John Austin and the Catholic response to the English Commonwealth

Abstract

ABSTRACT The work of the seventeenth-century writer John Austin has often been side-lined when compared to fellow Blackloist contemporaries Thomas White and Henry Holden. Yet John Austin was a prolific author in the mid-seventeenth century, who commented on the political, theological, and social situations that befell English Catholics under Commonwealth rule, and he made some of the most provocative and well-publicised responses to the English Civil War. This article scrutinises Austin’s The Christian Moderator essays which were published between 1651 and 1653. It shows that Austin was at the forefront of addressing Catholic sequestration, oath-swearing, and Catholic loyalty under Commonwealth rule, and that he later re-published the essays under a new title in 1659, The Catholiques Plea, as the issues was still relevant. By examining Austin’s political essays, this article offers a new assessment of his work, and provides new analyses on the subject of Catholic loyalty, oath-swearing, and sequestration.