The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (45 page)

The new presidencies of the later 1570s were to be financed by composition; a scheme whereby the old military exactions demanded by the Gaelic and Gaelicized lords and the ‘cess’ (levy) exacted by the English garrisons would be surrendered and replaced by an annual rent
charge based on land. The defence of the territory would no longer rest with the lords alone, but with them in alliance with the presidents and their forces, to whom lesser landowners could now look for protection. There would be a certainty – both military and financial – in the new system which was lacking in the old. In a great perambulation throughout Ireland in 1575–6 Sidney negotiated composition agreements with many of the great lords, even in restless Connacht, and was assured of their obedience. But peace talks in Ireland did not generally last. Rumours spread of Sidney’s rapacity; rumours that he had, said the Queen, taken ‘our whole land to farm’. There was widespread discontent and a general call to resistance. The
Mac an Iarlas
, fearing the ruin of the Clanrickard lordship, and hating the English even more than they hated each other, rebelled again in 1576. In the following year the hitherto loyal Palesmen refused the cess – the imposition to pay for the Queen’s unlovely soldiers in Ireland – as a burden they would no longer carry, and they would not countenance composition. This crisis provoked Sidney’s second recall.

Rebellion threatened again, but now when it came it was in the guise of holy war. Sidney had warned the Queen that most of the Irish were ‘Papists… body and soul’; and ‘Romish’ not only in religion, for they looked for a prince of ‘their own superstition’. In July 1579 James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald returned, leading an expeditionary force from Catholic Europe, and raised the papal banner in the far west. He promised to deliver Ireland from the excommunicate ‘she-tyrant’, Elizabeth. Those who joined him might have had motives less elevated. The Geraldine swordsmen, humiliated by the pacific new world of composition which was intended to turn military retainers into husbandmen, rallied. In August 1579 John of Desmond murdered an English official and precipitated the House of Desmond into a revolt which its tormented head, the Earl of Desmond had little choice but to lead. A war between loyal and disloyal Munster lords ensued, with Ormond, Desmond’s old enemy, leading the Crown’s forces. The following summer a Catholic confederacy formed in the Pale, led by James Eustace, Viscount Baltinglas, a nobleman of the Pale. In the name of the Pope, he called upon the leaders of Anglo-Irish society to join his ‘holy enterprise’ and to ‘take the sword’ against the unnatural and unjust supremacy of the Queen. The sons of some leading Pale families joined his cause, and paid with their lives, yet most of the Pale community was, although loyal to Rome, loyal to the Queen also, and did not rise. But the discovery
that even a Dublin alderman had been involved in the conspiracy led to alarm that religious dissidence might turn to open defence of Catholicism, and to a new and minatory atmosphere. The rebellion offered the chance for the Gaelic septs of Leinster to prey upon the Pale, and in August the new, and as yet unwary, chief governor, Lord Grey de Wilton was ignominiously defeated by Fiach MacHugh O’Byrne at Glenmalure Pass in the Wicklow Mountains. In Ulster, Turlough Luineach was always ready to menace the English.

The Desmond rebellion destroyed the House of Desmond, disgraced the Earl of Kildare, alienated Ormond from the Crown, and devastated Munster. The English strategy had been to ‘prey, burn, spoil and destroy’, and it had worked. In the early 15 80s Munster was truly waste and ready for colonization. The rebel remnant, wasted by famine, crept out of woods and glens; ‘anatomies of death; they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves’. This was the approving description of Edmund Spenser, the prophet poet. The papal garrison at the Fort of Gold at Smerwick in the far west of Kerry was massacred in November 1580, its appeals to the laws of nations and the customs of war unheard. One great Elizabethan poet and courtier, Walter Ralegh, was executioner; another, Spenser, was recorder. Poetry was for camps as well as courts. According to Lord Deputy Grey, who ordered the garrison to be cut down, the Irish ‘addiction’ to ‘treachery and breach of fidelity’ was due to their Catholic religion which ‘dispenses’ with oaths from ‘advantage’.

A harder spirit entered English policy. Sir Nicholas Malby warned that if the Queen did not ‘use her sword more sharply, she will lose both sword and realm’. All private quarrels in Ireland, so he told Leicester in August 1580, were now converted into ‘a general matter of religion’. The Irish might now make Catholicism the symbol of national identity and turn Ireland into a battleground of the Counter-Reformation. Ominously, the new battle cry of the rebels was ‘
Papa abo
[The pope above]’. What had not begun as a war of religion might become so at last. If the Pope could send an invading army into Ireland, might he send one into England too?

Catholics had in the ‘days of darkness’ at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign been quiescent and acquiescent. Their hierarchy overthrown, their churches usurped and their faith outlawed, most had responded by
continuing to attend their parish churches as the law demanded, and as no Catholic authority yet insistently forbade. Most Catholics found ways of retaining both their hearts’ allegiance to Rome and their obedience to their sovereign; still performing their public duty, sitting on the magistrates’ bench and in their accustomed pew in church. Those who took the understandable path of least resistance and celebrated according to the rites of the Book of Common Prayer while longing for the Latin ones still thought of themselves as Catholics. Yet for the more uncompromising, they were not; they were schismatics, lost souls. This form of surrender would turn them from half-hearted ‘Catholics’ into half-hearted ‘Protestants’, and would lead to the loss of the old faith in their children’s generation. All Catholics, a great part of the English population, hoped that the Protestant ascendancy was temporary, and that they would not forever be banished in their own land. Many shared a vision that the Church, invincible through history, would be restored. A few began to think that better times would come not by waiting but by working. The lives of would-be loyal and peaceful Catholics could not remain untouched by the increasing militancy of Catholicism at home and abroad. Nicholas Sanders, the most virulent of the polemicists in exile, wrote of the Church on earth arrayed as an army under its papal captain, and he himself sailed as papal emissary to the Fort of Gold in Ireland. A state of warfare between the Churches came to be acknowledged.

The papal bull
Regnans in excelsis
(February 1570) and its consequences in England had made confrontation more likely. When the Pope demanded that Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects withdraw their allegiance he had created a fateful link between loyalty to Rome and disloyalty to the Queen. Stark choices faced Catholics once it became harder to maintain that their conforming attendance at church was other than schism and sin. In the shadow of the Northern rebellion of 1569, the leaders of every shire had been charged to declare their assent to Prayer Book services and to take Communion. Some in conscience could not. Open refusal to attend church was recusancy, and the refusing Catholics, the recusants, were subject to increasing penalties. In 1571 a House of Commons full of vengeful Protestants – the first Parliament to exclude admitted Catholics by the administration of an oath which they could not in conscience swear – extended the treason laws to include all those who imported papal bulls or sacred Catholic objects, who reconciled others to Rome or who were reconciled themselves. Priests were the
agents of reconciliation. Some among the Catholic clergy who had remained in their parishes since Mary’s reign had been urging the spiritual duty of withdrawal from heretic services, envisaging a separated Catholic community; some, of more agile conscience and with a just fear of the consequences of refusal, had said Prayer Book services in public and sung Mass in private. For many Catholics any crisis of conscience might have been passing, as long as sympathetic clergy continued to celebrate something that looked like the Mass, and while ‘papist’ midwives assisted childbirth with Latin invocations and illegal baptisms. But from 1574 these efforts to sustain the Catholic faithful were inspired by priests of another kind.

Almost a thousand years after St Augustine’s mission to England another mission was launched. By the mid 1570s the young exiles at William Allen’s English College at Douai in Flanders (founded in 1568) were studying the Jesuit spiritual exercises along with doctrine, and in 1574 the first seminary-educated missionary priest arrived in England. The mission of the seminary priests was less to convert than to rescue conforming Catholics from schism: to be pastors in the spiritual wilderness. They came to insist that recusancy was the spiritual duty of every Catholic, and to sustain them, illegally and secretly, for as long as was necessary. Although Catholic polemic was uncompromising, priests, faced with human weakness and troubled times, might temporize. The missionary priests did not invent the idea of a separated recusant Catholic community, but their arrival made that prospect more likely.

Without priests as agents of sacramental grace, Catholics could hardly be Catholics. But the arrival of the seminary priests brought not only new hope but new danger. Reconciling the faithful to Rome was treason; abetting it was scarcely less so. Priests were fugitive and needed shelter, so Catholic gentry who protested sincerely their loyalty to the Queen found themselves sheltering outlawed priests in their households, for to protect a priest was a duty hard for any Catholic to refuse when the faith depended upon it. Priests disguised as lay stewards, servants, teachers and soldiers, moved from house to house saying Mass, always in danger of betrayal and detection. In 1577 Richard Grenville, the Protestant Sheriff of Cornwall, arrived at the house of a Catholic neighbour, Francis Tregian, whom he disliked for more than religion, and found Tregian’s steward in the garden wearing a forbidden
Agnus Dei
. This was Cuthbert Mayne, a Douai priest. Priests, if caught, were faced with a single choice: apostasy or death. Martyrdom was the risk they
knowingly took at ordination. In the English College at Rome scholars read chapters from their martyrologies at dinner, telling of the saints executed at Tyburn. Mayne was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1577, the first of more than 200 Catholics martyred during Elizabeth’s reign.

The Catholic mission was spiritual. Yet the priests, as emissaries of the Pope who had used his deposing power against the Queen, were enemy agents and traitors. Elizabeth and her Council knew that the overwhelming majority of her recusant Catholic subjects were, as they themselves insisted, loyal, anxious for a quiet life, obedient to the Queen in everything save church attendance, obedient to the Pope only in spiritual matters: what they could never know, until the test came, was precisely which Catholics were loyal and which might not be. Until and unless they knew, all Catholics were under suspicion; an enemy within. Until the late 1570s Catholics were treated with a remarkable latitude: ‘By a merciful connivance [they] enjoyed their own service of God in their private houses’, wrote the historian William Camden. The Queen remained reluctant for violence to be offered to consciences.

The arrival of the first English mission sent by the Society of Jesus, under Edmund Campion and Robert Persons, the Pope’s ‘white boys’, in June 1580 changed things. But how could two Jesuits, however brilliant and compelling, threaten so entrenched a Protestant establishment? There was no doubting their power to inspire. Campion vowed that the Jesuits would persevere in their mission ‘while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun.’ Campion’s audacity in travelling through England, celebrating the sacraments and writing controversial tracts, intensified the search for him. In July 1581 he was arrested, and in the Tower he disputed with his opponents. On 1 December he went to Tyburn. But the Jesuits had been sent to England as leaders of a special mission, not as martyrs; to keep the faith alive, not to die for it. To do their job, they must live. Hence the Jesuits’ need for worldliness and their development of the art of casuistry – the answering of interrogators’ questions subtly enough to escape and thereby to continue to catechize and to celebrate.

The arrival of the Jesuit mission coincided with a crisis for the godly. By the later 1570s England’s Protestants feared that all their gains were illusory. English Catholics were, after twenty years, not retreating but resurgent. They were protected by friends in the highest places, and Masses were celebrated even in the heart of London. Early in 1575 there
were rumours that Philip II would persuade Elizabeth to allow four Jesuits to preach in England; an advance guard of militant Tridentine Catholicism, the faith redefined and strengthened by the Council of Trent. Catholics, and especially the Jesuits, were believed to have wiles to win over even the wary. Spenser’s tale of the easy seduction of the kid (the simple, faithful Christian) by the guileful (papist) fox in his
Shepherd’s Calendar
was written in 1579, a dark period for England’s godly, when some feared that even the Queen might succumb to flattering Catholic counsels.