Elizabeth I ascended the throne of England a Protestant, but a Protestant who, during the reign of her Catholic sister, Mary, had thought it wise to affect a sympathy for Rome. During those turbulent and terrible five years she had been under constant suspicion of conspiring with the nobles who had never been reconciled to rule by a Catholic queen. She had been arrested, charged with treason and imprisoned in the Tower, where she had daily expected to follow in the innocent footsteps of Lady Jane Grey. After much pleading, many interrogations, the agreement to attend Roman Mass and the transportation to and from almost every royal palace in the Home Counties, she was at last allowed to meet her sister and swear her loyalty to the crown (which was genuine) and her adherence to the Church of Rome (which was not). So she survived to complete the Reformation that her father had begun.
Mary, although she received a rapturous reception, had chosen to begin the conversion of England cautiously. Elizabeth, whose accession was greeted with far less enthusiasm, ignored the warnings of her closest advisers and began the work of reconversion at once. She appointed Protestants as her most trusted councillors, invited only Protestants to preach at Court and spontaneously demonstrated her true feelings by telling Westminster monks – who proceeded her in procession with candles – ‘Away with those torches. We see very well.’1 On Christmas Day 1558, two months after her succession, the Queen issued a proclamation which required the use of English prayers in all services. As an earnest of her intentions, she instructed that, when Parliament began in the New Year, the service of thanksgiving in the Chapel Royal at Westminster should not include the elevation of the host. It was the first step in the eventually successful campaign to restore the 1547 Royal Injunctions, the 1552 Book of Common Prayer and what amounted to a revision of the 1553 Forty-Two Articles of Religion, which Queen Mary had revoked. But there was more objection to the changes that she proposed than Elizabeth had anticipated. Some came from Catholics and Catholic sympathisers. The most vehement came from Protestants ultras who – despite the new Queen’s clear sympathy for the Protestant cause – thought that the reversion to the extreme form of Edwardian Protestantism was coming too slowly and feared that it might never come.
In February 1559, the legislation which was necessary to effect the second reconversion was introduced into the House of Commons. The new Supremacy Bill, which made the Queen ‘Governor’ rather than ‘Head’ of the Church of England, was passed without facing much opposition. But antagonism to the legislation which proscribed dogma and liturgy was so strong that the separate bills that dealt with individual items of doctrine and procedure were withdrawn and replaced with a single bill. The strongest opposition was to changes in the words, spoken by the priest, during the administration of Communion. The version that appeared in the first 1552 Prayer Book had been drafted with the intention of placating traditionalists, but Edward – who had no time for compromise – had insisted that a second edition be published with all concessions to Popery removed. Elizabeth proposed to reintroduce the original version. That was unacceptable to rabid Protestants. They claimed that to give thanks for ‘the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ which was shed for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life’ implied the possibility of transubstantiation. Other changes were found almost equally objectionable. The litany had been purged of offensive references to the Pope. The words of the Communion service had been altered to allow (though not, of course, to require) belief in a ‘real presence’. Vestments and ornaments were no longer prohibited. Ministers were to conduct services from the place at which priests had stood when performing the Mass. The bill was passed in the House of Lords with a majority of three votes. Had it not been for the arbitrary exclusion of hard-line Protestant peers, and the imprisonment of Protestant bishops, it would have been overwhelmingly defeated.
Once again the typical Catholic (or ex-Catholic) family – whatever its response to the dogmatic disputes and doctrinal changes – was forced to recognise the primacy of the Church of England and acknowledge it as part of its daily life. A Third Act of Uniformity (composed to placate Protestant extremists) imposed a fine of twelve pence on persons who failed to attend Sunday services for a month. It also prohibited, by law, all forms of Catholic worship. The substance of the Act became the Thirty-Nine Articles, as drafted by the Convocation of Canterbury in 1563, revised – largely by the Queen herself – and finally endorsed by Convocation in 1571. From then on, until the present day, they stand – together with the Book of Common Prayer – as the statement of Church of England litany and doctrine.
Some Englishmen took pride in what they believed to be Elizabeth’s moderation. Sir Thomas Smith in De Republica Anglorum boasted that ‘Torment … which is used by the order of civil law and custom of other countries … is not used in England.’2 Whether he knew it or not, he was wrong. But unlike its incidence in Mary’s reign, torture was used in moderation as compared with its use in France and Spain. And the advent of a new queen would, it was hoped, herald an era of stability in which such cruel expedients were rarely necessary. Elizabeth was expected to be, and was welcomed as, the harbinger of tranquillity. In 1570, John Jewel, the Bishop of Salisbury, looked back on twelve years of her reign and rejoiced, not at the suppression of Catholicism, but at a decade largely untroubled by civil strife and theological commotion. ‘God gave us Elizabeth and with her gave us peace and so long a peace as England has seldom seen before.’3 The first twelve years did not pass in complete tranquillity. But, after the bloody turbulence of Mary’s reign, it seemed that England was in repose. Not even the appearance of tolerance and calm was to survive long into Elizabeth’s second decade.
Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects were concerned less with theological argument than with liturgical practice. They wanted their lives to be undisturbed by change. To the illiterate parishioner, a chalice – as used in the Mass – was hard to distinguish from a cup which was used in the Protestant Communion service. Some men and women of simple faith were still comforted by their preacher’s habit – developed in King Edward’s reign - of reading the English liturgy in such a way and at such a speed that it was indistinguishable, in its incomprehensibility, from the Latin it had replaced. Ingenious priests told their parishioners to attend Church of England services, as the law required, but not to regard them as genuine acts of worship and then, later that Sunday, secretly distributed the host, which had been consecrated at an authentic celebration of the Mass. Often relics of Catholicism were retained long after they should have been removed or destroyed. In one Lancaster parish church the taper, in front of the image of St Nicholas, burned on for most of Elizabeth’s reign.4 At Sedgefield, in County Durham, the Bishop’s instruction to remove the altar and replace it with a Communion table was ignored for five years. The blurring of the boundaries that separated the two faiths – although in part cosmetic – helped to reconcile most Catholics to the end of the Marian dream. But Elizabeth’s concessions and the clergy’s contrivances did little or nothing to appease the dedicated minority.
Elizabeth was more conciliatory towards idols than she was towards men. Bishops who refused to swear that they accepted the royal supremacy were deposed. The most intransigent were the first to go. So the list was headed by Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London. The work of seeking out Papists was done by Commissioners – appointed for each diocese – who, being almost always unyielding Protestants, rooted out Catholics and Catholic sympathisers with a rigour that went beyond the Queen’s early inclinations. Working on the principles first laid down by Cranmer in 1548, they were particularly severe in their attitude towards images – one of the aspects of Catholic worship which Elizabeth would have been prepared to tolerate. In London they ordered public burnings to which churchwardens were required to bring their statues. Lincolnshire followed suit. In parts of the country their attitude was applauded – sometimes after a little encouragement. In Ashburton the churchwardens were paid ten pence each ‘for their labour that carried the images to be burned and their drinking’.5
The iconoclasm was so indiscriminate that at Bures in Suffolk family tombs were destroyed during the demolition of the canopy above the Easter sepulchre. In October 1559 – perhaps as a sign of disapproval – Elizabeth first announced that a crucifix and candles were to be placed on the Communion table in the Chapel Royal. And then decreed that rood screens were to be erected in parish churches. The Protestant bishops who had been appointed to complete the Reformation rose up in condemnation, and the Queen capitulated in face of their insistence that she was proposing to defy God’s will.
During the first two years of Elizabeth’s reign three hundred priests were formally deprived of their benefices because of their ‘popish’ inclinations. Rather more conducted secret Catholic services for recusants, performed their daily offices in the great houses where noble families felt powerful enough to ignore the law, or simply worshipped their chosen God as laymen. The shortage of Protestant priests was exacerbated by the flu epidemic of 1558, which, killing a disproportionate number of recently converted clergy, was regarded by Catholics as God’s vengeance on apostates. Elizabeth, who took a more prosaic view of the situation, wholly unreasonably blamed the crisis on the bishops. When they told her that there were 13,000 parishes in England and that it was not possible for each one to be served by a suitably qualified incumbent, she replied with the exasperation that was her invariable response to inconvenient reality. ‘Jesus! Thirteen thousand is not to be looked for … my meaning is not that you should make a choice of learned preachers only for they are not to be found, but of honest and wise men such as can read from the Scriptures and the Homilies, well to the people.’6 Unfortunately even that reduced ambition was beyond achievement and, throughout the country, shortage of Church of England ministers intensified.
The Church of England Hierarchy first responded by allowing an increase in pluralities – one of the causes of parish dissatisfaction before Henry VIII’s Reformation. Then some churchmen experimented with a reduction in the quality and qualifications of candidates for ordination, despite the inadequacy of parish priests already contributing to thousands of Protestants returning to the Church of Rome. Edmund Grindal, the new Bishop of London, ordained 107 priests during his first seven months in office. Others were more cautious. Matthew Parker, Elizabeth’s Archbishop of Canterbury, emphasised the need ‘to be very circumspect in admitting to the ministry’ and, remembering the resentment of thirty years earlier, warned that ministers ‘not brought up in learning … are very offensive to the people’.7 His advice either did not reach or was ignored in the Chester diocese where William Downham’s 176 ordinations did not include one graduate, but admitted into Holy Orders fifty-six men who, on examination, had been found inadequate. Even intellectual dilution did not solve the problem. In 1554 there were 172 working Protestant ministers in south Lancashire. By 1563 there were only ninety-eight. Twenty-one of them had died and were not replaced. The rest had just drifted away. In 1563 one-third of all Suffolk benefices were vacant.8 The experience of the two counties, north and south, was typical of the country as a whole.
Concerns about the number and quality of men admitted to the ministry were moderated by the belief that the clandestine Catholic communion was suffering from an even more grievous shortage of priests and that, combined with the apparently effective proscriptions and prohibitions, the result would be a gradual, but irreversible, decline into eventual oblivion. In 1563, Elizabeth attempted to accelerate the process by prescribing the death penalty as the punishment for saying Mass. The defence of papal supremacy was, on conviction, to be followed by confiscation of the offender’s property.
The Protestant establishment – underestimating the strength of Catholic conviction – believed that time was on its side. So it was prepared to tolerate the minor manifestations of the old faith: the representations of crosses and the crucifixion, scrawled on parish church walls in place of the burned images, and the Corpus Christi plays, most notably at York, depicting transubstantiation as an essential part of Christian dogma. Children of Catholics, who were brought up on Protestant imitations of the Mass, would – optimistic Protestants insisted – eventually lapse from the faith of their fathers. And it was taken for granted that neither they nor their parents would support the Pope or the invasion of England by a Catholic king or emperor. Catholicism, being no threat to the crown or state, could be left to die of natural causes. All the Queen and her councillors had to do was wait. But in the autumn of 1568 they were given cause to revise their complacent judgement about the safety of the realm. The north of England rose up in revolt.
The Rising of the Northern Earls had many causes. The Duke of Norfolk – humiliated by Elizabeth reneging on her promise to arrange his marriage to Mary, Queen of Scots – had given the dissatisfied Earls of Westmorland and Northumberland to believe that, in London, the Queen had lost support and popularity. When a real rising was about to begin, he changed his story and lost his nerve, but by then it was too late. The march south could neither be postponed nor abandoned. The revolt had begun. The real reason for the rising was hubris – the earls’ resentment that they did not number among the Queen’s favourites and the belief that they would receive their proper reward in a Court over which Mary Stewart presided. Both their flagging spirits and their self-delusion were encouraged by Mary, Queen of Scots’ message to the Spanish Ambassador: ‘Tell your master that if he will help me, I shall be Queen of England in three months.’9
The earls, expecting Spanish reinforcements, determined that their first strategic objective would be a port on the north-eastern coast. Hartlepool was chosen as the beachhead for the promised Duke of Avila’s invasion. The Spaniards did not come. And, since it lacked a cause, the revolt had little popular support. A quarter of the soldiers who marched south were pressed men – tenants of the earls who led them. No doubt there were rebels who genuinely supported the Catholic cause, and their leaders certainly saw the call to defend Catholicism as the best way to keep morale high and desertion low. When they reached Durham Cathedral, they issued a proclamation – not so much to increase Catholic support of the enterprise as to assert it: ‘Your duty doth bind you for the setting forth of His true religion.’10
Whatever effect the call to service had on recruitment, it certainly inspired an orgy of destruction. The Church of England Prayer Books were torn apart and their pages scattered in the nave of the cathedral. The practice was repeated in eight churches in the county and seventy churches in Yorkshire. The Mass was restored in at least fifteen churches. In Durham Cathedral a vast congregation was absolved en masse from any involvement in England’s rejection of Rome.
The rebels advanced as far south as Leeds before they had to face Elizabeth’s generals. A hastily prepared and badly thought-out plan to rescue Mary was abandoned after they heard that the Queen of Scots had been moved from Tutbury to Coventry. Hopes of support from a Catholic rising in the East Riding of Yorkshire and south Lancashire were not realised. The earls – with only self-interest to guide them – decided that they were doomed, gave up the struggle and fled to Scotland, leaving their followers to face the wrath of both the English troops and the local inhabitants who had decided, on second thoughts, that they were loyal to the Queen and the Church of which she was Supreme Governor. The Northern Earls’ Revolt was not a second Pilgrimage of Grace.
Elizabeth responded even more savagely than her father had reacted to the only genuine threat to his throne. Eight hundred rebels were executed. All of them were peasants, farm labourers or vagrants. Like all the Tudor monarchs, Elizabeth was chronically short of revenue. Rebels who could buy their freedom were reprieved on a payment of £5. Elizabeth’s orders were brazenly explicit: ‘You may not execute any that have freeholdings or noted wealth, for to do so is the Queen Majesty’s pleasure.’11 So the poor died and the well-to-do and wealthy took refuge in Scotland, where the Reformation was following a confused course of theological scholarship and tribal loyalty.
Mary Stuart, although crowned Queen of Scotland when she was six days old, lived in France from her sixth to her nineteenth year. In 1561 – after the death of her first husband, Francis II – the double queen reluctantly returned to Edinburgh, where she was almost certainly party to the death of her second husband, before marrying his murderer. Scotland was under the governance of the Protestant Lords of Congregation, but before her flight to England (and, as it turned out, to captivity), Mary’s presence in Edinburgh protected and sustained Catholicism in what was an increasingly Protestant country. Her private chapel at Holyrood was described as ‘nothing less than a Catholic parish church’12 and when, one Palm Sunday, she heard that the Protestants of Edinburgh had tied a priest to the market cross and pelted him with refuse until he was dead, she called on the Catholics ‘of Fife, Lothian, Tiverdale and Liddesdale to rise up and avenge him’13 – only to discover that the priest was alive and well.
Mary’s matrimonial record made her a less-than-ideal champion of Scottish Catholicism and her turbulent emotional life contributed to her rejection by the Lords of Congregation and the consequent loss of Scottish Catholicism’s most potent icon. But, in Scotland, the enemy was England. So, despite her close connection with French ambitions, the Queen of Scots’ religion helped Scottish Catholics to escape the accusation that bedevilled Catholics south of the border. They were, or claimed to be, patriots rather that potential traitors. In 1564, John Scott, a priest found saying Mass, successfully defended himself against the charge of Popery by claiming that he was ‘of the Queen’s religion’.14 But Mary was a straw in the theological wind. Scotland had become Protestant by nature.
The Scottish Reformation was partly the result of theological conversion and partly – the one feature it shared with England – the result of a contempt for the Scottish priesthood. In the border counties the people had fallen under the spell of Knox’s anti-clerical Calvinism. Further north they thought less about Calvin’s doctrine and more about the failure of the Church to meet their needs. In both Highlands and Lowlands the rejection of things past took on a particularly violent form. Churches, as well as monasteries, were attacked and their physical fabric desecrated. In Glasgow the Collegiate Church of Our Lady and St Anne was in part demolished, and the cathedral church of St Mungo’s was so badly damaged that services had to be cancelled and it was left to rot for so long there were fears that ‘this greit monument will allturlie fall doun and dekey’.15 The physical destruction that occurred throughout lowland Scotland was accepted, by most Catholics, with the resignation that follows recognition of the inevitable. Few attempts were made at rebuilding. The churches were left in ruins, like the relics of a lost civilisation, adding to the impression that Scottish Catholicism was dead and incapable of resurrection.
The brutality of the assaults on consecrated buildings matched the uncompromising nature of the laws passed by the Scottish Parliament. As early as 1560, it had legislated to prohibit ‘Idolatry and all acts contrary to the Confession of Faith published in its Parliament’, and to secure the ‘abolition of the mass’.16 The laws were to be enforced by a series of penalties which escalated from confiscation of property to death. For years they were ignored by Scotland’s wayward sovereign. In 1562, a year after Mary’s return to Scotland, a pyre was prepared in Dunblane for a Catholic priest, but it was used to burn his vestments while a jeering crowd pelted him with rotten eggs. It was a rare example of leniency. Resentful Protestant elders attributed the aberration to the influence of the Queen.
Scotland became more and more Protestant. The Kirk was part of the community and offences against it were tantamount to the rejection of generally agreed conventions and beliefs. So exclusion from the Presbyterian Church incurred social as well as civil penalties – ostracism, in addition to fines and the threat of imprisonment. It was the Kirk, rather than the civil authorities, which attempted to purge Scotland of Roman practices and influence. And it enforced conformity with a thoroughness that was not a feature of the English Protestant offence against Rome. Instead of imposing a negative obligation – possible dissidents being required to abandon Catholic practices and deny the Catholic faith – it demanded a positive assertion of Protestantism, the ‘confession of Calvinistic faith’ at ‘Kirk Sessions’. That did not mean that popish practices were overlooked. After Mary Stuart left Scotland in 1568, persecution, prosecution and simple mob violence were as great as they were in England. By the 1570s covert priests were being hanged in Edinburgh for saying the Mass.
Catholic life was very different in Ireland, where the Church benefited from continued supervision by the Vatican, and its English colonial masters’ habit of thinking about it as only a plantation, with cheap crops to export, until it was in actual rebellion. A Jesuit, David Wolfe, supervised Trent-inspired reforms which included the creation of Mass centres, the imposition of strict rules of conduct on the priesthood and the prohibition of simony. The Irish Catholic Church had reasserted its faith in all things Roman, while swearing loyalty to ‘the natural crown and queen of England whom the Lord God maintain now and forever’. That position was impossible to sustain and the leadership of the Irish Church split.
In 1569, Philip II of Spain received a manifesto signed by four Irish Catholic archbishops, eight bishops and thirteen nobles. It reaffirmed the Irish people’s determination ‘to remain firm, constant and unshakable in the faith of the Catholic Church [and] also persevere even to their last breath in their immemorial obedience and attachment to the Roman Pontiffs and the Apostolic see’. It also asked for Spain’s assistance in freeing Ireland from the ‘infection and ruin of the accursed and contagious heresy raging in England’.17 The manifesto suggested that the release be brought about by the nomination of a Spanish Hapsburg as King of Ireland. Pope Gregory was so moved by the Irish manifesto that he, briefly, thought of compensating for King Philip’s inaction by mounting an invasion of Ireland from the Papal States. Nothing came of it. But Ireland remained a predominantly Catholic nation for the rest of time.
The collapse of the Northern Earls’ Rebellion might have been followed in England by a period of relative tranquillity. The Queen announced that she did not intend her subjects to ‘be molested either by inquisition or examination in any matter … of faith … for as long as they shall, in their outward conversation … shew themselves quiet and comfortable and not manifestly repugnant and obstinate to the laws of the land which are established for frequentation of divine service’. She was, in fact, asserting her support of freedom of conscience rather than freedom of worship, but even that limited degree of tolerance did not survive the folly of February 2nd 1570.
On that day Pope Pius V, apparently still under the impression that England was ripe for revolution, tried to accelerate the process by issuing the Papal Bull Regnans in Excelsis – ‘The Sentence Declaratory of the Holy Father against the Pretended Queen of England and those heretics adhering to her’. It excommunicated Elizabeth and made treason against her the obligation of all good Catholics. ‘Peers, subjects and people of the said kingdom, and all others on whatever terms bound to her, are freed from their oath and all manner of duty, fidelity and obedience … They shall not once dare to obey her or any of her laws, directions or commands, binding under the same curse those who do anything to the contrary.’ Encompassing Elizabeth’s murder became a moral duty. ‘The guilty woman of England … is the cause of so much injury to the Catholic faith and loss of so many souls [that] there is no doubt that who ever sends her out of this world with pious intention of doing service, not only does not sin but gains merit.’ From then on, every Catholic was thought to be Elizabeth’s enemy and the friend of Spain. And an enemy of Elizabeth was an enemy of England. The process which Mary Tudor had begun was complete. Protestants could claim, on the authority of the Pope, that every Catholic was a traitor and potential regicide.
Neither King Philip of Spain nor the Emperor Maximilian was told of Pius’ intention to excommunicate Elizabeth. Neither approved of a decision which required them either to disobey the Pope or increase – possibly to the point of war – their antagonism towards England. Both monarchs prohibited the bull from being publicised or published within their kingdoms, which may account for the extraordinary fact that – despite her notorious network of spies – neither the Queen nor her Court knew of its existence until a copy was nailed to the Bishop of London’s garden gate. Thirty-seven years after that act of calculated effrontery, Mrs Frances Salisbury, daughter of the perpetrator of the daring deed, described to George Farrar, her priest, how and why it had come about and what, for her father, the consequences were:
When Pius V, his Bull concerning the Excommunication of Queen Elizabeth was to be sent into England, Mr Felton, being known to be a gentleman of approved resolution and virtue, was dealt withal to undertake the business of publishing it, one way or another, about the City of London. The danger of such an employment, which he took to be an act of virtue, daunted him not a whit. Whereupon, promising his best endeavours on that behalf, he had the Bull delivered to him in Calais and, after the receipt thereof, came presently to London, where being assisted by one Laurence Webb, Doctor of Canon and Civil Law, he set it upon the gate of the Bishop of London, his Palace but stayed not by it.
He had given a copy of the Bull to a gentleman of Lincoln’s Inn, a special friend of his. Now the houses and lodgings of all Catholics about London being narrowly searched upon the publication of the aforesaid Bull, the closet of this Inns of Court gentleman (for he was a known Catholic) was in his absence broken up and the afore mentioned copy found therein. The gentleman, being hereupon apprehended and put to the wrack, confessed of whom he had it. Upon this were sent next day the Mayor of London with men and halberts to the number of five hundred to apprehend him, whom, as soon as from the window Mr Felton saw the knocking at the gate and ready to break in, he desired them to have patience, saying he knew why they came for him and would come down unto them.
From his house he was carried by the Mayor and the Lord Chief Justice to the Tower where he remained prisoner almost three months, having been thrice in that space put upon the wrack not withstanding that at his apprehension he had confessed he was the man who put the Bull on the Bishop’s gate. Being condemned he was brought on the eighth day of August 1570 from the Tower to St Paul’s Church yard near to the bishop’s Palace, drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution. He hanged but a while and was cut down and bowelled while still alive insomuch as the hangman, having his heart in his hand, he said once or twice, Jesus.18
By declaring that the murder of Elizabeth had ceased to be a crime and become a duty, Regnans in Excelsis brought to an end what little tolerance had preceded its publication. During 1571 new laws were passed with the stated intention of preventing revolution – encouraged by the ‘false, usurped and alien authority of Rome’ – and the practical effect of penalising Catholics. The assertion that Elizabeth was not, or should not be, Queen of England, or that she was a heretic or infidel, became high treason. So did the circulation and dissemination of Papal Bulls, acceptance of absolution from the sin of schisms and attempts to promote a reconciliation with Rome.
It may have been pride, or perhaps it was genuine fear of assassination, that made Elizabeth respond to Regnans in Excelsis with twenty years of unremitting violence. Whatever the reason, the campaign against Catholicism was extended, to the trivial extent of prohibiting the importation of crosses, beads and holy pictures. In 1581 an Act with the avowed purpose of ‘reconciling’ Papists to the authority of their ‘lawful sovereign’ made recusancy an indictable offence to be tried at quarter sessions, and the fine for failure to attend Church of England Sunday services for a month was increased from twelve pence to £20. Catholic education was prohibited. Attendance at Mass incurred a penalty of one hundred marks or a year’s imprisonment. Converting to Catholicism, or attempting to make converts, was punishable by death. Inevitably some Justices felt the need to demonstrate their unequivocal loyalty to the Queen and her Church. They did so by asking suspects what became known as ‘The Bloody Question’. In the event of invasion, would they fight for the Queen or the Pope?
Then the murderous assault on the priesthood began. Priests who had trained abroad were forbidden to return to England. Those who did so were said to be guilty of high treason and were executed. Those already in the country were required to leave within forty days or face the same penalty. During the reign of Good Queen Bess – unlike her sister, Mary, spared the prefix ‘Bloody’ – 126 priests were executed.
After the death of Mary Tudor, many Catholic scholars had chosen to live and study abroad. The most notable among them – though by no means the most distinguished – was William Allen, a graduate of Oriel College and Principal of St Mary’s Hall in Oxford. Allen was to become one of the Catholic Church’s great evangelists. But initially he shared the view that the reclamation of England would come in ‘God’s good time’ and that it was therefore impious – as well as uncongenial – to attempt an acceleration of the process by proselytising among the godless English. While they waited for God to do His duty, the exiled English scholars had, they believed, an obligation to continue their examination and clarification of Catholic theology – ‘nothing more being proper to men of their profession, or possible as long as a heretical government held sway in their country’.19
During 1567 Allen – then a virtual refugee in the University of Louvain – had travelled to Rome with Jean Vendeville, Professor of Law at Douai University, and Vendeville had suggested that some sort of Catholic institution should be founded in the Netherlands. With funds supplied by Vendeville, Allen set out to attract ‘the best wittes out of England’ to a college which was devoted to Catholic scholarship. The college closed as the result of pressure – and some violence – from the Calvinist minority in Douai. Allen, who was better at urging others to face danger than at facing it himself, became rector of a college in Rheims. Most of the Douai seminarians went with him, but a handful chose Rome, where the college in Via di Monserrato – once a hospice for pilgrims – had greatly increased in size after Pope Gregory had agreed, despite initial doubts, to provide a grant to finance its expansion. At first the money was not well spent. The head of what had become the English College in Rome, Dr Morys Clynnog, had been inherited from the hospice, and the supervision of an institution that was both academic and missionary was beyond him. The favouritism he showed towards the handful of Welshmen under his supervision led to disturbances which almost caused the college to be closed. But in October 1578, two Italian Jesuits were added to the staff and a new rector was appointed. He, too – Father Agazzari – was a Jesuit. The Jesuits had launched their own mission to England in 1572 and Allen, who was appointed to the staff, complained bitterly that, as a consequence of the new rector’s influence, the best English seminarians were being persuaded to abandon the notion of becoming lay priests and join the Society.
Allen’s instinct that it was his duty to encourage study rather than missionary zeal was rejected by many of the young men he recruited. Their passion to save English souls convinced him that God’s wishes had been misinterpreted or that He had changed His mind. Allen announced that ‘God himself decided otherwise than we had foreseen.’20 The Vatican was not sure that God was so capricious. It had never been enthusiastic about the English College usurping a task which the Jesuits were founded to perform, and openly wondered if sending good priests to almost certain death was the best use of its resources. Yet, notwithstanding all the regrets and reservations, the seminarians became Soldiers of God on the model of the Society of Jesus. Despite the rejection of cooperation with the Jesuits, the curriculum included the Jesuits’ Spiritual Exercises. But there remained a fundamental disagreement about the purpose of the mission. Most of the English priests thought of England as a Catholic country which was waiting for liberation from the Protestant minority who had seized power. The Jesuits, and those who followed them, thought of England as Francis Xavier thought of Goa: a heathen country, many years away from salvation.
But there was also a more material reason for the change in role. It soon became clear that the original intention – the recruitment, for seven years of study, of young men between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five from good families – was economically unsustainable. So the college became a missionary seminary, financed in part by the crowned Catholic heads of Europe, and its members swore ‘to Almighty God that I am ready and shall always be ready to receive holy orders, in His good time and I shall return to England for the salvation of souls, whenever it seems good to the superior of the college to order me to do so’.
Even before the new wave of priests had time to save many souls, the Protestant establishment – apart from Elizabeth herself – panicked and began groundlessly to fear that, despite its best efforts, England was being overrun by Papists. In 1577 the Bishop of London had complained that ‘the Papists grew marvellously both in numbers and in the obstinate withdrawing of themselves from the Church and the service of God’.21 Despite Elizabeth’s agreement to (and in some cases the initiation of) an increasingly draconian penal regime, he still feared that ‘Her Majesty is slow to believe that the great increase in Papists is a danger to the realm.’22 Whether or not his fears about the Queen’s complacency were justified, he was right about numbers. Many Catholics shared his opinion about the changing pattern of religious allegiance. Although they accepted they could never regain the old supremacy, they believed that persecution was strengthening their ranks and their cause. What they most feared was tolerance. One exile went as far as to claim that ‘the rigour of the law and the severe execution thereof … has been the foundation of our credit … the only thing to be feared is a report about liberty of conscience at home’.
A year later, Don Bernardino Mendoza, the Spanish Ambassador, rejoiced in reporting to Madrid that ‘The numbers of Catholics are increasing daily so abundantly that even Lord Burghley [Elizabeth’s first minister] … is looking decidedly askance at the wonderful and constant growth [and] has confessed … That for every one staunch and constant Catholic at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign there were now ten.’23 Mendoza attributed the growth to the ‘college and seminary for Englishmen which your Majesty ordered to be supported … Of the old ones [Marian priests] very few remain … This was the cause of great decay in religion as there was no one to teach it … This cause is being remedied.’24
The Pope was more realistic. He knew that the English Catholic Church remained beleaguered and that its members were being subjected to pressures which many of them found difficult to withstand. Catholics in England were being forced to choose between heresy and treason and, although the punishment for heresy was more drastic, the penalty for treason was more immediate. English Catholics needed help and encouragement. The first missionary priest had landed in England from France in 1574. But in 1580 the campaign to save the heretic nation for a Catholic God acquired a new dimension. What amounted to a Jesuit expeditionary force landed on the south coast.
England was so desperately short of priests that there were fierce arguments about the proper employment of the few clergy who were available. The fundamental disagreements over the purpose of the English mission had not been resolved. But Allen, having been convinced that England could and must be reconverted, became the most passionate exponent of spreading the missionaries’ net as widely as the number of priests allowed. The Pope agreed that reconversion was the vocation of Allen’s seminarians. Allen’s letter of gratitude – sent to Gregory XIII from what had become the English College in Rome – is too sycophantic in tone to sound genuine to the modern reader. But there is no doubt that he meant every word of it:
I give the greatest and most humble thanks, as great as spirit and affection are able to compass acts towards us, especially for the two seminaries … For there is nothing more distinguished, Most Holy Father and Lord, of all your great services towards our Country, non more salutary among all your wise counsels received for the restoration of the collapsed religion, nothing more glorious in all the works for eternal commemoration for God and men, nothing which either now earns more souls for the Lord or from which greater hope exists of reconciling the whole people into the future.25
Allen, although now associated with the English College in Rome – where he is buried – secured his place in Catholic history at Douai. Not only did he make it a model for other English seminaries abroad, but he supervised the preparation of the Douai–Rheims translation of the Bible, which remained the authorised Catholic text for five hundred years. However, he is best remembered for the part that he played – always in the rearguard rather than the front line – in the campaign for the reconversion of England. He equivocated about the purpose of the mission. The determination to ‘earn’ rather than ‘preserve’ souls for God was, like the hope of reconciling the whole people, indistinguishable from the aspiration to reconvert the entire nation, but whatever Allen thought about the religious future of England, he had no doubt that the Jesuits must play a part in it. That was a view shared by Robert Parsons (or Person, as he is sometimes called), a disenchanted Fellow of Balliol (then a Puritan college) who, during travels in Europe, had decided that his future lay with the Society.
Parsons had taken Jesuit vows before the notably demanding Society had agreed to admit him and had spent his novitiate undergoing the six exacting experimenta which were designed to test his courage, his stamina and his determination, as well as his faith. During two years of what amounted to probation, he had completed the Spiritual Exercises, spent months in retreat, lived as a mendicant begging alms from door to door, and taught the catechism to the children of the poor. He had performed all the menial tasks of a servant and demonstrated his humility by obeying the rule that required all Jesuits ‘to hide no temptation, but to disclose it to their confessor or Superior, nay more, to take pleasure in thoroughly manifesting their whole soul to them, not only discussing their defects …’26 Despite, or perhaps because of, the obligation to ‘yield himself to perfect obedience’ to his superior and to ‘acquire perfect resignation and resignation of his own will and judgement’,27 Parsons exuded the self-confidence and belief that typifies the Jesuit. Armed with those indispensable assets, he joined with Allen in arguing that the Society had a duty to contribute towards the salvation of England and the English.
During December 1579, William Allen and Robert Parsons discussed the proposals with Father Everard Mercurianus, the General of the Society, and Father Claude Aquaviva, his deputy. Neither man was attracted by the idea. One objection transcended all others. Sending a missionary to England was sending a missionary to death. Jesuits had proved, time after time, that they were not afraid to die, but to approve a mission which they knew would end in almost immediate capture and death was knowingly to waste scarce resources. But there were other reasons why they were opposed to the idea. Jesuits were careful to avoid involvement in domestic politics and – partly because of their Spanish connection – they would be (wrongly) seen in England as agents of King Philip, not of God. A handful of Jesuits would be in ‘everlasting hurly-burly’, with ‘no time to renew their fervour in retreats’.28 The arguments against sending Jesuits to England were so strong that Parsons and Allen must have begun to think that all was lost. But Parsons, in one last desperate attempt to save the day, offered a reason for setting aside all the objections. The Benedictines were honoured as the society that converted England to Christianity. The Jesuits could outshine them with the glory of reclaiming it for Rome.
Jesuits will argue that the explanation for their mind change was invented by their enemies. But the widespread belief that it was true – right or wrong – illustrates the (often irrational) unpopularity of the Society and its members, even among Catholics. The association with the Inquisition was, and remains, far less damaging than the Society’s reputation for regarding itself as superior to other societies. Jesuits do what other Orders dare not do, go where other Orders dare not go, think and say what other Orders dare not think and say. They obey a rigid code and accept an iron discipline that only men of indomitable will could survive. Jesuits are feared and disliked because they are so shamelessly admirable.
On Low Sunday, April 18th 1580, the Pope pronounced his blessing on the expedition to England. Parsons was accompanied to the valedictory audience by Edmund Campion, an English Jesuit with whom he was already well acquainted, and Ralph Emerson, a Jesuit lay brother. During their long and torturous journey to the Channel coast – turning back on themselves time after time to cover their tracks – they were joined by other priests from the seminary, including Ralph Sherwin, Edmund Rishton and Luke Kirby. It was agreed that secrecy and safety demanded that they should make the crossing separately. Parsons landed on June 16th, Campion nine days later.
Parsons ‘went disguised as a soldier of choleric disposition, and he would have eyes, indeed, who discern beneath that costume, face and gate the goodness and modesty that lay in hiding’.29 Campion claimed to be an Irish travelling salesman from Dublin. It was a role that itinerant priests were to assume many times during the perilous days that lay ahead. A ‘pedlar’s chest’, found hidden in a wall at Samlesbury Hall near Preston in Lancashire, was a relic of the subterfuge. The ponyskin-covered wooden box looked as though it contained tools. In a sense it did. It held all that a priest might need to discharge his duties – including a portable altar stone. The likelihood is that it was the property of St Edmund Arrowsmith, a priest who was hanged, drawn and quartered in Lancaster in 1628.30 Missionaries gambled their lives on the travelling-salesman disguise for at least fifty years.
Rome once more – but not for the last time – changed its position on the purpose of the mission to England. Jesuits who landed in Kent during the summer of 1580 were under strict instructions. They were forbidden to waste their time on heretics. Their task was ‘the preservation and augmentation of the faith of the Catholics of England’, not to make converts.31 They were also bound by ‘new and particular laws’ which they were to obey ‘besides the common and ancient laws of religious orders and the institute of the Society’.32 Some of the new regulations appear to have been designed to help the missionaries merge into the local landscape. They were required ‘to live without choir and chant’ – the obligation of coming together in church for prayers several times during the course of the day. It was their duty ‘to have and wear no [distinctive] habit or kind of clothing’. The severest strictures of the institute were repeated, – reminding the missionaries that, legally, they were wholly in the hands of the Society. ‘The contract entered into between the Society and the subject is not equal for both parties.’ The ‘defects of subjects’ were to be ‘punished without judicial process’. The missionaries were enjoined to remember the principle – ‘the union of obedience’ – on which the Society’s cohesion was built. ‘The whole governance depends on one head, namely the Superior General.’
Informers warned the Privy Council that Jesuits were coming, and presumably in part as a response to the Society’s reputation, the government reacted by introducing new punitive legislation. The statute of 1581 was designed to frustrate the work of itinerant priests and their avowed intention to encourage those Catholics who remained true to the faith to regularise their relationship with the Church by fulfilling the obligation to attend regular acts of worship. Between 1580 and 1585 – when it was made high treason for a priest who had been trained abroad to enter England – most of the missionaries were not Jesuits. They were ‘seminary priests’ from colleges run by other Orders. Their numbers grew rapidly – more than a hundred by 1589, and more than six hundred by the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. It was, however, the Jesuits who made their mark on the history of the time – partly because they were so tirelessly reckless; and partly because, when they went to the stake, they left behind testaments of their work and faith. The most famous testament was written by Edmund Campion.