Benedictine Opposition to Bishop Richard Smith (1625—1629)

The Catholic clergy in post-Reformation England have often, it must be confessed, behaved more like flamingoes than croquet mallets, especially in the seemingly endemic disputes between the secular priests and the regulars. Some men are islands, and because Richard Smith was one of these, the dispute that centred on his personality became a precedent for at least one major quarrel that followed it. This being so, it may be worth recording the fact that the Benedictines, not the Jesuits, had the dusty glory of assuming the lion's share of opposition to the Bishop for the first five years of this dispute.The Smith dispute itself was not without parentage, for its antecedents go back to the Appellant conflict of the 1590s, to the controversy between a section of the secular clergy and the Jesuits over the Oath of Allegiance (1606) and to the demand for the creation of bishops in England (1607-23). A party among the Benedictines favoured the Oath, against the Jesuits, and other monks supported the plea for bishops. But in time the Benedictine majority committed itself against the Oath. And in 1611-12 there was a curious anticipation of the Smith affair, in which high words were exchanged between Archpriest George Birkhead and Thomas Preston (for the Cassinese Benedictines) concerning the jurisdiction of the former over a delinquent monk. But the Anglo-Spanish monks supported Birkhead.