Like most English Jesuits, Edmund Campion initially intended to become a seminary priest. He could, had he chosen to remain a Protestant, have risen to great heights of fame and distinction. While still at Oxford, his reputation as a theologian and man of letters made him a favourite of the Queen – probably on account of his blank verse, which is more to be admired for its metaphysics than for its metre:
Dearest son, choose a cube, for a slippery form
Is the ball, and in unsightly manner at every slight breeze
It moves about. It never stands still or performs well.
A cube is stable, wherever it be impelled by a stroke
Wherever you move it, balanced by the correct weight,
It holds firm and whatever way it is thrown, it rights itself.
Do not cast down your spirit to me in sudden tempest.
Bear it and be firm, thus one may live, put on
A peaceful mind and, unmoved by whatever bitterness may come against you
Stand with straight feet. Never forsake good works, once you have begun.1
Campion, who had been ordained Deacon of the Church of England, intended to take Holy Orders but, after travels – Dublin, Prague, Douai and Rome – and a conscience troubled by doubts about the schism, he was received into the Catholic Church. He became a Jesuit in 1573 and was ordained five years later. On December 5th 1578, he was notified that God and the Society of Jesus had called him to England. He obeyed with resignation and misgivings. ‘It is a venture which only the wisdom of God can bring to good and to His wisdom we lovingly resign ourselves.’2
Robert Parsons, not Campion, was the pathfinder for the first party of Jesuits to land in England. Twenty years later, he published The Memorial for the Reformation of England. It revealed what had motivated the missionaries during the desperate days at the end of the sixteenth century. Jesuits or not, they rejected the notion that England was a heathen nation, to be treated as the Jesuits treated India and China. It was a Catholic country beset with doubts as well as enforced apostasy. It would not return to the true faith unless the Church remedied some of its past mistakes rather than hoped and worked for a return to the formal ritualism that had preceded King Henry’s Reformation. Parsons wanted a totally new Church, organised under three archbishops and supported by three universities. Its most welcome members would be those who were Catholics by conviction. But where conviction failed, the law would guarantee compliance with the tenets of faith. It was to be a universal Church at which attendance would be compulsory. In Parsons’ judgement, religious liberty promoted heresy. The Memorial did not say, though the implication was clear, that the vision could only become reality if a foreign power imposed its brand of Catholicism on England. Parsons spent the last years of his life attempting to persuade Spain to become that nation. And there is no doubt that, from the very beginning of his mission, he was dedicated to the complete reconversion of England by whatever means could achieve that end. His colleagues – Campion in particular – took a softer approach to the business of conversion. But total conversion (as well as reassurance) was their aim. That put them at odds with the leadership of their Order – a severe fault in so disciplined a society. In his reverential biography of Campion, Evelyn Waugh rightly asserts that Campion and his companions were instructed not even to speak to heretics.3
The Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus suggests that, when the missionaries arrived in England, the Pope – whatever the Jesuit Society believed – intended that they should save the souls of Protestant apostates as well as providing comfort and grace to the steadfast and secure. The record is precise and explicit: ‘After the persuasion of the Most Reverend William Allen, His Holiness sent to England for the conversion of heretics and the assistance of Catholics.’4 There was certainly some ambiguity in the instructions that the Vatican issued. They included the order ‘to preach and teach, though not openly but in private houses, after the old example of the Apostles in their day, the Catholic faith and administer the sacraments to such as have need and were capable of that heavenly benefit’.5 It is difficult to imagine how, from the security of ‘private houses’ they would have been able to achieve ‘the conversion of heretics’. The contradiction may well be that – neither for the first nor last time – the Jesuits thought they knew better than the Pope and followed their own conscientious judgement rather than his orders.
Campion’s own description of his duties was sufficiently comprehensive to cover either or both definitions of his task. ‘My charge is, of free cost, to preach the Gospel, to minister the Sacraments, to instruct the simple, to reform sinners, to confute errors, and in brief to cry alarm spiritual against foul vice and proud ignorance, wherever my countrymen are abused.’6 With that mandate to inspire him, he set out on his mission – first by boat from Dover to Hythe and from there along the Thames to London. In Chancery Lane – at the home of George Gilbert, a wealthy Catholic layman who was to become one of the expedition’s patrons – he was reunited with the other missionaries. Together they spent the first few days in conclave with half a dozen old Marist priests in what they chose to call the Synod of Southwark. It was there that they composed a Brief Discourse on Why Catholics Refuse to Go to Church. Their didactic duty done, they left London in some style, thanks to the generosity of George Gilbert. Each seminary priest and Jesuit was given a pair of horses, a travelling servant, a suit of gentleman’s riding clothes and the immense sum of £60 in cash. The splendour of their departure – though justified as both a disguise and as the assurance that the mission could afford to spread out from the Home Counties – was to become a cause of both criticism and regret.
Campion went north, noting with some embarrassment that he had been sent to one of the safer parts of the country. However, he seemed to enjoy the months he spent in Lancashire. ‘I ride about some piece of the country every day. The harvest is wonderful great. On horseback I meditate my sermon. When I come to the house I polish. Then I talk with such as come to talk with me or hear their confessions. In the morning, after Mass, I preach; they hear with exceeding greediness and often receive the sacrament.’7
Every account of the missionaries’ daily lives confirms that they lived in constant danger of capture and death. ‘Sometimes when we are sitting at table quite cheerfully conversing familiarly about matters of faith and piety … if it happens that someone rings at the front door a little insistently, so that it can be put down as an official, immediately, like deer that have heard the voice of hunters and prick their ears and stand alert, all stop eating, stand to attention and commend themselves to God’.8 It was faith combined with the certainty that was, and still is, Catholicism’s hallmark which made them strong.
The Pope, having realised the folly of Regnans in Excelsis and the encouragement of Elizabeth’s assassination, had warned the missionaries to avoid any involvement in politics – a difficult task, but one that Campion accepted with the assurance that matters of state were ‘things which appertain not to my vocation and from which I gladly restrain and sequester myself’. England was not in the mood to distinguish between religion and politics – both, when practised by Catholics, seemed committed to the overthrow of England’s lawful government. The confusion was compounded by hotheads who insisted that ‘The state of Christendom depends on the stout assailing of England.’9
Knowing that it could only be a matter of time before they were arrested, the missionaries prepared for the day of reckoning. Campion was warned by messages smuggled out from Catholic priests imprisoned in the Marshalsea prison that, if he were caught, he would be given neither time nor opportunity to state his case. So, in anticipation of inevitable capture, he wrote a message to the Right Honourable Lords of the Privy Council. It came to be called either ‘Campion’s Challenge’ or ‘Campion’s Brag’. It acquired those pejorative descriptions because Campion – having explicitly denied, in the text, the intention to commit either bombastic offence – went on, in the same paragraph, to make both errors of taste and judgement:
I am loathe to speak anything that might sound of a prank or an insolent brag or challenge – especially now, being as a dead man to this world … Yet have I such courage in the advancing of the majesty of Jesus Christ, my king … and such assurance in my quarrel and my evidence is so impregnable because I know perfectly that non of the protestants of England, nor all the protestants living, nor any sect our adversaries (however they may … overrule us in the kingdom of grammarians and of unlearned ears) can maintain their doctrine in disputation.10
Right or wrong, it was a foolish claim to make and diminished the majesty of the rest of the document.
The ‘brag’ included a necessary and genuine assurance of political neutrality. ‘I never had in mind, and am strictly forbidden by the father who sent me, to deal in any respect with matters of estate, or policy or the realm’, and there was a (no doubt sincere) obeisance to Elizabeth, ‘my Sovereign Ladye’ whom ‘God had been pleased to enrich with notable gifts of nature, learning and princely education’. Then, after a defiant mention of the ‘English students … beyond the sea’ who were ‘determined to win you to heaven or die upon your torments’, came the passage that ennobled the whole document. It was a brag. But it was about something that was worth bragging about: Jesuit indomitability.
And touching our society, let it be known to you that we have made a league – all the Jesuits of the world whose succession and multitude must overreach all the practices of England – cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn or be wracked with your tortures or consumed in your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God, it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted: so it must be restored.11
Campion ended with a farewell that was, in truth, addressed not to the Privy Council, but to all England. ‘I have no more to say but to recommend your case and mine to Almighty God, the Searcher of Hearts, who send[s] us His grace and set[s] us to accord before the day of payment, to the end we may at last be friends in heaven, where all shall be forgotten.’
The ‘brag’ was intended to be Campion’s dying testimony, the statement he would not be allowed to make at the stake. But he showed it to several of his colleagues, one of whom – when he was arrested – took a copy with him to the Marshalsea. From there the ‘brag’ found its way into the world of besieged and bewildered Catholics. The Bishop of Winchester told the Privy Council that copies were circulating in his diocese, and the Sheriff of Wiltshire complained that it was being openly read in his shire. What had been written as a personal valediction became a public proclamation of invincible faith and the manifesto of the missionary zeal. A treatise intended for publication – Ten Reasons why Catholicism was the one true faith – added to Campion’s reputation as Rome’s most successful advocate in England. Without either seeking or expecting the role, he had become the most famous of the Jesuits who risked their lives in the hope of keeping English Catholicism alive. He had also become the ‘most wanted’ of the missionaries.
For a while the missionaries’ efforts were a gratifying success. In Parsons’ words, they ‘passed through most part of the shires of England, preaching and administering the sacraments in almost every gentleman’s house we passed by, whether he was a Catholic or not, providing that he had any Catholics in his house to hear us’.12 Although they took what precautions they could, often moving about the country in disguise – Campion ‘in apparel to myself very ridiculous.’13 – all the Jesuits knew they could ‘not long escape the hands of the heretics. The enemy has so many eyes, so many scouts and crafts.’14
Campion was not the first of the Jesuits to be arrested. Between Advent 1580 and Easter 1581, eight missionaries were captured, indicted and tortured on the rack. After failing to name any of their (as yet free) associates, they were left to rot in gaol. The persecution was extended to include the Catholic laity as well as the priesthood. Parsons wrote to Alfonso Agazzari, the Rector of the English College in Rome, with the ominous news that ‘the violence is now extreme and unheard of since England first became Christian. Everywhere gentlemen and commoners, men, women and even children are being dragged off to gaol. They are bound in chains, despoiled of their goods, deprived of light.’15
Despite the mounting risk of capture, for three months Campion continued preaching without apparent fear of arrest. Overconfidence was his undoing. In mid-July, against the strong advice of Parsons, he spent a night at Lyford Grange in Berkshire – a well-known centre of Catholic activity and a refuge for fugitive priests and nuns. He left after a day of discreet private prayer, but was prevailed upon to return a couple of days later. By then his fame had attracted Catholics from all over the county and beyond. On the second day of Campion’s visit, George Eliot – a professional priest-hunter – arrived at the Grange. He had heard that Mass was to be said there, but had no idea of the celebrant’s identity until he attended the service and listened to Campion preach on the text ‘Jerusalem thou killest the prophets’. Eliot left to return later in the day with enough men to surround the house. They searched the Grange throughout the evening and into the night, but found nothing. Then, as dawn broke, they noticed early sunlight shining through a narrow cavity between the stones of the stairwell. They broke down the wall and found Campion in the ‘priest’s hole’ that had been constructed behind it.
Before formal proceedings against him were begun, Campion – once one of Elizabeth’s favourites – was taken to Leicester House in the Strand for cross-examination by the Earl of Leicester and the Queen herself. His answers to their questions must have exasperated his inquisitors and might well be described by the Society’s critics as ‘Jesuitical’. Could the Pope lawfully depose the Queen? It was not for him to judge. If Catholic Spain invaded England, what would he do? He would do ‘as God shall give me grace’. He was still offered a pardon if he would agree to attend a Protestant service – just once. Campion could recite Ten Reasons why he must reject the offer. The law was left to take its course.
The series of examinations that followed included a number of ‘conferences’ at which the prisoner was required to argue theology with various Protestant scholars, including the Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. Often Campion answered questions in the obtuse language that has come to be associated with Jesuit disputation. But on the crucial issue of transubstantiation his reply was simple and passionate. Told that belief in the Real Presence denied the truth of the Bodily Resurrection, he came near to losing his temper. ‘What? Will you make Him a prisoner now in Heaven? Must He be bound to those properties of a natural body? Heaven is His palace and you will make it His prison.’16
After four conferences, the Privy Council decided that there was enough evidence to indict Campion for offences against the English Church. The charge was then changed to conspiracy to murder the Queen. The trial – of Campion and seven other priests – began on November 20th 1581. On December 23rd, Parsons wrote again to Alfonso Agazzari. All the defendants had been accused of plotting with ‘the Pope, the Catholic King [of Spain] and the Duke of Florence to invade England …’ Their principal accusers were ‘three young men who had been one time in Rome … Who, if only on account of their age and insignificance could never have known anything of such a matter had it been mooted.’17 Parsons did not think it necessary to add that such a matter had been, or was about to be, mooted by him.
The result was a foregone conclusion. Campion’s final address to the jury included the affirmation for which he is best remembered: ‘If our religion do make us traitors we are worthy to be condemned; but otherwise we are and have been as good subjects as the queen ever had.’ He was condemned ‘to be hanged and let down alive and your privy parts cut off and your entrails be taken out and burnt in your sight and your head be cut off and your body divided into four parts and disposed of at her Majesty’s pleasure’. The execution took place at Tyburn on December 1st 1581. More by chance than intention, he was left hanging until he was dead. It was the only indulgence he received on the day of execution. His final prayers and last words were interrupted by abuse, which was shouted at him by the courtiers and councillors who had been deputed to watch the execution. The following day, having sensed the mood of the people, Sir Francis Walsingham expressed his bitter regret at the executions. He was not moved by moral outrage, but by expediency. He belatedly concluded that ‘it would have been better for the Queen to have spent 40,000 gold pieces than to have put these priests to death in public’.18 Martyrdom was Rome’s recruiting agent.
Among the silent Catholics, who were emboldened by the execution of Edmund Campion, was the wife of William Byrd, the composer and organist in the Elizabethan Chapel Royal. She, at least according to folklore, was in the crowd that witnessed the disembowelling, and dipped her handkerchief in the martyr’s blood. Byrd and his fellow composer and Chapel Royal organist, Thomas Tallis, were remarkably open about their Catholic sympathies. That they escaped censure was probably more the result of their numerous aristocratic patrons than the consequence of Burghley’s belief that loyalty must take second place to artistic genius.
Initially, Robert Parsons’ reaction to the deaths seemed as brave as, if less dramatic than, Juliana Byrd’s demonstration at Tyburn. He published a rebuke – Confessio Fidei – which was addressed to the London magistrates: ‘You are persecuting a corporation which will never die, and sooner will your hearts and hands satiated with blood fail you than there will be lacking men eminent for virtue and learning who will be sent by this Society to allow their blood to be shed by you for this cause.’19 However, instead of allowing his own blood to be shed for the cause, Parsons left England for France, never to return.
There is no doubt that a number of good Catholics urged him to go. Their concern was less his safety than the security of their community as a whole. While Parsons remained, the persecution would continue. Some of the seminary priests – whose mission had preceded his – claimed that, far from furthering God’s work, his presence had become the excuse for a reign of terror which the Church could not survive. They threatened to expose him if he did not go. Whatever the true reason for Parsons’ flight, his subsequent explanation reeks of guilt that is felt, but not acknowledged. ‘I returned into Sussex … and finding the commodity of passage to go to France, I resolved to go to confer with Dr Allen … With full intention to return presently … One cause was also to print some books which I had written In England or was in writing … Another reason of my coming over was to make a mission of Scotch fathers into Scotland.’20 Although Parsons explained why he left, he offered no reason for why he failed to return.
Initially Parsons settled in Rouen, from where he wrote to the Vicar General of the Jesuits to say that he experienced ‘a slight feeling of sadness’ when he recalled how many of the comrades who set out together for England had ‘attained their reward’ in heaven.21 He consoled himself with the explanation that he had fled not to avoid martyrdom, but to be in a position to carry on the work which God had set him. That included telling the Duke of Guise, Philip II of Spain and any other Catholic king or prince who would listen that it was a Christian sovereign’s duty to invade England and return its citizens to the true faith by force of arms.
Other Jesuit missionaries thought that the redemption of England lay in the hands of priests rather than soldiers. The suffering that their presence might cause to their followers was nothing as compared with the horrors that awaited them. Robert Southwell, a fugitive priest, described conditions inside the Bridewell gaol. Prisoners, he wrote, welcomed the release of death, ‘even though as full of pangs as hanging, drawing and embowelling quick can make them … Some are hanged by their hands 8 or 9 or 12 hours together till not only their wits but their senses fail them … some have been watched and kept without sleep until they were passed the use of reason and then examined when they could barely give an account of their own names … What insufferable agonies we have been put to on the rack, it is not possible to express, the feeling so far exceedeth speech.’22
Robert Southwell, knowing the fate that awaited him, had continued his mission in the north of England until the day of his arrest, and, in London, Henry Garnett had enjoyed almost equal success. Three months before Campion’s death, Sir Francis Knollys told the Queen, ‘The Jesuits are going from house to house to draw men from allegiance to Her Majesty into the false politics of the church of Rome hath and will endanger Her Majesty’s person and state more than all the sects in the world, if no executions shall follow upon their traitorous practices that are for the same apprehended.’23
There was still an army of the faithful who shared Campion’s certainty that since the ‘enterprise is of God, it cannot be withstood’. But the prevailing spirit had changed. Time and persecution had undermined Catholic convictions. So had a shortage of priests and the consequent break in the habit of worship. Most corrosive of all was the increasing belief – encouraged by the calls for invasion made by expatriate and exiled ultras – that Rome was the agent of Spain. As well as unnerving patriotic Catholics, it hardened Protestant resistance to Catholicism. An onlooker at Edmund Campion’s execution had echoed the fears and feelings that were felt by much of England: ‘In your Catholicism, all treason is contained.’24
News of the programmes and the persecutions had reached Rome back in April 1580, and Pope Gregory – partly because of concern for beleaguered Catholics, partly on account of his long-standing doubts about its justification, but mostly out of expediency – retreated from the claim that the death of Queen Elizabeth was the hope, and should be the aspiration, of all true believers. His Explanatio was intended to absolve the faithful from having to make a choice between fidelity to Church and loyalty to the state, without either relinquishing his claim to spiritual domain over England or moderating Pope Pius’ condemnation of Elizabeth and all her works. Regnans in Excelsis was reaffirmed as the statement of intention. But Catholics were not obliged to follow its instructions until the objective that it sought became a practical possibility. That might have seemed a step away from support for assassination and revolution, had it not been for the way in which the doctrine was interpreted.
Six months after it was promulgated, Cardinal Como, the Vatican Secretary, was obliged to provide a clarification of what the Pope regarded as a practical possibility. The Papal Nuncio in Madrid had been approached by two English nobles who wanted to know if the murder of Elizabeth would be a sin. They were assured that, to the contrary, it would be a sin not to take whatever opportunity for assassination Providence provided. ‘Since the guilty woman of England is the cause of so much injury to the Catholic faith and the loss of so many million souls, there is no doubt that whosoever sends her out of this world with pious intention does God a service.’25 In the following year the English Parliament passed the Act of Persuasion, which made it a capital offence to alienate English subjects from their lawful sovereign. A little over a year later, Pope Gregory retaliated by offering a plenary indulgence to all new converts to Catholicism, and the English College in Rome changed its mandate from preparing candidates for Holy Orders to sending missionaries to England ‘for the help of souls there led astray’.26
Whatever effect Explanatio – and its interpretation and associated activities – had on the English Catholics, it certainly did nothing to diminish the determination of those councillors who wanted Elizabeth to purge England of the seminary priests. Their anxieties were increased by the indomitability of the Catholic minority and by the success of its martyrs in bearing public witness to their undying faith. Arthur Pitts, a priest awaiting execution in the Tower of London, described the death of Thomas Cottam, a fellow priest, whose execution by burning at Tyburn he was taken to witness:
He came to his window over against my door, saying with joy of heart and voice ‘Give God thanks with me for tomorrow is my day and I now hope that I shall not escape the happy hour which I have so earnestly desired, because I find my name first on the roll of the Tower assigned to die tomorrow.’ The next day he departed joyfully, but arriving at the place of his martyrdom he was quailed again. For albeit he was the first to be taken up, yet the officers fearing that his example might draw many to be of his religion, because he was well known and beloved in the City having been before a Schoolmaster there. They, desirous to save his life, solicited him earnestly to recant his religion in which, he persisting, they take him down to see if the death and torments of the other of his brethren could move him. But when they perceived that his courage, by their blood increased, he had his desired crown of martyrdom.27
The constancy of most English Catholics had certainly unnerved some of Elizabeth’s councillors. In 1577, just as the Protestant hegemony was becoming unassailable, the Bishop of London had complained that ‘the Papists marvellously increase in both numbers and in obstinate withdrawing of themselves from the Church and the service of God’. Obviously unimpressed by the penal legislation of 1559, 1563 and 1570, he had gone on to argue, ‘Her Majesty must herein be made to be animo abfirmato or else nothing will be done and all our travail turned into a mockery.’28 A year later, the Earl of Leicester had written to warn Lord Burghley that ‘since Queen Mary’s time, the Papists were never in that jollity they be in at this present time in this country’.29 Burghley shared the Bishop of London’s view that the Queen was too lenient. ‘Her Majesty hath, from the beginning, showed her natural disposition to be such towards her subjects in the cause of religion that those who have ben repugnant or mislikeous of her religion have not lacked her favour.’30
The danger to Elizabeth came not from numbers, which were diminishing, but from the possible action of individual fanatics, encouraged to treason and murder by men of learning and virtue who, from the safety and comfort of the Vatican, lectured their followers in England on the importance of killing and being killed. The conduct of the English émigrés increased the Privy Council’s determination to root out ‘Papist traitors’ and reduced what little chance there was of Elizabeth making some sort of accommodation with the ‘loyal Catholics’ who genuinely wished her no harm.
William Allen, safe in Rome, kept anxious (and probably spurious) count of the number of English missionaries who risked torture and death. In the autumn of 1585 he told the Pope, ‘We have now … almost 300 priests in the households of noblemen and men of substance and are daily sending others who will direct the consciences and actions of others when the time comes.’31 The coming time of which he spoke was the day of the invasion of England. He had completely changed his view on the proper role of seminarians and had come to see them as agents of a Catholic revolution which, exclusively in his imagination, would be ignited by a Spanish invasion. Being a scholar, he thought it necessary to support his belligerence with the learned opinion that the Pope, ‘being the first and chief prelate of all Christendom’, was entitled to give ‘his consent that anything be done or attempted by arms or violence against any lawful or anointed prince whatever’.32 Allen had become the Catholic that Elizabeth’s councillors warned against.
Allen, made a cardinal in 1587, expanded his justification of a Spanish invasion in his Admonitions to the People of England. It was not written in the grave and measured language which might have been expected of his elevated status. The condition of England had reached the point at which the rule of Elizabeth ‘cannot be tolerated without the eternal infamy of our whole country, the whole world deriding our effeminate bastardy, that have suffered such a creature almost thirty years together to reign over our bodies and souls’. Neither the Admonitions’ style nor its substance chimed with Campion’s heroically gentle view of the priestly vocation. But most of Elizabeth’s councillors saw all missionaries – indeed, all Catholics – as threats to the stability of the state. Their error was encouraged by the mindless extremism of men like Nicholas Sanders, an émigré priest. Sanders told the Duke of Alba that ‘the State of Christendom depends on the stout assailing of England’.33
There was plenty of evidence to confirm that they meant what they said. All the major plots of Elizabeth’s reign – the Northern Earls in 1569, Ridolfi in 1571, Throckmorton in 1583, Parry in 1585, Babbington in 1586 and Essex in 1601 – were either Catholic-inspired or attracted Catholic support. The three Armadas were sent by Catholic Spain to invade England and overthrow Protestant Elizabeth – 1588 being the first and therefore the most famous – and numerous other expeditions were all mounted in the name of the True Church. The constant rumours of often-imaginary plots in England were usually associated with Mary Stewart, not because she was a Scot, but because she was a Catholic who still, it was assumed, attracted the treasonable allegiance of the apparently irrepressible legions of other Papists in England. She survived for so long, in an unmerciful country during an unmerciful age, not because of Elizabeth’s confidence or compassion, but because the Queen was reluctant to remove a crowned head.
The contemporary notion that Elizabeth was, by contemporary standards, lenient – even indulgent – towards her Catholic subjects reveals much about the brutality of the age. The Queen of England was obsessive in her determination to rule a country that was totally Protestant in form, if not in genuine belief. She could not convert every one of her Catholic subjects. But she could suppress, or perhaps even eliminate, all manifestations of the forbidden faith – a process which, in 1587, she attempted to accelerate first by instructing Justices of the Peace to confiscate the land and property of recusants who failed to pay their fines, and then by prohibiting recusants from buying or selling land. In 1593, ten years before her death, Elizabeth signed into law the last of the punitive statutes which were as much a defining feature of her reign as the more popular notion of the all-conquering Gloriana. Catholics were obliged to obtain permission before travelling more than five miles from their homes, and those who were absent from their usual place of residence for more than three months were sent into exile. Persistent recusants, above sixteen years of age, were to be imprisoned.
The case for even more repressive action was, in the Privy Council’s judgement, obviously strengthened by the apparent increase in open recusancy. Catholics rejoiced at what they attributed to a brave rejection of intimidation. Protestants were bewildered by what seemed to be the failure of their penal policies to drive Catholics to Church of England services. In fact what looked like an upsurge of rebellion – as measured by the number of prosecutions – was less the result of an increase in defiance of the penal code than the statistical consequence of anxious Justices taking the identification of recusants more seriously. In the Archdiocese of York, commissioners began to search out and fine recusant gentry – a class of Catholics previously thought to be beyond pursuit.34
Francis Ingleby of Studley Royal, hard by Fountains Abbey, had returned to Yorkshire from Rheims an ordained priest. He had – by his departure, ordination and return – defied three ordinances. He followed his vocation, disguised ‘as a poor man without a cloak’, until, one day in March 1586, he made the mistake of engaging a known Catholic in conversation ‘on an open spot called Bishopsfield … which was overlooked by a window of the Archbishop’s palace of Bishop-thorpe. It happened that chaplains of the Archbishop espied them and that the Catholic took off his hat to Ingleby and showed him greater marks of respect that were fitting towards a common person meanly dressed.’35 Ingleby was arrested, convicted at York Assizes and executed on June 3rd 1586. Though the history is too dazzled by Elizabeth’s brilliance to say so, for ten years there was a Reign of Terror in England.
The penal legislation of 1581, and its extension in 1585, certainly reduced the numbers of prosperous and established families that were willing to employ domestic priests as they employed lawyers and bailiffs – often the only celebrants of Mass in the county. A meeting of Catholic gentry in Kent decided that the dangers of residence were so great that ‘all priests should shift for themselves’; and when John Brushford arrived in England from Rheims, he ‘found everybody so fearful that none would receive [him] into their house’ and, after some weeks in hiding in London and the West Country, he went home to France.36
Ten years or so after the disastrous interpretation and reinterpretation of Regnans in Excelsis had provoked an increase in the butchery and burning, the Catholic gentry regained their nerve and resumed the patronage that sustained the Church for much of the seventeenth century. In the absence of parish structures, they alone could afford a priest’s upkeep, and the great houses of the south-east and East Anglia were convenient stopping places for missionary priests entering England from Calais or Dieppe and landing in Dover and Rye. So, at the end of the sixteenth century, the labouring poor – particularly in the north – suffered from acute spiritual neglect. In some parts of England – notably Lancashire – the ancient Catholicism of the local aristocracy held sway even after the old Marian priests had died. The same was true of Wales. Despite the patronage of the (mostly English in origin) nobility, the Welsh Catholics were chronically short of priests and in consequence fell ‘into considerable ignorance’.37
Elizabeth never contemplated even the grudging tolerance of Catholics who worshipped in private and made no attempt to proselytise for their faith, and even the few moderate voices that were sometimes heard at court were silenced by a series of aggressive Jesuit initiatives – the most provocative of which was a conference on the succession to the English throne. Under the guidance of Robert Parsons, it concluded that Elizabeth’s successor should be neither James VI of Scotland, the rightful heir, nor Arbella Stuart, the next in line. In an act of calculated lèse-majesté, it concluded that the next English sovereign should be the Infanta of Spain. Outrage combined with incredulity – two emotions that were intensified, among the seminary priests, by their increasing animosity towards the Jesuits.
At the heart of the antagonism was a fundamental disagreement about the nature of the Catholic Church in England. Many of the seminarians, who wanted a national Church with its own hierarchy and episcopate, felt an instinctive loyalty to England and its sovereign. The division between the militants and the moderates had been increasingly a reflection of the protagonists’ age and experience. William Allen still hoped that England would be invaded by Spain and published his Declaration of the sentence and deposition of Elizabeth the Usurper.38 Father Thomas Wryght, a young secular priest, publicly posed the question ‘Is it lawful for Catholics in England to take up arms. And in other ways, defend the queen and the realm against Spain?’39 He bravely concluded that it was.
It was not only disagreement about the nature of the mission to England that divided the men who were ordained to carry it out. The lay priests deeply resented the Jesuits’ presumption. There was, they complained, ‘nothing holy except that which they had sanctified’. Some seminarians in the English College in Rome demanded that their rivals for the souls of England be put in their place. In the castle at Wisbech – a community of captured and imprisoned priests – the seminarians refused to accept Jesuit leadership and rebelled against the seating arrangement at meals as a reflection of their discontent. At the height of the controversy, two items of news about William Allen reached England. The first, which was greeted with incredulity, was that he had so mellowed that he was offering his protection to English Protestants who were travelling through Rome. The second, which was accepted as more authoritative, was that he was dead. The Catholic Church in England needed a new titular head.
Richard Bancroft, the Bishop of London, saw Allen’s death as an opportunity to widen the division between intransigent Catholics and Catholics who wanted to live in loyal peace. With the enthusiastic approval of Cecil and the acquiescence of the Queen herself, he invited Father Thomas Bluet, the leader of the secular priests, to Fulham Palace to discuss the possibility of reconciling the moderate Catholic clergy and the crown. After five months of talks it was agreed that a petition, The Protestation of Allegiance, be presented to the Queen in the name of all Catholic clergy and laymen. It did not go so far as to demand, or even request, freedom of expression, but promised complete and perpetual fidelity and asked, in return, for the right privately to exercise freedom of conscience. Bancroft and Bluet made a brave, but fruitless, attempt to ensure its success by including a clause which was welcomed as much by the Catholic seminary priests as the Protestant bishop. It proposed the suppression of all Jesuit publications. Elizabeth was unmoved. ‘If I grant this liberty to the Catholics, by this very fact I lay at their feet my honour, my crown and my life.’40 Bancroft was disappointed but not dismayed. With the Queen’s knowledge, if not her actual approval, he endorsed Bluet’s decision to present to Rome a petition which called for the Catholic Church fully to recognise Elizabeth’s right to the throne of England. Without her knowledge, he relaxed the censorship regulations so as to allow the publication and circulation of material produced by the seminary priests. He was motivated less by a belief in liberty of expression than by the hope of tactical advantage. The Pope had appointed George Blackwell, a Jesuit sympathiser, to lead the Catholic Church in England. Both Bancroft, as a Protestant, and Bluet, as a Catholic, wanted to diminish the influence of the Society by increasing the visibility of its rivals. In 1602, Elizabeth made their tactical manoeuvring pointless. She confirmed the order for the expulsion from England of all Jesuits and secular priests.
Clement VIII had given George Blackwell the title ‘Archpriest’ – a rank previously unknown to the Church – and instructed him to work closely with the Jesuits. The lay priests and seminarians had been severely affronted. They had no doubt about what, though not whom, their titular head should be. They wanted the independent status of the Catholic Church in England to be confirmed by the appointment of a bishop. Their appeal to Rome – which won them the title of ‘Appellants’ – was precise. England should be provided with ‘a hierarchy approved by a free vote of the seminary priests and by them alone’.41 There was no hope of their solution being adopted. Robert Parsons, who had become Rector of the English College in Rome as a consolation prize after failing to inherit Allen’s red hat, opposed it. So did many influential English lay Catholics, who feared that a hierarchy would challenge their position as leaders of their local communities. And, most important of all, the Vatican was not in a mood to antagonise the Society of Jesus. The delegation that the Appellants sent to Rome, in the hope of preventing endorsement of the appointment, was not even granted an audience by the Pope, and Blackwell was confirmed in office. Inevitably the Appellants rejected the archpriest’s authority – without, since it was a recently invented office, being sure what it was. Four uneasy years passed before the Pope revised his instructions, ordered the Archpriest to work independently of the Jesuits and decreed that lay priests and regulars were to be segregated and limited to the performance of their separate and distinct functions. The post-Reformation Catholic Church in England was beginning to take shape.
Most Catholics who thought about the future of their Church aspired to no more than creating little enclaves of belief among the heathens. But there was still a movement to treat English Catholicism as the depleted, but still viable, continuation of the Church that Augustine founded. The conflict between the two groups was exacerbated by Parsons’ Memorial for the Reformation of England. It disturbed moderates by being wholly realistic about the prospects of concessions from the government and excited extremists by being wholly fanciful about the hopes of relief by invasion. But the desire for a settlement – still a minority position – was growing irresistibly in both Protestant and Catholic Churches.
Attempts to accommodate Pope and Queen had always foundered on what even the most moderate of the priests invariably regarded as both reasonable and non-negotiable: the assertions of loyalty to the crown, balanced with the acceptance that Rome’s spiritual authority should be respected in England. In the autumn of 1602, John Popham, the Lord Chief Justice, made the last attempt of Elizabeth’s reign to broker an uneasy peace. He had become convinced – during various cross-examinations of secular priests – that the offer to reject Regnans in Excelsis, the bull of excommunication, was sincere and he had persuaded Robert Cecil that the genuine revision of the Church’s animosity was enough to justify the gradual and informal relaxation of restrictions on freedom of worship. Priests who believed that a formal reconciliation was right and necessary responded and made their last attempt to live in peace with the old Queen. In January 1603, thirteen priests signed a Protestation which acknowledged that Queen Elizabeth had ‘as full authority, power and sovereignty over us and over all the subjects of the realm as her highnesses predecessors ever had’.42 The difficulty caused by slight ambiguity of the Protestation’s wording was compounded by the addition of the proviso that England and Elizabeth were exceptions and that, in other instances, the Pope might be entitled to depose a secular ruler. That contradicted the general rejection of the Pope’s authority which had become an essential part of Protestant theology. So the approach was rebuffed.
Attempts at reconciliation – never made by more than a tiny minority in either community – were invariably prejudiced, and sometimes prevented, by fears of a Spanish-inspired coup d’état. Sometimes the fears of an attempt to depose Elizabeth – as distinct from fears of the coup succeeding – were justified. But often they were the result of what amounted to neurosis. The most bizarre fears of a Catholic uprising were spread over two reigns and were associated with Arbella Stuart, a young woman who – while fractious by nature – wanted only to live as normal a life as was possible in the courts of Queen Elizabeth and King James. She was denied the opportunity because she was a Tudor by birth and a Catholic by religion.
Arbella Stuart – descended from Queen Margaret of Scotland, Henry VII’s older daughter and therefore niece, at least by marriage, to Mary, Queen of Scots – was, at various times, third, second and fourth in line to a throne to which she never aspired. In consequence she was the constant victim of rumours, which usually predicted marriage to a Catholic prince as a preliminary to seizing the crown. The list of supposed suitors was said to include two princes of the House of Savoy, the eldest son of Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, and a cardinal brother of the Pope, who was to be unfrocked in preparation for becoming a husband and a king. The perpetrators of the Main Plot against James I – a serious but doomed attempt on his life – claimed that they acted in Arbella’s interest. The claim was probably an afterthought and certainly made without the authority of the supposed beneficiary. Other alleged conspiracies were examples of how neurosis can give credence to the most unlikely stories.
The story that ‘two Scotch Catholics [were to] convey Arbella by stealth out of England’43 seemed to be confirmed by the discovery that Sir William Stanley, an exiled zealot, had given the Spanish court notice of the proposed flight. It was then revealed that Rome’s ‘greatest fear’ was that ‘her Majesty should die and that Arbella should be proclaimed Queen’.44 In Stanley’s version of events, Arbella was seen by the Vatican as a possible obstacle on the path to the throne of a genuine Catholic pretender. Whatever the young woman’s prospects and whoever her supporters might be, Elizabeth was not prepared to take any risks. Arbella, like Mary Stuart before her, was kept in the genteel custody of Bess, Countess of Shrewsbury in Sheffield Castle and Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire. It was a county of willing martyrs. The Earl of Shrewsbury had arrested two fugitive priests, Nicholas Garlick and Robert Ludlam, in Padley Manor at nearby Hathersage. Local outrage at their conviction and sentence to death turned into mass hysteria when they converted a convicted murderer on their way to the scaffold. An informer named Barnes offered his opinion on the real cause of the ‘agitation. All platforms fell to the ground on the death of the Queen of Scots … They harp much on Lady Arbella, despairing of the King of Scots.’45
Arbella was briefly infatuated with the Earl of Essex, who reciprocated her affection by claiming, after the failure of his plot in 1601, that he had intended to see her crowned Queen. Her enthusiasm for acting as the banner around which Catholics rallied can be judged by her response to the arrival in Mansfield – ten miles away from Arbella’s enforced home at Hardwick Hall – of Henry Stapleton, ‘a very wilful Papist’. Stapleton was accompanied by forty armed men, one of whom – in what was regarded as proof of his intention – had a pillion attached to his saddle. Arbella’s page visited Stapleton on the night of his arrival in Nottingham. It seemed that a Catholic pretender was Rome’s for the taking.
Next morning two of the armed men stationed themselves outside Hardwick’s gate while Stapleton asked, and was refused, permission to ascend the tower of Ault Hucknall parish church, from which he could have watched events outside the Hall. He would have witnessed the humiliating anticlimax of his plot. First, ‘Arbella did come forth from her chamber, went towards the gates, as she said intending to walk, but being persuaded that it was dinner time did stay.’46 Then a servant came to the gate with a simple message. ‘She cannot come out this day.’47 Stapleton made one last effort to salvage the expedition by formally requesting an audience with Arbella. It was denied. So ended in fact – though not in fervid imaginations – Arbella Stuart’s involvement with Popish plots to seize the throne, leaving the unhappy lady to years of suspicion and the denial of her modest hope to marry for love and live happily ever after. The Privy Council reacted to accounts of ‘the Hardwick Plot’ with commendable calm. The Shrewsbury family was admonished and, much to their relief, Arbella was removed from their custody and a warrant was issued requiring Derbyshire magistrates to prohibit ‘unlawful assemblies and disorderly attempts’. It may be that they were less calm than preoccupied with more important events. Stapleton’s men attempted the rescue (or abduction) of Arbella Stuart on March 8th 1603. On March 24th Queen Elizabeth died.
After the accession of James VI and I, Arbella’s life alternated between periods of exaltation at court and virtual imprisonment in Derbyshire. Both were equally unwelcome. She wanted marriage, children and peace. At the age of thirty-five she married twenty-two-year-old William Seymour – without the king’s permission. Husband and wife were sent to the Marshalsea to await James’ pleasure. Arbella was sentenced to be held, indefinitely, in the custody of the Bishop of Durham. During the journey north she escaped. The plan to flee to France with Seymour was botched. He got away. She did not. During the next four years she slipped gradually into madness. In early 1615 she began to refuse food. On September 25th she died and was pronounced to have committed suicide by starvation.