Recusants, Church-Papists, and "Comfortable" Missionaries: Assessing the Post-Reformation English Catholic Community

MISCELLANY RECUSANTS, CHURCH-PAPISTS,AND "COMFORTABLE" MISSIONARIES: ASSESSING THE POST-REFORMATION ENGLISH CATHOLIC COMMUNITY Andrew R. Muldoon* One of the more pronounced shifts in British historical thought in the last quarter-century has been the re-interpretation of the English Reformation. What was once presented as a swift and sure Protestant transformation that swept all of England has lately appeared as a slow, controversial, and not immediately successful process.The work ofA. G. Dickens and Geoffrey Elton,which portrayed a speedy Reformation, has lost favor among ecclesiastical historians.' The emphasis now, as demonstrated by Eamon Duffy's massive The Stripping of the Altars, lies less on reform than on resistance.2 An even more recent "revisionist " effort is Christopher Haigh's English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors,which is the product oftwo decades spent slowing down the Reformation.5 Haigh has identified several "Reformations" as Protestantism and Catholicism, matched more evenly than previously supposed , battled fiercely until Elizabeth's accession. After 1558 Protestantism slowly consolidated its hold, aided both by enthusiastic preachers and government support. Yet the old practices did not subside easily. To quote Patrick CoLLinson, who has chronicled the rise of Puritan evangelicals: "It is only with the 1570s that the historically minded insomniac goes to sleep counting Catholics rather than Protestants, since only then did they begin to find themselves in a minority situation."4 *Dr. Muldoon is an assistant professor of history in Saint Anselm College, Manchester, New Hampshire. He would like to thank Professors Derek Hirst and Thomas Head for their advice and criticism. 1A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (London, 1964; 2nd edn. 1989);G. R.Elton,J?eform and Reformation: England 1509-1558 (London, 1977). ?. Duffy, The Stripping oftheAltars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-1580 (New Haven, 1992). 'C. Haigh,English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford , 1993). 4P. Collinson, The Birthpangs ofProtestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1988), p. Lx. 242 BY ANDREW R. MULDOON243 The debate over the speed and strength of the English Reformation has produced a related debate over the nature of English Catholicism in the sixteenth century, particularly after the Elizabethan Settlement. As views of the Reformation have changed, so have ideas about those Catholics who were the objects of reform. There is widespread agreement that, after 1559, there emerged a separated , sacramental "Catholic community," sustained largely by members of the gentry within their households and reliant on the services of household and roving priests.5 John Bossy's landmark work, The English Catholic Community 1570-1850 (Oxford, 1976), has been the foundation for such an assessment. Since 1976, however, ecclesiastical historians have divided over the questions of the origins and membership of such a community. This review will explore and compare the arguments of the past twenty years on three issues central to the dialogue: the emphasis on continuity in the origins of the post-Reformation community, and the roles of two groups within this body:"church-papists" and the various missionary movements in England. The standard study of English Catholicism had been Bishop David Mathew's, which stressed "the continuity of an English Catholic tradition . . . descended from More through Campion and Sir Thomas Tresham and the solid Cavalier Catholics of the country party."6 More had "fathered" this tradition, and various staunch conservatives had adhered to it in the decade after 1559 until its rejuvenation by the missionaries.7 For Mathew post-Reformation Catholicism was part of a larger, more amorphous "tradition" which had survived the upheavals of the sixteenth century. Two works, both published in 1976, fundamentally challenged this notion. In The English Catholic Community, Bossy declared that post-Reformation Catholicism did not represent a continuation of "traditional" English Catholi5For examples of general agreement, if not of general approval for this development, see Haigh, English Reformations, p. 266; J. Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570-1850 (Oxford, 1976), p. 181; Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England 1547-1603 (New York, 1990), p. 150; C. Haigh, "From Monopoly to Minority: Catholicism in Early Modern England," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 31 (1981), 145; Caroline Hibbard, "Early Stuart...