God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (34 page)

‘Do you think it right and proper that you should be admitted to a widow’s house before she or her servants or children are out of bed? Why this lack of good manners? Why come so early? Why keep coming to my house in this hostile manner? Have you ever found me unwilling to open the door to you as soon as you knocked?’

He turned to his companion and said:

‘It’s quite true. I’ve always had courtesy from this lady and you can take my word for it that she was not yet out of bed. But I want to know who that man was who fled from the house. I haven’t much doubt he was a priest and if you don’t hand him over, either we stay here or take you away with us.’

At this she was very frightened, supposing the fugitive to be somebody other than it really was, but regaining her composure she said:

‘Oh, he’s a relation of mine (and she glibly called him by a name that was unfamiliar in those parts), I’m starting on a journey with him today.’

She had to add this because they could see the food prepared in the kitchen and if they had entered the stables (which, however, God forbade), it would have been difficult to account for so many horses being saddled for the road
.

Then they set about searching the house. Everything was turned upside down, everything was closely examined – storerooms, chests and even the very beds were carefully ransacked on the off chance of finding rosaries or pictures or books or agnus deis hidden in them
.
^fn1

I’ve no idea with what patience ladies in Italy would put up with this. Here we have been sold into slavery and have become hardened to this sort of barbarity. But on top of all this is the endless altercation with these uncivil fellows. The virgin always conducts these arguments with such skill and discretion that she certainly counteracts their persistence and their interminable chatter. For though she has all a maiden’s modesty and even shyness, yet in God’s cause and in the protection of His servants, virgo becomes virago. I’ve often seen her so exhausted by the chronic weakness that she nearly always labours under, that she finds it painful to speak even two or three words, yet on the arrival of the pursuivant she suddenly rallies to such an extent that she has been known to spend as much as three or four hours arguing with him. If there is no priest in the house, she is full of apprehension, but the very presence of one so heartens her that she is convinced that the devil can have no power there
.

She had every reason to feel secure from the devil during this particularly rigorous search. She says the pursuivants behaved just like a party of boys playing blind man’s bluff, who in their wild rush bang into the tables and chairs and walls and yet haven’t the slightest suspicion that their playfellows are right on top of them and almost touching them. So it was with the searchers. One of them, she says, was banging on the walls with furious energy, shifting sideboards and upsetting beds, and yet when his finger or foot touched the very place where some article was hidden, he was completely blind to the most obvious significance of what he had touched. One instance was quite miraculous: a pursuivant picked up a silver pyx for containing the Blessed Sacrament and put it down again at once as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world. Before the eyes of another lay a folded dalmatic of great value and yet though he unfolded everything else, he never even touched this. I should never finish this letter if I put down everything that happened in this and similar searches, all worthy of our admiration. All I will say is that the zeal and courage of Catholics is never more in evidence than at times like this
.

The pursuivants soon grew tired of their fruitless search and were invited to breakfast. Then they wanted to interview that brother of ours who had fled. He was a priest and they couldn’t turn a blind eye to that. Having first extracted a promise that if he proved to be no priest, he would be suffered to have his liberty, she ordered him to be called in from the copse. He denied that he was a priest and his word was accepted, for at that date the heretics were certain that no priest could deny the fact without grave sin. Now we gather from the replies of your theologians that it is lawful to do so. Many accept this opinion at once, but there are some that are scrupulous because it is laid down in the canons of the apostles that a priest, who out of fear denies his priesthood, may be deposed. They are in doubt whether this new opinion is sanctioned by human law or is deduced from the divine
.

After breakfast the whole house was thoroughly searched again, but when they saw they had no hope of success, they accepted a bribe for the lady herself, and for the man who fled, and they departed …

You can imagine our joy and mutual congratulations when we were brought out after their departure. There could be no lack of angel guardians in a house so angelic, and where so many holy women were consecrated to God. I had such confidence in their devotion and loyalty, which I had experienced over a period of many years, that I went to the hiding place with about as much apprehension as I should have felt in moving from one room to another at a time when there was nothing whatever to fear
.
¹

^fn1
The priests’ mattresses were still warm, but as Gerard recalled in his
Autobiography
(p. 42), ‘some of us went off and turned the beds and put the cold side up to delude anyone who put his hand in to feel them.’ He added that the pursuivants, or ‘leopards’ as he called them, ‘pried with candles into the darkest corners.’ It was October. The raid commenced at 5 a.m. and took four hours, so about half of it was conducted in near darkness.

13

Hurly Burly

‘We were all saved that day,’ John Gerard recalled – himself, Garnet, Southwell, Oldcorne, Stanney, ‘two secular priests and two or three laymen’ – all standing ankle-deep in water for four hours as the pursuivants ‘tore madly’ through the house above them. Anne did not give the signal to come out until the officials had gone some distance, ‘so that there was no danger of their turning back suddenly as they sometimes do’. Eventually ‘not one but several Daniels’ emerged, blinking from their den.
¹
There is no account of the raid from the pursuivants’ perspective. They would, no doubt, have had other words for Anne’s ‘discretion’, ‘loyalty’ and ‘courage’.

The strength of official feeling against the mission was made very clear the following month when a royal proclamation was issued from Richmond, lambasting all Jesuits and seminarians as ‘seedmen of treason’. These ‘fugitives, rebels and traitors’, it pronounced, had trained abroad ‘in school points of sedition’ and returned ‘by stealth’ to incite rebellion. Two years earlier, a Dominican monk had fatally stabbed his king, Henri III of France (on his close stool). Now, with the Spanish occupying French ports and again threatening the Channel, the Queen was determined, ‘by execution of laws and by all other politic ordinances’, to safeguard the realm. A general muster was ordered and subjects were enjoined to defend ‘their natural country, their wives, families, children, lands, goods, liberties and their posterities against ravening strangers, wilful destroyers of their native country and monstrous traitors’. Special commissioners were appointed in every shire, city and port town to investigate suspicious behaviour. Householders were charged to assist by making a ‘particular inquisition’ of all newcomers and, if necessary, handing them over for further interrogation. Only with ‘very diligent and continual search’ and
‘severe orders executed’ could the ‘secret infection of treasons in the bowels of our realm’ be prevented.
²
Had the pursuivants in Warwickshire conducted a ‘very diligent and continual search’ at Anne and Eleanor’s house on the day the proclamation was written, 18 October 1591, instead of the following day, they might have captured every Jesuit active in the country and saved themselves some work.

It was time to ‘shift dwelling’. A seminarian turned informer called Snape had heard ‘for a truth’ that one of Lord Vaux’s daughters was in Warwickshire. He wasn’t sure which one, or the exact ‘situation or state of the house’, but it was said that priests did ‘lurk’ there.
³
On 11 February 1592, Garnet informed Aquaviva that he was living in London in order to give Southwell, who was currently based there, ‘time to breathe’.
⁴
Southwell had just completed his defence of Catholic loyalism,
An Humble Supplication to her Maiestie
. As a response to the proclamation, it was a great deal more measured than the vicious output of the Continental presses,
^fn1
but Southwell’s description of the proclamation as ‘so full farced with contumelious terms as better suited a clamorous tongue than your Highness’s pen’ was never going to go down well. Nor were the vivid passages detailing the tortures being carried out in the Queen’s name, nor, indeed, the contention that the late Francis Walsingham had ‘plotted, furthered and finished’ the Babington Plot.
⁵

The
Humble Supplication
was already circulating in manuscript when Garnet bemoaned, in his February dispatch, that ‘the latest storm we are being tossed by is the worst we have yet suffered in this ocean’. He warned that no further missionaries should be sent to England, ‘unless they are willing to run straight into the direst poverty and the most atrocious brigandage, so desperate has our state become and so close, unless God intervenes, to utter ruin’. The strains of leadership were telling. Four months earlier, Garnet had begged Aquaviva, in vain, for a chance to ‘hand over the torch to someone more expert than myself’ and to be allowed ‘to learn rather than teach, and to run, not by my own discretion, but under the guidance of others’. Now in the
throes of what his Antwerp contact Richard Verstegan called ‘the new Cecillian Inquisition’, Garnet was close to despair: ‘More often than not,’ he scribbled, ‘there is simply nowhere left to hide.’
⁶

In the spring of 1592, Anne Bellamy, the 29-year-old daughter of a notable recusant, Richard Bellamy of Uxenden, fell pregnant. She was unmarried and in prison. Her family, from whom she tried to conceal her condition, had ‘hoped that she should have been kept undefiled, being the queen’s prisoner’. They were sure that the man on whose estate she gave birth and whose crony she married was responsible. In an appeal to the Privy Council, Anne’s brother Thomas formally accused the sexagenarian pursuivant Richard Topcliffe.
⁷

‘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