As Jane Austen would say, it is a truth universally acknowledged, even among Shakespeare scholars, that Shakespeare is the great enigma in English literature. To some extent this truth was partially covered up during the long period of Shakespeare scholarship when any discussion of Shakespeare's religion was considered taboo. But in the past couple of decades this taboo has been lifted to the extent that the theme proposed for the biennial Shakespeare Conference at Stratford in the year 2000 was ‘Shakespeare and Religions’. On the other hand, so far from resolving the Shakespearian enigma, the recent weakening of the taboo has only served to bring it more prominently into the foreground of scholarly attention and discussion. And of all the plays that may be said to centre on this enigma, it hardly needs to be said that Hamlet is not only one among many but the one play that may be called uniquely so—as being the most problematic of all Shakespeare's so-called ‘problem plays’.

(John Macky, 1707)

(John Macky, 1725)

Historians of early modern England benefit from a rich and varied array of contemporary accounts by individuals that shed light on the local, regional, and wider impact of religious and other policies of successive monarchs. These include the narrative of Robert Parkyn, a Yorkshire priest, of the years 1532–54, Rose Hickman's recollections of Protestant life during the reign of Mary Tudor, to the chronicle of Henry Machyn in 1550–1563, to name but a few. More broadly, too, the history of the book and its import in illuminating various aspects of medieval and early modern popular culture, devotion, piety, reading practices and other related topics has been widely recognised. They have been successfully mined in recent years by various scholars of medieval and early modern England, Ireland, and beyond, from Eamon Duffy to Salvador Ryan and Raymond Gillespie.

Writing in 1532, the elderly Erasmus reflected on the hazards of marriage and parenthood: friendship, he concluded, is the prime source of comfort in human life, praecipuum humanae vitae solatium, ‘but even there trust is rare and inconstancy is common’. Given the span of acquaintance covered by the eleven volumes of correspondence collected by P. S. Allen in his Erasmi epistolae, Erasmus had plenty of opportunity to test this rather pessimistic view. Indeed, one suspects that it derived as much from his own touchiness as from the unreliability of his friends. Few of his friendships have received so much attention as that which he established with Thomas More, a relationship which lasted some thirty-six years, from Erasmus’ first visit to England in 1499 down to More's execution on 6th July 1535, and indeed until Erasmus’ own more domestic death in Basel almost exactly a year later. From an early date this was seen as a model friendship, something to be celebrated in the Republic of Letters. As we shall see, its religious implications were to prove more complex; but for much of the twentieth century More and Erasmus were conveniently paired as representatives of Christian humanism, a perception reinforced by More's canonization in 1935.

Mary Ward was born in 1585 near Ripon, eldest child of a recusant family. She spent her whole life until the age of 21 in the intimate circle of Yorkshire Catholics, with her parents, her Wright grandparents at Ploughland in Holderness, Mrs. Arthington, née Ingleby, at Harewell Hall in Nidderdale, and finally with the Babthorpes of Babthorpe and Osgodby. Convinced of her religious vocation, but of course unable to pursue it openly in England, she spent some time as a Poor Clare in Saint-Omer in the Spanish Netherlands, first in a Flemish community, then in the English house that she helped to found. She was happy there, but was shown by God that he was calling her to ‘some other thing’. Exactly what it was to be was not yet clear, so she returned to England, spent some time in London working for the Catholic cause, and discovering that there was much for women to do—then returned to Saint-Omer with a small group of friends, other young women in their 20s, to start a school, chiefly for English Catholic girls, and through prayer and penance to find out more clearly what God was asking. Not surprisingly, given her early religious formation in English Catholic households, served by Jesuit missionaries, and her desire to work for her own country, the guidance that came was ‘Take the same of the Society’. She spent the rest of her life trying to establish a congregation for women which would live by the Constitutions of St. Ignatius, be governed by a woman general superior, under the Pope, not under diocesan bishops or a male religious order, and would be unenclosed, free to be sent ‘among the Turks or any other infidels, even to those who live in the region called the Indies, or among any heretics whatsoever, or schismatics, or any of the faithful’. There were always members working in the underground Church in England, and in Mary Ward's own lifetime there were ten schools, in Flanders and Northern France, Italy, Germany and Austria-Hungary. But her long struggle for approbation met with failure—Rome after the Council of Trent, which had insisted on enclosure for all religious women, was not yet ready for Jesuitesses. In 1631 Urban VIII banned her Institute by a Bull of Suppression, imprisoning Mary Ward herself for a time in the Poor Clare convent on the Anger in Munich. She spent the rest of her life doing all she could to continue her work, but when she died in Heworth, outside York, in 1645 and was buried in Osbaldwick churchyard, only a handful of followers remained together, some with her in England, 23 in Rome, a few in Munich, all officially laywomen. It is owing to these women that Mary Ward's Institute has survived to this day.

John Henry Newman's poem ‘On Oxford’ published within a section called ‘Champions of the Truth’ in the verse collection, Lyra Apostolica, which he edited in 1836, encapsulates Newman's vision of Oxford and its colleges. Oxford was portrayed in the poem as an embattled but triumphant ‘city on a hill’ (in spite of its valley location surrounded by hills); a bulwark against contemporary forces, religious, and political, which for Newman, seemed to threaten it in the 1830s. The poem reminds us that the Oxford Movement, the great movement of religious revival within the Church of England commonly dated from 1833, the movement which Newman famously led and inspired, was rooted in Newman's keen and abiding sense of place (genius loci, as he put it), of memory, tradition, ethos, and association.

The 1688 Revolution was the culmination of an eighteen-year campaign against James and his co-religionists as idolaters of bread. The Test Acts of 1673 and 1678 required an oath against Transubstantiation for public employment, and the parliamentary debate in 1673 showed that the ground for this was idolatry. It was a strange accusation, because the age was more inclined to atheism than idolatry and because virtually all the Christian world—Catholics, Orthodox, and Lutherans—worshiped Christ as bodily present in the Sacrament. In three recent councils between 1639 and 1672, the Orthodox Churches had accepted the term transubstantiation and condemned Calvinist teaching on the Eucharist. Stranger still, the accusation of idolatry was being raised not by Puritans, but by Anglican churchmen and a Cavalier parliament. The first Test Act of 1673 (25 Charles II, c. 2) excluded Catholics from all civil and military employment under the Crown under penalty of £500 pounds and disability in law, unless they would take this oath against Transubstantiation: ‘I do believe that there is not any transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Lord's supper, or in the elements of bread and wine, at or after the consecration thereof by any person whatsoever’.

In the account of his missionary work, the Jesuit John Gerard (1564–1637) famously explained how, after a few years of penury in ‘Mass equipment’, Catholic houses had become so well equipped that priests were able to set about their work immediately upon their arrival. He recalled that in the last two years of his work (1604–06), he no longer needed to lodge in taverns but always found friendly dwellings to shelter him on his way. Most of these were run by women, whose prominence in the activity of harbouring was pointed out in many documents, including the minutes of the confession given to the Privy Council by the appellant priest Anthony Sherlock, who turned informer after his capture in 1606:

Between July and October 1580, Robert Persons and Edmund Campion, who had landed at Dover in June, ‘passed through the most part of the shires of England, preaching and administering the sacraments in almost every gentleman's and nobleman's house that we passed by, whether he was Catholic or not, provided he had any Catholics in his house to hear us’. Between Christmas 1580 and Whitsun 1581 Campion went on a similar journey to the North, the itinerary of which can be recovered in fair detail from entries in the Acts of the Privy Council and from a summary of the subsequent examinations which was annotated by Lord Burghley. The mission of Campion and Persons (and of the dozen or so others who accompanied them from Rome) has rightly been regarded as a pivotal event in the story of Elizabethan recusancy. But no serious attempt has ever been made to reconstruct their itineraries in 1580.

When Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914 few could have foreseen that it would last four years or predicted the slaughter it would bring. The parishioners of the Catholic parish of St. Peter Seel St., in the docklands of south Liverpool, along with Catholics throughout the country, on the first Sunday of the war were exhorted to pray for peace. The assumption seemed to be that the war would be a short one. The lessons of Britain's last major conflict, the South African Wars at the turn of the nineteenth-century, seemed not to have impinged on popular imagination. it would, however, be only a relatively short space of time before the news of local young men ‘killed in action’ began to appear in the notice books of St. Peter's and other Catholic parishes, bringing a growing realisation that this war was ‘different’. Perhaps it would not end quickly and certainly as the horror of events in Belgium and France began to appear in the press, national, local and ‘confessional’, the conviction grew that indeed this was no ‘ordinary’ war. How did the leaders of the Catholic community respond? What guidance and comfort were offered to the community, which was largely working class, whose sons found themselves in the front line?

Historians have paid little attention to the controversy provoked when Edward VII, in conformity with the Bill of Rights (1689) and Act of Settlement (1701) made the ‘Declaration against Transubstantiation’ which grossly insulted the Roman Catholic faith. Angry protests by Catholics in England were replicated even more strongly throughout the empire and issues of constitutional importance were raised which remain alive to the present day. The records of the lengthy parliamentary debates on this matter between 1901 and 1910 show that despite lingering suspicion of the Roman Catholic Church, and determination that no one professing that faith should ever occupy the throne, most members of both houses regarded Catholics as loyal citizens who should no longer be affronted at the beginning of the sovereign's reign by language born of a bygone age. Even so, to devise a formula which while removing what gave offence could satisfy the diverse interests involved when the religious and political spheres impinged on each other proved extremely difficult. The difficulty was increased because a large proportion of the general public regarded the declaration as a vital safeguard to the Protestant succession to the throne which made politicians hesitant to tamper with what had become ‘woven into the very texture of religious belief and adhesion’ in the country. It is worthwhile, therefore, to examine the various attempts to deal with this ‘thorny and difficult question’, which finally led to a revised declaration being forced in great haste through the House of Commons amid loud protests at what was considered unprecedented procedure.

James Byres of Tonley (1734–1817) is a pivotal figure in many respects, whose life as a virtuoso has been the subject of exemplary scholarship in the fields of art history and the history of archaeology. For three decades, he was close to the centre of the circle of artists, antiquarians and art-dealers who guided and advised the grand tourists and student artists visiting Rome, then the unchallenged capital of the visual arts worldwide. His fortunes, and those of his family, are typical of those of the last generation of Aberdeenshire Catholics before the Relief Acts of the late eighteenth century and the death of Henry Benedict, Cardinal York, in 1807. Like many Scots, whose cultural or military achievements were enacted in continental exile, he is not particularly remembered nor celebrated in Scotland itself.

None of Robert Southwell's writing illustrates as do the texts of A Shorte Rule of Good Life the conditions under which he wrote and the manner in which his work was transmitted by manuscript copy and printed book. Until recent years it was known only in rare printed copies representing a series of editions issued in rapid succession following Southwell's execution in 1595. The first, issued from Henry Garnet's second secret press in 1596 or 1597, was probably edited by Garnet himself. The volume also contained the first printing of Southwell's Epistle to his Father. There can be little doubt that ‘The Preface to the Reader’ preceding the Rule, though unsigned, was written by Garnet himself when the grief of loss was still raw. This was followed by two more editions from secret presses in England and further editions from Douai and St. Omer. The first commercial printing in London was that of Richard Field for William Barret in 1620, when the text was crudely adapted for English readers with Puritan sympathies in a volume that gathered together verse and prose already established in popularity, although the author was still identified merely as ‘R. S’.

In October 1970, amidst jubilant celebrations at St Peter's in Rome, Pope Paul VI canonised forty English and Welsh martyrs as saints. Auberon Waugh called it ‘the biggest moment for English Catholicism since Catholic emancipation in 1829’. It marked the culmination of a long campaign which had begun in earnest in the mid-nineteenth century under Cardinals Wiseman and Manning, shortly after the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy. By 1935 nearly two hundred Reformation martyrs had been beatified, but only two of these had been canonised, John Fisher and Thomas More—the first Englishmen to be made saints since John of Bridlington in 1401. After the hiatus of the Second World War, the cause was revived in 1960 seeking the canonisation of another forty English martyrs. All were Roman Catholics executed under the Tudor and Stuart monarchs or the Puritan Commonwealth, ranging from Carthusian monks who fell foul in 1535 of Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy, to seminary priests who were caught up in the ‘Popish Plot’ against Charles II in 1679. All but six of the forty had been hung, drawn and quartered, many of them on the gallows at Tyburn.

In her recent study of the Bayeux tapestry, Suzanne Lewis argues persuasively that we cannot use only the simple Latin tags on this long embroidery (it is not a tapestry) to come to know its story. The more we attend to the exceptionally detailed images, the more we see ambiguity and complexity. Why does Harold have two hands on reliquaries for oath-taking? Why does he look in one direction while a ship leaves in the other? Why does the Fable of the Fox and the Crow appear three times?

Apostasy among the English Catholic gentry in the late eighteenth century was not uncommon. In this period contemporary Catholic observers were concerned by what they perceived to be a great qualitative decrease of English Catholic gentry and they regarded apostasy as ‘a major and catastrophic cause of the decline’. Conformity to the established religion was a social virtue and was rewarded with social advantages; it was part and parcel of one's rise in the social scale and so was a great temptation for gentlemen outside the Anglican fold who were desirous of a service or parliamentary career. In almost every county in England many heads of old English Catholic families conformed. Indeed, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, of the twenty-four Catholic gentry families that existed in the Riding in. 1706 only twelve remained by 1780. Between the years 1754–1790 seven members of the House of Commons had renounced Roman Catholicism in order to pursue political careers and according to the contemporary Catholic priest Joseph Berington, by 1780 there were but 177 landed Catholic families in England ten of which had either died out or recently abjured their faith. Just a few conversions could have devastating consequences for Catholic communities. As David Butler points out, often ‘Catholic missions were over-dependent on the Catholic aristocracy and gentry for the continuance of Catholic worship’ and for Butler, in eighteenth-century London alone, if ‘just eight prominent families had apostatised … the Catholic missions would have lost about half of their numbers’.