¹ I should say at the outset that what follows is a product of what has now been a rather long ongoing conversation with Michael Questier on how best to reintegrate things catholic into the master narratives of post-Reformation English history. It is Michael's work that has done most to re-centre the doings and sayings of English catholics in the political and religious histories of late Tudor and early Stuart England. Typically, it was Michael who first suggested that I read the 1577 recusant survey against the survey of the prophesyings of the previous year. This paper also draws on the work of three other scholars – Patrick Collinson, Simon Adams and Diarmaid MacCulloch – the extent of whose contribution to its argument cannot properly be indicated through occasional references in the footnotes. It is a pleasure to be able to acknowledge here the extent to which my own work has been informed by theirs over the past thirty years.

² Rowse, A. L., Tudor Cornwall (New York, 1969), 346–51Google Scholar.

³ On the prophesyings see P. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967), 168–79, 182–3, 191–6; idem, ‘Lectures by Combination: Structures and Characteristics of Church Life in 17th-Century England’, in Collinson's Godly People (1983); Conferences and Combination Lectures in the Elizabethan Church, 1582–1590, ed. P. Collinson, John Craig and Brett Usher, Church of England Record Society, 10 (Woodbridge, 2003), xxvi–xxxii, xxxvii–xxxviii.

⁴ P. Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (1979), chs. 3, 14, 15; idem, ‘The Downfall of Archbishop Grindal and its Place in Elizabethan Political and Religious History’, ch. 14 of his Godly People.

⁵ Trimble, W. R., The Catholic Laity in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, MA, 1964), 72–90Google Scholar.

⁶ Lambeth Palace Library [hereafter LPL] MSS 2003, fo. 40r–v, Elizabeth to John Whitgift, bishop of Worcester, 7 May 1577. For another copy see British Library [hereafter BL], Lansdowne MSS 25, fo. 94r.

⁷ Here Bishop Scory of Hereford's response to Grindal was perhaps the most outspoken. LPL MSS 2003, fo. 10r–v, Scory to Grindal, 18 July 1576.

⁸ Ibid., fo. 13r, Archdeacon Walker of Essex to Bishop Sandys; ibid., fo. 16v, Archdeacon Kemp of St Albans to Sandys.

⁹ Ibid., fo. 5r–v, Bishop Bentham to Grindal, 16 July 1576; ibid., fos. 29r–30r, Bishop Cooper to Grindal, 27 July 1576.

¹⁰ Ibid., fo. 5r, Bentham to Grindal, 16 July 1576; ibid., fo. 29v, Cooper to Grindal, 27 July 1576; ibid., fo. 4r, Curtis to Grindal, 15 July 1576.

¹¹ Ibid., fo. 12r, Walker to Sandys; ibid., fos. 31r–v, Bishop Davies of St David's to Grindal, 24 July 1576. ‘I think it were not amiss to give the moderators and interpretors authority to all and admit a learned lay man to interpret or oppose if they see cause.’

¹² Ibid., fos. 106r–109v, order for the prophesying in Hertfordshire, see especially Cooper's postscript, fo. 109v.

¹³ Ibid., fo. 8r, Bradbridge to Grindal, 9 July 1576.

¹⁴ Ibid., fos. 29v, 30r, Cooper to Grindal, 27 July 1576.

¹⁵ For Cox's opinion see BL, Additional MSS 29546, fo. 47r–v.

¹⁶ LPL MSS 3470, fo. 22r–v, Aylmer to Grindal, 28 Sept. 1576. On Aylmer's career see Brett Usher's article on Aylmer in ODNB.

¹⁷ LPL MSS 2003, fo. 29v, Cooper to Grindal, 27 July 1576, ‘I suspect there be some that seek to creep in favour not only by their own well doings but by the discrediting of other's well doings, and so to suspect I have greater cause than I may conveniently put in writing.’

¹⁸ The Remains of Edmund Grindal (Parker Society, Cambridge, 1843), 376.

¹⁹ BL Additional MSS 15891, fos. 41v–42r, Aylmer to Hatton, 8 June 1578.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ P. Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, ch. 2 of his Elizabethan Essays (1994); now also see The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson, ed. J. F. McDiarmid (Ashgate, 2007).

²² On Whitgift's anti-puritanism see P. Lake, Anglicans and Puritans: Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (1988), ch. 1; idem, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I (and the Fall of Archbishop Grindal) Revisited’, in Monarchical Republic, ed. McDiarmid.

²³ See material cited in n. 3.

²⁴ Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, 213–14.

²⁵ The National Archives [hereafter TNA] (Public Record Office [hereafter PRO]), State Papers [hereafter SP], 12/114/22, Aylmer to Walsingham, 21 June 1577.

²⁶ There is an undated copy of this letter in Walsingham's letter book (ibid., 12/45/21). For a discussion of the likely provenance and date of the letter see Conyers Read, Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth (3 vols., Oxford, 1925), ii, 280–1. For the memorandum see TNA (PRO), SP12/45/10. This likewise is undated but, as Read pointed out, what links both documents together and to the summer of 1577 is a common concern with what to do with ‘Watson, Feckenham and the rest upon whose advice and consciences the said recusants depend’. For this see Acts of the Privy Council [hereafter APC], 1577–8, x, 4, Council to the bishop of Lincoln, 28 July 1577. (By a slip of the pen Read appears to have identified the recipient of the letter in Walsingham's letter-book – which is clearly addressed to the ‘bishop of London’ – as the bishop of Lincoln, the recipient of the Council's letter about the custody of Feckenham et al.)

²⁷ BL Additional MSS 48018, fo.184r, a copy of the Council's letter to the bishops, dated 15 Oct.

²⁸ The fiscal aspects of the scheme were still being pursued in December 1577, when on the 3rd of that month it was reported that the judges had met to discuss the matter and concluded that ‘the law ecclesiastical is plain that a pecuniary pain may be put upon such recusants’ by the bishops without recourse to further legislation. BL Lansdowne MSS 27, fos. 46r–47v.

²⁹ TNA (PRO), SP12/117/9, Grindal to the Council, 24 Oct. 1577. ‘I trust God will . . . move her Majesty's heart to consider of my afflicted estate in which I now live and that the rather by your Lordships' good mediation.’

³⁰ Remains of Edmund Grindal, 350–1, Grindal to Burghley, 13 Nov. 1574.

³¹ For such arguments see LPL MSS 2003, fo. 5v, Bentham to Grindal, 16 July 1576, where Bentham remarked that ‘the fretting and fuming which the papists have at this exercise causeth me the rather to like and allow of it’; also see ibid., fo. 30r, Cooper to Grindal 27 July 1576, where Cooper opined that ‘the general dissolution of them [the prophesyings] will raise a great triumph and expectation among the adversaries and an offense to all them that favour religion’.

³² MacCulloch, D., ‘Catholic and Puritan in Elizabethan Suffolk: A County Community Polarises’, Archiv für reformationsgeschichte, 72 (1981)Google Scholar.

³³ J. Morris, The Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers, first series (1872), 65–7, for the initial arrest; 77–8, 90–1 for the bull found in Mayne's possession.

³⁴ Ibid., 79, 91, for the differences amongst the judges. The account of the proceedings against Mayne and his co-defendants given in Morris garbles some of the technicalities of the case. For an exemplary reconstruction based on the indictments themselves see Leslie Ward, ‘The Law of Treason in the Reign of Elizabeth I, 1558–1603’ (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1985), 222–31.

³⁵ Morris, Troubles, 69–70, 97–8.

³⁶ Ibid., 97.

³⁷ APC, 1575–7, ix, 390, Council order, dated 4 Aug. 1577, requiring Mayne and others to be examined at the next assizes not only about their own offences ‘but also to understand what others there are of that condition lurking in this realm, and in what place’.

³⁸ The letter from the Council, dated 15 Oct., required an answer ‘within seven days also after your receipt hereof’. BL Additional MSS 48018, fo. 184r.

³⁹ The replies are reprinted in Catholic Record Society, Miscellanea, 12 (1921), 1–113.

⁴⁰ TNA (PRO), SP 12/117/12, Cheney to the Council, 24 Oct. 1577.

⁴¹ Ibid., 12/118/11, Whitgift to the Council, 5 Nov. 1577.

⁴² Ibid., 12/117/19, Francis Hastings and Adrian Stokes to the Council, ibid., 12/117/19, 27 Oct. 1577; ibid., 12/117/20, earl of Huntingdon and others to Archbishop Sandys, 27 Oct. 1577.

⁴³ Ibid., 12/117/9.

⁴⁴ Remains of Edmund Grindal, 394–5, Grindal to Hutton, 2 Dec. 1577.

⁴⁵ APC, 1577–8, x, 85.

⁴⁶ TNA (PRO), SP, 12/122/15, Wilson to Burghley, 23 Jan. 1578; ibid., SP 15/25/74, Killigrew to Davison, 22 Feb. 1578.

⁴⁷ The Execution of Justice in England by William Cecil and A True, Sincere and Modest Defense of English Catholics by William Allen, ed. Robert M. Kingdon (Ithaca, NY, 1965), 131–2.

⁴⁸ Calendar of State Papers Spanish, Elizabeth, 1568–1579 (1894) [hereafter CSPSp, 1568–1579] 2, 595, item 512, Mendoza to Zayas. APC, 1577–8, x, 92, 94, 111. On 4 Dec. 1577, the Council instructed ‘Mr Lieutenant, Mr Attorney, Mr Solicitor and Mr Recorder, or any three of them’, that since ‘Sherwood’ was now proving refractory ‘they are therefore to assay him at the rack upon such articles as they shall think meet to minister unto him for the discovering either of the persons or of further matter’.

⁴⁹ Allen, A True, Sincere and Modest Defense, ed. Kingdon, 73.

⁵⁰ TNA (PRO), SP 15/25/49.

⁵¹ Ibid., 15/25/74, Killigrew to Davison, 25 Feb. 1578.

⁵² Ibid., 12/118/46, ‘the examination of Cuthbert Mayne, taken at Launceston the 29th day of November’.

⁵³ CSPSp., 1568–1579, 550–2, item 471, de Guerras to Zayas, 29 Dec. 1577, reporting his arrest at midnight 19/20 Oct. Unable to make a case against him, de Guerras explained, they were trying to fabricate plots involving the queen of Scots and the exiled earl of Westmoreland.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 571–3, item 486, Mendoza to the king of Spain, explaining that when he raised the matter of de Guerras's arrest with the queen ‘she was very much irritated, and said that it was only because he was a subject of your majesty that she had not hanged him, as he had been in correspondence with her rebel subjects and the queen of Scotland and she had letters of his greatly prejudicial to the peace of her country’. Quote at p. 573. Also see ibid., 602–4, item 517, de Guerras's account of his examination by Sir Walter Mildmay and Dr Wilson who asked him, amongst other things, whether he had had ‘any understanding with the earl of Westmoreland’ or any correspondence with Mary Stuart about Westmoreland. Also see ibid., 607, item 522, document headed ‘Juan de Aguirre was examined on the 25th of June by the governor of the Tower, and master Herll, on the following points’.

⁵⁵ Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, Elizabeth, 1577–1578 (1901), 542–3, item 1325, Sir Thomas Wilson to Burghley, dated 10 Mar. 1577, informing him about de Guerras. Ibid., 546–7, item 1335, Wilson to Burghley, 17 Mar. 1577, remarking on the difficulty of breaking de Guerras's code. Ibid., 551–2, item 1360, Wilson to Leicester, 22 Mar. 1577, announcing that St Aldegonde ‘has deciphered Guerras' letters first into Spanish and then into French’.

⁵⁶ A point I owe to the kindness of Simon Adams.

⁵⁷ TNA (PRO), SP 15/25/35, Cheke to William Davison, from the court, 19 Sept. 1577.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 15/25/71, Killigrew to Davison, 29 Jan. 1578. I cite here from the Calendar of State Papers, Elizabeth, 1566–1579, Addenda (1871), 530, since the original is so badly damaged as to be illegible on the microfilm.

⁵⁹ Ibid.., 15/25/74, Killigrew to Davison, 22 Feb. 1578. The ideological timbre of the circles producing this commentary is rendered clear by the fact that the same correspondence between Killigrew and Davison contains detailed machinations to secure Walter Travers employment in the Low Countries (see, for instance, ibid., 15/25/68, Killigrew to Davison, 8 Jan. 1578, or ibid., 15/25/79, Killigrew to Davison, Mar. 1578) and casual references to the doings of one John Field. (Ibid., 15/25/74, Killigrew to Davison, 22 Feb. 1578.)

⁶⁰ Bishop Challoner, Memoirs of Missionary Priests (1880), 19.

⁶¹ Kervijn de Lettenhove, Relations politique des Pays Bas et de l'Angleterre sous le reign de Philippe II (11 vols, Brussels, 1882–1900), x, 128.

⁶² Ibid., 153. Lettenhove prints the memorandum as three distinct documents (ibid., 125, 127, 152). They are read by Read as one and dated to December 1577, see Read, Conyers, Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth (New York, 1960), 185–7Google Scholar.

⁶³ For a narrative account of the progress see Zillah Dovey, An Elizabethan Progress: The Queen's Journey into East Anglia, 1578 (Stroud, 1996). Now see the definitive account of the religio-political background by Patrick Collinson, ‘Pulling the Strings: Religion and Politics in the Progress of 1578’, in The Progresses, Pageants and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I, ed. Jayne Elizabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring and Sarah Knight (Oxford, 2007). It is entirely typical that I should have discovered this article in the week before I delivered this lecture.

⁶⁴ MacCulloch, ‘Puritan and Recusant’.

⁶⁵ E. Lodge, Illustrations of British History (1838), ii, 119–25. Mendoza reports rumours of these events in a letter to Zayas of 8 Sept. 1578; ‘during her progress in the north the queen has met with more catholics than she expected, and in one of the houses they found a great many images which were ordered to be dragged round and burnt.’ CSPSp., 1568–1579, 609–11, item 524, quote at 610–11.

⁶⁶ APC, 1577–8, x, 310–13, an account of the Council's treatment at Norwich of a large number of recusants. Rookwood was made a particular example of, being committed ‘close prisoner to the gaol of the county of Norfolk’, ‘without conference, saving of such as should be thought meet by the Bishop, either for his better instructions or for direction of the necessary business of his living and family’.

⁶⁷ The extent to which the queen's visit to the houses of overt catholics may actually have raised catholic hopes can be gleaned from a typically garbled account of these events by Mendoza, who in a letter of 14 Aug. reported that ‘in the north where the queen is traveling’ ‘there are many catholics’ and that on ‘her entering the house of a gentleman where she was to lodge, her people found an altar with all the ornaments thereupon ready for the celebration of mass, whilst the gentleman, his wife and children received the queen with crucifixes round their necks. There is not as much severity against them as usual’ (CSPSp. 1568–1579, 606–7, item 521). On this account, taking the visit of the queen to their house as a mark of royal favour and acceptance, known and recalcitrant catholics had not only taken no real precautions to hide the physical evidence of their religious identity – the altar prepared for the mass – they had actually paraded certain outwards signs of that identity – the rosaries – before the queen. Rather than any elaborate advance planning, it may have been some such display of catholic over confidence or indiscretion that both prompted and enabled the extemporised display of anti-papal zeal played out by and before the queen at Euston Hall. These, of course, are typically garbled versions of already garbled rumours. But if we cannot use Mendoza's account to establish what really happened at Euston Hall, his version of events certainly reveals the extent to which the queen's itinerary served to raise catholic hopes and expectations; just as Topcliffe's shows how the subsequent course of the progress was used to dash them again.

⁶⁸ Lodge, Illustrations, 121–2.

⁶⁹ TNA (PRO), SP 15/ 25/113, Heneage to Walsingham, 2 Sept. 1578.

⁷⁰ Ibid., 12/45/16, an undated letter ‘from the council to the bishop of London’.

⁷¹ The Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. K. Duncan-Jones and J. van Dorsten (Oxford, 1973), 13–32.

⁷² Ibid., 31.

⁷³ Lois Adrian Montrose, ‘Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Robert Sidney and the Motives of Elizabethan Courtship’, Renaissance Drama, n.s., 8 (1970); also see his The Subject of Elizabeth (Chicago, 2006), 107–9.

⁷⁴ As ever, the queen preferred peace and delay to active and overt intervention and war. On all this see Collinson, ‘Pulling the Strings’.

⁷⁵ In this case, however, the main focus of the political pressure was not some version of ‘the public’, so much as the queen herself. For it was Elizabeth who needed to be persuaded, by other central elements in her own regime, of the necessity of certain actions for the security of the state, herself and the protestant cause. On this point see n. 85.

⁷⁶ On this point more generally see Lake, P., ‘“The Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I” Revisited (by its Victims) as a Conspiracy’, in Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe, ed. Coward, B. and Swann, J. (Aldershot, 2004)Google Scholar.

⁷⁷ S. L. Adams, ‘The Protestant Cause: Religious Alliance with the Western European Calvinist Communities as a Political Issue in England, 1585–1630’ (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1973).

⁷⁸ Collinson, ‘Downfall of Archbishop Grindal’, and idem, ‘Pulling the Strings’.

⁷⁹ BL Harleian MSS 6992, no. 44, fo. 89, Knollys to Wilson, 9 Jan. 1578.

⁸⁰ BL Additional MSS 5935, fo. 68, Walsingham to Burghley, 31 May 1577, quoted in Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, 250.

⁸¹ S. L. Adams, Leicester and the Court (Manchester, 2002), chs. 1–4.

⁸² For this case see Lake, ‘“Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I”’.

⁸³ P. Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Conflict in Early Stuart England, ed. R. Cust and A. Hughes (1987), and idem, ‘Anti-Puritanism: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England, ed. K. Fincham and P. Lake (Woodbridge, 2006).

⁸⁴ For an explication of how such ideological codes could both prompt and enable certain groups to ‘go public’ in their attempts to push royal policy in the desired direction see P. Lake, ‘The Politics of Popularity and the Public Sphere: The “Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I” Defends Itself’, in The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, ed. S. Pincus and P. Lake (Manchester, 2007).

⁸⁵ It is perhaps worth remembering here that, if we include separatists in the category puritan, then, when push came to shove, even presbyterians could become quite virulently anti-puritan.

⁸⁶ De Lettenhove, Relations politique, x, 772, 29 Aug. 1578.

⁸⁷ For Mildmay's case against Grindal see Northamptonshire Record Office FM PB. For Bacon's ‘speech used to Edmund Grindal the Archbishop of Canterbury being in her Majesty's displeasure’ see BL Harleian MSS 5176, fo. 95.

⁸⁸ The Correspondence of Dr. Matthew Hutton, Archbishop of York (Surtees Society, 1844), 59, Huntingdon to Hutton, 20 May 1578.

⁸⁹ BL Lansdowne MSS, 25, no. 78, fos. 161–2, Barnes to Burghley, 11 Feb. 1578.

⁹⁰ Ibid., 103, no. 8, fos.14r–15v, ‘a missive to the Archbishop of Canterbury, sent by the dean of Westminster, containing the Lord Burghley's directions how to demean himself before the queen in respect of the offence he gave the queen by the exercises’.