Catholics in England and Wales, c. 1640–c.1740

Abstract

The outbreak of the civil war initiated one of the most serious crises for Catholics in the British Isles in the whole of their post-Reformation history. The relative favour shown by Charles I to the English Catholics and their grateful response, as shown in the ‘Contributions’ of 1639, revived ‘popery’as a live issue from 1640 onwards; fears of a ‘popish plot’, whipped up by the Irish rebellion of 1641 served as a coda to the mounting tension between the crown and the Long Parliament. The latter’s role as the sounding board of the nation’s Protestantism induced it to demand savage action against priests, with the result that eleven of these were executed in the period 1641–2. The historian Archbishop Mathew noted two points about these victims — their seniority of years (two of them were well past seventy), and the fact that ‘They had lived quietly and laboriously without concealment … [A]ll were well known to the authorities who had suddenly descended upon them.’1 In other words, for Catholics the period around the outbreak of the civil war was one of catastrophe because it brought renewed suffering on a community, and above all on its priests, that had in the preceding decades been building up a comparatively stable presence in England and Wales.