God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England

by Childs, Jessie

  Campion was not concerned with household accounts or worldly attachments. He left Harrowden Hall and continued on his circuit, all the while insisting upon absolute recusancy and agitating for a public debate. Back in Northamptonshire, on 22 September 1580, Lord Vaux signed a certificate of musters at Rothwell.47 Christmas came and went and as the New Year approached, he dusted off his parliamentary robes and prepared to journey to Westminster. Twenty-five miles away at Apethorpe, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Walter Mildmay, polished a speech that would set the agenda for a new bill. Once passed, the lay Catholics of England would have to reckon new expenses. They were about to realise quite how much the enterprise was going to cost.

  fn1 Those priests not part of a religious order like the Jesuits or the Benedictines.

  2

  To be a Perfect Catholic

  Parliament met on 16 January 1581. Lord Vaux took his seat four days later and was in regular attendance till the close of session on 18 March.1 On 25 January, Sir Walter Mildmay rose in the Commons and delivered an excoriating speech against the ‘implacable malice of the Pope’, the insolence of the ‘stiff-necked Papist’, and the ‘hypocrites naming themselves Jesuits, a rabble of vagrant friars newly sprung up and coming through the world to trouble the Church of God’. He depicted the Jesuits’ antics – ‘creeping into the houses and familiarities of men of behaviour and reputation’ – as part of a strategy ‘to corrupt the realm with false doctrine’ and ‘under that pretence, to stir sedition to the peril of her Majesty and her good subjects’.2

  The Queen’s ‘favourable and gentle manner of dealing’ with her Catholic subjects had failed. Indeed, the Jesuit mission had spawned ‘many, yea very many’ more recusants. New legislation was required to meet the renewed threat. The result was ‘An Act to retain the Queen’s Majesty’s Subjects in their due Obedience’.3 Also known as the ‘Act of Persuasions’, it increased the scope of the 1571 law against Catholic conversions. From thenceforth, anyone attempting, ‘by any ways or means’, to ‘absolve, persuade or withdraw’ any of the Queen’s subjects from their ‘natural obedience’ to her or, ‘for that intent’,fn1 to persuade them to forsake her Church for ‘the Romish religion’, would be committing high treason. Anyone who was reconciled to Rome would also be adjudged a traitor. Anyone who assisted in, or had any knowledge of, a treasonable act of reconciliation and failed to report it within twenty days was to be found guilty of misprision (non-disclosure) of treason.

  The saying and hearing of Mass would be punishable by fines of 200 marks and 100 marks respectively; both offences also incurred the sentence of a year’s imprisonment. Anyone over the age of sixteen who refused to go to church would be charged £20 a month. If they persisted in their ‘obstinacy’ for a year, they would have to post a bond of £200 ‘at the least’ for good behaviour. This amounted to a massive £460 per annum.fn2 Failure to pay within three months of conviction would lead to imprisonment until conformity or the settlement of the account. Further sections of the Act concerned the recusant schoolmaster (banned from teaching, imprisoned for a year, his employer fined £10 for every month of service retained) and against the conveyancing of property for the ‘covinous purpose’ of evading the fines. This was meant to prevent the common recourse to trusts. Any such transactions made since the beginning of Parliament were declared void. Another clause dealt with the owners of private chapels. They were exempted from the penalties of nonconformity if they used the right service book and provided they put in an appearance at church four times a year.

  The provisions of the Act had been hammered out in eighteen meetings by a joint committee of Lords and Commons. Early drafts had been a great deal harsher, but that was small comfort to the Catholics of England who faced an unprecedented onslaught on their social and financial standing. The maximum penalty for a year’s recusancy was roughly equivalent to the annual income of a landed gentleman.4 If successfully enforced, the Act would confront all but the wealthiest recusants with a stark choice: conformity or ruin.

  In May 1581 Lord Vaux was cited as a recusant. It was a sign of the government’s determination to enforce the new legislation. A more discreet approach to the problem of the recusant nobility had been attempted the previous year. In a dispatch to Rome in November 1580, Robert Persons had mentioned an offer, ‘lately proposed to certain noblemen’, that required just one church outing a year with ‘a previous protestation that they came not to approve of their religion or doctrines, but only to show an outward obedience to the Queen’. Persons had been delighted to report that ‘all most constantly refused’.5

  The recusant grandee presented a particular problem to the authorities, not only because people looked to his example for guidance in their own conduct, but also because of the protection he could afford his dependants. That is why the Jesuit General had instructed Campion and Persons to target the upper classes. The 1581 Act aimed to close the umbrella of protection held by influential recusants by threatening to undermine their personal standing in society and strike at the heart of their household.

  The entry for Harrowden in the Visitation book of the Archdeacon of Northampton provides a case in point:

  We do present the right honourable William Lord Harrowden, his household and familiars and divers servants not to frequent the parish church of Harrowden aforesaid, nor receive the holy communion in the parish afore rehearsed … Also we present my Lord’s schoolmaster.

  Further down the page, which has been invaded by damp, one of Lord Vaux’s yeoman servants is mentioned:

  Item, we present Athony [sic] Carrington’s child, being born before Shrovetide last, not to be baptized nor presented to the congregation, nor the said Athony’s wife churchedfn3 nor repaired to the church since the said deliverance.6

  Lord Vaux defended himself and his household by claiming that Harrowden Hall was ‘a parish by itself’. Men like Mildmay may have regarded such insularity as contempt for the Queen’s authority, but others, including the churchwarden who ‘affirmeth’ Lord Vaux’s statement, may have preferred to view it as a harmless matter of private devotion. We know that Campion the Jesuit had been welcomed through the gates of Harrowden Hall ‘sundry times’ the previous summer, but it cannot be told whether this was a factor in Vaux’s citation. However his defence was construed, it was no longer adequate in the law. Gone were the days when he could pay lip service to the regime and then entrench himself at home. Private worship was still permitted at the family chapel – provided, of course, that the correct service was used – but thenceforth Lord Vaux, along with his recusant servants, his recusant schoolmaster and the rest of his recusant household, would also have to be seen to attend the Queen’s Church.

  The presentment for recusancy was a singular humiliation for a peer who stood on his honour as much as Lord Vaux, but it would be eclipsed by the loss of two stalwarts of the English mission. At the end of June 1581, George Gilbert was smuggled across the Channel to France. He had encouraged his friends ‘to imitate the lives of apostles and devote themselves wholly to the salvation of souls’ and he had led by example, putting himself ‘and all that he had, even his very life, to frequent hazard in defence of the Catholic faith’.

  Since Father Persons’ arrival in England, Gilbert had been his ‘good angel’. Not only was he the funder-fixer of the mission, but he had also performed the roles of ‘counsellor, companion, servant [and] patron’ to the Jesuit superior. ‘If we have done any good,’ Persons wrote in a letter of recommendation to Rome, ‘a great part of it is to be attributed to this youth.’7 By mid-summer 1581, however, ‘the rarest spectacle to all England’ was too prominent. ‘We had more trouble and anxiety in protecting him than ourselves,’ wrote Persons. No longer able to operate in England ‘without plain peril of his life’, Gilbert was finally persuaded to flee his homeland and ‘keep himself for happier times’. Having hidden in a cave until his ship came into view, he escaped to Rheims and thence to the English College at Rome.

 
His exile would not last long. On 6 October 1583, having commissioned a series of thirty-four paintings celebrating past and recent English martyrs for the College chapel, he caught a fever and died. In his last moments, the 31-year-old reportedly asked, ‘Why are you weeping? You, who have the chance of martyrdom – while I am lying on a soft bed.’8

  Gilbert bequeathed the English mission a Latin memorandum entitled A way to deal with persons of all sorts so as to convert them and bring them back to a better way of life – based on the system and methods used by Fr. Robert Parsons and Fr. Edmund Campion. It was, as its title suggests, a proselytiser’s manual for future missioners to use, as applicable, on ‘heretics’, ‘schismatics’ and ‘lukewarm Catholics’. In his practical, tactical advice and complete understanding of what conversion entailed, Gilbert showed just how closely he and his lay companions had worked with the Jesuits in England and what a debt they were owed.9

  George Gilbert’s absence was keenly felt by all involved in the English mission, but for the Vauxes the loss of Edward Brooksby was more affecting. The exact date of his death is unknown, as is the cause. It deprived Eleanor Vaux of her husband, their two small children of their father and Henry Vaux of a brother-in-law, who, according to Persons, had been his ‘great admirer and follower’. Edward had been Robert Persons’ first escort in London and had also been involved in the secret Jesuit printing press at Greenstreet House, his father’s place in East Ham about six miles from London.10

  The press was, perhaps, the mission’s greatest asset. Not only did it clank out devotional works that provided spiritual sustenance to the lay community, but it also enabled the Jesuits to launch a propaganda campaign that was every bit as sophisticated as that of the government. ‘They are publishing most threatening proclamations against us, as well as books, sermons, ballads, libels, fables, comedies,’ Persons groused, but once the press was up and running, the Jesuits gave as good as they got. In August 1581 Persons gloated that ‘the heretics should not be able to publish anything without its being almost immediately attacked most vigorously’.11

  A sixteenth-century printing press, even a small one like the mission press that could only print half-folios, is a cumbersome contraption, not easy to hide. It was carried to Greenstreet House ‘with much charge and peril’. Printers were needed to operate it – Persons mentions ‘seven men continually at work’ – and they had to come and go without attracting attention. Once, on his way to the Brooksby house, Persons was ‘stayed by the watch’. Another time, one of his printers, ‘going about to buy paper in London’, was arrested, sent to the Tower and racked. The press was expensive to maintain and there was always the risk that ‘the noise of the machine’ would betray it.12

  The chief overseer of the press was Stephen Brinkley, who had translated and published The Exercise of a Christian Life back in 1579. He was forced to move it several times, which required dismantling, carriage and reassembly. From Greenstreet House, the press went to the home of Francis Browne, and later to the estate of Dame Cecily Stonor near Henley-on-Thames, where it was eventually discovered. Once printed, a work had to find an audience and here a slick, but spectacularly risky, distribution system came into play:

  All the books are brought together to London without any being issued and after being distributed into the hands of priests in parcels of a hundred or fifty, are issued at exactly the same time to all parts of the kingdom. Now, on the next day, when according to their wont the officials begin to search the houses of Catholics because these books have been distributed, there are plenty of young men of birth ready to introduce these books by night into the dwellings of the heretics, into workshops as well as into palaces, to scatter them in the court also and about the streets, so that it may not be Catholics only who are accused in the matter.13

  The most outrageous publicity coup, one that immediately intensified the hunt for Campion, was the dissemination of his Rationes Decem or Ten Reasons on 27 June 1581. The tract itself, concerning ten points that Campion wanted to make in debate, was provocative – ‘Listen, Elizabeth, mighty Queen, the prophet in speaking to thee is teaching thee thy duty’14 – but not especially novel. What rendered it so offensive was the illegality of its publication and the audacity of its distribution. Printed at Stonor Park, copies were found strewn across the benches of the university church of St Mary in Oxford on the morning of Commencement. Persons and Campion, both Oxford alumni, knew that the church would be full of students and dons gathering to hear the supplicants for degrees defend their theses. Campion had failed to meet this requirement in 1569. Twelve years later, he wrote in his tract, ‘it is tortures, not academic disputations, that the high-priests are making ready’.15 In fact, it was both.

  Campion was taken on 17 July 1581. It is a wonder, if the more celebratory accounts of the mission are to be credited, that he had not been caught sooner. People had reportedly flocked to his sermons, even suffering the discomfort of a night in a neighbouring barn in order to guarantee entry. There had been a number of close shaves. Once, at the home of the Worthington family in Lancashire, Campion was saved from arrest by a plucky maidservant, who disguised his priesthood by the irreverent act of pushing him into a pond.16

  The authorities finally caught up with him at Lyford Grange in Berkshire, tipped off by a spy among the large crowd that had gathered at the home of the Yate family to hear him preach and celebrate Mass. In the ensuing search, Campion and two other priests were found in a concealed chamber above the stairwell. (Not until 1959, however, would electricians working on the house discover an Agnus Dei blessed by Pope Gregory XIII in a wooden box nailed to a joist under the floorboards of the attic.)

  On Saturday, 22 July, Campion rode into London under armed guard. He was trussed up securely with his elbows tied behind him, his wrists in front, and his feet fastened by a strap under his horse’s belly. A sign on his hat announced to the market crowds that he was Campion the seditious Jesuit. He was incarcerated in the Tower of London and spent his first few days in a tiny cell known as ‘Little Ease’, where he could neither stand nor lie straight. He was interrogatedfn4 and tortured, but refused to recant any of his writings or beliefs.

  There was little chance that without apostasy he would be allowed to live. Everything that followed – the disputation that he was finally granted (though with no time to prepare, no say in the choice of topics and no books apart from the Bible17), the rumours, the tracts and the public performances – contested the reason for his death. For Campion, who had embraced martyrdom the moment he had accepted his mission, it was quite simple: he died for faith. ‘I am a Catholic man and a priest,’ he announced from the scaffold at Tyburn on 1 December 1581. ‘In that faith have I lived and in that faith do I intend to die; and if you esteem my religion treason, then am I guilty. As for any other treason, I never committed, God is my judge.’18

  For Burghley and the Council it was no less straightforward. Campion was a traitor, tried and convicted, along with six other priests and a layman, under Edward III’s treason statute for conspiring ‘both at Rome and at Rheims and in divers other places in parts beyond the seas’, to foment rebellion in England, procure a foreign invasion and kill the Queen.19 The prosecution would have been on firmer ground – and less reliant on dubious testimony – had it stuck to the original plan of charging Campion according to the 1581 ‘Act of Persuasions’, which clearly defined his activities as traitorous. The application of ‘the ancient temporal laws of the realm’ revealed the government’s determination to condemn Campion for his politics rather than his priesthood.

  The debate over whether Campion had returned to England, plough in hand, for ‘the harvest of souls’ or the ‘tillage of sedition’ glowed with white heat in England and throughout Europe for many years after his death. The chief protagonists, Lord Burghley (denouncing a political traitor) and William Allen (championing a religious martyr), both claimed victory and conceded nothing. Each wrote with perfect conviction. Burghley ended The Execu
tion of Justice in England with the biblical line ‘Great is truth, and she overcometh’ (I Esdras 4:41). Allen began A True, Sincere, and Modest Defence of English Catholiques that Suffer for their Faith with ‘Thy mouth hath abounded in malice, and thy tongue hath cunningly framed lies’ (Psalm 49:19).20 There was no middle ground.

  For those without a passion for absolutes, the issue was more complex. There was no hard evidence to suggest that Campion had conspired to kill the Queen or encouraged her subjects to revolt. The 1351 statute under which he was charged was not clearly applicable to his activities. Campion had always been combative about the mission. He had set out from Rome ‘to my warfare in England’, but his weapons were faith and force of argument. He wanted to provide counsel and sacramental grace to England’s Catholics and reconcile others by evangelical proselytising. ‘We only travelled for souls,’ he protested at his trial, ‘we touched neither state nor policy, we had no such commission.’21 And yet he returned to his homeland knowing that, by law, there was treason inherent in his mission.

  Whether by accident or design, Campion and Persons did engage in matters of state. Indeed, they actively pushed for a free and public debate with the Elizabethan regime. Once denied, they utilised illicit media to promote their arguments. They forbade Catholics to go to church and justified disobedience by attempting to redefine the boundaries between the temporal and spiritual realms. Arguably this impugned the royal supremacy and challenged the authority, and even the legitimacy, of the Elizabethan regime.22 It was not treason in the conventional sense, but it was inescapably political. Considering the Jesuits’ co-religionists at the Synod of Southwark had queried their motives from the outset, it is hardly surprising that, a year and a half later, Protestants regarded them with suspicion.