The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I

by John Cooper

  Allen’s missionary priests absorbed the intensive piety of the Counter-Reformation. Personal discipline was paramount, so they followed the spiritual exercises pioneered by the Society of Jesus. When they studied scripture, it was in a new English translation rather than the Latin Vulgate. In this sense, they had learned lessons from their Protestant enemies. In 1574, six years after Allen founded his seminary, its first three clergy sailed for the English mission. In 1576 sixteen priests were despatched, and the college at Douai had 236 students. Many of them were fresh out of Oxford and Cambridge, eager graduates whom the Church of England could ill afford to lose.

  The evisceration of Cuthbert Mayne in 1577 did nothing to staunch the flow of Catholic ordinands. When the English college was expelled from Douai the following year, it moved to Rheims and continued to flourish. In 1579 the English hospice in Rome was converted into a second seminary, and colleges in Spain would follow. By 1580, the year in which the English Jesuits Edmund Campion and Robert Persons joined the mission, Allen had sent a hundred Catholic priests into England. The total rose to 471 by the end of Elizabeth’s reign; small beer compared to the astonishing fifty thousand priests in England before the Reformation, but a serious challenge to the monopoly of faith demanded by the Elizabethan Church establishment.15

  The young Francis Walsingham had chosen exile in Basel and Padua rather than compromise with the Catholic regime of Queen Mary. His character was moulded by his studies at Cambridge, and the evangelical energy that pulsed through the colleges during Edward VI’s reign. So too with the students and tutors who left for Douai a generation later. When Elizabeth inherited the throne, there was still a spiritual excitement about the quadrangles and common rooms of the English universities, but this time it was on the Catholic side. Two Oxford colleges, Trinity and St John’s, had been founded under Queen Mary, and Caius was re-founded at Cambridge. Under the guidance of Cardinal Pole, the universities had become the forcing-houses of Catholic renewal. Pole’s tenure was short, but his achievement is attested by the Oxford men who toiled to disrupt the Elizabethan Church. Marian Oxford educated nearly thirty of the seminary priests ordained after 1559, plus at least seven Jesuits. Catholic influence continued strong in Elizabethan Oxford. Cuthbert Mayne, Edmund Campion and Gregory Martin (who translated the New Testament studied by the Douai ordinands) all spent time at St John’s early in Elizabeth’s reign. Reputed for its Catholic humanism, New College haemorrhaged scholars in the 1560s. Thirty-eight fellows were deprived by Elizabeth, or chose to flee Oxford. They found sanctuary in the Netherlands, firstly at the University of Louvain and later at Douai.16

  To Walsingham, their theology was repugnant and their politics subversive. Yet the principal secretary and the seminary priest had more in common than either would have admitted. Both were formed by the common life of university and exile; both perceived past and current events through the lens of religious ideology. To that extent, they inhabited the same mental world.

  If English Catholicism had been looking frail by the early 1570s, the mission from Douai gave it a shot in the arm. Its clergy travelled in disguise, changing their names, clothes and horses to throw spies off the scent. As they dispersed throughout the kingdom, preaching and administering the sacraments, Catholic recusancy began to gain ground. The seminary priests who came to England were not missionaries in the stamp of the Jesuits who travelled to seventeenth-century Japan, or the Baptists who brought the Bible to Victorian Africa. England was not virgin terrain; it had known, and rejected, the true apostolic faith. William Allen distinguished between the ‘Catholics’ who could be brought back within the fold, and the ‘heretics’ who were beyond redemption. The Jesuits who came to England from 1580 had similar instructions. Shunning the company of Protestants, they were to preach to the converted and discourage any waverers from attending their parish church. Above all, they were to concentrate their efforts on the gentry.

  Jesuitical distinctions between Catholics and heretics meant little to the Elizabethan regime, which saw the invasion from Douai as a general assault on the establishment of Church and state. As the mission began to stabilise and reinvigorate the English Catholic community, it brought a more intense surveillance and persecution in its wake. Walsingham responded rapidly when reports of Cuthbert Mayne’s capture and the growth of recusancy reached the privy council in June 1577. A conference of councillors and bishops was summoned to consider how those who were ‘backwards’ and ‘corrupt’ in their religion could be brought within the fold of the Church of England. Up-to-date intelligence was a priority. Bishops were ordered to make a survey of those refusing to attend their parish church – and, ominously, the value of their lands and goods. Abbot John Feckenham and other Catholic figureheads were re-arrested. Education of the young was identified as a paramount concern. Schools were to be purged of suspect masters: men like Nicholas Garlick in Derbyshire, who shipped three of his boys to the seminary at Douai before entering the priesthood himself.17

  The census of recusant England began in October 1577. Lists of people who refused to attend church were hastily compiled for each diocese: a total of 1,562 names. Within an English population of perhaps three and a half million in the 1570s, this figure looks tiny. Modern evangelical churches regularly poll a congregation of this size every Sunday. Within the statistics, however, was a deeply worrying trend: fully a third of the recusants identified in 1577 were gentlemen. The decline of the feudal magnates under Henry VII, and the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, had left the gentry manor house as the dominant institution of the English countryside. A gentleman did not exist in isolation: he was lord of his own household, governing the behaviour of his clients and tenants. As Cuthbert Mayne’s case had demonstrated, a Catholic squire could do a lot to ensure that the old religion survived in his ‘country’. The authorities also feared the social disruption implicit in recusancy. A gentleman ought to be seen in his parish church, a visible symbol of hierarchy and good order. By staying away, he neglected his duty to the Tudor commonwealth. Recusancy, in short, was an encouragement to sedition.18

  The July 1577 conference mapped out a strategy to bring Catholics back into conformity with the Church of England. They were initially to be encouraged to rejoin the fellowship of their parish church. If negotiation failed, then an ascending scale of action was proposed: fines, an oath of allegiance, and ultimately imprisonment. Since there were many more Catholics than prison places to hold them, Walsingham and Burghley toyed with the idea of using castles to segregate ‘the better sort of recusants’. Deprive Catholic areas of the natural leaders of society, and the faith of the ‘baser sort’ would wither. But the plan could not be implemented, not least because the crown entirely depended on the gentry for effective local government. The punishment of crime, ensuring that the poor had access to cheap bread, the maintenance of coastal gun batteries: all would suffer if the Catholic gentry were stripped out of provincial life.

  Given the hierarchical nature of Tudor society, it is hardly surprising that the missionaries from Douai also focused on what they called the ‘better sort’ of men. William Allen had a vision of his clergy as latter-day Apostles, carrying the gospel from house to house; in practice this meant seeking shelter under the roofs of the aristocracy. A grand Catholic household, with its routines of confession and mass, allowed the seminarians to sustain the spiritual life that had formed them at Oxford and Douai. Where prominent local families had already fallen into heresy, they shook the dust from their feet and moved on. When Protestant heresy crumbled in England, it was vital that Catholics should be ready to answer the call as magistrates, lords lieutenant and members of Parliament. In any case, and as Allen observed, many of the English missionaries were high-born. Their education, their manners, even the language that they spoke, made it easier for them to move among the gentry without detection.

  Country-house Catholicism focused disproportionately on the south of England. Walsingham ordered the ports of Dover a
nd Rye to be watched for seminary priests, but the descriptions issued to the local authorities were often vague and inaccurate. A high proportion of missionaries who slipped through the net chose to become chaplains to the gentry of the southern counties. In 1580, six years into the English mission, half of its forces were mustered in London, the Thames Valley and Essex. Docking at Dover that same year, the Jesuit Robert Persons was shocked to find no priests serving in Wales or the far north of England. These were communities with residual Catholic sympathies, where vigorous preaching and evangelisation might have made a difference. Persons exaggerated to make a point, or perhaps he didn’t have the full picture; an agent informed Walsingham in 1585 that priests were making use of boats sailing from France to Newcastle to collect coal. But in all too many locations, the seed planted by the secret Catholic congregations of the 1560s was becoming choked with thorns.19

  The nature of the mission made a permanent impression on the English social landscape. For the next three centuries, Catholic England would remain aristocratic and inward-looking, sustaining itself in country houses rather than parish churches. Radical change only came with Victoria’s reign and the mass immigration of the Irish working class. Yet the Catholicism that Evelyn Waugh mourned and celebrated in his novels was still that of the recusant gentleman. On converting to Roman Catholicism, Waugh chose to write a biography of the Elizabethan Jesuit Edmund Campion as his work of piety. In Officers and Gentlemen the elderly and gentle Mr Crouchback, called up to teach in a wartime school, could reliably be distracted into lengthy reminiscences about the penal times under the Tudors, when the Blessed Gervase Crouchback was martyred for the Catholic faith.

  How did Catholics experience their religion in Walsingham’s England? While the Church settlement was still becoming established, traditionalists had been able to dress up the new religion in the clothes of the old. But the sinews of the Tudor state were strong, the pressure of crown and bishops inexorable. One by one the altars were broken up, the devotional images profaned and holy wells filled with rubbish. In 1567 the Reformation caught up with Aysgarth, a village in Wensleydale which offered a home to the rood screen from Jervaulx Abbey following the dissolution of the monasteries. Parishioners who had hidden their ‘idols’ and ‘old papistical books’ were forced to burn them and stand barefoot in white sheets in a public shaming ritual.20

  Deprived of its traditional places, the practice of Catholicism was forced beyond consecrated ground. Missionary priests celebrated mass in safe-houses, barns and farmyards. In the West Country, sheets were spread on hedgerows at crossroads to indicate when and where to congregate. Country houses of this period often had their own chapels attached, but government surveillance made them too visible for Catholics to use. Attics and upper chambers were more secluded. To an older generation who remembered the sumptuous ritual of the past, the recusant liturgy must have seemed a pale imitation. Vestments and sacred vessels were rudimentary by comparison with the silk chasubles and silver-gilt chalices of Henry VIII’s reign. Sacred music, such a striking feature of the pre-Reformation English Church, was limited to what the congregation could sing for themselves. In the 1590s William Byrd composed mass settings in three, four and five parts to meet their needs. His patrons, the Pastons of Norfolk, felt secure enough to sing in open procession around their gardens, though few other families could be so bold. But Catholics took heart from the history of the early Church, when Christians had gathered in private houses to worship.21

  The English mission was a grim war of attrition. Of the three hundred-odd seminary priests who had come to England by 1586, thirty-three had been executed, fifty were in prison and another sixty had been arrested or banished. This was an unsustainable wastage rate. Travel without obvious cause was inherently suspect in Tudor England, and communities kept a close watch for vagrants and gypsies. Catholic priests needed a good disguise and a strong alibi to avoid arrest by village constables and magistrates. A chaplaincy offered an alternative, but Catholic households were themselves increasingly liable to being raided by the authorities. Walsingham’s pursuivants or ‘priest-hunters’ could search properties for hours or even days, ransacking possessions and intimidating servants, women and children to reveal any hidden secrets.

  Catholic houses began to acquire secret hiding-places where a missionary could shelter with his chalices and vestments in the event of a raid. The first priest-hole that we know about was built in York in 1574, the year that the English Catholic mission began. Early examples were often crude. Sheriffs soon learned to search the dead space in eaves and attics, or below garderobes and latrines, to flush priests out of hiding. They brought measuring-rods to discover cavities behind walls and fireplaces. The ringing of a bell could reveal a hollow echo.

  By the later 1580s hides were becoming far more sophisticated thanks to Nicholas Owen, a carpenter from Oxford known to his friends as ‘Little John’. Two of his brothers were ordained as Catholic priests, while a third was apprenticed to the university printer and later set up a secret press in London’s Clink prison. Nicholas had a craftsman’s ability to visualise his art in three dimensions. Recruited by the superior of the Jesuit mission Henry Garnet, he became a master of architectural concealment. Owen understood perspective: he could visualise the ways in which a search party would scan the lines of a building. Choosing places where gables and towers met and making use of changes of level, he was able to construct priest-holes that were virtually invisible from the outside. In the words of the Jesuit John Gerard, he designed hiding-places ‘in all shires and in the chiefest Catholic houses of England’. Some allowed their inhabitant to be fed via a trapdoor, or a hollow quill through which broth could be dripped. An example of Owen’s craftsmanship survives at Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk, accessed via a pivoting floorboard and complete with a feeding-trap. In 1606 Owen himself survived a four-day search in a hide at Hindlip in Worcestershire before being starved out. Ten further ‘secret corners and conveyances’ were found in the same house. As Gerard pointed out, Owen could have done more to undermine the Catholic cause than anyone else in England, but he died under torture in the Tower without revealing anything. He was canonised as a martyr in 1970.22

  Many Catholics, however, had little or no chance of attending mass. The concentration of priests in southern England left much of the realm bereft of spiritual comfort. Nor can we assume that the Catholicism of the great house was always welcoming to the countryside that surrounded it. The risk of betrayal meant that the sacraments were often restricted to the immediate household. Where formal provision was sporadic or non-existent, Catholicism retreated to the hearthside: the reading of devotional manuals in a family setting, or prayers recited over a baby’s cradle. When the Elizabethan injunctions banned the hallowing of wax tapers for the feast of Candlemas, Catholics in north Wales transferred the ceremony into their own homes and placed candles in their windows each 2 February. Women were particularly active in sustaining this Catholicism of the hearth. The state was often satisfied if a husband attended the parish church, leaving wives to tend the embers of the old faith within their own domestic domain.23

  Church papism, country-house Catholicism, a religion of women and the hearth: three ways of experiencing traditional religion in Walsingham’s England, and each of them personal and secretive. In the prisons and on the gallows, however, Catholicism found a more public stage. Well over half the missionary priests who came to England in Elizabeth’s reign spent a period behind bars before being deported or executed. Life for Catholic clergy in an Elizabethan prison could follow a bizarre sequence of brutality and relative freedom of movement. Physical and psychological torture was commonplace, and plague and jail-fever were a constant terror.

  Yet for those with money or connections, visits from the outside were easy to arrange. Servants and sympathisers were allowed in and out, and supervision was so lax that the Catholic mass became a common feature of Elizabethan prisons. A report on London’s Newgate in 1583 informed Walsingham
that the mass was being openly celebrated in the common jail, and privately in the prison-keeper’s house. Three years later, one of his agents found two priests in Newgate attended by several Catholic gentlewomen: ‘Sir, if you mean to stop the stream, choke the spring: for believe me, the prisons of England are very nurseries of papists’. John Gerard’s autobiography describes how Catholic priests in the Marshalsea were able to smuggle in books and liturgical equipment. One search by the prison authorities yielded a cartful of Catholic paraphernalia. Subsequently imprisoned in the Clink on London’s Bankside, Gerard found himself able to carry out ‘all the tasks of a Jesuit priest’ thanks to fellow Catholic prisoners who fabricated him a key for his door. The situation was no better in the provinces. Thomas Bell, a daring seminary priest who later made a spectacular conversion to become a Protestant polemicist, broke into York Castle in 1582 and sang high mass complete with a sub-deacon and music. In October 1586 Sir John Horsey and George Trenchard complained to Walsingham about the dismal state of security in Dorchester jail. The result of having a prison system run for profit by ‘persons of no credit’ was that ‘all justice is subverted, and papists live at ease, and have their conventicles in despite of us, do what we can’.24