Jesuit Martyrs and the Tudor Terror

Can you imagine any Jesuit today dying for the Faith? James (Jimmy Boy) Martin, SJ? Antonio (2+2=5) Spadaro, SJ? I certainly can't!

From Catholic World Report

By Joseph Pearce

Editor’s note: The following in an exclusive excerpt from Joseph Pearce’s new book, Faith of Our Fathers: A History of True England (Ignatius Press).

In October 1588, a few short weeks after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, a young Jesuit priest, just turned twenty-four-years-old, landed secretly on the coast of Norfolk. This was Father John Gerard, who was destined to become one of the most successful of all the missionary priests and therefore one of the most wanted by Elizabeth’s government. He would serve the English mission in East Anglia for the next five and a half years, evading arrest and eluding the authorities. He was finally arrested in April 1594 and then, after three years in prison, was moved to the Tower of London to be tortured. In October 1597 he made a daring escape from the Tower, by means of a rope stretched from a cannon on the roof of one of the towers across the moat to a wharf on the river Thames.

Father Gerard remained at large for the next eight years, moving mostly between Northamptonshire and London, serving England’s Catholics, including those high-ranking Catholics who had access to the queen’s court, such as the Earl of Southampton, a favourite of the queen who was, at the same time, a devout Catholic and confidant of the Jesuit priest, St. Robert Southwell, as well as being William Shakespeare’s patron. William Byrd, composer of the Chapel Royal, was another of the queen’s favourites. Although Elizabeth knew of Byrd’s recusancy, she not only chose to turn a blind eye to it but instructed her ministers to protect him from the anti-Catholic laws. On more than one occasion, court records show that efforts to fine Byrd and his wife for their refusal to attend Anglican services were abandoned “by order of the Queen’s Attorney General”.¹ Not only did Elizabeth intervene personally to rescue Byrd from persecution, she even made him a gift, in 1595, of the lease of Stondon Place, in recognition of his faithful service as her court composer. And yet, according to Byrd’s biographer, “loyal and circumspect as Byrd undoubtedly was, he was more intimately involved in Catholic circles, and probably knew more about Catholic intrigues, than is betrayed by the bare written records”.² If this is true of Byrd, it is equally true of William Shakespeare, who was raised in a recusant home and who appears to have retained his Catholic sympathies following his arrival in London.

The parallels between William Byrd and William Shakespeare are worthy of note. There is evidence that Byrd might have known the Jesuit martyr, Edmund Campion, as there is evidence that Shakespeare probably knew the Jesuit martyr, Robert Southwell, and it is conjectured that Byrd might have been in the crowd who witnessed Campion’s martyrdom, and that Shakespeare might have witnessed the martyrdom of Southwell. William Byrd set part of St. Henry Walpole’s poem eulogizing Campion to music, risking the ire of the queen by publishing his musical setting of the poem in 1588, and Shakespeare alludes to the poetry of St. Robert Southwell in several of his plays, including Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet and King Lear.

If Jesuit priests, such as John Gerard and Robert Southwell, managed to evade capture for several years, other newly-arrived priests were not so fortunate. Four priests who arrived on the north-east coast of England in March 1590, expecting to be met as they landed and then taken from one safe house to another, found that they were utterly alone and without any help, the underground network having been betrayed by spies. With little option but to make the long journey south without any assistance, they made the fatal mistake of travelling together and not splitting up. Betrayed by someone who pretended to be a Catholic to gain their confidence, they were tried and executed. Fathers Richard Hill, John Hogg, Richard Holiday and Edmund Duke were hanged, drawn and quartered on May 27, 1590, at Dryburn on the outskirts of Durham.

The way in which the homes of recusants were raided and searched by the government’s priest-hunters was described by Robert Southwell:

Their manner of searching is to come with a troop of men to the house as though they come to fight a-field. They beset the house on every side, then they rush in and ransack every corner – even women’s beds and bosoms – with such insolent behavior that their villainies in this kind are half a martyrdom. The men they command to stand and to keep their places; and whatsoever of price cometh in their way, many times they pocket it up, as jewels, plate, money and such like ware, under pretense of papistry…. When they find any books, church stuff, chalices, or other like things, they take them away, not for any religion that they care for but to make a commodity.³

In October 1591, nine or ten Jesuits, several other priests, as well as a number of laymen who were living in hiding, were gathered for a conference at Baddesley Clinton, a large recusant house in Warwickshire. Fearing that there were not enough priest holes in which to hide such a large number of outlaws, the meeting was kept short. Several of the priests and laymen dispersed, leaving the remnant at the house. At five o’clock on the following morning, the house was raided. “I was making my meditation,” wrote Fr. Gerard, “Father Southwell was beginning Mass and the rest were at prayer, when suddenly I heard a great uproar outside the main door.” There was much shouting and swearing at a servant who was refusing entrance to the priest-hunters. Had not this “faithful servant held them back … we should have all been caught.”

With no time to lose, Fr. Southwell slipped off his vestments and stripped the altar bare. Meanwhile, the other priests grabbed all their personal belongings so that nothing was left to betray the presence of a priest. “Even our boots and swords were hidden away,” wrote Fr. Gerard, “they would have roused suspicions if none of the people they belonged to were to be found.”⁴ The five Jesuit priests, three of whom were destined to die martyrs’ deaths, two secular priests and two or three laymen clambered into a sort of cave hidden underground, the floor of which was covered with water. Here they remained for four hours while the priest hunters delved into every corner, and every nook and cranny, seeking in vain for their prey. Although Robert Southwell escaped the clutches of Elizabeth’s henchmen on this occasion, he would finally be betrayed the following year after eluding capture for six years. He would face three years of brutal torture, never once divulging information to his torturers. His astonishing resilience and courage earned him the grudging respect of one of those who witnessed his excruciating suffering. “They boast about the heroes of antiquity,” wrote Robert Cecil, the son of Lord Burghley (William Cecil), Elizabeth’s chief minister, “but we have a new torture which it is not possible for a man to bear. And yet I have seen Robert Southwell hanging by it, still as a tree trunk, and no one able to drag one word from his mouth.”⁵

In the autumn of 1593, another Jesuit, Fr. Henry Walpole, set sail for England. His journey was tracked by Elizabeth’s spies and he was hunted down and arrested only three days after he had landed at Bridlington in Yorkshire. After a brief period of imprisonment in York Castle, he was transferred to the Tower of London. There he was tortured on no fewer than fourteen occasions under the supervision of the sadistic Richard Topcliffe, suffering the same grisly fate as his Jesuit confrere, Robert Southwell. Both men would be hanged, drawn and quartered, the common fate of most of the martyrs, in 1595.

Standing in the cart at Tyburn, beneath the gibbet and with the noose around his neck, Fr. Southwell made the sign of the cross and recited a passage from Romans, chapter nine. When the sheriff tried to interrupt him, those in the crowd, many of whom were sympathetic to the Jesuit’s plight, shouted that he should be allowed to speak. He confessed that he was a Jesuit priest and prayed for the salvation of the queen and his country. As the cart was drawn away, he commended his soul to God in the same words that Christ had used from the Cross: In manus tuas (Into your hands Lord I commend my spirit). As he hung in the noose, some onlookers pushed forward and tugged at his legs to hasten his death before he could be cut down and disemboweled alive. Southwell was thirty-three-years-old, the same age as Christ at the time of his Crucifixion.

Endnotes:

¹ David Mateer, “William Byrd’s Middlesex Recusancy”, Music and letters 78, no. 1 (February 1997), 1-14

² John Harley, William Byrd: Gentleman of the Royal Chapel (Bookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing, 1997), 77

³ Robert S. Miola, ed., Early Modern Catholicism: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 34

⁴ John Gerard, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan (Oxford: Family Publications, 2006), 41-2

⁵ Hugh Ross Williamson, The Day Shakespeare Died (London: Michael Joseph, 1962), 57