An Unsettled Religious Settlement and the Crisis of the 1620s: English Catholics, Anti-Popery, and the Spanish Match, 1622–4

Abstract The anti-popish fervour that accompanied the collapse of the Spanish Match has been long acknowledged both by the wave of revisionists who dismissed anti-popery as inherently irrational and by those scholars, attentive to popular political communication, who were willing to view anti-popery as a legitimate tool of contemporary political analysis. Still, the study of anti-popery has remained disconnected from examinations of the English Catholic community around which such an ideology was constructed. This article aims to reintegrate the activity and expressed intentions of English Catholics in the years 1622 to 1624 into mainstream political narratives of the Spanish Match period. With particular attention to divisions within the English Catholic community, this article also comments upon the nature of an early modern public sphere, examining the uses and risks of publicity in intra- and interconfessional conflict. It is suggested that Catholic activity, as it emerged increasingly into full public view, might be seen as calling into radical question the post-Reformation religious settlement. In this light, the anti-popery expressed in parliament, at the pulpit, and in print appears part of a dynamic debate about the future of the English church and state.