English Catholicism Under Charles II: The Legal Position

Abstract

Many years ago there was published an English translation of La Persecution des Catholiques en Angleterre sous Charles II by the Comtesse R. de’Courson: a work which remains the only one devoted wholly to English Catholicism during that reign. Unfortunately, however, the title is misleading and the book is given up almost entirely to the two and a half years of the Popish Plot—not, in other words, to the reign of Charles II as a whole but merely to one-tenth of it—with the result that the reader is presented with an unbalanced and unduly depressing picture. A more judicious appraisal has been provided by a number of “background” works such as Archbishop Mathew's Catholicism in England, Mr. E. I. Watkin's Roman Catholicism in England from the Reformation to 1950 and, most recently, Miss. M. D. R. Leys's fascinating Catholics in England, 1529-1829, while an article published in The Dublin Review (Autumn, 1959) suggested that the pecuniary laws, so ferocious on paper, to which Catholics were theoretically subject, were in fact enforced only very spasmodically during the reign of Charles II. Clearly, in order to judge how rigorously the penal laws were enforced in Charles Il’s reign, it is necessary first to consider what exactly were these laws; to establish what was the legal position of the English Catholics at the Restoration and to discover what fresh enactments were passed in the course of the next twenty-five years. It is such an examination of the legal position of the English Catholics between 1660 and 1685 which will be attempted in the pages that follow.

Gentry Catholicism in the Thames Valley, 1660–1780

“…The laws could be extremely severe, such as one that threatened life imprisonment for Catholic priests or the death penalty for bringing papal bulls into England. 2 The majority of the penal statutes, however, were rarely used against Catholics and acted rather as potential threat than real hindrance. Catholics might be presented for absence from church to either the lay or secular courts, possibly followed by a fine.…”

“…26 It is unlikely that these last civil disabilities still applied in the eighteenth century and there is evidence that they were avoided. 27 The main penalty that might have affected gentry Catholics if excom-municated was the inability to have their wills proved in an ecclesiastical court though, again, there is no evidence that Catholics in the Thames Valley experienced this problem. By the eighteenth century, the punishment of excommunication was largely used against those who failed to turn up at court after citation rather than for the original offence, such as recusancy or non-payment of fines.…”

Gender and the “Lost” Spaces of Catholicism

“…Paradoxically, the laws exacerbated gender inversion by leaving married women relatively unmolested while threatening to reduce Catholic men's legal rights to those of the average married woman, at least at the level of prescription. 19 Thus, the woman in charge of a recusant house might cohabit with variously displaced men. The gendered division of labor in the early modern period clearly governed relations to space, although not by means of a simple dichotomy of wives inside and husbands outside.…”