All Hail to the Archpriest: Confessional Conflict, Toleration, and the Politics of Publicity in Post-Reformation England

All Hail to the Archpriest revisits the debates and disputes known collectively in the literature on late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England as the 'Archpriest controversy'. Peter Lake and Michael Questier argue that this was an extraordinary instance of the conduct of contemporary public politics and that, in its apparent strangeness, it is in fact a guide to the ways in which contemporaries negotiated the unstable later Reformation settlement in England. The published texts which form the core of the arguments involved in this debate survive, as do several caches of manuscript material generated by the dispute. Together they tell us a good deal about the aspirations of the writers and the networks that they inhabited. They also allow us to retell the progress of the dispute both as a narrative and as an instance of contemporary public argument about topics such as the increasingly imminent royal succession, late Elizabethan puritanism, and the function of episcopacy.Our contention is that, if one takes this material seriously, it is very hard to sustain standard accounts of the accession of James VI in England as part of an almost seamless continuity of royal government, contextualised by a virtually untroubled and consensus-based Protestant account of the relationship between Church and State. Nor is it possible to maintain that by the end of Elizabeth's reign the fraction of the national Church, separatist and otherwise, which regarded itself or was regarded by others as Catholic, had been driven into irrelevance.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Part I: LATE ELIZABETHAN CATHOLICISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS 1: The Death of Cardinal Allen and the Wisbech Stirs: The Emergence of a Conspiracy Theory 2: After Wisbech: The Attempts to Secure Order in the English Catholic Community 3: Troubles in Rome 4: The Archpriest Cometh: The Appointment of George Blackwell and the Launching of the First Appeal 5: The New Appeal Part II: THE ARCHPRIEST CONTROVERSY AND LATE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY POLITICAL CULTURE 6: Libel, History and Polemic, or the Rights and Wrongs of Publicity in the Archpriest Controversy 7: Libel, Sin, and Virtue 8: The Archpriest Controversy and the Dynamics of the Post-Reformation Public Sphere 9: Jesuit Popularity in Practice and Theory 10: A Rebel's Charter 11: Politics and Religion Rightly Understood and Ordered 12: Temporal and Spiritual, Pope and Prince, the Right Way Up 13: Episcopacy and the Government of the Church 14: Both Catholic and English - the Enemies of the Society of Jesus and the Pursuit of Toleration 15: The Appellant Agitation and the Kingdom of France 16: Rival Understandings of Civil Peace, Toleration, and the Politics of Religious Identity 17: (Hostile) Reception and Response Epilogue Conclusion

About the Author :
Peter Lake did his undergraduate degree and PhD at Cambridge University and has taught subsequently at Bedford College, and then Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, in London. He spent a year as a visiting professor at Cornel before moving to Princeton in 1992 where he spent sixteen years. He moved to Vanderbilt University in 2008. While in London he is an habitual attender of seminars at the Institute of Historical Research and has been a grateful beneficiary of extended stints at both the Folger Shakespeare and Huntington Libraries. He was elected to be a fellow of the British Academy in 2018. Formerly a professor of history in the University of London, Michael Questier has moved, via a Leverhulme research chair in 2015-2017, to be a research professor at Vanderbilt University.

Review :
This is a major work written by two historians who are the acknowledged experts in this field, working at the height of their powers. a scholarly monograph on a neglected subject All hail to the archpriest will be of interest to many scholars of post-Reformation England, and of the Counter-Reformation more broadly. Written in the authors' typically punchy style, All Hail to the Archpriest should be required corrective reading for those who still believe the story of post-Reformation England can be told as if Catholics had disappeared from the scene, only to emerge whenever a handy scapegoat was required.