The Catholic Majority Under Pressure
Now it was the Catholics' turn to be persecuted. Though still a majority, they were forbidden to hold their own services or read Catholic books. By government order religious images were removed from churches and altars destroyed. Six Oxford students were sent to the Tower for resisting the removal of crucifixes from their college chapels. Many Catholics sadly submitted to the new laws, but many others chose to pay fines rather than attend the Anglican church; the council estimated, according to the book, that there were about fifty thousand such recusants in England in 1580.
Anglican bishops complained that Catholics were holding services in private houses, that people were gradually returning to Catholic customs, and that in areas of strong Catholic feeling it was dangerous to be a Protestant. Elizabeth rebuked Archbishop Parker in 1565 for laxity, and enforcement grew harsher. Catholics who attended Mass in the Spanish ambassador's chapel were jailed, houses were searched, strangers found in them had to explain their beliefs, and in 1567 judges were ordered to punish anyone who owned Catholic books.
Judging by the Standards of the Age
Such laws should not be judged by the relative tolerance that philosophers and the revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries later made normal. The religious parties of that age were at war with one another, and religion was bound up with politics, a field where tolerance has always been limited. Every party and government in the sixteenth century agreed that religious dissent was a form of political rebellion.
The conflict became openly political when Pope Pius V, apparently after long patience, issued a bull in 1570 that not only excommunicated Elizabeth but released her subjects from obedience to her and ordered them to disregard her commands and laws. France and Spain, both then seeking England's friendship, did not enforce the bull, but a copy was secretly nailed to the door of the Bishop of London's house; the culprit was found and executed.
Faced with this declaration of war, the queen's ministers asked Parliament for severe anti-Catholic laws. It became high treason to call the queen a heretic, schismatic, usurper or tyrant, to bring a papal bull into England, or to convert Protestants to Catholicism. The Court of High Commission was empowered to examine the beliefs of any suspect and to punish offenses, including moral ones such as adultery, that had previously gone unpunished.
William Allen and the College at Douai
The Catholic kings of Europe hardly dared protest against measures so like their own. Many English Catholics quietly conformed, and the government hoped that habit would become acceptance and, in time, belief. To prevent this, William Allen, an English exile, founded a seminary at Douai in the Spanish Netherlands to train English Catholics as missionaries to their homeland. He described its aim with passion: to stir in Catholic minds a justified zeal against heretics, to show the students the splendor of Catholic worship, and to remind them of the sorrowful state of England, where friends, kinsmen and thousands of others were perishing in schism and unbelief, and where the prisons were filled not with thieves but with priests and servants of Christ, indeed with their own parents and relatives. Better, he concluded, to endure any hardship than to stand by while such misfortune befell their nation.
The college worked at Douai until 1578, when the Calvinists took the town; it then moved to Reims and returned to Douai in 1593. The Douai Bible, an English translation of the Latin Vulgate, was prepared at Reims and Douai between 1582 and 1610 and appeared a year before the King James Bible. Between 1574 and 1585, the book reports, the college ordained 275 graduates and sent 268 to England. Allen was called to Rome and made a cardinal, but the work went on, and before Elizabeth's death in 1603 another 170 priests had been sent. Of the 438 in all, ninety-eight were executed.
The Jesuit Mission of Parsons and Campion
The mission was led by a Jesuit, Robert Parsons, a bold and ardent man and a master of controversy and English prose. He openly maintained that the papal bull deposing Elizabeth justified her assassination as well. Many English Catholics were horrified, but Tolomeo Galli, secretary of state to Pope Gregory XIII, agreed; a Catholic historian has noted that this approval followed principles accepted at the time, and that Gregory, whom the secretary surely consulted, held the same view. Parsons urged the Catholic powers to invade England. The Spanish ambassador condemned the plan as a criminal rebellion, and Everard Mercurian, head of the Jesuit order, warned Parsons to keep out of politics.
Undaunted, Parsons decided to act himself. Disguised as an English officer returning from service in the Netherlands, with a soldierly walk, a gold-laced coat and a plumed hat, he crossed the border in 1580 and prepared the way for another Jesuit, Edmund Campion, who followed him disguised as a jewel merchant. The two settled secretly in central London. They visited imprisoned Catholics, found them gently treated, and sought help from clergy and laity to keep Catholics in the faith and win back recent converts to the established church.
The secular priests living secretly in England were alarmed at the missionaries' daring and warned them that they would soon be caught and that their arrest would make life harder for all Catholics; they begged them to leave. Parsons and Campion refused. They moved from town to town, organized secret gatherings, heard confessions, said Mass and blessed those who received them as messengers of God. They claimed to have brought twenty thousand people back to Catholicism within a year. They set up a press and printed tracts; leaflets found in London streets declared that since Elizabeth was excommunicated she was no longer lawful queen. Another Jesuit was sent to Edinburgh to encourage Scottish Catholics to invade England from the north. The Earl of Westmorland answered a summons from the Vatican and brought a bar of gold to help an invasion through the Netherlands, and in the summer of 1581 many Catholics expected the Spanish army of Alva to land in England.
The Arrest and Trial of Campion
Warned by its spies, the government redoubled its search for the Jesuits. Parsons escaped across the Channel, but Campion was captured in July 1581 and taken, past sympathetic country people and hostile Londoners, to the Tower. Elizabeth summoned him and tried to save him. She asked first whether he accepted her as lawful sovereign, and he said yes. To her second question, whether the pope could lawfully excommunicate her, he replied that he could not judge a matter on which learned men disagreed. She sent him back to prison with orders that he be treated kindly, but Cecil had him tortured to reveal the names of his associates. After two days of suffering Campion named a few, and more arrests followed.
Having recovered his courage, he challenged the Protestant clergy to a public debate. With the council's permission it was held in the prison chapel before courtiers, prisoners and townspeople, and the weakened Jesuit stood for hours defending Catholic doctrine. Neither side convinced the other. When Campion came to trial, he was charged not with heresy but with conspiring to overthrow the state through foreign invasion and domestic sedition. He and fourteen others were condemned and executed on 1 December 1581.