Reading Foley and Alford

I was due to give a talk last week on the Reformations in Essex and borrowed a work by B.Foley (Notes on Some Catholic Confessors in the County of Essex .... in Reformation and Penal Times) published by the Essex Recusant Society in 1963. Unfortunately, I caught a touch of influenza and was thus unable to deliver my talk. But one thing did strike me very forcibly about Foley's observations useful though they were in the sense of identifying recusant families in the later Tudor and early Stuart periods, namely the lack of context for his analysis. There is no doubt that, in 1558 when Queen Mary died, England and Wales were very largely Catholic in their religious affiliations. Protestants in Essex and elsewhere were very much in a minority and had been persecuted by the State and the Catholic Church for their beliefs. Of this persecution, not a word appeared in Foley's work. Nor indeed was anything said about the Wars of Religion in France between 1562 and 1598 when attempts were made - with or without the support of the Valois Kings - to extirpate the Huguenots. Similarly, the efforts of Philip II's regime to crush Protestantism by force in the Low Countries from 1566/67 until 1609 (and later) were passed over in silence. People in England and Wales under the reign of Queen Elizabeth were well aware of the consequences of  a return to Catholicism and the price that would have to be paid for such an outcome. In part, this explains why late Tudor England and Wales became overwhelmingly Protestant by the time Queen Elizabeth died in 1603. Today, I have begun reading Stephen Alford's book, All His Spies, which deals with the career and rise of Sir Robert Cecil. It deals in great detail with the threat that Catholicism posed to the late Tudor regime and why it was so strenuously resisted. It is a very mature piece of historical writing and a book that I must commend.

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