Michael Mullett

Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558-1829

Catholics in England and Wales, c.1558-c.1640 Catholics in Scotland and Ireland, c.1558-c.1640 Catholics in England and Wales, c.1640-c.1745 Catholics in Scotland and Ireland, c.1640-c.1745 Catholics in England and Wales, c.1745-c.1829 Catholics in Scotland and Ireland, c.1745-c.1829 Conclusion Index

Catholicism and the Church of England in a northern library : Henry Halsted and the Burnley Grammar School Library

T HE contents of what was described in 1885 as ‘the most extensive and the most interesting of the old Grammar School Libraries of Lancashire’, the Burnley Grammar School Library, shed interesting light on the state of religious controversy in the north between the late sixteenth and the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The library, which, through the generosity of Burnley Grammar School and with the kind co-operation of the Lancashire County Library, is now on permanent loan at Lancaster University, forms, as presently constituted, a collection of 875 volumes, published mainly in the seventeenth century. It owes its foundation to, and, as we shall see, reflects the religious interests, aims, and viewpoint of, the Revd Henry Halsted (1641-1728), rector of Stansfield, in Suffolk, who left the whole of his personal library to the Burnley Grammar School in 1728. Shortly after Halsted’s death, the collection was augmented by a small addition of books presented by another clergyman, the Revd Edmund Towneley of Rowley, rector of Slaidburn, Lancashire. It is, therefore, essentially a clerical and religious library and provides an interesting example of what sort of material typical, affluent English incumbents of the Augustan and early Hanoverian period considered worthy of places on their study shelves. For purposes of comparison within the region, a collection by two laymen made in another northern town and, like the Halsted-Towneley collection, charitably gifted, the Petyt Library, built up to over two thousand volumes by two brothers in the first decade of the eighteenth century, and now housed within Skipton Public Library, with its heavy emphasis on divinity, can be profitably examined. In the essay that follows we shall consider the Burnley Collection as essentially that of its principal donor, Henry Halsted, and as enshrining his aims.

‘Men of Knowne Loyalty’: The Politics of the Lancashire Borough of Clitheroe, 1660–1689

IN THETHREEDECADES between the Restoration and the Revolution, the autonomy of the English municipal corporations underwent a major challenge from central government. In this period the boroughs also took part in the early development of party politics, and in the Lancashire towns in particular Toryism took root in the sixteen-eighties. This article sets out to examine the political, and especially the parliamentary, history of one of these towns between 1660 and 1689. The borough of Clitheroe in this period provides an example of gentry, aristocratic and government competition and co-operation for the control of a constituency with a small and manageable electorate. 1 Clitheroe was created a parliamentary borough in 1558. As the manorial proprietor, the Crown obviously exerted strong influence on the borough electorate. After its enfranchisement, Clitheroe returned to Parliament a succession of outsiders chiefly southern lawyers, and gentry dependent on the Court. Then from the early seventeenth century, there grew up the practice of twinning a local man with an outsider in the boroughs parliamentary representation.2 In 1662 Charles II conferred on George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, the honor of Clitheroe.3 However, this grant, as we shall see, did not result in the automatic transfer to the Albemarles of the Crowns influence over Clitheroes choice of M.P. s. The small size of the electorate created intense competition for influence. The suffrage was in the burg age holders and selected freemen and even at its greatest extent it accounted for only about 10 per cent of what was, by any reckoning, a small population. 4 The possibility

Catholics in Scotland and Ireland, c.1558–c.1640

We shall begin this chapter with a survey of the state of Catholicism in Scotland on the eve of the Reformation. We shall see that traditional religion possessed considerable potential for renewal, but that the Reformation, assisted by England, by the support of the nobility and by popular adhesion, dominated the scene in the years after 1559. We shall examine the factors that might have sustained a Scottish Catholic recovery but will also discount their lasting value for underpinning a strong endurance of the old faith.

Catholics in England and Wales, c. 1558–c.1640

This chapter surveys the emergence of Catholic recusancy and its consolidation in Elizabethan and early Stuart England and Wales. We begin with a study of the early English Catholic recusant community and its emergence in particular regions as minority groupings, largely rural in location and with Catholic aristocrats leading a predominantly plebeian rank and file; this community was, at the best of times, marginalised and in the worst periods actively persecuted on political grounds, for in the course of Elizabeth’s reign from 1558 to 1603 England’s Catholics were to become linked in the official and the public mind with treasonable conspiracy in alliance with Spain. The Catholic-inspired Revolt of the Northern Earls of 1569 against Elizabeth led to the excommunication and papal deposition of the queen in the bull Regnans in Excelsis of 1570; this was followed by the Ridolfi Plot of 1571, a conspiratorial version of the 1569 rising, sharing its programme of a Catholic marriage between Mary Queen of Scots and the Duke of Norfolk backed by Spanish and papal military and financial assistance. The Throgmorton Plot, exposed in 1583, involved French as well as Spanish and papal support for another bid to dislodge Elizabeth, while the Parry Plot of 1585 indicated a high degree of papal intervention in English affairs, and the Babington Conspiracy in 1586 once more centred on the violent substitution of Elizabeth by Mary.

Catholics in Scotland and Ireland, c.1640–c.1745

The situation for Catholics in Scotland between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries was bleak, though perhaps not entirely so: established communities continued to exist in Banffshire and Aberdeenshire and there was continuity — indeed, as we shall see, remarkable growth — in the Highland mission; a few Scots abroad were converted from time to time, attracted, perhaps, by the glamour of Continental Catholicism on display in Paris or Rome; some were persuaded that, although the first, Knoxian, Reformation might have been a necessity, the second, Presbyterian and Covenanting variant was not.

Catholics in Scotland and Ireland, c. 1745–c. 1829

The period from 1745 to 1829 cannot be categorised in any simple terms of growth or decline for the Catholic Church in Scotland, even though it may be possible to detect the early signs of a ‘second spring’ from around 1790 onwards. Yet for some commentators ‘a severe judgment on eighteenth-century Scottish Catholicism is deserved’. Some might see the symptoms of a more general malaise in the failure of the Scots College, Rome, a key institution set up for ‘the provision of a steady and regular supply of secular clergy who would spend their lives working in Scotland amongst Scottish Catholics’: the early nineteenth-century historian of the College, the Abbe Paul McPherson, claimed that amidst ‘disorders’, serious ill-discipline and chronic financial mis-management ‘the college had failed and failed lamentably and culpably in fulfilling that purpose’. A further sign of contraction in Scottish Catholicism on the Continent was the secularisation in 1744 of the much-reduced ancient Benedictine foundation at Wurzburg. While these erosions of the Scottish Catholic presence abroad might, arguably, have had the effect of concentrating attention on the task of the mission within Scotland itself, there was a further problem of Catholic ecclesiastical authority within the country.

Catholics in England and Wales, c. 1745–c. 1829

Our final period in the history of the Catholic communities of England and Wales between the Reformation and Emancipation is in some ways the most intriguing. The decades in question are punctuated with clear marks of transition: the Catholic Relief Act of 1778 as the first breach in the wall of penal legislation; the Gordon Riots as a violent reminder of the stubborn persistence of popular anti-popery; the impact of the French Revolution in softening national anti-popery; the Second Relief Act of 1791, licensing Catholics’ worship by, in effect, extending to them the benefits that Nonconformists enjoyed under the 1689 Toleration Act; the arrival of refugee French priests in the 1790s, bringing refreshment to the faith, especially in its newer urban centres; and, finally, after protracted political struggle, the achievement of full civil rights in 1829.1

Reviews : Richard Wunderli, Peasant Fires; The Drummer of Niklashausen, Bloomington and Indianopolis, Indiana University Press, ISBN 0-253-36725-5, 1993; xii + 156 pp.; £17.50 hardback, £7.99 paperback

Professor Wunderli has written here a popular study aimed at a wide, non-specialist readership and delivered in a light, chatty tone that sometimes goes too far in its attempt to achieve a demotic voice (the opposite of ’sane’ appears as ’loony’). The aim is to use the particular case of the messianic insurgent the Drummer of Niklashausen (1476) to construct a wide-ranging study of features of late-medieval German and European society, with particular reference to popular culture and mentalities, but also taking in the state of the Church and its reform, and the economy. Aspects of popular belief explored include the social meaning of the festal cycle, saints’ cults, anti-Semitism (or rather, says Wunderli, to this reviewer’s surprise, its absence in rural Germany) and mariolatry. Mary, dispensing a queen’s prerogative of extra-judicial mercy, had come to be depicted as the genetrix of social compassion in late-medieval Europe, perhaps pre-eminently in Germany, with its agonizing combination of defective, yet proliferating, government, acute economic and demographic pressures and extraordinary devotional creativity. However, the theological, or rather christological, origins of the emphasis on Mary’s intercessionary role lay not, pace Wunderli, in concentration on the Virgin’s collaboration with her forgiving Son but rather in a focus on her function in warding off the righteous anger of a Christ portrayed iconographically and homiletically in ever more judgemental terms, until

Reviews : Andrew Pettegree, ed., The Early Reformation in Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-1521-39454-6, 1992; xii + 250 pp.; £27.95 hardback, £9.95 paperback

the political factors that determined success, or failure. Indeed, the book might just have usefully carried some such title as ’The Politics of Protestantization in Sixteenth-Century Europe’. So decisive do political considerations-along with support or opposition on the part of key social classes-appear to have been in determining whether or not a realm or region would or would not go Protestant that it almost seems superfluous for the authors to adduce other than such political factors as primary agents in advancing or retarding Reformation. Thus, in the case of Germany, the attempt on the part of Pettegree to give causative primacy to non-political agencies such as the Flugschriften or the fact that Germany was a ’land of towns’ either fails to show why only Germany evolved such a key medium of propaganda or puts forward as explanation a characteristic that Germany had in common with other areas of Europe, including Italy, with its extensive urbanization and seemingly ineradicable Catholicism, and the urbanized Netherlands, where the Protestantism of the first generation could not prevail against the political resistance of Charles V.