Elizabeth's Spymaster (10 page)

The Privy Council was goaded into urgent action and sought reports from all dioceses of the local levels of recusancy in order to evaluate the scale of the problem. They also proposed to collect the more obdurate and lock them up in what today would be seen as internment camps. A document from this period, in Walsingham’s handwriting, lists ten castles to be used for this purpose – Wisbech and Kimbolton (Cambridgeshire); Banbury (Oxfordshire); Framlingham (Suffolk); Portchester (Hampshire); The Vize (Wiltshire); Melborne (Derbyshire); Hatton (Cheshire); Wigmore (Herefordshire); and Barnard Castle (Durham). The plan was never fully carried out, but several castles were commandeered as prisons for Catholics.
⁴⁷
Of these, Wisbech became the most notorious.
⁴⁸

The first prisoners were sent there in October 1580 after the Bishop of Ely, Richard Cox, was asked to put the castle ‘in order and strength’. Catholic priests were to be confined at Wisbech and Banbury and laymen in the many London jails. Eight priests, including Thomas Watson, the Marian Bishop of Lincoln,
⁴⁹
and Abbot John Feckenham
⁵⁰
of Westminster Abbey became inmates, held under a strict regime. The prisoners were locked in separate rooms and only released for meals and thirty minutes’ exercise before dinner and supper every day. Discipline and confinement
were relaxed following the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, when there were about thirty-five prisoners held there. Visitors were permitted, as were servants, and the priests were allowed out to stroll around the town surrounding the castle.

The community held loosely within the walls of Wisbech became a kind of ecclesiastical college, a forum for debating theological issues and a place of pilgrimage for Catholic laity from far and wide,
⁵¹
particularly for the sons of the gentry, who arrived disguised as servants. One Catholic prisoner recounted how he secretly celebrated Mass at the castle:

In the dead of night, we were enabled to obtain vestments by a rope, which was let down from [a] window [above] and in the early morning, before the wardens and other prisoners were awake, we returned them in the same manner.
⁵²

Discipline became so lax that in 1590, allegations of slackness were made against the prisoners’ keeper, Thomas Gray, and a commission was appointed to investigate conditions there. Matters had truly got out of hand at Wisbech: the priests could unlock each other’s doors, they interrupted Gray’s Puritan prayers by whistling and stamping on the floorboards of the room above and even his daughter Ursula had become a Catholic convert. The inquiry recommended that ‘trustworthy townsmen’ should be chosen to assist the keeper, who was not allowed to absent himself from the castle without permission; visits were stopped; letters were to be censored; and no communication between prisoners permitted except at meal times.
⁵³

Elsewhere, overly optimistic attempts were made to persuade recusant prisoners of the errors of their religious ways. A group was taken to York Cathedral in August 1580 for indoctrination, where they were exhorted to ‘forsake your vain and erroneous opinions of Popery and conform yourselves with all dutiful obedience to [the] true religion now established’. These earnest pleas were rudely ignored and the prisoners tried to drown them out by loudly coughing and holding their hands over their ears. After refusing to recite the Lord’s Prayer in English, they were sent packing back to York Castle.
⁵⁴

Enough was enough. Elizabeth’s government began to tighten its grip on recusants in the spring of 1580. Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, reported to his master King Philip II in June that Tor the past three weeks they have proceeded with much more rigour than formerly against the Catholics. Those of them who had been released on bail [are now] sent back to prison again’.
⁵⁵

William Herle, Burghley’s old stool pigeon in the Marshalsea, wrote to the military and naval commander Sir Edward Horsey
⁵⁶
in December that year that Elizabeth was ‘sharper bent against the papists and is resolved that the oath [of allegiance] shall be ministered to the recusants’. He warned that a first refusal would be deemed an act of praemunire (the crime of asserting papal jurisdiction over England) and a second would be ‘treason to those that persist’. This, insisted Herle, ‘will gall them indeed and is the direct way to meet with their seditions and practices at home and to discourage [them] abroad’.
⁵⁷

A raft of penal measures was introduced by Burghley to hone the sharp edge of the law in countering the Catholic threat. The Parliament of 1580–1 passed, without opposition, new legislation that increased fines for non-attendance at Church of England services from one shilling per Sunday to a punitive £20 per month. These fines appear to have only been patchily imposed, as in the five years that followed, only sixty-nine recusants paid fines totalling £8,938 1s 11d, or nearly £1.5 million in today’s monetary values. More importantly, the act declared high traitors all those priests who entered England to convert Protestants.
⁵⁸
Five years later, another new law
⁵⁹
enabled the crown to confiscate Catholic lands and property for non-payment of fines and gave ‘Jesuits, seminary priests and other priests in England’ just forty days to quit the country on pain of being declared a traitor and facing the death penalty. Income from these fines totalled £3,332 9s in the next five years, or £500,000 in modern prices, which must have pleased the parsimonious Elizabeth.

Bolstered by this new legislation, in July 1581 she ordered Walsingham to examine various individuals accused of conspiring against her, including the ‘runnagate priests’ Thomas Cottam
⁶
° and Luke Kirby,
⁶¹
Jesuit
seminarists from Douai
⁶²
and the English College in Rome. Walsingham’s questions focused on who they had been in contact with since arriving in England, what they knew of papal plans for an invasion and if they had any links with Mary Queen of Scots.

These unfortunates were probably swept up in Walsingham’s hunt for the two Jesuits Robert Persons and Edmund Campion, who had entered England in June 1580. Persons had arrived ahead of Campion and after evading the searchers at the ports of Dover and Gravesend had boarded a small boat to travel up the River Thames to London by night. He found himself in the company of ‘the queen’s musicians that returned from Kent which imported [for] him extreme danger if God’s holy hand had not kept them off for a time’. Moving through London on foot, Persons could get no lodgings and was

forced to go up and down half a day from place to place … until noon, [when] he resolved to adventure into the prison at the Marshalsea and to ask for a gentleman prisoner there named Thomas Pound
⁶³
in whose chamber he dined and was singularly comforted at the sight not only of him but of many confessors of Christ that had suffered there for His cause and religion.
⁶⁴

Meanwhile, Campion was also now in London, hiding for ten days in a house in Chancery Lane on the western outskirts of the city. At Pound’s suggestion, Campion wrote a letter to the Privy Council explaining the reasons why both priests had come to England – to preach and comfort the Catholic population and, he emphasised, avoiding all politics. This communication was to be kept secret and only released when one or other was captured, but Pound stupidly circulated the document and a copy fell into Walsingham’s hands. The hunt for the priests was now on.

Campion was active in Lancashire and in the Midland counties, but on 17 July 1581 he was arrested at the house of a Mr Yates
⁶⁵
at Lyford Grange, near Wantage in Berkshire, hidden in a secret room above the gatehouse, after the authorities were tipped off by an informer called George Eliot, who was already under suspicion of murder. The priest was taken under escort to London, bound hand and foot and riding
backwards with a paper prominently marked ‘seditious Jesuit’ stuck in his hat.
⁶⁶
On his arrival in London, he was quickly interviewed at the home of the Earl of Leicester. Walsingham was probably one of the group who interrogated him before dashing off later that day to attend to diplomatic duties in Paris.
⁶⁷
He wrote to Burghley from France, hoping that the queen ‘may take profit of Campion’s discovery by severely punishing the offenders, for nothing has done more harm than the overmuch lenity that has been used in that behalf.

In the Tower, Campion was tortured three times on the rack in attempts to force him to divulge the names of those who had helped him, the whereabouts of Persons and the details of a plot to murder the queen, believed by the government to have been hatched at the seminary college at Rheims. He was so badly injured that at his trial on 14 November he was unable, as was the custom, to raise his right hand to plead ‘not guilty’. Inevitably, he was condemned and on 1 December was dragged on a hurdle to a traitor’s hideous death at Tyburn, on the site of today’s Marble Arch in London. On the scaffold, Campion told the crowd that if ‘our religion do make us traitors, we are worthy to be condemned but … [we] are and have been as true subjects as ever the queen ever had’. Moreover, he prayed for Elizabeth, ‘your queen and my queen, unto whom I wish a long quiet reign with all prosperity’ and acknowledged to the spectators that ‘if you esteem my religion [as] treason, then I am guilty’. He was beatified in December 1886 and canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1970.

Throughout the sixteenth century, the rack was the instrument of first choice used to persuade prisoners to talk. In 1575, whilst investigating allegations of secret channels of communication between Mary Queen of Scots and the outside world, Walsingham told Burghley darkly: ‘Without torture I know we shall not prevail.’
⁶⁸
There were other instruments of violent persuasion available. These included the ‘Scavenger’s Daughter’,
⁶⁹
an iron band that compressed the head whilst the body was locked in a crouching position, and the metal gauntlets fitted with screws that crushed the hands. The hapless prisoner could also be confined in the ‘Little Ease’, a cell in the Tower so small that it was impossible to stand
upright or lie down, a forerunner of the modern technique of sleep deprivation to reduce resistance to interrogation. Campion was one of its occupants, spending an agonising four days within its cramped walls. Another place of special confinement was ‘The Pit’, an oubliette twenty feet deep, and totally dark. Other cells were said to be full of vermin, especially rats, which at high water were driven up in shoals from the River Thames.

If prisoners refused to talk or to enter a plea even under such extremes they could face the ordeal of ‘pressing’. This involved the placing of rocks or other heavy objects on their bodies until their resistance collapsed or they were crushed to death. That grim fate befell the butcher’s wife and schoolmistress Margaret Clitherow in York in 1586, after she was accused of harbouring priests.
⁷⁰
She died rather than speak. Such strong faith posed real problems for the interrogators. The Privy Councillor and evangelical Protestant Sir Francis Knollys drew up a list of questions to put to prisoners ‘in the examination of Papists’ and the ‘prevarication and pleas of Popish recusants’ were described, the better to counter them.
⁷¹

The first notorious ‘rackmaster’ was Thomas Norton, the lawyer-turned-printer, playwright and poet, based at London’s Guildhall. After a period of imprisonment in the Tower, he became an enthusiastic hunter of Papists,
⁷²
writing to Walsingham enquiring how he could best serve the queen. After becoming an interrogator and torturer, in March 1582 he wrote to Walsingham angrily complaining about a seditious book that claimed that he had racked the Jesuit Alexander Briant so fearfully that he left him ‘one foot longer than ever God made him’.
⁷³
The following month, Briant’s name appears amongst a list of tortured priests contained in a letter, written in Latin by a priest held in the Tower to other Catholics, complaining at the ‘cruelty and severity with which they were being treated’.
⁷⁴

Norton died in 1585, but not before the crowning moment of his extraordinarily varied career: the racking and interrogation of Francis Throgmorton, involved in yet another plot to murder Elizabeth in November 1583. Walsingham ordered Thomas Wilkes, clerk to the Privy
Council, to bring Throgmorton to the Tower ‘tomorrow morning early [and] to be present at [his] racking’.
⁷⁵
Throgmorton refused to talk after his first session strapped to the fiendish device. Walsingham was sanguine that Norton would break the prisoner’s resistance:

I have seen as resolute men as Throgmorton stoop, notwithstanding the great show he has made of Roman resolution.

I suppose the grief of the last torture will suffice without any extremity of racking to make him more comfortable than he has hitherto shown himself.
⁷⁶

His optimism and confidence in Norton’s skills were fully justified. On 19 November, Throgmorton was placed on the rack again, but confessed ‘before he was strained to any purpose’.