Recusants became adept at replacing confiscated vestments. One gentleman, a Knight of the Bath, offered up his investiture robes to be ‘turned to use at the altar’. Others converted dresses, gowns, blankets, even cushions (permissible as long as they were blessed afterwards). Some vestments were designed to be reversible, others were disguised as ordinary domestic items. Unfurled in all its glory, a dalmatic at All Saints Chapel, Wardour, displays a cross; folded up with the linen, it could have passed for a patchwork quilt.20 In households like Anne and Eleanor’s, pious ladies were supposed to work the needle in sober, straight-backed devotion. It was a commendable pastime ‘in which the mind is little or nothing at all busied’ and could focus on edifying thoughts. And as they sat and sewed and meditated, these ladies also produced altar-cloths and chalice veils, silk panels, appliqué hangings, monogrammed handkerchiefs and even – in one house in Samlesbury, Lancashire – a ‘gown without a pocket and yet devices secretly to keep letters in’.21 It is a testament to their industry that John Gerard, S.J., only had to carry around his own Mass equipment for a few years after his arrival in England in 1588. ‘In nearly every house I visited later I would find vestments and everything else laid out ready for me.’22
Only the most privileged families could afford – both in terms of cost and risk – to have much ‘church stuff’, that is: chapel plate and furnishings, altarpieces, crucifixes, candlesticks and other holy objects and images. These were encouraged, but not required, for the legitimate celebration of the Mass. A priest would need his missal, however, even if he could remember all the words, and consecrated vessels for the bread and wine. Chalices were sometimes made to a small scale and unscrewed at the stem for portability and concealment. Traditionally, they were cast in precious metals, but hard times called for hard measures. To the question, May a tin chalice be used for saying Mass in England at the moment?, came the sensible resolution:
There is no difficulty at all for we have the express decision of a canon, where it is laid down that the chalice of the Lord and the paten should be made of gold, or, if that is not possible, of silver. In cases of great poverty, a chalice should at least be made of tin. But chalices should not be made of bronze or brass because they react with the wine to form a mould, which can cause vomiting. No one has dared to sing Mass with a wooden or glass chalice. Lo, there you have every material of which a chalice may or may not be made, and it may be made from tin, especially in England where the most perfect tin is to be found.23
The casuist texts that pronounced such rulings were written by senior clerics in exile to help seminarians adapt the inflexible institutional mandates of Rome to the conditions on the ground in England. In certain circumstances, rules could be relaxed for the greater good of the mission. Thus, on a fast day, a recusant might serve meat to an Elizabethan magistrate or even break the fast herself to avoid detection on the road. ‘Gambling games’ were acceptable and even preferable to excessive abstinence, which could be ‘more dangerous than useful’. Church property could be rented from Protestant landowners and ‘a blind eye’ might be turned to servants who attended divine service.24
But the casuists could only bend so far. When it came to the Mass, the central observance of their faith, there was a basic minimum requirement. Hence the need for vestments, vessels and, above all, an altar for the sacrifice. A vast stone edifice of the kind used before the Reformation was clearly impractical, so a portable altar (or ‘superaltar’, or altar-stone) was used. This was a slab of natural stone, about the size of a placemat, into which a relic was usually set. In theory, it had to be consecrated, but in cases of extreme necessity the stipulation might be waived.fn10 One altar-stone used at the time and now at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire was found in a ‘pedlar’s chest’ hidden behind the wall of a nearby house. The chest also contained a lady’s bonnet (intended to dupe the causal searcher), vestments and a chalice and paten (see Plate 27). This was the field kit of the missionary priest and it allowed him to bring his Church – and his God – into almost every place that he visited.
The Mass could happen anywhere, the texts ruled, ‘except at sea or on a river’. It could be said outside, within a gentleman’s wardrobe, behind bars, even in ‘a bridal chamber’. Some of the grander, more protected residences like Harrowden Hall or Battle Abbey still enjoyed the use of traditional altars in private chapels, but this was exceptional.25 For Anne and Eleanor, trying to maintain secrecy on the move or in rented accommodation, the Mass would often have been celebrated on an altar-stone slotted into a frame built into a tabletop or the surface of a sideboard or bureau. The diminutive carpenter Nicholas Owen alias ‘Little John’ often travelled with the sisters and may have created bespoke furniture or adapted existing items for this purpose.
Security mattered more than status in the room or rooms selected for the Mass. It had to be private and quiet, and have as many stairs and lockable doors in the way as possible. Attics and withdrawing rooms were favoured. Once the sisters decided to settle somewhere, they would have established the ‘chapel’ on a more permanent, but still convertible, basis, introducing a range of vessels, vestments and images, as well, no doubt, as their grandmother’s ‘gold cross full of relics’. At Stanley Grange, a house that Anne would later run as a school in Derbyshire, a pursuivant discovered
two chapels, one opening into the other, and in either of them a table set to the upper end for an altar, and stools and cushions laid as though they had been lately at Mass. Over the altars there were crucifixes set and other pictures about it.26
Raids were often timed to catch the priest in the act of saying Mass, but households grew wise to their tactics and soon developed their own. At the signal, a well-drilled priest would throw off his vestments, snuff out the candles, strip the altar, pop his stone in his pocket and scuttle into his hide. He often benefited from the cover of darkness, especially during the dawn raids of the winter months, when waking embers and candlelight failed to lift the gloom. Even in daylight a young pursuivant born after 1558, having no memory of Catholicism as the official religion, might struggle to distinguish a dalmatic from a dressing gown. Others may not have looked that hard or may have had the ‘golden reason’ to flinch from the task.27 Not all officials enjoyed rifling through their neighbour’s goods, especially those of widows, who traditionally warranted the protection of society. One contemporary, referring to the ransacking of Eliza Vaux’s house in 1611, acknowledged ‘the disgrace that is wont to accompany this kind of service’.28 It seems plausible that some of the tales of miraculous deliverance from discovery might have owed as much to official discretion as divine intervention.
Some raids, though, were truly terrifying. Around February 1574, in Common School Lane, York, men raged through the house of the recusant doctor Thomas Vavasour
with naked swords and daggers, thrusting and porring [prodding] in at every hole and crevice, breaking down walls, rending down cloths, pulling up boards from the floors, and making such spoil of their goods in such cruel manner that the gentlewoman his wife … thereupon lost her wit.29
Despite their best efforts, the pursuivants failed to discover Vavasour’s ‘politicly devised’ hide. This was England’s earliest recorded priest-hole, though the vast majority were constructed after the 1586 Hurleyford conference, when it was decided that certain households should become proper missionary posts. Before that time, most priests had been itinerant and too many had been stopped in their tracks. Of the three hundred-odd priests who had returned to England between 1574 and 1586, thirty-three had been executed, over sixty had gone into exile, around fifty were in prison and a few had died naturally.30 By the 1590s, their chances of survival had improved, thanks in no small part to the masons and joiners who put their skills to the use of the mission. Chief of their number was Nicholas ‘Little John’ Owen, a young carpenter from Oxford who presented himself to Garnet around the time that the Vaux sisters removed to Warwickshire. Together they strived to keep Garnet – and the Je
suit mission – alive.
Examples of Owen’s handiwork survive, some so well hidden that they have only been found by accident. In 1894, a boy exploring a derelict part of Harvington Hall in Worcestershire chanced upon a loose brick that exposed a tiny room, eight feet long, three feet wide and five feet high. Its entrance, past a swinging beam at the back of a panelled cupboard, had not been tried for almost three hundred years (see Plate 26). The uninformed observer, looking at a wall or fireplace or staircase, might never suspect an Owen-built hide in the vicinity, but know where to look, lift the right step, tread on a particular tile and his genius is revealed. Owen understood buildings intimately. He worked with them, using their features, exploiting every angle and space. He had to operate quickly and quietly, keeping his plans in his head. He never grew lazy; each priest-hole was different. He was generous with his advice, giving tips ‘for the making of others’, and he was discreet – he never gave up his hides, even under torture. He was Garnet’s man and lodged with the sisters, but was often on secondment, chiselling away in ‘the chiefest Catholic houses’ in the land. His talent seems only to have been matched by his industry. ‘He was so skilful,’ wrote John Gerard, S.J., ‘both to devise and frame the [hides] in the best manner, and his help therein desired in so many places, that I verily think no man can be said to have done more good of all those that laboured in the English vineyard.’31 He must have infuriated his adversaries.
One justice of the peace, characterised in a play performed at the English College in Rome, was said to have
brought in engineers by art,
With mathematic and instruments to sound
The depth, the breadth, and length of ev’ry room,
To see what close conveyance may be found,
Or secret place that might conceal a priest.32
Others took less care, hacking, ripping, smashing and stripping until the house was unrecognisable. In an attempt to brazen out a raid on Garnet’s cottage in Finsbury Fieldsfn11 around 1591, the caretaker, Hugh Sheldon, offered to provide the pursuivants with an axe, so they could ‘break open, pull down, knock holes through or cut to pieces anything whatever’.33
Not all homes benefited from the expertise of an Owen or a Greene, who reportedly made ‘all the secret places’ in Derbyshire.34 Dorothy Lawson ill-advisedly used her oven; the Lygons of Elkstone hid stuff in the loo.35 Priests inevitably were caught and had to think quickly. Disguises helped, as did pseudonyms and cover stories. But could they lie? If directly asked about their priesthood, could they deny it? No, said some clerics, this was ‘tantamount to denying Christ’ and would always be a mortal sin. Others posited that when truth and justice were at odds – for example, when priests were unlawfully declared traitors – they were not obliged to incriminate themselves or, indeed, their harbourers. The burden of proof lay with the accuser and the priest could do ‘anything he can – using equivocation, silence, returning the question, or any method he likes – to avoid making a reply, as long as he neither denies his faith nor lies’. This was the resolution of a casuist text produced under the supervision of William Allen and Robert Persons in the early 1580s. The two clerics endorsed the resolution with the more pithy: ‘He may delude.’36
Just how far a Catholic could delude his examiner was a matter of discretion and some controversy. The practice of ‘mental reservation’, by which a respondent kept in his head a statement that contradicted or qualified the answer he had just given, could be taken to faintly absurd lengths. When, for example, Thomas Cornford was captured saying Mass for the imprisoned Eliza Vaux in 1612, he told the Archbishop of Canterbury that he was John Underwood, a married father of six who had visited Eliza in the hope of renting a farm on her son’s estate. At his second examination, however, he admitted that he was a Jesuit priest:
Whereas he affirmed himself to be a married man, his meaning was that his wife was his breviary and that he had been married unto it twelve years. As for his children … those were his ghostly and spiritual children … The reason why he called himself a farmer was because he was so to God, according to that text, Redde rationem villicationis tuae: Give an account of thy farmership. And the reason why he said that he went to Mistress Vaux to take a farm of the Lord Vaux was because he was ready to do them any service for their salvation and for the spiritual tilling of their souls. Whereas he had denied himself to have been beyond the seas, his answer was that he spoke that with intention that he had been there, but not that he was bound to tell His Grace so much.37
For many people, this was lying by any other name and it showed that whatever the armchair casuists might prescribe from the security of exile, equivocation was a tricky doctrine to apply – and justify – on the ground. Priests were roundly condemned for the practice, especially the Jesuits with whom it came to be closely identified.fn12 The 29-year-old gentlewoman Anne Bellamy, who would betray the whereabouts of Robert Southwell in 1592, claimed at his trial that he had coached her to deny having seen a priest, keeping the true meaning in her head that she had not seen one with the intention of traducing him.
In 1598, Garnet would enter the fray with A treatise against lying and fraudulent dissimulation, in which he defended Southwell and the use of equivocation ‘both to heretics and also to diverse Catholics’, who think it ‘seemeth strange’. According to the Protestant polemicist Richard Sheldon, Cornford had been a ‘doltish’ simpleton before Garnet had received him into the Society of Jesus. ‘Well it may be observed herehence,’ he surmised, ‘how efficacious the Garnetian Academy hath been for training youth in lying, cogging and equivocating.’38
This was presumably the sort of ‘evil instruction’ that Sheriff Cave of Leicestershire had feared – youths studying ‘equivocating tricks’ alongside their (equally harmful) catechism, servants drilled to deal with raids, girls sewing vestments, boys gathering relics, children learning to read and write in invisible inkfn13 and being exhorted ‘from the very beginning to protect religion and the holy Church’; households turning inwards, celebrating different holidays and heroes from the rest of the country, shunning Protestants (‘since they are more grievous enemies of Christ and much more to be hated’ than ‘Jews or Turks’): the very bonds of society being broken by the pernicious influence of the recusant mistress. ‘If only there was some one place where they might be permitted to live in peace,’ Garnet opined, ‘they would consider themselves treated fairly enough.’39 But the authorities had no truck with this line, especially as regards the Vaux sisters, who were hardly retreating into a quiet seigneurial existence.
Alongside Eleanor’s children, the sisters raised and educated other youths, including William Hutchinson, the fourteen-year-old cited by Cave in 1588, who was listed as a recusant thirty-five years later.40 There was also their little cousin Frances Burroughs, whom Eleanor had adopted around 1581 when the five-year-old lost her mother (Lord Vaux’s sister Maud). According to the Chronicle of St Monica’s, the convent in Louvain that Frances would join:
When this child came first to the said widow, she took her in her arms with tears and said ‘I will have Frances, I will have Frances’, having before intended to have taken another of the sisters who was her goddaughter. ‘For to this child,’ quoth she, ‘God will give a blessing which none of the rest shall have.’ Which proved true, for she became a religious [i.e. a nun] and none of the rest so much as Catholic.41
Family legend had it that Frances had been destined for God’s graces since infancy, for every Sunday when her (conformist) father took the family to church, she had fallen into a deep slumber,
not waking till she was out of the church again, and this continued with her after she could go alone, and was so observed in her that they thought it bootless to lead her into the church, but would leave her in the churchyard to play during the time of service.
Eleanor would have enjoyed, and presumably had a hand in, that tale, it being just the kind of conformity-bashing story that the missioners encouraged. At least baby Fran
ces only fell asleep. The moment Francis Woodhouse entered his parish church in Norfolk, he felt a fire in his bowels that not even eight pints at the local tavern could quench. The message was clear: since England’s churches were ‘polluted’ with heresy, God disapproved of attendance.42
Although Frances Burroughs was ‘sickly all her life long’, she had a mischievous, indomitable spirit. Once, when an alms-seeker came to the house, she sneaked him a slice of pie when the butler, who had already provided ‘a good piece of bread and meat’, disappeared to fetch some beer. During searches, she was ‘always let out to go up and down to answer the officers, because her courage was such as she never seemed to be daunted or feared of anything’. On one occasion, a pursuivant, ‘holding his naked dagger at her breast’, threatened to stab her in the heart if she would not tell him where the priests were hiding. ‘If you do,’ she cried, ‘it shall be the hottest blood that ever thou sheddest in thy life.’ The pursuivant was so taken by Frances’s courage that he tried to buy her for a hundred pounds.
The chronicler of St Monica’s was less impressed. Although she praised Frances’s patience, humility and obedience, she was clearly needled, even after Frances’s death, by her ‘hasty words’ and ‘some small defects’ in her character, ‘which,’ the writer suggested with superb disdain, ‘perhaps were not so displeasing to God as to creatures’. Her last words on Frances were that she had ‘but a weak voice for the choir’, a mortifying shortcoming for a nun.
God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England Page 22