Michael Questier

Puritans, Papists, and the “Public Sphere” in Early Modern England: The Edmund Campion Affair in Context

The categories and assumptions that typically frame discussions of the relations between “Catholicism” and the Elizabethan state seem clear enough in many ways. Two flatly opposed views confront us. On the one hand, some historians believe that the activities of Catholic engages, both clerical and lay, were essentially “religious.” Attempts by the Protestant establishment to recast them as political and to organize them under the sign of “treason” were mere fantasies, invented for their own nefarious purposes by Protestant zealots, informers on the make, and Machiavellian politiques. At its most extreme this view presents the Elizabethan regime as fundamentally evil and interprets all its intelligence activities against notional Catholic sedition or subversion as mere pretexts for religious persecution.1 On the other hand, many orthodox narratives of the religious politics of the period take as a given the link between the policy imperatives of European Catholic states and the existence of some form of self-conscious English Catholicism (even if the writers of such narratives are unclear about how far Catholic political activism was dispersed among those who felt consciously un-Protestant). Indeed, the categories used by contemporaries to talk about these things, centering on the dichotomies or binary oppositions between politics and treason (or resistance), on the one hand, and conscience/religion and loyalty (or obedience), on the other, have been perpetuated in much modern writing, largely without any analysis of the contemporary ideologies that informed that rhetoric. Thus the magisterial historian of the Elizabethan regime and state, Conyers Read, could describe the activities of the seminary priests as political (because of their dissemination of “potentially traitorous doctrines”) without giving very much thought to the media through which those doctrines were dispersed, or indeed to what different context(s) might have rendered their

ARMINIANISM, CATHOLICISM, AND PURITANISM IN ENGLAND DURING THE 1630 S

The relationship between Arminianism and Roman Catholicism in the early Stuart period has long been a source of historiographical controversy. Many contemporaries were in no doubt that such an affinity did exist and that it was politically significant. This article will consider how far there was ideological sympathy and even rhetorical collaboration between Caroline Catholics and those members of the Church of England whom both contemporaries and modern scholars have tended to describe as Arminians and Laudians. It will suggest that certain members of the English Catholic community actively tried to use the changes which they claimed to observe in the government of the Church of England in order to establish a rapport with the Caroline regime. In particular they enthused about what they perceived as a strongly anti-puritan trend in royal policy. Some of them argued that a similar style of governance should be exercised by a bishop over Catholics in England. This was something which they believed would correct the factional divisions within their community and align it more effectively with the Stuart dynasty.

English Clerical Converts to Protestantism, 1580–1596

It is proposed in this article to discuss the English Catholic seminarists who apostatised between 1582 and 1596—that is, after the date when Catholics in England were required unequivocally to separate themselves totally from the Established Church but before the beginning of the Appellant Controversy. P. McGrath in a recent article has set out the basic biographical details of a number of the Elizabethan apostates. T. H. Clancy has dealt with Jesuit defectors from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and gives interesting and useful statistics on apostates in general. Neither of them, however, makes any extensive attempt to assess the development or significance of these apostates’ changes of religion. McGrath expressed the hope that his ‘survey… of an important section of the Elizabethan clergy’ would ‘draw attention to the variety of motives influencing these men’ and ‘the need for further examination of their strange careers’. It is the intention of this article to explore further the importance of apostasy among the Elizabethan seminarists (seminary priests and students for the priesthood who never got as far as being ordained). Instead of concentrating, as McGrath and Clancy do, upon establishing who the apostates were, a comparative approach over a shorter period will be employed, using a wider range of source material, including the books of ‘motives’. The aim is to challenge the view that all clerical apostates were basically of similar significance, distinguished mainly by whether they remained with the Established Church or not. It will be argued here that the phenomenon grew more serious between 1580 and 1596. It is not enough to say of these apostates merely that there were bound to be ‘deviationists’ from the Allen-Persons line, or that they had the example of the Marian priests before them.