English Clerical Converts to Protestantism, 1580–1596

Abstract

It is proposed in this article to discuss the English Catholic seminarists who apostatised between 1582 and 1596—that is, after the date when Catholics in England were required unequivocally to separate themselves totally from the Established Church but before the beginning of the Appellant Controversy. P. McGrath in a recent article has set out the basic biographical details of a number of the Elizabethan apostates. T. H. Clancy has dealt with Jesuit defectors from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and gives interesting and useful statistics on apostates in general. Neither of them, however, makes any extensive attempt to assess the development or significance of these apostates’ changes of religion. McGrath expressed the hope that his ‘survey… of an important section of the Elizabethan clergy’ would ‘draw attention to the variety of motives influencing these men’ and ‘the need for further examination of their strange careers’. It is the intention of this article to explore further the importance of apostasy among the Elizabethan seminarists (seminary priests and students for the priesthood who never got as far as being ordained). Instead of concentrating, as McGrath and Clancy do, upon establishing who the apostates were, a comparative approach over a shorter period will be employed, using a wider range of source material, including the books of ‘motives’. The aim is to challenge the view that all clerical apostates were basically of similar significance, distinguished mainly by whether they remained with the Established Church or not. It will be argued here that the phenomenon grew more serious between 1580 and 1596. It is not enough to say of these apostates merely that there were bound to be ‘deviationists’ from the Allen-Persons line, or that they had the example of the Marian priests before them.