Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England

Let us pause at this point to consider the question of why we should be bothered about what the second Viscount Montague's, or any contemporary English Catholic patron's, chaplains did. They have certainly been off the radar screens of most historians of the period. There were never that many of them. Of their number, many, as far as we know, never did anything very earth-shattering. (The biographical accounts of them in, for example, Godfrey Anstruther's Seminary Priests often run to no more than a few lines.) Even those who were caught up in the ‘persecution’, and about whom we know a bit more simply for that reason, frequently remain two-dimensional figures. Indeed, the martyrological memoirs compiled by contemporary Catholics appear slight when compared with the ponderous œuvre of John Foxe on the Marian martyrs.

Furthermore, there is always a suspicion that because, in the context of the English Church, these Catholic priests were entirely separatist, they were therefore untypical. It is notable how, in Christopher Marsh's recent overview of popular religion in the sixteenth century, the ageing revisionist account of the Catholic seminarist clergy is accepted more or less uncritically because it fits Marsh's larger interpretive frame, where the religious activists of the period are regarded as unrepresentative. In other words, the form of religion followed by most Englishmen during the period was unaffected by the particular concerns, and perhaps delusions, of the self-appointed gurus of supposedly ‘true’ religion.