Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing

by Melissa Mohr

  A Jesuitical Doctrine

  In the 1580s, England was in religious ferment, and had been for some time. Henry VIII had halfheartedly begun the Protestant Reformation when he broke with the Catholic Church in 1534 over its refusal to grant him a divorce from his first wife. His son, Edward VI, was a staunch but very young and sickly Protestant, whose ministers tried hard to Protestantize the country during his six-year reign. When Edward’s half sister Mary acceded to the throne in 1553, she brought Catholicism back with a vengeance. Queen Elizabeth I returned the country to Protestantism once again when she was crowned in 1558, but she looked to be quite tolerant of Catholics. At this point, toleration was welcomed by a large part of the English population, who had had to adapt to four religious changes in thirty-four years, each time having to figure out whether they would or would not go to purgatory after death, whether the soul of a child who died before baptism was in limbo or with God.

  When Elizabeth acceded to the throne, many Catholics were so-called schismatics who attended Protestant church despite their differences with the liturgy and doctrines. In 1564, however, Pope Pius V specifically forbade English Catholics from attending Church of England services. And in 1570 he issued the bull Regnans in Excelsis. This decree excommunicated Elizabeth, declared that she was not the lawful queen of England, absolved her subjects of allegiance to her, and excommunicated anyone who would “dare obey her orders, mandates, and laws.” It was rumored (falsely) throughout the country that the bull also granted full remission of sins to anyone who assassinated her. After this, English penal laws against Catholics grew ever more oppressive. Statutes passed in 1571 made it treason to reconcile anyone to the Catholic Church or be oneself reconciled, to procure or publish papal bulls, and to bring into England crucifixes, rosaries, or an Agnus Dei (a small wax cake impressed with the figure of a lamb bearing a cross, blessed by the Pope and thought to possess apotropaic power—a more modest version of the flying phallus pilgrimage badge). In 1581, the government prohibited celebration of the Mass, imposing large fines and year-long imprisonment for the celebrant and hearers. This law also increased the recusancy fine—the penalty Catholics paid if they refused to attend Church of England services—to £20 per month, forty or fifty times the wage of artisans such as carpenters or tailors. The 1585 statute that made it illegal to be a priest in England, under which Southwell was tried, also made it an offense punishable by death to shelter or aid a priest in any way. And in 1587, recusants were to forfeit two-thirds of their income if they refused to pay the huge fines levied on them.

  In short, it was a difficult time to be a Catholic in England. If you helped priests—necessary to your salvation because only they could provide access to the sacraments—you risked death, not just for yourself but also for members of your family. If you followed the Pope’s dictates and refused to attend heretical services, you faced poverty brought on by crippling fines. If you didn’t do these things, though, you were at best, as Catholics of the time believed, preparing for yourself a long, long time in purgatory. Purgatory was not to be taken lightly—it was very much like hell, but with the possibility of release after much suffering. Depending on their sins, souls in purgatory might, according to historian Eamon Duffy, be “suspended by meat-hooks driven through jaws, tongue, or sexual organs, frozen into ice, boil[ed] in vats of liquid metal or fire.” At worst, you were damning yourself eternally, going straight to hell, where those souls on meat hooks writhe forever.

  The crown had many methods to discover and prosecute suspected Catholics. They employed pursuivants, special Catholic-hunters who traveled through the country raiding houses to look for priests and Catholic paraphernalia such as crucifixes and rosaries. They had torture. The head pursuivant, Richard Topcliffe, even constructed a special room in his basement in which to practice his favorite form of torture, to extract confessions from priests. (A bit like crucifixion, it involved hanging a prisoner by his hands, in irons. The body cannot endure this position for more than ten minutes without terrible pain; internal injury follows shortly, and it eventually becomes very difficult and then impossible to breathe.)

  But the crown’s chief and most insidious weapon seems almost harmless on its face—it was the oath ex officio. The oath ex officio (meaning “by virtue of office”) was put to all people arrested for heresy, whether Catholic or Puritan (Protestants more reformist than the Church of England), before their interrogation. They had to swear that they would answer all questions truthfully, before they had been given any idea of what those questions might be. This violated the principle, established in common law since at least the twelfth century, that people should not be forced to incriminate themselves (a principle enshrined in the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution). A Puritan petitioner to Parliament complained that “to a conscience that feareth God [the oath] is more violent than any rack to constrain him to utter that he knoweth, though it be against himself and to his most grievous punishment.” It seems that he was not exaggerating to any great degree in describing this oath as a kind of torture in a society where to forswear oneself was to injure God and commit one’s soul to the fires of hell, but to answer according to one’s oath would be to condemn one’s mortal body, and possibly others’, to imprisonment or death.

  The “Bloody Question” was another coercive oath employed frequently by the Tudor state and greatly feared by English Catholics. It was meant to divide the Catholic community, forcing Catholics to choose between loyalty to the queen and loyalty to the Pope. Arrested Catholics would be asked what they would do if the Pope sent an army into England to overthrow the queen and commanded all Catholics to support the army. Would they side with the queen or with the Pope? This was a genuinely difficult question for most Catholics. They owed loyalty and obedience to Elizabeth, their temporal sovereign, but were also bound to obey the Pope, the spiritual leader of the Church, in all his dictates. The issue was made doubly complicated by the Pope’s declaration that Elizabeth was not the lawful queen of England and by his excommunication of her and all her “followers.” A few Catholics, including Southwell himself, came down firmly on the side of the queen, but many chose the Pope, or made no answer at all to the question. These latter Catholics could then, with at least some justification, be prosecuted as traitors, giving a more plausible coloring to the 1585 statute that made it treason for priests to remain in the land and for anyone to help them.

  As many Catholics saw it, equivocation was their only defense against coercive oaths that forced them to incriminate themselves. Southwell’s trial gives us an idea of how this technique worked. Southwell was accused of telling Catholics that if Protestant authorities asked whether they knew the location of a priest, they could swear that the answer was no, “reserving this intention: ‘Not with a purpose to tell you.’” This is the mental reservation we’ve mentioned before, which depends on a distinction between what is spoken out loud and what is intended silently. A Catholic could swear out loud that she had not seen a priest, as long as she added silently, “With a purpose to tell you.” Though what the listeners heard was false—she had indeed seen the priest—what God heard is true, since he understood the entire speech, its spoken and unspoken components. The Catholic saw the priest, but not with the intention to tell the authorities—true. God, not the Protestant authorities, is the audience that matters here. Without equivocation, the Catholic would have been constrained to admit that she had seen the priest, a crime punishable by huge fines and even death for her and for the priest, or she would have refused the oath, an act the authorities would have seen as a confession of guilt, for why refuse to swear unless you had something to hide?

  Secular authorities hated equivocation, since it allowed suspected criminals to escape incriminating themselves by oath. It would allow a man to repudiate and ruin a woman whom he had, for all intents and purposes, married; it would allow a thief to claim that stolen goods were really his own; worst of all, it would allow someone caught plotting against the queen
to deny his involvement. Equivocation would give these criminals freedom to mislead their prosecutors, indeed to perjure themselves in men’s eyes as long as they told the truth in God’s. In effect, it would take the threat of divine punishment, upon which any kind of testimony relied, out of the equation. Lord Chief Justice Popham (who also condemned Mary, Queen of Scots to die) summed it up: “If this doctrine should be allowed, it would supplant all justice, for we are men, and no gods, and can judge but according to their outward actions and speeches, and not according to their secret and inward intentions.” The legal system cannot function, civil justice cannot be done, if people are free to swear whatever they like to the authorities as long as they do not perjure themselves to God. The system needs to—and today does—define this kind of language as perjury; otherwise, “all judgments, all giving of Testimonies should be perverted.” Southwell was sentenced to death.

  Equivocation eventually backfired for parties on both sides of Southwell’s trial. Though the Tudor authorities were appalled by equivocation, the general populace was apparently not particularly concerned about it. They were horrified, however, that the government was executing a man whose only “crime” was being a priest. The usual procedure in these executions was hanging, drawing, and quartering. A noose was put around the prisoner’s neck, and he was allowed to hang for a while until he was weakened but not dead. Then he would be cut down, still alive, and his privy parts sliced off; then he would be disemboweled. His heart would be cut out, killing him, and thrown into a fire along with his intestines. Finally he would be decapitated and his body hacked into pieces to be nailed on the gatehouse of London Bridge as a warning to other would-be traitors. An early seventeenth-century account of the Babington conspiracy, a Catholic plot to replace Elizabeth with her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, notes that this procedure is “not without some note and touch of Cruelty.”

  When it was Southwell’s turn to suffer this not entirely uncruel punishment, the spectators prevented it from being carried out in the usual way. The hangman tried to cut the rope so that Southwell could be disemboweled alive, but the crowd stopped him with cries of “Let him hang till he be dead” and “Pull his legs.” In response, the executioner pulled down on his legs to end his torment quickly. When he later held up Southwell’s head with the customary announcement “Here is the head of a traitor,” no one in the crowd shouted “Traitor, traitor,” the standard response. People instead scrambled to dip pieces of cloth in pools of his blood, to preserve as relics. Southwell died a martyr, the authorities having failed to turn the populace against him because of his advocacy of equivocation.

  Popular indifference to equivocation didn’t last long, however. Advocated by Southwell, the Jesuit superior Henry Garnet, and other Jesuits of note, equivocation became known as a primarily Jesuit doctrine, and thus was tainted by English suspicion of Jesuits as traitors, Spanish agents willing to do or say anything to overthrow the queen. Its involvement in the Gunpowder Plot finished it as a respectable doctrine. In 1605, a group of Catholics attempted to blow up Parliament and with it, King James I and much of his family. Henry Garnet was one of the men arrested in connection with the plot, and the issue of equivocation played a key role at his trial, as it had in Southwell’s. This time, however, it was linked with a plan so monstrous—to kill the king, his Protestant heirs, and most of the Protestant nobility of England—that it was forevermore tainted with treason, seen as trickery practiced only by the most dishonest, most depraved criminals.

  Equivocation had unanticipated effects on the sacredness of the very oaths it was designed to protect. Eventually the doctrine became so entwined with Catholicism in the popular imagination that it was nearly impossible for a Catholic to swear and be believed. Even English Catholic authors began to decry the practice, complaining as the priest Christopher Bagshaw did in 1601 that, as a result, “they may charge us … with any treason whatsoever, and we have no way left unto us to acquit ourselves from it.” Even a straightforward oath like “I swear I have not sheltered a priest” was assumed to include a mental reservation, an inward “so that it’s any of your business,” to deceive the authorities. No matter what accused Catholics said, the Protestant authorities thought they were guilty and practicing Jesuit trickery to save themselves. Equivocation, created to get Catholics out of one bind, inadvertently created another—the presumption of guilt. It also became a factor in the general decline of the power of oaths in this period. If it is always possible to equivocate out of an oath, there is little point to swearing anymore; swearing itself is devalued as a means of guaranteeing the truth.

  What the #%&* Is a Spiritual Body?

  Another key factor that led to the weakening, the devaluing, of oaths was the rise of Protestantism itself. Protestantism made it impossible for people to touch God’s physical body, in the Eucharist or by swearing, making oaths seem less effective.

  The defining difference between Catholicism and Protestantism was the status of God’s body in the Eucharist. For Catholics, as we saw in the previous chapter, God’s body is really physically present in (or rather as) the Host. It looks like a wafer, but it has been transformed really and entirely into the body of God. For Protestants, the Host still becomes God’s body after consecration, but in a spiritual sense, not a physical one. Though Protestant groups from Lutherans to Calvinists to the Church of England to the Anabaptists subscribed to a variety of contradictory opinions about many religious issues—the timing and role of baptism, what constitutes proper church adornment, even the precise nature of what the Host becomes after consecration—they all agree that a priest cannot transubstantiate a wafer into the physical body of God. At Communion God is not “bodily, naturally, and carnally … eaten,” as the orthodox Catholics insist. The Thirty-Nine Articles, which codified Church of England doctrine, explain how the Eucharist is to be understood instead: “The body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner.” The wafer remains material bread, but God’s body is also there “spiritually,” “sacramentally,” “figuratively,” or “virtually,” depending on which kind of Protestant is doing the describing. God’s body was no longer capable of being touched, let alone broken and eaten by the faithful.

  For Catholics, however, the concept of a spiritual Real Presence didn’t make any sense. The early seventeenth-century Catholic controversialist Robert Parsons scoffed at the idea that God could be received “substantially, though yet spiritually only and sacramentally.” For Parsons and his brethren, Real Presence meant physical presence—God is only (in) the wafer in some meaningful sense if he can be touched and eaten bodily, not spiritually or sacramentally.

  Swearing, the other means through which people could touch God’s body, underwent a parallel transformation, also moving from the physical to the spiritual realm. We have seen how certain kinds of medieval Catholic swearing could literally rip apart Christ’s physical body, the same body that is on the paten during the Eucharist. Protestant swearing was thought to rip apart Christ’s spiritual body, the same body that is there spiritually (and rather confusingly) on the paten during the Eucharist. Protestant William Vaughan described in 1611 how this was supposed to work: “When [people] forswear themselves … whether by God’s body, by his blood, or by his wounds, they spiritually pierce his sides with their bloody weapons.”

  The Protestant Eucharist was supposed to be no less real and no less efficacious for being spiritual, and Protestant oaths were supposed to be no less capable of making God a witness and thus guaranteeing the truth of a person’s statements. But an oath’s power to affect God’s spiritual body is nonetheless not as satisfactory as the power to compel him physically. Medieval Catholics knew that God’s body was up in heaven, and sometimes on a paten during Mass, and they could reach out and touch it with their oaths, making sure he was paying attention. Where is God’s spiritual body, though? What is his spiritual body? Just as the spiritual Real Presence of God during Communion caused
epistemological problems for Catholics and for some Protestants—in what sense is God really there if not physically?—the Protestant mechanism of swearing cast doubt upon the extent of oaths’ ability to secure the truth. Although Protestant writers stressed that swearing still worked to compel God to act as witness, oaths’ new “spiritual” access to God called into question the certainty of their success.

  All this weakened the power of oaths during the Reformation. The sheer number of oaths people were required to take during this period also contributed to the cultural sense that swearing by God was becoming meaningless verbiage instead of a sacred formula that guaranteed the truth of people’s words. Henry VIII started the trend, arguably, with the 1534 Oath of Supremacy, which required various of his male subjects to swear that the king was the supreme governor of the Church of England. Elizabeth made her subjects swear a similar oath. In 1606, following the Gunpowder Plot, James I added the Oath of Allegiance, in which subjects had to swear loyalty to him and disavow the Pope. When the Civil War broke out, the oaths started to come thick and fast—the Protestation Oath (1641) of loyalty to king, Parliament, and Church of England; the Solemn League and Covenant (1643), declaring loyalty to the reformed (Protestant) religion; the Oath of Abjuration (1643 and 1656), disavowing, again, the poor Pope; the Engagement (1650), pledging loyalty now to the Commonwealth, since the king was dead; and in 1660, renewed Oaths of Allegiance to the new king, Charles II, and the Church of England. Historian Christopher Hill estimates that men might have had to take up to ten oaths of loyalty, all of them conflicting, between 1640 and 1660, with the effect that oaths lost much of their ability to do what the authorities kept imposing them in order to do. They stopped being a real guarantee that a person would be loyal or that he was telling the truth about something, and became a mere formula that could freely be recited for authority, irrespective of the swearer’s real intentions and beliefs. What was like the rack “to a conscience that feareth God” in 1586 was a joke in a popular song by 1662: