The Queen's Constables
Page 10
Endnote
Dear Reader,
Thank you for investing your valuable time into reading this third novella in the series, which was based on well documented historical fact.
When Pope Pius excommunicated Elizabeth 1st, he also declared that her subjects were forbidden, on pain of excommunication, to follow her commands. He also impliedly invited them to remove her from the throne, and this gave encouragement to the many Catholic families, some of them noble, to plot her downfall. To assist, and to give them spiritual succour in what could prove fatal if discovered, a seminary was established in France to train priests who could be smuggled into England and hidden away in country houses. When intelligence of this reached Secretary of State William Cecil and his spymaster Francis Walsingham, the cat and mouse game began.
Priest hunters known as ‘pursuivants’ were sent in search of these covert priests, and their protectors took to redesigning their country houses in order to hide them when the Queen’s men came calling. The most popular locations were in false wall cavities, under staircases, down in cellars or inside fireplaces, and as the pursuivants became more skilled in finding them, so the hiding places became more ingenious. Many an English country house still boasts these ‘priest holes’, and many a Gothic horror story has been written about the ghostly wraiths of former priests who died of suffocation, starvation or thirst while hidden away from their pursuers, only to return as resentful ghosts.
The most active of those who constructed these hiding places was the Nicholas Owen of this novel, a lay Jesuit Brother and a skilled carpenter. He was not captured until after the failure of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, and regrettably he died under torture in the Tower of London the following year.
Historical fact as dramatic as this makes the work of a historical novelist both easy and rewarding, and I hope that you enjoyed the fruits of my research. I should be grateful for any review you would care to leave on Amazon, and/or I look forward to chatting with you more directly on my Facebook website davidfieldauthor.com. I can also be contacted on Twitter.
David