Anthony Kitchin, the 1559 Settlement of Religion, and the Ambiguities of Early Elizabethan Church Politics

Abstract Anthony Kitchin, the bishop of Llandaff between 1545 and 1563, is traditionally seen as a self-serving careerist, an unprincipled hypocrite, and a pastoral failure. He was one of only two Marian Catholic bishops to serve under Elizabeth I, and Eamon Duffy memorably jests that he ‘would doubtless have become a Hindu if required, providing he was allowed to hold on to the see of Llandaff’. But re-evaluating Kitchin’s career uncovers a man with a consistent stance that was not unusual amongst his peers, and reveals that the Elizabethan government retained serious hopes of bringing numerous Marian bishops, not just Kitchin, into conformity. Still more striking, while Kitchin has been reviled as a hypocrite for swearing the 1559 oath of supremacy, there is persuasive evidence that he did not in fact swear that oath, keeping his see only through a contingent and awkward compromise with the Elizabethan state, and that the details of this compromise were conveniently forgotten, perhaps even deliberately suppressed. Re-evaluating Kitchin significantly advances our understanding of the period by contributing to the extensive and developing historiography on Catholic conscience and loyalty to the crown, helping problematize binary distinctions between zealous Catholic resistance and craven conformity.