Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (60 page)

Edmund Campion and Robert Parsons, together with seven other colleagues, were among the first to return. Campion had studied at the English College in Douai, but his earlier education had been more impressive. He had been a fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, and such were his gifts of scholarship and oratory that he was chosen to welcome the queen on her visit to that university in 1569. He gained the patronage of both Leicester and Lord Burghley, and seemed likely to gain preferment in the established Church; he was considered likely to be one day archbishop of Canterbury.

Yet he suffered from what he called ‘remorse of conscience and detestation of mind’, as a result of which he returned to his own old faith; he fled to Douai where he received the Eucharist and was reconciled to the Catholic communion. He was, therefore, an able and worthy representative of the cause. He had friends, and acquaintances, at Westminster; he may even have had secret friends in the queen’s council.

He was of course in danger, since he was mixing with those who detested Elizabeth as a heretic and favoured the cause of Mary Stuart. Yet the peril was part of the enterprise; it had occurred to his superior, William Allen, that the Catholics of England might be stirred out of their complacence by the spectacle of burnings or worse. Campion was ordered to refrain from any discussion of politics and to say nothing injurious to the queen. He was to concentrate solely on religious matters so that, if he died for the faith, he would die as a martyr rather than a traitor.

It was not so easy, however, to contain the doubts and desires of the English Catholics. Some papers were scattered in the streets of London, declaring Elizabeth to be a schismatic and unlawful queen. The council thereupon reissued the statutes against Catholics. A gentleman caught hearing Mass would be imprisoned. Any English family found to be harbouring Jesuit priests would be prosecuted for maintaining rebels. The problem was compounded when a detachment of Catholic soldiers from Italy, under a Spanish general, landed in Ireland; it was considered to be the likely preparation for an invasion commanded by the king of Spain. It was also widely reported that the pope had acquiesced in plans for the assassination of the queen.

Walsingham, the catcher of spies, now became the hunter of Jesuits. By the end of the year, six or seven young Jesuits had been arrested and taken to the Tower. It is said that, to this day, no dog will enter the Salt Tower where they were imprisoned. On the walls of that tower were engraved a pierced heart, hand and foot as a symbol of the wounds of Jesus together with a cross and an ‘H’ that are the emblem of the Jesuits. After a time the prisoners were led to the rack which was housed in a vaulted dungeon beneath the armoury. Which gentlemen had welcomed them? Where were their leaders concealed? Every turning of the winch increased their agony.

Yet Parsons and Campion were still at large, and more Jesuits were returning to England. They landed secretly at night, avoiding any dwellings and even barking dogs; they spent the first night in the woods, whatever the weather, and at daybreak they separated and made their own way. They avoided the high roads, where strangers might question them. They might be disguised as gentlemen,
or as military captains, or as journeymen. One of them, Father Gerard, cut across the fields and asked anyone he met if they had seen his escaped falcon.

A secret printing press was established in Stonor Park, at Henley-on-Thames, where the printers dressed up as gentlemen – complete with swords and ruffs – to disguise their occupation. It is from the Jesuits that the word ‘propaganda’ comes. Campion and Parsons went on a tour of the country, visiting most of the shires where they preached and administered the sacraments; they were welcomed by gentlemen and noblemen in every place to which they travelled. They generally stayed only one night, for fear of discovery.

In the summer of 1581 Parsons described the danger to a fellow priest. ‘Sometimes,’ he wrote, ‘when we are sitting merrily at table, talking familiarly about points of religion (for our talk is mostly of matters of this sort), there comes the insistent rapping at the door we associate with the constables; all start up and listen, hearts beating, like deer who hear the hunters’ halloo; we leave our food and commend ourselves to God in a brief moment of prayer; not a word is spoken, not a sound is heard, until the servant comes in to say what it is. If it is nothing, we laugh – all the more merrily because of our fright.’

‘The enemy sleeps not,’ Sir Walter Mildmay told the Commons on behalf of the council. ‘A sort of hypocrites, Jesuits and vagrant friars, have come into the realm to stir sedition, and many of those who used to come to church have fallen back and refused to attend . . . it is time to look more strictly to them.’ Campion was for a time concealed in London. He often visited a friend who lived along the road to Harrow and on his walk there he would pass the gallows at Tyburn; whenever he passed by, he touched his hat to the machine that might one day destroy him.

In the summer of 1581 he was discovered within a secret ‘priest’s hole’ in a manor house at Lyford, near Abingdon. He was taken to London, still wearing his lay disguise of a buff jerkin and velvet hose; his feathered cap was put on his head, and his legs were tied beneath the belly of a horse. On his head a sign was fastened, ‘Campion, the seditious Jesuit’, and he rode through crowds of jeering spectators to find his place in the dungeon of
Little Ease in the Tower; with dimensions of just 4 square feet this chamber was itself a form of torture.

On the following day the earl of Leicester sent for him, and on being taken into a private chamber Campion found himself in the presence of the queen. She remembered the learned young man whom she had met and was determined, if possible, to save his life. She asked him whether he regarded her as his lawful sovereign; to which proposition he assented. The pope had permitted this. She then asked him if the bishop of Rome could lawfully excommunicate her. He replied more equivocally, saying that such matters were beyond his judgement. He was sent back to the Tower and, on refusing to answer his interrogators, he was put on the rack for two successive days.

Torture had in previous centuries been applied only to those who refused to plead and were then slowly ‘pressed to death’, but in the reign of the Tudors it became a royal prerogative in cases of national safety or security. In 1580 Burghley himself wrote a short narrative in praise of the practice. The most notorious of the interrogators was Richard Topcliffe, a lawyer from Yorkshire who came to specialize in the refinements of torture upon priests. One Jesuit wrote from his prison cell that ‘the morrow after Simon and Jude’s day I was hanged at the wall from the ground, my manacles fast locked into a staple as high as I could reach upon a stool: the stool taken away where I hanged from a little after 8 o’clock in the morning till after 4 in the afternoon, without any ease or comfort at all, saving that Topcliffe came in and told me that the Spaniards were come into Southwark by our means: “For lo, do you not hear the drums” (for then the drums played in honour of the lord mayor). The next day after also I was hanged up an hour or two: such is the malicious minds of our adversaries.’ Any form of barbarity became known as a ‘topcliffian custom’ and ‘topcliffizare’ was the verb for hounding to ruin or death. It was said that there were men in the world who would drink blood as easily as beasts drank water.

Weak though Edmund Campion was from his treatment, he was not demoralized. He called for a public debate on matters of religion, and the chapel of the Tower was used as the chamber for a contest between him and two Protestant divines. They argued
on three separate occasions but inevitably there was no settled conclusion. The matter was one concerning the stability of the realm rather than the truths of religion. He was tortured once more but, remaining defiant, he was sent for trial. He was brought to Westminster Hall, his limbs dislocated from the rack. He could not raise his arm to proclaim his response of ‘not guilty’; two of his fellow defendants held it up, and kissed the broken joint as they did so. There could only be one outcome. ‘We are charged with treason,’ Campion declared. ‘We are no traitors.’ He went on to say that ‘we are men dead to the world, and we travailed for the salvation of souls’.

Campion, and fourteen other Jesuits, were condemned to death by the conventional punishment of hanging, drawing and quartering. On the first day of December he and two others were led from the Tower for their journey to Tyburn. It was noticed that Campion’s fingernails had been torn off by his torturers. When he came up to the gallows he declared that ‘we come here to die, but we are not traitors’. The ropes with which he met his death are preserved at Stonyhurst College. As the butchery commenced a drop of his blood spurted upon a spectator, Henry Walpole; Walpole was converted on the spot, and himself became a Jesuit. He, too, would meet the same fate at Tyburn.

It has been calculated that some 200 Catholics suffered death in the course of Elizabeth’s reign, among them 123 priests, compared with the 300 Protestant martyrs who perished during Mary’s much briefer rule. In the reign of Henry VIII 308 people were executed as a result of the Treason Act of 1534. The historian here often pauses to deliver a lament on human bigotry, but the temptation should be resisted. It is not possible to judge the behaviour of one century by the values of another. It was in any case a high crime to refuse to conform to the religious imperatives of the state.

An alternative to execution was found in incarceration, and a special prison was established for priests and Catholic laymen at Wisbech Castle on the Isle of Ely. It would in more recent times be described as an internment camp for approximately thirty-five prisoners. The conditions were not harsh, however; scholars were among the number, and Wisbech became a form of seminary.
The ancient castle of Beaumaris, on the island of Anglesey, was another such centre. More conventional detention was also in place and it was said that ‘the prisons are so full of Catholics that there is no room for thieves’. When parliament assembled at the beginning of 1581 further measures were taken against them; the fine for recusancy was raised from 1 shilling each Sunday to £20 per month, two hundred times higher. Anyone attempting to absolve a subject from his or her allegiance to the queen was guilty of treason.

In this spirit the Cheapside Cross was assaulted, to ‘a great shout of people with joy’. It was considered to be a pagan idol from the dark days of superstition. On the night of 21 June 1581, certain young men ‘did then fasten ropes about the lowest images’ of the Cross but they could not dislodge them; they did take the picture of Christ, however, and struck off the arms of the Virgin Mary. The cross itself, on the top of the monument, was also pulled down.

The image of the cross could also be put to secular use. When builders were repairing or restoring parts of the palace at Whitehall, they painted red crosses on the new plaster. This was to prevent the common practice of pissing anywhere. It was believed that no one would dishonour the cross by urinating upon it.

The Jesuit missionaries claimed that they had made 140,000 converts; the figure may be slightly exaggerated, but in any case they were not converted from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism. They represent those who were now ready to confess their adherence to the old faith, and of course they were considerably outnumbered by the ‘church papists’ whose Catholicism was disguised by their attendance at the orthodox services. It has been estimated, however ingeniously, that the country harboured some 200,000 Catholics; if that figure is correct, they made up some 5 per cent of the population.

It was not necessary to be a Catholic, however, to be named as a recusant. There were heretics of quite another colour. In 1581 Robert Browne established in Norwich the first religious organization that considered itself to be independent of the Elizabethan
settlement. Its members became known indiscriminately as Brownists, Independents or Separatists; they rejected the established Church of England as unscriptural and were attached to the more severe forms of Puritan doctrine. Their churches became known as ‘gathered’ churches because they relied upon a gathering of people. The Brownists were as a result harried and persecuted by the authorities. They retreated from Norwich to Bury St Edmunds, and then fled overseas to Holland; those caught in England were likely to be imprisoned or hanged.

The proponents of another sectarian faith, the Familists or the Family of God, believed that a man or woman might be ‘godded with God’ and thus be responsible for a fresh incarnation. They rejected the notion of the Trinity and repudiated infant baptism; they refused to carry arms or to take oaths. Henry Barrowe, in 1581, left Gray’s Inn and retired to the country, in which retreat he formulated the creed known as Barrowism; he believed that the Elizabethan Church was polluted by the relics of popery, and that only complete separation from it could guarantee a true faith. These men and women were of truly heroic fortitude; they challenged all the principles of the society in which they lived, and were willing to endure the scorn and punishment of those whom they offended. No account of sixteenth-century England would be complete without them.