ABSTRACT
A Memorial for the Reformation of England was the work of an exile in Spain, still hopeful of restoration. 1 Even before Persons left Spain late in 1596 to attend to the problems at the English College in Rome, he was turning his mind to an ambitious project that would make history benefit English Catholicism even under continued persecution. This he was to entitle the Certamen Ecclesiae Anglicanae, 2 a title that bears witness to the struggle or contestation of the church in England: that is, the conflict between church and state. If Protestants thought of the history of the church as a history of the English people trying to cast off the Roman yoke, Persons insisted that English secular rulers were culpable for stifling the flow of grace from Rome on which the spiritual health of the nation depended. The Certamen, which occupied him from 1597 to 1604 or even later, never got beyond the stage of compilation of divers materials, but it stood behind two major polemical works: namely, A Treatise of Three Conversions of England, which was directed at the Foxe tradition of representing Catholicism as an oppressive burden on the English spirit, 3 and An Answere to the Fifth Part of Cokes Reportes, which refuted the claim that autonomy from Rome was implicit in the common law. 4 Published at a critical period around the beginning of James’s reign when the question of toleration was open, both works tended to claim for the Catholic community the right 94to be regarded as the authentic historical embodiment of the Christian faith in England.
