CHAPTER THREE3 The Catholic reaction to Jewel
English Catholics and the Counter Reformation
Previous studies on Jewel noted the varied, articulate and voluminous
Catholic reaction to the bishop’s polemical works, and then largely
ignored it. The Recusant polemic suffers the disadvantage that their
authors were traitors, expatriates and that they lacked, at least in the
English speaking world, a strong confessional interest in their work.
With the exception only of Harding – since Jewel in responding to him
in both his Answerand the Defense of the Apologypreserved a good bit
of what Harding wrote – none of the Catholics garner more than passing
allusions in works treating either Jewel or Elizabethan religion. Yet each
of the men who answered Jewel’s Challenge Sermon and the Apologia
Ecclesiae Anglicanaeeventually became prominent in their own right
apart from any relation they enjoyed with the bishop of Salisbury.
Together they formed an integral part, not only of the history of
Elizabethan Catholicism, but also of the Counter Reformation and the
renewal of the Catholic Church in the second half of the sixteenth
century. Yet aside from Southern’s treatment of the prose of the several
Recusants, and some biographies of such as Allen and Stapleton, little
has been recently done on this group.^1
Not all Catholics who sought to maintain their faith got to leave
England; indeed, many who would have sought this life were prevented
(^1) For the Recusants, see A.C. Southern, Elizabethan Recusant Prose, 1559–1582
(London, 1950); Marvin O’Connell, Thomas Stapleton and the Counter Reformation
(New Haven, 1964); for the English mission Thomas Parsons and Edmund Campion;
Michael L. Carrafiello, Robert Parsons and English Catholicism, 1580–1610(Selinsgrove
and London, 1998); Francis Edwards, SJ, Robert Parsons. The Biography of an
Elizabethan Jesuit, 1546–1610(St. Louis, 1995); John Edward Parish, Robert Parsons:
English Jesuit(New York, 1951); and Parish, Robert Parsons and the English Counter-
Reformation(Houston, 1966); Ernest Edwin Reynolds, Campion and Parsons: the Jesuit
mission of 1580–81(London, 1980); Malcolm H. South, Jesuits and the joint mission to
England during 1580–1581 (Lewiston, NY, c1999). There are also older monographs on
English Catholicism: Thomas McNevin Veech, Dr. Nicholas Sanders[sic]and the English
reformation, 1530–1581(Louvain, 1935); J.H. Pollen, The English Catholics in the Reign
of Queen Elizabeth(New York, 1920). For Recusant political thought see Peter Holmes,
Resistance and Compromise: the Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics,
(Cambridge, 1982), and Arnold Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England,
(Chapel Hill, 1979).