By the beginning of James I’s aggressively Protestant reign, the Catholics of England amounted to little more than a besieged community of devout believers, which could never again dominate the life of their country or influence its alliances. The Church’s ranks had been substantially depleted by Elizabethan savagery, which had been far more severe than her father’s punitive polices and had lasted far longer. Numbers were never clear and are still in doubt, but rough estimates are possible. In 1603, the calculation, which was required in every Church of England diocese, identified a total of 85,000 recusants and 2.5 million regular Anglican communicants in England and Wales. Bishops were reluctant to admit the extent of dissent that flourished within their diocese. So the recusant figure is probably an underestimate. Ten years later Guido Bentivoglio, the Papal Nuncio to the Spanish Netherlands, reported to Rome that there were six hundred priests in England and that, on average, each one served thirty families.1 The typical family had six or seven members. So, on the Bentivoglio calculation, the English Catholic population totalled something approaching 120,000. Whatever its true size, 1603 was not to be the year of its release from bondage. The son of Mary, Queen of Scots – regarded by Catholics as the rightful Queen of England and martyr to their faith – was no less the enemy of Rome than Elizabeth, his mother’s nemesis.
James I of England was a strange man whose peculiarities would, today, be attributed to his disturbed upbringing. He was born on June 19th 1566 and seven months later baptised with the full rites of the Roman Catholic Church. He was not destined to keep the vows which were made on his behalf. When he was less than a year old he was put in the care of the Protestant Lords of Congregation and on July 22nd 1567 – the day on which Mary reluctantly abdicated the throne of Scotland – he saw his mother for the last time. James was crowned in her place during a service which respected the liturgy of the Scottish Presbyterian Church. John Knox preached the sermon. From then on, he was the Protestant king of a Protestant kingdom. It was his faith – rather than the fact that he was the legitimate heir – which encouraged Robert Cecil to ensure that he inherited the English throne.
At the time of James’ accession, very few Catholics believed that a full restoration of their faith was possible. But many of them still hoped that greater tolerance would follow their continued protestations of loyalty to the crown. In the north, the sentimental assumption that the accession of Mary Stewart’s son would herald a new era of understanding was particularly strong. Although they had failed in their vain attempts to win the throne for the sovereign of their choice, they had lived to witness the accession of the dynasty which they certainly preferred to the Tudors. James – although a Protestant and Mary’s bitter rival for the succession to the throne of England – was sanctified by her martyrdom. Catholics of a more practical turn of mind saw James’ arrival as a new opportunity to broker the sort of peace deal which Elizabeth had always rejected. As an apparent sign of the changing times, the ruling dynasty changed the spelling of its family name: Stewart became Stuart.
The Catholic aristocracy led the way – not least because they hoped to avoid the sequestration of their property. During the first year of James’ reign, Sir Thomas Tresham – who had become so disenchanted with the Jesuits that he denounced them with a vehemence that they claimed was proof of his atheism – revived an idea which had been considered, and rejected, fifty years earlier. His Petition Apologetical proposed that, in return for the promise of toleration, the number of Catholic priests in England would be reduced to the number that was necessary to meet the needs of those country gentlemen who kept a family confessor. The suggestion was built on the assumption that, if the landowning classes asserted their loyalty, they could be relied upon to keep their word. Priests, on the other hand, needed to be treated with caution. So, the proposal went, they should be required to swear allegiance to King and country ‘before they shall be admitted to our houses, otherwise they shall not have release from us’.2 Their employers would then take responsibility for their conduct.
The idea came to nothing. It was probably not even presented to the King. But had it been put into operation, it would have helped to create the sort of Church of which the Catholic gentry wanted to be members. Before the beginning of the Reformation, English Catholicism belonged, under God, to the bishops and, through them, to the Pope. During the Reformation it survived, at least in part, because priests could live and work – sometimes in secret and sometimes with the tacit acquiescence of the authorities – in country houses. That gave the Catholic gentry a power over the Catholic Church in England which, throughout the seventeenth century, they struggled to keep and increase. The Petition Apologetical, had it been accepted, would have tightened the grip. It would also have put English Catholicism in danger of becoming a country-house religion.
Hopes that some sort of arrangement would be possible were encouraged by the King’s conduct during the months immediately before and after his accession. He was an enemy of the Jesuits. But so were many Catholics, and his enmity towards priests in general was more a reaction to their arrogance than to their piety. In December 1602 he told Cecil, ‘I greatly wonder … that not only so great flocks of Jesuits and priests dare both resort and remain in England but do so proudly use their function.’3 Three months later he wrote to Cecil again. ‘I will never allow in my conscience that the blood of any man shall be shed for diversity of opinion in religion.’4 His first speech to Parliament was even more encouraging. It promised an end to the execution of priests and ‘incorrigible Catholics’, and went on to emphasise his personal moderation. He was, he said, a Protestant by conviction as well as upbringing, but he ‘was never violent or unreasonable in the profession [of that faith]. I acknowledge the Romane Church to be our Mother Church, although defiled with some infirmities and corruptions … And, as I am non enemie to the life of a sicke man because I would have his body purged of all ill humours, no more am I an enemie of their Church because I want them to reform their errors.’5
All thought of compromise and reconciliation might have been destroyed by two inevitably abortive conspiracies which were exposed during James’ first year on the throne. The Main Plot, although it rallied support by promising to make Arbella Stuart a Catholic queen, was really no more than the product of resentful courtiers (including Walter Raleigh) who were out of fashion and favour. The Bye Plot – which aspired to do no more than hold the King prisoner until he agreed to a relaxation of the penal laws – was obviously doomed from the start. However, both futile conspiracies were used – perhaps even promoted – by the more extreme Protestants as evidence that some Catholics were still active regicides and that even the sullenly submissive supported them in their hearts.
The two plots undid most of the good that had been done by the open enthusiasm with which Catholics welcomed the new King. They were enough to convince Parliament that England could not risk a sudden outbreak of toleration. The House of Commons urged the King to be more vigilant in the face of the (wholly imaginary) threat of invasion and to accept the need to introduce ‘all manner of persecution, banishing priests and re-imposing recusancy fines’.6 James exceeded their expectations. The laws against recusancy were reinforced and reimposed with such severity that one Jesuit, Henry Garnet, described the persecution as ‘worse than in Bess’s time’.7 Another, Richard Blount, told a story which at least gives some credence to the notion that James’ instincts were not as accommodating as his apologists suggest. ‘His Majesty has gone this last day to Newmarket to hunt. As he passed Tyburn, being a little past it, he returned back to the gibbet, rode under it, looked upon it and struck it with his rod, saying scoffingly, ‘all you Jesuits and priests that have been hanged here, pray for me’.8
The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 made relaxation of the penal laws impossible. The most ambitious conspiracy in British history very nearly achieved its object – the murder of the whole British establishment in one explosion. Its instigator was Robert Catesby, a staunch Catholic and already convicted recusant, whose father had been imprisoned during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. His plan was to blow up Parliament on the day when both Houses, and attendant dignitaries, assembled to witness the formal opening by the King. Six months before the planned date of the explosion, Catesby and his co-conspirators rented a house in Westminster with a cellar that stretched under the Parliament building, and filled the cellar with twenty barrels of gunpowder. All that prevented the gunpowder being ignited was an indiscretion by one of the plotters. Francis Tresham warned his brother-in-law, Lord Monteagle, not to attend Parliament on November 5th, and Monteagle – himself a Catholic – warned the government that some sort of outrage had been planned. A search of local premises revealed the twenty barrels of gunpowder and Guy Fawkes, who was keeping guard over them.
King James told his closest advisers that he was determined that the madness of a small group of regicides should not stigmatise all Catholics and be used as an excuse for another assault on their liberties, but in May 1606, Parliament passed two bills which were designed ‘for the better discouraging and repressing of popish recusants’. The first bill empowered a bishop, or two Justices sitting together, to require recusants to take an oath of loyalty to the crown and extended the definition of religious disobedience to anyone who had not taken Communion, in a service of the Established Church, at least twice during the previous year. The Oath of Allegiance could also be demanded of travellers. The second bill was a ragbag of deterrents. Anyone who left England to serve a foreign government, without swearing oaths of loyalty, automatically became a convicted felon. Informers were to be paid £50 for exposing either a priest who said Mass or a layman who attended. Protestants who married Catholics were to be subject to the same restrictions and penalties as their spouses. Recidivists were to be subject to harsher punishment – arbitrary imprisonment at the King’s pleasure.
The oath, around which the first bill was built, was comprehensive and explicit. It required those who took it to swear allegiance to James I as the rightful and lawful King of England, promise to support him against rebellion and – more difficult for Catholics to accept – repudiate the Pope’s claim to possess the power to depose secular monarchs whom he had judged to be heretics. The idea of swearing allegiance had been included in the 1603 Protestation of the Thirteen Appellant Priests. But the oath of three years later was a far stronger rejection of papal authority than the draft prepared by Bishop Bancroft in his attempt to reconcile loyal Catholics to Queen Elizabeth. It was composed in language which even the most reckless and desperate Catholic would not contemplate using in a description of papal conduct, and began with a denunciation of the dormant, if not defunct, Regnans in Excelsis, which it described as the ‘impious and heretical damnable doctrine’ that ‘princes which be excommunicated or deprived by the Pope may be deposed or murthered by their subjects or any whatsoever’.9 The oath was concerned not with the safety of James alone and in particular it denied, at least by implication, that the Pope possessed any secular authority beyond the bounds of the Papal States. The initiative was, therefore, doomed from the start.
Some Members of Parliament wanted the oath to go even further in dismissing papal powers. James claimed that the Commons proposed that the oath should assert that ‘the Pope had no power to excommunicate’ and that he had forced them to accept the more moderate version.10 Even in its more modest form, it was anathema to many Catholics. Most of the thirty martyrs who were executed in the reign of James I went to the scaffold because of their refusal to take an oath which only required them to deny temporal power to the Pope. They could not accept any limit on the authority – secular no less than theological – or the behaviour of God’s Vicar on earth.
Robert Parsons attributed the idea of the oath, and the principles on which it was based, to the Appellant priests’ hopes of creating a ‘National Catholicism’ – a development that would inevitably result in limitations of the Pope’s spiritual authority. Even Archpriest George Blackwell – the leader of the secular priests – originally declared the Oath to be unlawful. Later, remembering that he must speak for England, he slightly revised his position. When he realised the Pope had issued a condemnation of the oath, he reverted to his old position, leaving behind him a trail of Catholics who had followed his apparent advice and signed. Then, after much pressure from the Privy Council, he changed his mind again and, as well as declaring the oath lawful, urged Catholics to swear, as required. The Pope issued a statement describing Blackwell as ‘in error’. On September 18th 1607, Cardinal Roberto Bellarmine, theologian and controversialist, declared that God had granted the Pope secular as well as spiritual authority. James retaliated. On February 21st 1608, he published Triplici nodo, triplex cuneus, An Apology for the Oath of Allegiance. Anyone who refused to endorse his sovereign rights committed treason.
That notwithstanding, for a while it seemed that circumstances conspired to promote a compromise. Popes Sixtus V and Clement VIII – elected in quick succession – had not endorsed the militant evangelism of Gregory XIII, as embodied in Regnans in Excelsis, and many Protestants had begun to accept Catholicism as a religion rather than a subversive political movement. Sympathetic Justices – not all of them Catholics – ignored minor breaches in the religious laws. Often offenders who had been convicted were released from prison after demonstrations in their support. In many areas riots followed the arrest of recusants. The Protestant establishment began to recognise the advantages of living in peace with those Catholics who were loyal to King and country.
In 1611, Catholics were encouraged to demonstrate their fidelity by buying baronetcies11 and, from time to time, Cecil himself exhibited sufficient open-mindedness to arrange for Catholics of his class and acquaintance to be excused the pains and penalties imposed on less exalted miscreants. Lady Elizabeth Lovell – a distant relative of Thomas More – was granted permission to leave the country, despite admitting having entertained Catesby and Digby, two of the Catholic Gunpowder Plot conspirators. Cecil first released her from house arrest and then excused her from taking the loyalty oath that was required of travelling Catholics. She entered the English Benedictine convent in Brussels.12
As well as being England’s only (openly) bisexual sovereign, James was, and remains, the only (either openly or secretly) intellectual monarch to occupy the English throne. It was his respect for the English language, rather than his support of the English Church, which made him endorse the proposal, made by the President of Corpus Christi, Oxford, that there should be a new translation of the Bible to replace the texts that were in common use – the ‘official’ Bishops’ Bible (which James thought was a poor translation) and the Geneva Bible, which he thought was even worse.
James’ interest in ideas prevented him from seeing the Reformation in the simple terms which had given the strength of certainty to his predecessors. He was, by upbringing, a Calvinist and never lost his belief in a divinely ordained predestination, which divided the world into the elect, who were destined for heaven, and the damned, who could not even hope for salvation. But he promoted Arminians, who believed in the absolute opposite, because he admired their scholarship and shared their even more inconvenient insistence that the post-Reformation Church of England had roots buried deep in the Church of Rome. Indeed, in the public theological argument with the Vatican, which preoccupied him for two years of his life, he called upon an Anabaptist, Lancelot Andrewes, to help him confound his opponents and then – despite the contest, at best, ending in a draw – promoted Andrewes from the See of Ely to the See of Chichester.
It was James’ genuine intellectualism which prompted him to turn from the sonnets of his youth to the composition of theological treatises and participation in rhetorical tourneys. During his twenty-first year he had publicly contested the doctrine of justification as set out by Father James Gordon, a distinguished Jesuit; and, after his accession, he sought to engage in public disputations with Catholic theologians – which he was certain he would win. Some of James’ closest associates were not so sure. The Earl of Salisbury, believing that James was no match for his adversaries, did his best to persuade the King to abandon intellectual controversy.13 James would not listen. Challenges were issued in bellicose language. One, ‘with a preface to all the princes of Christendom’, was a call to arms which was intended to convince the Vatican that, ‘The Pope’s bulls should pull in their horns and himself wish that he had never meddled in this matter.’14
Robert Parsons lowered the tone of the debate by publishing the Judgement of an Englishman, a personalised challenge to the King of England. The deterioration continued. Cardinal Bellarmine might have been expected to deal calmly with the central issue under dispute – the source from which rulers derive their power – but, despite his eminence, he opened one disputation with a claim that was an irrelevancy, but which was also a telling low blow. In a Responsio, published in the name of one of his chaplains, he revealed the contents of a letter, written in 1599, from James to Pope Clement VIII. Its purpose was to announce that James was considering becoming a Catholic. It is unlikely that the thought was any more than a moment’s aberration. By the time of his succession James had certainly put all idea of conversion aside. But he had written the letter, and a scapegoat had to be found to take the blame. The King’s Scottish Secretary, James Elphinstone, the Lord Balmerino, was induced to say that he had drawn it up without consulting the King and had given it to James to sign just as he was leaving Holyrood to hunt deer. He was convicted of treason, sentenced to death, reprieved and allowed to go into honourable retirement.
James decided that, despite his intellectual strengths, he could not – with any hope of success – carry on the battle alone. So two genuine scholars were employed to rebut the reasoning of his theological adversaries. Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Chichester, published Responsio ad Apologiam Cardinalis Bellarmini, and William Barlow, the Dean of Chester, responded to Parsons with an Answer to a Catho-like Englishman (so by himself entituled). Both men toiled for nine months, augmented from time to time by other scholars. The final version of the Apology was heavily edited by James – hence his fury when factual errors were discovered in the text. A revision corrected some, though not all, of the mistakes. Critics concentrated on the passages in which what passed with James for humour produced comments that were perilously close to blasphemy – including his judgement on Mary’s intercession on behalf of repentant sinners. James found it hard to believe that the Virgin ‘hath no other things to do in heaven than to hear every idle man’s suit and busy herself with their errands; whiles requesting; whiles commanding her son, whiles coming down to kiss and make love to priests and whilst disputing and brawling with the devil’.15
In one of his more thoughtful passages, James raised again the question that, seventy years earlier, had exercised Cardinal Pole during his first visit to Rome. If Popes possessed the power to denounce and dethrone the wicked, why had they not urged and authorised uprisings against the early Roman emperors? Bellarmine took refuge in an explanation that echoed Pope Gregory’s Explanatio, the absolution of good Catholics from the obligation to take Regnans in Excelsis literally and immediately attempt to overthrow Elizabeth I. There was no virtue in attempting the impossible, especially when failure would damage the Church. The strength of the early Roman emperors meant that ‘severity would have been pointless’. The Popes were right to ‘exercise patience rather than authority’. Condemnation would have been ‘not only unprofitable, but utterly pernicious to the Christians … It is not sufficient to say that the Church is bound to doe some thing because she can lawfully doe it, unless she can also doe it with prudence and profit.’16
The doctrine of feasibility – the obligation to act only if action is likely to have the desired result – was a side-issue in the long argument between James I and Cardinal Bellarmine. They sought to answer serious, indeed fundamental, questions – including whether or not kings and princes derive their sovereignty from the communities which they govern or from God. The conventional Catholic position – derived from Aristotle via Aquinas – was that God had invested the right in society. On that point, James and Bellarmine basically agreed. Their difference lay in conflicting views of what justified and legitimised the removal of a sovereign. The papal view was that the Oath of Allegiance was vitiated by a greater obligation. ‘A Christian Commonwealth may not proceed against their Christian Prince, though he be a tyrant, without the advise and consent of the supreme Pastor of their souls’17 – and, therefore conversely, could proceed if they obtained the Pope’s approval. The Pope possessed God-given power to protect the people’s spiritual welfare and, therefore, had a duty to intervene when souls were in jeopardy.
Parsons, extreme in all things and incapable of missing an opportunity to condemn godless England and its heretic King, announced that no Catholic could, ‘with safety of Conscience, [deny that] in certeyne urgent cases, [the Pope had the power to act] for the universal good of God’s church’.18 Other Jesuits joined in. Anthony Hoskins wrote that the Pope could depose a ‘prince when it was necessary for the salvation of souls’. Archpriest Blackwell condemned the Gunpowder Plot in language which was consistent with that theory and, therefore, of little comfort to James. ‘Our divines do say that it is not lawful for private subjects, by private authority, to take arms against their lawful king, albeit he become a tyranny.’ As the Earl of Salisbury pointed out, Blackwell was arguing by implication that revolution and regicide were lawful, if approved by the Pope. When the Gunpowder conspirators came to trial, the prosecution quoted Parsons’ virtual exhumation of Regnans in Excelsis, ‘If any Christian prince manifestly turns away from the Catholic faith and tries to take others with him, he at once loses all power and authority by both human and divine law. All subjects are freed from their oaths to him.’
None of the contestants in the oath controversy could be said to have won or lost. Each participant remained immovable in his initial position, tethered to the spot by principles which were not subject to rational examination. The exchange of polemics did, however, keep open the channels of theological communication between Rome and England and clearly gave James great pleasure. Indeed, he enjoyed the arguments so much that he developed a taste for public disputation with anyone who would accept his challenge. Father John Percy, SJ, recalled the King’s courtesy. Just as ‘fencers were wont to salute and embrace one another, so before he entered into argument, he would embrace me with a speech’.19
While the disputations were conducted in high places, rank-and-file Catholics, born since the beginning of the Reformation – many of whom had never even heard of the issues which their betters found so compelling – attempted to balance their wish to worship as their fathers had done with the need to avoid penalties for ignoring the proscriptions imposed by the state. A number of first-generation Protestants risked all and were converted to Rome. Among them were a number of notable priests whose desertion not only handed a propaganda victory to the Vatican, but also exacerbated doctrinal divisions within the Church of England. They included Benjamin Carier, a royal chaplain and prebendary of Canterbury Cathedral, and Theophilus Higgons, an ex-Catholic, who ‘with great learning and aboundance of tears’ announced his reconversion during a four-hour sermon at St Paul’s Cross.20 The congregation was scandalised, and there were whispered allegations that the promise of a ‘fatt benefice’ had influenced his decision. But Higgons was neither burned as a Catholic nor lynched as Protestant. Somehow he managed to avoid no more severe a punishment than the destruction of his books, and even that was brought to a premature end by the intervention of the Lord Mayor of London. Higgons felt sufficiently confident in his new status to publish two pamphlets justifying his double apostasy, The first Motive of T. H. Maister of Arts and lately Minister to suspect the integritie of his Religion and The Apology of Theophilus Higgons lately Minister now Catholic. But he still did not burn. Tolerance, although not yet breaking out, was beginning to bubble under the surface of society.
The fiery preaching of John Knox – vituperation not very well disguised as sermons – had done nothing to hurry the arrival of tolerance in Scotland. The examination of new ideas which had stimulated the Scottish Reformation had been replaced by a one-sided war of polemics, with Protestant publications dominating theological debates. Knox’s public sermons and debates had led the humblest of lay Presbyterians into the consideration of theological principles. But the involvement of the whole Kirk in the government of the Scottish Church had done nothing to make its leadership more emollient. In what amounted to a declaration that Christ did not recognise class distinction, its ministers dismissed even the consideration of the concession – common in England – that the gentry should be allowed licence to worship as they wished in their own houses. There was to be no compromise with Rome. The General Assembly of the Kirk expressed its views in language that illustrated the strength of Scottish feeling, when it condemned ‘the bloody decrees of the Council of Trent against all that trewlie profess the Religioun of Chryst’.21 The Reformation was often a ruthless business. But in Scotland it exhibited an intellectual brutality that certainly had its effect on the Vatican. It also seemed to act as a deterrent to attempts at reconversion. Clement VIII’s bull of foundation of the Scottish College in Rome did not impose a missionary obligation on its members. None of the first group of seminarians returned to Scotland. Nor did many of their successors.
Attempts to guarantee Ireland’s loyalty by the introduction of Protestant settlers into the normally rebellious province only served to add to the confusion of beliefs and interests which disturbed the peace for the next five hundred years. There was already a class of Irish gentry who, although native-born, regarded themselves as English and interpreted their obligation to loyalty as the duty to support England’s economy as well as England’s monarch. Initially the ‘Old English’ Catholic apostates benefited from the closure of the Irish monasteries as their contemporaries in the homeland benefited from the Dissolution. But gradually, as ‘New English’ settlers were introduced into Ireland, the established families lost the privileged status they had traditionally enjoyed and, with it, the chance to acquire, at knockdown prices, the land and property of the dissolved religious houses. Seeking solace and support, they returned to their old religion and began to feel an increasing community of interests with Catholics, of all classes, who had not lost their Roman faith. The result was the creation of a whole class of Catholic gentry whose return to the faith of their fathers was the result of alienation rather than conviction.
Sometimes the grievances were imaginary and sometimes they amounted to no more than resentment at the loss of an inherited elite status. But sometimes they were tangible. The Stanihursts of the County Dublin Pale were one of the many families whose loyalty to the ‘Old English’ – values as well as people – was lost over three generations. Richard Stanihurst – although ‘a devout Catholic’ – had, because of his close association with the English ruling class, been a beneficiary of the monastery closures in County Dublin and County Meath. James, his son, walked the tightrope of faith and patronage so adroitly that he managed to be both Speaker of the Irish House of Commons and host to Edmund Campion during his visit to Ireland. Sometime about the end of the sixteenth century he lost both his influence and the fruits of the consequent patronage. The result was De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis – a treatise in ‘defence of the power of the old English’, as distinct from new arrivals,22 and a prominent place among the Irish Counter-Reformation Catholics.
The alienation of the Barnwells – also part of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy inside the Dublin Pale – was the consequence of one of King James’ lapses into mindless prejudice. Sir Patrick Barnwell had been a King’s sergeant and, in consequence, a revered figure in the Crown Courts. His grandson, who might have been expected to follow in the legal tradition, became a leader of the Irish Counter-Reformation. He was, because of his religion, prevented from practising law. James had suppressed the entire Dublin Bar on the grounds that ‘the greatest number of them are Iryshe, arrogant papysts that will neyther com to church, nor take the oath of obedience’.23 In the rest of Ireland, Catholicism, of a sort, was eliminated from the courts more gradually – too gradually for some bigots. In 1604, Protestant vigilantes complained that ‘the chief and principal places of justice in the realme are supplied by such of the Irish as are open recusants or dissembling hypocrites’.24 However, the situation was soon rectified. In 1607, John Everard, the last Catholic Irish judge of the period, was forced, by threats of violence, to resign.
No such draconian policy was necessary in Wales. In the year of Elizabeth’s death there were only 808 identified recusants in the whole Principality, as compared with almost one quarter of a million churchgoing Protestants. There were, however, a large number of Welsh men and women who only accepted the Church of England if, where and when it incorporated elements of the Mass into its services. Wales was also in thrall to the Tudors and, because of its affection for the family – which it thought of as blood relations of the whole country – was as reluctant to defy Elizabeth as it had been to disobey Mary.
The pattern of Welsh belief was deeply influenced by residual pagan superstitions. At Holywell, locals combined primitive Catholicism rituals with pre-Christian rights. The grove in which the well stood was dedicated to St Beuno, and bullocks were sacrificed to assuage his anger. There were reports of ‘companie of people dauncing and singing of rimes about the altar in the chapel … having pots and cups upon the said altar, drinking and making merrie’.25 The Catholic Church – reluctant to change with the times – finds that some of its minor problems are repeated with the passing of the years. On February 20th 1833, Thomas Penswick – Vicar Apostolic of the Northern District – wrote to Rome to ask ‘what hereafter must be my conduct towards secret societies, not banded together by any oath but using signs and passwords given out at a lodge. Such is the society calling itself Loyal Druids?’26 At least Penswick was spared the rumours current in the early seventeenth century of Spanish landings on the Welsh coast – usually at Milford Haven where, on one occasion, it was said that 10,000 Welshmen waited to support the invaders, who neither came nor planned to come. Immediately after the death of Queen Elizabeth, a William Watson had attempted to raise a rebellion. His abject failure only served to show that Wales posed no real threat – even though opposition to the Reformation was associated, in some Welsh minds, with national identity. Catholicism was ‘yr hen ffydd Cymru’ – the old faith of Wales. Protestantism was ‘y ffydd newydd y Saesin’ – the new faith of England.27 But in the Principality, as in the rest of Britain, the ‘new faith’ had become the irresistibly dominant religion.