‘Old and hoary and a veteran in evil’, Topcliffe (b. 1531) had been around for a while, long enough to remember the Marian burnings and to have served, so he claimed, in Princess Elizabeth’s household. In 1582, he had interrogated Lord Vaux in the Fleet. In the ensuing decade, he had been busy gathering intelligence, conducting searches, inflicting tortures, cross-examining defendants and sometimes also gloating over their deaths at the scaffold.fn2 He chased priests for zeal and recusants for money and he revelled in their suffering for the simple pleasure of watching pain. (He was happy to torture thieves, murderers, gypsies and vagrants too.) Henry Garnet labelled him homo sordidissimus – most sordid man. He had a strange relationship with the Queen, who seems to have indulged his little fiefdom of terror. She apparently let him have a torture chamber in his house at Westminster. With the authorisation of conciliar warrants, he made extensive use of it. His behaviour was so notorious that he spawned new words at court – Topcliffizare (v.): to go recusant hunting; Topcliffian (adj.): related to torture, as in Anthony Standen’s comment about the Earl of Essex: ‘contrary to our Topcliffian customs, he hath won more with words than others could do with racks.’8
Topcliffe was the arch-villain of Catholic literature, who spoke, Gerard wrote, ‘from the cesspool of his heart’. The demonisation of ‘persecutors’ was a key component of martyrology. Just as the missionaries were represented as descendants of the earliest Christians, so their enemies, in their ‘barbarous cruelty’, were likened, or even said to surpass, ‘the old heathen persecutors of the primitive church’.9 Catholic propagandists often caricatured Protestant officials unfairly, but in Topcliffe’s case there was no need to exaggerate. He revelled in his notoriety and was proud of his excesses. Writing to the Queen, ‘this Good, or Evil, Friday 1595’, upon a brief imprisonment for maligning her councillors, he boasted that he had sent more traitors to Tyburn ‘than all the noblemen & gentlemen about your court, your counsellors excepted’. Since his committal, he continued,
wine in Westminster hath been given for joy of that news & in all prisons rejoicings … And now at Easter, instead of a Communion, many an Alleluya will be sung of priests & traitors, in prisons & in ladies’ closets, for Topcliffe’s fall, & in farther kingdoms also.10
To John Gerard – admittedly a lively witness – Topcliffe would allegedly snarl as he slammed his sword on the table, ‘You know who I am? I am Topcliffe. No doubt you have often heard people talk about me.’
It will hardly be a surprise to learn that Topcliffe was also a bad husband and, like many psychopaths with the means, a sharp dresser.11 Aside from assassination, which was never attempted,fn3 there was not much that Catholics could do about him. The ‘foul spider’ that was dropped into his milk as he breakfasted in one recusant house was a feeble, if telling, protest. ‘It was not a spider but a humble bee,’ he was informed. It is not known if the gentleman thief who broke into his house and stole his fine clothes in December 1571 was a Catholic with a grudge, or an opportunist with a sartorial bent.12 The ultimate revenge was had by the seminary priest, Thomas Pormont, who issued an account of his interrogation by Topcliffe following his arrest in September 1591. Topcliffe, he claimed, had offered to release him if he declared himself the bastard son of Archbishop Whitgift. Topcliffe also allegedly boasted
that he was so great and familiar with Her Majesty that he many times putteth his hands between her breasts and papps [nipples] and in her neck.
That he hath not only seen her legs and knees, but feeleth them with his hands above her knees.
That he hath felt her belly and said unto Her Majesty that she had the softest belly of any woman kind.
That she said unto him: ‘Be not these the arms, legs and body of King Henry?’ To which he answered: ‘Yea.’
That she gave him for a favour a white linen hose wrought with white silk.
That he is so familiar with her that when he pleaseth to speak with her, he may take her away from any company; and that she is as pleasant with every one that she doth love.
That he did not care for the Council, for that he had his authority from Her Majesty.
That the Archbishop of Canterbury was a fitter counsellor in a kitchen among wenches than in a Prince’s court.
And to Justice Young the said Topcliffe said that he would hang the Archbishop and 500 more if they were in his hands.13
Pormort may, of course, have made it all up – Topcliffe reportedly tried, unsuccessfully, for almost two hours to get him to admit as much on the scaffold – but, if not, the timing is interesting. Pormort was executed on 21 February 1592. In a matter of days, Anne Bellamy conceived her child. Whatever happened to her in the Gatehouse prison and whatever fantasies may or may not have been swirling round Topcliffe’s head at the time, he certainly took advantage of her plight.
In exchange for her freedom and a promise (not kept) that her family would be untouched, Anne provided information. On the basis of that information, her family home at Uxenden, near Harrow, was surrounded. In the early hours of 26 June 1592, Topcliffe stormed the house and announced that he knew where the priest was hiding and that he should give himself up or he would come and get him. A slim, auburn-haired thirty-year-old came out of his hide and entered the hall where Topcliffe was waiting. Thus, Robert Southwell later wrote, ‘I fortuned to fall under his ungentle hands.’14
‘A priest and a traitor!’ Topcliffe allegedly spat when Southwell refused to identify himself. In his fury Topcliffe ran at Southwell with his sword and had to be restrained by his men. Southwell admitted to nothing more than being ‘a gentleman’. He challenged Topcliffe to prove his assertion. At first light, Topcliffe took him to his ‘strong chamber’ in Westminster. ‘My body trembled,’ Southwell later wrote, ‘and my tears bewrayed grief through the horror and expectation of my painful agonies.’15 Before he set to work, Topcliffe wrote to the Queen, congratulating himself on his prize and detailing his intention to hang the prisoner by his wrists, ‘his feet standing upon the ground & his hands but as high as he can reach against the wall’. Topcliffe promised that, ‘if he be rightly used’, Southwell would ‘tell all’.16
But Southwell did not tell all. On 28 June he was transferred to the Gatehouse prison, where several high-ranking officials continued the interrogation. A month later he was placed in solitary confinement in the Tower of London. As he wrote in a letter to Robert Cecil on 6 April 1593, he was living ‘as one enclosed up in an anchorite’s cell, having had no more part of the whole world but the scope of a few paces, no more use of life but to expect and behold my death, no more comfort of mankind but the recourse of a keeper and sometimes of Her Majesty’s Lieutenant’. Finally, after two and a half years in the Tower, he was taken to Newgate prison and, on 20 February 1595, he was tried before the Queen’s Bench for the treason of being a priest ordained overseas during Elizabeth’s reign and practising in her realm. He reportedly claimed to have been tortured ten times, ‘so extremely that the least of them was worse than ten executions’.17 Anne Bellamy gave evidence. Topcliffe railed a lot. Much was made of Southwell’s advocacy of equivocation. He was found guilty. The following day he was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn.
Much of what was written about Southwell at this time flowed from Garnet’s pen. The moment he had heard the news of his friend’s arrest, he had ridden post-haste to London from Warwickshire, whither he and his ‘family’ had returned and Southwell himself had been headed. ‘Father Garnet had to move’ to the capital, John Gerard explained, ‘so that he could keep in touch with us all, scattered as we were up and down the country, and in this central position be more accessible when we wanted to see him.’18 He also wanted to be the first to discover the news of Southwell. If he could do nothing to alleviate his friend’s suffering, he was at least determined to tell the world about it. ‘We will be no less persistent in writing to you than they are in persecuting us,’ Garnet informed his General when he suspected that one of his letters had been intercepted:
All the cruel, barbarous and bestial acts perpetrated under the noonday sun, these I shall make known on the summit of the Capitoline hill. Therein is our triumph, our crown and our laurels. Have they intercepted my letter about my dearest Robert? If so, I shall write again. His valour, constancy and devotion are not such as will be lost to memory if a single letter falls into the enemy’s hands, unless there is obliterated at one and the same time everything that is written with such splendour in the hearts of all who knew him.19
Garnet’s information was not always accurate. He stated, for example, that Southwell had acknowledged his priesthood before his transfer to the Tower, when in fact he only ‘unveiled’ himself in his letter to Cecil of 6 April 1593. On the other hand, before a manuscript copy of this letter was discovered in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, its existence was only known because Garnet, solely of all reporters, mentioned it.20 Clearly he was privy to a unique, if not always reliable, channel of information. He also mingled with the crowds when Southwell was moved. He was determinedly constructing a martyr’s tale. He wrote for dramatic effect, but he also professed to tell ‘the sole truth as far as I could any way learn’.21 His reports reflect the news, and often his own mood, as the Vaux sisters would have experienced it. They provide snapshots of suffering:
It is reported by some, and very credibly, that he hath been tortured: as by being hanged up by the hands, put in irons, kept from sleep and such like devises to such men usual, but hereof there is no certainty.
(16 July 1592)
He asked his gaoler not to be too far away in case some accident might happen, or he might need something. As a result of his severe torture, his sides were not strong enough for him to call out aloud.
(Reported, 22 February 1595)
‘God forgive me, Mr Topcliffe, but I do not think that there can be another man like you in the whole world.’
(Southwell, as reported by Garnet in his letter of 22 February 1595)
I have a rosary, which he threw from the scaffold and also the bone of one of his knees: and these I shall send to your lordship when I conveniently can.
(1 May 1595)22
In his dispatch of 22 February 1595, Garnet wasn’t sure if he should be ‘sorry’ or ‘glad’ of Southwell’s death. He was sad that he had lost his ‘most dear and loved companion’, who had also been his confessor, but decided that it was ‘more fitting to rejoice’ in Southwell’s ascension to heaven. During his novitiate in Rome, Southwell had written:
If God, who knows man’s misery, still wishes to lengthen my life … and to exercise me still further in this valley of tears, then let toil come, let come chains, imprisonment, torture, the cross of Peter and Andrew, the gridiron of Lawrence, the flayer of Bartholomew, the lions of Ignatius, all things in a word which can possibly come. Indeed, my dearest Jesus, I pray from my heart that they may come, and by Thy wounds and the sufferings of Thy Saints, by Thy merits and by theirs, I most humbly beg that they may begin now at this very moment when I am writing and last until the very end of my life. For Thy sake allow me to be tortured, mutilated, scourged, slain and butchered. I refuse nothing, I will embrace all, I will endure all, not indeed I, dust and ashes as I am, but Thou, my Lord, in me.23
Robert Southwell was hardened by years of ascetical training, primed for the rigours of the mission and ready, indeed eager, to die for his faith. From his first days at Hackney to his last in prison, he had kept ‘the supreme goal of martyrdom in view’. It was said that his face had once lit up at the sight of human remains on London Bridge and he had exclaimed to his companion, ‘If God grants it, you will see my head sometime on one of those.’24 It is tempting, perhaps, to regard someone so intensely committed to his faith, and fixated on death and the afterlife, as somehow sub-, or super-, human. But Southwell was also the ‘boy-priest’, who loved to write poems, good poems,fn4 and whose family worried about him. ‘Even from my infancy,’ he wrote to his father, ‘you were wont in merriment to call me Father Robert.’ That Richard Southwell was eventually confirmed in his prophecy gave him no pleasure and when he heard that Robert was ‘much troubled with lice’ in prison, he obtained the Council’s permission to send him fresh clothes.25 In his letter to Cecil, Southwell wrote of his readiness to accept ‘that happy destiny, which is commonly made the salary of priests’ labours’. It is good to remember that in the same letter, he also wrote: ‘I was the child of a Christian woman and not the whelp of a tiger.’26
‘London is like a whirlpool,’ Garnet wrote; ‘every day it sucks Catholics into prison and throws them out again.’ They tended to lodge in the capital for the autumn and spring assizes, keeping ‘two or three houses there at the same time’, but it was extremely risky and whenever they could, they would escape the ‘watchers’, the plague and the ubiquitous London mud (‘rich and black as thick ink’fn5) and head for the shires.27 Travelling entailed its own risks and could be a fairly wretched experience. Most roads were just well-worn tracks, often impassable in the winter and perilously rutted in the summer, which was also peak season for the high lawyers, rufflers, whipjacks, clapperdudgeons, dummerers, counterfeit cranks and priggers of prancers.fn6 Fair weather also brought out the pursuivants, ‘much worse’, Southwell had written, ‘than any rainstorm or hurricane’.28 Since the 1591 proclamation, which required householders to enquire after the ‘condition and country’ of newcomers, and the ‘statute of confinement’ of 1593, which forbade recusants from travelling beyond five miles of their homes without a special licence, the hamlets and highways of Elizabethan England had become even more hostile.
But static priests did not win souls and missionaries could hardly complain about travelling. It was particularly important for Garnet, as Jesuit superior, to encourage his colleagues in their lonely postings and persuade the authorities in Rome of the urgent need for more men. It is often impossible to trace Garnet’s steps – or to ascertain whether he was accompanied by one, or both, of the Vaux sisters – but we do know that he visited the north of England over the winter of 1592–3 and was appalled by what he saw and heard. He was told that throughout Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland the post-proclamation searches and rumours had been so intense that many recusants had forsaken their homes for the mountains and woods. He heard the story of one man and his heavily pregnant wife, who had spent six weeks enclaved under an oak tree: ‘The entrance was invisible in a cleft root, just large enough for a man to pass through, and it was kept covered with a thin layer of sods. When the rain came and the snow melted, it collapsed on them.’29
Increasingly, since the loss of Southwell, Garnet was haunted by the prospect of his own arrest. He had visions of his quarters impaled on London Bridge. ‘For me and for no other man,’ he wrote, ‘tortures are already prescribed; death itself would indeed be a delight.’ He feared the manacles and the rack: ‘I distrust myself, as well I might.’ He begged, again, to be relieved of the superiorship. Aquaviva was sympathetic, but firm: Garnet was the best man for the job: ‘You must retain this burden yourself, and with keenness.’ But he could have a deputy: Henry Walpole, a priest since 1588 and an erstwhile chaplain in Sir William Stanley’s rebel regiment supporting Philip II in the Low Countries (a standard-bearer of this regiment was a certain Guy Fawkes). ‘We are daily waiting for Father Walpole,’ Garnet enthused on 12 November 1593.30 The following month Walpole landed and, within hours, was arrested.
He was dealt with, according to Topcliffe’s written request, ‘in some sharp sort’. According to Catholic reports, this sharp dealing occurred fourteen times. At Walpole’s execution in York in April 1595 – just two months after Southwell’s – sympathisers noted that his fingers appeared dislocated. He had given up some information before he died. The authorities now knew that Garnet used ‘Verstegan in Antwerp’ to convey his letters and that he ‘kept at Mris Vaux her house in London’. Walpole had also heard that Garnet had stayed at Braddocks Manor in Essex, but he ‘never knew where he was’.31 This was probably t
rue. Garnet was well protected, his lodgings ‘known to a very few persons who could be thoroughly trusted’. Thus wrote Oswald Tesimond, S.J. Another priest was commended to John Gerard by Robert Persons ‘by token that he gave him his breviary at his departure, and by that token he should direct me to Garnet, otherwise called Walley, being a private man only to papists known’.32 But Topcliffe and his colleagues had caught the scent of this private man and his private family and they were not prepared to give it up. As Garnet had written in July 1592, ‘we can never be safe, never free from danger’.33
*
‘The Friday night before Passion Sunday,’ Garnet informed Robert Persons in September 1594,
was such a hurly burly in London as never was seen in man’s memory, no, not when Wyatt was at the gates: a general search in all London, the Justices and chief citizens going in person, all unknown persons taken and put in churches till the next day.
To Aquaviva, who may not have heard of Thomas Wyatt’s 1554 rebellion against Queen Mary, Garnet suggested that ‘the uproar was such that Hannibal himself might have been at the gates or the Spanish fleet in the river Thames’.34
The year had begun with the revelation of two assassination plots. The first involved the royal physician, Roderigo Lopez, a Portuguese Jew who had converted to Christianity. He had allegedly been paid by the King of Spain to poison Queen Elizabeth. Arguably the Spanish link made it a Catholic plot, but its disclosure at this time, indeed its very existence, had more to do with the political rivalry of the Earl of Essex and the Cecils. Keen to prove his security credentials, Essex announced his discovery of this ‘dangerous and desperate treason’ in January. Burghley, who had known about Lopez’s Spanish connections much earlier and even used him as a double agent, was compromised and so had to lend his weight to Essex’s vigorous investigation.
God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England Page 25
