Course:History 344 Nasty Families/Religion/All About Catholics/General Information on Catholics in Stuart England

Catholics in Early Stuart England

Following the English Reformation, English Catholics who refused to attend Church of England services were called “recusants.” (1) In 1603, convicted recusants numbered between 30,000 and 40,000, and there may have been many more English Catholics who were not convicted. (2) By 1641, the number of convicted recusants grew to 60,000, mostly due to re-conversions of Protestants who lived in areas without a strong Church of England presence. (3) These areas were mostly in the rural north and west. (4)

The presence of Catholic clergy in England was illegal, but many priests lived and worked in the country even so. Some were engaged in missionary work, trying to win back the English Protestants. Most of the missionaries belonged to the Jesuit order. (5) Of the non-missionary clergy, many served as chaplains and tutors in the houses of aristocrats and gentry. (6) These houses often had priest-holes, secret chambers where the resident priest could hide if the authorities came by. Many upper-class English Catholics were educated on the Continent and later entered the Catholic church, with some serving as missionaries in England. (7)

Harsh legislation existed against Catholics in England, but it was not always enforced. Many Catholics in the upper classes led fairly “normal” lives, since “pressure from the central government for enforcement of the penal laws was intermittent, and local initiative was often lacking.” (8) The legislation that made Catholicism tantamount to treason was almost exclusively employed against priests and not the laity. (8) Few Catholic families were actually impoverished by fines. (10) King James had a fairly tolerant approach to Catholicism. He believed that not all Catholics in his realm were troublemakers, and he was reluctant ‘to punish their bodies for the error of their minds’. (11) He even wrote that ‘I will never allow in my conscience that the blood of any man shall be shed for the diversity of opinion in religion.’ (12) Though he did not execute Catholics, he encouraged prosecution of recusants beginning in 1605. (13)

Although laws against Catholics were not always enforced, popular hostility towards Catholics was a strong force in seventeenth-century England. Catholics were considered superstitious and dangerous. The connection between Catholicism and superstition was so strong that some Protestants accused the pre-Reformation Catholic clergy of spreading belief in fairies among the English people. (14) Marriage between Catholics and Protestants was frowned upon. When Sir Thomas Isham’s friends discovered that he wanted to marry a wealthy Catholic woman, they strongly urged him not to marry ‘a person of the Romish religion,' because to do so would be to dishonour his family. (15) In general, Catholics preferred to marry amongst themselves. (16)

(1) Caroline M. Hibbard, “Early Stuart Catholicism: Revisions and Re-Revisions,” The Journal of Modern History, 52, No. 1 (March, 1980), 1. (2) Edward Toby Terrar,"Gentry Royalists Or Independent Diggers? The Nature of the English Catholic Community in the Civil War Period of the 1640s," Science & Society 57, no. 3 (Fall, 1993): 316. (3) Ibid. (4) Ibid. (5) Hibbard, 11. (6) Terrar, 315. (7) Hibbard, 3. (8) Hibbard, 4. (9) Hibbard, 20. (10) Hibbard, 19. (11) Quoted in Barry Coward, The Stuart Age: England 1603-1714, 3rd ed. (London: Longman: 2003), 128. (12) Quoted in Jenny Wormald, "Gunpowder, Treason, and Scots," Journal of British Studies 24, no. 2, (Apr., 1985): 147. (13) Coward, 129. (14) Peter Marshall, “Ann Jeffries and the Fairies: Folk Belief and the War on Scepticism in Later Stuart England,” in The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England: Essays in Celebration of the Work of Bernard Capp, ed. Angela McShane and Garthine Walker (Chippenham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 131. (15) Anthony Fletcher, “The Ambition of a Young Baronet: Sir Thomas Isham of Lamport, 1657-1681,” in The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England: Essays in Celebration of the Work of Bernard Capp, ed. Angela McShane and Garthine Walker (Chippenham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 44. (16) Hibbard, 3.