In the early summer of 1614, James VI and I – the first monarch to rule the dual kingdoms of England and Scotland – was at odds with both the Scottish nobles and the English Court and, following fractious discussions with the House of Commons about revenue and the royal prerogative, had dissolved the ‘Addled Parliament’ three months after it was elected. He felt in need of friends. The man in whose company he found comfort was Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Count Gondomar, the new Spanish Ambassador, who assured him that King Philip of Spain believed that the two sovereigns should ‘live as brothers’. The Ambassador had a better idea. They could become relations. For some time James had wondered if it was possible to forge a new alliance by arranging a marriage between Charles, Prince of Wales, and one of Europe’s Catholic princesses – even though the match would require the relaxation of the penal legislation which, without amendment, would make the future Queen of England a heretic and criminal in her own country. De Acuña revived the idea with the news that Philip, who was also seeking new allies, would not be averse to Charles marrying the Infanta of Spain.
Charles, who had become heir apparent after the death of his elder brother, enjoyed a close and highly emotional relationship with James I, who – in a Court accustomed to the public show of affection between the King and his male favourites – still surprised his councillors by referring to the Prince of Wales as ‘my baby’. The Prince of Wales certainly wanted to marry. Indeed, being a romantic by nature, he wanted to be in love. But, in part, it was the acceptance of filial duty which prompted him to fall in with his father’s plans. James’ first hopes had been for a match with Princess Christiana of France, the sister of Louis XIII. But negotiations had broken down before the unlikely match appeared to be on offer.
The Spanish Ambassador to the Court of St James’s was admirably forthright about the religious settlement that must precede the betrothal. The prosecution of Catholics and Catholicism must cease at once and the formal repeal of the laws, under which the prosecutions were mounted, must begin without delay. There were also promises to be made about the treatment of the Infanta and her entourage – in their own way more difficult to accept than the demand that the laws of England be changed. The Princess of Wales, as the Infanta would become, must remain a Catholic and be allowed to observe the full rites of the Roman Church. Her priests would wear the robes and vestments of their calling. Most important to Spain, and least acceptable to England, the children of the union were to be brought up in the Catholic faith, and their Catholicism was not to be a bar to their succession to the Crown of England. James was prepared at least to negotiate.
Although the King was of a mind to consider meeting the Spanish demand, the terms on which the marriage was proposed were so objectionable to Ralph Winwood, the Secretary of State, and George Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury, that they proposed an alternative scheme for establishing England’s position in the world. James should immediately declare war on Spain. The King revised his position. Struck down by a series of simultaneous sicknesses with symptoms ranging from vomiting to boils, he summoned the Court to hear what he told them was his ‘death-bed speech’. It included the advice to his son that ‘marriage to the daughter of a king’ should not require him to ‘marry her religion’.1 But James had not abandoned his determination to secure new alliances by means of marriage – even though an earlier excursion into matrimonial diplomacy had caused him much pain and, worse still, considerable expense. His daughter, Elizabeth, had married the Palgrave of the Palatinate, a small Protestant state with Heidelberg as its capital. The Palatinate was under threat from the Catholic Spanish Netherlands. So James was under moral and diplomatic pressure to provide military support for his faith and daughter, while he was attempting to betroth his son to the aggressor.
Not surprisingly, much of the Protestant priesthood – purged of its Roman sympathisers – was outraged by the idea of a Catholic princess becoming the Queen of England. The Bishop of London, loyal to the King, called a diocesan synod and ordered the clergy ‘not to meddle in their sermons with the Spanish match or any other matter of state’.2 But the following Sunday, preachers at St Paul’s Cross denounced the proposed match and, during the three months that followed, priest after priest described the prospective union as an offence against God and the dignity of the realm. The Reverend Matthew Clayton tried to disguise his defiance of his bishop by the use of a metaphor which was as transparent as it was offensive. He was imprisoned for calling attention to the dangers of importing a ‘Spanish ewe’.3
James recalled Parliament and punctuated his opening address with complaints about how grievously he was treated and promises to maintain, at all cost, the Protestant religion. Nevertheless, he sent Prince Charles – accompanied by his bosom friend George Villiers – to Madrid to embark on what was to become a long and fruitless courtship. The party arrived in Madrid on March 7th 1622. When he was admitted to the Prince’s presence, Count Gondomar fell on his knees in a gesture of supplication and cried out ‘Nunc Dimittis’. Count de Olivares – the Chief Minister of Spain – embraced Charles round the thighs, kissed his hands and gave thanks to God in language which suggested that he imagined the object of the visit was an announcement of England’s intention to return to the true faith.4 In London bonfires were lit to celebrate the peace that matrimony would guarantee. There was, however, a growing tide of opposition to the whole idea. Dr George Hakewill, the Prince’s personal chaplain, had – before he left for Madrid – given the King a memorandum opposing the match. He was dismissed within minutes of Charles discovering his perfidy.
Charles declared himself desperately in love and moped, while Villiers (soon to become the Duke of Buckingham) assumed command of what was essentially a political operation. His letters home kept the King informed about the initiative’s progress. The Spaniards were sympathetic to the proposal, but the Papal Nuncio worked ‘maliciously and actively’ against the idea. It fell to Villiers to ask James ‘how far we may engage you in the acknowledgement of the Pope’s spiritual powers?’ He had come to believe that, without such a major concession, the Spaniard would not agree to the marriage; and yet, if it were made, the Nuncio’s outright opposition would be brushed aside. James was ahead of his emissary. He had sent two of Charles’ chaplains – Leonard Mawe and Matthew Wren – to Rome with orders to judge the mood of the Holy See. His reply to Villiers’ enquiry (based on their reports of the Pope’s inclination) confirmed his command of the argument, if not of the situation. ‘I know not what you mean by my acknowledging the Pope’s spiritual supremacy. I am sure you would not have me renounce my religion for all the world. But all that I can guess at your meaning is that it be an allusion to a passage in my book where I offer that if the Pope would quit his godhead and usurping over kings, to acknowledge him as chief bishop to whom all appeals of churchmen ought to lie.’5 That was ‘as far as his conscience [would] permit him to go’.
Villiers replied that although the Spaniards had originally negotiated, ‘in the hope of the conversion of us both’, they had come to realise the futility of that approach. They were ready to do a deal. ‘We never saw the business in a better way than now is. Therefore, we humbly beseech you, lose no time in hastening the ships.’6 The conversion of Charles and Villiers had been a more realistic prospect than the letter admitted. Both men had spent time with Catholic scholars and had been impressed by the arguments in favour of papal supremacy. But, for reasons of convenience or conviction, they retained their Protestant faith.
The Dispensation contained so many provisos and conditions that Villiers thought it necessary to urge James to keep the Spanish requirements secret, lest public opinion be antagonised still further against the match by the sheer effrontery of the demands – the most impertinent of which was the insistence on the written confirmation of the verbal agreement. The conditions included the demand for English Catholics to be allowed to ‘worship freely’. Prince Charles was happy to confirm his father’s decision to suspend, if not to abolish, the laws that penalised recusants. But ‘freedom of worship’ implied the state’s endorsement of all religions other than the Protestantism of what was becoming the Church of England – effective acceptance that another faith had merit which was equal to that of the Anglican communion. And the Stuarts – with their Scottish experience to guide them – had a second objection to unlimited freedom. They were almost as afraid of Calvinists as they were of Catholics.
Villiers renewed negotiations with an argument that was intended to replace the complexity of theological disputation with an ultimatum which, he hoped, would frighten the Spaniards into accepting that failure to reach agreement would harden the English inclination to treat Catholics as enemies of the state. ‘If this marriage is not concluded, what remains of Catholicism in England will be utterly rooted out and they will proceed against the Catholics with the utmost rigour.’7 The Spaniards – regardless of failure on the fate of English Catholics – would not budge. The marriage negotiations were deadlocked. Villiers and Prince Charles prepared to travel home.
The only way out of the impasse, Villiers decided, was an appeal over the head of the Spanish Catholic bureaucracy to the King of Spain. The marriage and its diplomatic consequences were in the interests of both countries, and Prince Charles had proved his sincerity – and England’s – by travelling to Spain and waiting upon the Infanta for so long. The Spaniards presented a new draft agreement. Like its predecessor, it both guaranteed the Infanta’s Catholic status and promised protection to English Catholics who still endured persecution and discrimination. As the Spaniards must have realised, the promise of protection, even if made, could not be fully kept. The true mood of England was soon to be revealed.
It may have been belated recognition of the obvious, or perhaps it was just tedium, that made the negotiations grind to an adjournment. When, in early 1623, Charles returned to England, Matthew Wren, his chaplain, arranged for him to give audience to Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester, Richard Neale, Bishop of Durham, and William Laud, then Bishop of St David’s. He prepared them for the meeting with his assessment of the Prince of Wales’ theological position. It began with the admission that he ‘had not his father’s learning’, but went on to say, ‘I know his judgement to be very right and as for his affections for those particulars that your lordships have pointed at for upholding, the doctrine and discipline and the rights of the church, I have more confidence in him than in his advisors.’8 The audience was arranged to consider ‘those things in foresight whereof we conceive will soon come to pass’. King James had not long to live. Plans had to be laid to defend the faith.
Parliament – anxious about the lengths to which father and son would go to secure the related alliances – flexed its muscles. Before the King addressed a joint sitting on February 24th 1624, the Speaker thought it necessary to remind Honourable Members of the need strictly to apply the recusancy laws. The Commons then used the weapon which it always employed against recalcitrant monarchs: the threat to refuse to raise revenue or, in parliamentary jargon, to ‘withhold supply’. The Subsidy Bill – a measure to finance greater military expenditure – was only passed after a new clause relating to the Prince of Wales was agreed. ‘When it shall please God to send him any lady that is a Papist, she should have no further liberty but for her family and no advantage for recusants at home.’9
Although the negotiations were resumed and the deal was done, the Infanta was never to enjoy even those limited freedoms. While waiting for the Papal Dispensation that would exonerate the Infanta of the sin of marrying a Protestant, both the Spanish and English royal families – confident that the Pope would oblige – prepared to celebrate a proxy wedding. The English Court already referred to the bride as the ‘Princess of Wales, ‘and Madrid was en fête, with flowers decorating the streets and a vast podium erected to ensure that the cheering multitudes could watch the ceremony. It was then that Charles discovered he was no longer in love, and his father decided that Spain was a better enemy than friend. The Dispensation was published, but the wedding was cancelled. However, the danger – as Parliament and prelates saw it – had not passed. The fears were justified. England was still to have a Catholic queen who would give birth to two Catholic kings – one a secret Papist and the other open enough about his faith to ensure his downfall.
Even before they left Spain, Charles and Villiers had begun to consider with whom the Prince of Wales should next fall deeply in love. They chose Henrietta Maria, the sixth and youngest child of Henry IV of France and Marie de Medici. The negotiations which passed for a courtship were speedily concluded. As anticipated, France – being less pious than Spain – made fewer demands about respect for the young princess’s religion. And it was hoped that English public opinion would be more willing to accept an alliance with a Bourbon than a compact with a Hapsburg. Nevertheless, the terms of the engagement agreement, signed in July 1624, were kept secret. They included the promise that all Catholics imprisoned in England would be released. There were to be no more religious prosecutions. Catholics, whose land had been confiscated during the previous year, were to have it restored. The promises became public in December, when the recusancy laws were suspended and the Lord Keeper was told to release all prisoners who were held under laws that proscribed or punished Catholicism. The King explained his earlier decision to keep the terms of the agreement secret with an example of anti-logic which also revealed exactly how much respect he felt for his future daughter-in-law’s religion. There was no need to make the terms of the agreement public, for he had agreed with the King of France that they were only intended to ensure a Papal Dispensation for the marriage and were never meant to be binding. When, in the year of his death, James needed to raise extra revenue, he increased his income by charging Catholics (and Nonconformists) double rates.
King James had the opportunity neither to break nor keep the rest of his promise. He was dying when the protracted nuptials began, and dead by the time they had finished. There was a proxy marriage – in full Catholic splendour – outside the Great West Door of Notre-Dame, in which the Duc de Chevreuse played the part of the bridegroom. In a more subdued ceremony in Whitehall, Charles promised that the children of the union would be brought up as Catholics and it may well be that when the besotted Prince of Wales made the promise, he meant to keep it. He certainly indulged his wife’s wish to be a very public, as well as a very devout, Catholic. A chapel was built in Somerset House for her personal use. It was staffed by twelve Capuchin monks. Attendance at Mass increased wherever the news of the Queen’s conduct became known. If the King permitted his wife to be a Catholic, surely he would also tolerate his subjects’ Catholicism.
During the years in which King James and his son were acting out great dramas of state – confused in Charles’ simple mind with affairs of the heart – the Catholic Churches of the two kingdoms over which James ruled were arguing no less passionately about their form of governance. In 1523 William Bishop was given what amounted to episcopal authority and the courtesy title of Bishop of Chalcedon, one of the ancient sees with which senior clerics were associated, before the English hierarchy was re-established. That, in itself, was a victory for the secular clergy, the vast majority of whom wanted the Church to enjoy the status that the degree of autonomy provided. During Bishop’s few months in office, before his premature and unexpected death, he introduced reforms which met many of the demands that were made by the ‘Appellant’ clergy who had petitioned Rome against the appointment of George Blackwell as ‘Archpriest’, and the consequent assumption that England was still under the control of the Vatican. He set up a network of vicars general and rural deans. The creation of what he called, without authority, a Dean and Chapter was a signal of his belief that the secular clergy must play a part in the management of the Church. The reorganisation also gave notice that, in the future, the institutions of the English Church would expect to nominate a bishop for Rome’s approval. The logic of the nascent bishopric was that the regulars should also come under the bishop’s supervision, if not control. The Benedictines agreed to respect his authority. The inevitable battle with the Jesuits he left for another day.
Richard Smith, who succeeded William Bishop in 1624, was not a man to tread lightly. Indeed, he seemed to possess a talent for causing offence. When he believed that Lady Montague made disorganised confessions, his criticism of her performance was so brusque that she believed he was accusing her of hiding sins.10 And it was not just over-sensitive elderly aristocratic ladies who found his manner intolerable. During the first two years in office he lost the goodwill of the Benedictines, who seemed likely to join with the Jesuits in the rejection of the whole nascent episcopate.
Smith was too authoritarian to be tolerated even by a Church that believed, implicitly, in respect for authority. He claimed control over all missionary funds and endowments and attempted to impose a discipline that, while correct in itself, was far too arcane to be accepted in a Church which was struggling to hold on to its members. Smith was right to say that, according to the decision of the Council of Trent, only a parish priest who had been authorised by the bishop of his diocese was allowed to exercise the ‘jurisdiction of confession’. In other cases, absolution was withheld. Catholic gentry – who had appointed their own confessors without reference to any authority – were left to wonder if years of sin, for which they had done penance, would go unforgiven. That was not, however, his greatest mistake. Smith’s crucial blunder was an attempt to set up what amounted to Church courts in which he would exercise jurisdiction over a range of sensitive subjects. The most sensitive of all was matrimonial disputes. Unwisely, Smith took contentious decisions on his own authority. He was deposed and, overcome by the humiliation, fled to France.
The departure of Richard Smith relieved the Catholic Church in Scotland of what they, no doubt, regarded as a humiliation. Until he died in 1603, its leader had been Archbishop James Beaton of Glasgow. For much of the time he had exercised his authority from exile in Rome but he had maintained his enthusiasm for Scottish scholarship – an interest which he had confirmed by taking the Glasgow University mace with him when he fled. He also founded the Scottish College in Rome. After he died, a number of Archpriests were appointed. Then Scotland was put under the control of William Bishop – by then Vicar Apostolic. When Smith was deposed, the Scottish Catholic Church was freed from the English yoke.
In England the Catholic Church continued to agonise over what it regarded as irregular unions. Almost two hundred years later, they were still the cause of doubt and confusion. Thomas Walsh, Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District from 1826 to 1848, bombarded Nicholas Wiseman, then in Rome, for rulings on dubious cases and for general advice: ‘What is to be done in the case of a proposal of marriage between a Catholic and a Quaker or any other baptised person of whom there are many in this country?’ On July 11th 1868 Henry Edwards, the Archbishop of Westminster, wrote to Cardinal Barnabo at Propaganda Fide – the department in the Vatican which supervised the Church’s work in missionary territories – to ask for permission to authorise marriages ‘where mixed religions are concerned … Provided that the conditions established by the Church are protected and especially those regarding the removal of danger of perversion from the Catholic spouse.’ Cardinal Barnabo replied on July 23rd that Pope Pius IX ‘grants the renovation of the authority’. The agonies of indecision continued for the next hundred and fifty years. The subject was discussed, inconclusively, at the 2015 Synod. In 2016 the Pope speculated on the possibility of relaxing the prohibition.
The title and status of Vicar Apostolic – ancient in origin and re-created – were part of the Vatican’s plan to strengthen its worldwide control. Vicars Apostolic – who, although in bishops’ orders, acted not on their own authority but on the authority of the Pope – were the agents through whom it exercised its power. After Smith’s flight to France, the Catholic Church in England struggled on for forty years without a head. Then John Leyburn was appointed quasi-bishop under the supervision of Propaganda Fide. Ronald Knox – a twentieth-century priest, intellectual and media celebrity – described Vicars General including Vicars Apostolic as ‘emissaries from Rome, personally responsible to the Holy See – as if this island had been some newly discovered territory in the Pacific whose inhabitants were mere beginners in the faith’. That was to be the status of England and Wales until the restoration of the Hierarchy in 1850. Propaganda Fide remained directly in charge of Scottish Catholicism until 1908. Despite all the blood and the burnings, the Catholics of Britain had to work hard and wait long to prove themselves to Rome.
For a time after Charles’ succession in 1625, it seemed to Catholic optimists – possessors of a characteristic which their faith encouraged – that England’s two Churches might live in some sort of partnership. The fantasy was given some credence by the presence, in King Charles’ inner circle of close advisers, of men who made no secret of their Catholicism: the Earl of Portland, Sir Francis Windebank and two courtiers who had served him since his youth, Francis Cottington and Endymion Porter. In October 1633, the King provided even stronger evidence of his wish for some sort of understanding with the Vatican. Sir Robert Douglas, a Scottish Catholic, was sent to Rome with the task of convincing the Vatican of the King of England’s goodwill. The optimists were destined to be disappointed.
Charles did not possess his father’s enquiring mind. He saw life in simple terms. To him, the Church of England was ‘the nearest [form of religion] to the practice of the Apostles and the best for the propagation and advancement of Christian religion of any church in the world.’11 In his opinion, it charted ‘a middle way between the pomp of superstitious tyranny and the meanness of fantastic anarchy’. Yet there was much about Roman Catholicism that attracted him. He believed in the absolute necessity of confession as an assurance of moral discipline in this life, as well as of eternal peace in the next. He regarded celibacy as essential to guarantee the secrecy of the confessional, and argued that indulgences were a penalty imposed on sinners, not the encouragement of easily condoned sin.
There was also a part of Charles’ character to which the practices of Catholicism, as distinct from its theology, appealed. The beauty of the Mass attracted him far more than the conscious austerity of Puritan services and he enjoyed listening to plainsong. He possessed an aesthetic enthusiasm for images, which he admired without bothering to worry if they became objects of worship as well as veneration, and he sent to Catholic Spain for a crucifix that was said to possess healing powers. A small piece of wood – found in the mud of the Thames at low tide – was presented to him in the sincere belief that it was a fragment of the True Cross and he accepted it as genuine. That was a symptom of a deeply damaging (and, in the end, fatal) weakness. Charles I believed what he wanted to believe. His view on the rival liturgies was limited to the conviction that the Roman Mass book and the Church of England service book had much in common, and his judgement on the conflicting theologies was that the Protestant Thirty-Nine Articles were barely different from the Catholic Creed.
Rome was far too theologically sophisticated to take the King’s apparent sympathy at its face value. Cardinal Bagna – because of his age, thought to be an authority on human conduct – judged that ‘Charles’s motives, as all who know him at all will admit, are beyond guessing.’12 However, for a while, it was thought as well to woo him. A series of emissaries was sent to London. The first, Gregorio Panzani, arrived in England in 1634 on what was represented as a semi-private mission, which had been promoted by Queen Henrietta Maria and was given the most encouraging of welcomes. The King greeted Panzani with the meaningless assurance that, had the choice been offered him, he would ‘rather have lost his right hand’ than been responsible for the schism13 and added the promise that no Catholic blood would be shed during his reign. Panzani was surprised but encouraged to discover that Francis Cottington had a particular admiration for the Jesuits. The Nuncio concluded that Charles was a ‘person of strict virtue and great benevolence’ who attended services in his wife’s chapel, where it was ‘a satisfaction to him to observe the order and significance of the ceremonies’.14 Indeed, he became so optimistic about promoting Rome’s relationship with England that he had to be warned against overplaying his hand. ‘The English are a mysterious people … The sea which you passed over on your way to visit them is an emblem of their temper.’ Despite its doubts about Charles’ malleability, Rome continued to bombard him with the sort of gifts that kings and emperors exchange at times of great moment. Amongst them was a portrait bust of Charles I by Bernini – based on Van Dyck’s triple portrait.
The bust was brought to England in 1636 by George Con, Panzani’s successor. The new emissary was charged with the specific task of exploring the prospects of reconciliation. He too was impressed by Charles’ apparent sincerity. ‘It is well known that His Majesty is altogether innocent in his affections and aversions.’15 His aversions, in Con’s judgement, included Puritanism, and his affections embraced Rome. At one point something like a negotiation took place. ‘You must,’ said the King, ‘induce the Pope to meet me half way.’ Wisely Con chose not to respond, but flattered Charles with the promise that ‘His holiness will even come to London to receive you into the Catholic Church.’ He knew that the halfway point, which the King had in mind, was an impossible distance away from any position that Rome could accept.
Despite Charles’ claims to Con, there was one basic item of dogma that the King could not accept. He rejected, without hesitation, the notion that the Pope had any authority, spiritual or secular, over England. Had there been no other impediment to a concordat, that in itself would have made it impossible. But other insurmountable obstacles grew up on the road to reconciliation. The most important was growing popular feeling against the royal tolerance, about which Con rejoiced when he reported to the Vatican, ‘whereas in the past, Catholics could only hear mass within the embassies and at great risk of being arrested when they came out, now the chapels of the queen and embassies are frequented with great freedom’.16 There were further manifestations of increasing Catholic confidence. The Queen’s chapel became a place of public worship, a sanctuary for Catholic troublemakers and, it was feared, the headquarters of the campaign for the reconversion of England. Protestants came to a wholly reasonable conclusion that William Watling of Suffolk thought self-evident. ‘The king has a wife and loves her and she is a papist and we must all be of her religion.’17 After the discovery of a Jesuit meeting place in Clerkenwell, anti-Catholic feeling rose to such heights that Contarini, the Venetian envoy, reported that Catholics feared that their children would be taken from them and brought up as Protestants.
The Catholic faction at Court had overplayed its hand and the scandalised Protestant establishment, led by William Laud (by then Archbishop of Canterbury) struck back. Private Catholic worship was – in the case of the Queen and her retinue – tolerable. The public manifestation of allegiance to Rome was not. Archbishop Laud preached a sermon on the evils of freedom of worship, and the King forbade his English subjects to attend Mass in his wife’s chapel. A gentleman usher of the Queen’s privy chamber was posted at the door, during services, to make a note of anyone who defied the royal will. The Spanish Ambassador was summoned to court and rebuked by the King himself for making too-frequent attendances at the Somerset House chapel.
Although the trouble had been caused by the noisy Catholics at Court, action was also taken against the mostly quiet Catholics in the country. All Jesuits, and those who harboured them, were to be arrested. The sons of nobles who were in foreign seminaries were ordered home. Catholic office-holders were required to take the Oath of Allegiance. A large majority of those affected were happy to confirm their formal allegiance to the English crown, as long as the recusancy laws were operated flexibly, and sometimes not at all. Between 1625 and 1640 only three Catholics were executed for crimes related to their Catholicism. A commission on prisons joined in the fashionable pursuit by condemning the laxity of gaol housekeepers by whose folly ‘priests and Jesuits are let loose to say masses … and to seduce our people in all places to the great and just offence of both God and our laws’.18 There were a number of exemplary prosecutions. A Captain Scott of Queensborough in Scotland was charged with organising the transport of English subjects to continental seminaries.
Charles himself feebly claimed that he ‘did not approve of so much rigour … against the papists’19 but added that they occasionally needed ‘to be curbed as they were sometimes seditious’. Whether he wished it or not, he was totally unable to curb Henrietta Maria. He agreed to the construction of a second chapel in Somerset House, designed by Inigo Jones and decorated in the lavish style of European Catholicism. There were hundreds of observers at its opening, and thousands at the papal Masses that celebrated its consecration. A number of ladies who were regulars at Court, including Lady Newport and Lady Hamilton, announced their conversion. A plan was laid to mount a procession from the Somerset House chapel through the streets of London, singing the Te Deum to celebrate the birth of the Dauphin.
Henrietta Maria became even more ostentatiously provocative after her mother’s arrival in England. Marie de Medici had fled from France, in 1631, after a failed (one-day) coup against the government of Cardinal Richelieu. After seven years in the Spanish Netherlands she joined her daughter in London, where she never hesitated to press the merits of the Catholic Church on her son-in-law and correct his theological errors. Over dinner one evening, Con returned to the subject of Charles’ possible conversion and the King – relying on the broader definition of the word – replied that his faith was already catholic. His mother-in-law immediately contradicted him. He was not, but ‘must become an Apostolic Roman Catholic’.20 Henrietta Maria’s choice of friends became, at best, reckless. At worst, it was intentionally provocative and even possibly seditious – the term by which her husband had described those Catholics who had left him no option but to reintroduce modified penal policies. The principal conspirators in the Army Plot of 1641 – a doomed plan to free Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, from prison, where he awaited execution – included Henry Jermyn, the Queen’s principal adviser and Master of Horse. After the failure of the Army Plot, fearing that Parliament would turn on her, the Queen confined her intrigues to what amounted to collective wishful thinking with trusted friends. But she still came perilously close to committing treason. She told Count Rossetti, the Papal Nuncio, that in return for £150,000, Charles would guarantee more freedom for Catholics in England and Ireland and ‘extirpate’ the Puritans.21
Thanks to the behaviour of his queen, the reign of Charles I marked a great move forward in the domination of the English Catholic Church by the gentry and nobility. Henrietta Maria not only provided reassurance of safe conduct, but she made faith fashionable. As a result, the King’s edict against the Jesuits had no effect. Indeed, they grew in strength. It had always been their wish to be separate from the secular clergy and free from interference from the Vicars Apostolic. Located in and around great houses, answerable only to God and their Captain General, they had prospered in their independence, even in King James’ time. At the turn of the century there were eighteen Jesuit priests active in England. Six years later there were forty. By 1623 the number had increased to 123. But many of them were Frenchmen and Spaniards. In 1639, 193 Englishmen applied to join the Society.22 They had become the elite battalion in the army of God.
Jesuits were, however, notably absent from Scotland, King Charles’ other kingdom. There the Catholic Church had been deserted by the old nobility and, leaderless, had disintegrated south of the Highland line – despite the missionary attention that it sometimes received from across the border in England. Lowland Protestants found it convenient to represent all attacks on the Kirk as part of a Spanish plot to subvert Scotland in preparation for the invasion of England, even though they knew that the Spaniards had never even considered the idea. To the north, Catholicism survived amongst the remote mountain moorland where, according to a report to Rome, there was the potential for a genuine revival. ‘These people are neither Catholic nor heretical, since they detest Protestantism as a new religion and listen to the preachers out of sheer necessity, straying in matters of faith out of ignorance caused by lack of priests who would be able to instruct them on those issues.’23 Scottish seminarians who had experienced the delights of Rome and Louvain rarely found that their vocations called them home. In 1629 an attempt was made to remedy the deficit by giving Gaelic Scotland into the spiritual care of regular priests. The Vatican convinced itself that the initiative had almost instant success. Propaganda Fide claimed that in 1631 the Church in Scotland had ‘10,000 adherents’ and that the Irish Franciscan mission to the Hebrides (which it regarded as a separate nation) ‘bore consoling fruit, claiming 10,000 converts and the institution of ten or twelve parishes’.24
During the whole period of what Propaganda Fide called ‘the Scottish revival’ there were ‘only five or six diocesan priests in the whole country’.25 Rome ‘twice requested Queen Henrietta Maria … to use her good offices with her husband, Charles I, in favour’ of his beleaguered Scottish Catholic subjects and ‘urged the French King to come to their aid’. Nothing came of either initiative, and by 1647 even the hopes of a Highland revival were forgotten. The Dominicans were refused permission to reinforce their numbers with five Irish volunteers, on the grounds that the Highlands were already occupying the time of more trained priests than the scattered population justified. The Catholic Church became reconciled to Scotland, like rural Wales, persisting in observing rites and venerating saints who were said to be Christian but were unknown to Rome.
In Ireland – a colony in all but name – Catholic confidence and Catholic activity were both increasing, at least in part, as a result of the laws governing the punishment of recusants and the requirement of public office-holders to take the Oath of Supremacy being enforced with Gaelic flexibility. The report to Rome that ‘the king of England, in order to gain the good will of the Irish through fear of Spain has declared that the Irish are free to practise whatever religion they wish and that Catholics are not to be molested’26 was no more than wishful thinking. It reflected Irish Catholics’ optimism about the ultimate triumph of their faith. During the following three hundred years weight of numbers and the indomitable piety of simple people gave Irish Catholics some protection – allowing occasional disputes between secular and lay clergy to flourish. But Ireland’s strength was its piety. It was said to be ‘almost impossible to find a lay person in Ireland who would wish to die without having been clothed in some sort of religious habit’.27
The strength of the Irish religious conviction contributed to a feeling, amongst the more spiritually casual English, that the two people had little in common. Apart from a moment when desperate King Charles – under threat from Scottish Covenanters and Parliament – was willing to recruit Irish mercenaries to his cause, the Irish were increasingly treated by the English establishment as an alien race. And it was assumed in London (not without some justification) that all native Irishmen were encouraged by both race and religion to be the enemies of England. Irish Catholicism had become synonymous with subversion.
It therefore seemed wholly plausible that a particularly grotesque plot to assassinate John Pym – at the height of his parliamentary campaign to prevent the King raising taxation without parliamentary approval – was the work of rebellious Irish Catholics. A package was delivered to Pym at the House of Commons. It contained dressings which had been recently removed from plague sores. It was immediately assumed, and soon after declared, that the attempt on Pym’s life had been the first act of a popish plot. Two weeks later, seventeen Privy Councillors, who had been asked to enquire into the Outrage, reported to Parliament ‘of certain intelligence that were lately come of a great Treason and general rebellion of the Irish Papists in Ireland; and a design of cutting off all the Protestants in Ireland and seizing the King’s forts there’.28
They were right in so much as Ireland was in an even greater state of turmoil than usual. The dispossessed Catholic ‘Old English’ had been promised redress by what was called ‘The Graces’. They amounted to the removal of some of the limitations on Catholic land ownership, and relief from some of the disabilities imposed as penalties for ‘popish’ practices. But Charles, who could take some credit for introducing the reforms, lost his nerve and, instead of activating them on the agreed date, prevaricated and procrastinated. He was afraid that relaxing the penal laws would so provoke Protestants that the ‘New English’ settlers of the ‘plantation’ would combine with the Calvinistic Church of Ireland in a disastrous but doomed attempt to impose a late but savage Reformation on the whole of Ireland, and that the result would be civil war. There was an uprising, but not the one that Charles feared. The Irish peasantry and the ‘Old English’ nobility combined, under the leadership of Sir Phelim O’Neill, to assert their rights. The revolt began on October 25th 1641, with an audacious, but hopeless, plan to take Dublin Castle. When that failed – according to O’Neill, the result of betrayal – the rebels issued a call to arms in defence of ancient liberties. The insurgents were (either out of expediency or principle) explicit in their support for the King. It was not all that they held in common with their ‘oppressors’. From then on, both sides in the conflict saw the uprising as a religious war.
The inhabitants of Galway – in their declaration of independence – spoke for all Catholic Ireland when they swore they were open and explicit about their aspiration to ‘shake off the heavy yoke and tyranny of England and at the same time anxious to live as Catholics with a free exercise of our holy religion’.29 The Munster rebels were less frank about their motives, but a letter to the House of Commons – which described the atrocities of which they were said to be guilty – left no doubt about whom, according to their enemies, was their chosen victim. It was ‘poor Protestants’ on whom were perpetrated the alleged barbarities. They included ‘cutting off of privy members, ears, fingers and hands; plucking out their eyes, boiling the heads of little children before their mothers’ faces and then ripping up their mothers’ bowels …30 It was not the first instance of the demonisation of Catholics, but it was the most lasting and effective. Before 1641, Catholics were the enemy. After 1641, Irish Catholics were a threat.
Apprehension was increased in England by the reaction in Parliament – in truth, more concerned with the battle against royal supremacy than with the threat of Catholic insurrection, but cynically exploiting the fear of a popish plot. ‘Additional Instructions’ to the parliamentary Commissioners denounced but did not describe ‘miseries, burdens and distempers’ imposed on the people by ‘cunning, false and malicious practices’ carried out by men close to the King, who were ‘favourers of Popery, superstition and innovation, subverters of religion, honour and justice’. They were identified as ‘Jesuit Papists’ and the ‘corrupt part of the clergy who favour formality and superstition’.31 Parliament had barely drawn breath before Pym tabled what has come to be called The Grand Remonstrance.
The Grand Remonstrance was intended to encourage support for strengthening the power of Parliament at the expense of the sovereign. It aimed to achieve its objective by claiming that the King was being manipulated by advisers who supported ‘the insurrection of Papists within your kingdom of Ireland and the bloody massacre of your people’ in Great Britain32 and that, as a result, precautions taken in more prudent times had been ignored. Initially the Commons agreed to endorse, but not publish, what amounted to an indictment for treason. When, in December 1641, it was agreed that it should be published, the result was what its proponents should have expected and probably wanted. Anti-Catholic feeling increased to fever pitch. Hatred was again combined with panic.
It is impossible now to know how many, if any, of the fears were well founded. In his history of the Civil War, Michael Braddick listed some of the more implausible rumours. Guildford, Norwich and London expected to be burned down by Catholic incendiarists. Bands of armed Catholics were said to be roaming about Lancashire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and the capital, waiting for the moment to strike. In Bedfordshire and Berkshire, assemblies and movements of unspecified size or nature were reported and were assumed to be the build-up to a revolution. Liverpool, Conway and Beaumaris decided to take no chances and ordered the arrest of strangers, known Catholics and men travelling at night. Newcastle, Hull and Berwick appealed for parliamentary protection. Ludlow and Bewdley spent mid-November 1641 ‘in very great panic’.33
It was the Jesuits who were most feared and suspected. Yet, thanks very largely to the continued patronage of great houses, they increased in numbers during the second half of Charles’ reign. At the outbreak of the Civil War there were about twenty Jesuit missions in London, thirty in the north of England, twenty-eight in Wales and the west, and eighty in the south and Midlands.34 Those who were not resident chaplains were sustained by the income from two funds which were established sometime shortly after 1624. William, the Second Lord Petre, donated £8,000. Mrs Eleanor Brooksby and Anne Vaux, the daughters of Lord Vaux, donated £9,000.35
When the real war began, not every Catholic rallied to Charles I’s standard, but most did. More than one-third of the ‘gentlemen’ – five hundred in all – who died fighting for the King could have been prosecuted as Papists. The Eyre family of Hassop in Derbyshire was, perhaps, not typical, but it certainly espoused King and Catholicism with equal devotion. Five miles away in Chatsworth House, the 3rd Earl of Devonshire had allowed his mother, a friend of Henrietta Maria, to negotiate a deal with the Royalists by which her son’s neutrality was recognised in exchange for a substantial donation. The surrounding minor aristocracy usually followed the Cavendish lead. But Colonel Thomas Eyre of Hassop raised a troop of cavalry and led it into battle at Edgehill and the Siege of Newark, where he was wounded and captured. He died in a Commonwealth prison. Thirty years later his kinsman, Rowland Eyre, cheerfully broke the laws of the King for whose father his kinsman had fought and died. The funds that were set up to finance the Jesuit missions had fallen on hard times. The Petre bequest had been depleted by fraud and the Vaux endowment had been diminished by Commonwealth sequestration. With the help of local Jesuits, Rowland Eyre of Hassop acquired the remaining capital and invested it, in his name, in an estate in Ashbourne. In 1672 it earned, for the use of Jesuits, the sum of £349.
The Great Civil War – King versus Parliament – did not deflect attention from the ‘Catholic threat’. The continued fear of Rome resulted in the promotion of Oliver Cromwell, whose first position of note was the membership of a committee that was set up, during the spring of 1642, to supervise the disarmament of recusants36 in response to an appeal from nervous Protestants. After ending the incipient resistance in Monmouth, he moved on to Cambridge, where college plate was being sent to London, in anticipation of the King needing money with which to buy arms. Cromwell, acting with exemplary speed and initiative and without waiting for orders, raided all the college plate rooms. He went on first to capture and then demolish the great fortified houses. The primary intention was to prevent them from becoming rallying points for the Royalist Army. But their destruction also often denied the Catholic Church a safe haven in which a priest could live in something like security. After the capture of the Marquess of Winchester’s Basing House, Cromwell’s men burned down the chapel.
O’Neill’s rebellion of 1641 had made Cromwell – normally tolerant of religious denominations other than his own – profoundly intolerant of Catholics in general and of Irish Catholics in particular. In his Declaration of 1649, he warned the Irish Catholic priesthood that they would no longer be allowed to enjoy the more casual enforcement of the law which had followed the uprising of eight years earlier. The Mass had been illegal in Ireland for eighty years before O’Neill’s insurrection and he was ‘determined to reduce things to their former state on this behalf’.37 Cromwell’s anti-Catholic passion increased with the years. In 1651 he issued an edict which prescribed the death penalty for any Catholic priest found in Scotland. The new law was to be enforced from the day that followed its proclamation.
In Ireland, the situation was confused in a typically Irish way. James Butler, Earl of Ormond, who had commanded the English army during the 1641 O’Neill Rebellion, was confronted by a new alliance. The Catholics and ‘Old English’ found that they had common interests and made common cause. The partnership was strong enough – or thought itself strong enough – to call the arrangement a ‘confederation’ and to set up an independent Catholic government in Kilkenny. From then on, Ireland was a land of shifting alliance. Catholic troops – who had fought against Charles in Ireland – went to Scotland to fight for him against the Covenanters. Catholics and Old English combined to fight Cromwell as they had fought the King – and, towards the end of the Civil War, formed a shaky alliance with the local nobility. Cromwell swept the confederation aside, confiscated the land that was left in Catholic ownership and distributed most of it among Protestant veterans of his victorious New Model Army. What was left was sold to merchant adventurers and Scottish Covenanters. The already embittered Irish Catholics had a new reason to hate the English. The Irish peasantry had been left landless.
During his years in power, Cromwell was unyielding in his savage suppression of Catholics – whom he assumed to be subversive – in Ireland. When the Governor of Ross had the temerity to ask why the freedoms that Parliament claimed to hold dear were not respected to the west of the Irish Sea, he received an answer that embraced the whole Commonwealth. ‘I meddle not with any man’s conscience. But if by liberty of conscience you mean liberty to exercise the mass, I judge it best to use plain dealing and let you know that where the Parliament of England have power, that will not be allowed of.’38 Unyielding though that statement was – and despite the determination with which its message was driven home – it was not Cromwell’s prohibition of the Mass which made him anathema to Catholics in Ireland and beyond. It was his conduct during the siege and subsequent capture of Drogheda.
In August 1649 – seven months after the execution of Charles I – Oliver Cromwell led an army of 8,000 foot and 4,000 horse to Ireland, there to put down a new attempt at rebellion. It was led by the Earl of Ormonde who, for the moment, was more of a Royalist than a Protestant and was therefore prepared to command Catholics in a campaign against the Commonwealth. The first obstacle, as Cromwell marched north from Dublin, was the heavily fortified town of Drogheda. Cromwell sent a message to Sir Arthur Aston, the commander of the garrison. His offer – sympathetic treatment of the garrison in return for a quick surrender – was meant to be an act of Christian charity. It was, however, not made in charitable language. He told the city at large that he proposed ‘to reduce it to obedience, to the end that an effusion of blood may be prevented’.39 But if Aston refused to surrender, whatever happened to the garrison, its commander would ‘have no cause to blame’ Cromwell. Aston replied that his soldiers were ‘unanimous in their resolution to perish rather than to deliver this place’. It is, therefore, possible to argue that, according to the rules of war as understood in the seventeenth century, Cromwell was entitled to wreak a terrible vengeance on the obdurate garrison, which chose to fight rather than accept the inevitable and surrender. But he was certainly not in any way justified in either ordering or allowing the massacre of civilians. Although official instruction to his troops was death to anyone who had borne arms, he knew that his soldiers were not in a mood to make careful distinctions. More than one thousand non-combatants were murdered in Drogheda – among them every Catholic priest in the town.
Most of the dead – counting soldiers as well as civilians, nearly 4,000 in all – were cut down as the parliamentary troops rampaged through the town. But the clergy at St Peter’s, in the north of the town, died terrible premeditated deaths. They took refuge in the church tower. Cromwell’s soldiers tore out the pews and every other combustible article of the nave of the church, built a bonfire at the foot of the tower and watched the priests roast to death. They became instant Catholic martyrs – and the reason, in Catholic mythology, why Cromwell died in terror as he listened to the thunder that accompanied his last hours. If he did repent Drogheda, it was late in life that he felt any guilt. At the time, as he reported to Parliament, he regarded the slaughter as both a military necessity and the expression of divine vengeance on sinners. ‘I am persuaded that this is the righteous judgement of God upon those barbarous wretches who have inbrued their hands in so much innocent blood; that it will prevent such effusions of blood for the future, which are satisfactory grounds for such actions which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.’40
Cromwell remained in Ireland for nine months. During that time – and during the suzerainty of Ireton and Ludlow, his successors – the country was subject to a policy of calculated devastation and its people were systematically massacred. At Wexford, Cromwell’s troops slaughtered every captured soldier who had fought against them, and then watched with amusement while two overloaded boats capsized in the harbour and the men who had hoped to escape drowned. The subsequent Irish peace was as savage as the war. Yet more veterans of the New Model Army and English Puritans were given title to land previously owned or occupied by native Irish families, and it was said that the deposed were given the choice of going to ‘hell or Connaught’ – the most barren of Irish counties. Despite the influx of Protestant settlers to the Irish ‘plantation’, four years of famine and slaughter killed so many Irish Catholics that the total population of Ireland was reduced by one-third.41
In 1653, on Cromwell’s instruction, the Act of the Long Parliament – which required English Catholic ‘delinquents’ to forfeit two-thirds of their estates – was repealed. Clarendon observed that ‘Cromwell proceeds, with strange dexterity, towards the reconciling of all sorts of persons’.42 It was the sort of expedient gesture which English Catholics – without much evidence to support their optimism – always used to convince themselves that their continued hope for some sort of accommodation with the Protestant state was about to be realised. Cromwell’s concession to ‘delinquents’ encouraged new reconciliation initiatives. The most ambitious plan was formulated in ‘Blacklow’s Cabal’ – the followers of Thomas White, also known as Blacklow, sometime Professor of Philosophy at Douai. It was made public after Charles had lost the Civil War and left English religion in unprecedented confusion. The Church of England, as it had been established by Queen Elizabeth in 1559, had been abolished by Parliament. Attempts to impose a Presbyterian orthodoxy on the whole country had been frustrated by the leaders of other denominations, supported by the army. In what seemed to be an era of tolerant diversity, it was inevitable that a combination of ingenuity, naivety and faith in the eventual irresistibility of Rome should result in a proposal through which Catholicism could benefit from what appeared to be a belief in religious pluralism.
The Blacklow scheme – which one Catholic, Sir Kenelm Digby, described as conceived by the Holy Ghost43 – required Parliament to draft an Oath of Allegiance that would be sworn by all Catholics. The penalty for refusal was to be banishment. The Catholic Church was to have six or eight bishops (bearing traditional geographical titles) who, although appointed by the temporal powers, would receive their authority directly from Jesus Christ rather than the Pope. Indeed, each bishop would be required to renounce the Oath of Allegiance to Rome that was normally taken on ordination – as would every priest. In consequence, the Pope, who had been bypassed, would have power neither to dismiss nor to instruct them. Henry Holden, the ‘Blacklow’ disciple who had worked out the details of the plan, was so enthusiastic about its attractions that he told Sir Kenelm Digby, who had friends in Catholic high places, ‘You may freely give out [in Rome] that the Independents intend us an absolute toleration.’44
The attraction of the scheme to the Commonwealth Parliament – insomuch as such a feeling existed – lay in the duties it imposed on bishops. They were ‘obliged both by the principles of their religion and by their particular interests to be watchful over the persons and the actions of the priests, who they appoint under them, to guide the conscience of the laity’.45 In return for allowing the form of Catholic worship – albeit to the exclusion of the Pope – Parliament was to be provided with a mechanism by which the behaviour of potentially rebellious Catholics could certainly be observed, and possibly be contained. The initiative – and several other attempts at rapprochement – came to nothing. Rome rejected it because it denied the supreme authority of the Pope. The Commonwealth Parliament rejected it because there were easier ways of ensuring the subordination of the Catholic population. So English Catholics were left to wait and pray for the Restoration, which – it was at least rumoured – would begin with a Catholic being crowned King of England.