Francis Bacon’s A Letter written out of England to an English Gentleman remaining at Padua, published anonymously around February 1599, reported the alleged plot against the life of Elizabeth I contrived between Edward Squire and the Jesuit Richard Walpole. Widely understood as the official government publication on the Squire affair, it was answered by a number of exiled English Catholic writers, most notably Martin Aray and Thomas Fitzherbert, who identified its anonymous author, and launched a detailed attack on his account of the Squire affair. This article analyzes those responses to argue that Bacon’s Letter was a belated entry in the government propaganda campaign. It forwarded a streamlined and simply anti-Jesuit narrative, rather than the rather muddled version of events that had previously emerged from the interrogations, trial, and early government publications.

Reacting sharply against the whiggish thesis that religious tolerance was a heritage of the Enlightenment, revisionist scholars have pointed to the many pragmatic concessions people made to tolerate those of other faiths prior to the eighteenth century. While they have underscored the contingent relationship of tolerance with neighbourliness in many important case studies, the historiography portrays early modern London as an essentially intolerant society for the city’s Catholics and a church on the margins. Through an examination of London’s embassy chapels reflected in vicious anti-Catholic polemic, this article argues that tolerance was not lacking in Jacobean London. It additionally shows how ambassadors’ chapels sustained a vibrant and visible form of Counter-Reformation Catholicism in the capital. Finally, it assesses how contemporaries connected both of these issues to tensions surrounding the ‘king’s two bodies’ and the execution of the royal prerogative. While this places London’s Catholics at the heart and centre of Jacobean religio-political tensions, the article concludes that it is ultimately the circular relationship between tolerance and intolerance that is key to understanding why a contested form of corporate Catholicism survived in the very heart of England’s Protestant kingdom.

This article analyses the conversion of 379 English Protestants to Catholicism in Malta between 1600 and 1798. It explores the motivations behind their recantation, the agents of their conversion and the role of dissimulation in discarding their Protestant faith. It ends with two remarks. First, people in the Mediterranean ‘knew no religious frontiers’.1 Malta, like other Mediterranean territories was a place with a mixed religious profile. Second, though English Protestants considered themselves to be the ‘elect’ and their country the new Israel, the two faiths were not mutually exclusive and could find common ground over the defence of Christendom.