FATHER LIAM SAYS: The
Catholic opponents of Queen Elizabeth I saw Mary Queen of Scots as the legitimate claimant to
the throne. In their eyes Elizabeth was
illegitimate and had usurped the lawful right of Mary Stuart to be Queen of
England and Scotland. Mary gave birth to
a son in 1566 and the future James VI of Scotland (who later also became James
I of England) was baptised a Catholic.
Mary
faced huge opposition and conflict from the Calvinist reformers led by John
Knox. She was forced to abdicate the
throne of Scotland in 1567 and fled to England.
She became a focus for Catholic resistance to Elizabeth and there were a
number of plots and rebellions - such as the Northern Rebellion in 1569 and the
Ridolfi Plot of 1570 – together with the Papal Bull in 1570 excommunicating
Elizabeth, events that ensured Government retribution against English and Irish
Catholics became more repressive. Mary
was finally executed at Fotheringhay in 1587.
The
first English Seminary on the Continent was established at Douai in France in
1568. This college and others later set
up in Rome and Valladolid and Seville trained young men from English Catholic
families to be priests. Many of them
were Jesuits and these priests returned to England to help in ministering to
their fellow Catholics. Irish colleges
were also set up in many European cities such as Louvain and Salamanca to serve
the Catholics of Ireland. These priests
were known as Seminary priests as they were products of the Seminaries which
were one of the fruits of the recent Council of Trent, to ensure that future
priests were well trained.
Ports
were watched to try to prevent Papal messengers or Catholic priests from
landing. Importation of books was
carefully monitored and crucifixes and rosary beads were banned. A new Act was passed making it high treason
to claim that the Queen was ‘a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel or
usurper.’ Anyone leaving the country
without the Queen’s permission and staying abroad for six months had their property
confiscated, thus removing the wealth of many Catholic families. In 1571 secret letters from the Italian
banker Roberto do Ridolfi were discovered and the full Ridolfi Plot to free
Mary Queen of Scots from prison was exposed.
The Duke of Norfolk was to marry Mary and lead Spanish troops in an
armed insurrection against Elizabeth, placing Mary Stuart on the throne and
restoring Catholicism to England.
Ridolfi escaped but Norfolk was found guilty of High Treason and
beheaded. Catholics were increasingly
perceived as being traitors to the crown.
In local courts people were accused of sedition and some were hanged or
burnt for treason. In 1576 Mary Cleere
of Ingatestone in Essex was burnt at the stake for high treason. She had said that the Queen was baseborn and
therefore not rightly Queen and that a woman cannot make knights The aristocracy who were found guilty of high
treason like the Duke of Norfolk and the Duke of Northumberland were beheaded,
as were the Earl of Essex and, most famously of all, Mary Queen of Scots. Beheading, rather than hanging, was the
punishment reserved for the nobility.
Life
became increasingly harder for Catholics and by 1580 it became almost
unbearable. By now more than one hundred
Seminary priests had entered the country.
Anyone who encouraged a person to join the Catholic Church is now to be
held guilty of treason and executed.
Recusants were now to be fined £20 per month. Those who failed to attend services in the
Established Church must in addition submit a bond of £200 to guarantee their
compliance. To be present at Mass would
get you a fine of £67 and a year in prison.
One of the first Seminary priests to be put to death was Edmund Campion
who was carefully non-political. He was
a brilliant scholar and preacher.
Trumped up charges of conspiracy to overthrow the Queen were brought against
him and after being tortured in a vain attempt to secure a confession of guilt
he was executed at Tyburn in 1581.
In 1585 war broke out with Spain. One of the reasons was the fact that Spanish
shipping was being attacked on the high seas by English sailors such as Sir
Francis Drake and his cousin Sir John Hawkins who with a privateer’s licence from
Queen Elizabeth plundered and pillaged very successfully. But after the destruction of the Spanish
Armada in 1588 treatment of Catholics worsened further. Commissions were established in every county
to establish people’s beliefs and test their church attendance. Those not attending church for a month were
to be imprisoned. Catholics were not
allowed to travel more than five miles from their homes – on pain of forfeiting
all their property and estates. They
were required to register with the local authorities and obtain a licence if
they wished to go anywhere. In the last
year of Elizabeth’s reign Mass was celebrated in secret at night or very early
in the morning, mostly in the houses of the gentry – the safest places in which
to participate in such highly dangerous activity. In these houses there would be
a priest hole – a small secret chamber in a wall or beneath a floor – where the
priest could hide with vestments and chalice if the authorities searched the
house.
The
Tower was the most feared place of confinement for Catholics. Dungeons were so small that a person could
not stand erect. To extract a confession
the limbs were pulled in opposite directions by means of wooden rollers. Fetters and chains and gauntlets are attached
to the limbs causing intense pain. Yet a
contemporary historian, William Harrison stated in his ‘Description of England:
To use torment or question by pain and torture in these common cases with us is
greatly abhorred since we are found always to be such as despise death and
abhor......such servile hauling and tearings as are used in other countries.’
