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II. Elizabethan Recusancy Commissions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Roger B. Manning
Roger B. Manning
Affiliation:
Cleveland State University
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Extract

The Elizabethan religious settlement was meant to secure the unity of England by means of religious uniformity. As a political compromise it brought eighty years of relative peace and prosperity, but as a religious compromise it failed to satisfy either Catholic or Puritan. The problem of enforcing the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity of 1559 was complicated by the lack of adequate administrative machinery. The delay in purging the commissions of the peace, the failure to promote sufficient zeal among the justices of the peace, coupled with the decline of episcopal power and disenchantment with the High Commission and the various diocesan ecclesiastical commissions, led the government in the late 1580s and early 1590s to issue special royal commissions to carefully selected magistrates for dealing with seminary priests and recusant affairs. Thus, the Elizabethan government's policy towards recusants at any given period of time was a reflection not only of the degree of tension in the international situation, but also of the need to devise effective ways of enforcing die penal laws.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 1972 , pp. 23 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972

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References

1 Usher, R. G., The Rise and Fall of the High Commission (Oxford, 1968 reprint ed.), pp. 17–18.Google Scholar

2 Bishop Richard Davies of St David's complained that one of the reasons for the erosion of episcopal authority was general lack of co-operation on the part of the sheriffs in punishing excommunicated persons (PRO, SP 12/66/26–26.1).

3 Hist.MSS.Comm., Salisbury MSS., vi, 265–6.Google Scholar

4 Walker, F. X., ‘The Implementation of the Elizabethan Statutes against Recusants, 1581–1603’ (London Ph.D. thesis, 1961), pp. 36, 66–7, 79–IIIGoogle Scholar; Aveling, Hugh, ‘The Catholic Recusants of the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1558–1790’, Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, Literary and Historical Section, X, vi (1963), 191–306, esp. p. 209 f.Google Scholar

5 Gleason, John H. (‘The Personnel of the Commissions of the Peace, 1554–64’, Huntington Library Quarterly, XVIII (1955), 169–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar) concluded that the changes in membership of the commissions of the peace during the reign of Mary and the first five years of Elizabeth's reign were largely attributable to a high mortality rate rather than religious factors. Smith, A. Hassell (‘The Personnel of the Commissions of the Peace, 1554–64: A Reconsideration’Google Scholar, ibid, XXII (1959), 301–2) argues that there were extensive changes in the commission of the peace following the accession of Elizabeth and that probably at least half of these changes arose out of religious factors. My own researches (Religion and Society in Elizabethan Sussex: A Study of the Enforcement of the Religious Settlement, 1558–1603 (Leicester, 1969)Google Scholar; ‘Catholics and Local Office Holding in Elizabethan Sussex’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, XXXV (1962), 47–61) show that in Sussex the commission of the peace was not effectively purged until after the 1569 survey. Even after that date crypto-Catholics, Catholic sympathizers, and an occasional open Catholic such as Sir Edward Caryll, turn up on practically every commission. It seems apparent that the Government had no desire to exclude any but the most uncompromising Catholics from local offices: if they were not quite trusted in the commission of the peace, they turned up frequently as sheriffs.Google Scholar

In his new book, The Justices of the Peace in England, 1558–1640 (Oxford, 1969), pp. 68–72, 81–2, Professor Gleason still maintains that there never was a thorough purge of Catholic J.P.s during the reign of Elizabeth, and that except in times of crisis, such as 1569 and 1587, outward conformity was all that was required.Google Scholar

6 PRO, SP 12/21/27. For a discussion of instances of evasion of the oath of supremacy, false returns concerning the swearing of the oath, and cases of Catholic office holders who occasionally conformed but retained Catholic associations, see my ‘Catholics and Local Office Holding in Elizabethan Sussex’, loc. cit.Google Scholar

7 PRO, SP 12/19/36.

8 For examples of expressions of this sort of community feeling prevailing over religious differences, see Brit.Mus., Lansdowne MS 12, fos. 74–74V; MacCaffrey, W. T., Exeter, 1540–1640: Tie Growth of an English Country Town (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), pp. 189–90, 202.Google Scholar

9 My Religion and Society in Elizabethan Sussex, p. 88.Google Scholar

10 PRO, SP 12/74/44, 165/22.

11 Ibid. 155/42.

12 23EHZ. I, c. I.

13 Walker, , op. cit., pp. 123–33Google Scholar; SirNeale, John, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, 1559–1581 (London, 1953), pp. 386–92.Google Scholar

14 In some counties recusancy cases took up so much time at the quarter sessions that the J.P.s had to postpone or omit other business. The clerk of the peace of Hampshire was compelled to spend ‘not only by himself or by his deputy and a servant or two, a great deal of time before and after every sessions, but also the most part of the sessions itself in drawing and engrossing the indictments, judgements and processes thereupon’ (Paul, John E., ‘Hampshire Recusants in the time of Elizabeth I, with special reference to Winchester’, Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club, xxi, pt. 11 (1959), 74).Google Scholar

15 29 Eliz. I, c. 6.

16 Guide to the Contents of the Public Record Office (London, rev. ed. of 1963), I, 127Google Scholar

17 Tyler, Philip, ‘The Significance of the Ecclesiastical Commission at York’, Northern History, II (1967), 27–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Usher, , op. cit., p. 287Google Scholar; Price, F. D., ‘The Commission for Causes Ecclesiastical for the Dioceses of Bristol and Gloucester, 1574’, Trans. Bristol and Gloucestershire Arch. Soc., LIX (1937), 61–184Google Scholar; also my ‘The Crisis of Episcopal Authority during the Reign of Elizabeth I’, in the 11 1971 issue of the Journal of British Studies.Google Scholar

19 The Puritan unrest and disobedience that followed upon the publication of inflammatory pamphlets by Thomas Cartwright and Edward Dering prompted the Government in October 1573 to issue special commissions of oyer and terminer to enforce the Act of Uniformity and a recent royal proclamation (Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Hughes, P. L. and Larkin, J. F. (New Haven, 1969), II, no. 599, pp. 379–81Google Scholar: ‘Penalty for Speaking against the Book of Common Prayer’). The commission for Suffolk is found in Brit.Mus., Harley MS 380, fo. 69, and is mistakenly described in the Brit.Mus. Catalogue as an ecclesiastical commission. Rymer, Thomas (Foedera (Hague ed., 1739–1945), xv, 724–29Google Scholar) prints this commission and the commissions for six other counties and labels them ‘De Commissione speciali ad Audiendum ’. The original commissions are enrolled in PRO, C. 66/100, m. 3Id. See also Acts [of the] P[rivy] C[ouncil], ed. J. Dasent, vm, 208, 171; Strype, John, Annals of the Reformation (Oxford, 1824), n.i, 3848.Google Scholar; Collinson, Patrick, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), p. 151ff.Google Scholar; Williams, Penry, The Council in the Marches of Wales under Elizabeth I (Cardiff, 1958), p. 89.Google Scholar

The Privy Council were reluctant to issue these special commissions of oyer and terminer except where the church was hard pressed. The bishops were also instructed to enforce the Proclamation of 20 October 1573 in their visitations and synods and to punish offenders ‘by censures of the churche ’. The Privy Council felt that this could be accomplished ‘without extraordinary and temporall (as it is called) iurisdiccon … if dilligente Care and heede weare taken by yow the Pastor and Bishopp’ (Bris.Mus., Add.MS 32,323, fos. 133V-134).

John Whitgift, who fought a long battle, both as bishop of Worcester and later as archbishop of Canterbury, to deprive the Council of the Marches of Wales of its ecclesiastical jurisdiction (the Council had been granted a commission of oyer and terminer to enforce the Act of Uniformity in 1573 and an ecclesiastical commission of its own in 1579), obtained a commission of oyer and terminer in 1577 issued to himself and a select group of Welsh bishops to proceed against recusants under the Act of Uniformity. Whitgift had persuaded the Privy Council to grant him this commission because certain magistrates were sheltering friends and relatives (Victoria County History, Worcestershire, II, 50–1Google Scholar; Lambeth Palace Library, Carte Misc. I/90). Elsewhere, in the draft of a letter evidently intended for the archbishop or the Privy Council, Whitgift states that eighty-two recusants were indicted at the Worcestershire Assizes under the terms of the commission of oyer and terminer of 1577 (ibid, iv/123). The diocese of Worcester eventually obtained its own ecclesiastical commission in 1598 (PRO, C. 66/1478, m. 8ff.).

(I wish to thank the Rev. J. F. Larkin for his kindness in allowing me to use his page proofs and typescript in advance of the publication of vols. 11 and m of Tudor Royal Proclamations.)

20 Except in Sussex and one instance in Norfolk, bishops' chancellors rarely sat on commissions of the peace.

21 ‘Episcopacy and Reform in the Later Sixteenth Century’, Studies in Church History, III, 121.Google Scholar

22 Ibid. p. 120.

23 In a Liber Pads, Brit.Mus., Harley MS 474.

24 Acts P.C., xiv, 15.

25 PRO, SP 12/208/15; Brit.Mus., Harley MS 703, ‘The Letter book of Sir Walter Covert’, fo. 20. There are no Chancery enrolments of these commissions because they were issued out of the Exchequer, which had jurisdiction over convicted recusants. Thus the function of these commissions was to milk those already convicted of recusancy rather than to detect those not yet indicted (cf. PRO, SP 12/208/15).

26 In the case of Sussex it is clearly evident that the Privy Council concluded that the J.P.s could not be depended upon to carry out the assessments with anything like rigour. In 1584 the J.P.s returned a schedule with only three names on it. The Privy Council sent back the list instructing those responsible to add more names. In 1587 the responsibility for assessing the ability of recusants to contribute was entrusted to special commissioners and this time thirteen Sussex recusants were rated to furnish one or two light horses or their monetary equivalent. But in each case the sheriff, Thomas Bishop, reduced the sum after listening to the pitiful accounts that those charged gave of their circumstances (see my Religion and Society in Elizabethan Sussex, p. 14if.).

27 Brit.Mus., Harley MS 703, fos. 524–53.

28 Ibid. fo. 52; PRO, SP 12/208/19.

29 Ibid. 208/15.

30 29 Eliz. I, c. 6; supra p. 26.

31 PRO, SP 12/208/34.

32 Brit.Mus., Harley MS 703, fos. 52–52V.

33 Ibid. fos. 52V-53.

34 PRO, SP 12/208/19.

35 After 1584 various special commissions were issued from time to time to the Privy Council and the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London authorizing them to banish Jesuits and seminary priests indicted for high treason and to pardon conformable recusants (see appendixes A and B for a list of such commissions and persons to whom issued). Under the terms of a commission of the second type, a pardon was granted to Sir John Southworth of Salford, Lancashire, by reason of conformity. According to his pardon, he had accumulated fines totalling, £1,100 and consequently had some of his property sequestered. The copy of his pardon (Brit.Mus., Add.MS 4627, fos. 157–160V), made by Thomas Rymer in the eighteenth century, is dated 1 December 1585, but probably should be dated sometime after 1592 since sequestration of property and the continuous levying of monthly fines was not authorized until the 1587 Recusancy Act was enacted (29 Eliz. I, c.6).

36 PRO, SP 12/208/66.

37 Ibid. 208/37.

38 McGrath, Patrick, Papists and Puritans under Elizabeth I (London, 1967), p. 254Google Scholar; SirNeale, John, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, 1584–1601 (London, 1957), pp. 199–201, 246–7.Google Scholar

39 Hughes, and Larkin, , op. cit. III, no. 738, pp. 86–93. The individual commissions were passed under the great seal, although only a few were actually enrolled on the dorse of the patent rolls (see appendix A).Google Scholar

40 Ibid. no. 739, pp. 93–5. These articles of instruction were printed and ordered to be annexed to the individual commissions.

41 Ibid. no. 739, and the commissions for the year 1591 listed in appendix A.

42 Brit.Mus., Harley MS 703, fos. 73–73v.

43 Ibid. fo. 113. For letters from Lord Buckhurst giving the same instructions to the commissioners for recusancy in Sussex in 1598 and in Dorsetshire in 1600, see St Hyland, G. K., A Century of Persecution under Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns from Contemporary Records (London, 1920), pp. 223–6. Also see Acts P.C., x, 174.Google Scholar

44 Brit.Mus., Harley MS 703, fo. 68v.

45 PRO, SP 12/243/76.

46 My Religion and Society in Elizabethan Sussex, p. 259, demonstrates that the number of hard-core recusants among the greater gentry remained constant after circa 1580.Google Scholar

47 Acts P.C., xxii, 138–40.Google Scholar

One of the Norfolk commissioners, Sir Nathaniel Bacon, drew up a set of recommendations which proposed that the bishop's chancellor be removed from the commission and made a ‘certefier’ instead, that the gaoler of Norwich and his officers be removed or else the recusants in Norwich Gaol be moved to towns where it would be more difficult for their friends to communicate with them, and that the port of Yarmouth be granted a separate commission. Bacon also made recommendations of individuals fit to be added to the commissions for Norfolk and Norwich (The Official Papers of Sir Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, Norfolk as Justice of the Peace, 1580–1620, ed. Saunders, H. W. (Camden Soc., 3rd ser., vol. xxvi), pp. 173–5).Google Scholar

48 Acts P.C., XII, 174, 181, 211, 227, 316, 340, 427, 543ff.

49 35 Eliz, I., c. 2, Statutes of the Realm, II, 843–6.Google Scholar

50 Acts P.C., xxiii, 192–3.Google Scholar See also Ibid. 342–3.

51 Ibid. xxii, 227, 336, XXIII, 106, 188, 289; Brit.Mus., Harley MS 703, fos. m, 134.