One of the central contentions advanced by the architects of the Elizabethan religious settlement was that the statutory conformity that it required was relatively minimal. What was arguably a series of low-level acts of compliance required by the legislation of 1559 concerning the government of the church could be pointed to, by those who defended the settlement, as proof that Elizabeth Tudor did not make windows into men's souls—in other words, she did not force their consciences.

There was a good deal of truth in this. The 1559 settlement may well have been a recognizably Protestant one, pushed through by queen and council in the face of parliamentary (especially aristocratic and episcopal) opposition.Footnote ¹ Recent research has demonstrated, however, that the extent to which people, including those of a Catholic disposition, found their consciences directly troubled by the settlement may have been quite limited. For example, relatively few were prevailed upon to swear the oath of the royal supremacy, that is, the declaration that the queen was the “only supreme governor of this realm . . . as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes as temporal.”Footnote ² The provisions of the Act of Uniformity that dictated attendance at church on Sundays and holy days were always a problem for some Catholics. Still, it seems that for years after the settlement it was only a minority of those who were unsympathetic to the, in some sense dominant, Protestant culture of the upper echelons of church and state that refused outright to conform to the minimum scope stipulated by the law.Footnote ³

In the late 1570s and 1580s, Catholic separatism started, for a variety of reasons, to increase. But when the regime began to crank up the statutory pressure on nonconformist Catholics, this was almost always articulated by government spokesmen in terms of a division between politics and religion. Time and time again, it was declared that Catholics were not being punished for their conscience-based scruples but for sedition or, at the very least, for refusal to comply with the statute-based obedience that had been ushered in when the realm had broken, once again, its jurisdictional links with Rome. If, regrettably, some of these Catholics had to be brought to book for their separatism (or worse), this was because they had deliberately disobeyed the civil law of the state as it related to the government of the church.Footnote ⁴

The Elizabethan state, like most others, had every incentive to avoid the creation and overt expression of visibly different and ideologically driven versions of how the national church should be governed. This, after all, was the principal purpose of the conformity legislation. It was supposed to lock down and choke off religion-fueled expressions of opposition to monarchical authority. The alternative to a conformist peace was, potentially at least, the kind of violence that contemporaries witnessed in Valois France during the wars of religion. A conformist settlement was on some level mere common sense and also in accord with the queen's own wishes, which, as is well known, were so often at odds with the more aggressively Protestant counsel and vision of those around her.Footnote ⁵

This is not to say that, from time to time, the Elizabethan regime did not veer away from the queen's preferred via-media inclinations. It certainly did this in the early 1580s when it had to enlist moderate Puritan opinion in the battle against the public challenge posed by the Jesuit Edmund Campion.Footnote ⁶ But all through the period, Protestants who wanted a harder line against Catholics had to work within the narrow parameters set by the law. They could often do no more than protest that legal penalties for recusancy should not be allowed to become a form of de facto or licensed toleration.Footnote ⁷

One superficially rather obvious way in which they could make their case was by demanding that force be used to compel recalcitrant Catholics to listen to good Protestant sermons. In September 1590, for example, faced with what appeared to be a lurch into recusancy in the Pale area around Dublin, Archbishop Loftus urged Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley that “the sword alone without the Word is not sufficient, but unless they be forced they will not once come to hear the Word preached.”Footnote ⁸ We occasionally find the Protestant authorities using compulsion to evangelize and convert Catholics by enforcing attendance at Protestant sermons, although not all Protestants believed that this was a licit approach. There was also a strand of Catholic opinion that, faced with the harsh legal implications and consequences of disobedience, was prepared to compromise over the state's demands for compliance.Footnote ⁹ For example, in the 1590s, a former Jesuit named Thomas Wright declared that it was allowable for a Catholic to attend the sermons of Protestant preachers, since this was different in kind from being willingly present at the rest of the liturgy and could not in itself be taken to signify assent to Protestant doctrine.Footnote ¹⁰

Attempts to evangelize by force were, it has to be said, not all that common. Nor were they likely to be successful in their stated purpose of procuring conversions. But the rare occasions that something like this did take place and the assumptions of the participants that were brought out into the open offer us a potentially significant way of describing what was at stake in the political and religious standoffs between the authorities and the queen's Catholic subjects.Footnote ¹¹

Perhaps the best-recorded incident of this kind happened in York in 1599–1600. In December of 1600, a document describing some of the recent goings-on in York Castle was compiled and apparently began to circulate in manuscript. It recounted the events that were referred to in its title: “A Trewe Storie of the Catholicke Prisoners in Yorke Castle, theire Behavioure and Defence of the Catholicke Religion when they were hailed by force to the Protestants Sermons, Anno Domini 1600. With a Confutation of Cooke the Ministers Sermon by C.J. Priest.”Footnote ¹² There had been, the text said, a weekly procession of godly ministers to York Castle in order to preach to the forcibly assembled Catholic prisoners there (fifty-four in all, of whom twenty were women) and to lecture them on the nature of their errors in religion.Footnote ¹³ The writer was the seminary priest William Richmond, who was receiving his information directly from inside the prison. For him, perhaps predictably, the courage of the prisoners, and indeed, the whole business, served as a demonstration of the invincibility of Catholic truth and the “weakness of heresie.”Footnote ¹⁴

In this period, the holding of what were in effect political prisoners frequently generated news. Accounts of what went on in the government's supposedly high- (but in fact often rather low-) security prisons were pumped out, inter alia, via the circulation of manuscripts.Footnote ¹⁵ In the previous few years, Wisbech Castle in East Anglia, where high-profile Catholic clerics were jailed, had been an endless source of news and rumor about their factions and quarrels.Footnote ¹⁶ It was not unknown for Protestant ministers on their own account to challenge imprisoned Catholics to disputation.Footnote ¹⁷ But what happened in York Castle in 1599–1600 was a formal week-by-week confrontation between a slate of godly ministers and a group of imprisoned and coerced recusants. It seems to have been staged by the authorities in York in an attempt to win a polemical battle with some of the leading representatives of northern Catholic separatism. The council in the North evidently felt that it was worth risking the possibility that those who were forced to listen to these sermons would try to respond and make a case for their nonconformity in a way that was generally denied to them, even though, or so William Richmond claimed, “the ministers were learned men” and the majority of the Catholics there were “utterlie unfitted for such a combatt.”Footnote ¹⁸

These prison sermons, taken together, were perhaps the single most significant public confrontation over religion between Catholics and Protestants anywhere in late Elizabethan England. Relying on a blow-by-blow account of events in the castle and using a species of microhistorical methodology, I argue that a close reading of Richmond's unique narrative imparts a real sense of the different interest groups confronting each other as they posed before a variety of different publics in order to win, if they could, a series of arguments about topics such as toleration and conformity, coercion and freedom. These were topics that were integral to several other hot political issues of the day, notably the question of what would happen when, upon the death of the queen, the Tudor dynasty gave way, as almost everyone believed that it would, to the Stuart one, and James VI of Scotland took Elizabeth's crown. In particular, would the new king permit a latitude to dissenters, both Catholics and Puritans, which they had not previously enjoyed?

Although nowhere in the proceedings in York Castle in 1599–1600 was this explicitly stated, the act of bringing preachers to the castle jail does appear to have been a response by the northern authorities to the kinds of argument that were now being aired, publicly, by Catholics during the so-called Archpriest, or Appellant, Controversy. During this rancorous Elizabethan fin-de-siècle dispute between leading Catholic priests about a range of linked jurisdictional issues, a number of those clergy, by rejecting Rome's newly erected and arguably novel archpresbyteral device for exercising control over them, tried to position themselves publicly so as to take advantage of the coming, indeed perhaps imminent, change of regime and dynasty.Footnote ¹⁹

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The Archpriest Controversy would indeed have been an unwelcome reminder in the late 1590s that the problem of separatist Catholicism simply refused to go away. There had been a sense for several years among some of the administrators whose task it was to govern the North of England that an unwarranted leniency was being shown to Catholics. To the more hawkish of the northern authorities, the determination that had been displayed by the godly earl of Huntingdon (d. December 1595) to deal with obstinate papists had slackened off. Catholics who practiced only a modicum of conformity, and who at one time would likely have suffered the full penalties of the law, seemed now to be escaping the consequences of their actions.Footnote ²⁰ Archbishop Matthew Hutton, who had replaced Huntingdon as head of the council in the North (he was not given the title of lord president), was considered inadequate by some for the task of disciplining Catholic dissenters.Footnote ²¹ The queen's letter of 24 August 1599, which unambiguously discharged Hutton of his leadership of the council, also accused the ecclesiastical commission of failing to deal with Catholic separatists. These Catholics, the letter claimed, had received “over much tolleracion.” This was something for which Hutton could hardly escape some share of the blame, though he undoubtedly thought this to be grossly unjust.Footnote ²² His successor was Thomas Cecil, second Lord Burghley. It was assumed that Burghley would bring the smack of firm government back to the North and teach its Catholic population that they would not be allowed to exploit uncertainty about the succession.Footnote ²³

In addition, Hutton, who remained archbishop of York and thus was still responsible for securing Catholics' obedience, was known to think that it was counterproductive to use compulsion to try to spread the Gospel.Footnote ²⁴ To many it must have appeared that, even in his archiepiscopal role, he was still not fit for purpose. It is almost certainly significant that four of the prison sermons were delivered by William Goodwin, prebendary of York and future chancellor of the York archdiocese and dean of Christ Church, Oxford. Goodwin was known to be a bitter critic of what he took to be Hutton's slackness in teaching Catholics obedience.Footnote ²⁵ Another hardliner was Dr. John Bennett, who was subsequently rumored, even if erroneously, by Hutton's enemies to have fallen out with the archbishop.Footnote ²⁶

Despite Hutton's wariness of using force against Catholics, he was also sympathetic to moderate forms of Puritanism. But those who set up the sermon series evidently wanted to make the exercise free from the taint of Puritanism. Virtually all the castle preachers of 1599–1600, despite their zealous antipopery, were visibly conformist in the sense that they were not associated with the kind of challenges to liturgical norms that we associate with late Elizabethan Puritans. The only exception was John Favour, the well-known vicar of Halifax.Footnote ²⁷ William Palmer, the godly chancellor of York minster since 1571, who preached five of the sermons, was a stalwart member of the high commission, one of the principal functions of which was to enforce obedience to the 1559 settlement.Footnote ²⁸

By contrast, it appears that the authorities may have wanted to exploit the known disagreements among contemporary Catholics over the issue of conformity. One sermon was preached by Thomas Bell, a “revolted prieste.” In the early 1590s, he had been forced out of the Catholic community by other Catholics' attacks on his teaching that it was licit under certain circumstances to obey the Act of Uniformity.Footnote ²⁹ Bell had claimed that he represented the larger and better part of Catholic opinion. His appearance at York Castle in 1600 in order to preach the thirty-first sermon of the series was probably intended to remind the Catholics who were present of the fissures among them on this crucial issue.Footnote ³⁰

It may be that the entire sermon series was designed to cause uncertainty and dissension within the wider Catholic community on the question of their separation from the national church. The imprisoned recusants appear to have believed that it was not acceptable under any circumstances to obey the Act of Uniformity. If they had not thought so, then they would not have been incarcerated in York Castle in the first place. Some of them (notably the gentleman William Stillington) feared, with some reason, that public reports of Catholic “attendance” at the sermons in the castle would be read as a sign that they had offered a measure of obedience to the authorities' demands; in that case, their compliance would deprive them of the moral status that they had acquired through their separation and the hardship that they had to endure as a result of their refusal to obey the queen's officers.Footnote ³¹ But the preachers wanted to challenge the prisoners' certainty over this matter. Among the preachers was, for example, Edmund Bunny, a former client of the godly archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindal.Footnote ³² He had established a track record as an opponent of Catholic separatism. Bunny's expurgated and Protestantized version of the famous, indeed notorious, Jesuit Robert Persons's devotional and pietistic work called the Christian Directory served also as a reply to Persons's arguments in favor of recusant separation.Footnote ³³ Bunny had disputed with the leading separatist Margaret Clitherow, herself a prisoner in the castle before she was executed in March 1586, about whether the queen's Catholic subjects had the right to reject the national church in this way. Bunny's edition of Persons's book, first published in 1584, claimed that Catholics should not cut themselves off from the Church of England since it possessed all the forms and means of devotion and piety that they could possibly require to live a life of faith. Preaching was one of those forms. This in effect was the case made by all the preachers at York Castle in 1599–1600.

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The sermon series kicked off on Sunday, 9 December 1599. On this day, “the preachers came,” as the “Trewe Storie” related, “in all honour and glorious showe to the place of meetinge.” Anyone in York who was anyone, and many who were not, were there to watch. According to William Richmond, there was intense public interest in the outcome of the confrontation between the forces of authority and the stubbornly separatist representatives of northern Catholicism. When these sermons took place, the usual format was for the preachers to be accompanied by “the lord lieuetennant, the councell, and almost all the nobilitie, knightes and gentrie of the countrie, the lord maior and aldermen of the cittie and of theire friends and favorittes a verie great assemblye about them, all count[e]nancing, commendinge and approving theire doinge.” The preachers were assured of “popular applause,” commented Richmond, while the Catholics, who were “disgracefullie hailed to the sermon place, one by one,” were confronted by the “people laughinge” at them.Footnote ³⁴

For the first sermon, the keeper of the jail, an odious individual named Robert Redhead, “called all the Catholicke prisoners downe from theire chambers and tolde them they must goe to the hall before my lord and the counsell.” When the prisoners got there, they were “placed within the railes” in front of the council, though Lord Burghley was not present at this point.Footnote ³⁵ They were “sett right before the preacher as principall audience of that assemblie; they were by the majestrates commaunded silence with great authoritie and charged upon theire allegiance and most greevous punnyshmentes not to trouble or interrupt the preacher” who, fumed William Richmond, “was brought thither to disgrace theire profession of religion and with bitter speeches and blaspheamynge to provoke and goare their consciences.”Footnote ³⁶

Once they were all assembled, William Palmer opened the batting. According to the “Trewe Storie,” however, the Catholic prisoners in the castle had not anticipated that they would be preached at. They “were astonished att the straingenes of this matter.”Footnote ³⁷ The council wanted to make the whole thing look like a voluntary acquiescence and submission on the part of the assembled Catholics. So, to give this impression, “after a while, all beinge quiet, the doores were sett open.” The Catholics did not immediately grasp the significance of this. When William Stillington and Robert Halleley tried to depart, the “doores” were “shutt . . . againe.” By the time that the sermon was over, it was clear that the authorities had pulled a fast one. Stillington took the lead. He “went to the counsell and said the keper had deceyved them, for he tolde them of no sermon but that they must all appeare there.” Stillington “said further that he was verie lothe to offend them, but yet in discharge of his conscience he must lett them knowe that he woulde nott heare theire sermons.”Footnote ³⁸

As he described in a long letter that was set down three days afterward and was conveyed out of the castle, Stillington admitted that there had been rumors that a sermon would be preached in the hall. He had, however, counseled the others that it was better to comply at first, for “oure absolute refusal to goe before the authoritie could not but be accoumpted obstinacye, which with all care wee oughte to avoyde.” It was, therefore, “better . . . for us to doe oure duties simplie and lett the deceipt fall upon theire part that ment it, than refuse before wee had cause.” Clearly, it was being said that he had in effect advised a measure of conformity and compliance (“if I did wronge, it was of ignorance,” Stillington wrote, out of fear that others would interpret his advice as counseling conformity; “God forgeve me”).Footnote ³⁹

After the sermon, Stillington was summoned to the King's Manor, the seat of royal government in the North, to explain himself to the lord president and the council. There he tried to ingratiate himself with Burghley. He even promised that he would voluntarily go to church if Palmer bested him in an argument about patristic doctrine. Stillington claimed that Burghley “laughed” and even “the counsell seamed to like my profer verie well.” According to Stillington, though the council endorsed Palmer's reading of the controverted text and “therefore saide merilie that nowe I must go to churche as I had promissed, . . . they slenderlie urged the matter and my lord himselfe smyled at it.” The council nevertheless decided that Stillington should be “kept close prisoner” for his temerity.Footnote ⁴⁰

Here, as elsewhere, Stillington was determined to argue that he and other separatists could demonstrate an appropriate respect for temporal authority, represented by the queen's officials in York, and yet, at the same time, refuse to make concessions over conformity. It was, for him, essential to claim, however implausibly, that there was a certain open-mindedness on the part of the lord president on this matter.

The prisoners were not taken by surprise when, on 16 December, the time came for the second sermon. The keeper came to fetch them, but “they all refused to goe with him.” Redhead then “caused his servantes and other fellowes to take them one by one and drawe them to the hall.” Led by a Marian priest, George Rayner, they protested that it was “against their consciences to heare their sermons.” Burghley was less than pleased and told them “in manner of an oration that the state had longe borne with them” and now “he would . . . compell them to heare the Woord.”Footnote ⁴¹ Upon hearing this, the Catholic prisoners tried to flee the room but were hauled back “with greater rigour than before.” In retaliation, they “fell . . . of murmoringe and makinge a noyse some in one manner and some in an other, to interrupt the preacher,” the unfortunate William Palmer, again. Burghley “commaunded silence.” Stillington and another gentleman, William Middleton, waited until the end of the sermon before making a formal protest that what the council did was against the law—in other words, to treat the prisoners thus who were already “punnyshed otherwayes” for their “refusal of goinge to churche.”Footnote ⁴² Stillington brought out a Bible to confute Palmer, something which, Stillington claimed, Burghley regarded with “a good friendlie count[e]nance.”Footnote ⁴³

Perhaps Burghley felt that this could be construed as at least partial compliance on the part of the incarcerated Catholics and therefore was compatible with his remit to procure some measure of obedience from them. When Mr. Fenton “stood upp and desired they might have some learned man from Wisbitch [Castle] to defend the cause,” Burghley “yielded verie willinglie.” He said that “if they would name unto him any priest or Jesuite att Wisbitch or att London, he would send for them for that purpose. Or if there were any learned priest in the countrie within his commission that would come in and dispute the matter,” he would “have saife conduct to come and goe” as he pleased. Then, in the “weeke followinge, the prisoners made a petition” for their chosen clerical representatives. They named, principally, Thomas Wright and Christopher Bagshaw.Footnote ⁴⁴

Exactly what the Catholic prisoners were thinking in choosing their representatives is not clear. Wright, after all, was the one who had argued that it was licit for Catholics to attend what they themselves regarded as heretical sermons. However, he was also known to be a client of Robert Devereux, earl of Essex. Wright had arrived in England from Spain in June 1595 and had made contact with Essex by surrendering himself to Anthony Bacon.Footnote ⁴⁵ Off Wright had gone in the second half of 1595, on Essex's warrant, to York. There he provoked uproar with his aggressive though self-consciously loyalist proselytizing. Essex and his circle continued to regard him as saying what he meant and meaning what he said about the dangers from Spain.Footnote ⁴⁶ In response, as Wright claimed, to the demands of unnamed English Catholics, he then wrote a piece that urged Catholics to take the queen's part against Philip II.Footnote ⁴⁷ Wright's Essexian loyalties meant that he was not likely to be welcome to Lord Burghley, brother of Sir Robert Cecil, whose enmity toward Essex was already defining the factious twilight of the Elizabethan period. Perhaps the prisoners at York anticipated that Wright would, despite his loyalist opinions, be forced in public to distinguish between his own teaching on conformity and the purposes of the council in the North. But they must have calculated that he could not easily be regarded as merely seditious.

The group's second chosen representative, Christopher Bagshaw, was himself at this time perhaps the leading (and certainly the angriest) opponent of the interest group within the English Catholic community that had become identified with the Jesuits, or rather with those whose opinions and ideology tended to be publicly expounded by and associated with Robert Persons and his friends. Bagshaw was already notorious for his opposition at Wisbech Castle to those clergy who followed the lead of the Jesuit William Weston when Weston called for a more rigorous and austere mode of life among the priests imprisoned there. The Catholics interned in York Castle were, it seems, trying to pose as loyalists by enlisting the services of clergy who were known for their Hispanophobe opinions and for their hostility to the Jesuits. But nothing came of this. Stillington had to record that “his honours purpose was altered by the preachers or by the counsell att theire perswations.”Footnote ⁴⁸

The following week, the Catholics were compelled to listen to John Palmer, the new rector of Escrick, attacking the Catholic understanding of prayer to saints. His words were punctuated by interruptions from Stillington, who “desired inke and paper to write.” Palmer offered him the sheets of paper that contained the text of the sermon. The sermon came to an end, and Stillington stormed off to the council to demand a right of reply. The reaction of those who were watching and listening showed how much was at stake here. According to Richmond, “divers . . . other prisoners went after him, and the people in great haste brake over the barres about them with desire to heare them speake.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Stillington recited in a letter of 1 January 1600 how he had got into an argument with members of the council about what constituted heresy and schism. In particular, he had clashed with the bishop of Limerick, John Thornborough, who accused Stillington and all recusants of being schismatics. Thornborough, who was dean of York as well as a bishop of an Irish see, had come to York in mid-March 1599 to serve as a member of the council in the North.Footnote ⁵⁰ When Burghley's own chaplain, Mr. Fuller, preached on 30 December, the same performance began again: in fact, the “prisoners made more resistance for beinge drawne to the haule than before they had done.” But this time there was violence as the keeper's officials “crushed” the Catholics “against the walls, and by forcible strivinge gave them many many shrewd knockes.”Footnote ⁵¹ An attempted mass exodus of the prisoners to “the lower ende of the haull” resulted in the “keepers and the counsels men” dragging “them backe in angrie moode” and throwing “some of them downe upon” the floor. Faced with this, and with the council's demand for silence when they drowned out the preacher's words with “noyse,” the prisoners “stopped theire eares with theire fingers till the sermon was ended.”Footnote ⁵²

The Catholic internees were desperate for a clerical mouthpiece who would argue with the preachers and make the exercise look like a series of disputations rather than sermons. Another newsletter from Stillington to Richmond followed on 11 January. It claimed that although the preachers had “drawne” Burghley “wholie to theire side, that before was verie upright and indifferent,” temporarily the Catholics now took heart again because “God had sent us a good priest,” “one Mr [James] Bollan[d], newelie taken att Rippon and brought to the castle.” Stillington thought that the new priest would “defend oure cause against the ministers.” For the time being, however, the authorities refused to allow them to see Bolland, or he them.Footnote ⁵³

At the fifth sermon, given by William Palmer on 6 January 1600, five days before the date of Stillington's letter, Stillington, Richard Danby of South Cave (Stillington's cousin), and Thomas Clitherow (the martyr Margaret Clitherow's stepson) all loudly declared their refusal to listen.Footnote ⁵⁴ A week later, on 13 January, Archbishop Hutton himself was the preacher. There was “a verie great audience this daye att the hall.” Stillington, along with the priests George Rayner and Christopher Wharton, objected strenuously to the proceedings. The Catholics knew quite well that Hutton was unhappy about his task. They suspected that the archbishop “being troubled . . . might sooner than others that were att command have taken occasion to have left thatt exercise, as verilie it is like he would, for the speach went that he disliked of that course.” Stillington was so vocal that allegedly Burghley “stroke at him with his staffe” and threatened to “hang him the next weeke at the gaole delivery.” Stillington's Bible, snatched from him on this occasion, was rumored to contain seditious annotations so subversive that they would definitely lead to his arraignment.Footnote ⁵⁵ When Hutton had finished preaching, he spoke briefly about the purpose of the sermon series. In his speech, he said, “he plainelie delivered that he thought it not lawfull to haile them to churche, nor to force them to receive any sacrament.” The archbishop averred rather lamely that “therefore that place was chosen, beinge a peece of theire prison, for them to heare the woord of God.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Perhaps because of the drift of the archbishop's words, and the fact that Hutton was not, as it were, on message, Hutton's critic William Goodwin delivered the seventh sermon on 20 January. He claimed to preach only “Christ crucified.” More chaos ensued, with ear-stopping and shouting (the prisoners had “purposed to speake and make a noyse without ceasinge till the counsell should leave them or send them away”), as it did when Goodwin was succeeded by Matthew Hutton's client, Archdeacon Christopher Gregory, a week later, on 27 January.Footnote ⁵⁷

One might have expected the general public to lose interest in this frankly unedifying spectacle of mutual weekly recrimination and apparent stalemate. However, at this stage, the sermon day actually had to be changed from Sunday to Friday because “these sportinge preachinges drewe moste of the audience from the cathedrall churche to the castle and so made the congregation there verie small, to the disgrace of theire ghospell.”Footnote ⁵⁸ There was more ear-stopping at the sermon preached by the vicar of Leeds, Robert Cooke (the ninth of the series), on 1 February 1600. But some of the participants seem to have tried to up the ante. The ministers in particular labored even harder to get the separatist Catholics to engage with them. Thus Cooke demanded a private debate with Stillington and Danby. He even brought along “the first tome of Fa. [Robert] Bellermyne his workes” and demanded a debate about the existence of purgatory. “Gloryinge in the strength of his witte and learnynge,” Cooke “desired us to take a coppie of his sermon and to gett it answered,” and so Stillington sent the manuscript out of the prison to William Richmond in order to secure a learned retort. Richmond passed it to his friend and fellow seminarist Cuthbert Johnson, who like him was a chaplain to the leading Yorkshire Catholic Margaret (Dormer), wife of the crypto-Catholic Sir Henry Constable.Footnote ⁵⁹

Richmond then continued his narrative by describing how the duplicity of the jail keeper, Robert Redhead, had destroyed the credit of the seminarist James Bolland.Footnote ⁶⁰ It is possible that, throughout this episode, Redhead was the willing agent of Lord Burghley. He was certainly a bitter enemy of the uncooperative Archbishop Hutton.Footnote ⁶¹ Richmond now claimed that Redhead's wife, “the belldame of Hell,” had, “not longe before, plaied the bawde” to various people and had fallen (so said Richmond) with her husband into disrepute with the lord president. To repair their credits, they suborned a prisoner called William Dickinson, imprisoned for debt, to offer the priest Bolland a means of absconding from the castle. A sizable fee was put up by, among others, the prominent separatist prisoner Katherine Radcliffe. In return, Bolland would be sprung from the prison, seemingly by force; this would deflect blame from Redhead. Bolland was persuaded that he should “gett some friendes abrode to come to receive him forth and to shewe some force to couller his escape for Readheades discharge.” To accomplish this, Bolland was “suffered to perswade . . . with Mistres [Alice] Readshawe, by her meanes, to get her brothers Mr John Wright and Mr Christopher Wright into the action, as well to catche them in the trappe as to commend Readheads vigillancie in resistinge so hardie men as the Wrightes were accompted. Bollan[d] wrote his letters to Mrs Radcliffe of all this matter,” though “shee suspected the plotte.”Footnote ⁶² In the meantime, Redhead reinforced the castle guard and ordered a search for the money on the pretext that Mrs. Radcliffe and William Stillington had “made keyes for the castle and had prepared files for cuttinge irons and the like.” While the search was going on, a “lighte” was “sett” “to be seene abrode to confirme theire forgerie that the prisoners sett it upp for a signe to the armed men they had redie without to assault the castle upon such a signe.” Although the search was a failure, Redhead took the credit for discovering what he declared was a genuine popish conspiracy. He evidently anticipated that this would allow Burghley to challenge the prisoners' claims to the theological high ground by producing evidence of a violent Catholic plot and by making sure that news of it was widely publicized: “[I]n the morninge it was geven forth in the cittie that the papists had gotten armour and weapons and made keyes and thought to have killed the keper and his wife and all to have gone theire waye; and that for this purpose there was [sic] fortie men in armour on the outside of the castle redie upon a watch woord to have come to helpe them.” John Wright and his brother were “taken in theire hoste[s] house in the cittie and the matter brought unto” the lord president and the council “that knewe it well enough before.”Footnote ⁶³ An impromptu hearing followed at which Radcliffe and Stillington, though not Bolland and Readshaw, were cleared.Footnote ⁶⁴

Whatever the dynamics of the failed conspiracy were, the authorities could exploit it to prevent the young priest Bolland being employed by the prisoners as a mouthpiece to articulate their protests about the freedom of their consciences. In the meantime, it was Edmund Bunny's turn to preach; he claimed his sermon was merely a “speech.” In spite of the usual ear-stopping, he delivered it on 8 February 1600, and Burghley's chaplain Fuller followed after him.Footnote ⁶⁵

By the time that Goodwin appeared again on 22 February for the fifteenth sermon, the prisoners had adopted a fully formed loyalist argument. They claimed that not only did they suffer the loss of two thirds of their estates “by statute for their conscience” but “they still paide all sesmentes, taxes and subsid[i]es as depelie as other of theire neighbours, and with loyall myndes were still redie to [perform] all imployementes for theire countrie and her Majesties service.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Here, the prisoners were appealing to and exploiting the regime's own habitual distinction between sedition/disobedience and loyalty. Burghley was now able to play his trump card in order to undercut these loyalist protestations: namely, the priest James Bolland's abject, snivelling, and pathetic conformity. Bolland had been, wrote Richmond, put in irons “and gott no ease of irons and manicles till he gave a taste of his recantation and yeildinge unto them.”Footnote ⁶⁷ At Goodwin's sermon, as soon as the prisoners had made their loyalist statement, Burghley “called to Mr Bollan[d] the priest and said unto him, Bollan[d], you knowe thatt either the first or second tyme you were before me, I advised you to consider that, dyinge in your case, you should of all men be reputed a traitour and that not many daies after you made sute againe to come before me, and then said you had seriouslie considered of my speaches, and as one unwillinge to be taken for such a one, and most dreadfull of such a kinde of death, you had resolved otherwayes.” Bolland then “kneeled downe in the middest of the place and, with a sorrowfull count[e]nance and a quiveringe voice, redd a recantation of his religion and priesthood which he brought redie penned in his handes. After that, the oathe of supremacye was redd unto him and he repeated the same, woord by woord, after the reader, and . . . laide his hand upon the booke and tooke that oathe.” Burghley then formally requested the judges that Bolland's “triall might be deferred.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The very next week, on 1 March, Burghley, probably sensing that he had scored a propaganda triumph, wrote to his brother Sir Robert Cecil in London that he thought the North was in good order and that soon eighteen out of every twenty recusants would conform. Five hundred had done so in the previous three weeks, he said, and a “notable papyste” was known to have complained “unto his frend how myghtelye the common people doo decline from them.”Footnote ⁶⁹

This was still not enough for Burghley. Things now turned rather nasty. Though the “Trewe Storie” omits to mention it (deliberately, one assumes, so as to preserve the appearance of Burghley's relative impartiality) at this point, during the Lent assizes in 1600, the aged priest Christopher Wharton was indicted under the 1585 statute against seminary priests and Jesuits. He was sentenced at the same assizes at which Bolland would have been tried, had he not recanted. John Savile, himself an assize judge as well as a member of the northern council, who was present at some of the castle sermons, was on the bench. On 28 March 1600, Wharton was hanged, drawn, and quartered, presumably as a way of distinguishing very visibly his noncompliance from the example of the now conformed and recanted Bolland.Footnote ⁷⁰

The Catholic tactic of trying to draw a line between political loyalty, on the one hand, and freedom of conscience, on the other, had clearly goaded the authorities into focusing more explicitly on what they took to be the real meaning of political obedience. On 17 April 1600, Mr. Higgins delivered the twentieth sermon of the series. Although it was interrupted in exactly the same way as the others, it was prefaced by a harangue from John Thornborough. He “charged” the Catholics with having “rebellious hartes and gave examples of rebellions that papists had made.” He said that “as they nowe resisted the majestraites in that action,” it would not be long before “they woulde lift theire hand against theire soveraigne.”Footnote ⁷¹

Robert Cooke preached next. He abandoned the formal structure of a sermon altogether. Furthermore, he, like Thornborough, tried to drag the proceedings back into a discussion of secular politics.Footnote ⁷² He lectured the assembled Catholics on the justice of the regime's proceedings against them. He then began to read passages “out of a Catholike booke,” Richard Verstegan's Theatrum Crudelitatum, “where it was written that the earle of Huntington was a tirant and that he had cruellie executed Mrs [Margaret] Clitheroe and bannyshed her husband and children, which latter part he said was false.”Footnote ⁷³ Here, Cooke recalled the killing in March 1586 of Mrs. Clitherow, who was pressed to death after refusing to plead to a charge of harboring a priest.Footnote ⁷⁴ Among the Catholics assembled in the castle at this time were, as we have seen, not only members of the Clitherow family, notably Thomas Clitherow (Margaret's stepson), but also some of those who had been with Mrs. Clitherow at the time she was condemned, in particular Anne Tesh.Footnote ⁷⁵ Stillington, determined to shift things back from politics to religion, reproached him: “for shame, handle some other matter.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Cooke returned to talking about the book of Machabees, “att which speaches Mr Stillington, havinge his handes lowse, clapped them upon his eares and said, ‘Fie blasphemye.’” Normal service was, as it were, resumed.Footnote ⁷⁷

So it continued, week after week. Despite the appearance of stalemate, some of the preachers thought there was still much to play for, notably Edmund Bunny, who delivered the twenty-third sermon on 8 May 1600. The prisoners had somewhat refined their technique of obliterating the preacher's words with “white noise.” Now they mocked Bunny's own faux-irenicism and his claims in his expurgated version of Robert Persons's Christian Directory that they all shared a common religious heritage and therefore that recusant separatism was unjustified. When the assembled prisoners “began to speake and made a noyse,” they said “Pater noster, and others Haile Marye, full of grace; and others said the Creede, and others other prayers as came to theire mynde.” Here, one assumes, they were trying to ridicule the outwardly irenic (but in fact rather aggressive) rhetoric that Bunny had incorporated by way of commentary in his version of Persons's famous book. Interrupted by the recusant prisoners' jeers, Bunny wanted to break off from his sermon. When the council ordered him to go on, he tried to shout the prisoners down, but “he grewe hoarse and made an ende with speede.”Footnote ⁷⁸

After John Palmer's sermon on 22 May (the twenty-fifth of the series), Burghley left York and, wrote Stillington, “made a speach unto us for a farewell.” The lord president said that they resisted more than they needed to, and “willed us that if wee would pray or speake to hinder oure owne hearinge, yett so [to] doe it as it should not hinder them that” were “willing to heare the preacher,” though it was not clear who exactly Burghley meant by this.Footnote ⁷⁹

Five more sermons came and went (from late May to late June). According to the “Trewe Storie,” the authorities now made little effort to force the prisoners to listen.Footnote ⁸⁰ As remarked above, the former Catholic priest Thomas Bell was called, on 3 July 1600, to preach the thirty-first sermon. The “Trewe Storie” refers to him merely as the “appostata seminarie priest” and says that he was “reasonable sober and seamed doubtfull of his creeditt with the prisoners.” If he reminded the Catholics there of the disagreements within their community over recusancy, the “Trewe Storie” does not explicitly mention it.Footnote ⁸¹

Bell was followed by Goodwin on 10 July and then, as the scheduling of the sermons started to become rather erratic, by Mr. Culverwell (presumably Samuel Culverwell, who became rector of Cherry Burton in Yorkshire) and Richard Crakanthorpe, the vice president Lord Eure's chaplain (sermons thirty-three and thirty-four); then Mr. Cartwright of Beverley on 31 July (sermon thirty-five); and then by Mr. Smith of Hull, Mr. Casweke, William Palmer, Mr. Harwood (a preacher based in York), Mr. Morton, Mr. Higgins, John Palmer, and John Favour (sermons thirty-six to forty-three).Footnote ⁸² On 2 October, “the preachers (as was said) agreed amonge themselves to write supplicatorie letters” to Burghley in London in order “to be eased of this exercise for the counsell would not ease them, and they were nowe as wearie of the match as they were haistie thereof in the beginninge,” a conclusion reinforced by Edmund Bunny's effort on 16 October and by Arthur Kay, vicar of Doncaster's, on 23 October, and indeed the four sermons that followed (preached by the ministers Daynam, Whitaker, Pollard, and Street). Footnote ⁸³ The last of these sermons, the fiftieth, was delivered by Cooke, after which “one of the counsell stoode upp and tolde the prisoners that it was my lords pleasure the sermons should cease till the springe, and so they all departed.”Footnote ⁸⁴ The author of the “Trewe Storie” concluded his account on 8 December 1600 with a paean to those who had so manfully and virtuously resisted the preachers.Footnote ⁸⁵

■ ■ ■

What, then, do we make of all this? It seems likely, as has already been suggested, that the participants, willing and unwilling, had their eyes on a range of current political issues. At some level, the Catholic separatists, and in fact most of the preachers, tried to talk about religion rather than politics. By and large it was those on the council who made explicit references to controversial political questions. But of course, the entire sermon series was shaped by the argument over how far Catholic dissenters might or might not be compelled to conform in matters relating to the government of the church and what that conformity might be taken to mean. The sermons also raised in a very acute form the issue of how far the theoretically rather absolute demands of the conformity legislation might be moderated when, as all were now anticipating, the Elizabethan regime died along with its queen and the one that succeeded it looked again, as it inevitably would, at the twin issues of conformity and toleration.

The extent to which the question of imminent regime change was an essential context for the York sermons can be gleaned from the link between, on the one hand, the arguments over what the regime should do about Catholics in the North and, on the other, the divisions on the Privy Council and at court between the earl of Essex and his opponents. Essex attempted to represent himself to King James as a reliable political agent and ally, just as James was becoming increasingly suspicious of the Cecils.Footnote ⁸⁶ As is well known, Essex had developed early on a reputation for sympathy toward Puritans. In 1590 he interceded on behalf of the imprisoned John Udall. Eight years later he could be found defending Stephen Egerton of Blackfriars when he came under scrutiny for his nonconformity. After the earl's failed rebellion, the Puritan Sir Francis Hastings refused to distance himself from Essex completely. But the earl looked favorably on those who were otherwise inclined, notably John Buckeridge.Footnote ⁸⁷ Essex had also been the recipient of at least one formal Catholic toleration petition.Footnote ⁸⁸ Though not sympathetic toward Catholicism as such, he certainly seems to have been looked to by loyalist Catholics, such as Henry Constable and Thomas Wright, who rejected the notions of Robert Persons's notorious Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland, a tract (dedicated, ironically and mischievously, to Essex himself) to which James himself took extreme exception.Footnote ⁸⁹ We can safely assume that these issues were prominent in the minds of those York Catholics who were conducting their brinkmanship exercise with Lord Burghley over the sermons.

There is at least some evidence that Essex had actually recruited supporters in the North among those who were known to be Catholics.Footnote ⁹⁰ John Wright, who took part with his brother Christopher in the ill-starred attempt to spring James Bolland from York Castle, was involved in Essex's rising in 1601.Footnote ⁹¹ Essex had been, as we saw, behind the decision to send the former Jesuit Thomas Wright to York, though Wright had rapidly abused the degree of freedom that he had been given to express himself on questions of religion.

Essex had every reason to cast about at this point for broader political support. Despite his headline-grabbing raid on Cadiz in 1596, and the brief threat of further armadas, it was now the earl's agitation for continued hostilities that was starting to look out of step, principally because of the increasing certainty that the war would sooner or later have to end.Footnote ⁹² The Vervins peace treaty between France and Spain, though not including England and the Dutch republic, was signed on 22 April/2 May 1598.Footnote ⁹³ Neither Elizabeth nor her Dutch allies were yet ready to come to terms. It was clear, however, that neither Spain nor the archducal regime in Flanders could carry on the war indefinitely. In any case, after Vervins, Flanders had been granted a measure of autonomy from Spain. The Archduchess Isabella had no interest in Elizabeth's crown. There was a powerful peace movement in England among the mercantile community.Footnote ⁹⁴ Sir William Cecil, first Lord Burghley was, as Peter Lake stresses, a somewhat late-in-the-day convert to a peace policy toward Spain.Footnote ⁹⁵ His death had temporarily tipped the balance on the council back toward those who wanted to continue the war, but Essex was becoming dangerously isolated.

This, of course, might have made Essex seem like an unpromising focus for Catholic political aspirations, or indeed anyone else's, particularly when his interventions in Ireland started to go disastrously wrong. Yet Essex's strategy in Ireland to deal with the on-off rebel earl of Tyrone was far from irrational. He was, in fact, following the line taken by other soldier-servants of the queen in Ireland, notably Sir John Norreys. Back in July 1596, for example, Norreys had argued that whether one regarded Tyrone as a traitor or not, the fact was that the queen should “call to remembrance the examples of the late kings of France,” who, “as often as they were resolved to have a pacification with their subjects in arms against them,” including, of course, the Holy Catholic League, were well advised to proclaim “an oblivion of all faults past.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Essex's course would undoubtedly have been observed very carefully by English Catholics. Essex's deal with Tyrone via the truce of early September 1599, although it tried to guarantee Ireland against Spanish attack, might have looked like the basis for some sort of future toleration there and perhaps elsewhere in the British Isles. The subject was a prominent one at the hearing, held at York House on 5 June 1600, into Essex's alleged offenses in Ireland.Footnote ⁹⁷

No one could foresee that Essex would in effect destroy himself. But after his rebellion of February 1601 failed, the regime retaliated by spreading the rumor that his revolt had been a popish conspiracy.Footnote ⁹⁸ Evidence poured in about the earl's self-seeking populism. Robert Redhead himself testified in February 1601 that among the recusants in York Castle, that is, those Catholics who had been forced to attend the sermons, “whenever any advertisment came that the earle of Essex was like to have libertie, they would all exceedinglie rejoice, and pray to God to prosper and blesse him, and make as much triumphe at it as they could expresse; and contrariewise when any newes came that the earle . . . was like to fall into further troble, they would then exceedinglie mourne and be soarie thereat.” All this, Redhead “did divers tymes relate” to Lord Burghley “who mervailed thereat” and ordered Redhead to “looke well unto them.”Footnote ⁹⁹

None of this was explicitly referred to by either side during the York sermon series itself, at least not in the version of these events described and circulated by William Richmond. Essex had already fallen from grace after his precipitate return across the Irish Sea in late September 1599, although his final disaster of February 1601 was still some time away. There was, however, clearly a sense in which the agenda of Essex and his friends was compatible with the rhetoric of self-professed Catholic loyalists, a rhetoric that had already started to emerge into the public domain with the Archpriest Controversy. There was now a vocal minority of the Catholic community, both at home and in exile, that was openly Hispanophobe. These Catholics had appropriated the kind of language that the enemies of the Catholic League in France had used to characterize the Spaniards' interference in French politics as an expression purely of Habsburg dynastic ambition, and really not connected with true religion. This section of English Catholic opinion was also unequivocal about its support for James VI's right to succeed Elizabeth, regardless of his religion.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ It is also worth pointing out that shortly before the York sermon series began, Tyrone adopted a more explicit hard-line endorsement of Catholicism as the grounds for his quarrel with English government in Ireland, all in the context of London's reneging on the deal brokered with him by Essex.Footnote ¹⁰¹

All of this helps to explain what Lord Burghley was trying to do when he set up and presided over the sermon series of 1599–1600. As previously stated, we have only Richmond's side of the story. If anyone in authority wrote an account of the proceedings, it has not been found.Footnote ¹⁰² However, the “Trewe Storie” does strongly suggest how keen the authorities were to disabuse those Catholics who were articulating how a new (Stuart) regime might grant them some form of tolerance. This would also undercut the attempts of busybodies such as Thomas Wright to construct a model of Catholic loyalism that was connected with and potentially supportive of the political interests of the earl of Essex.

The specter against which the council in the North had been fighting became even more visible after the end of the sermon series and after Essex's trial and execution. Some appellant clergy had already solicited patronage from members of the regime, notably Bishop Richard Bancroft. On 29 June 1602, Lord Burghley pointed out to his brother Sir Robert in London that the council in the North had had to send a formal communiqué down to the Privy Council that the northern council was “muche . . . troubled” with two seminary priests, one of whom, Edmund Calverley, had come to York recently, flaunting a safe conduct from the appellant priests' unofficial patron, Bishop Bancroft. The other was Cuthbert Trollop, “an obstinate and peryllous fellowe,” who had been “taken of late here.” He had been licensed by the Privy Council to go up to London, “therby to save his lyffe, at the sute of my Lord Lumley.” Trollop's brother was a servant of Lumley and had himself brought the council's warrant. Trollop had been trading off his reputation for loyalism. He was known to have challenged the public reading in the English seminary at Rome of Robert Persons's Conference about the Next Succession. On 14 June, two weeks previously, Bancroft had advised Sir Robert Cecil that it “would be very inconvenient in many respectes” that Trollop “shuld be proceeded with” in York “according to lawe.” Indeed, it was essential that he should be sent up to the capital. Burghley, in York, insisted nevertheless that this was “a great dystaste unto our mannour of stryckt gouverment here.” It was being said that there was “great encouragement given to the papistes to thynk that w[e] proceede more strycktly with those sorte of men than is allowyd” in other places. In other words, the attempt in the North by Burghley to crack down on Catholic separatism was being undermined by the favor apparently being dispensed from London to certain Catholic clergy. Burghley accepted that “such traytours” might be released so as to “make more use of them for the state,” though he would ideally have liked some advance notice in this case. But he also needed such information so that he could reassure “a number of the best sorte here that is mutch troubled with this extraordinary course of procedyng.”Footnote ¹⁰³

A month later, Burghley and other members of the northern council conceded with a bad grace that London would not have ordered the transfer of the priests without wisely considering the consequences. They warned nevertheless that “experience hath informed us that the people heare (with whose affeccions we are acquainted, being for the greater parte inclined to poperye) will apprehend any occasion, though never so false, to confyrme themselves in that religion and to weaken and withdrawe others.” This is what had happened when Thomas Wright had been sent down to York “by the earl of Essex his meanes in the last lord presidents tyme.” Wright's presence in the county had been “the cause of many secrett conventicles.” Many people “took hope of tolleracion, and fell back from religion.” Now the same thing was happening again because of the favor granted to Calverley and Trollop.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Burghley's prescience was plain to see when, not much more than six months later, the toleration agitation, against which he and others had warned, started in earnest. As King James came south in April 1603, he was petitioned in and around York, as indeed elsewhere, by prominent Catholics. Francis Foster related that “Doctore [Thomas] Hill” was among those who “delivered him a petitione, and talked with him before he came to Yorke, and was dismissed.” But “in Yorke, being espied” by a renegade seminarist called William Atkinson, “the kinge was solicited” by the dean of York, John Thornborough, “to cause” Hill “to be apprehended, and so he was by the kinges warrant.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

On 1 November 1603, Lord Sheffield, the new lord president in York, complained directly to the king about the insolence of the recusants now that, “by what menes I know not, the penaltie of those laws” has “not so absolutely as before ben inflicted” upon them “as allso many grases and favores showed them.” Indeed, “of late in all thes northe partes,” he wrote, “many . . . men have ben imployed” to go up and down “to gett oute a petission for tolleration of religgion” and to secure “all the hands of not only requsantes” but also of all such “as be favoreres of there religgion.” They were openly resentful that “in the late sertifficate made . . . by the bisshopes, so few of them were therin sett downe and sertefied, as it were gloriinge in ther numberes.” He believed that he had “made stay of this their firste atemte by comittinge som of the ringlederes.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

But this was only the beginning. From Durham, Bishop Tobias Matthew wrote to Cecil in late November 1603. He lamented that the popish agitators were sending out “theire solicitours to persuade men and women yea and children in a greate longe schedule of parchement to subscribe their names to a supplicacion to be presented unto his Majestie on behalf of the Catholickes (fallsly so called) and withal, by mustering as it were the numbers of them, to deface the certificat that my selfe and other busshops have retorned and sent up by vertue of lettres to us directed for that purpose.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The strategy of the northern council, one assumes, to make it appear that stubborn separatism was confined to the relatively few out-and-outers who were locked up in places such as York Castle, was falling apart. A popular agitation was gathering pace as manuscript copies of Catholic petitions started to circulate widely. Matthew did not doubt that Cecil had “at manie handes . . . seen copies of their saide supplicacion yet I make bolde to send hereinclosed such a one as I coulde come by with mutche adoe . . . least haply there should be some difference betwene the copies here and elswhere exhibited to the vulgare sorte to be subscribed.” Matthew had been trying hard to knock a bit of sense into some of them. He claimed that “I tell them besydes,” quite accurately in fact, “that by the proclamacion” of 24 October 1603 (“A proclamation concerning such as seditiously seeke reformation in church matters”), “they are termed adversaries; and that his Majesties purpose and resolucion ever was and nowe is to preserve the state as well ecclesiasticall as politick in suche forme as he founde it, reforming only th'abuses apparantly proved.” But apparently his Catholic interlocutors would not accept this: “No persuasions will prevaile with them because forsooth they be not named . . . but all must be construed only against the precisions,” that is, puritans, “and not a worde against the papistes.” The Catholics were declaring that “there is no lawe in force to touche them after her Majesties decease, and that his Majestie hath as yet made none, neither will [he] as they hope, against them.” They said “that suche as be in commission were best [to] take hede howe we procede, least his Highnes take it not well.” They cited James's partial suspension of the recusancy fines in mid-1603, and they claimed that he had “annulled all leases of the recusantes landes taken formerly by commission and letten by thexchequer.” In a postscript, Matthew mentioned that he had been informed of yet another petition that the papists had drawn up, to be exhibited to the Privy Council “and others in the parlament, not only for toleracion in religion and libertie of conscience, but for magistracie also.” He believed that they were trying to influence the forthcoming elections, which was proof, if anyone needed it, of how far they were interfering in matters from which they ought to be excluded.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The early Jacobean Catholic toleration campaign was relatively short-lived, interrupted as it was by the king's about-face in February 1604. In another royal proclamation, the king withdrew the limited tolerance offered to Catholics in summer 1603. The legislation against Catholics in the 1604 Parliament followed soon after. The Gunpowder Conspiracy served to impose closure, for a time, on an agitation that had begun to get seriously out of hand. In fact, it could be argued that the stage management of the accession had been remarkably adept. The popular political potential of James's arrival in England had been drawn out and suppressed, as much at the Hampton Court conference and via the 1604 canons as it was in the crackdown on popish recusants. James appeared to have been persuaded that he had simply made too many concessions to those who had approached him, before and after his accession, with pleas for tolerance.

We have in the York Castle sermons, however, evidence of an acute public awareness of how certain Catholic concerns were likely to become part and parcel of events after the accession in England of the Scottish king. In some sense, the Catholics' performances in the castle were an acting out of some of the issues raised in the Archpriest Controversy. These issues were, of course, not new. In fact, they were the product of forty years of debate about the Elizabethan religious settlement. But the to-and-fro arguments about how far Catholics could be compelled to conform were not going to go away. James's politique and potentially absolutist understanding of kingship (one that virtually required a public discourse of tolerance in order to fend off the tendency of some of the king's subjects, Catholic and Protestant, to speak truth to power about what was and was not acceptable in church and state) made sure of that. For the whole of the Jacobean period, across James's three kingdoms, Protestants claimed to find it hard to understand, and Catholics said it was quite easy to understand, why the king's personal Calvinism and periodic denunciations of papal authority never seemed to translate into a program for a recognizably Protestant uniformity.