catholic loyalism in early stuart england

English Historical Review Vol. CXXIII No. 504 © The Author [2008]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

EHR, cxxiii. 504 (Oct. 2008)

doi:10.1093/ehr/cen253

Catholic Loyalism in Early Stuart England*

O ne could be forgiven for thinking that the topic of catholicism and the nation state has recently become almost fashionable. Several historians are agreed that it is diffi cult, if not impossible, to tell the story of the Reformation in England and Britain without at least looking at the part played by the catholic population of the Tudor and Stuart realms. 1 The relationship between catholics and the post-reformation state was a complex and diffi cult one. Many catholics actively contested the anti-popish canon in which they fi gured as underminers of the commonwealth and as enemies of monarchical authority. They vigorously protested their loyalty to the sovereign and claimed that their refusal to conform to the Elizabethan settlement of religion was a matter of conscience only. They were as politically trustworthy and loyal as any of the nation’s protestants. But catholics’ rejections of all the labels and stereotypes foisted upon them by anti-popish sermons and polemical pamphlets were not unnaturally taken, by some, as signs of political activism which proved that they and their opinions were exactly as inimical to monarchical authority as their critics had claimed in the fi rst place.

What, then, do we understand by ‘ loyalty ’ ? Loyalty was evidently not a purely secular quantity. The regimes of Elizabeth Tudor and of the fi rst two Stuart monarchs in England did not say that, as long as catholics refrained from actual conspiracies against the sovereign and the state, their religion was simply a matter for them. The royal supremacy over the Church entrusted the sovereign with the duty of promoting godly and protestant patterns of worship and ecclesiastical propriety. Hence, nothing that was explicitly Roman catholic, such as principled noncompliance with the act of uniformity of 1559, was excluded from persistent questioning about its political attributes. 2

The fraught relationship between the mid-Elizabethan state and the queen’s catholic subjects was, however, in the context of the period between 1558 and 1642, not entirely typical. Of course, the law against catholic separation remained in force, and was added to rather than

* I am very grateful to Pauline Croft and Peter Lake for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay. 1 . See, e.g. E. Shagan, ed., Catholics and the ‘ Protestant nation ’ : Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005); R. Corthell, F. Dolan, C. Highley and A. Marotti, eds., Catholic Culture in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, Indiana, 2007). See also P. Lake and M. Questier, eds., Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560 – 1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), introduction. 2 . For the political implications of recusancy (refusal to obey the stipulations of certain clauses in the act of uniformity of 1559), see, e.g. F.X. Walker, ‘ The Implementation of the Elizabethan Statutes against Recusants 1581 – 1603 ’ (Univ. of London Ph.D. thesis, 1961).

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CATHOLIC LOYALISM IN EARLY STUART ENGLAND

3 . See J. Watkins, ‘ “ Out of Her Ashes May a Second Phoenix Rise ” : James I and the Legacy of Elizabethan Anti-Catholicism’, in A. Marotti, ed., Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (London, 1999), 116 – 36. 4 . Richard Broughton, An Apologicall Epistle: Directed to the right honorable Lords, and others of her Maiesties privie counsell (Antwerp [imprint false; printed secretly in England], 1601), 88. 5 . Francis Bunny, An Answere to a Popish Libell (Oxford, 1607). The vigour of the early Jacobean catholic toleration campaign was instrumental in provoking the reimposition of the fi nancial penalties for recusancy which had been temporarily suspended in mid-1603 and were now levied again in order to choke off catholic calls for tolerance, J.F. Larkin and P.L. Hughes, eds., Stuart Royal Proclamations: Royal Proclamations of King James I 1603 – 1625 (Oxford, 1973), no. 34; A[rchives of the] A[rchdiocese of] W[estminster], A vii. 497 – 500; M.A. Tierney, Dodd’s Church History of England (5 vols., London, 1839 – 43), iv. 38; Bodleian Library, Oxford, Rawlinson MS D 320, fo. 27r-v; Richard Challoner, Memoirs of Missionary Priests (J.H. Pollen, ed., London, 1924), 274, 280; A.J. Loomie, Toleration and Diplomacy (Philadelphia, 1963), 31 – 4, 38 – 9. In 1604, a statute (1 & 2 James I, c. 4) confi rmed and reasserted all of the Elizabethan penal code against catholic nonconformity, even though the Elizabethan legislation had never actually been repealed. 6 . See, e.g. C. Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1997), ch. 4, esp. 94 – 101. 7 . J.J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984), 182.

diminished by statute. Leading protestant clergy continued to churn out volumes of anti-popish polemic. But the extreme hostility between certain catholic engagés and the Elizabethan regime (at least between c . 1569 and c. 1572 and then again between c. 1580 and c . 1595) was not characteristic of the fi rst ten years of her reign, and certainly not of much of the early Stuart period. There had been a fairly steady stream of Catholic pleas for tolerance in Elizabeth’s later years. During the years immediately after James Stuart’s accession, however, the new regime was bombarded by catholic toleration pamphlets. Catholics argued that their support during Elizabeth’s reign for Mary Stuart and, by extension, for James’s own claim to succeed Elizabeth, showed that, despite the differences in religion between themselves and the new king, they were bound to support him wholeheartedly, that is, even though they still refused to accept the royal supremacy. 3 Catholics such as Richard Broughton declared that it was ‘ the puritanes platforme ’ that ‘ tendeth to the overthrow of the whole state’, while no catholic doctrine tended to the detriment of the commonwealth. 4 Protestants such as Francis Bunny, however, insisted that catholics still rejected James’s rule, whatever they said to the contrary. 5

The historiography of the topic has, however, been rather inconsistent. Conventional narratives of catholicism in post-Reformation England allow that it was defi ned by political factors. Yet English catholics themselves are frequently said to have been, by and large, non-political. Although some scholars have claimed that the state had good reason to view catholics as a clear and present danger, 6 J.J. Scarisbrick, for instance, suggests that ‘ English papists ’ were like ‘ English protestants ’ in that ‘ both were proudly English, and, with a few exceptions in both camps, loyal subjects of the crown’. 7 Others have tried to construct a kind of middle position. Arnold Pritchard’s study of catholic loyalism argues

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that, for the most part, catholics simply kept religion and politics in separate compartments. Politically active catholicism was the work of a few, to be fi rmly distinguished from the purer catholic religion of the many, which was merely conscience-driven and pertained only to doctrine. 8 There is an assumption that ‘ loyalism ’ , in this context, is the same as mere passivity. 9

The topic of catholicism’s confl ict with the Tudor and early Stuart state has suffered, in fact, from being, on the one hand, the virtually sole concern of catholic historians’ accounts of the period, and, on the other, an essentially minor detail for other historians who regard catholicism’s political characteristics as largely irrelevant. Yet we know that, in the later sixteenth century, the issue of catholic loyalism and disloyalty was central to a number of other debates about the nature and exercise of sovereign power. This article will examine the problem from the perspective of loyalist discourse in the forty years or so before the civil war, and principally by revisiting the vexed question of the Jacobean oath of allegiance. It will be taken as, fi rst, the cornerstone or fl agship of Jacobean and Caroline policy towards the crown’s catholic subjects, and secondly as the site of a crucial contemporary debate between catholics and protestants (and among catholics themselves) about the true extent of sovereign authority. In particular, the ways in which the oath’s meaning changed in the period up to the civil war will be explored. What Charles I said about the oath and about the essence of political loyalty was remarkably similar to what his father, James, had said about these things. Yet many of Charles’s protestant subjects did not construe Charles’s words in the same light, or credit him with his father’s political acumen and integrity. The Jacobean loyalty oath of 1606 can be used, therefore, as a means of deciphering the political signifi cance of catholicism in early modern England. But in order to do this, it is necessary to look beyond the evidence of the printed literature and supplement it with other kinds of often rather scattered and disparate source material which record a whole range of contemporary reactions to the oath.

The oath passed into English law, after the discovery of the gunpowder treason, early in the 1606 parliament, in a statute entitled ‘ An Act for

8 . A. Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England (London, 1979), 37 – 8. 9 . John Bossy has argued that the English catholic community, from the early seventeenth century, was characterised by a kind of political inertia. By this he meant that conservative social forces succeeded in re-establishing control, within the late sixteenth-century community, over more radical spirits there. This happened, he said, when towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign, the seminarist clergy were compelled to submit to the requirements and agenda of the gentry who employed them as chaplains. This, however, was not the same thing as political inactivity, though several other scholars took Bossy to mean precisely this, J. Bossy, ‘ The Character of Elizabethan Catholicism’, Past and Present , xxi (1962), 39 – 59; id., The English Catholic Community 1570 – 1850 (London, 1975), section I; id., ‘ Unthinking the Sixteenth-Century Wars of Religion’, in T. Kselman, ed., Belief in History: Innovative Approaches to European and American Religion (London, 1991), 267 – 85; M. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion c. 1550 – 1640 (Cambridge, 2006), 294 – 5.

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the better discovering and repressing of Popish Recusants ’ (3 & 4 James I, c. 4). The statute contained, in fact, a variety of measures designed to discipline the more refractory and dangerous expressions of Catholic separatism. It even incorporated a clause which bridled the recruitment of men for the archduke’s service in the Low Countries against the Dutch, since these had often turned out to be catholics. 10 But the new oath of allegiance was the centre piece of the statute. 11 The oath asserted that King James was ‘ lawful and rightful ’ king of his dominions. It rejected the papal deposing power in both its direct and indirect forms. The swearer had to affi rm that he would actively defend the king’s rights, and bear ‘ faith and true allegiance ’ to him ‘ notwithstanding any declaration or sentence of excommunication or deprivation … by the pope or his successors’. In particular, the swearer had to declare that ‘ I do from my heart abhor, detest, and abjure, as impious and heretical, this damnable doctrine and position, that princes which be excommunicated and deprived by the pope may be deposed or murdered by their subjects or any other whatsoever ’ . 12

This was not the fi rst time that a loyalty oath had been formulated for catholics to take. In fact, this oath can be viewed as the culmination of a series of attempts to concoct a form of words which would work effectively to test catholics’ attitudes to sovereign power. 13 James explained, in his printed justifi cation of the oath, that his only purpose was to make ‘ a separation betweene so many of his … subjects, who although they were otherwise popishly affected, yet retained in their hearts the print of their naturall duetie to their soveraigne’. Here was fertile, monarchically delineated ground for discussion of what loyalty and popish affection really meant. A proclamation issued in 1610, which dealt with the administration of the oath, announced that it had been formulated as ‘ an acte of great favour and clemencie towards so many

10 . P. Croft, ‘ Serving the Archduke: Robert Cecil’s Management of the Parliamentary Session of 1606 ’ , Historical Research , lxiv (1991), 289 – 304, esp. at 297; D. Lunn, ‘ Chaplains to the English Regiment in Spanish Flanders, 1605 – 06 ’ , Recusant History , xi (1971 – 2), 133 – 55. A second statute, 3 & 4 James I, c. 5, added further measures to the already extensive law against Catholic separatism, J.R. Tanner, Constitutional Documents of the Reign of James I 1603 – 1625 (Cambridge, 1961), 94 – 104. 11 . For the text of the oath, see Tanner, Constitutional Documents , 89 – 91. 12 . Ibid., 90 – 1. For the circumstances in which the oath could be tendered and for the penalties for refusal, see ibid., 89 – 91; J.P. Sommerville, ‘ Jacobean Political Thought and the Controversy over the Oath of Allegiance ’ (Univ. of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1981), 3 – 4; J.V. Gifford, ‘ The Controversy over the Oath of Allegiance of 1606 ’ (Univ. of Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 1971), 41 – 3. In 1610 the statute 7 & 8 James I, c. 6 extended the classes of people to whom the oath could be tendered, The Statutes of the Realm (11 vols., London, 1810 – 28), iv. 1162, 1163. For the centrality of the papal deposing power in contemporary protestant accounts of anti-popery, see P. Lake, ‘ Anti-popery: the Structure of a Prejudice’, in R. Cust and A. Hughes, eds., Confl ict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603 – 1642 (London, 1989), 72 – 106, at p. 79. 13 . See M. Questier, ‘ Loyalty, Religion and State Power in Early Modern England: English Romanism and the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance’, Historical Journal , xl (1997), 311 – 29, at 312; Gifford, ‘ Controversy’, 46 – 55; W.B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge, 1997), 79; J. Bossy, ‘ Henri IV, the Appellants and the Jesuits’, Recusant History , viii (1965), 80 – 122, at 87 – 90, 96 – 100.

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of our subjects, who, though blinded with the superstition of poperie, yet caried a dutifull heart towards our obedience ’ . 14 James had, in fact, made a concession in 1606 when he insisted on striking a clause from a draft of the oath which would have denied that the pope could excommunicate him. 15

There has, however, recently been a certain amount of controversy over this topic. Johann Sommerville, whose knowledge of and expertise in the printed literature on the oath, both English and European, are second to none, has argued that contemporary catholics’ claims that they found the oath of allegiance unacceptable on religious grounds were largely spurious. According to Sommerville, the central clause of the oath (which described as ‘ impious and heretical ’ the notion that a king could be deposed or murdered) was never really much of an issue. Instead, he argues, we should see the catholic community split between a few papalists (who really did support the concept of the papal deposing power) and the rest who did not subscribe to it and, above all, wanted a quiet life. The papalists fell silent when faced by the statute of 1606 and the new oath. But the regime still, with good reason, regarded catholics with suspicion. 16

The problem starts, really, with Sommerville’s categories. They are stark and sometimes simplistic. For him, a true ‘ loyalist ’ was someone who entirely conceded all the claims made in and by the oath, and ceased to take issue with the regime on this topic. But of course many catholics genuinely believed, or could credibly claim, that they were loyalists in the true sense of the word, in that they properly understood the extent of sovereign power; yet they refused to endorse the oath. At the very least they wished to see it radically qualifi ed. They asserted that their refusal to take the oath as it stood ought not to put them outside the pale of royal favour for they, unlike some of James’s subjects, did not in fact hold radical political opinions about the limits of royal authority. 17

14 . Gifford, ‘ Controversy’, 40 – 1; James I, Triplici Nodo, Triplex Cuneus (London, 1607), 3; Questier, ‘ Loyalty’, 314; Larkin and Hughes, Stuart Royal Proclamations , 249; Patterson, King James VI and I , 78. 15 . Sommerville, ‘ Jacobean Political Thought’, 6 – 7. James, as is well known, had intervened, immediately after the discovery of the gunpowder conspiracy, to restrict a general retribution against catholics, His Maiesties Speech in this Last Session of Parliament (London, 1605), sig. C2r-v; L.A. Ferrell, Government by Polemic (Stanford, 1998), 69 – 70. 16 . Sommerville, ‘ Jacobean Political Thought ’ ; id., ‘ Papalist political thought and the controversy over the Jacobean oath of allegiance’, in Shagan, Catholics and the ‘ Protestant Nation ’ , 162 – 84. 17 . Some catholics could become extremely aggressive when they felt that their loyalism was being called in question by godly protestants. See, e.g. the Star Chamber case in which John Brudenell (a recusant) and Thomas Belley defended themselves against the accusations of Thomas Bedell that, inter alia , they had poured scorn on Bishop William Barlow’s recent reply to Robert Persons’s published attack on the oath, T[he] N[ational] A[rchives], P[ublic] R[ecord] O[ffi ce], STAC 8/11/23 (for which reference I am very grateful to Simon Healy); William Barlow, An Answer to a Catholicke English-Man (London, 1609); Robert Persons, The Iudgment of a Catholicke English-Man (St Omer, 1608).

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Any attempt at an account of contemporary catholic political attitudes should try to operate on more than one level. At the level of theory, there was a series of sharp oppositions between James’s account of sovereign authority and the catholic defi nition of the prerogatives of papal political power. Here, as much of the rhetoric on both sides stressed, there was little room for manoeuvre or compromise. At the level of practice, however, the oath supplied the grounds for a set of negotiations between catholics and the state. In these negotiations, virtually none of the catholics involved resembled the zealots depicted and excoriated in traditional anti-popery literature, nor did the state generally treat them as such. At the same time, these negotiations were directly affected by the political contexts in which they took place. These contexts shifted and altered quite spectacularly during the period up to the civil war. In order to describe catholic loyalism, therefore, we need a narrative as well as a theoretical sense of the controversy between representatives of the state and of the English catholic community. In other words, the question which we have to address is how the issues raised by the oath affected and altered in practice and over time the relationship between, on the one hand, James I and Charles I and, on the other, their subjects, both catholic and protestant. 18

First, we should try to establish how far the oath was a deliberate attempt by James I to launch a rigorous and systematic repression of English catholics in the wake of the gunpowder conspiracy. Sommerville himself argues that ‘ the idea that the king pursued a long-term policy of tolerating loyal catholics, and that the oath was part of this policy, is … questionable, since he and his chief advisers frequently denounced toleration ’ . 19 He denies that James was guilty of persecution; he simply meant what he said when he claimed that the oath’s purpose was to help him distinguish between loyal and disloyal subjects. 20 At the same time, Sommerville asserts that the oath was tendered only spasmodically and was never intended to be applied very widely: ‘ the oath resulted from the gunpowder plot and was intended to target those who, like the plotters, believed that heretical rulers could … be deposed or killed by their subjects ’ . In other words, the regime was merely telling the truth about its motives and objectives. The oath was not, therefore, a persecutory measure. 21 Some historians have undoubtedly gone too far in their account of the oath’s enforcement as a quasi-totalitarian impulse. For example, Clarence Ryan claimed that the 1610 proclamation which dealt with the oath was the equivalent of a ‘ tocsin ’ ushering in a ‘ reign of terror’. 22 This

18 . See T.H. Clancy, ‘ The Jesuits and the Independents: 1647 ’ , Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu , xl (1971), 67 – 90, at 73. 19 . Sommerville, ‘ Papalist Political Thought’, 166. 20 . Ibid. , 174. 21 . Sommerville, ‘ Jacobean Political Thought’, 73; id., ‘ Papalist Political Thought’, 166. 22 . C.J. Ryan, ‘ The Jacobean Oath of Allegiance and English Lay Catholics’, Catholic Historical Review , xxviii (1942), 159 – 83, at 171.

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is clearly rather extreme. Yet Sommerville also exaggerates when he suggests that historians who have argued that the oath was vigorously administered, certainly in the early years of James’s reign, took this line only because they were blinded by their own confessionally driven assumptions about James’s intentions. 23

‘ Persecution ’ , undoubtedly, lies largely in the eye of the victims and their sympathisers. But there is a good deal of evidence that, at least in the early years, the oath was deployed in order to discipline refractory, and particularly separatist, English catholics. We should certainly not assume that the oath was automatically a dead letter (a form of de facto back-door tolerance) because the regime never really intended to enforce it. Now, admittedly, the oath was never tendered in an entirely uniform fashion. In the context of the often ramshackle ways in which other aspects of the law against separation from the Church of England were implemented, this was hardly surprising. 24 Yet the oath was clearly not a spur-of-the-moment measure, allowed to drop almost as soon as it passed into law. In September 1606, the Spanish noblewoman Luisa de Carvajal recorded that the oath had become a major issue within the catholic community, and the clergy had divided among themselves about whether it could be taken. 25 In March 1608, the Jesuits noted that a sizeable number of catholics were imprisoned at York for refusal, and stood condemned in praemunire. 26 The oath’s administration was tightened up and expanded by statute in the 1610 parliament. Two proclamations, in 1610 and 1611, reinforced it. 27 And there was a consensus among contemporary catholics, in private newsletters as much as in printed polemical works, that, at least periodically, the oath was enforced in a rigorous, even repressive, way. The evidence for this is so widespread that it really cannot be ignored. At times, the lead came from the king himself, especially in the parliament of 1610. 28

Of course, as Sommerville points out, some catholics undoubtedly wanted (for a variety of reasons) to give the impression that a full-scale persecution was in progress. The contents of contemporary catholics’ newsletters which protested against their own and their co-religionists’ sufferings were intended for a European as well as an English audience.

23 . It is, Professor Sommerville says, ‘ easy to grasp why catholic historians should attempt to demonstrate that their co-religionists in seventeenth-century England were loyalists who were persecuted for religious reasons’, Sommerville, ‘ Papalist Political Thought’, 174. He suggests that such historians have been misled by contemporary catholic propagandists who knew that ‘ they were much more likely to win sympathy if they said they were suffering for their religious beliefs than if they publicly declared that they thought the pope could deprive King James of his crown’, ibid. 24 . Questier, ‘ Loyalty’, 322 – 3; Patterson, King James VI and I , 78. 25 . Epistolario de Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (digital edition, Alicante, 1999), letter 66. 26 . A[rchivum] R[omanum] S[ocietatis] I[esu], Anglia 37, fo. 331r. 27 . E.R. Foster, Proceedings in Parliament 1610 (2 vols., London, 1966), i. 136, 137; Statutes of the Realm , iv. 1162; Larkin and Hughes, Stuart Royal Proclamations , nos. 111, 118. 28 . AAW, A ix. 79; C.H. McIlwain, ed., The Political Works of James I (New York, 1965), 322 – 3. See also AAW, A x. 235; ibid., A xiii. 59; The Reports of Edward Bulstrode (3 parts, London, 1657 – 9),

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But it does appear that, in the localities, zealous offi cials often wanted to tender the oath vigorously. 29

There were some notable victims of the 1606 oath, in particular, the leading catholic peers Viscount Montague in 1611 and Lord Vaux and the Kentish gentleman Sir Henry James in 1612. 30 Between 1607 and 1618, a number of catholic clergy suffered the full penalties for treason, but sentence was carried out only after they had declined the oath. To many catholics their deaths appeared to be punishment for refusal of the oath. 31 The Jesuits recorded the barbarity of Matthew Flathers’s execution: he was ‘ cutt down, alive ’ ; two men grappled with him ‘ whom he shoke off ’ , ‘ wherupon one with a halberd stroke him upon the head and cutt off a peece, another with a sword cutt him overthwart the face ’ , and another ‘ with a hatchet cutt off his head ’ . 32 There is, it seems, evidence that the regime was, in high-profi le cases such as these, targeting catholics, notably the clergymen Robert Drury, George Gervase, Roger Cadwallader, George Napper, John Roberts and John Almond, who were thought to hold radical political opinions. 33 John Almond clearly brought his misfortune on himself by affi rming that he would give absolution to ‘ one who showld confess unto him that he hadd killed a kinge ’ as long as ‘ he were penitent’. 34 Clergy such as the archpriest George Birkhead, had they been arrested, would never have met with a fate such as was visited on these clerical victims of the Jacobean regime. The archpriest and his offi cials were known not to endorse monarchomach political theory about the limits of sovereign

ii. 155 – 6; Questier, ‘ Loyalty’, 325; id. ed., N[ewsletters from the] A[rchpresbyterate of] G[eorge] B[irkhead] (Camden Society, 5th series, xii, London, 1998), 263; B.D. de Clerimond ( pseud .), A Proclamation Published Under the Name of King Iames of Great Brittany (St Omer, 1611), 77 – 83. 29 . See AAW, A x. 235, 377; TNA, PRO, SP 14/49/26, fo. 44r; Questier, ‘ Loyalty’, 324 – 5. See also AAW, A x. 23, xi. 65, 194, 209, 243, 358, 499; J.C.H. Aveling, The Catholic Recusants of the West Riding of Yorkshire 1558 – 1790 (Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, Literary and Historical Section, x, pt 6, Leeds, 1963), 231; NAGB , 168; A.G. Petti, ed., Recusant Documents from the Ellesmere Manuscripts (C[atholic] R[ecord] S[ociety] lx, London, 1968), 208 – 10. 30 . Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England , 337, 355, 358 – 66, 369; Questier, ‘ Loyalty’, 325; NAGB , 166, 266 – 7. The father of the seminary priest George Holtby was sentenced to life imprisonment in early 1612 for refusal of the oath, A. Kenny, ed., The Responsa Scholarum of the English College, Rome (2 vols., CRS liv – v, 1962 – 3), i. 255 – 6. 31 . Challoner, Memoirs , 291 – 339. 32 . ARSI, Anglia 37, fo. 330v. 33 . At his trial, Drury uncompromisingly voiced his scorn at the Elizabethan statutes which forbade the reconciliation of the sovereign’s subjects to Rome, A True Report of the Araignment, tryall, conviction and condemnation of … Robert Drewrie (London, 1607), sig. B4r-v. Drury and the Benedictine John Roberts, executed in 1610, were thought to have been associates of the gunpowder plotters, NAGB , 31. For Gervase, see ARSI, Anglia 37, fo. 330v. For Cadwallader, see NAGB , 20, 30, 31, 32, 90, 96, 108, 109, 112, 114; G. Anstruther, The Seminary Priests (4 vols., Ware and Great Wakering, 1968 – 77), i. 237. For Napper, see H.F. Brown and A.B. Hinds, eds., C[alendar of] S[tate] P[apers,] V[enetian Series] (11 vols. [for 1581 – 1625], London, 1894 – 1912) 1610 – 13 , 50; AAW, A ix. 283. 34 . AAW, A xii. 21; cf . NAGB , 207. See also the case of John Ogilvie SJ, who in Scotland in early 1615 appears to have affi rmed the views of leading European catholic political theorists who condoned tyrannicide, AAW, A xiv. 338 – 9; W.E. Brown, John Ogilvie (London, 1925), 124 – 5; A.R. MacDonald, The Jacobean Kirk, 1567 – 1625 (Aldershot, 1998), 154 – 5.

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authority, even though Birkhead and other moderates would, if the oath had been tendered to them, certainly have refused it as well. 35

The oath was also used to discipline large numbers of humbler and more obscure catholic separatists, although they did not suffer the extreme fate infl icted on some of the clergy. In August 1611, Birkhead lamented that ‘ the oath is now most hotely prosecuted; everie one that can be found is cited by the constable to appeare before the justices. Whosoever denieth the oath are presently committed to prison. Above thirtie as I am told were committed the other day at London. ’ ‘ Many of the inferior sort ’ , he observed, ‘ which commonly stand unto it are like to goe to wreck ’ while ‘ those of greater worth, being winked at by some ’ found ways to escape their predicament. 36 In the same month, one of Birkhead’s friends, Thomas Heath, reported that ‘ in Southwarck all have solemnly taken yt ’ , not just the protestants but also some catholics. ‘ Such … as could not hide them selves as well there, as otherwhere, are imprisoned and as yet have noe other hope than to remaine in prison and pay the penalty. In Holborn many poore catholics, refusing, are in Newgat. ’ 37

For some, it seems, the oath was merely a formality — yet another irritating initiative on the part of an ideologically rampant regime. Edward Bennett wryly remarked in May 1612 that it was ‘ reported in Wostershyre and Staffordshyre ’ that a large number of artisans, ‘ beinge to take the oath of allegiaunce, viz coblers, carpenters, smithes and of mechanik trade, all goinge from ther howses tipled drinck and swore all the way they went, and being of some zealous brother rebuked therefore, awnswer was returned that seing they were summoned to swear they would swear alsoe without summons ’ . 38

Clearly, however, for many who, for a variety of reasons, identifi ed themselves during this period as catholics, the issue was a deadly serious one. The murder of Henri IV in May 1610 instigated statutory measures and proclamations which involved the tendering of the oath. Late 1612

35 . In the case of less well-known catholics, such as, for example the Sussex yeoman John Loane, who were continually badgered to take the oath, it is sometimes possible to show that they were already regarded with suspicion by local authorities, and for reasons other than the mere fact of their nonconformity, NAGB , 95; East Sussex Record Offi ce, XA 63 (Sussex lieutenancy papers, 1614 – 24), 29. 36 . AAW, A x. 275. 37 . Ibid., 317. For other cases of low-born catholics who were dealt with for refusal of the oath, see, e.g. ibid., 317, xi. 323; ARSI, Anglia 37, fo. 307r; Ryan, ‘ The Jacobean Oath of Allegiance’, 183. 38 . AAW, A xi. 218. In October 1619, two Somerset gentlemen, befuddled with drink, were hauled up before the privy council and charged with making aspersions about the religion established by law, but, confronted with the oath, they immediately took it and were dismissed; neither were recusants, and we may imagine that neither were unduly concerned about the ideological ramifi cations of the oath, APC 1619 – 21 , 45. In February 1620, a Kentish serving man, one George Wood (whose master was the crypto-catholic physician Edward Lapworth), in a idle moment, wished that all protestants in England were hanged, but purged himself by taking the oath of allegiance and also the oath of supremacy, TNA, PRO, SP 14/112/99; John Phillips, The Way to Heaven (London, 1625), sigs. A3r – B2r.

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saw not just the death of Prince Henry but also the dynastic match between Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V, the elector palatine, a marriage to which it was assumed that many catholics would be extremely hostile and which they might attempt to frustrate. 39 In January 1613, Benjamin Norton asserted that ‘ the othe (as is sayed) muste bee offered a freshe to all recusants, and it is sayed that theye all shall bee warned to bee at the assises either to take it or els to indure the payne of the lawe’. 40 After 1614, the enforcement of the oath, or at least documentary evidence of such enforcement, to some extent tails off. But even at the end of the 1610s and during the early 1620s, the privy council was still directing JPs to compel the taking of the oath. 41

The tendering of the oath could, therefore, be quite stringent. At times it could strike deep into the heart of the English catholic community. One does not need to enumerate and list all those who were proceeded against in order to show this. It is suffi cient to demonstrate that, at particular points in the reign, catholics felt able to claim that the oath’s administration was a ratcheting up of the other statute penalties which were already in force against them. 42

Whether one calls this a persecution or not is a matter of semantics. The introduction of this statutory measure (coupled with its, at times, quite vigorous practical application) was a clear and deliberate demonstration by James to protestants that he was sympathetic to their concerns over the political dislocation caused by catholic interference in the body politic. It was hardly surprising that parliament did not object to James’s elimination of the excommunication clause in the oath, which we mentioned above. They knew perfectly well what he was doing, and certainly believed that, as it stood, the oath and the other provisions in the statute which promulgated it constituted a tightening up of the law against separatist catholicism. They did not, at least in the fi rst half of James’s reign, regard it as a sign of royal leniency. When Bishop William James wrote, early in 1612, to the earl of Salisbury calling for the strict enforcement of the oath, he noted that the oath ‘ was by his sacred majestie mainteyned, as never king wrote since Salomon’. 43 We can fi nd references to its use in Ireland, where most of the Elizabethan legislation against the practice of catholicism was not in

39 . NAGB , 211. 40 . Ibid., 210. 41 . Questier, ‘ Loyalty’, 325. 42 . For example, swearing the oath would not protect a nonconformist catholic from the penalties for recusancy if the authorities chose to prosecute, M.J. Hartharn, ‘ The Fortescue Family of Faulkborne Hall, Witham’, Essex Recusant , xv (1973), 46 – 8; Questier, ‘ Loyalty’, 313; ARSI, Anglia 37, fo. 305r-v. In 1612, several Oxfordshire recusants were told that taking the oath would not ‘ free them’. One of them consented to take the oath, as demanded, for a second time, but was then immediately tendered the oath of supremacy, and was imprisoned for refusal, AAW, A xi. 499. 43 . TNA, PRO, SP 14/68/63.

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force. The oath itself did not pass into Irish law, but, according to the priest William Rayner in October 1611, that did not stop zealous protestants from tendering it there, where ‘ they have no other lawe but … principi placuit’. 44

It seems clear that King James was signalling to the catholic community that the loyalty issue was to be taken seriously. They would have to engage with him on his own terms. What there was not to be was ideological latitude. It appears that this is what James really meant when he tied his understanding of the oath to his frequently rehearsed dictum that he would tolerate catholics of a moderate persuasion. 45 In some sense, most English catholics were moderate. The radical ideological imperatives of the Elizabethan catholics were now almost entirely passé ; the gunpowder treason had been the work of a tiny and unrepresentative minority. But even those who proclaimed their loyalty would be compelled to frame their professions of loyalism according to the template which James had provided for them.

It is not surprising, then, that the regime did not target merely those catholics who were suspected of harbouring radical ideas but also those who were, in some very real manner, moderates, and certainly not, by almost any defi nition, extremists, or even, really, papalists (in the sense that Professor Sommerville uses that word). To the regime’s way of thinking, ‘ moderate ’ attitudes on these issues could in fact provide breeding grounds for confusion about exactly what was and was not licit in the Stuart polity. This comes across clearly in the published reports of the interrogations of the archpriest George Blackwell following his arrest in June 1607. Blackwell was not a champion of the deposing power. Before the papacy issued its breves, in September 1606 and August 1607, against the oath, Blackwell’s own inclination had been to allow English catholics to swear it. 46 But the protracted verbal harassment of Blackwell during his interrogations was intended to show that even his generally favourable disposition and moderate mind towards the oath were not adequate for the state’s purposes. 47 The authorities were not, as Sommerville suggests, trying at this time to discipline merely a few dangerous extremists. Really serious dilemmas were posed, by the oath, for leading catholic clergymen, such as George Birkhead, and for their gentry and aristocratic patrons — in other words, for the genuine moderates within the English catholic community for whom the deposing power was probably not, in itself, a major article of faith and

44 . AAW, A x. 378. See also ibid., xii. 351; NAGB , 240. 45 . K. Fincham and P. Lake, ‘ The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I’, Journal of British Studies , xxiv (1985), 170 – 206, at 171, 185 – 6. 46 . Questier, ‘ Loyalty’, 313; Anstruther, Seminary Priests , i. 40; Sommerville, ‘ Jacobean Political Thought’, 29 – 30. 47 . Mr. George Blackwel … his Answeres upon sundry his Examinations (London, 1607); A Large Examination … of M. George Blakwell (London, 1607).

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who were, in almost every sense of the word, loyalists. 48 But the regime could, not without reason, quite easily argue that ill-defi ned views about the oath were a harbour for militant catholicism. Catholics were not, therefore, to be given suffi cient leeway to allow them to become, as it were, a state within a state. 49

The state’s vigour in this respect caused a good deal of equivocation and prevarication by catholics who were confronted with the oath, even as they sought to escape the regime’s attempts to force them to say what they really thought about the relationship between temporal and spiritual (papal) authority. 50 What many catholics evidently did do was to practise a species of equivocation in the sense that they swore (or swore partially) the oath but without conceding all that the state, or at least certain protestant interpreters of the oath, understood by it. Catholics who had severe reservations about the oath thus resorted to a series of negotiations with the state which were intended, indirectly, to undercut the public impact of their approval, or even swearing, of the oath. The leading secular clergyman John Mush’s accounts of his casuistical advice to ‘ diverse catholique gentlemen ’ on the oath makes absolutely clear that this was what was happening on a large scale. 51 Mush’s catholic clerical opponents condemned him for his casuistical latitude, ‘ as yf he had justifi ed the oath’. 52 But his confrere John Jackson defended him for trying to arrive at a compromise which did not involve taking the oath simply as it stood. 53

48 . NAGB , passim . 49 . In the recent catholic toleration campaign of 1603 – 04, self-styled catholic loyalists had demanded that they should be granted the same privileges as the Huguenots had been given by the edict of Nantes. But those privileges were extensive and had created, to many people’s way of thinking, an armed and politically quasi-independent state within the French state. I am very grateful to Pauline Croft for this point. 50 . Ferrell, Government by Polemic , 92; D.H. Willson, ed., The Parliamentary Diary of Robert Bowyer 1606 – 1607 (New York, 1971), 29. Professor Sommerville suggests that equivocation over the oath was impossible for contemporary English catholics because ‘ taking the oath would involve a tacit denial of the catholic faith’, Sommerville, ‘ Jacobean Political Thought’, 120 – 7. It is not hard to see how Sommerville arrived at this conclusion. The catholic theoretical tracts on which his argument is based did assert that, since the oath was a matter of faith, it was not permissible to practise equivocation when confronted with it. See, e.g. Robert Persons, The Iudgment of a Catholicke English-Man (St Omer, 1608); Stonyhurst, Collectanea P I, fo. 163r. But it is clear that many catholics, without specifi cally lying, or practising to deceive, concerning their opinions on tyrannicide, did use a series of shifts to evade the full ideological consequences of the oath. In 1612, the loyalist priest William Warmington claimed that some catholic priests, when they were arrested and had the 1606 oath of allegiance put in front of them, took it and then immediately denounced it again when they were freed, William Warmington, A Moderate Defence of the Oath of Allegiance (London, 1612), sig. ¶2v. John Aveling argued that the majority of recusants and non-communicants in York ‘ must have taken the oath with private reservations’, J.C.H. Aveling, Catholic Recusancy in the City of York 1558 – 1791 (London, 1970), 83. See also J.T. Cliffe, The Yorkshire Gentry from the Reformation to the Civil War (London, 1969), 179. 51 . See AAW, A ix. 239 – 41. 52 . Ibid., x. 23. See also ibid., 395; NAGB , 120-1; Questier, ‘ Loyalty’, 316 – 17. 53 . Tierney, Dodd’s Church History , iv. clxxiv.

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Why this mattered was because, despite offi cial condemnation of much contemporary catholic political theory, it implied, indeed it actually created, a forum for discussion of the political relationship between the king and his catholic subjects. Almost everyone knew perfectly well (though they might not always say so) that the vast majority of the English catholic community did not envisage any circumstances in which the deposing power would be used against King James. What many catholics were unwilling to allow, though, was the unconditional surrender of their stake in the early Stuart polity, that is as catholics who claimed a measure of political independence from the state. Equivocation in the face of the authorities’ widespread tendering of the oath was thus an essential method for the different factions and fractions within the community to maintain their own ideological coherence, and their claims to be the true leaders and representatives of English catholicism, respected as much at Rome as in England (even though the different catholic factions and interest groups frequently accused each other of pusillanimity in the face of the state’s enforcement of the oath, while boasting of their own refusal to compromise or comply in any way). 54

The manner in which the twin issues of the oath’s enforcement and reception were played out and resolved would, therefore, affect the shape and character of catholicism in England. And, if the catholic community and the Stuart monarchy were fi nally to reach a public accommodation over the relationship between royal and papal authority, then the status and condition of the Stuarts’ catholic subjects might well be substantially transformed.

The 1606 oath was, therefore, never merely, or even primarily, a device for exposing a few genuine traitors and potential regicides. All parties to the contemporary debate about allegiance were well aware of this. At the same time it was also about far more than mere allegiance, in the sense of outward obedience. It is still controversial, however, to make this claim. Sommerville argues that such a claim implies that ‘ the oath of allegiance was designed by a bigoted but subtle government to try to force catholics to acknowledge the king’s supremacy over the

54 . See, e.g. AAW, A ix. 131, 335, x. 57 (the case of Thomas Lister SJ), 277, 413. William Bishop was furious when the Benedictine monk Thomas Preston claimed him as a supporter of his opinions in favour of the regime’s proceedings about the oath, ibid., xi. 391. The seculars retaliated against Preston with accusations not simply that he allowed the oath (in fact, he technically did not say that catholics should take it) but that he was a hypocrite in saying one thing to the state and quite another to his catholic interlocutors. It was alleged in March 1616 that Preston had thought that the martyr Drury was justifi ed in refusing the oath ‘ with the daunger of his life’, ibid., xv. 135. It was known that Preston had angered George Abbot by advising Lord Vaux to refuse the oath when Abbot had anticipated that Preston would counsel Vaux to take it, ibid., xi. 123, 209; NAGB , 147. See also M. Questier, ed., N[ewsletters from the] C[aroline] C[ourt: Catholicism and the Politics of the Personal Rule, 1631 – 1638] (Camden Society, 5th series, xxvi, London, 2005), 222 – 3, for the case of Sir Richard Lashford and John Percy in 1635.

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Church under the guise of requiring them to swear temporal allegiance’. 55 It is worth pointing out here ( pace Professor Sommerville 56 ) that there is evidence that some protestants did regard the new oath of allegiance as an ideological parallel of the oath of supremacy, and thought that, at the very least, it should propel people in the same ideological direction as the supremacy oath. 57 In April 1610, in parliament, Lord Zouch claimed that the taking of the oath was a fi rst step to religious uniformity. 58 In 1614, John White stated that, in his opinion, the two oaths were ideologically equivalent. 59

There was, therefore, a great deal at stake here, and this is why catholic negotiations, however surreptitious and convoluted, with the regime on this issue were so important. Virtually all the historians who have looked at the question have agreed that the clause which described the deposing power not just as ‘ impious ’ but positively ‘ heretical ’ was the crucial part of the oath. It seemed, on some readings, to imply that the swearer of the oath deliberately separated himself from communion with the many catholics who did endorse the concept of the papal deposing power. 60

Sommerville disagrees. He asserts that the writings of catholics on the oath of allegiance ‘ place remarkably little emphasis … on the “ impious ” clause. In fact not a single surviving contribution to the Jacobean controversy over the oath places the clause at the centre of its arguments, and most give it scant attention. ’ Only two English catholic clergymen, according to Sommerville, said that it was signifi cant. But while few held forth in public on this point, there was clearly a consensus,

55 . Sommerville, ‘ Papalist Political Thought’, 174. 56 . Ibid., 177. 57 . Questier, ‘ Loyalty’, 321; Gifford, ‘ Controversy’, 80 – 1, 182 – 90. As I have pointed out elsewhere, all those who conformed according to statute after 1606 were required to take the oath of allegiance as well as the oath of supremacy. Several of the catholic clergy who recanted their catholicism claimed that the oath had proved an effectual persuasion to them to conform, Questier, ‘ Loyalty’, 327. See John Copley, Doctrinall and Morall Observations (London, 1612), 124. 58 . Foster, Proceedings , i. 206. 59 . John White, Defence of the Way (London, 1614), 34. White’s tract was a favourite text of Henry Burton who cited White’s views on the oath, Henry Burton, For God, and the King (Amsterdam, 1636), 133. 60 . Ryan, ‘ The Jacobean Oath of Allegiance’, 163 – 4; A.F. Allison, ‘ An English Gallican: Henry Holden, (1596/7 – 1662): Part I (to 1648)’, Recusant History , xx (1995), 319 – 49, at 339; Questier, ‘ Loyalty’, 319 – 20; T.H. Clancy, Papist Pamphleteers (Chicago, 1964), 89; Sommerville, ‘ Papalist Political Thought’, 174. The Benedictine Thomas Preston, in defence of the crown’s proceedings, argued in print that the word ‘ or’, located between the words ‘ deposed ’ and ‘ murdered ’ actually stood for ‘ and’. In other words, Preston said the oath condemned deposition and tyrannicide together as heretical, not the deposing power alone, Sommerville, ‘ Jacobean Political Thought’, 110, citing Thomas Preston, A Theologicall Disputation Concerning the Oath of Allegiance (London, 1613), 70. But the phraseology of this section of the oath was designed to be capable of more than one interpretation. Anthony Hoskins SJ thought that ‘ to say, this clause of doctrine thus abjured, includeth also that he [the sovereign] may be murthered (which being false, the whole clause may be condemned) is but a vaine shift. For the plaine sense of the oath condemneth not only the opinion of murthering, but also of deposing; and he that taketh the oath, abjureth both the one and the other’, Anthony Hoskins, A Briefe and Cleare Declaration of Sundry Pointes (St Omer, 1611), 55.

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among those who rejected the oath, that this clause was what made the oath so controversial and, indeed, unacceptable. 61

In fact, it was the critical ideological signifi cance of this aspect of the oath which gave rise to such reluctance on the part of catholics to speak openly about it at all. Some out-and-out loyalists, such as the crypto-catholic MP John Good, who wanted an accommodation with the state more or less on the regime’s terms, positively approved of the oath and were determined to treat it as a straightforward performance of loyalty and to avoid acknowledging that the clause in question in any way touched on the essentials of religion. 62 Lord William Howard let it be understood (much to George Birkhead’s chagrin) that ‘ no man of consideration ’ would refuse the oath in the ‘ sence ’ in which the king had defi ned its meaning. 63 We know that some catholic gentlemen really wanted to construe the oath merely as an oath of personal loyalty to their king, and they became exceedingly irate when their chaplains told them that this was not possible. 64

Others who believed that the oath was, as the papacy had explicitly declared, detrimental to faith, did not want to discuss the oath’s contents because they desperately wanted to avoid the catholic community being ideologically divided and even torn apart (in much the way that the regime clearly intended it to be). The martyr Robert Drury would have taken the oath if it had been tendered to him privately. But this was not permitted. He was told that he would have to swear it in a public forum.

61 . Sommerville, ‘ Papalist Political Thought’, 174 – 5. For example, the priest and martyr John Almond declared to Bishop John King that ‘ if in taking it you abjure that position as heretical which is not heretical, then is it perjury and falsehood to take it’. At the same time, Almond made it clear that he did not regard the deposing power as itself a matter of faith, Challoner, Memoirs , 331, 332. Thomas Somers likewise claimed, underneath the gallows, ‘ that hee was ever a true faithfull and loyall subject and that hee refused not that oath in respect of allegiance … but in regarde it is mixed with matter of relligione’, AAW, A ix. 351. George Con, who was sent as a papal agent to Henrietta Maria during the mid-1630s, bluntly told King Charles that this was the reason the oath was unacceptable to catholics, Allison, ‘ An English Gallican’, 339. Much later, in 1678, the Jesuit John Gavan stated that a taker of the oath ‘ sweareth that to be unquestionable of which there is a very great question amongst the best divines in the world and he sweareth that to be absolutely heretical which was never defi ned to be so’, Clancy, ‘ The Jesuits and the Independents: 1647 ’ , 74; H. Foley, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus (7 vols., in 8, London, 1875 – 83), v, 460 – 1. The Sorbonnist Dr Perrot singled out the ‘ And I doe further swear … ’ clause concerning the deposing power, on the grounds that it pronounced to be heretical that which was not believed by catholics to be so: ‘ the integrity of Christian faith is oppressed and choaked ’ and ‘ its union broken and torne’, AAW, B 24, no. 20. Sommerville argues that the Sorbonne refrained from condemning the oath, Sommerville, ‘ Papalist Political Thought’, 177. But Perrot did not; and, as Allison points out, after the expulsion of Edmund Richer in 1612, the Sorbonne’s overall position on this and other issues changed, A.F. Allison, ‘ The Later Life and Writings of Joseph Creswell, S.J. (1556 – 1623)’, Recusant History , xv (1979), 79 – 144, at 93. 62 . M. Questier and S. Healy, ‘ ‘ What’s in a Name? ’ : A Papist’s Perception of Puritanism and Conformity in the Later English Reformation’, in A.F. Marotti, ed., Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (London, 1999), 137 – 53, at 142 – 3; Huntington Library, Ellesmere MS 2187. 63 . NAGB , 117. For the patronage link between Lord William Howard and the Benedictine Thomas Preston, see ibid., 162. 64 . See, e.g. AAW, B 24, no. 39: AAW, A ix. 287.

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He chose instead to go to the gallows. 65 Lord Vaux, at his trial in 1612, skirted furiously around the issue of whether he thought the oath was licit. He pleaded that ‘ he thought it better to swear, from his heart, his true allegeance to the king than to swear to a matter of the which he in his conscience hath some doubt’. Vaux did not even want to say what he thought was objectionable in the oath, though the judges insisted that he must take the whole oath simply as it stood. 66 He was sentenced to the penalties of the law for refusal. But prominent catholic clergy noted that ‘ Lord Vaux … did not refuse it. Noe he stood upon it that he had not refused it, and offred to take it after the kings booke [i.e. James’s published defence of the oath] which he had with him’, but the court ‘ concluded that his not taking it … when it was tendred was a refusall ’ . 67

The irony here, though, was that while the regime intended to exert an ideological stranglehold over the English catholic community by confronting it with a set of stark conundrums and choices about the correlation between spiritual and temporal authority, this stranglehold could be applied only if the catholics in question were prepared to enter into a form of dialogue with the regime (much as Blackwell had been compelled to do). And this, ironically, was what allowed some of them, even if often at a severe disadvantage, to attempt to negotiate ideologically with the regime.

Technically, there was not supposed to be any latitude allowed to catholics who were tendered the oath. Either they were to take it in full or they would suffer the full statutory penalties for refusal. When rumours spread that such latitude was being permitted, 68 some local governors moved quickly to stamp it out. Lord Eure, in November 1609, sharply reproved those who seemed to be permitting such laxity when, ‘ at the last assises … at Hereford … fower principall recusants being convented … to receave the oath of alleagiance’, one of the justices ‘ yeelded such favour unto them in min[ister]inge the oath in some points concerninge the pope ’ in such a way as to encourage others to refuse the oath altogether. 69 In early November 1611, John Mush reported that two of his patrons ‘ in generall tearmes made an oath of allegance’. The justices ‘ said this might serve for their allegance, but not for the kings oath and therfore they should incurr premunire if they took the oath in this manner. ’ 70 As we have already seen, Lord Vaux was told in no uncertain terms that either he should swear the whole oath or suffer the statutory penalties for refusal. In March 1612, Lord Vaux’s

65 . A True Report of the Araignment , sigs. B4v-C3r. 66 . The Reports of Edward Bulstrode , i. 199. 67 . AAW, A xii. 170; James I, Triplici Nodo, Triplex Cuneus. Or an Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance (London, 1607). 68 . See, e.g. AAW, B 24, no. 39; ibid., A xi. 240 – 1. 69 . TNA, PRO, SP 14/49/26, fo. 44r. 70 . AAW, A x. 401.

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mother was condemned in praemunire for refusal of the oath, although she had offered to Bishop John King that the judges might ‘ take her oath of allegeance’, rather than the parliament oath, ‘ whereby she might free her integrity from disloyalty and secure … the king from feare of her’. She ‘ offered to sweare fi delytie to him notwithstanding any excommunication of the pope granted against him’, but this would not suffi ce. 71

Despite the oath’s ideological rigour, there was still a very broad range of ways that catholics could respond to it. A lot depended on the manner in which individual catholics reacted to the authorities’ demands that they should swear it. In August 1617, for example, it was reported that an out-and-out recusant, Dorothy Forman, daughter of the leading Sussex catholic James Thatcher, had taken the oath once, in front of the commissioners for restraint of passage, but now refused to take it again. 72 Was this loyal compliance or stubborn disobedience? William Morgan of Llantarnam, son-in-law of the Earl of Worcester, was forced to compound at a high rate for his refusal to take the oath. Benjamin Norton related that when Morgan’s ‘ frendes weare uppon the pointe of compoundinge with the kinge theare was an horible honeste man which spoke to the kinges face, or soe that the kinge hearde of it, againste these compositions. Butt the kinge, as hee is wise, answered that he woulde have the moneye and it shoulde bee payed him in golde too. For, quoth hee, the man will take the othe if he weare muche urged. ’ 73 Apparently Morgan’s refusal to take the oath was phrased in such a way as to make the king differentiate between his act of resistance and the noncompliance of many other catholics. Equally, we can fi nd a prominent catholic, such as Sir John Yorke of Nidderdale, showing extreme hostility to the oath in certain circumstances, for example when faced with its enforcement by hostile local offi cials, but being prepared to take it, as he did in 1621 when, clearly, its meaning as a loyalty oath had, at least for him, been transformed. 74

Very frequently we fi nd that catholics, even while faced with a supposedly blanket offi cial ban on any kind of moderation or variation of the terms of the oath were able to enter into forms of negotiation with the offi cialdom of the local state. Some resorted to a variety of expedients in order to try to demonstrate their loyalty to the king without either actually taking or directly refusing the oath. Benjamin

71 . Ibid., xi. 85. 72 . TNA, PRO, SP 14/93/10, fo. 15v. For James Thatcher’s own conformist tendencies, see TNA, PRO, E 368/489, mem. 186a. 73 . NAGB , 191. In the early 1620s we fi nd Cardinal Millini, in Rome, dealing with the case of an unnamed English nobleman who, ‘ although [he] dislike[s] the oath, yett he defendeth the clause which is conte[i]ned in it against the authoritie of the pope in deposinge kinges’, AAW, OB I/i, no. 61, fo. 117r. 74 . C. Howard, Sir John Yorke of Nidderdale 1565 – 1634 (1939), 16 – 17; Aveling, The Catholic Recusants of the West Riding , 231.

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Norton, who served as a chaplain to a Sussex Catholic called Constance Lambe, reported in mid-April 1611 that recently she had been ‘ to a justice of peace his howse ’ and had told him that, when the commission for tendering the oath came into the county, as was expected, if he should then ‘ sende for her … shee … intended not to come unto him, not owte of contempte, but for conscience sake, for that she never intended to take that othe ’ . The JP tried to persuade her to take the oath, and actually ‘ fetcht the statute booke ’ . Together they read through the text of the oath, ‘ and readinge the othe with her shee, as hee redd it unto her, misliked this, and thatt, and delivered her opinion plainlye concerninge the authoritye of the pope over princes ’ . The JP warned her that she was liable to fall into praemunire for her opinion, but she, somewhat histrionically, told him that she would rather see her children ‘ all kilde ’ before her face, and that, if she were to take it, the devil would carry her away to Hell. By this stage, the JP realised that she was playing mind games with him; and ‘ understandinge whoe she was, and how well descended … told her hee woulde doe her any good he coulde ’ , implying that she would not be confronted with the oath. When she arrived home, she and her chaplain were reduced to fi ts of laughter as she described her ‘ prancke ’ in dealing with the JP. 75 The outcome, however, was that she had both escaped being directly tendered the oath and had also preserved her political and religious honour within the local catholic community.

The authorities may well have tried to eradicate such manoeuvres, but they were themselves part and parcel of the process by which the oath was tendered. It seems likely that there were many similar bids to work out such deals locally, deals which were quite outside the scope of the offi cial directions which were issued concerning the statutory oath. On 18 April 1611, perhaps with Constance Lambe’s recent performance in mind, Birkhead wrote that ‘ some justices are content to huddle upp the matter in that sort for there frends ’ , though this was not a practice which he felt able to endorse. 76

Thus the state’s often quite vigorous attempts, especially between c . 1610 and 1614, to administer the oath served to set up a series of negotiations or dialogues between catholics and the state’s representatives. These dialogues were conducted partly in private and partly in public. Clearly the situation was somewhat fl uid. As early as August 1608, Robert Persons anticipated that a new and more moderate oath might be endorsed by the privy council in order to replace the one in the statute of 1606. 77 Even in June 1610, just after the assassination of Henri IV, there were rumours among the catholic clergy that the oath would

75 . NAGB , 105 – 6. 76 . AAW, A x. 93. See also Cliffe, The Yorkshire Gentry , 178. 77 . Archivum Britannicum Societatis Iesu, Collectanea P ii, fo. 464r. See also Tierney, Dodd’s Church History , v. xl, xlii, xliv; NA, SP 14/24/50, fo. 82r; AAW, A ix. 225.

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be ‘ qualifi ed ’ . 78 In the event, this did not happen, but the public controversy over the oath was informed by a sense of the possibility that, under certain circumstances, the state’s attitude to the oath and its enforcement might shift quite dramatically.

While we tend to know most about those who either complied outright or refused the oath outright (and suffered the consequences), the majority of catholics took a position which was somewhere in the middle. In many ways this is not surprising. Certainly many of the catholic clergy were keen to persuade Rome that they censured the oath. But for the most part they did not want the Stuart regime to construe their censures of the oath in the way that they hoped Rome would. In this they were likely to be followed by many of their patrons who were urging them to set precisely the kind of example which they themselves would be able to imitate. As late as 1634, George Leyburn remarked of the Benedictine Leander Jones that ‘ in Flanders and Ro[me] he would be esteemed a great opposer of the oath, and by the state here a favorer of it ’ . 79

Sommerville claims that there is little evidence that English catholics were ‘ scrupulously loyal to the crown ’ . The Jacobean government was thus right to doubt their loyalty. He suggests that ‘ there is very little reason to suppose that James or his counsellors thought that on central questions of papal power the large majority of English catholics differed profoundly in attitude from the pope himself ’ , or from the prolifi c political theorists Cardinal Bellarmine and the Jesuit Francisco Suarez. 80

It all depends, of course, what is meant by ‘ attitude ’ . Catholics may have believed that, in the best of all possible worlds, the papacy’s condemnation of the oath should be respected. But this is not the same as saying that all such catholics were ready to parrot the statements of the more extreme theoretical defenders of papal power and prerogative.

Sommerville blames Catholics’ refusal of the oath on the ‘ intransigence of the pope and papalists ’ . 81 But there are real problems with this line of interpretation. For the relationship between the catholic community and the early Stuart state was far more nuanced and fl uid than he implies. While we cannot with certainty determine what every catholic actually thought about these issues, and some were keen to say as little as possible about them, the point is, as has already been suggested, that this relationship relied on factors outside the parameters of the theoretical debate — more precisely on whether the community, as a bloc, was likely to render political support for whatever style and series of policies the Stuart regime decided to endorse and pursue at different times.

78 . AAW, A ix. 115. 79 . NCC , 250. 80 . Sommerville, ‘ Papalist Political Thought’, 178. See also R. Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572 – 1651 (Cambridge, 1993), 142, 260. 81 . Sommerville, ‘ Papalist Political Thought’, 178.

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This can be illustrated by reviewing the relationship between the catholic community and the state from the mid-Jacobean period until the civil war. In the middle years of James’s reign, catholics in certain parts of the country were being dealt with quite severely. As has been said, it was suspected that catholics might try to resist James’s decision to marry his daughter, Elizabeth, to the elector palatine. In February 1613, Anthony Champney, in Paris, with disgust heard it reported that the priest John Almond had been executed ‘ to geve contentment to the count palatin’. 82 There were rumours in some regions that they might rise in rebellion. In the same month, Benjamin Norton related that it was supposed in his part of Sussex that ‘ catholiques woulde burne Chichester, Winchester, and suche cityes’. 83 James certainly reacted aggressively at this time to what he perceived to be catholic political obstinacy. In November 1613, he ordered Suarez’s recently published volume, his Defensio Fidei Catholicae , to be publicly burned at Paul’s Cross. So great was the offi cial displeasure at this book that the English members of the Society of Jesus were, reported William Bishop in December 1613, ‘ in feare ’ . 84 During the same year, the regime tried hard to refute rumours that any kind of offi cial tolerance would be shown to James’s catholic subjects. In March 1613, John Jackson relayed, from the court, the news that ‘ one of the greatest persons in the government of the state said of late that they be in great errour who think that the king wyll ever yeeld that any of the lawes shold be stayed … from execution. He may well from private or publick respects shew favour to private men but to think that the government shall be altred, or that the lawes shall not be executed as they see occasion, is a great mistaking; unles, said the party, the pope wold doe that which he will never doe, that is disclayme from any power of deposing and medling with temporalities as life and livelyhoods’. 85

James showed great interest in the attempts made in the French estates-general during autumn 1614 to formulate an oath which bore a clear resemblance to the 1606 oath. In September, Anthony Champney actually described the French proposal as ‘ the oathe of Ingland ’ . 86 The ultramontane Cardinal Du Perron spoke strongly against what was regarded in France as a Huguenot-inspired initiative by the third estate (and his response was of considerable interest to English catholics). He condemned it as an attempt to introduce divisions into the French state, and he censured James’s government for supporting the third estate’s

82 . AAW, A xii. 76. 83 . Ibid., 211. At this time, the catholic gentry were subjected to the ritual indignity of having their arms and armour taken from them, NAGB , 211 – 12, 222 – 3. 84 . AAW, A xii. 529; Francisco Suarez, Defensio Catholicae Fidei (Coimbra, 1613); NAGB , 254 – 5, 261, 263. 85 . AAW, A xii. 101. 86 . Ibid., xiii. 531. See also ibid., xv. 135; J.H. Salmon, The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought (Oxford, 1959), 70, 77 – 8.

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efforts to secure the oath. 87 James was deeply irritated by Du Perron’s attack on the principles contained in the French oath. 88 At this time, James was still posturing as a supporter of the pan-European ‘ protestant cause ’ . One of the crucial issues of the latter part of James’s reign was how far the king would maintain this pose, and promote the rights of, for example the Huguenots in their struggle against the French monarchy. 89 He invited the Huguenot preacher Pierre du Moulin to England, and extended his patronage to him on condition that he should write a reply to Du Perron. 90

But, as is well known to scholars of the early Stuart period, James began to fi nd it increasingly diffi cult to sustain a stable public posture and policy towards the issue of religious division in Europe. The position and attitudes of catholics in England shifted in response to the complex series of foreign policy manoeuvres and initiatives which attended the Stuart court’s attempts to provide for the succession, via a dynastic marriage for Prince Charles, and to resolve the Palatinate question, following Frederick V’s ejection from his patrimony by Habsburg forces in the early stages of the Thirty Years War. Throughout the mid- and later 1610s, we can detect an increasing certainty within the English catholic community that James’s enthusiasm for the cause of international protestantism was not entirely guaranteed or secure. We certainly get a sense of this in the stream of stories about the trials and tribulations of Archbishop George Abbot. Both Anthony Champney and William Bishop (Bishop had recently crossed swords with Abbot over the issue of the oath) reported that Abbot had lost favour because of the palatine match — ‘ for the Ladie Elizabethe her mariage ’ was ‘ a thinge solicited by him ’ and now it turned ‘ to the dishonoure of the kingedome and the smale contentment of the ladie in whome lyethe the greatest hope of posteritie ’ , because ‘ the prince ’ , that is Charles, was ‘ verie weake and seeklye ’ , as Champney said. Bishop added that Princess Elizabeth herself made ‘ complaint that she ’ was ‘ as good as cast away which was principally through ’ Abbot’s ‘ importunity ’ . Bishop said that this was ‘ the best newes that I heard this great while, for it argueth that the king wilbe eas[i]ly induced to take a more calme course with his catholike subjects ’ . 91

Catholic clergy of this kind were hardly impartial observers. Abbot and some of his friends were, however, genuinely in political diffi culties at this stage over their stance on, for example the Essex divorce case. 92

87 . The Jesuit Joseph Creswell oversaw the translation of Du Perron’s speech in the estates-general, Allison, ‘ Later Life’, 91 – 2, 92 – 3. 88 . AAW, A xiv. 339; Allison, ‘ Later Life’, 93. 89 . S. Adams, ‘ The Protestant Cause: Religious Alliance with the West European Calvinist Communities as a Political Issue in England, 1585 – 1630 ’ (Univ. of Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 1973), chs. 8, 9. 90 . Allison, ‘ Later Life’, 93. 91 . AAW, A xii. 395, 400. 92 . D. Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard (London, 1993), 83.

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Catholics such as the priest John Jackson, who had an entrée at court, glossed and infl ected whatever signs of royal moderation that they could detect. 93 Even James’s speech at the opening of the 1614 parliament, some catholics thought, was a balancing act of sorts: the king began with an ‘ invective ’ against catholics, but he then declared that there were suffi cient laws against them already, and no more were required, nor would he make martyrs of them. 94 In the context of the widely reported executions of 1610 and 1612, this might have been construed as a change in policy. 95 By January 1615, there were rumours that all recusancy offences, including the refusal of the oath, were to be dealt with by way of composition. 96

It is in this context that circulating reports and rumours about latitude being allowed to catholics to whom the oath was tendered, and particularly about variant versions of the oath, were politically so signifi cant. While at certain times catholic compliance (even if not complete) could be interpreted as a sign of weakness and potential schism among catholics, at others it could be construed as a sign of a much more balanced and genuinely two-sided dialogue between the state (national and local) and the catholic community.

From very early on a number of catholics tried to frame variants of the parliament oath. Sometimes these took the form of protestations tacked on to the oath; at other times versions of the oath were drawn up which omitted the offending aspects of it. In the early years, those who concocted these hybrid versions of the oath often found that the authorities refused to countenance them. In 1608, Thomas Garnet produced a modifi ed form of the oath; but it was not accepted and he was hanged. 97 But, even in the mid-Jacobean period, when the king still postured as a champion of European protestantism, there sometimes seemed to be potential slippage and inconsistency in offi cial constructions and interpretations of catholic attitudes to the oath. In 1610, Cuthbert Johnson, a respected northern priest, formulated a variant of the oath which he wished to be sent to Rome to see whether the papacy would endorse it. He fi rst had it presented at court, via a Scottish intermediary,

93 . NAGB , 257 – 8. 94 . AAW, A xiii. 175. 95 . There were, however, another six executions in James’s reign (all between 1616 and 1618) under the penal statutes against catholics, although the last, of John Southern, caused James considerable displeasure, A.J. Loomie, ed., Spain and the Jacobean Catholics (2 vols., CRS lxiv, 68, London, 1973, 1978), ii. 113; Challoner, Memoirs , 358 – 9. However, it is worth noting that the two martyrs of May 1612, William Scot and Richard Newport, had a reputation for loyalism, and, at trial or execution, made speeches suffused with contemporary loyalist rhetoric. The northern gentleman Roger Widdrington made polemical capital out of the rumours that ‘ the kinge was displeased att the executione of the two prestes when he hearde howe they dyed with so great affectione to his service in all dutefull alleadgeance’, AAW, A xi. 329; Challoner, Memoirs , 323 – 9; P. Lake and M. Questier, ‘ Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England’, Past and Present , cliii (1996), 64 – 107, at 74. 96 . AAW, A xiv. 14. 97 . Challoner, Memoirs , 298; AAW, A viii. 254.

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and the report came back that the king ‘ liketh it well ’ ; and indeed the king ‘ swore by his soule that he desired no other at the papistes handes’. George Birkhead, albeit with misgivings, sent it off to be perused by the cardinals of the holy offi ce. 98 In 1611, for example when William Bishop claimed, as did many other catholics, that it was possible to tack a protestation on to the oath to make clear that the swearer accepted only certain parts of the oath, he was merely sent into exile. Indeed, the king opined that Bishop’s reasons for refusing the oath as it stood were not offensive in the way that others ’ refusals clearly were. 99

James had, of course, publicly linked the tendering of the oath to his own published account of the oath’s meaning, in other words, as Birkhead put it, ‘ onely to tie us to our temporall subjection’. 100 The 1610 parliament had affi rmed James’s reading of the oath’s meaning. 101 James’s words presented an opportunity, however, to drive a wedge between the king and some of his more vociferous protestant supporters. Lord Vaux answered in court in 1612 that ‘ the king gives strength and life unto the statute, and that he [Vaux] did never refuse for to take this oath according to the kings exposition of it’. As we have seen, the court had not been prepared to accept this. But the attorney-general had said to Vaux that ‘ in your answer, that you will take the oath according to the kings exposition of it, in this your saying, you do offer hereby very great wrong unto the king, for to make others to believe that the king hath a particular exposition of this statute to himself, and contrary to the said generall act of parliament, the which is not so, for the king did never make any other exposition, contrary to the words of the said statute, neither doth he any wayes allow of the taking of this oath in another manner, contrary to the forme specifi ed in the statute’. 102

Here, however, were the seeds of future confl ict. It was far from clear that James’s reading of the oath, and his account of what constituted proper and acceptable loyalty towards the sovereign, would remain identical to or compatible with the understanding of it shared by many of the members of his later parliaments, and certainly not when, in the later 1610s and during the 1620s, James negotiated for a dynastic marriage between the house of Stuart and, fi rst, the Spanish branch of the house of Austria and then, subsequently, the Bourbon court in Paris. Certainly, while the negotiations for the Spanish match were being conducted, James regarded protestant agitation on behalf of the elector palatine with suspicion and thought that those who urged too

98 . NAGB , 77, 79, 82; AAW, B 24, no. 38. See also AAW, B 26, no. 106. 99 . AAW, A viii. 35 – 6; NAGB , 19, 49, 111, 149. At his arraignment in July 1611, Henry Pett took the oath with a protestation or justifi cation on exactly the lines which had been laid down by William Bishop, AAW, A viii. 93, x. 263; Anstruther, Seminary Priests , i. 273. 100 . NAGB , 82. 101 . AAW, A ix. 106. 102 . Reports of Edward Bulstrode , iii. 198.

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vehemently a military intervention on the elector’s behalf were in effect opposing royal authority. 103 At the same time, the logic of the Stuart court’s dynastic policy pointed the way towards a radical reorientation of offi cial renderings and interpretations of catholic separatism. 104

It was inevitable that one of the conditions of any dynastic alliance with either the Habsburgs or the Bourbons would be some public measure of tolerance for James’s catholic subjects. Such tolerance would serve as a public guarantee of the regime’s good faith in entering into the treaty. The regime’s public commitment to a toleration would be used as a litmus test by the foreign negotiators of the treaty to determine how far James was prepared to override the domestic opposition (some of it, of course, harboured and expressed by members of the regime itself) which such a treaty would encounter. All of this would necessarily involve a revision of the way that the penal laws against catholics were understood. Catholics predicted that, as a result of whatever treaty was eventually concluded, they would be regarded as eligible for royal service and that some of them might even be able to move directly into the entourage of Prince Charles’s bride. This would of necessity entail the suspension of both the oath of allegiance and the oath of supremacy. As Sir Basil Brooke, a prominent catholic, put it, ‘ how easie a thing it is for his majestie by proclamacion to direct the auntient othe of allegeance to be ministred instead of the twoe other oathes, which was the course ever held in England till Henrie the 8 th fell from the Church. And this would be most proper at this time wherin his majestie endevoreth to remove all the impedimentes of his amity with catholike princes. ’ 105

By August 1622, catholics such as William Bishop were anticipating exactly such a revision of crown policy. As he explained to the secular clergy’s agent in Rome, it would be necessary for the papacy, in issuing the dispensation for the expected marriage, to insist that ‘ three or four catholike lords may be sworne on the privy counsell’, and that ‘ we may have in every shire some two or three justices of peace either catholike or catholikely affected, to defend the countrey catholikes in every shire: to which end the old oath of the kings supremacy, and [the] new [oath] of false fi delity must be suppressed in all catholikes cases’. 106 Representatives of the catholic community had been actively and aggressively negotiating with the regime, in late 1621 and early 1622, and particularly with the lord keeper, Bishop John Williams, to secure the release of their co-religionists who had been imprisoned for refusal to take the oath. 107

103 . S. Adams, ‘ Foreign Policy and the Parliaments of 1621 and 1624 ’ , in K. Sharpe, ed., Faction and Parliament (London, 1978), 139 – 71, at 149 – 50. 104 . See Adams, ‘ Protestant Cause’, ch. 9; M. Questier, ed., Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Politics, 1621 – 1625 (Camden Society, forthcoming, 2010). 105 . B[ritish] L[ibrary], Additional MS 21203, no. 4, fo. 12v. 106 . AAW, A xvi. 533 – 4. 107 . AAW, OB I/i, no. 64. Some catholic defenders of the oath, such as the Benedictine Thomas Green, now abandoned their former ideological stance in favour of the oath, ibid., nos. 75, 78.

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The narrative of the catholic toleration campaigns of the early 1620s and the process by which, temporarily, the penal statutes were suspended before their eventual reimposition in 1625 is complex. But it is clear that, as the crown’s dynastic policy started to provoke increasingly strident protestant opposition, catholics could posture as supporters of the Stuart court’s foreign policy. They did this just as several of the regime’s spokesmen started volubly to warn against the dangers of ‘ popular ’ spirits and the resurgence of the styles of puritan agitation which had been detected and condemned by conformist ideologues in the mid- and later Elizabethan period (even though, as Peter Lake comments, ‘ presbyterianism, either as a movement or … an expressed preference … was conspicuous by its absence from the Jacobean Church ’ ). 108 Tolerance was the logical reward for these catholic loyalists, a tolerance for which they were willing to agitate vigorously. Naturally enough, even those members of the privy council who supported the Spanish match hardly wished to see a full-scale legal toleration, for this would intensify the streams of anti-popery polemic which were already being directed at the proposed marriage treaty. So the toleration issue turned into a three-cornered debate between the, in many ways, now increasingly schizophrenic regime, which was trying to give away as little as possible, the regime’s protestant critics who thought too much had already been conceded, and different catholic factions, some of which thought that James’s sluggishness in granting toleration was regrettable and that he should be subjected to more international pressure to give way. Simultaneously this triggered a dispute within catholic circles about how such tolerance should be used to effect changes in the shape and disciplinary structures of the catholic community in England. Those clergy who believed that Rome ought to reinstate direct local (catholic) episcopal rule in James’s English and Scottish realms argued that a functioning episcopate of this kind could be represented to the crown as a bulwark of monarchical authority and security against the alleged threat from those catholics, notably the Jesuits, whom many, both protestants and catholics, tended to accuse of having monarchomach and republican inclinations. Such a restoration could also be offered as proof, both to foreign diplomats and to the papal curia, which was being lobbied for the dispensation required to allow the marriage to proceed, that toleration was now a political reality in the Stuart kingdoms. (Other catholics, especially the religious orders and their patrons, argued by contrast that such a move would make tolerance more diffi cult since it might be taken as a direct challenge to the royal supremacy.) 109

108 . Lake, ‘ Anti-popery’, 84 – 5, 86. 109 . Questier, Catholicism and Community , ch. 12; id., Stuart Dynastic Policy .

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The oath of allegiance was integral to these debates, both among catholics themselves and between catholics and the regime. The state’s offi cial line was that catholics were only ever punished for their political disobedience to the temporal power and not for their religion. But a sizeable number of catholics had been, and still were, imprisoned because they had refused to take the oath. And, as we have seen, the oath was not concerned merely with temporal loyalty, at least not narrowly interpreted. Hence, any relaxation of the Jacobean regime’s original line on the oath would threaten to reverse an entire generation’s understanding of the legal status of English catholics and the status also of the 1559 settlement of religion. The vigorous lobbying campaign (mounted by the Spaniards and their English catholic friends) eventually dragged out of the regime the famous letter of 2 August 1622, issued by the somewhat reluctant lord keeper, Bishop John Williams, which suspended the penal laws. 110 John Chamberlain commented with disgust on the ‘ compleat geol-deliverie ’ for all catholics, even for those who had refused the oath of allegiance. 111 What the crown had wished to be kept a relatively quiet procedural matter, in order to facilitate the passage of the negotiations with Spain, now became an extremely controversial issue. The regime struggled to reassure its critics that this was only a limited measure. Williams claimed in mid-September that if the papists should ‘ waxe insolent with this mercie, insulting upon the protestants, and translating this favour from the person to the cause’, the king would ‘ remaund them to their former state and condition, and renue his writ no more’. Williams outlined how the papists would be able to repay royal gratitude, and incidentally set an example to other of the king’s subjects: if they would ‘ use these graces modestly’, admit ‘ conferences with learned preachers’, ‘ peacably ’ pray ‘ for his majestie, and the prosperous successe of his pious endevours’, and ‘ relieve him

110 . TNA, PRO, SP 14/132/84; AAW, OB I/i, no. 80; John Hacket, Scrinia Reserata (London, 1692), pt i, sig. N2r. For the escalation in godly protestant criticism of royal policy in later 1622 after the issuing of the lord keeper’s letter, see A. Milton, Catholic and Reformed (Cambridge, 1995), 59 – 60; T. Birch, ed., The Court and Times of James the First (2 vols., London, 1848), ii. 329 – 30; Richard Sheldon, A Sermon Preached at Paules Cross (London, 1625). Sheldon, a royal chaplain, was one of the catholic clergy who had accepted the regime’s case on the oath, and had then left the Church of Rome. He was censured for this violently anti-popish sermon, preached in September 1622, in which he cited, in self-justifi cation, the king’s own Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance … . Together with a Premonition to all most mightie Monarches (London, 1609); J. Shami, John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit (Cambridge, 2003), 108 – 9; E. Bourcier, ed., The Diary of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (1622 – 1624) (Paris, 1974), 94 – 5. As Simon Adams points out, the passages in James’s work on the oath which identifi ed the pope as Antichrist were not unequivocal, and, at the York House conference in 1626, Richard Montagu cited them to argue that James had not subscribed to this apocalyptic perception of the papacy, Adams, ‘ Foreign Policy and the Parliaments of 1621 and 1624 ’ , 148. 111 . N.E. McClure, ed., The Letters of John Chamberlain (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1939), ii. 449. For the release of Yorkshire catholics imprisoned for refusing the oath, see Loomie, Spain , ii. 152 – 3; TNA, PRO, C 181/3, fo. 70r-v.

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bountifullie ’ if he should be ‘ forced and constrained to take his sword in hand’, then, and only then, would they meet with royal favour. 112

The regime, however, found it virtually impossible to keep control of the public’s perception of its policy in this respect. The toleration articles agreed with the Spaniards could not be convincingly represented as a mere administrative accompaniment of the proposed marriage. 113 There were even clauses guaranteeing the admission of catholics ‘ in counsell, as in goverments’. 114

The marriage negotiations with the Spaniards began to unravel in later 1623 just as the treaty’s articles, including the toleration clauses, were formally agreed upon. But the change of direction towards France (which fi nally brought Henrietta Maria to England in 1625) produced another set of proposals for tolerance for James’s catholic subjects, proposals which created real tension between the English and the French negotiators, just as the parliament of 1624 began to agitate violently against popery. Offi cials, both at the centre of government and in the provinces, continued to push, as they had done while the Spanish match negotiations were in train, for more vigorous enforcement of what was still, technically, the extant statute law against catholics. 115 Following the royal proclamation of 6 May 1624, which commanded the catholic clergy to take themselves off into exile, Edward Forset, in a full-length tract on the royal supremacy, reminded his readers of the ideological import of the oath of allegiance. He was, like everyone else, aware that the proclamation had been dragged by parliament out of an extremely reluctant king and that there was speculation that James had no intention of implementing it. 116 The negotiations with the

112 . TNA, PRO, SP 14/133/20; BL, Additional MS 22591, no. 35, fo. 222v; CSPD Addenda 1580 – 1625 , 646; A Letter Writt[en to] the L. Viscount Anan, decl[aring the] Nature and Reason of the late [Clemency] extended to the Lay-Recus[ants in] England (London, 1622), 5. For James’s letter to Williams concerning the toleration, see AAW, OB I/i, no. 79, printed in C. Dodd, The Church History of England (3 vols., Brussels [false imprint; printed at Wolverhampton], 1737 – 42), ii. 439. 113 . The form of dispensation proposed for catholics permitted them unrestricted private worship and exempted them from the requirements of the 1559 act of uniformity and from taking the oaths of supremacy and allegiance, TNA, PRO, SP 14/151/76, fo. 102r. For the public reading and swearing of the treaty’s articles on 23 July 1623, see TNA, PRO, SP 14/149/30. 114 . AAW, OB I/i, no. 84, fo. 158r. 115 . Lord Zouch used the issue of the oath’s administration in July 1623 to attack Lord Keeper Williams who had bailed suspects who had passed through the port of Dover and had refused the oath, TNA, PRO, SP 14/148/31, 31. i – iv, SP 14/149/19. For catholic accounts of the severe enforcement of the oath in the provinces in August and September 1624 and June 1625, see, e.g. ibid., A xviii. 361; ibid., B 26, no. 98; ibid., B 47, no. 155, fo. 178r. It was noted at the beginning of the 1624 session that several catholic peers had caused a stir by refusing to take, as one Venetian diplomat described it, ‘ the oath which excludes the pope’s sovereignty ’ (a reference, it appears, to the oath of allegiance rather than to the oath of supremacy). The tendering of the oath to peers had been specifi cally allowed by 7 & 8, James I, cap. 6; CSPV 1623 – 5 , 232; William Whiteway of Dorchester: His Diary 1618 to 1635 (Dorset Record Society, xii, Dorchester, 1991), 60; Questier, Catholicism and Community , 409 – 10; cf. E.R. Foster, The House of Lords 1603 – 1649 (Chapel Hill, 1983), 23, 31, 38, 66. See also Questier, Stuart Dynastic Policy . I am very grateful to Pauline Croft for advice on this point. 116 . Edward Forset, A Defence of the Right of Kings. Wherein the Power of the Papacie over Princes, Is Refuted; and the Oath of Allegeance Iustifi ed (London, 1624); McClure, Letters , ii. 556; Larkin and Hughes, Stuart Royal Proclamations , no. 252; CSPD 1623 – 5 , 247.

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French court, incorporating guarantees of legal tolerance for English catholics, caused serious domestic political problems and a barely concealed scorn for the Stuart regime’s proceedings with the French. Once again, English catholics could pose as supporters of the Stuart monarchy against the carping of puritan agitators. 117

In the years immediately following Charles’s accession in March 1625, the new regime tried to play a version of the protestant card. In the mid-1620s, it engaged in military hostilities against Spain and then, ironically, against France as well. But the early 1620s had proved a watershed in the relationship between the English catholic community and the crown. Indeed, in 1623, Rome had appointed William Bishop as bishop of Chalcedon ‘ in partibus infi delium ’ ; and Bishop was succeeded in his post by one of Cardinal Richelieu’s chaplains, a priest called Richard Smith. After James’s death, despite Charles’s attempts to posture as a protestant warrior prince, catholics insisted that Charles (whose pronouncements on controverted issues in religion were quite as confusingly varied as his father’s had been) was fundamentally tolerant. 118

Catholics’ perceptions of Charles’s disposition towards them directly infl ected what they understood political loyalism to mean in the new Caroline era. While technically the 1606 oath was still not a licit oath for catholics, because Rome had not reversed its censures of it, the way in which catholics negotiated with the crown over the tendering of the oath to them changed quite markedly. A memorandum compiled in the mid-1630s by the English catholic secular clergy summarised the position. They said that Charles had ‘ declared at severall tymes that by it he intended onely an assurance of his subjectes fi delity and loyalty towards him’. Charles deserved to be reassured by his catholic subjects of their ‘ fi delity by any oath that ever was proposed by any king to the subjectes of this kingdome, or by the kinges of France or Spaine or by any other princes in the Christian world who live in union with the sea of Rome’. This was, of course, an entirely standard formula, and the clergy were well aware that, of itself, this would not satisfy the king because Charles ‘ doth stand precisely upon the words of this oath as they lye’. Charles still insisted that ‘ the said oath made by the parlament is a lawe, and therefore not to be altered or changed without a parlament’, for he had been told that ‘ his catholique subjectes doe refuse to sweare unto the wordes of the oath as they lye, meerely because his holynes hath by a publick breve forbide[n] them, and not because the wordes

117 . See Questier, Stuart Dynastic Policy . Richard Corbett informed the duke of Buckingham, in a letter which can, tentatively, be dated to February 1625, that ‘ here is newes … that in the point of allegiance now in hand, all the papists are exceeding orthodox’, and ‘ the onely recusants are the puritanes’, Cabala (London, 1654), 121; BL, Harleian MS 7000, no. 78, fo. 146r. I am very grateful to Alexander Courtney and to Glyn Redworth for help with this reference. 118 . NCC , passim .

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themselves conteyne the least thing contrary to faith, religion or conscience, and that before the popes breves not any did refuse to take the said oath’. Charles thought it was an easier matter for the pope simply to withdraw his breves against the oath. But, the memorandum suggested, ‘ if meanes could be found to possesse his majesty: fi rst that by vertue of his prerogative he may justly dispense with the altering of the forme of this oath, [and] secondly that ’ his catholic subjects ‘ doe not refuse to sweare unto the wordes of the oath as they lye because forbidden by his holynes briefe, but because in the word[s] them selves are contained many things contrary to religion and conscience, and, before ever the sea of Rome did publish her breves, the said oath of alleageance was generally condemned by all learned divines as unlawfull’, then ‘ without doubt meanes also would bee found to give his majesty content and satisfaccion by an other forme of an oath that should give a farr better assurance of his subjectes fi delity than this doth’. 119

Within the essentially traditional contours of this catholic account of the oath lay the recognition that the relationship between king, prerogative and parliament (up to 1629) was not now as it had been under James, even in the early 1620s. During the personal rule, catholics complained less about persecution (though the compounding scheme devised for recusant nonconformists’ fi nes often extracted quite considerable sums from the catholic gentry) and tended, rather, to accuse each other of defaming the king by calling him a persecutor. 120 All the major catholic clerical factions and their patrons negotiated during this period both with Rome and with the regime for a modifi cation of the oath, and these negotiations took on an entirely different tone from the fraught and tense one which had characterised such attempts during James’s reign. 121 The Benedictine monk Leander Jones tried to work out a compromise on the oath by trading on his friendship with Archbishop William Laud. 122 As during James’s reign, a number of variant oaths were constructed to see whether the authorities would accept them. 123 This was, of course, unlikely of itself to produce a statutory reformulation of the parliament oath. For most of the 1630s, the crown simply felt under no immediate pressure to make concessions to catholics and, in any case, there were now severe obstacles to the

119 . Ibid., 247 – 8. 120 . See, e.g. ibid., 154, 167, 168, 174, 175, 181, 202, 209, 210, 246, 255, 267, 307. 121 . Ibid., passim , esp. 26 – 7, 215, 222, 224, 231, 247 – 8, 250, 261 – 2, 263. 122 . Ibid., 229, 230 – 1, 235, 255. 123 . Ibid., 27, 235, 242; G. Sitwell, ‘ Leander Jones’s Mission to England, 1634 – 1635 ’ , Recusant History , v (1960), 132 – 82; Vatican Archives, Nunziatura d’Inghilterra 3a (Gregorio Panzani’s Diary 1634 – 7; transcript and translation at Farm Street Library, London), fo. 117r; R. Scrope and T. Monkhouse, eds., State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon (3 vols., Oxford, 1767 – 86), i. 88 – 90. For Leander Jones’s attempts to persuade Rome that Charles’s intentions in retaining and enforcing the 1606 oath of allegiance were different in kind from those of James I, and so should not be condemned now in the terms employed by Pope Paul V, see G. Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome (London, 1635), 146 – 7, 255 – 7.

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calling of a parliament, through which, of course, it was virtually impossible that any such reform would pass. Catholics who still wanted to negotiate were faced both with intransigence at Rome and with royal demands that they should concede more than they were prepared to offer. 124

What was obviously decisive here, however, was the change in personal style which marked off Charles’s kingship from that of his father. There was a good deal of semi-public irenicism in the conversations between the king and George Con, one of the papal agents accredited to Henrietta Maria’s court during the 1630s. As Gordon Albion remarks, ‘ Charles’s intimacy with the papal agent was no backstairs affair conducted only in the privacy of his own or the queen’s apartments’. 125 Charles dropped hints to such prominent catholics as Edward Somerset, heir to the earl of Worcester, that, as Con related it to Cardinal Barberini in 1637, ‘ the oath as it stood contained a scandalous proposition, and that he had to sympathize with those who refused it’. In fact, by November 1636, Charles had himself drawn up possible modifi cations to the oath. 126

This is not to say that the regimes of James I and Charles I, or even the more sympathetically disposed members of those regimes, ever entirely bought into contemporary catholic rhetoric that, simply by removing stumbling blocks such as the 1606 oath, Charles’s catholic subjects would be able to serve him with the love and devotion which they had always reserved for the Stuart dynasty. Nevertheless, such negotiations clearly progressed a good deal further in the 1630s than they had done before. And they contributed signifi cantly to publicly voiced suspicions of popish infi ltration at the Stuart court, allegations which characterised so much of the opposition to Caroline government during this period. The rehearsal of what appear, on the surface, to be altogether standard arguments about whether the oath was licit or not take on very different meanings during this period, something of which contemporaries were fully aware. Catholics eagerly recorded every occasion on which it appeared that leading members of the regime, such as Lord Cottington, advised against pressing the oath on catholics. 127 High-profi le cases in which courtiers around Henrietta Maria refused the oath, and were not punished, were reported widely. 128

124 . Richard Smith noted in July 1632 that Leander Jones was ‘ dejected in mynde, perhaps becaus[e] his writing in favour of the oathe is not wel taken … [in Rome] as in truthe it deserveth’, NCC , 250. 125 . Albion, Charles I , 236. See also C. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill, 1983), 50. 126 . Albion, Charles I , 264 – 71. For the negotiations over the oath between Charles and the Roman curia via the diplomats George Con and Sir William Hamilton, see Albion, Charles I , ch. 11; Hibbard, Charles I , 68 – 9, 265. 127 . NCC , 222. 128 . Ibid., 208 – 9. The queen supported the proposal that Richard Smith should take an ordinary oath of fi delity to the king, ibid., 215.

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During the 1630s, several observers claimed that the regime’s stance on the oath (as on several other ecclesiastical issues) was stoking the fi res of protestant political opposition. The Venetian diplomat Anzolo Correr remarked on Con’s negotiations with the king about the format of the oath, and noted that many, and in particular the ‘ puritans’, ‘ begin to speak angrily about it, saying that if they permit this licence to the catholics, it will amount to declaring absolute liberty of conscience in England and thereby open the way to those civil divisions and discords ’ which in the past have led to ‘ persecutions ’ . 129 Agitators such as Henry Burton argued that the oath was being perverted, serving in fact as a back door to tolerance of popery: ‘ though some papists will take the oath of allegiance, as subjects to their king, yet they refuse the oath of supremacy, as acknowledging their subjection to the king upon no other termes, but as subordinate to the pope’. 130 Burton and others were aware that some of the political lessons which contemporaries had drawn from the gunpowder treason of 1605 were being applied now to puritans just as much as, if not rather more than, to catholics. 131

Charles lobbied by indirect means at Rome to get the papacy to drop its opposition to the oath, or at least to secure its approval for some kind of compromise formula. 132 In the end this came to nothing. But the point was that the oath was now being used by the Stuart regime as a negotiating tool to secure political support both at home and abroad from an English and from a European catholic constituency. The oath was, therefore, no longer simply a way of repressing what the Jacobean regime had once viewed as an acutely dangerous form of political dissent. Just as in the early 1620s, there now appeared, to some contemporaries, to be a connection between, on the one hand, catholic attempts to refashion themselves as loyalists, and, on the other hand, rumours during the personal rule of a ‘ puritan ’ conspiracy against both Church and state. 133

As is quite well known, in the war against the Scottish rebels which preceded the calling of parliament in 1640, Charles authorised the formulation of a new, non-statutory, oath which was to be used for army personnel. There were, as Caroline Hibbard points out, suspicions,

129 . CSPV 1636 – 9 , 120. 130 . Burton, For God, and the King , 41. Christopher Dow, Burton’s polemical antagonist, defended catholics for taking the oath, but not in a sense of which Burton could approve, Christopher Dow, Innovations Unjustly charged upon the Present Church and State (London, 1637), 139 – 40. 131 . Dow, Innovations , 136 – 7. William Whiteway observed how in 1634 certain New Englanders were being compelled to take both the oath of allegiance and the oath of supremacy, William Whiteway … Diary , 140 – 1. I am grateful to Kenneth Fincham for this reference. 132 . Hibbard, Charles I , 68. 133 . AAW, A xxiv. 129, 137 – 9; M. Questier, ‘ Arminianism, Catholicism and Puritanism in England during the 1630s’, Historical Journal , xlix (2006), 53 – 78; J. Peacey, ‘ The Paranoid Prelate: Archbishop Laud and the Puritan Plot’, in B. Coward and J. Swann, eds., Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2004), 113 – 34.

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voiced by Charles’s enemies, that this oath was intended to allow catholic offi cers to enlist. Leading puritan peers (Lord Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke) refused to take it, and their refusal gained wide publicity when they were arrested for their noncompliance. They were not the only ones to have such reservations. The opposition of other peers at York in April 1639 actually forced Charles to modify the new oath’s terms. 134 Signifi cantly, they claimed that the ‘ prerogative of drawing up such oaths … belongs solely to parliament and not to his majesty’. 135

Ironically, the papacy was not prepared to approve the army oath either. 136 But, from more than one contemporary perspective, the new form of the oath constituted a reversal of royal policy towards catholics, a reversal which catholics themselves had been urging and anticipating for over thirty years. In the frenetic circumstances of the confl ict with the covenanters, the change of legal status of English catholics (who the Venetian ambassador said were, in any case, the only lobby which expressed itself publicly in favour of the war, and who were raising money for the war’s prosecution) took on a sinister appearance. It was made worse by the spread of Scots propaganda which claimed that the king was under the infl uence of evil counsellors who were themselves in the pay of Rome, and aimed to restore popish catholicism to both kingdoms. 137

Inevitably, the army oath became an essential component of the thesis that a ‘ popish plot ’ was responsible for the falling out between the king and his people. Sir Francis Windebank saw the introduction of the new oath as a way of compensating for the failure, earlier in the 1630s, to secure a renegotiation of the 1606 oath. Windebank and the earl of Arundel had consulted, over its format, with George Con and with the leaders of the English catholic clergy. In Hibbard’s words, ‘ it was to be hoped that the new oath would ultimately lead to the abolition of the old oath of allegiance ’ and was certainly identifi ed as ‘ a means for catholics to dispense with ’ the 1606 oath. 138 The new oath omitted virtually all the contentious material in the 1606 version. What was fl agged by royal propaganda as a rallying cry to come to the king’s aid against the Scottish rebels could also be read as an attempt both to reintegrate catholics into the Stuart polity and as part of an effort to fi nd a nonparliamentary solution to the current crisis, a crisis which, if resolved in the king’s favour, would overturn many contemporary

134 . Hibbard, Charles I , 110 – 11, 118 – 20; M.C. Fissel, The Bishops ’ Wars (Cambridge, 1994), 19 – 21; A. Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620 – 1660 (Cambridge, 1987), 121; Clancy, ‘ The Jesuits and the Independents: 1647 ’ , 75. 135 . CSPV 1636 – 9 , 536. 136 . Clancy, ‘ The Jesuits and the Independents’, 75. 137 . CSPV 1636 – 9 , 536. See also Hibbard, Charles I , 121 – 4; id., ‘ The Contribution of 1639: Court and Country Catholicism’, Recusant History , xvi (1982), 42 – 60. 138 . Hibbard, Charles I , 118, 119.

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protestant assumptions about religion and politics. As Hibbard comments, the view of peers such as Saye and Brooke was that ‘ loyal Englishmen took oaths against catholics, not against protestant covenanters’. 139 In other words, this was, in the context of what appeared to be a war of religion in Charles’s Scottish realm, the all-too-logical working out of recent negotiations between the catholics and the crown over the terms in which they should acknowledge their allegiance. 140

With the failure of the king to defeat his enemies, of course, the catholic investment in the cause of the Stuarts, temporarily at least, appeared to come to an end. Their efforts to make their peace with the republican regime caused all sorts of fractures within their own ranks. 141 Yet the issues raised by the oath of allegiance, in the period up to 1642, throw a crucial light on the relationship between the early Stuart state and its catholic subjects. They allow us to describe how English catholics could be transformed from alleged proponents, as indeed many of them were in the later sixteenth century, of republican resistance theory and quasi-democratic attitudes to the origins of political power and the nature of sovereign authority into something altogether different by the time of the civil war.

One can also sense here a necessary corrective to accounts of the period in which catholics, or virtually all of them, are portrayed as an essentially quiescent minority within the state, whose primary concerns were religious, not political. 142 Loyalism, in the context of the early seventeenth century, was simply not the same as inertia or quiescence. Tied in with, at times, vigorous campaigns by catholics for tolerance to be granted to them by the state, discussions of loyalty and, in particular, of the statutory oath of 1606 actually gave the catholic issue a lot of its political momentum during this period. At certain points, especially in the second half of James’s reign, and during most of Charles’s reign up to the civil war, catholics were able to reprise with considerable effect the toleration rhetoric which they had employed in 1603 – 04, when they claimed that they, rather than the king’s so-called ‘ puritan ’ subjects, properly understood the true relationship between temporal and spiritual power and, moreover, had always been the sincerest supporters

139 . Ibid., 120. 140 . The crown’s critics responded that the protestation of 1641, the parliamentary vow and covenant of 1643, the oath of supremacy and the oath of allegiance were all compatible, Englands Oaths (London, 1642); D. Cressy, ‘ The Protestation Protested, 1641 and 1642 ’ , Historical Journal , xliii (2002), 251 – 79, at 253, 255, 256, 270, 276; D.M. Jones, Conscience and Allegiance in Seventeenth Century England (Woodbridge, 1999), 116 – 19. See also A Vindication of the Late Vow and Covenant (London, 1641). The protestation was used to imply that the king had failed in his duty to safeguard the true meaning of loyalty. See also The Harmony of our Oathes, showing an Agreement betwixt the Oathes of Supremacie, Allegeance, the Freemans Oath, Protestation and Covenant (London, 1643). 141 . Clancy, ‘ Jesuits and Independents ’ ; J.R. Collins, ‘ Thomas Hobbes and the Blackloist Conspiracy of 1649 ’ , Historical Journal , xlv (2002), 305 – 31; Allison, ‘ An English Gallican’. 142 . See, e.g. Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism , 37 – 41.

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of the rights of the Stuart dynasty in England, and consequently were now a more reliable bulwark of royal authority than some godly protestants.

From its inception the oath of allegiance of 1606 was diversely interpreted, as contemporaries argued about what it actually signifi ed, and what it meant either to take it or not, and to enforce it or not. It is possible to contend that what was originally an aggressive and a masterly piece of royal rhetoric, designed to disrupt the internal coherence of the catholic community, functioned eventually in a rather different way. James I’s tergiversations about the oath refl ected his continuing, often waspish, dialogue with English catholics, as well as with his protestant subjects. At the time that the oath passed into law, James could claim, with parliamentary backing, to be a leading protestant arbiter of contemporary political thought about the extent of monarchical authority. At certain points, the law was enforced with full rigour even against those catholics who declared, with some justice, that they were loyal. At other times, however, former certainties expressed in royal discourse about the relationship between religion and political obedience looked a good deal less secure, so much so that, by the early 1640s, some of Charles I’s protestant subjects were actually starting to instruct their king about the proper meaning of the oath of allegiance designed by his godly progenitor, King James.

Queen Mary, University of London MICHAEL QUESTIER

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