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Toby Terrar, “Gentry Royalists or Independent Diggers? The Nature of the English and Maryland Catholic Community in the Civil War Period of the 1640s.” This article originally appeared in Science and Society (New York), vol. 57, no. 3 (Fall, 1993), pp. 313-348.

            Traditionally, the seventeenth-century Catholic community in England and Maryland has been depicted as gentry and royalist. Detailed studies of the various English counties and of Maryland in recent years have done much to fill in and revise the picture of seventeenth-century England and Maryland history. Evidence from these studies seems to undermine at least part of the traditional view about Catholics. This article will analyze the evidence about the nature of the Catholic community which has emerged from the county studies.

            The significance of such an exercise as this, aside from revising the picture of the Catholic community, is that it lends support to those who believe that the political independence of the English laboring people in general needs to be re-examined. Christopher Hill and Brian Manning, for example, maintain that the tenantry in the north and west of England, where the bulk of the Catholic population lived, were royalist because of deference to their landlords. It was the "masterless men" who formed the mainstay of parliamentary support.[1] However, independence seems to have been more characteristic of the Catholic tenantry than deference. In pursuit of their own needs, they often opposed not only their landlords, but both the crown and parliament.

            The class interpretation maintained by Hill and Manning is not questioned in this article. Rather, it is suggested that a more universal application of it may be needed. For many laboring people, including Catholics, the war was about liberation from their class enemies: both the royalist and parliamentary landlords and monopolists. The article has two parts. It first discusses what the county studies have to say about the class composition of the Catholic community. Then it will look at their political alignment during the war.

            Gentry or Laboring? As noted, the traditional view, as pictured by the nineteenth and early twentieth-century historians, using mainly printed source materials as evidence, was the Catholic community as gentry royalists. Many continue to hold this interpretation. Lawrence Stone is not untypical in writing, "For all intents and purposes seventeenth-century Catholicism was a quietest sect of aristocratic and upper-gentry families."[2] In this view Catholics generally identified with the court party during the Civil War. Francis Edwards, S.J. states, "Inevitably, the Catholics supported the king's cause, and drew enmity on themselves for that alone."[3] Christopher Hill comments, "The Catholics were solidly royalist in the Civil War."[4]

            In defense of the traditional view, it is true that in the south and east of England the Catholic gentry did have a significant influence within the community. Two-thirds of the Catholic clergy served in this area. The clergy were in large measure themselves the off-spring of gentry families. They earned 20£ per year as domestic chaplains and tutors in the gentry households. This was twice what most laboring Catholics with families earned.[5] There has been criticism of the gentry's monopolization of the clergy. Christopher Haigh is illustrative:

The Catholic gentry, the second group of heroes of the Persons' version of English Catholic history, arrogated to themselves an inappropriate share of the clerical resources of the post-Reformation mission. The gentlemen have been credited with ensuring "the survival of the faith" and so they did, but their faith, at the expense of everyone else's![6]

            Despite the influence of the gentry in the south and east, the great bulk of the Catholic population were laboring people, or diggers, as they sometimes called themselves, in the north and west of England.[7] This is the picture that one sees in the the diaries, commonplace books, and court, tax, census, and parish records that are emphasized in the county studies of Hugh Aveling, O.S.B., John Bossy, Anthony Fletcher, Christopher Haigh, J. A. Hilton, Keith Lindley, John Morrill, C. B. Phillips, David Underdown, and Anthony Williams.[8]

            The Catholics were only 5 or 10 percent, that is, 60,000 people by one conservative (convicted recusant only) estimate, out of a total mid-seventeenth-century English population of 5 million.[9] But of those who were Catholic, more than 80 percent made their living from their own manual labor. They were not the gentry who derived their income mainly from rent or capital investment. This was the case even for the convicted recusants, who were more likely to be gentry than the non-adjudicated recusants and church Catholics. Laboring Catholics were not generally prosecuted for non-attendance at Anglican services because they did not have enough wealth to make it worthwhile.[10] Hence there are no court records documenting the number of non-convicted recusants. Based on contemporary estimates, the actual Catholic population (not only the 60,000 recusants and their families) might have been as high as 500,000. This figure would mean most were too poor to prosecute or were church Catholics.[11]

            Typical of the community studies which reveal the class composition of the Catholic community is that of David Mosler. He finds the following occupational breakdown of convicted Catholic recusants in the Warwickshire sequestration and composition records of 1642:

Table 1:[12]

Occupations of Warwickshire Recusants

Occupation                   Number of                                Percentage of
                                                Catholics                                  Catholics

yeomen                                                37                                            11
husbandman                             51                                            15
artisan                                      62                                            18
laborer                                     68                                            19
widows                                                49                                            14
spinster                                     18                                            5
other                                  3                      1 
non-landlord (total)    288                                             83%

gentry ("overwhelmingly  57                       17 
               marginal")
knights                                4                      1
landlord (total)              61                                            17%

In J. A. Hilton's study covering the early part of the seventeenth century in the relatively densely Catholic northeast England, 13 percent of the convicted Catholic recusants in Durham were gentry; another 8 percent had no status listed. The rest were laboring people: 7 percent were copyholders and cottagers, such as day laborers, ploughhands, dairymaids, and apprentices in husbandry.[13] They paid rent to a landlord and farmed up to 25 acres.[14] The bulk of the recusants, some 56 percent, were yeomen, meaning among other things, they did field labor. They farmed their own land, which was generally less than 100 acres. They owned cows, horses, sheep, dwellings, and farm equipment worth up to £500 and averaged from £40 to £120 per year in income.[15] In the St. Mary's colony in Maryland, 90 percent of the Catholics made their living from manual labor. None were gentry by English standards.[16]

            A majority of the Catholics were engaged in agriculture, but there were also sizable numbers involved in occupations that were not directly farming. In Hilton's study, 16 percent worked as blacksmiths, butchers, laborers, mercers (cloth sellers), millers, miners, saddlers, sailors, tailors, tavern keepers, teamsters, and textile workers.[17] The recusant Catholic records for Warwickshire list non-agrarian trades such as blacksmith, laborer, innkeeper, drover, barber, saw-maker, flax dresser, weaver, thread maker, musisioner, yeomen, husbandmen, and saddler.[18] Catholic women, in addition to the above, engaged in dairying, semptrying, spinning, weaving, knitting, lacemaking, gardening, baking, and winnowing.

            In London as in the four other major towns and cities of Norwich, Bristol, Newcastle, and York, there were relatively large Catholic populations. Their occupations included apothecaries, goldsmiths, innkeepers, lace weavers, merchants, physicians, printers, schoolmasters, silk weavers, students pursuing their studies, tobacco pipe makers, and watermen.[19] One contemporary counted among the London Catholics 26 physicians, eight surgeons, and apothecaries (four in Fleet Street alone), and numerous barber surgeons.[20] There were also the unemployed Catholics: orphans, widows, spinsters, beggars, paupers, vagrants, wandering poor, blind, insane, and lame.

            Catholicism did best in the poor northern and western areas of the country, such as Lancashire, Yorkshire, the Northern High Peake district, and Monmouthshire on the South Wales border.[21] These were areas where Anglican parishes were large, offered little income for the established clergy, and consequently the needs of laboring people tended to be ignored.[22] Those Anglican clergy who did serve were sometimes non-residents or pluralists, meaning they held incomes and responsibilities for two or more parishes.[23] In Yorkshire, for example, there were 314 parishes, but there were 470 settled places of worship. In effect this meant there were more than 100 potential Yorkshire parishes without regular clergy.[24] In these areas, as one writer puts it, Catholicism had "an ability to attract and hold people as diverse as Cleveland jetters, fisherman, tailors, small gentry, farmers, ambitious new peers, and declining old ones. It had an extraordinary tenacity of attraction for the most marginal."[25]

            John Bossy documents the increase in the English Catholic recusant population by one-half, from 40,000 to 60,000, between 1603 and 1641.[26] A similar growth occurred in Ireland.[27] This was largely because of the dedication of the Catholic clergy. Two-thirds of the clergy lived in the south and east of England, served the gentry, and had no relation to the bulk of the Catholic community. But the other third exercised an itinerant and congregational ministry with fruitful results.[28] The people they ministered to in the northern wastes, far from churches and landlords, were condemned in the eighteenth century by the established church as "Cherokees."[29]

            Ralph Corby, S.J. (1598-1644) was one of their priests. A report discussed the esteem in which he was held, "He was so beloved of the poor people and so reverenced and esteemed for his pious labors and functions that he was commonly called by them apostle of the country."[30] Henry Foley, S.J. writes of Corby:

He pursued a moderate and poor style of living with the laboring class of men, and always visited the neighboring places on foot. In the neighborhood where he lived, were many Catholics of narrow means and obscure station. There he always thought it his duty to administer the sacraments and to visit among their villages and in their houses. He used to go without a cloak, in a very humble dress, so that he might have been taken for a servant, a farm-bailiff or letter-carrier. His reception too and manner of living was such as is usually to be met with among the laboring classes. He did not visit by appointment, but casually. And he was as much delighted with chance fare as with the greatest luxuries.[31]

            Another of their priests was Nicholas Postgate who served in Cleveland, which was in Yorkshire. He reported, "at this moment I have quite 600 penitents, and could have more if I wished; or rather, what I lack is not will, but help; I am working to the limits of my strength."[32]

            Perhaps the best preserved record of the correlation between the dedication of the clergy and the growth of Catholicism is from the St. Mary's colony in Maryland. For example, nearly all the Protestants who migrated to Maryland in 1638 became Catholics.[33] This may have been more than 100 people. They converted because the Catholic clergy were there to serve. There were no permanent Anglican or other clergy.

            The correlation between the dedication of the clergy and the growth of Catholicism seems likewise to be evident in Lancashire. While in some counties there was one Anglican priest per 400 people, in Lancashire's 56 Anglican parishes, it was sometimes closer to 1,700 people per priest.[34] Catholic priests willing to serve without pay or rather to serve a circuit in exchange for a meal with a family and a night's rest under their roof had unlimited congregations.[35] The Benedictine Ambrose Barlow (d. 1641) served 23 years at Leigh in Lancashire. From a neighborhood gentry family, he spent one week in circuit for every three he spent at home. On circuit he lived with the country farmers, wore country dress, walked, not rode, and ate the meatless diet of whitemeats such as cheese and eggs and the garden produce of the ordinary people.[36] The circuits of some clergy, such as that of the Jesuit, Thomas Gascoigne, extended for 200 miles and took a month to complete.[37] At his home base, Gascoigne lived in a cottage and chopped his own wood for fire.

            In some places the congregation of mainly tenants and yeomen owned their own chapel or held services in barns and farmyards.[38] A few congregations numbered up to 200 people. In and about Lancashire there were Catholic chapels, some of which are still in use, at Brindle, Chorley, Claughton, Gillmoss, Little Crosby, Liverpool Lytham, Manchester, Pleasington, Preston, Wigan, and Woolton.[39] There were villages that were entirely Catholic in population.[40] In some villages the school master or catechist was Catholic, either licensed or as in the case of Thomas Wood at Leake and Emmanuel Dawson at Lanmouth, unlicensed.[41] They taught the rudiments of religion as well as English and Latin. Women who had been educated in the seventeen English-language continental convents also served as school teachers and catechists in these villages.[42] In 1637 Mary Ward established a community of women at Newby, Ripon, which made its living as teachers.[43] In 1639 three English Franciscan nuns established a convent in York to teach school.[44]

            Royalist or Independent? The county studies raise doubts not only about the gentry nature of the Catholic community but about its royalism. If one looks only at the Catholic gentry, then the Catholic Royalist interpretation seems correct. About one-third of the officers in the king's northern army were Catholic.[45] Of the 500 royal officers killed during the war, about 200 were Catholic.[46] The Catholic gentry's pamphlet literature abounded with admonitions about being obedient to the established royal authority.[47]

            However, a majority of the Catholics were not gentry. The picture that emerges from the county studies about their political allegiance is that they took an independent position that best protected their economic and religious interests. Independency did not mean neutrality. Their independency like that of the Protestant Independents, including the levelers, sometimes put them in opposition to the royalist order and sometimes in opposition to the parliamentary order. The Catholics seem to have had the same reasons for their independency that were common among Protestant laboring people.

            Typical of the county studies is one by Keith Lindley. In a sampling of 1,500 convicted London Catholic recusants, he finds that 82 percent took an independent position during the war. That is, among other things, they did not join the royal side.[48] Laboring Catholics did serve in the royal forces, but they also were part of the parliamentary forces. Among these was John Hippon, a member of Cromwell's own regiment in the New Model Army.[49] Hippon referred to himself as a "Catholic and a Parliamentarian." Allen Prickett was a church papist who served first in the trained band for "part of St. Sepulchers parish and other parts adjacent to the city of London" and on March 8, 1642, he joined the parliamentary army.[50] Another was a weaver, who was mentioned by Richard Baxter in his account of the war. Baxter was a chaplain in the same unit with this follower of "Thomas More":

When I came to the Army, among Cromwell's soldiers, I found a new face of things, which I never dreamed of. I heard the plotting heads very hot upon that which intimated their intention to subvert church and state. Independency and anabaptistry were most prevalent; antinomianism and arminianism were equally distributed; and Thomas More's followers (a weaver of Wisbech and Lynn, of excellent parts) had made some shifts to join these two extremes together. . . I perceived that they took the king for a tyrant and an enemy and really intended absolutely to master him or ruin him; They said, what were the Lords of England but William the Conqueror's colonels, or the barons but his majors, or the knights but his captains?[51]

            In his history of the Lancashire County Catholic recusants, B. G. Blackwood documents that even among the gentry, a number served in the parliamentary army or in the parliamentary government as sequestration agents, assessors, collectors, or magistrates.[52] The Catholic Alexander Barlow, who was a sheriff for Lancashire in 1651 under the parliamentary government, had two uncles in the Benedictine religious order.[53] Peter Newman has studied what he calls the "legendary" hatred between the Puritans and Catholics manifested in the battles of the first Civil War, such as in Lancashire. He concludes that the hatred is a myth, invented by later self-interested parties to advance their own interests: "Anyone with the barest knowledge of the campaigns in the county must be at a loss to account for the legendary bloodiness of the Civil War in Lancashire."[54] The parliamentary forces took Lancashire in 1643 by default without a fight and what few battles that later occurred were not between Catholics and Protestants.

            Hugh Aveling and John Cliffe's examinations of Yorkshire Catholic recusant gentry make findings similar to those of Lancashire. As would be expected, 54 of the 110 Catholic gentry in Cliffe's study took the royal side. But 46 took an independent position and ten served in the parliamentary army or government.[55] This amounted to 11 percent of Catholic gentry being parliamentary for whom sufficient data could be found to determine loyalties.[56] Some Catholics such as Edward Saltmarshe of Saltmarshe in Yorkshire and Robert Brandling (1617-1669) of Leathley in York held positions of rank in the parliamentary army.[57]

            Based on the failure of the county studies to find a correlation between laboring Catholics and royalism, Keith Lindley has suggested a more nuanced explanation for the Catholics' political behavior has to include a class aspect:

When Catholic royalism is related to Catholics generally in the counties, it is apparent that the Royalists managed to raise only a minority of Catholic support for their body. . . Catholics were not a unified group in this period, but were divided by status and interest, and to some extent they appear to have reacted to the formation of the parties in the same way as their Protestant counterparts.[58]

            The county studies turn up a picture of the laboring Catholics as less enthusiastic for the crown than was traditionally believed. These studies also give some hints about the royal policies which account for why there was an absence of enthusiasm for the crown's attempts to overthrow Parliament. The royal policies that often found disfavor included taxation, enclosure, and military. The relation of each of these policies to the laboring Catholic community needs to be discussed, starting with taxation. During the 1630s when it ruled without Parliament, the crown imposed a "ship money" tax to fund itself. Many believed this tax and the rule of the crown without Parliament was illegal. The tax fell heavily on the laboring people, both rural and urban, and was resented, especially by the poor.[59] The playwright Philip Massinger (d. 1640), who bibliographer Joseph Gillow maintains was a Catholic, was popular with laboring people. He protested in his drama against the ship money tax.[60] In his play The King and the Subject (1636), which the crown called "insolent" and refused to license, Massinger put the following lines into the tyrannical king's mouth:

Money? We'le raise supplies what way we please,
And force you to subscribe to the blanks, in which
We'le mulct you as we shall think fit. The Caesars
In Rome were wise, acknowledging no laws
But what their swords did ratify.[61]

In her writings the English Benedictine nun Gertrude More (d. 1633) remarked on the "unjust taxes" inflicted on the people.[62] Not long after Parliament was restored in the 1640s, it abolished the "ship money" tax. Beginning in 1643 an assessment tax explicitly on landowners was established as one of Parliament's main sources of revenue.[63]

            That the Catholic tenantry were inclined toward the assessment tax and the parliamentary government which the tax supported can be seen in the tax cases unearthed in the county studies. The manor of Sowerby Thirsk in Yorkshire had enough Catholics that it had its own Catholic school.[64] The manor was owned by the Catholic Thomas Meynell, a "radical encloser" who had been censured by the quarter sessions court as a depopulator. Most of his tenants were probably Catholic.[65] These included the families of Lawrence Brown and Christopher Hawe, who stopped paying rent to him all together during the Civil War period. His other tenants turned over their rent to the parliamentary county committee instead of to Meynell. Meynell disliked this. His income was about £500 per year but was normally understated as £40 per year for tax purposes.[66] Meynell was unable to dodge his taxes when his tenants handed over their rent directly to the county committee. In 1647 he called his tenants "vulgar plebeians" because they "presumed to assess the true landlord. . . as thought he had been one of their coridons. . . The lord's rent at Sowerby was never assessed or questioned until these late new times. The bushhopper tenants were never so unkind or foolish to access their lords' rent."[67]

            The Catholic tenantry lost nothing by parliament's assessment tax. The tax money they turned over to the government was entitled to be deducted from their rent. Those who disliked the assessment were the landlords, both royalist and parliamentary. The tax was collected on a weekly and then a monthly basis. It equaled from 15 to 70 percent of the landlord's rent receipts.[68] It was only the New Model Army's threat of rebellion that kept Parliament from repealing the assessment after 1646.[69]

            Laboring people in general seem to have found the assessment an improvement over the "ship money" tax and were reluctant to see the crown overthrow Parliament on that account alone. In 1639 there was a mass refusal, which have included Catholics, to pay "ship money."[70] Derek Hirst describes the nation-wide opposition to "ship money" taxation that was manifested in the parliamentary elections of 1640:

The likelihood is that the open challenges to aspects of government policy which took place at many of the 1640 elections were not wholly manufactured by the gentry. Unlike ordinary parliamentary taxation, which left the bulk of the population untroubled, ship money hit the pockets of a very extensive social group, and was correspondingly resented.[71]

            The tithe was another part of the crown's tax system and was no more popular than ship money. It likewise helps account for the reluctance of many Catholic laboring people to see the crown overthrow Parliament in 1642. Because the established church was under the control of the crown, and after 1642 of the Presbyterians, both Catholic and Protestant Independents supported the establishment of a voluntary system for maintaining the clergy and the abolition of the tithe.[72] Thomas Clancy, S.J. suggests that after the crown's defeat in 1646, Catholics (meaning the gentry) "overwhelmingly" supported the Independent party within Parliament.[73] They wished to benefit from the religious toleration offered by the Independents, which included abolition of the tithe.[74] Such a tithe-abolition measure was enacted by the Barebones Parliament in November 1653. But the Presbyterian and Anglican minority went to Cromwell and got him to overturn the act.[75] However, Cromwell was not able to prevent the people on their own from substantially reducing the income of the established clergy.[76]

            St. Mary's in Maryland also provides an example of the relation between royal taxes and the reluctance of the Catholics to support the crown's war against Parliament. The traditional view of Maryland Catholic political loyalties during the war was based on the traditional view of English Catholic loyalties. As summarized in the following passage, the traditional view is that the Maryland Catholics were Royalists:

The polarization between Royalists and Roundheads, between those Anglicans and Catholics who supported the king and those Presbyterians and Independents who supported Parliament, spilled over into the American colonies.[77]

            The traditional view is true for the Maryland proprietor and his governor, but not for the bulk of the Maryland Catholics. They did not like the royal tax policy and even took up arms to resist both the tax and the crown's efforts to overthrow their parliamentary rights in Maryland. The Catholics' rebellion started in 1644 as soon as the crown attempted to impose a custom tax on Maryland to support the royal army. Part of the royal scheme involved the construction of custom houses and fortifications in Maryland, the establishment of a royalist armed force to replace the local militia, and the seizure of ships, goods, and debts belonging to the parliamentary London merchants.

            When the proprietor's governor first revealed the existence of the royal tax plan in the Fall of 1644, the Maryland assembly denounced it. A majority of the assembly representatives whose religion is known were Catholic.[78] Several months later the governor was overthrown in February 1645 and took refuge with the royalist governor of Virginia. His overthrow grew out of his attempts to cut off the right of Parliamentarians to trade in Maryland. Of the eleven Maryland citizens known by name who helped in the overthrow, four were Catholic, one was Protestant, and six were of unknown religion.[79] When the proprietor's governor was finally restored in December 1646, it was not with the aid of Catholics but with the protection of an army hired in Virginia and led by a Presbyterian, Richard Bennett. The army had an agreement with the proprietor that they would plunder the Maryland Catholics and Protestants if there was resistance.[80] During the two year overthrow period, the thirty known Catholic members and leaders of Maryland's seven militia districts planted their crops and made no effort at a restoration.[81] The Maryland assembly met as usual in February, March, and December 1646 with a majority of the delegates with known religion being Catholics.[82]

            It was predictable that the Catholics would reject royalist attempts to cut off trade with their main trading partners, London's parliamentary merchants. Maryland was in the midst of a 6 year economic depression due to declining European prices for tobacco. The proprietor, on the other hand, was willing to support the crown and the tax scheme because he (the proprietor) was to get half the tax for his own use. It should be noted that the tenantry who lived on manors, as was essentially the case in Maryland and was specifically the case at Sowerby Thirsk, had a tradition of independent government, which included resistance even to the crown. Manors were governed by assemblies of tenants, which as David Allen points out in his study of the Puritans at Rowley in Yorkshire, required wide participation, not deference in government.[83] Manors dominated in areas of open field production, such as the north and west of England, where Catholics had their greatest strength.

            Besides taxation, there was a second royal policy one finds in the county studies that hints at why laboring Catholics were unenthusiastic for the crown to overthrow Parliament. This policy involved royal monopolies, enclosure, and depopulation. The Stuarts had often converted corporation patents and the grant of monopoly rights on royal land from being effective governmental regulative devices into mere money-raising expedients. This was because the Stuarts sought to rule and spend money without the consent of Parliament.[84] The dislike of patents resulted when they were given, as one contemporary put it, for "a private and disordered engrossing, for the enhancing of prices, for a private purpose, to a public prejudice."[85] The crown granted patents to get loans and revenue, and often ignored the abuses caused by monopolies. The following sums up the pervasive nature of seventeenth-century monopolism:

A typical English family lived in a house built with monopoly bricks, heated by monopoly coal. Their clothes were held up by monopoly belts, monopoly buttons, and mxonopoly pins. They ate monopoly butter, monopoly currents, monopoly herrings, monopoly salmon, and monopoly lobsters.[86]

            Illustrative of where laboring Catholics were hurt by the Stuart patent abuses involved the grant of a monopoly on crown land in Gloucestershire's Forest of Dean to two Catholic magnates, John Wintour and Basil Brooks.[87] These leases were in Lydney and 28 other parishes as well as in several dozen manors. "Forest" did not mean a wooded area, but an area under the crown's ownership and under forest law, rather than common law. Forest law gave tenants fewer legal remedies than common law.[88] Wintour's leases covered some 18,000 acres of arable land, timber, iron mills, and coal mines.[89] In the years prior to the war he had confiscated much of the land from the tenants and turned it into pasture on which to raise sheep. In these areas there was more profit for the landlord in wool production than in the income that could be gained by a tenant's production of grain crops.[90] Because there was less land to cultivate, there was more demand for it. Wintour thus was able to raise the rents.[91] The tenantry's complaint against enclosures was part of the Grand Remonstrance to Parliament in 1641.[92] It was denounced in the plays of the alleged-Catholic, Philip Massinger.[93] According to R. C. Richardson, "the central agrarian issue in the English Revolution was whether the landlords or the small farmers should control and develop the wastes."[94]

            More profits for landlords like Wintour and Brooke because of enclosures meant the loss of livelihood for their tenants. The revenues from these leases was so great that Wintour acted as a financier for the crown during the 1630s when the king ruled without Parliament.[95] Wintour's and Brooke's displaced tenants used the war as an opportunity to stage a successful uprising against him and his royal patents. They tore down some 17 miles of enclosures standing 4½ feet high worth £1,000.[96] They burned structures used for coal mining.[97] At one point 3,000 people assembled including 8 score Welshmen and staged a mock funeral for Wintour. Armed with guns and pikes they carried his effigy accompanied by two drums, two colors, and a fife. Among the leaders was a cobbler, a glover, and a husbandman.[98] They claimed that since 800 A.D. they had held their land in common for their hogs and cattle to graze upon.[99]

            There is no record of how many of Wintour's and Brooke's tenants were Catholics. But several factors point toward a significant number. The west was an area of relatively high Catholic concentration. Catholics, especially recusant Catholics as opposed to church Catholics, tended to rent from the Catholic magnates. This was because the magnates were influential in local politics and prevented recusancy prosecutions or they sometimes paid the fines for their tenantry.[100] B. G. Blackwood documents that in the 1660s, one Catholic landlord had 68 percent, that is 68 of his 99 leases, with Catholics; and another had 85 percent of his leases with Catholics.[101] Both Wintour and Brooke subsidized the Catholic clergy and this probably included clergy in the Forest of Dean.

            The leveling of enclosures at Dean was not an isolated incident, but a normal pattern in western England.[102] Catholics were concentrated in this area and its seems reasonable to assume they were among the levelers against the crown's patent holders. A scholar remarks on the wide-spread nature of the leveling in the west:

As soon as the members of England's elite found themselves preoccupied with the political crisis that led to Civil War, the inhabitants of forests and fens took advantage of the times to riot once again and destroy the works of enclosers and drainers. In the years between 1642 and 1649 riots erupted in all those western forests which had been the scenes of the riots between 1626 and 1632.[103]

            Catholic tenants displaced by the Stuarts' monopolies and enclosures, like Protestants, were favorable to the parliamentary measures in the early 1640s which brought some relief and would have resisted Parliament's overthrow. Parliament's measures included the abolition of many royal monopolies and patents and the elimination of the Star Chamber, which had been used by the crown to control the county justice of the peace network and the enclosure process. Parliament also terminated the House of Lords in 1647, which was a landlord institution, and it granted royal land in some cases to the landless.[104]

            The extent pamphlet literature giving the views of laboring Catholics about enclosures and royal monopolies is not as abundant as that of the Protestant levelers, but there is enough to get an idea of what at least some were thinking. At the top of the list of Catholic pamphleteers who addressed the issue was the secular priest, Thomas White. With some 40 titles to his credit, White did well in terms of being published and reprinted. This was evidently because he articulated what many people believed and patronized. According to John Bossy, White was the intellectual leader of the 450 secular clergy in England during the period.[105] That he was representative of the thinking of laboring people was testified to at the time by the Royalist, Robert Pugh. Pugh complained that White took the side of the "meanest of the commons, against the just rights of the king, the nobility, and a great part of the gentry."[106] Similarly Roger Coke was upset because White was a tool of those with "plough-holding" hands.[107]

            White voiced the common anti-monopoly views of the period, what Derek Hirst calls the "commonwealth philosophy."[108] God wanted each member of society, according to this philosophy, to help each other. As White put it, "God and nature have so managed humanity, that none have as much as they desire, but regularly abound in one kind of goods, and want some others which their neighbor has. Hence they mutually assist society to be accommodated with such necessities, as they cannot have but by communication one with another."[109] Royal monopolists like John Wintour were "caterpillars of the commonwealth." They violated God's plan by living off the work of others rather than by doing their share of the work. White commented about "private" wealth making:

When I see the same person work for a commonwealth, in a free way doing it good, and again for a private person, I see a vast distance between his pretended ends. There is an eminent generosity in one over the other. Whence, I believe it comes that heroes and heroical virtues are chiefly taken in respect of doing good to the whole society.

When I see it thought that good is the same, I find it an intricate labyrinth of equivocation wherein we endless err. To cry the common good is a mere deceit and flattery of words unless we can show that the common good is as great to us as we make it sound.[110]

Laboring Catholics were harmed as much as by royal monopolists as their Protestant counterparts. They believed in the same anti-monopoly ideology. Derek Hirst remarks on the ubiquity of the "commonweal" beliefs:

Dearth caused both rich and poor to turn on profiteering middle men, the `caterpillars of the commonweal': the magistrates through quarter sessions and the enforcement of the marketing regulations, the commons by less peaceful means. There was a common espousal of a philosophy of an ordered, inter-dependent commonwealth. While on the one hand this was indeed frequently a pious cover for unrestrained capitalistic enterprise, there seems to have been less hypocrisy from the other side, for there was little direct challenge to the ideal of the commonweal from the poor.[111]

            Instead of seeking to overthrow Parliament, Catholics inclined to commonwealth ideas were inclined to overthrow the royal monopolists.[112] J. P. Cooper points out that in the commonwealth perspective, it was "the commonly held view that republics were more beneficial for trade than monarchies."[113] Thomas Violet in 1660 wrote that the "common sort of people" do better under a commonwealth than "the nobility and gentry." This idea "has for twenty years been the oil that fed the flame of rebellion in London."[114]

            Besides taxation, monopolies, and enclosures, there was one other royal policy that helps account for why laboring Catholics were unenthusiastic for the royal side. This involved the crown's drafting and billeting of troops for the Northern War beginning in 1639.[115] Laboring people, especially the Catholics who lived in the North, were targets of the troop levies and they resented it. The wide-spread refusal to fight among the crown's conscript rank-and-file Catholic troops, which Charles I marched to the Scottish borders, brought him to quick defeat.[116] Edward Varney commented in May 1639, "I dearsay there was never so unwilling an army brought to fight."[117] The laboring Catholics had nothing to gain in 1639 by having Scotland reduced to an English colony or by having a system of bishops imposed on the Scottish church.[118]

            During the first Civil War the Catholic conscripts in the royal army often proved equally unwilling to fight. The Earl of Derby was a Lancashire Catholic and many of his troops were Catholic. At Marston Moor they threw down their arms crying that they were pressed men and did not wish to fight.[119] In November 1643 royalist Catholic soldiers engaged in the siege of Wardour Castle mutinied because they had not been paid. Another royal army had to be sent to put down the mutiny. Three Catholic ringleaders of the mutiny were executed by order of the Catholic commander.

            Contrary Considerations. The argument in this article is that the county studies provide evidence that raises the possibility of revising the traditional view of seventeenth-century English and Maryland Catholicism. Most Catholics of the period were laboring people, and growing out of this, most had economic reasons for not taking the royal side. However, several arguments against revising the traditional interpretation need to be considered. One argument is that mentioned at the beginning of this article. It centers on the concept of deference. Those who stress deference include Brian Manning, Christopher Hill, and David Underdown.[120] Even though the royalist overthrow of Parliament was not in their tax, enclosure, monopoly, or military interest, the laboring Catholics may still have had economic reasons for supporting the crown: their landlords were often royalists. The landlords' refusal to renew a lease or provide a loan or take other punitive measures, including conscripting them into the royal services, may have neutralized or outweighed for many of the Catholic tenantry any tendency toward independency. There were economic reasons to be independent, but there were also economic reasons for being deferential to royalist landlords.

            While some scholars emphasize deference, others, including Anne Hughes and George Harrison, have taken a contrary position.[121] Harrison, for example, finds that the recruitment to both the royal and parliamentary armies in Wiltshire depended on proximity to royal or parliamentary garrisons.[122] The political persuasion of the landlord was not a controlling factor. Nor were landlords able to prevent great numbers of desertions from both armies. After 1644 the clubmen were a significant force in Wiltshire, as they were elsewhere. Some of the clubmen were royalist landlords, but they were unable to persuade tenantry clubmen to fight for the Royalists. The best they could do was to prevent both royalist and parliamentary garrisons from plundering.

            There was no doubt some deference among the tenantry to their royalist Catholic landlords. But one of the features of the period, as depicted in the county studies, was how independent the tenantry were of their landlords. Copyholders and tenants-at-will refused to pay rent or paid less than was customary. They ploughed up the landlord's pastures, put in improper crops, and neglected normal manuring and repairs. Christopher Clay comments, "Tenants threw up their farms, pressed for reductions in rent, ignored husbandry covenants, and encroached on their landlord's rights in other ways."[123] J. P. Cooper documents the "irrecoverable rent arrears piling up."[124] David Underdown quotes as not unusual the complaint by a landlord at seeing the "massive arrears" in rents being run up:

Now men are are lawless, trees and hedges are carried away without controlment; tenants use their landlord how they list for their rents, taking this to be a time of liberty.[125]

Most large landowners according to one study were forced to sell land because of lack of rental income in order to pay their debts and taxes.[126] Many were bankrupted and in counties such as Lancashire that had many Catholics, about half the gentry families disappeared permanently as landlords.[127]

            The failure to pay rent hints at a lack of deference concerning the most important feature of the landlord-tenant relation. The lack of deference is even clearer in the widespread plundering which the tenantry conducted against landlords during the period. Thousands of gentry houses, woods, and parks were leveled by the tenantry as well as by the parliamentary and royal armies and at least 200 houses "of major importance" were reduced to ruins.[128] This looting was directed at both the royalist and parliamentary, Catholic and Protestant gentry.

            The Catholic tenantry seems to have been no less deferential than the Protestants. Illustrative were the troubles which Cecil Calvert and his Arundell in-laws had with their tenants. Calvert and the Arundells were Catholics and lived in southwest Wiltshire. Some if not all of Arundell's tenants were Catholic.[129] The records are silent about the religious denomination of Calvert's tenants, but as noted earlier, it was common for a Catholic landlord to have Catholic tenants.[130]

            Both Arundell and Calvert identified with the crown and were in large measure leveled during the war. Their tenants took part in the leveling. The tenantry took the war as an opportunity to settle economic grievances. The leveling in May 1643 of Wardour castle, which was the Arundell's residence, was precipitated by the siege there of Edward Hungerford, Edmund Ludlow, and their parliamentary troops. The Catholic tenants and neighbors took a hand when it came to confiscating from the castle and its surrounding lands some £100,000 worth of cattle, farm animals, tools, furniture, cartloads of fish from ponds that were drained dry, and oak and elms worth £5 per tree that were felled and sold at 4d per tree.[131] Likewise, Cecil Calvert's tenants turned the Civil War into a rebellion against him.[132] After he was sequestered in November 1645 by the parliamentary Wiltshire County committee, Calvert's tenants questioned and refused his right to hold a manor court, impose the homager's oath, and receive the economic benefits that went along with such rights.

            At St. Mary's in Maryland, as in England, the Catholic tenantry turned the war into an opportunity to level their landlords. It was mentioned that in 1645 the Maryland Catholics helped overthrow the proprietor's governor because of his royalist tax scheme. At the same time the tenantry also leveled Maryland's few landlords.[133] Indentured servants and debtors took articles of indenture, account books, and bills and notes from their masters' houses and destroyed them. Cattle were taken from the landlords' herds and the servants set up farming as squatters on the land they had earlier farmed for their landlords.

            One Catholic landlord in England summed up what must have been the sentiments of many in his class, when he said that the war had made the magnates slaves of their servants. John Bossy discusses the predicament of this landlord.

There were obvious dangers in sending away discontented servants at a time of national tension. One Lancashire servant "was required to go, as did his master and mistress, to hear a Jesuit preach. He did not go." He was presumably dismissed as a consequence. Naturally enough he turned informer. "As these times go," one lord was told by his son in similar circumstances, "all servants are masters, and we their slaves."[134]

            That deference was not at a high point among the laboring Catholics during the period can also be seen in their pamphlet literature. In the discussion of Catholic opposition to enclosure and monopoly, it was noted that Thomas White was one of the most widely-published Catholics of the period and that he took the side of the laboring people. One of the themes in his pamphlets was that deference to the established order in church and state was not God's will. The Protestant antinomian Thomas Collier wrote in 1646 that "believers are a law unto themselves."[135] White taught in like manner, "It is a fallacious principle, though maintained by many, that obedience is one of the most eminent virtues and that it is the greatest sacrifice we can offer to God, to renounce our own wills, because our will is the chiefest good we have."[136]

            Laboring Catholics were not deferential to the crown or parliament concerning their religion. It should not be surprising that they were not deferential toward their landlords. To the claim made by some landlords that the landlord-tenant relation was God-ordained, unchangeable, and not subject to contractual rights by the tenantry, White voiced the belief of the laborer, "None think a husbandman, who is hired to till or fence a piece of ground, obeys the hirer more than he that sells a piece of cloth obeys the buyer, because he takes his money; but they are said to contract and perform their part of the bargain."[137] White praised those who stood up to landlords, as he put it, "seeing their labors disposed on to people, of whom they have opinion that they are idle, vicious and unworthy, therefore desire freedom from such a yoke and become masters of their own goods and labors."[138] He pointed out:

What are people better than a herd of sheep or oxen, if they be owned, like them, by masters? What difference is there between their masters selling them to the butcher, and obliging them to venture their lives and livelihoods for his private interest?[139]

            Besides deference to the coercive economic measures of their landlords, there is a second argument that can be made against revising the traditional view of Catholics as Royalists. There were points during the war when it made economic sense from the perspective of labor to side with the crown against Parliament. The crown was sometimes seen by laboring people as an asset. The existence and aggression of the crown forced the gentry in Parliament to seek the aid of and make concessions to the working people, especially those in the army, in order to gain their support against the threats of the crown. Some of the concessions that were won by laboring people from Parliament and that can be attributed at least in part to their playing the crown off against the Parliament included toleration of opinion, expanding voting rights, and elimination of taxes that hurt the poor, not the least of which was the excise.[140]

            Because it eliminated some of their leverage against the gentry, opposition to the king's execution came especially from the levelers and artisans, including weavers, painters, and journeymen in the city companies.[141] The strategy of the Catholics in playing the crown off against Parliament can be seen when they joined the Independents in 1647 in winning increased religious toleration against the wishes of the Presbyterian-dominated Parliament. The effectiveness of their tactics was reflected in the animosity shown by the Presbyterian gentry who baited Cromwell and the Independents for their neglect to enforce the anti-Catholic laws:

Is not this like the practice of Garnet the Jesuit who did lay his commands on the papists to obey their king and keep themselves quiet, and all in order that the plot might not be suspected? If Cromwell follows Garnet's steps, I would have him take heed of Garnet's end.[142]

Cromwell took pride in stating that citizens of all creeds enjoyed liberty of conscience under his rule, provided they did not use religion as a cloak for rebellion.[143]

            The Maryland Catholics also played the crown off against Parliament, when it suited their needs. The London merchants during the period used Parliament to enact legislation in 1642, 1650, and 1651 giving them a monopoly on Maryland's trade. The Catholics refused to acknowledge the authority of Parliament to govern its trade, and continued to trade with the royalist merchants in Bristol and Holland, as well as with the London merchants. This drove up the price of tobacco to the advantage of the Maryland planters and it reduced the price of imports.[144]

            The evidence seems to be that the Catholics at significant points were neither parliamentarians or Royalists. They took an independent position, which sometimes pitted them against one side or the other. Because the Catholics may have found it in their interest to oppose the abolition of the crown or to maintain their trade with the Bristol Royalists did not make them any more Royalists than the levelers who for similar reasons opposed the abolition of the monarchy.

            Conclusion. To sum up, the article has suggested that the county studies undermine the traditional view that the English and Maryland Catholics were gentry Royalists during the English Civil War period. They were mainly laboring people and the evidence seems to be that many were independent in politics. They resembled the Protestant Independents.

            Catholics like those at Sowerby Thirsk, Wardour Castle, and St. Mary's in Maryland helped contribute to the advances made by laboring people during the period. These included enforcement of anti-monopoly, pension, and unemployment measures. J. A. Chambers writes about the new vigor in antimonopoly regulations during the period:

The middle years of the seventeenth century saw new vigor in the enforcement of the statutes. During the Interregnum, and at least until the later 1680s, active prosecution of offenses by middlemen continued.[145]

            Similarly, there were gains during the period for laboring people in pension and unemployment measures. Mobilized and demobilized parliamentary and royal troops, including Catholics, were especially militant in pressing for such measures and sometimes took the law into their own hands.[146] In 1647 many gentry in Parliament proposed to disband the New Model Army without providing for the disabled, the families of those killed, and the arrears of pay. In response the rank and file established a military command system independent from that of their officers, and they set up a press and published newsletters and pamphlets to make their case known to the English people. Then they successfully marched on Parliament in order to aid those in Parliament who had been defending their economic rights there.[147]

            Joan Thirsk has remarked that concern for full employment for laboring people quite naturally distinguished their thinking from most gentry.[148] To solve the unemployment problem, a wide range of measures were initiated or continued during the war by England's 10,000 parish governments. F. G. Emmison writes, "It was the duty of everyone to work. It was equally the responsibility of the parish to help them get work."[149] Parish measures provided for full employment and job training through the spinning and weaving of wool, fisheries, the establishment of municipal brewhouses, the draining of fens, clearing of wasteland, working up of flax, and the distribution of confiscated royal estates to the landless for farming.[150] In many parts of the country the relief system gave laboring people the security of a job and of knowing that in their senior years they would not have to worry about necessities.[151] In London Parliament established the London Corporation of the Poor in 1647 and made it a model for the country.[152] Parliament also helped alleviate unemployment by establishing and subsidizing manufacturing and agricultural projects and by setting high import duties that made the import of foreign manufactured goods into England difficult.[153] Illustrative was the House of Commons 1642 Book of Rates, which was protectionist.[154]

            Margo Todd and A. L. Morton conclude from their studies that the laboring people won advances during the war on a scale unmatched in previous periods.[155] Morton's remarks about the levelers might also in part be said of the Catholics who opposed monopolies, enclosures, and inequitable taxation, and who helped achieve pension and unemployment measures:

A party that held the center of the stage for three of the most crucial years in our nation's history, voiced the aspiration of the unprivileged masses, and was able to express with such force ideas that have been behind every great social advance since their time, cannot be regarded as wholly a failure or deserve to be wholly forgotten.[156]

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