The terror

Richard Topcliffe (1531 to 1604) ran his own torture room next to the Gatehouse prison in Westminster from the late 1580s to 1595, hanging priests by the wrists in manacles. He wrote to the Queen as his “goddess” and boasted from the Marshalsea in 1595 that he had “helped more traitors” to Tyburn “than all the noblemen and gentlemen of the court”. He also interrogated Ben Jonson in 1597 over The Isle of Dogs.

Pursuivants were bounty hunters, informers and apostates. There are few recorded cases of searchers finding an occupied hide without an informant, and the searched household paid for the search. Anthony Munday, the lead author of Sir Thomas More, had entered the English College at Rome under a false name in 1578 and was rewarded in 1584 for “political services against the Catholics”.

The procedure: dragged on a hurdle, hanged from a ladder, cut down alive, emasculated and disembowelled, the entrails burned, then beheaded and quartered, the remains parboiled with salt and cumin, the heads set on London Bridge. About 183 to 189 Catholics were executed under Elizabeth, most after 1581, and twenty-odd under James. The Tyburn Convent counts 105 Catholic martyrs at Tyburn.

Crowd behaviour shifted. At Southwell’s execution in 1595 Lord Mountjoy pulled his legs and no one shouted “Traitor!” at the head. At Garnet’s in 1606 the crowd cried “hold, hold” so he was dead before the knife. Within fifteen miles of Stratford, the priest John Sugar and the layman Robert Grissold, arrested at Rowington in July 1603, were executed at Warwick on 16 July 1604.

Sources: Wikipedia, Topcliffe; Lyons, Topcliffe; Wikipedia, Priest hunter; Wikipedia, Munday; Wikipedia, Hanged, drawn and quartered; Britannica, English Martyrs; Wikipedia, Southwell; Gunpowder Plot Society, Garnet; Wikipedia, John Sugar.

The mission

William Allen leased a house at Douai on Michaelmas Day 1568 with six students. The college sent over 300 priests into England by 1600, of whom more than 130 were executed. Rome followed in 1579, Valladolid in 1589, Seville in 1592, Saint-Omer in 1593 or 1594.

Campion landed at Dover on 24 June 1580 disguised as a jewel merchant. He wrote his “Brag” to be found if captured: “The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God; it cannot be withstood.” He printed Decem Rationes on a secret press in the attics of Stonor and had 400 copies left in the pews of St Mary’s, Oxford. He was betrayed at Lyford Grange on 17 July 1581 when searchers saw light between two planks, racked, disputed four times standing in the Tower chapel, and hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 1 December 1581.

John Gerard’s Autobiography is the best firsthand account of the tradecraft: landing in the dark on the Norfolk coast in November 1588, posing as a gentleman sportsman fluent in falconry, writing in orange juice because the writing stays visible once heated, so a reader could tell if a letter had been opened, never using true names, hiding “between walls, under gables, or beneath fireplaces”, hung by the wrists in the Tower in 1597 and escaping across the moat by rope that October with hands still injured.

Nicholas Owen, “Little John”, a crippled Oxford joiner, built the hides alone and at night for eighteen years, with feeding tubes, a “hide within a hide” at Huddington, and never charged. He died under torture in the Tower on the night of 1 to 2 March 1606 having revealed nothing.

Sources: Wikipedia, English College, Douai; EWTN, Campion’s Brag; Catholic Encyclopedia, Campion; CIA Historical Review, The English Mission; Wikipedia, John Gerard; Wikipedia, Nicholas Owen; Tudor Times, Leopards and Little John.

The secret life

Mass before dawn in an upper room. A resident priest passing as tutor, steward or gardener. Vestments and chalice in a “secret corner” distinct from the “conveyance” that held a man. Rosaries and Agnus Deis that were themselves evidence of a crime: an Agnus Dei round his neck helped hang Cuthbert Mayne in 1577. Smuggled books: Persons’s Christian Directory and the Rheims New Testament of 1582, which Fulke’s hostile 1589 parallel edition made widely available. William Byrd’s three Masses, printed undated without a printer’s name, one bifolium per partbook to aid concealment.

The documented inventory of a raided house, from the Hindlip and Clopton seizures: a chalice, crucifixes, vestments, Latin books, candles, beads. Pilgrimage to St Winefride’s Well at Holywell, the one British shrine with continuous pilgrimage through the Reformation, where Garnet led a barefoot party in 1605 and about 1,400 gentry gathered in 1629.

Behind it all, the loss of the old religion of the dead: chantries dissolved in 1547, prayers for the dead cut in 1552, and in Stratford itself the Guild Chapel Doom, Christ enthroned with the damned driven into hell’s mouth, limewashed when John Shakespeare was chamberlain and still faintly visible in 1641, forty feet from the schoolroom.

Sources: Catholic Encyclopedia, Agnus Dei; Wikipedia, Cuthbert Mayne; Wikipedia, Douay-Rheims; Wikipedia, William Byrd; Wikipedia, St Winefride’s Well; SBT, The Great Doom.