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On 24 June 1559, less than a year after the state-sponsored restoration of English Catholicism came to an abrupt end with the death of Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I's government passed 'An act for the uniformity of common prayer and divine service'. This new law required that 'all and every person...shall diligently and faithfully, having no lawful or reasonable excuse to be absent', be present at their parish church 'during the time of the Common prayer, Preachings or other service of God' - services which, if not strictly 'Protestant', were certainly no longer Catholic.1In the face of this religious settlement, English Catholics have long been depicted as both confused and divided; as early as 1600, the English Jesuit Robert Persons explained how the former clergy of Mary's reign descended into 'sharpe bickerings', whilst the laity, deprived of clear clerical leadership, drifted towards quiet conformity.2Persons lamented how 'all (excepting very few) went to [the Protestant] Churches, sermons, and Communions'.3In the Jesuit's opinion, it was mainly thanks to the 'practise, zeale and authority of priests comminge from the Seminaries beyond the seas' after 1574, and later his fellow Jesuit missionaries, that the issue of Catholic attendance at Protestant services 'hath byn cleared and the negative parte fully established'.4Without this injection of religious steroids from abroad, English Catholicism would have died a slow and unheroic death.
This decidedly Jesuitical interpretation of the origins of Elizabethan recusancy has exerted, and continues to exert, a profound influence over historians' understanding of the period from 1558 to 1574. In 1975, John Bossy labelled these years 'the death-throes or posthumous convulsions of a church', seeing conscientious, nonconformist Catholicism as the creation of continentally trained missionary priests from c. 1574 onwards.5Christopher Haigh criticized this 'fairy story' in 1981, instead suggesting that, thanks to the efforts of dedicated Marian clergymen, 'by the time the seminary mission and later the Jesuits had an impact upon England, there already existed the essential concept of a separated Catholic church'.6However valiant as the efforts of this 'small rump of recalcitrant priests' were, even Haigh admitted that their activities were highly localized and sporadic, and their beliefs 'curious and confused' until at least the early 1570s.7