During the volatile 1600s, attendance at the English Protestant Church was imperative to guarantee the religious conformity that would maintain social order and keep central and local government politically viable. Yet in the east Anglian county of Essex, a number of Catholics continued to hold important positions as shire magistrates and commissioners. Elizabethan and Jacobean law should have purged these suspected papists or known recusants from Essex's powerful local offices, especially in a county often viewed as a Puritan stronghold. But as the "godly" gentry of Essex consolidated their power in the early- and mid-seventeenth century, Catholics at all social levels served conspicuously in positions of authority and competently fulfilled central and local government needs.
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