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This chapter focuses on papists. ‘Church papists’ went to church to avoid trouble: they usually kept their heads down, and their opinions to themselves. Catholics who stayed away from church — the recusants (or ‘refusers’) — denied the legitimacy and authority of the Church of England, and so rarely bothered to appear before its courts. When recusants were indicted at quarter sessions or assizes, certified absence was enough to convict them, and their reasons hardly mattered. So historians have found it difficult to write about grass-roots Catholic opinion — what ordinary Catholics thought of their own religion and of the religion of Protestants.

This chapter looks at how descriptions of Spain in the eighteenth century are intriguing for their accounts of perceived indolence, or more generally of a people who failed to take advantage “of their Climate and Situation.” Taken at face value, these observations convinced contemporaries and historians that Spain was simply producing less than it could have. Alleged idleness was a well-rehearsed theme in Europe's Protestant north whenever the mores of southern European papists (or non-Europeans, for that matter) were described. Travel writer Henry Swinburne argued that Spaniards worked fewer hours and days than he thought they ought to, and intuitively provided one possible explanation for such behavior: Spaniards simply did not believe they could benefit from higher levels of “industry,” that is, effort.

Oxford University could not escape the political agitation set in motion by the Popish Plot. The scaremongering associated with Titus Oates's discovery of a supposed Catholic conspiracy against the life of Charles II seriously bothered Protestants. No sooner had the anti-Catholic hysteria of the capital invaded Oxford than there was a sharp revulsion of feeling against individual papists. The inbred anti-Catholicism of the nation — never far beneath the surface of Restoration politics — became ever more strident and merciless. The local magistracy made good use of the information collected by Bishop John Fell in his primary visitation of the diocese in 1676. Vice-Chancellor John Nicholas, the trimming warden of New College, was particularly active. His officious conduct in arresting the most harmless of Catholics, such as the poverty-stricken William Joyner, was seen by his critics as a bid to curry favour at Westminster in the hope of attracting preferment.

This chapter discusses five anti-Catholic dialogues, all of which engage explicitly with highly topical issues. A dialogue agaynst the tyrannye of the papistes (1562), attributed to Walter Haddon, exploits the massacre of Protestants in France to advocate English support for the Huguenots. In An historical dialogve tovching antichrist and poperie (1589) Thomas Rogers sees divine intervention in the defeat of the Armada and proof of the ‘truth‘ of Protestantism. The chapter argues that John Nicholls's Pilgrimage (1581) and George Gifford's A Dialogue betweene a papist and a protestant (1582) form part of a government‐sponsored media campaign to convict the Jesuit Edmund Campion of treason. Finally, in A conference betwixt a mother…and her son (1600), Francis Savage tackles female Catholic recusancy, the long‐standing bugbear of the government and the bishops. A dextrous deployment of characterization and a plot of failed or successful conversion licenses hard-hitting messages.

This chapter examines how Reformation changed what it meant to be a Christian in England, affecting not just what people believed but how they believed it. The late 1580s did not herald the end of endeavours to reform the worship, habits and thoughts of the people of England. But more than one grandiose project of Reformation peaked and ebbed in the period around 1587–1589. The chapter considers the precariousness of peace and Protestantism in Elizabethan England, the moral panic about Jesuits, the use of judicial torture that reflected some important claims about the limits of ‘religion’, and the division between papists and Protestants. It also discusses the results of the campaign to encourage the Protestant Church of England to become the best version of itself, with particular emphasis on the failure of bishops to make the case for continuing reformation that pushed Puritanism into becoming a political movement.

This chapter examines security laws, including loyalty oaths, enforced in the wake of the English Revolution, and designed to preserve the new regime from disloyal elements, especially those known as papists. It shows that reading these strictures through the lens of an earlier “equation of Protestantism and loyalty, Catholicism and disloyalty” does not do justice to the way they were now used. This change was due in part to the newly visible phenomenon of disloyal Anglicans, and resulted in the development of new religious tests, such as the Declaration against Transubstantiation, which were aimed only at suspected Catholics. It argues that the equation of Catholicism with political disloyalty was counterfactual, but politically useful to Anglicans. A similar conflation of religious with political identity can be observed today, with the threat of Islamic terrorism.

This chapter examines three societies in the west of Europe where Catholicism was confronted with a hostile state and a dominant non-Catholic church establishment. It analyses the reasons why Catholicism suffered the most precipitous decline in the region in Britain while outlining the reasons why England remained a significant imaginative space in the Catholic world. In the Netherlands and especially in Ireland far larger numbers continued to adhere to the church of Rome. This was strongly related to the lesser deployment of coercive measures by state authorities. Ironically one of the effects of the religious change was to give Rome greater possibilities to influence the ecclesiastical leadership of both Ireland and the Netherlands. The exclusion of Catholicism from public space also had gender implications which identified this region as different from the European norm.

By nationalizing the church, the Tudor monarchs created a new managerial issue. The Queen was the Supreme Governor, and Parliament made laws about the church, but its management remained in the hands of bishops. They were powers in their own right, and answerable directly to the Queen. The institution, created in 1559, that bound the church to the state bureaucratically was the Ecclesiastical High Commission, a joint clerical and lay effort that gained power as the reign went on. Burghley’s management of the ecclesiastical side was primarily carried out through the appointment of bishops and commissioners, but after Grindal fell from grace, Archbishop Whitgift pursued a policy out of sync with Burghley’s. Charged with keeping the peace, Burghley’s policy was anti-papal but did not overly pressure Catholics who showed allegiance to Elizabeth. He did not like Whitgift’s willingness to prosecute Protestants and Catholics alike.

This chapter argues that the first English Catholic recourse to the libellous secret history and systematic use of the argument from evil counsel, The treatise of treasons, has to be read as a response to the official and semi-official exercises in public politics and black propaganda outlined in the previous two chapters. Echoes between this tract and central tropes in the texts by Thomas Norton are discussed. Particular emphasis is placed on the use of Roman history and the figures of Catiline and Cicero, and on the way in which the rhetorically inflected claims and counter claims contained in these texts created or called into being an evaluating audience to whose sympathies and credulities all of these texts were designed to appeal.