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13 - The second Viscount Montague, his entourage and the approbation controversy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2010

Michael C. Questier
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London
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Summary

It was almost inevitable that once Richard Smith had returned, armed with his new episcopal status and authority, to the bosom of those aristocratic families which traditionally rendered support to him and his friends, he would take the opportunity to try to realise what had previously been just hierarchalist hallucinations. Of course, he and his circle would claim that his rule over the Catholic community in England was purely benign and, indeed, fruitful, just as William Bishop's had been. Faction and discontent arose, Smith claimed, merely because of the emulous bitterness of his enemies. When he started to insist that Catholic clergymen in England should turn to him for ‘approbation’, i.e. the (theoretically automatic) licensing of missionary priests to hear the confessions of their ghostly children, his critics maliciously (said Smith) seized on this instance of his dutiful attention to his flock's spiritual welfare in order to attack him.

Smith's claims about the peacefulness and benignity of his rule were, however, in their essentials, severely economical with the truth. As David Lunn has shown from the archives of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (De Propaganda Fide), in autumn 1626 Smith launched a visitation of the entire country and, though virtually no formal records of it survive, he occupied himself at this time by transmitting rude messages to Rome about his critics in the religious orders.

Type
Chapter
Information
Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England
Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c.1550–1640
, pp. 433 - 472
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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