Polemicist as Pastor: Daniel Featley's Anti-Catholic Polemic and Countering Lay Doubt in England during the early 1620s

Abstract

In the months immediately before the collapse of the Spanish Match in 1623, an important debate took place between the Protestant controversialist Daniel Featley and John Percy (alias Fisher), the notorious Jesuit polemicist. The accounts of the debate alleged that the meeting was originally intended to be a small, informal, private conference to provide satisfaction to Humphrey Lynde's ageing cousin, Edward Buggs, concerning some doubts he was having about the legitimacy of the Protestant faith. Nevertheless, it is argued that Protestants used this conference to showcase a strong stance against Rome at a crucial moment when Catholicism was beginning to intrude further into England, and deliberately subverted royal policy by engaging Catholics in debate and publishing anti-Catholic polemical works. This was done to increase other Protestants’ confidence that their Church was the true Church and Catholicism was a counterfeit version of Christianity. Ultimately, this episode demonstrates how Protestants’ pastoral concerns about lay conversion could go hand in hand with their polemical activities and gives us a window into the particular mechanisms that Protestants employed as they struggled against the tide of political and ecclesiastical circumstances which threatened to diminish their influence in the 1620s.