A Qualified Intolerance: the Limits and Ambiguities of Early Stuart Anti-Catholicism

Milton, Anthony

doi:10.1057/9780230374881_4

Cited by 18 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…63 English Protestants, to quote Anthony Milton, were 'able to deploy multiple modes of anti-Catholic polemic'. 64 Anti-popery was built, to a certain extent, upon the stereotyping of a religion: Catholicism was seen as a superstitious, idolatrous and persecuting faith. Yet it was a religion with startling political implications, so far as English Protestants were concerned, since the Catholic church held that the Pope, not the king, was the head of the church and that he could depose heretical rulers, whilst Catholics believed in resistance theory.…”

Section: Mobilising and Contesting Stereotypesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Religious and national stereotyping and prejudice in seventeenth-century England

Harris¹

2022

Stereotypes and Stereotyping in Early Modern England

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King James VI of Scotland was known to have had a stormy relationship with the Scottish Presbyterian clergy. Sometime before moving south to become king of England in 1603, so it was said, he happened to hear a sermon by a Presbyterian minister who began railing from the pulpit against king, church and state. Taken aback, James commanded the preacher 'either to speak sence, or come down'. Unfazed, the preacher 'saucily' replied: 'I say Man, I'le nowther speak sence, nor come downe'. 1 This anecdote appears in a manuscript commonplace book held in the collections of the British Library. Little is known about the provenance of the book, except that it dates from the later seventeenth century, but the collector was seemingly writing down things he had heard or read -'Apothegms ancient and modern' he styled them -so we can presume that this tale of King James's encounter with the Presbyterian cleric was in more general circulation. Some nineteenth-and early twentieth-century historical works related the story as if true (without citing any sources), though they disagreed over whether the sermon had been delivered in Edinburgh or St Andrews and whether the king in question was James VI and I (r. 1567-1625) or James VII and II (r. 1685-88). One confidently named the preacher as the Edinburgh minister Robert Bruce (1554-1631). 2 What we can say for certain is that our commonplacer was in the business of collecting things he found amusing. On the page immediately preceding the anecdote about King James he wrote of 'a certain Man that was exceeding fat, and corpulent, yet alwayes rode upon a very leane Horse'; when people 'ask'd him the reason thereof', he explained this was because 'he fed himself, but trusted others to feed his horse'. 3 Thus the story about King James and the preacher was clearly a joke, though a joke that might have been based on an event that had actually happened. It was at a certain level a joke at the expense of the Scots, as the mocking of the Scottish accent makes clear, 4 and it embodies a stereotype of the Scots, or rather of a particular type of Scottish clergyman. The stereotype reflects a prejudice, suggesting as it does that English people tended to prejudge people based on their accent.

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Section: Mobilising and Contesting Stereotypesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Religious and national stereotyping and prejudice in seventeenth-century England

Harris¹

2022

Stereotypes and Stereotyping in Early Modern England

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“…Engagement with Catholic learning and appreciation of Catholic culture was as much a factor of early modern Englishness as was anti-popery -we need only think of the Grand Tour as an aspect of 'English' gentility. 106 Curiosity and condemnation sat side-by-side: Rome was both the eternal city and the Whore of Babylon. But a contradiction is not the same as tempering.…”

Section: Mobilisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fighting popery with popery

Morton¹

2022

Stereotypes and Stereotyping in Early Modern England

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“…35 At parish level, moreover, sectarian conflict was only episodic and polemical anti-popery was not incompatible with cordial relations with real Catholics: intolerance was often ambiguous and qualified. 36 On the other hand, puritans were fiercely critical of radical Protestants on the far left of the spectrum who refused to tarry for the magistrate and had journeyed into the wilderness of schism. Denouncing the "unreasonablenesse of separation", they saw this as a dereliction of their religious and pastoral responsibilities towards the "weaker brethren" and to an ecclesiastical institution that was not entirely beyond the pale.…”

Section: Interacting With Othersmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Godly and Their Neighbours: Puritanism and Religious Pluralism in Early Modern England

Walsham¹

2022

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A Qualified Intolerance: the Limits and Ambiguities of Early Stuart Anti-Catholicism

Cited by 18 publications

References 19 publications

Religious and national stereotyping and prejudice in seventeenth-century England

Religious and national stereotyping and prejudice in seventeenth-century England

Fighting popery with popery

The Godly and Their Neighbours: Puritanism and Religious Pluralism in Early Modern England

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