Elizabethan Legacies

Abstract

Abstract This chapter draws together the arguments developed throughout the book and considers their longer-term significance for our understandings of English Catholicism and the broader European Counter-Reformation. It explores the ways in which the Henrician and Edwardian emigration set important precedents for the experiences, responses and challenges faced by Elizabethan Catholics, precedents which ranged from the purely practical, to the devotional, doctrinal and definitional. This chapter also explores the posthumous legacy of Henrician and Edwardian émigrés amongst Catholic reformers elsewhere throughout western Europe, underlining the extent to which the reform programme they had attempted to implement in Marian England subsequently shaped European ideas about Catholic reform. In this way, it not only reinforces the core argument of this book—that, from the very beginning of the Reformation, English Catholicism was a religion shaped, defined and sustained by the mobility of people between England, the wider British Isles and the continent—but also underlines the extent to which English Catholicism and the broader European Counter-Reformation were not just connected, but interdependent.