Search Results

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 focuses on English pride in learned women by 1550: learned women at the early Tudor court. It discusses Erasmus and the household of Sir Thomas More; the development of companionate marriage in both Catholic and Protestant families; and the Seymour sisters and the political implications of humanist education for girls. It also considers the learning and culture of Elizabeth I, and of women associated with her court, in particularly the four Cooke sisters, who included Mildred Cecil, Lady Burghley. Elizabeth's desire to impress foreign humanists is examined. Sixteenth-century Protestant women humanists outside the court, notably Anne Lok, women recusants, women and Latin culture in Ireland and Scotland are presented.

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.

Ultimately, it was the emergence of religious diversity within England that played the greatest role in creating religious diversity in the colonies. Conformity was a useful method for changing the religion of the English people, but it was never completely successful. Clashing expectations among reformers, resistance to reform, and, for the first three decades, a series of radical changes in official religion, left England with substantial pockets of dissent from the established church on both sides of the religious spectrum. A small but significant Roman Catholic community survived, strengthened by support from within the aristocracy as well as ties to foreign Catholic countries like Spain. Puritans, dedicated Protestants who felt that the church of Queen Elizabeth had erred when it compromised with religious conservatives and failed to embrace the wholehearted reforms adopted by places like Geneva remained a powerful presence within the church. They struggled for further reforms against a regime that showed little interest in changing the established religious order once again. Over decades of struggle, frustration pushed some of these individuals to favor alternatives to the official religion. Separatists began developing an independent church order, a decision with great political and religious consequences for England and America.

This chapter examines the double helix of Matthew’s political and pastoral roles. He saw the northern Church as a missionary Church, and, like his contemporaries in Ireland, came to see prosecution as a powerful weapon in the struggle to end support for Catholicism. This led him to stress the importance of the law, alongside preaching and hospitality, as a tool of reformation. This chapter shows that Matthew’s persecution of Catholics was driven by his belief in the urgency of edifying reform as well as his fear of divine punishment. Matthew also played an important role in Anglo-Scottish relations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign. Anticipating James VI of Scotland’s succession to the English throne, he coordinated spy networks for Robert Cecil, negotiated border treaties, and oversaw James VI/I peaceful entry into England in 1603.

This chapter analyses the sheriff’s police powers, including his right to arrest suspected felons, traitors, and disturbers of the peace without a warrant from a court, and his responsibility of quelling riot and disorder. It also discusses his responsibilities of keeping prisons. High sheriffs and municipal sheriffs were charged with keeping four main categories of prisoner: those arrested on suspicion of wrongdoing, those arrested on an indictment, those arrested in the course of civil proceedings, and those arrested after judgment. The chapter also discusses the sheriff’s seizure of property forfeited by felons, traitors, heretics, and (from 1587) recusants; and his duty of making proclamation in the king’s name.

The chapter looks at knowledge networks and the construction of memory. It examines the reasons why Roger Barlow’s legacy was forgotten for centuries while both Robert Thorne and Sebastian Cabot were remembered. It records how, as a merchant taylor, Thorne’s memory was perpetuated in the public sphere by the Bristol Grammar School, his guild, and by Cyprian Lucar, the son of his former apprentice. In contrast, Roger Barlow’s family focused on establishing their reputation as landowners, downplaying Barlow’s trading activities and memorializing him within the confines of their estate. They were remembered as Pembrokeshire recusants and, as the experiences of Charles Chester, Barlow’s grandson, suggest, having Spanish connections was useful but dangerous in Elizabethan England. The chapter concludes by considering how Cabot established his reputation as a voyager of the North rather than the South Atlantic and how that reputation has been challenged.