Catholics in the Interregnum

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines how Catholics experienced changes to the religious and political landscape during the Interregnum. Since the later sixteenth century, Catholics had faced legal sanctions because of their religious nonconformity, with Elizabethan and Jacobean laws augmenting these restrictions. The reality for Interregnum Catholics was complex. Catholics were prohibited from practising their faith, and they faced suspicions from officials and locals that they were promoting ‘popery’ that threatened to subvert the peace and stability in the precarious republican regimes. Additionally, the scattered nature of the relevant Catholic archives, combined with Catholics avoiding making explicit references to their faith, has meant that Catholics have been largely absent from historiographies for this period. This essay, therefore, seeks to revise this assessment by demonstrating that through using different archival materials and methodologies we can integrate Interregnum Catholics into the broader narrative of how the Church in England was contested in the mid-seventeenth century.