Heretic Queen (41 page)

Though Turner and Topcliffe had failed in 1587, the earlier Parliament of 1584–85 had prevailed. Legislation had been passed to transform the collection of recusancy fines into an efficient tax collection system for the exchequer. The theory behind the law was to stop the steady overcrowding and overwork in England's courts. Recusants would continue to be convicted in absentia on the sole evidence of informers. Few, if any, judges troubled themselves to discover if the informers were relatives or disgruntled neighbors or former friends of the defendants.
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Indeed, as many were to learn, their nearest family were often their worst enemies, especially when a juicy inheritance was the prize.

That same Parliament passed a new Treason Act, specifically aimed at Jesuit priests and those who harbored them, providing that any layman who “shall wittingly and willingly receive, relieve, comfort, aid, or maintain any such Jesuit, seminary priest … shall … for such offence be adjudged a felon.” The penalty was, naturally, death. The reaction among the Catholic gentry was immediate. A secret and urgent meeting was called at Hoxton, to the west of the City of London, where the leading Catholic gentry including Sir Thomas Tresham, Sir William Catesby, and Lord Vaux were assembled. After much heated discussion, they agreed that “the priests shall shift for themselves abroad, as in inns or such like places, and not visit any Papists … except they be sent for.” Lord Vaux agreed to pay a relief for priests who remained in the country of “one hundred marks” apiece.
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Little did they know that Walsingham's most highly skilled spy, Nicholas Berden, was also present, taking copious notes.

*   *   *

This was only part
of the unfolding drama for Catholics in 1588. The rise in executions—in all seventeen priests, nine Catholic laymen, and one woman, Margaret Ward, who was charged with providing the priest William Weston with rope to escape his prison at Bridewell—was shocking. Margaret Ward, crippled by her captors on the rack, generated tremendous sympathy. Elizabeth was so outraged by the effects of the torture that she “pardoned two other women who had borne themselves before the tribunal with singular courage,” Garnet wrote to the superior general in Rome in the month before Gerard's Norfolk landing.
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In a way, the greatest threat to the Jesuit reconversion of England to Catholicism was the Jesuits themselves. Since Campion's and Persons's time, they had singularly been unable to establish a bridgehead anywhere in the country. It was Garnet's duty to reverse and revive their fortunes, and Norfolk seemed the best place to begin that task. Not only did the Norfolk coast provide a perfect landing station, but it had a skein of Catholic families, intertwined and interrelated, who would provide the close-knit network Garnet so desperately needed.

Garnet's companion from Rome, Robert Southwell, was a Norfolk lad, born at Horsham St. Faith. He grew up in the shadow of the Benedictine prior acquired by his grandfather, Sir Richard, in the time of Henry VIII. Like many other good Catholic families, the Southwells had benefited personally from the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Besides, Southwell knew better than most just how Norfolk society worked. So when Henry Garnet issued instructions to concentrate their efforts on ministering to the Norfolk gentry in a first instance, he approved. After all, Robert's father still lived at Horsham St. Faith, though he had long before converted to the Anglican Church. After Norfolk, the plan was to knit their network throughout England to bind themselves to other Catholic gentry.

The Southwells knew the other great Catholic families in the county well. Southwells had married into the Bedingfields of Oxburgh Hall, and the Bedingfields had married into the Yelvertons. In the spring of 1589, it was time for John Gerard to put his new plan into place to secure the Jesuit toehold in Norfolk using this very family network.

Just south of Grimston lies the village of Oxborough and its hall, a magnificent moated manor house built in the 1480s, complete with decorative crenulations and battlements. John Gerard was brought there by Edward Yelverton, with whom he had lodged for the previous six months. The owner of Oxburgh Hall, Thomas Bedingfield, had given the Jesuit priests his blessing to make a minor alteration to his palatial home. Yelverton and Gerard were accompanied by an Oxford-born carpenter and joiner of remarkable talent, Nicholas Owen. It was Owen who would complete the desired works.

Owen, a small and wiry man, had grown up in the shadow of Oxford Castle in the parish of St. Peter Le Bailey at 3 Castle Street. Nicknamed “Little John” or “Little Michael” by Gerard, Owen had volunteered his exceptional services to Henry Garnet sometime in the autumn of 1588 or spring of 1589. Owen had completed his apprenticeship to William Conway, an Oxford joiner, four years earlier and in the intervening period had perfected the art of fine furniture making, which included virtually undetectable hides for priests. Yelverton had vouched for Gerard to Bedingfield, and Gerard did the same for Owen. The purpose of the visit was to build a hide at Oxburgh Hall that would escape the detection of the shire searchers.

Garnet best explained how it worked to Jesuit General Claudio Acquaviva. “When the priests first arrive from the seminaries, we give them every help we can. The greater part of them, as the opportunity offers, we place in fixed residences. This is done in a very large number of families through our offices.” Gerard's job was to reconcile the gentry to this plan and have them take in a priest. Owen's was to build a virtually undetectable hide. Each hide would be different—like a bespoke piece of furniture specifically built for its space.

Still, Owen was but one man. After Oxburgh, it was quite clear that he was streaks ahead of any other “priest-hole” builder of his day. So it was quite natural that Owen would only build hides for the “Chiefest Catholic houses” and build up a thriving consultancy advising others in his art.
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More exceptional still was Owen's utter silence about any of the places where he had worked.

At Oxburgh Hall, the hide still stands in the garderobe just off the King's Room. There is a small recess of door height against the interior wall that is common in the reuse of space. When one steps close to the recess wall and puts one's weight onto it, a portion of the wall swings open, revealing the hide beneath. The access cover is nine inches thick and cannot be detected from outside as a hollow space. Beyond, the L-shaped room measuring approximately three feet wide by seven feet high was where the priests would hide in the event of searchers arriving unexpectedly.

By 1590, Thomas Bedingfield was dead. His heir, Henry, aged eight, had been anonymously accused of “treasonable designs” with papists, and the Norfolk justice of the peace ordered Oxburgh Hall diligently searched. Nothing and no one was found. Owen's hide, where the priests took cover, had withstood its first test. So, from Oxburgh Hall, the Jesuit network grew. If priests were to minister to their flocks in the homes of the gentry, they would be provided with hides, preferably built by Nicholas Owen.

 

TWENTY-FOUR

Marprelate, Puritans, Catholics, and Players

The Martinists or Puritans were much more dangerous for domestic broils, than the Spaniards were for open wars.

—Archbishop Whitgift

The battle for the hearts and minds of Elizabeth's subjects was as alive in 1589 as it had been thirty years earlier when she ascended the throne. Father Robert Persons had strengthened his link with Spain to found a seminary at Valladolid. Within four years others would be founded at Seville, St. Lucar, and St. Omer in the Spanish Netherlands. Persons would never acknowledge that his actions upset a growing number of Catholics in England, known as the Appellants, who would remain steadfastly loyal to Elizabeth and abhor the threats of a Spanish or papal invasion.
1

Persons's ensuing print war in the post-Armada period sought to defend the innocence of the Jesuit mission and priestly vocation. Naturally, the Puritans responded. Ballads, chapbooks, and other forms of cheap print proclaimed their authors' worldview, and Elizabethan censorship swung into high gear. Though Catholic texts had long been banned and seen as subversive, a new voice was raised that grabbed the reader's heart. The Jesuit cause in England had found a new poet, the first true wordsmith since Campion—Robert Southwell. His poignant “Vale of Tears,” only one of hundreds of poems, describes a forbidding landscape that could be England as much as a soul conscious of sin:

A vale there is enwrapped with dreadful shades,

Which thick of mourning pines shrouds from the sun,

Where hanging cliffs yield short and dumpish glades,

And snowy flood with broken streams doth run.
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Where Robert Southwell had become the new voice of Catholicism in England, another furtive writer emerged—Martin Marprelate. Martin Marprelate was, of course, a pseudonym, and the Marprelate tracts lacked the poetry and deep emotion of Southwell. To this day, no one knows for certain who the “Marprelate” author or authors were, though many have been suspected, from the Catholic Robert Persons to the playwrights John Lyly, Thomas Nashe, and Walsingham's man Anthony Munday. Martin's message was raucously Presbyterian in tone, unforgiving, racy, and, most dangerously, written in colloquial prose that appealed to the masses. In a society that had just begun to recognize the significance of the printed word, the Marprelate tracts were dangerous enough. They became positively seditious when they began to be performed on the stage.

By 1589, the Martin Marprelate controversy was racing ahead at full tilt. Eight tracts had been printed—none favorable to the Elizabethan settlement. The Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney, became apoplectic with rage once these began to appear in London's playhouses. Unless and until someone could stop these outrageous sketches, Tilney would have to close the theaters. The Lord Mayor wrote his confirmation to Burghley that he understood “it was your honours [
sic
] pleasure, that I should give order for the stay of all plays within the city, in that Mr. Tilney did utterly mislike the same.”
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A special censorship commission of three men was appointed with Tilney as its main member. Burghley evidently took a lively interest, as did Elizabeth, whose passions had long been the theater, music, dance, and pageantry. The Corporation of London was represented on the censorship commission, too, since it had a public duty to preserve public order from the “Martinists,” as fans of the tracts were called. The third member on the commission was a divinity expert appointed by Archbishop Whitgift. The issue for the mostly Puritan corporation and aldermen of London was not so much the regulation of plays, as it remained for the crown and Tilney, but the suppression of plays altogether.
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*   *   *

Given that the players,
actors to us today, were a crucial part of everyday entertainment at court and around the country, as well as a secret weapon in Elizabeth's arsenal of spies, ceding control of censorship of the theaters to the Puritan aldermen in London was an anathema to Elizabeth. Long before Walsingham came to power, William Cecil, as Lord Burghley was known in the 1560s, had used the services of playwrights like George Gascoigne and poets like Edward Dyer to report on activities of certain noblemen in whose homes they had entertained. This practice continued throughout Elizabeth's reign.

In the winter of 1585 when Elizabeth had dispatched Thomas Bodley to Frederick II of Denmark with the message “that [it is] the purpose of the Guise to force the king [of France] to deprive the King of Navarre of his succession to the crown,” Walsingham had reinforced Bodley with two of his best spies, Robert Poley and Nicholas Skerres. The “English gentlemen” Poley and Skerres were met in Denmark by Leicester's Men, who had come to play at Elsinore Castle for the Danish king the following spring, reporting to them on the Dutch debacle.
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Poley and Skerres brought the intelligence from both Holland and Denmark back to Walsingham.

Burghley had used the impoverished scholar Christopher Marlowe from the playwright's early Cambridge days as a spy, with the attraction from Marlowe's viewpoint being extra money and privileges. It was Burghley who had rescued the outspoken Marlowe in 1587 when he had been accused of defecting to Rheims. Burghley had been in charge of Marlowe's “mock” interrogation, and Burghley released Marlowe back to his duties on behalf of the crown.
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*   *   *

The links between
the theater, the secret service, and political controversy would rumble on. Meanwhile, the censorship of plays was to be the commission's primary function, just as the Stationers' had been to license and censor all that was fit to print since 1559. The main reason for the thirty-year gap between print and performing censorship is attributable to the growing popularity of the new Elizabethan theater in the 1570s and the proliferation of companies of players with patrons from the queen through most of her top nobility. Elizabeth herself was quite willing to see representations of current political events staged, such as Marlowe's
Massacre at Paris
or John Lyly's
Endymion
and
Sappho and Phao.
The Marprelate plays were another matter entirely.

The controversial Martinist plays have not survived and have only come down to us by allusions to the portions most offensive to Elizabethans. However, over twenty tracts survive in print.
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Mar-Martine
and
A Whip for an Ape; or, Martin Displayed
were the first to be performed in the summer of 1589. Thought to have been written by John Lyly and Thomas Nashe, these plays were the beginning of the furor and are usually blamed for the rise in Elizabethan censorship of the stage: