6 - Conservatism and Catholicism in Elizabethan Cambridge

Summary

Historians agree that Elizabethan Cambridge had a continuing problem with religious nonconformity. Patrick Collinson called the 1570s ‘a time of exceptional turbulence’ in the university; Christopher Brooke suggests that it was a time of ‘doctrinal strife’, with religious orthodoxy under attack from both ‘the advocates of presbytery and the advocates of Rome’. One of these two threats has received by far the greatest amount of attention. There are clear and obvious reasons for this. The central place of the university in the genesis of Elizabethan Protestant radicalism is not in doubt, and, as Collinson puts it, young Cambridge Fellows and students provided the ‘rank and file’ of the nascent movement. There is no need to abandon the notion that the University of Cambridge and the Elizabethan ‘godly’ had a special, if frequently strained, relationship.

Yet this is an association that can be pressed too far. There are two particular dangers. The first is that later developments are allowed to distort understanding of the first decades of Elizabeth's reign. Debora Shuger has argued that ‘The Calvinist dominance at Cambridge was real. It was also, however, confined to a single decade’: the 1590s. The conflicts of this later period had their own dynamics, shaped by hardened confessional identities and attitudes to ‘popery’ altered forever by the arrival of the twin threats of Jesuits and attempted Spanish invasion. They cannot easily be taken as reflective of the same institution ten or twenty years earlier. The second danger lies in conflating the importance of Cambridge to the godly with the importance of the godly within Cambridge. The undoubted volume, eminence and persistence of Puritan voices in Cambridge does not necessarily demonstrate that radical – or even moderate – Protestantism dominated the university to the exclusion of all else.

This chapter begins from this premise and, in a discussion centring on four case studies, examines the continuing presence of conservatives and Catholics within the university. This discussion needs some caveats, not least on those terms themselves. One of the greatest transformations in the historiography of early modern Catholicism over the past few decades has been the recognition that the lines around the term ‘Catholic’ have often been drawn too sharply for this period, masking the many shades of grey between full conformity and total defiance in the face of the demands of the Elizabethan state.