This work aims to analyze and interpret the relationship between religion and politics in English Catholic thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The debate in Elizabethan and Jacobean England over this theme provides central starting points for examining the development and articulations of the clash between church and state over the jurisdiction of consciences, in a context in which the aspect assumed by the English monarchy and by the Church of England had reframed the question of the relationship between who should govern bodies and who should govern souls in a complex and in many ways, in the eyes of the rest of Europe, peculiar manner. Such a context presents various fundamental traits worth identifying in detail.