ABSTRACT

Recent writing on post-Reformation England has constructed a very pessimistic picture of the consequences of both Catholic and Protestant attempts to evangelize or convert “the people”. On both sides of the confessional divide, it has been argued, there was an effectual barrier between the elite world of the clerical would-be proselytizers and the people whom they were trying to convert. On this view, because of the word-and doctrine-based nature of Protestantism, along with Protestantism’s heavily iconoclastic attitude to the vast assemblage of symbolic image and ritual practice in which the holy was shadowed forth and manipulated in the late mediaeval Church, it was almost inevitable that “the people” would be turned off by the interminable sermons and improving books through which the godly tried to transform the religious condition of England. On the Romish side, things might well be thought to have been rather different. There the attachment of the majority to the old ways surely offered the Catholic clergy a head start as they sought to turn the conservative religious proclivities of the people into a self-consciously Catholic community, a launching pad for the re-Catholicization of the whole country, should the political tide turn in their favour. Even here, it has been argued, that the, if not cowardice, then at least prudential passivity of the seminary priests in the face of official persecution, along with a social and cultural elitism that was inherent in the nature of “the mission”, conspired to alienate the Catholic clergy from “the people” and to consign the bulk of post-1570 Catholic “missionary” activity to the houses and spheres of influence of the Catholic gentry. There the priests stayed, preferring to associate with their social equals and to disseminate their own forms of rigorist practice amongst a captive, literate and elite audience rather than to

proselytize among the unlettered and superstitious multitude. In the process, of course, the priests were only too happy to avoid too direct an acquaintance with the general nastiness of government officials, privately-run prisons and Tyburn. In so doing, it has been argued, they removed themselves from the popular sphere and the affections of the people as effectively as did their Puritan enemies who alienated their audiences more directly by long and boring sermons and a dirigiste attitude to religious belief and observance. Perhaps the only real difference between these two groups was that while at least the Puritan evangelists tried to evangelize, the inadequately-trained seminarists scarcely made the attempt. Thus Christopher Haigh has pictured both formal, recusant Catholics and Protestants/Puritans as differently embattled minorities confronting audiences they neither liked nor understood.1