"An investigation into the politics of the Jesuits in Elizabethan England"

Abstract

Only comparatively recently has it been recognised that the Jesuits in Elizabethan England were not the political agents of their superiors abroad that past historians have supposed them to be. Yet many current writers still mistakenly assume that the Jesuits may be lumped together with the political exiles and studied as a group. This thesis is an attempt, through the study of individual missionaries, to demonstrate that the Jesuits in England obeyed the prohibition contained in their instructions upon meddling in matters of state, and to emphasise that they must be treated as a distinctive group. It shows that the Jesuit missionaries took a quite different stance to their continental brethren in attitudes to religious toleration and suggests that circumstances in England would have worked against Jesuit involvement in politics even if their instructions had not forbade it.