The Archpriest Controversy of 1598–1602, an important dispute within the late Elizabethan Catholic community over the necessity of an archpriest for a reformation of manners among the English Catholic clergy, has drawn commentary from many historians over the decades. The historical debate focuses on identifying why the Archpriest Controversy occurred, whether out of a serious ideological divide or a power struggle in the Catholic Church hierarchy between the supporters of the archpriest, the Jesuits most notably among them, and the Appellants, secular priests who appealed directly to Rome over the archpriest.Footnote 1 Contrary to the historiography of the Archpriest Controversy, the present study will demonstrate that the Appellants embodied the conservative impulse of political loyalty to the English monarchy that English Catholics held long before the arrival of the Jesuits in the English Mission of 1580–81.Footnote 2 The conflict between the Appellants and the Jesuits was the decisive moment in determining whether English Catholicism would become more closely associated with international and centralized Counter-Reformation Catholicism or with the traditional views of provincial English Catholics who desired a degree of autonomy from the papacy.Footnote 3 By the end of the Archpriest Controversy, the Appellants, for the first time, clearly defined the interests of conservative English Catholics who professed political loyalty to the Elizabethan state while acknowledging the spiritual primacy of the hierarchical Catholic Church.
The Archpriest Controversy was no less than a battle for the soul of the English Catholic community of equal importance to the Spanish Armada. Both events reconfirmed the tradition among English Catholics throughout the Reformation to obey the monarch in spite of political decrees from the Catholic hierarchy. Indeed, when placed into a greater historical context from the English Mission to the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, the Archpriest Controversy is but a part of a longer running conflict between the Jesuits and much of the English Catholic community. The Appellants, like other traditionalists, believed that they could somehow ignore the 1570 excommunication of Queen Elizabeth and fulfill their political obligations while remaining pious Catholics. The English Jesuits and their allies, on the other hand, sought to reassert the deposing power of the papacy in regards to monarchical authority. The Jesuit faction and the Appellants both claimed to be conservative, but when viewed in the context of English precedent regarding church and state relations, it was the Appellants who had a stronger case for conservative identity. The Jesuits aspired to an English government subordinate to the authority of the Catholic Church, a position which it had been retreating from since the Middle Ages.
In recent historiography, Stefania Tutino contends that the Appellants represented the more progressive faction of English Catholics because they were in favour of a primitive type of religious tolerance for themselves without seeking to upset the Protestant establishment. She also points out that there was a very real ideological conflict because the Appellants referred to the Jesuits as being part of Spanish attempts to conquer England.Footnote 4 Michael Questier recognizes that the Appellants had some issues in common with moderates within the Catholic community as they both found ways to reconcile their faith with being a loyal subject. Questier treats the Archpriest Controversy as a healthy debate within the Catholic community in England, not evidence of it being weak and divided.Footnote 5 Robert Scully argues that the ultimate winner in the Archpriest Controversy was not the Appellants or the Jesuits, but the Elizabethan government. Scully tends to agree with Henry More, a seventeenth-century Jesuit historian, that the disputes between the two factions irreversibly damaged the Catholic cause in England, if one defines this as the full restoration of the Catholic Church.Footnote 6 Brian Lockey argues that the Jesuits represented a strain of medieval religious conservatism. They advocated a type of transnational Christian community in direct opposition to a rising sense of nationalism in Elizabethan England. The Reformation, however, drove them into an extreme position by advocating for the power of the papacy to depose monarchs at will.Footnote 7
Although Lockey views the Jesuits as holding conservative thoughts on the idea of Christendom, there had long been a tradition in England of the monarchy asserting itself against the Catholic Church whenever religion clashed with royal prerogative: one going back as far as the Constitutions of Clarendon and the ensuing Beckett Controversy in the Middle Ages.Footnote 8 During the reign of Queen Mary, loyalty to the Papacy was not a high priority, many authors of the time preferred instead to emphasize the importance of the Mass.Footnote 9 Mary asserted her royal prerogative against the pope when she felt it necessary, most notably with her refusal to hand over Cardinal Reginald Pole to be tried in Rome for heresy charges by Pope Paul IV.Footnote 10 While the authority of the pope was recognized in Marian England, it was out of a need for the unity of Christendom rather than implicitly acknowledging that the papal authority was greater than that of the monarch in his or her own realm.Footnote 11
In order appreciate the breadth of opposition among lay English Catholics to the Jesuits as represented by the Appellants in the Archpriest Controversy, it would be helpful to look at how they responded to the Reformation prior to arrival of the Jesuits. A. G. Dickens in his seminal work The English Reformation writes of a second sort of reformation that took place alongside the Protestant Reformation in England: ‘the conditioning of society to the rule of law.’ Dickens asserts that church historians have been too preoccupied with the conflicts between church and state during the English Reformation when they more often than not worked with each other as they had in the wider Reformation on the European mainland.Footnote 12 Geoffrey Elton also makes point in The Tudor Revolution in Government that a more effective system of government sprang up during the English Reformation to ensure obedience to religious change.Footnote 13 Although English Catholics certainly did not welcome these changes, they too were affected by increasing efforts on the part of the Tudor government to persuade its subjects to at least respect the religion of the establishment.
The tensions between Jesuits and provincial Catholics was by no means unique to England. The Jesuits were inclined to view England as a blank slate ripe for missionary work, just as they viewed any area in Asia or the Americas. They used the absence of any clearly established church hierarchy in England to operate as they saw fit, without any outside interference from other priestly orders in the Catholic Church. The Jesuits met with a very similar reception in other Protestant majority areas such as the Netherlands, where Catholics were a much larger minority. Protestants persecuted Catholics very little in the Netherlands which made Dutch Catholics highly unreceptive to militancy of the Counter-Reformation. Even in countries where Catholics were in the clear majority, such as France, the Jesuits often clashed with the French Church as it reconstructed and reformed itself in the early seventeenth century.Footnote 14 Gallicanism, the assertion of French royal authority against interference of the pope in political matters, had a very clear influence on the writings of the Appellants as many of them spent time in France before the outbreak of the Archpriest Controversy.Footnote 15 The beginning of French involvement in the affairs of the English Catholic Community could be traced back to the Archpriest Controversy, when Henri IV first became interested in the cause of the Appellants but ultimately did not firmly commit to either side.Footnote 16 In short, Catholics across the Continent and in England questioned whether the Council of Trent was the final authority on how the Church should be governed and how it made doctrinal pronouncements.
Essentially, the Jesuit faction and the Appellants debated the meaning of being a true Catholic. The Jesuits were prepared to invoke the deposing power of the papacy in order to establish what they viewed as a purer form of Catholicism. Nicholas Sander, an influential writer and polemicist of the later sixteenth century, mirrored their sentiments as he drew upon earlier instances of popes deposing heretical or tyrannical kings in the Middle Ages in defense of the international Christian commonwealth when national identity remained relatively weak.Footnote 17 Robert Persons later embraced the position of Nicholas Sander, reasoning that the deposing power of the pope acted as an important check on the power of the monarch. Persons believed that the Scriptures recorded a gradual separation of church and state, with church being clearly superior. For Persons, England was not far from following the Turkish model of union of church and state which tended towards despotism. The alternative check on the power of monarchs, for Protestants, came with the people themselves. Persons considered this unacceptable, he thought, like many other Catholic intellectuals, that the masses were highly factious and therefore could not be trusted as much to make the call to depose a monarch as the pope.Footnote 18
The Appellants, on the other hand, held fast to native English tradition in upholding the status quo while seeking greater religious toleration for Catholicism. Although the Jesuits saw the Appellants as being little better than the Protestant establishment, the Appellants, much like the rest of the English Catholic community, viewed the Jesuits as dangerous extremists who threatened political anarchy through their relentless pursuit of religious purity.Footnote 19 When the Appellants failed to convince the pope to dismiss the archpriest in 1599, they turned to political measures with the Protestation of Allegiance in 1602 to Queen Elizabeth which declared their loyalty. The Protestation of Allegiance not only clarified the position of the Appellants regarding the pope as a strictly spiritual leader, but also the position that the English Catholic community had adopted regarding political obedience during the Reformation period.Footnote 20
The appointment of the Archpriest and the rise of the Appellants
Following the Wisbech Stirs of 1594–1595, there was a need to find a replacement for Cardinal William Allen, founder of the English College at Douai and leader of the missionary enterprise to England, who died in 1594.Footnote 21 For Allen, the English seminary movement was but part of a comprehensive project aimed at Catholic revival across Europe—as evidenced by Pope Gregory XIII’s renewed patronage of seminaries for other countries.Footnote 22 In order to continue the wider advance of the Counter-Reformation, Pope Clement VIII decided, in March 1598, to appoint as archpriest of England, George Blackwell who, though not a Jesuit himself, sympathised with them. As archpriest, Blackwell was given authority to enforce disciplinary standards among the English clergy as he saw fit.Footnote 23 A number of secular priests found the establishment of an archpriest unacceptable and so William Bishop and Robert Charnock, the representatives of the Appellant faction, went to Rome in December 1598 to appeal directly to the pope’s authority against the archpriest. As they arrived in Rome, however, they were arrested on the orders of the pope and detained at the English College where they were questioned on the controversy over the archpriest in England.Footnote 24
While Charnock and Bishop remained confined in Rome, the pope and the Cardinals conferred together to pass their judgement on the Controversy. They entreated that Charnock and Bishop return to Paris and to Lorraine but not to England unless they had the special approval of the pope or the Cardinal Protector. In a new brief on April 6, 1599, the pope confirmed the authority of the archpriest and the authenticity of the Cardinal’s letters. He also ordered that there be no more contention or strife among the clergymen of England.Footnote 25 The brief, however, was not completely favourable towards the Jesuits and the archpriest. It made some concessions to the Appellants by condemning Thomas Lister’s incendiary book and reproving the archpriest, but it also prohibited any further writing or renewed controversy on the archpriest. The orders of the pope, however, did not bring a definitive conclusion to the Controversy because both sides continued to write against each other with no less bitterness than before.Footnote 26 The Archpriest Controversy shifted from becoming an argument over ecclesiastical hierarchy to questions of political ideology.
Although it seemed that the Appellants had ultimately failed in their goal to remove the archpriest from ecclesiastical office and that the Jesuits had won a victory, in reality the archpriest did far more to harm the cause of the Jesuits in England than it did to aid them. While they sought to enforce their standards of discipline and political loyalty on the rest of the clergy, their overreaching pushed the Appellants all the more into allying with the government against the Jesuits. It is important to remember, however, that the Appellants were not conformists. The fact that they appealed to the pope in order to rid themselves of the archpriest shows that they still acknowledged papal authority over ecclesiastical matters, but not in political affairs—as the Protestation of Allegiance would later demonstrate. The Elizabethan government, well aware of the growing rift between the seculars and the Jesuits, did everything in its power to support the Appellants in an effort to keep the divisions among the clergy alive and well.Footnote 27
Historians have generally downplayed the writings of the Appellants due in part to the history of Christopher Bagshaw with the Jesuits before the Archpriest Controversy. It is well known that Bagshaw and Robert Persons were formerly rivals at Balliol College in Oxford, and the Archpriest Controversy could be seen in one sense as part of that rivalry.Footnote 28 William Watson, in an embarrassing incident for the Appellant faction, was to be executed for treason for his alleged involvement in the Bye plot of 1603. Yet it was one of Watson’s fellow Appellants, Anthony Copley, who betrayed the plot to Blackwell and revealed it to the Jacobean authorities.Footnote 29 It should also be noted that conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot looked almost exclusively to the Jesuits for spiritual advice, including Henry Garnet.Footnote 30 Despite their past and future dealings, Watson and Bagshaw, along with the rest of the Appellants, gave a dedicated and genuine defense of Catholic loyalty to the English monarch as far as they could take it at the risk of possible excommunication. In the last years of Elizabethan England, the Appellants felt they had an opportunity to profess their loyalty after their appeal to the pope failed over the archpriest.
William Watson’s letter to the attorney general, Edward Coke, in April 1599 illustrated the level of mutual support that the Appellants and the government had for each other. During the conflict between the Jesuits and the Appellants, Watson reminded the attorney general that he held ‘loyalty, love & duety, to god, my prince, countrey & yorselfe in autority,’ which contrasted with the revolutionary behavior of the Jesuits who felt no such respect for authority. Watson had a long and troubled history with the Elizabethan authorities, being sent to prison first to Marshalsea then to Bridewell. At Bridewell, Watson was severely tortured. He was subjected to ‘whipping [and] grinding in the milne’ but was remarkably forgiving of Elizabeth, saying this was ‘unknowen to her majesty or her councell.’ Watson eventually escaped to Liege where he lived for two years, only to regain his resolve and return to England. On his return, he was betrayed and once again imprisoned, suffering even more torture at the hands of Richard Topcliffe, a notorious priest hunter. Incredibly, Watson made a second escape from prison to continue his ministry in England for up to thirteen years at the time of the letter.Footnote 31 Watson made it a point to say that in his stay at Marshalsea Prison, around the time of the Babington Plot in 1586, he was one of the priests who condemned Babington’s schemes and that he and other seminarians fought ‘togither against the ruine of or poore country wche we greately feared by that Spanified league.’ Watson stated that he had repeatedly spoken out against the Jesuits’ meddling in political affairs and their vain presumptions of being above the rest of the Catholic clergy in England. He even wrote letters to his contacts and associates dissuading them from entering into the Society. Watson went so far as to claim that he suffered heavier persecution from the followers of the Jesuits for speaking out against them than he otherwise felt at the hands of the magistrate, in spite of the physical torture he endured.Footnote 32
The Jesuits accused Watson of holding secret meetings with Robert Cecil, one of Elizabeth’s chief spymasters, which he denied in the face of his inconceivable passing in and out of prison. Although the Jesuits believed Watson to be a spy in the pay of the government, his fellow seminarians refused to believe such a thing; even if he did have dealings with Cecil, Watson claimed they were for the good of the country and English Catholics as a whole. Not only were a great number of the secular priests in arms against the Jesuits, but the Catholic nobility of northern England, especially Westmorland and Dacre, were opposed to their designs. Watson wrote at length against the Spanish inheriting the throne of England and favoured the Scots, which caused the Jesuits to accuse Watson of being schismatic since he preferred a Scot to inherit the throne ahead of a Spanish Catholic.Footnote 33
Watson wrote the letter primarily to assure the attorney general and the Queen that not all Catholics were of the same mind as Persons, whom Watson referred to under his pseudonym as Doleman. The secular priests wanted Persons’s desires for the English succession to be known in order ‘to cleare the inocent as also to abate the peoples fond affection to that Span. title.’ Watson wished for a truce between himself and the Elizabethan regime in which he promised that writing would be limited to the refutation of Persons and no inflammatory works would be published against Protestantism. Also, no further polemical works would target the Queen or her council as the Jesuits’ so often did. In return, Watson desired safe conduct from the government for his service to the Queen. Watson, however, still feared retaliation from the Jesuits for hindering them in their disloyal enterprises. He hoped that the attorney general would well consider these promises and to persuade the Queen and her royal council to at least alleviate the persecution that he suffered.Footnote 34
Thomas Bluet, another of the Appellant priests, echoed Watson’s feelings as he wrote Important Considerations in 1601. Bluet was of the opinion that the proceedings of the Elizabethan state towards recusant clergy and laymen were relatively lenient in the face of a dangerous and unprecedented situation. He even cast blame upon the secular priests for not speaking out sooner against the Jesuits, as ‘the State hath bene most iustly irritated and provoked against us.’ He reminded the reader that the very fact that there were so many Catholics left alive in the realm to talk about the Catholic faith was evidence for the merciful nature of the Queen. Although Bluet was naturally disappointed that Elizabeth, unlike her predecessor Mary, was not in communion with Rome, he also said that all Catholics owed her loyalty. Bluet also noted that during the first ten years of Elizabeth’s reign, times were relatively good for English Catholics as the government persecuted them very little. It was mainly the excommunication of Elizabeth in 1570, according to Bluet, that necessitated the harsher measures put in place against all English Catholics.Footnote 35 Additionally, he criticized the Jesuits and certain Catholics who stirred up rebellions for provoking Elizabeth. Bluet perceived that Elizabeth could hardly be blamed for their situation as it was her primary duty to defend the country from certain conspiring Catholics. Above all, Bluet recalled the sentiments of many Catholics during the attempted invasion of the Spanish Armada as he stated emphatically,
But if he [the pope] come or send hither an army, under pretence to establish the said Catholike religion, by force, and with the sword, we will ever be most ready, as native borne and true subiects to her Highnesse, with the hazard of our lives, and with al our might, to withstand and oppose ourselves against him, & to spend the best bloud in our bodies in defence of the Queene and our country.Footnote 36
The Jesuits in their efforts to exert further control over the English mission through the archpriest had only succeeded in alienating much of the secular clergy, who began to realize increasingly that their goals for the mission to England were far different from those of the Jesuits. The Appellants constantly said that they often felt less persecuted and harassed by the government itself than by the Jesuits because the latter threatened them with excommunication and published slanderous works against them. Most importantly, however, Appellants such as Bluet remembered the early years of Elizabeth’s reign in which there was little persecution of Catholics and the steadfast loyalty shown by them at the time of the Spanish Armada. The Appellants saw themselves as upholding the allegiance to the English monarchy that conservative Catholics had always maintained during Elizabeth’s reign and the Reformation as a whole.
Supporters of the Archpriest
It is well known that the Jesuits were among the strongest supporters of the archpriest. A number of the secular priests also approved of the archpriest although the volume of their surviving writing remains sparse compared to that of the Appellants. In January 1599, Richard Haddock and Martin Aray took the side of Cardinal Cajetan at the English College in Rome against their Appellant counterparts William Bishop and Robert Charnock. Haddock and Aray lamented the apparent lack of respect for church authority among the Appellants and believed that the Appellants were doing grave harm to the Catholic Church in England by stirring up resistance to the archpriest. They castigated the Appellants for going to Rome to dispute the legitimacy of the archpriest, repeating Persons’s claim that Blackwell had already been endorsed by the pope. They also claimed no fewer than thirty examples they could cite from ancient sources in the Church for the legitimacy of the office of the archpriest. The two secular priests dismissed the desires of the Appellants to make their wishes known on whether or not they would accept an archpriest, arguing that such a move would invite more sectarian strife. Haddock and Aray thought very highly of the Jesuits, saying that they were the best clergy England had to offer, being both selfless and highly industrious in working towards the greater glory of the Catholic Church.Footnote 37 Through these statements, it is clear that Haddock and Aray supported the archpriest mainly for preserving unity in the face of discord and also to ensure higher disciplinary standards.
Thomas Worthington, the president of the seminary at Douai, also came to the defense of the Jesuits in A Relation of Sixtene Martyrs. Worthington thought very highly of Persons, noting that during his stay in England he ‘did more good in two yeares, then I think anie of his emulators have donne in twentie.’ He also declared that ‘English Catholiques suffer for the Catholique Religion, and that the Seminarie Priests agree with the Jesuits.’Footnote 38 Worthington saw the Archpriest Controversy as an obstacle to the reconversion of England as it did nothing but ‘hinder the best meanes of increasing the Catholique faith in our Countrie, and consequently to hold heresie there the longer.’Footnote 39 For Worthington, much like Haddock and Aray, the dispute was more over matters of discipline than being in any form political or religious. He also downplayed the level of opposition towards the Jesuits, saying that the dispute was not between the seminary priests as a whole and the Jesuits, but rather ‘a smal partie of opposits disliking the same Subordination, and the fathers of the Societie.’Footnote 40
Robert Persons, the most visible Jesuit in the Archpriest Controversy, viewed the Appellant refusal to accept the archpriest as a deliberate move to hinder the growth of a reinvented Catholic community that could serve as a laboratory of the Counter-Reformation. He saw the emergence of the Appellants as creating a dangerous division among English Catholics which offended him greatly. Persons was convinced that the Jesuits held the key for Catholic renewal in England and he saw Appellant critique as slander aimed at preventing a strong resurgence of Catholicism in England.Footnote 41 In an effort to discredit his opponents, Persons wrote to Ottavio Mirto Frangipani, the papal nuncio in Flanders, in February 1602 and said the Appellants were really worse than they appeared. They were not seeking peace at all because they wrote against the king of Spain, whom Persons considered a valuable Catholic ally. Persons also saw the Appellants as coming dangerously close to being in schism because they wrote against the political authority of the pope. According to Persons, they were daily getting more rebellious, and strong disciplinary measures needed to be taken against them for working with Protestants, or they would never stop.Footnote 42
Persons claimed that the Appellants responded that they did acknowledge Blackwell as their superior, but yet they sought to discredit his authority. According to Persons, the Appellants identified the archpriest as being a foreign potentate whom they could not obey according to the Statute of Praemunire in English law, the same law that Henry VIII used to justify his schism with the Catholic Church. The Appellants also appealed to the traditions of the Catholic Church against the archpriest, believing that the Pope could not appoint an archpriest without their consent. They also accused the archpriest of holding a schismatic position on the matter that priests in England could not appeal over his authority to the Pope directly.Footnote 43 Persons, however, emphasized the teachings of the Doctors of the Church which counseled ready obedience to Church authority. He quoted Thomas Aquinas as saying that subjects are bound to obey their superiors in almost every matter, except in those of which the superior did not have adequate knowledge or if the order was contrary to Christian precepts or the command of a higher Church authority.Footnote 44
Although the majority of attention has been given to clerical support for the archpriest, he was not without a following among the lay gentry and aristocracy. In a letter to the pope, in February 1602, several unnamed lay nobles wrote on behalf of Blackwell. They believed that the Appellants went to Rome only to accuse the innocent of betrayal not only of England but of the Catholic Church. The three principal goals of the Appellants, according to the anonymous nobles, were ‘the abolition of the Archpriesthood, the withdrawal of the Jesuits, and the devastation of the seminaries.’ It appeared to the nobles that the Appellants were almost schismatic since they condoned taking the Oath of Supremacy and accused a number of their fellow Catholics of treason to the Crown. They further claimed that the Appellants initially opposed the appointment of an archpriest since it would obstruct any possible promotions in the Catholic hierarchy. Even though the Appellants bitterly opposed the archpriest, the nobles maintained that Blackwell still found it within himself to forgive them as they continued in their resistance. The nobles urged the pope not to listen to the Appellants, whom they characterized as ‘a few disobedient priests.’Footnote 45 It is worth emphasizing, however, that these noblemen remained anonymous in the letter, which calls into question how reliable this particular piece of correspondence remains in gauging support among the laity for the archpriest. Their sentiments towards the archpriest and feelings on the Oath of Supremacy appear far from the norm if one defines the Catholic community in England more broadly than a recusant nobility who could often afford to pay recusancy penalties.Footnote 46
Robert Persons justified the institution of the archpriest as a way not only to enforce Counter-Reformation standards of discipline on the English Catholic clergy, but also as a method to define sharply religious divisions in England—as was often the case with the Catholic Church on the continent. Persons thought that having an archpriest in England would end any reconciliatory tone towards the Elizabethan government that more conservative Catholics, such as the Appellants, were taking. Persons did have papal authority on his side, which the Appellants refused to believe at first, but the Appellants also justified resistance to the archpriest through English legal precedent such the Statute of Praemunire which Persons dismissed. The supporters of the archpriest that were not Jesuits, such as the other secular clergy, tended to back him more out of a desire to reform the morals of the English Church and to end any discord among English Catholics rather than for any political reasons. For Persons, the archpriest was a way to fully integrate the English Catholic community with a more modernized and international Catholic Church against Protestant heresy. The archpriest regime, however, only heightened previous Catholic resistance to the Jesuits and the Counter-Reformation because it would soon motivate a number of secular clergy and lay Catholics to make an overt declaration of allegiance to Elizabeth.
Arguments against the institution of the Archpriest and the protestation of allegiance
After the Appellants made their journey to Rome, their supporters back in England continued to identify the archpriest with the Jesuit faction and a continuation of the earlier dispute in the Wisbech Stirs. According to Christopher Bagshaw, Henry Garnet followed Weston’s example at Wisbech in seeking to exercise authority over all priests in England and Robert Persons set about to prolong what was started at Wisbech.Footnote 47 Bagshaw imagined the hand of Persons behind the appointment of the archpriest although it was the pope who made it official. Bagshaw wrote that even though Persons thought it necessary to have one individual in charge of all the Catholic clergy in England, he dared not to recommend a Jesuit to the pope because that would have made too obvious their designs; Persons had to nominate a secular priest instead. Bagshaw claimed that Persons named George Blackwell his candidate for archpriest of England because Blackwell was a close associate of the Jesuits, though not one himself. Bagshaw refused to believe that the pope was involved with the Jesuits’ schemes for an archpriest regime in England and demanded to see written approval from the pope himself for such a plan. There was such bitter division between the seculars and the Jesuits that ‘One Lister a Iesuit writeth a booke to prove us al schismatikes’ in which he wrote that those who opposed the archpriest ‘have incurred the sentence of excommunication.’Footnote 48
As the Appellants rejected the archpriest regime, Blackwell and his associates forbade lay Catholics from attending Masses celebrated by them or any religious services conducted by them and declared that those who did so were committing great sins. Bagshaw claimed that the Jesuits sought to discredit him by saying he did not verbally attack the Protestant adversary in his writings, and he gave several reasons why he chose not to lash out against the Elizabethan regime. The topic he was mainly concerned with did not afford an opportunity to attack the Elizabethan government as it strictly concerned the internal affairs of the Catholic community in England. Bagshaw, like Watson, claimed ‘that the Iesuiticall persecution begun against us, is much more grievous unto us, then that which we are subiect unto from the State.’ Bagshaw further pointed out that they would have to come to rely on the good favor of Elizabeth in order to obtain relief from persecution. He made it clear that although they differed from the government in religion, they still remained the Queen’s subjects and emphasized that they, unlike the Jesuits and their followers, would not withdraw their allegiance or seek her overthrow.Footnote 49
In 1601, one of the Appellants, John Mush, sought to defend the secular priests against accusations of causing schism and disruption in the Catholic Church while simultaneously delegitimizing the archpriest.Footnote 50 The Jesuits charged the Appellants with disobedience since they would not recognize the validity of the archpriest, but Mush made very much the same argument that the Elizabethan government had often suspected of Catholics in general of serving two masters. Just as Christ had preached against serving two lords, ‘it is impossible to be obedient to the See Apostolick, but that by necessary sequele, the same observant must disobey Master Blackwell the Archpriest’ because, despite the reality of the situation, Mush felt that the pope had little to do with the creation of the archpriest in England and that Blackwell existed outside of legitimate church hierarchy.Footnote 51 Mush’s argument shows that at least some English Catholics were influenced politically more by their own government and their Protestant countrymen, as well as a nascent sense of nationalism evolving out of their conservatism, than by any argument the Jesuits could have made in support of following the decrees and bulls of the Holy See.Footnote 52
Although Mush was very much opposed to the archpriest, he excused Blackwell by saying that Blackwell did not know what his office really meant or the treasonable practices that the Jesuits expected of him. Mush, however, disparaged the laity and the less experienced priests who seemed predisposed to be persuaded by the Jesuits. He claimed that the Jesuits thought they were closest among Catholics to perfection in morals, virtue, and knowledge, and he warned against following them because humankind is inherently imperfect. Mush cited the doctrine of Original Sin and the writings of pagan philosophers on the imperfection of humans, and he foretold that the pride of the Jesuits would lead to their ultimate ruin and downfall. Mush made a direct parallel between the Puritans and the Jesuits as he considered both groups vain and hypocritical.Footnote 53 Indeed, conservatives in the Church of England and the Catholic Church in England agreed over their distaste for the radicalism of both Jesuits and Puritans.
Anthony Copley, a lay Catholic and poet, took the side of the Appellants against the Jesuits in his pamphlet, An answere to a letter of a Iesuited Gentleman.Footnote 54 Throughout, Copley argued that the average seminary priest was a better exemplar of Christian virtue than any Jesuit. Seminary priests, Copley claimed, were much more ready to martyr themselves for the faith while the Jesuits often avoided martyrdom as he writes that ‘from Father Ignatius time their founder to this day (which is now well nigh a hundred yeeres since) halfe so many Martyrs thorought the whole world in all that time of the Societie, as have beene of our Seminaries within these thirtie yeeres here in our countrie.’Footnote 55 Copley also argued that it was far more traditional and natural for Catholics to petition their own government for religious freedom than to hope for foreign intervention in overthrowing the rightful sovereign as the Jesuits desired.Footnote 56 He assigned little blame to Queen Elizabeth for her treatment of Catholics, as Copley realized that relations between church and state at the time could hardly call for anything but at least a partial suppression of Catholicism. Copley hoped that one day Catholics might petition Queen Elizabeth to secure religious toleration rather than going along with the Jesuit vision of establishing an officially Catholic nation at any cost.Footnote 57 Copley’s insistence on petitioning the English monarch for relief rather than advocating a revolution to establish a Catholic state mirrored the conservative sentiments of the wider English Catholic community.
As Mush, Bagshaw, and Copley wrote against the establishment of the archpriest in England, the other Appellants added their voices to the Archpriest Controversy in a letter sent out from Wisbech in January 1601. They accused Blackwell of causing nothing but further division among Catholics in England. The Appellants claimed to be in desperate need of funding from the Catholic hierarchy while Blackwell prevented money getting to the Appellants and accused them of being greedy. Blackwell wanted to settle the dispute between himself and the Appellants in Flanders, but the Appellants knew well that the Spanish Infanta held sway there and that Persons considered her a legitimate heir to the English throne. The Appellants sought to remain as apolitical as possible and used this as a reason for appealing their case to the pope.Footnote 58
William Watson also gave his thoughts on the conflict between the Appellants and the Jesuits in A decacordon of ten quodlibeticall questions concerning religion and state. In this treatise, Watson took a very harsh tone towards the Jesuits, comparing them to ‘martiall men, or common souldiers in the field of warre, in all temporall, mundane, and stratagemicall affaires.’ According to Watson, the seminary priests made the Jesuits’ cause of reintroducing Catholicism to England their own, until they were entangled by the same penal laws that the Elizabethan government aimed at the Jesuits. It was then that the seminarians realized that the Jesuits were really there for secular reasons: to overthrow the government and also to control the English clergy. Watson condemned the Jesuits for their apparent contempt of ecclesiastical and secular order in their quest for pure religion which few English Catholics obsessed over. For Watson, as for most conservatives in England whether Protestant or Catholic, respect for church hierarchy and the magistrate were inextricably linked and the Jesuits lacked either.Footnote 59
As the Appellants continued to write against the archpriest, they negotiated with the papal nuncio Ottavio Mirto Frangipani. They were able to obtain letters from Frangipani that urged peace above all else, but they interpreted them as being in their favour. Interestingly, the Appellants borrowed a technique used by Protestants in the Church of England by referring to the archpriest as a Spaniard not only to depict him as a foreign invader but also to gain support from the king of France and to use his endorsement in Rome. The Appellants, like other moderate Catholics, clearly opposed the power of the papacy to depose political leaders and considered the archpriest a traitor whom they believed held to this line of thought.Footnote 60
Richard Hall, the canon of the Jesuit College of St. Omer in France, also wrote to Frangipani on the goals of the Appellants in 1602. Hall’s letter to Frangipani provides further evidence that the Appellants were in step with pre-Elizabethan Catholic precedent as, following cultural and legal tradition, they instinctively obeyed the political dictates of the English government before the demands of papacy.Footnote 61 He presented their main grievance as being that the archpriest was instituted without their representation. On the contrary, they agreed beforehand that two among them should become archbishop and bishop, splitting England between them. Like Persons, Hall noted that the Appellants invoked the Statute of Praemunire to nullify the pope’s influence in deciding their own clerical affairs. One of the Appellants’ main concerns, according to Hall, was that Catholic parents were sending their offspring to be educated in Spain or Rome, countries which, though Catholic, were still foreign. The Appellants viewed the Spanish king’s generosity towards English Catholic exiles with great suspicion since they saw it as merely a way to win the English throne. The Appellants once again stated unequivocally that if a Catholic monarch should happen to invade England, even with the pope’s approval, all Catholics at home were bound to support Elizabeth against the invasion just as they had promised to do so in 1588 against the Spanish Armada.Footnote 62
Although originating as a hierarchical dispute, the Archpriest Controversy took on an added political dimension. The archpriest, for the Appellants, symbolized what the Jesuits had been planning all along: the domination of the English Catholic clergy. The Appellants argued that the creation of the archpriest was without precedent in England and ultimately unnecessary. For them, the archpriest was just another way for the Jesuits to enforce their precisian views of Catholicism on moderate factions of Catholics among the clergy and laity which made them as unpopular as their Puritan counterparts in the Church of England. The Appellants also saw the archpriest as another medium that the Jesuits could use to follow through with their plans, which they had never abandoned, for the overthrow of Elizabeth. They feared that Jesuit domination of the English Catholic community through the archpriest would erode its traditions of loyalty to the sovereign monarch.
The failure of a second appeal to the pope over the archpriest in 1602 caused the Appellant faction to turn increasingly towards political measures with the Elizabethan regime which they increasingly viewed as natural allies against the Jesuits.Footnote 63 The final and most visible rejection of Jesuit political ideology came with the Protestation of Allegiance later that same year signed by thirteen secular priests who desired to put to rest any questions about where their true political loyalties lay. Not only did priests sign the Protestation, but laymen did as well, as they promised all due loyalty and obedience to the Queen. They also swore simultaneously that they would not support in any case any prince or power other than Elizabeth. The Protestation of Allegiance diverged significantly from the political practice of the Jesuits by stating that they would not under any circumstances obey the pope if he happened to make another bull or other pronouncement against the authority of Elizabeth. They also promised to resist actively any foreign invasion of England that had the aim of a Catholic restoration.Footnote 64 The Protestation of Allegiance put on paper what many English Catholics, including some of the staunchest recusants, felt about allegiance to the Queen as they were nothing but traditionally minded on this issue.Footnote 65
While imprisoned during the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, George Blackwell would later sign the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance in 1607 and he encouraged other Catholics to do likewise which led swiftly to his removal by the papacy. Blackwell’s replacement as archpriest, George Birkhead, was more acceptable to the anti-Jesuit faction among the secular priests because he was not under the Jesuits’ influence.Footnote 66 Although Birkhead wanted to assure Rome that he could be counted on to support the pope’s prerogatives in order to keep his position, like the Appellants he so earnestly desired to convince the Jacobean regime that moderate Catholicism was no threat to King James.Footnote 67 Over the longer term, the Appellants may have failed to overthrow the institution of the archpriest, but it is clear from Blackwell’s signing of the Oath of Allegiance in 1607 and Birkhead’s mild approach towards the Jacobean state that their influence continued to be felt in the English Catholic community long after there was any controversy over the archpriest. Most significantly, in 1623, William Bishop received an episcopal appointment over England as Bishop of Chalcedon. This signified the final ascendancy of the Appellant faction as Bishop came as close as he could in professing loyalty to King James without ever taking the Oath of Allegiance.Footnote 68
Conclusion
While Tutino, Questier, Scully, and now Lockey differ in opinion about whether the Jesuits were a modernizing or conservative force in the English Catholic Church, they agree that the Jesuits espoused a mode of thinking that was unique among English people, both Catholics and Protestants. The Jesuits did want to modernize English Catholicism, but much of the Catholic community, like the rest of England, was very conservative in its views regarding loyalty to the national sovereign. Although they viewed themselves as conservatives restoring true religion, the Jesuits represented a different vision of modernizing the English Catholic Church to make it more internationally based, more centralized, and less insular, similar to the intentions that the Catholic King James II would have nearly a century later for modernizing England in the mould of absolutist France.Footnote 69
The Jesuits’ ideas on the nature of authority held no wide acceptance among English Catholics as was proven by the sentiments of the members of the Catholic community at large, who, since the accession of Elizabeth, had expressed no desire other than to remain faithful subjects in spite of whatever punishment they may have suffered for their beliefs. Except for perhaps a minority of recusants, the divide on the Archpriest Controversy had little effect on the average lay Catholic, but it was also just as much an argument about politics as it was over the nature of ecclesiastical organization of the Catholic Church in England. The repeated identification in the Appellants’ writing of the Jesuits with the Spanish is particularly significant as it shows a clear element of political antagonism between the Appellants and the Jesuits. Although Robert Scully argues that ‘The real winner in all this internecine Catholic strife was the Elizabethan regime,’ the goals of the Appellants aligned not only with the Elizabethan government but also with much of the Catholic community.Footnote 70 The Appellants had the opportunity to declare their allegiance to Queen Elizabeth in the Protestation of Allegiance as many other English Catholics would have gladly done during the myriad of other crises that involved the Spanish and the papacy.
The divide between the Jesuits and the secular clergy, however, did not suddenly begin during the 1590s. Questier is correct in arguing that the Archpriest Controversy was a conflict over whether the Jesuits or the Appellants would represent the interests of the Catholic community, but it must be remembered that much of the secular clergy, like the Appellants, were seminarians. A gradually deepening divide between the secular clergy and the Jesuits had begun to take shape in the seminaries themselves by the middle of the 1580s, most notably with Christopher Bagshaw’s expulsion from the English College in Rome in 1585.Footnote 71 The increasing gap between executions of seminary and Jesuit priests from the latter half of the 1580s through the 1590s further contributed to division as the seminarians suspected they were sacrificing much more than the Jesuits in the propagation of the faith throughout England.Footnote 72
The Archpriest Controversy is one example among many others in the sixteenth century of the complex and often turbulent relationship between the Catholic Church and civil government during the Counter-Reformation. Although originating as a dispute over enforcement of clerical standards of obedience, it quickly morphed into a battle over the future of the Catholic Church in England and whether it could exist in officially Protestant England without seeking to bring about official religious change. The English Jesuits favoured the Catholic Church in England being more subject to authority in Rome and under the absolutist rule of the papacy that could enthrone and dethrone monarchs at will. Conversely, the Appellants had the traditional English view on the papacy, dating back to the Statute of Praemunire in 1393 or even as far back as the conflict between Thomas Becket and Henry II from 1163 to 1170, as being less than absolute, especially in political affairs. The Appellants reaffirmed the actions taken by the majority of English Catholics when they did not join with the Jesuits or the Spanish in their attempted conquest of England, whether spiritually through the Jesuit Mission or militarily in the Spanish Armada. The Archpriest Controversy should be seen as a critical part of a longer chain of events, along with the Jesuit Mission, the Spanish Armada, and the Gunpowder Plot, which officially clarified the inherently conservative nature of the Catholic community.
