ELIZABETH 1

[kit_kat_507]

WHAT WAS THE RELIGION LIKE WHEN ELIZABETH 1 WAS QUEEN ?

[sprogglin]

Liz 1 was protestant, her predecessor Mary was catholic.

[Peter Pedant]

Sprog has a short answer, and here is a longer one.

Mary I Tudor died in 1558 on the same night as her chief minister Cardinal Pole. The archbishopric of Canterbury was therefore vacant. Although twenty years before, Henry had no trouble in turning the bishops protestant, no-one would crown Elizabeth except in the Catholic rite and so it came about that Elizabeth I was the last monarch to crowned in the Roman rite in Latin.

Elizabeth lasted well until 1568 when she was excommunicated by Pius (V I think) and later on deposed by the Pope. The deposition was postponed also by the Pope but caused great trouble for Catholics whose loyalties were strained.

Priests were sent in to reconvert the population, with varying success from 1580. The Jesuits were in the forefront and became hate-figures for Elizabeth's protestant hard line ministers. Edmund Campion whose autobiography was written by Evelyn Waugh and is quite a good read, was caught up in this and was executed.

Laws were framed so that harboring priests was treason and this means that the Catholics said on execution tht they were dying for their faith and the authorities that they were traitors.

40 of these unfortunates were canonised in 1970 by Paul VI, includng St John Rigby who was 19 when he was sent down to London to say that another defendant was too ill to attend court. He was identified as a Catholic and asked ' if Queen Elizabeth were hiding up a tree and the Popes forces were hunting her, what would you say on being asked if she were up the tree,

I regret he failed to answer that question satisfactorily to his questioners althoughmost satisfactorily to hmself and was hanged drawn and quartered.

There was a second wave in the early 1600s, of Jesuit infiltration if you like, and this is referred to in Act 1 Sc 2 of Macbeth, written for the Kings accession (James VI and I) in the Porter's speech

 

[Peter Pedant]

 

John gerard was one of the jesuits and Philip Caraman has left an account of the translation of gerard's "Spy's Manual" in Autobiography of an Elizabethan Gentleman. This too is worth a read.

I hope in this brief answer I have given you an idea of what is was like to be a Roman Catholic in England in the last half of the sixteenth century.

 

[Sludge]

Generally speaking, though, from 1558 Queen Elizabeth I (born 1533 Reigned 1558 - 1603 motto "Semper Eadem" - always the same) made religion her priority. She recognised how important it was to establish a clear religious framework and between 1559 and 1563 introduced the acts which made up the Church Settlement. This returned England to the Protestant faith and from then on Public Worship  and all religous books such as the Bible were to be in English and not Latin. The new Book of Common Prayer was introduced, adapted from earlier Books used under the Protestant Edward VI. But Elizabeth was careful not to erase all traces of Catholic worship and retained, for example, the traditions of candlesticks, crucifixes and clerical robes. The Queen  pursued a policy of moderation and, although some Protestants were upset by the continuance of some Catholic traditions, an uneasy compromise was reached and maintained throughout her Reign.

[woofgang]

As I recall, QE1 intorduced a system of fines for recusancy (refusing to worship in the prodestant faith) sounds weird now but was way more moderate that the previous sanctions, most of which involved pain and suffering visited on "one lot" by "the other lot" depending upon who was in power. Its a slighly odd thought that if HenryVIII hadn't been so obsessed with having a son, its likely that England would have remained a Catholic country

[Famous5]

I understood that Henry VIII never saw himself as anything but a Catholic. His quarrel with the Pope was partly about who had authority in England, and Henry broke away from the Pope's authority. Henry declared himself as Head of the Church IN England, not OF England. His son Edward VI was the one who took things further and pushed the Protestant cause, developing amongst other things the Bok of Common Prayer still used by the C of E in some parishes.