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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 December 2015
This article re-examines the nature and extent of conformity to the Religious Settlement amongst the parish clergy in the first decades of Elizabeth I's reign. The estimate of Henry Gee, made over a century ago, that only around 300 clergymen were deprived for non-conformity to the Settlement has been remarkably influential and durable, and it continues to shape broader assessments of the ways in which religio-political change was implemented and received in this period. Using digital resources such as the Clergy of the Church of England Database, in conjunction with hitherto neglected biographical compilations, the article argues for a significant revision of Gee's figures. More broadly, it reflects on the complex meanings of ‘conformity’ in a period of perplexing change and dramatic institutional disruption, disputing any suggestion that apparent acquiescence signalled pervasive ‘acceptance’ of the alteration in religion among the clergy. In the process, it draws attention to the pitfalls of uncritical deployment of numbers and statistics, and of using them as explanatory short-cuts in understanding the dynamics of Reformation change.
The authors would like to thank Felicity Heal, Ralph Houlbrooke, and Helen Parish for advanced access to data and transcriptions of the Parker Certificates Project; Karl Gunther for permission to read and cite an important forthcoming article; and Andrew Foster for much helpful advice.
1 Henry Percy Gee, The Elizabethan clergy and the Settlement of religion (London, 1898), pp. 247, 244.
2 John Strype, Annals of the Reformation and establishment of religion, and other various occurrences in the Church of England, during Queen Elizabeth's happy reign (Oxford, 1824), p. 255; William Camden, Annales the true and royall history of the famous empresse Elizabeth Queene of England (London, 1625), p. 30.
3 A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (London, 1967), p. 423 and note (2nd edn, London, 1989), p. 366 and note.
4 Both W. H. Frere and G. M. Trevelyan had already taken Gee's not ‘many more than 200’ to be ‘not more than about 200’, ‘not more than 200’: W. H. Frere, The English church in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I (London, 1904), p. 104; G. M. Trevelyan, English social history: a survey of six centuries, Chaucer to Queen Victoria (London, 1942), p. 174.
5 Maurice Powicke, The Reformation in England (London, 1941), p. 129.
6 G. R. Elton, England under the Tudors (3rd edn, London, 1991), p. 276.
7 J. B. Black, The reign of Elizabeth, 1558–1603 (Oxford, 1959), p. 21 (Black stops short of wholeheartedly endorsing Gee's figure, but refers to the ‘small minority who resisted and were deprived of their livings’); Peter J. Helm, England under the Yorkists and Tudors, 1471–1603 (London, 1968), p. 167; Owen Chadwick, The Reformation (revised edn, Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 133; Simon Adams, ‘Government and politics, 1553–1625: crown, church and parliament’, in Christopher Haigh, ed., The Cambridge historical encyclopaedia of Great Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 1990), p. 155; John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford, 1990), p. 293; Diarmaid MacCulloch, The later Reformation in England, 1547–1603 (Basingstoke, 1990), p. 112; Susan Doran, Elizabeth I and religion, 1559–1603 (London and New York, NY, 1994), p. 49; Scott A. Wenig, Straightening the altars: the ecclesiastical vision and pastoral achievements of the progressive bishops under Elizabeth I, 1559–1579 (New York, NY, 2000), p. 49; Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2003), p. 211; Mark Chapman, Anglicanism: a very short introduction (Oxford, 2006), p. 32; Steven G. Ellis with Christopher McGinn, The making of the British Isles: the state of Britain and Ireland, 1450–1660 (Harlow, 2007), p. 162; John Edwards, Mary I: England's Catholic queen (New Haven, CT, and London, 2011), p. 344 (‘about 5 per cent’ of parochial clergy); Eric Ives, The Reformation experience: living through the turbulent sixteenth century (Oxford, 2012), p. 248; Peter Marshall, Reformation England, 1480–1642 (2nd edn, London, 2012), p. 159.
8 Christopher Haigh, Reformation and resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 209–16; Christopher Haigh, English reformations: religion, politics, and society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993), p. 244.
9 Henry Norbert Birt, The Elizabethan Settlement of religion: a study of contemporary documents (London, 1907), p. 197.
10 Ibid., p. 202.
11 P. M. Tillot, ed., A history of the county of York: the city of York (London, 1961), p. 149; Penry Williams, The Tudor regime (Oxford, 1979), p. 266n; S. T. Bindoff, Tudor England (Harmondsworth, 1950), p. 193. Bindoff was unusually open to estimates of the number of non-conforming clergy other than Gee's, yet he stopped short of endorsing a ‘modern Catholic’ figure of 2,000. He concluded that, with exact figures difficult to obtain, ‘the student is the free to place his guess’ at any number between 200 and 1,000. A rare exception to the scholarly disregard of Birt's estimates is William J. Sheils, ‘The Catholic community’, in Susan Doran and Norman Jones, eds., The Elizabethan world (London, 2011), p. 254: ‘The Marian bishops, except for Kitchin of Llandaff, all resigned, and their example was followed by a number of cathedral clergy and about 2,000 parish priests.’
12 J. H. Pollen, The English Catholics in the reign of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1920), pp. 39–42; Philip Hughes, The Reformation in England (3 vols., London, 1950–4), iii, pp. 37–8.
13 Eamon Duffy, Fires of faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven, CT, and London, 2009), pp. 197–9.
14 Haigh, Reformation and resistance, p. 209.
15 Roger B. Manning, Religion and society in Elizabethan Sussex (Leicester, 1969), pp. 54–9; Timothy J. McCann, ‘The clergy and the Elizabethan Settlement in the diocese of Chichester’, in M. J. Kitch, ed., Studies in Sussex church history (London, 1981), pp. 99–115 (quotation at p. 104). Writing about the same time as McCann, Alan Dures suspected ‘the generally accepted figure of only 300 resignations [sic] out of 8,000 incumbents is probably too low’: English Catholicism, 1558–1642 (Harlow, 1983), pp. 2–3.
16 Gee, Elizabethan clergy, pp. viii–ix.
17 Ibid., p. 238.
18 Manning, Religion and society, p. 55.
19 Edward Rowland, ‘The popular reformation in county Durham’ (MA thesis, Durham, 1989), p. 149.
20 Ibid., p. 135.
21 Gee, Elizabethan clergy, p. 251.
22 Ibid., p. 237.
23 Gee's critic, Henry Norbert Birt, pointed out the significance of these gaps in 1900, noting that ‘complete accuracy is unattainable for the very period when it would have proved of such inestimable value’: Birt, Henry Norbert, ‘The deprivation of clergy in Elizabeth's reign’, Dublin Review, 126 (1900), pp. 25–45Google Scholar (quotation at p. 28n).
24 Gee noted this ‘lamentable gap’ for Lincoln (Elizabethan clergy, p. 237), yet it was swiftly filled by his contemporary C. W. Foster, who in the late 1890s located a series of near-contemporary records covering institutions in the period 1547 to 1570. Foster, C. W., ‘Institutions to benefices in the diocese of Lincoln, 1540–1570: calendar no. I’, Reports and Papers of the Architectural and Archaeological Societies of the Counties of Lincoln and Northampton, 24 (1897–8), pp. 1–32Google Scholar, 467–525; C. Foster, W., ‘Institutions to benefices in the diocese of Lincoln, 1540–1570: calendar no. II’, Reports and Papers of the Architectural and Archaeological Societies of the Counties of Lincoln and Northampton, 25 (1899–1900), pp. 499–505Google Scholar; Foster, C. W., ‘Institutions to benefices in the diocese of Lincoln in the sixteenth century’, Lincolnshire Notes and Queries, 5 (1898), pp. 129–81Google Scholar, 195–243; Foster, C. W., ‘Institutions to benefices in the diocese of Lincoln in the sixteenth century’, Lincolnshire Notes and Queries, 6 (1901), pp. 3–19Google Scholar, 83–5, 102–11, 142–7. See David M. Smith, Guide to bishops' registers of England and Wales (London 1981), p. 127.
25 Gee, Elizabethan clergy, p. 219.
26 Ibid., pp. 239–40.
27 Ibid., p. 247.
29 Arthur Burns, Kenneth Fincham, and Stephen Taylor, ‘The problems and potential of pouring old wine into new bottles: reflections on the Clergy of the Church of England Database, 1999–2009 and beyond’, in Rosemary C. E. Hayes and William J. Sheils, eds., Clergy, church and society in England and Wales, c. 1200–1800 (York, 2013), pp. 45–60.
30 Connected Histories www.connectedhistories.org/.
31 At the time of publication, a correspondent lamented the lack of availability of this ‘important work’ and put this down to the ‘continuous rise in the cost of printing’: The Tablet, 11 Aug. 1973, p. 16.
32 Field's work has occasionally been cited, but mostly for biographical details of individual clergy. See McGrath, Patrick, ‘Elizabethan Catholicism: a reconsideration’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 35 (1984), pp. 414–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 418; D. Andrew Penny, Freewill or predestination: the battle over saving grace in mid-Tudor England (Woodbridge, 1990), p. 40; Joy Rowe, ‘“The lopped tree”: the re-formation of the Suffolk Catholic community’, in Nicholas Tyacke, ed., England's long Reformation, 1500–1800 (Abingdon, 1998), pp. 167–94, at p. 170.
33 21 deprivations and 5 resignations in 122 parishes.
34 The total number of parishes has been taken from the relevant Clergy of the Church of England Database (CCEd) ‘Diocesan resources’ pages: http://theclergydatabase.org.uk/reference/diocesan-resources/a-z-list-of-dioceses/.
35 58 deprivations, 16 resignations in 339 parishes in Winchester; 19 deprivations, 7 resignations in 165 parishes in Ely.
36 Haigh, English reformations, p. 243; C. J. Kitching, ed., The Royal Visitation of 1559: act book for the northern province, Surtees Society, clxxxvii (London, 1975).
37 Buckingham, Christopher, ‘The movement of clergy in the diocese of Canterbury, 1552–1562’, Recusant History, 14 (1977), pp. 219–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote at p. 227.
38 Andrew Foster, ‘Bishops, church and state, c. 1530–1646’, in Anthony Milton, ed., The Oxford history of Anglicanism, i (forthcoming). Dr Foster's forthcoming book on English dioceses will shed considerably more light on this question.
39 John I. Daeley, ‘The episcopal administration of Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, 1559–1575’ (Ph.D. thesis, London, 1967), p. 149; McCann, ‘Clergy and the Elizabethan Settlement’, p. 113.
40 Grieve, Hilda E. P., ‘The deprived married clergy in Essex, 1553–1561’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., 22 (1940), pp. 161–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
41 Daeley, ‘Episcopal administration of Matthew Parker’, p. 156; Grieve, ‘Married clergy’, pp. 165–6; McCann, ‘Clergy and the Elizabethan Settlement’, p. 115.
42 J. Bruce and T. T. Perowne, eds., The correspondence of Matthew Parker (Cambridge, 1853), pp. 127–7, 153–4.
43 Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 122 (Certificates and Returns of Livings of the Province of Canterbury), pp. 45–53. For the total number of parishes in Colchester Archdeaconry, see J. E. Oxley, The Reformation in Essex to the death of Mary (Manchester, 1965), p. 18.
44 Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 580B (Parker Certificates, Ely), fo. 20v. Our understanding of the state of the early Elizabethan Church will be greatly enhanced by the forthcoming edition of the Parker Certificates, being prepared for publication with the Church of England Record Society by Helen Parish, Felicity Heal, Ralph Houlbrooke, and Fiona Youngman.
45 A. G. Dickens, Lollards and Protestants in the diocese of York (Oxford, 1959), p. 172.
46 Alexandra Walsham, Church papists: Catholicism, conformity and confessional polemic in early modern England (Woodbridge, 1993); Michael Questier, ‘Conformity, Catholicism and the law’, in Peter Lake and Michael Questier, eds., Conformity and orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 237–61.
47 Kenneth Fincham, ‘Clerical conformity from Whitgift to Laud’, in Lake and Questier, eds., Conformity and orthodoxy, pp. 125–58, esp. p. 128.
48 Among a large corpus, see in particular Patrick Collinson, ‘The cohabitation of the faithful with the unfaithful’, in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke, eds., From persecution to toleration: the Glorious Revolution and religion in England (Oxford, 1991), pp. 51–76.
49 Mark Byford, ‘The price of Protestantism: assessing the impact of religious change on Elizabethan Essex: the cases of Heydon and Colchester’ (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford, 1988), p. 35.
50 Dickens, A. G., ed., ‘Robert Parkyn's narrative of the Reformation’, English Historical Review, 62 (1947), pp. 58–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eamon Duffy, The voices of Morebath: reformation and rebellion in an English village (New Haven, CT, and London, 2001). See also Eamon Duffy, ‘The conservative voice in the English Reformation’, in Simon Ditchfield, ed., Christianity and community in the West: essays for John Bossy (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 87–105.
51 Henry Gee and W. J. Hardy, eds., Documents illustrative of English church history (London, 1896), pp. 448–9.
52 Gee, Elizabethan clergy, p. 45.
53 Ibid., pp. 77–8; Jonathan Michael Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2012), p. 53; Kitching, ed., Royal Visitation of 1559, pp. 11–12.
54 Kitching, ed., Royal Visitation of 1559, p. xxii.
55 Haigh, Reformation and resistance, p. 211.
56 Birt, Elizabethan Settlement, p. 192.
57 Rowland, ‘Popular reformation’, pp. 134–9; Kitching, ed., Royal Visitation of 1559, p. xxiii.
58 Gee and Hardy, eds., Documents illustrative of church history, pp. 449–53, 460–1.
59 Birt, Elizabethan Settlement, p. 150.
60 Ibid., p. 154.
61 Harkins, Robert, ‘Elizabethan puritanism and the politics of memory in post-Marian England’, Historical Journal, 57 (2014), pp. 899–919CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Karl Gunther, ‘The Marian persecution and early Elizabethan Protestants: persecutors, apostates, and the wages of sin’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, forthcoming.
62 Gee and Hardy, eds., Documents illustrative of church history, pp. 430–1.
63 Ibid., p. 478.
64 Peter Marshall, The face of the pastoral ministry in the East Riding, 1525–1595, Borthwick Paper No. 88 (York, 1995), p. 2. During an argument in 1578, Dean Matthew Hutton of York had the temerity to tell his archbishop, Edwin Sandys, ‘my Lord, my orders are better than yours…for I was made a minister by the order of the Queen's Majesty and laws now established, and your grace a priest after the order of popery’: ibid., p. 1.
65 J. S. Purvis, ed., Tudor parish documents of the diocese of York (Cambridge, 1948), pp. 111–12.
66 Patricia Cox, ‘Reformation responses in Tudor Cheshire, c. 1500–1577’ (Ph.D. thesis, Warwick, 2013), p. 306.
67 Mary Bateson, ed., ‘A collection of original letters from the bishops to the privy council, 1564’, in Camden Miscellany, ix (Camden Society, n.s., 53, London, 1895), pp. 3, 19–21.
68 Bateson, ed., ‘Original letters’, pp. 34–5, 40.
69 Gee, Elizabethan Settlement, esp. pp. 248–51.
70 Walsham, Church papists, p. 14.
71 Duffy, Fires of faith, pp. 188–207. Cf. the judgement of Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman that the leadership of the Marian Church ‘fostered a parochial revival of Catholicism that took a generation at least to eradicate’: ‘Introduction’, in Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, eds., Mary Tudor: old and new perspectives (Basingstoke, 2011), p. 17.
72 Michael A. R. Graves, ‘Campion, Edmund [St Edmund Campion] (1540–1581)’, Oxford dictionary of national biography.
73 East Anglian, 11 (July 1862), pp. 129–30; Thomas F. Mayer and Courtney B. Walters, eds., The correspondence of Reginald Pole, iv:A biographical companion: the British Isles (Aldershot, 2008), p. 568; Godfrey Anstruther, The seminary priests: a dictionary of the secular clergy of England and Wales, 1558–1850: 1 Elizabethan 1558–1603 (Durham, 1969), p. 375; CCEd person ID: 33371.
74 The National Archives (TNA), SP 12/179, fos. 9r–13r. For Gunnes's rectorship of Yelford: CCEd person ID: 16421.
75 CCEd location ID: 15907; Anstruther, The seminary priests, p. 367, who says Vivian resigned. See Thomas Knox, The first and second diaries of the English College, Douay and an appendix of the unpublished documents (London, 1878), p. 150, ‘in tantum erat divina gratia collustratus ut beneficio sponte renuncians aut consilio, ex Calvinista Christianus, ex praedicatore haeretico athleta catholicus evasit’. See also Anstruther, The seminary priests, pp. 13, 72, 110, 224, 244, 287, 306, 343, 384.
76 Krista J. Kesselring, The Northern Rebellion of 1569: faith, politics and protest in Elizabethan England (Basingstoke, 2010), p. 73; James Raine, ed., Depositions and other proceedings from the courts of Durham, Surtees Society, xxi (London, 1845), pp. 138, 160, 180, 200–1; Cuthbert Sharp, ed., Memorials of the Rebellion of 1569 (London, 1840), p. 261; Robert Surtees, ‘Chapelry of Witton Gilbert’, in The history and antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham, ii:Chester ward (London, 1820), pp. 368–76 (Browne is first recorded as curate in 1561, and was deprived in 1570).
77 McGrath, Patrick and Rowe, Joy, ‘The Marian priests under Elizabeth I’, Recusant History, 17 (1984), pp. 103–20Google Scholar; McGrath, Patrick and Rowe, Joy, ‘The imprisonment of Catholics for religion under Elizabeth I’, Recusant History, 20 (1991), pp. 415–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
78 Byford, ‘Price of Protestantism’, passim.
79 W. P. M. Kennedy, ed., Elizabethan episcopal administration: an essay in sociology and politics (3 vols., London, 1924), ii, pp. 113, 122, iii, 140, 146, 154, 163.
80 Anthony Gilby, A pleasant dialogue, betweene a souldior of Barwicke, and an English chaplaine (Middleburg, 1581), sig. M2r.
81 Albert Peel, ed., The seconde parte of a register (2 vols., Cambridge, 1915), ii, pp. 99, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 139, 147, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 162, 166, 167, 169, 170, 173. For further examples, see Christopher Haigh, ‘The Church of England, the Catholics and the people’, in Christopher Haigh, ed., The reign of Elizabeth I (Basingstoke, 1984), pp. 196–7, 200; Haigh, English reformations, pp. 248–9; Walsham, Church papists, pp. 14–15.
82 Price, F. D., ‘The commission for ecclesiastical causes for the dioceses of Bristol and Gloucester, 1574’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 59 (1937), pp. 61–184Google Scholar, at p. 150; CCEd person ID: 145572.
83 Peel, ed., Seconde parte of a register, ii, p. 166.
84 TNA, Probate, 11/69. We are indebted to Anne Thompson for this reference.
85 Hans van Wees, ‘Politics and the battlefield: ideology in Greek warfare’, in Anton Powell, ed., The Greek world (London, 1995), p. 176; Paul Cartledge, Thermopylae: the battle that changed the world (Basingstoke, 2006), pp. 131, 136–7, 192–3.
