Archpriest Controversy Research Articles

The Archpriest Controversy: The conservative Appellants against the progressive Jesuits

The Archpriest Controversy, a dispute that took place from 1598 to 1602 over the necessity for an archpriest to enforce moral discipline among the English Catholic clergy, has been traditionally seen either as a struggle for hierarchical order within the Catholic Church or a serious ideological breach between the Jesuit faction and the Appellants. In contrast to recent historiography, this paper argues that the Appellants, secular clergy that opposed the archpriest, represented views of conservative English Catholics who believed they could reconcile their political loyalty to their monarch with their Catholicism. The Archpriest Controversy should be reconsidered as a critical moment in a chain of important events from the English Mission of 1580–81 to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 that reaffirmed the inherently traditionalist nature of the Catholic community in England.

THOMAS DIGGES, ROBERT PARSONS, SIR FRANCIS HASTINGS, AND THE POLITICS OF REGIME CHANGE IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND

AbstractBy reconstructing the multiple contexts that prompted the production, in 1601, of a single tract, this article evokes and analyses the febrile political atmosphere of the Elizabethanfin de siècle, produced by the spectre of regime change consequent upon the death of the queen, and by the visible connections between central elements in the regime and certain Catholic loyalists involved in the notorious Archpriest Controversy. Certain men, most notably Sir Francis Hastings, who were used to regarding themselves as insiders and believed that they were some of the Protestant state's most trusted agents in the struggle against popery, now found themselves typed as ‘puritans’ and thus, at least potentially, on the outs with a regime engaged in a (to them) extraordinarily dangerous flirtation with allegedly ‘loyal’ papists. Adopting the politique hermeneutic mode of the Jesuit Robert Parsons, Hastings all but outed the guilty men and did so via a thoroughly self-conscious exercise in public politics. Throughout, the full range of contemporary media was in play, with printed polemic framing parliamentary debate, that debate in turn feeding into the pamphlet press, which prompted yet more rumours, in London and on the continent, before provoking the state's recourse to those ultimate forms of official publicity, a royal proclamation, treason trials, and the gruesome performativity of the scaffold.

La controverse sur l’archiprêtre, ou les catholiques élisabéthains dans les coulisses de la clandestinité

The most divided communities ordinarily choose to unite in the face of a powerful enemy. But when a community is ordered by the same religious ideology, when it has been forced into clandestinity, and when its very survival is at stake, this strategy seems all the more appropriate. Such is the logic that should have determined the choices of Elizabethan Catholics. But strangely enough, they did not opt for this strategy. The aim of this article is to analyse the fracture that divided the clandestine Roman Catholic clergy during the reign of Elizabeth I and which came out in the open under the name of “the archpriest controversy”. We will analyse the causes, the unfolding and the outcome of this internal scission. We will demonstrate that, contrary to what might have been expected, not only was this controversy — and the divisions it provoked within the persecuted community — the very element that ensured the survival of Catholicism in England, but it also brought about the advent of a specifically English form of Catholicism.

Catholicity and nationality in the northern European counter-reformation

Why choose this subject? First, because I think there is a general historiographical problem about nationality in early-modern Europe, which has been rather abandoned and is perhaps worth another look. Second because, on the Catholic side of the subject, there is a problem of actuality concerning Ireland and a rather different one concerning Holland. Third, because there is a specific and limited issue in the history of English Catholicism. I shall really be concerned with a simple problem raised by Arnold Oskar Meyer in his England and the Catholic Church under Queen Elizabeth: how far the internal conflicts among English Catholics, generally known as the Archpriest controversy, are to be explained as an outbreak or resurgence of ‘nationalism’, a conflict of ‘national’ and ‘Catholic’ tendencies. There have been good reasons for objecting to Meyer’s view that this was the case: his conceptions of national character, of ’puritanism’, were by present standards shaky, and he weakened his personal position by becoming more closely involved with the Third Reich than he perhaps need have been. The recent historiography of the subject has been largely a history of attempts to find an alternative: in the international competition of France and Spain; in the constitutional hostility of gentry and clergy; in the geographical determinism of Braudelian routes; in the ecclesiastical choice between a traditional and a missionary church. Many of them have been made by myself; most recently Christopher Haigh has added another, connected with the continuity or discontinuity of Elizabethan Catholicism with its pre-Reformation predecessor.

An Epistle of Pious Grief: An Anti-Appellant Tract by Robert Persons

During the Archpriest Controversy, altogether eighteen books were printed on behalf of the Appellant priests. On the other side, in defence of the Archpriest Blackwell, barely a third of this number of pamphlets appeared. The first of these anti-Appellant works to arrive in England—in the summer of 1601—was entitled The copy of a letter written to a very worshipful Catholic gentleman in England, of grief conceived about some scandalous dissension and books set forth tending to the disgracing one of another by such as labour in the same cause, know from its running-title as An epistle of pious grief. A small tract of fifty pages, written by ‘S.N.’, it is now so rare that only one copy is known to survive.

Shakespeare and the Archpriest Controversy: A Study of Some New Sources

Shakespeare and the Archpriest Controversy: A Study of Some New Sources

Shakespeare and the Archpriest Controversy: A Study of Some New Sources

Shakespeare and the Archpriest Controversy: A Study of Some New Sources

THE ARCHPRIEST CONTROVERSY AND THE PRINTERS, 1601–16031

THE ARCHPRIEST CONTROVERSY AND THE PRINTERS, 1601–16031 Get access GLADYS JENKINS GLADYS JENKINS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Library, Volume s5-II, Issue 2-3, September 1947, Pages 180–186, https://doi.org/10.1093/library/s5-II.2-3.180 Published: 01 September 1947

Reviews of Books

Journal Article Reviews of Books Get access The Archpriest Controversy. Documents relating to the dissensions of the Roman Catholic Clergy, 1597–1602. Edited from the Petyt MSS. of the Inner Temple, by THOMAS GRAVES LAW, Librarian to the Signet Library, Edinburgh. (London: Camden Society. 1896.) AUGUSTUS JESSOPP AUGUSTUS JESSOPP Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume XII, Issue XLVIII, October 1897, Pages 789–790, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/XII.XLVIII.789 Published: 01 October 1897