ABSTRACT
Whereas the public establishment of the Catholic faith in the Spanish Netherlands allowed for magnificence in the celebration of its rites and the importation of baroque religious art and architecture, in England, as in the Dutch Republic, persecution severely restricted opportunities for Catholic liturgical or artistic splendour. In England and Wales, Catholicism under Elizabeth (1558–1603) was equated with treason and associated with attempts, through alliance with Spain, to reverse the nation’s Protestant Reformation, fashioned in 1559. The Catholic clerical spokesmen Cardinal William Allen and the Jesuit Robert Persons (or Parsons, 1546–1610) confirmed government suspicions of Catholic loyalty with their advocacy of subversion and Spanish assistance, so as to restore Catholicism. A Catholic-inspired rebellion, the 1569 Revolt of the Northern Earls, directed at replacing Elizabeth with her Catholic cousin Mary Queen of Scots (1542–87), was supported by Pius V’s bull of excommunication and dethronement of Elizabeth, Regnans in Excelsis (1570). The menacing political implications of a Catholic religious mission to Protestant England became apparent from the 1570s with the arrival in the country of highly motivated Jesuit and seminary-trained priests from the Continent, and Elizabeth’s government and parliament responded with such measures as the Act of Persuasions of 1581, making it high treason, punishable by hanging, drawing and quartering, to convert English people to Catholicism or to be so converted. Obdurate lay Catholics (known legally as ‘recusants’) faced fines of an astronomical £20 per month for absence from Church of England worship, an attempted legislative deterrence of the significant gentry and aristocratic support that accrued to the Catholic cause. A century or so of the most intense penal period can be dated from about 1580, decades in which political crises such as the Spanish Armada of 1588, the 1605 Gunpowder Conspiracy against James I (1567–1625) and the Civil War which broke out in 1642, spasmodically accelerated the rates of persecution, especially of priests, 133 of whom were executed under Elizabeth alone. 1
