Even discourses and practices that established common ground among English Protestants (such as anti-Catholic prejudice and the shared liturgy) also marked fissures. Until the Laudian recuperation of the Roman Church as a true Church, English Protestants were broadly united by patriotic anti-Catholicism. As Christopher Hill says, the long Reformation “sublimated and idealized” English nationalism.80 For example, the overwhelming majority of his fellow playgoers would have applauded William Lambarde’s staunch commitment to a Protestant England. Lambarde’s Anglo-Saxon scholarship recovered historical foundations of English Protestantism; in Parliament in the 1580s, he made a bold attempt to prevent the possibility of a Catholic English monarch. His academic and political efforts epitomize a widely shared sense of national Protestant identity.81 However, it would be a mistake to treat popular, anti-Catholic nationalism as straightforward evidence of Protestant unity. Although the pope presented a common enemy against whom intra-Protestant groups could join in opposition, the perceived threat of popery within the Church—in myriad forms, from the episcopacy, to the surplice, to altar rails, to set prayers, to superstitious parishioners—was a major locus of internal division.82 For example, playgoer Lionel Cranfield’s ornate, private chapel would have satisfied Laudians devoted to the “beauty of holiness,” but been seen by the godly as dangerously popish.83 English Protestants generally agreed that popery was bad, but they fiercely disagreed as to what popery was.
Playgoer and prayer book Protestant Lady Anne Clifford represented a “significant minority [of] committed conformists” whose faith was embedded in the liturgy of the established Church.84 During the interregnum, Clifford continued to use the proscribed prayer book, although to do so put her in danger: “She had in the worst of times the liturgy of the Church of England duly in her own private chapel … though she was threatened with sequestration.”85 Clifford’s loyalty to the set prayers of the English Church defies what Maltby identifies as the “[false] assumption that non-conformists took their faith more ‘seriously’ than men and women who conformed to the lawful worship of the Church of England.”86 But standards of conformity were shifting and contentious; the prayer book itself was a mixed-faith document.87 Religious normativity was a moving target. Despite his self-presentation as an exemplar of orthodoxy, Bishop John Overall’s enthusiasm for ceremony and aversion to Calvinist doctrine were decidedly avant-garde for the Jacobean Church. Yet Overall’s visitation articles, establishing rubrics of conformity, would become the model for at least twenty other sets of articles used—albeit, still controversially—by Laudian divines in the later 1620s and 1630s.88
Moreover, even pious, conformist theatergoers such as Clifford were immersed in a broader, mixed-faith culture. Clifford’s eulogist praises her ability to sift “controversies very abstruse,” recalling how “she much commended one book, William Barklay’s dispute with Bellarmine, both, as she knew, of the popish persuasion, but the former less papal; and who, she said, had well stated a main point.”89 Julie Crawford has shown how Clifford, in her struggle to claim property from her husband and the King, drew on models of political resistance from puritan texts.90 This does not mean that Clifford was secretly inclining to either Catholicism or puritanism. The point, rather, is that even firm conformists did not live in an orthodox bubble, untainted by contact with the broader religious spectrum.
The long Reformation embroiled everything it touched in the unstable processes of cross-confessional appropriation. For example, theatergoer Richard Brathwaite’s Spiritual Spicery (1638) includes an anodyne Protestant autobiography, alongside translations of devotional material by Catholic theologians. Similarly, in the same year he published his famous appraisal of contemporary dramatists, Church of England deacon Francis Meres also translated the work of the Spanish, Dominican mystic Louis de Granada.91 These men were not crypto-Catholics. Brathwaite asserts the orthodoxy of “[extracting] flowers from Romish authors,” by labeling anyone who objects “a rigid Precisian.”92 It was common for committed Protestants to draw on Catholic devotional texts. The Jesuit Robert Parsons’s Christian Directory was adapted by the Calvinist Edmund Bunny into A Book of Christian Exercise, one of the most frequently reprinted books in Elizabethan England: Clifford read both Bunny’s version and Parsons’s.93 People across the spectrum of belief productively engaged with texts and practices coded as belonging to other confessional groups, often repurposing these cultural materials for radically different ends.
Catholics, Church Papists, and the Curious
English Catholicism was not simply a monolithic other, against which various English Protestants defined their own identities; this internally diverse, master category offered rich devotional and cultural resources to its various adherents and sympathizers.94 Although anti-Catholic prejudice was rife—playgoer John Melton describes Catholics as “blood-sucking antichristian tiraunts”—even committed Protestant audience members were capable of a more open range of attitudes toward Catholic people and Catholic culture.95
Early modern English Protestants sometimes flirted with Catholicism without actually converting. As Shagan points out, “[Dabbling] with Roman books and services [was] part of the normal spectrum of English religious activity … [comparable to] experimentation with illicit substances … in the modern world.”96 For example, Sir Humphrey Mildmay was born into a family with an impeccable puritan pedigree, but he seems to have been attracted to Catholic devotional practices.97 His diary shows him lending part of a Douai Bible, that is, the Catholic translation of the Bible into English.98 As shown earlier, there were certainly steadfast Protestants who owned and read Catholic books. But Sir Humphrey’s diary also records him performing “the Spaniards discipline” before bed, a reference to the Spiritual Exercises of the Spanish Jesuit Ignatius of Loyola, and it makes frequent invocations of the Blessed Virgin Mary.99 Collectively, these practices suggest Sir Humphrey was inclined toward the Roman Church. Yet, in the midst of legal difficulties in 1648, he made a formal statement denying the charge that he was ever a recusant or held Catholic sympathies.100 We cannot gauge precisely the strength or exact nature of Sir Humphrey’s attraction to Catholicism. Then again, this might have also been difficult for Sir Humphrey himself. He falls somewhere in the gray region occupied by English Protestants who felt drawn toward devotional practices too popish for the established Church, but not so strongly as to prompt conversion. Similarly, theatergoing courtier Sir John Harington seems to have harbored Catholic sympathies; he supported toleration for members of the Roman Church, and his epigrams are peppered with pro-Catholic arguments and devotional references.101 Harington’s self-description as a “Protesting Catholick Puritan” at the opening of his Tract on the Succession to the Crown testifies to his sense of his own mixed identity and “epitomizes his interest,