ABSTRACT
Historical continuity can be found between the Catholic exiles of the late sixteenth century and the royalists of the mid-seventeenth century, but it is complicated by the enormous transformations that occurred within English politics during the intervening period. 1 To be sure, those points of continuity that exist, as circumstantial as they often are, are compelling. In 1640, for example, during the early conflict with the Scottish Covenanters, among the first to rise up on behalf of Charles I’s efforts against the rebelling Scots was the Earl of StrafforD's Irish army, composed primarily of Irish Catholics. Later in October 1641, when a number of Ulster Catholic gentry, led by Sir Phelim O'Neill, rose up and took control of English forts and castles, they claimed their actions were taken “by authority from His Majesty out of England, and by consent of the prime nobility and gentry of Ireland” and were intended “for the preservation of His Majesty’s prerogative” and “their own religion and liberties against the Puritan faction in England, Scotland, and Ireland.” 2 And during the later period in exile, some of the most committed adherents to the royalist cause, especially those that surrounded Queen Henrietta Maria’s court in France, were Catholics, and even conformist royalist adherents to the Queen such as Sir William Davenant were reputed to have taken the opportunity of being in exile to convert to Catholicism. 3 Obviously, English Catholic perceptions of the crown had undergone a drastic transformation during the period between the end of the sixteenth century and the civil war period. Whereas the early Jesuits saw Elizabeth as a heretic queen who had not only usurped the pope’s rightful claim to the ecclesiastical realm but was introducing heresy into her realm, English Catholics during Charles I’s reign had become accustomed to relying on Charles I’s absolutist claims to sovereignty, especially his exercise of the sovereign’s extraordinary powers, to insure whatever limited de facto tolerance that they enjoyed. A wide array of Catholic perspectives existed during the seventeenth century: between the idiosyncratic position taken by later English Catholics such as Kenelm Digby and Thomas White who supported a Roman Church divested of the Court of Rome’s authority and the more orthodox position of Robert Persons and Fr. Robert Bellarmine, S.J., most English Catholics were doubtless somewhere in the confused middle. But because Charles I’s policies were perceived as more generous to the old faith than his Puritan opponents, most Catholic supporters of the crown seemed all too eager to ignore the fact that from the Church’s perspective, like Elizabeth and James I, Charles had also effectively usurped the ecclesiastical realm and was responsible for presiding over the introduction of dangerous heresies into the body politic. 4
