TY - JOUR
AU - Collinson, Patrick
AB - Abstract Were politics and religion in Elizabethan England two distinct substances? The practice of religion, specifically of the religion defined by the Act of Uniformity and the Book of Common Prayer, was compulsory, and enforced. The structures of church and state were analogous. Yet, politics and religion were prised apart both in the justification offered for the persecution of Catholics and in the Catholic response. There were areas of religion which were private and voluntary, but they were far from apolitical. The politics of religion in Elizabethan England was heightened by the inability of the state to enforce strict religious uniformity. One of the things to be done in haste and repented at leisure is to propose a neat formula by way of a title for an article without thinking through what the formula might mean, and how the subject could be tackled. ‘The politics of religion and the religion of politics’ sounds fine until you begin to consider how the topics of religion and politics are to be prised apart. To make any sense, my title depends on religion and politics being two distinct substances; and it is not at all clear that that is what they were in Elizabethan England. Are they ever? Not in the Islamic world, to be sure. I wonder how my subject would fare in the context of George Bush's United States. Is American religion really religious? And what might we mean by ‘really religious’? An old chestnut that, among sociologists of religion. President Eisenhower once said: ‘Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply held religious faith’, adding ‘and I don't care what it is’.1 As for western Europe in the sixteenth century, historians endlessly debate whether its many wars should be called wars of religion, and what was religious and what was political in its violent uprisings and rebellions: some anachronistic dichotomies here, deriving from questions badly put. In the American and many other modern constitutions there is a formal separation of church and state. My subject is more messily enmeshed, religion and politics tightly entangled with each other. In Elizabethan England the monarch was more than a commander (which is what her prime minister, William Cecil, once called her).2 She was head of the church, or more properly its supreme governor, which contemporaries said amounted to the same thing.3 Unlike her father, there is not much evidence that Elizabeth modelled herself on the biblical figure of Melchizedek, who was both priest and king. She was not an ayatollah. Yet, by her authority, and that of the parliament of which she was the principal member, every one of her subjects was legally bound to be present at the liturgical services of the church, twice on every Sunday and holy day, services which were constructed in minute detail in a Book of Common Prayer which, in the eyes of the law, was no more than an appendix to an act of parliament, the Act of Uniformity of 1559. Absence from church, and any deviation from the forms and rubrics of that book, were statutory offences and attracted the secular penalties of fine and imprisonment, penalties sharply increased by a further act of parliament in 1581. Other religious and ecclesiastical misdemeanours invited excommunication. That was a religious matter, but it had political and social implications. So far was religion from being private or voluntary that you could be put to death by incineration for the simple offence of holding beliefs which were contrary to orthodox Christianity. It did not happen very often, but it still happened, so far as we know, to eight persons between 1575 and 1612.4 Political interest in religious belief and practice was not, of course, an Elizabethan innovation. Readers of Eamon Duffy's brilliant and hugely influential book The Stripping of the Altars might be forgiven for gathering that the politicization of religion began with Henry VIII.5 But it was much older than that, and had been ratcheted up by the Lancastrian kings, using the threat of heresy and an act of parliament dealing with heresy to bolster their dubious entitlement to the throne. Henry VIII merely moved the goalposts and changed the rules. Since parliament had made the religious settlement, it could presumably unmake it, or change it (that had happened several times before, since the fifteen-thirties), and many sessions of successive Elizabethan parliaments were dominated by the politics of what Protestant critics of the settlement called ‘further reformation’. Parliamentary campaigns to improve the state of the church, by reforming the prayer book, or even changing the very structure of the church, but above all to promote what hot Protestants called a godly preaching ministry, involved some precocious parliamentary politics. The religion of politics and the politics of religion in Elizabethan England in this sense meant a lot of work at the grassroots, gathering evidence and forwarding it to Westminster; petitions claiming to speak for the people of England; procuring the election of the right sort of M.P.s; and the lobbying of M.P.s by what we would call pressure groups. The fact that these campaigns all failed (the queen saw to that) does not make them any less significant, for the political as well as the religious history of England. Sir Geoffrey Elton thought that Sir John Neale made too much of all this, but I think that Elton made too little of it.6 In principle, all children were baptized, willy-nilly, within days of birth. The only marriage was marriage in church. Only executed felons and suicides were denied Christian burial. Membership of the church was not so much compulsory as a birthright and a birth obligation, as inescapable as participation in the political body of the commonwealth. Richard Hooker wrote that church and state resembled the sides or the base of the one triangle. There was ‘not any man of the Church of England but the same man is also a member of the commonwealth; nor any man member of the commonwealth, which is not also of the Church of England’.7 Hooker's pipe dream (for church and commonwealth were not perfectly coterminous) helps us to understand how far it was socially as well as legally difficult to hold beliefs and engage in religious practices which were inconsistent with the social obligations summed up in the concept of neighbourhood. It largely explains why most Elizabethans of a Catholic persuasion were not recusants, or not 100 per cent recusants; and why, among Protestant dissenters, or puritans, out-and-out separation was rare, denounced by the majority who have left their opinions on record;8 and why emigration, to the Low Countries or later America, was often the only option available to those who did separate; and why, even more to the point, the leaders of the many thousands who emigrated to New England in the sixteen-twenties and thirties regarded their transplantation as an acceptable alternative to separation, insisting that that was not what it was. As soon as circumstances at home allowed it, a surprisingly large proportion of the colonists came back to Old England.9 We may legitimately talk of ecclesiastical patriotism. Hooker also helps us to understand how in the teeming London suburb of Southwark, with perhaps 10,000 inhabitants, virtually everyone who was physically able and of an age to do so, over ninety per cent, took communion in the parish church once a year.10 Whether that made a religious or a social-cum-political statement is a question which cannot be answered and should probably not be put. Elizabethan England was a confessional state. If we follow the reasoning of Heinrich Schilling, Wolfgang Reinhard and others, proponents of the currently fashionable notion of ‘confessionalization’, the English case was more typical than exceptional. In all parts of Europe, whether confessionally Catholic or Protestant (which further subdivided into Evangelical, or Lutheran, and Reformed, or Calvinist), the growing crystallization of the religion upheld by the state, setting in concrete the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, was one of the building blocks of state formation. In this perspective, religion was politics, as indispensable a component as military capacity, or bureaucracy or the power to tax.11 But, conversely, it was also the case that religion in the form of dissent, which was no less confessional, divided states, in France and Scotland to the extent of civil war. In those conditions religion was dysfunctional for the purposes of state formation. Contemporaries detected a close affinity, to say no more, between forms of ecclesiastical regiment (as they called it) and political structures. The government of single persons, bishops, was appropriate in a monarchical state. No bishop no king, as James VI and I famously pronounced. The alternative arrangements we know as Presbyterianism, collective government by groups embodying ministerial parity, strenuously advocated by some Elizabethan Protestants as the only church polity allowed by scripture, were thought even by their opponents to be not inappropriate in the few civic republics remaining in sixteenth-century Europe, such as Geneva. But not in a monarchy. The bishops and their spokespersons charged the Presbyterian puritans with being anti-monarchical republicans. They were as much a threat to the monarchical constitution of the state, and indeed, as with the Anabaptists, to the very fabric of society, as they were to the hierarchical structure of the church.12 It was perhaps significant that the young Thomas Cartwright, who was to become the leading Presbyterian ideologue, took the negative side in a philosophical disputation staged before the queen on her visit to Cambridge in 1564. Debating the proposition that monarchy was the best form of government, he used Aristotle's ideas on mixed government to make the case against it.13 Ten years later, in that Herculean engagement with the future Archbishop John Whitgift, the Admonition Controversy, Cartwright wrote: ‘And if it were not beside my profession, I could shewe that it agreeth moste with the definition of a cytisen … that the cytisens should have this intereste off choise off their Maiors and Bailifes.’14 So Cartwright was a closet republican. What was not beside Cartwright's profession was his insistence that church and state were distinct and separate social constructions, so that ministers of the church ought not to bear civil office, and civil magistrates should not have in their remit ecclesiastical government. Even the chief magistrate and ‘head of the commonwealth’, although ‘a great ornament unto the church’, was ‘but a member of the same’, and amenable to its discipline. So he censured Whitgift for thinking ‘that the church must be framed according to the commonwealth’. But Cartwright, too, did some framing. What was appropriate for the church was the mixed government described by Aristotle: ‘For, in respect of Christ the head, it is a monarchy; and in respect of the ancients and pastors that govern in common and with like authority amongst themselves, it is an aristocracy, or the rule of the best men; and in respect that the people are not secluded but have their interest in church-matters, it is a democracy, or a popular estate.’ And so with the civil polity of the realm, which ‘in respect of the queen her majesty, it is a monarchy, so in respect of the most honourable council, it is an aristocracy, and having regard to the parliament, which is assembled of all estates, it is a democracy’. Whitgift's response was to say that he knew all about the theory of mixed government, but since the buck stopped with the queen, England was without limitation a monarchy.15 A Presbyterian of the last generation but one thought that puritanism ‘teemed with political implications’: ‘A Puritan Aristotelian was from the point of view of absolute monarchists a politically dangerous person.’16 Peter Lake agrees, writing of ‘a coherent presbyterian approach to politics’, a politics which had its logical conclusion in the right, or obligation, to resist.17 The effective extinction of Elizabethan Presbyterianism as a force to be reckoned with was a precondition for another kind of politics, tending towards royal absolutism, which was in the ascendant in the fifteen-nineties.18 The footings of this incipient absolutism were religious. As Ethan Shagan has recently argued, the monarchy was now using religion to generate novel or controversial claims to state power. This was in a religious context, that of a case before the high commission for ecclesiastical causes, a case concerning a puritan minister who had publicly condemned the Book of Common Prayer as ‘a vile book’, and who, backed by a prominent lawyer, had denied the legitimacy of the commission, which its victims called the English Inquisition. On appeal, the judges in queen's bench upheld the queen's ‘imperial’ authority as supreme governor to empower that prerogative court; since ‘by the ancient laws of this realm this kingdom of England is an absolute empire and monarchy’.19 In what I have called the nasty nineties, there was a declared war against terror, aimed at puritan extremists who were allegedly prepared to use violence to achieve their ends; a war, to be sure, mostly of words, although there were three barely legal executions.20 Let us return to the question of confessionalization. The concept tends to iron out the differences between Catholic and Protestant Europe. All regimes were involved in similar state-building processes. All religions were equally serviceable for these essentially political purposes. The argument resembles that originally advanced by Jacques Delumeau that, transcending their surface differences, Protestantism and Counter-Reformation Catholicism were engaged in the common enterprise of reforming the manners of ordinary Europeans, turning them into real Christians, and so, incidentally or not, obedient and tractable subjects and citizens.21 But, paradoxically, the politics of late sixteenth-century Europe depended, even for the consolidation of its regimes, on a perception of the profound and irreconcilable religious differences by which the continent was now divided. The international politics of relations between states were themselves confessional, and had become so as the consequence of the Reformation. This was new. Traditionally, and historically, diplomacy and war had concerned the interests of ruling families or dynasties, the control of territory and sea lanes, together with bread and butter issues, especially cross-border commerce; a diplomacy engineered by marriage alliances and lubricated with the exchange of gifts.22 Western Europe had been at one confessionally, and religious differences had entered into international relations only in such exceptional circumstances as the Great Schism at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and locally, in fifteenth-century Bohemia. True there were constant clashes of interest between secular monarchies and the papacy, especially over the right to tax and to appoint to church offices. But although ideology, contained in religious texts such as the Bible, was a weapon available to be deployed in these cold wars, this was a matter more of politics than of religion, contests over jurisdiction and competition for resources. But now western Christendom was divided by a more profound schism, which in the perception of many transcended the mundane matters of state which had been the ordinary stuff of international relations. So far as Protestant England was concerned, mistrust and fear of the Catholic powers, the pope and those rulers deemed to be his agents, fuelled the most powerful of political motives and emotions. Anti-Catholicism became the defining ideology if not of the nation of dominant forces within the nation.23 In a parliamentary speech of 1593, Robert Cecil said that ‘the occasion of this parliament … is for the cause of religion and the maintenance thereof amongst us, the preservacion of her Majestie's royall person and the good of this relme, and of our countrie … The enemie of these be the King of Spaine, together with the Pope, that Antechrist of Roome (for I may well couple them together)’.24 Politics was now a matter every bit as ideological as it would be in the years of the twentieth-century Cold War, a parallel of which my teacher Sir John Neale, writing in the nineteen-fifties, was almost too fond. These sentiments rose to their highest decibels at the time of the Armada, in the rhetoric of the public prints if not on the equivalent of the Clapham omnibus; and in the political theatre of the scaffolds, where more Catholics were executed than in any other year. A pamphlet, hot from the press on 9 October 1588, spoke of ‘the Almightie God, who alwayes auengeth the cause of his afflicted people which put their confidence in him, and bringeth downe his enemies that exalt them selues with pride to the heauens’.25 My title begins to be less of an artificial contrivance if we put the question: how many Elizabethans, and especially how many in powerful political positions, saw the events on the European stage of their time through these religious spectacles? Most Elizabethan historians have characterized the queen herself as non-ideological. That is not beyond dispute, if only because we know so little about Elizabeth's own religion.26 Francis Bacon famously said that she was averse to making windows into men's hearts and secret thoughts. But the windows of her own soul are heavily curtained, and there was also, in front of the curtains, a good deal of window-dressing. On repeated occasions this sort of Protestant drew back from marrying a foreign prince of the opposite religious persuasion.27 Was that only because she knew that such a marriage would be unacceptable to many of her subjects? Elizabeth was reluctant to engage in foreign wars which were at least partly religious in their motivation. Does that indicate a lack of religious commitment, or simply parsimony?28 It was against her religion to get into debt. Unlike many of her counsellors and ministers, the queen was disinclined to prosecute her subjects on grounds of religious belief alone. It appears that she was personally responsible for a critical amendment to a parliamentary bill which would have made it a capital matter to convert to Catholicism, making it instead an offence only to convert with a treasonable intent (we are at the parliament of 1581). Neale called that ‘a remarkable story of royal intervention’, evidence of Elizabeth's ‘hostility to extreme doctrinaire policy’, making the resultant anti-Catholic legislation ‘political and secular’. So the queen was a politique rather than a dévot. But Neale was surely at his most anachronistically whiggish when he suggested that at that moment in history ‘the English liberal tradition’ owed much to his heroine's ‘sanity’.29 Can we distinguish between the ideologues and the politiques in the Elizabethan political class? Increasingly the Elizabethan state was a confessional state. Beyond 1571 no Catholic sat in the house of commons, or at least none who was identified as such. Government in the counties was more and more taken out of the hands of papists, crypto-papists and ‘neuters’ and put into the hands of strongly committed Protestants, which happened in a moment in time in East Anglia in 1578.30 In the fifteen-seventies and eighties the dominant presence and voice in the privy council was that of the hotter sort of Protestants, although that body continued to include some of the cooler voices. These politicians believed that there was an international conspiracy to root out the Reformed religion, hatched by French and Spaniards at a meeting at Bayonne. The French massacres of 1572 were the best proof of that. Even some of the most learned and experienced of Elizabethan public figures believed in this scenario: men like Robert Beale, diplomat and civil servant, who knew six languages and had studied and worked for many years at the heart of Europe.31 These were the concerns which coloured Sir Philip Sidney's world view. Here are some of the things he heard from his mentor Hubert Languet, a kind of continental equivalent of Beale: Languet to Sidney, November 1573, ‘Satan is beginning to gnash the teeth, because he sees that his throne is tottering’; April 1574, ‘The Roman Pontiff transforms himself into every shape to prop his falling throne; but God turns his wicked counsels to his ruin.’ When Languet told Sidney that he feared that ‘these civil wars which are wearing out the strength of the princes of Christendom’ would open the way for the Turks to invade Italy, Sidney replied: ‘What could be more desirable?’ It would put paid to the pope. In May 1574 Languet wrote: ‘You English, like foxes, have slunk out of it, with a woman too for your leader, which makes it more disgraceful and discreditable to us.’32 So, schooled by Languet, Sidney wrote of the continental wars as ‘the wounds from which the Church of God is now suffering’. The international Protestant struggle was ‘the cause’, ‘our cause’, ‘the good cause’, ‘the true cause’. And he wrote into the poetic code of his Arcadia a sense of disgust at the failure of Elizabeth to rise to a challenge which was as much religious as political and military, preferring the politics of a dubious marriage alliance with a French papist.33 Those at the heart of government who believed that England's safety depended upon solidarity with ‘those abroad who are … of the same religion that we profess’ included the secretary of state (and Beale's brother-in-law) Sir Francis Walsingham, and Elizabeth's special favourite, Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester. Walsingham believed that it was the intention of the Catholic monarchies to ‘root out … the professors of the gospel’ everywhere. For him ‘the common cause of religion’ was the proper basis for English policy.34 As for Leicester, his military expedition to the Netherlands in 1585–6, which inaugurated open warfare with Spain, in both motivation and composition took on something of the character of a puritan crusade.35 But what of the perennial anchorman of Elizabethan politics and government, William Cecil, Lord Burghley? We used to think that Cecil's foreign policy was old-fashioned and secular: particularly the policy of protecting English interests in the Netherlands, limiting the power of Spain but, above all, keeping the French out. Conyers Read posited a factional split in the privy council between Cecil and the Walsingham-Leicester axis.36 But we no longer believe that factional splits were a structural feature of politics before much later in the reign.37 And now, especially in the work of Stephen Alford, a new Cecil has emerged, more complex, more interesting, but above all more Protestant. Cecil, too, could fear the ‘conquest and spoyle of the small flock that are now with all extremity compelled by armes to defend them selves against only the Popes tyrannous bloody and poysoning persequutors’.38 It is, of course, possible that the political puritanism of Leicester and Walsingham, or Cecil's robust Protestantism, were expressions of a political rather than a genuinely religious agenda. We are back to what I may call the American question. Cardinal William Allen alleged that Cecil and his pack were ‘the politiques of our country, pretending to be Protestants’.39 In the extraordinary libel published in the Catholic interest against Leicester, Leicester's Commonwealth, it was said that the earl, ‘being himself of no religion’, fed upon ‘our differences in religion, to the fatting of himself and ruin of the realm’.40 Until recently, historians, who photocopied the dislike of Leicester expressed by the original Elizabethan historian, William Camden, tended to agree.41 But that raises questions not only of motivation but of inner disposition and psychology from which we must, I think, back off, like Elizabeth not presuming to make windows into men's souls. Catholics, using the weapon of the press against the regime, did not back off. For them the entire fabric of Protestant politics, what we nowadays call a Protestant ‘monarchical republic’, was a Machiavellian ramp.42 So much for the fifteen-seventies and eighties, the period dominated by a more or less consensual and emphatically Protestant regime. The religion of politics was to be very different in the final decade, the fifteen-nineties. This may appear paradoxical, since this was a decade of patriotic war against Spain; and, in 1591, in expectation of a second Armada, a proclamation establishing special commissions to investigate seminary priests and Jesuits led to an anti-Catholic security operation unprecedented in its scope. And there was some murky politics behind that proclamation.43 But now there were voices, some close to the centre of power, calling for a measure of accommodation to be extended to the more peaceable Catholics, especially to those prepared to repudiate Spanish patronage; even talk of a common ‘Christendom’. The earl of Essex may have been Elisha to his stepfather Leicester's Elijah, but he and his circle, including Francis Bacon's brother Anthony, were part of this new trend.44 The 1591 proclamation may be paradoxical evidence of this new climate of opinion: the elderly and obsessional Burghley firing a torpedo against this threatening ecumenism. Essex's rival Robert Cecil and the future Archbishop Bancroft were meanwhile engaged in splitting the Catholic ranks by doing business with the party opposed to the Jesuits, the Appellants. This new scenario was coming to its climax and resolution in the contest over the succession. And that was a moment in time from which all parties in the quadrille which was the religion of politics hoped to gain.45 When it suited them, Elizabethans were perfectly capable of sorting out religion from politics. The distinction was made by Cecil himself, in his defence of the bloody justice meted out by the state to some Catholics. It is the case that those who suffered the ultimate penalty were not burned as heretics but executed as traitors. Many Elizabethan Protestants regarded ‘papists’ as heretics, and believed that their heresy merited death. The dean of St. Paul's said in a sermon preached before parliament that maintainers of false religion ought to die by the sword, and an archbishop of York, preaching on the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth's accession, invoked Old Testament precedents for the killing of ‘false prophets’: ‘Let the blasphemer be stoned.’46 But the only Catholic to be burned for the heresy of his Catholicism was in the time of Elizabeth's father.47 Did that mean that the Elizabethan Catholics were not martyrs but traitors? The question has divided Catholic and non-Catholic historians for four centuries. Cecil insisted that they were traitors in a pamphlet aimed at a European readership, The Execution of Justice in England. Those who had suffered the full rigour of the law – and Cecil, writing in 1583, had the Jesuit Edmund Campion in mind – had been dealt with not ‘upon questions of religion’ but as rebellious traitors, although ‘like hypocrites’ they had coloured and counterfeited their treasons ‘with profession of devotion in religion’. The issue was simple: the papal bull of deposition of 1570, by which those professing obedience to the pope were released from the obligation of obedience to their lawful sovereign. Those who had died, including Campion, were executors of this sentence. So reports that ‘a multitude of persons’ had been put to torture and death ‘only for profession of the Catholic religion and not for matters of state against the Queen's Majesty, are false and shameless’.48 This was not new. Cecil had written in 1570 that ‘there shall be no colour or occasion to shed the blood of any of her majesty's subjects that shall only profess devotion in their religion without bending their labours maliciously to disturb the common quiet of the realm, and therewith to cause sedition and rebellion’. The queen herself, also in 1570, had said much the same.49 So there you have it: religious profession and ‘matters of state’ clearly separated. Cecil explained that the legal basis for the indictment of Campion and others was not some new law relating to religion but the fourteenth-century statute defining treason. The best proof he could offer that his government was not in the business of persecuting religion per se was that numerous prominent Catholics whom he named, both priests and laymen, who lived their lives quietly and obediently, had been left in peace, even those who held it as a matter of conscience that the pope was the only supreme head of the church.50 He could have added that at many of the executions, the victim had been free to speak at length from the scaffold about his religious faith, whereas in other parts of Europe where heresy was punished as such, tongues were cut out or other means employed to silence the victims. Those who objected, whether officers or onlookers, and some did, indicated by their protest that in their perception the victim was indeed being punished for his religion.51 Cecil was answered by William Allen in the book called A true, sincere, and modest defense. For Allen it was even more essential to distinguish between religion and politics. The Catholics for whom he was the apologist would never have offended the temporal power in defence of the spiritual, ‘acknowledging in divers respects all humble duty to them both’. It followed that the men for whom he claimed the status of martyrs, ‘holy confessors’, were unjustly charged with treason. Not traitors within any reasonable reading of the law of treason, they had been tormented, arraigned, condemned and executed ‘for mere matters of religion’. It was absurd to suggest that the questions commonly put under torture had nothing to do with religion.52 One of those not taken in by Allen's fair words was the most zealous and sadistic persecutor of Elizabethan Catholics, Richard Topcliffe. Topcliffe's annotated copy of Allen's Defense survives. His comments include: ‘A good science for the king of Spayddes [should that read “Spayne”?]’, and ‘here hee fisheth for a Cardenalls hatt’.53 Other Catholic polemicists deployed Allen's rhetoric. Campion's companion Robert Parsons asked the Protestant William Chark: ‘Must euerye man be an enymie to the state, which lyketh not that religion whiche is fauoured bye the State?’54 Later, in the altered conditions of the early reign of James I, when Catholics were confronted with the Oath of Allegiance, Parsons wrote at great length in justification of the peaceful cohabitation and ‘mutuall vnion’ of Catholic subjects with Protestants.55 That had been the ostensible, if somewhat specious, theme, twenty-five years earlier, of Leicester's Commonwealth. The frustration of the French marriage had torpedoed the ‘probability that some union or little toleration’ between Catholics and Protestants would have been one of its consequences.56 James I now declared that ‘we had never any intention in the forme of that Oathe to presse any point of Conscience for matter of Religion, but only to make some discoverie of disloyall affection’. Whether or not that was an honest attempt to condone some limited measure of confessional coexistence is something still vigorously debated.57 It has to be said that the distinction between matters of state and matters of religion, on which both Cecil and Allen were equally insistent, was little more than rhetorical and polemical. Cecil knew perfectly well that Catholics were penalized for being Catholics. But the precedent of the Marian persecution of Protestants was one factor inhibiting him from admitting as much; international opinion another. On the other side of the argument, Allen, like Parsons, was up to his neck in the politics of tyrannicide and foreign intervention. The case that individuals, Jesuits and other missionary priests, were sent on a spiritual rather than a political mission was formally correct, in reality specious. There could be no hope for the Catholic faith in England without regime change. With the Armada on its way, the same Allen, in an Admonition to the Nobility and People of England, described Elizabeth as ‘an incestuous bastard, begotten and born in sin, of an infamous courtesan … the only poison calamity and destruction of our noble church and country.’58 Those were extreme words, justifying deposition. Yet, as Michael Questier has argued, the conventional distinction between ‘loyal’ Catholics, usually alleged to have been in the majority, and ‘political’ Catholics, machinating against the Elizabethan regime, is unreal. There were many ways of being political.59 Tyrannicide and plots may have belonged to an extremist minority. But words, especially printed words, were a more acceptable mode of resistance. Even books ostensibly intended to nurture piety may have concealed a political agenda.60 Perhaps because theirs was the losing side, the politics conducted by Catholics have rarely entered the mainstream historical record.61 The polemics of both Cecil and Allen had to pretend that it was possible in Elizabethan England to adhere to and practise a religion different from that of the state, and even opposed to that of the state, without any political consequences. It is time to investigate further the areas of religion in Elizabethan England which were private and voluntary, a prolepsis of a more modern state of religious pluralism; and to consider how far this state of affairs really was apolitical. Take first the case of the Catholics. Until recently, the history of Elizabethan Catholicism was hagiographical, celebrating the story of the martyrs and other recusants whose blood and guts and prison privations were on record, and who could be identified, numbered and located from the legal record as well as from Catholic sources. That was not bad history, since those things happened, to many hundreds of Elizabethan Catholics. Elizabethan England was a confessional, and a persecuting, state.62 But the untold and untellable numbers of partially conforming, non-recusant Catholics, pilloried by their own hard-line co-religionists as schismatics and by Protestants as ‘church papists’, were airbrushed out of the record; just as John Foxe in his Protestant historiography failed to mention the so-called ‘Nicodemites’ who had conformed under Mary, and even made out the conforming Princess Elizabeth to have been a kind of martyr.63 There is, at root, a semantic problem here. What might and should we mean by ‘Catholics’?64 John Bossy presented a sophisticated, less confessional and more sociological account of the English Catholic community.65 But that very phrase, ‘the Catholic community’, and Bossy's characterization of Catholicism as the first of the post-Reformation nonconformities, continued to leave out of account a plurality of Catholic communities of different sorts, and Catholics of no community, except that they were still connected in various ways, through kinship, wealth, local clout, even positions at court, to the majority community.66 The conventional historiography conveyed the impression that church papistry was a transient phenomenon of Elizabeth's first decade, terminated by the papal bull of excommunication and deposition of 1570, making a Catholic loyal and obedient to the queen an oxymoron. The character writer John Earle was often cited on the subject of the church papist: ‘He loues Poperie wel, but is loth to lose by it.’ Earle is quoted as if his account belongs to the fifteen-sixties. But he was writing sixty years later, in the reign of Charles I.67 Now, thanks to Alex Walsham and Michael Questier, the phenomenon of non-recusant, low-profile Catholicism is given the attention it deserves.68 And Questier has taught us that the simple dichotomy of recusant and church papist is itself too crude. ‘Recusant’ is problematical. Absence from church was not like parking on a double yellow line. It was not dealt with routinely, by issuing parking tickets, but selectively and for reasons that often deserve to be investigated.69 Within extended family networks, there could be relatives of both religions, and even of almost none (thinking of the midland family of the Throckmortons, and, in particular, of Arthur Throckmorton, who has left behind an extensive diary, which has more to say about medicine than religion, and who was on good terms with his relations of both religions).70 Convicted recusants might still attend Protestant wedding services and baptisms, even standing in as godparents.71 Questier tells us about the Sussex gentry family of Caryll, who in some respects conformed, but were connected to a network of Catholic families in and beyond the county, had friends among the Jesuits and tended to support the Jesuit party against its Catholic opponents: ‘The Carylls did not therefore conform to any conventional Catholic occasional conformist stereotype.’72 Anthony Browne, first Viscount Montague, was by any reckoning a leading Catholic. He had been the only lay peer to vote against the Act of Supremacy in the parliament of 1559. His connections with Catholic families up and down the country make a kind of gazetteer of what Philip Caraman called the other face of Elizabethan England.73 Reconstruction of his entourage and affinity makes it clear that we are not mistaken in calling him a Catholic. But Montague himself was a conformist. He continued to be used by the government in diplomatic missions. He took his seat in the house of lords, and in 1571 was even present at a conference between the two houses of parliament to consider a bill to enforce church attendance more strictly, and to compel participation in the communion.74 He enjoyed the warmest of friendships with Sir William More of Loseley, the very model of a godly Protestant magistrate, a sort of relation and a neighbour to some of his lands and interests around Guildford in Surrey.75 For the most part Montague was left alone in a kind of political no-man's-land, perhaps because he was no friend of Mary Queen of Scots. In August 1591, he entertained the queen, her court and council at his seat of Cowdray, a great event subject to more than one political interpretation.76 Not all of Montague's Catholic neighbours in Sussex were so squeaky clean, or so lucky. The Throckmorton Plot of 1584 would have brought a French army of 5,000 ashore in the county, according to John Bossy ‘a fairly near thing’, and that gave Philip Howard, earl of Arundel, a one-way ticket to the Tower.77 We know, especially from Bossy, what the private, indeed illegal, religion of aristocratic Catholic families consisted of, in the sometimes precarious safety of their own homes and chapels.78 What we know less about is how non-recusant Catholics ordered their attendance at the parish church: how frequently, and with what kind of disposition. Was their attendance a political and social gesture devoid of any religious significance? Were they aware of what went on in parts of central Europe, where presence at the church of a rival confession was not considered to indicate religious conformity? Anecdotal evidence tells us of people leaving the church or pulling their hats over their faces when the minister began to preach, or reading their Catholic primers so loud as to disturb the service. We learn of a man in Chichester presented in the church court for ‘not coming orderly to our parish church who when he comes uses not to stay’.79 The efforts by the bishops over many years to make it a statutory offence to be absent from the communion suggest that taking the sacrament, as the good people of Southwark did at least once a year, was not something that church papists reckoned to do.80 But can we be sure about that? Puritan ministers in East Anglia and Essex were in trouble with their bishops for repelling from the communion parishioners whom they believed to be papists; whereas a bishop like John Aylmer of London hoped by gentler means to win such people to general conformity, which no doubt was something which to a considerable extent was achieved.81 When did a non-recusant Catholic cease in any meaningful sense to be a Catholic? This might be called the Isle of Man question, for on Man there was no Catholic mission, and the old religion withered on the vine as no more than folklorish superstition. More solid evidence of semi-conformable Catholicism survives in the many grandiloquent tombs of Catholic grandees erected, often in the most demonstrative part of their parish churches, in which they still chose to be buried: such as the tomb of the first Baron Teynham in his parish church of Lynsted near Faversham in Kent, designed by Epiphamius Evesham. It is a monument loudly proclaiming Catholic values, from the crucifix around the neck of the grieving widow, to the pious posture of the sons, kneeling before an altar and ostentatiously turning their backs on hawk and hound, expressive of a kind of Catholic puritanism.82 It has recently been noted that their common experience of estrangement from the established church led Catholics and puritans to evolve very similar modes of voluntary religious activity.83 These strategies depended on the legal doctrine that a man's home is his castle,84 what went on within a household beyond the remit of the confessional state (not a doctrine which troubled the Richard Topcliffes of the Elizabethan world). Such strategies had been employed long before our period, and would continue, with some consistency, long after it, among various religious tendencies. Before the Reformation, the Wycliffite Lollards, or many of them whom we know about, were not so much occasional as habitual conformists, gathering in their private meetings, or ‘schools of heresy’, at times not in conflict with Sunday mass. They were neither recusants nor separatists.85 Theoretical grounds for their way of life were to be found in the ecclesiology of the invisible and visible church. In the Wycliffite tract called The Lanterne of Lizt we read that in God's word there were three churches. The first was the ‘little flock’ of Jesus's followers, ‘the chosen number of them that shall be saved’. That was the church invisible. The second church was the material church, ‘diverse from this’, the ‘coming together of good and evil in a place that is hallowed, … for there sacraments shall be treated and God's law both read and preached’. The religious orders of monks and friars (apparently the third church, ‘the fiend's church’) are denounced as ‘our new feigned sects’; ‘People should draw to parish churches and here [sic] their service there, as God's law hath limited, and else they been to blame.’86 Margaret Spufford and some of her pupils have demonstrated the continuity of this double way of thinking and living from Lollard times to the period of post-Restoration dissent. The Lollards of early sixteenth-century Buckinghamshire combined their heretical beliefs and the household gatherings in which these things were taught with occupation of the various parish offices appropriate to their station, and performance of the neighbourly things expected of them, such as the witnessing of wills.87 It was much the same with Baptists and even Quakers in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire in the late seventeenth century.88 This was a brilliant strategy of having your cake and eating it. The social strength and economic success of these dissenting communities consisted in part in the cultivation of an endogamous social system. Dissenters did business with dissenters, and Quakers, right up to my own family in the last generation, married only Quakers. The extreme example of this endogamous and yet integrated dissent is provided by the small Elizabethan sect of the Family of Love, which enjoyed a presence and some social clout in Cambridgeshire, especially in the village of Balsham. Familists made it not so much a matter of pragmatism as of principle and conscience to conceal their true beliefs, and part of the concealment was to play a normal part in the affairs of their parochial communities, paying their parish rates, even serving as church wardens.89 This was to take the closing of the windows of the soul to a fine art; so much so that it has been tempting for some to wonder whether Queen Elizabeth herself may have been a Familist. We know that the sect was well represented among her yeomen of the guard.90 Well Balsham was Balsham, and an unusual place. But only a few miles away was the village of Linton where there were many Catholics, dependants of a notorious recusant, Ferdinando Paris. The plebeian papists of Linton contributed to parish charities, appointed Protestants as the executors of their wills, and even left legacies to the vicar.91 I was guilty of disparaging the admirable collection of essays in which the work of the Spuffordians was published, The World of Rural Dissenters, as a polo mint of a book, which is to say, a book with a hole. The hole consisted of much of the history of Protestant dissent between the Lollards and the Restoration.92 That was because I had spent much of the last fifty years trying to fill that hole, exploring the world of Protestant dissent, which is to say, in crude shorthand, puritanism. Puritanism had been discussed mainly in terms of its negative reaction to the established church of the Elizabethan Settlement, as nonconformity, and mainly as the nonconformity of puritan clergy. The subject needed to be dealt with as Bossy and Questier and other historians of Catholicism now deal with their subject: as a shared religious experience and a religious culture.93 Others have gone farther along this road from where I have begun to leave off: Peter Lake with his heightened sense of the inner and often disruptive dynamics of evangelical Protestantism;94 Tom Webster with his perception that mutuality and society, the shared search for the ultimate reassurance which is salvation, were what made the godly tick; and what motivated something as drastic as the migration to New England.95 There is no room in an article of very general scope to explore the innerness of the puritan religious experience: sufficient to look briefly, from the outside, at some of the structural features of a puritan voluntarism lived, without formal separation, within the involuntary confines of a national, established church and a social system intolerant of difference and of what contemporaries called, often with the puritans in mind, ‘singularity’. Some people vigorously denied being religious in the way that these people were religious. Singularity expressed itself in a withdrawal from much of the social life and culture of local communities, especially on the Sabbath, which puritans observed with a near Judaic scrupulosity. So no dancing or football, the typical recreations of a Sunday afternoon; no church ales, or May games, no Whitsuntide-cum-Corpus Christi plays and shows.96 This was more than separation, it was segregation: if indeed that was how it really was. We shall never know. The godly were told to avoid unnecessary company keeping, to have as little to do with the ungodly as possible, since the day was not far off when they would be saying goodbye for all eternity.97 But did the godly do as they were told? Peter Lake observes that in London they must have gone to the theatre, or the preachers would not have gone blue in the face telling them not to.98 And was the alehouse really given such a wide berth? Diaries, like that of the young Lancastrian Roger Lowe, suggest not.99 So here we have negotiations with the majority community every bit as complex and various as those described by Questier for Catholics. The sermon was, of course, the motor of puritan religious experience. Where the incumbent of the parish was a preacher deemed to be ‘godly’, who preached acceptable and ‘edifying’ sermons, his godly hearers were comfortably built into that part of the Anglican establishment. It was the less than godly who might feel themselves to be excluded, and sometimes actually were.100 Where the ministry in the parish was not acceptable, the godly ‘gadded’ to sermons elsewhere. In all probability that was an organized, demonstrative thing, consolidating along the way a group already looking and behaving like semi-separatists.101 But the practice of gadding, where there was no sermon at home, was held by some lawyers not to be illegal and it was not separatist.102 The preaching rallies known as ‘prophesyings’, and later ‘combination lectures’, which had very limited public authorization, brought together in the market town or some other central location ministers and people from a locality: more voluntary gadding.103 A much overlooked part of this religious culture was ‘repetition’, repetition of the heads of the sermon heard earlier in the day, or even some time before. It seems to have been a nearly universal practice in these religious circles. Repetition could take place in church, in the presence of the minister, but as often as not it happened in people's homes, sermon notes taking the place of the physical presence of the preacher. No doubt there was often prayer offered on these occasions; but not, short of the rubicon of separation, doctrine offered by the lay adherents themselves, on the basis of their own understanding of scripture. When that rubicon was crossed, a separate, gathered church was in the making. But that depended upon circumstances, especially the circumstances of the sixteen-thirties and forties, and it probably happened rarely in the Elizabethan period.104 The question is, how far, and in what respects, according to the law, did these household meetings transgress as ‘conventicles’? According to a hard-line ecclesiastical judgement, gatherings of more than one household, typically of ten or a dozen persons, were conventicles, and schismatical. They were proscribed, with qualifications, in the ecclesiastical canons of 1604 and, later in the seventeenth century, in the Restoration Conventicle Acts. But the laws relating to lawful and unlawful assembly were sufficiently flexible for so-called conventiclers with any legal know-how to deny that that was what they were. Public duties, which is to say attendance at the services of the parish church, often referred to in puritan sources simply as ‘the public’, were compatible with private religious meetings. In the later seventeenth century, Richard Baxter insisted that such meetings were not schismatical if held not ‘in distaste’ of public services, but at a different time and ‘in subordination to the publique’. They were ‘not a separated Church but a part of the Church more diligent then the rest’. That was how Elizabethan puritans had understood the status of their private meetings. It is, of course, possible, even likely, that, thinking of the doctrine of the visible and invisible churches, private meetings of the godly came closer to making the little flock of the elect visible than the inclusivity and promiscuity of the whole parish at prayer.105 We seem to have drifted away from religion and politics to the rather different discourse of tolerance and intolerance, and to have discovered that Elizabethan England was the scene of a surprising amount of religious latitude. But that very religious diversity was full of political potential. In the factional infighting endemic in many, perhaps most, Elizabethan towns it was often convenient for one party to accuse the other of religious deviance. In Thetford in Norfolk the bottom line of local politics was competition for the various civic offices, the use and alleged abuse of power. But these squabbles were dressed up as a struggle between the ‘godly’ and the ‘popishly inclined’. That was a cunning ploy on the part of the godly, since those allegations led the county magistrates and the privy council to intervene on their behalf.106 The boot was on the other foot in many other towns, where the godly were demonized as ‘puritans’ and subjected to defamatory libels and street demonstrations.107 The cultural bones of contention between the puritans and the rest – May games and maypoles, dancing, alehouses, stage plays, the whole question of the Sabbath – were matters highly politicized. Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair was full of that sort of politics, called by a literary scholar ‘the politics of mirth’; and the play was itself politically motivated.108 Parishioners in Balsham in Cambridgeshire did not complain about their neighbours being members of the Family of Love until that became a convenient way to get their own back on a Familist who was getting too big for his boots.109 In case after case, accusations of popish recusancy were often no more than a weapon with which to pursue a quarrel about something else.110 In conclusion, we have arrived at a sort of paradox. Conventional wisdom would have it that ecclesiastical repression provoked organized nonconformity and political agitation for change. And that happened: there is plenty of evidence in the Elizabethan parliaments; and much more when the wind of the sixteen-thirties provoked the whirlwind of the sixteen-forties. However, Catholics were not driven by persecution to the politics of resistance, except in such exceptional events as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. But their semi-tolerated presence, however covert and quiescent, was in itself a politically explosive factor; and so was puritan singularity. Religion in Elizabethan England was a political matter because the Elizabethan state was unable for lack of resources, or unwilling for lack of conviction and commitment, to enforce the strict religious uniformity which was supposed to obtain. Perhaps it was a mistake even to try, so that this supposedly confessional state finished up with the worst of both worlds. And that, far from making religion apolitical, as it might be in a liberal society, or in a secularized society indifferent to religion, made it the hottest of all political potatoes, capable in the lifetime of many born in Elizabethan England of igniting a civil war from the grassroots up. It was a civil war which grew out of an anxiety about religious pluralism, both Catholic and Protestant.111 As Richard Baxter would famously remark, the war was begun in our streets before there were any armies on the march.112 Footnotes * This article is a revised version of a plenary lecture delivered at the 75th Anglo-American Conference of Historians, Beveridge Hall, University of London, in July 2006, within the theme ‘Religions and politics’. 1 S. E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Conn., 1972), p. 954. 2 State Papers and Letters of Sir Ralph Sadler, ed. A. Clifford (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1809), ii. 126. 3 John Parkhurst to Heinrich Bullinger, 21 May 1559 (Zurich Letters (Cambridge, 2 vols., 1842–5), i, no. XII; see C. Cross, The Royal Supremacy in the Elizabethan Church (1969), pp. 23, 136–7). 4 J. Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (Harlow, 2000), pp. 99–102, 114–15. 5 E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven and London, 1992). 6 P. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967); J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, 1559–81 (1953); J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, 1584–1601 (1957); G. R. Elton, The Parliament of England, 1559–81 (Cambridge, 1986), chs. 8, 9; G. R. Elton, ‘Parliament in the 16th century: functions and fortunes’, in G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, iii (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 156–82. See copious prime evidence of these activities in The Seconde Parte of a Register, ed. A. Peel (2 vols., Cambridge, 1915) (hereafter The Seconde Part of a Register). 7 Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: an Abridged Edition, ed. A. S. McGrade and B. Vickers (1975), p. 336. 8 P. Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: the Church in English Society 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 273–8; P. Collinson, ‘The English conventicle’, in P. Collinson, From Cranmer to Sancroft (2006), pp. 164–6. 9 S. Hardman Moore, Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home (New Haven and London, 2007). 10 J. Boulton, ‘The limits of formal religion: administration of holy communion in late Elizabethan and early Stuart London’ , London Jour. , x ( 1984 ), 135 – 54 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 11 W. Reinhard, ‘Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the early modern state: a reassessment’ , Catholic Historical Rev. , lxxv ( 1989 ), 383 – 404 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ; H. Schilling, ‘Confessional Europe’, in Handbook of European History, 1400–1600, ed. T. A. Brady, H. A. Oberman and J. D. Tracy (2 vols., Leiden, 1995), ii. 641–75; H. Schilling, ‘Confessionalisation in the empire: religious and societal change in Germany between 1555 and 1620’, in H. Schilling Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society: Essays in German and Dutch History (Leiden, 1992), pp. 205–45. 12 P. Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (1988), ch. 1, ‘What was the admonition controversy about?’. Many trenchant examples of these allegations against the Presbyterians can be gathered from the polemical works by, or attributed to, the future Archbishop Richard Bancroft (see Tracts Ascribed to Richard Bancroft, ed. A. Peel (Cambridge, 1953) and two books of 1593: Davngerovs positions and proceedings and A survay of the pretended Holy Discipline). 13 A. F. Scott Pearson, Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism, 1535–1603 (Cambridge, 1925), pp. 12–17; A. F. Scott Pearson, Church and State: Political Aspects of 16th Century Puritanism (Cambridge, 1928), p. 2; P. Collinson, ‘Cartwright, Thomas (1534/5–1603)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4820> [accessed 16 Oct. 2006]. 14 Scott Pearson, Church and State, pp. 2–3. 15 Scott Pearson, Church and State, pp. 29, 23, 142–3; Lake, Anglicans and Puritans, pp. 55–64; The Works of John Whitgift, ed. J. Ayre (Parker Soc., 3 vols., Cambridge, 1851), i. 393. 16 Scott Pearson, Church and State, pp. 128–9, 146. 17 Lake, Anglicans and Puritans, pp. 56–7. 18 J. Guy, ‘Introduction – the 1590s: the second reign of Elizabeth I?’, in The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, ed. J. Guy (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 1–19. 19 E. H. Shagan, ‘The English inquisition: constitutional conflict and ecclesiastical law in the 1590s’ , Historical Jour. , xlvii ( 2004 ), 541 – 65 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ; J. Guy, ‘The Elizabethan establishment and the ecclesiastical polity’, in Guy, Reign of Elizabeth, pp. 126–49. In the years that followed, the full implications of this reading of the royal supremacy were developed, especially in a 700-page book by the civil lawyer Richard Cosin, An apologie of, and for sundrie proceedings by jurisdiction ecclesiastical (1591). Richard Hooker took a different view of these matters, less absolutist and more parliamentary, in his Of the laws of ecclesiastical polity: but only in bk. 8, which was not published until 1648, by which time the theocratic/absolutist ideology had backfired. 20 Bancroft, A survay of the pretended Holy Discipline and Davngerous positions and proceedings; Richard Cosin, Conspiracie, for Pretended Reformation (1592); P. Collinson, ‘Separation in and out of the church: the consistency of Barrow and Greenwood’ , Jour. United Reformed Church History Soc. , v ( 1994 ), 239 – 58 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 21 J. Delumeau, Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire (Paris, 1971) (trans. as Catholicism Between Luther and Voltaire (1978)). 22 K. Ploger, ‘Foreign policy in the late middle ages’ , German Historical Institute: London Bulletin , xxviii ( 2006 ), 35 – 46 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 23 C. Z. Wiener, ‘The beleaguered isle: a study of Elizabethan and early Jacobean anti-Catholicism’ , Past & Present , li ( 1971 ), 27 – 62 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ; P. Lake, ‘Antipopery: the structure of a prejudice’, in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–42, ed. R. Cust and A. Hughes (Harlow, 1989), pp. 72–106; J. Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–88 (Cambridge, 1973). 24 Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, iii: 1593–1601, ed. T. E. Hartley (Leicester, 1995), p. 71. 25 ‘The printer to the reader’, an appendix to The copie of a letter sent ovt of England to Don Bernardin Mendoza (1588). 26 P. Collinson, ‘Windows in a woman's soul: questions about the religion of Queen Elizabeth I’, in P. Collinson, Elizabethans (London and New York, 2003), pp. 87–117; S. Doran, ‘Elizabeth I's religion: the evidence of her letters’ , Jour. Eccles. Hist. , li ( 2000 ), 699 – 720 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 27 S. Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony: the Courtships of Elizabeth I (London and New York, 1996). 28 But see the judgment of J. E. Neale: ‘Her financial principles were those of sound business: to pay what she owed and spend what she could afford … They were principles rare among princes in her day and explain that miracle of her age, the solvency of her government’ (J. E. Neale, Essays in Elizabethan History (1958), pp. 200–1). 29 Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, 1559–81, pp. 386–92. 30 P. Collinson, ‘Pulling the strings: religion and politics in the progress of 1578’, in The Progresses, Pageants and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I, ed. J. E. Archer, E. Goldring and S. Knight (Oxford, 2007); Z. Dovey, An Elizabethan Progress: the Queen's Journey into East Anglia, 1578 (Stroud, 1996); D. MacCulloch, ‘Catholic and puritan in Elizabethan Suffolk: a county community polarises’ , Archiv fur Reformationsgeschichte , lxxii ( 1981 ), 232 – 89 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ; D. MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors: Politics and Religion in an English County, 1500–1600 (Oxford, 1986); A. Hassell Smith, County and Court: Government and Politics in Norfolk 1558–1603 (Oxford, 1974). 31 P. Collinson, Servants and Citizens: Robert Beale and other Elizabethans (St. Mary's College, 2006), and Hist. Research, lxxix (2006), 488–511. 32 The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, ed. S. A. Pears (1845), pp. 2, 43, 44, 48, 68. 33 Pears, pp. 478, 75, 91, 146; B. Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney's Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven and London, 1996), p. 56 and passim. 34 C. Read, Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth (3 vols., Oxford, 1925), i. 239, 214; Worden, p. 56. 35 S. Adams, ‘A godly peer? Leicester and the puritans’ and ‘A puritan crusade? The composition of the earl of Leicester's expedition to the Netherlands, 1585–6’, both in S. Adams, Leicester and the Court: Essays on Elizabethan Politics (Manchester, 2002); P. Collinson, ‘Letters of Thomas Wood, puritan, 1566–77’, in P. Collinson, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (1983), pp. 45–107; E. Rosenberg, Leicester, Patron of Letters (New York, 1955). 36 C. Read, ‘Walsingham and Burghley in Queen Elizabeth's privy council’ , Eng. Hist. Rev. , xxviii ( 1913 ), 34 – 58 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 37 S. Adams, ‘Faction, clientage and party: English politics, 1550–1603’ and ‘Favourites and factions at the Elizabethan court’, both in Adams, Leicester and the Court. 38 S. Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–69 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 27–8, 53–5. For evidence of Burghley's support for a religiously motivated intervention in the Netherlands, and criticism of the queen for dragging her feet over this, see Collinson, ‘Pulling the strings’. 39 The Execution of Justice in England By William Cecil and A True, Sincere and Modest Defense of English Catholics by William Allen, ed. R. M. Kingdon (Ithaca, N.Y., 1965) (hereafter The Execution of Justice), pp. 56, 79. 40 P. Lake, ‘From Leicester his Commonwealth to Sejanus his Fall: Ben Jonson and the politics of Roman [Catholic] virtue’, in Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England, ed. E. Shagan (Manchester, 2005), pp. 128–61; Leicester's Commonwealth: the Copy of a Letter Written by a Master of Art of Cambridge (1584) and Related Documents, ed. D. C. Peck (Athens, Oh. and London, 1985) (hereafter Leicester's Commonwealth); Collinson, Godly People, p. 62. 41 P. Collinson, ‘William Camden and the anti-myth of Elizabeth: setting the mould?’, in The Myth of Elizabeth, ed. S. Doran and T. S. Freeman (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 79–98. 42 Lake, ‘From Leicester his Commonwealth to Sejanus his Fall’. 43 Tudor Royal Proclamations, iii: the Later Tudors (1588–1603), ed. P. L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin (New Haven and London, 1969), pp. 86–93. For what lay behind this proclamation, see forthcoming work by Glyn Parry on John Dee, whose prophecy that the Armada would return in 1592 was exploited by Burghley as a means of outflanking Archbishop Whitgift and transferring the harassment of the puritans to the papists. See G. Parry, ‘The context of John Shakespeare's “recusancy” re-examined’, Shakespeare Yearbook, xvi: the Shakespeare Apocrypha (Lewiston, N.Y. and Lampeter, 2007). 44 P. E. J. Hammer, The Polarization of Elizabethan Politics: the Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, 1581–97 (Cambridge, 1999); A. Gajda, ‘Political culture and the circle of Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, c.1595–c.1601’ (unpublished University of Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 2005); J. Scott-Warren, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford, 2001), pp. 57–98. 45 A. Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England (1979), pp. 120–201; J. Hurstfield, ‘The succession struggle in late Elizabethan England’, in Elizabethan Government and Society: Essays Presented to Sir John Neale, ed. S. T. Bindoff, J. Hurstfield and C. H. Williams (1961), pp. 369–96; The Struggle for the Succession in Late Elizabethan England: Politics, Polemics and Cultural Representations, ed. J.-C. Mayer (Montpellier, 2004). 46 Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, 1559–81, p. 93; The Sermons of Edwin Sandys, ed. J. Ayre (Parker Soc., Cambridge, 1841), pp. 72–3. For further evidence of Sandys's bloody-mindedness, see P. Collinson, ‘Sandys, Edwin (1519?–1588)’, O.D.N.B. <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24649> [accessed 16 Oct. 2006]. 47 P. Marshall, ‘Papist as heretic: the burning of John Forrest, 1538’ , Historical Jour. , xli ( 1998 ), 351 – 74 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 48 The Execution of Justice, pp. 7–9, 20. See C. Read, ‘William Cecil and Elizabethan public relations’, in Bindoff, Hurstfield and Williams, pp. 21–55. 49 Shagan, ‘The English inquisition’, p. 549. 50 The Execution of Justice, pp. 9–13. 51 P. Lake and M. Questier, ‘Agency, appropriation and rhetoric under the gallows: puritans, Romanists and the state in early modern England’ , Past & Present , cliii ( 1996 ), 64 – 107 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at pp. 73–6. 52 The Execution of Justice, pp. 58–61, 70–1. 53 Topcliffe's copy of Allen's Defence is in San Marino, California, Huntington Library, C 373 60060. I owe this reference to Alex Walsham. Cf. Sir John Neale's reference to Topcliffe's copy of L'Historia Ecclesiastica della Revoluzion d'Inghilterra, in which his annotations were still more exuberant, including drawings of the gallows intended for Allen and the author, ‘the viper’, ‘the villain’, ‘the bastard’ (Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, 1584–1601, p. 153). 54 Robert Parsons, A brief censvre vppon two bookes written in answere to M. Edmonde Campions offer of disputation (Douai, 1581), sig. Dviii. 55 Robert Parsons, A treatise tending to mitigation tovvardes Catholicke subiectes in England (St. Omer, 1607). 56 Leicester's Commonwealth, pp. 78–9, 65. 57 Stuart Royal Proclamations, i: Royal Proclamations of King James I 1603–25, ed. J. F. Larkin and P. L. Hughes (Oxford, 1973), pp. 184–5; A. Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester, 2006), p. 262. 58 Quoted in M. Questier, ‘Elizabeth and the Catholics’, in Shagan, Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’, pp. 64–94, at p. 70. See M. L. Carafiello, ‘English Catholicism and the Jesuit mission of 1580–1’ , Historical Jour. , xxxvii ( 1994 ), 761 – 74 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 59 Questier, ‘Elizabeth and the Catholics’. 60 A. Walsham, ‘“Domme Preachers”? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the culture of print’ , Past & Present , clxviii ( 2000 ), 72 – 123 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 61 This is the message throughout the recent collection of essays, Shagan, Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’. 62 A. Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1533–1603 (Aldershot, 2002). 63 A. Pettegree, Marian Protestantism: Six Studies (Aldershot, 1996), p. 116; T. S. Freeman, ‘Providence and prescription: the account of Elizabeth in Foxe's “Book of Martyrs”’, in Doran and Freeman, pp. 27–55. 64 Shagan, Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’, pp. 7–8, 14–16; M. Questier, ‘Conformity, Catholicism and the law’, in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660, ed. P. Lake and M. Questier (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 237–61. 65 J. Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (1975). 66 M. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2006). 67 J. Earle, The Autograph Manuscript of Microcosmographie (Leeds, 1966), pp. 41–4. 68 A. Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 1993; 2nd edn., 1999); Questier, Catholicism and Community. 69 P. Lake and M. Questier, ‘Introduction’ and Questier, ‘Conformity, Catholicism and the law’, both in Lake and Questier, Conformity and Orthodoxy, pp. xiv, 245. 70 A. L. Rowse, Ralegh and the Throckmortons (1962); and The House of Commons, 1558–1603, ed. P. W. Hasler (History of Parliament, 3 vols., 1981), iii. 490–1. 71 Questier, ‘Conformity, Catholicism and the law’, pp. 254–5. 72 Questier, Catholicism and Community, pp. 50–6. 73 The Other Face: Catholic Life under Elizabeth I, ed. P. Caraman (1960). 74 Questier, Catholicism and Community, pp. 68–206. 75 Questier, Catholicism and Community, p. 84. 76 Questier, Catholicism and Community, pp. 169–75. 77 Questier, Catholicism and Community, pp. 164–5. 78 Bossy. 79 A. Walsham, ‘“Yielding to the extremity of the time”: conformity, orthodoxy and the post-Reformation Catholic community’, in Lake and Questier, Conformity and Orthodoxy, pp. 211–36, at pp. 231–2; Questier, ‘Conformity, Catholicism and the law’, p. 242. 80 F. X. Walker, ‘The implementation of the Elizabethan statutes against recusants’ (unpublished University of London Ph.D. thesis, 1961). 81 The Seconde Parte of a Register, ii. 33–4. 82 This account is based on observation. I often took students and visitors to Lynsted when living and teaching in Canterbury. And see the tomb monuments erected for John Caryll at Warnham and Sir John Gage at West Firle, both Sussex examples, and, at Wing, Buckinghamshire, for the Dormers (Questier, Catholicism and Community, illustrations 10–13). 83 E. Shagan, ‘Introduction: English Catholic history in context’, in Shagan, Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’. 84 In the 18th century William Hawkins, following the 17th-century Sir Matthew Hale, pronounced that ‘a Man's House is looked upon as his Castle’ (Collinson, ‘The English conventicle’, p. 150). 85 Collinson, ‘The English conventicle’, p. 156; P. Collinson, ‘Night schools, conventicles and churches: continuities and discontinuities in early Protestant ecclesiology’, in The Beginnings of English Protestantism, ed. P. Marshall and A. Ryrie (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 209–35, at pp. 221–5. 86 Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. A. Hudson (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 115–19. 87 D. Plumb, ‘A gathered church? Lollards and their society’, in The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725, ed. M. Spufford (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 132–63. 88 B. Stevenson, ‘The social integration of post-Restoration dissenters, 1660–1725’, in Spufford, pp. 361–87. 89 C. W. Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630 (Cambridge, 1994). 90 P. Collinson, ‘The religion of Elizabethan England and of its queen’, in Giordano Bruno 1583–5: the English Experience, ed. M. Cilibertro and N. Mann (Firenze, 1997), pp. 20–1. 91 A. Bida, ‘Papists in an Elizabethan parish: Linton Cambridgeshire c.1560–c.1600’ (unpublished University of Cambridge Diploma in Historical Studies dissertation, Cambridge, 1992). I was privileged to supervise Mr. Bida's work, which should have led to a doctoral thesis, but for lack of funding from his native Poland. 92 P. Collinson, ‘Critical conclusion’, in Spufford, pp. 388–96. 93 See P. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, The Religion of Protestants and many of the essays gathered in Godly People and From Cranmer to Sancroft. 94 P. Lake, The Boxmaker's Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Manchester, 2001); P. Lake with M. Questier, The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven and London, 2002). 95 T. Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: the Caroline Puritan Movement c.1620–43 (Cambridge, 1997). 96 P. Collinson, ‘Elizabethan and Jacobean puritanism as forms of popular religious culture’, in The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700, ed. C. Durston and J. Eales (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 32–57; P. Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Basingstoke, 1988). 97 P. Lake, ‘“A charitable Christian hatred”: the godly and their enemies in the 1630s’, in Durston and Eales, pp. 145–83. 98 Lake and Questier, The Antichrist's Lewd Hat, pp. 425–38, 484–500. 99 Collinson, ‘Puritanism as popular religious culture’, p. 55. 100 See above, n. 77; and the case of East Hanningfield in Essex, discussed in Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 349–50. 101 See what was said of those who gadded to hear William Dyke at St. Albans: ‘Many of this gadding people came from far and went home late, both young men and young women together’ (Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 373–4). 102 In a speech made in the 1628 parliament, Sir Henry Marten, dean of the court of arches, said that if a bishop were to trouble a man for going to another sermon when he had none at home, ‘it is against law and I have upon appeals given good costs against the ordinary and I will ever do it’ (B. P. Levack, The Civil Lawyers in England, 1603–42 (Oxford, 1973), p. 191). 103 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 168–76; P. Collinson, ‘Lectures by combination: structures and characteristics of church life in 17th-century England’, in Collinson, Godly People, pp. 467–98. 104 Collinson, Religion of Protestants, pp. 248–9, 264–7; P. Collinson, ‘The English conventicle’, pp. 158–61. 105 Collinson, ‘The English conventicle’. 106 J. Craig, Reformation, Politics and Polemics: the Growth of Protestantism in East Anglian Market Towns, 1500–1610 (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 133–51. 107 Collinson, ‘Elizabethan and Jacobean Puritanism’; ‘Introduction’ and essays by P. Collinson and A. Fox in The Reformation in English Towns, 1500–1640, ed. P. Collinson and J. Craig (Basingstoke, 1998); D. Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603–60 (Oxford, 1985). Copious source material relating to this subject will be found in virtually all volumes of the Toronto series Records of Early English Drama. 108 L. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth (Chicago, Ill., 1986); P. Collinson, ‘Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair: the theatre constructs puritanism’ and L. Marcus, ‘Of mire and authorship’, both in The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576–1649, ed. D. L. Smith, R. Strier and D. Bevington (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 157–81; Lake and Questier, The Antichrist's Lewd Hat, pp. 583–608. 109 C. W. Marsh, ‘The gravestone of Thomas Lawrence revisited (or the Family of Love and the local community in Balsham, 1560–1630)’, in Spufford, pp. 208–34. 110 Questier, ‘Conformity, Catholicism and the law’; Questier, Catholicism and Community. 111 Walsham, Charitable Hatred, esp. p. 301. 112 Richard Baxter, A Holy Commonwealth (1659), pp. 456–7; and see P. Collinson, ‘Wars of religion’, in The Birthpangs of Protestant England, pp. 127–55. © Institute of Historical Research 2007 This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © Institute of Historical Research 2007
TI - The politics of religion and the religion of politics in Elizabethan England
JF - Historical Research
DO - 10.1111/j.1468-2281.2007.00448.x
DA - 2009-02-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-politics-of-religion-and-the-religion-of-politics-in-elizabethan-gto4htQr3M
SP - 74
EP - 92
VL - 82
IS - 215
DP - DeepDyve
ER -