Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (40 page)

William Cordell remained master of the rolls until his death in 1581. An outward conformist, Cordell reputedly remained at heart a Catholic who had strong social connections with his co-religionists. Sir Edmund Peckham kept his office as treasurer of the mints until his death in 1564.
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Wills or benefactions provide good evidence of Catholic outlook or preferences in the case of some of the former councilors. Sir John Baker died in December 1558, after participating zealously in the Marian persecution, leaving a thoroughly Catholic testament.
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Sir Clement Heigham of Barrow in Suffolk, another persecutor of heretics under Mary, remained a justice of the peace and 
custos rotulorum
 until his death in 1571. In 1564, Bishop Parkhurst of Norwich cautiously judged him one of those “not so well bent vnto the advauncement of the godlie procedinges of this Realme in cawses ecclesiasticall as other the Justices of that Shire be.” In 1570 Heigham prayed in his will for grace to make a full confession of his sins before he died and to express full repentance, and his worthy reception of Christ’s body and blood in the form of bread, which (he explained) he steadfastly believed to be the body and blood of Jesus Christ after its consecration. His careful stipulations concerning payments to poor people, priests, and clerks present at his funeral and to poor householders in five villages for four years on the anniversary of his death closely resemble the traditional Catholic pattern, lacking only explicit provision for intercessory prayers.
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Sir Richard Rich had made provision for the endowment of a chantry in April 1554, remarkably early in Mary’s reign, even though it was not designed to be activated until after his death. He did not convert it to a school foundation till 1564. He had been a vigorous enforcer of the laws against heresy and voted against the Act of Uniformity in 1559.
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Sir Richard Southwell asked to be buried on the site of the Easter sepulcher in Wood Rising church and left the considerable sum of £100 for distribution to the poor within a ten-mile radius, probably expecting that the beneficiaries would pray for his soul.
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Clandestine occasional attendance at mass was probably widespread but was most likely to attract government attention when important people were involved, or when such activity was perceived to have political significance. In the spring of 1561, William Cecil was determined to prevent the admission to England of a papal nuncio bearing an invitation to Elizabeth to participate in the council of Trent. He was also concerned about plots concerning the succession. In January, Henry Sidney, speaking on behalf of Robert Dudley, had sought through the Spanish ambassador de Quadra public support for the marriage of Elizabeth and Dudley in return for participation in a church council. De Quadra told the imprisoned Catholic bishops that Dudley and the queen had promised that such support would lead to the restoration of Catholicism.
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The discovery in April of clusters of participants in clandestine masses enabled Cecil to argue that the prospect of the nuncio’s arrival was threatening to divide the realm. No fewer than four former councilors, Sir Thomas Wharton, Sir Edward Waldegrave, Lord Hastings of Loughborough, and Sir John Mordaunt, had been involved, along with several other less important people, and were taken into custody. The main centers were Wharton’s and Waldegrave’s houses in Essex. A chamber in Wharton’s house at New Hall had been fitted out with an altar, a cross, images, and pictures. Wharton and Waldegrave were convicted and required to pay fines. Waldegrave died in the Tower on September 1. Wharton and Hastings took the oath tendered to them and entered bonds of good behavior, though Hastings regarded this latter requirement as a grave dishonor. He was allowed to keep his stewardship of the duchy of Cornwall and wardenship of the stannaries. Mordaunt’s detention seems to have been briefer. Wharton, whom Bishop Best of Carlisle reported in 1564 to be still “evil of religion,” was to be saved by a fall from his horse from involvement in actively promoting or resisting the Northern Rebellion of 1569.
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Meanwhile in Worcestershire Sir John Bourne and the bishop of Worcester, Edwin Sandys, were locked in a bitter feud. After Sandys’s arrival in Worcester late in 1559, according to the bishop’s account, Bourne, who notoriously had mass celebrated in his house, had defended transubstantiation in argument with Sandys. He had prevented the destruction of an altar stone in his parish church, challenged the doctrine that Sandys had preached in a marriage sermon, and prevented the detection of faults in his parish in Sandys’s visitation. Clerical marriage disgusted Bourne. The abusive behavior of Bourne’s son and a servant of his toward some prebendaries’ wives resulted in violence between Sandys’s men and Bourne’s, followed by investigations by the bailiffs of Worcester, the council in Wales and the Marches, and finally, in 1563, the privy council. Bourne for his part denied most of Sandys’s accusations and charged him with wasting the property of the bishopric. After a spell of confinement, Bourne wrote an apology and submission but remained “an adversary of true religion.” His continued failure to attend church and his use of prohibited rites and ceremonies led to his expulsion from Lincoln’s Inn in 1570.
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Elizabeth’s discovery of the duke of Norfolk’s plan to marry Mary Stuart led to the arrest of Norfolk and some of his followers in October 1569. The privy council examined Sir Thomas Cornwallis, formerly comptroller of Queen Mary’s household, along with two other clients of the duke’s. Nine councilors shortly afterward pointed out to the bishop of Norwich, the mild John Parkhurst, that two of these gentlemen had not been to church for four or five years, while the third had not come for two years and had not received communion for ten or eleven.
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The letter graphically illustrates the inefficiency of supervision in one of England’s largest dioceses. It suggests that lack of evidence may have led some historians to underestimate the extent of unobtrusive recusancy before 1569. The imprisoned Cornwallis reportedly misliked many things in the Church of Rome, especially the primacy claimed by the pope over princes in matters temporal, and approved of some of the changes made in the church of England. In his own letter of June 20, 1570 signifying his humble submission to the queen, he reminded Cecil that the danger of offending God outweighed even the peril of the prince’s indignation. However, he craved pardon for offending her and promised to try to obey her laws for religion as God should give him grace to be further persuaded. He returned to recusancy by 1578.
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Soon after Cornwallis’s 1569 arrest, the council required subscription to pledges of religious conformity from present and former justices of the peace. The great majority complied. One of only two in Suffolk who did not was Sir Henry Bedingfeld, custodian of Princess Elizabeth during Mary’s reign, and subsequently captain of Mary’s guard and her vice chamberlain. He had to enter bond for his good behavior: Sir William Cordell and Sir Clement Heigham were second and third on the list of Suffolk justices who witnessed the bond! Together with his wife, he made his house at Oxborough a Catholic center during the 1570s and in 1577 was listed as a recusant, together with his wife.
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Sir Henry Jerningham, former master of the horse to Queen Mary, one of her earliest supporters in 1553, a friend of both Bedingfield and Cornwallis, avoided drawing attention to himself despite being earlier described on a list of King Philip’s English pensioners as a good man, a Christian, and a servant of the king. In 1577 his heir was listed as a recusant.
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Mary’s privy council had included four churchmen at the end of her reign. Elizabeth hoped for the cooperation of Nicholas Heath, Mary’s lord chancellor and Archbishop of York, but in vain, and soon dropped him from her council. Heath probably delivered an uncompromising speech during debate on the royal supremacy in the Lords in which he upheld papal authority and cited St Paul in order to demonstrate that a woman could not be head of the Church.
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Thomas Thirlby, Bishop of Ely, was another steadfast opponent of the religious settlement. The eighty-four-year-old Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of Durham, one of England’s most respected prelates, was excused attendance at the parliament of 1559, but in August, after coming south, he told Cecil that he could allow only Catholic doctrine in his diocese.
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Along with all but one of the other Marian bishops, these three were deprived of their sees for refusing to recognize the royal supremacy. John Boxall, another churchman, Mary’s last secretary of state, also refused the required oath. Tunstall died in November 1559. The government was anxious to prevent the three remaining churchmen from stiffening the resistance of other Catholics. They all spent some time in the Tower. Heath was released in 1561 and allowed to reside in his houses in Chobham and Southwark, where the celebration of mass continued. Boxall and Thirlby were transferred into Archbishop Parker’s custody in 1563. All three lived into the 1570s.
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IV

Apart from the Catholic clergy who were imprisoned or put under house arrest in England, a substantial number, especially from the universities, went into exile. Few of the laity did so during the early years of the reign, and only two ex-councilors. Sir Robert Peckham, a Buckinghamshire gentleman, was the son of Sir Edmund, treasurer of the mints, a leader of the Thames valley rising for Mary in July 1553. The Peckhams had been the only father and son to be members of Mary’s council at the same time. Edmund’s will, made in May 1563, contained a bequest to his poor neighbors in Denham to pray for his soul, a bequest that indicated his continuing Catholic belief.
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In 1564 Bishop Bullingham of Lincoln thought Sir Robert a “hinderer of religion.” His epitaph in Denham church describes him as a man “specially addicted to the study of divinity.” He left for the continent shortly after his father’s death that year and made his will in the English hospice in Rome in September 1569. He was buried in the church of San Gregorio Magno. Peckham bequeathed to his kinsman Thomas Dayrell the books and cosmographical charts he had left in Paris and an annuity to support his studies overseas. This was probably the Thomas Darrell who in 1568 helped William Allen found the English seminary at Douai. Peckham gave the residue of his goods overseas to the poor, the recipients to be chosen by Thomas Goldwell, the exiled Marian Bishop of St. Asaph, and another English priest. But Peckham asked that his heart be cased in lead and sent home to his brother to be buried in the ancestral tomb.
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The Berkshire gentleman Sir Francis Englefield, a steadfast Catholic and master of the court of wards under Mary, was exceptional in his early reaction to the Elizabethan settlement and the penalties he subsequently suffered. Englefield obtained in April 1559 a two-year license to go abroad for his health. In 1561 contacts between him and the Essex Catholic gentry came to light, and in July 1562 the keeper of his house in London was reported to be looking forward to his master’s imminent return to England, together with the restoration of the old law and the imprisoned Catholic prelates. Englefield did not, however, return home when summoned. In 1563 his lands were surveyed and sequestrated on the grounds that he had fled overseas and joined the queen’s enemies and rebels.
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In letters written to Cecil and the privy council from Antwerp in April 1564, Englefield eloquently set out the conflicting claims of conscience and his duty to the queen.

My faulte ys that I came not, her majestie calling me, whyles I remayne tyed wyth chaynes of greatyste force. For what string (my lordes) can be so stronge as conscyens in a chrystyan man? And vnto a subiecte faythfull, & fearefull to offende (wherein I wyll gyve place to none) what lynke ys more vyolent then the inevytable choyse eyther of the often and open offence of hys prynce, and contempte of her lawes, or elles, of a perpetuall torment, by that vnplacable tyrant, the troubled conscyens that gnaweth for ever?
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Englefield’s solution to his dilemma was that he should enjoy the revenues of his property in exile. He would thus avoid flouting the queen’s laws in England. He utterly denied that he had adhered to his sovereign’s enemies and rebels. He also rejected a list of more specific accusations that he believed to have been made against him; these included being privy to the practices of foreign powers to trouble the queen, raising rumors of her death, and supporting “raylers and rymers” against her. He believed that the investigation of such charges would show them to be as baseless as ones previously made but “nowe buryed in sylens,” such as his supposed correspondence with the imprisoned clergy in matters dangerous to the realm; heinous conspiracies with foreign powers contrived by Englefield abroad, and by Waldegrave and others within the realm, to trouble and turn the whole state; his procuring a friar in Antwerp to preach against the queen almost five years back, at a time when he had really been in Italy or on his way there; and his declaiming against the queen and his country before the pope and the college of cardinals. Eventually Philip II himself interceded with Elizabeth on Englefield’s behalf, but she refused to relent. In 1568 Englefield became Philip’s pensioner and developed over the following decades into one of the Elizabethan government’s bitterest enemies.
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V

On Mary’s death the bond of service that had previously united her privy councilors was severed. However, the surviving letters of Francis Yaxley throw light on social contacts between some ex-councilors during the early 1560s. Member of a well-established Suffolk family, Yaxley had been a protégé of William Cecil’s in Edward’s reign, when he had served as a junior member of diplomatic missions. He had been elected a member of three parliaments and had become clerk of the signet under Mary. He seems to have remained at or close to the court after Elizabeth’s accession. He was twice imprisoned, briefly in January 1561 for gossiping about Elizabeth’s relationship with Dudley, and then for a longer stretch from February 1562 for his involvement in the countess of Lennox’s plans to marry her son Lord Darnley to Mary Stuart. Several letters written to Yaxley, mainly by religious conservatives, including former Marian councilors, between February 1560 and September 1561 survive among the State Papers. It was presumably on his second arrest that his correspondence fell into the government’s hands.
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