by John Cooper
Incarceration was not the end of the line for a Catholic priest: paradoxically, it offered real opportunities to evangelise. Confessions were heard, the sacrament of the altar distributed, even marriages solemnised without fear of discovery or the incrimination of a host family. Missionary work could be undertaken among the felons imprisoned in close proximity with the clergy, often with startling success. The possibilities for priestly ministry, and the affirmation of Catholic identity offered by imprisonment, help to explain why so few priests sought to escape. A handful of clerics actually sought a martyr’s death and glorified in their capture, although this was viewed with disapproval in Douai and Rome. More commonly, the room for manoeuvre enjoyed by imprisoned Catholic priests made life on the outside seem less spiritually fruitful. Just as the English mission was modelled on the journeys of the Apostles, so jailed priests could find solace in the scriptural imprisonments of St Peter, St Paul and John the Baptist.
Openly proclaimed in the prisons, the English Catholic mission found its apotheosis on the gallows. By 1592 ninety-six Catholic priests and thirty-six laypeople had been executed in full view of the Elizabethan crowd. Many of these died at Tyburn, near London’s Marble Arch, where they are now venerated as martyrs by a house of Benedictine nuns. Others suffered a provincial death, such as the fourteen priests who were moved away from London to be executed in the Armada year of 1588. Two years earlier Margaret Clitherow, a butcher’s wife who ran a safe-house for fugitive priests in the Shambles in York, had been pressed to death on a toll-bridge over the Ouse river for refusing to testify. The site was marked with a commemorative plaque in 2008.
Public executions in this period usually had a carnival atmosphere, especially if a celebrity criminal was dying. But the reactions of the crowds witnessing the death of priests were complex, even in Protestant London. Executions were imagined in the language of the playhouses that had sprung up on the south bank. The participants in this grisly theatre – audience, executioner, the victims themselves – had roles that were scripted by contemporary expectations. The authorities wanted punishments to be exemplary, offering visible proof that Catholicism and treason were two sides of the same coin. Priests denied this equation by praying for the queen, and strove to live up to a burgeoning Catholic martyrology by dying in a state of spiritual calm. Mindful of Christ’s actions on the cross, they offered absolution to the criminals who were executed alongside them.
The quest for a good death could create scenes every bit as macabre as those played on the Elizabethan stage. When Ralph Sherwin was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn in December 1581 he prayed for the queen before kissing the hands of his executioner, still dripping with the blood of Edmund Campion. John Nelson managed to pray for Elizabeth during his own dismemberment. The crowd were impressed by equipoise of this sort, as the watching authorities noted with alarm. Walsingham himself was dubious about a policy of execution, not out of sympathy (he was content with a handful of deaths ‘for example’s sake’) but because he recognised the raw political truth that persecution creates martyrs. As he wrote in 1586, the ‘constancy or rather obstinacy’ of executed priests and Jesuits ‘moveth men to compassion and draweth some to affect their religion, upon conceit that such an extraordinary contempt of death cannot but proceed from above’. Such stoicism on the scaffold made people wonder if God wasn’t on the Catholic side after all.
For some Catholic priests, the mission continued even after their deaths. Bodies which had been butchered by the state could be recovered, either for burial or for relics. So it was that Cuthbert Mayne’s skull, removed by the Arundells from a pike at Wadebridge in Cornwall, eventually found its way to the convent that now inhabits their ancient family house at Lanherne. A year after the priest Robert Sutton was executed at Stafford, local Catholics were able to remove an arm from the corpse to venerate as a relic. The forefinger and thumb which pronounced the blessing when celebrating mass had not corrupted, thus proving Sutton’s sanctity. Crowds fought to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood of despatched priests, just as they had done with the Protestant rebel Thomas Wyatt when he was hanged for treason against Queen Mary. They would do the same at Charles I’s execution in 1649.25
The arguments witnessed on the Elizabethan scaffold – the authorities claiming that they executed Catholics on grounds of treason, the victims retorting that they suffered only for their religion – were also played out in a vigorous propaganda war. In 1583 Lord Burghley published a tract defending the policy of the Elizabethan regime towards the Catholic problem. The Execution of Justice in England was urgent and direct. Queen Elizabeth did not make searches into the consciences of those who differed from the Church of England in their religion. But since the pope was attempting ‘to deprive her majesty of her kingdoms, to withdraw from her the obedience of her subjects, to procure rebellions in her realms’, it was only reasonable to invoke the treason laws to head off the threat. Burghley seized on the cloak-and-dagger tactics of the missionary priests, their disguises and false names, as proof that they were ‘secret espials and explorers in the realm for the pope’, intent on fanning the ‘flames of rebellion’ in England.26
The Execution of Justice was translated into French, Dutch and Latin to maximise its propaganda value on the continent. It was known to William Allen in Douai, who soon replied to Burghley’s ‘libel’ with a book of his own. A True, Sincere and Modest Defence of English Catholics flatly denied that Allen’s seminary priests were tainted with treason. English Catholics were being persecuted ‘for mere matter of religion’, under statutes that had been devised specifically for this purpose. The Defence demolished Cecil’s argument that the Elizabethan state was simply enforcing ancient treason laws, pointing out that Cuthbert Mayne was martyred under new legislation for owning an Agnus Dei made of wax. But Allen, too, was selective in his presentation of the facts. If he schooled his priests to preach the Catholic gospel and face martyrdom with spiritual joy, Allen himself had only one end in mind: the renaissance of the English Catholic Church on the model of Queen Mary’s reign. This was hardly possible without Elizabeth’s deposition. Much of Allen’s career was spent in lobbying the papacy, the King of France and above all Philip II of Spain to provide the military resources for a full-scale invasion of England. The bishopric of Durham awaited him if any of these schemes had proved successful.27
Historians tend to be shy of moralising about the past. The rightness of competing routes to salvation is best debated by the theologian and the philosopher. But if we are to make any sense of the English mission, it demands something more than a simple recitation of statutes and statistics. There are two compelling reasons for coming to a judgement about the actions of Francis Walsingham and his agents, Cardinal Allen and his priests. The first is that hundreds of Elizabethans died during this conflict, in prison or in prolonged torment on the scaffold. Many more lost their property, positions and status. The second lies in the way that these events have been interpreted. Stories and myths were born in these years, both Protestant and Catholic, that went on to make a deep impression on British culture. Identities and prejudices have been formed by the memory of the English mission; it is up to us to determine whether they have any foundation.
The keystone of Burghley’s argument in the Execution of Justice was the papal bull issued against Queen Elizabeth by Pius V in April 1570. Citing her ‘impieties and crimes multiplied one upon another’, Regnans in Excelsis not only absolved English subjects of their allegiance to Elizabeth, but ordered them to disobey her laws on pain of excommunication. This seemed plain enough: no true Catholic could accept Elizabeth as queen. Parliament responded the following year, declaring it high treason to possess the papal bull or to call Elizabeth a heretic. But the impact of Regnans is questionable, not least because it was never generally broadcast in England. Most English Catholics never saw a copy, although one was successfully nailed to the Bishop of London’s palace by John Felton, who was promptly executed for treason. The great
majority of Catholic subjects would have been deeply uneasy about its splenetic attack on ‘the pretended queen of England and the servant of crime’. Far from advancing the English mission, Regnans became a hindrance to the missionary priests who hoped to reconcile patriotic Catholics.28
The life of Sir John Arundell, the Cornish gentleman who protected Cuthbert Mayne, reminds us that English Catholic identity was more flexible, and more compromised, than the propaganda of the time would have us believe. The Arundells had served the Tudors as soldiers and sheriffs for three generations, and Sir John was no exception. He was knighted and appointed justice of the peace by Elizabeth, and surveyed Cornwall’s coastal defences for the crown in 1574. Yet he consistently refused to subscribe to the royal supremacy over the Church, and he supported the seminary priest John Cornelius as well as Cuthbert Mayne. Following Mayne’s execution, Arundell spent much of the rest of his life imprisoned or under house arrest. Fines for refusing to attend church, raised from a shilling per offence to £20 a month by the 1581 Parliament, meant that estates had to be mortgaged and sold. Under this punishing regime, what had been one of the greatest families of western England began to fade away. Why then did Sir John, to the end of his life, pledge allegiance to his sovereign over the pope in Rome?29
The truth is that the majority of English Catholics were keen to carve out a distinct identity for themselves, combining loyalty to the old faith and fealty to their queen. Had there been no mission from Douai and Rheims, official attitudes towards Catholicism in England would not have hardened in the way that they did. But the arrival of hundreds of seminary priests, undeterred by banishment, imprisonment and execution, was seen as undermining the stability of the state. In Burghley’s words, Catholic priests had been trained up as ‘seedmen in their tillage of sedition’, sent to England to uphold the pope’s ‘anti-Christian and treasonous warrant’ of deposition. Burghley was a skilled propagandist, yet the fears expressed in the Execution of Justice – that England faced ‘imminent danger of horrible uproars’ and a ‘bloody destruction of great multitudes of Christians’ – were real enough. With wars of religion raging across the Channel, as Walsingham had seen for himself, the breakdown of order in England seemed all too possible.30
There was another threat to the equilibrium of the many Catholics balanced between Church and state, and again it came from their own countrymen in exile. By the early 1580s, Paris had become a refuge for hundreds of English laypeople, mainly drawn from the gentry, who refused to compromise with the Elizabethan Church settlement. Paris was one of the great centres of the European book trade, and its English exiles actively collaborated with local printers to mobilise opposition to the Elizabethan regime. In 1583 Walsingham received a series of disturbing reports of events in the French capital. In July he heard from the outgoing ambassador in Paris, Sir Henry Cobham, that printing-houses in the city were supplying the market for illicit Catholic devotional material in England. In November the new ambassador, Sir Edward Stafford, sent word that obscene pictures of Elizabeth hitching up her skirts for the Duke of Alençon had been posted in the streets of Paris, with English exile collusion strongly suspected. Meanwhile the English polemicist Richard Verstegan had produced a French-language broadsheet of engravings depicting the torments of Catholics in England. Such brazen propaganda had disturbing implications for royal authority in France as well as England, and Stafford successfully lobbied for his arrest. Four years later, however, Verstegan’s polemic took physical form when a tableau of the tortures endured by the English Catholic martyrs was set up in the churchyard of Saint-Séverin, where it pulled in large crowds and sparked off a riot. Mary, Queen of Scots, recently brought to execution by Walsingham, was included in the display.31
It was in this context that Walsingham and Burghley tightened the screws of state. English exile propaganda was encouraging Catholics at home into a self-imposed apartheid from their Protestant neighbours, following St Paul’s admonition to the Corinthians to shun the company of ‘unbelievers’. Although most Catholic writers combined recusancy with political non-resistance during the first half of Elizabeth’s reign, more radical voices could also be heard. Nicholas Sander’s De Visibili Monarchia, published in 1571, reprinted the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis and justified deposing Queen Elizabeth as a heretic. To Sander, the rising of the northern earls in 1569 had been a miracle; those who were executed in its wake, martyrs for the faith. His explanation of the uprising – that it failed only because English Catholics were not yet aware that Elizabeth had been deposed – was taken by Walsingham and Burghley as clear evidence of the treachery inherent in Catholicism. Sander spent years petitioning Philip II and the papacy to fund the overthrow of the Elizabethan regime, writing to Cardinal Allen that ‘the state of Christendom dependeth upon the stout assailing of England’. He died in Ireland in 1581, still campaigning against the ‘she-tyrant’. 32
In the early 1570s, Sander’s politics were on the extreme. Ten years later, a radicalisation had set in among the English Catholic exiles. By upholding the pope’s power to depose Queen Elizabeth, William Allen’s Defence represented a turning-point in Catholic political thought. This ratcheting-up of the rhetoric was a response to the growing persecution in England, but it also demonstrates the power of ideologies to cross national boundaries. Faced with a Protestant heir to the throne since the death of the Duke of Alençon, French Catholics were developing a theory of legitimate resistance to the higher powers. Their deliberations struck a chord with the English exiles. Crucially, ideas similar to those of Sander and Allen crop up in the interrogations of the seminary priests sent to England. Cuthbert Mayne had stated that Catholics should be ready to rise in rebellion against the state if the pope sanctioned it. The Lancashire priest James Bell concurred, telling the judge at his trial that he would support the pope against the queen in the event of a foreign invasion to restore Catholicism. He also requested that his lips and fingers be cut off to punish him for his earlier adherence to the Church of England.33
The life of one man, Nicholas Roscarrock, can be taken to illustrate the personal impact of this complex fusion of faith and politics. We first met Roscarrock as a boy, watching the relics of St Piran in procession in his native Cornwall. In the early 1570s he spent some time at the Inner Temple, collecting medieval manuscripts and making friends with the historians William Camden and Richard Carew. Both Carew and Camden were Protestants, but this was no obstacle to their intellectual kinship with the Catholic Roscarrock. By the later 1570s, however, Roscarrock’s identity and behaviour were becoming defined by his faith. Refusing to attend his parish church, he was indicted as a recusant at Launceston assizes and his lands were assessed for fines.
Persecution had the effect of radicalising Nicholas Roscarrock’s religion. By 1580 he had joined an association of Catholic gentlemen in London, bound by an oath to support the priests of the English mission. Then he went on pilgrimage to Douai and Rome. Such activity brought him to the notice of Francis Walsingham, who ordered two agents to ‘discover’ him. Roscarrock was hosting a sermon by the missionary priest Ralph Sherwin when his house was raided. The two men were taken first to the Marshalsea, then the Tower. Accused of being a ‘dangerous papist’ and a ‘practiser with foreign states’, Roscarrock was forced to listen to Sherwin being racked before he too was tortured for information.
Sherwin was executed in 1581. His death was commemorated in a sequence of frescoes in the English College in Rome which depicted Edmund Campion and other recent martyrs alongside St Alban and St Thomas Becket, setting the priests of the English mission within a continuum stretching back to the earliest days of the Catholic church in Britain. Nicholas Roscarrock lived, but languished in prison for more than five years. The friendship he struck up with Lord William Howard in the Tower is commemorated in the ‘Langdale rosary’, now preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Roscarrock subsequently found a degree of healing in the biographical register of British and Irish saints which he com
piled in the 1610s and 20s.34
In the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, a sort of doublethink prevailed among English Catholics. Obedience to the monarchy was justified, no matter what Regnans in Excelsis may have said, so long as spiritual allegiance was owed to Rome. By the early 1580s, this dualism was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain as both the English crown and the Roman Church demanded a monopoly over personal loyalty. Later Elizabethan Catholics were caught in a vice formed by their faith on one side and their nationality on the other. Most laypeople struggled with this twin identity until the end of the reign, attending mass when they could and quietly ignoring the shrill propaganda that was assailing them from the continent. Some, like Nicholas Roscarrock, went further by sheltering priests or suffering imprisonment and torture for their faith. And a handful crossed the line into open treason.
NOTES
1 Tregian: A. L. Rowse, Tudor Cornwall (London, 1941), 346–54; R. F. Trudgian, Francis Tregian 1548–1608 (Brighton, 1998). Mayne’s interrogation: TNA SP 12/118, fol. 105; APC IX (1575–7), 375, 390. Agnus Dei: statute 13 Eliz. I, c. 2, Statutes of the Realm (London, 1810–28), IV, 529–30; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971), 33, 60.
2 Council of Trent: Christopher Haigh, ‘The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation’, PP 93 (1981), 46. Rebellion in Edward VI’s reign: J. P. D. Cooper, Propaganda and the Tudor State: Political Culture in the Westcountry (Oxford, 2003), 62.
3 Martyred clergy: Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (London, 1974), under ‘Forty Martyrs of England and Wales’.
