Chapter Elizabeth's Religious Settlement of Elizabethan England - Study Guide by History

The Queen had always refused to take strong measures against the Catholics in England, this despite constant pressure from her bishops and Parliament. She angered them by both pardoning rescusants and banning her bishops from administering the communion to suspected Catholics. This complacency was heightened in 1580 when Pope Gregory XIII made it clear that no English Catholic was expected to try and subvert their government. That the pope spent much of his time plotting Elizabeth's downfall is a strange inconsistency (for instance in 1579 he encouraged James Fitzgerald, kinsman of the Earl of Desmond to stir up rebellion in Ireland - the resulting revolt was easily crushed). The Pope's fierce attitude towards Elizabeth and renewed pressure from Parliament led to increased persecution of papists. This began with the missionary priests who had come over in the 1570s to reconvert England. Cuthbert Mayne was the first missionary to be killed by the new, more oppressive regime. Parliament denounced all missionaries, but especially the Jesuits, for threatening the realm with seditious doctrine. A bill was drawn up which, if passed, would have meant death for singing the mass and loss of estates for refusing to attend the Anglican Church four times. The Queen was once again responsible for saving the Catholics from complete persecution. The final act was somewhat less draconian yet can still be viewed as a watershed in Recusant legislation: on one side concession of the other repression. Those failing to attend Church were now fined £20 per month and the burden of proof to obtain an execution for sedition was reduced. This led to a rapid rise in the number of executions, while the fines caused serious economic difficulties for those refusing to attend Church. As a result of propaganda fears increased and the Bond of Association was established to defend Elizabeth's life and to scupper any attempt at a Catholic succession. The Association promised to "pursue as well by force of arms as by all other means of revenge all manner of persons of what estate so ever they shall be... that shall attempt... the harm of her majesty's royal person."

In reaction to this Catholic propagandists set about setting the score straight. Allen wrote his Defence and Robert Southwell wrote his An Epistle of Comfort abroad to be smuggled in by devoted English Catholics. These writers attempted to make martyrs of those being executed under the new laws. In this they were attempting to do for Catholics what John Foxe had done for Protestants with his Acts and Monuments but A Brief History of the Glorious Martyrdom of XII Reverend Priests by William Allen (1582) lacked the skill of his predecessor as well as the official patronage which had made Acts and Monuments such an effective tool of propaganda. The establishment countered this with pamphlets of their own painting the English Catholics as an evil and seditious enemy wanting nothing except the downfall of England. These included the pamphlets The Execution of Justice (1581) and The English Roman Life (1580). Protestant propaganda totally subsumed the relatively small amount of Catholic work rendering their impact null. Outside of such officially sponsored Protestant tracts, Elizabethan writers were unsurprisingly reluctant to talk on religious issues. The Revels Office was expressly in charge of searching plays to censor any religious writings (which dramatists were strictly prohibited from creating). Those authors who felt an emphatic wish to write on religious issues had to step a very fine path, avoiding all contentious issues. Thus Shakespeare's Sonnet 146 is full of religious themes but fails to commit to either a Catholic or Protestant viewpoint, and the same can be said for the majority of his plays (one reason may have been the fact that invoking the name of God on the stage was forbidden).

The sum total of this was that the work Elizabeth had carried out with such success in keeping ideological lines form crystallizing was undone by the confrontational tone of the papal Bull. The Puritan movement, which for so long had been kept from carrying out their extremist policies, were now given their head and Catholic persecution increased.

Despite this the religious policy of Elizabeth must be considered a success. Although she didn't manage to restore the Anglican Catholicism of her father, she did create a religious settlement that was accepted by the majority of England and came to be the lasting English doctrine.