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A Brief Discours Contayning Certayne Reasons Why Catholiques Refuse to Goe to Church, by ‘a learned and vertuous man’ (i.e. Robert Persons). Printed in Douai (i.e. East Ham) by John Lyon (a pseudonym), 1580.

Lower Library, F.32.20

Reasons of Refusal (as its title is often shortened) is a communication from underground, published under a false name and false imprint. Two decades into Queen Elizabeth I’s resumed Protestant reformation, her government’s commissioners had completed their strategic work to efface the distinctive remnants of the old religion from the churches that all subjects had to attend. Catholicism ‘had to operate outside the parish’, as Alan Dures and the Caian Francis Young observe (English Catholicism 1558–1642, 2022). The Society of Jesus now assumed the leading role in the creation of a new structure, with a first mission itself led by this book’s author, the priest Robert Persons (or Parsons, 1546–1610).

Persons had travelled from Rome to his native England in June 1580; another Jesuit priest, Edmund Campion, and the lay brother Ralph Emerson arrived a week later by a different route. The risks were considerable. The Jesuits followed a hundred secular missionary priests from English seminaries at Douai, Rheims, and Rome, two of whom had recently been executed. The government treated Catholics with increased suspicion after the Northern Rebellion of 1569 and Pope Pius V’s belated bull in support, which claimed to depose Elizabeth and forbade obedience to her.

The month after their arrival Persons and Campion organized a meeting of clergy and laymen in Southwark, whose most important decision, reaffirming a 1562 decree of the Council of Trent, was that Catholics should illegally refuse to attend Protestant services: that they should practise what was coming to be called recusancy. Yet the Catholic clergy in England, where the missionaries joined the surviving priests ordained at home under Queen Mary I, was still small and disorganized. In this situation, the printed word offered ‘a powerful surrogate for … personal pastoral discipline’ (Alexandra Walsham, ‘ “Domme Preachers”?’, Past and Present 168, 2000).

Reasons of Refusal was the first production of a secret press that Persons set up in East Ham in October, after a period when he and Campion had separated to travel the country through a sheltering network of gentry houses. The misdirections of the book’s title page had been prepared with an exemption from a Trent decree against anonymous publications, granted ahead of the mission by Pius’s successor, Gregory XIII. In the text Persons presents nine urgent arguments against church attendance, notably the perils of ‘infection’ with false doctrine, ‘scandal’ – that is, causing another’s spiritual downfall – ‘schism, and loss of the benefits of Catholicism’ (Thomas M. McCoog, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England 1541–1588, 1996), as well as the dissembling and denial of one’s faith: denial, since Persons argues the government has made church attendance a ‘sign distinctive’ between Catholics and Protestants (stressed by Peter Marshall, Heretics and Believers, 2017).

Campion was arrested in July 1581, and executed on 1 December. Persons narrowly escaped to France after Campion’s arrest, but the mission survived: two more Jesuit priests had arrived in June. The Jesuits’ activity provoked the government to harsher repression, with a 1581 statute that multiplied fines for recusancy four hundredfold, and declared an ambiguous ‘reconciliation’ to Catholicism to be high treason, punishable by death. In ‘the entanglement of religion and politics that was the result of the English Reformation’ (James E. Kelly, ‘The Jesuit English Mission’, 2019), Persons’ ‘sign distinctive’ could also mark loyalty and treachery.