Catholics in England and Wales, c. 1558–c.1640

Abstract

This chapter surveys the emergence of Catholic recusancy and its consolidation in Elizabethan and early Stuart England and Wales. We begin with a study of the early English Catholic recusant community and its emergence in particular regions as minority groupings, largely rural in location and with Catholic aristocrats leading a predominantly plebeian rank and file; this community was, at the best of times, marginalised and in the worst periods actively persecuted on political grounds, for in the course of Elizabeth’s reign from 1558 to 1603 England’s Catholics were to become linked in the official and the public mind with treasonable conspiracy in alliance with Spain. The Catholic-inspired Revolt of the Northern Earls of 1569 against Elizabeth led to the excommunication and papal deposition of the queen in the bull Regnans in Excelsis of 1570; this was followed by the Ridolfi Plot of 1571, a conspiratorial version of the 1569 rising, sharing its programme of a Catholic marriage between Mary Queen of Scots and the Duke of Norfolk backed by Spanish and papal military and financial assistance. The Throgmorton Plot, exposed in 1583, involved French as well as Spanish and papal support for another bid to dislodge Elizabeth, while the Parry Plot of 1585 indicated a high degree of papal intervention in English affairs, and the Babington Conspiracy in 1586 once more centred on the violent substitution of Elizabeth by Mary.