The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (57 page)

This was no easy time to set the claims of the conscience against the laws of the state; to decide whether to obey God’s laws or man’s. At this moment, when disagreements over religion were ‘at their highest float’, Richard Hooker published the first four books of the
Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
, his masterly apologia for the Church of England, and his polemical manifesto for its reform. He adumbrated the degenerative dangers of puritan pluralism and schism, and advocated an ordered world in which membership of the Church of England and the commonwealth would be reciprocal. But that compromise church, moored between Rome and Geneva, which was the ideal of the Elizabethan establishment, was still scorned by both confessional sides. Job Throckmorton – Martin Marprelate’s alter ego? – had complained in Parliament
in 1587 that ‘obedience to the law of man is the whole sum of religion in this age’, and a form of irreligion.

At about the time that the harshest penalties were being imposed on nonconformists, John Donne wrote his disloyal, radical
Satire 3
. ‘Seek true religion. O where?’ His speaker in the satire was unconvinced by all the reasons for choosing Catholicism, Calvinism, conformity or separatism. Truth must be found by ‘mind’s endeavours’ – tough thinking – for the consequence of the wrong choice was not human punishment but divine. The seeker disparaged the civil penalties which awaited the doubter and nonconformist:

Donne had had his own searing experience of religious repression. In May 1593 a young man was arrested in the rooms of Donne’s brother Henry, on suspicion of being a Catholic priest. Faced with torture, Henry Donne betrayed him. The priest was executed, and Henry Donne died that summer in a plague-infested prison. John Donne, now under the surveillance of priest-takers, betrayed the Catholic Church of his father, and made the soul-destroying choice that the seeker in his satire condemned:

Some did refuse to conform, risking ‘man’s laws’. Sir Thomas Tresham built a triangular lodge on his Northamptonshire estate in 1593: a profession of his Catholic faith in stone. It was an Elizabethan conceit, an allegory of the Trinity and of the Mass. Around the frieze ran an inscription of 33 letters: ‘
Quis separabit nos a charitate Christi
? [Who will separate us from the love of Christ]’ Who indeed? The government certainly tried to separate Tresham from his Catholic allegiance. Rome was still the enemy, the Pope was still the ‘Man of Sin’, and fear of Catholic subversion had never gone away. The spiritual mission to regenerate Catholicism in England was set to continue indefinitely so long as the persecution intended the faith’s oblivion. ‘The weapons of our warfare’ were solely spiritual, insisted Robert Southwell, the Jesuit: ‘Our prisons preach, our punishments convert, our dead quarters
and bones confound your heresy.’ But after 1584 the leaders of the mission, Persons and Allen, turned to writing radical theories of resistance. English Catholics did not listen to their call to arms when the Armada came, and leading Catholic gentry petitioned the Queen to be allowed to fight for her against the Pope. They wanted the faith restored, but not by invading Spaniards and ‘the Pope’s bridge of wood made on the seas’. Yet suspicions remained that they might choose differently next time.

Catholics insistently refuted the charges made in proclamations that they were ‘unnatural subjects’; fugitives, rebels and traitors. Yet with every invasion scare, every shift in European politics, the danger for all Catholics grew. Every quiescent Catholic was affected by the militancy of a very few. Successive legislation had made priests traitors, and the lay Catholics who knowingly aided them felons. Catholic loyalty was always suspect while the priests worked secretly and unseen. Isolated and hunted, in the midst of Protestant communities, the tiny band of Catholic priests, Jesuits and seminarians took extraordinary risks to say Mass, to preach and to return people to the Catholic fold. The Catholic community lived in a state of siege, keeping the faith whether a priest came or not. But when a priest did arrive in their neighbourhood, the local laity must feed him, shelter him undetected, often in concealed priest-holes, and then speed him on his way. When Robert Southwell left for the mission in 1586, he was already under observation. Stationed in London, often sheltered there by the Countess of Arundel, Southwell received priests whose missions led them to the capital. At the end of 1588 he was sent on a missionary tour. Sometimes he called in disguise upon Protestant sheriffs who, seeing his elegant clothes and aristocratic retinue, welcomed him with sumptuous banquets. Secretly, he ministered to hidden Catholics in their households. But by February 1592 Henry Garnet, Southwell’s superior, feared that there was nowhere left for him to hide. In June Southwell travelled from Fleet Street to celebrate Mass at the Bellamys’ house at Uxenden in Middlesex, and there he was betrayed by his host’s sister. Three years of solitary confinement and torture followed until his martyrdom in February 1595.

Since the priests were sent as missionaries, not as martyrs, they must stay alive and at large and learn to survive among heretics who hated them, and whose heresy they hated. Manuals offered answers to ‘cases of conscience’. What should a Catholic do when, while among heretics, his companions began to sing psalms, or wanted to take him to church
with them? If, while travelling, a priest was questioned about his destination or his religion, should he avoid the question or was he bound to tell the truth? To the last, Allen and Persons answered that he was bound never to deny his faith, but needed not to confess it if it meant endangering his life. How to avoid telling the truth without lying? They were taught ways of misleading an unjust interrogator while not breaking the absolute prohibition on lying. At his trial, Robert Southwell admitted advising a woman that, if asked upon oath whether she had seen a priest, she could answer ‘no’ by keeping in her mind the meaning that she did not see him with the intention of betraying him. Most dangerous of all was the ‘bloody question’ which demanded which side a Catholic would take in the event of a papal invasion.

Catholic resistance centred upon the symbolic act of not going to church, of never intending to go. This was to show the world what it was to be Catholic. Attendance at heretic rites was sinful. Yet adherence to Rome was a very costly choice. There was what Bishop Aylmer called ‘pecuniary pain’; the monthly recusancy fines of £20 for richer Catholics, who grew steadily poorer. Some suffered long imprisonment; what Sir Thomas Tresham called ‘the furnace of our many years’ adversity’. Nonconforming Catholics were excluded from Parliament, from office holding, and from university education. After 1593 they could not travel more than five miles from their homes without a licence. And beyond these mortifying disabilities there was their sense of alienation, isolation and terror.

The priests, recognizing human frailty and that absolute recusancy and separation might even damage the Catholic cause if it led to expropriation and oblivion, condoned concession and compromise. They allowed Catholics to attend Protestant services with the heretics; to wait upon England’s eventual return to Rome. ‘Just fear’, the necessity to save a family from ruin, could justify occasional conformity. In compassion, the leaders of the mission, with assurance from Pope Clement VIII, allowed that conforming Catholics could be easily absolved from what was still a sin. From as early as 1582 these conforming Catholics were abusively known as ‘church papists’. Church papistry seemed then an almost irresistible way out, although the vision of a truly restored Church was based upon the official fiction of undeviating recusancy. Faced with the prospect of imprisonment and impoverishment, Catholics moved from recusancy to church papistry, and back again. Men attended church from time to time, often leaving their recusant wives at home; or
they came to church but did not receive Communion, or only rarely. And while conforming for ‘fashion sake’, they promised themselves that they would make satisfaction; that they would live in one faith and die in another. In the North and West those of Catholic sympathies inclined to recusancy, but in the Midlands and South nominal conformity predominated.

Church papistry might be particularly necessary for those families upon whom many others depended: the nobility and gentry. The Catholic leaders recognized that any movement needed the protection of the great, who must keep their positions of honour so that after the death of Elizabeth they could forward the faith. Many of the Elizabethan titled nobility and members of their families were Catholic or crypto-Catholic. Special dispensation was granted to noblemen and women to attend upon the Queen when she went to church. Viscount Montague kept a Catholic household, managed by his saintly wife, but still attended upon the Queen. But for a few, conformity was agony. Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, reconverted to his faith by Campion’s public disputations of doctrine in the Tower in September 1581, paced around Westminster Abbey during services or found excuses for staying away, until finally he could conform no longer. He was captured while escaping to exile.

The survival of the faith under persecution owed much to the protection of Catholic congregations by the nobility and gentry. The old ways of deference would incline a tenant to follow the faith of his lord, and that deference might be strengthened if the lord defended that faith. The great Catholic households could provide an alternative to the parish. Although the processions and festivals which had been so vital a part of the old religion were lost, within great households the celebration of the major Catholic feasts could be subsumed within the annual cycle of hospitality. The priest could be a guest among others, or live in the house disguised as a tutor or steward. Church papists could worship within the parish for the sake of legality, but receive Catholic rites within the household for the sake of religion. The whole household could be endangered if one disaffected servant revealed to the authorities the Catholic ways followed within it. Yet many Catholics
were
still the authorities. They saw no conflict between devotion to Rome and devotion to the Queen, and insisted upon their duty to serve her by upholding civil law and order. In Lancashire, Cheshire and Sussex, even a generation after the purges of the 1560s, church papistry persisted within the commissions of the peace and the town corporations. The
vice-president of the Council in the Marches of Wales was the occasional conformist Sir John Throckmorton. Many local gentry were, as JPs, unenthusiastic persecutors of Catholic neighbours, to whom they were bound by ties of kinship and friendship. Philip Sidney found the prospect of collecting recusancy fines repugnant.

The presbyterian movement had, by the early 1590s, been shattered, but the zeal of the godly community had not. And Catholicism had been broken as a political force, but survived as a living faith. Protestantism and Catholicism became more divided over the great issues of faith: grace, free will, sin, predestination, justification, scripture, sacraments and the authority of the Church. And there were now ominous divisions among Protestants themselves. Through the 1570s and 1580s disputes among the godly had centred upon the debate about the system of church government, not about doctrine, for within the English Church Calvinism was ascendant. Calvinism had entered its dogmatic phase, as the systematizers of Calvin’s ideas – the most brilliant of whom was William Perkins – advanced views on predestination which were still more uncompromising than Calvin’s. Perkins taught that God had divided mankind unconditionally into the elect and the reprobate, even before the Fall of Adam, and denied that grace was universal. Yet some within the Church began to question these central doctrines as too deterministic and to assert that election and reprobation were
conditional
. They believed that Christ had died for all, and that saving grace was offered to all (if not granted to all); they impugned the Calvinist doctrine of Christian assurance. In the mid 1590s the foundations and consensuality of Elizabethan Protestantism were assaulted, and dangerous crypto-papist doctrines came to threaten the peace of the Church.

Presbyterians and Catholics alike knew that there would be no advance for their causes while the Queen lived, and they awaited her death as a day of judgement. Robert Southwell wrote that England was ‘so full of makebates and factions’ that the prospective ‘civil mutinies’ were worse than any enemy invasion. As the question of the succession grew more urgent, some Catholic exiles, including Persons, combined to write a work of radical resistance theory. The
Conference about the Next Succession
(1595) argued that, while hereditary monarchy was the best principle of government, neither monarchy nor the principle of succession were inviolable. The monarch who broke the coronation oath and covenant with the people was a tyrant and might be deposed
by the people, who could also alter the course of succession. The work was dedicated to the figure in Elizabethan politics to whom aspirant groups – Catholic or puritan – foreign heads of state, soldiers, writers and the people now turned: the Earl of Essex.