Katherine Willoughby, like many exiles, rejoiced to hear of the succession of Elizabeth I in 1558. In January 1559, she wrote to offer her congratulations to the queen and express her fervent prayer that she would ‘do the will of Him that hath raised you up [in] spite of His and your enemies’. Two months later, she conveyed her bitter disappointment in the slow pace of reform and the queen's indifference to the importance of preaching and her tolerance of rituals and vestments associated with Catholicism. She lamented that ‘men have so long worn the Gospel slopewise that they will not gladly have it again straight to their legs’. Willoughby's religious views placed her among a group of Protestants dissatisfied with the Elizabethan church and eager to encourage further religious change in England. While much attention has been given to the activities at court of godly patrons like Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, or to the influence of Protestant aristocrats like Henry Hastings, earl of Huntingdon, in Leicestershire, less attention has been devoted to Willoughby and her allies’ promotion of religious change in late sixteenth-century Lincolnshire. They contributed to the slow transformation of the county's religious climate through a variety of domestic, educational, and religious institutions and helped to create areas favorable to reform in the midst of a region still committed to traditional beliefs.4 Despite her fierce condemnations of papists and her criticism of more moderate Protestants, however, Willoughby maintained friendships across the doctrinal spectrum with neighbors who held a wide range of more moderate Protestant and even conservative religious views.

An examination of the activities of the duchess and her network in Lincoln- shire contributes to an understanding of the role of the aristocracy and gentry in the development of Protestantism in England during the early decades of Elizabeth I's reign. As revisionist studies have noted, reformers faced considerable challenges in creating a ‘nation of Protestants’ among a populace who remained dedicated to the doctrines and rituals of the Catholic Church. Studies of Lincolnshire, for example, have frequently emphasized the county's religious conservatism and cited it as evidence of the slow pace of reform during Elizabeth I's reign. Ronald Hutton and Christopher Haigh have demonstrated that many Lincolnshire parishes resisted the removal of their altars and continued to retain their vestments and mass vessels in the 1560s.