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THE ENGLISH INQUISITION: CONSTITUTIONAL CONFLICT AND ECCLESIASTICAL LAW IN THE 1590s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 September 2004

ETHAN H. SHAGAN
ETHAN H. SHAGAN
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
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Abstract

This article examines the relationship between religious debate and constitutional conflict in the 1590s, focusing on the status of ecclesiastical law and the right of the church courts to impose ex officio oaths upon English subjects. It argues that Richard Cosin, a client of Archbishop Whitgift and the leading apologist for the government's use of ex officio oaths, used the issue to make a series of aggressive and controversial assertions of state power. These theoretical claims did not involve sovereignty or the powers of the monarch – the issues usually addressed by historians of political thought – but rather the much more theologically charged question of the line between public authority and private conscience. As such, Cosin and his supporters transformed the raw materials of conformity and anti-puritanism into a view of the state and its coercive powers that seemed to threaten both the common law and the Elizabethan regime's own claims that it did not make ‘windows into men's souls’.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , September 2004 , pp. 541 - 565
Copyright
2004 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would like to thank John Guy, Karl Gunther and two anonymous readers for their helpful comments on drafts of this article. Earlier versions were presented at the Tudor–Stuart seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, in April 2003, and at a conference entitled ‘From religious toleration to civic tolerance: religion and the state from antiquity to the present’, Wayne State University, October 2002. I would like to thank all the participants in these events, and especially Conrad Russell, for their valuable criticisms. All quotations in this article have been modernized except the titles of printed books.