University of Mississippi eGrove Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 1-1-2014 That Spanified League: The Elizabethan Catholic Community and Resistance to the Jesuits Thomas Ridgedell University of Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd Part of the European History Commons Recommended Citation Ridgedell, Thomas, "That Spanified League: The Elizabethan Catholic Community and Resistance ot the Jesuits" (2014). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1426. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/1426 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact [email protected]. "THAT SPANIFIED LEAGUE": THE ELIZABETHAN CATHOLIC COMMUNITY AND RESISTANCE TO THE JESUITS A Dissertation presented in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History The University of Mississippi by THOMAS W. RIDGEDELL II May 2014 Copyright Thomas W. Ridgedell 2014 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT Historians have devoted much attention to Catholics in Elizabethan England at a time when tensions ran high between the Catholic Church and the English state. The current dissertation deals with perceptions of the Jesuits among the Catholic community in the Elizabethan Age. Numerous primary sources, both printed and manuscript, written by the Jesuits, their supporters, and their opponents were consulted in the writing of this dissertation. Additionally, the observations and research of other historians have been included to show how the current study differs from past scholarship on the Catholic community in Elizabethan England. Previous studies of the Elizabethan Catholics have tended to depict them as very divided on the question of loyalty to the monarchy and whether or not to support the Jesuits in their quest to restore the Catholic Church in England by overthrowing Queen Elizabeth I. The current treatise argues that the political influence of the Jesuits over the English Catholic community was very limited and superficial. The overwhelming majority of Catholics in England, even among recusants, displayed loyalist sentiments towards Elizabeth and were far more united against than divided by the Jesuits. Catholics who took the Jesuits seriously were confined to a tiny minority of conspirators involved in failed plots to carry out the will of the papacy in overthrowing Elizabeth. The Jesuits were on the extreme end of the spectrum of Catholicism in Elizabethan England because of the tradition of loyalty among English Catholics to established political authority. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................... ii INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 1 THE ORIGINS OF CATHOLIC CONFORMITY IN THE ENGLISH REFORMATION ....... 42 CATHOLICISM IN THE EARLY ELIZABETHAN AGE AND THE EMERGENCE OF RECUSANCY ........................................................................................................................... 81 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE SEMINARY AT DOUAI AND THE ENGLISH MISSION OF 1580...................................................................................................................................... 120 ENGLISH CATHOLIC RESISTANCE TO THE JESUITS AND THE SPANISH ARMADA ................................................................................................................................. 159 THE FINAL REPUDIATION OF JESUIT IDEOLOGY FROM THE CATHOLIC COMMUNITY........................................................................................................................... 198 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................ 237 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................... 249 VITA ........................................................................................................................................ 256 iii INTRODUCTION Contemporaries in late sixteenth-century England viewed the Jesuits as a potentially destabilizing religious and political force to be reckoned with. Protestants considered them the ever-present threat of papal domination. Protestants in Elizabethan England, for the most part, were supporters of the church establishment and were generally receptive to basic ideas of Protestant theology such as salvation by faith alone while simultaneously denouncing both the spiritual and political authority of the papacy. Resentment of the Jesuits crossed what remained of the confessional divide in England, as even many Catholics expressed a genuine dislike for their strong-handed methods and perceived disloyalty to the English state. The Jesuits, however, were a very important faction within the larger English Catholic community as they came to represent the menace of international Catholicism and the ever-present subversive foreigner. In writings, the Jesuits often paid lip service to being loyal subjects. Their protestations, however, mattered little to the government that saw every Jesuit as a political traitor deserving of death instead of a religious heretic, thanks in part to a number of contemporaneous events such as the failed Rising in the North of 1569 to place Mary, Queen of Scots on the English throne and the 1570 papal excommunication of Elizabeth. In an age when religion and politics were inseparable, it was hardly possible for the Jesuits, who swore allegiance to the pope to be anything but loyal subjects in the eyes of the English government. The English Jesuits, especially the leadership, represented a radical group within Elizabethan Catholicism that emerged as an indirect result of the English Reformation that also 1 produced different groups of more extreme Protestants within and without the Church of England. Although the Jesuits bolstered the number of Catholic clergy and performed the invaluable service of distributing the Sacraments to Catholic laity, they still remained a fringe group within English Catholicism. English Catholics, generally speaking, longed for the restoration of traditional services and rituals, but very few felt any great affinity for the institutional Catholic Church, especially the one that came out of the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation, which increasingly seemed foreign as time progressed. There was a real distinction between Catholicism in England and the Catholic Church in England, as many Catholics held a great love for the mass in Latin and elaborate ceremonies and rituals while at the same time not identifying much with the international Catholic Church, especially with the advent of the Counter-Reformation and its emphasis on obedience to the pope whose authority surpassed that of Scripture. Not only did the Reformation divide Protestants in England from the European mainland, but it also produced divisions in Catholicism in England over the question of loyalty to the pope and his decrees that would gradually manifest in the Elizabethan Age. Indeed, English Catholics saw the Jesuits' direct political loyalty to the pope and opposition to Elizabeth as a sign of disrespect for traditional authority and ran counter to the culture of obedience to the law in England and elsewhere in western Europe. Eamon Duffy in The Stripping of the Altars explains the broader success of the English Reformation by stating, "And even among those complying promptly by destroying images, books, ornaments, obedience to 'the lawes of the realme...and the procedyngs of the heyghe powers' was often the operative factor, rather than communal zeal for 2 Protestantism" in the visitation of 1559. 1 Other historians, such as David Loades, have also discussed how a general desire for order and obeying the law often overrode religious consciences throughout the English Reformation. Even during the reign of Mary, a great number of Protestants supported her ascent to the throne mainly because they thought her to be the legitimate heir despite a minority seeking to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne. 2 Elizabeth held the backing of most Catholics for the same reason that Protestants approved of Mary notwithstanding their religious differences. Mary's reign, however, was too brief for her to face the same problems of loyalty among radical Protestants that Elizabeth had to deal with from a minority of Catholics, more specifically from a number of Jesuits and conspirators. Had Mary lived longer, it is possible that she could have faced an almost inverse situation with the Marian exiles training missionaries and sending them into England from Geneva and other centers of Calvinism on the continent to keep the flame of evangelicalism alive in England while hoping for better times in the future. With the advent of the English Reformation, there were many different ways to profess religious beliefs for both Protestants and Catholics. Protestants increasingly broke away from the Church of England into dissenting groups as the English Reformation proceeded in directions that Henry VIII could have scarcely predicted. Puritanism began to crop up in the reign of Elizabeth with the return of the Marian exiles who had been educated abroad on