Robert Parsons and English Catholicism, 1580-1610

Nearly four hundred years after his death, Robert Parsons remains one of the most enigmatic figures of late-Tudor England. The primary reason for this nagging uncertainty is that Parsons was on the wrong side of history and that those who opposed him ultimately came to assess his place in history. It was the English Protestants who portrayed him as the archetypal Jesuit: scheming, dishonest, subversive, and ultimately un-English. This book significantly challenges what has come to be the prevailing view of Parsons by surveying and analyzing Parsons's single-minded ideas and plans for the restoration of Catholic rule in England. Ultimately, Parsons's life and political career were products of the sixteenth century. Raised in the shadow of Tridentine Catholicism, political and religious compromise simply were not possible for him. This political biography, then, explains Parsons in terms of his single-minded devotion to the restoration of Catholicism in England. Parsons's place in history, like that of other failed activists, does not rest entirely upon his successes or failures. Instead, his legacy can be measured by the importance of his ideas in the context of late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England. Those ideas, and the machinations they inspired, were ultimately an integral part of the ongoing struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism in religion and between constitutionalism and absolutism in politics.