Abstract
Principled dissent to the Elizabethan Settlement came from two directions: Catholic and radical Protestant. Of the two, it was the Roman Catholic menace which seemed the more important and which the government and the Church spent more time combatting. After all, throughout the reign, the section of the population whose sympathies lay with loyalty to Rome included many of the peerage (perhaps as many as a third as late as the 1580s) and a sizeable section of the gentry, while in the exceptional case of Lancashire there may have been more Catholics than Protestants in the population at large at the death of Elizabeth: as late as the seventeenth century in the Fylde, the Catholic heartland of Lancashire, there were probably still more Catholic clergy than clergy of the established Church.1 Yet the story of Roman Catholicism amid the 1559 Settlement of religion is one of failure: failure to recapture the nation or bring about alteration in the state of the Church of England.
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Notes and References
A good account of the problems is A. Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England (London: Scolar Press, 1979).
See especially Haigh (ed.), English Reformation Revised, Chapter 9, repr. from Past and Present 93, with agreement from A. D. Wright, ‘Catholic history, North and South’, Northern History 14 (1978), pp. 126–51.
C. Haigh, ‘From monopoly to minority: Catholicism in early modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 31 (1981).
J. Bossy, ‘The character of Elizabethan Catholicism’, Past and Present 21 (April 1962), p. 57.
Cf. J. C. H. Aveling, ‘Catholic households in Yorkshire, 1580–1603’, Northern History 16 (1980), pp. 86–7.
P. Holmes, ‘The authorship of “Leicester’s Commonwealth”’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 33 (1982), pp. 426–7.
D. M. Loades, ‘Anabaptism and English sectarianism in the mid-sixteenth century’, in D. Baker (ed.), Reform and Reformation: England and the Continent c.1550–c.1750 (Studies in Church History: Subsidia 2, 1979), p. 63.
D. Plumb, ‘The social and economic spread of rural Lollardy: a reappraisal’, in W. J. Sheils and D. Wood (eds), Voluntary Religion (Studies in Church History 23, 1986); A. Hope, ‘Lollardy: the stone the builders rejected?’, in P. Lake and M. Dowling (eds), Protestantism and the National Church in sixteenth century England (London: Croom Helm, 1988).
F. Heal, ‘The Family of Love and the diocese of Ely’, in D. Baker (ed.), Schism, Heresy and Religious Protest (Studies in Church History 9, 1972), pp. 213–22
A. Hamilton, The Family of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Loades, ‘Anabaptism and English sectarianism’, pp. 66–7; J. W. Martin, ‘The Protestant underground congregations of Mary’s reign’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35 (1984), pp. 519–38.
Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 84–91; White, English Separatist Tradition, pp. 28–9; M. E. Moody, ‘Trials and travels of a Nonconformist layman: the spiritual odyssey of Stephen Offwood, 1564–c.1635’, Church History 51 (1982), p. 159.
Collinson, Religion of Protestants, pp. 268–73; Collinson, ‘The English Conventicle’, pp. 253–9; N. Tyacke, ‘Popular Puritan mentality in late Elizabethan England’, in P. Clark et al. (eds), The English Commonwealth 1547–1640 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979).
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© 1990 Diarmaid MacCulloch
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MacCulloch, D. (1990). Principled Dissent. In: The Later Reformation in England 1547–1603. British History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20692-6_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20692-6_9
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