This chapter offers a survey of religious dissimulation in early modern England, where questions concerning its legitimacy were, owing to the unpredictable course of the English Reformation(s), arguably more pressing than anywhere else in Europe. While most Catholic and Protestant theological authorities condemned dissimulation in principle, the practice must have been widespread and was perceived, at least by those in power, as a political reality that could not simply be ignored. This chapter outlines both ecclesiological and political justifications for tolerating those who dissembled their faith and argues that their ambivalent status and the often unstable practices of policing such religious dissimulation should be considered a central aspect of early modern approaches to the problem of religious toleration. Religious dissimulation was a highly controversial practice, and toleration for inward dissent was never a given. Especially in times of political crisis, church and state authorities frequently resorted to aggressive measures to access the secret beliefs of religious dissenters, which belied the Queen’s alleged refusal to make windows into men’s hearts.

This chapter discusses the collaboratively written Sir Thomas More in the context of Catholic outrage over the breakdown of the Elizabethan policy of outward conformity in the 1580s and 1590s and the various means by which the Elizabethan regime made windows into men’s hearts in the late sixteenth century, including espionage, oaths, and torture. The play’s insistent Senecan intertext, which revolves around questions of silence and treason, thus becomes legible in relation to late Elizabethan legislative developments that served to penalise silence in matters of religion. As this chapter argues, the play’s biographical treatment of the famous Catholic martyr, who never specifies the convictions for which he is executed, thus reflects the predicament of Elizabethan Catholic loyalists, such as Anthony Browne, first Viscount of Montague, who were concerned with maintaining an increasingly untenable sphere of silence as a middle ground between truth and dissimulation.