The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (24 page)

The nature of the mission made a permanent impression on the English social landscape. For the next three centuries, Catholic England would remain aristocratic and inward-looking, sustaining itself in country houses rather than parish churches. Radical change only came with Victoria’s reign and the mass immigration of the Irish working class. Yet the Catholicism that Evelyn Waugh mourned and celebrated in his novels was still that of the recusant gentleman. On converting to Roman Catholicism, Waugh chose to write a biography of the Elizabethan Jesuit Edmund Campion as his work of piety. In
Officers and Gentlemen
the elderly and gentle Mr Crouchback, called up to teach in a wartime school, could reliably be distracted into lengthy reminiscences about the penal times under the Tudors, when the Blessed Gervase Crouchback was martyred for the Catholic faith.

How did Catholics experience their religion in Walsingham’s England? While the Church settlement was still becoming established, traditionalists had been able to dress up the new religion in the clothes of the old. But the sinews of the Tudor state were strong, the pressure of crown and bishops inexorable. One by one the altars were broken up, the devotional images profaned and holy wells filled with rubbish. In 1567 the Reformation caught up with Aysgarth, a village in Wensleydale which offered a home to the rood screen from Jervaulx Abbey following the dissolution of the monasteries. Parishioners who had hidden their ‘idols’ and ‘old papistical books’ were forced to
burn them and stand barefoot in white sheets in a public shaming ritual.
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Deprived of its traditional places, the practice of Catholicism was forced beyond consecrated ground. Missionary priests celebrated mass in safe-houses, barns and farmyards. In the West Country, sheets were spread on hedgerows at crossroads to indicate when and where to congregate. Country houses of this period often had their own chapels attached, but government surveillance made them too visible for Catholics to use. Attics and upper chambers were more secluded. To an older generation who remembered the sumptuous ritual of the past, the recusant liturgy must have seemed a pale imitation. Vestments and sacred vessels were rudimentary by comparison with the silk chasubles and silver-gilt chalices of Henry VIII’s reign. Sacred music, such a striking feature of the pre-Reformation English Church, was limited to what the congregation could sing for themselves. In the 1590s William Byrd composed mass settings in three, four and five parts to meet their needs. His patrons, the Pastons of Norfolk, felt secure enough to sing in open procession around their gardens, though few other families could be so bold. But Catholics took heart from the history of the early Church, when Christians had gathered in private houses to worship.
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The English mission was a grim war of attrition. Of the three hundred-odd seminary priests who had come to England by 1586, thirty-three had been executed, fifty were in prison and another sixty had been arrested or banished. This was an unsustainable wastage rate. Travel without obvious cause was inherently suspect in Tudor England, and communities kept a close watch for vagrants and gypsies. Catholic priests needed a good disguise and a strong alibi to avoid arrest by village constables and magistrates. A chaplaincy offered an alternative, but Catholic households were themselves increasingly liable to being raided by the authorities. Walsingham’s pursuivants or
‘priest-hunters’ could search properties for hours or even days, ransacking possessions and intimidating servants, women and children to reveal any hidden secrets.

Catholic houses began to acquire secret hiding-places where a missionary could shelter with his chalices and vestments in the event of a raid. The first priest-hole that we know about was built in York in 1574, the year that the English Catholic mission began. Early examples were often crude. Sheriffs soon learned to search the dead space in eaves and attics, or below garderobes and latrines, to flush priests out of hiding. They brought measuring-rods to discover cavities behind walls and fireplaces. The ringing of a bell could reveal a hollow echo.

By the later 1580s hides were becoming far more sophisticated thanks to Nicholas Owen, a carpenter from Oxford known to his friends as ‘Little John’. Two of his brothers were ordained as Catholic priests, while a third was apprenticed to the university printer and later set up a secret press in London’s Clink prison. Nicholas had a craftsman’s ability to visualise his art in three dimensions. Recruited by the superior of the Jesuit mission Henry Garnet, he became a master of architectural concealment. Owen understood perspective: he could visualise the ways in which a search party would scan the lines of a building. Choosing places where gables and towers met and making use of changes of level, he was able to construct priest-holes that were virtually invisible from the outside. In the words of the Jesuit John Gerard, he designed hiding-places ‘in all shires and in the chiefest Catholic houses of England’. Some allowed their inhabitant to be fed via a trapdoor, or a hollow quill through which broth could be dripped. An example of Owen’s craftsmanship survives at Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk, accessed via a pivoting floorboard and complete with a feeding-trap. In 1606 Owen himself survived a four-day search in a hide at Hindlip in Worcestershire before being starved out. Ten further ‘secret corners and
conveyances’ were found in the same house. As Gerard pointed out, Owen could have done more to undermine the Catholic cause than anyone else in England, but he died under torture in the Tower without revealing anything. He was canonised as a martyr in 1970.
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Many Catholics, however, had little or no chance of attending mass. The concentration of priests in southern England left much of the realm bereft of spiritual comfort. Nor can we assume that the Catholicism of the great house was always welcoming to the countryside that surrounded it. The risk of betrayal meant that the sacraments were often restricted to the immediate household. Where formal provision was sporadic or non-existent, Catholicism retreated to the hearthside: the reading of devotional manuals in a family setting, or prayers recited over a baby’s cradle. When the Elizabethan injunctions banned the hallowing of wax tapers for the feast of Candlemas, Catholics in north Wales transferred the ceremony into their own homes and placed candles in their windows each 2 February. Women were particularly active in sustaining this Catholicism of the hearth. The state was often satisfied if a husband attended the parish church, leaving wives to tend the embers of the old faith within their own domestic domain.
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Church papism, country-house Catholicism, a religion of women and the hearth: three ways of experiencing traditional religion in Walsingham’s England, and each of them personal and secretive. In the prisons and on the gallows, however, Catholicism found a more public stage. Well over half the missionary priests who came to England in Elizabeth’s reign spent a period behind bars before being deported or executed. Life for Catholic clergy in an Elizabethan prison could follow a bizarre sequence of brutality and relative freedom of movement. Physical and psychological torture was commonplace, and plague and jail-fever were a constant terror.

Yet for those with money or connections, visits from the outside were easy to arrange. Servants and sympathisers were allowed in and out, and supervision was so lax that the Catholic mass became a common feature of Elizabethan prisons. A report on London’s Newgate in 1583 informed Walsingham that the mass was being openly celebrated in the common jail, and privately in the prison-keeper’s house. Three years later, one of his agents found two priests in Newgate attended by several Catholic gentlewomen: ‘Sir, if you mean to stop the stream, choke the spring: for believe me, the prisons of England are very nurseries of papists’. John Gerard’s autobiography describes how Catholic priests in the Marshalsea were able to smuggle in books and liturgical equipment. One search by the prison authorities yielded a cartful of Catholic paraphernalia. Subsequently imprisoned in the Clink on London’s Bankside, Gerard found himself able to carry out ‘all the tasks of a Jesuit priest’ thanks to fellow Catholic prisoners who fabricated him a key for his door. The situation was no better in the provinces. Thomas Bell, a daring seminary priest who later made a spectacular conversion to become a Protestant polemicist, broke into York Castle in 1582 and sang high mass complete with a sub-deacon and music. In October 1586 Sir John Horsey and George Trenchard complained to Walsingham about the dismal state of security in Dorchester jail. The result of having a prison system run for profit by ‘persons of no credit’ was that ‘all justice is subverted, and papists live at ease, and have their conventicles in despite of us, do what we can’.
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Incarceration was not the end of the line for a Catholic priest: paradoxically, it offered real opportunities to evangelise. Confessions were heard, the sacrament of the altar distributed, even marriages solemnised without fear of discovery or the incrimination of a host family. Missionary work could be undertaken among the felons imprisoned in close proximity with
the clergy, often with startling success. The possibilities for priestly ministry, and the affirmation of Catholic identity offered by imprisonment, help to explain why so few priests sought to escape. A handful of clerics actually sought a martyr’s death and glorified in their capture, although this was viewed with disapproval in Douai and Rome. More commonly, the room for manoeuvre enjoyed by imprisoned Catholic priests made life on the outside seem less spiritually fruitful. Just as the English mission was modelled on the journeys of the Apostles, so jailed priests could find solace in the scriptural imprisonments of St Peter, St Paul and John the Baptist.

Openly proclaimed in the prisons, the English Catholic mission found its apotheosis on the gallows. By 1592 ninety-six Catholic priests and thirty-six laypeople had been executed in full view of the Elizabethan crowd. Many of these died at Tyburn, near London’s Marble Arch, where they are now venerated as martyrs by a house of Benedictine nuns. Others suffered a provincial death, such as the fourteen priests who were moved away from London to be executed in the Armada year of 1588. Two years earlier Margaret Clitherow, a butcher’s wife who ran a safe-house for fugitive priests in the Shambles in York, had been pressed to death on a toll-bridge over the Ouse river for refusing to testify. The site was marked with a commemorative plaque in 2008.

Public executions in this period usually had a carnival atmosphere, especially if a celebrity criminal was dying. But the reactions of the crowds witnessing the death of priests were complex, even in Protestant London. Executions were imagined in the language of the playhouses that had sprung up on the south bank. The participants in this grisly theatre – audience, executioner, the victims themselves – had roles that were scripted by contemporary expectations. The authorities wanted punishments to be exemplary, offering visible proof that Catholicism
and treason were two sides of the same coin. Priests denied this equation by praying for the queen, and strove to live up to a burgeoning Catholic martyrology by dying in a state of spiritual calm. Mindful of Christ’s actions on the cross, they offered absolution to the criminals who were executed alongside them.

The quest for a good death could create scenes every bit as macabre as those played on the Elizabethan stage. When Ralph Sherwin was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn in December 1581 he prayed for the queen before kissing the hands of his executioner, still dripping with the blood of Edmund Campion. John Nelson managed to pray for Elizabeth during his own dismemberment. The crowd were impressed by equipoise of this sort, as the watching authorities noted with alarm. Walsingham himself was dubious about a policy of execution, not out of sympathy (he was content with a handful of deaths ‘for example’s sake’) but because he recognised the raw political truth that persecution creates martyrs. As he wrote in 1586, the ‘constancy or rather obstinacy’ of executed priests and Jesuits ‘moveth men to compassion and draweth some to affect their religion, upon conceit that such an extraordinary contempt of death cannot but proceed from above’. Such stoicism on the scaffold made people wonder if God wasn’t on the Catholic side after all.

For some Catholic priests, the mission continued even after their deaths. Bodies which had been butchered by the state could be recovered, either for burial or for relics. So it was that Cuthbert Mayne’s skull, removed by the Arundells from a pike at Wadebridge in Cornwall, eventually found its way to the convent that now inhabits their ancient family house at Lanherne. A year after the priest Robert Sutton was executed at Stafford, local Catholics were able to remove an arm from the corpse to venerate as a relic. The forefinger and thumb which pronounced the blessing when celebrating mass had not corrupted, thus
proving Sutton’s sanctity. Crowds fought to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood of despatched priests, just as they had done with the Protestant rebel Thomas Wyatt when he was hanged for treason against Queen Mary. They would do the same at Charles I’s execution in 1649.
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