Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570–1625 (review)

This scholarly and lucidly written book makes a significant contribution to the history of post-Reformation English Catholicism. Tutino analyzes how Catholics in Elizabethan and Jacobean England attempted to reconcile their political loyalties with their political commitments. She convincingly argues that the bull Regnans in Excelsis, by which Pope Pius V excommunicated and deposed Queen Elizabeth I, accentuated the difficulty for Catholics of combining their duties to the pope with those they owed to their sovereign and stresses the importance of the theoretical defenses of papal power mounted by the English cleric Nicholas Sander and then in more detail by the Jesuit cardinal and saint Robert Bellarmine. Under King James I, she contends, the prospects grew much greater for Catholics of successfully combining their obligations to church and state, and of winning toleration from the latter, and she emphasizes the role played in this development by the controversy over the Jacobean oath of allegiance.

Tutino adopts a largely English and Elizabethan/Jacobean perspective on debates about papal powers and, in particular, about the power to interfere in the temporal affairs of states by means including the deposition of sovereigns. She portrays the arguments on this question of Sander and Bellarmine as more innovative than they perhaps were. It would be interesting to know how Bellarmine’s theory related to medieval thinking on church-state relations and to the ideas of figures such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Jean Gerson, Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, and Francisco Suárez, but they receive little attention here. One reason why English Protestants around 1600 were skeptical about Catholic protestations of loyalty to the Crown was that they suspected that Catholics made such declarations using equivocation or mental reservation. This theme is not much discussed here.

The book would have benefited from some more proofreading and fact-checking. Dean Matthew Sutcliffe has been promoted to a bishopric, while the archbishops William Gifford (Rheims) and Marc’ Antonio de Dominis (Split or Spalato) have been demoted to the same rank. Pope Paul VI appears as Paul IV (p. 36n15). Matthew Kellison, president of the English College at Douai, appears correctly on one page (p. 195) but becomes Ellison on the next (p. 196).Tutino states that if a recusant refused the Jacobean oath of allegiance “he or she would have been considered as a traitor, and punished accordingly” (p. 131). But the most severe punishment prescribed by law for refusing the oath was the penalties of praemunire—loss of goods to the Crown and imprisonment at the king’s pleasure—not of treason—hanging, drawing, and quartering. Some of those who refused the oath were indeed executed as traitors but only if they were found guilty of treason on other grounds. Nevertheless, this book contains a great deal of new and interesting information. Perhaps most impressive and valuable is its use of much Italian and Latin manuscript material from archives in Rome.