The Politics of Religious Conformity and the Accession of James I

Abstract

Abstract The issue of conformity in religion is crucial for historians who want to describe how religion worked politically in the English Church during the period of the Reformation. This article takes one aspect of conformity—the struggle by self‐consciously Protestant authorities to force Catholics in the North of England to conform before and after the accession of James'VI in their country. It appeared to some Protestants (as well as to some Catholics) that James's accession might lead to changes in the established order of religion in England. Some papists in the North were very enamoured of James. Protestants tried to cool their ardour in part by using statutory conformity to emasculate their political activism. Yet some Catholics who expressed their hatred of the Elizabethan regime by and in separation from its Church became less determined to stand out against conformity when James's accession seemed assured. The very mechanism by which papists were to be controlled no longer worked as Protestant activists intended. In short, the politics of conformity explains many of the puzzling features of Catholicism (particularly of ‘church papistry’) at this time and in this region—why some people moved between nonconformity and compliance, and why strict recusancy might not always be an article of faith even for the most belligerent of Roman dissidents.