As with intra-Protestant struggles over nomenclature, defining who was Catholic was a matter of debate among contemporaries, and it continues to pose methodological problems for historians. Earlier Catholic historiography’s emphasis on recusancy has been enlarged to include a broader range of forms of Catholic practice by Alexandra Walsham’s work on church papistry and Haigh’s attention to the conservative religious habits of ordinary people.103 Both those committed Catholics who avoided persecution through occasional conformity and others whose devotional tendencies leaned toward traditional religion, but who may not have described themselves as members of the Roman Church, were labeled by various kinds of Protestants as “church papists.” English Catholics were divided among themselves as to their religious obligations. Although strategic conformists were often criticized by their recusant coreligionists as “schismatics” who had abandoned the Roman Church, this group in fact played a crucial role in sustaining an English Catholic community.104 Playgoer John Davies of Hereford was Catholic, but he attended Protestant services; he was married and buried in the Church of England.105 Davies of Hereford may have wished to retain the social benefits of parish life and participate in Christian community with neighbors.106 As Walsham writes, “Living in frosty isolation from people who were in principle agents of heresy and the devil, but in practice friends, acquaintances, and relatives, was largely an impracticable polemical ideal.”107
Faithful English Catholics sought various ways to balance their spiritual commitments against the economic, social, and political costs of practicing an illegal religion.108 Even for privileged Romanists, the steadfast recusancy demanded by polemicists was difficult to maintain, and many Catholic casuists included exceptions permitting conformity in pastoral literature. As Protestant playgoer John Earle mocks, “A Church-Papist is one that parts his religion betwixt his conscience and his purse.”109 Playgoer Sir John Davies of Oxford (not to be confused with his eponymous coreligionist mentioned previously) for a time refused to attend Church of England services. However, while Davies of Oxford continued publicly to embrace the Roman Church, he also made concessions to the Protestant state. In 1610, when considering whether to restore Davies’s blood nobility after his involvement in the Essex rebellion, Parliament carefully parsed the mixed signs of his resistance and accommodation. As they saw it, Davies was “halted between two opinions.”110 He was more willing than previously to attend Protestant services, but he continued to evade communion by pretending to be out of charity with his neighbors. This common ruse of church papists, and his equivocal answer when asked if he would see a Church of England minister, led the bishop of Asaph to conclude that Davies was one of those “obstinate resolved papists [who] do come to church to save the penalty … and yet rest their conscience on not receiving communion.”111 But where Asaph saw an entrenched religious position, Lord Zouche saw confessional movement in Davies’s new outward conformity and was “hopeful of his coming.”112 Zouche was encouraged by Davies’s willingness to take the oath of allegiance, and he observed a difference among Catholics whereby, “though at the first, few recusants would refuse it, now almost none will take it.”113 What constituted adherence to the Roman Church was a matter of external, as well as internal, debate.
English Catholics were divided among themselves regarding the conflicting allegiances claimed by the monarch and the pontiff. After the pope’s 1570 bull declaring Elizabeth a heretical monarch and licensing her assassination, English Catholics were dogged by versions of the “bloody question”: If Spain invaded to re-Catholicize England, for which side would you fight? Challenges to Catholic patriotism were sometimes posed explicitly by an interrogator, but doubts about papist loyalty were often implied, or taken for granted, as in the popular saying “English face, Spanish heart.”114 The religious and political contradiction lived by English Catholics generated both a body of resistance theory and defenses of Catholic loyalism.115 For some, attending Protestant services was a meaningful and voluntary act of political obedience. For other Catholics, conformity was duplicitous, and loyalty was best demonstrated by the open profession of their faith. Theatergoing Catholics included both Sir Charles Percy, a likely participant in the Gunpowder Plot, and William Parker, Baron Monteagle, who revealed his coreligionists’ terrorist conspiracy to the Privy Council.116
“We know that most of the principal Catholicks about London doe go to plays,” writes theater buff and Catholic priest Father Thomas Leke.117 The Romanist upper classes served as an important resource for their coreligionists in post-Reformation England.118 These pillars of “seigneurial” Catholicism supported their community by harboring illegal priests, making sacraments available, employing (or converting) Catholic servants, setting visible examples of recusancy, and participating in international Catholic networks.119 However, English Catholicism was far from a “top-down” phenomenon. Many tradesmen, students, yeomen, servants, and apprentices actively supported Romanist networks, hiding priests and circulating Catholic texts and devotional objects.120 In London, Catholics of all ranks had some degree of access to sacraments through foreign embassies and the townhouses of Catholic nobles, such as Montague House in Southwark, as well as in prisons such as the Clink (both close to the Globe).121 Often, Catholic inmates were allowed to gather together, and free Catholics were permitted to visit prisons for spiritual succor. On one occasion in 1602 when pursuivants did raid the Clink, they found “nearly forty laypersons, mostly women and poor people” about to celebrate Mass.122 There was an active Jesuit enclave in Jacobean Clerkenwell, ministering largely to the same demographic of working people that made up the audience of the nearby Red Bull Theater.123 The Inns of Court afforded a semiprivate space for Catholic ritual, as well as a steady constituency of student playgoers.124 Holborn was known as an area with a high concentration of Romanists.125 Fleet Street, which had a similar reputation as a Catholic neighborhood, was a short distance from the Salisbury Court, St. Paul’s, and Blackfriars playhouses.126
Both upper-class and ordinary English Catholics practiced a form of religion very different from that of their late medieval ancestors. As Lisa Mc-Clain writes, “Catholic goals changed—from maintaining strict adherence to pre-reform or Tridentine practices … to finding ways to duplicate the functions of traditional or Tridentine practices while reinterpreting the forms such practices might take.”127 Because of the obstacles to receiving sacraments, the circulation of books and manuscripts in Catholic circles took on greater importance. The poetry of Romanist playgoer William Habington appears in a collection compiled by a Catholic woman. Post-Reformation English Catholicism, too, was a religion of the word.128 In London, the public execution of Catholic martyrs galvanized sympathetic communities of witnesses.129 The devotional life of English Catholics was often piecemeal, idiosyncratic, and flexible, cobbled together from occasional sacraments snatched when they could be had, news and consolation from local networks of fellow believers, pastoral literature, and private meditation, often involving repurposed objects or spaces.
In place of the visible, corporate community of the faithful, so powerfully described in Eamon Duffy’s account of the late medieval Church, later English Catholics faced the isolation of practicing an illegal, minority religion.130 But both recusant and conforming Catholics found ways to sustain their spiritual lives within the strictures of Protestant society. As John Bossy observes, “The features of pre-Reformation Christian practice to which conservatively-minded people held most strongly were those which … belonged to a region of private social practice which in effect lay outside the field of legislation”—such as fasting.131 Devout Catholic convert and enthusiastic playgoer Elizabeth Cary herself fasted during Lent (“living almost wholly … on nettle porridge”), but she also served meat for Protestant family members and guests. Her table was confessionally mixed in both food and talk. She describes meals with her children and their Oxford friends, “conversing freely … [about] religion [with] those very capable on both sides.”132 For Cary, the goal was to reconcile those around her to the Roman Church, but she understood the conviction of conversion as emerging from uncertainty and open dialogue.
Conversion and Mixed-Faith Families
Religious lives were changeable. But conversion was not a simple flip from one