God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World

by Cullen Murphy

  This is a dry and clinical dissection. It describes capabilities that the Inquisition possessed in rudimentary form. Over time, the very same capabilities contributed to the power of secular governments, which in turn refined and improved those capabilities. Technology extended their reach. When it comes to inquisitions, a more concise way to describe the modern world would be: fertile soil. Plant an inquisition, and it grows.

  Keep Your Faith

  “Institutions do what they must to retain power. Isn’t it that simple?” The comment came from Eamon Duffy, a historian of the early modern period, whose work has chronicled the difficult and bloody religious transitions in England during the sixteenth century, as a Catholic country was forcibly transformed into a Protestant one. We had been talking about the campaign by Elizabeth I against Catholic priests and their supporters, and the intelligence apparatus Elizabeth put in place to wage it. Duffy’s office is in a garret under the eaves of the Pepys Library, in Magdalene College, at Cambridge University. C. S. Lewis taught at Magdalene, as did the theologian Henry Chadwick, and in a more distant time the Protestant martyr Thomas Cranmer, the force behind the Book of Common Prayer, so the place resonates with a certain pedigree. It’s hard to imagine a more congenial scholarly space than Duffy’s rooms. The doorways are low and uneven, and make you not only stoop but also tilt. A crucifix hangs over one of them. There is a fireplace. Pictures on the walls: Thomas More, Cardinal Newman, William Butler Yeats. A color photograph of Seamus Heaney, a friend, on the mantel. Books everywhere, of course—shelved, stacked, tossed. A bottle of Jameson’s in a corner. A teakettle on the hearth. To get to Duffy’s garret, you pass through the porter’s lodge into a spacious quad and then make for a passageway on the far side. The motto of Magdalene is emblazoned above it: Garde ta foy. The popular collegiate translation is “Watch your liver.” The correct one is “Keep your faith.”

  Keeping your faith was a hard thing to do in the period Eamon Duffy writes about. The Reformation had undermined the very meaning of “orthodoxy,” and the alignment of secular powers with various religious groups made sectarian disputes murderous. In England, Henry VIII had broken with Rome in 1534, over the issue of his divorce, placing himself at the head of the church and vigorously suppressing anyone who raised an eyebrow. His short-lived son, Edward VI, continued this policy. Henry’s daughter Mary, a Catholic, married to the man who would become Philip II of Spain, attempted to lead England back to the fold by force. This is the subject of Duffy’s book Fires of Faith. Protestants were arrested, and many were burned at the stake. Mary was succeeded by her half-sister Elizabeth, who attempted to steer a moderate course but eventually returned the kingdom to a Protestant path. Mary and Elizabeth were animated in part by expediency: both faced implacable enemies determined to drive them from power. The opposition may have been based on religion, but both monarchs saw it fundamentally as treason. The challenge to Rome had divided Europe in complicated and lethal ways.

  “Elizabethan England certainly wasn’t a police state, because they didn’t have a police force,” Duffy said. “But you’ve got an ideological war going on in Europe, with England very conscious that there’s a struggle for the soul. It’s a bit like American feeling about Islam now.” Once Jesuit priests started arriving—they were being trained and ordained on the continent, and then smuggled back into Britain—popular fears had a sharp focus: “a bogeyman,” as Duffy put it. This was something that elements of the government, or powerful individuals with their own agendas, or local folk with scores to settle, could build on. It was also a situation in which unstable people could come to the fore. At the same time, Duffy explained, commitment was growing among large numbers of people to a kind of Protestantism that fed on anti-Catholicism—indeed, that defined itself that way.

  “What makes religious persecution so shocking to us, I suppose,” Duffy said, “is that cruelty in the pursuit of the things of God seems particularly outrageous. I’m not sure it’s any more outrageous than protecting democracy with, you know, waterboarding. Systems find ways of protecting themselves, and ways to justify these things to themselves.

  “I feel less shocked by the Inquisition than a lot of people do,” he went on, “because you ask yourself, What would they have done? I mean, take Mary’s government in the 1550s in England. What should she have done? These people did want to depose her, and she did think they were murdering souls. What could she have done? And it’s not that you’re saying, ‘I would have done the same in that position,’ because we’re just not in that position. That was then, and this is now. Of course, these things are outrageous if they’re considered in the abstract. But human beings don’t live in the abstract. They live in the particular.”

  Not much is left of “the particular” of Elizabeth I’s London, or Mary’s, much less the London of their father—not much of the urban landscape, at any rate. It’s easy to pretend, in Jerusalem or Carcassonne or Rome, that you’ve been transported to another era—that you’re walking the streets the way they really were in some bygone age. London does not accommodate the imagination that way. The Great Fire swept much of the Tudor city away, and the natural evolution of what was to become an imperial capital took most of the rest. Elizabeth and Henry would recognize only a few nonreligious buildings, such as the Banqueting House of Whitehall Palace, and Hampton Court. By and large, churches have survived most successfully. And street names. The house owned by Sir Francis Walsingham, who ran Queen Elizabeth’s intelligence service, stood in Seething Lane, not far from the Tower of London. The house is gone, but you can still walk down Seething Lane. And of course the Tower is there, London’s great constant, originally the Roman praetorium, always fortified, a place at the center of so much of England’s public history, and also the place where so many personal histories came to an end.

  But “not much left” isn’t completely accurate—it applies to how the city looks on the outside. From the inside—in the to and fro of government business, the ebb and flow of friendships, the vicissitudes of family fortune, the vagaries of commerce, the pricks of conscience—the remains of sixteenth-century London have been remarkably well preserved in various ways. A good place to start is in the manuscript collections of the British Library. Because many of these handwritten documents originally came from private sources—the papers of Lord Burghley, for instance, who was Queen Elizabeth’s chief advisor during most of her reign—the variety gathered up within each leather-bound folio can be astonishing. Imagine throwing an assortment of ordinary papers into a box—canceled checks, report cards, deeds of sale, diary entries, warranties, Christmas letters, road maps. Going through that box decades later brings back to life a former self and another world, in a way few other stimuli can.

  That is the sixteenth-century experience on offer at the British Library. Some of it is glorious. Much of it is mundane. Not a little is disturbing. It is an era of religious transition—occurring not organically but by compulsion. The boundary between religious belief and treasonable activity is not always clear, or may not even exist. The state feels itself under siege—from religious enemies inside the realm, and from their powerful allies beyond the Channel. Pope Pius V, in 1570, has issued a bull, Regnans in Excelsis, declaring the queen to be a heretic, absolving her subjects from allegiance, and giving papal sanction to attempts to depose her. Englishmen are being trained as priests in foreign seminaries and then smuggled back into Britain. (That censored edition of Shakespeare came from a Spanish seminary for English priests.) Catholic sympathizers seem to be lurking everywhere. Rumors are rife of imminent invasion by Catholic forces.

  To meet the threat, the state does what it believes it must. It enacts increasingly harsh penalties on Catholics, and seeks out and confiscates Catholic books and religious articles. It makes support for priests and the old religion tantamount to sedition. It declares treasonous the mere act of being a Jesuit priest or seminarian, even if one has done nothing that could otherwise be construed as treasonous. As one
historian writes, “It was now treason to belong to a particular category of person, a remarkable extension of the law.” The state also revives attempts at censorship, requiring printers in England to secure a license from the crown. One printer will be executed under Elizabeth, and an unwise pamphleteer will lose his right hand (to a meat cleaver hammered by a croquet mallet). The deposition scene from Shakespeare’s Richard II will be deleted from a printed version of the play—it is too incendiary.

  Under Elizabeth, the government creates a powerful intelligence apparatus whose networks extend throughout England and deep into Scotland, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Italy. It relies on spies and informers, idealists and opportunists. It keeps a watchful eye on what is being taught in universities. It subjects prisoners to prolonged interrogation under conditions of horrific duress—to extract information as well as confessions. Many are condemned to death—typically drawn and quartered rather than burned at the stake. From 1581 to 1603, some 130 Catholic priests will die in this manner, together with some sixty members of prominent Catholic families.

  The manner of execution represents a divergence from the Roman Inquisition, which had been launched by the pope a few decades earlier. But in other respects, the secular inquisition in England shares points of resemblance. For obvious reasons, people rarely drew the connection openly. Edward Peters writes, “To the English, Inquisition was exclusively Spanish or Roman. Nothing that English judges might do to Englishmen of different religious persuasions could imaginably be considered as Inquisition.” But the connection was there, and sometimes noticed. Lord Burghley himself commented on one occasion that the inquisitors of Spain “use not so many questions to comprehend and trap their preys” as some English prosecutors did.

  High-Value Target

  For many years, this apparatus was run by Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s principal secretary. A portrait of him, by John De Critz the Elder, hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, alongside portraits of several people—such as Mary, Queen of Scots—for whose fate he bore some responsibility. MI6, Britain’s modern intelligence agency, looks to Walsingham as “the father of the British Secret Service.” His web of informants was extensive, and he harbored no doubts as to the utility of torture for obtaining reliable information; indeed, without torture, he would say, he couldn’t do his job. Nor did his jailers employ just the rack and other instruments; the corrosive effects of sleep deprivation, a modern staple, were well understood. One room in the Tower, known as Little Ease, was so low and tight that a prisoner could only crouch, awkwardly and painfully. Sleep was out of the question.

  The tenor of the period is captured vividly in the documents. A nobleman’s letter of confession to the queen sits alongside his last will and testament, his property carefully itemized. There is an English spy’s lengthy account of life among the Jesuit seminarians studying in Rome—dining with this person and that, discussing theology and foreign affairs, and mentioning names that will turn up a few years later in the execution rolls of Tyburn Hill. A single folio page amounts to a cheat sheet for interrogators, listing sample questions to be asked of priests and other Catholics in custody, to determine how dangerous they are: for instance, do they believe the “poape” has the power to depose a British monarch? There are lists of known popish sympathizers, county by county, and the outline of a plan—scrawled by Walsingham himself—to round up members of prominent Catholic families and hold them in what amounts to detention camps. On two sides of a page, the plan is neatly laid out in columns—one for “The Castels” where the camps would be located, one for the lord who would serve officially as “The Keper,” and one for the counties from which the detainees for each camp would be drawn.

  Interrogation records are plentiful—not always verbatim transcripts, but at a minimum detailed accounts. Looking in a bound volume for something else one afternoon, I was startled to see, in the upper left margin of a folio page, “Primo Julij 1587 Rich. Topclyff.” Richard Topcliffe had been trained in the law, but history remembers him only because he was a brutal interrogator. There, in the margin, in neat brown ink, was his name. Running across the next three pages was a report on the interrogation of “Christofer Sothworthe, Preiste.”

  Southworth had arrived in England only recently, and had practiced his vocation very briefly before being apprehended: “Hee came over Aboute xprmas Laste and i. taken in Lente of a greate and perilous family.” On the folio pages, here and there, a little drawing of a pointing finger calls attention to some matter of special interest: “Hee is of Extraordinary authority,” the manuscript notes of Southworth in one place, and then at another takes pains to emphasize the point: “Hee hathe some Authoritie of A Bisshopp.” In other words, Topcliffe regarded Southworth as what today would be called a high-value target.

  Southworth was from a stubbornly Catholic branch of a prominent family in the troublesome north of England. He left the country to enter a seminary in Rome, and was ordained in 1583. As the report indicates, Southworth was discovered and arrested soon after his return. His life was spared. A roster of prisoners from 1595 finds him in one of those internment “Castels”—Wisbech Castle, an ancient place in the Fens where many other priests were held. He is no. 12 on the list: “Xpofer Southworth sonne to Sr John Southworth a Seminary prieste a man of especiall accoumpte amongest the papists who doe much relie upon him & hath diuers tymes intelligence from beyonde the Seas & dispseth it abroade.” He was eventually released, and returned to the north of England, where he played a role in the saga of the so-called Samlesbury Witches. The details are not germane, but the episode was one of many that would occur throughout Europe and in North America as the clash of religious beliefs, and the inquisitorial systems through which it was channeled, produced bizarre accusations and very serious prosecutions. Whether it arose in Salem or Samlesbury, the phenomenon has been much picked over by social historians looking to explain the origins of mass hysteria.

  “Systems find ways of protecting themselves,” Eamon Duffy had said, “and ways to justify those measures to themselves.” The measures, though sometimes rolled back, seem mainly to accrue. In England, the efforts of Mary built on actions by previous monarchs, just as the efforts of Elizabeth built on the actions of Mary. Motivations may change, targets may shift, but the infrastructure builds by increments. Proof of identity, record-keeping, informers, surveillance, denunciation, interrogation: these are the basic instruments. And as medieval kingdoms remade themselves into modern states, the instruments became better and were applied in a more systematic way.

  France was a leader. By the mid eighteenth century, the government’s undercover police apparatus deployed some 3,000 paid informers in Paris alone, and 10,000 throughout the realm. A lieutenant general of the police in Paris boasted at the time, “When three people are chatting in the street, at least one of them is certain to belong to me.” The police controlled the organs of censorship. (Voltaire and Diderot were both imprisoned for committing unfettered thoughts to print.) They routinely opened letters, read them, resealed the envelopes, and sent the letters on their way. The apparatus of surveillance could not stave off the Revolution—but did survive it. France in the 1790s would invent the passport and the identity card (and the words for them we still use), and under Napoleon and his chief prefect, the redoubtable Joseph Fouché, the secret police would become a pervasive force. Six days a week, wherever he was, Napoleon received from Fouché the equivalent of the President’s Daily Brief—a digest of news, intelligence, rumor, and gossip. A French nobleman, looking back at the period, referred to the Napoleonic system as “a revolting inquisition.”

  Revolting, but also influential. The czars modeled their secret-police system, the Okhrana, on that of the French—and after the Russian Revolution, Lenin took it over and made it his own. It evolved into the KGB. Prussia created a considerable undercover network, which was later adopted by a united Germany and then brought to a state of high performance under the Nazis. After the collapse of
communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union, the security services temporarily fell on hard times. Russia, in name, was a democracy now, and citizens had rights. Former agents gravitated to the private sector—to the service of criminals and oligarchs. Their skills proved portable; even the organizational charts were replicated. Eventually, under Vladimir Putin, the security operations were rebuilt. The Federal Security Service, or FSB, as it is now called, is more powerful than ever, and there is no Communist Party to answer to. It has perhaps 200,000 employees. It controls the Border Guard. Its network of agents on “active reserve” hold key positions throughout the government. Ties with the Russian Orthodox Church are close. Fingerprint dossiers have been assembled for fully half of Russia’s population. A system of “watchdog surveillance” targets individuals not suspected of any crime—Islamists, members of youth groups and “pagan cults,” journalists, trade unionists. Cameras with face-recognition software, known as VideoLock, operate at airports and train stations. Once, in the 1990s, before he became Russia’s president, Putin was asked by a reporter if he planned to organize a coup d’état against the serving president, Boris Yeltsin. Putin replied, “And why do we need to organize a coup d’état? We are in power now.”

  One trait all systems of state security share is a passion for establishing identity: counting the population, writing down names, connecting people to locations, and issuing documents to match names and individuals. These are acts of baseline authority. They are essential, of course, for specific tasks, such as raising armies and collecting taxes—foundational functions of the nation-state. But they constitute tools of control in every sphere. Identity as skeleton key: it comes across as a modern thought, even a postmodern one, though it would not have surprised Jacques Fournier, the interrogator of the village of Montaillou. The philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte made the point clinically in 1796: “The chief principle of a well-regulated police state is this: That each citizen shall be at all times and places . . . recognized as this or that particular person. No one must remain unknown to the police.”