The Northern Rebellion, excommunication and the missionary threat
A Decade of Catholic Threat
The 1559 religious settlement had survived its first ten years, but in 1568 the situation changed sharply. Mary, Queen of Scots, fled into England after losing a Scottish civil war. As a Catholic with a strong claim to the English throne, she became an instant focus for any Catholic discontented with Elizabeth. Within twelve months, the country saw its largest rebellion of the reign; within fifteen months, the Pope declared Elizabeth no longer queen; within a decade, hundreds of trained Catholic missionaries were entering England in secret. This lesson follows that chain of events.
The Northern Rebellion, November 1569
The Northern Rebellion was led by two great northern earls: Thomas Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and Charles Neville, Earl of Westmorland. Their grievances were both religious and political. They were Catholics who resented the 1559 settlement; they had lost influence in the north as Elizabeth promoted southern Protestants; and they were drawn into a wider plan to marry Mary, Queen of Scots, to the Duke of Norfolk and force Elizabeth to recognise Mary as her heir. Norfolk was arrested before he could act.
On 14 November 1569 the earls and around 4,600 followers seized Durham Cathedral, tore up the English Prayer Book, and celebrated a Catholic mass for the first time in a decade. They marched south. But their numbers stalled below 6,000, the southern Catholics they hoped would rise stayed quiet, and a royal army under the Earl of Sussex moved north. By December the rebels had retreated; by January 1570 the earls had fled to Scotland; the rebellion was over. Around 450 rebels were hanged in their home villages on Elizabeth’s orders — a deliberately public punishment to deter further risings.
The Northern Rebellion of November 1569 was led by the Catholic earls of Northumberland and Westmorland. They seized Durham Cathedral, restored the Latin mass, and marched south — but failed to spread the rising. Around 450 rebels were hanged in their villages.
The Papal Excommunication, 1570
In February 1570, Pope Pius V issued the bull Regnans in Excelsis. He declared Elizabeth a heretic, excommunicated her, and released English Catholics from their oath of allegiance to the Crown. In effect, the Pope told Catholics they no longer had a religious duty to obey their queen — and that those who deposed or killed her would be acting in line with Catholic conscience.
The bull was a turning point. Before 1570, the regime could treat its Catholic subjects as politically loyal even if religiously different. After 1570 every recusant was, on paper, a potential traitor. The political consequence was almost immediate: a 1571 Treasons Act made it treason to import the bull or to call the queen a heretic, and recusancy fines began their long climb. The longer-term consequence was psychological: from 1570 the regime treated militant Catholicism as a national-security problem, not a pastoral one.
In May 1570, a London Catholic named John Felton nailed a copy of the papal bull to the gates of the Bishop of London’s palace. He was arrested, tortured, and executed in August. His action made the bull famous overnight. Felton’s defiance set the pattern for what missionary priests would later do: take a public stand for Catholic conscience and accept the consequences. He was canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1970.
The Missionary Priests
From the 1570s, English Catholics responded to the bull with a quiet counter-offensive. William Allen, an English Catholic in exile, opened a seminary at Douai (in what is now northern France) in 1568. Its purpose was to train English-speaking Catholic priests and send them home to keep Catholic worship alive. The first Douai priests reached England in 1574. Around 471 trained priests would enter England by the end of the reign. From 1580 the Jesuit Order joined the mission — the most famous arrivals being Edmund Campion and Robert Persons in June 1580.
The missionaries were not, in their own minds, plotters. Their task was sacramental: to hear confessions, say mass and baptise. But the regime saw them differently. After Regnans in Excelsis, any priest entering England in secret was assumed to be working for the queen’s deposition. The 1585 Act of Parliament made it treason for any Catholic priest trained abroad to be in England at all. Around 130 priests were executed during the reign, including Campion in 1581. Persons escaped to the Continent and went on writing in support of Catholic claims to the English throne.
The chain from 1569 to 1588 is unbroken. The Northern Rebellion fed Mary’s reputation as a Catholic figurehead. The 1570 bull made her a focus for plots, including Ridolfi (1571), Throckmorton (1583) and Babington (1586). Each plot tightened the laws against Catholics; tighter laws drove some English Catholics to Spain; Spanish willingness to invade was hardened by Mary’s execution in 1587. The Armada of 1588 is the last act of the same drama. Each event makes far more sense as part of this chain than it does on its own.
The Threat in Context
It is easy to overstate the danger. The Northern Rebellion fizzled out within seven weeks; no English Catholic gentry of consequence joined the missionaries; ordinary Catholic parishioners mostly continued to attend church and pay their fines. But the regime felt the threat acutely. Walsingham’s intelligence service was built largely to track priests and plotters; the Privy Council’s correspondence in the 1580s is dominated by Catholic anxieties; and the increasingly harsh recusancy laws are unintelligible without 1569 and 1570 in the background.
The 1570 papal bull Regnans in Excelsis released English Catholics from loyalty to Elizabeth and was the moment the regime began to treat Catholicism as a national-security problem. The 1571 Treasons Act, the missionary priests, and the 1585 Act against them all flow directly from this turning point.