No abstract

This is a study of the political, religious, social and mental worlds of the Catholic aristocracy from 1550 to 1640. Michael Questier examines the familial and patronage networks of the English Catholic community and their relationship to the later Tudors and Stuarts. He shows how the local history of the Reformation can be used to rewrite mainstream accounts of national politics and religious conflict in this period. The book takes in the various crises of mid- and late Elizabeth politics, the accession of James VI, the Gunpowder Plot, religious toleration and the start of the Thirty Years War and finally the rise of Laudianism, leading up to the civil war. It challenges recent historical notions of Catholicism as fundamentally sectarian and demonstrates the extent to which sections of the Catholic community had come to an understanding with both the local and national State by the later 1620s and 1630s.

No abstract

. This article explores the Jacobean oath of allegiance as an act of government. It suggests that historians have misread the intentions of the regime in its formulation and enforcement of the oath. Consequently they have underestimated the capacity of the regime to enforce its will on catholic nonconformists. An analysis of contemporary reaction to the oath demonstrates that early modern government could exert its power in ways which revisionist historians have either missed or denied. The oath should be understood as an exceptionally subtle and well-constructed rhetorical essay in the exercise of state power, and this we see in the devastating effect it had on the structure of Jacobean Romanist dissent. The evidence presented here suggests that this statutory oath was not a simple profession of civil allegiance to which English Romanist dissenters responded with a characteristic mixture of paranoia and politically illiterate confusion. Rather it was an exceedingly complex association of religious and political ideas, a diabolically effective polemical cocktail, which did not have to rely merely on the mechanics of a bureaucracy to work its intended course against the Romanist fraction within the English state.