recusancy

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recusancy, the refusal to attend the services of the established Church of Ireland, was punishable by 12d. fines under 1560 legislation. ‘Recusant’ became an official synonym for Catholic.

At the start of Elizabeth's reign most clergy adapted the Anglican rites to suit themselves and their congregations. They ignored the ‘church papistry’ developing among the urban patriciate, who were having Catholic baptisms and masses at home and beginning in the 1570s to send their children to Irish colleges in Catholic Europe.

The Baltinglass crisis and the coincidental return of continental students as ordained priests proved the turning point. There was a widespread desertion from Protestant services by existing priests and parishioners in the Pale in the mid‐1580s. Similar developments took place in the Munster towns in the early 1590s.

The Dublin authorities were powerless to prevent the growing nonconformity. The tougher English legislation of 1581, though planned for the 1585–6 and 1613–15 parliaments, never reached the Irish statute book but did influence the treatment and fines meted out by prerogative courts. The court of Ecclesiastical High Commission (established 1564) was never effective because recusants bribed its officials.

After the Nine Years War Chichester embarked on the mandates campaign, now known to have been more wide‐ranging and of a longer duration than historians had hitherto surmised. Not only were hefty fines imposed and exacted, but the policy was having the desired effect of forcing the population to attend Protestant services. Chichester's second drive against recusancy in 1611–12, which this time extended to the countryside, culminated in the executions of Conor O'Devany and Patrick O'Loughlin.

Dublin aldermen, pressurized by the oath of supremacy, began to elect the Protestants among them as mayor. After 1615 the government deposed and fined recusant town officials in Munster and Leinster and imposed a governor upon Waterford as an example. Recusancy fines were extended to women, but were difficult to collect outside Dublin. Royal plans for a Spanish marriage followed by the Graces eased the pressure on Catholics until the lord justiceship of Richard Boyle and Adam Loftus in 1629.

Bibliography

Lennon, Colm , The Lords of Dublin in the Age of the Reformation (1989)
McCavitt, John , Recusant History (1991)

Hiram Morgan

recusancy. Refusal to submit to authority, and especially refusal to attend the services of the established C of E. Though used particularly of RC recusants, it was also applied to Protestant Separatists. Until the Pope excommunicated Elizabeth I in 1570, recusancy had been rare, since conservative religious elements had received no clear instruction about their attitude to the Establishment. It received a powerful impetus with the arrival of Jesuits and other priests from the Continent c.1580. Elizabethan and Jacobean statesmen regarded it as a dangerous problem because of its tenacious roots throughout the social structure of some regions, e.g. in the North of England. The small recusant minority preserved the continuity of RC practice in England. See also ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IN ENGLAND AND WALES AFTER THE REFORMATION.

Recusancy (Lat., recusare). Refusal to attend Church of England services as required by the 1559 Act of Uniformity. Nonconformists were therefore also recusants, but the term is more usually reserved for Roman Catholics. The offence of recusancy was abolished by the Catholic Relief Act of 1791.