The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (23 page)

What disturbed this equilibrium, forcing Walsingham and the powers of the Elizabethan state to redefine English Catholics as traitors, and hound their priests as outlaws? A decade after Elizabeth’s accession, a biting anxiety began to afflict the Catholic community. Unless it took more positive action, it might soon cease to be. Parishes which had initially hung onto their costly Catholic fabric were now disposing of their obsolete chalices and vestments. The failed uprising of the Catholic northern earls in 1569 convinced the churchwardens of Morebath that their silken tunicle, worn by a sub-deacon during the old Latin liturgy, had become a liability. With an eye for economy, they recycled it into a covering for the wooden communion table that had replaced the ancient altar. Like a myriad similar decisions by wardens in other parishes, it was tacit recognition that the Catholic mass would never be sung again.
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Numerous secret Catholic congregations survived the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, served by priests who resigned their posts in protest at the 1559 settlement of religion. By the mid-1570s, however, the supply of breakaway clergy was dwindling as death claimed the pre-Reformation generation. Deprived of
their Latin primers and annual saints’ plays, the English people were beginning to forget their Catholic devotions and old processional routes. Meanwhile, parish life was becoming attuned to the reformed rhythms of the Church of England. The turning of the seasons was measured by the collects of the Book of Common Prayer rather than by saints’ days and sacred drama. From the later 1560s, bell-ringing and bonfires for the queen’s accession day offered a replacement for the medieval holidays of Candlemas and Corpus Christi. The privy council was sufficiently confident to release prominent Catholic prisoners from the Marshalsea in 1574, including John Feckenham, the last abbot of Westminster Abbey. There was a new spirit of English patriotism in the air. ‘Our England’, exclaimed Bishop Horne of Winchester, ‘is sailing with full sails and a prosperous breeze’.
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Within and beyond the walls of the established Church, Catholic culture was in danger of bleeding away. The tourniquet was supplied by an exiled Lancashire gentleman and Oxford academic, William Allen. Walsingham and Allen were direct contemporaries: their characters were both formed by the political and religious upheavals of the mid-sixteenth century. But their response could hardly be more different, since Allen was destined to become a cardinal and the spiritual leader of the English Catholic community. In 1568 Allen set up a college in Douai in the Netherlands to educate Catholic émigrés from the English universities. At first he was content to play a waiting game. When God chose to strike down the heretical regime of Queen Elizabeth, Allen would be waiting to deploy a new church leadership in England. But when the rising of the northern earls and the 1571 Ridolfi plot both failed to restore a Catholic government to England, Allen began to see a different meaning in contemporary events. God must have another purpose for the English students who were by now flocking to Douai. Looking
back to the persecution of the early Church, ‘the old example of the Apostles in their days’, Allen found the model of the missionary priest: a preacher in private houses rather than a parish church, free to move between congregations.

Allen’s missionary priests absorbed the intensive piety of the Counter-Reformation. Personal discipline was paramount, so they followed the spiritual exercises pioneered by the Society of Jesus. When they studied scripture, it was in a new English translation rather than the Latin Vulgate. In this sense, they had learned lessons from their Protestant enemies. In 1574, six years after Allen founded his seminary, its first three clergy sailed for the English mission. In 1576 sixteen priests were despatched, and the college at Douai had 236 students. Many of them were fresh out of Oxford and Cambridge, eager graduates whom the Church of England could ill afford to lose.

The evisceration of Cuthbert Mayne in 1577 did nothing to staunch the flow of Catholic ordinands. When the English college was expelled from Douai the following year, it moved to Rheims and continued to flourish. In 1579 the English hospice in Rome was converted into a second seminary, and colleges in Spain would follow. By 1580, the year in which the English Jesuits Edmund Campion and Robert Persons joined the mission, Allen had sent a hundred Catholic priests into England. The total rose to 471 by the end of Elizabeth’s reign; small beer compared to the astonishing fifty thousand priests in England before the Reformation, but a serious challenge to the monopoly of faith demanded by the Elizabethan Church establishment.
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The young Francis Walsingham had chosen exile in Basel and Padua rather than compromise with the Catholic regime of Queen Mary. His character was moulded by his studies at Cambridge, and the evangelical energy that pulsed through the colleges during Edward VI’s reign. So too with the students and tutors who left for Douai a generation later. When Elizabeth
inherited the throne, there was still a spiritual excitement about the quadrangles and common rooms of the English universities, but this time it was on the Catholic side. Two Oxford colleges, Trinity and St John’s, had been founded under Queen Mary, and Caius was re-founded at Cambridge. Under the guidance of Cardinal Pole, the universities had become the forcing-houses of Catholic renewal. Pole’s tenure was short, but his achievement is attested by the Oxford men who toiled to disrupt the Elizabethan Church. Marian Oxford educated nearly thirty of the seminary priests ordained after 1559, plus at least seven Jesuits. Catholic influence continued strong in Elizabethan Oxford. Cuthbert Mayne, Edmund Campion and Gregory Martin (who translated the New Testament studied by the Douai ordinands) all spent time at St John’s early in Elizabeth’s reign. Reputed for its Catholic humanism, New College haemorrhaged scholars in the 1560s. Thirty-eight fellows were deprived by Elizabeth, or chose to flee Oxford. They found sanctuary in the Netherlands, firstly at the University of Louvain and later at Douai.
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To Walsingham, their theology was repugnant and their politics subversive. Yet the principal secretary and the seminary priest had more in common than either would have admitted. Both were formed by the common life of university and exile; both perceived past and current events through the lens of religious ideology. To that extent, they inhabited the same mental world.

If English Catholicism had been looking frail by the early 1570s, the mission from Douai gave it a shot in the arm. Its clergy travelled in disguise, changing their names, clothes and horses to throw spies off the scent. As they dispersed throughout the
kingdom, preaching and administering the sacraments, Catholic recusancy began to gain ground. The seminary priests who came to England were not missionaries in the stamp of the Jesuits who travelled to seventeenth-century Japan, or the Baptists who brought the Bible to Victorian Africa. England was not virgin terrain; it had known, and rejected, the true apostolic faith. William Allen distinguished between the ‘Catholics’ who could be brought back within the fold, and the ‘heretics’ who were beyond redemption. The Jesuits who came to England from 1580 had similar instructions. Shunning the company of Protestants, they were to preach to the converted and discourage any waverers from attending their parish church. Above all, they were to concentrate their efforts on the gentry.

Jesuitical distinctions between Catholics and heretics meant little to the Elizabethan regime, which saw the invasion from Douai as a general assault on the establishment of Church and state. As the mission began to stabilise and reinvigorate the English Catholic community, it brought a more intense surveillance and persecution in its wake. Walsingham responded rapidly when reports of Cuthbert Mayne’s capture and the growth of recusancy reached the privy council in June 1577. A conference of councillors and bishops was summoned to consider how those who were ‘backwards’ and ‘corrupt’ in their religion could be brought within the fold of the Church of England. Up-to-date intelligence was a priority. Bishops were ordered to make a survey of those refusing to attend their parish church – and, ominously, the value of their lands and goods. Abbot John Feckenham and other Catholic figureheads were re-arrested. Education of the young was identified as a paramount concern. Schools were to be purged of suspect masters: men like Nicholas Garlick in Derbyshire, who shipped three of his boys to the seminary at Douai before entering the priesthood himself.
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The census of recusant England began in October 1577. Lists of people who refused to attend church were hastily compiled for each diocese: a total of 1,562 names. Within an English population of perhaps three and a half million in the 1570s, this figure looks tiny. Modern evangelical churches regularly poll a congregation of this size every Sunday. Within the statistics, however, was a deeply worrying trend: fully a third of the recusants identified in 1577 were gentlemen. The decline of the feudal magnates under Henry VII, and the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, had left the gentry manor house as the dominant institution of the English countryside. A gentleman did not exist in isolation: he was lord of his own household, governing the behaviour of his clients and tenants. As Cuthbert Mayne’s case had demonstrated, a Catholic squire could do a lot to ensure that the old religion survived in his ‘country’. The authorities also feared the social disruption implicit in recusancy. A gentleman ought to be seen in his parish church, a visible symbol of hierarchy and good order. By staying away, he neglected his duty to the Tudor commonwealth. Recusancy, in short, was an encouragement to sedition.
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The July 1577 conference mapped out a strategy to bring Catholics back into conformity with the Church of England. They were initially to be encouraged to rejoin the fellowship of their parish church. If negotiation failed, then an ascending scale of action was proposed: fines, an oath of allegiance, and ultimately imprisonment. Since there were many more Catholics than prison places to hold them, Walsingham and Burghley toyed with the idea of using castles to segregate ‘the better sort of recusants’. Deprive Catholic areas of the natural leaders of society, and the faith of the ‘baser sort’ would wither. But the plan could not be implemented, not least because the crown entirely depended on the gentry for effective local government. The punishment of crime, ensuring that the poor had access to
cheap bread, the maintenance of coastal gun batteries: all would suffer if the Catholic gentry were stripped out of provincial life.

Given the hierarchical nature of Tudor society, it is hardly surprising that the missionaries from Douai also focused on what they called the ‘better sort’ of men. William Allen had a vision of his clergy as latter-day Apostles, carrying the gospel from house to house; in practice this meant seeking shelter under the roofs of the aristocracy. A grand Catholic household, with its routines of confession and mass, allowed the seminarians to sustain the spiritual life that had formed them at Oxford and Douai. Where prominent local families had already fallen into heresy, they shook the dust from their feet and moved on. When Protestant heresy crumbled in England, it was vital that Catholics should be ready to answer the call as magistrates, lords lieutenant and members of Parliament. In any case, and as Allen observed, many of the English missionaries were high-born. Their education, their manners, even the language that they spoke, made it easier for them to move among the gentry without detection.

Country-house Catholicism focused disproportionately on the south of England. Walsingham ordered the ports of Dover and Rye to be watched for seminary priests, but the descriptions issued to the local authorities were often vague and inaccurate. A high proportion of missionaries who slipped through the net chose to become chaplains to the gentry of the southern counties. In 1580, six years into the English mission, half of its forces were mustered in London, the Thames Valley and Essex. Docking at Dover that same year, the Jesuit Robert Persons was shocked to find no priests serving in Wales or the far north of England. These were communities with residual Catholic sympathies, where vigorous preaching and evangelisation might have made a difference. Persons exaggerated to make a point, or perhaps he didn’t have the full picture; an agent informed
Walsingham in 1585 that priests were making use of boats sailing from France to Newcastle to collect coal. But in all too many locations, the seed planted by the secret Catholic congregations of the 1560s was becoming choked with thorns.
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