I

When Persons and William Allen edited Nicholas Sander's De origine ac progressu schismatis Anglicani they decided to pay much more attention to Mary Tudor's reign than the book's original author had.Footnote ¹⁸ In an earlier version, Sander paid scant attention to her reign and offered no substantial discussion of why it did not lead to long-lasting reform, aside from a quick mention of her providentially ordained death. Allen and Persons, on the other hand, discuss the regime's limitations that ultimately resulted in God's continued punishment. The queen herself was a model of Christian piety and her victory over challengers to the throne at the start of her reign was a reward for this. She and Cardinal Pole, who was the main ecclesiastical authority once he set foot in England, were among the very few people untainted by the heresies of Edward vi and his evil counsellors. Thus, Marian failures, as described by Persons and Allen, had little to do with intent. Both Pole and Mary acknowledged the authority of Rome, used their authorities to re-establish important ecclesiastical institutions (including religious orders), hoped for the return of ecclesiastical properties from secular hands, sought to reform universities and extinguish all Protestant innovations, punished heretics and tried to restore all ceremonies of the Church.Footnote ¹⁹ And yet, for all their good will, they could not cleanse the Church of all its perceived corruptions.

Allen and Persons comment disapprovingly on the ways in which Mary and Pole (sometimes with the blessing and support of Rome) proved accommodating to impure elements in England. To start, when the mass had been restored, there was no proper means by which to ensure quality control. Allen and Persons lament the absent mechanisms to assess priests, by whom they had been instituted, and their proper qualifications. As a result, though perhaps well-meaning, Marian priests carried out their duties rashly and inadequately.Footnote ²⁰ Despite their best intentions the Marian Church and Rome also had to compromise on what to do with ecclesiastical lands. There were many people of different confessional stripes who feared the loss of worldly possessions and the regime ultimately succumbed to those concerns. Permission was thus granted for the retention of church lands in secular hands, even if that concession was accompanied by a warning against such a sinful arrangement.Footnote ²¹ So mighty a submission was accompanied by several others. Persons and Allen mention how the regime forgave those who had married during schism within improper degrees, and, in line with such laxity regarding clergy, Mary and Pole allowed for the re-integration of bishops created during schism.Footnote ²² Even university reforms that generally received high marks from Persons and Allen are said to be muddied by the fact that Pole had allowed married priests to remain in power.Footnote ²³ Although Allen and Persons insinuate empathy for the difficult situation which Mary faced given the corruptions of the times, failure to meet sinfulness with full rigour ultimately failed to establish lasting change. Leniency bred corruption. Allen and Persons insist that the disruption of church discipline could only lead to further errors. Footnote ²⁴

Marian failures occurred by providential design. As Allen and Persons suggest, Mary's reign was a respite from heretical rule, a sign of consolation for true Catholics provided by God.Footnote ²⁵ Ultimately, however, the time was not ripe to defeat Protestantism, presumably because – and here the line between individual will and divine diktat is hazy – England had not been properly reformed. The half-measures of Marian subjects were proof of this and its consequences. For example, among the bishops of the Marian Church, most of them fully understood the insufficiency of taking leadership roles in the renewed Church without going through the proper ecclesiastical motions. Despite allowances for sidestepping proper Catholic means of confirming their clerical posts, most did seek out papal forgiveness. The one that did not, though he was said not to have done so maliciously, was the only one to have relapsed during the Elizabethan regime.Footnote ²⁶ Clearly the failure to play by proper Catholic rules of decorum enabled heresy's spread. Such stories of individual failures were synecdochal of the broader ‘national’ failures that led to the rise of Elizabeth.

Nearly fifteen years after the publication of De schismate Anglicano, Persons returned to writing a historical narrative that touched on the Marian period, this time in the form of a book (that remained in manuscript) about troubles within the English Catholic community. In it, Persons situated the troubles of the Marian regime within a narrative of elite political corruption at the centre of which stood the earl of Arundel and William Paget. Both had been important counsellors to Edward vi and had been among Queen Jane's momentary supporters. In Persons's telling, Arundel comes off as an opportunistic Catholic and Paget as a secret, corrupt Protestant. Mary disliked Paget, but he became a prominent counsellor after lobbying by other advisors who thought he ‘knew much as having been secretary and counselor to two former kings and of great credit with the Protestants also and so might help every way much’.Footnote ²⁷ This decision proved fatal as it ushered in factional politics that would ultimately undermine Catholic reform. Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, wanted revenge against Paget for having excluded him during Edward's reign. Knowing this, Paget went out of his way to support the Spanish match between Philip ii and Mary in opposition to Gardiner, a tactic that led to deepening divisions between Protestants and Catholics and within both communities as they rallied for or against a Spanish marriage. Paget ensured that this dynamic worked to his advantage. When the Spanish king came to England, he had Philip's ear. He was thus behind Philip's decision to save Elizabeth from punishment. Paget convinced Philip that, after Elizabeth's death, Mary Stuart would challenge Spanish influence. Paget and his allies also delayed Cardinal Pole's arrival in England, again because he convinced the Spanish that his arrival would undermine the Spanish match, either because Pole would ally with Gardiner or because Pole would want to marry the queen himself.Footnote ²⁸ For the rest of Mary's reign, internal animosities would persist, with the result that the regime held Gardiner and Pole ‘shorted and much limited in the proceedings against principal protestants upon divers reasons of state suggested from time to time to the Spanish council, which in effect did most in those affairs’.Footnote ²⁹

This vision of factional politics crucially divided the commonwealth and made it near impossible to reform England. Part of the problem had to do with continued Protestant influence and the failure to choke those influences off. Protestant involvement in and around court helped to perpetuate the secularist climate of English political culture in which politicking trumped thorough spiritual reform. It was along the axis of political calculation that Pole was prohibited from doing his job for two long years while he waited anxiously in Flanders and it was along the axis of political calculation that Catholics could make alliances with Protestants that led to serious discord among themselves. This led to the establishment of a Church that was riven by disputes and which was saturated by worldly prudence. When Elizabeth came to power, the ecclesiastical institutions of the previous regime thus crumbled.

Upon realising the nature of Elizabethan schemes, some wanted to resist. Indeed, some bishops wanted to go to Paul's Cross to excommunicate the new queen. But others tried to work with her. Many among the lower clerical orders based their willingness to accommodate to the regime's desires on the memory of similar arrangements under Henry viii. Others answered the call of duty. Some priests believed that their ministries (unlike those of bishops) required loyalty to parishioners and that ‘Immediate pastors of souls might bear and dissemble some little time to see what would become of matters and so keep out heretics, which otherwise would destroy all.’ The more zealous saw the errors of such compromises and argued that those who entertained them did so out of ‘worldly fear or love rather of the world, that would drive them in the end flatley and openly to deny Christ’.Footnote ³⁰

In between the two texts discussed so far, Persons wrote the Memorial, which served as partial gloss to both. The Memorial differed from De schismate Anglicano and the Domesticall dificulties in that it was not (primarily) a historical work and was more explicitly a white paper for future anti-Elizabethan activity. In looking forward, Persons nevertheless offered his most succinct and pungent critique of the Marian regime and broader Catholic reformist impulses. He compared what happened in England to the failures of the Council of Trent, where the Church resorted to superficial mending. Though vague on the point, Persons suggests that ‘when it came to matters of Reformation of Manners, it [the council of Trent] was constrained to accommodate itself in many things to the capacity of the decay'd State of Christendom which then they found’.Footnote ³¹ The Church tempered its decrees much like a doctor might for a patient and in doing so compromised the effectiveness of its remedies.Footnote ³² In England, too, reform was frail. To begin, there was no effective reconciliation process, only a ‘general absolution … without due search and consideration of what had been committed, or what satisfaction was to be made to God and man’.Footnote ³³ Without a more comprehensive approach, the spirit could not be renewed. The dangers of this were most troubling among the clergy because many priests who married under Edward ‘were admitted presently to the altar, without other satisfaction than only to send their concubines out of mens sights’.Footnote ³⁴ Some of these priests had not even confessed their sins before resuming their spiritual activities. Those who had previously preached against Catholics suddenly started preaching to them, those who had persecuted Catholics suddenly started persecuting Protestants. According to Persons, things proceeded ‘as a stage-play, where men do change their persons and parts, without changing their minds or affections’.Footnote ³⁵ Persons thus lashed out against the shape-shifting subject who pretended Catholic allegiance only for personal gain.

As Sander's history had implied, a sincere return to the Church required the return of ecclesiastical properties as a first step towards rehabilitating their illegitimate owners. Persons invoked Scripture: ‘cleanse yourself thoroughly of the old Leaven’ (1 Corinthians v.7). He argued that ‘the most principal old Leaven that distained and distempered the other actions of our Catholick Realm at the last change, and offended the eyes of our Just God most highly, that they took no sound order at all for the reasonable satisfaction, in this great affair of Restitution to be made to God and his Church’.Footnote ³⁶ Toleration exhibited by Mary and the pope regarding church property had been the result of necessity: they took what they could get instead of losing it all. But how could a man's conscience be allayed if he held on to property that was not his and used it in wholly inappropriate ways? Lands being used against the wishes of institutional founders or donors could not ‘in any Reason or Law of Justice be wholly taken from those uses’.Footnote ³⁷ Proper restitution would ensure that ‘God's Justice in part may be satisfied, [that] Men's Consciences [may be] quieted, their Estates at home for the time to come, assured, the world abroad edified and the Church of God, in some portion of equity, satisfied’.Footnote ³⁸

The Memorial confirms that Persons saw England's failure as a result of institutional limitations. His ‘positive’ arguments all hinge on altering the relationship between Church and State in such a way as to ensure both probity and piety. Part of this had to do with internal clerical reform monitored by the vigilant eyes of a good bishop. Part of this also has to do with other probing ecclesiastical institutions such as the Inquisition. But from the start of Catholic renewal under Elizabeth's Catholic successor, Persons envisioned the more aggressive involvement of clerics in secular politics. Abbots and bishops should return to a prominent place in parliament and, more notably, at the beginning bishops would help to select knights and burgesses for it. They would ‘judge their virtue and forwardness in religion, and … confirm their election, or have a negative voice’.Footnote ³⁹ Bishops would also act as intermediaries between monarch and nobles. He suggested that ‘when any poor man were injured by a great he might be heard easily, and remedied, and so taken into the prince's peculiar protection, as he durst complain, and not fear afterwards the others power and violence’. All this, he continued, so ‘that the people would only depend on the prince, and great men would come into less suspicion and danger, and the commonwealth and prince stand more assured from troubles’.Footnote ⁴⁰ At court, too, clerics would have a greater presence. Aside from secular royal advisors, Persons called for the establishment of a ‘table of conscience’. Inspired by Portuguese precedent, it would be made up of learned men ‘notorious for their Piety and good conscience whether they were of religious orders or no, and the head or chief of these, commonly the king's own confessor, who might with more security, by council and assistance of these able men, direct the king's mind’.Footnote ⁴¹

Such moves were deemed essential because only through more direct ecclesiastical guidance could past errors be overcome. Persons's critique dwelled on the idea that reformist zeal had been watered down by tactical decisions made in light of heresy's progress and the presence of undoubtedly impure elements within secular and spiritual realms. There were no proper supports to enable the kind of soul-searching and monitoring of true interior conversion that would be essential for the proper restoration of the Church and for the proper purification of so many lost souls, nor were there any mechanisms to ensure that the immoralities at court could be overcome even when governed by a good, pious monarch like Mary. Thus, the Church could not be reformed by good monarchical example nor by confidence in man's goodness alone, but by structural changes that would mitigate the extent to which evil counsel and forms of secular prudence would intervene in decision-making and policy.

II

There is no doubt that Persons's understanding of Marian limitations was framed by concerns about the English Catholic community at the time that he wrote. Each of the books mentioned above was written at different junctures of growing confraternal strife. Sander's history was published amid ongoing debates about licit levels of accommodation to the Elizabethan regime. The Memorial was written at a critical moment of confusion and upheaval in England and in the English Colleges on the Continent, especially between Jesuits and secular priests, but also between hispanophilic elements in the English Catholic community and others that were decidedly not. Domesticall difficulties was written at a moment of intense backbiting between secular priests and Jesuits known as the Appellant Controversy. As Peter Lake and Michael Questier have shown, many of these conflicts centred on mutually exclusive claims of purity and impurity among English Catholic rivals.Footnote ⁴² Persons's writings fit within this mould. His criticism of Catholic limitations during the Marian regime can be interpreted as finger-pointing at weak Catholics of his own times.

These books were also written at moments when English Catholics were trying to work out the institutional means by which England's Catholic renewal might take place. De schismate Anglicano was printed on the eve of what for some was a long-awaited conquest of England by Spanish forces (the Armada that would sail in 1588), the Memorial was written in the thick of what seemed to be another Armada effort in 1596 and the Domesticall difficulties was written amid controversies about how to structure the English Church, either under traditional episcopal leadership or by means of an extraordinary archpriest. This helps to explain Persons's interest in matters of institutional coherence and effectiveness.

Even if these ‘biases’ are granted, however, they are not grounds for dismissal. On the contrary, because these books were being written during moments of change and contestation, they are evidence of an important strand of early modern Catholic thought during a time of heated religious strife. These books were not meant to convince or attract the heretical nemesis, but to appeal to an audience of (potentially) sympathetic Catholic readers, who, while imperfect and flawed, would have presumably been open to Persons's basic assessments and presuppositions. Thus, while these books might have been on many counts self-serving, Persons's interpretive framework was not merely self-interested. On the contrary, these sources flood light onto an interpretive thread within early modern Catholicism during an age of religious war.

Moreover, Persons's take on Marian reform was not a fantasy created ex nihilo. While his interpretation of the facts is debatable, he does offer a set of plausible narratives. Despite what some modern scholarship might say about the successes, or possible successes, of the Marian Church had Mary lived longer, Persons's stories are not necessarily at odds with some modern historiographical assertions. The transition from Protestantism to Catholicism seems to have been swift, but from the start it does not seem to have been accompanied by rigorous examination of converts and their conversion. The Marian regime was satisfied with nominal allegiances that must have been rooted, as Duffy has put it, in fear and opportunism as well as the ‘sheer unexpectedness of Mary's political success’.Footnote ⁴³ It is also clear that Marian reforms required compromises and adjustments, including the slow re-implementation of heresy laws and concessions to parliament regarding church property. The Marian regime also saw the absorption of politiques like Paget into governanceFootnote ⁴⁴ and political calculations were involved in the delaying of Pole's arrival as well as Pole's exclusion of Jesuits from England.Footnote ⁴⁵ There is also little doubt that the rapid concessions made to Elizabeth by Catholic clergy and Catholic subjects more generally revealed something of the transactional and situational nature of confessional identity.

Evidence of ample vigorous resistance is still debatable. Haigh, for example, suggested that what remained of the Marian clergy amounted to a ragtag group of recalcitrant priests.Footnote ⁴⁶ More recent accounts of the aftermath of the Marian clergy do not fundamentally reconfigure this narrative. Although Smith's analysis of Marian cathedral clergy networks early in Elizabeth's reign provides grounds to explore the depth of early recusancy, further work is needed to suggest that more than a small number of Marian clergy in England fought the good fight. There is no doubt that these early recusants were a minority among many others who in one way or another conformed to the Elizabethan regime and who, by Persons's standards at least, would have been deemed deficient in zeal.Footnote ⁴⁷ The point here is not that there was no such thing as Marian recusancy, but that Persons's assessment was grounded on a series of contemporary maximalist arguments and conforms to a range of possibilities allowed for by modern scholarship.

The record should be cleared on what Persons said about Marian Catholics. Haigh contends that Persons's Domesticall difficulties ‘has two groups of villains, the bishops and the parish clergy who betrayed their faith to hold on to their livings’.Footnote ⁴⁸ This suggestion ignores the nuance of Persons's narrative. In fact, he does see weak Catholics – bishops and parish clergy – as culprits, but he does not suggest that the weakness was total. Indeed, he emphasises deep divisions among Marian priests on how to proceed. Some, especially among the bishops, were not willing to sacrifice conscience so easily and ‘divers wished to go to Paules Crosse and excommunicate the Q. and her hereticall counselours’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The eventual floundering of this rigorist impulse was caused not by inherent evils among the bishops, but because of failed leadership. Archbishop Heath took Elizabeth's side and so the body of bishops effectively lost their head. The ‘inferior clergy’ also fell victim to divisions. Some of them were no doubt self-interested dissemblers, but they did not ultimately make up a majority. Persons insists that ‘against these opposed themselves many others the more zealous party affirming that this was worldly feare or love rather of the world, that would drive them in the end flattly and openly to deny Christ’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The demise of English Catholicism was thus not the fault of Marian priests as a whole, but a result of the divisions that arose among the steadfast and those who were not; or as Michael Questier has put it, Persons believed ‘some were weak and some were strong’.Footnote ⁵¹

Persons's interpretation of the dichotomy between good and bad Catholics was based on a prevalent belief by hard-liners that forms of compromise – a common, if multifaceted, dynamic – within the English Catholic community were a fundamental source of Protestant success. This is perhaps most easily observed in the martyrological literature men like Persons promoted and produced for broad consumption – from Poland to Peru, from London to Rome. These types of books were fundraising tools for the mission and served to ‘sell’ the English Catholic cause, but they also catered to a demand for such stories within a religiously fractured context of competing martyrologies between Catholics and Protestants during an age of religious war. Martyrologies nurtured real longing among Catholics for models of good Christian zeal that both proved the rightness of their cause and the ends to which they must fight against the existential enemy. Thus while it might be easy to see in Persons and others like him an inclination toward the aggrandisement of a (Jesuit) mission at the expense of others, it is important to emphasise that these narratives also conformed to a cultural necessity for martyrdom, the ultimate sacrifice, as a real model of behaviour in contrast with various forms of acquiescence.Footnote ⁵²

The fear of Protestantism across the Catholic world was stoked by fears of internal weakness. The prevalence of this dynamic is hard to miss, but one text from the 1580s allows us to see how it crystallised in transnational polemic. In 1586 Louis d'Orléans, a lawyer and prominent voice of the Catholic League in Paris, wrote a pamphlet in the voice of an English exile: Avertissement des Catholiques Anglois aux François Catholiques.Footnote ⁵³ The book is of interest here because it brings together three important blocks of early modern Catholic activity. Its framing as an ‘English’ text suggests that it attempted to reproduce a set of English Catholic tropes which cohered with the needs and wants of Catholics who belonged to the radical League in France. The book was also translated, not once but twice, into Spanish.Footnote ⁵⁴ The book's Anglo-Spanish-French relevance was due to a shared polemical charge against heresy and, more particularly, against Henry of Navarre, who was poised to take the French throne after Henry iii died. The book thus has plenty of things to say about the dangers of Protestants and the dangers posed by Navarre in particular. Just as important – and more relevant to what has been suggested so far – the book analyses corruptions within the realm of Catholicism that led to English heresy and the dangers of its spread to France and Spain. The threat of heresy was partly extrinsic, but internal contexts had to be propitious for successful infection. Thus, d'Orléans talks about a sleepy kind of Catholicism that threatened to destroy France altogether. Priests exercised their function in name only. They were often ignorant and lazy, more interested in worldly gain than the salvation of souls.Footnote ⁵⁵ The political class was similarly corrupted, guided by self-interest and prone to offering politique advice. These realities informed wrong-headed efforts at compromise with heretics. The Colloquy of Poissy stands out as a particular failure as it only succeeded in giving heretics free rein; where once they hid in ‘caves and underground ditches’, now they became ‘more audacious, they abandoned the night to show themselves in the light of day’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Only after futile attempts at negotiation fell through could Protestants afflict society at large and challenge the king.

Persons not only shared prejudices against ‘heretics’, but also shared an understanding of heresy as an institutional problem. In 1590 an anonymous English author – probably William GiffordFootnote ⁵⁷ – wrote one of the most assertive League texts, De iusta reipublicae christianae … authoritate.Footnote ⁵⁸ In it he argued that while Christ gave ‘kings palaces, he gave bishops Churches: to one the body, to the others souls; to one external civic matters (republica civile); to the other interior affairs of the republic and of the holy Church’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Because the Church was directly instituted by God and because it tends to superior things, it was ultimately superior to secular governance. He insisted that the Church does not exist within the state, but the state within the Church. Though heretics might resist this logic, even Muslims understood this hierarchy which allowed the Church to punish those who failed to protect or indeed challenged ecclesiastical institutions.Footnote ⁶⁰ Time and again he showed how secular governance depends on ecclesiastical support. Taxation, for example, depends on the will of high clergymen within the estates general. More broadly, the very laws of the state (to which the prince is bound) must conform to ecclesiastical diktat. It is not so much that the Church makes laws, but that the laws are made under the tutelage ‘of bishops and the instruction of synods’.Footnote ⁶¹

Persons was undoubtedly influenced by Gifford's work,Footnote ⁶² but he also shared a point of view held by important Jesuit thinkers in Spain. Pedro de Ribadeneyra was his closest intellectual acquaintance there and in the Memorial he promoted Ribadeneyra's most widely read ‘political’ work, the Tratado de la religion y virtudes del principe christiano.Footnote ⁶³ This text was a screed against Machiavellians and politiques who, in their devilish atheism, treated matters of state and matters of faith separately. No doubt secular rulers should ensure their subjects’ ‘temporal happiness’ and Ribadeneyra did not underplay royal powers as they pertained to secular justice, war and commerce. But he believed that success on these fronts must not be divorced from religion. Indeed, he wanted to replace preposterous notions of a secular Reason of State with a Christian one. The Tratado argued that because soul is superior to body, both secular and religious authorities needed to work toward the maintenance of true faith. The prince's primary duty was to ‘seek God out, to keep his Holy Faith, and to ensure all his subjects keep it’.Footnote ⁶⁴ All his decisions should be based on a Christian logic: kings needed ‘no other teacher, nor any other guide than the Christian religion’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Ribadeneyra's discussion is not clear on the nuts and bolts of how this godly logic can be ensured, but elsewhere there are glimpses of an ideal institutional arrangement. In his history of the English schism (1588), for example, he insisted that ‘Churches and ecclesiastical prelates be rich, and that they have authority’. He pointed approvingly to Germany where Catholicism had been conserved in those parts ‘subject to bishops and Church prelates’.Footnote ⁶⁶

A recombination of institutional authority is at the heart of another contemporary writing at the end of the sixteenth and start of the seventeenth centuries: Juan de Mariana. Though it is unclear how much contact there was between Persons and Mariana, scholars have in the past noted resonances in their work, especially between Persons's notorious Conference about the succession to the crown of England and Mariana's even more notorious mirror of princes, De rege et regis institutione (1599). The commonalities between De rege and Persons's Memorial are quite simple: both men perceived an institutional imbalance between secular and spiritual authority and both men had very specific and very practical approaches to changing the malfunctions of state.Footnote ⁶⁷ Though, as Harald Braun has pointed out, Mariana is most often remembered as a promoter of tyrannicide and constitutionalist thought, one of his most radical contributions to early modern discourse had to do with his advocacy of ‘royal-ecclesiastical co-rulership’ in which ‘bishops are to suffuse the whole of secular government with their benevolent authority’.Footnote ⁶⁸ For example, Mariana believed that bishops, ‘like princes and great lords of the political community’,Footnote ⁶⁹ should play a more prominent role in the Spanish cortes, Footnote ⁷⁰ and that they should monitor the conduct and integrity of civil magistrates.Footnote ⁷¹ Such arguments were rooted in a historical understanding of the roles that clerics had traditionally played in Spanish politics, but, more broadly, they articulate what appears to have been a resonant vision of the need for clerical oversight in political affairs to ensure that political matters remained grounded in a Christian ethic.

In sum, when Persons thought about the Marian regime and its limitations, his interpretation must be seen as a result of ideological attachments and polemical voices typical of when he wrote. To be sure, this analysis is based on relatively few texts, but these are texts that achieved some recognition and, especially in the Spanish case, that were written by extraordinarily important figures in Catholic history. They are also texts deeply embedded in prominent cultures of self-proclaimed Catholic orthodoxy in Spain and France. The resonances alluded to here allow us to assume that while Persons's interpretation might be skewed, it is hard to claim that it was either far-fetched or exclusively self-interested. Instead, by pointing out salient resonances with contemporaries on the Continent, this article has underlined a shared conception of realities and possible solutions with other contemporary Catholics. The rapt audiences that existed for stories of English suffering, failures and demise, existed because the story of English demise conformed to perceived behavioural patterns that threatened to ruin Christendom as a whole, even in places that had not yet experienced the horrors of true heresy. Spiritual laxity, secular overreach and the Church's frayed institutional integrity threatened Catholic Europe and had already proved lethal in England. This was a polemical stance and an assimilated reality among many in post-Reformation Europe. Persons's critique of the Marian regime is part of an important conceptual trend and reflects a typical set of polemical activities within the context of the Counter-Reformation.

III

In the recent past, scholars who have studied the ‘political’ dynamics of early modern English Catholicism have not placed those narratives within a narrative of the ‘Counter-Reformation’, while scholars who have tried to integrate English Catholicism into broader Counter-Reformation patterns have not been interested in embedding political activism into their narratives. Thus, for example, though Peter Lake made occasional use of the ‘Counter-Reformation’ catchphrase, his emphasis has tended to be on the political culture of post-Reformation England. Similarly, Michael Questier is not particularly interested in framing his stimulating discussions of English religion and politics within a Counter-Reformation mould. On the other hand, two distinguished students of English Catholicism and the Counter-Reformation, Eamon Duffy and Alexandra Walsham, emphasise the continuities between English Catholicism and continental trends outside of secular ‘politics’. They are both aware and deeply knowledgeable about early modern politics, but it is not the primary lens through which they examine sources. When Duffy claims that England produced the Counter-Reformation, he means that the Marian Church provided inspiration and raw materials for important ecclesiastical institutions such as the seminary, that it nurtured certain sensibilities such as a revived papacy and that it left in its wake a diaspora of thinkers and writers that ‘merged seamlessly into the wider movements for reform’.Footnote ⁷² Walsham's work, on the other hand, has tended to emphasise the continuities between British and continental Catholicism in terms of missionary techniques, spiritual practices and devotional precepts.Footnote ⁷³

This article has highlighted Persons's views of the Marian regime and how this understanding informed his construal of heresy. When he contemplated the demonic forces infesting Christendom he considered both a cosmic battle between good and evil and a more pedestrian realm of worldly action that facilitated the spread of evil, including the institutional realities that allowed for such an eventuality. Of course, Persons believed that a range of didactic and missionary endeavours would facilitate the full conversion of individuals and indeed England as a whole, but the path to spiritual reform required a supportive worldly infrastructure. This explains his (in)famous political meddling, his association with Philip ii, his support of various plots to murder the queen and his hard-nosed polemics. His activities were all meant to achieve salvation for England and were necessary expedients in order to recombine the secular and spiritual realms in such a way that the state would become a prophylactic against heretical impulses. In light of this, countering the Reformation required participation in realms of secular politics that needed to be reconfigured and re-directed to the service of a Christian state. Seen from this perspective, fighting against heresy required ‘political’ engagement, though not to the exclusion of piety and worship. As he told the Jesuit General, Claudio Acquaviva, ‘things concerning the Catholic religion in England are so bound and mixed with those of the State, the one cannot treat one without dealing with the other, as there is no other state in England than a heretical one, and everything that we do in favour of religion is against their state’.Footnote ⁷⁴

Persons's zealous immersion in that sordid world was not aberrant. By mentioning Ribadeneyra and Mariana here, I hint at the fact that this inclination was not solely the result of the requirements and stresses of exile or the reality of having to deal with a heretical queen. Heresy was the existential threat on the minds of many clerics. Even if Spain is now recognised as a bulwark against Protestantism, contemporaries could not be so sure. Domino theories of a ‘Lutheran’ plague were real and organised how people thought about the proper defences against exterior threats. Thus, it is no surprise that Spanish Jesuits too would think long and hard about how to inoculate the state against infectious elements from without. Both Persons's assessment and his potential solutions for the debilities exposed by the Marian regime, far from being obfuscatory as Haigh might have it, are in fact revelatory of Counter-Reformation culture and practice.

Why harp on the Counter-Reformation? Scholars have long registered dissatisfaction with the term and its hermeneutical limitations are well known.Footnote ⁷⁵ And yet, in current scholarship the term has not fallen from use, albeit often with such imprecision as to make it meaningless. To take one example, an excellent recent volume on the topic falters only in its effort to make the term too capacious. In it, Mary Laven justifies the volume's thematic inclusiveness on the premise that using the phrase encourages ‘us to put encounters at the center of religious change’.Footnote ⁷⁶ This kind of blurring between engagement and conflict is problematic because it threatens to detract from the specifically adversarial dynamics that should be at the core of any field examining how Catholic individuals and/or institutions countered Protestant challenges. Surely there are plenty of ways to think about early modern Catholicism beyond its pugilistic episodes, but these are of primary importance and as discussed here are a crucial aspect of ongoing anti-Protestant efforts across Europe. Indeed, the division between ‘Church’ and ‘State’ did and must organise our understanding of how pre-modern actors configured the existential threats of their times as it constituted a core problem of early modern thought.Footnote ⁷⁷ Undoubtedly, men like Persons believed that the path toward inner conversions for Catholicism's healing required teaching, patience and charity, but he was at the same time conscious that these efforts would amount to nothing without the proper workings of the state.

This article is but one effort to think about the Counter-Reformation as a profoundly political phenomenon with thoroughly religious ends. Such an argument is, admittedly, not altogether new. The call here is for a return to politics as a fundamental component of the Counter-Reformation, as promoted by Robert Bireley sj, among others.Footnote ⁷⁸ As with so many historiographical steps forward, one must look back.