Answer ALL questions. Write in full sentences for Questions 15 and 16. You are advised to spend about 65 minutes on this pack.
1
Give the year the Pope issued the Bull 'Regnans in Excelsis', excommunicating Elizabeth I.
(Total for Question 1 is 1 mark)
2
Name the pope who issued the Bull excommunicating Elizabeth in 1570.
(Total for Question 2 is 1 mark)
3
State two consequences of the 1570 papal bull 'Regnans in Excelsis' for English Catholics.
(Total for Question 3 is 2 marks)
4
State two features of the Act of 1581 that increased the pressure on Catholic recusants.
(Total for Question 4 is 2 marks)
5
Name the English Catholic college on the continent, founded in 1568, that trained seminary priests to be sent back into England.
(Total for Question 5 is 1 mark)
6
Name the Jesuit priest, captured in 1581 and executed for treason later that year, who had returned secretly to England as a missionary in 1580.
(Total for Question 6 is 1 mark)
7
Give the year of the Act that made it treason for a Catholic priest ordained abroad to be present in England, and also treason to harbour such a priest.
(Total for Question 7 is 1 mark)
8
State two reasons why the government viewed seminary priests and Jesuit missionaries as a serious threat in the 1570s and 1580s.
(Total for Question 8 is 2 marks)
9
Name the type of Protestant who believed the Church of England had not been reformed enough and wanted to remove remaining Catholic-style practices.
(Total for Question 9 is 1 mark)
10
Name the Cambridge academic whose lectures in 1570, criticising the Church of England's hierarchy of bishops and calling for a Presbyterian structure instead, led to him losing his university post.
(Total for Question 10 is 1 mark)
11
Name the Puritan gatherings, held for clergy to study the Bible and practise preaching, that Elizabeth ordered Archbishop Grindal to suppress in 1576.
(Total for Question 11 is 1 mark)
12
State what happened to Archbishop Edmund Grindal after he refused Elizabeth's order to suppress the prophesyings in 1576/77.
(Total for Question 12 is 2 marks)
13
Give two consequences for Separatists, such as followers of Robert Browne, who rejected the Church of England altogether, if the government judged their actions a serious threat.
(Total for Question 13 is 2 marks)
14
Describe two features of the Puritan challenge to the Elizabethan Church in the 1560s-70s.
(Total for Question 14 is 4 marks)
15
Explain why the Elizabethan government came to see Catholic missionary priests as a greater threat than ordinary English Catholics who quietly kept the old faith.
(Total for Question 15 is 12 marks)
16
'The Puritan challenge was a more serious threat to Elizabeth's government than the Catholic challenge, 1559-88.' How far do you agree with this statement? Explain your answer.
(Total for Question 16 is 16 marks)
Mark scheme · EDX.EE4 Early Elizabethan England, 1559-85: The Catholic and Puritan Challenges
Question 1
B1 1570
Answer: 1570
Question 2
B1 Pope Pius V
Answer: Pope Pius V
Question 3
B1 it declared Elizabeth a heretic and formally released her Catholic subjects from any duty of allegiance to her
B1 in practice, it made the government more suspicious of all English Catholics, treating them as potential traitors regardless of their personal loyalty
Answer: It released Catholics from allegiance to Elizabeth, and increased official suspicion of Catholics generally.
Question 4
B1 it raised the fine for recusancy (non-attendance at church) to 20 pounds a month, a sum most families could not sustainably pay
B1 it also made it treason to convert someone to Catholicism, or to be converted, increasing the legal risk of practising or spreading the Catholic faith
Answer: It raised recusancy fines to 20 pounds a month, and made conversion to Catholicism treason.
Question 5
B1 the English College at Douai (Douai College)
Answer: The English College at Douai
Question 6
B1 Edmund Campion
Answer: Edmund Campion
Question 7
B1 1585
Answer: 1585
Question 8
B1 they secretly kept the Catholic faith alive among English Catholics, actively working against the aims of the religious settlement
B1 their presence, sent from abroad and often linked to hostile Catholic powers, raised fears they were also intelligence agents or were preparing the ground for invasion or rebellion
Answer: They actively kept Catholicism alive, and were feared as agents linked to foreign, hostile Catholic powers.
Question 9
B1 a Puritan
Answer: A Puritan
Question 10
B1 Thomas Cartwright
Answer: Thomas Cartwright
Question 11
B1 prophesyings
Answer: Prophesyings
Question 12
B1 he was suspended from carrying out his duties as Archbishop of Canterbury
B1 he remained out of favour, with his powers restricted, for the rest of his time in office, until his death in 1583
Answer: He was suspended from his duties and remained out of favour until his death in 1583.
Question 13
B1 they could be imprisoned for spreading separatist ideas or writings
B1 in the most serious cases, such as the 1583 executions of John Copping and Elias Thacker, they could be executed for distributing separatist/Brownist material
Answer: Imprisonment, or in the most serious cases execution, as with Copping and Thacker in 1583.
Question 14
B1 feature 1 identified, e.g. opposition to prescribed clerical vestments
B1 supporting detail for feature 1, e.g. in the 'vestments controversy' of the 1560s some clergy refused to wear the surplice, seeing it as an unnecessary remnant of Catholic ceremony
B1 feature 2 identified, e.g. calls for a Presbyterian church structure, without bishops
B1 supporting detail for feature 2, e.g. Thomas Cartwright argued authority should rest with elected elders rather than crown-appointed bishops, costing him his Cambridge post in 1570
Answer: Any two features, e.g. opposition to vestments, and calls for a Presbyterian structure.
Question 15
Level 1 (1-3): Identifies one or two general reasons why missionary priests were seen as more threatening, with little or no supporting detail or explanation.
Level 2 (4-6): Identifies and begins to explain one or two reasons, supported by some accurate detail.
Level 3 (7-9): Explains two or three reasons, each supported by accurate and relevant detail.
Level 4 (10-12): Explains three or more reasons in a well-developed, logically structured way, supported throughout by precise and accurate detail, showing how the reasons connect.
Indicative content:
Missionary priests, trained abroad (e.g. at Douai from 1568, Jesuits from 1580), actively worked to keep Catholicism alive and win converts, directly undermining the religious settlement rather than passively disagreeing with it.
Their arrival from overseas, often via Catholic states hostile to England such as Spain, raised fears they doubled as intelligence agents or that their presence prepared the ground for future invasion or rebellion.
The 1570 papal bull 'Regnans in Excelsis', which released Catholics from allegiance to Elizabeth, made any priest acting on the pope's authority look, in official eyes, like an agent of open disloyalty rather than simple private religious conscience.
Converting others to Catholicism threatened to grow the pool of the queen's enemies, unlike a lay recusant's quiet, static non-conformity, which affected only themselves.
The government's legal response shows this distinction clearly: the 1585 Act made the mere presence of a seminary priest treason, targeting active missionary work specifically rather than private belief.
Overall, the government distinguished between passive religious conscience, which threatened little on its own, and active, organised missionary work, which threatened the settlement's survival directly and was treated accordingly.
Question 16
Level 1 (1-4): Shows limited relevant knowledge of the Catholic and Puritan challenges, and offers only a simple, unsupported opinion on the statement.
Level 2 (5-8): Shows some relevant knowledge and identifies relevant factors, but the argument is only partly supported and lacks a developed judgement on how far the statement is accurate.
Level 3 (9-12): Shows good relevant knowledge and explains a range of factors, reaching a supported judgement on how far the statement is accurate, with some links made between factors.
Level 4 (13-16): Shows precise, well-selected knowledge and explains a range of factors in a balanced way, reaching a fully supported and sustained judgement on how far the statement is accurate, with clear analytical links between factors and consistently accurate use of specialist historical terminology.
Indicative content:
Supporting: prophesyings and Presbyterian ideas, such as Cartwright's, challenged the church's very structure and had sympathy among some senior figures, such as Archbishop Grindal, a threat arising from within the establishment itself.
Against: the Catholic challenge was linked to the possibility of foreign invasion and armed rebellion, since the 1570 papal bull sanctioned disloyalty and missionary priests were feared as potential foreign agents.
Against: the loss of allegiance sanctioned by Rome in 1570 made Catholic disloyalty a matter of national security and treason law, not simply a question of internal church discipline, in a way Puritan dissent rarely was.
Balanced: both challenges were real and persistent but of different kinds; Puritan dissent mostly stayed within the political system, working through the church hierarchy, Parliament and the universities, whereas the most extreme Catholic dissent connected directly to treason and international conflict.
Balanced: Puritan pressure was arguably more continuous and harder for the government to fully suppress, since it came from within loyal, conforming subjects and clergy, while the most serious Catholic dangers were concentrated in a smaller number of missionary priests and plots.
Judgement: on balance the Catholic challenge posed the more serious threat to Elizabeth's throne and personal safety specifically, given its ties to international conflict and treason law, even though the Puritan challenge was a more sustained internal irritant to church governance throughout the period.