Equivocation, Cognition, and Political Authority in Early Modern England

Writing at the opening of his voluminous A Treatise Tending to Mitigation toward Catholicke-Subiectes in England (1607) to, as he puts it, "all true-hearted English-men," the English Jesuit Robert Persons lays out a scene of terrible religious conflict. Quoting the beginning of Lucan's The Civil War—"Of wars across Emathian plains, worse than civil wars, / and of legality conferred on crime we sing, and of a mighty people / attacking its own guts with victorious sword-hand"—Persons notes that one need only change Thessaly to England and poetic singing to "our weeping and wailing" to accurately describe the state of England in 1607.¹ Persons further explains that the religious divisions wracking his native land are more than simply civil; rather, they are also domestic, dividing villages, houses, and families in a conflict that had moved beyond debate into brutal action. "Whereof," he notes, "our continual searches, privy intelligences, bloudy and desparate conspiracies, apprehensions, imprisonments, tortures, arraignementes, condemnations and executions are most loathsome and lamentable witnesses" (3). Persons's catalog of searches and seizures, conspiracies and punishments, reflects the troubled position during the period of not only Catholics (and in particular Jesuits) but also the presumptively loyal and settled Protestant population and their magistrates. Written by a subject marked as a traitor and living in exile, Persons's opening appeal to "true-hearted Englishmen" nicely identifies the complex challenges the Jacobean establishment faced in securing the population's religious and political loyalties. In the wake of both the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the subsequent imposition of the Oath of Allegiance upon all royal subjects, inquiries into religious conscience had once again been radically intensified and transformed into matters of the utmost importance to the commonwealth.

That Persons should open a treatise containing an extended justification of equivocation by describing the ransacking of English minds and homes should perhaps come as little surprise. As a defense against the interrogation of conscience, equivocation laid out a scheme whereby, in separating one's speech from one's interior thoughts, an individual might safely respond to questions of faith while endangering neither soul nor body. Though its approval and use were generally limited to a small segment of Catholics in England, the doctrine became a matter of intense public debate and obloquy owing to the 1606 trials of Henry Garnet and the Gunpowder Plot conspirators. The antagonism and even ridicule generated by this somewhat obscure Catholic doctrine is most famously demonstrated by Shakespeare's Macbeth, in which at the opening of act 2, scene 3 the Porter declares: "Faith, here's an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either side; who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven" (2.3.8-10). Literary critics have long focused primarily on reading Macbeth and a handful of rhetorical treatises for their investigations of the intersection of equivocation and literature, though their queries have generally been limited either to dating the play or to considering the broader relationship between language and treason during the early modern period (see Mullaney, Scott). The increasing critical interest paid to Roman Catholicism and in particular the place of recusancy within the political, religious, and literary world of early modern England, however, has begun to bring renewed attention to both equivocation and Robert Persons, its primary Catholic expositor.² Critics have begun to uncover the complexity of Persons's efforts in nurturing Catholicism, and in particular the Jesuit mission to England, from the late 1580s onward, recognizing that this project was not simply a matter of doctrine or politics but of writing, one in which the struggle for souls (and by extension for more temporal allegiances) was carried out through books, pamphlets, and manuscripts that themselves display some concern with the nature of text and practices of reading.³ Equivocation itself has experienced a similar growth in critical attention, with its focus on dissimulation being used to interpret the work of John Donne and Elizabeth Cary, as well as the position of Catholic women writers negotiating the constraints of politics and gender.⁴ Olga...