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Cambridge University Press
0521860083 - Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England - Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550–1640 - by Michael C. Questier
Excerpt

1
Introduction

This book started out as a proposal for a doctoral thesis on the post-Reformation experiences of one aristocratic family – namely the Brownes who dwelt during this period principally at Cowdray in West Sussex, Battle Abbey in East Sussex and in their Southwark residence, Montague House, which was situated in St Saviour’s parish on the south bank of the Thames. (The head of the Browne family during Mary Tudor’s reign, Sir Anthony, was promoted to the peerage in 1554 as Viscount Montague.) These were the sort of people whose lives and careers could be used, I thought, to explore certain central themes within the social history of the aristocracy of the period, especially with reference to political ideology and religious belief. For the Browne family was predominantly and often openly Catholic in its religious inclinations.

   At the time that I was commencing research, however, this topic looked potentially rather unfashionable. It was the ‘popular’ rather than the blue-blooded variety of English Catholicism which was then attracting Reformation historians’ attention. Popular conservatism, we are still told, is the key to explaining why the English Reformation failed in its purpose of transforming the English Churchinto the godly and pious institution which some Protestants wanted. Indeed, popular residual Catholic sentiment would have had even more clout after 1559 had the natural leaders of Catholicism, the high-born, particularly the peerage, not been vertebraically challenged. But they did nothing to crystallise and express that popular defiance which perhaps could, with proper direction, have completely halted the Reformation in its tracks. If, as has been estimated, approximately 20 per cent of the aristocracy remained Catholic in this period,¹ it must have been the least important 20 per cent. And their Catholicism can stand only as an index for their irrelevance. They were generally deprived of high office, but, not having the zeal of humbler Catholic folk, they were not usually called to account for their religious opinions in the way that many recusant nonconformists were when they were hauled before the judges of the ecclesiastical and the secular courts.

   It was therefore something of a worry to me that, since the project was concerned, initially at least, with the first Viscount Montague and his grandson and heir (who succeeded to the title as the second viscount), the thing might end up being called ‘a tale of two nobles’, or that, reflecting on their (apparent) withdrawal from the national stage, some wit might suggest that the first and second viscounts were an example of, using John Bossy’s famous phrase, ‘inertia to inertia in three generations’, without there even being an active generation in the middle! Therefore, the preliminary work which I had done on the project I simply put aside, thinking that one day it might become an article in a local history journal.

   But, as the years went by, I kept coming across references to this family, stories told and opinions voiced about them, and not just them but a wide variety of people with whom they were connected in various ways (by blood, marriage, tenurially, through patronage and service and even purely through ideological affinity). Although I was stumbling across bits and pieces of information and evidence essentially at random, it began to look as if there was something amounting to a fairly significant social entity which, for shorthand purposes, I decided to call an ‘entourage’ (grouped around the leading members of the family).²

   I began to hope that by pursuing this entourage in some depth, even by resorting from time to time to some of the methodology of microhistory,³ it might be possible to take an identifiable unit or nexus of individuals within the English Catholic community and ask a series of questions about it. For example, what political opinions did they hold? What were their attitudes on a range of questions such as nonconformity? How did the patronage structures work which allowed for the support of the Catholic clergy? Why was Catholicism so factionalised? What structures of authority for preserving Catholicism were created among such people? In particular, how did these Catholics understand the relationship between themselves and the regime? And what was the nature of their relationship with the Church of England? The interaction of the Catholic community with the outside world, or, rather, the rest of English society, was something which Professor Bossy’s justly famous magnum opus, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850, for methodological reasons, did not fully address. In some very real sense Catholicism did become, as Bossy argued, ‘sectarian’. But Bossy developed this concept by writing about his topic from within. He specifically said that he was not interested in the ‘relation of minority to majority, considered either as State or as Church, but with the body of Catholics as a social whole and in relation to itself’.⁴ But this did not mean that the relationship of minority to majority could or should not be considered. Indeed this aspect of the topic positively invited study since one of the consensuses of recent Reformation scholarship has been that there was a good deal more interaction between people of supposedly hermetically sealed religious traditions than we had previously thought. Thus, by indulging myself in telling a story about a specific bit of the early modern Catholic community in which I was interested, I hoped to be able to narrate something which was not only about that community, at least not as it has traditionally been understood.

   It is not surprising, of course, that, within the small-ish world of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English gentry/aristocratic Catholicism, people tended to know other people. Methodologically, there was clearly a danger that what started out as a study of one relatively coherent family unit might become a mêlée of stray remarks about everyone who had even the slightest connection with anybody else within this comparatively narrow universe of individuals. There was also a risk that one would attribute impulses, attitudes and ideas exclusively to this group which were much more widely shared and held by other people, people about whom one knew next to nothing simply because they did not figure in the sources upon which one was relying.

   On the other hand, I was sure that one could do more here than write a connected series of biographical sketches. For while at certain points in the period all we can find out about these characters is the absolute minimum of scattered biographical detail, at other times the aristocratic entourage’s political and religious identity converged with and influenced, in quite significant ways, the wider Catholic community. Many of the well-known factional divisions and inclinations within the early modern Catholic community can be found being played out within this particular aristocratic following, as Catholics argued with each other about what Catholicism in post-Reformation England should be like. While there was often, as we might expect, a close fit between what clergy and laity within this aristocratic entourage thought and wanted, it was by no means guaranteed that they would always agree. In the early seventeenth century we can find clerics within this entourage making a bid for influence and authority in a fashion which many other Catholics, lay and clerical, looked at askance. It seemed to me that what one had here was an often fairly coherent and quite sizeable slice of the English Catholic community, and a window potentially on to the whole of it.

   I also hoped to do something which might be regarded as methodologically and historiographically innovative. As I have already suggested, a good deal of the current historiography of post-Reformation Catholicism in England tends to adopt a worm’s-eye view of the beast. It has been defined almost exclusively as a popular response to the official Reformation, a response which was sulky and negative, enunciated by the ‘people’ who lived mainly in a series of shattered parochial rural idylls. For the Tudor State had systematically attacked, sequestrated and/or destroyed the forms and accoutrements of traditional religious practice.⁵ Here ‘Catholicism’ and ‘popular’ are almost interchangeable terms. In contrast to this ‘popular’ groundswell of opinion, the actual Catholics whose names appear in the indexes of most of the volumes which deal with ecclesiastical politics in this period look like an ill-assorted and rather paltry lot – a few peers and gentry, a few seminary priests and the odd, sometimes very odd, conspirator. As I have intimated at the start of this chapter, historians have often defined what happened to English Catholicism by looking at these individuals in the context of the massed ranks of conservative plebeians. Here was the interpretative key necessary to explain why neither achieved anything: elite Catholicism was inept and detached from reality; popular Catholicism was inert and leaderless. And, in consequence, Catholicism after 1559 rapidly became a spent force.

   Our entourage-based view of Catholicism does not fit this model at all. It wants, instead, to look from the top down as well as from the bottom up, and outwards as well as inwards. It is necessary to do this if we want to understand why some contemporaries continued to see Catholicism as a dynamic and threatening ever-present religious and political force or movement. To do this we have to know what the Catholics in our entourage said to each other, which of them spoke to each other and especially which ones did not, what they wrote and published, what forms of patronage were exercised among them, what the patrons among them wanted from their clients, and how their clients responded, and how these Catholics positioned themselves in relation to the regime and the State (both local and national).⁶

   Now, in an ideal world, one might have extended one’s research to more members of the Catholic aristocracy. But the surviving papers for most Catholic aristocratic families of the period are extremely limited. About some leading Catholic clans, such as the Barons Windsor, almost nothing is known. Obviously, for them, as for most landed families in this period, trawls through the Public Record Office’s archives of chancery, exchequer and other government departments might turn up some material, but it would for the most part be about their economic and legal concerns and interests, not their politics or their religion. (To base a study on such sources would certainly tell one relatively little about such people’s Catholicism.) Thus it seemed sensible to fix upon one specific entourage where it might be possible to reconstruct in some detail both the web of relationships between its members and also its political and religious concerns; an entourage which was clustered about a great man or men whose patronage, protection and company were consistently sought by a variety of people whose own paths and politico-religious interests crossed and collided in a variety of ways.

   For my purposes the ideal entourage turned out to be the one with which I was already familiar – namely the following of the Viscounts Montague of Cowdray. Here there appeared to be an extremely wide set of marital relationships and ideological affinities, in some sense national in scope (since they were not restricted by county boundaries), perhaps even international (if one takes into account the entourage’s clerical members’ friends and contacts abroad). The entourage was also usefully decentred, in that what it stood for was not any single belief, objective or programme. Precisely because it was not a univocal and unidirectional entity, it might allow one to glimpse what a quite major section of English Catholicism was like, and what factors and characteristics enabled contemporaries to identify people as Catholics in the post-Reformation period.

   This approach was suggested, in fact, by a throw-away comment in an essay written by Professor Bossy, an essay which I read years ago while I was still an undergraduate. In a survey of Jacobean Catholicism he remarked, commenting on Lawrence Stone’s account of noble religion, that the Catholic aristocracy played ‘a comparatively passive role’ in the history of the Catholic community. In particular he noted that ‘it might be argued that the Catholicism of the earls of Worcester was as much an effect as a cause of its popularity among the gentry and people of Monmouthshire’.⁷ This idea was sparsely footnoted but intriguing. Obviously, what he meant by ‘passive’ was that the peerage was at best a buffer zone to protect the Catholic community from the predatory hand of government. Meanwhile the character of the community was formed among the gentry class by both the ‘active’ and the ‘quiet’, with the clergy primarily and necessarily serving those gentry once their own larger ambitions of exercising a restored clerical authority had been frustrated by those same gentlemen who had no wish to see clerics lording it over them. I was not entirely sure how ‘passive’ the Catholic aristocracy were. But the idea of interplay between patrons and clients helping to define what Catholicism was, and how it was perceived, seemed interesting, perhaps crucial, and worth further exploration and more time than Bossy could give it in a short essay for a Macmillan ‘Problems in Focus’ volume.

   So what I had conceived originally as a study of a minor south-coast aristocratic family became, instead, an attempt to recover a series of political démarches within Catholicism between the Reformation and the civil war, and to chart some of the responses to major issues which were thrown up by, and were directly concerned with, or touched upon, the problem of Catholicism, issues such as non/conformity, the succession to the throne, allegiance and loyalism, intra-Catholic division over ecclesiastical issues (notably over hierarchy and discipline), sacerdotalism and the ‘triumph of the laity’, and also the coming of ‘Laudianism’, or at least the series of policy innovations which some historians have identified as radically changing the face of the Church of England during the 1630s.

   It would, of course, have been possible to deal with Catholic attitudes to allegiance, the succession and so on, in a purely thematic way. But I have chosen to pursue them within the context of a particular Catholic ‘entourage’ because I did not want to see these things only, as it were, in the abstract. The dearth of source material generated by as well as about Catholics has often meant that such issues are, by default, discussed in a thematic manner. But, at the end of it all, it frequently remains a problem to say which Catholics held this or that view on all or any of the above questions, or whether such views were, in fact, merely being attributed to them by others. I wanted to set the whole thing in the context of a specific Catholic group of people talking to and about each other, bound and linked to each other by various ties (of kinship, ideology etc.). And I wanted to see how Catholics’ ideas were discussed inside a large clientage/patronage network, and to see what such a network thought and did in particular circumstances.⁸

   Clearly, not all human life was here, and not even all of the post-Reformation English Catholic community. The Brownes and their friends were not necessarily representative of all other Catholics. But by describing how such an entourage was built up, and how it intersected with other parts of the community, I believed and still think that it is possible to contribute to a description of how Catholicism evolved in later sixteenth- and early to mid-seventeenth-century England, and why at particular times it was so politically ‘hot’, when, on many modern historical accounts of the ‘seigneurial’ (or gentrified) and marginalised Catholic community, it should have been nothing of the kind.

   There have been some outstanding studies of patronage networks among English Protestants of the period.⁹ Clearly in the patronage stakes Catholics generally had a lot less to play for. Catholic clergymen were not eligible for university posts, for official Court chaplaincies, indeed for any Church-of-England benefice. In addition, lay Catholics who were recusants were barred from holding public office. Those who were tainted by suspicion of Catholicism were liable to lose official posts and employment in both the local and national State. It is extraordinary, however, that, for example, no systematic study has been undertaken of which Catholic clerics were attached to which lay patrons. It is often not known even which houses and households they lived in. Even where this is known it is generally assumed that their residence in those houses and households was an ideologically neutral event (i.e. that they were there simply to carry out the functions of a priest) even though it is evident from many sources that clergy frequently attached themselves to those patrons with whom they were ideologically in sympathy. In England, those Catholic clergy who had an impact on public opinion were invariably those who had powerful patrons. By incorporating those patrons back into the picture, and by identifying how they and their clients talked not just to each other but also to curial officials in Rome, to foreign diplomats and notables and especially to the papal nuncios in Paris, Brussels and other places, and to local and national representatives of the English/British State, it seemed possible to give both definite social shape, and even, in places, a narrative form (and thus, perhaps, a degree of coherence) to the lives of some of those Catholics who tend otherwise to be discussed in the thematic abstract and are mentioned, if they are lucky, only in the footnotes of monographs.

   Thus, while it would be difficult to pretend that this social entity, this Catholic aristocratic entourage, was itself the Catholic community, it is, I claim, nevertheless, possible to read off from its view of itself and the world, an account of Catholicism during the period, or rather, how Catholicism was understood and discussed by a range of contemporaries (both Catholics and Protestants). For the fact that traditional parish worship was largely ground out at the root by a series of reforming Tudor regimes did not mean that Catholicism died the death as a public and political issue. Contemporaries talked endlessly about Catholicism (or ‘popery’), its political inclinations and significance, the vicissitudes of the pan-European ‘Protestant cause’ and the real or imagined threat from its diametrical opposite, the ‘Catholic cause’. The connection between the danger from an international Catholicism and the existence and activities of actual English Catholics was a source of constant contemporary comment.¹⁰ English Catholic polemicists and ideologues, often with powerful foreign patrons, developed coherent and sometimes perilous lines of thought on major political issues – for example (during Elizabeth’s reign) the unsettled question of the succession, the problematical topic of when and how far it was legitimate to resist sovereign authority and the issue of toleration.

   The drive for toleration was carried on with even more vigour after the accession of James Stuart, a king whose dynasty’s claims to the English throne many English Catholics had long reckoned to have supported. After his accession, they loudly and continuously reminded him that this had been so. James’s European dynastic ambitions for his own house, principally a marriage for his heir with either the Habsburgs or Bourbons, meant that the ‘Catholic issue’ was given renewed political vigour in the middle and at the end of his reign. And, under Charles I, while it is possible to overestimate the extent to which actual Catholicism infiltrated the Court, many contemporaries perceived a link between the regime’s ecclesiastical projects and the infiltration of popish Catholicism into the bowels of the regime and State. There were violent anti-Catholic scares throughout the period, and notably after 1637.¹¹ The crisis leading up to the civil war was perceived by many Protestants to be the product of a popish plot, and, as Thomas Cogswell has remarked, by their reckoning this would have been ‘at least the third’ time since the beginning of the seventeenth century that a popish plot had been concocted in order to overthrow the commonwealth.¹² During the civil war, Catholics heavily engaged themselves for the crown. Virtually to a man those Catholics who took part in armed conflict were royalists. A glance at the pages of the heralds’ visitations, printed by the Harleian Society, reveals numerous members of the Catholic gentry who are recorded as having been slain at one or other of the civil war’s various battles. Catholics recalled and eulogised their co-religionists who suffered in the king’s service.¹³

   It is worth pointing out here that I have, throughout, decided deliberately to privilege evidence of kinship networks. Clearly this might be regarded as a somewhat tendentious methodological approach.¹⁴ After all, the mere fact of kinship can be precisely that – a mere fact. On the other hand, the fact that so many of the Catholics dealt with here were indeed related by blood or marriage does in itself put a specific gloss on the nature of the Catholic ‘community’ in this period. Catholics tended to portray themselves as being a ‘gathered’ community of all right-thinking people who had a conscience in matters of true religion and the courage to express it. The post-Reformation/pre-civil-war Catholic community has since that time often been presented by historians in the same way. Instead, the suggestion here will be that contemporaries might well see the Catholic community as a series of entourages and networks, often factionally aligned internally, whose ideological concerns inflected the more basic fact of their blood, kin and client relationships.¹⁵

THE FATE OF THE RECORDS

Where, then, should one look for evidence of all this? As we have already noted, remarkably little material on the Catholic aristocracy actually survives, at least in the form that such records were originally kept.¹⁶ And there is even a dearth of archival material for the family at the centre of this study – the Brownes of Cowdray.

   In the late eighteenth century a series of mishaps conspired to wipe out both the family’s title and much of its memory. In the late summer of 1793 the eighth viscount, George Samuel, took it into his head to go on a jolly jape of a boating trip and try to ‘shoot the falls’ at Laufenburg on the Rhine. He proceeded to take himself and a friend and an unfortunate dog to a watery grave despite the best efforts of the local authorities and an old family retainer to prevent him. (His heir, a distant relation, died without issue and the title became extinct.) Shortly before the drowning incident, the family’s palace of Cowdray was destroyed by fire, on 24 September 1793. (See Figures 1 and 2.) Workmen who were completing alterations and repairs to the building had taken to burning charcoal in an improvised carpenter’s shop in a tower above the north gallery, in ‘the midst of all the shavings and chips which strewed the floor’. Several of the staff were soused on that particular night, and they were quite unable to form a chain to pass water buckets up from the river.¹⁷

   In fact, the muniment room (in the Kitchen Tower) which housed the family’s records was not destroyed in the blaze. But nothing was done to preserve the papers there. In 1834 they were noted to be ‘lying in heedless heaps on the floor, or . . . scattered on the shelves’ while a few of the more important documents ‘more ancient, and known by their rightful owner to be more curious than the rest’ were set aside in some rudimentary kind of exhibition for the multitude to come and look at. Actually, visitors carried away quite a lot of deeds and manuscripts, and others were used ‘as wrappers, or for kindling fires’. The scandal was remarked on even by a pupil at the grammar school in Midhurst. In 1863 Sir Sibbald Scott noted that he had been able to root around in the ‘parchments and papers’ of the family in the same muniment room, still decaying and mouldering with the effects of the weather, damp and passing jackdaws. From his description, the really serious loss would appear to have been not so much estate documents but rather the ‘piles of letters to and from different members of the family’.¹⁸ By circuitous routes a few clutches of papers have survived, but comparatively little overall, and distressingly little for the mid- to late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.¹⁹