The northern earls had rallied their troops under a Catholic banner - quite literally, for it was the banner of St Cuthbert, traditionally housed at the shrine in Durham Cathedral, the banner under which the men of the north were accustomed to march against the Scots. This reminded Elizabeth and Cecil of the political risks inherent in religious division. Their public line, though, was to maintain that religion was just a pretence to conceal the rebels’ real objective, ‘the subduing of this realm under the yoke of foreign princes’. The lesson was hammered home by the untimely decision of Pope Pius V to excommunicate and depose Elizabeth as a heretic and a tyrant. The papal bull announcing this sentence, Regnans in Excelsis (known, like all papal bulls,
From its opening words), appeared in February 1570, just as the last embers of revolt were being stamped out. Henceforth it was possible to argue that no good Catholic could be a loyal subject of the queen. This specious line of argument was invoked over the next twenty years to justify ever stricter penal laws against Catholics, laws which often in effect defined aspects of Roman Catholic faith or worship as high treason. The process began almost immediately in the 1571 Parliament, where calls for the execution of Mary Stuart and Norfolk were accompanied by frenzied proposals for dealing with ‘papists’ - who were increasingly seen as the ‘enemy within’. Reconciling and being reconciled to the Roman Catholic Church were made treasonable offences, and the possession of Catholic devotional objects which had received papal blessing became liable to the penalties of ‘praemunire’ (forfeiture of goods and imprisonment at Her Majesty’s pleasure). A bill to levy heavy fines on Catholics who refused to take communion in their parish church failed only because Elizabeth herself exercised the royal veto. One of the few religious bills to which Elizabeth did give assent in that Parliament was an act requiring all clergy holding benefices in the Church of England to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles (the summary of its doctrine which had been agreed by Convocation in 1563) - thus making it harder for closet Catholics to stay inside or infiltrate the ministry of her Church.
Religious and political tension increased throughout the reign, but most rapidly from 1580, when a new initiative by the Catholic refugee community in Europe began to bear fruit: training priests abroad and sending them back as missionaries. The mission to England in 1580-81 of two Jesuits, Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion, reinvigorated the Catholic community, struck fear into their dedicated Protestant opponents and astounded the nation in general. Touring the land and evading their pursuers for months, they reconciled hundreds of Catholics before Campion was captured and Parsons fled the country. Campion, having been tortured, was tried and executed under the old treason law, along with some other priests. But the charges were not especially convincing, and now that the Catholics had some appealing martyrs to set against the Protestant martyrs made famous by John Foxe, they were quick to celebrate them in print. The guiding spirit of the Catholic refugees abroad, William Allen, published his Brief History of the Glorious Martyrdom of Twelve Reverend Priests, Father Edmund Campion and his Companions in 1582, and William Cecil thought it worth his while to write a reply, The Execution of Justice in England (1583).
Amidst the panic inspired by the mission of Campion and Parsons, new measures against Catholics were multiplied and, more to the point, were purposefully implemented. By the 1590s, thousands upon thousands of ‘recusants’ (as those who refused to attend Church of England services were known) were being regularly mulcted of huge sums, while hundreds of Catholics, both priests and those who sheltered them, were being imprisoned, banished, or even executed. About 120 Catholic priests were executed over the next twenty years, most of them under new laws which simply declared it treason to have been ordained as a Catholic priest
Parsons and Campion from George Carleton, A Thankfull Remembrance of Gods Mercy in the Deliverance of the Church and State in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I (1627), p. 59. A typical piece of English propaganda, implying that Roman Catholic monasteries were training camps for religious terrorists plotting against Elizabeth I’s life. The document in the priest’s hand is meant to be literally a ‘licence to kill’ (it reads ‘Pope’s licence’), on the grounds that the papal excommunication of Elizabeth in 1570 released Catholics from their allegiance to her.
Abroad. But in an age when religion was the most important issue in the political arena, arguments about whether the executions were for political or religious reasons were essentially verbal. Those who lobbied in Parliament for harsher measures were not bothered about such distinctions. Nor were Catholics unduly worried by this quibbling. English Catholic victims were given a prominent place in a pictorial martyrology published in 1588 by Richard Verstegan, the Theatre of the Cruelties of the Heretics of Our Times.
Elizabeth’s claim that she did not seek to open windows into men’s souls was looking increasingly threadbare. Yet, to be fair, repression was imposed upon her almost as much as upon her Catholic subjects. The Catholics held Cecil chiefly to blame for their miseries, and although in early modern Europe there was a polite preference for blaming ministers rather than monarchs, for once there is much to suggest that they were right. Cecil’s papers for the 1580s and 1590s are full of bright ideas for tightening the screws on Catholics, from imposing the oath of supremacy on laymen to taking away the children of recusants for re-education. The 1571 bill which Elizabeth vetoed was powerfully urged in the Commons by Thomas Norton, one of Cecil’s closest political allies, and in the Lords by Cecil himself. It might be thought that Elizabeth was simply diverting the flak for this policy onto Cecil, as she diverted the flak for the repression of Puritans onto her Archbishops of Canterbury. Yet while we have good evidence for her role in commanding her bishops to act against the Puritans, the evidence with regard to the Catholics points in the other direction. Elizabeth’s ministers were the driving force, led by Cecil and egged on by Francis Walsingham (appointed Secretary in 1573), whose profoundly anti-Catholic attitudes were shaped by his experience as ambassador in Paris, where he had witnessed the horrors of the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day. They even manipulated the information which was supplied to her in order to build up the Catholic threat as far as they could. Only thus could they induce her to implement even a selection of the imaginative sanctions they worked out. This is not to set up Elizabeth as some sort of model of toleration. Had she wished to grant toleration to Catholics, there was little to stop her. Her demand for outward obedience to her religious settlement was uncompromising. But she was more sensitive than her chief minister to the accusation of persecuting men for their religion.
Although most Catholic victims suffered under laws which simply redefined their religion as treason, the widespread fear of ‘popery’ was by no means groundless. The later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw a series of high-profile political assassinations, usually of Protestants by Catholics, sometimes of Catholics by Catholics: Admiral Gaspard de Coligny in 1572, Prince William of Orange in 1584, Duke Henry of Guise and Cardinal Charles de Guise in 1588, Henry III of France in 1589, and Henri IV of France in 1610. Add to this that some Catholic theologians were prepared to justify tyrannicide, and there was genuine reason to fear for the queen’s safety. Catholic plots against her were regularly brought to light by Walsingham, who had built up a formidable network of spies and informers. However, few Catholics participated in the plots. Most Catholics bent over backwards, with a disconcerting spinelessness designed to put their loyalty to the person of Elizabeth beyond any doubt: a testimony to the power of the Tudor myth, and to the growing symbolic power of the English state (it is towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign that the term ‘state’ begins to be used in English in something approaching its modern political sense). In 1585, Catholic loyalists petitioned the queen, in vain, in these terms:
We do protest before the living God that all and every priest and priests, who have at any time conversed with us, have recognised your Majesty their lawful and undoubted queen... And if we knew or shall know in any of them one point of treason or treacherous device or any undecent speech... we do bind ourselves by oath irrevocable to be the first apprehenders and accusers of such.
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