from doing so by Her Majesty. These included most of the bishops and
also such clerics as John Feckenham, the erstwhile abbot of Westminster.
For most of these life continued in the confines of Elizabeth’s several
prisons; Feckenham himself, however, was actually turned over to the
custody of Robert Horne, the bishop of Winchester, for several months
beginning in October 1563. Feckenham’s tenure at Winchester was an
attempt by Horne to get him to recant his recusancy, or at least to
embarrass him during their daily disputations at Winchester, but
Feckenham would have none of it. After a number of progressively
heated dialogues, Horne sent the former abbot back to the Tower. In
1574 he was released on bail and allowed to go to Bath, though in 1577
was placed in the custody of Richard Cox, bishop of Ely and eventually
imprisoned in Wisbech Castle, where was also the former bishop of
Lincoln, Watson. Feckenham died there in 1584. Nicholas Heath fared
better. Bishop of Worcester under Henry VIII, he was deprived under
Edward VI for his refusal to recognize Cranmer’s ordinal, and spent the
remainder of Edward’s reign as the guest of Nicholas Ridley in London.
Following his restoration to Worcester after Edward’s death, he became
the archbishop of York and Mary’s chancellor. Acting as Mary’s
chancellor Heath had proclaimed Elizabeth’s accession in 1558, and had
also in 1559 helped arrange the Westminster Disputation. Yet when he
withstood the Royal Supremacy he was deprived of everything.^2 After a
short sojourn in the Tower, he was allowed to retire to his estates at
Chobham, so long as he refrained from interfering in questions of
religion. Heath stayed on good terms with his monarch, and was even
visited by her; but he never attended Protestant services, probably
secretly had Mass at his home, and died there in 1578. Most of the other
bishops who survived 1559, like Watson, had been imprisoned, though
a few made it to the continent (for example, Scot and Goldwell). For the
vast majority of England’s Catholics conformity became the option,
though for some only on the most bare of terms, giving rise eventually to
the protean epitaph ‘church papist’. This moniker was largely Puritan
shorthand for those who did not quite measure up to precisian zeal, and
who as such were a threat to the godly commonwealth.^3
More important was the throng of Oxford and Cambridge faculty
and students who quit the universities for the Low Countries and the
north of France. A number of Catholics did remain in England, for
example, the Regius Professors of Divinity and Greek at Cambridge,
George Etheridge and Thomas Sedgwick respectively. But it is the first
group, the émigrés which became the concern for Jewel. Some were
116 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^2) Jones,Birth of Elizabethan Age, p. 20.
(^3) Cf. Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists(Woodbridge, 1999).
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