duplicate the functions of traditional or Tridentine practices while reinterpreting the forms such practices might take.”127 Because of the obstacles to receiving sacraments, the circulation of books and manuscripts in Catholic circles took on greater importance. The poetry of Romanist playgoer William Habington appears in a collection compiled by a Catholic woman. Post-Reformation English Catholicism, too, was a religion of the word.128 In London, the public execution of Catholic martyrs galvanized sympathetic communities of witnesses.129 The devotional life of English Catholics was often piecemeal, idiosyncratic, and flexible, cobbled together from occasional sacraments snatched when they could be had, news and consolation from local networks of fellow believers, pastoral literature, and private meditation, often involving repurposed objects or spaces.
In place of the visible, corporate community of the faithful, so powerfully described in Eamon Duffy’s account of the late medieval Church, later English Catholics faced the isolation of practicing an illegal, minority religion.130 But both recusant and conforming Catholics found ways to sustain their spiritual lives within the strictures of Protestant society. As John Bossy observes, “The features of pre-Reformation Christian practice to which conservatively-minded people held most strongly were those which … belonged to a region of private social practice which in effect lay outside the field of legislation”—such as fasting.131 Devout Catholic convert and enthusiastic playgoer Elizabeth Cary herself fasted during Lent (“living almost wholly … on nettle porridge”), but she also served meat for Protestant family members and guests. Her table was confessionally mixed in both food and talk. She describes meals with her children and their Oxford friends, “conversing freely … [about] religion [with] those very capable on both sides.”132 For Cary, the goal was to reconcile those around her to the Roman Church, but she understood the conviction of conversion as emerging from uncertainty and open dialogue.
Conversion and Mixed-Faith Families
Religious lives were changeable. But conversion was not a simple flip from one ecclesiastical monolith to its opposite. As Michael Questier observes, “It is a misreading to see the English Reformation just as a struggle between two tightly consolidated blocks, Roman and Protestant, facing each other across a deserted religious no-man’s-land with a few isolated and lack-lustre nonentities [moving] between the two positions.”133 Religious “start” and “end” points could themselves be unstable composites. Even those who professed throughout their lives the same faith into which they were born also wavered and experimented, under often conflicting pressures of family and education, internal conscience and external law. All post-Reformation English people lived in conditions of at least potential convertibility. Playgoing clergyman John Gee became an anti-Catholic polemicist only after his budding interest in the Roman Church led him to the so-called fatal vespers, the 1623 disaster in which overcrowding at a Catholic service caused the building to collapse, killing ninety-five people. Gee’s providential escape (and subsequent interrogation by the archbishop of Canterbury) led him to recommit to Calvinism. The minister’s account of how he came to be at the deadly Catholic gathering is instructive: “I was the same day in the fore-noone at the Sermon at Pauls-Crosse: and lighting vpon some Popish company at dinner, they were much magnifying the said Drury, who was to preach to them in the afternoone. The ample report which they afforded him, preferring him far beyond any of the Preachers of our Church, and depressing and vilifying the Sermons at Pauls-Crosse, in regard of him, whetted my desire to heare his said Sermon: to which I was conducted by one Medcalfe a Priest.”134 Gee’s report gives a glimpse of an urban religious culture in which it was possible for a Church of England minister to hear the Calvinist Thomas Adams deliver an open-air sermon before thousands at Paul’s Cross in the morning, and attend a clandestine Catholic service conducted by the Jesuit priest Robert Drury for a packed crowd of three hundred in a room at the French embassy that same evening.135 Gee’s cross-confessional gadding demonstrates the polyphony of the discursive field that post-Reformation Londoners negotiated daily.
A similar sense of malleability, and the contingency of multiple religious influences, characterizes the autobiography of theater enthusiast (later turned amateur actor and playwright) Arthur Wilson, who describes himself as “such Waxe in Religion, as was apt to take any Impression.”136 Wilson was apprenticed to fellow playgoer John Davies of Hereford, “who being also a Papist, with his Wife & Familie, their Example & often Discourse gave Growth to those Thrivings I had. So that, with many Conflicts in my Spirit, I often debated which was the true Religion.”137 Later apprenticed in another papist household, Wilson continues to question and dispute: “Finding no way fitter to discover the Truth than to search into it, & being always in Argument against them, I went under the Notion of a Puritan; but God knowes, it was rather out of Contention than Edification: for indeed I was nothing.”138 Afterward, “out of the Societie of Papists” and serving as secretary to tepid presbyterian Robert Devereaux, third Earl of Essex, he writes that he “became a confirmed Protestant: but found nothing of the Sweetnes of Religion.”139 His piety deepened later in the employ of puritan playgoer Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, who maintained silenced ministers: “Now Preaching, the true Glasse of the Soule, discovered more unto mee that I had formerly seene; & good Men, by how much they were eclipsed by the Bishop’s, did privately shine the brighter.”140 Wilson’s later-life, godly, presbyterian commitments are evident in the disparaging treatment of the episcopacy in his History of Great Britain.141 On one hand, there is a clear trajectory in Wilson’s life from youthful dalliances with papistry to mature puritan devotion. However, it is also apparent that his taste for cross-confessional discussion did not evaporate with his turn toward godly piety. In later years, Wilson struck up a friendly acquaintance with the Catholic priest Father Weston: “Being familiar with him, I askt him many Questions, which are Arcana among them; & he was ingenuous to me in discovering the Truth.”142 Wilson’s interests in both religious dialogue and theater were lifelong and compatible.
In the process of conversion, spiritually turning toward God (metanoia) and changing denominations could be entangled in various, complex ways. For playgoer and Catholic priest Father Augustine Baker, a horse-riding accident immediately set his mind on higher things (“If ever I git out of this danger, I will beleive there is a God”). Yet his denominational conversion came later in an intense burst of prayer and reading.143 Sometimes piety and confessional commitment grew together: playgoing clergyman Peter Heylyn moved from an initial reluctance to study theology under the influence of his “zealous Puritan” Oxford tutor, through a growing love for the English Church that awakened skepticism toward Calvinist thought, to a career as a Laudian polemicist.144 These examples illustrate differences not only in the content but also in the experiential process of religious change. Baker’s first conversion is an event, and his second the product of a concentrated period of reflection, whereas for Heylyn religious change was a gradual, long-term evolution.
Spiritual conversions did not happen in splendid isolation from worldly concerns. However, Questier rightly points out that it is reductive to speak of people simply subordinating their consciences to better their careers or avoid persecution. More often, “when political and religious motives were both engaged in the mind of the individual convert they were maintained in a constant tension.”145 For example, theatergoer Christopher Blount was educated by William Allen himself, but in 1585, he abandoned his faith and helped Francis Walsingham embroil Mary, Queen of Scots, in the manufactured conspiracy that led to her execution. Blount’s apostasy seems to have been driven initially by worldly considerations, whether for political advancement or to protect his Romanist family from persecution. Yet his subsequent years of dedication to Leicester (under whose command he served in multiple, Protestant military campaigns); his marriage to Leicester’s widow, Lettice; and his ill-fated loyalty to Leicester’s stepson, Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, suggest a factional commitment beyond shallow careerism.146 Confessing at his trial that he supported Essex because the earl had promised “toleration for religion,” Blount refused to speak with a Protestant minister before he was beheaded, declaring, “I die a
