2. Catholics and the Law

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we look at the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, focusing in particular on: (i) the key difference separating Elizabeth’s religious settlement from that of her Tudor predecessors; (ii) the creation of recusants as a new category of criminal; (iii) Church papists and their circumvention of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement; (iv) punishments for recusancy, and how they changed in severity over the course of Elizabeth I’s reign; (v) how the law changed after Elizabeth I was excommunicated from the Catholic Church and seminary priests began to arrive in England; and (vi) the torture and execution of Catholics in Britain.

Course

In this course, Dr Francis Young (University of Oxford) explores Catholicism in the British Isles during the reign of Elizabeth I. In the first module, we look at Elizabeth I’s relationship with Catholicism, paying particular attention to how her reformist upbringing influenced her treatment of Catholics when queen. In the second module, we turn our attention to the Elizabethan Religious Settlement and how its legal enforcement impacted Catholics in Britain, before in the third module considering how this treatment of Catholics gave rise to a number of rebellions during Elizabeth’s reign. In the fourth module, we consider the extent to which a Catholic community survived in Britain, giving attention also to the communities of exiled English Catholics that formed on the Continent. In the fifth module, we debate the extent to which Catholics were persecuted and tolerated in Britain, before in the sixth and final lecture giving special focus to the experiences of Catholics in Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

Lecturer

Francis Young is a tutor at the University of Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education. His research interests lie in early modern Catholicism, folklore, magic, and other forms of supernatural belief. Some of his recent publications include the co-authored volume English Catholicism 1558-1642 (2021), Catholic East Anglia: A History of the Catholic Faith in Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough (2016), and (2015). His book Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic was also awarded the Book Subvention Award by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic studies in 2021.