God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot. Alice Hogge

with a proposal. In view of this spread of recusancy, he and his colleagues were devising a scheme to ‘procure the Queen a thousand pounds by year to her Coffers’. Since the scheme involved bypassing existing law and imposing ‘round fines’ on all those refusing to receive Communion (not in itself a criminal offence), the bishop suggested Walsingham keep from Elizabeth the precise details of his proposal, ‘or else’, he added feelingly, ‘you can guess what will follow’. This small difficulty aside, the bishop reckoned his scheme would ‘weaken the enemy and touch him much nearer than any pain heretofore inflicted’. The proposal was never implemented. Evidently, though, it set Walsingham thinking. When the Privy Council carried out its nationwide census of recusants that year, included among the list of returns were precise details of how much every recusant was worth.²⁶

      It took until 1581 for the Government to decide fully to profit from papistry. The arrival of the Jesuits the year before had removed even Elizabeth’s objections to sterner anti-Catholic measures. If her new Church of England was not to become a mockery, then no more English Catholics could be permitted to break the law and absent themselves from it. Up to now she had prevented Parliament from raising recusancy fines—no longer. Included in that year’s Treason Act was a clause designed to hit recusants hard. Overnight, the fines for non-attendance jumped from twelve pence up to twenty pounds per month. And for the purposes of calculation, the year was deemed to contain thirteen lunar months, rather than the customary twelve. William Cecil explained the new policy with unusual political candour: ‘The causes that moved the renewing of this law was for that it was seen that the pain being no greater than xii pence, no officer did seek to charge any offender therewith, so that numbers of evil disposed persons increased herein to offend with impunity.’²⁷

      Now the full moneymaking potential of Catholic recusancy could be realized—and legally too. Soon a Hampshire clerk of the peace was writing to the Council complaining that ‘The number of recusants which at every session are to be indicted is so great that [I am] driven to spend…a great deal of time before and after every session…in drawing and engrossing the indictment[s].’ In 1587 new legislation was introduced to make the collection of recusancy fines more efficient. To ease the pressure on the courts recusants could now be convicted in their absence, on the evidence of informers, disgruntled relatives or jealous neighbours. Henry Garnet wrote to the Jesuit General in fury that ‘any utterly base creature can cast it in our teeth that we are unfitted to have our share of life in common with them’. Another clause allowed the Exchequer to seize two-thirds of the recusant’s estate in default of payment. They ‘build their houses with the ruins of ours’, wrote Robert Southwell angrily, and ‘by displanting of our offspring adopt themselves to be heirs of our lands’.²⁸

      It was not just fines from which the Government was determined to benefit. In 1585 recusants were assessed for contributions ‘towards the providing of horses and furniture for her Majesty’s present services in the Low Countries’. As the Council explained, given the religious nature of the up-coming conflict ‘her Majesty seeth so much the less cause to spare them in this’. In Norfolk, County Sheriff Sir Henry Woodhouse began the unpleasant process of extracting forced donations from his recusant neighbours. Evidently he was sympathetic to their plight. In December that year he wrote to Walsingham apologizing for his delay and naming only the unfortunate Robert Downes as capable of furnishing a light horse for the cavalry.* Other Catholics in other counties were not so lucky. Londoner Mary Scott wrote to the Council begging to be excused payment. Her husband—on account of whose recusancy the family was being assessed—had died just four days earlier, she explained, and now she was ‘plunged in many cares’. Mrs Margaret Blackwell of Sussex wrote with an even more heartfelt plea. She had never been absent from church, she protested, and she enclosed a certificate signed by Arthur Williams, parson, and all the churchwardens of the parish of St Andrew’s to prove her statement. And in March 1585 John Gerard’s father would write to the government, apologizing for his failure to pay the military levies (on account of his debts) and, instead, ‘offering his person to serve Her Highness in any place in the world’.²⁹

      These new anti-Catholic measures were entirely in tune with a financial policy grown increasingly desperate as the looming war with Spain began to drain the Exchequer dry.* Moreover, they upheld Elizabeth’s determination that the extirpation of Catholicism from England should never be seen as religious persecution. Yes, she explained, there were ‘a Number of Men of Wealth in our Realm, professing contrary Religion’, but none was ‘impeached for the same…but only by Payment of a peculiar Sum, as a Penalty for the Time that they do refuse to come to Church’. English Catholics were still only being punished for breaking the law; that the law forbade the profession of their faith was really neither here nor there. However, behind closed doors at Westminster something else was happening that was altogether more invidious. It revealed itself in a bid to make Catholics turn in their weapons, in a motion that they be expected to pay double rates as foreigners did, in MP Dr Peter Turner’s demand that they be forced to wear an identifying badge so ‘that by some token a Papist may be known’. Catholics were different; Catholics were dangerous; Catholics were other. Not content that Catholicism had become un-English by imputation, Parliament was attempting to make it un-English by force of law.³⁰

      For Norfolk’s gentry, for the Yelvertons, Bedingfelds and Southwells, the effects of such a policy were devastating. In 1574 Edward Rishton had written: ‘the greater part of the country gentlemen was unmistakably Catholic; so also were the farmers throughout the kingdom…Not a single county except those near London and the Court…willingly accepted the heresy’. If the city and the Court, both frantic and fast-moving, spoke for the new religion, then the Norfolk gentry and their ilk, farmers, countrymen and landowners, all rooted in the slower rhythms of the soil, spoke for the old—and they saw no reason to change. For them Catholicism was the traditional religion of Englishmen and women since Christianity was first introduced to the isle almost a thousand years before; it was the stripling Germano-Swiss construct Protestantism that was the foreign interloper. For the new merchant-class Members of Parliament to tell them they were un-English impugned their rank, for their fellow Englishmen to tell them they were traitors impugned their patriotism, but for them to change their beliefs impugned their very identity. Moreover it imperilled their mortal souls.³¹