‘Sentenced to Die as in Cases of High Treason’

Abstract

Abstract This chapter surveys the English Catholic martyrologies of the sixteenth century up until the early 1580s. It distinguishes the martyr texts of the Henrician Reformation from those which were generated in and after the late 1570s. It reintegrates Catholic claims about persecution into some of the more recent accounts of a mid-Elizabethan political crisis and, more specifically, of what happened when the discontents of contemporary puritanism expressed themselves via critiques of royal policy. Here, the queen confronted those who disliked her preferred politique methods of dealing with religious dissent and of trying to construct European dialogues and alliances without resort to what some saw as a European ‘Protestant cause’. From a position in the 1560s where external political forces meant that there was often an incentive for those in authority not to identify public expressions of Catholicism with sedition, despite the Northern Rebellion of 1569, the papal bull of excommunication Regnans in Excelsis, and then the Ridolfi conspiracy, we arrive at a point in the later 1570s and the early 1580s when that was exactly what some of the queen’s councillors did. Front and centre here we have the two Jesuit priests, Edmund Campion and Robert Persons. Their high-profile intervention in the politics of the queen’s diplomacy with the French court, often referred to as the ‘Anjou match’ negotiations, provoked a raft of new legislation in parliament and a violent reaction from the regime to what it interpreted as Catholic treasons.