–6. 55 Sharpe, Rebranding Rule, pp. 271–2, 285; Pauline Croft, ‘The Religion of Robert Cecil’, The Historical Journal, 34 (1991), p. 788.

Material Culture  221 chest, to draw blood and feed its hungry offspring. Though commonly used by Catholics to represent the Mass, it was also used by Protestants to represent the devotion of leaders to their people.56 Similarly, James placed a painting of Chinese Catholic convert Michael Alphonsius Shen Futsung by English artist Godfrey Kneller in his presence chamber. While this was a loaded statement of support for the Jesuits who had converted Futsung, the imagery exoticized its subject in a way which distanced the subject matter and may have been thought acceptable to James’ Protestant subjects; to make a case for Catholicism at a distance, rather than assert its truth in the immediate context of England.57 The emphasis was not on the conversion of a ‘pagan’ to Catholicism—­Jesuits and popes do not figure alongside Futsung—­but rather to Christianity. The crucifix and monastic habit worn by Futsung do advertise his Catholicism, but they are also couched in a foreign setting, worn beneath Chinese clothing. While it evokes depictions of martyrs, the painting eschews more controversial imagery.

Jacobite Opposition The hasty retreat of Britain and Ireland’s last Catholic king in 1688 presaged another spike in violence towards Catholic material culture. Encouraged by William of Orange’s proclamation to seize, disarm, and imprison Catholics, the buildings erected for Catholic chapels, schools, and other charitable endeavours over the past three years were attacked by mobs. Private recusant residences, such as those of Lords Dover and Melfort, were ransacked. Effigies of popes and the King were burned as Catholics conveyed threatened devotional objects to gentry homes, back into the ‘private’ domestic sphere, for safekeeping. Chapels established by old Catholic families, like the Throckmortons or Yates of Harvington, were utterly ‘demolished’.58 Meanwhile, Williamite forces attacked Catholic hold outs, such as Powis Castle, the penal laws were revived by parliament, and the rhetoric of assumed Catholic disloyalty was reinvigorated.59 Catholic material culture again became an indicator of loyalty to a now-­deposed tyrannical king. Yet, as Kevin Sharpe has pointed out, we should be careful not to forget that ­loyalty to the Catholic Stuarts still carried considerable political weight, and these  narratives were hotly contested by contemporary Protestants, as well as Catholics.60 56  Susan Doran, ‘Virginity, Divinity and Power: The Portraits of Elizabeth I’, in Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (eds.), The Myth of Elizabeth (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 178–9. 57 Sharpe, Rebranding Rule, pp. 270–2. 58  Gabriel Glickman, English Catholic Community: 1688–1745 (Woodbridge, 2009), pp. 21–2. 59 Glickman, English Catholic Community, pp. 22–3. 60 Sharpe, Rebranding Rule, chs. 7 and 8.

222  Sarah Johanesen and Claire Marsland Given the religious significance of Divine Right and James II’s Catholicism, the exiled Stuarts’ faith clearly had an impact on Jacobite material culture, particularly at their Court.61 Stuart remains, particularly those of Mary, Queen of Scots, Charles I, and James II after his own death, were regarded by many Catholics as religious relics.62 Lady Derwentwater, for example, took great pains to preserve the belongings of her husband, executed for participating in the 1715 uprising, and pass them on to their Catholic descendants, whilst cultivating the image of her husband as a martyr. Embroidering her husband’s hair into their bed sheet during her exile was an act of personal grief, political statement, and Catholic devotion.63 Though conducted through very different frames of reference, a reverence for Stuart martyrs was not unique to Catholics, however, and those Jacobite materials circulating in Britain and Ireland were largely secular in nature and broad in appeal.64 Nevertheless, explicitly Catholic Jacobite material culture was preserved, much like pre-­Reformation artefacts, by Catholic families in England, and the religious institutions in exile, which facilitated Jacobite networks.65 Plate, vestments, and liturgical items associated with James II became a particular focus of rescue. A cope purportedly used during the coronation of James II was acquired by the Sheldons of Brailes, Worcestershire.66 Religious paintings from Lime Street chapel and Whitehall Palace were transferred to Broughton Hall and Arundel Castle. The Tempests of Broughton also received a silver sanctuary lamp from Lime Street, which was later hung in their new mid-­ eighteenth-­ century chapel.67 Jacobitism had more of an impact on Catholic material culture than the other way around, altering the framing of national identity and loyalty wherever it intersected with their faith—­whether that was to demonstrate their support or rejection of the Jacobite cause.

61  Edward T. Corp, with Edward Greeg, Howard Erskine-­Hill, and Geoffrey Scott, A Court in Exile: The Stuarts in France, 1689–1718 (Cambridge, 2004). 62  Neil Guthrie, The Material Culture of the Jacobites (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 116–18; Jan Graffius, ‘The Stuart Relics in the Stonyhurst Collections’, Recusant History, 31 (2012), pp. 147–69. 63  Sasha Handley, ‘Objects, Emotions and an Early Modern Bed-­Sheet’, History Workshop Journal, 85 (2018), pp. 169–94. 64 Guthrie, Material Culture, esp. pp. 53–4, 118–19; Murray Pittock, ‘Treacherous Objects: Towards a Theory of Jacobite Material Culture’, Journal for Eighteenth-­Century Studies, 34 (2011), pp. 42–4, 49–54. 65  Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 109, 111–14, 125–8; Kelly, English Convents, pp. 157–9. 66 ‘A cope of cloth of silver with orders of the garter on the hood’, St Mary’s College, Oscott, museum number: 499. 67  The altarpiece in the Arundel Castle chapel, which was redecorated in the 1760s, contained Gennari’s Nativity, in oils, from James II’s chapel at Whitehall Palace: see A. P. Baggs and H. M. Warne, ‘Arundel’, in T. P. Hudson (ed.), A History of the County of Sussex, vol. 5: Part 1, Arundel Rape: South-­ Western Part, Including Arundel (London, 1997), pp. 10–101, British History Online, http://www. british-­history.ac.uk/vch/sussex/vol5/pt1 (accessed 18 January 2022). A painting of Christ crucified by Godfried Mais of Antwerp was rescued from the Lime Street chapel, with the sanctuary lamp, and moved to Broughton Hall chapel.

Material Culture  223 The State’s need to gain Catholic compliance and stifle support domestically meant that despite the redeployment of legal mechanisms against Catholics, anti-­ Jacobite legislation in Britain made a point of separating Jacobitism from religious matters. Though Jacobite material culture could result in treason or praemunire charges, most were prosecuted as misdemeanours. In England, as in Scotland, seditious libel became the weapon of choice for prosecuting prominent Jacobites who were not in-­arms.68 However, these charges all focused explicitly on the identification of support for the King-­in-­exile, not on the religion or devotional belongings of those involved. Once the penal laws were reinstated, Catholic devotional materials were not confiscated and publicly paraded, or destroyed as ‘Jacobite’ by State officials. The difference between Catholic and Jacobite treason was legally distinct. As anti-­Catholic laws were often mitigated in practice, and not used in prosecuting Jacobitism, devotional materials gradually became detached from the treason of greatest public concern. The narrative of inherent Catholic treason, though still potent, no longer carried the widespread support it once had, and was clearly shaky ground on which to rest the prosecution of Jacobitism, at least in Britain. As a result, English Catholic worship continued to be more relaxed than it had been a century earlier, even if it was not as overt as in James’ brief reign. Manor house chapels moved out of the attic and into more prominent locations within the house, with liturgical equipment becoming larger and more decorative. This process is clearest in the chapel of Everingham Hall near Pocklington. In 1685, Mass was held in secretive upstairs rooms, but by 1710 a simple chapel, sacristy, and priests’ room were established on the first floor in a wing of the house.69 With the diminishing threat of invasive searches, English Catholic gentry began to invest in decoration and accoutrements for their chapels. Commissions expanded to include a range of non-­essential items such as sanctuary lamps, tabernacles, cruets, incense boats, thuribles, and monstrances, which had been too large or decorative to conceal from pursuivant raids.70 A list of church plate in the house chapel of William Fowler, for example, included two large silver thuribles, two large silver cruets with plate to stand on, six large silver candlesticks, a large silver-­gilt ciborium, a large silver crucifix, and another crucifix for processions.71 New and varied commissions of Catholic liturgical silverware went hand in hand with goldsmiths being confident enough to mark their work without fear of reprisal. Into the 1700s, notable goldsmiths Benjamin Pyne, and later Charles Fredrick Kandler, dominated Catholic silver commissions as

68 Guthrie, Material Culture, ch. 1, esp. pp. 21–6; Pittock, ‘Treacherous Objects’, pp. 42–4. 69  Hugh Aveling, Post Reformation Catholicism in East Yorkshire, 1558–1790 (York, 1960), p. 53. 70  Tessa Murdoch, ‘Recusant Plate in England’, in Timothy Shroder (ed.), Treasures of the English Church: A Thousand Years of Sacred Gold and Silver (London, 2008), pp. 78–86. 71 Oman, English Church Plate, p. 263.

224  Sarah Johanesen and Claire Marsland English Catholics avoided the Huguenot craftsmen who then controlled the secular plate market.72 Despite their continued political marginalization, English Catholics experienced a subtle relaxation of the invasive anti-­papal policies which had left priests vulnerable, and the laity wary. In Ireland, however, where every day Catholic practice was a fact of life, the Jacobitism of Catholics was indeed presumed, and somewhat borne out, by their armed resistance to William III. The legislation subsequently enacted in Ireland was more confessional and aggressive than ever before. Like the Cromwellian regime, it was not the symbols or materials of ­popery which were targeted, but the elite and clergy whose political and religious clout sustained the faith.73 The implementation of more enforceable laws, however, had an unprecedented impact on Irish devotional materials. From 1705, for example, all secular clergy were to register themselves and their places of worship, and all regulars were exiled. As a result, chalices like those used in late-­sixteenth-­ and early-­ seventeenth-­ century England started to emerge. These, like the McMahon Chalice (1724), were designed to pull apart for ease of concealment and travel with illegal, itinerant regulars.74 While chalices started to reflect the increasing difficulties faced by male religious, the vestments and liturgical textiles produced by women religious in Ireland tell a different story. Despite the occasional raid, the authorities largely turned a blind eye to these communities after 1700.75 In the Poor Clare and Dominican convents of Galway, this facilitated the making of church textiles rich with Continental embroidery techniques. These skills had been developed through their engagement with the thriving religious textile workshops of Spain, where they had fled during Cromwell’s conquest.76 However, the nuns did not merely replicate Spanish designs. One vestment, from the Dominican convent in Galway, includes a distinctly Irish Catholic emblem. The orphreys on the chas­ uble depict the cockerel over the cooking pot. This was a reference to an apoc­ ryph­al story that Judas had come home after betraying Christ to find his wife (or sister) roasting a cockerel. Asking for a rope with which to hang himself, because he knew Christ would rise on the third day, the woman scorned the idea of Christ’s resurrection, and the cockerel miraculously came to life, crowing three times. The symbol had become embedded in Irish religious imagery, folklore, and 72 Oman, English Church Plate, p. 262. 73 Sean J. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford, 2002), ch. 7. 74  Philip Magee, ‘The McMahon Chalice 1724’, Clogher Record, 21 (2013), pp. 83–8. 75 Raids of the Dominican convent occurred in 1708, 1715, and 1731. See Helena Concannon, ‘Historic Galway Convents: II. The Dominican Nuns’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 39 (1950), p. 69. 76  Helena Concannon, ‘Historic Galway Convents’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 38 (1949), pp. 439–46; Concannon, ‘Galway Convents: II’. The Poor Clares returned to Ireland during the reign of Charles II, followed later by the Dominicans in 1686. Some of the Dominican Church textiles are now in the collections of the Galway City Museum.

Material Culture  225 literature from the fifteenth century, and regularly appeared on memorial stones and penal crosses.77 Exchanges with Continental Catholicism had a significant impact on the devotional, philosophical, and artistic formation of the laity, as well as those in holy orders.78 The Scottish Catholic diaspora was particularly prominent in Continental military service, bringing home not only the fruits of their exposure to other cultures, but resources through which they could express their faith and expand missionary work. James, second Count Leslie of Balquhain, for example, commissioned vestments made from Turkish textiles obtained during his engagement in the 1683 Siege of Vienna, before sending them to his Scottish home at Fetternear in the 1690s.79 The Leslies’ collecting practices appear to have been geared towards operating as a centre for Jesuit missionaries and Catholic lay leadership at this time. Despite the distinctions the State made between religious and political loyalty, overtly Catholic activity like this could still throw suspicion of Jacobitism onto a family, and the Leslies faced repeated reprisals during periods of Jacobite Rebellion.80

Conclusion The way things are created, distributed, appropriated, and reused means they are a valuable means for understanding both ‘the divisions of this world, as well as its points of contact’.81 By investigating Catholic experience through material culture, we can see that the diversity of Catholic experience was driven by a variety of intersecting identities, interplaying with the political, religious, and socio-­ economic fluctuations around them. Interrogating Catholic material culture can offer a greater insight into Catholic lived experience. As more studies of this material culture emerge, we need to consider what it can tell us about Catholicism as a whole, as well as the situations in which British and Irish Catholics found themselves in the period. By thinking

77  John D. Seymour, ‘The Cock and Pot’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 11 (1921), pp. 147–51. For the white and yellow silk damask chasuble, Irish early eighteenth century, held by the Dominican Convent, Galway, see Joseph McDonnell (ed.), Ecclesiastical Art of the Penal Era: Maynooth College Bicentenary Art Exhibitions (Maynooth, 1995). 78  Geoffrey Scott, ‘The Throckmortons at Home and Abroad, 1680–1800’, in Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott (eds.), Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation in Emancipation (Farnham, 2009), pp. 171–211. 79  Peter Davidson and Prue King, ‘The Fetternear Vestments at the Blairs Museum’, British Catholic History, 33 (2016), pp. 259–77. 80  Penelope Dransart and Nicholas Q. Bogdan, ‘The Material Culture of Recusancy at Fetternear: Kin and Religion in Post-­Reformation Scotland’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 134 (2004), pp. 457–70. 81  Paula Findlen, ‘Early modern things: objects in motion, 1500–1800’, in idem. (ed.), Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories (Abingdon, 2013), p. 5.

226  Sarah Johanesen and Claire Marsland through material things, this chapter suggests avenues for new research and encourages the reconsideration of pre-­ existing assumptions. First, the gap between anti-­papal rhetoric and lived reality in the period is revealed, and the questioning of anti-­popery as a political force in this period, particularly in England, becomes more pronounced. Second, the contrast between the ways in which Catholics in the countryside and urban areas accumulated religious ma­ter­ ials after the Restoration challenges the extensive, and sometimes exclusive, focus on Court Catholicism in the period. Though important, there is a clear need to put these studies into dialogue with work focused on the development of Catholic communities beyond elite and gentry enclaves.82 There is also a critical need to draw our gaze far beyond the well-­established clerical communities in exile, and even the diasporic laymen discussed in Liesbeth Corens’ monograph, to the colonies and trading outposts of the nascent British Empire.83 Catholic culture was awash with responses to global missionary work and to the cultures with which they came into contact, and their material culture is surely no different. As Helen Kilburn’s recent work has demonstrated, it is vitally important that we start to unpick the complications of colonialism and empire which impacted Catholic experience at home, as well as abroad.84 A concentrated analysis of Catholic material culture needs to be part of a much wider move to complicate our narratives and assumptions about Catholicism in the period, as well as the ways in which we understand the lives and experiences of Catholics themselves.

Select Bibliography Davidson, Peter and Prue King, ‘The Fetternear Vestments at the Blairs Museum’, British Catholic History, 33 (2016), pp. 259–77. Dransart, Penelope and Nicholas Q. Bogdan, ‘The Material Culture of Recusancy at Fetternear: Kin and Religion in Post-Reformation Scotland’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 134 (2004), pp. 457–70. Graffius, Jan, ‘The Stuart Relics in the Stonyhurst Collections’, Recusant History, 31 (2012), pp. 147–69. Guthrie, Neil, The Material Culture of the Jacobites (Cambridge, 2013). 82  Particularly as John Bossy has pointed us to the declining role of such elite and gentry enclaves in the size and shape of the community from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards. See John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London, 1975), pp. 298–316. 83 Liesbeth Corens, Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-­Reformation Europe (Oxford, 2019). 84  Helen Kilburn, ‘Catholics in the Colonies: Nation, Religion, and Race in Seventeenth-­Century Maryland’ (University of Manchester PhD thesis, 2019); Helen Kilburn, ‘Jesuit and Gentleman Planter: Ingle’s Rebellion and the Litigation of Thomas Copley SJ’, British Catholic History, 34 (2019), pp. 374–95.

Material Culture  227 Morton, Adam, ‘Sanctity and Suspicion: Catholicism Conspiracy and the Representation of Henrietta Maria of France and Catherine of Braganza, Queens of Britain’, in Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly and Adam Morton (eds.), Queens Consort, Cultural Transfer and European Politics, c.1500–1800 (London, 2016), pp. 172–201. Murdoch, Tessa, ‘Recusant Plate in England’ in Timothy Shroder (ed.), Treasures of the English Church: A Thousand Years of Sacred Gold and Silver (London, 2008), pp. 78–86. Pittock, Murray, ‘Treacherous Objects: Towards a Theory of Jacobite Material Culture’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34 (2011), pp. 39–63. Scott, Geoffrey, ‘The Throckmortons at Home and Abroad, 1680–1800’, in Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott (eds.), Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation in Emancipation (Farnham, 2009), pp. 171–211. Sharpe, Kevin, Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–1714 (London, 2013).

12 Architecture Eoin Devlin

The Stuart and Hanoverian periods witnessed the construction of a surprisingly wide range of buildings with Catholic associations. Some were meant to last forever, while others were deliberately and necessarily impermanent. Some were specifically intended as spaces for Catholic worship, while others were not new buildings, but rather reconsecrated Protestant churches made newly (or restored as) Catholic. The strongest influence of individual Catholics in British and Irish architecture of this period was entirely disconnected from a Catholic purpose altogether; it is found in the work of Catholic architects creating great public buildings and homesteads for the Anglican monarchy, aristocracy, and churches across England, Ireland, and Scotland. Conversely, most of the new Catholic ecclesiastical spaces were designed by Protestants. Many examples of Catholic ecclesiastical architecture, especially from the seventeenth century, no longer survive. Often there are no ruins; interiors and exteriors are simply gone and their appearance unrecorded in any detail, even if their existence and purpose is known.1 The confessional character of Stuart and Hanoverian architecture could be porous and liminal, and this raises a challenging question as to what made buildings ‘Catholic’ in their moment of creation or later, or indeed what makes them so from the historian’s perspective. Any study of Catholic architecture, broadly understood, must explore the complexity of Catholic cultural and religious ex­ peri­ ences, while also indicating how the binary opposition of ‘Catholic-­ Protestant’ can be unhelpful in characterizing the panoply of architects, builders, patrons, and clientele who designed, built, paid for, and used many different kinds of buildings and spaces over these years. The dominant, but not exclusive, aesthetic across newly built Catholic buildings was baroque, a style ‘characterized by painterliness, grandness, massiveness

1 Bryan D. G. Little, Catholic Churches since 1623: A Study in Roman Catholic Churches in England and Wales from Penal Times to the Present Decade (London, 1966), p. 30. An indication of the paucity, and perhaps impossibility, of extended research into British and Irish Catholic architecture is indicated by the fact that no comprehensive survey of Catholic architecture has appeared to match Little’s in 1966. Eoin Devlin, Architecture In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II: Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745. Edited by: John Morrill and Liam Temple, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843436.003.0013

Architecture  229 and movement’, with its origins in late-­ sixteenth-­ century Rome.2 British ­mani­fest­ations are more muted than the excesses of Continental Europe, and ‘tended to eschew ornament, and instead relied on the manipulation of light and shade’.3 Much recent scholarly work has debated whether the baroque is a useful conceptual category in either European or British contexts, but the term does have value as a means of delineating an apparent and notable strand of neo-­classicism in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.4 Conventionally, the baroque has often been associated with the global Catholic Church, for its origins lie in Counter-­Reformation Rome and it appears as a preferred aesthetic in the colonies of the Catholic powers throughout this period.5 However, the prominence of the baroque in Protestant contexts raises questions as to whether contemporaries regarded it as ideologically Catholic in any significant way, or whether, apart from the complaints of Puritans opposed to visual and material excess in all circumstances, the baroque in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries essentially functioned as a secular, or even ‘un-­Catholic’, aesthetic which highlighted British cosmopolitanism, fashionable consumption of European cultural trends, and a rather naughty exercise in cultural appropriation designed to emphasize Protestant Britain’s defeat of popery and France in the decades after the Glorious Revolution. Its influence in the Church of England’s ecclesiastical architecture over the long eighteenth century points to its transconfessional adaptability, a phenomenon weirdly suitable for a liminal aesthetic which collapses the sacred into the profane; this duality helped it to manifest in Protestant territories denuded of its Catholic spiritualism. Scholarship on the global baroque has questioned the extent to which the baroque was the ‘cultural expression of the Counter-­Reformation’, but any confessional dimension to the baroque in the Stuart and Hanoverian territories is largely unobserved in British-­based studies.6 Instead, the ‘stuttering’ character of baroque in Britain and Ireland has been linked to the absence of the requisite ‘mastery of the classical language [of architecture]’ until the arrival of Christopher Wren, as well as the (apparently) anti-­absolutist 2  John  D.  Lyons, ‘Introduction: The Crisis of the Baroque’, in John  D.  Lyons (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque (Oxford, 2019), p. 1. 3  Owen Hopkins, Architectural Styles: A Visual Guide (London, 2014). For a general account of the English baroque, see Emil Kaufmann, Architecture in the Age of Reason: Baroque and Post-­Baroque in England, Italy, and France (Cambridge, MA, 1955), part 1. 4  Helen Hills, ‘Introduction: Rethinking the Baroque’ in Helen Hills (ed.), Rethinking the Baroque (Abingdon, 2016), pp. 3–4; Andrew Leach, ‘Considering the Baroque’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 74 (2015), pp. 285–8. Walter Moser, ‘The Concept of Baroque’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 33 (2008), pp. 11–37. 5 For instance, Owen Hopkins, From the Shadows: The Architecture and Afterlife of Nicholas Hawksmoor (London, 2015), p. 224; Michael A. Mullet, The Catholic Reformation (London, 1999), ch. 7; Patrick Collinson, The Reformation (London, 2013), p. 15. For a survey of relevant issues, see Andrea Lepage, ‘Art and the Counter-­Reformation’, in Alexandra Bamji, Geert H. Janssen, and Mary Laven (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-­ Reformation (Farnham, 2013), pp. 373–94. 6  R. Po-­Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 154.

230  Eoin Devlin character of the Stuart territories.7 This might come as news to the authoritarian Stuarts who patronized at least some baroque buildings during the seventeenth century, and the widespread adoption of the baroque in public, private, and ec­cle­si­as­tic­al buildings throughout the early years of the eighteenth century undermines some of these Whiggish assertions about sensible British distaste for the grotesque extremes of their Continental European neighbours.8

Royal Catholic Architecture The most detailed knowledge of Catholic architecture from this period comes, perhaps counter-­intuitively, from the royal chapels established at the centre of  Protestant political power in London. These chapels were incorporated into pre-­existing buildings which were nominally Protestant spaces, an interior Catholic architecture shrouded in a heretical veneer with conspicuously unobtrusive ex­ter­iors, built for the Catholic Queens Henrietta Maria and Catherine of Braganza, as well as for King James II & VII. These chapels became important public spaces not only for Catholic worshippers and curious Protestants, but also as sites encouraging the ire of hostile Protestants who regarded them as a material expression of Counter-­Reformation activity, and the tip of a crypto-­Catholic iceberg at the centre of the Stuart political world. At times of religio-­political crisis they were targeted by mob violence and became the centre of popular discontent. The power of their Catholic sanctity was felt by faithful Catholics as well as Protestants challenged or disgusted by their existence. Three royal consorts over the course of the seventeenth century required spaces in which to worship as Catholics, and chapels were established for them in a number of royal complexes. The primary chapels of Henrietta Maria, Catherine of Braganza, and Mary of Modena were at St James’ Palace and Somerset House. Inigo Jones designed the Queen’s chapel as an external building at St James’ Palace, and it was opened in 1625, making it the ‘first wholly classical church in England’.9 Its exterior was ‘unchurchlike’ and in the Palladian style within the gothic palace complex, but its interior was baroque, decorated with statues of

7  Giles Worsley, ‘Wren, Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor, and Archer: The Search for an English Baroque’, Studies in the History of Art, 66 (2005), p. 99. 8  Although responses to the baroque did not fall along party lines; see for example Edward Chaney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-­Italian Cultural Relations since the Renaissance (London, 1998), p. 352; Rémy G. Saisselin, The Enlightenment against the Baroque: Economics and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, 1992), p. 2; James Stevens Curl, Georgian Architecture in the British Isles, 1714–1830 (Swindon, 2011), p. 21. 9  Peter Guillery, ‘Suburban Models, or Calvinism and Continuity in London’s Seventeenth-­Century Church Architecture’, Architectural History, 48 (2005), p. 72.

Architecture  231 saints in niches, with an elaborate painting over the altar.10 This chapel soon became a popular centre for Catholic attendance and a larger chapel, in a similar style and also designed by Jones, formally opened at Somerset House in December 1635. This chapel was over 100 feet long, had several side altars, was colonnaded with an elaborate ceiling, and its nave formed a Palladian double cube. A painting by Rubens hung on the walls, and the first Mass there made use of a dramatic monstrance over the high altar.11 This was a space to encourage a baroque form of ‘performative’ worship, which might align it to other cultural spectaculars hosted with more secular effect at the Caroline Court.12 The Somerset House chapel was well tended by the Queen’s resident Capuchins, and it became a focal point of Catholic life. Both chapels reflected the baroque interiors characteristic of royal style at this time, for the Protestant Court also, and the non-­descript exteriors highlight awareness of the politico-­religious sensitivities apparent in allowing Catholic public worship; the throngs of Catholic attendees foiled the disguise. In March 1637, Sir William Gerrard could bemoan that ‘popery certainly increaseth much amongst us and will do so still, as long as there is such access of all sorts of English to the chapel at Somerset-­House, utterly forbidden and punishable by the laws of the land’.13 In January 1642, sparked by the ongoing revolt by Catholics against Protestant settlers in Ireland, various ‘lewd persons’ broke into the Queen’s chapel at Somerset House, but they did little damage. It was ransacked by Puritans on Maundy Thursday 1643, and most of its furnishings were then destroyed.14 Iconoclastic riots against Catholic spaces broke out in London in August 1643 when parliament issued an ordinance calling for the removal of ‘all Monuments of Superstition or Idolatry’.15 The chapel at Somerset House was entirely destroyed in March 1644, highlighting the antagonisms generated by this most public of Catholic buildings, and the perceived influence of the Queen and courtiers who frequented it. The lesser chapel at St James’ survived. The restoration of monarchy in 1660 saw Henrietta Maria’s return to England as Queen Dowager in October 1660. On her arrival, an altar and pulpit were set 10 Little, Catholic Churches, pp. 21–2. For contemporary understandings of the relationship between Palladianism and baroque, see Alexander Echlin and William Kelley, ‘A “Shaftesburian Agenda”? Lord Burlington, Lord Shaftesbury and the Intellectual Origins of English Palladianism’, Architectural History, 59 (2016), p. 234. 11 Simon Thurley, ‘The Stuart Kings, Oliver Cromwell and the Chapel Royal, 1618–1685’, Architectural History, 45 (2002), pp. 245–7; Little, Catholic Churches, p. 22. 12  Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Court Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford, 2009); Martin Butler, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge, 2009). 13  Quoted in Caroline M. Hibbard, ‘The Somerset House Chapel and the Topography of London Catholicism’, in Marcello Fantoni, George Gorse, and Malcolm Smuts (eds.), The Politics of Space: European Courts, ca. 1500–1750 (Rome, 2009), p. 331. 14  Hibbard, ‘The Somerset House Chapel’, pp. 335–6. Henrietta Maria had already left London and taken many of the chapel’s furnishing with her, but these were lost at sea. 15 ‘August 1643: An Ordinance for the Utter Demolishing, Removing and Taking Away of all Monuments of Superstition or Idolatry’, in C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (eds.), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660 (London, 1911), pp. 265–6.

232  Eoin Devlin up at Somerset House.16 In February 1664 a new Catholic chapel for the Queen Dowager’s use was completed there. Its design was baroque and influenced by her entourage of French Jesuits and Capuchins, familiar with the fashions of Catholic Europe. Around this time, a nearby townhouse built in the 1640s was converted into a Capuchin friary, and the Capuchins continued to manage the chapel when Henrietta Maria returned to France in 1665.17 Charles II’s Portuguese wife, Catherine of Braganza, arrived in London in 1662 and was installed at the chapel at St James’.18 Nearby, a small convent was built for her Portuguese Franciscans.19 Charles was sensitive to her requirements for Catholic worship, and his obligations under their marriage treaty, and went to some lengths to fulfil them.20 Purchasing Audley End House in Essex in 1667 as the royal residence during attendance at the Newmarket races, a Catholic chapel was set up with con­sid­er­able effort. Audley End’s council chamber was rebuilt—­its chimney stacks were removed, the ceiling was lowered by 6 feet and redecorated, and an altar was installed.21 When Charles’ mother, Henrietta Maria, died in September 1669, Somerset House was given to Queen Catherine. Somewhat reluctantly, Catherine moved her spiritual entourage and her Catholic worship to the larger chapel, where she was a regular attendee at services, and took up temporary residence during Holy Week in 1675. The chapel complex was expanded at this time to respond to the size of the Catholic congregation in regular attendance. As in the 1630s, the presence of a large Catholic congregation in the centre of London helped to stoke anti-­Catholic hostility, and Catherine was forced to return to St James’ after enduring high levels of harassment in the late 1670s. The Somerset House chapel had much of its furnishings moved to St James’ until it was restored for Catherine’s use following the accession of James II & VII, and the restoration of Catholic monarchy, in 1685.22 At the centre of James’ architectural projects was the construction of Catholic chapels in the palaces of Whitehall and Windsor, occasionally attended also by Mary of Modena, in addition to her use of the Queen’s chapels.23 While the Anglican chapel royal continued to function during James’ reign, the King himself 16  Simon Thurley, Somerset House: The Palace of England’s Queens 1551–1692 (London, 2009), p. 60. 17 Thurley, Somerset House, p. 69. 18  J.  Cyril  M.  Weale (ed.), Registers of the Catholic Chapel Royal and of the Portuguese Embassy Chapel, 1662–1829, Vol. 1: Marriages, CRS 38 (London, 1941), pp. ix–­xii. 19  Weale (ed.), Registers of the Catholic Chapel Royal, pp. xii–­xiii. 20  Weale (ed.), Registers of the Catholic Chapel Royal, p. vii. 21  P. J. Drury, ‘No Other Palace in the Kingdom Will Compare with It: The Evolution of Audley End, 1605–1745’, Architectural History, 23 (1980), p. 11. 22 Thurley, Somerset House, pp. 71–2. 23  Matthew Jenkinson, ‘Preaching at the Court of James II, 1685–1688’, The Court Historian, 17 (2012), p. 20; Simon Thurley, Whitehall Palace: An Architectural History of the Royal Apartments, 1240–1698 (New Haven, 1999), p. 132. For an impression of the chapel, see the print by Jan Kip, ‘Prospectus interior Sacelli Serenissima Mariae Magnae Britanniae Reginae’, British Museums Collections, no. 1853,0813.108, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1853-0813-108 (accessed 3 March 2022).

Architecture  233 did not attend Anglican services.24 Whitehall became the residence of James’ key Jesuit advisor, Edward Petre, and the King’s confessor, John Warner (who also had rooms at Windsor).25 Petre presided over the appropriately lavish decoration of the chapel at Whitehall, indulging in imported textiles including ‘Crymson Damask Curtains’ and a ‘large Persian Carpett for the Altar stepps’.26 Both chapels at Windsor and Whitehall were designed by Christopher Wren. The chapel at Whitehall was constructed in two phases between May 1685 and November 1687. Wren may have been hedging his bets on the interior in the first design, which welcomed its royal congregants on Christmas Eve 1686 and was criticized by the King for being too Anglican.27 Revisions followed, and the final version was an impressively elaborate outlay. The altar was ad orientum and decorated with ornate altarpieces designed by Grinling Gibbons and Arnold Quellin.28 These were just under 40 feet high, and were decorated with tabernacle and mosaic, and carved and gilded designs. ‘Large’ candlesticks were made for it, costing £100 each.29 Frescoes on ceiling and walls were painted by Antonio Verrio, who had already worked on the baroque renovations of Windsor commissioned by Charles II.30 A painting of the Annunciation by Benedetto Gennari hung over the altar, and an organ was installed.31 The chapel became a centre for Catholic sermons and music, and a series of Catholic marriages took place there.32 But less than two years after its completion, in 1689, the royal chapel at Whitehall was dismantled following James’ deposition-­abdication. The chapel was finally destroyed in a fire in January 1698. A contemporary witness, James Vernon, created a powerful image when he described ‘a devouring fire, which is still kept alive in the ruins of the popish chapel’, conjuring a vision not only of the chapel’s literal destruction, but gesturing towards the phoenix-­like potential of Catholicism to return to bring final destruction on English Protestantism through Jacobite restoration. The chapel at Windsor was turned to Anglican worship under William and Mary. In the late 1680s, there were also royal Catholic chapels in Scotland and Ireland, although James never had the opportunity to use the former. He allowed a 24  Jacqueline Rose, Godly Kingship in Restoration England: The Politics of the Royal Supremacy, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 2011), p. 242; Stanford E. Lehmberg, Cathedrals under Siege: Cathedrals in English Society, 1600–1700 (Pennsylvania, 1996) p. 77. 25 Tim Harris (ed.), The Entring Book of Roger Morrice, III: The Reign of James II, 1685–1687 (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 335. 26  Arthur T. Bolton and H. Duncan Hendry (eds.), ‘The Royal Palaces of Winchester, Whitehall, Kensington, and St. James’s’, The Wren Society, 7 (1930), p. 133. 27 Thurley, Whitehall Palace, pp. 132–3. Roger Morrice noted the chapel’s opening over Christmas, Harris (ed.), Entring Book, p. 331. 28 Thurley, Whitehall Palace, p. 132. 29  Harris (ed.), Entring Book, p. 325. 30  Cécile Brett, ‘Antonio Verrio (c.1636–1707): His Career and Surviving Work’, British Art Journal 10 (2010), pp. 7–8. 31 Thurley, Whitehall Palace, p. 134. 32  Peter Leech, ‘Music and Musicians in the Catholic Chapel of James II at Whitehall, 1686–1688’, Early Music, 39 (2011), pp. 379–400; Jenkinson, ‘Preaching’, pp. 17–33; Weale (ed.), Registers of the Catholic Chapel Royal, pp. 1–30.

234  Eoin Devlin Catholic chapel to be opened at the palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh in November 1686, and in July 1687 the abbey church there became the central place of Catholic worship for the newly constituted Catholic Order of the Thistle.33 This was an impressively repurposed space, a ‘magnificent baroque interior’ designed by the architect James Smith, who may have been a student in the Scots College in Rome, and had certainly travelled in Catholic Europe.34 The project was led by James Drummond, earl of Perth, who commissioned new silver altar plate and a sanctus bell for the royal chapel, and would contract Smith to build a much smaller Catholic chapel at Drummond Castle, completed in late 1688.35 The Thistle Chapel was a focal point of discontent, even though James instructed that ‘you are likewise to care that there be no Preachers or others suffered to insenuate into the people any feares or jealousies as if We intended to make any Violent alteration’.36 In February 1686, Roger Morrice recorded letters came out of Scotland that told us the rabble had broke in upon my Lord of Pirth [sic.] at Solemne Mass there and had broken the Alter and Crucifixes, and Candles, and all the things in the Chappel, and broken the windowes of the house (I take it, it is Holly Rood house).37

The chapel was ransacked again in 1688, and returned to Protestant worship under William and Mary.38 In Ireland, after the Revolution, James launched an effort at restoration from Dublin. During his reign, Irish Protestants had feared that Christ Church Cathedral, the city’s (Anglican) royal place of worship, would be given to Irish Catholics. In October 1689 it was returned to Catholic control when James arrived in the city, and the King worshipped there with his Catholic allies.39 With James’ defeat in Ireland, Christ Church was soon restored to its Anglican forebears, and Dublin reasserted its credentials as a defiantly Protestant city, subject to a Protestant monarchy which would not require Catholic chapels under the Hanoverians.40 33  Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London, 2007), p.  167; Matthew Glazier, ‘The Earl of Melfort, the Court Catholic Party and the Foundation of the Order of the Thistle, 1687’, Scottish Historical Review, 79 (2000), p. 236; Jennifer Strtak, ‘The Order of the Thistle and the Reintroduction of Catholicism in Late-­Seventeenth Century Scotland’, Innes Review, 68 (2017), pp. 138–44. For an impression of what this looked like, see the print ‘Inside of the Chappell Royal of Holyroodhouse c.1761–1802’, Royal Collections Trust, RCIN 702900, https://www. rct.uk/collection/702900/inside-­of-­the-­chappell-­royal-­of-­holyroodhouse (accessed 3 March 2022). 34  Aonghus MacKechnie, ‘The Earl of Perth’s Chapel of 1688 at Drummond Castle and the Roman Catholic Architecture of James VII’, Architectural Heritage, 25 (2014), pp. 109–16. 35  MacKechnie, ‘The Earl of Perth’s Chapel’, pp. 119–20. 36  Harris (ed.), Entring Book, p. 281. 37  Harris (ed.), Entring Book, p. 102. 38  Strtak, ‘The Order of the Thistle’, p. 141. 39  Kenneth Milne, ‘Restoration and Reorganisation, 1660–1830’, in Kenneth Milne (ed.), Christ Church Cathedra Dublin: A History (Dublin, 2010), p. 272. 40 David Dickson, Dublin: The Making of a Capital City (London, 2014), chs. 3–5; Diarmuid Ó  Gráda, Georgian Dublin: The Forces That Shaped the City (Cork, 2015); Christine Casey, The Eighteenth-­Century Dublin Town House (Dublin, 2010).

Architecture  235

Non-­Royal Chapels, Religious Spaces, and Schools Most ‘chapels’ in early modern Britain and Ireland were ordinary rooms in houses which held secret and illegal meetings for Catholic worship and sacramental activities. In 1724, Daniel Defoe described White Ladies Priory in Shropshire as ‘a house always inhabited by Roman Catholicks, it had and perhaps has still some rooms so private in it, that in those times could not have been discovered without pulling down whole buildings’.41 Sometimes less elaborate structures were built. In 1636 George Conn, the Pope’s agent at the Queen’s Court, established a Catholic place of worship near his house at Long Acre in London colloquially known as the ‘pope’s chapel’, modelled after Jones’ Court designs and focused on an altar of repose.42 Along with the embassy chapels which essentially functioned as public sites of Catholic worship, it was well attended as a centre for Catholic worship in London.43 Alethea Howard, countess of Arundel, bought Tart Hall on the edge of St James’ Park in the 1630s, and ‘created a space for herself where she could withdraw from the public eye while meeting and entertaining her Catholic circle’.44 There may have been a Catholic chapel there too.45 Some parts of Scotland ‘remained almost wholly Catholic’ and continued to use pre-­ Reformation Catholic buildings.46 In Wales, at some point before 1679, a baroque chapel at Abergavenny was openly using Jesuit insignia on its exterior, and a ceiling painting of the adoration of the Magi marks it out as a distinctively baroque example of the period, and a rather courageously Catholic space.47 Perhaps too courageously, since it was attacked by Protestants during the Popish Plot crisis. In Ireland in 1628, a large Jesuit chapel was built at Kildare Hall in Dublin, patronized by the countess of Kildare. The chapel was part of an abortive effort to establish a Jesuit university in Dublin.48 Measuring 75 feet long and 25 feet wide, a contemporary description highlights its baroque interior: it ‘was seated round about with an altar with ascents, a curious pulpit and organs and four places of confession . . . a cloister above with many other chambers, all things most fair and graceful, like the banqueting house at Whitehall’ (designed in the baroque style

41  Daniel Defoe, A tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain, 3 vols. (London, 1724). 42  Denis Evinson, Catholic Churches of London (Sheffield, 1988), p. 21. 43 Elizabeth  V.  Chew, ‘The Countess of Arundel and Tart Hall’, in Edward Chaney (ed.), The Evolution of English Collecting: The Reception of Italian Art in the Tudor and Stuart periods (New Haven, 2003), p. 293. 44  Chew, ‘The Countess of Arundel’, p. 292. 45  Jennifer Rabe, ‘Mediating between Art and Nature: The Countess of Arundel at Tart Hall’, in Susanna Burghartz, Lucas Burkart, and Christine Göttler (eds.), Sites of Mediation: Connected Histories of Places, Processes, and Objects in Europe and beyond, 1450–1650 (Leiden, 2016), p. 191. 46 Deborah Howard, Scottish Architecture: Reformation to Restoration, 1560–1660 (Edinburgh, 1995), p. 193. 47 Little, Catholic Churches, pp. 2, 3–4. 48  George A. Little, ‘The Jesuit University of Dublin, c.1627’, Dublin Historical Record, 13 (1952), pp. 34–47.

236  Eoin Devlin by Inigo Jones).49 Although the Jesuits were removed in 1630, the interior seems to have been still intact as late as 1653.50 Generally, the impact of Counter-­ Reformation renewal encouraged enthusiasm for the baroque in Ireland, but its presence was limited where aristocratic patronage was absent.51 Catholic buildings were attacked in all three kingdoms during the Civil Wars of the 1640s.52 But in Ireland, the breakdown of Protestant governance allowed the  Catholic confederacy based at Kilkenny to begin restoring the material culture of Catholic worship in the parts of the island under its control. The medieval churches of Kilkenny were reclaimed from Anglicans for Catholic worship.53 Some were refurbished, and while rebuilding was sensitive to the original aesthetic of medieval architecture, there could still be scope for ­modernizing extensions. The influence of Counter-­Reformation was felt.54 In Kilkenny, St Canice’s Cathedral was claimed by the Catholic Bishop David Rothe and rededicated to Catholicism; so too was St Mary’s church. Both buildings became the centre of regular Catholic liturgy in the city, celebrating high Masses, vespers, and Holy Week celebrations. Ordinations took place at the Black Abbey, presided over by the Dominicans from 1642, while the Jesuits took over St John’s Priory. Both orders were evicted by the Cromwellians at the end of the decade.55 In 1647 the ruined cathedral at Clonmacnoise was partially repaired with new arches.56 But the ultimate defeat of the Confederates resulted in further iconoclasm. Many of the reclaimed Catholic churches were destroyed or allowed to fall into disrepair. The accession of a Catholic monarch encouraged the resurgence of Catholic building across England and Scotland, often with the assistance of the gentry whose ‘continued veneration of . . . medieval shrines demonstrates the fusion of Pre-­Reformation and Counter-­Reformation piety’.57 In 1686 the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary established a convent at York.58 In London, a number of Catholic places of worship were established as the religious orders reasserted their

49  Rolf Loeber, ‘Early Classicism in Ireland: Architecture before the Georgian Era’, Architectural History, 22 (1979), pp. 55–6. 50  Little, ‘Jesuit University’, p. 37. 51  Loeber, ‘Early Classicism’, p. 50. 52  Loeber, ‘Early Classicism’, p. 56. 53  Ana Dolan, ‘The Large Medieval Churches of the Dioceses of Leighlin, Ferns and Ossory: A Study of Adaptation and Change, Part I’, Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies, 2 (2000), p. 44. 54  Loeber, ‘Early Classicism’, p. 55. 55 Dolan, ‘The Large Medieval Churches . . . Part I’, pp. 44–5; Ana Dolan, ‘The Large Medieval Churches of the Dioceses of Leighlin, Ferns and Ossory: A Study of Adaptation and Change, Part II’, Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies, 3 (2000), pp. 130, 145. 56 Trudy Ring and Robert  M.  Salkin (eds.), International Dictionary of Historic Places, vol. 2: Northern Europe (Abingdon, 1995), pp. 181–2. 57 J.  A.  Hilton, ‘The Catholicism of the Ascendancy, 1685–88’, London Recusant, 1 (1981), p. 65; G.  A.  Fallon, ‘The Catholic Justices of Lancashire under James II’, North West Catholic History, 8 (1981), p. 8. 58 Little, Catholic Churches, p. 23; J. A. Hilton, ‘Wigan Catholics and the Policies of James II’, North West Catholic History, 1 (1969), pp. 97–110.

Architecture  237 influence in the city following James’ Declaration of Indulgence in April 1687. The Benedictines opened a chapel at St John’s, Clerkenwell, the Dominicans and Franciscans at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the Carmelites at Bucklersbury.59 The Jesuits established two free interdenominational schools at the Savoy and Lime Street.60 The Savoy school comprised schoolrooms, a chapel, and accommodation for fifteen resident Jesuits.61 Chapel and schoolrooms were both expanded to accommodate the surge of students, which reached about four hundred in 1688.62 The Lime Street school opened in March 1688 with schoolrooms and a chapel, and its opening triggered riots among Protestant Londoners.63 The Jesuits had long since aspired to establish a collegia in England, and James’ Indulgence allowed them an expansion of their activities.64 They were not only based in London. For many years, a Jesuit chaplain had run an illegal Catholic school at Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire.65 They established a chapel at Wigan.66 In Edinburgh, a Jesuit school supported by James opened in August 1687 in what had previously been the lord chancellor’s residence at Holyroodhouse.67 Across England, Catholic buildings appeared. A large Catholic chapel was set up at the back of the White Hart Inn in Newcastle. Catholics had long worshipped at the church ruins at Hathersage in North Derbyshire, and a chapel may have been built there in the 1680s.68 In 1687, a medieval chapel contiguous with the main house at East Hendred in Berkshire was restored by the Eyston family.69 Both King James and Mary of Modena, along with other Catholic and Protestant not­ ables, contributed timber to build a church led by Father Leo Randolph in Birmingham. This building had a cruciform plan with a number of side chapels. Almost the same length as the Queen’s chapel at Somerset House at 95 feet, it was decorated with an altarpiece of Christ appearing before Mary Magdalene. The style was baroque, but ‘in Birmingham, and probably in the other out of town Catholic centres, these buildings put up between 1686 and 1688 were closer in spirit to Wren than to the Fountains of Borromini’.70 But on 15 November 1688,

59 T.  G.  Holt, ‘A Jesuit School in the City in 1688’, Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, 32 (1981), p. 153. 60  Holt, ‘Jesuit School in the City’. There was a Catholic grammar school supported by the earl of Worcester at Raglan Castle, until the Civil War siege of the castle closed the school in 1646. See Maurice Whitehead, English Jesuit Education: Expulsion, Suppression, Survival and Restoration, 1762–1803 (London, 2013), pp. 28–9. 61 T.  G.  Holt, ‘A School in the Savoy, 1687–1688’, Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, 41 (1990), pp. 22–3. 62  Holt, ‘School in the Savoy’, pp. 23–4. 63  Holt, ‘Jesuit School in the City’, p. 25. 64  Terry Friedman, James Gibbs (New Haven, CT, 1984), pp. 26–8. 65 Friedman, James Gibbs, p. 28, n. 14. 66 Little, Catholic Churches, pp. 25–6. 67 Harris, Revolution, pp. 167–8. 68 Little, Catholic Churches, pp. 25–6. 69 Little, Catholic Churches, pp. 31–2; Roderick O’Donnell, ‘The Architectural Setting of Challoner’s Episcopate’, in Eamon Duffy (ed.), Challoner and his Church: A Catholic Bishop in Georgian England (London, 1981), p. 56. 70 Little, Catholic Churches, p. 25.

238  Eoin Devlin the King ordered the closure of Catholic chapels and schools, and many were destroyed in the Revolution.71 Roger Morrice recounts how the crowd in London: gathered togeather in the evening about most of the known Masshouses in Town (the Ambassadors Chappells that were open and publick not escaping)[.] . . . They have since pulled down burnt and carryed away all the Timber in most of them[.] . . . I think few Popish Ambassadors Chappells that were open and publick without their own Closets have escaped.72

Similar scenes were repeated throughout England and Scotland. In Ireland, there had been some building in the Restoration period. For instance, a Franciscan chapel was built on Francis Street in Dublin in c.1680.73 James’ appointment of a Catholic lord deputy, Richard Talbot, earl of Tyrconnell, triggered an appropriation of elite Protestant spaces for Catholic use.74 While the chapel at Dublin Castle had been destroyed by fire in 1684, its replacement was consecrated for Catholic worship.75 The new chapel, on the south-­east side of the Castle’s stable Court, was decorated with imported work by a group of prominent London-­based designers: John Coquns, Rene Cousin, Francis Duddell, John Heysenbuttell, and Francis Quellin, including a large tabernacle altar frame.76 Tyrconnell heard High Mass here.77 In 1687 Tyrconnell successfully lobbied for permission to consecrate the Anglican chapel at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham for Catholic worship.78 This had been designed with a baroque interior by the Huguenot James Tabaray.79 Elsewhere, he demonstrated his interest in baroque architectural projects with the commissioning of Carton House in County Kildare, which became the ‘first known Palladian layout of an Irish country house in which the buildings and landscape are purposefully related’ and it contained a rich interior in the style of the Italian baroque.80 One could argue that these projects suggest Tyrconnell was more interested in his own personal aggrandisement as a leader in Ireland, perhaps in the mould of the earl of Ormond who had patronized the Catholic architect James Archer.81 There was some other aristocratic patronage: the new Dominican abbey at Castlelyons, County Cork, was 71 Holt, ‘School in the Savoy’, pp. 25–6; Holt, ‘School in the City’, p. 157; Harris, Revolution, pp. 290–3; Little, Catholic Churches, pp. 19, 31–2. 72  Stephen C. Taylor (ed.), The Entring book of Roger Morrice, IV: The Reign of James II, 1687–1689 (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 383. 73 Dickson, Dublin, p. 99. 74  Toby Barnard, ‘Ireland, 1688–91’, in Tim Harris and Stephen Taylor (eds.), The Final Crisis of the Stuart Monarchy: The Revolutions of 1688–91 in their British, Atlantic and European Contexts (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 174–6. 75  Rolf Loeber, ‘The Rebuilding of Dublin Castle: Thirty Critical Years’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 69 (1980), pp. 62, 66. 76  Loeber, ‘Rebuilding of Dublin Castle’, p. 66. 77 Dickson, Dublin, p. 101. 78  Loeber, ‘Rebuilding of Dublin Castle’, pp. 48, 68. 79  Loeber, ‘Early Classicism’, p. x. 80  Loeber, ‘Early Classicism’, p. 57. 81  Loeber, ‘Early Classicism’, p. 51.

Architecture  239 supported by Lord Barrymore, and a chapel was rebuilt in the Cathedral of Ardfert, County Kerry under the guidance of the dowager countess of Kildare.82 A chapel at Gormanston Castle, County Meath, was instituted in 1687. James’ defeat in the Williamite wars led to the establishment of a new penal code in Ireland which should have prevented the construction of new ec­cle­si­as­tic­al buildings. Catholic worship now focused on temporary spaces, often outdoors.83 It became something of a truism that ‘the condition of proscription compelled Catholics deprived of churches and other accustomed places of worship to enter into a particularly intimate relationship with the natural environment.’84 In 1714, a local high sheriff broke up a Catholic meeting at Glendalough, where the congregation had set up a series of tents and crosses around the holy wells at the site. Catholics continued to use ruined churches from earlier periods.85 However, as early as 1700, there are examples of Catholic churches with a sophisticated cruciform layout. A notably large example of this style was in Tipperary.86 By 1731 the Dublin government was concerned enough by the clear expansion in Catholic building to commission a report which detailed 892 public chapels (‘Mass houses’), fifty-­ four private chapels, fifty-­ one friaries, and nine nunneries in Ireland. Of these, there were sixteen public chapels in Dublin, three private chapels, two nunneries, and forty-­five schools.87 Forty per cent of public chapels in the diocese of Dublin had been built after 1714. Most were beyond the city, rudimentary, and made of mud and stone, with thatched roofs, usually with very basic interior accoutrements, just like chapels throughout the kingdom.88 There were some more ornate exceptions. In County Cork, wealthy Catholics patronized churches at Kinsale, Macroom, and Kanturk.89 The Galway merchant Anthony Bodkin hosted a chapel in one of his warehouses within the city, and Mass was publicly celebrated.90 The Augustinians built a friary at New Ross, County Wexford, in 1724 and a chapel in 1728.91 When new chapels emerged in this period, they tended to be hidden away from the centres of urban spaces, and 82 Rolf Loeber, Hugh Campbell, Livia Hurley, John Montague, and Ellen Rowley, Art and Architecture of Ireland, vol. 4: Architecture 1600–2000 (Dublin, 2015), p. 289. 83  Edward McParland, Public Architecture in Ireland 1680–1760 (New Haven, CT, 2001), pp. 34, 37. 84  Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2011), p. 232. 85 Michael P. Carroll, Irish Pilgrimage: Holy Wells and Popular Catholic Devotion (Baltimore, 1999), pp. 19–20. 86 Brendan Grimes, ‘The Architecture of Dublin’s Neo-­ Classical Roman Catholic Temples, 1803–62’ (National College of Art and Design, NUI, PhD thesis, 2005), p. 25. 87 ‘Report on the State of Popery, Ireland, 1731’, Archivium Hibernicum, 1 (1912), pp. 10–27; Loeber, Campbell, Hurley, Montague, and Rowley, Art and Architecture, p. 289. 88 McParland, Public Architecture, pp. 37–8; Loeber, Campbell, Hurley, Montague, and Rowley, Art and Architecture, p. 288. 89  Loeber, Campbell, Hurley, Montague, and Rowley, Art and Architecture, p. 289. 90  Philip Walsh, ‘The Blakes of Ballyglunin: Catholic Merchants and Landowners of Galway Town and County in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’ (University College Dublin PhD thesis, 2017), p. 155. 91  Loeber, Campbell, Hurley, Montague, and Rowley, Art and Architecture, p. 289.

240  Eoin Devlin often looked like the houses of local tenants on landed estates.92 The ‘riverchapel’ in North Wexford was only accessible across water through stepping stones between 1730 and 1745, when it was moved to surer ground.93 This secrecy impacted the designs of chapels which was often ‘somewhat irregular, often t-­shaped, l-­shaped or octagonal’.94 By the 1730s, these smaller buildings had been succeeded by a galleried ‘barn church’ design to maximize attendance.95 Churches in Dublin, Clonmel, and Mullingar had as many as three galleries. The exteriors of most of these churches were nondescript, and the interiors were generally barren of decoration.96 While the Catholic majority in Ireland made some form of Catholic renewal likely, the minorities in England and Scotland also became more confident over the course of the eighteenth century. The longstanding presence of Jesuits at Spinkhill facilitated the establishment of the first post-­Reformation Catholic chapel in Sheffield, under the patronage of Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk.97 The Tudor chapel at Cowdray had been restored in 1625 and was redecorated in a baroque style in the 1690s featuring a series of statues in niches and an impressive ceiling featuring a dove above the altar. By the 1730s, it had added a painting by the Italian Jacopo Amigoni to sit in the reredos.98 The chapel at the Petre family’s Thorndon Hall was opened in 1739, with a railed altar, pulpit, and gallery, alongside a tabernacle and throne. There was an ‘extraordinarily full liturgical calendar of mass, vespers and benediction’ there.99 Daniel Defoe described the Catholics of Durham openly attending Mass, and observed at the pilgrimage site of St Winifred’s Well how Catholics ‘in private . . . have their proper Oratory’s in certain Places, whither the Votaries resort . . . however the Protestants know who and who’s together; no Body takes notice of it, or enquires where one another goes, or has been gone.’100 The embassy chapels in London continued to offer space for Catholic worship, but they were less prominent than in the Stuart period. The Spanish and Portuguese embassies moved several times in the decades after 1720, but their chapels remained functional and the other Catholic powers opened new London chapels in mid-­century.101 Usually they were sparsely decorated, but the Portuguese Chapel opened in 1736 was galleried with a large altarpiece of the Crucifixion.102 The embassy chapels were now politically circumspect, and most

92  Walsh, ‘Blakes of Ballyglunin’, pp. 116–17. 93  Kevin Whelan, ‘The Catholic Parish, the Catholic Chapel, and Village Development in Ireland’, Irish Geography, 16 (1983), p. 8. 94  Grimes, ‘Architecture’, pp. 32, 34. 95  Whelan, ‘The Catholic Parish’, p. 6. 96  Loeber, Campbell, Hurley, Montague, and Rowley, Art and Architecture, pp. 289–90. 97  Denis Evinson, The Lord’s House: A History of Sheffield’s Roman Catholic Buildings, 1570–1990 (Sheffield, 1991), p. 23. 98  O’Donnell, ‘Architectural Setting’, p. 60. 99  O’Donnell, ‘Architectural Setting’, pp. 62–3. 100 Defoe, A tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain, III, p. 189. 101  O’Donnell, ‘Architectural Setting’, p. 65. 102 Evinson, Catholic Churches of London, p. 21.

Architecture  241 closed during the crisis of Jacobite invasion of 1745.103 They had become more sensitive to their political implications, with good reason. During the Jacobite invasion of 1715 Fernyhalgh church in Preston was plundered by soldiers.104 In 1746, in the aftermath of the ’45, anti-­Jacobites destroyed the first Catholic chapel built in Liverpool and forced the local Catholics to move to a warehouse-­style space which resembled a commercial property.105

‘Un-­Catholic’ Baroque Although the baroque had been used in a variety of explicitly Catholic contexts in Britain and Ireland throughout the seventeenth century, its most powerful impact was in buildings commissioned by Protestants, sometimes even Anglican churches. British architects were informed and influenced by the Continental baroque style either through first-­hand experience of travel in Catholic Europe or through the ready availability of images and written descriptions of these architectural works. Britain was hardly unique in embracing the ‘Protestant baroque’, and the aesthetic can be found in the most unlikely parts of Lutheran and Calvinist Europe.106 In England, Ireland, and Scotland, practitioners of baroque architecture might have been Protestant, like Christopher Wren or Nicholas Hawksmoor, or Catholic, like James Gibbs. Sometimes they worked for Catholic patrons, but more often for Protestants. Indeed, the popularity of the baroque trumped any association it might have held with Catholicism, and it became the preferred form of architectural style for British Protestants until the Palladian resurgence in the mid-­1710s. Such buildings included churches, and good ex­amples are Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral, Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, Spitalfields, and Gibbs’ St Martin-­in-­the-­Fields.107 Even in Ireland, the influence of the baroque can be seen in both exterior and interior appearances of Anglican churches from the 1710s, and the influence was often explicitly Roman.108 St Werburgh’s in Dublin was inspired by the Gésu and Jesuit church of S Chiara in Rome.109 In the same city, St Ann’s was based on S Giacomo degli Incurabili.110 Instead of a Catholic emphasis on the collapse of the sacred and the profane, ‘the exaggeration of structure . . . is the dominant idea of English baroque 103 Evinson, Catholic Churches, p. 64. 104 Little, Catholic Churches, p. 28. 105 Little, Catholic Churches, p. 30. 106  Nigel Yates, Liturgical Space: Christian Worship and Church Buildings in Western Europe, 1500–2000 (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 39, 53. 107  Derek Keene, Arthur Burns, and Andrew Saint, St. Paul: The Cathedral Church of London (New Haven, 2004), pp. 184–219; Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey, Hawksmoor’s London Churches: Architecture and Theology (Chicago, 2000), pp. 99–105; Friedman, James Gibbs, pp. 55–86. 108  Jane Fenlon, ‘Irish Art and Architecture, 1550–1730’, in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), The Cambridge History of Ireland, vol. 2: 1550–1730 (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 381–2. 109  Loeber, ‘Early Classicism’, pp. 59–60. 110  Loeber, ‘Early Classicism’, p. 60.

242  Eoin Devlin architecture’ and this allowed the baroque to gain a foothold in public spaces, both ecclesiastical and secular in Britain, especially among the great homes of the aristocracy.111 Sir John Vanbrugh, a committed Protestant and Whig, was the English architect most strongly associated with an excessively extravagant baroque style, but he was nonetheless commissioned by his associates in the Kit-­ Kat Club to develop ‘secular’ buildings in this form: Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace are the most notable examples of this palatial Protestant baroque.112 The conclusion must be that the baroque was not seen as essentially Catholic, and Catholicism was not necessarily an impediment to a commission. Indeed, patrons from across the three kingdoms sought out the creative energies of European Catholic architects. Visiting Rome in 1707, Sir John Perceval sought the advice of Roman architects on the restoration of the ruined Burton House in County Cork, Ireland; ultimately the commission went to the Scot Colen Campbell, whose finished design is explicitly modelled on Palladian originals, rejecting baroque excess.113 For some, there were lingering suspicions about the Catholic character of the baroque. Even though he successfully constructed several important Protestant buildings, James Gibbs was still declined patronage because of his ­religion.114 There were occasions when Protestant architects of the baroque were denied commissions on ideological grounds too; their style was seen as too ‘Catholic’.115 After 1715 the baroque’s pre-­eminence was gradually displaced by renewed interest in a purer, cleaner, classically sound Palladianism.116 Colen Campbell’s hugely influential Vitruvius Britannicus begins with an attack on the ‘affected and licentious’ Roman baroque architects Bernini and Fontana, and critiques the ‘wildly Extravagant . . . Designs of Borromini, who has endeavoured to debauch Mankind with his odd and chimerical Beauties’. Campbell then praises the British architects commonly associated with the baroque (Jones, Wren, Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor) as ‘learned and ingenious Gentlemen . . . who have all greatly contributed to adorn our Island with their curious Labours, who are daily embellishing it more’.117 But even as the baroque was overtly challenged with 111  Anthony Geraghty, ‘Castle Howard and the Interpretation of English Baroque Architecture’, in Mark Hallett, Nigel Llewellyn, and Martin Myrone (eds.), Court, Country, City: British Art and Architecture, 1660–1735 (New Haven, 2016), p. 142. 112  Vaughan Hart, Sir John Vanbrugh: Storyteller in Stone (New Haven, 2008); Christopher Ridgway and Robert Williams (eds.), Sir John Vanbrugh and Landscape Architecture in Baroque England, 1690–1730 (Stroud, 2000); Neil Levine, ‘Castle Howard, Its Landscape, and Its Garden Structures (1699–circa 1745)’, in Caroline van Eck and Sigrid de Jong (eds.), The Companions to the History of Architecture, vol. 2: Eighteenth-­Century Architecture (Hoboken, 2017), pp. 125–35; Vaughan Hart, ‘Blenheim Palace (1705)’, in van Eck and de Jong (eds.), The Companions to the History of Architecture, vol. 2, pp. 136–40. 113  Loeber, ‘Early Classicism’, pp. 52, 59. 114 Friedman, James Gibbs, p. 30. 115 Terry Friedman, ‘The Transformation of York Minster, 1726–42’, Architectural History, 38 (1995), p. 75; Terry Friedman, ‘Baroque into Palladian: The Designing of St Giles-­in-­the-­Fields’, Architectural History, 40 (1997), p. 127. 116  Worsley, ‘Wren, Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor, and Archer’, p. 101. See also Kaufmann, Architecture in the Age of Reason, ch.1. 117 Colen Campbell, ‘The Introduction’, Vitruvius Britannicus, or the British Architect, 2 vols. (London, 1715), I.

Architecture  243 Palladian ideologies, its influence might still be ‘Catholic’. Castletown House, the great residence of William Conolly, speaker of the Irish House of Commons, was a collaboration between the English Protestant Edward Lovett Pearce, and the Catholic Italian (and future papal client), Alessandro Galilei in the 1690s.118

Conclusion A history of Catholic architecture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries must necessarily respond to the enormous challenges posed by considerable gaps in the material record, especially with regard to ordinary Catholic chapels, sites of worship, and ecclesiastical spaces. Quite a lot can be said about the royal commissions in London, but much less about the chapels supported throughout the country by rich Catholic patrons hidden and now lost. But it would be wrong to dismiss the importance of these buildings, for they helped sustain Catholic communities during decades of persecution. One of the striking things about Catholic buildings in these years is how conspicuous they often were, and how many Protestants were prepared to turn a blind eye at the same time as others launched ferocious rhetorical and physical attacks against them. Elite patronage of the baroque suggests an obvious connection to Catholic Europe, but assuming the baroque was necessarily ‘Catholic’ is misleading. The emphasis must instead be on the porosity, liminality, and adaptability of these forms and spaces. The ex­trava­gance of the chapel at Chatsworth, decorated by Antonio Verrio, Samuel Watson, and Louis Laguerre, celebrated the Protestant triumph of William and Mary in the most aggressively baroque way. In 1671, Thomas Clifford completed an Anglican chapel at Ugbrooke House at Chudleigh. His timing was unfortunate, for he converted to Catholicism only two years later and had it reconsecrated.119 Against this background of shifting confessional dynamics, ‘[t]he Catholic chapels timidly built in Georgian England, or fitted out within mansions or smaller private houses, were the settings for a crabbed, restricted version of the liturgy of the Counter-­Reformation.’120 This may be so, but it would be a mistake to underestimate the vitality of Catholic worship in persecution, and the dominance of baroque architecture, for a time, demonstrated the receptivity of British patrons to foreign and heretical influences.

118  Patrick Walsh, ‘Between the Speaker and the Squire: The Anglo-­Irish Life of William Conolly II’, Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies, 20 (2018), pp. 59–75; Pat Sheridan, ‘Sir Edward Lovett Pearce 1699–1733: The Palladian Architect and His Buildings’, Dublin Historical Record, 67 (2014), pp. 19–25. 119  Matthew J. Martin, ‘Joseph Reeve, SJ, the Park at Ugbrooke and the Cliffords of Chudleigh’, in James  E.  Kelly and Susan Royal (eds.), Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-­Reformation (Leiden, 2016), p. 145. 120 Little, Catholic Churches, p. 29.

244  Eoin Devlin

Select Bibliography Evinson, Denis, Catholic Churches of London (Sheffield, 1988). Hallett, Mark, Nigel Llewellyn, and Martin Myrone (eds.), Court, Country, City: British Art and Architecture, 1660–1735 (New Haven, 2016). Harris, Tim, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London, 2007). Kaufmann, Emil, Architecture in the Age of Reason: Baroque and Post-Baroque in England, Italy, and France (Cambridge, MA, 1955). Little, Bryan D. G., Catholic Churches since 1623: A Study in Roman Catholic Churches in England and Wales from Penal Times to the Present Decade (London, 1966). Mackenzie, Aonghus, ‘The Earl of Perth’s Chapel of 1688 at Drummond Castle and the Roman Catholic Architecture of James VII’, Architectural Heritage, 25 (2014), pp. 109–16. McPartland, Edward, Public Architecture in Ireland 1680–1760 (New Haven, 2001). O’Donnell, Roderick, ‘The Architectural Setting of Challoner’s Episcopate’, in Eamon Duffy (ed.), Challoner and his Church: A Catholic Bishop in Georgian England (London, 1981), pp. 41–59. Thurley, Simon, Somerset House: The Palace of England’s Queens, 1551–1692 (London, 1992). Van Eck, Caroline and Sigrid de Jong (eds.), The Companions to the History of Architecture, vol. 2: Eighteenth-Century Architecture (Hoboken, 2017).

13 Catholic Music Andrew Cichy

The eighteenth-­century satirical song ‘The Vicar of Bray’, possibly inspired by Francis Carswell, the vicar of Bray from 1667 to 1709, points humorously to the challenges faced within the established Church by political upheaval. The aforementioned vicar attempts to stay ahead of the changes to the monarchy by being a high-­churchman under Charles II, a proto-­Jesuit under James II, and advocate of resistance to tyranny under William III. These tumultuous times were equally felt by Catholics, whose fortunes could also alter rapidly as the monarchy changed. Changes in the political landscape provide helpful clues as to where and how English Catholic music developed between 1641 and 1745. In England, the best potential insights before the eighteenth century were at Court, with the royal chapels and various embassies. From the eighteenth century onwards, an increasing attitude of tolerance opened a new range of possibilities in private residences, paving the way, in the second half of the eighteenth century, for the barely concealed Catholic chapels at Mapledurham and Milton Manor. Abroad, the fortunes of Continental exiles, including those in institutions founded in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, were mixed, with music providing, at times, a useful barometer of their economic well-­being. The situation in Scotland and Ireland, it seems, was rather different. If Thomas Day’s notorious Why Catholics Can’t Sing has made a scapegoat of Irish Catholicism for the musical woes of the contemporary Catholic Church in the United States, the lack of any significant sources to show exceptions to Low Mass during penal times has given the caricature some staying power.1 In Scotland, the situation seems to have been hardly any better. While acknowledging several isolated examples in an otherwise ‘imposed silence’, Shelagh Noden notes that for ‘about two hundred years following the Reformation music formed no part of Catholic worship in Scotland’.2 Any further analysis of music among Scottish and Irish Catholics during this period therefore awaits the discovery of relevant sources. This chapter focuses on three main areas where scholars can confidently

1  Thomas Day, Why Catholics Can’t Sing: The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste (Chestnut Ridge, NY, 1992). 2  Shelagh Noden, ‘The Revival of Music in the Post-­Reformation Catholic Church in Scotland’, Recusant History, 31 (2012), pp. 239–60. Andrew Cichy, Catholic Music In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II: Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745. Edited by: John Morrill and Liam Temple, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843436.003.0014

246  Andrew Cichy trace consistency and change in music among Catholics: at Court, at home, and abroad. It also explores the reasons why music from this period is virtually unknown and unused in the present day and offers suggestions on how to recover this cultural legacy.

Marriage Treaties and Music Between 1625 and 1688 the title of queen consort in England was held exclusively by Catholic women: Henrietta Maria of France, Catherine of Braganza, and Mary of Modena. For over sixty years, although not uninterruptedly, there was a Catholic chapel in London—­first at Somerset House, then at Whitehall—­that was arranged fittingly for members of the royal family to worship publicly. By the time of James II, husband and wife worshipped there together.3 The extent of any involvement by English musicians in these chapels, however, seems to have been limited, with the establishments predominantly served by foreigners who, at least in the cases of Henrietta Maria and Catherine of Braganza, came to England as a result of marriage negotiations.4 The chapels provided Londoners with a window into the exotic and foreign world of Continental Counter-­Reformation Catholicism, including the musical styles then in vogue. Samuel Pepys’ account on 21 September 1662 of the first Mass that Catherine of Braganza attended in her chapel gives some indication of onlookers’ bewilderment at the strange and unfamiliar musical styles they heard: I crowded after her, and I got up to the room where her closet is; and there stood and saw the fine altar, ornaments, and the fryers in their habits, and the priests come in with their fine copes and many other very fine things. I heard their musique too; which may be good, but it did not appear so to me, neither as to their manner of singing, nor was it good concord to my ears, whatever the matter was.5

Pepys’ account takes on more significance because he was no mere dilettante, but rather held a serious interest in music. His diary is redolent with the details of music in other contexts, observed with the knowledge and experience of one who played a number of musical instruments, sang, and composed. What he observed at Catherine of Braganza’s chapel that day was outside his normal lived 3  Peter Leech, ‘Music and Musicians in the Catholic Chapel of James II at Whitehall, 1686–1688’, Early Music, 39 (2011), p. 383. 4  On English musicians Richard Mico and Richard Dering in the chapel of Henrietta Maria, 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. 195–213. 5  Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (New York, 2001), p. 74.

Catholic Music  247 experience. Some of this would be down to the nationality of the musicians themselves. The Queen’s chapel included Portuguese singers who, doubtless, brought a range of different musical influences to their work. Despite Pepys’ misgivings, Peter Leech has demonstrated that they were still in the Queen’s service until 1692.6 Charles II’s establishment, in contrast, included English, Italian, and French musicians. English musicians, it is important to note, did therefore have some presence and influence. These included the composer Matthew Locke after 1671 and the violinist Paul Francis Bridges.7 Royal chapels became more important for Catholic musicians at Court with the passing of the Test Act in 1673, which, by requiring the reception of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper in the Church of England and swearing an oath against transubstantiation, effectively barred all Catholics from civil and military office. The exodus of Italian musicians was immediate, with Matteo Battaglia and Bartolomeo Albirici leaving the service of Charles II that year for service in the Queen’s Catholic chapel, while others, including Pietro Cefalo and Giovanni Sebenico quit the country entirely, perhaps fearing greater persecutions ahead.8 The comparative tolerance of musicians almost a century earlier during the reign of Elizabeth I, characterized by an unwillingness to make ‘windows into men’s souls’, was now just a memory. As a result, the possibility of a new generation of Catholic Court musicians succeeding the likes of William Byrd, Thomas Tallis, and John Bull was lost. At a place and in a time when Catholic worship was illegal, the chapels of Henrietta Maria and Catherine of Braganza stood as the pre-­eminent institutions for Catholic liturgical music in England. These were, however, exceptions to the norm. Somerset House was barely a mile away from Tyburn where, while Masses and offices for the Queen continued, so too did the executions of Catholic clergy for treason. As such, while standing at the hub of a protected Catholic network in London, these establishments were more a sign of contradiction and exceptionalism than any kind of missionary enterprise. Tracing their ongoing legacy beyond, perhaps, Oliver Cromwell’s personal taste for Richard Dering’s motets (despite allowing the building for which they were reputedly composed to be converted into a stable), remains very much a musicological work in progress.9

6  Peter Leech, ‘Musicians in the Catholic Chapel of Catherine of Braganza, 1662–92’, Early Music, 29 (2001), p. 575. 7  Leech, ‘Musicians in the Catholic Chapel’, p. 581. 8  On Italian musicians at the Court of Charles II and the Test Act, see Ester Lebedinski, ‘ “Obtained by Peculiar Favour, & Much Difficulty of the Singer”: Vincenzo Albrici and the Function of Charles II’s Italian Ensemble at the English Restoration Court’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 143 (2018), pp. 325–59. 9  A transcription of the antiquarian Anthony Wood’s account of this is provided in J. P. Wainwright, ‘Richard Dering’s Few-­Voice “Concertato” Motets’, Music & Letters, 89 (2008), p. 184, fn. 46.

248  Andrew Cichy

The Jacobite Chapel Royal The short-­lived reign of James II, although resulting in no significant changes for the established Church, temporarily brought Catholic liturgical observances from the periphery of Court life to its centre, signified by the construction of a new Catholic chapel at the King’s principal residence at Whitehall. John Evelyn’s diary entry of 29 December 1686 records his observations of artistic opulence, as well as his evident alarm at the religious rituals: I went to hear the music of the Italians in the new chapel, now first opened publicly at Whitehall for the Popish Service . . . Here we saw the Bishop in his mitre and rich copes . . . who sat in a chair with arms pontifically, was adored and censed by three Jesuits in their copes; then he went to the altar and made divers cringes, then censing the images and glorious tabernacle placed on the altar, and now and then changing place: the crosier, which was of silver, was put into his hand with a world of mysterious ceremony, the music playing, with singing. I could not have believed I should ever have seen such things in the King of England’s palace, after it had pleased God to enlighten this nation; but our great sin has, for the present, eclipsed the blessing, which I hope he will in mercy and his good time restore to its purity.10

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 put an end to this, leaving only Catherine of Braganza’s chapel in London until she finally departed England in 1692. James II’s flight to France, where he settled at Saint-­Germain-­en-­Laye, gave rise to an enclave of Italian musicians in France in his chapel. These came under the direction of Innocenzo Fede, who had been the King’s maestro di cappella in London from 1686. Most of the arrangements seem to have been overseen by James II’s wife, Maria of Modena.11 Surviving sources point to a rich repertoire of elevation motets by Carissimi, Legrenzei, and Colonna.12 An association between organist Francois Couperin and the Jacobite Chapel Royal, Edward  T.  Corp asserts, is ‘almost certain’, with a succession of motets by Couperin probably composed for John Abel, a Scottish counter-­tenor, for liturgical use.13 In contrast to his father, whose musical interests waned as he retreated into a kind of asceticism towards the end of his life, James III had a fondness for opera. His tastes, as Corp has demonstrated, shifted from the French opera he came to know at

10  John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, 2 vols (London, 1901), II, p. 258. 11  Edward  T.  Corp, ‘The Exiled Court of James II and James III: A Centre of Italian Music in France, 1689–1712’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 120 (1995), pp. 216–31. 12  Edward  T.  Corp, ‘The Jacobite Chapel Royal at Saint-­Germain-­En-­Laye’, Recusant History, 23 (1996), p. 538. 13  Corp, ‘The Jacobite Chapel Royal’, p. 539.

Catholic Music  249 Saint-­Germain-­en-­Laye to the new and fashionable Italian styles he encountered near Urbino.14 Nonetheless, Innocenzo Fede remained on the payroll and, after Maria of Modena’s death in 1718, joined James III in Rome, where he continued to draw a monthly pension from the King until his death in 1732.15

Music in the Home and Convent Although evidence of liturgical music in seventeenth-­century English Catholic homes is scant, the surviving fragments suggest that the rites were able to be ­carried out in at least some places with a degree of solemnity. The presence of a Tenebrae hearse, a pax brede, and a cope in an inventory for the chapel of St Thomas, near Baswich, among Fowler family accounts for the period 1684 to 1688, points strongly towards a sung liturgy.16 There are no circumstances in which a cope would be worn if the liturgy were not sung, and the pax brede implies the sign of peace, which, in the Tridentine liturgy during this period, was exchanged only between the sacred ministers and clerics assisting in choir. It seems utterly implausible that the same period in which Helena Wintour could embroider exquisite vestments, preserved at Stonyhurst and elsewhere, Catholics could not have also been embellishing the liturgy with music.17 Links between individual musicians and Catholic communities in England are difficult to reconstruct, and this process often involves connecting individuals with scant biographical details. This process is also not helped by the lack of surviving musical manuscripts with identifiable provenances to provide insight into what music might have been performed and by whom. Yet when identifications can be made, it provides another way of revealing the world of music in Catholic households, as is the case of the musician Cesare Morelli. On 3rd July 1716 the Douai Diaries document the arrival of ‘expertissimus musicae magister Dnus Morelli’ in the company of Laurence Breres who, it is recorded, was to be the College’s confessor and prefect of music.18 What makes this utterly astonishing is 14  Edward T. Corp, ‘Music at the Stuart Court in Urbino, 1717–1718’, Music and Letters, 81 (2000), pp. 351–63. 15 Edward T. Corp, The Stuarts in Italy, 1719–1766: A Royal Court in Permanent Exile (Cambridge, 2011), p. 78. 16  The ‘hearse’ is a large, triangular candlestick holding fifteen candles which are extinguished during the solemn recitation of the Office of Tenebrae on the Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday evenings of Holy Week. The ‘pax brede’, is small plate of ivory or wood, with a representation of a holy subject that was kissed as a sign of peace by the celebrant and then by others who received it in turn. It is only used in the Roman Rite during High Mass. 17 Sophie Holroyd, ‘ “Rich Embroidered 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, 2007), pp. 73–116. See Chapter 11 by Sarah Johanesen and Claire Marsland in this volume for more information on Wintour. 18  Edwin  H.  Burton and Edmond Nolan (eds.) The Douay College Diaries: The Seventh Douay Diary 1715–1778, CRS 28 (London, 1928), p. 39.

250  Andrew Cichy that the last known reference to Cesare Morelli’s connections with England is a letter from Samuel Pepys some thirty years earlier, describing his attempts to procure a place for him in James II’s musical establishment—­and this letter was sent to Morelli in Brussels.19 Evidently Morelli did return to England, but where and with whom he found employment remains unknown. The fact that Breres and Morelli arrived at Douai the same day from England, and that both were musicians suggests that they knew each other. One time seminarian-­turned-­ informer, Richard Hitchmough, reported in October 1716 that he had seen Laurence Breres officiating as a priest.20 Given that Hitchmough’s informing activities around this time seem to have been concentrated in Lancashire, this is probably where Breres was active, and the most likely place that he and Morelli would have met. That, at least for now, is where the trail grows cold. It does, however, suggest the tantalizing possibility that Morelli was connected to Catholic families in the area and that additional research might provide further insights into the ways that their mu­sic­al practices developed under his influence. As with earlier periods, the records of English convents in Continental Europe are a useful quarry for biographical material and other data to make connections between musical capacity and particular households. The Jerninghams of Costessey Hall are well known for their musical interests in the late eighteenth century through the publication of the Jerningham letters, extracted from the correspondence and diaries of Lady Jerningham and her daughter, Lady Bedingfield. The long history of the family and its chapels is documented elsewhere.21 A cursory search for all Jerningham nuns through the ‘Who Were The Nuns?’ database, however, reveals a legacy of women skilled in singing and playing the organ that extended back into the seventeenth century. In some cases, convents were willing to accept a lower dowry from English women of excellent musicianship. This was the case with the Augustinian canonesses at Bruges, where Cecily Bracy entered in 1739 for £100 on account of her ‘perfect’ musical ability as a singer and organist.22 It could thus be in a Catholic family’s interests to ensure their daughters had a good musical education. That is not to say that the study of music in Catholic households was the sole preserve of daughters, however. 19  For a summary of the correspondence between Morelli and Pepys, see Christopher Page, The Guitar in Stuart England: A Social and Musical History (New York, 2017), p. 189. 20  John Payne (ed.), Records of English Catholics of 1715: Compiled Wholly from Original Documents (London, 1889), pp. 122–3. 21  See for instance Mary B. Shepherd, ‘ “Our Fine Catholic Magnificence”: The Chapel at Costessey Hall (Norfolk) and its Medieval Glazing’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 54 (1995), pp. 186–207. 22  Caroline Bowden (ed.), The Chronicles of Nazareth (the English Convent), Bruges 1629–1793 (Woodbridge, 2017), pp. 288–9. For an overview of music at the English convents, see 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. For a brief overview, see James  E.  Kelly, English Convents in Catholic Europe (Cambridge, 2020), pp. 105–7.

Catholic Music  251 Edward and Mary Polehampton, both of whom went on to join the Dominican order in the eighteenth century, were organists at their respective institutions.23 In other cases, musical education seems to have taken place on the Continent and brought back home with the returning children. At the English Augustinian monastery in Bruges, the ‘reckonings’, especially those for scholars from the 1650s onwards, show payments to a series of musical masters (e.g. the ‘organ maister’ in 1652, the ‘singing maister’ in 1683, and ‘for musicke and learning’ in 1685), as well as purchases of viol strings, and occasionally an instrument (a viol in 1653 and virginal in 1654 are mentioned specifically).24 A list of some 695 students educated by the Bruges Augustinians between the mid-­seventeenth century and 1793 provides a starting point for tracing the path of this musical instruction back into England.25 The case of the Huddleston family, of whom some ten women studied at Bruges between 1688 and 1781, is in­struct­ive.26 The evidence for their musical abilities seems more or less absent from the historical record, but a portrait of Frances Justina Huddleston, painted around 1727 when she took her vows at Bruges, shows the young woman holding an open book of music.27 Frances Justina was educated at the convent school from 1722, suggesting that this is also where her musical training took place. That her family was willing to  incur the additional expense this music tuition entailed suggests something about the place of music in the household and points to a history yet waiting to be written.

Continental Connections If the mid- to late seventeenth century was turbulent for Catholics in England, it should come as no surprise that the situation for exiles on the Continent was somewhat better. Institutions that had been founded in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries flourished, with surviving records attesting to both 23  Bede Jarrett, OP, ‘Two Rosary Confraternity Lists, at Bornhem and in the North of England’, in Miscellanea IX, CRS 14 (London: 1914), p. 208; Prioress and Community of Carisbrooke, ‘Records of Dominican Nuns of the Second Order’, in Dominicana: Cardinal Howard’s Letters, English Dominican Friars, Nuns, Students, Papers and Mission Registers, CRS 25 (London, 1925), p. 213. 24  Archives of the Priory of Nazareth of the Augustinian Canonesses Regular of St John Lateran (hereafter APN), Bruges, ‘Procuratrix’s Reckonings 1639–1660’, fol. 114; ‘Procuratrix 1660–1702’, fol. 92v; ‘Procuratrix 1660–1702’, fol. 100r; ‘Procuratrix’s Reckonings 1639–1660’, fol. 123; ‘Procuratrix’s Reckonings 1639–1660’, fol. 132. 25  APN, Bruges, ‘The Names of the young Ladies and Gentlewomen Pensioners at the Monastery of the English Canonesses Regular of the Holy Order of St Augustine at Bruge, from the Year 1629 to 1908’, typescript transcription. 26  Caroline Bowden, ‘Convent Schooling for English Girls in the “Exile” Period, 1600–1800’, SCH, 55 (2019), pp. 197–8. 27 The portrait appears to be in an unnamed private collection, but is viewable through the Bridgeman Education online database, image number KDC231044, https://www.bridgemaneducation.com (accessed 6 January 2022).

252  Andrew Cichy their increasing visibility in their locales and their apparent largesse. At the English Augustinian monastery in Bruges, the Procuratrix’s reckonings for 1650 record a substantial payment to ‘Mr. Crispin ye Organ maker’ for the new chapel organ.28 This would appear be Crispin Dubois, who had been charged with building a new instrument for the cathedral in Bruges five years earlier.29 Although both the cathedral and organ have perished, a painting of St Donatian’s Cathedral by Jan Baptist van Meunincxhove from 1696 shows the massive instrument to the right side of the choir screen. In selecting Dubois to build the organ for their chapel, the nuns were positioning themselves at the centre of cultural developments in Bruges, a deliberate reversal of the periphery that they occupied in the English political and cultural landscape through exile. It is a marker of the nuns’ cultural and social achievement that their accounts also record funds spent entertaining Charles II and his exiled Court in both 1656 and 1657.30 Although the number of Catholic musicians going into exile does not appear to have increased in the mid- to late seventeenth century, some interesting names emerge among those who did choose to leave. One such interesting case study is the Dallam family, a dynasty of organ builders. The family extended back to the late sixteenth century when its founder, Thomas Dallam, delivered an organ to Mehmet III in Constantinople as a gift from Elizabeth I. Later during the Civil Wars his son, Robert, relocated the family to Brittany. There, armed with a letter of introduction attesting to his strong Catholic faith from the bishop of Chalcedon, Richard Smith, the family continued building instruments.31 Robert’s granddaughter, Catherine, married a ‘servant’ involved in their circle of organ-­ building, Thomas Harris. Thomas returned to England with his son, Renatus, where they continued as both recusants (evidenced by a fine for recusancy and banishment from the City of London in 1679) and organ builders.32 The full implications of their Continental exile, with its attendant exposure to a significantly different organ-­building tradition, repertoire, and its Catholic liturgical use, for the history of organ-­building in England has yet to be reckoned with. The surviving sources connected with a number of English Catholic institutions abroad from the mid-­seventeenth century onwards contain many more foreign surnames in connection to their music than had been the case previously. Whether or not, overall, this reflects an increase in patronage of local musicians is debatable. 28  APN, ‘Procuratrix’s Reckonings 1639–1660’, fol. 102. 29 Edouard G. J. Gregoir, Historique De La Facture Et Des Facteurs D’orgue. Avec La Nomenclature Des Principales Orgues Placées Dans Les Pays-­Bas Et Dans Les Provinces Flamandes De La Belgique Et D’une Notice Sur Les Maitres De Chapelle Et Organistes De La Cathédrale D’anvers (Antwerp, 1865), p. 92. 30  APN, ‘Procuratrix’s Reckonings 1639–1660’, fols. 132, 180. 31  For a comprehensive discussion of the Dallams, see Stephen Bicknell, The History of the English Organ (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 91–103. 32 John  P.  Rowntree, ‘The Organs in English Benedictine Churches 1685–1850’, EBC History Symposium (1995), p. 14.

Catholic Music  253 The records of the Venerable English College, Rome, for instance, demonstrate an almost consistent reliance upon Italian musicians from the time the seminary was established.33 At St Alban’s College in Valladolid, payments for music on particular feast days persisted throughout the seventeenth century. Although the entries seldom mention who is engaged, a payment in the Libros de Gastos from October 1631 to ‘los cantores de la yglesia mayor’ for singing a Mass makes it clear that in all likelihood, these were local musicians.34 Even at Saint Omers, where late-­ seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century English musicians were well represented on the college’s staff, the name connected with sacred music is that of Antoine Selosse.  Born in Flanders, Selosse, as master of vocal music at the college, was responsible for directing the chapel choir and playing the organ.35 By the eighteenth century, the impact of local interactions on musical repertoires was plain for all to see. According to the Chronicle of the Blue Nuns in Paris, Mother Catherine Matilda decreed that the convent should sing plainchant using Nivers’ edition in January 1696.36 At Louvain, one John van Doren, a Dominican priest and singing teacher, composed and gifted a Mass to the English Augustinians nuns there in 1742.37 Lest the Continental situation for English Catholics be thought of as uniformly greener pastures for liturgical music, tensions between the nuns at St Monica’s Convent, Louvain, and the archbishop of Mechelen, Alphonsus de Berghes, demonstrate that it was not always so. On 5 October 1688, the archbishop decreed that the nuns would not sing Mass accompanied by music, apart from on feast days of the first class and for clothing ceremonies, professions, and jubilees. In addition, they were forbidden from singing before ‘strangers’, whether clergy or  secular persons, and were henceforth to sing for Sunday Benediction ‘­without music’.38 The archbishop was known to have had Jansenist tendencies, having previously forbidden the carrying of both the Blessed Sacrament and statues of the saints in processions.39 Although not as vulnerable as in England,

33  See 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; G. Dixon, ‘Music in the English College During the Early Baroque Era’, The Venerabile, 28 (1984), pp. 62–70. 34  Archives of St Alban’s College, Valladolid, ‘Libros de Gastos 1614–1659’, October 1631. 35  On the evidence for Antoine Selosse at the English College of Saint Omer, 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. 78–9. 36  Archives of St Edmund’s College, Ware, ‘Copy of the Diary of a Convent of English Nuns of the Order of the Immaculate Conception’, Cabinet F2, fol. 110. 37  Archive of St Augustine’s Priory, Devon, eighteenth-­century gradual (unfoliated). This archival collection is stored at Douai Abbey Library and Archives, Upper Woolhampton. 38  Archdiocesan Archives of Mechelen-­Brussels, Mechelen, ‘Mecheliniensia/Reg. 31’, fols. 475–6. I am indebted to Katia Brys for her kind translation of the decree. 39  See Raymond Baustert, Le Querelle janséniste extra muros ou La Polemique atour de la Procession des Jésuites de Luxembourg, 20 mai 1685 (Tübingen, 2006), pp. 68–72.

254  Andrew Cichy liturgical music among communities on the Continent was still subject to different ecclesiastical and social constraints. The same forces that shaped its growth in particular ways could equally shape, if expedient, its decline. The reckoning with music in English Catholic institutions on the Continent is far easier from the mid-­seventeenth century than, in general, for the preceding century of their history. This is due largely to the rich array of sources that survive from the latter period. Although for many places the sources remain fragmentary, there are more fragments, containing more detail. The survival of a significantly larger number of musical manuscript and print sources helps to make the picture more complete. The field is largely underexplored and much work remains to be done.

Conclusion Buried in the text and footnotes of the preceding discussion is a constellation of composers, most of whom are barely known today. If at least some manuscript sources of English Catholic music—­albeit often devoid of provenance—­for the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries either survive or are recoverable in some way, why do they have no apparent place in the repertoire of most choirs today? Corp suggests that in the case of Innocenzo Fede, the ‘misfortune to serve a king who lost his throne and another who failed to regain it’ accounts in part for subsequent neglect of his music.40 The Latin-­texted liturgical repertoire of Byrd and Tallis, however, can also be said to have occupied the wrong side of history, and yet are now both the standard fare of cathedrals internationally. What then accounts for this extended silence with regard to the music of their musical successors? The answer, in part, seems to relate to reforms of liturgical music in the Catholic Church initiated by Pius X at the start of the twentieth century, with their strong emphasis on the restoration of plainchant and Renaissance polyphony. The revival of liturgical interest in Byrd and Tallis in particular has much to do with the research of Richard Runciman Terry, who oversaw the modern editions of their works and put these into the repertoire at the Westminster Cathedral. Concomitant with this, Terry made a strong case for ridding the English Church of unsuitable ‘modern’ music. His remarks about late-­ seventeenth-­century repertoire are telling: Just as Plainsong overlapped classic Polyphony, so Polyphony overlapped modern music in its earlier stages . . . Just as it was true that musicians living in an entirely

40  Corp, ‘The Exiled Court of James II and James III’, p. 231.

Catholic Music  255 ecclesiastical atmosphere would not have any great measure of success in their secular work, so it is true that musicians whose pursuits were mainly secular could not hope to preserve the ecclesiastical atmosphere in their com­pos­itions for the Church. The more individualistic their modes of expression, the less the trace of that serene aloofness which characterised the Church music of those to whom it was a life’s work . . . Even in the “transition period” this became very marked. To take Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater as an example: side by side with numbers of real dignity, such as the duets Stabat Mater and Fac ut ardeat, and solos of haunting pathos like Vidit suum we find Inflammatus et accensus brimming over with the secularity of the eighteenth century . . . and in which the style is practically identical with the graceful numbers of Pergolesi’s opera, La Serva Padrona.41

Buoyed along on a current of ultramontanism among some English Catholics, the fate of these repertoires was sealed: the Pope had decreed their irrelevance and thus they were made irrelevant. Even the French alternatim repertoires, which had influenced the organ-­building practices of the Dallam dynasty, were to be discontinued. Rome’s position softened in subsequent years, recognizing the value of religious (as distinct from liturgical) music and suggesting that its place was in concerts, but by then it was too late. Perhaps now, divorced from any utilitarianism, is the time to revisit these musicians, composers, and their works. In giving back the past its present, and therefore understanding the music properly in its context, a substantial cultural legacy stands to be recovered.

Select Bibliography Bicknell, Stephen. The History of the English Organ (Cambridge, 1996). Corp, Edward  T., ‘The Exiled Court of James II and James III: A Centre of Italian Music in France, 1689–1712’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 120 (1995), pp. 216–31. Corp, Edward T., The Stuarts in Italy, 1719–1766: A Royal Court in Permanent Exile (Cambridge, 2011). Dennison, Peter, ‘The Sacred Music of Matthew Locke’, Music and Letters, 60 (1979), pp. 60–75. Lebedinski, Ester, ‘ “Obtained by Peculiar Favour, & Much Difficulty of the Singer”: Vincenzo Albrici and the Function of Charles II’s Italian Ensemble at the English Restoration Court’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 143 (2018), pp. 325–59.

41  Richard Runciman Terry, Catholic Church Music (London, 1907), pp. 62–3.

256  Andrew Cichy Leech, Peter, ‘Musicians in the Catholic Chapel of Catherine of Braganza, 1662–92’, Early Music, 29 (2001), pp. 571–87. Leech, Peter, ‘Seventeenth-Century Music at St Omers’, Stonyhurst Magazine (2008), pp. 57–64. Leech, Peter, ‘Music and Musicians in the Catholic Chapel of James II at Whitehall, 1686–1688’, Early Music, 39 (2011), pp. 379–400. Leech, Peter and Maurice Whitehead, ‘New Light on Music and Musicians at St Omers English Jesuit College, 1658–1714’, Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 66 (2016), pp. 123–48. Rowntree, John, ‘The Organs in English Benedictine Churches 1685–1850’, EBC History Symposium (1995), pp. 5–26.

14

Vernacular Catholic Literature Mícheál Mac Craith / James January-­McCann / Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart

Irish Gaelic The two most important literary productions of the mid-­1630s, if not of the whole century, must surely be Seathrún Céitinn’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (A Compendium of Knowledge about Ireland) and Mícheál Ó Cléirigh’s Annála Ríoghachta Éireann (Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland). The former was a Continentally trained priest of Old English stock, while the latter was a member of a hereditary Gaelic literary family who joined the Franciscans in Leuven as a lay friar and compiled his narrative in Ireland between 1632 and 1636. For all the differences in length, style, and organizational structure between these two works, the authors were at one in seeking to provide an authoritative history of Ireland for the new Catholic nation that had come into being under the common peace established by James I and continued by Charles I. Ó Cléirigh’s return to Leuven in 1636 to prepare his history for publication is a good indication of the optimism of the period, though his work remained unpublished until the mid-­nineteenth century. Further evidence of this confidence is found in a letter written by Rory O’Moore, one of the leaders of the 1641 insurrection, to Hugh de Burgo, OFM, the Irish commissary in Flanders: ‘if we may afore Flan Mac Egan dies, we will see an Irish school opponed, and therefore could wish heartily that those learned and religious fathers in Lovaune did come over in hast with their monuments and with an Irish and Latin print.’1 Antoin Gearnon’s Parrthas an Anama (Paradise of the Soul), published in Leuven in 1645, seems to be a manual of devotion for Irish Catholic gentlefolk living in tranquillity as opposed to the earlier Leuven publications that sought to encourage Irish Catholics to persevere in the face of persecution. The inclusion of eighty-­six woodcuts in this text only adds to the general aura of serenity that the work presumes and the polemical bitterness that mars other Counter-­Reformation works emanating from Leuven is absent from the text. The Confederate Wars and

1  Gregory Cleary, Father Luke Wadding and St. Isidore’s College, Rome; Biographical and Historical Notes and Documents (Rome, 1925), p. 133. Mícheál Mac Craith / James January-McCann / Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart, Vernacular Catholic Literature In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II: Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745. Edited by: John Morrill and Liam Temple, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843436.003.0015

258  Mac Craith / January-M c Cann / Stiùbhart the Cromwellian aftermath, however, soon shattered this period of calm. Funds used to finance the historical, hagiographical, and literary projects of Leuven were diverted to military aims and the whole scheme ground to a halt. In the first section of this essay, we will examine the specifically catechetical publications produced by the Irish Church in the century following 1645, before moving on to the Catholic dimensions of secular literature.

Catechetical Publications in the Irish Language It must be said that the Irish Church as such had no concerted policy on the Irish language, the need to provide priests capable of ministering to the faithful in Irish, or on the need to provide religious material in Irish for literate Catholics. Works that did appear emanated from concerned individuals acting on their own initiative and nearly all were based in one of the Continental colleges at Leuven, Rome, and Paris. It is hard to better Ciarán Mac Murchaidh’s assessment that ul­tim­ate­ly, as an institution, the Catholic Church’s approach to Irish in the eighteenth century was, at best, neutral.2 Suim bhunudhasach an Teaguisg Chríosduidhe (A basic summary of Christian teaching), the last catechetical work to be published by the Franciscan press in Leuven in 1663, was in fact written by a diocesan priest from the west of Ireland, one Seán Ó Dubhlaoich. Openly acknowledging his indebtedness to Gearnon and Ó hEódhasa’s catechism of 1611, Ó Dubhlaoich declared that his aims encompassed not only those places in Ireland where there was a dearth of priests and friars because of religious persecution, but also Scotland and ‘the many islands on the coasts of America where there are numerous Irish people who are bereft of clergy from whom they could learn any instruction at all.’ This reference to the transportation of Irish Catholics to the West Indies in the aftermath of the Cromwellian wars indicates a strong pastoral concern. We do not know, however, if any copies of Ó Dubhlaoich’s work were sent to the Caribbean. The Irish Franciscans in St Isidore’s College in Rome relied on the printing press of Propaganda Fide to produce a handful of books, with the latter’s involvement seemingly indicating that Rome thought of Ireland more as a mission than as a Church. It is interesting that one of these volumes was Proinsias Ó Maolmhuaidh’s Grammatica Latino-­Hibernica (1677), the first grammar of the language to appear in print. It should be emphasized that the focus of this work was more pastoral than academic, evincing a concern that Irish Franciscans were losing their command of Irish during their years of study abroad and 2  Ciarán Mac Murchaidh, ‘The Catholic Church and the Irish Language’, in James Kelly and Ciarán Mac Murchaidh (eds.), Irish and English Essays on the Irish Linguistic and Cultural Frontier, 1600–1900 (Dublin, 2012), pp. 162–88.

Vernacular Catholic Literature  259 consequently not up to the demands of ministering to their people on their return home.3 Aindrias Ó Doinnshléibhe, prefect of the Irish College in Paris since 1722, produced a substantial catechism of 518 octavo pages in 1742 with facing Irish and English text. Stressing in his introduction that it was not an abridgement designed for children, Ó Doinnshléibhe’s aim was to move the will to the practice of virtue.4 The catechetical works noted so far were all composed on the Continent. No Catholic books were published in Ireland in the seventeenth century, and it was only in the second quarter of the eighteenth century that Catholic publishing came to the fore. Pride of place must go to Séamus Ó Gallchobhair’s Sixteen Irish sermons, published in Dublin in 1736 during the author’s tenure as bishop of Raphoe between 1725 and 1737.5 The work proved to be very popular and was reissued many times between 1736 and 1911.

Catholic Dimensions of Secular Literature Surprisingly enough, the Confederate Wars themselves did not inspire much literary endeavour, though a spirited poem by the Dominican priest Pádraigín Haicéad, Múscail do mhisneach, a Bhanbha (Ireland, stir up your courage), is worthy of mention. Composed after the emergence of a peace faction in the Confederate ranks in 1646, Haicéad urged the main body to stand firm, the strident tenor of the poem well captured by his prose introduction: After the making known of their treachery and their fratricide, in making peace with heretics, and after the crowd known as the Faction raised its head, i.e. selfish people who, in treachery and oath-­breaking, cut themselves off from the Catholic body known as the Confederation, i.e. from the alliance of peace and assistance and covenant which Irish people made among themselves under Bible oaths re making war and protecting the true faith in Ireland.6

Cromwell’s invasion in 1649 and subsequent upheavals brought a grim conclusion to the Confederate Wars. In addition to the great number of victims who perished by sword, famine, or plague, between 30,000 and 40,000 men enlisted for foreign service. Hundreds of boys and girls were shipped to the West Indies and rewards were offered for the capture of priests who were sent to Barbados or confined to Inisboffin off the coast of Mayo. Furthermore, most of the Catholic landowners 3  Clare Lois Carroll, Exiles in a Global City the Irish and Early Modern Rome, 1609–1783 (Leiden, 2018), pp. 144–72. 4  Proinsias Mac Cana, Collège des Irlandais Paris & Irish Studies (Dublin, 2001), pp. 115–16, 119–21. 5  Sixteen Irish sermons, in an easy and familiar stile, on useful and necessary subjects (Dublin, 1736). 6  Michael Hartnett, Haicéad (Oldcastle, 1993), p. 61.

260  Mac Craith / January-M c Cann / Stiùbhart had their lands confiscated to pay Cromwell’s victorious troops.7 These traumatic disturbances inspired a series of poems on Ireland’s woes that led one commentator to classify them together as a Tuireamh Náisiúnta / Elegy for the Nation.8 Composed in stressed metres by amateur poets, both lay and clerical, they adopt the framework used by Céitinn in his Foras Feasa, but continue it on from the twelfth century to the 1650s. While not unanimous in their politics, these poems reflect the fissures that characterized the Confederation of Kilkenny. Nevertheless, moving seamlessly from the country’s mythological past to his­tor­ic­al times, they are at one in conceiving the history of Ireland as one dominated by five major events: St Patrick and the coming of Christianity, the Viking invasions, the coming of the Normans, the Reformation, and the Cromwellian invasion and its aftermath. As the last two events receive the most prominence, all the poems agree in making Catholicism an essential part of Irish identity, drawing the wrath of the English on Ireland from Henry VIII onwards and culminating in the Cromwellian upheavals. Tuireamh na hÉireann (Elegy for Ireland) is attributed to one Seán Ó Conaill, whose identity and profession remain uncertain. Probably composed by a priest from Kerry around 1657, this poem merits special attention for its continued popularity in the literary tradition, underlined by its occurrence in 257 manuscripts before 1900.9 Easily memorized because of its brevity, the Tuireamh became a popular substitute for Foras Feasa.10 Like Céitinn, Ó Conaill reflects an Old English outlook, promoting an inclusive concept of Catholic Ireland composed of people of both Gaelic and Norman stock. This harmony which endured for nearly 400 years was shattered, however, by the Reformation, in particular by: Promiscuous Calvin and voracious Luther, / two who forsook their faith for a prostitute. / Saxon princes, sorry tale, Henry VIII, Elizabeth and James, king of Britain and Scotland / became followers of Luther and denied the church. / The king became head of the clergy, / Their lands and their lives were taken together, / The Bible was changed from Latin to English, / They make an act forbidding attendance at mass.11

This attack on the true faith had consequences beyond the strictly religious, leading to a breakdown of morality which included sexual promiscuity, perjury, robbery, violence, indiscriminate bloodshed, destruction of churches, and ­ ex­ploit­ation of the poor. Unwieldy Latin and English legal terms are interspersed throughout the poem, highlighting the manipulation of the law in oppressing 7  Cecile O’Rahilly, Five Seventeenth-­Century Political Poems (Dublin, 1952), p. 132. 8 Breandán Ó Doibhlin, Manuail de Litríocht na Gaeilge, Faisicil IV, 1641–1704: Díshealbhú (Dublin, 2008), pp. 31–57. 9  Vincent Morley, Ó Chéitinn go Raiftearaí (Dublin, 2011), pp. 123–38. 10  Vincent Morley, The Popular Mind in Eighteenth-­century Ireland (Cork, 2017), p. 108. 11  Author’s translation.

Vernacular Catholic Literature  261 Irish Catholics. The most ominous use of these foreign words occurred in the line ‘Transplant, transport go / to Jamaica’, as the poet grimly recalls that Cromwell’s campaign was the war that finished off Ireland. Another poem in this group is Dáibhí Ó Bruadair’s Créacht do dháil mé im árthach galair (A wound has reduced me to a vessel overflowing with disease) from around 1652. Ó Bruadair’s personal anguish at Ireland’s sorry state in the wake of Cromwellian vengeance leads him to contrast his country’s idyllic past with its traumatic present. Attributing this sorry state of affairs to the sins of the people, it is only in the next life that the poet finally hopes for redress. Ó Bruadair is indisputably the major poet of the second half of the seventeenth century. Not only has he left us a substantial corpus of eighty poems, but having experienced first hand the major disturbances of the period, from the Confederate Wars to the penal laws, his oeuvre is a most important witness to the effect of these disjunctures on the Catholic landed classes. Furthermore, his tendency to address these matters almost exclusively in terms of his own personal plight adds a tone of intense bitterness and invective. Ó Bruadair’s work falls into four main periods. Along with his contemporaries, his work in the 1650s registers the misfortunes of the Irish as God’s punishment for their sins. Unlike his contemporaries, Ó Bruadair notes a complete dis­con­tinu­ity between what he perceived to be an idyllic past and the desolate present. A change of emphasis marks the poet’s verse in the 1670s. While the famine of 1674–6 is still represented as divine punishment, the response is much more personal. Ó Bruadair evinces no interest in a glorious past and his only hope of salvation is to be found in prayer and trust in God.12 The acquittal of a number of Munster gentlemen accused of complicity in the Popish Plot introduces a new optimism into Ó Bruadair’s verse in 1682. With the accession of the Catholic James II to the throne and the emergence of Irish figures like Patrick Sarsfield, Ó Bruadair’s optimism becomes even more striking.13 In some poems of this period he seems to envisage the restoration of Ireland’s idyllic past, while in others he is less interested in resorting to the past than in focusing on the present now that God’s judgement is lifted from the Irish. The ‘Purgatory’ of the 1680s with its promise of paradise regained gave way, however, to the ‘shipwreck’ of the 1690s and the victory of the Williamite forces. As Pádraigín Riggs judiciously comments, ‘the poet of the 1690s is a victim of despair and despondency, finally succumbing to historical amnesia’.14 Ó Bruadair himself is so traumatized by the debacle that he

12  Bernadette Cunningham and Raymond Gillespie, ‘Lost Worlds: History and Religion in the Poetry of Dáibhí Ó Bruadair’, in Pádraigín Riggs (ed.), Dáibhí Ó Bruadair: His Historical and Literary Context (Dublin, 2001), pp. 27–37. 13  A senior commander in James II’s army, Patrick Sarsfield, rallied the Jacobite forces after their defeat at the Boyne, consolidating his heroic status with a spectacular raid on the Williamite artillery train. 14  Pádraigín Riggs, ‘Foreward’, in Riggs (ed.), Dáibhí Ó Bruadair, p. vi.

262  Mac Craith / January-M c Cann / Stiùbhart resolves to write no more. National catastrophe and personal catastrophe coincide. Furthermore, the very craft of poetry is no longer able to function. Whereas Ó Bruadair complained of a lack of patronage in his earlier compositions, this concern for the very future of his craft is a new element in his work. While the last two periods of Ó Bruadair’s oeuvre belong chronologically to the seventeenth century, his poetry from the accession of James II can be correctly seen as initiating the Jacobite era of Gaelic literature. That Ó Bruadair should be the harbinger of a new era at the very moment when he plunged the depths of personal and professional despair is most paradoxical. A fine example of the close link between Irish Jacobitism and Catholicism is found in the work of the seventeenth- and early-­eighteenth-­century Cork priest, Domhnall Ó Colmáin. His main claim to fame is his composition in 1697 of Párliament na mBan (The Parliament of Women), a sort of speculum principis for his pupil James Cotter. Not an original work, it owes much to Erasmus’ Colloquia familiaria. In his introduction Ó Colmáin emphasizes that his protégé could find no better role model than his father, James Cotter Senior. There is much more involved here than standard formulaic praise, however, as the elder Cotter is specifically praised for his involvement in the death of the regicide Sir John Lisle in Switzerland in 1664, which Ó Colmáin asserts was a most virtuous act and carried out at the express wish of Charles II. Knighted by James II, Cotter was appointed governor of Cork city by the King and commander in chief of the Jacobite forces in west Munster. Following the Williamite victory, James Cotter managed to retain his lands, and Ó Colmáin praises him both for his protection of the Catholic faith and his support for the Irish language during the new regime. Young Cotter is urged to follow his father’s example in his loyalty to James II, his adherence to his Catholic faith, and his patronage of Gaelic culture. While the rest of the text is didactic and moralistic in tone, it is hardly fortuitous that the date chosen for the next session of the parliament was 10 June, the birthday of James Edward Francis Stuart, prince of Wales and legitimate heir to the throne. Ó Colmáin’s work is a fine example of the link between Jacobitism and Catholicism in Ireland and it also bears mentioning that he was friendly with several Jacobite poets, some of whom were Catholic priests.15 The younger Cotter readily imbibed his father’s values. In 1718, however, he was indicted for the abduction and rape of Elizabeth Squibb, a Quaker woman of his acquaintance, found guilty, and hanged in Cork city on 7 May 1720. Certain aspects of the conduct of the trial led to the belief that it was a miscarriage of justice. It is remarkable that many of the leading Munster Jacobite poets composed elegies on Cotter’s decease, strengthening the view that he was executed primarily because he was his father’s son. 15 Breandán Ó Buachalla, ‘The Making of a Cork Jacobite’, in Patrick O’Flanagan and Cornelus G. Buttimer (eds), Cork History & Society (Dublin, 1993), pp. 473–4.

Vernacular Catholic Literature  263 As Breandán Ó Buachalla famously said, Irish (language) political poetry in the eighteenth century is essentially Jacobite poetry.16 The main poets were Jacobite poets, owing allegiance to James II and his descendants and using Jacobite ideology and rhetoric in expressing their desire for a Stuart restoration. They believed in the divine right of kings, rightful kingship, and hereditary right. A Stuart restoration, backed by French military support including the Irish brigades, would restore the dispossessed to their lands, restore the Catholic Church to its former pre-­eminence, and restore the Gaelic literati and Gaelic culture to their privileged position as before the conquest. A necessary corollary to this quadruple restoration would entail the expulsion from Ireland of the descendants of Calvin and Luther together with their religion and language. Frank McLynn described the relations between France and the Stuart dynasty in symphonic terms. He argues that the period 1715–40 is best considered as one in which, after the ferocious first movement of Bourbon support for the Stuarts from 1689 to 1713, a slow andante of indifference prevails. Then, from 1740 to 1748 there is a stirring allegro of pro-­Jacobitism, followed by a short final movement from 1756 to 1759.17 Gaelic Jacobite poetry reflects this musical pattern, waxing when French support was in the ascendant and waning when it declined. Similarly, the rigour with which the penal laws were imposed or not followed the same pattern. A fine example of Jacobite verse that emphasizes the links between Jacobitism and Catholicism is contained in this prophecy by Aogán Ó Rathaille, composed between 1701 and 1714: Do you find it pitiable that the wolves of falsehood and black treachery. / are banishing the clergy and placing them in slavery? / Alas that the son of Charles our former king is prostrate / Alone in the grave and his noble son banished . . . // That bible of Luther with its black teaching of falsehood / and this band who are guilty of not reverencing the clergy / are being banished overland from Ireland to Newfoundland, / Louis and the Prince will hold court and assembly. // Ireland will be joyous and her palaces exultant, / Irish will be cultivated by the poets within their walls. / The English language of the dark upstarts will be diffident under a cloud / and James in his bright court showing affection to the Irish.18

For all their dazzling brilliance, however, Ó Rathaille’s famous Jacobite ‘vision’ poems contain but one passing reference to Catholicism. When Pope Clement XIII refused to recognize Charles Edward Stuart as king in 1766, the Irish transferred their allegiance to the Hanoverian monarchy. The Gaelic literati, however, persisted in their fidelity to the Stuarts. If their role henceforth

16  Breandán Ó Buachalla, ‘Irish Jacobite Poetry’, The Irish Review, 12 (1992), pp. 40–9. 17  Frank McLynn, The Jacobites (London, 1987), p. 31. 18  Author’s translation.

264  Mac Craith / January-M c Cann / Stiùbhart was more symbolic than real, it was nonetheless a potent symbol as the subversive rhetoric of Jacobitism morphed effortlessly into Jacobinism.

Welsh In contrast to the previous century, the years 1641–1745 saw a marked reduction in the amount of Catholic material published in Welsh. The failure to establish a distinct Welsh seminary as intended by Morys Clynnog, and as a result, to create a distinct Welsh mission, under Welsh leadership, ensured that Wales would remain on the periphery of both the English Church and the English State.19 The death of key figures in the earliest period of the Welsh Counter-­Reformation, such as Clynnog himself, Gruffudd Robert, Rhosier Smyth, and Owain Lewis, meant the end of an influential Welsh voice at the papal court and other significant locations such as Milan and the University of Paris. It also meant a decline in the funds available to publish Catholic texts in Welsh.20 Wales’ poverty and small literate population meant that without subsidy, printers were unlikely to make a profit from the production of Welsh language texts, particularly Catholic ones.21 Despite the earlier successes of the first wave of seminary trained missionaries, typified by the careers of Robert Gwyn and Morgan Clynnog, by 1641 the Welsh Catholic community had settled down into a pattern that would continue until the advent of mass Irish migration in the nineteenth century.22 The main Catholic populations were to be found in the north-­east under the protection of the Mostyns of Talacre, in southern Breconshire, and under the protection of the Herberts of Raglan in Monmouthshire.23 Indeed, in 1642 roughly 8–9 per cent of the population of Monmouthshire were Catholic, with the proportion in some

19  Jason Nice, ‘Being “British” in Rome: The Welsh at the English College, 1578–1584’, The Catholic Historical Review, 92 (2006), pp. 1–24. 20  Angharad Price, ‘Ar Drywydd y “Bigel Phyrnig”—Golwg Ar Fywyd a Gwaith Morys Clynnog’, Trafodion Cymdeithas Hanes Sir Gaernarfon, 64 (2003), pp. 15–32; M. Paul Bryant-­Quinn, ‘Cymaint Serch i Gymru’: Gruffydd Robert, Morys Clynnog a’r Athrawaeth Gristnogol (1568) (Aberystwyth, 1998); P. Boaistuau, Theater Du Mond (Gorsedd y Byd), ed. T. Parry, trans. Rhosier Smyth (Caerdydd, 1930); Geraint Bowen, ‘Dau Lythyr Gan Owen Lewis’, Llên Cymru, 2 (1952), pp. 36–45. 21  Glanmor Williams, ‘Welsh Authors and Their Books, 1500–1640’, Radnorshire Transactions, 58 (1988), p. 37. 22 James McCann, ‘Na All Fod Un Ffydd Onyd Yr Hen Ffydd Robert Gwyn’ (Aberystwyth University PhD thesis, 2017), pp. iii–­ix; John Martin Cleary, ‘CLYNNOG, MORGAN (1558 – after 1619), Seminary Priest’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography, https://biography.wales/article/s1-­CLYN-­ MOR-­1558 (accessed 9 April 2020). 23 Glanmor Williams, ‘St Winifred’s Well: Ffynnon Wenfrewi’, Flintshire Historical Society Publications, 36 (2003), pp. 32–51; R.  Tudur Jones, ‘Religion in Post-­Restoration Brecknockshire 1660–1688’, Brycheiniog, 8 (1962), p. 41; Hannah Thomas, ‘Missioners on the Margins? The Territorial Headquarters of the Welsh Jesuit College of St Francis Xavier at The Cwm, c.1600–1679’, Recusant History, 32 (2014), pp. 173–93.

Vernacular Catholic Literature  265 parishes as high as 20 per cent.24 There were also small pockets in Presteigne, Radnorshire, and in Welshpool and Llanfyllin in Montgomeryshire, centred on the home of the Herberts of Powys Castle.25 All these locations are of course near the boundaries of the dioceses and not far from the border. The only area removed from the border with a significant Catholic population was that around Llandeilo Fawr in Carmarthenshire.26 The previously promising region of Llŷn, in western Caernarfonshire, had been lost to the Catholic cause as a result of the fallout from the so-­called ‘Lleyn Recusancy Case’, when several gentry families in the area were accused of harbouring priests and of absenting themselves from church.27 The retrenchment of the community, and the realization that neither Wales nor England would be swiftly reconciled to the Church led to a consequent shift in focus in the literature produced for the Catholic community. While the works of the most prolific Welsh Catholic author, Robert Gwyn, had been largely focused on apologetics and aimed at the conversion of Protestants and enabling Catholics to adequately defend their faith, those texts dating from our period were focused more on the pastoral needs of the Catholic community itself.28 Despite the relatively high number of priests available, opportunities to hear Mass would have been limited for the majority.29 In Wales as in England, devotional literature and catechisms were used to fill the gap, and from 1640 onwards this became the sole focus of Wales’ Catholic literary output. It would not do, however, to overstate the amount of literature produced. The relatively small size of the Catholic community in Wales, and the consequently small number of Welshmen entering the priesthood or religious life, was necessarily reflected in the number of Catholic writers the community produced. Indeed, during our period a mere two Welshmen wrote Catholic texts in their native language or translated them into Welsh.

24 Robert Matthews, ‘ “Such a Doleful President of Misery and Calamity”: Protestant Fears of Catholics in Monmouthshire in the First Civil War, 1642–46’, The Monmouthshire Antiquary, 23 (2007), p. 15. 25  F. Noble, ‘A 1663 List of Radnorshire Baptists, Quakers and Catholics’, Radnorshire Transactions, 28 (1967), p. 69; E.  R.  Morris, ‘Some Catholic Recusant Families of Llanfyllin and Welshpool’, Casgliadau Maldwyn, 58 (1963), pp. 143–55. 26  Wyn Thomas, ‘Carmarthenshire Recusancy: A Synopsis’, The Carmarthenshire Antiquary, 24 (1988), p. 113. 27  Emyr Gwynne Jones, ‘The Lleyn Recusancy Case 1578–1581’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1936), pp. 97–124. 28  McCann, ‘Na All Fod Un Ffydd Onyd Yr Hen Ffydd Robert Gwyn’, pp. 1–359; James JanuaryMcCann, ‘Robert Gwyn and Robert Persons: Welsh and English Perspectives on Attendance at Anglican Service’, Recusant History, 32 (2014), pp. 159–71; James January-McCann, ‘ “Y Gwsanaeth Prydwysaidd yn y Gwledydd Yma”: Portrayals of Continental and English Catholicism in Sixteenth Century Wales’, in Raimund Karl and Katharina Moller (eds.), Proceedings of the Second European Symposium in Celtic Studies (Hagen, 2018), pp. 119–30. 29  There were twenty working in Monmouthshire and southern Breconshire in 1676, for example. See Jones, ‘Religion in Post-­Restoration Brecknockshire’, p. 48.

266  Mac Craith / January-M c Cann / Stiùbhart The first was Fr John Hughes, the youngest son of Hugh Owen of Gwenynog in Anglesey who had served as the earl of Worcester’s secretary at Raglan Castle.30 Hughes was born in June 1615 and entered the English College at Rome on 25th December 1636. He was ordained priest on 16th March 1640 and departed for England on 28th September 1643. In 1648 he became a Jesuit at Watten near St Omer before returning to the mission in 1650. He spent some time at the Jesuit College of St Francis Xavier at the Cwm in Herefordshire before moving to Holywell until his death on 28th December 1686.31 He published two Catholic texts in his lifetime, Allwydd neu Agoriad Paradwys i’r Cymry (The Key of Paradise for the Welsh) and Dilyniad Crist, the first complete Welsh translation of Thomas à Kempis’ De Imitatio Christi, originally translated by his father, but edited, emended, and published by Hughes himself.32 The Allwydd is a devotional text intended to allow Welsh Catholics to follow the devotional life of the Church, as far as possible, in the absence of a priest and regular access to the sacraments. As such, it contains a calendar of saints’ days and major feasts and fasts, taken mostly from the Roman Martyrology, but with numerous Welsh saints also included.33 It also gives the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, and Creed in both Latin and Welsh. The orthography used for all Latin appearing in the Allwydd is particularly interesting, as Hughes uses a mildly Cambricized spelling, intended, as he says, ‘to enable the uneducated Welshmen to pronounce the Latin vowel “u” correctly’ and to ensure that the Welsh improve their pronunciation of Latin, rather than continuing to ‘imitate the English, who pronounce Latin very falsely’.34 Interestingly, this section of the book is written in English, specifically in order to assist English speakers with their sloppy Latin as well! To this end, Latin ‘u’ is written ‘w’, and ‘v’ as ‘f ’, in order to follow Welsh orthography more closely. The text also contains a brief description of the Seven Sacraments, along with scriptural references attesting to their validity as sacraments—­a useful corrective to Protestant propaganda from the pulpit. As Alexandra Walsham has shown, the utility of the printed book in providing adequate catechesis in the absence of a priest had long been recognized.35 This is reflected in the Allwydd with the inclusion of long sections, in the form of dialogues between a teacher and pupil, discussing the Sacrament of Penance and explaining how to make a good confession.36 The order of Mass is given as well, in 30  Emyr Gwynne Jones, ‘OWEN, HUGH (1575?–1642) of Gwenynog, translator’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography, https://biography.wales/article/s-­OWEN-­HUG-­1575 (accessed 14 April 2020). 31  Emyr Gwynne Jones, ‘HUGHES, JOHN or HUGH OWEN (1615–1686), Jesuit’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography, https://biography.wales/article/s-­HUGH-­JOH-­1615 (accessed 14 April 2020). 32  John Hughes, Allwydd Neu Agoriad Paradwys i’r Cymry, ed. John Fisher (Caerdydd, 1929); Hugh Owen, Dilyniad Christ, ed. John Hughes (Llundain, 1684). 33 Hughes, Allwydd, pp. 1–2. 34 Hughes, Allwydd, pp. 1, 231. 35 Alexandra Walsham, ‘ “Domme Preachers”? Post-­Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print’, Past & Present, 168 (2000), pp. 72–123. 36 Hughes, Allwydd, pp. 25–37, 38–48.

Vernacular Catholic Literature  267 both Latin and Welsh, to enable those not conversant with Latin to understand fully. This is prefaced by an explanation of the Mass, including the gestures made by the priest throughout.37 Continuing the ‘domme preachers’ theme, Hughes also suggests suitable books to be read by those unable to be present for Mass.38 The devotional part of the book ends with a series of prayers and litanies, including the Litany of the Saints and the Litany of Loretto, and a translation of the Passion from each of the four gospels.39 Hughes states in his introduction that he took some of his material from ‘the English key of Paradise’, presumably the text published at St Omer in 1675.40 Since the Allwydd was published five years before the English version he must have used a manuscript copy, as the two texts are indeed very similar. There are however a few differences between the two. For example, rather than an ex­plan­ation of the Sacrament of Penance and a riposte to Protestant criticisms of it, the English version provides a dialogue of attrition and contrition, with an ex­plan­ation of the importance of performing regular Acts of Contrition. This difference can most likely be explained by the dearth of Catholic texts available in Welsh compared to English, as an English reader would most likely have been able to access apologetics elsewhere, meaning it was less necessary to include them in a devotional work. There is also an explanation of mental prayer which is absent from the Welsh version, likewise the section on the entertainment of good thoughts.41 The examination of conscience on the Ten Commandments is also unique to the English version.42 The second Welsh author of the period was Gwilym Puw, one of the strongly recusant Puw family of Penrhyn Creuddyn in Caernarvonshire.43 The third son of Phylip Puw and Gaynor Gwyn, Puw served as a captain in the army of Charles I, being stationed at Raglan. He spent some time travelling in Europe before joining the Benedictines at St Edmund, Paris, and returning to Wales as a missionary.44 He settled at Blackbrook in Monmouthshire, home of the recusant Morgan family, and later of the Bodenhams, where he remained until his death in c.1689.45 He composed several poems on a religious theme, including Buchedd ein harglwydd Iessu Grist (The life of our lord Jesus Christ) and Buchedd Gwen Frewu Santes 37 Hughes, Allwydd, pp. 88–121. 38 Hughes, Allwydd, pp. 122. 39 Hughes, Allwydd, pp. 123–91, 192–221. 40 Hughes, Allwydd, p. xiv. 41 Anon., The Key of Paradise (Saint-­Omer, 1675), pp. 68–70. 42 Anon., The Key of Paradise, p. 97. 43  For an introduction to Puw, see ‘Monks in Motion’ database, ID 145, https://community.dur. ac.uk/monksinmotion/ (accessed 5 January 2022). See also Emyr Gwynne Jones, ‘Robert Pugh of Penrhyn Creuddyn’, Trafodion Cymdeithas Hanes Sir Gaernarfon, 7 (1946), pp. 10–19; Emyr Gwynne Jones, ‘The Duality of Robert Ap Hugh of Penrhyn Creuddyn’, Trafodion Cymdeithas Hanes Sir Gaernarfon, 18 (1957), pp. 54–63. 44 ‘PUW, PUE, PUGH, family, of Penrhyn Creuddyn, Caernarfonshire; a prominent Roman Catholic family’, Dictionary of Welsh Biography, https://bywgraffiadur.cymru/article/c-­PUW0-­ PEN-­1618 (accessed 12 May 2020). 45  Jones, ‘The Duality of Robert Ap Hugh’, p. 57.

268  Mac Craith / January-M c Cann / Stiùbhart (The life of St Winefride), as well as several hymns in poetic metre. Continuing the catechetical theme seen in the period’s literature, some of his poems were devoted to explaining Catholic doctrine, such as Deongliad ar y Miserere (Explanation of the Miserere) and Deongliad ar y Magnificat (Explanation of the Magnificat).46 He also translated the Jesus Psalter into Welsh, and prepared a Welsh and Latin catechism, Crynodeb or Athrawiaeth Gristnogawl (Synopsis of Christian teaching).47 His work was never published, but survives in two manuscripts, one of them composed by himself.48 This tendency to rely on manuscript rather than print was characteristic of the Welsh mission throughout its history, partially due to the aforementioned difficulties in printing Welsh books, and partially due to the existence of a network of professional scribes throughout Wales, but particularly in the south-­east, who supported the work of the still flourishing professional bards. This meant that it was possible to produce and circulate texts even in the absence of a printing press, or of the necessary finance to print books abroad and smuggle them into Wales.49 The hymns and poems would also have circulated orally, which would have enabled the dissemination of Catholic teaching amongst the illiterate majority who would otherwise have been dependent on their literate neighbours to read for them.50 The overriding theme of the literature produced for the Welsh mission during this period is catechesis. The shortage of clergy and the constant fear of persecution from the authorities meant that the opportunities to hear Catholic doctrine explained by a priest would necessarily have been few and far between, at least for those Catholics not in a position to keep their own resident chaplains.51 While this was a necessary development in the face of the challenges facing the community, it also shows a decline in confidence that the Welsh nation as a whole could be won back to Catholicism, and a consequent quiet retreat into becoming another non-­conformist denomination. The increasing prominence of translations over original works is symptomatic of this. Whereas the Elizabethan period had seen the production of several original apologetic texts discussing areas of doctrine in contention with the Reformers, the period 1641–1745 by contrast is almost entirely devoid of original compositions. Apart from some sections of the Allwydd, all we have is Gwilym Pue’s poetry; a more visible sign of the decline in vitality of the community would be hard to imagine. That being said, whilst the dream of reconciling Wales to the Church might well have faded, the Catholic 46  The National Library of Wales (hereafter NLW) MS 13167B, fols. 1–44, 45–61. 47  ‘PUW, PUE, PUGH, family, of Penrhyn Creuddyn’. 48  NLW MS 13167B and MS 4710. 49  Garfield H. Hughes (ed.), Rhagymadroddion 1547–1659 (Caerdydd, 1976), p. 47. 50  For a discussion on the use of orality amongst a similarly illiterate population in Scotland, see Jane Dawson, ‘Calvinism and the Gaidhealtachd in Scotland’, in Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke, and Gillian Lewis (eds.), Calvinism in Europe 1540–1620 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 231–53. 51  The Herberts of Powis Castle in Welshpool, for instance, were able to keep at least one Jesuit chaplain on hand throughout most of the years of persecution. See T.  B.  Trappes-­Lomax, ‘Roman Catholicism in Montgomeryshire’, Casgliadau Maldwyn, 55 (1957), pp. 15–20.

Vernacular Catholic Literature  269 community itself was going nowhere. It was still capable of producing martyrs, such as John Lloyd and Phillip Evans, executed in Cardiff on 22 July 1679, and its major site of pilgrimage, St Winefride’s shrine at Holywell, remained open throughout the period.52 Indeed, marriages were celebrated there as late as 1640.53 The continuing patronage of the Catholic gentry ensured at least some level of protection from the authorities, as did a certain tendency to avoid confrontation that might lead to persecution. Fewer than a quarter of the Catholic gentry of Monmouthshire were active for the King during the first Civil War, for example, and the most prominent of the county’s recusants played no part in the war.54 As the shift in focus of the community’s literature from outward looking apologetics to an inward looking emphasis on catechesis demonstrates, by 1745 Wales’ Catholics were a self-­sufficient minority that would have been near-­impossible for the authorities to remove entirely, but which was unlikely to expand far without some major outside stimulus.

Scottish Gaelic This brief overview of surviving references to Catholicism in early modern Scottish Gaelic vernacular literature outlines an absence as much as it delineates a presence. Such references are less common than might be expected, principally because of contemporary political considerations, but also, perhaps, due to the Protestant allegiances of the pioneer collectors of oral literature. Across the Gaelic-­speaking half of Scotland, Calvinist ministers attempted to stamp out ‘idolatry’ and ‘superstition’: the remnant customs, rites, sites, and beliefs surviving from pre-­Reformation Scotland.55 In the Highlands, in districts less accessible to godly reformers, a ‘vernacular’ folk Christianity survived at a community level. The launch of the Franciscan mission to the western Highlands in the early 1620s, with the support of Randall MacDonnell, first earl of Antrim, saw Catholic clergy returning to many districts in the region. The missionary venture also facilitated clandestine resistance to the expansion across the western seaboard of the political authority of the Campbells of Argyll.56 Nevertheless, as with later 52  M.  C.  O’Keefe, ‘Three Catholic Martyrs of Breconshire’, Brycheiniog, XVII (1976), pp. 59–65, p.  63; Alexandra Walsham, ‘Holywell: Contesting Sacred Space in Post-­Reformation Wales’, in Will  Coster and Andrew Spicer (ed.), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 211–36, p. 217. 53  Williams, ‘St Winifred’s Well’, pp. 32–51, p. 47. 54  Matthews, ‘Protestant Fears of Catholics in Monmouthshire’, p. 21. 55  Dawson, ‘Calvinism in the Gàidhealtachd in Scotland’, pp. 231–53; James Kirk, ‘The Kirk and the Highlands at the Reformation’, Northern Scotland, 7 (1986), pp. 1–22; Fiona A. Macdonald, Missions to the Gaels: Reformation and Counter-­Reformation in Ulster and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland 1560–1760 (Edinburgh, 2006), pp. 16–28. 56  Cathaldus Giblin (ed.), Irish Franciscan Mission to Scotland, 1619–1646 (Dublin, 1964), pp. 55–96; R. Scott Spurlock, ‘Confessionalization and Clan Cohesion: Ireland’s Contribution to Scottish Catholic

270  Mac Craith / January-M c Cann / Stiùbhart Catholic missionary undertakings, only a very few individuals were involved. Throughout the 1620s just four or five Franciscans were active among the perhaps 300,000 people inhabiting the Gàidhealtachd. Most of the abundant ‘conversions’ enumerated in Franciscans testimonies were brought about through working within popular belief frameworks.57 Theological—­ and, doubtless, political—­ contentions were largely employed in winning over local gentry and nobility. Cornelius Ward, for example, followed a strategy originally proposed by the nuncio at Brussels, to curry favour with local chiefs using literary skills ‘either by writing histories or something similar’. Disguising himself as an Irish poet, Ward ingratiated himself into the household of the powerful but insolvent magnate John Campbell of Cawdor and brought about his conversion.58 Catholic proselytizing in the Scottish Highlands nonetheless remained episodic and precarious. Until the end of the seventeenth century, Highland missions were mainly undertaken by Irish Gaels. These clerical ‘frontiersmen’ were dependent upon local Catholic chiefs and gentry. The Hebrides and western Highlands remained a peripheral zone wedged between Scotland and Ireland, generally passed over by Propaganda Fide. They were often sidelined by the network of Irish Catholic colleges on the Continent or even repudiated altogether, as by Lowland clergy at the Scots colleges at Rome and Douai.59 Want of patronage and supervision also hindered the recruitment of Scottish Gaelic-­speaking candidates for the priesthood.60 Clerical continuity with pre-­ Reformation ecclesiastical institutions had been broken. In the absence of an indigenous Catholic clergy, the history of Highland Christianity, even the figure

Renewal in the Seventeenth Century’, in David Edwards and Simon Egan (eds), The Scots in Early Stuart Ireland: Union and Separation in Two Kingdoms (Manchester, 2015), pp. 169–202; Jason Harris, ‘The Irish Franciscan mission to the Highlands and Islands’, in Edwards and Egan (eds), The Scots in Early Stuart Ireland, pp. 203–29; Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart, ‘An Gàidheal, a’ Ghàidhlig, agus a’ Ghàidhealtachd anns an t-­seachdamh linn deug’ (University of Edinburgh PhD thesis, 1997), pp. 78–93, 128–32, 138–42. 57  Giblin (ed.), Irish Franciscan Mission, pp. 27, 49–53, 66, 68–72, 74, 83–9. Compare Alexandra Walsham, ‘Miracles and the Counter-­Reformation Mission to England’, The Historical Journal, 46 (2003), pp. 779–815. 58  Giblin (ed.), Irish Franciscan Mission, pp. 27, 54–5, 124. 59  Giblin (ed.), Irish Franciscan Mission, pp. 90–2, 94–5, 109, 112, 117–18; Cathaldus Giblin, ‘The Irish Mission to Scotland in the Seventeenth Century’, Franciscan College Annual: Irisleabhar Choláiste na bProinnsiasach (Multyfarnham, 1952), p. 8 n. 9; Harris, ‘Irish Franciscan Mission’, pp. 207–8, 218–19, 221–3; Macdonald, Mission to the Gaels, pp. 88–91. 60  See 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; Breandán Ó Buachalla, Aisling Ghéar. Na Stíobhartaigh agus an tAos Léinn 1603–1788 (Dublin, 1996), pp. 16–134; 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 (Manchester, 2017), pp. 90–114; Tadhg Ó Dúshláine, An Eoraip agus Litríocht na Gaeilge 1600–1650. Gnéithe de Bharócachas Eorpach i Litríocht na Gaeilge (Dublin, 1987).

Vernacular Catholic Literature  271 of its founder St Columba himself, were appropriated by Protestant thinkers, Presbyterians and Episcopalians alike. In the Gàidhealtachd, unlike in Ireland, the Catholic Church played no role in educational, intellectual, or artistic patronage. Local chiefs and gentry continued to serve as cultural benefactors, but financial support was also available from the Church of Scotland, in particular the Synod of Argyll which encompassed the entire Hebridean archipelago. In contrast to the Irish religious orders who served as agents of Catholic Counter-­Reformation, many of their Scottish Gaelic counterparts established long-­lasting Protestant clerical dynasties.61 Some of these were beneficiaries of a scheme launched during the 1640s, heavily backed by the marquess of Argyll, to educate a cadre of Gaelic-­speaking ministers. This aimed to secure the allegiance of a youthful generation of Gaelic intelligentsia to the Covenanting cause. Significantly, the programme was not only to be brought to fruition through bursaries for Highland divinity students in Lowland universities but also through the assistance of John MacMarquess in Kintyre, ‘ane old man and able in the Irish language’—the classical literary standard is meant here—­ who would advise on the translation of religious materials.62 Establishing the scheme became more urgent following the landing of Alexander MacDonald in Argyll as head of a royalist expeditionary force of 2,000 Irish troops in 1644. The account of the Jesuit James Macbreck demonstrates how MacDonald’s campaign could be interpreted as a Catholic crusade against the forces of heresy, assisted by Franciscan regimental chaplains.63 But contemporary Gaelic songs, as well as the voluminous narratives concerning MacDonald recorded from later oral tradition, offer a different picture, with only a single reference to Catholicism: ‘Alasdair mac Colla himself and the men who were with him were Catholics, and they were burning every house they passed unless the household was Catholic’.64 The major vernacular poet of the period was John MacDonald or Iain Lom (Bald John) from Lochaber. A Catholic who was said—­erroneously, of course—­to have acquired his nickname from a tonsure acquired during an education in Rome, Iain Lom lent vociferous support to MacDonald’s campaign.65

61  Derick S. Thomson, ‘Gaelic Learned Orders and Literati’, Scottish Studies, 12 (1968), pp. 67–8. 62  Salvatore Cipriano, ‘ “Students Who Have the Irish Tongue”: The Gàidhealtachd, Education, and State Formation in Covenanted Scotland, 1638–1651’, Journal of British Studies, 60 (2021), pp. 66–87. 63 William Forbes Leith (ed.), Memoirs of Scottish Catholics during the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries, 2 vols. (London, 1909), I, pp. 281–358; Allan I. Macinnes, The British Confederate: Archibald Campbell, Marquess of Argyll, c. 1607–1661 (Edinburgh, 2011), pp. 197–212; David Stevenson, Highland Warrior: Alasdair MacColla and the Civil Wars (Edinburgh, 2003), pp. 122–3, 146, 150–1, 156, 158, 199. 64  Angus Matheson, ‘Traditions of Alasdair mac Colla’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Glasgow, 5 (1958), pp. 22–3; the Classical Gaelic poet and historian Niall MacMhuirich displays a similar reticence regarding any Catholic impulses in his late-­seventeenth-­century account of the campaign: Rev. Alexander Cameron (ed.), Reliquiæ Celticae, 2 vols. (Inverness, 1892–4), II, pp. 174–204. 65 Annie  M.  MacKenzie (ed.), Òrain Iain Luim: Songs of John MacDonald, Bard of Keppoch (Edinburgh, 1964), pp. xxvi, xxviii–­xxix, xxxiv–­xxxvii, xli.

272  Mac Craith / January-M c Cann / Stiùbhart His songs, abounding in inflammatory polemic, composed in the vernacular ­language of the people rather than the mandarin classical literary standard, parallel English public discourse driven by a ‘explosion’ in accessible cheap printed material.66 Despite Iain Lom’s outspoken persona, however, there are exceptionally few explicit references to confessional allegiances in his oeuvre. One explanation for this is hinted at in a long list of potential clan allies in a song praising MacDonald’s Lowland associate, James Graham, first marquess of Montrose.67 Given that the Scottish Gàidhealtachd was a patchwork of different clans and confessional allegiances, for Iain Lom to accentuate the Catholic aspect of the campaign would repel potential allies, exacerbate existing rivalries, discredit the royalist cause, and further provoke anti-­Catholic opposition of the Gàidhealtachd. Rather, he prudently exploited widespread anti-­Campbell animus. The very lack of overt Catholic verse from the period suggests that Highland Catholics were already accustomed to employing an outward conformity which contrasted with inner recalcitrance.68 Nevertheless, there are piecemeal allusions to Catholicism in Iain Lom’s extant work. An elegy for Alexander MacDonald, composed following his death in Ireland in 1647, is a defiant assertion in which the omens and marvels associated with the Highland campaign appear to be ascribed as much to MacDonald himself as to the deity: But my trust is in Christ That that day will be avenged Before your great miracles cease.69

It is notable that the one song where Iain Lom openly declares his Catholic af­fi n­ ities is in his elegy for the royalist George Gordon, second marquess of Huntly, beheaded at Edinburgh in 1649. Although from a Catholic family, the marquess’ own religious inclinations were artfully concealed. His heir, Lord Lewis Gordon was less constrained, and Iain Lom may have composed his elegy as much for him as for its ostensible subject.70 In concluding stanzas, the poet superimposes three different concepts of destiny to hammer home his conviction of ultimate royalist

66  Jason Peacey, ‘The Revolution in Print’, in Michael J. Braddick (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution (Oxford, 2015), pp. 276–93; Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about Itself (New Haven, 2014). 67  MacKenzie (ed.), Òran Iain Luim, pp. 28–33. 68  See R.  Scott Spurlock, ‘The Laity and the Structure of the Catholic Church in Early Modern Scotland’, 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. 243–4. 69  MacKenzie (ed.), Òrain Iain Luim, p. 36. 70  See Barry Robertson, Lordship and Power in the North of Scotland: The Noble House of Huntly 1603–1690 (Edinburgh, 2011), pp. 89–93, 95–6, 143–54.

Vernacular Catholic Literature  273 victory: age-­old prophecy; the wheel of fortune; and, finally, God’s favour to the faithful: Well ought we to entreat Thee, Whose virtues are most wonder-­working, And to go on our knees, To make prayer and fasting, To celebrate a Mass without deceit To prove that we are Thine, Whose hand disperses the waves for us, Send us Cromwell to trample.71

References to Catholicism in the public verse composed in Scottish Gaelic during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms are relatively sparse. We have, however, two late-­ seventeenth-­century private devotional poems composed by Catholics. Sgrìobh le toscaire bile (Write a letter by a messenger), perhaps from the early 1680s, is a twelve-­stanza deathbed poem composed by the chief Archibald MacDonnell of Keppoch: With tearful repentance That would clean every blemish in my body; Christ, be reconciled with me, Take from me your sharp, agonising scourge.72

Composed later in the decade, and similarly devoid of specific doctrinal references, is Mo chomraich ort, a Rìgh (Give sanctuary to me, o King), twenty-­three stanzas in the popular crosanachd syllabic metre. It is one of several devotional poems making up the first part of the ‘Fernaig manuscript’, a collection begun in the late 1680s, probably compiled by the Episcopalian Duncan MacRae of Inverinate in Kintail. Here the poem is ascribed to ‘Alister McCuistan’.73 This may well be the Douai-­educated, staunchly Catholic son of a Covenanting officer, Alexander Fraser of Kinerras; a rare example of a seventeenth-­century Gaelic alumnus of a Continental college, he was instrumental in maintaining his religion in his native Strathglass. In a clan history dating from the early eighteenth ­century, Sir Aeneas MacPherson appraises fellow Catholics Alexander Fraser and Iain Lom as ‘two of the greatest poets and genealogues of the Highlands’.74 71  MacKenzie (ed.), Òrain Iain Luim, p. 54. 72  Colm Ó Baoill and Donald MacAulay, Scottish Gaelic Vernacular Verse to 1730: A Checklist (Aberdeen, 2001), no. 71. 73  Calum MacPhàrlain (ed.), Làmh-­Sgrìobhainn Mhic Rath (Dundee, 1923), p. 98. 74 Aeneas MacPherson, The Loyall Dissuasive and Other Papers concerning the Affairs of Clan Chattan (Edinburgh, 1902), p. 220; Alexander MacWilliam, ‘A Highland Mission: Strathglass, 1671–1777’, Innes Review, 23 (1973), pp. 78–9, 82, 85.

274  Mac Craith / January-M c Cann / Stiùbhart If my ascription is correct, the ‘Fernaig manuscript’ verses seems to be the only surviving example of Fraser’s compositions. As with the poem of Archibald MacDonnell of Keppoch, that of Fraser is a work of contrition, in this case for sins of the flesh, progressing to meditation on the crucifixion and concluding with praise of his Saviour: The King in which I would find truth, Who makes the sea ebb and flow, Who makes every leaf wither, Who makes every wonder.75

Following the expansion and consolidation of the Catholic mission in Highlands under James VII & II, the Williamite Settlement instigated a period of intensified political and religious strife in the Highlands.76 The latter half of MacRae’s ‘Fernaig manuscript’ composed during the Highland civil wars of the early 1690s, is quite different.77 It was now public, political, and polemical, above all in the purported translations of two English broadsides, Jock Britain’s Complaint, and The True Protestant’s Complaint, the latter of which excoriates the papacy and Catholic doctrine.78 A more reliable perspective on early eighteenth-­century popular Catholicism might be evinced in the work of Sìleas, or Julia, MacDonnell, the daughter of the poet-­ chief Archibald MacDonnell. Although born in Lochaber, Sìleas spent most of her life on her husband’s lands in Highland Banffshire on the very eastern border of the Gàidhealtachd, part of the extensive estates of the dukes of Gordon.79 The assertive Jacobite and Catholic leanings of her husband’s people helped to shape her poetic voice. Sìleas’s most ardent pol­it­ ical poetry was composed during the 1715 Jacobite Rising; lines in her limerick song Do dh’Fheachd Mhorair Màr (To the Army of the Earl of Mar) vilify Presbyterian adversaries: 75  MacPhàrlain (ed.), Làmh-­Sgrìobhainn Mhic Rath, pp. 102–3. 76  Allan Kennedy, ‘The Condition of the Restoration Church of Scotland in the Highlands’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 65 (2014), pp. 323–6; Macdonald, Mission to the Gaels, pp. 155–77, 218–40; Allan  I.  Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788 (East Linton, 1996), pp. 173–81. 77  Sìm Innes and Steven Reid, ‘Expressions of Faith: Religious Writings’, in Nicola Royan (ed.), The International Companion to Scottish Literature (Glasgow, 2018), pp. 66–7. 78  MacPhàrlain (ed.), Làmh-­Sgrìobhainn Mhic Rath, pp. 232–53. 79  Colm Ó Baoill (ed.), Bàrdachd Shìlis na Ceapaich (Edinburgh, 1972), pp. i–­lxvi. See also Colm Ó Baoill, ‘Sìleas na Ceapaich’, in Thomas Owen Clancy and Murray Pittock (eds.), Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 2007), pp. 305–14; Barbara Hillers, ‘Cleas a’ Choin Sholair: Aesop’s Dog Fable in the Poetry of Sìleas na Ceapaich’, in Wilson McLeod et al. (eds.), Bile ós Chrannaibh: A Festschrift for William Gillies (Brig o Turk, 2010), pp. 195–210; Sorley Maclean, ‘Sìlis of Keppoch’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, 45 (1967–8), pp. 98–112; Kate Louise Mathis, ‘Presence, Absence, and Audience: The Elegies of Sìleas na Ceapaich “at Home” and “Abroad” ’, in Sierra Dye, Elizabeth Ewan, and Alice Glaze (eds.), Gender and Mobility in Scotland and Abroad (Guelph, 2018), pp. 183–201; Natasha Sumner, ‘Women’s Conduct and the Poetry of Sìleas na Ceapaich’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 32 (2013), pp. 304–24.

Vernacular Catholic Literature  275 many a pulpit now in the rabble’s care, many a bishop at the mercy of the beasts.80

In general, however, it is notable that Scottish Gaelic Jacobite poets, whether involved in the 1715 or 1745 Risings, followed earlier examples and avoided potentially divisive confessional avowals. From the end of the seventeenth century, Presbyterian authorities—­latterly with the support of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge or SSPCK—­made strenuous efforts to educate and catechize a younger generation of Gaels. In areas where the two denominations met Catholic clergy had to respond. In 1716 a new seminary was founded at Scalan, some 20 miles from Sìleas’s home. Establishing local schools, however, was more difficult, given hostility of the authorities, inadequate finances, and the fact that parents were eager for children to acquire literacy in English, which was offered by Protestant schoolteachers.81 Sìleas MacDonnell composed at least seven religious poems.82 Among these are three hymns, two to be recited in the morning, one at night; a hymn to Mary, ’S e do bheatha, Mhoire Mhaighdean (Hail to thee, Virgin Mary), a brief versified life of Christ, which remained popular within living memory, and An Eaglais (The Church), a simple exposition of Church doctrine containing stanzas such as: They bound the Creed around it [the Church], lest it come apart; there are seven locks upon its door, and keepers hold its keys: Baptism, Confirmation in order, the glorious Body of Christ, and Penance, Extreme Unction, Ordination, and Matrimony— those are the seven which we should receive.83

It is very likely that these poems were intended to disseminate rudimentary Catholic doctrine. Again, it may be that Sìleas was involved in the initiative referred to in a 1714 Presbyterian report concerning the parishes of Glenlivet and 80  Ó Baoill (ed.), Bàrdachd Shìlis na Ceapaich, p. 24. 81  Nathan Philip Gray, ‘ “A Publicke Benefite to the Nation”: The Charitable and Religious Origins of the SSPCK, 1690–1715’ (University of Glasgow PhD thesis, 2011), pp. 20, 136, 172–3, 185–9, 193–4, 198–200, 214; Jamie J. Kelly, ‘The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge: Education, Language & Governance in the British State and Empire, c. 1690–c. 1735’ (University of Glasgow PhD thesis, 2020), pp. 121–5, 133–6, 160; John Watts, Scalan: The Forbidden College, 1716–1799 (East Linton, 1999), pp. 20–46. 82  Ó Baoill (ed.), Bàrdachd Shìlis na Ceapaich, pp. lix–­lx, lxii–­lxv, 12–15, 58–63, 84–107, 116–21. 83  Ó Baoill (ed.), Bàrdachd Shìlis na Ceapaich, p. 104.

276  Mac Craith / January-M c Cann / Stiùbhart Strathavon in Highland Banffshire: ‘The papists in the said bounds have of Late set up privat Schools which are taught by popish women. The priests also Instruct women, and send them through the Country to propagat their delusions’.84 The persistent tradition ascribing Sìleas’s dialogue poem Còmhradh ris a’ Bhàs (A Conversation with Death) to her experience of a prolonged, trance-­like illness that resulted in her conversion, associates the poet with a wider European mysticism: He struck a heavy blow on my side, and one or two were not enough for him, till he made me cry out, and it was a vain task for me to strike him.85

The work of Sìleas MacDonnell encourages us to look beyond formal printed religious material in Scottish Gaelic, published in the Lowlands, and to explore the heterogeneous, fluid, and perhaps more influential tradition of popular devotional hymns and versified Biblical narratives. These were composed and dis­sem­in­ated within local communities: examples, perhaps, of cultural confessionalization propagated from below. References to Catholicism in early modern Scottish Gaelic literature remain frustratingly elusive in the sources. This was understandably prudent in a multi-­ confessional region. Nevertheless, even if substantially more Catholic poetry was composed in Scottish Catholic, later song collectors, many of them Protestant clergy, may have been disinclined to record them. For example, the only sources for Sìleas’s ‘A Conversation with Death’, as well as for two of her hymns, are transcriptions from a now lost notebook preserving poems recorded from one of her servants long after her death, by a great-­nephew educated at the Scots College in Rome.86 The hymns of Sìleas MacDonnell also evoke the charms, incantations, prayers, and blessings permeating everyday Gaelic culture. The collections of late-­ nineteenth-­century folklorists, particularly Alexander Carmichael, the editor of Carmina Gadelica (1900), demonstrate that these items remained abundant, and cherished, throughout the region.87 Throughout the Scottish Gàidhealtachd, over 84  Noel Macdonald Wilby, ‘The “Encreasce of Popery” in the Highlands 1714–1747’, Innes Review, 17 (1966), p. 93. 85  Ó Baoill (ed.), Bàrdachd Shìlis na Ceapaich, p. 14. See Sarah Apetrei, ‘Gender, Mysticism, and Enthusiasm in the British Post-­Reformation’, Reformation and Renaissance Review, 17 (2005), pp. 116–28; Michael  B.  Riordan, ‘The Episcopalians and the Promotion of Mysticism in North-­East Scotland’, Scottish Church History, 47 (2018), pp. 31–56. 86 Morley, The Popular Mind, pp. xxx–­xxii, 169. 87 Alexander Carmichael (ed.), Carmina Gadelica, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1900); John Gregorson Campbell, The Gaelic Otherworld (Edinburgh, 2005), pp. 199–219, 448–83, 675–9, 688; Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart (ed.), The Life and Legacy of Alexander Carmichael (Port of Ness, 2008).

Vernacular Catholic Literature  277 and beyond the work of specific poets, Catholic tradition continued to make itself felt in everyday spiritual life.

Select Bibliography Bowen, Geraint, ‘Roman Catholic Prose and Its Background’, in R. Geraint Gruffydd (ed.), A Guide to Welsh Literature, vol. 3: c. 1530–1700 (Cardiff, 1997), pp. 210–40. Bowen, Geraint, Welsh Recusant Writings (Cardiff, 1999). Cunningham, Bernadette, ‘Language, Print and Literature in Irish, 1630–1730’, in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), The Cambridge History of Ireland, vol. II: 1550–1730 (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 434–58. Giblin, Cathaldus (ed.), Irish Franciscan Mission to Scotland 1619–1646 (Dublin, 1964). Mac Craith, Mícheál, ‘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: To 1890 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 191–231. Mac Murchaidh, Ciarán, ‘The Catholic Church and the Irish Language’, in James Kelly and Ciarán Mac Murchaidh (eds.), Irish and English Essays on the Irish Linguistic and Cultural Frontier, 1600–1900 (Dublin, 2012), pp. 162–88. Macdonald, Fiona A., Missions to the Gaels: Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Ulster and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland 1560–1760 (Edinburgh, 2006). Ó Baoill, Colm (ed.), Bàrdachd Shìlis na Ceapaich (Edinburgh, 1972). Riggs, Pádraigín (ed.), Dáibhí Ó Bruadair: His Historical and Literary Context (Dublin 2001).

15 Jacobitism and Catholic Loyalists Éamonn Ó Ciardha

Jacobitism, both as a personal allegiance to the exiled James II and his heirs, and as a commitment to values that those who had ‘usurped’ the Stuart Crowns appeared to have trampled on, survived as a menace to those ‘usurpers’ for much of the century after 1688. The resultant ideology and movement, which manifested itself in foreign invasion plots and intestine rebellion, also inspired vibrant popular cultural and literary traditions across the three kingdoms and among a far-­flung, sizeable European diaspora. The birth of a Catholic heir to James II’s second wife Mary of Modena in June 1688 focused English, Irish, and Scottish minds on the prospect of a Catholic ­succession. Distaste at the King’s flirtations with Catholics and non-­conformists precipitated an invasion by his Protestant nephew and son-­in-­law, William Prince of Orange, who landed unopposed at Torbay on 5 November 1688. James subsequently fled to France; parliament pronounced his abdication and bestowed the Crown jointly on William and his wife Mary, James’ eldest, Protestant daughter. Although some of the old recusant families of the north and west rallied to their deposed king, English Whigs and Tories largely acquiesced in James’ removal and did not fire a shot in support of his cause.1 A small, but influential, tight-­knit group of English Catholics refused to break their solemn oaths to their late king and would play a leading role in Jacobite politics and culture at home and abroad for the next seventy years.2 They would be joined from the 1690s onwards by a host of disgruntled Tory and Whig pat­ riots, aristocrats, gentry, country squires, artisans, and labourers; a Jacobite underworld of demobilized soldiers, highwaymen, poachers, robbers, and smugglers who trumpeted the ‘illegitimacy’ of Orange or Hanoverian rule from ale house, club, coffee house, parlour, printing press, publishing house, pulpit, and gibbet. Many disdained how William III and George I put the interests of Holland and Hanover above those of England, squandering national wealth on clients, corruption, favourites, and futile foreign wars, while contaminating and corrupting English justice, politics, and culture. 1  Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745 (Woodbridge, 2009), p. 22. 2 Glickman, English Catholic Community, p. 20.

Éamonn Ó Ciardha, Jacobitism and Catholic Loyalists In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II: Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745. Edited by: John Morrill and Liam Temple, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843436.003.0016

Jacobitism and Catholic Loyalists  279 Deep-rooted political, religious, and clan rivalries undermined Scottish s­ olidarity with the hereditary Stuart dynasty and immediate military resistance to William ul­tim­ate­ly collapsed after the death of the charismatic John Graham, viscount Claverhouse at Killicrankie, in July 1689. However, the massacre of the MacDonalds of Glencoe (1692), the devastating famines of the 1690s, the disastrous failure to colonize Darien (1698–9), and the unpopular Act of Union (1708) rekindled the fires of a Scottish Jacobitism in which the highly militarized, predominantly Gaelic-­speaking Highlands assumed a disproportionate role. Its clan system, where tenants owed military service to their chief, meant that substantial bodies of armed men could be easily raised to support intestine rebellion or a foreign descent.3 Providing the main political ideology for Irish Catholics between the ‘Glorious’ (1688) and French Revolutions (1789), Irish loyalty to the Stuarts emerged after the Jacobean succession and would survive through the Civil War and Restoration periods. On the elevation of Charles’ Catholic brother, James, duke of York, to the throne in 1685, Irish Catholics hoped that he would repeal anti-­Catholic legislation and restore the lands and titles they had lost fighting for his family against the English parliament. Defeat and disillusionment initially dimmed but did not extinguish Irish enthusiasm for his fallen house; instead, their hopes for political deliverance would be inexorably linked with the ebbs and flows of the Jacobite tide. Through the course of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, often in the context of a whole series of Jacobite plots and invasion scares, Irish Jacobite commentators, Irish-­language poets, and a large, active Irish clerical, diplomatic, and military diaspora paid careful attention to Europe’s numerous dynastic wars and ongoing political and military rivalries, and their possible ramifications for the cause.4 Although different in form and intensity across the three kingdoms, Jacobitism nevertheless enjoyed a deep and active support base that produced a rich and vibrant history which has only begun to be understood in its proper three kingdom, pan-­European contexts. Monolingual, ‘nation-­based’ historians traditionally interpreted Jacobitism through the narrow prism of their national narratives, which has only served to obscure and marginalize an important, international, multidimensional movement. This chapter explores three distinct elements of Jacobitism: its relationship with Europe, the important role played by Catholic clergy to sustain it, and finally the literary culture it generated.

3  Daniel Szechi, The Jacobites: Britain and Europe, 1688–1788 (Manchester, 1994). 4 Éamonn Ó Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite cause 1685–1766: A Fatal Attachment (Dublin, 2002); Vincent Morley, The Popular Mind in Eighteenth-­Century Ireland (Cork, 2017).

280  Éamonn Ó Ciardha

The Jacobite Diaspora Sustained migration to Europe has characterized Britain and Ireland’s shared ­histories over 1,500 years. Close ties with the papacy and Europe’s great universities, religious institutions and organizations, the English and Scottish Crowns’ links with France, and a lucrative trade in fish, wine, and wool across the Irish Sea and English Channel accounts for much of this traffic in the medieval period. In the early modern period the political, military, socio-­economic, and cultural effects of the Reformation and Counter-­ Reformation considerably boosted this Continental footfall. Similarly, in the decades after the ‘Glorious Revolution’, thousands of English, Irish, Scottish, and, to a lesser extent, Welsh Jacobites found themselves scattered across Europe from the Iberian Peninsula to the Russian Steppe. They would play a key role in all aspects of European society, including banking, the church, education, trade, and soldiering.5 Many of these exiles retained a strong connection to their patrimonies, and some intended to return to help restore their king, reclaim their lands and titles, and rehabilitate their respective Catholic, Episcopalian, and Nonjuring com­mu­ nions. These expatriate communities also functioned as distinct diplomatic, military, political, and cultural (educational and religious) groupings; they ministered to the domestic missions in the three kingdoms, carried intelligence across the English Channel and Irish Sea, organized recruitment networks at home and abroad, and utilized religion and Jacobitism for military, political, and practical advantage. English, Irish, and Scottish priests ministered as chaplains to their respective military diasporas, acted as notaries and witnesses for wills and testaments, and served as guardians for their widows and orphans. Recent research has also shown that English-, Irish-, and Scottish-­born bankers, merchants, educators, lawyers, and notaries fulfilled similar roles; their careers, pan-­European political, socio-­economic, and cultural networks tell us much about their place in their host societies. After all, the Jacobite military diaspora formed only one part of multifaceted expatriate populations which organized themselves in host kingdoms, empires, and nations.6 Likewise, English, Irish, and Scottish Jacobites served, staffed, and led in armies across the entire continent from Lisbon to Moscow, seemingly flitting effortlessly between duchies kingdoms, empires, and republics; cultures, ideologies, languages,

5  J.  C.  D.  Clark, ‘Reconceptualising Diaspora: Religion, Persecution and Identity in Britain and Ireland’, in Donald  M.  MacRaild, Tanja Bueltmann, and J.  C.  D.  Clark (eds.), British and Irish Diasporas: Societies, Cultures and Ideologies (Manchester, 2019), pp. 20–56; Éamonn Ó Ciardha, ‘Irish Jacobites in Early Modern Europe: Exile, Adjustment and Experience, 1691–1745’, in MacRaild, Bueltmann, and Clark (eds.), British and Irish Diasporas, pp. 56–99. 6 Éamon Ó Ciosáin, ‘A Hundred Years of Irish Migration to France, 1590–1688’, in Thomas O’Connor (ed.), The Irish in Europe (Dublin, 2001), pp. 93–106; Glickman, The English Catholic Community, chs. 2, 7.

Jacobitism and Catholic Loyalists  281 and religions. Like other recruits, they joined foreign armies for many reasons, some ideological and political, others practical and professional. They fled confessional, cultural, and political persecution, famine, economic stagnation, and the drudgery of a labouring life. Others exchanged these for adventure and opportunity.7 Family ties, regional loyalties, tradition, and ‘chain military migration’ helped to sustain this extensive military diaspora. These exiles maintained strong cultural and ideological links with the land of their birth; they marched to Jacobite martial music and wore the red livery of their exiled king. Furthermore, their trials, tribulations, and triumphs animated their compatriots at home and throughout far-­flung, expatriate communities. They utilized genealogy, lineage, religion, and royalism to facilitate entry into (and promotion within) their chosen service, while others found that these sometimes hampered or stifled a promising military career. History, literature, journalism, art, and iconography have at once articulated, recorded, and supplemented its evolution, reincarnation and spread. Biographers, diarists, historians, pamphleteers, and poets nurtured and recorded the emergence and spread of a distinct, multilayered, multilingual identity that had religion and Jacobitism at its core.8 However, its record, which transcends chronological, geographical, and political boundaries, remains incomplete. The post-­Revolution careers, trials, and tribulations of high-­profile and or­din­ ary Jacobite exiles bear testimony to the flexibility, geographical mobility, and longevity of the ideology at home and abroad. As a multilayered, transnational, transcontinental, and transconfessional ideology, Jacobitism enabled these exiles to negotiate the choppy waters of exile and flourish, or flounder, in ancien régime Europe. It provided meta-­narratives through which they interpreted their own exile and the continued persecution of their domestic peers. Surviving historical and literary relics provide a fascinating insight into complex, interconnected confessional struggles, Hanoverian and Stuart royalism, and Franco-­British imperialism. Their activities in the realms of diplomacy, espionage, politics, and especially warfare provide a fitting testimony to their cultural fluidity, mobility, and vulnerability, while their often fraught diplomatic, military, and political travails shed valuable light on the vagaries of exile, in particular the need to balance loyalty to the Stuarts with political and military duty to the Bourbons and Habsburgs, and, to a lesser extent, Lorraines, Romanovs, and Vasas. 7  Ó Ciardha, ‘Irish Jacobites in Early Modern Europe’; Allan I. Macinnes, ‘Jacobitism in Scotland: Episodic Cause or National Movement?’, The Scottish Historical Review, 86 (2007), pp. 225–52; Glickman, English Catholic Community, pp. 78–9; Antoin E. Murphy, Richard Cantillon, Entrepreneur and Economist (Oxford, 1986); Priscilla O’Connor, ‘Sir Daniel Arthur’, in James McGuire and James Quinn (eds.), Dictionary of Irish Biography, 9 vols. (Cambridge, 2009), I, pp. 168–9. 8  Éamonn Ó Ciardha, ‘Irish-­Language Sources for the History of Early Modern Ireland’, in Alvin Jackson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Irish History (Oxford, 2014), pp. 439–62; Míchál 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: To 1890 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 191–231. For Scotland and England, see Macinnes, ‘Jacobitism in Scotland’; Glickman, The English Catholic Community.

282  Éamonn Ó Ciardha The correspondence, memoirs, and musings of these named and anonymous military exiles also reveal an optimistic and vibrant political ideology that ebbed and flowed with the vicissitudes of Irish, British, and European politics. Moreover, they show how they coped with political adversity at home and flourished or floundered in early modern Europe, interpreted their own exile, remained pre­ occu­pied with the persecution of their Jacobite peers at home, and viewed their respective kingdom’s role in Jacobite and European geo-­politics. These exiles ­display the tenacity, triumph, and tragedy that characterized Jacobitism, which helped to sustain English, Irish, and Scottish Catholic, Episcopalian, and Nonjuring identities for much of the eighteenth century and provide a link between the three kingdoms and their early modern diasporas.

Jacobite Catholicism The recently digitized Stuart Archives (Royal Collection, Windsor Castle), largely ignored by Irish historians until the 1990s, contain untold riches relating to successive Jacobite plots, vigorous diplomatic and political intrigues, and the all-­ consuming hopes of a Stuart restoration. A number of important characteristics of Jacobitism emerge from the archive, including evidence for the activities of ambitious English, Irish, and Scottish Catholic clerics, their vigorous canvassing for vacant bishoprics, and their diplomatic activity and political intrigue on behalf of their secular master in Rome. This is of course no surprise, given that close ties had been established between Jacobitism and Catholicism. Immediately after his accession to the throne in 1685, James II petitioned Pope Innocent XI for the right to nominate Catholic bishops in his kingdoms. Likewise, Mary of Modena, acting as regent for her son, and later ‘James III’ himself, regularly exercised this jealously guarded prerogative over the succeeding seventy years. For example, the Stuarts nominated all but five out of 129 Irish bishops and coadjutors between 1687 and 1765, thereby wielding a major influence over the higher clergy.9 As a result of this ideological hold, Jacobitism remained crucially relevant as the clergy understood that Episcopal hopefuls had to make their representations to their king, not the papacy. Although the exiled king never got the opportunity to show his appreciation to those Catholics who had sacrificed everything for his cause, he judiciously exercised this right of nomination. In return for his patronage, many bishops, priests, and religious acted as the eyes and ears of the Stuart king and his

9  Cathaldus Giblin, ‘The Stuart Nomination of Irish Bishops 1687–1765’, Proceedings of the Irish Catholic Historical Committee 1965–1967 (1968), pp. 35–47; Glickman, The English Catholic Community, pp. 215–19.

Jacobitism and Catholic Loyalists  283 allies in Europe. While adhering to official Vatican policy, they continued to inculcate a loyalty to the exiled monarchy among their flocks.10 In addition to their clandestine role in recruitment, Catholic clergymen-­cum-­ Jacobite agents and spies also trafficked between the three kingdoms and their respective diasporas. The diaspora remained in regular contact with the expatriate clerical brethren of their native diocese, they often contributed to their upkeep, and entrusted them with their wives, widows, and children. This is best exemplified by the proliferation of bursaries and scholarships that Irish Brigade soldiers bestowed on the continental colleges, providing education for the impoverished clergy from their own families, native parishes, baronies, or diocese. In return, the colleges took care of the spiritual needs of their secular brethren, supplied chaplains to the Brigades and acting as useful ports of call for those arriving from Ireland who were un­famil­iar with European languages and customs.11 The archival collection also contains hundreds of postulations from the in­di­ gen­ous and exiled nobility in support of Episcopal hopefuls; these are invariably imbued with a Catholic, Jacobite self-­righteousness, and persecution mentality, which is a necessary corrective to those histories which have downplayed the psychological effects of the penal laws. Their postulations continually refer to their ‘poor oppressed country’, ‘the poor persecuted Catholics’, their ‘lawful king’, their ‘fatherland’, and the ‘tyranny’ of the ‘usurping Elector of Hanover’ (George I/II). Moreover, they provide a ringing testimony to the singular importance of Jacobitism. Indeed, their sentiments are replicated 200-­fold in missives from Jacobite soldiers and statesmen, in the poems of the literati, and in the alarmist, pessimistic sermon and pamphlet culture of their Protestant contemporaries on both sides of the Irish Sea and English Channel. Finally, when used in conjunction with the extensive archives of Propaganda Fide, the Nunziatura De Fiandra, records from English, Irish, and Scots Colleges, as well as various French and Spanish archives, the Stuart Archive illuminates English, Irish, and Scottish Catholic Church organization in numerous ways. It reveals Catholic ecclesiastical high politics, the role of the Stuart king as the political conscience of the Catholic Episcopate, as well as the links between the Stuart kingdoms, France, Spain, Austria, Flanders, and Rome. Furthermore, it focuses on the major problems of the respective missions such as the inconvenience and 10 Éamonn Ó Ciardha, ‘On His Majesty’s Secret Service: Irish Catholic Clerics and the Exiled Stuarts’, in Conn Mac Gabhan (ed.), Dissonant Voices: Faith and the Irish Diaspora (Winchester, 2015), pp. 37–63. 11 Glickman, The English Catholic Community, pp. 9, 74–5, 82–3, 194–5, 201–2; Liam Swords, ‘Calendar of Irish Material in the Files of Jean Fromont, Notary at Paris, May 1701–24 Jan. 1730, in the Archives Nationales, Paris: Part 1, 1701–15’, Collectanea Hibernica, 34/5 (1993), pp. 77–115; Liam Swords, ‘Calendar of Irish Material in the Files of Jean Fromont, Notary at Paris, May 1701–24 Jan. 1730, in the Archives Nationales, Paris: Part 2, 1716–1730’, Collectanea Hibernica, 36/7 (1994/5), pp. 85–139; Liam Chambers, ‘Irish Fondations and Boursiers in Early Modern Paris, 1682–1793’, Irish Economic and Social History, 35 (2008), pp. 1–22.

284  Éamonn Ó Ciardha intermittent persecution of the penal code, as well as the struggle between the Continental-­based and indigenous clergy (and in the case of Scotland, between Highlanders and Lowlanders) for control of the English, Irish, and Scots Colleges. It also highlights ongoing friction between the regulars and seculars, as well as the problems caused by absentee bishops, and the oversupply of clergymen.12 The need for caution in cultivating and sustaining this written and oral traffic necessitated their deployment of a cryptic vocabulary and intricate ciphers and pseud­ onyms; ‘widows’ (vacant dioceses), ‘farms’ (dioceses), farmers (bishops), ‘tenants’ (bishops), and ‘the landlord’ (‘James III’).

Jacobite Literature Jacobitism also generated and recycled new, vibrant, multilingual literary traditions at home and abroad, much of which centred on the Stuarts’ hereditary, lawful right to the Crowns of the three kingdoms and disdain for the corrupting influence of usurping foreigners. It would also posit the inevitability of a Stuart restoration as the only solution to the nations’ problems. Several other common issues, themes, and tropes emerged and re-emerged, including passive obedience and non-­resistance, divine right and elective monarchy, chronic injustice, national humiliation, political and cultural self-­loathing, exile, dispossession, might vs. right, innocence, loyalty, and the devastating consequences of violent deposition and usurpation. These infused all genres of Jacobite literature, from the ‘high’ literature of figures such as John Dryden, Alexander Pope, John Caryll Senior, first Baron Caryll of Durford, and the nameless author of the ‘Poema de Hibernia’ (c.1691), to the anonymous, vernacular verse composed in five languages and pedalled across the three kingdoms by printers, poets, ballad-­singers, hawkers and scribes.13 This section will explore these authors, as well as several others, in greater detail. Like his Irish and Scottish contemporaries Dáibhí Ó Bruadair and Iain Lom, John Dryden’s literary career spanned the Civil Wars, Interregnum, Restoration, and Revolution periods. His Astraea Redux (Justice brought back) (1660) explored 12  Hugh Fenning, The Irish Dominican Province, 1698–1797 (Dublin, 1990); Hugh Fenning, The Undoing of the Friars (Dublin, 1972); Patrick Fagan, Divided Loyalties: The Question of an Oath for Irish Catholics (Dublin, 1997); Patrick Fagan, Dublin’s Turbulent Priest: Cornelius Nary, 1658–1738 (Dublin, 1991). For the small, but no less influential English mission, see Glickman, The English Catholic Community. 13  Howard Erskine-­Hill, ‘Literature and the Jacobite Cause: Was There a Rhetoric of Jacobitism?’, in Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1759 (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 49–69; Murray G. H. Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-­Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 1994); V.  Morley, ‘Idé-­eolaíocht an tSeacaibíteachais in Éirinn agus in Albain’, Oghma, 9 (1994), pp. 14–24; Éamonn Ó Ciardha, ‘The Stuarts and Deliverance in Irish and Scots-­ Gaelic Poetry’, in S.  J.  Connolly (ed.), Kingdoms United? Great Britain and Ireland since 1500: Integration and Diversity (Dublin, 1998), pp. 78–94.

Jacobitism and Catholic Loyalists  285 common royalist themes, including distrust of the impressionable populace, reverence for kingship, and his faith in divine providence. Absalom and Achitophel (1681), which coincided with the treason trial of the Whig peer Anthony Ashley-­ Cooper, first earl of Shaftesbury, portrayed Charles II as a god-­like King David, with Shaftesbury as the scheming Achitopel, and the duke of Monmouth, Charles’ impressionable natural son, as the doomed, errant Absalom. His extensive oeuvre of poems, plays, and operas, which included translations of Virgil, Theocritus, Lucretius, Horace, Ovid, and Homer, further distanced him from the Cromwellian regime, established his royalist credentials, and enabled him to recast classical literature and repurpose its heroes in the cause of his exiled king and Jacobite cause.14 This, as well as his conversion to Catholicism, would ultimately cost him his role as poet laureate and historiographer royal.15 As a Catholic of indifferent health and modest wealth, Alexander Pope found himself debarred from all posts of ‘trust and profit’. Despite these disadvantages, he enjoyed the friendship, patronage, and support of some of England’s most important Tories and Jacobite grandees. His Windsor Forest (1713), which he dedicated to George Granvillle, Lord Landsdowne, is a descriptive, historical poem on his native Windsor which is infused with strong Jacobite undertones. Like his friend Jonathan Swift, dean of St Patrick’s, who also sailed close to the wind on Jacobitism, Pope found his calling in political satire.16 The Rape of the Lock (?1712/14), which purportedly has its origins in a quarrel between two prominent English Catholic families over the provocative cutting off of a lock of a young woman’s hair, and The Dunciad (1729, 1742/3), which satirized bad w ­ riters, both contemplate key, politically loaded themes of beauty, reputation, conquest, anger, humour, and resignation, while also vigorously challenging Hanoverian rule and title.17 North of the Tweed, Dr Archibald Pitcairne, a medical doctor and skilled composer of Latin verse, penned the comedy The Assembly, or Scotch Reformation, originally entitled The Phanaticks (1691), and a satirical poem, Babel, which ex­ cori­ ated prominent Presbyterian divines. James Philip of Almerieclose’s Grameid (1689), a Latin history of the war in Scotland modelled on Lucan’s Pharsalia and Virgil’s Aeneid, had as its hero John Graham, Viscount Dundee, who leads the Highlanders in defence of James, ‘son’ of Fergus, the Irish-­born, ancestral king of the Scotland. Richard, Lord Maitland, later (titular) fourth earl of Lauderdale served with James II at the Battle of the Boyne (1690) and the first

14 See for example Threnodia Augustalis (London, 1685); The Hind and the Panther (London, 1687); Britannica Reviva (1688); Don Sebastian (London, 1689); and King Arthur (London, 1691). 15 Paul Hammond, ‘Dryden, John (1631–1700), poet, playwright, and critic’, ODNB. See also Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics, ch. 1; Glickman, The English Catholic Community, pp. 42, 125. 16  Ian Higgins, Swift’s Politics: A Study in Disaffection (Cambridge, 1994). 17  Howard Erskine-­Hill, ‘Pope, Alexander (1688–1744), poet’, ODNB. See also Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics, ch. 1; Glickman, The English Catholic Community, pp. 125, 153.

286  Éamonn Ó Ciardha Siege of Limerick (1690). He later joined his exiled monarch at St German-­en-­laye, where he translated Virgil into English, which he dedicated to Mary of Modena and dispatched to Dryden before the latter had commenced his own. Alexander Robertson of Straun, thirteenth holder of the barony of Struan, played a role in all Jacobite campaigns from Dunkeld (1689) to Preston Pans (1746). Taken prisoner after Sheriffmuir (1715), he escaped and fled to France where he penned poetry in English, Scots Gaelic, French, Italian, and Latin, before returning to Scotland as an elderly man to take part in the ’45.18 His poems lamented his exile and the internal exile of those doomed to spend their lives evading Hanoverian soldiers, excoriated ‘UNION Slav’ry’, and lauded some of the leading Jacobites, including James Fitzjames, duke of Berwick, and the captain of Clanranald. Furthermore, in keeping with pan-­Jacobite literary tropes, he composed beast fables, Jacobite psalms, imitations of Horace, and a translation of The Aeneid.19 Finally, Allan Ramsay and his literary associates in the Easy Club (1712) penned prolific, patriotic Scots poetry and songs such as ‘This aint ma ain house’ and ‘To daunton me, to daunton me’ which articulated national grief at the decline and passing of an idealized, independent Scotland and their antipathy towards the Union and England’s subjugation of their patrimony.20 No appraisal of Irish and Scottish Jacobite literature can be considered comprehensive without addressing its extensive Irish and Scots-­Gaelic canon. Indeed, no subject stirred the Gaelic muse, either in Ireland or Scotland, as much as the Stuarts, although this material has not always received adequate attention by historians. The surviving literary output for the Jacobite period derives from three main areas of Irish and Scottish Gaeldom: first, the province of Munster; second, Oriel (Oirialla, representing most of the modern counties of Louth, Armagh, Monaghan, and parts of Down, Cavan, and Meath); and, finally, the Mac Donald territories (the Isle of Skye, the outer Hebridies) and mainland Invernesshire. Many, predominantly Anglocentric, monolingual historians have overlooked this literature as vacuous, and this neglect shows a total misunderstanding of the pivotal role of the poet and scribe, especially in early modern Irish societies. As key media, receptacles, and guarantors of this rich tradition, the poet and scribe, who, as Morley shows us, represented all sectors of Irish or indeed Scots Gaelic, society. This included book-­dealers, craftsmen, gentry, labourers, priests (Catholic and Church of Ireland), publicans, shopkeepers and tenant-­farmers, who at once both reflected and moulded public opinion until the middle of the ­nineteenth century. Moreover, their oeuvre survived in the repertoire of singers and story-­tellers in all areas of the country where Irish continued to be spoken.21

18  M. G. H. Pittock, ‘Robertson, Alexander, of Struan, c.1670–1749’, ODNB. 19 Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics, pp. 170–3. 20 Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics, pp. 146–60; Macinnes, ‘Jacobitism in Scotland’, p. 239. 21  The best account of this is in Morley, The Popular Mind, pp. 1–14.

Jacobitism and Catholic Loyalists  287 Their poetry and song culture often adopted a toasting and drinking component; poets regularly addressed their verse to Ireland in her various female forms (‘Gráinne’, ‘Róisín’, ‘Caitlín’, ‘Mailí’, or ‘Méibhín’), or to her aristocracy, clergy, and people. They based their political verse on news gleaned from English-­language newspapers and acted as a kind of press corps for the transmission of European political and military affairs to a largely monoglot Irish-­speaking public. The ­dramatic quality of the ‘aisling’ (vision poem), the literary apogee of Irish Jacobite composition, also resembled an embryonic form of street theatre, or the modern agallamh beirte (dialogue of two). Paul Monod, Paul Chapman, and Murray Pittock have highlighted the hawker and street-­singer’s importance for the articulation of the Jacobite ideology in England and Scotland, and it is inconceivable that eighteenth-­century Ireland and Gaelic Scotland would have been much different, particularly in view of the importance of their respective literary, oral, and song traditions, and because it provided one of the few media at their disposal for the articulation of Jacobite rhetoric.22 Its provenance and relevance are further exemplified by the fact that Irish poets regularly employed imported English and Scottish Jacobite airs such as ‘The White Cockade’, ‘For the King to Enjoy His Own Again’, ‘The Blackbird’, ‘The Soger Laddie’, ‘Flowers of Edinburgh’, ‘My Laddie Can Fight’, ‘Bonnie Dundee’, ‘Charlie Come Over the Water’ and ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’. The greater Irish, or indeed monoglot Scots Gaelic, populace had little access to other aspects of the popular Jacobite media and iconography, such as medals, coins, touch-­ pieces, art, ceremonial drinking glasses, fans, medals, prints, broadsheets, and other artefacts which characterized English and Scottish Jacobitism, while internal and Continental communication through English had obvious dangers.23 Therefore, poetry and song provided a remarkably flexible medium through which they could articulate and disseminate their political sentiments with relative impunity. Like its Scottish and English counterparts, Irish Jacobite poetry and song operated at two levels; the educated ear knew exactly who the poet meant when he referred to ‘The Steward’, ‘The Blackbird’, ‘The Shepherd’, ‘The Little Branch’, ‘The White-­ Backed Heifer’, or ‘The Merchant’s Son’. In poems such as ‘Suim Phurgadóra bhFear nÉireann’ (The Purgatory of the men of Ireland), ‘Caithréim an dara Séamuis’ (The triumph of James II); ‘Céad buidhe re Dia’ (One hundred thanks to God), and ‘Caithréim an tSáirséalaigh’ (The triumph of Sarsfield), Dáibhí Ó Bruadair and Diarmuid Mac Sheáin Bhuí

22 Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics; William Donaldson, The Jacobite Song: Political Myth and National Identity (Aberdeen, 1988). 23  Paul Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1989); Neville Woolf, The Medallic Record of the Jacobite Movement (London, 1988); Martin Kelvin, Jacobite Legacy: A Catalogue of Memorabilia of the Jacobite Era (Wigtown, 2003); Robin Nicholson, Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Making of a Myth: A Study in Portraiture 1720–1892 (London, 2002); Neil Guthrie, The Material Culture of the Jacobites (Cambridge, 2013).

288  Éamonn Ó Ciardha Mac Cárthaigh both chronicled Irish persecution under Charles I, Cromwell, and Charles II, and celebrated Irish Jacobite triumphalism in the mid-­1680s. They loudly sang the praises of James II, Mary of Modena, Lord Deputy Richard Talbot, earl of Tyrconnell, and the Jacobite General Patrick Sarsfield. Conversely, Ó Bruadair’s ‘An Longbhriseadh’ (The shipwreck) would become a metaphor for Irish Jacobite political and military bankruptcy.24 Similarly, their Scots-­Gaelic contemporary Iain Lom celebrated the darlings of the Scottish Royalist and Jacobite tradition, including Alasdair Mac Colla, the scourge of the Campbells; Montrose, royalist par excellence; and his kinsman ‘Bonnie Dundee’, the tragic victor of Killiekrankie (1689). James II’s ultimate defeat left Lom despondent, aghast at the repudiation of ‘God’s anointed’ for a ‘borrowed king’ (William III), horrified by the judicial murder of the MacDonnells of Glencoe (1692), and scathing against those Scots who sold their country for English gold in 1707.25 Ó Bruadair pre-­deceased his exiled king by three years (1698), while Iain Lom survived the signing of the Anglo-­Scottish Union by the same duration. After their demise, a new generation took up the cause. The poetry of Aogán Ó Rathaille, the Dryden of Munster, chronicles the obliteration of the Catholic aristocracy, gentry, clergy, and commonality in the decades after Limerick (1691). His ‘An milleadh d’imthigh air mhór-­shleachtaibh na hÉirionn’ (The destruction wrought on the great families of Ireland) paints a vivid picture of Ireland’s woes, which proceeded from the true king’s exile, while his aislingí ‘Gile na Gile’ (Brightness of brightness), ‘Mac an Cheannaí’ (The merchant’s son), and ‘An Aisling’ (The vision) at once provided a vivid insight into the cataclysmic consequences of their exile and the poet’s hopes for relief and restoration.26 Ó Rathaille’s Scottish contemporary, Shìlis nan Ceapaich, expressed a similar optimism in his ‘Oran do Righ Séamus’ (A song for King James). Composed in the run-­up to the 1715 Rebellion to the Irish tune ‘Mo Mhalí beag ó’ / My Little Molly O’, it heralded King’s James’ imminent arrival and the courage it would give to his friends.27 During the 1720s and 1730s, Ó Rathaille’s literary contemporaries and successors Seán and Tadhg Ó Neachtain, Seán Clárach Mac Domhnaill, Aindrias Mac Cruitín, Aodh Buí Mac Cruitín, Liam Dall Ó hIfearnán, Seán Ó hUaithnín, Seán na Ráithíneach Ó Murchadha, and Aindrias Mac Craith renewed their entreaties 24  For the examples given here, see John C. MacErlean (ed.), Duanaire Dháibhidh Uí Bhruadair: The poems of David Ó Bruadair. Part III, containing poems from the year 1682 till the poet’s death in 1698 (London, 1917), pp. 78–80, 94, 110, 142–58. 25 Annie  M.  McKenzie (ed.), Orain Iain Luim: Songs of John Macdonald, Bard of Keppoch (Edinburgh, 1973). 26 Aogán Ó Rathaille, ‘An milleadh d’imthigh air mhór-­ shleachtaibh na hÉirionn’, in Patrick  S.  Dinneen (ed.), Danta Aodhagain Ui Rathaille: The Poems Of Egan O’Rahilly (London, 1900), p. 6. 27  Colm Ó Baoill (ed.), Bàrdachd Shìlis nan Ceapaich (Edinburgh, 1972), no. x.

Jacobitism and Catholic Loyalists  289 to ‘James III’ and his prospective allies to come to Ireland’s aid. The outbreak of a general European war in September 1742 (The War of the Austrian Succession) reanimated Irish and Scots-­Gaelic Jacobite hopes. Seán Clárach Mac Dómhnaill, Liam Inglis, Tadhg Ó Neachtain, Liam Dall Ó hIfearnáin, and their contemporaries gleaned European war news from newspapers (such as the Dublin Gazette and Limerick Journal), translated it into Irish verse, and set it to popular Jacobite tunes. Indeed, Seán Clárach’s ‘Anfhocain Bhreatain’ (Britain’s peril), ‘Seal do bhíos i mo mhaighdin shéimh’ (Once I was a slender maiden), and ‘Gach Gaoidheal geal greanmhar’ (Every bright, merry Gael), as well as Aindrias Mac Craith’s ‘A dhálta nár dalladh le dlaoithe’ (The youth not blinded by comely locks) provided vivid details on British reversals in Europe and Prince Charles Edward’s successful landing and stunning progress in Scotland.28 A similar optimism pervaded contemporary Scots-­Gaelic poetry. Alasdair Mac Mhaisdir Alasdair MacDhòmhnaill served as a volunteer in Prince Charles Edward’s army. Among his numerous Jacobite poems and songs are a series of ‘amhráin bhrosnachaidh’ or incitements which expressed jubilation at King James’ imminent arrival and called on his compatriots to gather their arms, clothes, and flowing tartan plaid.29 Although ultimately vanquished at Culloden (1746), the Jacobite Gaels of Scotland looked to their exiled monarch for deliverance until at least the end of the Seven Years’ War. Mac Mhaisdir Alasdair beseeched ‘gentle James to come to us, king and earthly sire and sovereign of the nation by divine right’. He called on him to ‘pity his family, and since he owned his children, he urged him to put an end to the gallows and the axe that has taken off our heads’.30 Cumberland’s post-­ Culloden ransacking of Scottish Gaeldom, the proscription of the tartan, and wholesale disarmament of the clans brought many waverers and Whigs into the Jacobite fold, as evidenced in the post-­Rebellion verse of Iain Mac Fhearchair of North Uist, Donnchadh Bàn Mac an t-­Saoir of Argyllshire, Rob Donn Mac Aoidh of Sutherlandshire, and, of course, Mac Mhaistir Alasdair himself.31 Likewise the Munster poets Andrias Mac Craith, Seán Ó Tuama, Seán Clárach Mac Domhnaill, Píaras Mac Gearailt, Liam Inglis, and Seaghan Ua Cuinneagáin also preoccupied themselves with the Seven Years’ War, its possible ramifications for the Stuart cause, and the tangible benefits for Irish Jacobites, including the return of the native aristocracy, an end to religious persecution, the banishment of Protestants, and the rehabilitation of Irish and its literary culture.

28  Seán Clárach Mac Dómhnaill, ‘Anfhocain Bhreatain’, in R. Ó Foghluadha (ed.) Seán Clárach Mac Dómhnaill, 1691–1754 (BÁC, 1932), pp. 54, 56, 71, 72, 74; Aindrias Mac Craith, ‘A dhálta nár dalladh le dlaoithe’, Foghluadha (ed.), Éigse na Máighe (BÁC, 1932), p. 204. 29  John Lorne Campbell (ed.), Highland Songs of the Forty-­Five (Edinburgh, 1933), p. 48. 30  Campbell (ed.), Highland Songs of the Forty-­Five, pp. 102–3. 31  Angus Macloed (ed.), The Songs of Duncan Ban McIntyre (Edinburgh, 1978), p. 8; W. Matheson (ed.), The Songs of John MacCodrum (Edinburgh, 1938), pp. 6, 10.

290  Éamonn Ó Ciardha

Conclusion Jacobitism involved more than blind loyalty to the Stuarts. English, Irish, and Scottish Jacobites at home and abroad looked to the exiled dynasty to restore their confiscated lands and titles, reverse the political dominance of the Whig Oligarchy and Irish Protestant Ascendancy, and end the persecution of the Catholic, Episcopalian, and Nonjuring communions. They celebrated and promoted their cause in ink, oil, marble, and stone, and through rich ‘Court’ and plebian literary cultures in five languages. However, ‘James III’s’ death (1766) and the slow decline of his son Charles Edward into alcoholism and political oblivion ultimately reduced Jacobitism to a studied, sentimental irrelevance in English and Scottish politics, a process aided by the succession of the English-­born, ‘patriot king’, George III, the military and political rehabilitation of Scottish Jacobitism, and its absorption into the British war machine. Although Dr Johnson, James Boswell, Robert Burns, James Hogg, Lady Caroline Nairne, and Sir Walter Scott regularly evoked the Jacobite muse, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ and his lost cause was ‘noo awa’. Seventeenth-­century confiscations and the subsequent political decimation of the Irish Catholic landed interest ensured that an English or Scottish style, gentry-­ led, clan inspired movement did not characterize Irish Jacobitism. Nevertheless, it remained closely associated with the surviving Catholic aristocracy and gentry, a politically suspect Irish Protestant ‘convert’ interest, and a European-­ based, ­cler­ic­al, diplomatic, and military diaspora, and the Irish-speaking populace generally. Furthermore, it would be adroitly articulated and vigorous promoted by clerical and secular Jacobite commentators and writers at home and abroad. Subsequently fractured between Hanoverian accommodationists and those seduced by American- and French-­inspired republicanism, Catholic Ireland cemented its reputation as problem child of the British Empire.

Select Bibliography Clark, J. C. D., ‘The Many Restorations of King James: A Short History of Scholarship on Jacobitism, 1688–2006)’, in Paul Monod, Murray Pittock, and Daniel Szechi (eds.), Loyalty and Identity: Jacobites at Home and Abroad (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 9–56. Glickman, Gabriel, The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology (Woodbridge, 2009). Macinnes, Allan I., ‘Jacobitism in Scotland: Episodic Cause or National Movement’, Scottish Historical Review, 86 (2007), pp. 225–52. Monod, Paul, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1989). Morley, Vincent, The Popular Mind in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Cork, 2017).

Jacobitism and Catholic Loyalists  291 Ó Buachalla, Breandán, Aisling Ghéar: na Stíobhartaigh agus an t-aos léinn, 1603–1788 (BÁC, 1996). Ó Ciardha, Éamonn, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685–1766: A Fatal Attachment (Dublin, 2002). Ó Ciardha, Éamonn, ‘Irish Jacobites in Early Modern Europe: Exile, Adjustment and Experience, 1691–1745’, in Donald  M.  MacRaild, Tanja Bueltmann, and J. C. D. Clark (eds.), British and Irish Diasporas: Societies, Cultures and Ideologies (Manchester, 2019), pp. 56–99. Pittock, Murray G. H., Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 1994). Szechi, Daniel, The Jacobites: Britain and Europe, 1688–1788 (Manchester, 1994).

16 European Mercantile Networks Paul Monod

The eighteenth-­century Irish or British Catholic entrepreneur, while increasingly familiar to specialists, is still likely to be greeted with some incredulity by the ­general public. This is due in part to the survival of a stereotype that imagines capitalism as uncongenial to Catholics, especially Irish Catholics, at least before the so-­called Celtic Tiger was unleashed in the late twentieth century. It also stems from the enduring belief that religious and political oppression prevented Catholics from developing commercial interests. This negative interpretation was dispelled in the 1970s by L. M. Cullen’s research, revealing that the eighteenth-­ century Irish economy was far more robust than previous scholars had assumed. Cullen also began to explore the world of Irish Catholic merchants, at home and abroad.1 The subject was soon noticed by historians outside Ireland. In a 1973 article in Annales, Guy Chaussinand-­ Nogaret highlighted the Continental scope of eighteenth-­century Irish and British expatriate commerce. He connected ‘Jacobite’ merchant communities in Europe with two ‘diasporas’, the first departing from Ireland after the defeat of James II and the Treaty of Limerick in 1691, the second leaving Scotland after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715. Chaussinand-­ Nogaret explored the ‘commercial offering’ of these Jacobites to countries that took them in as exiles. He listed Irish and Scottish commercial houses in Denmark, Sweden, the Austrian Netherlands, France, and Spain. They became energetic dealers in wine, brandy, tobacco, and East Asian products like tea and silk. They were also involved in the trading of slaves.2 Unfortunately, Chaussinand-­Nogaret was mistaken on two points. First, Irish Catholic merchant communities in Europe preceded the Jacobite War and were a long-­term commercial phenomenon with religious overtones, not the result of a purely political migration. Second, none of the Scottish merchant houses he mentioned were founded by Catholics and few were demonstrably Jacobite. Emigrants 1 L. M. Cullen, An Economic History of Ireland since 1660 (London, 1972); L. M. Cullen, ‘The Irish Merchant Communities of Bordeaux, La Rochelle and Cognac in the Eighteenth Century’, in L. M. Cullen and Paul Butel (eds.), Négoce et industrie en France et en Irlande aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Paris, 1980), pp. 51–63. 2  Guy Chaussinand-­Nogaret, ‘Une élite insulaire au service de l’Europe. Les Jacobites au XVIIIe siècle’, Annales. Economies, Sociétés, Civilizations, 28 (1973), pp. 1097–122. Paul Monod, European Mercantile Networks In: The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II: Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745. Edited by: John Morrill and Liam Temple, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843436.003.0017

European Mercantile Networks  293 from Ireland, in fact, dominated the history of global commerce by Catholics displaced from the British Isles, before and after 1688. Scholarly interest in them began to change in the 1990s, with fresh research on the Irish in France, Spain, and the southern Netherlands. This expanded focus informed three volumes of essays edited by Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons, dealing with early modern Irish involvement in Europe, including trade and commerce.3 A now extensive body of publications has rendered the figure of an eighteenth century Irish Catholic entrepreneur far less incredible.

Emigration and Settlement Irish Catholic communities existed in western France from the late 1500s. As Mary Ann Lyons has shown, the Nine Years’ War from 1593 to 1601 brought a wave of impoverished Irish immigrants into Brittany, particularly to Saint-­Malo and Nantes.4 Éamon Ó Ciosáin has detailed the settlement of the Irish in France, especially Brittany, throughout the seventeenth century and has proposed a figure of 30,000–40,000 for the total number of Irish migrants prior to 1688. Departures from Ireland increased after 1650, in response to the Cromwellian conquest, the dispossession of Irish landowners, and the attempt to restrict trade to Protestant merchants. A list of Irish residents of Brittany in 1666 shows them spread out throughout the province. It includes the merchant Philip Dillon of Quimperlé, already naturalized as French, but omits Nantes, home to the Irish ship-­owning families of Lee, Fitzgerald, Barnwall, and Wetherby. The merchant elite was mainly Old English—­that is, descendants of the Catholic English settlers of the Middle Ages—­rather than Old Irish or Gaelic, but the community in Brittany was diverse. Those who lived in the port of Quimper, for example, had Gaelic names from Munster.5 The defeat of James II in the Jacobite War of 1689‒91 brought another 19,000 Irish immigrants into France, most of them soldiers in the King’s army. Under the terms of surrender at Limerick, 15,000 Jacobite troops were loaded onto ships and transported to France, along with about 4,000 women and children. The majority 3  Thomas O’Connor (ed.), The Irish in Europe, 1580–1815 (Dublin, 2001); Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons (eds.), Irish migrants in Europe after Kinsale, 1602–1820 (Dublin, 2003); O’Connor, Thomas and Mary Ann Lyons (eds.), Irish Communities in Early Modern Europe (Dublin, 2006). 4  Mary Ann Lyons, Franco-­Irish Relations, 1500–1610: Politics, Migration and Trade (Woodbridge, 2003), ch. 7; Mary Ann Lyons, ‘ “Vagabonds”, “Mendiants”, “Gueux”: French Reaction to Irish Immigration in the Early Seventeenth Century’, French History, 14 (2000), pp. 363–82. 5  Éamon Ó Ciosáin, ‘A Hundred Years of Irish Migration to France, 1590–1688’, in O’Connor (ed.), Irish in Europe, pp. 93–106; Thomas O’Connor, ‘The Irish in France, 1660–90’, in O’Connor and Lyons (eds.), Irish Communities, pp. 85–102; Thomas O’Connor, ‘Hidden by 1688 and After: Irish Catholic Migration to France, 1590–1685’, in David Worthington (ed.), British and Irish Emigrants and Exiles in Europe, 1603–1688 (Leiden, 2010), pp. 125–38.

294  Paul Monod ended up serving in the Irish regiments of Louis XIV, where soldiers were paid 1 sol more per day than French troops. After the 1697 Peace of Ryswick, about 5,000 Irishmen were demobilized. Nathalie Genet-­Rouffiac has traced their settle­ ment at Paris and St Germain-­en-­Laye, where the exiled James II and his family were installed in a palace belonging to the French monarch. The Jacobite Court, dominated by English and Scottish advisors, offered little support to the Irish ex-­ soldiers who tended to live in poverty.6 The theory that a substantial number of these veterans immediately went into commerce is a myth. Instead, they waited for the next war, which came in 1702, when many signed up for military service again. When the War of the Spanish Succession ended in 1714, some former soldiers did become entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, the main source of recruitment for the Irish merchant communities in France was never the French king’s Irish regiments, but Ireland itself. A steady stream of non-­military Catholic emigrants left Ireland, and to a far lesser degree England and Scotland, for France and other parts of Europe from the 1690s to the 1760s. While their numbers are hard to calculate, they must have amounted to many thousands. Their specific reasons for leaving home included economic difficulties, the renewed confiscation of Catholic land, the passing or enforcement of penal laws, and increased hostility towards Catholics. Seeking career opportunities, the Irish gravitated towards existing trading communities in France, Spain, and the southern Netherlands. Former Irish officers of the French army, some of them daring and innovative entrepreneurs, augmented their ranks after 1714. Younger sons of merchant families moved in the opposite professional direction by taking commissions in the French military. Marriage, family ties, and geographical origins facilitated the process of social integration between ex-­ officers and civilian immigrants.7 Should the migrating Irish and British Catholics be labelled exiles or a diaspora? English Catholic emigrants, mostly landowners, regarded themselves as excluded from the status that was their birthright, but they were not exiles in a legal sense. The same was the case among Irish merchants in Europe. With few exceptions, they were not outlaws, and in peacetime, they could freely move in and out of Britain or Ireland. One of them, George Fitzgerald, lived in London from 1718 to 1744, where he held the second largest Irish account at the Bank of England and was director of a maritime insurance firm.8 Surely, a man like 6  Natalie Genet-­Rouffiac, ‘Jacobites in Paris and Saint-­Germain-­en-­Laye’, in Eveline Cruickshanks and Edward Corp (eds.), The Stuart Court in Exile and the Jacobites (Edinburgh, 1995), pp. 15–38; Natalie Genet-­Rouffiac, Le Grand exil. Les Jacobites en France, 1688–1715 (Vincennes, 2007); Natalie Genet-­Rouffiac, ‘The Irish Jacobite Regiments and the French Army: A Way to Integration’, in Paul Monod, Murray Pittock, and Daniel Szechi (eds.), Loyalty and Identity: Jacobites at Home and Abroad (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 206–28. 7 See Siobhan Talbott, ‘ “Such Unjustifiable Practices?” Irish Trade, Settlement, and Society in France, 1688–1715’, Economic History Review, 67 (2014), pp. 556–77. 8 L.  M.  Cullen, ‘The Two George Fitzgeralds of London, 1718–1759’, in David Dickson, Jan Parmentier, and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), Irish and Scottish Mercantile Networks in Europe and Overseas

European Mercantile Networks  295 Fitzgerald cannot be considered an exile. Yet Fitzgerald’s family had lost land in Waterford after 1692, pushing them to emigrate to Saint-­Malo. Even in London, Fitzgerald maintained close ties with Catholic merchants and bankers, as well as officers of the Irish regiments. In 1739, he became chief purchaser for the French tobacco monopoly. Despite his success, he remained a product of the Catholic emigrant experience and a partial outsider in the London business world. Exile is a cultural perception among migrants rather than an objective cat­ egory. The current fierce debate over whether ‘economic migrants’ are also refugees—­that is, whether lack of opportunity has resulted from systematic prejudice or victimization—­illustrates the difficulty of reducing complex human situ­ ations to simple terms. Irish and British Catholics in the eighteenth century faced discrimination in their native lands, even if it was not the sole reason for their migration to Europe. The Irish were familiar with the concept of exile from trad­ ition­al Gaelic poetry, which depicted Catholic life in a bereaved Ireland as a time of religious trial that would last until the return of the Stuarts.9 ‘I had no great inclinations to stay in the cursed city of Cork for several reasons chiefly want of the liberty of conscience’, wrote Patrick Sarsfield, an Irish Ostend merchant, in 1716.10 However, while Irish Catholics abroad may have regarded exile as an appropriate metaphor for their own condition, it did not dominate their view of life in Europe. Letters from the Irish community of Bordeaux, seized by a British privateer in 1757, show that Catholic expatriates cared about those left in Ireland but were hardly sentimental concerning the homeland. The letters inquire about relatives and friends, and provide details of good fortune, or lack of it, in France. They evince an attachment to family, such as when the clerk Patrick MacDermott wrote to his father, living near Navan, that ‘if Circumstances permitted it I wd soon have ye honour, pleasure, and satisfaction of seeing you’. On the other hand, Mary Flynn, domestic servant to an Irish wine merchant, informed her sister in Dublin that ‘I am as hapy as anny gireal that ever leaft irland’.11 These are the voices of aspiring young people, who faced separation from home as an op­por­ tun­ity rather than as the burdensome consequence of exile. The Irish Catholic merchants did not remain distinct from the populations among whom they settled, but they had limited relations with the Scots, the other large expatriate merchant community from the British Isles. Settling mostly in in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Ghent, 2007), pp. 251–70; Jacob M. Price, France and the Chesapeake, 2 vols. (Ann Arbor, MI, 1973), I, pp. 557–87. 9  Éamonn Ó Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685–1766: A Fatal Attachment (Dublin, 2004), pp. 41–51, 335–49; Breandán Ó Buachalla, ‘Irish Jacobite Poetry’, The Irish Review, 12 (1992), pp. 40–9; Monique Gallagher, ‘Images of Ireland in Songs of Exile and Emigration’, Etudes Irlandaises (1994), pp. 145–65. 10 Quoted in David Dickson, ‘The Cork Merchant Community in the Eighteenth Century: A Regional Perspective’, in Cullen and Butel (eds.), Négoce et industrie, p. 46. 11  L.  M.  Cullen, John Shovlin, and Thomas  M.  Truxes (eds.), The Bordeaux-­Dublin Letters 1757: Correspondence of an Irish Community Abroad (Oxford, 2013), pp. 181, 199.

296  Paul Monod Sweden, Denmark, and the Dutch Republic, the Scots played a significant role in developing East Asian trade in northern European ports. While some of them were Jacobites, all the major Scottish mercantile families were Protestant. Scottish Catholic exiles, most of them clansmen fleeing the consequences of Jacobite Rebellions, went into military careers, not into commerce. While émigré Scots Protestants often did business with the Irish, they did not settle in the same places or intermarry with them.12 A prominent exception was the banker and financier John Law of Lauriston, who converted to Catholicism in 1719 to take up an appointment as controller general of finances to Louis XV of France.13 Law was certainly not the only Scottish entrepreneur in France. Robert Arbuthnot, brother of the Tory writer Dr John Arbuthnot, was a wine and brandy dealer of Rouen, as well as a smuggler and an active Jacobite agent. Like most Scottish merchants in Catholic Europe, however, he does not seem to have converted to Catholicism. In 1717, his wife was denounced by James III’s Scottish Catholic physician Patrick Abercromby for being ‘a blackhearted Huguenot’.14 The Irish had closer ties with the small number of English Catholics in Europe who pursued commerce. Members of the Matthews and Mannock families traded alongside the Irish at Cádiz, while James Dormer, part of a largely Irish mercantile network in Antwerp, was related to an English Catholic baron.15 However, English Catholic émigré families tended to be landowners, and their offspring were more likely to practice law than commerce, because it was considered more compatible with their status. English and Irish Catholic lawyers became advisors to recusant families and agents to British convents in many parts of western Europe, a role that Irish Catholic lawyers like Adam Colclough and Matthew Duane played in London.16 Whatever their origins, foreigners living in France laboured under restrictions. They had to use French intermediaries in certain commercial transactions, had special taxes imposed on them, and worst of all, might be subjected to the droit d’aubaine, by which their goods and property could be seized after death by the State. The Irish alone were exempted from the droit d’aubaine. Nonetheless, about 260 Irish immigrants obtained letters of naturalization in France between 1689 and 1715, most of them in 1697, when the government of Louis XIV levied a tax 12 Leos Müller, ‘Scottish and Irish Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth-­Century Sweden’, in Dickson, Parmentier, and Ohlmeyer (eds.), Irish and Scottish Mercantile Networks, pp. 147–74; Steve Murdoch, ‘Irish Entrepreneurs and Sweden in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century’, in O’Connor and Lyons (eds.), Irish Communities, pp. 348–66. 13 Antoine E. Murphy, John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-­Maker (Oxford, 1997), p. 179. 14  Calendar of the Stuart Papers Belonging to His Majesty the King Preserved at Windsor Castle, vol. 3 (London, 1907), p. 456. 15 Paul Monod, ‘Dangerous Merchandise: Smuggling, Jacobitism, and Commercial Culture in Southeast England, 1690–1760’, Journal of British Studies, 30 (1991), p. 171. 16 Richard  G.  Williams (ed.), Mannock Strickland (1683–1744), Agent to English Convents in Flanders: Letters and Accounts from Exile (London, 2016); John Bergin, ‘The Irish Catholic Interest at the London Inns of Court, 1674–1800’, Eighteenth-­Century Ireland, 24 (2009), pp. 36–61.

European Mercantile Networks  297 on resident foreigners. Historians often assume that naturalization was a path to cultural assimilation, but this was not necessarily the case. It encompassed certain privileges but did not always lead immigrants to give up the use of English at home or to cease marrying within their own community. Peter Sahlins has argued that over the course of the eighteenth century, naturalization became a personal choice in favour of ‘citizenship’ or merging oneself with a national body. At that point, becoming French clearly meant assimilation, but the change arrived late for most of the Irish community.17 Irish merchants naturalized in France who were able to prove a genealogical relationship to a landowning family in Ireland might seek letters of recognition of nobility, which brought distinct advantages. French nobles were prevented from taking part in mining or manufacturing by the threat of dérogéance or loss of aristocratic privileges. The rules exempted foreign nobles altogether, which allowed them to act as commercial representatives of the French aristocracy in various types of business enterprise.18 In contrast to France, the southern Netherlands did not pressure foreign merchants to seek naturalization. A foreigner became a resident after a year and a day and could rise to the status of burger through marriage, purchase, or long residence.19 Foreign Catholics could also live and trade in Spain without serious restrictions. Whether this resulted in a slower process of assimilation is unclear. The memoirs of Joseph Blanco White, who grew up in an Irish mercantile family of Seville in the late eighteenth century, are equivocal. On the one hand, many of his relatives maintained a strong sense of Irishness: ‘My family, in fact, may be considered as a small Irish colony, whose members preserve the language [English, not Gaelic] and many of the habits and affections which its founder brought to Spain’. On the other hand, his father changed the family name from the unpronounceable White to Blanco, married into the Andalusian nobility, and educated Joseph as a Spanish aristocrat. The memoirist’s later history was extraordinary. Joseph abandoned Catholicism, moved to England, and became a severe critic of Catholic emancipation. This reaction against his religion was arguably due to the influence of enlightened Spanish anti-­clericalism rather than a rejection of his upbringing.20 Ultimately, he had Irish and Spanish identities, both equally complicated.

17 Peter Sahlins, Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After (Ithaca, NY, 2004). 18  Patrick Clarke de Dromantin, ‘De l’intégration des nobles étrangers dans le Second Ordre de l’Ancien Régime’, Revue historique de droit français et étranger, 77 (1999), pp. 223–39. 19  Bruno Bernard, ‘Les Etrangers dans les Pays-­Bas Espagnols (XVIe–­XVIIe siècles)’, in M. B. Villar García and P. Pezzi Cristóbal (eds.), Los extranjeros en la España moderna, 2 vols. (Málaga, 2003), I, pp. 175–85. 20  Joseph Blanco White, The Life of the Rev. Joseph Blanco White, Written by Himself, ed. John Hamilton Thom, 3 vols. (London, 1845), I, p. 5; Óscar Recio Morales, ‘Identity and Loyalty: Irish

298  Paul Monod Most of what is known about Irish merchants in Europe concerns their ­ usinesses, their marriages, and their movements from place to place. This evidence b reveals that they were an international community, with trading links that crossed borders. In some cases, they did not remain long in each port or even each country. Personal ties, whether through geographical origins, family relations, marriage, or friendship, were of central importance to them. Finally, the sources point to the uncertainty of overseas commerce. Trade was ruined by shipwrecks, spoiled goods, poor harvests, high prices, bad credit, dishonest partners, or the outbreak of war. As a result, Irish merchants diversified. They dabbled in every type of trade, from foodstuffs and wine to cloth and the trafficking of African slaves. They did not hesitate to cross over into illegality, like smuggling, or to engage in pri­vat­ eer­ing, regarded by the British government as no better than piracy if carried out by Irish shipmasters and crews. Like other merchants, the Irish were engaged in a constant search for investments that were both safe and profitable, leading them eventually towards colonial trade and government-­backed companies. A few were drawn towards London, a commercial city in which they could live as Catholics, whether concealed or as members of a foreign community, with a relative degree of anonymity.21 A fascinating example of this peripatetic and unstable lifestyle is provided by the merchant couple John and Helena Aylward, who have been studied by Giada Pizzoni. Of a Waterford family, John began trading at Cádiz and Málaga in the 1670s, where he dealt in French wine, Italian wheat, Spanish raisins, and oranges, all bound for Bristol and London. Helena’s father Matthew Porter was a business associate of John’s at Cádiz, but her first marriage was to a French merchant, with whom she had five children. Even before his death, Helena was handling her first husband’s affairs, corresponding with other Irish merchants about shipments of wine and fruit. John went to Marseilles, where he became involved with Mediterranean commerce: Apulian wheat, Genoese lemons, Neapolitan fish, and fruit. After 1687, he was based in Saint-­Malo, joining Dominic Lynch in exporting coarse woollen cloth to the Spanish West Indies. Helena married him around this time, and had three daughters with him, one of whom later married into the family of the duke of Norfolk—­an extraordinary example of an alliance between an Irish merchant family and the English Catholic aristocracy. After 1688, John became involved with a Protestant merchant, Thomas Brailsford, who dealt in enslaved Africans and East Indian calicoes. When war broke out between Britain and France, the two men resorted to the use of privateers to smuggle goods across the Channel. The Aylwards moved to London in 1698, where their commercial

Traders in Seventeenth-­Century Iberia’, in Dickson, Parmentier, and Ohlmeyer (eds.), Irish and Scottish Mercantile Networks, pp. 197–210. 21  See John Bergin, ‘Irish Catholics and Their Networks in Eighteenth-­Century London’, Eighteenth-­ Century Life, 39 (2015), pp. 66–102.

European Mercantile Networks  299 interests spread from South Asia to Mexico. John’s will, proven at Canterbury and necessarily silent concerning the testator’s piety, was witnessed by the wealthy London merchant Thomas Skerrett, an Irishman whose daughter became the second wife of Sir Robert Walpole. After John’s death in 1705, Helena ran the family’s global business network on her own, expanding into armaments and investing in South Sea Company stock.22 Helena’s career shows that the Irish Catholic entrepreneur was not always a man. Like many wives of merchants in this period, she took over her husband’s affairs when it became necessary for her to do so, proving herself highly capable. Another extraordinary aspect of the Aylward story is the couple’s relative anonymity. If they had been Protestants, John might have ended up serving in a London civic office or joining a livery company. He and his wife would have been celebrated after death by a lavish and pious memorial in some Wren church. Because they were Irish Catholics, with most of their connections living in French and Spanish ports, they were virtually unknown until recent archival work rediscovered their importance.23 Outside Britain and Ireland, émigré Catholics who prospered through trade did not have to keep low profiles. They were figures of considerable local im­port­ ance, who made significant contributions to the commercial development of the places in which they lived. While their business careers played out on an inter­ nation­al level, they were also rooted in migrant communities, usually within a maritime town bordering the Atlantic. Reviewing those communities on a nation-­by-­nation basis can give a deeper understanding of how émigré merchants adapted to new environments and were able to build up global networks of trade.

From Port to Port Any overview of Irish Catholic commercial enterprise in Europe should begin with the points of arrival for most immigrants—­the French Atlantic ports. They traded directly with Ireland and south-­ east England. From the harbour of Dunkirk, at least 205 ships departed for Irish ports between 1730 and 1781, carrying back butter, hides, and salt beef. Irish ship-­owners and captains with names like Gough, Ruttlidge, Archdeacon, Connelly, and Kenny handled this commerce, and some grew wealthy on it.24 A similar story could be told of many smaller

22  The National Archives, London, PROB 11/481/389 and 11/539/120, wills of John and Helen Aylward. 23  See for example Giada Pizzoni, British Catholic Merchants in the Commercial Age, 1670–1714 (Woodbridge, 2020); Giada Pizzoni, ‘Mrs Helena Aylward: A British Catholic Mother, Spouse and Businesswoman in the Commercial Age (1705–1714)’, British Catholic History, 33 (2017), pp. 603–21. 24  Christian Pfister, ‘Dunkerque et l’Irlande 1690–1790’, in Dickson, Parmentier, and Ohlmeyer (eds.), Irish and Scottish Mercantile Networks, pp. 93–114.

300  Paul Monod ports around Brittany and Normandy. The four most important centres for Irish trade in France, however, were Saint-­Malo, Nantes, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux. The walled city of Saint-­Malo was the primary junction for Irish merchants in France and indeed throughout Europe. By 1715, immigrants from Ireland had lived and traded in its gray cobbled streets for over a century. André Lespagnol, historian of the Malouin merchant elite, has described their hometown as the most dynamic port in France during the reign of Louis XIV. It was a base for the Newfoundland fishery, commerce with the British Isles, provisioning of French colonies, the slave trade, and legal or illegal imports from the Far East. Irish and British Catholic merchants like the Géraldins (Fitzgeralds), Walshes, Porters, and Harringtons were deeply involved in these enterprises. Between 1706 and 1709, ‘les Messieurs de Saint-­Malo’ even traded directly with Spain’s American colonies. After the Treaty of Utrecht, however, Saint-­Malo’s trade declined and Malouin merchants were obliged to employ agents in Cádiz, like George Morrogh or the White brothers, Irishmen of the town who had migrated to Spain.25 The famous corsairs or privateers sustained the economy of Saint-­Malo and Dunkirk in wartime by seizing English and Dutch ships in the Atlantic. James II commissioned a dozen of them during the Nine Years’ War, at first ‘uniquement formez d’Irlandois et autres ses sujets’. The ship-­owners of Saint-­Malo who outfitted privateers in the 1690s included Raymond and Antoine Géraldin, Richard Murphy, George Kennedy, and Walter Cruice. François Browne of Brest recruited Irish Malouin investors like Jacques Walsh, Philippe Walsh, and Patrice Lambert for his privateering expeditions. Nicolas Géraldin of Dunkirk, knighted by James II in 1700, outfitted no fewer than sixteen corsairs. La guerre de course, as pri­vat­ eer­ing was called, became a wide-­ranging business. One Irish captain, Thomas Formby, cruised as far as Madeira. It was also risky, as shown in 1693 when Walter Cruice was bankrupted after his ship was captured in a four-­hour battle off the Scilly Isles. The British punished Irish privateering with death—­provided they could prove where a captured privateer was born. Robert Walsh was executed in Ireland, and four other Irish privateers were hanged in England, but others were pardoned at the end of the war. The Irish corsairs set sail again after 1702, in ships dispatched from Saint-­Malo and Dunkirk by Sir Nicolas Géraldin and others.26 Privateering often intersected with smuggling. La guerre de course could be a way to convey a cargo illegally from England to France, by arranging its ‘seizure’ by a privateer. Goods taken by privateers could also be conveyed via the Isle of 25  André Lespagnol, Messieurs de Saint-­Malo. Une élite négociante au temps de Louis XIV, 2 vols. (Rennes, 1997), I, pp. 80–6; Mary Ann Lyons, ‘The Emergence of an Irish Community in Saint-­Malo, 1550–1710’, in O’Connor (ed.), Irish in Europe, pp. 107–26. 26 J.  S.  Bromley, Corsairs and Navies, 1660–1760 (London, 1987), pp. 139–66; Anne Morel, ‘La Guerre de course à Saint-­Malo de 1681 à 1715, 1ère partie’, Mémoires de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Bretagne, 37 (1957), pp. 5–103; Anne Morel, ‘La Guerre de course à Saint-­Malo de 1681 à 1715. 2ème partie, tableaux des armements malouins’, Mémoires de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Bretagne, 38 (1958), pp. 29–169.

European Mercantile Networks  301 Man into Ireland or through the Channel Islands into Britain. ‘Owlers’ or wool-­ smugglers from the south coasts of England travelled directly to Saint-­Malo, exchanging wool for cash payments or brandy. After the Glorious Revolution, smugglers might also carry Jacobite agents or sympathizers travelling to and from England, as well as Irish recruits for the regiments in French service.27 How strongly the smugglers, or the merchants, were inclined towards the Jacobite cause, is indeterminable. Sir Nicolas Géraldin carried escapees over from Scotland after the 1715 Rebellion; others were less committed; and some were indifferent.28 Among the carriers of illegal goods, however, everything depended on personal trust. Jacobitism was a way of establishing mutual confidence among those who plied the frigid coastal waters with contraband. This was a network of interest and reliance that made use of politics but did not require an explicit ideology. Nantes was another port whose merchants engaged in privateering and smuggling, but the white stone mansions that grace the city today were built with ­profits from the odious trade in enslaved West Africans. Irish merchant families were crucial to this traffic. During the seventeenth century, Nantes developed a brisk commerce with Dublin, Cork, and Limerick, from which it imported butter and salt beef in exchange for wine and brandy. This continued even in times of war. As Siobhan Talbott has shown, in 1709, at the height of the War of the Spanish Succession, twenty-­seven Irish ships departed the harbour of Nantes, and the following year, the number reached twenty-­eight. No English ship and only one from Scotland unloaded a cargo at Nantes in those years. Salt beef was not imported to suit French tastes, but rather sent to the French Antilles to feed African slaves. The 1685 Code Noir, which governed slavery in the French col­ onies, stipulated two pounds of salt beef per week be given to slaves. Most of it came from Ireland.29 This linkage explains the rise of several generations of Irish merchant families in Nantes. The earliest was that of Nicolas Lee, a Cromwellian exile whose fortune was inherited by his daughter-­in-­law Marie Géraldin, of the extensive Saint-­Malo clan. Widowed, Marie Lee took over the family business along with her sons and son-­in-­law, extending it to England, Spain, and Holland. The dominance of the Lee family among Irish mercantile houses waned in the early eighteenth century, however, with the appearance of new firms like that of the three Macnemara brothers. They disguised contraband trade from France to Ireland as internal Irish commerce, by setting up a company in Limerick run by a fourth brother. A  post-­1691 arrival, Luc O’Shiell, was the first Irishman to make slave-­trading voyages from Nantes. Along with his nephew Toby Clarke, O’Shiell sent nine 27  L.  M.  Cullen, ‘The Smuggling Trade in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 67 (1968–9), pp. 149–75; Monod, ‘Dangerous Merchandise’, pp. 150–82. 28  Calendar of the Stuart papers, vol. 2 (London, 1904), p. 78. 29 Talbott, ‘Irish Trade, Settlement and Society’, p. 561; Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York, 2002), p. 357.

302  Paul Monod ex­ped­itions to Africa and the Antilles after 1714. Only the loss of three ships on a voyage in 1721 prevented him from engaging in more. O’Shiell also administered the affairs of a deceased Nantes merchant, Jean Stapleton, owner of a slave plantation on Saint-­Domingue and another on Montserrat, where many Irish had settled in the seventeenth century.30 The slave-­trader Antoine Walsh outstripped them all. The son of Philippe Walsh of Saint-­Malo, Antoine moved as a young man to Nantes, where he married Mary, daughter of Luc O’Shiell. Walsh was captain on two slave ships in 1728 and 1730, before becoming a ship-­owner and outfitting more than a dozen ex­ped­ itions between 1734 and 1744. He founded the Société d’Angole in 1748, the first joint-­stock company dedicated to the slave trade, with a capital of two million livres, mostly raised from Paris bankers. Walsh himself invested a quarter million livres in the company, showing his immense wealth. The Société d’Angole sent out twenty-­six slave-­ships before its failure and dissolution in 1753. In that year, Walsh was ennobled by Louis XV. He was the fifth largest slave-­ trader in eighteenth-­century France, responsible for forty voyages and boundless human misery. Today, he is best known for having supplied Charles Edward Stuart with the ship that carried him to Scotland to begin the Rebellion of 1745. Despite this act of generosity, Walsh was not a benign man; his slave ships were regularly overloaded and experienced a high rate of mortality. In 1748, an insurrection on one of Walsh’s vessels by enslaved Africans bound from Whydah resulted in thirty-­six deaths.31 The deep-­water port of La Rochelle specialized in colonial trade and was the main departure point for brandy from Cognac. From the mid-­1600s, it was home to a major Irish mercantile family, the Butlers, who were eventually ennobled.32 Antoine Galwey married a Butler descendant around 1757, and soon became a leading exporter of brandy to Ireland. Other Catholic Irishmen followed in his path: Laurence Saule of Dublin, his nephew John Saule, Luke Bellew, and Richard Hennessy. The last two were former officers in Irish regiments. Hennessy was related to a successful merchant family of Ostend and had prudently chosen a wife from among them. He and John Saule were encouraged and assisted by an Irish Protestant merchant of Huguenot origins, James Delamain, who like them was a Freemason. Saule remained at La Rochelle, while Hennessy moved his 30  Guy Saupin, ‘Les Réseaux commerciaux des irlandais de Nantes sous le Règne de Louis XIV’, in Dickson, Parmentier, and Ohlmeyer (eds.), Irish and Scottish Commercial Networks, pp. 115–46; Kristen Block and Jenny Shaw, ‘Subjects without an Empire: The Irish in the Early Modern Caribbean’, Past and Present, 210 (2011), pp. 33–60. 31  Gaston Martin, Nantes au XVIIIe siècle. L’ère des négriers (1714–1774) (Paris, 1931), pp. 241–7; Robert Louis Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An Old Regime Business (Madison, WI., 1979), pp. 28, 153; Nini Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery and Anti-­Slavery, 1612–1865 (Basingstoke, 2007), ch. 5. 32 John Garretson Clark, La Rochelle and the Atlantic Economy during the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1981), pp. 46–7, 59, 83.

European Mercantile Networks  303 business to Bordeaux, where he revealed an ineptitude at commerce, and his ­fortunes sank. In 1782, he considered seeking a position as a plantation overseer in Barbados through the influence of a famous relative, Edmund Burke. Instead, his son James, who had a better head for business, returned to Cognac, went into partnership with Delamain’s nephew, and began to rescue what became the house of Hennessy. Meanwhile, Saule set up contacts in London and by his death in 1788 had established his own successful brandy firm. The collaboration of Protestant and Catholic merchants in the brandy trade was facilitated by enlightened values and perhaps a shared desire for reform in Ireland—­Lawrence Saule was a supporter of the Catholic Committee, which lobbied for the full admission of Catholic tradesmen into urban guilds.33 The Irish became prominent in Bordeaux in the 1740s, when the city was enjoying remarkable growth. Its imports consisted mainly of sugar, indigo, and other colonial products; wine, brandy, and provisions for the colonies dominated its exports.34 As at Nantes, the Irish involved themselves in the butter and salt beef trades that were essential to supporting slavery in the French Caribbean. Many of them also developed an interest in the wine trade. Several of them became wine producers in the Bordeaux region, including Marc Kirwan, Thomas Michel Lynch, Robert Dillon, and Toby Clarke, all of whom left their family names on famous château labels. Bordeaux brandy was of lesser quality than that of Cognac and much of it was smuggled into Ireland or England. The interests of Irish merchants also extended to the Antilles grain trade. André Quinn, his widow, and sons were responsible for 110 shipments of grain to the colonies between 1715 and 1772, while William Coppinger and Son dispatched twenty-­ nine shipments between 1776 and 1792.35 Letters captured by the British in 1757 reveal a complex Irish community in Bordeaux, including Protestant and Catholic merchants, clerks, clerics, students, and servants.36 In Spain, an Irish and English Catholic mercantile presence developed sim­ul­ tan­eous­ly to that of France. Irish merchants were active in the Canary Islands wine trade from the mid-­1600s when they began to supplant English Protestant exporters. In 1701, there were forty-­five Catholic (both Irish and English) and 33 L. M. Cullen, The Brandy Trade under the Ancien Régime: Regional Specialisation in the Charente (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 8–9; L.  M.  Cullen, The Irish Brandy Houses of Eighteenth-­Century France (Dublin, 2000); Patrick Fagan, Catholics in a Protestant Country: The Papist Constituency in Eighteenth-­ Century Dublin (Dublin, 1998), p. 172. 34 Paul Butel, La Croissance commerciale Bordelaise dans la second moitié du XVIIIe siècle (Lille, 1973). 35  Patrick Clarke de Dromantin, Les Réfugiés jacobites dans la France du XVIIIe siècle (Bordeaux, 2005), pp. 421–35. 36 Nicholas Canny, ‘The Irish Colony in Bordeaux, 1757: A Representative Sample of Irish Communities Abroad?’, in Thomas Truxes (ed.), England, France and the Atlantic in a Time of War: The Bordeaux-­Dublin Letters, 1757 (London, 2017), pp. 32–50; Jean-­Pierre Poussou, ‘The Outset and Course of the Seven Years’ War in Bordeaux’, in Truxes (ed.), England, France and the Atlantic in a Time of War, pp. 128–47.

304  Paul Monod forty Protestant (English and Scottish) merchants in Tenerife, but by 1770, the Irish owned three-­quarters of the local houses doing business with the British Isles.37 Málaga was another port where Irish merchants congregated, specializing in the export of local cane sugar, fruit, and wine. Tomás Quilty took over his uncle Mateo’s firm at Málaga in 1734; Diego Macnamara established his business there in 1724, Guillermo Terry in 1730. A survey of 1776 listed twenty-­one exporting firms in Málaga, ten of which included Irish Catholic principals. Quilty began investing in sugar production in the 1770s, replicating an Irish trajectory into the supply of exported goods that was also seen in France.38 The port of Cádiz became a magnet for foreign merchants after 1680, when cargoes from the Americas were allowed to be unloaded there as well as Seville. Only Spaniards could engage directly in trade with the Indies, although foreign merchants could re-­export colonial goods. The Irish were deeply embedded on both sides of this regulated exchange. Guillermo Terry, knight of the Order of Santiago, became the first Irish-­born merchant to gain a royal license to trade with the Indies in 1719. At least twenty other naturalized Spaniards of Irish origin were granted this distinction by 1800, among them Nicolás Aylward, the Blanco or White brothers, two Walshes (Valois in Spanish), and an O’Shiell. Lawrence Carew, born in Waterford and naturalized in 1731, formed an export business at Cádiz with Nicholas Langton and Michael Power that enjoyed considerable success in shipping goods to the Indies. In 1773, 127 Irish lived in Cádiz, of whom three-­quarters were merchants, clerks, or others connected with commerce. Their economic impact was far greater than their numbers: 36 per cent of the foreign ships entering or leaving the harbour of Cádiz in 1773 belonged to firms having at least one Irish partner. Seville, with its small but affluent Irish community, was essentially an outpost of the merchant families of Cádiz.39 The predominance of 37 Karin Schüller, Die Beziehungen zwischen Spanien und Irland im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert; Diplomatie, Handel und die soziale Integration katholischer Exulanten (Münster, 1999), pp. 75–106; Karin Schüller, ‘Inmigrantes irlandeses en España en la primera mitad del siglo XVII. Condiciones básicas para una integración’, in María Begoña Vilar García (ed.), La emigración irlandesa en el siglo XVIII (Málaga, 2000), pp. 207–27; Karin Schüller, ‘Irish-­Iberian Trade from the Mid-­Sixteenth to the Mid-­ Seventeenth Centuries’, in Dickson, Parmentier, and Ohlmeyer (eds.), Irish and Scottish Mercantile Networks, pp. 175–95; Manuel Lobo Cabrera and Maria Elisa Torres Santana, ‘Los extranjeros en Canarias durante el Antiguo Regimen’, in García and Cristóbal (eds.), Los extranjeros en la España moderna, II, pp. 79–97. 38  María Begoña Vilar García, ‘Los extranjeros en Málaga en el siglo XVIII’, Baetica, 5 (1982), pp. 205–14; María Begoña Vilar García, ‘Los comerciantes extranjeros de Málaga en 1776. Culminación de una instalación seculár’, Baetica, 19 (1997), pp. 191–207; Cristóbal García Montoro, ‘Inversiones industriales de los Irlandeses en Málaga durante la etapa final del Antiguo régimen’, in García (ed.), La emigración irlandesa, pp. 143–56; García, ‘Los irlandeses en la Andalucía del siglo XVIII’, in García (ed.), La emigración irlandesa, pp. 245–74. 39  Samuel Fannin, ‘Carew, Langton and Power, An Irish Trading House in Cadiz, 1745–1761’, in García and Cristóbal (eds.), Los extranjeros en la España moderna, I, pp. 361–72; María del Carmen Lario de Oñate, ‘Irlandeses y Británicos en Cádiz en el siglo XVIII’, in García and Cristóbal (eds.), Los extranjeros en la España moderna, I, pp. 417–25; María del Carmen Lario de Oñate, ‘The Irish Traders of Eighteenth-­ Century Cádiz’, in Dickson, Parmentier, and Ohlmeyer (eds.), Irish and Scottish Mercantile Networks, pp. 211–30; María José Alvarez Pantoja, ‘Irlandeses de Sevilla en el siglo

European Mercantile Networks  305 foreign merchants in Cádiz led a writer in 1741 to attribute to a fictional Irishman the opinion that ‘all the commerce that has been and is being done with the Indies is by foreigners’.40 It was an understandable exaggeration. Trade through the southern Netherlands made the fortunes of many Irish merchants. Historians fixated on Amsterdam, Rotterdam, or London have often underestimated the continuing commercial importance of Bruges or Ostend. Irish mercantile migration to the Spanish Netherlands began with Anthoine Carew, who outfitted privateers in the 1650s and 1660s and became mayor of Ostend. Dominic Lynch imported Irish butter and hides into Ostend until the British bombarded the city in 1705, after which he retired to Bruges. There he joined an Irish merchant community that included William Prosser and Nicolas Porter, importers of English textiles and Spanish wine or fruit, and exporters of Flemish grain to Cádiz. Porter became pensionary of Bruges in 1735. Born in Cork, William Archdeacon of Bruges used his brother James, a ship-­owner based in Rotterdam, to disguise tea smuggling operations to Ireland in the 1730s; later, he employed Carew, Langton, and Power as his Cádiz agents. Another Irish ­merchant who engaged in both tea smuggling and Spanish trade was Charles Hennessy of Ostend. He engaged his brother-­in-­law, Thomas Coppinger, a supercargo for the Swedish East India Company, to obtain tea in Göteborg, which he then smuggled into Britain. In the 1750s, Hennessy supplied the London market with French brandy, but died before the foundation of his cousin Richard’s firm at Cognac. John Galwey shipped Spanish salt to Ostend in the 1730s, and through a relative, Henry Morrogh of Lisbon, dealt in Brazilian hides and fruit.41 Several members of the Morrogh family were killed in the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755, along with other Irish residents of the Portuguese capital.42 The greatest Irish merchant of Ostend, however, was Thomas Ray, originally an O’Regan of Youghal. He was described in 1715 as ‘een man van seer grote affaires’, a very big businessman.43 Arriving at Ostend in 1698, Ray outfitted privateers in the War of the Spanish Succession and entered the Spanish trade, representing the Irish merchants of Bruges. From 1714 to 1720, Ray organized three hugely

XVIII. White, Plunket y compañía’, in García (ed.), La emigración irlandesa, pp. 19–40; Paloma Fernández Pérez, ‘Comercio y familia en la España pre-­industrial. Redes y strategias de los inmigrantes irlandeses en el Cádiz del siglo XVIII’, in García (ed.), La emigración irlandesa, pp. 127–42. 40  José Miguel Delgado Barrado (ed.), Fomento portuario y compañías privilegiadas. Los ‘Diálogos Familiares’ de Marcelo Dantini (1741–1748) (Madrid, 1998), p. 232. 41  Jan Parmentier, ‘The Irish Connection: The Irish Merchant Community in Ostend and Bruges during the late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Eighteenth-­Century Ireland, 20 (2005), pp. 31–54; Jan Parmentier, ‘The Sweets of Commerce: The Hennessys of Ostend and their Network in the Eighteenth Century’, in Dickson, Parmentier, and Ohlmeyer (eds.), Irish and Scottish Mercantile Networks, pp. 67–91. 42  Mark Molesky, This Gulf of Fire: The Great Lisbon Earthquake, or Apocalypse in the Age of Science and Reason (New York, 2015), pp. 288–9. 43 Jan Parmentier, ‘Irish Mercantile Empire Builders in Ostend, 1690–1790’, in O’Connor and Lyons (eds.), Irish Communities, pp. 367–82, quote on p. 375.

306  Paul Monod profitable voyages from Ostend to India and China. The crews of these ex­ped­itions were mostly Irish, but some of the investors were English, including Edward Gibbon and Francis Acton, directors of the South Sea Company. The Sarsfields, who worked with Ray on these voyages, were notorious smugglers, and much of their South and East Asian cargo ended up in England. In 1722, Ray was appointed director of the new Generale Keijserlijcke Indische Companie, better known as the Ostend Company, a joint-­stock enterprise trading with India and China. The formation of the Company was due to the efforts of Patrick MacNeny, an Irish lawyer who served as secretary of state to Prince Eugene, governor of the Austrian Netherlands. The British and Dutch objected strongly to what they saw, correctly, as an attempt to smuggle Chinese tea and Bengal calicoes into their countries. In 1731, the Ostend Company was dissolved, and Thomas Ray went into the grain trade. His son Thomas junior started a partnership with Patrick Roche that would dominate Ostend shipping until the 1780s.44 The Irish of the southern Netherlands, like their counterparts throughout Europe, remained adept and versatile entrepreneurs until the last years of the ancien régime.

Towards an International Economy Irish Catholic merchants tended to be free traders who moved around Europe without much regard for international boundaries or constraints on commerce. They engaged in risky, clandestine, and semi-­legal enterprises like privateering, slave-­trading, smuggling, or interloping, to sustain businesses that were particularly fragile because they lacked connections to nationally protected monopoly companies. No commerce was more strictly controlled than that of the Spanish colonies with Cádiz, but the Irish who took part in it were re-­exporters, representing family firms throughout Europe. In this sense, the Irish merchants, while they certainly contributed to the growth of national economies in the eighteenth century, were also forerunners of the internationalized commerce of the twentieth century. International finance sustained the Irish banking houses, which were pioneering the movement of funds around Europe. Among them were the Dillons of Dublin, wine merchants who set up a bank with branches at London, Bordeaux, and Rotterdam. Its spectacular bankruptcy in 1754 caused tremors throughout

44  Michel Huisman, La Belgique commerciale sous l’empereur Charles VI. La Compagnie d’Ostende (Brussels, 1902); Frederik Dhondt, ‘Delenda est haec Carthago: The Ostend Company as a Problem of  European Great Power Politics (1722–1727)’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 93 (2015), pp. 397–437; Bruno Bernard, ‘Patrice Mac Neny (1676–1745) Secrétaire d’État et de Guerre’, in Roland Mortier and Hervé Hasquin (eds.), Une famille noble de hauts fonctionnaires: les Neny (Brussels, 1985), pp. 7–78.

European Mercantile Networks  307 Europe.45 Another large banking concern was that of the immensely rich Sir Daniel Arthur of Limerick, who left Ireland after imprisonment in the Popish Plot scare. Arthur’s clients included aristocrats at Saint-­Germain, as well as English tourists, but he also dealt with bills of exchange at Paris, set up a London branch, and had extensive contacts with Irish merchants in France and Spain.46 His protégé Richard Cantillon, another Kerry man, became confidante to the Scottish financier John Law, and a supporter of his plan to fund the French debt through issuing stock in a company trading with Louisiana. Cantillon wisely withdrew his own money from Law’s Mississippi Scheme before it collapsed in 1720. He went on to write a treatise on the circulation of money and its influence on prices and interest rates. Published in 1755, the work introduced the term ‘entrepreneur’ to economic discourse and influenced both Turgot and Adam Smith.47 Despite its impact, the establishment of the French caisse d’escompte or discount bank, by the Bordeaux Irish merchant, Thomas Sutton, comte de Clonard, had more to do with the necessity of moving money across borders than with Cantillon’s theories. Founded in 1767, the bank purchased commercial paper and government se­cur­ ities, instruments of international investment. It collapsed two years later but was revived by Turgot in 1770.48 Even the staid Paris house of George Waters, banker to the exiled Stuarts, engaged in bold plans to create a Prussian East India Company during the 1750s.49 Irish banking in France was acutely sensitive to the international flow of money and the financial needs of merchants dealing with foreign trade. The spread of technology throughout Europe was another aspect of the inter­ nation­al impact of Irish, Scottish, and English Catholic exiles. In some cases, they copied English innovations; in others, they introduced improved methods to new locations. The development of glass-­making at Bordeaux by the Mitchell family, or the encouragement of Rouen faience production by William Sturgeon owed much to their knowledge of English coal-­burning techniques. The establishment of a sulfuric acid industry in Normandy by the firm of Brown, Garvey, and Norris in 1766 broke an English monopoly on the product. The manufacture of gunpowder in Lorraine, initiated by Edward Warren, a veteran of the Jacobite War, depended on an existing technology, as did the production of potash in the Bordeaux region by Thomas Sutton and the MacCarthy brothers in the 1760s. 45  Bergin, ‘Irish Catholics and their Networks in London’, pp. 80, 82–3. 46  Nathalie Genet-­Rouffiac, ‘The Irish Jacobite exile in France’, in Toby Barnard and Jane Fenlon (eds.), The Dukes of Ormonde, 1610–1745 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 194–210. 47 Antoin Murphy, Richard Cantillon, Entrepreneur and Economist (Oxford, 1986); Anthony Brewer, Richard Cantillon, Pioneer of Economic Theory (London, 1992); Richard Cantillon, An Essay on Economic Theory, trans. Chantal Saucier, ed. Mark Thornton (Auburn, AL., 2010). 48  L. M. Cullen, ‘Irish Businessman and French Courtier: The Career of Thomas Sutton, Comte de Clonard, c. 1722–1782’, in John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan (eds.), The Early Modern Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 86–104. 49  Chaussinand-­Nogaret, ‘Une élite insulaire’, p. 1113.

308  Paul Monod The French textile industry was transformed by English ideas introduced by John Holker of Rouen, formerly a Manchester cotton manufacturer, Jacobite veteran of the 1745 Rebellion, and officer in an Irish regiment. In economic terms, Holker was arguably the most important English Catholic exile of the eighteenth century. The expansion of French textile production was also encouraged by Irish entrepreneurs like Thomas Le Clere, who brought spinning machines over from England in the 1780s, and by James Macarty of Lille, specialist in industrial es­pi­ on­age.50 Another Irish Catholic, John O’Kelly, who fought for the Allied side in the War of the Spanish Succession, introduced the Newcomen engine into the Austrian Netherlands and first patented it in Sweden.51 Enlightened monks promoted new technologies in late-­eighteenth-­century Germany, and the public lectures on optics of the Scottish Benedictine Ildephonsus Kennedy were instrumental in establishing the glass industry, as well as lens-­ making, in Munich.52

Conclusion In these industrial enterprises as in their mercantile trade, British and Irish Catholics were pleased to serve the interests of their adopted countries, but they were also breaking down differences in economic development between European nations. Of course, they saw themselves simply as acting in their own interests, not as promoting internationalization. Like Jews and Huguenots, however, their separation from the land of their ancestors made them less averse to crossing boundaries, whether political, legal, or technological. A degree of alienation from the landowning, rentier mentality that tempted merchant elites throughout Europe may explain why even a titled Irish aristocrat like Sutton de Clonard remained at heart an entrepreneur. When Irish Catholics bought land in the Gironde, Andalusia, or the Antilles, they turned it to commercial uses, in wine growing or sugar cultivation. In the nineteenth century, to be sure, descendants of these immigrants could be found retiring to their estates, as did some successful Jews and Huguenots. By that time, however, the great Irish Catholic mercantile houses of Europe had dissolved, the Continent was deeply embroiled in national commercial rivalries, and the first Celtic Tiger was no more than a fading memory.

50  Clarke de Dromantin, Les Réfugiés jacobites, pp. 313–99; Patrick Clarke de Dromantin, ‘The Influence of the Jacobites on the Economic Development of France in the Era of the Enlightenment’, in Monod, Pittock, and Szechi (eds.), Loyalty and Identity, pp. 229–42. 51  Murdoch, ‘Irish Entrepreneurs and Sweden’, in O’Connor and Lyons (eds.), Irish Communities, pp. 360–6. 52  Thomas McInally, A Saltire in the German Lands: Scottish Benedictine Monasteries in Germany, 1575–1862 (Aberdeen, 2016), pp. 174–5.

European Mercantile Networks  309

Select Bibliography Clarke de Dromantin, Patrick, Les Réfugiés jacobites dans la France du XVIIIe siècle (Bordeaux, 2005). Cullen, L. M., The Irish Brandy Houses of Eighteenth-Century France (Dublin, 2000). Cullen, L.  M. and Paul Butel (eds.), Négoce et industrie en France et en Irlande aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Paris, 1980). Dickson, David, Jan Parmentier, and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), Irish and Scottish Mercantile Networks in Europe and Overseas in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Ghent, 2007). García, María Begoña Villar (ed.), La emigración irlandesa en el siglo XVIII (Málaga, 2000). Genet-Rouffiac, Natalie, Le Grand exil. Les Jacobites en France, 1688–1715 (Vincennes, 2007). O’Connor, Thomas (ed.), The Irish in Europe, 1580–1815 (Dublin, 2001). O’Connor, Thomas and Mary Ann Lyons (eds.), Irish Migrants in Europe after Kinsale, 1602–1820 (Dublin, 2003). O’Connor, Thomas and Mary Ann Lyons (eds.), Irish Communities in Early Modern Europe (Dublin, 2006). Truxes, Thomas (ed.), England, France and the Atlantic in a Time of War: The Bordeaux-Dublin Letters, 1757 (London, 2017).

Index Note: Figures are indicated by an italic ‘f ’ following the page number. Digital users may on occasion find that indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–3) appear on only one of those pages. Abel, John, musician  248–9 Abercrombie, Patrick, Catholic physician  296 Abergavenny  217; baroque Catholic chapel at  41–2 Abjuration Oath (1643), imposed in Scotland  19–20, 23–4, 26–7, 31, 210–11 Act against bulls from Rome (English, 1572) 210–11 Act against papists and priests (Scottish, 1661)  81 Act against primogeniture for Catholic families (Irish, 1704)  90–1 Act against protestants marrying Catholics (Irish, 1726, 1746, 1750)  91 Act banishing priests and religious (Irish, 1697) 90 Act denying the franchise to Catholics (Irish, 1728) 91 Act for Abolishing Monuments of Idolatry (Scottish) 214 Act for appointing to benefices, (Irish)  77–8 Act for disarming papists (Irish, 1695)  89, 92 Act for double assessment of papists (Irish, 1697) 89–90 Act for preventing the growth of popery (Scottish, 1700)  83–4 Act for the registration of Catholic clergy (Irish, 1703, 1705, 1709)  90 Act for the Settling of Ireland (English, 1652)  28, 32–3; consequences of  87 Act of Security (Scottish, 1702)  84 Act of Settlement (English, 1701) and anti-popery 181–2 Act of Union (British, 1707)  84, 183, 279 Act to prevent protestants marrying Catholics (Irish, 1699)  90 Act to prevent the spread of popery (Irish, 1704, 1709) 90–1 Act to restrain foreign education (Irish, 1695)  89 Acton, Francis, investor  305–6 Acts of Supremacy and Allegiance (Irish, 1560), enforcement of  86–7 Adventurers (in Ireland)  28–30

Adventurers Act (1642)  17, 40–1 Albirici, Bartolomeo, composer  247 Alexander VII, Pope  14 Allen, Cardinal William  14–15 Anglo-Scottish Union, see Act of Union Anti-Catholic panics, caused by Irish Rebellion  18 Anti-popery  35–44, 170–88; and civil war in the 1640s  176; and the Exclusion Crisis  179–80; Anti-Popery processions  219; as a mentality  170–2; contours of  172–5; defined  172–5; found within the Church of England 172–3 Antrim, Marquess of, see Macdonnell, Randall Antwerp, Catholic mercantile network in  296 Aquinas, St Thomas  190–1; on conscience  204 Arbuthnot, Robert, wine and brandy merchant 295–6 Archdeacon, William, merchant in Southern Netherlands 305 Archer, Gabriel, Catholic colonialist  100–1 Archer, James, Catholic architect  238–9 Ardfert, Kerry, Catholic chapel built in cathedral at 238–9 Argyll, earls of, see Campbell, Archibald Armagh, synod of (March 1642)  16–17 Army, royalist, Catholic officers in the  19–20, Catholic officers killed while serving in 19–20 Arnauld, Antoine, and education of James III 205–6 Arthur, Daniel, of Limerick, banker  306–7 Arundel Castle, altarpiece in  222n.67 Arundell, Anne, letters to her exiled husband  50 Arundell, Henry, Lord Wardour  46–7 Arundell, John  50 Ashley Cooper, Anthony, 1st earl of Shaftesbury, imperialist 105 Atterbury Plot (1722)  79–80, 184 Aughrim, battle of  182–3 Austin, Fr John, Christian Moderator 199 Aylward, John and Helena, merchants in Spain 298–9

312 Index Babthorpe family, Mary Ward and  138–9 Bacon. Fr Nathaniel, Meditations 161–2 Baillie, Robert, on limits to persecution of Scottish Catholics.  21–2 Baker, Dom. Augustine Baker, OSB, treatises of  140; teachings of  166–7; exposition of Benedictine rule  156; mystical writings of  162–5; guidance to Benedictine Houses  155–6; and challenge to Ignatian spirituality 153 Bannatyne, Fr William, apostolic prefect in Scotland 12 Bar Convent York  236–8; miraculous statues at 146–7 Barbados  103–4; transportation of priests to 259–60 Baroque, Catholic, defined  228–30; chapel fittings 230–1 Barry, James, petitions for Irish translations  121 Battaglia, Matteo, composer  247 Bedingfield, Frances, in Mary Ward Institute, Paris 129 Bedingfield, Margaret, Poor Clare  129 Bellarmine, Cardinal Robert, SJ  190–1 Bellew, Luke, brandy exporter to Ireland  302–3 Bellings, Charles  51 Bellings, Sir Richard  46–7, 50; marries Frances Arundell 47 Benedict XIV, pope  122, 127 Benedictine, English female houses  128 Benedictine, Irish convent in Ypres  130–1 Benedictine, monasteries, English  133 Benedictines, English, and James II  55–6 Benedictines, mission to England  126 Benedictines, rule translated into English  156 Bennet, Henry, 1st earl of Arlington  46–7 Berkeley, John, 1st Baron Berkeley of Stratton 48–9 Berrington, Fr Simon, Catholic reformer  206–7 Bishop, bishop William  12 Bishops in partibus infidelium, appointed for England in 1685  61–2 Bishops, Irish, appointed on nomination of James II  63–4 Black Abbey, Kilkenny, Dominican chapel in 235–6 Blackloism  189, 194–5, 205 Blackloists  14, 192–3; in Maryland  108–9 Blackstone, William, comments on nonenforcement of penal laws  185–6 Blake, Clare Colette, Christian, Irish Poor Clare, relics of  148 Blanco White, Joseph, merchant in Seville  297 Blessed Virgin Mary, devotion to  5–6, 143–5 Bloody Assizes (1685–6)  58–9

Blundell, Sir William  47–8, 50; and memories of the Irish Rebellion  42–3, 47 Bombay 99 Bonaventure, St, his works translated into English 5–6 Bonnie Prince Charlie, contemporary myth of  290 Book of Common Prayer, Scottish, seen as popish 177 Bordeaux, Irish merchant community in  303 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, bishop of Meaux, influence of writings on (in Scotland)  201 Boyle, Michael, Protestant archbishop of Armagh  36–8, 49 Boyle, Roger, Lord Broghill, as President of the Cromwellian Council in Scotland  23, 39 Boyne, battle of  70, 182–3 Brailsford, Thomas, slave trader  298–9 Brazil 102–3 Brent, George, Catholic settler in Virginia  101–2 Bridges, Paul Francis, composer  246–7 Bridgettines, convent in Lisbon  128 Brisket, Anthony, Catholic trader in Leeward Islands 99 British College in Rome, failed attempt to create a merged college for UK  124 Brittany, Irish migration to  293 Brockholes, Anthony  105–6 Broghill, Lord, see Boyle, Roger Brook, Susan, canoness, reading habits of  140 Browne, Bonaventure, Franciscan nun, and Irish saints’ lives  167–8 Browne, Henry, 5th Viscount Montagu, political thinking 202 Brudenell, Thomas Lord  192–3 Brudenell-More debates on conscience  205 Bruges, music in convents in  251 Bucklersbury (London), Carmelite chapel at 236–8 Bulstrode, Sir Richard, Jacobite ultra  201–2 Burnet, Gilbert, Church of England bishop  71–2; and papal tyranny  175 Burton, Catherine, and sacralisation of space  142; visits St Winefride’s well  143; miraculous cure of  147–8; incorrupt body of  148–9 Butler, James  44–5 Butler, James, earl, marquess and 1st duke of Ormond 36–7 Cadiz, Irish traders in  102–3; naturalized Irish community in  304–5 Caesaropapism 190 Callaghan, Fr John, Franciscan, and Jansenism 193

Index  313 Calvert, Benedict, 4th Lord Baltimore, and Maryland 114–15 Calvert, Cecil, 2nd Lord Baltimore, Proprietor of Maryland  27, 101–2, 107–8 Calvert, Charles, 3rd Lord Baltimore, Lord Proprietor of Maryland  108–9, 112 Calvert, George, 1st Lord Baltimore, Lord Proprietor of Maryland  109 Cambridge University, Act providing the university was to present to benefices owned by Catholics (1689)  77–8 Campbell, Archibald, 9th earl of Argyll  58–9 Campbell, John, of Cawdor, impoverished convert 269–70 Canary Islands, Irish involvement wine trade of 303–4 Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre, see Holy Sepulchre Cantillon, Richard, banker and friend of John Law 306–7 Capell, Arthur, 1st earl of Essex, Lord Deputy in Ireland 48–9 Capranica College, Rome, number of novices in. (1742) 120 Capuchins, in Henrietta Maria’s household 231–2 Caribbean Islands, under jurisdiction of the vicar apostolic for London district  127 Caribbean, Catholic engaged in trade with  99 Carissimi, Giacomo, composer  248–9 Carmelite, English Carmelite houses  129 Carre, Fr Thomas  199; funeral sermon for  164–5; meditations on life of St Augustine 157 Carroll, Charles of Carrollton  114–15 Carroll, John, archbishop of Baltimore  127 Carton House (Kildare), Palladian house 238–9 Caryll, John, 1st baron Caryll of Durford, Catholic writings of  284 Cashel, provincial synod held in under James II 63–4 Castlelyons (Cork), new abbey built at  238–9 Castlemaine, ear of, see Palmer, Roger Catherine of Braganza, Queen  39–40, 55–8, 248–9; chapels of  230–1; household of  50; music for the chapels of  246–7; given crucifix of Mary Queen of Scots  216–17 Catholic Emancipation Act (1829)  xvii, xxii Catholic, defined  xviii–xix Cavan, diocesan synod held in under James II 63–4 Ceapaich, Shìlis nan, and the making of memory 288 Cefalo, Pietro, musician  247

Céitinn, Seathrún, Irish author of Foras Feasa  257, 259–60 Chalice, silver  218f, 219f Chalices, particular Catholic form of  209–10 Challoner, Richard, bishop and apostolic administrator, spiritual writings of  154–5; author of devotional works  5–6; Jacobite links  203; writes The Garden of the Soul 154–5 Channel Islands, and Irish smugglers  300–1 Chapel Royal of James II  248–9; royal, music in 246–7 Chapter, the, and the organisation of the English mission 14 Charles Edward Stuart (the Young Pretender)  3–5, later life of  290. See also Bonnie Prince Charlie Charles I, King, forged commission to Irish rebels  1; ‘barbarously slain’  198–9; secret negotiations with Irish Catholics (1641) 28–9 Charles II, King, and popular sovereignty  179; de iure claims upheld by Jesuit  198–9; and Catholicism  39–40; deathbed conversion of  55; nearly converted to Catholicism 46–7 Chatsworth (Derbyshire), extravagant chapel of  243 Chesapeake  102, 114–15 Chislehurst (Kent) gathering of papists at  177–8 Christchurch Cathedral Dublin, as place of Catholic worship  234; James II appoints Catholic dean to  63–4 Christian dualism  190–2 Churches, Irish, reconsecrated  215 Circignani, Niccolò, painter of frescoes of saints and martyrs  158–9 Clarendon Code, so-called  76 Clarke, Toby, slave trader  301–2; wine merchant in Bordeaux  303 Clement XIII, Pope, recognises Charles Edward as King of Britain and Ireland (1766)  264 Clergy, Catholic, banished from England  76 Clergy, Irish proclamation for banishment of (1673)  87–8; reissued (1674)  87–8; imprisoned and transported  30–1; number killed during the Interregnum  30–1; number of, in Ireland  92–3 Clerkenwell, Benedictine chapel in  236–8 Clifford, Thomas, Lord Clifford of Ugbrooke  46–7, 200–1; builds chapel at Ugbrooke 243 Clifton, Fr James, deathbed of  166–7 Clonmacnoise, cathedral, partially rebuilt  235–6; meeting of bishops and ordinaries at.  29

314 Index Clonmel (Tipperary), three-galleried churches in 239–40 Clynnog, Morgan  264–5 Clynnog, Morys, strives to open seminary in Wales 264 Colonies, Catholic  198. See also, Maryland Colonna, Giovanni Paulo, composer  248–9 Commemoration, Protestant, of Irish massacres 41–3 Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes (1687–8) 66 Conceptionists, convent founded in Nieuport  130 Conciliarists xix–xx Confederate wars, poetic laments over  261 Confederation of Kilkenny  8, 13–15, 40–1, 178, 195–6, 235–6, 257–8; formed May 1642  16–17; successes of  17–18; and Britain  117–27, 270; extensive archives of 283–4 Conn, Fr George, papal envoy to court of Charles I  11, 41–2 Conscience, role of  196–203 Constable, Margaret, Benedictine nun, copyist 163–4 Contract theory  196–7 Convents, Irish proclamation closing  87–8 Cooqus, John, Dutch silversmith  216–17 Coppinger, Thomas, Irish merchant  305 Coppinger, William, grain merchant  303 Coquns, John, designs church interiors in Dublin 238–9 Corker, Dom. James Maurus OSB  195, 200–1 Corsairs, Irish, see privateers Cotter, John, as student of Domnhall Ó Colmáin  262; hanged for rape (1718) 262–3 Cotton, Elizabeth, prayer life of  138–9 Court of Claims. Irish (1663–6)  41–2 Courtney, Fr Edward, SJ  192–3, 198–9 Cousin, René, designs church interiors in Dublin 238–9 Crelly, Fr Patrick, Cistercian Abbot  32 Cressy, Fr Hugh Serenus, Benedictine  46–7; and possible reunion of churches  200–1; spiritual writings of  163–4 Cromwell, Henry, policies as Lord Deputy in Ireland  13–14, 30–1 Cromwell, Oliver, and the conquest of Ireland  28–9; Irish campaigns of  3; policies towards Catholics while Lord Protector  24–7; scornful rejection of the Clonmacnoise decrees  29 Cromwellian Conquest and Settlement of Ireland  29–30, 178

Crypto-Catholicism in court of Charles I, protestant perceptions of  176–7 Culloden Moor, battle of  4–5, 289 Cwm, Gwent, Jesuit school in  43–4 D’Adda, Fr Ferdinando  68–9 D’Aubigny, Ludovic Stuart, see Stuart D’Aubigny D’Este, Rinaldo, uncle-in-law to James II and VII 62–3 Dallam, Thomas, organ builder  252 Davenport, Fr Christopher, OMR (alias Francis a Sancta Clara), papalist  194–5 Davys, Sir John, author of Letter to a Friend 37 Declaration from Breda (1660)  35 Declaration of Indulgence (1672)  48–9, 76–7, 199–200, 216, 236–8 Declaration of Indulgence (English, 1687, 1688) 67–8 Declaration of Indulgence (Scottish, 1687)  67–8, 82–3 Declaratory Act (Irish, 1689)  70 Del Val, Merry,  xxiii Deposing power, papal  189 Derby, in the ’45 Rebellion  3–4 Dering, Edward, composer of motets  247 Digby, George, 2nd earl of Bristol  39–40 Digby, Magdalen, painful death of  166–7 Digby, Sir Kenelm  195; and the Blackloists  14, Dillon, Philip, Irish exile in Brittany  293 Dillon, Robert, wine merchant in Bordeaux  303 Dillons of Dublin, bankers  306–7 Dimock, Fr Charles, Bridgettine, translates Augustinian rule into English  156–7 Dispensing power, royal, affirmed in case of Godden vs Hales  65–6 Divine right theory  197 Dodd, Charles (alias of Fr Hugh Tootell)  6, 195–6, 202–3 Dominican house built at Castlelyons, Cork  238–9; several established (1657–95), Irish  132, 134–5; English  56–8; female convent, in Rome  130; Irish convent in Lisbon 130–1 Dongan, Sir Thomas, Catholic governor of New York 105–6 Douai, English college at  125–6, 249–50; Jansenists problems in  133; rebuilding of secular college in  131–2 Double assessment on Catholics in England and Wales  76, 78 Dover, Earl of, see Jermyn Dover, treaty of (1670)  46–7, 200–1

Index  315 Downes, Margaret, founder of Carmelite House at Lierre  129 Drogheda, massacre at  29 Drummond, James, 1st earl of Perth, see 64–6; builds a Catholic chapel  233–4; imbibes thought of Bossuet  201 Drummond, John, 1st earl of Melfort  64–6, 221; imbibes thought of Bossuet  201 Dryden, John, Catholic writings of  284–5 Dublin, failed Catholic coup in (Oct.1641)  15–16; James II and VII arrives in 1689  70, 88; provincial synod under James II  63–4; religious tensions in Restoration  36–8; St Werburgh’s church, modelled on specific Roman churches  241; three-galleried churches in  239–40 Dubois, Crispin, organ builder  251–2 Duddell, Francis, designs church interiors in Dublin 238–9 Duke of York, see James II and VII, King Dundee, Viscount, see Graham of Claverhouse Dunkirk, trade with Ireland  299–300 Durham, Catholic chapel at attacked during the ’15  184 East Hendred (Berkshire) ruined medieval chapel restored at  236–8 Easy Club, Jacobite literary figures as members of  286 Eberson, Fr Joseph, SJ, Rector of the English College in Rome  133 Ecclesiology, Catholic  192–6 Edict of Nantes, see Nantes, Edict of Ellis, Philip. Bishop of Amasia and vicar apostolic for the western district  61 Emancipation Act, see Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) Embassies, London, Catholic chapels in  2–3, 26, 42–3, England, missionary activity in  125–8 English College Rome, failed attempt to unite with Scottish and Irish Colleges  124 English College, Douai, see Douai Esh Burse,  213 Essex, earls of, see Capell Evans, Fr Philip, vestments of  217 Evelinge, Elizabeth, Franciscan nun, writings on Franciscan spirituality  156–7 Evelyn, John, visits chapel royal  248 Everingham Hall (York), fittings in chapel of 223–4 Exclusion Crisis (1678–81)  3, 53, 76, 175, 200–1 Exile, as a cultural perception  295; Jacobite experience of  281

Eyre, Rowland, aided by army officers, to regain Catholic estates  26 Eyston family, restore medieval chapel  236–8 Fairfax, Thomas, 3rd Lord Fairfax, protects Catholics 26 Famine in Ireland (1674–6)  261–2 Fede, Innocenzo, musician  248–9 Fénelon, archbishop François, Catholic Quietist and links to James III  205–6 Ferguson, Robert, suspicious of James VII’s Scottish toleration  67 Fifteen, the (or the ’15), see Jacobite Rising (1715–16) Fitzgerald, George, and the Bank of England 294–5 Fitzjames, James, duke of Berwick, Jacobite poet and translator  286 Fleetwood, Charles, as Lord Deputy in Ireland  32–3; Irish policies of  13–14 Flynn, Mary, reflections of a servant on exile  295 Forty-Five, the (or the ’45), see Jacobite Rising (1745–6) Foxe, John, Book of Martyrs, legacies of  185 France, and promise of military aid to Jacobites 3–4 France, Irish exiles in armies of  293–5 Franciscan churches in Tangier  104–5 Franciscan convent, Nieuport  130; in Nantes 130–1 Franciscan spirituality  156–7 Franciscan, Irish convent in Nantes  130–1 Franciscans in Ireland  13–14 Franciscans, Observant  xxiv Fraser, Alexander, praised for his poetry  273–4 Freemasonry, amongst Irish merchants  302–3 Frescoes of saints  158–9 Fursdon, Fr Cuthbert, translates Benedictine rule into English  156 Gall, Fr Robert, Scottish Jesuit  198–9 Gallicanism  xix–xx, 5–6, 102–3, 190–3; Anglican sympathy with  184–5; James II and VII and  59–61 Galway  102–3, 110; chapel built in warehouse at  239–40; eucharistic processions in  215; textiles made in Dominican convent in  224n.76; textiles made in Poor Clare convent in  224–5 Galwey, Antoine, brandy exporter to Ireland 302–3 Gary, Henry, Catholic trader in Bombay  99 Gascoigne, Catherine, Benedictine nun, copyist 163–4

316 Index Gateshead, Catholic chapel at attacked during the ’15  184 Gavan, Fr John, SJ  189, 199–200 Gavelkind, in Ireland  94 Gearnon, Antoin, Parrthas an Anama 257–8 Gennari, Benedetto, altar painting by  232–3 Gerrard, Sir Thomas, Catholic colonialist  100–1 Gerrard, Sir William  230–1 Ghent, convents in  39–40 Gibbon, Edward, investor  305–6 Gibbons, Grinling, ornate altarpieces by  232–3 Gibbs, James, Protestant builder of Catholic chapels 241 Giffard, Bonaventure, bishop of Madaura and vicar apostolic for the midlands district  61, 66 Gifford, Mary, Carmelite nun, and portrait of Peter Wright, martyr  165 Gifford, Walter, painter of miniatures  165 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey  100–1 Glencoe Massacre (1694)  279 Glendalough, large group of worshippers, broken up in 1714 at  239–40 Glengarry, Catholic school in  43–4 Glenlivet, Scottish seminary moved to  123 Godden vs Hales, and the royal dispensing power 65–6 Godolphin, William, ambassador to Spain  105 Golding, Bridgit, canoness, reading habits of  140 Good Friday Agreement  xvii Gookin, Vincent  30–1 Gordon, George, 1st duke of Gordon  65–6 Gordon, George, 2nd marquess of Huntly  214; elegy for  272–3 Gormanston Castle (Meath), built  238–9 Graham, James, 1st Marquess of Montrose  23–4, 271–2 Graham, John, of Claverhouse 1st Viscount Dundee  279; poetry extolling  285–6 Great Fire of London  49, 150 Great Tew circle  46 Greenhalgh, John, curious observer  216 Gunpowder Plot, commemorated  182 Gwyn, Fr Robert, writer of apologetics  264–5 Hacker, Col. John, protects Catholics  26 Haicéad, Pádraigín, Ireland Stir up your courage 259 Hakluyt, Richard  98 Hamilton, Margaret, hounded by the Kirk  22 Harris, Thomas, organ builder  252 Hartlepool, Catholic chapel at attacked during the ’15  184 Hathersage (Derbyshire), Catholic worship in church ruins  236–8

Hawkins, Fr Henry  212–13 Hawksmoor, Nicholas, Protestant builder of Catholic chapels  241 Hawley, Susan, founded convent of canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre  130 Hennessy, Charles, merchant in Southern Netherlands 305 Hennessy, Richard, brandy exporter to Ireland 302–3 Henrietta Maria, Queen  11, 14–15, 55–6, 176–7; and chapel at Somerset House  231–2; Catholic books and artefacts destroyed  210–11, 230; return to England in 1660s 216 Herbert, Fr Teresa Joseph, spiritual writer  155–6 Herbert, William, 1st earl of Powys  50 Heysenbuttell, John, designs church interiors in Dublin 238–9 High Court of Justice, Irish (1652–4)  32–3 Hitchmough, Richard, seminarian turned informer 249–50 Hobbes, Thomas, similarity of thought to Blackloist thought  199 Holden, Fr Henry, Blackloist  194–5 Holy Deaths  166–7 Holy Sepulchre, Canonesses of  130; daily rituals of 137–8 Holyrood, Catholic chapel created at  220–1, 233–4; Catholic school established in 236–8 Holywell (North Wales), St Winefride’s well, as place of pilgrimage  46, 142–3, 268–9 Hone, Elizabeth, Poor Clare, converted by reading saints’ lives  141 Hordesnell, Henry, speaker of the Bermuda assembly 112–13 Horses, Catholics forbidden to own those worth more than £5  77–8 Howard, Alethea, countess of Arundel, chapel of  41–2 Howard, Antonia, prioress  130 Howard, Cardinal Thomas  62–3; and the Venerable English College  131–2; as ‘the cardinal of Norfolk’  56–8; founds Dominican convent in Rome  130 Howard, Mary, prioress, lives of community sisters 155–6 Howard, Thomas, 21st earl of Arundel, granted lands in Virginia  100–1 Howard, Thomas, 5th duke of Norfolk, builds Catholic chapels  240–1 Huddleston family, and links with convents in Bruges 251 Hughes, Fr John, Welsh-language Catholic writings of  266–7

Index  317 Hull, Dom. Francis, OSB, promotes Ignatian spirituality against Baker’s  162–3 Hyde, Anne, wife of James duke of York  56–8 Hyde, Edward, 1st earl of Clarendon  39–40, 175–6 Hyde, Henry, 2nd earl of Clarendon, as Lord Lieutenant in Ireland (1685–6)  63–4 Idolatry, at home of George Gordon, marquess of Huntly 214 Immaculate Conception, doctrine of the  xxiii–xxiv Incorruption of nuns’ bodies  148 Independents, English, in negotiations with Catholics 24 Index of Prohibited Books, Roman, Thomas White’s placed on the  199–200 Inglis, Liam, Jacobite chronicler  288–9 Inisboffin, priests imprisoned on  259–60 Innes, Fr Thomas, and Jansenism  206–7; as principal of Scots College, Rome  194–5 Innes, Fr Lewis  195–6 Innocent XI, Pope  62–3, 69–70, 282–3; and episcopal appointments in Ireland  117–18; and James II and VII  61 Ireland, Cromwellian Conquest and Settlement of  28–33; diocesan and national synods in  12–13; Synod, Irish national (1666)  45; 10 diocesan and provincial, in Ireland (1685–9)  63–4; distinctive missionary challenges in  12; James II’s policies in  63–4; literature in Irish Gaelic  257–64; missionary activity in  117; patterns of exile from between the 1690s and 1760  294 Irish bishops, Jacobite royal appointment of  282–3 Irish Brigade of exiled soldiers, bursaries donated by to the Irish colleges  283 Irish Catholics, involvement in English colonies 102–4 Irish College Rome, failed attempt to unite with Scottish and English Colleges  124 Irish college, continental  134–5 Irish College, Rome  118–20 Irish colleges, students assisted by bursaries from the Irish Brigade  283 Irish Parliament (1689), and pro-Catholic legislation 70 Irish Rebellion (1641)  1–2, 5–6, 10, 15–18, 32–3, 40–1, 175–6, 180 Irish Remonstrance (1663), see Remonstrance (Irish, 1663) Irving, Alexander, of Drum, mocks the Kirk  22–3 Jacobite literature  284–90 Jacobite martyrs  168

Jacobite poetry after Culloden  289 Jacobite Rising (1715–16)  79, 123, 183–4; and subsequent diaspora  292; Catholic responses to  202–3; executions after  222 Jacobite Rising (1745–6)  1–4, 9, 79–80, 183–4, 203 Jacobites, and mercantile activity  292 Jacobites, and the Irish diaspora  280 Jacobites, Scottish  183–4 Jacobitism  118–19, 221–5; defined  278–91; elements in the cultural identity of  280–1 Jacobitism, Irish Catholic  262–3 Jacobitism, Scottish  82–3, 174–5, 183–4, Jamaica 110–13 James II and VII, King, and appointment of Church of England Bishops  59–61; and restoration of Catholicism  59–63; and the appointment of Catholic Bishops  59–61; as duke of York  49, 55–6, 78, 200–1, 216; conversion of  220; coronation of  59–61; and the ‘Catholic Moment’ in Britain and Ireland  53–73; anti-popery during his reign  181; catholicising policies of  181; creates Catholic chapel in Whitehall Palace 220; devot converts close to  201; colonial policies of  111–12; his sincerity as a believer in toleration debated  66–7; and episcopal appointments in Ireland  117–18 James III, death of  290; Gaelic literary attitudes to  288–9; Irish attitudes to  262–3; King in exile  203; King, and episcopal appointments in Ireland  117–18, 282–3; contested birth of  68–9 Jansenism  152–3, 193, 205–7 Jeffreys, George LCJ  58–9 Jermyn, Henry, 1st earl of Dover in Jacobite peerage 221 Jerningham family, of Costessey, Norfolk, musical interests of  250–1 Jerningham, Angela, abbess  130 Jesuit colleges founded in early seventeenth century 133 Jesuits: annual reports from (Ireland)  15; attempts to agree new Oath with Cromwellians  24; devotional writings of  212–13; found schools in England  236–8; in Abergavenny  41–2; in Henrietta Maria’s household  231–2; in Maryland  106–7; influencing female religious  129; mission to England  11; spiritual practices  161, and antipathy to  161–2; spirituality and influence on religious houses  152–4; teachings on liberty of conscience  204 Johnson, Dom. Henry Joseph, OSB, and exposition of Benedictine rule  156

318 Index Jones, Edward, and rebuilding of college at Valladolid 131–2 Jones, Inigo  235–6; designs Catholic chapels 230–1 Jonyne, Margaret Clare, Poor Clare, relics of  148 Kandler, Charles Fredrick  223–4 Kempis, Thomas á, author of The Imitation of Christ  154–5; his works translated into English 5–6 Kent, Fr John, rector of Irish College at Louvain 122 Kildare Hall Dublin, Jesuit chapel in  235–6 Kilkenny, Confederation of, see Confederation of Kilkenny Kilkenny, rededication of churches in  235–6 Kilkenny, St Canice Cathedral in  235–6 Kilmainham. Royal Hospital, conversion of chapel for Catholic use  238–9 Kinsale (Cork), Catholic church built at  239–40 Kirwan, Marc, wine merchant in Bordeaux  303 Knatchbull, abbess Mary  39–40, 128, 161–2 Kneller, Godfrey, paintings for James II  221 Knock, Co. Mayo, Marian devotions at xxiii–xxiv Knott, Fr Edward, SJ  192–3 La Rochelle, colonial trade from  302–3 Laguerre, Louis, decorations at Chatsworth  243 Lambert, Major General John, protects Catholics 26 Lancashire, Catholic royalist allegiance in  19–20 Land confiscation, Ireland  28 Land Settlement (Ireland)  44–5 Langhorne, Sir William  106–7 Lateran Council, Fourth  195 Law, John, of Lauriston, financier  295–6 Lawrence, Richard  30–1 Lee, Nicolas, Irish merchant in Nantes  301–2 Leeward Islands  99, 102–6, 113–14 Legrenzei, Giovanni, composer  248–9 Leslie, James, second count of Balquhain, commissioned vestments in Turkish material 225 Leuven, see Louvain Leveson, Anne of St Teresa, meditations on torments of martyrs  166–7 Leveston, Magdalen, deathbed of  144 Lewis, Fr David, vestments of  217 Leyburn, John, bishop of Adrumetum and vicar apostolic for London district  61–2 Liberty of Conscience (for Catholics)  39–40, 54, 190, 198–9, 203–7. See also Religious liberty Lime Street chapel, religious paintings in  222

Limerick, trading company and smuggling 301–2 Limerick, treaty of (1691)  113–14, 292; leads to 15,000 troops transported to France  293–4 Lisbon, English college in  107–9; and rebuilding of college for seculars in  131–2; Irish traders in  102–3 Litcott, Sir John, James II and VII’s representative in Rome  62–3 Liverpool, Catholic chapel at attacked during the ’15  184 Llanfyllin (Montgomeryshire), pocket of Catholics in  264–5 Lobb, Fr Emmanuel (alias Joseph Simons), SJ  130 Locke, John  108–9; his Letter on Toleration 181–2 Locke, Matthew, composer  246–7 Long Melford (Suffolk), anti-Catholic riots in 18–19 Louvain, convent in, music for  253–4, Irish College at  122, Irish exiled authors in  257; St Anthony’s College  134–5 Lutton, Fr Edward  164–5 Lynch, Dominic, merchant in Spain  298–9; imports Irish butter and hides to Ostend 305 Lynch, Thomas Michael, wine merchant in Bordeaux 303 MacCarthy, Justin, appointed to senior command in Ireland  64–5 Mac Colla, Alasdair  287–8, campaigns of in 1640s 271–2 Mac Craith, Aindrias, Jacobite chronicler  288–9 Mac Dómhnaill, Jacobite chronicler  288–9 MacDonnell, Randall, first earl of Antrim  28–9, 32; supports Franciscan mission in southern Highlands  269–70 MacMahon, Hugh, bishop of Clogher and archbishop of Armagh  118–19 Mac Mhaisdir Alasdair, still hopes for restoration after Culloden  289 Mac Murchaidh, Ciarán, and the Irish language 258 Mac Sheáin Bhuí Mac Cárthaigh, Diarmuid, and the making of memory  287–8 MacDermott, Patrick, reflections on exile  295 Macdonald, Alexander of Argyll  271–2; elegy for  272 MacDonald, Hugh, vicar Apostolic of the Scottish Highlands  123–4 Macdonald, John from Lochaber (aka Iain Lom [Bald John]), vernacular poet  271–3; praised for his poetry  273–4

Index  319 MacDonald, John, of Keppoch  288 MacDonnell, Angus, Lord Glengarry and Aros 43–4 MacDonnell, Archibald, of Keppoch, poetry of 273–4 MacDonnell, Julia, writes religious poems in Scots Gaelic  274–7 MacMarquess, John, of Kintyre, translator into Gaelic 271 Macnemara brothers, smugglers  301–2 MacPherson, Sir Aeneas, clan historian  273–4 MacRae, Duncan, of Inverinate, anthologiser of Gaelic poetry  273–4 Macroom (Cork), Catholic church built at 239–40 Madagascar 100–1 Madras 106–7 Magdalen College, Oxford, James II imposes Catholic President on  63–4, 66 Maitland, Richard, titular 4th earl of Lauderdale, Jacobite exile and poet  285–6 Malaga, Irish traders in  102–3 Manchester, Young Pretender in  4 Manning, Fr Robert  195; Catholic reformer 206–7 Manning, Henry, Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster  xix–xx; supporter of universal education  xxiii–xxiv Manwaring, Arthur, silversmith  209–10 Marten, Henry, iconoclasm of  1–2 Martyrs, portraits of  158–9 Marvell, Andrew, author of An account of the growth of popery and arbitrary government  66–7, 180–1 Mary II, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, see Mary Stuart Mary of Modena  68–9, 179; and relics  149; chapels of  230–3; selects Irish bishops as regent for James III  282–3 Mary Queen of Scots, her crucifix given by pope to Catherine of Braganza  216–17 Mary Stuart, daughter of James II and VII  68–9, 77–8 Mary Ward Institute founded  128–9 Maryland, as a Catholic colony  27, 97–8, 101–2, 105–15 Mason, Fr Richard, OFM  130 Mass plate  211–12, 216–17 Mazarin, Cardinal Jules, Cromwell explains his leniency towards Catholics to  27 McMahon chalice  224 Melfort, earls of, see Drummond, John Mercantile networks, Catholic  292 Merchants, British and Irish communities of 292–3

Mexico 102–3 Meynell, Agnes  211–13 Miracles 146–8 Molloy, Charles  110–11 Monck, General George, in Ireland  28–9; lifts restrictions on Scottish Catholics  22–3 Monmouth, duke of, see Scott, James Monmouthshire, large number of Catholics in 264–5 Monstrance 230–1 Montagu, Edward, 1st earl of Sandwich  104–5 Montrose, Marquess of, see Graham Moore, Andrew, silversmith  209–10 Moray, earls of, see Stuart, Alexander More, Fr Henry SJ  192–3 More, Gertrude, Benedictine nun and follower of Augustine Baker  163–4 More, St Thomas, hair shirt of  158–9 Morelli, Cesare, musician  249–50 Morrice, Roger, records iconoclasm in Nov.1688 236–8 Mostyn, Elizabeth Carmelite sister  129; and visits to ruined chapel  143 Mostyn, Margaret, Carmelite sister  129; Margaret, fights demonic possession  145–6; Marian devotion  143, 145–6; miraculous cure of  147–8 Mullingar (Westmeath), three-galleried churches in 239–40 Murray, Lord George, Jacobite  4 Music, Catholic  245 Mylott, Mary Michael, Poor Clare, translates texts on the Passion  159 Nantes, Irish merchant community in  293; privateering and smuggling out of  301; Irish merchant families in  301–2; Revocation of the Edict of  175 Naturalisation of Irish emigrants in France 296–7 Neary, Fr Cornelius, political thinking of  202–3 Netherlands, southern, status of Irish migrants in  297, 305 New Ross (Wexford), Augustinians build friary at 239–40 New York  105–6; James duke of York as proprietor of  111–12 Newcastle, Catholic chapel at attacked during the ’15  184; Catholic chapel built at inn in 236–8 Newfoundland, Catholic traders with  100–1 Newry, County Down, at outset of Irish Rebellion of 1641  1 Nicholls, Colonel Richard, governor of New York 105–6

320 Index Nicholson, Fr Thomas  124–5 Nicholson, Thomas, made bishop of Peristachium and vicar apostolic for Scotland (1694)  72, 123–5 Nicole, Pierre, and education of James III  205–6 Non-Jurors, Scottish  82–3 North America, under jurisdiction of vicar apostolic for London district  127 Notley, Thomas, Catholic governor of Maryland 101–2 Nuns, numbers of  136; reading habits of  139–42 Ó Bruadair, Dáibhí, A wound has reduced me to a vessel overflowing with disease  261–2; and the making of memory  287–8 Ó Cléirigh, Míchéal, Annala Rioghacta Eireann 257 Ó Colmáin, Fr Domhnall, The Parliament of Women 262 Ó Conaill, Seán, Elegy to Ireland 259–60 Ó Doinnshléibhe, Aindrias, prefect of the Irish College in Rome  258–9 Ó Dubhlaoich, Fr Seán, author of summary of Christian teaching in Irish  258 Ó Gallchobhair, Séamus, Sixteen Irish sermons 259 Ó hIfearnáin, Liam, Jacobite chronicler  288–9 Ó Maolmhuaidh, Proinsias, Grammatica Latino-Hibernica 258–9 Ó Neachtain, Tadhg, Jacobite chronicler  288–9 Ó Rathaille, Aogán, Irish Jacobite poet  263; and the making of memory  288 O’Connell, Fr Robert, papalist  193–4 O’Ferrall, Fr Richard, papalist  193–4 O’Mahony, Fr Connor SJ, and radical Catholic political theology  196–7 O’Molloy, Francis, author books on doctrine and grammar 121 O’Moore, Rory, and Irish Rebellion of 1641  257 O’Neill, Owen Roe  28–9 O’Neill, Sir Phelim, and the Rebellion of 1641  1 O’Queely, Archbishop Malachy  15–16 O’Reilly, Edmund, archbishop of Armagh, has meetings with Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell 32–3 O’Shiell, Luc, slave trader  301–2 O’Sullivan Beare, Philip, and radical Catholic political theology  196–7 Oates, Titus  49 Oates, Titus, in Tangier  111–12 Oath of Abjuration see Abjuration Oath (1643) Oath of Allegiance (English, 1606)  44–5, 84–5, 189, 191–3, 198–200; Catholic attempts to modify  205; reworked by Serenus Cressy 46

Oath of Allegiance and Assurance (Scottish, 1693) 82–3 Ormond Peace, first (1646)  17–18 Ormond Peace, second (1649)  40–1 Ormond, earl, marquess and duke of, see Butler Ormskirk, Catholic chapel at attacked during the ’15 184–6 Osborne, Thomas, 1st earl of Danby  180–1 Oxford University, Act for them to present to benefices owned by Catholics (1689)  77–8 Paine, Henry Neville, Catholic merchant  110–11 Palladian style, in Catholic chapels  230–1 Palmer, Roger, earl of Castlemaine  199–200; James II and VII’s representative in Rome  62–3; and Gallicanism  200–1 Panama 102–3 Papacy, James II and VII’s relation with  56–8; policies towards Britain and Ireland  10–11 Papal Court, James II and James VII’s diplomatic mission to  62–3 Paris, as major centre of religious life  131 Parliament, Irish (1689)  88 Pascal, Blaise, and education of  205–6 Passion, meditations upon  159–60 Passive obedience, Catholic  202–3 Paston, Mary Austin, painful death of  166–7 Peckham, Sir George, Catholic colonialist 100–1 Penal Laws  74–96: Irish  38, 86–94; Scottish  80–6; English and Welsh  47, 75–80 Penn, William, Quaker, and friend of James II and VII  67 Pepys, Samuel, comments on the Queen’s crucifix  210–11; visits Catholic chapels  246–7; visits Queen’s chapel  216–17 Percy, Mary, devotional works  161–2 Persecution, executions of priests in England 12–13 Persons [or Parsons], Robert, Jesuit controversialist 5–6 Perth, earls of, see Drummond, James Petre family, chapels of  240–1 Petre, Benjamin, bishop and vicar apostolic for the London district  126 Petre, Fr Edward, SJ  56–8, 62–3, 68–9, 232–3 Philip IV, King of Spain, pays for new Scottish seminary in Spain  23 Philip, James, Scottish Jacobite poet  285–6 Pitcairne, Dr Archibald, Scottish Jacobite poet 285–6 Plate, liturgical  222 Plowden, Sir Edmund, Catholic proprietor of ‘new Albion’  100–1, 109

Index  321 Plunkett, Sir Nicholas  41–2 Plunkett, St Oliver, archbishop of Armagh  50, 76–7; last recognised martyr  219–20; relics of 158–9 Poetry, Gaelic, Irish Jacobite  263; and where its authors came from  286 Polehampton, Edward and Mary, musicians  250–1 Poor Clares, English houses of  129; rule translated into Irish  156–7; West Meath and Galway, translate texts into Irish  140–1 Pope, Alexander, Catholic writings of  284–5 Popery and arbitrary government  176; seen as closely linked  174–5 Popish Plot (1641)  177–8 Popish Plot (1678)  36, 48–51, 53, 56–8, 76, 199–200; aftermath of  51 Porter, Matthew, merchant in Spain  298–9 Porter, Nicolas, merchant in Southern Netherlands 305 Portugal, Catholics engaged in trades with  97 Portugal, London embassy chapel of  216–17, 240–1 Postgate, Fr Nicholas, and his portable slate altar 217 Powis Castle, Williamite assault on  221 Poynings Law  70, 198 Presteigne (Radnorshire), pocket of Catholics in 264–5 Preston, Dom Thomas, OSB  192–3 Preston, Young Pretender in  4; Catholic chapel at attacked during the ’15  184 Priests, banished from Scotland  81; executed in England  18–19; number of in Scotland  81; Priests, numbers of: in Ireland  15 Privateers, Irish Catholic  102–3, 300; facing execution 300 Probabilism  189–90, 204 Processions, religious, in Ireland  215 Propaganda Fide, see Congregations Prosser, William, merchant in Southern Netherlands 305 Protestant building in Roman style  241–3 psychological effects of  283; Scottish, non-enforcement of  85–6 Pugin, Augustine Welby, global architect, xxiv–xxv Punch, Fr John, Franciscan, and radical Catholic political theology  196–7 Purchas, Samuel  98 Puw, Gwilym, author of Welsh language Catholic writings 267–9 Pyne, Benjamin, goldsmith  223–4 Quakers, and James II and VII  67–8 Quellin, Arnold, ornate altarpieces by  232–3

Quellin, Francis, designs church interiors in Dublin 238–9 Quietism 205–7 Quinn, André, grain merchant  303 Quirici, Giacomo, Propagande Fide agent in London 120 Quo Warranto proceedings (Ireland)  64–6 Radclyffe (nee Webb), Anna Maria, dowager Lady Derwentwater  222 Radclyffe, James, 1st earl of Derwentwater, political thinking of  202 Ramsay, Allan, patriotic poet  286 Ramsay, Fr Andrew Michael, Catholic reformer 206–7 Randolph, Fr Leo, builds timber Catholic church in Birmingham  236–8 Ray, Thomas, merchant in Southern Netherlands 305–6 Recusancy, Catholics penalised for  18–20 Regulars and seculars, disputes between, see Seculars and regulars Relics  142–5, 147–50, 158–9, 209–10, 217–19 Religious liberty  56–8, 65–8, 78. See also Liberty of conscience Remonstrance, Irish (1663)  44–7, 199–200 Rinuccini, Gian Battista, archbishop of Fermo and papal nuncio in Ireland, former supporters of  17–18, 45, 193–4, 197 Robertson, Alexander, of Straun, Jacobite poet 286 Roman Catholic Relief Act see Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) Rome, rebuilding of secular college in  131–2 Rome, see also Papacy Rome, Venerable English College in  56–8 Rosary, devotional importance of  144–6 Royal Supremacy, pope wants James II to surrender his  61 Rubens, Peter Paul, his painting of the crucifixion destroyed  1–2; paintings in royal chapels  230–1 Russell, Fr Richard  97–8, 104–5, 110–11 Rutherford, Andrew, 1st earl of Teviot 105–6 Rushworth, John, protects Catholics  26 Sacralisation of Space  142–5 Sacralisation of time, see time, sacralisation of Sacraments, availability of in Wales  265 Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide, see Congregation, Sacred Sacred Objects  142–5 Sacripante, Giuseppe, Cardinal Protector of Scotland 124

322 Index San Clemente priory, Rome, number of novices (1710–97) 120 Sancta Clara, Francis A, see Davenport, Fr Christopher Sanctuary lamps  223 Sarsfield, Patrick, as a soldier  261–2; as a merchant 295 Saule, Laurence, brandy exporter to Ireland 302–3 Savoy, Benedictine community at the, raided and looted 217–19 Scarisbrick Hall (Lancashire), Catholic school in 236–8 Scholasticism 190–1 Schools, founded in England (1685–9)  65–6; founded in Ireland (1685–9)  63–4; founded in Scotland (1685–9)  65–6; Irish proclamation closing  87–8 Scotland, music played no part of Catholic worship in  245–6; Catholic persecution during the civil wars in (1638–60)  21–4; Irish troops in royalist armies in  23–4; James duke of York as high commissioner in  55–6; literature in Scottish Gaelic  269–77; missionary activity in  122–5; Papal oversight of mission to  12 Scots College, Paris  134 Scots College, Rome.  124, 233–4; failed attempt to unite with English and Irish Colleges  124 Scott, James, duke of Monmouth  58–9 Sebenico Giovanni, musician  247 Second Spring, Victorian  7–8 Selosse, Fr Antoine, composer  252–3 Seminaries, Irish proclamation closing  87–8 Sergeant, Fr John, Blackloist  189 Seville, Irish traders in  102–3 Shen Futsung, Michael Alphonsius, painting of as a convert  221 Sheridan, Thomas, Irish courtier  201–2 Shrines 142–3 Sidney, Henry, Viscount  74 Silverware, Catholic  209–10 Simons, Joseph SJ, see Lobb, Emmanuel Sinnich, Fr John, Franciscan, and Jansenism  193 Skerrett, Thomas, wealthy Irish merchant in London 298–9 Slave trade, Irish merchants and  298–9, 301–2 Slave trading, Irish involvement in  302 Smith, Bishop Richard  xxiv, 11–12, 14–15 Smith, James, bishop of Callipolis and vicar apostolic for the northern district  61, 126 Smith, James, designs interior of James VII’s chapel in Holyrood  233–4 Smither, Robert, Catholic silversmith  216–17 Smuggling  300–1, 305–6

Somerset House, Catholic chapel in  1–3, 230–1 Songs, Jacobite  287 Sorbonne, support for Irish synod of 1666  45 Spain, status of Irish migrants in  297 Spinelli, Giuseppi, papal internuncio in Brussels 126 Spreul, Fr Francis  22–3 St Bridget, life of translated from French to English 157 St Christopher (Caribbean) – also known as St Kitts 103–4 St Germain-en-laye, Jacobite court at  293–4; James II and VII in exile at  70–1; St Germain-en-laye, music in chapel of 248–9 St Isidore College, Rome, visitation of  120–2, 134–5, 258–9, number of students in (1742) 120 St James Palace, Catholic chapel at  230–1 St Malo, hub for Irish merchants  300 St Patrick’s Purgatory  215 St Winefride’s Well (Holywell, N.Wales), see Holywell Stapleton, Sir William  105–6, 108–9 Stapleton, Thomas, Jesuit controversialist  5–6 Station Island (St Patrick’s Purgatory, Ireland) 142–3 Stations of the Cross  159–60 Statues, devotional  146–7 Stigmata 165–6 Stonor, Bishop John, proposes changed Oath of Allegiance 202–3 Stour Valley, anti-Catholic riots in the  18–19 Stuart d’Aubigny, Ludovic, almoner to Catherine of Braganza  56–8 Stuart, Alexander, 5th earl of Moray  65–6 Stuart, Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, apparent conversion to Protestantism  203 Sunderland, Catholic chapel at attacked during the ’15  184 Swift, Jonathan, dean of St Patrick’s cathedral, Dublin 285 Synods, diocesan and national, in Ireland, see Ireland, diocesan and national synods in Tabaray, James, designs Catholic chapel at Kilmainham 238–9 Talbot, archbishop Peter  36 Talbot, Richard, 1st earl of Tyrconnell  36; Catholic ultra in Ireland  201; appointed Lord Deputy in Ireland  64–5; appointed Lieutenant General in Ireland  64–5, 88; (mis)appropriate Protestant space for Catholic use 238–9 Talbot, Sir William  36

Index  323 Tangier  104–7, 109, 111–12, 115 Tart Hall (St James’s Park), chapel at  41–2 Temple, Sir John, author of History of the Irish Rebellion, (1646)  41–2 Teresa of Avila, St, her works translated into English 5–6 Terry, Guillermo, trades with the Indies  304–5 Test Act (1673)  48–9, 55–6, 65–6, 76, 199–200, 247 Test Act (1678)  48–9, 67–8, 76, 82, 199–200 Teviot, earls of, see Rutherford Textiles, liturgical  211–12 The ’15, see Jacobite rebellion The ’45, see Jacobite rebellion The Fifteen see Jacobite rebellion The forty-five, see Jacobite rebellion Thistle Chapel (Drummond Castle)  233–4 Thornden (Essex), chapels at  240–1 Three Kingdoms, War of  10, 37, 273; historiographical approach  xx Throckmorton, Sir Robert, political thinking of 202–3 Time, sacralisation of  137–42 Timperley, Elizabeth, founder of Conceptionist convent in Paris  129 Tipperary, cruciform church built at  239–40 Toleration Act (1689)  181–2 Toleration, see Liberty, religious Tootell Hugh, Fr, see Dodd, Charles Touching for the king’s evil, James and  59 Transportation of demobilised Irish Catholic troops 28 Trent, Council of  xix–xx, xxiv Tridentine reforms, see Trent, Council of Tyranny, types of  173–4 Tyrconnell, earl of, see Talbot, Richard Ugbrooke (Devon) ornate protestant chapel at  243 Ulster Rising (1641) see Irish Rebellion Ultramontanes,  xix–xx, 5–6 Unigenitus, Papal Bull condemning Jansenism 206–7 Union of England and Scotland  183 Urban VIII, Pope  1 Valladolid, English college in  133; music at  252–3; rebuilding of secular college in 131–2 Vanbrugh, Sir John, builds in Baroque style 241–3 Vatican Council, Second  xxiii Vaughan, Mary, Carmelite sister  129 Venerable English College, Rome  125–6; music at 252–3

Vernon, James, witness to iconoclasm at Whitehall 232–3 Verrio, Antonio, decorations at Chatsworth  243; frescoes by  232–3 Vestergan, Richard, engraver and author  6 Vestments  211–13, 217–19, 222, 224–5 Vicar Apostolic, and the four districts  125–6 Vicars Apostolic, appointed for England in 1685 61–2 Virgin Mary, see Blessed Virgin Mary Virginia 100–1 Wake, Sr Margaret, incorrupt body of  148–9 Wake, William, archbishop of Canterbury, and Gallicanism 184–5 Wales, Carmelite vocations in  117–18 Wales, Catholic participation in Civil wars in  18–21; Catholics in  43–4; literature in Welsh  264–9; seen as part of English mission in Rome  12 Waller, Sir William, raids and loots Benedictine chapel at the Savoy  217–19 Walpole, Robert, marries daughter of wealthy Irish Catholic merchant  298–9 Walsh, Antoine, slave trader  302 Walsh, Peter, bishop of Ferns and controversialist  44–5, 193–5 War of the Three Kingdoms, see Three Kingdoms Ward, Fr Cornelius, conversion strategy of 269–70 Ward, Mary, and lives of English martyrs  141; and sacralisation of time  138–9; sacralisation of space  142 Warner, Fr John, confessor to King James II and VII  56–8, 232–3 Warren, Edward, gunpowder manufacturer  307–8 Waterford 102–3 Waters, George, banker  306–7 Watson, Leon, negotiations with Blackloists  25 Watson, Samuel, decorations at Chatsworth  243 Wayside chapels and crosses, Irish  215 Welshpool (Montgomeryshire), pocket of Catholics in  264–5 Wentworth, Thomas, 1st earl of Strafford, and Ireland 177 Wexford, massacre at  29 Wharton, Jesse, Catholic governor of Maryland 101–2 Whigs, and anti-popery  180–1 White Ladies Priory, Shropshire  41–2 White, Fr Andrew, Jesuit, descriptions of work in Maryland 106–7 White, Fr Thomas, and Blackloists  15, 195; Grounds of Obedience 199

324 Index Whitehall Palace, James II’s chapel in  232–3; religious paintings in  222 Whore of Babylon, as a trope of anti-popery  180 Wildman, John, Leveller, protects Catholics  26 William III, King  77–8 William of Orange, later King William III, and the invasion of England  68–70, 77–8 Windsor Castle, James II’s chapel in  232–3 Wintour, Helena  216, 249; makes vestments 212–13

Wiseman, Jane, canoness, reading habits of  141 Witham, Fr Robert, President of Douai  131–2 Worthington, Fr Thomas, OP, and miracles 165–6 Wren, Christopher  228–30, 232–3; cautious designs for royal Catholic chapel  220–1; Protestant builder of Catholic chapels 241 Wright, Fr Peter, SJ, martyred  165