A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660

by Hutton, Ronald

  Elizabethan Catholicism

  Something upon which all recent historians of Elizabethan England have been agreed is the need to reintegrate Catholics into the mainstream of Tudor history. Until the 1970s, the study of them was carried on inside a ghetto, populated by Catholic historians, who cooperated little with other scholars and were largely ignored by the latter. They reproduced the characteristics of English Catholics in general, by being interested in what to them was a heroic story of resistance and survival on the part of that small percentage of the population which continued an open allegiance to the Church of Rome. As such it was a tale of martyrdom, stoicism and secrecy on the part of an embattled minority. Most English historians, working consciously or not in a Protestant tradition, tended to sideline the Catholics as either a lunatic fringe or a set of sentimental and unworldly reactionaries. As Peter Marshall has noted, the main textbook on the English Reformation between the 1960s and 1980s, by Geoffrey Dickens, relegated them to two pages, in a chapter dedicated to ‘residual problems’.

  Since the 1970s a succession of historians, starting with John Bossy and Christopher Haigh and joined more recently by Alexandra Walsham, Lucy Wooding and Peter Marshall, has constructed a new approach to the subject. This emphasizes that there was no such thing as ‘Elizabethan Catholicism’: instead there were different Catholicisms, some existing alongside each other and some developing out of each other over time. In the 1560s most English people who preferred the traditional religion seem to have decided that the Elizabethan Church was just about tolerable, especially as Elizabeth could die at any moment and had no obvious Protestant heir. The regime did impose a fine for persistent failure to attend church, representing a day’s pay for a craftsman, and from 1563 such defaulters could not enter university or law school. There was no law, however, which said that people had to attend church enthusiastically. The Lancashire squire Thomas Leyland of Leigh brought a dog along to each service with bells on its collar. He played with it every time the minister spoke, and so drowned out the service; and this was perfectly legal. The prominent Elizabethan Catholic Robert Persons was later to recall, with only some exaggeration, that for the first ten years of the reign all Catholics went to the established Church. During that period they posed no risk to the regime. When a college to train priests for service in England was founded at Douai, in Spanish territory, it was not to launch a missionary effort but to have fresh clergy ready if Elizabeth died or reconverted. Visitation records from the 1560s reveal lots of Catholic practices and ornaments surviving in the national Church, but almost nobody staying away from it.

  Attitudes began to change from the middle of that decade. In 1565, the reigning Pope ordered the English not to attend the Protestant worship, for the first time. After that the government began to put pressure on the gentry, at least, to keep attending. This in turn helped to provoke the rebellion of northern Catholics in 1569, and Elizabeth’s excommunication by the Pope. The government struck back by making it treason to obey any papal directives, and the Catholic seminaries retaliated by starting to send over missionaries: 438 by the end of the reign. With so many of the English still uncommitted to either Catholicism or Protestantism even by 1570, there was a real chance that this missionary effort could pull the rug out from under the regime’s feet. The pressure increased when the Jesuits began to arrive in 1580, and from the mid-1570s recusancy – deliberate absence from the national Church – was starting to become a serious problem for the first time. In 1578 there were eleven recusants recorded in and around Richmond, Yorkshire; by 1590 some 219 were present. So, in 1581 and 1585 the laws were tightened to make it treason to be a missionary priest or to protect one, and the fines for recusancy were raised to £20, crippling anybody except the rich. From 1577 priests were hunted down, and about half those sent from foreign seminaries were arrested, and about half of those in turn – a total of 124 – were executed, along with 59 lay supporters. To be a seminary priest in Elizabethan England was therefore a dangerous job, but as Peter Marshall has pointed out, the persecution of Catholic laity was thirty-eight times less intense than that of Protestant laity had been under Mary. This was a plank of the Elizabethan regime’s public stance: that it was prosecuting people for treasonable activities, and not for religious beliefs. The assertion is given some support by the fact that most executions occurred during the most dangerous period of Elizabeth’s war with Spain, when Catholics could most credibly be viewed as allies of a hostile power.

  Clearly, the government won the contest: by 1600 identifiable Catholics were reduced to about 6 per cent of the population of England, and this proportion diminished further thereafter. The main reasons for this are the sheer length of Elizabeth’s reign, the comparative unity and determination of her government, and its control of all the more obvious and accessible sources of education, information and patronage. In addition, Christopher Haigh has argued that the popes gave the missionaries no leader and no plan, so that their distribution and activities were haphazard: by 1580 the North of England had 40 per cent of recusants, but only 20 per cent of priests. Furthermore, persecution forced priests into the arms of the gentry, the only people who could provide the refuges in which they could celebrate mass. This, Haigh has argued, switched the energy of the Counter-Reformation effort from the populace to gentry households, and turned Catholicism into a domestic religion. A common analogy currently employed by historians is that of twenty-first century Britain’s relationship with its Islamic population. The latter is clearly not a threat in itself, but contains a few extremists who represent a danger to the national community in general. The implication of this comparison is that the Elizabethan government should have behaved more towards Catholics as the modern British one did to Muslims: instead of attacking them in general, it should have picked off conspirators while trying to cultivate the goodwill of the majority. Left in peace, the argument runs, Catholics could be expected to diminish naturally; and the record of the seventeenth century was to show that most of them were instinctively loyal to the English Crown.

  This orthodox case, however, also recognizes that to some extent the government actually did distinguish between loyal and disloyal Catholics. The queen bestowed knighthoods and state visits on some recusants, and allowed them to remain in local government. Her favourite in the 1590s, the Earl of Essex, had Catholics among his personal followers, and the first official list of recusants, issued in 1592, contained only 4,000 names, which was clearly a deliberate sampling of the true number. Moreover, while Elizabeth urged on the capture of priests sent from foreign seminaries, she and the law were always gentler towards those who had served in the Marian Church. What the recent orthodoxy suggests is that the government did not go far enough to protect the loyal majority, but succumbed to a sincere but misguided distrust of it. It is a view that unites the new scholarship with traditional Catholic history. During the past few years, none the less, it has been increasingly undermined by the work of Peter Lake and Michael Questier, and the results of this clash of opinion may now be summarized.

  It is true that most publications by English Catholics, and most private letters between them, advocated submission to the regime, and even cooperation with it. On the other hand, they also attacked the regime as corrupt, illegal and evil, and regarded submission as a regrettable necessity; they undermined it even while rejecting direct resistance to it. It is also true that many remained servants of the state in practice as well as theory, giving it active support; but at least as many slid between loyalty and disloyalty according to circumstance. It is correct to argue that the number of recusants was always small, but equally true that Catholics who attended the national church were probably much more numerous. Elizabethan Catholicism should be regarded as consisting of both, and it is notable that recusants were concentrated among women, the rich and the aged, those groups who were least vulnerable to the law. This suggests that many Catholics were indeed concealed among those who came to church. Priests generally avoi
ded direct involvement in politics, but their very presence acted as a rejection and criticism of the official religion. Finally, there is no doubt that the number of Catholics who actually conspired against the government was tiny and that none of their plots got near success: the closest to do so involved William Parry, who actually got into Elizabeth’s presence with a knife at the ready, but then lost his nerve. On the other hand, this lack of success was in large part due to the exceptional care taken by the government to guard against them. Among contemporary European leaders, two successive French kings and the leader of the Dutch all died at the hands of Catholic assassins: the threat was patently a real one.

  Above all, the fashionable simile, which compares Catholics to modern British Muslims, is fundamentally wrong. To make it work properly, there would need to exist a single world leader of Islam, openly devoted to the destruction of the British government and completely safe from British retaliation. Most of Europe, like Britain, would not have been Islamic, but the USA, Russia and China would all have been fundamentalist Muslim states, with the American president talking openly of intervention in Britain. Queen Elizabeth II would have been a devoted governor of the Church of England, but Prince Charles a dedicated Muslim who had been held in prison for many years and was associated with plots to overthrow his mother. Prince William would have been an Anglican, but said to have a soft spot for Muslims because of his father. Put into that situation, it is hard to imagine that the modern British government would have been any less frightened of British Muslims than the Elizabethan government was of Catholics.

  It may be, however, that the whole discussion of Elizabethan Catholicism has been fundamentally misconceived, and that the true danger posed by Catholics to the Elizabethan Church Settlement was of a quite different kind, which is usually ignored because it is redefined. This consisted of the attempts within the Church – which have been mentioned earlier – to reform it to make it more Catholic than the one sought hitherto by the majority of English Protestants. They appeared even as the great majority of the English were at last converted to the new religion. If the growth of recusancy was one feature of that conversion experience, then the appearance of forms of Anglo-Catholicism, later nicknamed Arminianism, was another. They were, for reasons also suggested above, to pose a more dangerous problem for the established Church. Put like that, the Catholic threat from within the Church was more significant than the one outside it, even though it was one that had sacrificed both the Pope and the mass and so lacked the two defining characteristics of true Catholicism.

  The sum of all these reflections is that it is just to fault Elizabethan Protestants for being too suspicious of individual Catholics, and for acting with too much brutality towards their priests. It is difficult, however, to conclude that their fear of Catholicism was itself misguided.

  Foreign Policy

  At the opening of Elizabeth’s reign, the chief policy imperative abroad was that which had dominated English statecraft for most of the previous 400 years: hostility to France, and therefore friendship with anybody who posed a threat to the French. As the latter had just taken Calais, and had an army stationed in Scotland, they seemed even more dangerous to England than before. This made imperative a continuation of the Tudor tradition of friendship with Spain. The latter was strained slightly by Elizabeth’s profession of Protestantism, which turned her realm automatically into the greatest Protestant power in the world and put the Spanish on the opposite side of the confessional divide. France, however, was also Catholic, and as long as Elizabeth did nothing to aid the international cause of religious reform, she and Philip still possessed more common interests than points of division.

  The 1560s were to bring about a diplomatic revolution, which the 1570s were to complete. First the French descended into their own wars of religion, which were to last for the remainder of the century. This enabled the English to throw them out of Scotland, and install a friendly Protestant government there, but it also reversed the whole traditional balance of power, turning France from an aggressive superpower into a broken and paralysed state, vulnerable to invasion and manipulation by its neighbours. In 1567, by contrast, Philip decided to strengthen his grip on the Netherlands, which he had inherited, together with Spain and most of Italy, from his father Charles V. Hitherto they had been largely self-governing; now he resolved to bring them under firmer control as part of an intolerant Catholic monarchy centred on Spain itself. A huge Spanish army of occupation was sent to them, intended to crush local resistance to this scheme, and representing, in the process, a serious potential threat to England’s control of the Channel and therefore to Elizabeth itself. As one of her councillors, the Earl of Sussex, put it, ‘the case will be hard with the queen and with England if ever the French possess or the Spaniards tyrannise over the Low Countries’.

  The aims of English foreign policy between 1570 and 1585 were therefore clear and consistent: a French royal government which was friendly to England and tolerant to its own Protestants, and the return of the Netherlands to their former practical self-government, preferably under a weak and notional Spanish rule or in the worst case as a newly independent Protestant state. Realizing those objectives was nightmarishly difficult, as the queen’s government sought to find French politicians who were both willing and capable enough to fit the bill, and supplied financial and diplomatic aid to rebels in the Netherlands while trying to keep the peace with Spain. By 1585 it was clearly failing in both objectives. Philip was slowly but surely regaining the Netherlands for strong and intolerant Spanish Catholic rule, reducing his opponents to Dutch Protestants holding out in a few northern seaboard towns. At the same time he had conquered Portugal and taken over its colonial empire, greatly strengthening his power in the Atlantic. A substantial faction of French Catholics had now become prepared to make their nation a Spanish client in order to eradicate Protestantism. In that year, therefore, Elizabeth at last made a formal alliance with the Dutch rebels to send an army to save them from reduction by Spain. Her aim was to force Philip to negotiate with them; instead she found herself at war with him.

  Philip rapidly concluded that his objectives in France and the Netherlands could be secured most easily by eliminating England; and the result was the invasion force that he sent against it in 1588, known as the Spanish Armada and representing the largest combination of soldiers and sailors that had ever sailed from a European port. It represented a compromise between two very different plans: to launch a carefully prepared amphibious operation directly from Spain, or to send over the Spanish army of the Netherlands in a swift attack using the element of surprise. What Philip actually did was to send a large fleet from Spain to the English Channel, to collect the army of the Netherlands and ferry it over to England. Even though it still caught Elizabeth’s government off guard, the plan was too complex and clumsy, and underestimated the superior power of the English fleet, which had larger and better armed ships. The queen had continued the build-up of sea power commenced by her father and sustained by her sister; she had spent more on her ships than any other ruler in peacetime, and produced the most heavily armed navy in the world. The result was history’s first big fight between the new style of war fleet, dependent on cannon and sails. Her captains could not destroy the Armada in battle, but they harried it so relentlessly that it was unable to achieve its rendezvous with the army and was driven up into the North Sea instead. From there, its whole objective now lost, it had to make its way home around the British Isles, suffering heavy losses from storms and collisions with coastlines on the way. It was a colossal English victory, and arguably the greatest naval disaster in Spanish history.

  Philip was now even more determined to prosecute the war with vigour, and it lasted beyond both his lifetime and that of Elizabeth, being waged until 1604. England found itself fighting on five different fronts, sometimes simultaneously: its armies continued to support the Dutch rebels, intervened in the French civil wars and had to deal with a major conflict in Ir
eland as well, while its fleets operated on the coasts of Spain and Portugal and among the Spanish colonies of the Caribbean. Perhaps 12 per cent of the young adult males of England saw military service during these years. Remarkably, in view of the comparatively limited nature of her resources and her increasing ramshackle financial system, Elizabeth achieved all of her military targets. She enabled the Dutch to establish an independent Protestant state in the northern half of the Netherlands, while the Spanish consolidated their control of the southern half: the opposite coast of the English Channel was taking on its enduring political shape, of being safely divided between France, Belgium and the Dutch Netherlands. She assisted a new royal family, the Bourbons, to take over France, which led the faction in the French wars that had been most amenable to England and hostile to Spain, and most willing to tolerate Protestantism. Ireland was thoroughly conquered, at last, and English naval supremacy established in the northern Atlantic. As part of the latter process, English trade links were dispersed around the Atlantic coasts of Europe instead of being concentrated on the Netherlands as before. The trick was to send out small expeditions with limited strategic objectives, paid for, as said above, partly by their officers. As a result, Elizabeth did not make a single foreign conquest, nor plant a single lasting colony, nor win a single major battle abroad; but she took on the strongest monarchy in the Christian world, with no other state to assist her, and won everything that she sought in doing so, without ever running out of money. In an age characterized by ruinously expensive warfare and religious division, in which France and Russia fell to pieces, the German states all temporarily ceased to function as great powers, and Spain repeatedly went bankrupt and lost the northern Netherlands, this was success indeed.