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Catholicity and nationality in the northern European counter-reformation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

John Bossy
John Bossy*
Affiliation:
University of York
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Extract

Why choose this subject? First, because I think there is a general historiographical problem about nationality in early-modern Europe, which has been rather abandoned and is perhaps worth another look. Second because, on the Catholic side of the subject, there is a problem of actuality concerning Ireland and a rather different one concerning Holland. Third, because there is a specific and limited issue in the history of English Catholicism. I shall really be concerned with a simple problem raised by Arnold Oskar Meyer in his England and the Catholic Church under Queen Elizabeth: how far the internal conflicts among English Catholics, generally known as the Archpriest controversy, are to be explained as an outbreak or resurgence of ‘nationalism’, a conflict of ‘national’ and ‘Catholic’ tendencies. There have been good reasons for objecting to Meyer’s view that this was the case: his conceptions of national character, of ’puritanism’, were by present standards shaky, and he weakened his personal position by becoming more closely involved with the Third Reich than he perhaps need have been. The recent historiography of the subject has been largely a history of attempts to find an alternative: in the international competition of France and Spain; in the constitutional hostility of gentry and clergy; in the geographical determinism of Braudelian routes; in the ecclesiastical choice between a traditional and a missionary church. Many of them have been made by myself; most recently Christopher Haigh has added another, connected with the continuity or discontinuity of Elizabethan Catholicism with its pre-Reformation predecessor.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 18: Religion and National Identity , 1982 , pp. 285 - 296
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1982

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References

1 Meyer, A. O., [England and the Catholic Church under Queen Elizabeth (English translation, London 1916)]Google Scholar: cf. my own introduction to the 1967 reprint.

2 Bossy, J., ‘Henry IV, [the Appellants and the Jesuits’, Recusant History, viii (1965)], pp 80–122 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘The Character of Elizabethan Catholicism’, in Aston, T. (ed), Crisis in Europe, 1560-1660 (London, 1965) pp 223–246 Google Scholar; ‘Rome and the Elizabethan Catholics: a Question of Geography’, Historical Journal, vii (1964), pp 135-149; The English Catholic Community[, 1570-1850 (London, 1975)] pp 35 ff; Christopher, Haigh, ‘The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation’, Past and Present, no 93 (1981)Google Scholar.

3 David, Mathew, The Celtic Peoples and Renaissance Europe (London, 1933) pp 77 fGoogle Scholar; Anthony, Kenny, ‘From Hospice to College’, in The English Hospice in Rome: the Venerabile Sexcentenary Issue (vol. xxi, 1962) pp 218–273 Google Scholar.

4 [Letters and Memorials of] William Cardinal Allen, [ed. Knox, T. F. (London, 1882)] pp 74 fGoogle Scholar, 78 ff.

5 A convenient summary of the work of Rogier, L. J., Geschiedenis van het Katholicisme in Noord-Nederland in de 16e en de 17e Eeuw (3 vols., Amsterdam, 1945-46)Google Scholar and others, will be found in Brachin, P. and Rogier, L. J., Histoire du catholicisme hollandais depuis le XVIe siècle (Paris, 1974)Google Scholar: see. pp 28, 45, 61 etc.; [Pieter], Geyl, The Netherlands [in the Seventeenth Century: i, 1609-1648] (English translation, London, 1961) p. 80 Google Scholar.

6 Kantorowicz, E., The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton, N. J., 1957) pp 232 ffGoogle Scholar; Bossuet, J.-B., Politique tirée de paroles de l’Ecriture Sainte (Versailles, 1818 edn) pp 44 fGoogle Scholar, 58 f (Livre premier, Art. VI and Conclusion).

7 Formula of allegiance, March 1604: I use the Latin version in Bibliothèque nationale, fonds français 15976, f. 526; there is a slightly incorrect version in Usher, R. G., The Reconstruction of the English Church (2 vols., New York/London, 1910) ii, pp 316 fGoogle Scholar. Cf. Bossy ‘Henri IV’ pp 96 f.

8 William, Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London 1963)Google Scholar.

9 Michael, Roberts, The Early Vasas (Cambridge, 1968) pp 24 Google Scholar, 64, 282-289; Oscar, Garstein, Rome and the Couner-Reformation in Scandinavia i (Oslo 1963) pp 15 ffGoogle Scholar, 191 ff ma passim; Olaus, Magnus, A Compendious History of the Goths, Swedes and Vandals (English translation, London, 1658) pp 26 Google Scholar, 103.

10 William Cardinal Allen pp 22, 66.

11 Richard, Verstegan, A restitution of decayed intelligence (Antwerp, 1605; repr by Scolar Press, 1976)Google Scholar, ‘Epistle to the English Nation’, and passim; Nederlantsche Antiquiteyten (Antwerp, 1613). For Verstegan, see The Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan, ed. Anthony, Petti (Catholic Record Society, vol. lii, 1959)Google Scholar, and Geyl, , The Netherlands i, p 240 Google Scholar.

12 Robert, Parsons, A Treatise of Three Conversions (1603; Scolar Press repr. 1976) i, p 3 Google Scholar; Bossy, The English Catholic Community pp 23, 33 f; Christopher, Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’, in Puritanism and Revolution (London 1968 edn), pp 54–125 Google Scholar (index under Verstegan).

13 Letters and Memorials of William Cardinal Allen p 82.

14 Quinn, D. B., The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, N.Y., 1960) pp 28 fGoogle Scholar, 46 ff, 80, etc.; Nicholas P., Canny, The Formation of the Old English Elite in Ireland (Dublin, 1975), pp 26 ffGoogle Scholar; Edmund, Campion, Two Bokes of the Histories of Ireland, ed Vossen, A.F. (Assen 1963)Google Scholar; for Parsons and William Good, see Letters and Memorials of Robert Parsons, i: 1588 ed Hicks, L. (Catholic Record Society, vol. xxxix 1942) pp 5 ffGoogle Scholar. See now Colin, Lennon, Richard Stanihurst (Dublin 1981)Google Scholar.

15 Hogan, E. (ed), Ibernia Ignatiana (Dublin 1880) pp 127 fGoogle Scholar, 182, 185; Kearney, H. F., ‘Ecclesiastical Politics and the Counter-Reformation in Ireland, 1618-1648’, JEH xi (1960) pp 202–212 Google Scholar; Bossy, J., ‘The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Ireland’, in Williams, T. D. (ed), Historical Studies viii (Dublin 1971), pp 155–169 Google Scholar.

16 Meyer, pp 376, 419, 428.