ABSTRACT
The relationship between religion and politics in light of the oath of 1606 and the controversy that pitted James I against Robert Bellarmine appear to mark a substantial change from the Elizabethan era. More specifically, in this chapter I want to argue that in the debate over the oath the very relation between Catholicism and political power takes on an entirely new aspect. Bellarmine and James discussed problems such as papal prerogatives, the pope’s right to intervene in political affairs, the possibility of separating civil obedience from the profession of faith, in a profoundly different theoretical manner with respect to the 1580s and 1590s. In those years the same themes were not issues for discussion or analysis, but merely a peril to the stability of the state and its rulers. Which is not to say the Catholic menace had been shelved. While it is true that James, unlike Elizabeth, was not excommunicated, it was certainly not unknown that a certain faction of English Catholics-Persons in primislong supported and sought to encourage the Spanish Infanta’s succession to the throne, and the Gunpowder Plot arose just a year before the proclamation of the Oath of Allegiance. Furthermore, as we have seen with James, the theme of Catholicism as a danger to the stability of the regime surely did not vanish from early seventeenth-century English polemics. Despite this, the very fact that Bellarmine included Sander in his formulation of a potestas only to be understood as indirecta as opposed to the directa, and that James proposed an oath to test the loyalty of his subjects who professed the pope’s religion, meant that the relation between religion and politics was beginning to be framed in very different terms than during Elizabeth’s reign. Bellarmine’s theoretically intransigent stance in turn demonstrates this change, as the Jesuit can now allow himself to quote Sander the theoretician and leave aside Sander the betrayer of England. And this can occur because, if the model of English Catholicism Sander and Persons offered in the 1580s was presented as an alternative to the state by direct governance of political power, and was perceived as such by Elizabeth’s government, the Bellarminian model represented the attempt to control the jurisdiction of bodies through the jurisdiction of souls.
