God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (31 page)

Then, in 1588, the Spanish Armada set sail for England and attitudes towards this monstrous regiment of recusant women began to harden. In February that year Francis Cromwell, Sheriff of Cambridge, wrote to the Council seeking advice on how to proceed against Catholic women, ‘whom he durst not presume to apprehend without further direction’; so, too, did the Sheriff of Leicester and the Earl of Kent. Four years later a memorandum, attributed to Richard Topcliffe, appeared to sum up official feelings in regard to recusant women during wartime: that they were ‘needful to be shut up…as much as men…[because]…although they cannot go to the field and lie in camp (for their sex and shame) yet they want no deceit nor malice’. And in March 1594, as the country braced itself for a new Spanish invasion, William Cecil drew up a list of defensive ‘Considerations’, one of which commanded ‘all men’s wives, being recusants, to come to church’ on penalty of their husbands being interned. That this was, in itself, against the law is a clear indication of the level of Government concern about recusant women.
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The difficulty was that no matter how much the responsibility of enforcing a wife’s behaviour lay at her husband’s door, justice itself was toothless when it came to proceeding against married women recusants. Since no married woman could own property, she could not be indicted and fined for her recusancy. Neither could a husband be punished for his wife’s criminal acts—fining or arresting him in lieu of his wife was illegal.
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The only option left to the courts was imprisoning recusant wives as excommunicates (under the writ of
de excommunicato capiendo
) until they proved conformable, unpopular since it allowed too many women to assume the role of martyr to the faith, particularly if they should die in prison.
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It was far easier to proceed against widows and spinsters: they were entitled to own property and could therefore be indicted and fined for their recusancy with impunity. With fining still the Government’s weapon of choice against Catholics, it is significant that the record books of the period are full of suggestions of how to make husbands financially liable for their wives’ misdemeanours. A 1586 list of Bedfordshire recusant women even went so far as to provide precise details of their non-recusant husbands’ annual incomes.
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By 1590 William Cecil had set out amongst his new religious priorities a series of specific measures whereby wives could be indicted for recusancy and their husbands compelled to pay their fines, and when Parliament met in February 1593, high on its agenda was the female problem. Immediately, a bill was introduced into the Commons that left little doubt recusant women had become the Government’s latest targets (with husbands seen merely as the cash cows capable of funding their wives’ law-breaking). Recusant heiresses were to lose two-thirds of their inheritances; recusant wives were to lose their dowries and jointures. In addition, all children aged seven and over were to be removed from their recusant parents’ care and given to selected families to raise—at their parents’ expense (such was the pernicious influence of recusant mothers on the next generation). Finally, in a clause left deliberately vague, householders were to be fined ten pounds a month for every member of their household refusing to attend church.
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On 14 March 1593, as the bill was batted back and forth between Commons and Council for amendment, Thomas Barnes wrote to fellow exiled Catholic Charles Paget, informing him how little these proposals were liked. Francis Craddock, MP for Stafford, had objected to the generalized clause against householders; Mr Wroth, MP for Liverpool, had identified that husbands were the real victims of this law. One parliamentary diarist even noted that many MPs kept ‘special eye…[during the bill’s progress]…that no such thing might be inserted which might wind them with such a penance’. Few men, it seemed, were willing to legislate against themselves. Nonetheless, when the completed ‘Act against Popish Recusants’ was passed that April, although all its other clauses had been stripped away, the remaining clause stipulating householders could be fined for their recusant household remained with all its old ambiguity intact. Indeed, courtesy of the Law Lords, it now contained an added twist. From this time onwards the courts were able to sue a husband jointly with his wife for her recusancy and a host of such prosecutions swiftly followed.
*
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Whatever the complications of proceeding against women for their recusancy, the law was unequivocal about what would happen to those of either sex caught harbouring Catholic priests. Yet, in practice, women seem to have been treated leniently in the courts. Out of the thirty people who would eventually be executed under the 1585 statute against aiding and abetting Jesuits and seminary priests only three of them were women. But of those three, the death of Margaret Clitherow, in 1586, provided the benchmark against which all other Catholic women considering supporting a priest could measure their actions.

Clitherow was the daughter of Thomas Middleton, a former Sheriff of York. Her stepfather was Henry Maye, Lord Mayor of York in the year of her death. In 1571 she married John Clitherow, a successful butcher and city chamberlain living in York’s Shambles (the name comes from the Saxon,
Fleshammels
, meaning the street of butchers). Hers was a solid, respectable background—marred only by her faith. Some time
c.
1574 Margaret Clitherow, then aged about eighteen, converted to Catholicism. Two years later she was arrested and imprisoned for recusancy. There followed a string of similar convictions, but all the while Clitherow continued maintaining priests, two at a time: one in a concealed chamber adjoining her house, the other stationed across the city. It was a high-risk strategy and several of her priests would be captured; she, herself, made no secret of her desire for martyrdom. On 10 March 1586 she was arrested for harbouring.
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On 14 March Margaret Clitherow was brought before the judges at the York Assizes and asked to enter her plea: guilty or not guilty as charged. Clitherow declined to do so, saying, ‘I know no offence whereof I should confess myself guilty.’ Asked once more by the judges to enter a plea, she responded, ‘Having made no offence, I need no trial.’ The law was clear about the fate of those felons who failed to plead in court (their refusal was felt to be a shameless spiking of the wheels of justice). Accordingly, the York judges invoked the fourteenth century penalty of
peine forte et dure.
*
‘You must return from whence you came,’ read Clitherow’s sentence, ‘and there, in the lowest part of the prison, be stripped naked, laid down, your back upon the ground, and as much weight laid upon you as you are able to bear, and so to continue three days without meat or drink, except a little barley bread and puddle water, and the third day to be pressed to death, your hands and feet tied to posts, and a sharp stone under your back.’
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There followed eleven days in which a stream of prison visitors attempted to persuade Clitherow to enter a plea and she refused them all. Perhaps she was unwilling to subject her family to the ordeal of testifying against her; perhaps she was just unprepared to accept that harbouring priests was a crime. Finally, on 25 March she was led out to the Tollbooth, some six or seven yards from the castle gaol, stripped of her clothes and stretched out on the ground, a wooden panel balanced on top of her. In an act of charity the judges appear to have accelerated the process that came after: ‘She was in dying one quarter of an hour,’ wrote John Mush, her biographer (and one of the priests she had maintained). ‘A sharp stone, as much as a man’s fist, [was] put under her back; upon her was laid to the quantity of seven or eight hundred weight [eight hundred and ninety-six pounds] at the least, which, breaking her ribs, caused them to burst forth of the skin.’
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Clitherow’s execution passed quickly into Catholic legend. Here was a martyr whose refusal to speak had emphatically given the lie to the belief that all women were ‘full of tongue and much babbling’. Her stubbornness served to remind both priests and government that the female sex was a force to be reckoned with. Over the years many missionaries would have cause to be grateful for this fact.

Two miles south of the parish church of All Saints in Wimbish, Essex stood Broadoaks Manor, high gabled, tall chimneyed, built round three sides of a courtyard, some time
c.
1560. The house was encircled by rich farmland; Wimbish, itself, lay just to the south of the prosperous market town of Saffron Walden. In Gerard’s words, the owner of Broadoaks, William Wiseman, enjoyed the wealth and independence ‘of a little prince’.
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It was Henry Drury, Gerard’s host at Lawshall, who had first brought the Wiseman family to Gerard’s attention, inviting Thomas and John Wiseman, William’s younger brothers, to meet the Jesuit there. Gerard had drilled the pair in the
Spiritual Exercises
of Ignatius Loyola. This was the Society’s
vade mecum
, a collection of documents (containing instructions and admonishments) and practical tasks (prayers and meditations) to help move the faithful to greater piety. (The full title of the work was
Spiritual Exercises to conquer oneself and regulate one’s life, and to avoid coming to a determination through any inordinate affection
, which gave a reasonably clear indication of the Spanish ex-soldier’s views on religious self-discipline.) Both men had been inspired by Gerard’s teaching; both had decided to leave England and join the Society.
*
Before they left, though, Thomas Wiseman had persuaded his brother William to try the
Exercises
for himself.
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In Gerard’s description, William Wiseman was a Catholic, ‘but his thoughts were very far from Christian perfection’. Like so many others of his religion, he had kept his head down and his family clear of the law, preferring to safeguard his estate rather than assist the mission. His encounter with Gerard was to change that. Within days of beginning the
Spiritual Exercises
William Wiseman ‘had resolved henceforth to devote the whole of his life to furthering God’s greater glory’. This was no mere boasting on Gerard’s part, for Wiseman immediately invited the Jesuit to move from Lawshall to Broadoaks and take up residence with him and his family. The man who up to now had avoided the company of seminary priests for fear of the harm they might do his reputation was now consorting with the even more harmful Society of Jesus.
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Wiseman’s invitation came at a good time for Gerard. Henry Drury had recently decided to leave England and become a Jesuit lay brother; the seminarian William Hanse had declared himself happy to stay on at Lawshall and care for Drury’s elderly mother; Henry Garnet was keen the Jesuits should open up another county for the mission.
*
So in the winter of 1591 Gerard shifted his centre of operations to Essex.
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Essex has been described as the headquarters of sixteenth century Puritanism. Like its neighbours Suffolk and Norfolk, it, too, had received an early dose of Protestant theology, courtesy of the east-coast trading vessels. In 1532 ‘the image of the crucifix was cast down and destroyed in the highway’ near Coggeshall, to the west of Braintree, as the muscles of the new religion began to flex. Under Mary the Bishop of London was ordered ‘to send into Essex certain discrete and learned preachers to reduce the people who hath been of late seduced by sundry lewd persons named ministers’. When the execution of heretics started, Essex suffered accordingly, with burnings at Colchester, Manningtree, Harwich and Saffron Walden among other sites. Under Elizabeth, and no doubt in part as a result of these widespread burnings, Protestantism in Essex had crystallized into a more hard-edged religious non-conformity, termed Puritanism for convenience’s sake, though this implied a greater unity of belief than was in fact ever the case. In the 1580s Robert, Lord Rich of Rochford Hall, prominent within the Puritan party, was imprisoned for a time to prevent this non-conformity spreading further; Rich was considered ‘the wealthiest lord’ in Essex. None of this deterred John Gerard. From Broadoaks he journeyed northwest to Sawston Hall, just over the county border in Cambridgeshire, to convert his host’s brother-in-law Henry Huddlestone, and northeast to Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk to supervise the religious education of the Rookwood children of Coldham Hall. He was even in conference with Lady Rich, attempting to win her to the faith.
*
Unknown to him, though, the Wisemans had come under suspicion.
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Some time in December 1592 an Essex magistrate named Nicholls led a raid on Broadoaks. The pursuivants spread out across the house and immediately set about sounding the wooden panelling in search of concealed hides. Very soon they struck lucky. Cowering in ‘a secret place between two walls’ they discovered the elderly priest Robert Jackson. As a Marian priest, Jackson was no outlaw (hence Wiseman’s long-standing support of him in favour of any seminarian): Elizabeth’s new treason legislation had made a clear distinction between those priests ordained in the previous reign—when England was Catholic—and those who had deliberately gone abroad to receive holy orders after England’s split with Rome. But when one of Wiseman’s servants, Edward Harrington, confessed to having heard Jackson say mass for the household on two separate occasions the family was now recognized to be in contravention of the law. On 12 January 1593 the Council received notice of the indictments against William Wiseman, his wife, mother and sisters for being present at one or both of two masses celebrated by Robert Jackson at Wimbish. Of John Gerard’s name there was no mention; neither does he, himself, record the event. Most likely he was absent at the time of the search.
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