The Elizabethans (37 page)

Of course the Church of England, as it was evolving or failing to evolve in the first quarter-century of Elizabeth’s reign, could not satisfy purists. It was a compromise, designed to appeal to the largest number; or, if that was impossible, to offend as few as possible. Even those at the very top, as we have seen, were divided: many of Elizabeth’s bishops wanted a Church on the German Lutheran pattern. Elizabeth herself wanted to revert to her father’s religion in his latter days: Catholicism without the Pope. The clergy at the beginning of the reign had nearly all been ordained in Catholic times, and had begun their careers saying the old Latin Mass. No wonder that in parishes all over England throughout the first three decades of the reign were found priests who still said the old Mass, or who muttered the new Mass as if it were the old, who raised the bread and wine in elevation; who used Communion wafers – ‘singing cakes’ – rather than ordinary bread as laid down in the rubrics. In Berkshire in 1584 and Hampshire in 1607 we find parishes that refused to communicate except with ‘singing cakes’. In Oakham in 1583 a preacher called Thomas Gibson was displeased to find the congregation ‘hold still their papistical transubstantiation’. But of course the most common complaint was not that the congregations were too papistical; rather, that they were irreligious, bored by religion, that they were people ‘that love a pot of ale better than a pulpit and a corn-rick better than a church door’, as the poet Nicholas Breton said in
A Merrie Dialogue betwixt the Taker and Mistaker
of 1603.
¹¹

The Protestant-minded rector Francis Trigge found a congregation in 1598 ‘weeping and bewailing of the simple sort. Who going into the churches and seeing the bare walls, and lacking their golden images, their costly copes, their pleasant organs, their sweet frankincense, their golden chalices, their goodly streamers, they lament in themselves and fetch many deep sighs and bewail this spoiling and laying waste of the church as they think.’ But this did not mean that any of these women would, the previous year, have wished that the King of Spain had sailed victoriously up the Thames to be crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey. And that is the difference between the large Catholic-minded church-going population and the tiny minority who believed it was necessary to their salvation to be in communion with the Pope.

During the first decade of the reign the government had been very lenient towards Catholic dissent. Puritans in particular were scandalised that bishops who in the reign of Queen Mary, had licensed the burnings of so many of their fellow countrymen should still be at large – ‘which sticketh much in the hearts of many, the suffering of those bloody Bishops and known murderers of God’s people and your dear brethren, to live, upon whom God had expressly pronounced the sentence of death, for the execution whereof he hath committed the sword into your hands, who are now placed in authority,’
¹²
as Christopher Goodman wrote to the Queen.

The House of Commons was much more bloodthirsty than the Queen. Cecil wrote to Sir Thomas Smith that ‘a law is passed for sharpening laws agaynst Papists, wherein some difficulties hath bene because they be made very penal; but such be the huymours of the commons house, as they thynk nothing sharp ynough agaynst Papists’. This was in 1563, when Cecil and Smith were united in their distaste for penal laws against people’s religious faith
per se
.
¹³
But the northern rising, the papal Bull of 1570 and the changing situation abroad – worsening relations with Spain, the torture of Hawkins’s shipmates in the Caribbean, the sufferings of Protestants in the Low Countries at the hands of Spain and of Huguenots at the hands of the Catholic monarch – hardened the attitudes of the political classes.

In 1574 missionary priests began to be infiltrated into England from the continent in a concerted attempt to reconvert the population. Cuthbert Mayne, a secular priest living in the house of Francis Tregian of Golden, was arrested. He was hanged, drawn and quartered at Launceston. In 1580 Edmund Campion and Robert Parsons, Oxford men who had converted and joined the Pope’s
Sturmabteilung
– the Jesuits – came back to England. Evelyn Waugh, in a pious biography of Campion published in 1935, described the setting up of the English seminary at Douai to supply priests for the population who could not in conscience attend their parish churches. The book was much impugned for its inaccuracy, but one assumes Waugh was right to assert that ‘Martyrdom was in the air of Douai. It was spoken of, and in secret prayed for, as the supreme privilege of which only divine grace could make them worthy.’
¹⁴
Again, the parallels between the sixteenth-century Jesuits and modern suicide bombers comes unmistakably to mind. Clever, educated men such as Parsons and Campion were not blowing themselves up in crowds, but, by persuading young university students, or members of the Inns of Court to risk prosecution in these dangerous times, they were preparing to take others with them as they readied themselves for their martyrs’ deaths.

One of the most dramatic stories told of the recusant martyrs was that of a young Yorkshire woman, Margaret Clitherow, who was converted by missionary priests in her very early twenties in 1574. She had been married, aged eighteen, to a prosperous butcher in York (John Clitherow), who gamely paid the fines – after her conversion – for her failure to attend church, and for harbouring priests. In 1585, with the worsening political situation, it became a capital felony to harbour Roman Catholic clergy. On 10 March 1586 the Clitherow premises were searched (her husband was a Protestant) and one of her frightened children revealed a secret room, and the unmistakable signs of a priest’s presence: the chalice and paten for saying Mass, vestments, and so on. The priest himself was hiding next door and was not found. Margaret Clitherow refused trial by jury, to preserve her servants or children from the necessity of testifying against her. The Mayor of York, Henry May, accused her of committing suicide, so willingly did she go to her death: ‘I pray God His will may be done, and I [may] have that which He seeth most fit for me. But I see not in myself any worthiness of martyrdom; yet, if it be His will, I pray Him that I may be constant and persevere to the end . . .’ Her missionary-priest biographer, Mr John Mush, wrote of how she openly yearned for martyrdom – ‘to His glory and her own felicity and the just punishment of many’.
¹⁵

They devised a sadistic punishment for her. She was to be stripped naked and pressed to death under seven or eight hundredweight. They took her to the toll-booth on the Ouse Bridge to suffer this fate on Lady Day. In the event, they relented about the nakedness and allowed her to put on a linen shift, before tying her hands to two posts in a cross shape. A door was then laid on top of her. The first weight was a stone about the size of a man’s fist. They continued to pile weights on the door until she was dead. It took about quarter of an hour.
¹⁶

It is a horrible story, from which no one emerges well. Obviously, the authorities who inflicted this punishment upon a young woman fill us with horror. But so, too, does the martyr herself: her neighbours in York thought her mad.
¹⁷
A son – Henry Clitherow – whom she had educated in Reims and Rome and who joined first the Capuchin and then the Dominican Order, died insane.
¹⁸
In 1970 Margaret Clitherow was canonised as one of the Forty English Martyrs.

These terrible deaths entered the collective minds of the recusants. Roman Catholicism all but died out in England during the eighteenth century, but in Victorian times there was a revival, in part fuelled by the conversion of the popular Oxford don, John Henry Newman, in part by mass immigration from Ireland. The cult of the English martyrs really took off at this juncture in history, nearly 300 years after their deaths. The triumphalist hymn, written by the high camp convert F. W. Faber, became an anthem of English Roman Catholics:

Faith of our fathers, living still

In spite of dungeon, fire and sword.

The Roman Catholic convert son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, Monsignor Hugh Benson, wrote popular best-sellers with titles such as
Come Rack! ComeRope!
With the changes that came upon the Western Church after the Second Vatican Council, the cult of the English martyrs became less popular and was largely confined to Catholics on the conservative wing of the Church, or to those living in the North, where recusancy had been most popular. This was partly because many English Catholics were shy of upsetting their friends in the Church of England; but at a more serious level, it was because the cult of the Catholic martyrs was perceived as historically something of an anachronism. It was a way of marking out the identity of what was in effect a new Church – the Victorian Catholic Church, with its new dioceses in the industrial cities, Salford, Leeds, Birmingham – as much as it was a revisiting of the sixteenth century.

This is not to diminish the suffering caused to many English families during the reign of Elizabeth by the persecutions. John Donne, the great poet-priest who died as the much-revered Dean of St Paul’s, was brought up by recusant parents. He was, as he said, ‘deriued from such a stocke and race, as, I believe, no family, (which is not of farre larger extent, and greater branches) hath endured and suffered more in their persons and fortunes, for obeying the Teachers of Romane Doctrine, than it hath done’.
¹⁹
Donne’s mother was descended directly from the sister of Thomas More, Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor and the noblest of Catholic martyrs. Donne’s grandfather, John Heywood, had fled with his wife to Louvain in 1564 for religious reasons. John Heywood’s brother Thomas (Donne’s uncle) was a monk who was executed in 1574 for saying Mass. Donne’s own brother Henry harboured a seminary priest – a Yorkshireman named William Harrington – in his chambers. Harrington denied he was a priest, but under cross-examination Henry Donne broke down, admitting that ‘he was a priest and did shrive him’. Harrington was – Stow tells us – ‘drawne from Newgate to Tyborne; and there hanged, cut downe alive, struggled with the hang-man, but was bowelled and quartered’. Before this gruesome end for the priest, Henry Donne had himself died of plague in Newgate gaol.

Although Donne was right to suggest that his family knew more painfully than most the experience of growing up as a Catholic in Elizabethan England, the threat of persecution affected many; the existence of the persecution was a stench in the atmosphere. Inevitably, the martyrologists liked to dwell on the quasi-pornography of torture. For most recusants, however, it was a matter of putting up with poverty, fines and painful inconvenience, rather than active physical nastiness. For instance, we find Michael Tempest attainted for taking part in the Northern Rebellion of 1570. He escaped to France, leaving behind a wife, Dorothy, and five children. On 17 October 1581 William Byrd brought the plight of these northern gentlefolk to the Queen, and Elizabeth arranged for an annuity of £20 to be paid to Mrs Tempest.
²⁰
This isn’t the monster-queen of Catholic martyrology. She was always insistent that Catholics should have freedom of conscience so long as they did not ally themselves
politically
with traitors. The one question she allowed to be included in the terrible interrogations of suspected infiltrators was the ‘bloody question’, which, during the 1580s and 1590s, had become a matter of urgency: ‘If England were attacked, would these priests support Elizabeth or a foreign army bearing the Pope’s approbation?’
²¹

The tragedy was that the distinction attempted by those who framed the laws, and perhaps above all by the Queen herself – the distinction between religion and politics – was in this situation impossible to draw. Short of the Queen’s conversion to Roman Catholicism (a political as well as a psychological impossibility) there was no way round the difficulty that the Pope’s Encyclical of 1570 had set up, and the Jesuit missionaries compounded. Slowly but inexorably a gulf widened between those ‘church-papists’ who were prepared to go along with the Elizabethan Settlement, however much, in religion, they loved the old ways, and those who were for the Pope, with all the seditious implications that position brought with it. Walsingham with his spy-networks and low torturers, and the fervent missionary priests and their converts, saw the same truth here, and inhabited the same stark world of uncompromising metaphysical choices. And it was a starker choice than the mere political one: Pope or Queen. On one side, there were those who believed that Christ himself came down to altars at which a Roman Catholic priest presided, but deserted the altar where the words of Archbishop Cranmer were used. For these Catholics, England had become a place of Apocalypse. God had deserted the altars of its church and His glory was to be manifested in the torture chambers and gallows where His martyrs suffered. On the other side, serious Protestants did not merely dread England being ruled by foreigners. They deeply and seriously believed that Christ’s Gospel was distorted and corrupted by the Pope’s Church, that salvation was by Faith in Christ alone, and could not be found either in a personal attempt at virtue or by sacramental allegiance. It was these deep religious divides, and these profoundly held convictions, which made the espionage so intense, the political legislation so fierce, the confrontations and trials – when the victims were apprehended – so electrifying.

The more eloquent and virtuous the martyr, the more agonising the confrontation – as was demonstrated by the arrest and death of Edmund Campion. The young scholar of St John’s who had welcomed the Queen to Oxford, the friend of Sir Philip Sidney and the ‘well-polished man . . . of a sweet disposition’ had returned to England in the summer of 1580 in an ineffectual disguise and was arrested as soon as he landed at Dover. The Mayor of Dover, however, released him and for eight or nine months Campion travelled about England. At Easter 1581 he had finished writing a polemical work,
Decem Rationes
– Ten Reasons (for becoming a Roman Catholic). Robert Parsons of Balliol, also a Jesuit, had a printing press and they printed Campion’s pamphlet and strewed the benches of the university church with it just before the Commemoration Sermon in June.