For Stapleton, the point of the whole story was to demonstrate to Horne
that the bishop should preach obedience to his own creed’s adherents,
for such brigandage had never been the way of Catholic subjects with
their Protestant princes. With regard to the literary fortunes of the
Recusants, since from that time Antwerp became an unsuitable place for
the production of their books, the printing end of the operation moved
to Louvain. Yet the Catholic enterprise faired little better in Louvain, as
by 1568 they were forced again to move as war pushed most of them to
Douai. Harding remained in Louvain where he died in 1572. But 1568
marked the end of the Recusant English literary endeavor for another
reason. As most of the English Catholics now saw themselves as involved
in a conflict greater than that between themselves and Protestant
England, they turned their attention to continental concerns.
Consequently, the controversial treatises after 1568 were almost entirely
in Latin.^8 There was also the problem of an ever increasing diligence on
the part of the Elizabethan government at its ports.^9
One of the Recusants who did not enter into the polemical fray with
Jewel was William Allen. With Stapleton, Allen led the English Catholics
for most of the second half of the sixteenth century. But while Stapleton
was the contemplative scholar, Allen was a man of action. Stapleton
avoided church preferments, and though he did make one trip to Rome,
he spent the last years of his life putting off the papacy’s requests that he
return, ostensibly for a cardinal’s hat. Allen on the other hand had the
foresight to see that Catholicism in England needed help from the
outside, and thus with Jean Vendeville, the Regius Professor of Canon
Law at Douai, traveled to Rome in 1567 to petition for the beginning of
the English College at Douai. The English College became the fount from
which flowed the Catholic mission back to England, and would produce
some 450 priests, over 100 of whom would be executed by the English
government for treason. Stapleton, though certainly of one mind with
the English College, was a professor at the University of Douai. When
Douai’s political fortunes changed in 1578 with a pro-Calvinist city
council in place, the English College was expelled. Stapleton, however, as
a university professor was allowed to remain. The situation was not a
calamity, though, for Allen, again showing prescience, had already made
arrangements to move the college to Rheims, where it would stay.
Jewel’s Catholic detractors confronted him on several fronts. Though
the main thrust of their arguments centered on only a few of Jewel’s
challenges, in essence they answered all of them, for their contentions
THE CATHOLIC REACTION TO JEWEL 121
(^8) Southern,Recusant Prose, p. 31; O’Connell, Stapletonp. 61. Southern notes that with
the coming of the Jesuits in 1581 the number of English Catholic books rises.
(^9) Southern,Recusant Prose, pp. 33–43.