Libel, History, and Polemic, or the Rights and Wrongs of Publicity in the Archpriest Controversy

One of the crucial features of the archpriest dispute was, as seen in Part I, the decision of some of the parties to it to go public when they saw that they were not getting their way. This was, however, the continuation of an appeal to public opinion which had been in train since the Wisbech Stirs in 1595. In the process the opposing sides in the controversy produced detailed narratives of the dispute which doubled as histories of the recent past and which touched, in places, on how far there had been a persecution of good Catholics by the queen’s government, and what the likelihood was of toleration at some or any point in the future.

The Archpriest Cometh

The purging of the dissenters in the English College in Rome was followed by the appointment of an archpriest over the English secular clergy, one George Blackwell. He was reckoned, by some, to be a cat’s paw of the Society of Jesus. The claim was that the lobbying in Rome for his nomination had been, in effect, the product of a factional grab for power. This, it was alleged, was likely to antagonize the queen’s government. Blackwell’s friends argued in reverse that the majority of English Catholics welcomed the Roman curia’s wisdom in establishing this new form of hierarchy. All this led to the first appeal against Blackwell in December 1598.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter sums up the arguments of the book and points towards the long-term significance of the Archpriest Controversy for the later relations between the English Catholics and the English crown, organized around such topics as tolerance and the acceptance de facto or de jure of religious pluralism and the consequences thereof. The chapter takes the account of these points of contact between the Catholic community and the crown down to the later seventeenth century, looking in particular at the petitioning and lobbying that occurred in 1603–4; at the gunpowder conspiracy in 1605; at what happened when the power of episcopal regulation was granted in the 1620s to members of the secular clergy; and also at the strain of so-called Blackloist thought among English Catholics during the Interregnum.

Both Catholic and English—the Enemies of the Society of Jesus and the Pursuit of Toleration

It went without saying that both sides in the dispute promised that their prescriptions for, or answers to, the questions raised by the controversy would guarantee an arrangement via which Catholics would obtain a toleration from the State. By and large, the appellants argued that this was possible only if Catholics put aside the ridiculous and often seditious nostrums of the Jesuits. By way of response, the appellants’ enemies tended to accuse them of cutting and running, that is, of betraying the bulk of the community in return for favours granted merely to themselves, a minority of the English Catholics.

A Rebel’s Charter

Jesuits were attacked by the appellants as the epitome of political disobedience, and, it was also said, their shenanigans over issues such as the succession had nothing to do with the promotion of the Catholic faith but rather with their own betterment and the advantage of their Spanish paymasters, though, said the appellants, the Society of Jesus’s interests would always in the end take precedence over those of Spain. There was, to many people’s way of thinking, indeed a visible fit between these accusations and the kind of public and polemical politicking in which the likes of Robert Parsons, especially, had engaged. Writers such as William Watson found clear targets here in Parsons’s Conference about the Next Succession and in his manuscript memorandum concerning a potential future and sweeping reformation of the English Church and polity.

Jesuit Popularity in Practice and Theory

This chapter deals with the issue of ‘popularity’, that is, as a recognizably bad form of public politics. The appellants attacked their Jesuit opponents for conducting their business, and for lobbying their community, in much the same style as Elizabethan puritans had been attacked by their conformist opponents, for their attempts to reform the national Church, and, by mobilizing a mob of voices, for telling the queen what to do. In turn, this worked itself into a rhetoric of financial and other sorts of corruption in which we can see much of what we tend to associate with the language of anti-popery, and the character of the archetypally evil Jesuit, emerging in fact in Catholic circles, although the association of Jesuits with puritans was a common enough contemporary observation.

Episcopacy and the Government of the Church

Central to the debates between Catholics during the archpriest business, and indeed long after, was the question of episcopacy and, more precisely, of how far episcopal regulation was needed in order to guarantee the integrity of the Catholic community in England and whether the pope was in any sense obliged to appoint a proper episcopal hierarchy and not rely upon the allegedly novel device of the archpresbyterate. Appellant arguments here linked up easily, of course, with the ongoing debates about presbyterianism in the national Church.

The New Appeal

The first appeal was a comprehensive failure, but this did not mean that Blackwell’s and the Society’s critics simply gave up. The arguably unwise labelling of them as schismatics, and the suspension of several of the archpriest’s opponents, triggered a new appeal which, for complex political reasons, had the support of the French monarchy and of intellectuals in the Sorbonne. It also had the backing of figures inside the late Elizabethan regime, notably Richard Bancroft. This was the period which saw the publication of the principal texts of the controversy. Some of the appellants’ pamphlets were published on a royal press. The assistance rendered to these Catholics produced fury among those who regarded it as evidence of a popish conspiracy inside the regime. The new appeal was heard in Rome during 1602.

After Wisbech

The disorders described in Chapter 1 provided much of the impetus for the imposition of a reform programme on the English Catholic community. There was a consensus that some mechanism was needed to produce order and discipline in a region with the makings of an organized Church but no formal structures for governing it. An attempt by clergy who opposed the Society of Jesus and the positions and principles that it was taken to endorse and represent tried to set up self-regulating clerical associations in England. This proposal was overtaken by further disharmony, notably in the flagship college in Rome.

Introduction

The introduction places the controversy in its historiographical context and it explains its relative neglect by historians of the Tudor/Stuart period. It then moves to connect the controversy with its immediate and longer-term contexts, and it tries to explain why the topics at the centre of the debate had long-term resonance through the rest of the post-Reformation period.