This article explores the Jacobean oath of allegiance as an act
of government. It
suggests that historians have misread the intentions of the regime
in its formulation and enforcement
of the oath. Consequently they have underestimated the capacity of
the regime to enforce its will on
catholic nonconformists. An analysis of contemporary reaction to the
oath demonstrates that early
modern government could exert its power in ways which revisionist
historians have either missed or
denied. The oath should be understood as an exceptionally subtle and
well-constructed rhetorical essay
in the exercise of state power, and this we see in the devastating
effect it had on the structure of
Jacobean Romanist dissent. The evidence presented here suggests that
this statutory oath was not a
simple profession of civil allegiance to which English Romanist
dissenters responded with a
characteristic mixture of paranoia and politically illiterate
confusion. Rather it was an exceedingly
complex association of religious and political ideas, a diabolically
effective polemical cocktail, which
did not have to rely merely on the mechanics of a bureaucracy to work
its intended course against the
Romanist fraction within the English state.