Catholic Godchildren of the Protestant Queen

This article analyzes spiritual kinship between Catholic aristocrats and the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I in England in the second half of the 16th century. A prosopographic study, which identified Elizabeth’s Catholic godchildren, demonstrated that the Catholic aristocracy was not excluded from the Protestant queen's court clientele. Spiritual kinship was the crowning achievement of a courtier's career, a sign of their belonging to the Queen's inner circle. A condition was that the child's mother belong to the “house” of the Queen, which implied either kinship or service as a lady-in-waiting or lady of the bedchamber. This emphasizes the important role women played in integrating the aristocracy into court society. Catholic women at court were required to accompany Elizabeth I to church and to receive communion according to the Protestant rite. For some women and their families, this became an obstacle, forcing them to keep a distance between themselves and the court; for others, prepared for religious compromises, women's service at court and spiritual kinship with the queen provided protection from persecution and opened up unlimited career prospects, as the case of the Somerset family, examined in the article, amply demonstrates.