AH Challenge: Largely Catholic Britain

You're challenge with a Pod after the death of Henry the 8th for Britain to return to Catholicism and stay that way till the present day.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
Mary and Philip are able to concieve a male heir. He continues the repressive policies of his Mother i.e. continuing the English Inquisition, etc. This might just do it. You'd even get an Anglo-Spanish kingdom out of it! Now that's one Mothra of a butterfly!
 
A Catholic Britain.

Wolfpaw, such a POD is indeed the easiest way to keep a largely Catholic Britain, especially if Mary herself lives a bit longer - or if Edward dies sooner.
However I took take umbrage at the reference to "oppressive policies";
recent scholarship shows that that is Elizabethan propaganda.
Without defending the execution of the Protestants, it is worth pointing out that unlike the Elizabethan persecutions - which were really oppressive, and designed to be so, the vast majority of the executions were in fact locally based; Mary's government actually tried to prevent them.
Elizabeth had more Catholics executed in London alone than the Roman Inquisition in the same period. Mary's pale into insignificance in comparison.
What made England Protestant was Elizabeth surviving 45 years so that by by the end of her reign, close enough to 2 generations had received sustained propaganda along the lines of "Elizabeth=England=Protestant".
Read Eamonn Duffy's "Stripping the altars" among other texts.
 
Actually there's more than a bit of a red herring on both sides as how can you fairly compare a reign of less than five years with a reign of over forty.
The people that Mary sent to their deaths died because they were in breach of the Heresy Laws that she'd revived and the people who died under Elizabeth come under a selection of different offences. Under Mary It ran into several hundred dead in less than five years. Mary was advised that it was turning people against her and the Catholic faith but by then it was too late.

Technically under Elizabeth it wasn't illegal to be a Roman Catholic however it was illegal not to attend the church as established by Parliament (for which you could be fined - catholic or puritan) and if you held public office you had to take the Oath of Supremacy which doesn't mention Catholicism but did force the swearer to renounce all foreign jursidictions which of course a devout Catholic couldn't.

Initially however Elizabeth was fairly tolerant - loyalty to her personally was more important - however as time drew on and she faced the threat of the Papal Bull excommunicating her, the growing succession problems presented by Mary Stuart and the numerous Catholic backed plots to free Mary and eventually the long war with Spain her government became more repressive and intolerant of religious diversity - it was also motivated by her council as increasing numbers of closet puritans like Walsingham gained an upper hand and the Queen's ear (although personally she had even less time for puritans with their radical theories).

Most of the Catholic martyrs in England and Wales under Elizabeth were clergy but the number is probably smaller or around the same as those protestants who died under Mary Tudor (if you include those who died as a result of the various plots).

The numbers rise of course if you include the number of people killed in Ireland during the various Irish rebellions of the late 16th Century but to be fair the focus was largely on rebellion against the crown and the religious motivation was a secondary consideration.
 
Black legend

Actually, Mcdnab while you are correct re the difficulty of comparing the two reigns, I just get irritated about the whole false dichotomy of "Bloody Mary" vs "tolerant" Elizabeth.
Leaving Ireland out, which I was; (religion really only became an issue when the English govt made it the test of loyalty), as I wrote earlier, Mary's govt, sent very few people to execution. 300 nationally,is plenty, but the vast majority of them, well over 90% were by the local authorities, under Henry VIII's laws, in response to local calls. They occurred despite Mary's government. And, despite what Foxe wrote, iof you read contemporary accounts, tehy were very popular.
Elizabeth's were the result of government policy - 500 in London alone, not counting the provinces. While there were a number of legal offences, that was because the laws had been froamed to make being Catholic treasonous. It is worth pointing out that every one of the English martyrs that I know of, explicitly stated their loyalty to Elizabeth on the scaffold!
There is plenty of black for both Protestant kettles and Catholic pots, but let's go beyod the Black Legend.
 
The numbers rise of course if you include the number of people killed in Ireland during the various Irish rebellions of the late 16th Century but to be fair the focus was largely on rebellion against the crown and the religious motivation was a secondary consideration.

That fact is not taken into consideration when speaking of other persecutions of the era. If you talk about the situation in the Netherlands and the Spanish Flanders, the spaniards were barbarian fanatics when the main offense that they saw in the dutch was the rebellion against the crown (even the Duke of Alva considered that if they were to burn in hell for heretics was their problem, but he could not tolerate the lack of loyalty to their king).
 
Her Brittanic and most Catholic Majesty?

Wolfpaw, such a POD is indeed the easiest way to keep a largely Catholic Britain, especially if Mary herself lives a bit longer - or if Edward dies sooner.
However I took take umbrage at the reference to "oppressive policies";
recent scholarship shows that that is Elizabethan propaganda.
Without defending the execution of the Protestants, it is worth pointing out that unlike the Elizabethan persecutions - which were really oppressive, and designed to be so, the vast majority of the executions were in fact locally based; Mary's government actually tried to prevent them.
Elizabeth had more Catholics executed in London alone than the Roman Inquisition in the same period. Mary's pale into insignificance in comparison.
What made England Protestant was Elizabeth surviving 45 years so that by by the end of her reign, close enough to 2 generations had received sustained propaganda along the lines of "Elizabeth=England=Protestant".
Read Eamonn Duffy's "Stripping the altars" among other texts.

Queen Elizabeth 1st had the philosophy of not making windows on mens souls i.e provided outward loyalty to the state was made then private beliefs didn't matter hence the Howards positions in high offices of the state including the Lord High Admiral at the time of the Armada.

However to answer the original question then Mary living longer with an heir and not adopting the polocies towards protestant that she did. Philip of Spain (not exectly known for moderation himself)is alledged to have warned her that they would make catholicism in Britain unpopular and he was vindicated. There were fears of a return to the days of "Bloody Mary" and an association with foreign powers. However this lies in the past apart from among the devotees of the Reverend Ian Paisley

There is however a debate over the meaning of catholicism in that the Church of England regards itself as following the apolistic succession and many Anglicans regards themselves as following the cathloic tradition with the term Roman Catholicism being applied to people who regard the Pope as head of the Church. The title Defender of the Faith was conferred on Henry for an essay attacking Martin Luther

A possible scenario would be for the Pope to have granted Henry's annulment and Britain may well have stayed in the fold. Would the industrial revolution have taken place in Britain given the Churches attitude towards commerce? Would an entrepenurial merchant class have arisen in Britain or would the industrial revolution have taken place in Northern Europe?
 
You make some intersting points in there - many Elizabethan and early Stuart Anglicans would struggle to recognise the Anglican Church today. In many communities they would regard it as far to "low" and verging on puritan. Traditional "high" Anglicans are closer to the early English church as established primarily by Elizabeth, James I and Charles II which as you say was to many people Catholicism without the Pope, without the veneration of the virgin and with certain key protestant views on transubstansiation.
The general anti-catholicism which became very endemic amongst British people through the intervening centuries has many sources but actual has little to do with religion. Roman Catholicism became linked however unfairly with foreign absolutism (anathema to the English Parliamentarians of the 17th C), terrorism (the Gunpowder plot probably did them as much damage as the view of Mary Tudor's burning had done 60 years earlier), intolerance etc. The situation was even worse in Scotland where the presbytarian church was Calvinist in nature and was even further removed from the Catholic tradition that still had echos within the English church in fact the prejudice in Scotland had far more to do with religious belief than in the rest of Britain. The overriding problem of course was that Catholics could never answer in the view of Protestants the eternal question whose subject were they? - where they loyal to the British Crown or to a foreign Prince (the Pope) and in that the endemic xenophobia (for which the English were known for by the 16th century) played a big part.
That suspicion of Roman Catholicism lasted far longer than the laws that excluded them from roles in Government and again came to the front during the mass Irish immigration into the UK mainland during the 19th Century. Also British views of Catholicism have in the last century have largely been informed by the Irish experience (i am not so much talking about terrorism here) where until the last decades or so the church had become so entwinned with government and education within the Republic a complete contrast to the role of the church in the UK and in other nominally catholic countries like France or Spain.
I am not convinced by arguements that had Mary I produced a child and lived longer or had the Pope granted Henry's annulment that the reformation wouldn't have reached British shores (Scotland's reformation happened without Royal sanction for example). Britain was remote from Rome and there was already a significant strand of anti clericalism and resentment.
If it doesn't happen then it is such a significant shift that you've wiped out a great deal - no growth in Parliamentary power and influence ( The Tudors relied heavily on Parliament to legalise their religious changes which in turn increased the role and influence of the commons), reduction in the wealth and power of the non-aristocratic tudor gentry (the men who dominated the shires for the crown and who grew rich from confiscated church land - almost all modern english aristocrats descend from these families along with most of England's most influential politicians of the intervening centuries), no union of the crowns at least in the immediate future and therefore more wars between the two countries, completely different issue with regard England's control of Ireland, no war with Spain to dominate the later half of the 16th century, strong possibility of England's colonial expansion stalling or being delayed, no export of the English view of Parliamentary democracy meaning significant changes in styles of government around the world - I could go on.

There is however a debate over the meaning of catholicism in that the Church of England regards itself as following the apolistic succession and many Anglicans regards themselves as following the cathloic tradition with the term Roman Catholicism being applied to people who regard the Pope as head of the Church. The title Defender of the Faith was conferred on Henry for an essay attacking Martin Luther

A possible scenario would be for the Pope to have granted Henry's annulment and Britain may well have stayed in the fold. Would the industrial revolution have taken place in Britain given the Churches attitude towards commerce? Would an entrepenurial merchant class have arisen in Britain or would the industrial revolution have taken place in Northern Europe?
 
[SIZE=2 said:
. The situation was even worse in Scotland where the presbytarian church was Calvinist in nature and was even further removed from the Catholic tradition that still had echos within the English church in fact the prejudice in Scotland had far more to do with religious belief than in the rest of Britain. The overriding problem of course was that Catholics could never answer in the view of Protestants the eternal question whose subject were they? - where they loyal to the British Crown or to a foreign Prince (the Pope) and in that the endemic xenophobia (for which the English were known for by the 16th century) played a big part.[/SIZE]
That suspicion of Roman Catholicism lasted far longer than the laws that excluded them from roles in Government and again came to the front during the mass Irish immigration into the UK mainland during the 19th Century. Also British views of Catholicism have in the last century have largely been informed by the Irish experience (i am not so much talking about terrorism here) where until the last decades or so the church had become so entwinned with government and education within the Republic a complete contrast to the role of the church in the UK and in other nominally catholic countries like France or Spain.
I am not convinced by arguements that had Mary I produced a child and lived longer or had the Pope granted Henry's annulment that the reformation wouldn't have reached British shores (Scotland's reformation happened without Royal sanction for example). Britain was remote from Rome and there was already a significant strand of anti clericalism and resentment.
If it doesn't happen then it is such a significant shift that you've wiped out a great deal - no growth in Parliamentary power and influence ( The Tudors relied heavily on Parliament to legalise their religious changes which in turn increased the role and influence of the commons), reduction in the wealth and power of the non-aristocratic tudor gentry (the men who dominated the shires for the crown and who grew rich from confiscated church land - almost all modern english aristocrats descend from these families along with most of England's most influential politicians of the intervening centuries), no union of the crowns at least in the immediate future and therefore more wars between the two countries, completely different issue with regard England's control of Ireland, no war with Spain to dominate the later half of the 16th century, strong possibility of England's colonial expansion stalling or being delayed, no export of the English view of Parliamentary democracy meaning significant changes in styles of government around the world - I could go on.

The initial question dealt with the antecedent rather than the consequent as did my answer. Scotland and Ireland present a different dimension as Scotland was and is a more inherently protestant nation than England and union may not have occured. Mary Queen of Scots would have been given asylum in England and would not have been the focus of "popish plots" would I catholic England have tried to restore her to the throne? Probably not given the history of English intervention culminating in Bannockburn

Ireland is even more complicated. No union between Scotland and England means no Scottish tranplants in Ulster. Also as there is an element of Orwell's transferred nationalism in Irish Catholicism the catholic church would not have its up till recent hold on Ireland and it may have taken an anti clerical form as in countries like Italy, France and Mexico in two of which catholicism was associated with an occupying power i.e the Hapsburgs. However the bulk of the leaders of the 1798 rebellion were protestant i.e Tone and Daniell O Connel was initially a freemason it is concievable that freemasonry may have become associated with Irish Nationalism. It played a disproportinate role in France and Italy. There would be no Orange order Freemasonry is more moderate
 
Top