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Revisionism, the Reformation and the History of English Catholicism1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Christopher Haigh
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Extract

Twenty years ago, when Patrick McGrath was writing Papists and Puritans, it made sense to present the history of Tudor Catholicism in terms of early decline and later heroic recovery. Our understanding of the sixteenth century was then dominated by two books, which seemed to demonstrate revolutions in religion and government that breached all continuities in ecclesiastical and political history. In A. G. Dickens's The English Reformation, an increasingly sophisticated laity, discontented with the moral laxity and spiritual torpor of the late medieval clergy, was shown to have accepted with enthusiasm the break with Rome and the new doctrines of Protestantism. Gentlemen, lawyers, merchants and artisans responded to the energetic evangelism of the early reformers, and abandoned medieval obscurantism. Secular and ecclesiastical politicians espoused reform for their own calculations of expediency or experience of spirituality, and threw the weight of the state behind the new doctrines, while conservatives lacked the commitment and imagination to resist change.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , July 1985 , pp. 394 - 406
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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Footnotes

1

This short essay is offered as a response to McGrathP., Revisionism, the Reformation and the History of English Catholicism1, this Journal, XXXV (1984), 414–28, where some of my work is misrepresented. However, I am conscious that, as all who have studied Elizabethan controversial literature will know, specific refutations make tedious reading. I have therefore attempted to set the views which Professor McGrath has attacked in a broader context, and to meet some of his particular criticisms in footnotes.

References

2 McGrath, P., Papists and Puritans under Elizabeth I, London 1967Google Scholar.

3 Dickens, A. G., The English Reformation, London 1964Google Scholar.

4 Elton, G. R., England under the Tudors, London 1955Google Scholar.

5 Bossy, J., The English Catholic Community 1570–1850, London 1975Google Scholar; Dickens, A. G., ‘The first stages of Romanist recusancy in Yorkshire 1560–1590‘, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, xxxv (1943). 157–8. 180–1Google Scholar.

6 Aveling, J. C. H., The Handle and the Axe, London 1976, 23–66Google Scholar.

7 For a survey of some of the work involved see Haigh, C., ‘The recent historiography of the English Reformation‘, Historical Journal, xxv (1982), 995–1007CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 See especially Bowker, M., The Secular Clergy in the Diocese of Lincoln 1495–1520, Cambridge 1968Google Scholar; Houlbrooke, R. Church Courts and the People during the English Reformation, 1520–1570, Oxford 1979Google Scholar; Thompson, S., ‘The pastoral work of the English episcopate, 1509–1558’ (University of Oxford D.Phil, thesis), 1984Google Scholar; Haigh, C., ‘Anticlericalism and the English Reformation‘, History, lxviii (1983), 391–407CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 The work of D. R. Starkey, E. W. Ives, D. E. Hoak and Elton himself, is most conveniently approached through Elton, G. R., Reform and Reformation, London 1977Google Scholar.

10 To the local studies cited in my ‘Recent historiography’ might be added Moir, M., ‘Church and society in sixteenth-century Herefordshire’ (University of Leicester M.Phil, thesis), 1984Google Scholar. The interpretation of Kent offered in Clark, P., English Provincial Society, Hassocks 1977Google Scholar, is now being challenged by Dr M. Zell, of Thames Polytechnic.

11 For the best example of this approach to Tudor government, which draws the same conclusion about the Reformation, see Williams, P., The Tudor Regime, Oxford 1979Google Scholar.

12 R. Parsons, A Briefe Apologie or Defence of the Catholike Ecclesiastical Hierarchic, n.p. ? 1601, fos. 1–4.

13 The Parsons interpretation is set out most unambiguously in ‘The Memoirs of Father Robert Parsons’, ed. Pollen, J. H., Catholic Record Society, ii (1906), 48–63Google Scholar, but it is also embedded in: The Jesuit's Memorial/or the Intended Reformation of England, ed. Gee, H., London 1690, 2, 4, 20–2Google Scholar, 49–51 (defended in A Manifestation of the Great Folly and Bad Spirit, n.p. 1602, fos. 56–62v); Defence of the Catholike Ecclesiastical Hierarchic, fos. 1–4; ‘Memoirs’, 189. Parsons's papers were written often at the request of his superiors, circulated widely during his lifetime and were used after his death (e.g. by More, Henry, in Elizabethan Jesuits, ed. Edwards, F., Chichester 1981, 32Google Scholar, 209, 211, 364).

14 I have suggested (e.g. in ‘From monopoly to minority: Catholicism in early modern England', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., xxxi, (1981), 131)Google Scholar that conservative conformists made an important contribution to the long-term survival of Catholicism. McGrath regards this as ‘a very dangerous argument of the kind advanced by collaborationists like Petain and Darlan’, and suggests that conformists contributed as much to the success of the Reformation. In the sense that partial compliance could lead to ultimate rejection or acceptance of Protestantism, we are both right – but it is difficult to see where the Elizabethan missionaries could have worked if Catholicism had not been kept alive, even in sullied form, by collaborationists. See n. 21 below.

15 Haigh, ‘Monopoly to minority’, 130–2; Haigh, C., ‘The continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation‘, Past and Present, xciii (1981), 37–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Lindley, K. J., ‘The Lay Catholics of England in the reign of Charles I’, this Journal, xxii (1972), 199–221Google Scholar; C. Hibbard, ‘Early Stuart Catholicism: revision and re-revisions’.

17 On the growth of preaching see P. Collinson, ‘The Elizabethan Church and the new religion’, in Haigh, C. (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I, Basingstoke 1984, 184–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Seconde Parte of a Register, ed. Peel, A., Cambridge 1915, ii, 88, 94Google Scholar.

18 C. Haigh, ‘The Church of England, the Catholics and the people’, in The Reign of Elizabeth I, 195–219.

19 I propose to develop these points at greater length elsewhere - and to offer some evidence!

20 Sander, N., The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism, cd. Lewis, D., London 1877Google Scholar; McGrath, ‘Elizabethan Catholicism’, 422, 425.

21 It is interesting that Allen and Parsons recognised that this form of Petainist collaboration was necessary if the loyalty and political power of leading lay Catholics were to be maintained. See Holmes, P. J., Elizabethan Casuistry (Catholic Record Society, Records Section 67, 1981), 2–3Google Scholar, 75–6.

22 Walker, F. X., ‘The implementation of the Elizabethan statutes against recusants, 1580–1603’ (University of London Ph.D. thesis, 1961)Google Scholar; Manning, R. B., Religion and Society in Elizabethan Sussex, Leicester 1969, 14–33, 129–50Google Scholar; Haigh, C., Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire, Cambridge 1975, 202–94Google Scholar; Burke, V., ‘The economic consequences of recusancy in Elizabethan Worcestershire‘, Recusant History, xiv (1972), 71–7Google Scholar.

23 McGrath, ‘Elizabethan Catholicism’, 425.

24 Calculated from G. Anstruther, The Seminary Priests, i, Ware n.d.; The Seminary Priests, ii, Great Wakering 1975.

25 McGrath objects (in ‘Elizabethan Catholicism’, 426–7) to my suggestion (in ‘Monopoly to minority’, 135) that some missionary priests courted martyrdom. But it was claimed that English students in Rome bragged that they would become martyrs, and some missioners were quite explicit about their hopes. See Aveling, J. C. H., Loades, D. M. and McAdoo, H. R., Rome and the Anglicans, Berlin 1982, 103Google Scholar; More, Elizabethan Jesuits, 232, 260, 265.

26 I argued that the mission to England was, between 1585 and 1630, gradually taken over by the gentry, but McGrath's reply deals only with the Elizabethan period. He claims (‘Elizabethan Catholicism’, 423, n. 56), that’ there is some danger in treating Catholicism under Elizabeth and Catholicism under the early Stuarts as a whole’: it is even more dangerous to break the past into artificial compartments, and then to complain (ibid., pp. 424, 425, 426) that a comment based on conditions in 1666 (arising from the example of Nicholas Postgate) does not apply to Elizabethan England!

27 For discussions of the mission's restricted aims, see Aveling, Loades and McAdoo, op. cit., 100; Haigh, ‘Continuity of Catholicism’, 55–7. Of course, priests converted heretics when they conveniently could, but this does not make conversion a significant aim of the mission.

28 McGrath defends the character of missionary priests against what he sees as my’ fierce criticisms’, and he writes in highly moral terms (e.g. ‘Elizabethan Catholicism’, pp. 422, 423, 424, 425, 426). I sought only to elucidate the function of the mission in the historical development of English Catholicism - but it is clearly unwise to appear to impugn another man's heroes!

29 Haigh, ‘Continuity of Catholicism’, 56–62.

30 Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Persons, ed. Hicks, L. (Catholic Record Society 1942), 108Google Scholar; Unpublished Documents relating to the English Martyrs, ed. Pollen, J. H. (Catholic Record Society 1908), 309Google Scholar; Bossy, J., ‘Rome and the Elizabethan Catholics: a question of geography‘, Historical Journal, vii (1964), 136–40Google Scholar; Haigh, ‘Monopoly to minority’, 133–6; Hughes, P., Rome and the Counter-Reformation in England, London 1942, 410Google Scholar; Williams, J. A., Catholic Recusancy in Wiltshire, 1660–1791 (Catholic Record Society monograph series 1968), 103Google Scholar.

31 Haigh, ‘Monopoly to minority’, 136–42.

32 I have suggested (ibid., 136–42) eight reasons for the mission's concentration on the gentry: for protection, as a structural strategy, from a desire to serve the great, for comfort and financial security, through the attractions of domestic piety, from a conception of clerical dignity, by the mechanics of the Weston-Gamet distribution agency and through the reluctance of patrons to share their chaplains. McGrath attacks only the comfort argument, perhaps the least important.

33 W. Watson, A Decacordon of Ten Quodlibeticall Questions, n.p. 1602, 53; Letters of Thomas Fitzherbcrt, ed. Hicks, L. (Catholic Record Society 1948), 53, 100, 121–2, 135–6, 144–5Google Scholar.

34 Duffy, E., ‘The English secular clergy and the Counter-Reformation’, this Journal, xxxiv (1983)Google Scholar; Foley, H., Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, London 1877–84, iii, 122Google Scholar; iv, 441, 447; vii (2), 1112; Hughes, Rome and the Counter-Reformation, 410–12, 417 419, 426–7; Albion, G., Charles I and the Court of Rome, Louvain 1935, 111–14Google Scholar.

35 Westminster Diocesan Archives, A. 28, no. 62, pp. 239–42.

36 Haigh, ‘Monopoly to minority’, 144; Dunbabin, A., ‘Post-Reformation Catholicism in the parish of Prescot, Lancashire, from the Elizabethan Settlement to the Civil War’ (University of Manchester M.A. thesis, 1980), 14ff, 65Google Scholar.