Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain

Alexandra Walsham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317169239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The survival and revival of Roman Catholicism in post-Reformation Britain remains the subject of lively debate. This volume examines key aspects of the evolution and experience of the Catholic communities of these Protestant kingdoms during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rejecting an earlier preoccupation with recusants and martyrs, it highlights the importance of those who exhibited varying degrees of conformity with the ecclesiastical establishment and explores the moral and political dilemmas that confronted the clergy and laity. It reassesses the significance of the Counter Reformation mission as an evangelical enterprise; analyses its communication strategies and its impact on popular piety; and illuminates how Catholic ritual life creatively adapted itself to a climate of repression. Reacting sharply against the insularity of many previous accounts, this book investigates developments in the British Isles in relation to wider international initiatives for the renewal of the Catholic faith in Europe and for its plantation overseas. It emphasises the reciprocal interaction between Catholicism and anti-Catholicism throughout the period and casts fresh light on the nature of interconfessional relations in a pluralistic society. It argues that persecution and suffering paradoxically both constrained and facilitated the resurgence of the Church of Rome. They presented challenges and fostered internal frictions, but they also catalysed the process of religious identity formation and imbued English, Welsh and Scottish Catholicism with peculiar dynamism. Prefaced by an extensive new historiographical overview, this collection brings together a selection of Alexandra Walsham's essays written over the last fifteen years, fully revised and updated to reflect recent research in this flourishing field. Collectively these make a major contribution to our understanding of minority Catholicism and the Counter Reformation in the era after the Council of Trent.

CHAPTER 1

In the Lord’s Vineyard: Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain

This collection of essays opens with a prayer: a fervent ‘prayer for the reparatione and reformatione of our Countrie’. Adjoined to Adam King’s translation of Peter Canisius’s influential catechism, it implored ‘maist merciful God’ to ‘look upon thy kirks prophaned be the hands of infidels, and the afflictione of thy deer flock’ and ‘cairfullie visite the vynyaird planted be thy right hand whilk the wyld bair trawails to wort and root out: strengthen the labourars thairof against the raige of thame who seiks to destroy it … mak thame victoriouse and mak thame that works weil thairin to possesss thy kingdome’.¹ Published in the year of the Spanish Armada, 1588, this was a prayer for the restoration of Calvinist Scotland to its historic allegiance to Rome through the agency of the missionary priests. In describing it as a vineyard, King was, of course, invoking a compelling biblical metaphor for the visible Church of God upon earth. And this was a scriptural trope echoed by King’s fellow Catholics across the British Isles. In 1614, the English layman John Heigham wrote from his exile in the Low Countries, beseeching the ‘religious fathers and reverend priests to whome is committed the care of this our devastated vyniarde’ to distribute the ‘heavenlie Manna’ and ‘divine foode’ of the blessed sacrament to his co-religionists at home, ‘least they perishe by famine’, despite the grave dangers they faced in doing so.² A few years later the same phrase sprang to the lips of Matthew Kellison, president of the English Catholic seminary at Douai, in his account of the life and martyrdom of Thomas Maxfield, the son of a Staffordshire recusant and an alumnus of the college, who had eagerly returned to labour in ‘this vineyard of ours’ before being arrested and executed at Tyburn in July 1616. Maxfield himself wrote in his farewell letter to Kellison of his pride in being a member of this blessed house of men who ‘hath afforded to our poor barren Contrye so much good and happie seed’.³ The Catholic Church to which all these writers self-consciously adhered was a universal Church, which by the early seventeenth century stretched not merely across the European continent but across the globe. As Gregory Martin wrote in a letter to his beloved, but misguided Protestant sisters, we are ‘of such a faith as is professed in Fraunce, in Spaine, in Flanders, Brabant, Zelant, &c. In a great part of Germanie, in all Italy, and beyond, wheresoever there be christians, and is now preached to the Indians, that never heard of Christ before, and encreaseth wonderfullye’.⁴

These quotations draw into focus the central themes of this book. The essays that comprise it examine key aspects of the experience and evolution of post-Reformation Catholicism, focusing chiefly on the period between the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558 and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, but extending across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They centre primarily on the realms of England and Wales, but place these against the backdrop of comparative events and tendencies in the kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland. Written over the course of the last decade and a half, and presented in revised and expanded form here, they reflect stages in an intellectual journey that has coincided with the historiographical transformations surveyed in this initial chapter. As a subject the history of Catholicism in the British Isles has emerged from the shadows and become one of the liveliest arenas of scholarly enquiry at the current time. The fruits of this new surge of interest by both historians and literary critics have been rich and abundant. A symptom and product of these trends, the essays in this volume are collectively underpinned by three key convictions.

First, reacting sharply against the insularity of previous accounts, Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain underlines the importance of investigating developments in this region in relation to wider international initiatives for the rejuvenation of the Catholic faith, for the recovery of territories and peoples temporarily lost to the forces of heresy and for the evangelical conversion of the indigenous peoples of Asia and the Americas to Christianity. It seeks to highlight not only what might be gained from doing so, but also what insights the British situation might contribute to our understanding of the movement for Catholic renewal as a whole. The second suggestion made by this book is the necessity of adopting a perspective that examines Catholicism and anti-Catholicism, Protestantism and anti-Protestantism as inextricably linked bodies of opinion and practice, which exerted powerful reciprocal influence upon each other. It endeavours to shed light not merely on the internal history of the Catholic communities it studies but also on their lateral connections with other churches, congregations and sects.

Thirdly, these essays emphasise the degree to which the condition of being a proscribed and persecuted minority constrained and shaped the experience of British Catholics and left lasting scars on the memory of subsequent generations. Practising one’s faith in secret, evading detection by hostile authorities and coping with exclusion from public life presented real difficulties and challenges to the Catholic laity and to the priesthood that served them. Yet while in some respects this served as a straitjacket, in others it functioned as a fillip and a stimulus. Paradoxically, it catalysed processes of religious identity formation and facilitated tendencies that were slower to emerge in territories where the Church was buttressed by the strong arm of the state and benefited from the support of a fully functioning episcopal hierarchy. If it often inhibited, at other times it operated as an effective incubator of developments that are now seen as a hallmark of the Counter Reformation itself. It placed obstacles in the path of some reform initiatives and fostered internal friction, but it also created unexpected opportunities and imbued English, Welsh and Scottish Catholicism with a peculiar dynamism. And this derived in large part from the experience of living in the multiconfessional society that was the most lasting and troubling legacy of the advent and entrenchment of Protestantism in these islands.

Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain revisits older questions and raises new ones under four main headings. Part I (Conscience and Conformity) focuses upon the strategies employed by Catholic laypeople and clerics in response to the legislative requirement that they attend worship in reformed churches. It explores the moral dilemmas that surrounded the issue of how to behave in a context in which recusancy was a punishable offence and in which interaction with Protestants was perceived to threaten the very existence and survival of their faith. The chapters in this section examine how Catholics reconciled their consciences with outward conformity; the intellectual consequences of debates about dissimulation for theories of toleration; and the implications of these practices for interconfessional relations. Part II (Miracles and Missionaries) offers a fresh perspective on the activities and impact of the Jesuit and seminary-trained priests sent to Britain from Rome, Spain and the Low Countries and draws attention to the imaginative ways in which they sought to succour the faithful, reclaim those who had strayed and convince heretics that the Catholic Church was the only safe haven for their souls. It highlights their careful cultivation of aspects of traditional piety suppressed by Protestantism, the risks entailed in the evangelical tactics they employed and the ongoing determination of many missionaries to reclaim the nation as a whole to the bosom of Rome. Part III (Communication and Conversion) focuses upon how post-Reformation Catholicism reacted to the rapid changes linked with the birth and expansion of the printing industry and the spread of reading and writing literacy. It analyses how it utilised the new typographical medium in conjunction with older modes of communication; assesses the degree to which it overcame its deep and long-standing ambivalence about translating Scripture into the vernacular; and investigates the manner in which it sought to mould public opinion, craft its historical legacy and deflect the polemical attacks of its enemies. Part IV (Translation and Transmutation) provides an overview of how the ritual life of Catholics was recast in the wake of the Reformation. It traces how they adapted to having intermittent access to the sacraments of penance and the mass and examines the curious mixture of handicap and advantage attendant upon becoming a Church under the cross. The rest of this introduction erects a more detailed historiographical and analytical framework for the essays that follow. It provides a synoptic overview of the changing scholarly landscape from which they have emerged, serves as a gloss and commentary upon their intersections with each other and offers some reflections on the future development of this flourishing field.

I

Coloured by confessional sentiment and suffused with an unmistakeable strain of apology, until very recently the historiography of Catholicism in Britain was the near exclusive preserve of committed believers: a subfield, if not a ghetto occupied by the ancestors of those who had suffered for their faith in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its natural focus was the heroic band of missionary priests and laypeople who risked and sometimes sacrificed their lives defying official attempts to persecute their beleaguered religion into extinction. An extension of early modern martyrology itself, it was something of ‘a self-satisfied cottage industry’ which overlooked individuals who did not fit into this inspiring mould.⁵ It omitted those whose attitudes and actions contaminated the empowering image of resilience and unity constructed by contemporary clerical leaders. A bias towards the former was inbuilt in the sources which these priests and their successors assiduously gathered, transcribed and edited for the edification of posterity and to assist the ongoing campaign to secure the canonisation of the martyrs. Overtly or tacitly, it also shaped the pioneering endeavours of the scholars who founded the Catholic Record Society and the great bibliographers who catalogued the remarkable body of printed literature that emanated from the community and its diaspora.⁶

Inward-looking and afflicted by a kind of tunnel vision, this historiographical tradition was also a vertical history which neglected the horizontal relationships between Catholics and the several varieties of Protestants alongside whom they lived in these islands.⁷ Aptly described by Hugh Aveling as ‘a particularly locked hortus conclusus’,⁸ it replicated the splendid isolation that the ecclesiastical hierarchy insisted was the only way to save the faith from complete annihilation and it often dwelt on the tribulations of clergy and laity at home at the expense of their connections with the wider movement for spiritual and institutional renewal that was sweeping across Europe and beyond the seas to America and Asia. Indeed, it usually presumed that persecution effectively insulated this community from the currents of change to which their coreligionists on the Continent were exposed. For their part, most historians of the Counter Reformation showed little interest in Catholic minorities living in Protestant lands. Their excoriating experiences were at odds with the resurgent, militant and victorious Church of Rome with whose successful alliance with secular authority and role in the creation of powerful nation states these scholars were chiefly preoccupied.⁹

Within the British historical mainstream, meanwhile, the study of Catholicism’s reduction to an embattled and passive minority has long remained an ‘intellectual backwater’, an obscure byway and minor distraction from the grand narrative of progress that released the people of England, Wales and Scotland from popish ignorance, superstition and tyranny.¹⁰ The tale of Protestantism’s triumph as the official and popular religion in Britain (t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 In the Lord's Vineyard: Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain
• Part I Conscience and Conformity
• Part II Miracles and Missionaries
• Part III Communication and Conversion
• Part IV Translation and Transmutation
• Bibliography
• Index