by John Guy
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With the draconian new law against puritans on the statute book, Elizabeth made it clear to her privy councillors that she was determined to be seen to be acting even-handedly. Whitgift’s attack on ‘seditious sectaries’ was thus to be accompanied by an equal, if not greater, assault on dissident Catholics.33 This approach had most likely informed her decision to visit Cowdray, when she had arrived just in time to frustrate Viscount Montague’s weekly Mass and where her privy councillors had drafted harsh new anti-Catholic proclamations.
Her most effective and notorious Catholic-hunter was her chief pursuivant, Richard Topcliffe. A vicious, desperately insecure man with pronounced psychopathic tendencies, Topcliffe doubled as her rack-master. Several times accused by his victims of ransacking their houses without due cause or of torturing them without the necessary warrants, he was a menacing and divisive figure who almost everyone knew about but preferred to forget. The earliest known document describing him as ‘Her Majesty’s servant’ dates from 1573, and there has been much debate as to how much, or how little, Elizabeth countenanced his activities.34 Almost universally, her biographers, following Camden’s Annales, have distanced her from him. In reality, strong archival evidence exists that she knew him personally, thoroughly approved of his activities and received reports directly from him rather than through intermediaries.
Unscrupulous, self-seeking and venal, a sharp dresser who boasted of his ‘watchful eyes’ and took delight in his luridly serpentine handwriting, Topcliffe was a Nottinghamshire man. Orphaned at the age of twelve, he was brought up by an uncle and trained as a lawyer. He does not appear to have ever been called to the bar but, in or about the year 1557, when he was approaching twenty-five, he married (unhappily) Jane, the daughter of Sir Edward Willoughby of Wollaton, whose niece Margaret was one of Elizabeth’s attendants during Mary Tudor’s reign.35
First employed by Leicester during the reprisals following the Northern Rising to carry messages to the queen, Topcliffe was also on cordial terms with the Earl of Shrewsbury, Mary Queen of Scots’s custodian, to whom he began writing chatty newsletters from London and the Court. In 1578, he told Shrewsbury how, during one of her summer progresses at which he was present, Elizabeth had drawn his attention to ‘sundry lewd popish beasts’ who were known to be frequenting the spa at Buxton. In reply, Topcliffe had informed her of ‘one Dyrham, or Durande’, a man he claimed was ‘a detestable popish priest’ and a sexual predator ‘lurking in those parts’, and offered to trap him.36
Shortly after the arrival of a Jesuit mission to England in 1580, Topcliffe’s career came into its own. He began volunteering information to Burghley and Walsingham about the seditious activities of Jesuits and seminary priests. He scoured London’s prisons, looking for men he could employ as spies and informers, and secured warrants from the Privy Council to torture suspects, sometimes for hours on end, in a ‘strong room’ in his house near the churchyard of St Margaret’s Church in Westminster.37 When the Throckmorton Plot was discovered in 1583, Elizabeth sent him on a special mission to ‘the North parts’ to round up political Catholics on a hit list she had prepared.38 And in September 1586, there was more direct contact between them, when she called him in to see her and asked him to supervise the delivery of a herd of bucks she was sending as a gift to the hunting-mad James VI.39
Topcliffe’s victims, many of them innocent, told gruesome stories about him. One of the most bizarre came in November 1591, submitted as a written complaint to William Waad, clerk of the Privy Council, by the seminary priest Thomas Pormort. Among his more spine-chilling claims, Pormort alleged that, while racking him, Topcliffe had indulged in salacious sexual fantasies. According to what still survives of Pormort’s damaged manuscript, Topcliffe claimed to be ‘familiar’ with the queen: he had, he said, many times fondled her nipples and breasts and put his hands up her skirt. He had ‘felt her belly’ (vagina) and told her that she had ‘the softest belly of any womankind’. She had (allegedly) said to him, ‘Be not these the arms, legs and body of King Henry’, to which Topcliffe answered, ‘Yea.’ Afterwards, the queen supposedly gave him one of her white stockings, ‘wrought with silk’, as a love token.40
Submitted in confidence solely to impeach Topcliffe and so as not to slander the queen, Pormort’s claims about his tormentor’s sexual fantasies are likely to have been substantially true. For, on a freezing-cold morning in February 1592, when Pormort was about to mount the gallows in St Paul’s Churchyard, Topcliffe suddenly halted the proceedings and forced his accuser to ‘stand in his shirt almost two hours upon the ladder’ while he demanded that he retract these damning claims, which Pormort refused to do.
Waad, however, took no further action. Rabidly anti-Catholic himself, he was destined to be Topcliffe’s ally rather than his scourge. Beyond that, he feared what might happen if the queen were to become involved. Even those at the centre of power were unsure as to where exactly she stood on the question of Richard Topcliffe. Who knew what she might do to anyone who dared to call him to account?41
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The smoking gun proving Elizabeth’s acquiescence in some of Topcliffe’s worst atrocities lies buried in Burghley’s papers. When, in October 1591, the anti-Catholic proclamations drafted at Cowdray were published, Robert Southwell, a thirty-year-old English Jesuit schooled in Douai (then in the Netherlands) and trained as a priest in Rome, composed a rebuttal. This was entitled ‘An Humble Supplication to Her Majesty’. Too explosive to publish, Southwell’s tract was passed in manuscript from hand to hand like samizdat literature: it would be printed surreptitiously in 1600, bearing a false date of 1595.42 The work was incendiary, because it made the most lucidly persuasive case yet for the legitimacy of a loyalist, non-political form of Catholicism. While Burghley had maintained since 1559 – long before the papal decree of 1570 excommunicating Elizabeth and declaring her to be deposed – that Catholics were, by definition, traitors, Southwell argued that the queen’s subjects were bound in conscience ‘under pain of forfeiting their right in Heaven . . . to obey the just laws of their princes’.43 It was not Catholics, but Calvinists, he argued, who believed that monarchs could be excluded or deposed on religious grounds. Here he aimed a cutting blow at Burghley.
Topcliffe longed to lay his hands on Southwell and bring him to the gallows. But the young Jesuit had a powerful protector. He had found a secure refuge in a house in Spitalfields, a suburb of London just outside the walls to the east of Bishopsgate Street, belonging to Anne Howard, Countess of Arundel, a Catholic convert. So long as he stayed in her lodgings he would be safe. But he made the mistake of venturing outdoors. On the feast of St John the Baptist (24 June), 1592, at ten in the morning, he met a young Catholic gentleman, Thomas Bellamy, in Fleet Street and set out for Bellamy’s father’s house, Uxenden Hall, near Harrow in Middlesex, some fifteen miles away. He celebrated Mass there before lodging for the night.
Shortly after midnight, Topcliffe, accompanied by a gang of armed men, smashed his way in. He knew Southwell would be there: his informer was none other than Thomas Bellamy’s twenty-nine-year-old sister, Anne. Six months before, she had been denounced for her devout Catholic beliefs to Bishop Aylmer and imprisoned in the Gatehouse Prison at Westminster. There, Topcliffe raped her and made her pregnant. In a subterfuge worthy of Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, Topcliffe then offered to secure her release and ‘protect’ her and her baby by marrying her off to one of his assistants, Nicholas Jones. To bait the trap, Topcliffe promised Anne that, if she became his informant, her family would not be harmed, a promise he conspicuously failed to keep.44
As soon as Southwell had been apprehended, an elated Topcliffe wrote to inform Elizabeth of his prize. His letter, later filed among Burghley’s papers, was explicit. As Topcliffe confided, his quarry was securely held in his ‘strong chamber’, shackled to the wall. It gave him great pleasure, he continued, to enclose Southwell’s first testimony under inte
rrogation. She would plainly see he had answered ‘foully and suspiciously’. To take his investigations further, Topcliffe requested the queen’s authorization to ‘enforce’ the prisoner ‘to answer truly and directly’. ‘May it please Your Majesty’, he asked, ‘to see my simple opinion?’ He felt himself ‘constrained in duty to utter it’.
Topcliffe advised Elizabeth that torture should begin at once:
To use any means in common prisons either to stand upon or against the wall (wherein above all things exceeds and hurteth not) will give warning. But if Your Highness’s pleasure be to know anything in his heart, [then] to stand against the wall, his feet standing upon the ground and his hands but as high as he can reach against the wall like a Trick at Trenchmore [a morris dance], will enforce him to tell all and the truth proved.
Specifically, Topcliffe recommended that Southwell be stretched out against the wall using ‘hand gyves’ (iron gauntlets). Speed was of the essence, or the prisoner’s accomplices, ‘such as be deeply concerned in his treacheries’, might flee.45
Although the queen’s reply was purely verbal, given at a private audience in the Privy Chamber and not written down, the fact that Topcliffe went on within a few days to torture Southwell in exactly the manner he had recommended, and without a further warrant from Burghley or his colleagues, as the law required, is the chilling proof that she gave her consent in the full knowledge of what he was about to do. Topcliffe would not have dared to act as he did had the queen forbidden it, and she was far from squeamish. At the time of the Ridolfi Plot, she had ordered two of Burghley’s men, this time in writing, to torture suspected conspirators on the rack ‘until they shall deal more plainly, or until you shall think meet [appropriate]’.46
Here, some highly curious facts may be illuminating. Southwell’s mother, Bridget, née Copley, was one of the queen’s kinsfolk. She and Anne Boleyn’s father were second cousins, and she was said in 1583 to have been Elizabeth’s ‘old servant of near forty years continuance’, although in what capacity is uncertain.47 In Mary Tudor’s reign, Bridget’s brother, Thomas, an ardent Protestant, had bravely championed Elizabeth’s claim to the throne in the House of Commons, for which he was arrested.48 Then, a few years later, when Elizabeth was queen, he had married a Catholic heiress and converted to Rome. By the time Robert Southwell was in Topcliffe’s hands, his uncle Thomas was dead. But his treachery had not been forgotten, as he had lived on for many years in exile at Rouen, from where he had regularly attacked the queen in libels and in print.49
Could it be that, for Elizabeth, who all her life was so keenly attuned to family loyalties, Robert Southwell’s case was personal? Could it be that she was dealing not just with a hated Jesuit but with one whose uncle she felt had personally betrayed her, hence her willingness to demand the harshest possible retribution?
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Topcliffe’s distinctive style of torture – as he had claimed in his letter to Elizabeth – was considerably more painful than the traditional rack. Using iron gauntlets to stretch out his victims against the wall like elastic for hours on end, he would leave them there until they seemed to be on the point of death. He then took them down and revived them, only to hang them up again. So intense was the pressure that, in almost every instance, a vein or artery would burst, causing a sudden discharge of blood. At his trial, Southwell would claim that Topcliffe had tormented him like this as many as ten times: so excruciating was it, he said, that ten separate executions would have been preferable.50
Transferred for a month to the Gatehouse, Southwell was deliberately housed in a pauper’s cell, in conditions so disgusting that his whole body was soon stinking and crawling with lice. After his friends protested loudly to the queen, he was escorted by his guards to one of the gloomiest cells in the Tower, where he was kept in solitary confinement for two and a half years.51 At last, on Thursday, 20 February 1595, he was led by soldiers into the Court of Queen’s Bench in Westminster Hall, to be tried before Chief Justice Popham, his wrists lashed together tightly with a cord.
Charged with treason under an Act passed by Parliament in 1585 that had declared all Jesuits and seminary priests to be traitors, Southwell was asked to plead guilty or not guilty. ‘I am a Catholic priest’, he replied, ‘and I thank God for it, but no traitor; neither can any law make it treason to be a priest.’ This was a formula Popham refused to accept. Only when the prisoner withdrew the subversive imputation that the law enacted by Parliament was invalid and pleaded simply, ‘Not guilty of treason’, could the case begin.52
The jury would take less than a quarter of an hour to find Southwell guilty. The next day, he was dragged to the gallows at Tyburn in the fields to the west of the city, where common criminals were hanged. There, Elizabeth’s macabre instructions to the hangman were that, as in 1585, in the failed assassin Dr William Parry’s case, the prisoner should be cut down from the gallows the moment the ladder was kicked away, after just one swing of the rope. Long before he had stopped breathing, Southwell was to be forced to endure the torment of being disembowelled while still fully conscious, the hangman hacking the flesh and bone back beyond the ribs so that the dying man could see his heart and bowels burning in the fire even as he finally expired.
In this, the queen was simply following her father’s method of dealing with inconvenient monks and priors. Except that, this time, things went awry. Allowed to speak a few words from the scaffold before he mounted the ladder, Southwell silenced his audience – who clearly expected something very different from a Jesuit – by praying for the queen and her councillors, just as Thomas More had done in her father’s reign. ‘May she enjoy all gifts of nature and grace’ was Southwell’s imprecation: ‘all helps of friends and faithful councillors, whereby she may reign to God’s glory and after this life be [an] inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.’
On hearing this, the crowd cried out with one voice, demanding that Southwell should not be cut down from the gallows and disembowelled until he was actually dead. And the hangman obliged. It was a rare moment of human compassion in a brutal world of bloodshed and religious violence.53
Camden airbrushed almost all of these events from his Annales. It was one thing to attack the frantic delusions of William Hacket, to whom he devoted several inflammatory pages, but to mention Cartwright or Southwell – and, most of all, Richard Topcliffe – was clearly quite another. Never, at least so far, had the Kafkaesque elements of Elizabeth’s forgotten years been more glaringly on public display.
10. Catastrophe in France
On Monday, 2 August 1591, while the case against Cartwright was still very much alive, the twenty-five-year-old Earl of Essex landed at Dieppe, ready to assume his command in Normandy. Splendidly clad in jewel-encrusted apparel and preceded by a dozen pages in gold-embroidered, orange velvet coats, he greeted his army of 3,400 men near the quayside. His mission, he confidently predicted, would provide him with the breakthrough he needed to succeed his stepfather, Leicester, as the country’s chief war leader.1
The reality would be crushingly different. Despite the bond that drew Essex and Elizabeth together, his career was not her priority. Her orders were clear and concise, her objectives limited. Working alongside Henry IV, he was to recapture Rouen from the Catholic League. He was then to make the town a regional base from which Henry’s forces could guarantee the security of the Channel ports of Normandy, so that they could not be used in a future invasion of England. Afterwards, there was to be a brief, decisive assault to drive the Spaniards out of the Blavet valley in Brittany and send them back to Spain. That was all.
But by presuming that Henry shared her aims, Elizabeth miscalculated. Never really sold on the idea of besieging Rouen, the French king had set his sights on defeating the Duke of Parma’s army in a pitched battle, and on recovering Paris. She had misread his character. Unlike Philip II, who could juggle many balls and keep them high in the air, as Elizabeth was being forced to do herself
, Henry liked to focus on one thing at once and perform it to ‘all his powers’. Compromise was not yet in his vocabulary. At thirty-eight, short of stature but immensely strong, with ruddy cheeks and a high forehead, he was energetic and courageous, accessible and familiar, long on promises but short on delivery. Lengthy speeches and protracted Council meetings he could not abide: a man of action like Essex himself, he tended to strike first and think afterwards.2
His current preoccupation was to capture Noyon, on the border of Picardy, which he told Elizabeth was necessary to protect the main route from Brussels to Paris and to prevent strategic towns such as Saint-Quentin falling into Spanish clutches, should Parma choose to invade again.3 Forbidden by their orders from joining the siege, Essex’s forces were left twiddling their thumbs. The Earl therefore marched his men to Arques, four miles inland from Dieppe, to set up camp, where he conferred with Sir Henry Unton, who reminded him that his commission would expire in two months’ time and that Elizabeth would not pay her soldiers for a day longer.4
Two weeks later, Noyon surrendered, and Sir Roger Williams, whom Elizabeth had put in charge of the six hundred troops sent from Brittany, rode in with letters from Henry inviting Essex to a man-to-man rendezvous at Compiègne, fifty miles north-east of Paris.5 Taking just two hundred cavalry, Essex defied the queen’s instructions by embarking on a perilous ride, travelling incognito through enemy lines for three long, scorchingly hot days, with both horses and men plagued by flies.
After four highly pleasurable days of feasting, entertainment, music and dancing, Essex left Compiègne ‘much troubled’ for his mission. To obey Elizabeth’s instructions would not be so easy. Henry’s enthusiasm for the siege of Rouen was lukewarm. Instead, the French king had decided to march into Champagne, where, as he claimed, his German Reiter would mutiny, unless they were paid.6 The most he could do to help Essex, he said, was ‘shortly’ to detach from his main army twelve thousand men, under Marshal Biron, his most trusted and experienced general, and send them into Normandy. If Essex and Biron were to strike camp ready to besiege Rouen, he would join them as soon as he could.7