"The King's Good Servant, But God's First"

"Many innocent hands are lifted up to Heaven for you daily by those English students, whose posteritie shall never die, which beyond seas, gathering virtue and sufficient knowledge for the purpose, are determined never to give you over, but either to win you Heaven, or to die upon your pikes." --St. Edmund Campion's "Brag"

"It was a horrible delight to sit, wrapped in her cloak with the hood over her head, listening to his story in the hall, and to know that it was to her house that he had come for safety." --Come Rack! Come Rope!

One of my favourite aspects (sort of counterintuitively?) of England's history is the history of Catholic persecution in England. Not because I like it when Catholicism is persecuted, per se, but because whenever that happens, it tends to produce a number of heroes and martyrs, and that was especially true in England during the reigns of King Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth I, and King James VI. (I'm actually drafting this post on the Feast of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales (May 4), but I'm in Ireland today, so to my great sadness, I will not be able to go to Mass for that illustrious feast, cuz it's not a thing in Ireland. *tears*.) 

I've had the great joy/nerdy happiness of getting to see a whole bunch of sites related to the persecution of Catholics in England while I've been here, and I wanted to share the nerdy joy by not only telling you about said sites, but also by recommending a whole bunch of related books, in case you're in need of further reading about heroic Catholics. (Which I'm pretty sure you are. After all, even after all the books I've read and the reasonable amount of them I've put into this post, I'm still in need of further reading about heroic Catholics.) 

If you don't know what the heck I'm talking about, here's a brief summary (to the best of my admittedly amateur knowledge. Errors are entirely my own, and I'll do my best to be informative but vague, lol). After Henry VIII decided that he wanted to marry Anne Boleyn and divorce Catherine of Aragon and subsequently put himself at the head of his own church, he didn't look too kindly upon those in his realm who thought/told him he was wrong. (Who ever does, really.) So, there were some martyrdoms under him, but mostly, as far as I know, his big atrocity was the stripping and plundering of the monasteries and convents--hundreds and hundreds of them, which is why there are now so many ruined convents and monasteries throughout the country. (Fun to visit, but very sad.) During the reign of his daughter, Queen Mary, daughter of Catherine of Aragon, and a Catholic, there was a reprieve for Catholics as Mary tried to reunite the country with the Church. However, under her sister, Anne Boleyn's daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, things turned around rapidly. Elizabeth, understandably unhappy after the Pope dispensed her Catholic subjects from loyalty to her until she repented of her heresy (or something along those lines), made it illegal to be a priest in England (as I talked about in this post) and levelled a series of increasingly stringent fines on her Catholic subjects unless they reformed and went to Anglican services. Under her rule, there were a large number of martyrdoms of priests and of those who sheltered them (which was also illegal). I believe these laws and the martyrdoms continued under King James VI (the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, a Catholic, but who was brought up away from her and Protestant, very unfortunately), but I know significantly less about that period. 

(Oh, and for your information and so you'll understand some of what I'm getting at in this post: the typical martyrdom for a priest was being hung, drawn, and quartered, i.e. being hung until almost dead, and then being cut down while still living, being castrated, having one's innards plucked out, and then being cut into four quarters. Pleasant.)

And if you don't know, now you know, Mr. President. 

I'm structuring this post around the sites I want to tell you about--I'll talk about the site for a little, and then share the pertinent books. :)

The Tower of London & Tyburn
The Tower of London is where several of the Forty English Martyrs were imprisoned, as well as St. Thomas More, St. John Fisher (I think?), and many other famous people, who mostly were subsequently killed. (It wasn't really a spot one wanted to be, shall we say.) I got to visit it with my family while they were in England, and one of the things that surprised me about it was that it's not just one tower, as the name would suggest--it's a complex of buildings, with the oldest bit, the White Tower, in the middle, and several curtain walls and other towers and buildings around it, including the wall that houses the Traitor's Gate (where 'traitors' (real and of the Catholic persuasion) were brought into the tower). We didn't get to see the tower where the Catholics would mostly have been imprisoned, but we did get to visit one of the 'dungeons' where they might have been racked and tortured, which was a rather sobering experience. 

Oh, and quite a few of the martyrs held at the Tower, including St. Edmund Campion and multiple others of the Forty Martyrs were hung, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn, which ended up being very close to where my family was staying, so we went and visited there, too. There actually now is a convent (of an order of nuns who are cloistered and devoted to Perpetual Adoration) within a stones throw of Tyburn, which I think is incredibly cool. 

Onto the pertinent books! 

Edmund Campion by Harold Gardiner
It seems appropriate to start with this one, since it's the first book I ever read about any of the English martyrs, and it made a definite impression! I still remember how engrossing it was, when I was a kid, and how horrified I was about the torture and the hung-drawn-and-quartered thing. (It's not graphic, I don't think. But it's definitely mentioned, because Ignatius Press doesn't euphemize martyrdom for kids.) This is an excellent, excellent biography of Edmund Campion for kids, although it's not dumbed down; I'd still read it. It's heavy on Campion's adventures in England when he came back after his studies and ordination as a priest (hence, I didn't know as much about his early life until reading further in other sources) but who can blame it for that? That is, after all, the most interesting part. :D It brings his life and heroic faith and ministry as a priest to vivid life for kids (to the point that, as an adult, I can still remember and picture the mental images from reading it, which I don't think I've done in at least eight years) and in sum...I'd highly recommend it. 

Edmund Campion: A Life by Evelyn Waugh
This is the book that made me love Edmund Campion as an adult. I was intimidated by it at first, because (at least in my edition) it looked like such a big book, but it's really just quite a bit of introduction and commentary, and the actual work doesn't take up that much space. And it's quite fascinating even without reading the commentary, lol. It's a more 'grown up' life of Edmund Campion (unsurprising, given that the other was written specifically for children), and my favourite part of that is that it sheds more light on his academic work. I hadn't realized that he actually went to Europe expecting to stay there as a scholar and a teacher for the foreseeable future, and actually wasn't all that thrilled about going back to England. An academic who's somewhat forced into heroics! Even better than an actual hero! It makes his subsequent swagger and Brag (a piece of writing that he wrote and sent to Queen Elizabeth, in defiance of her and Protestantism in general) almost more poignant to know that he was a scholar, and a slightly older one, at that, not a young man full of pluck and derring-do. I like that very much. (We love Evelyn Waugh in all his forms, but this definitely is one of my more favourite things he wrote.)

St. Thomas More of London by Elizabeth M. Ince
Here comes another pair of saint biographies! St. Thomas More was one of the first martyrs under the new regime (under Henry VIII) and another one of my favourites. He was a lawyer and a family man, and actually the Lord High Chancellor of England under Henry VIII until the king's ill-conceived divorce, and subsequently beheaded for not approving of said divorce, nor the king appointing himself head of the English Church. I read this Ignatius children's biography of him at around the same time as I read the one on St. Edmund Campion, and while it didn't quite make the same impression on me as the Edmund Campion one did, it certainly cemented in me a love of St. Thomas More as a courtly, learned, stately man who loved his family, but ultimately would not go against his conscience, and was imprisoned in the Tower and ultimately beheaded for it. One detail from the book sticks with me especially, which is the jest the author puts into More's mouth at the time of his beheading about getting his beard out of the way. I'm not sure if that actually happened, but it adds so much to the depiction of him as a man, and it makes me happy. Incidentally, the title of this post comes from a quote of his: "I die the King's good servant, but God's first".

A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt
This was recommended to me by several friends, and I actually read it one weekend when I was on a cow judging expedition, which means it'll always be associated in my mind with trying to memorize a muddle of oral reasons about which cow had higher thurls, and which had a deeper, wider barrel with more spring of rib. However, it's an extraordinary play, not the less extraordinary for being written by a man who (at least at the time of its writing) was an agnostic. Despite his agnosticism (or perhaps partly because of it?) Bolt manages to paint a vivid picture of More's struggle to keep himself clear of the shipwreck that is the king's politics. His struggle takes the vivid and interesting form of not saying what he thinks of the king's marriage and the subsequent mess. It's not what anyone is asking him just yet; and he desires not to be asked it, to keep himself with his family, in his private life. For as soon as the question is asked, he must declare his loyalty to the Church, and likely give his life for it, and he knows that. But he's surrounded by a web of people with varying loyalties and differing convictions and motives, and ultimately, the question must be asked. But the best part (leaving aside his discretion, which I also adore--sometimes it is not necessary to say anything. It is always necessary, when speaking, to speak the truth, but it is not always necessary to speak, as a saint said) is that once the question is asked, he never backs down from the truth that needs to be said. It's an excessively inspiring portrait of someone who is, after all, human, and I like it very much. (Even if it makes me think of cows.) 

The Shrine of St. Margaret Clitherow
Margaret Clitherow was a Catholic woman, the wife of a butcher and mother of three children, who was martyred for harbouring priests. Or rather, she was martyred for refusing to enter a plea, in an effort to avoid a trial that would have made her children testify against her. I knew a fair bit about her, but to add to the coolness that her life already is (harbouring priests, teaching Catholicism to the local children secretly), her husband actually wasn't Catholic, but supported her activities because his brother was a priest. And she sent her eldest son to France to study to become a priest himself. She was martyred while pregnant with her fourth child, by being laid on a sharp rock under her own door, and having the door piled with rocks until she was crushed. She's called the Pearl of York, which I enjoy because it's a pun--"Margherite" means "pearl" in Latin. Her shrine, which I talked about in the York post, is actually in the Shambles, arguably the most famous street in York, because the Shambles was the butcher's quarter, and her husband was a butcher. The shrine is her old house, and I still find it beautiful and fantastic that she was killed for harbouring priests in that very house, and now the house has been converted into a chapel, and Mass is said there weekly. 

The Trials of Margaret Clitherow by Peter Lake & Michael Questier
While this is a more scholarly book, and one that examines lives of other women in trouble with the law at a similar time as Clitherow (I think it was mostly Catholic women they were talking about, but I really couldn't tell you...it's been almost a year since I read the book) this book was my first introduction to St. Margaret Clitherow, and I love it for that. It paints a very compelling picture of her as a strong-minded, capable women who knew exactly what she was about, both in her religious activities and in her choice not to enter a plea in her trial. If memory serves, the book is in two parts: a preliminary survey of the times and context, and a more Margaret-focused second part. If you were picking it up for fun, you could probably skip the first bit. :)

(+ Margaret Clitheroe by Gerard Manley Hopkins)
A bonus...Gerard Manley Hopkins has an unfinished poem about Margaret Clitherow (or Clitheroe) that is absolutely fabulous despite its somewhat fragmentary nature. Definitely give it a look, especially if you like poetry, and/or are a fan of Hopkins. :)

Harvington Hall, Boscobel, and Padley
Some of my favourite sites related to Catholic persecution in England have been the Catholic manor houses I've gotten to see, some with my family and one on my own. During Queen Elizabeth's reign, when it was illegal to be a priest in England, priests would still come to minister to the Catholics, but it was vitally important that they could be hidden if pursuivants (priest hunters) showed up. Thus, most of the time the people who would host the priests were noble Catholic families, who had big houses with space for hiding places. When a priest was in the neighbourhood, Catholics would come from neighbouring houses and villages to 'hear Mass', and receive the Sacraments, and if pursuivants did come, the big house would typically have a "priest hole" or "priest hide" to hide the priest, as well as a place to hide the vestments and other Mass accoutrements (such as the chalice, paten, candlesticks, &c). One of the things that's Very Cool about all this is that a lot of the staunchest 'recusants' (Catholics) were found in the North of England, which also happens to be where I'm living currently. Which means that there are a non-zero number of old estates and manor houses nearby that have non-zero numbers of priest hides in them. :D 

Of note, there's: 

-Boscobel, which, in addition to having at least one priest hide and one back staircase/secret passage, also has the Royal Oak where King Charles II hid from his pursuers. 

-Padley, which is very, very close to Sheffield, and was a highly dramatic manor house, in that it was the home of a staunchly Catholic family, except that then one of the sons was imprisoned and became a traitor in league with the famous torturer Topcliffe and gave away the location of two priests who were hiding there. They were taken, after their hiding place was discovered, on July 18th, I believe, 1588, and subsequently hung, drawn, and quartered at Derby. Both of the priests taken then, Nicholas Garlick and Robert Ludlum, are currently Blesseds. Padley was unique in that it was allowed to still keep a chapel, although not to have Mass there. (Though the owners clearly didn't abide by that, lol.) The chapel is still there and they still have Mass there for the Feast. (And some other times, as well.) The rest of the manor house is completely in ruins (the family who owned it were taken away to prison when the priests were discovered there and never came back, and the house was given to Topcliffe, which is just Not Fair), but somehow the gatehouse with the chapel over it survived and was used as a cow barn until the 1900s when the diocese of Hallam bought it, found the altar stone (which had been buried in one of the gardens), and reconsecrated it as a chapel. Very cool stuff. 

-Harvington Hall, which is super cool for multiple reasons, not just the seven (SEVEN!!) priest hides the house has. Before I get back to the hides...it's the first recorded house in England to have indoor water access, apparently, because they enclosed their well as part of the kitchen. The well has perfectly pure water because the house is located on a sedimentary rock (I'm forgetting sandstone vs. limestone) island in the middle of a moat (A MOAT, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD), and the water for the well filters through the rock so that no matter how dirty the moat was, the kitchen's water was pure. So that's cool. (#landscapearchitecturenerd) The other cool thing is that it's one of the houses that was at least tangentially involved in Anthony Babington's plot against Queen Elizabeth. Babington was a hot-headed young nobleman who was inspired by the plight of Mary, Queen of Scots, and plotted to kill Elizabeth and establish Mary as queen in her place. Unfortunately, the letters he thought he was sending to Mary were being intercepted the entire time, and he and the men he was plotting with were all captured--several of them being taken at a house very near Harvington. (I know Harvington was involved in some way, but I don't remember exactly how.) 
Okay but the PRIEST HIDES AT HARVINGTON. A whole bunch of them were devised by Nicholas Owen, of whom more will be said in a moment, but they're AMAZING. Some of them are a bit less involved than others, such as the one that uses the space above one of the ovens, heavily insulated. But there are some that are simply incredible, like the swinging beam hide, where a beam that looks absolutely integral to the wall actually swings up and out, allowing one to slip inside. Or the hide that one accesses by lifting multiple stairs of the staircase, and which has an inner hide and an outer hide, with the hope that if valuables were put in the outer hide, the searchers would find and confiscate them, and leave the inner hide alone. Or the fireplace that was actually an escape route. 
It's super cool, y'all. I'm a big fan. 

St. Nicholas Owen: Priest-Hole Maker by Tony Reynolds
St. Nicholas Owen is one of my new favourite saints...mostly on the strength of this book, lol! Nicholas was a member of an Oxford recusant family but had some sort of physical disability that didn't let him become a priest, as one of his brothers did. Instead, he did an apprenticeship as a joiner, and ultimately ended up travelling around the country with multiple different Jesuit priests (including St. Edmund Campion), posing as their servant while secretly constructing "priest hides" in various recusant houses around the country. Up until that point, priest hides had been really crude things, often made of lathe and plaster, which were super easily discovered by the pursuivants (priest-hunters). However, Nicholas, with his joinery skill, created a variety of extremely clever and difficult to discover hides, and did his utmost to make sure that he didn't develop a 'trademark style'--that every single one was devised differently so that the pursuivants couldn't cotton on to where a hide was likely to be. I've gotten to see several of these Nicholas Owen hides, and they are truly incredible. And it's thought that there might still be some extant in old recusant houses that we actually don't know about, because he hid them so well. So that's amazing. He was staying in a house during some of the Anthony Babington drama, and the pursuivants showed up, so he gave himself up in order to hopefully conceal the fact that others were hiding within the house. The pursuivants were thrilled--here was a man who knew all of the secret hiding places in large swaths of England! But he didn't give up a single hiding place or name throughout his torture, and ultimately ended up dying on the rack. (In a very gruesome way that I'm not going to talk about because...ick.) The book has an excellent overview of his life, and then a survey of some of his hiding places! 

A Traveller In Time by Alison Uttley
This was one of my favourites when I was in middle school, and remains one of the few time travel books that I actually like. (Mostly because the time travel is sort of vague and mysterious and a bit like dreaming, rather than trying to have rules and be like "ooh, and we're changing the continuum here, and here, and..." which drives me insane.) The basic premise is that this girl begins to be transported back in time to the Babington house in her dreams and daydreams, and thus witnesses all of the drama around the plot to kill Queen Elizabeth and free Queen Mary. It's an excellent book, accurate, well-written, and fascinating! I read it a whole bunch of times as a kid, and as I'm writing this little summary, it's making me want to read it again. 

Come Rack! Come Rope! by Robert Hugh Benson 
This is one of my favourites of all the books I've mentioned--and I like them all quite a lot, so that's saying something! Part of the reason why it's my favourite is that it has a direct connection with Padley--Robert Hugh Benson, a Catholic priest who lived in the late 19th and early 20th century, began writing the book after preaching a homily during a pilgrimage to Padley Chapel. And nearly the whole of the book takes place near Padley, in the Peak District, the area of England I know best. (When he started the book by talking about Hathersage, I knew I was going to like it. :D) I'd read it a while ago and remembered like it very much, but didn't remember where it was set, so when I reread it recently, I was fangirling the whole time. 
The book essentially follows two childhood sweethearts as their lives diverge--the boy, Robin, goes to France to become a priest, and the girl, Marjorie, ends up becoming one of the most important safe-house keepers in Derbyshire--and then converge again, as Robin comes back to Derbyshire as a priest. The story is deeply integrated into the drama of the time it's set in, as it brings in Edmund Campion, Nicholas Owen, Fr. Simpson, and Frs. Ludlam and Garlick, among others. (The drama of their arrest at Padley comes into the story at one point, but I shan't spoil how...) 
It's written in a slightly older style, but between the references to Derbyshire, the references to contemporary figures, and the exploration of complex themes--faith and doubt, honouring one's father while also remaining true to one's faith, family, love and what true love means, and so on--it contrived to be one of the favourite things I (re)read this month. (I just...I freaking CANNOT with Majorie and Robin's relationship/friendship. It's SO GOOD. It's the only instance I've ever found in fiction where "okay, we love each other but one of us has a vocation" is handled well, even though it definitely happens in real life way more often than fiction would suggest. 11/10.) 

All the books above are ones I've personally read and can recommend. There are a few more that I've heard recommended by various sources that you could look into if you'd like further reading (and that I will be looking into just as soon as I can). This is obviously not an exhaustive list (and I can't recommend any of them personally): 

Martyrs of the English Reformation by Dr. Malcolm Brennan
Autobiography of a Hunted Priest by John Gerard
God's Secret Agents by Alice Hogge
God's Traitors by Jesse Childs
Secret Hiding Places by Michael Hodgetts
The Watchers by Stephen Alford
The Queen's Agent by John Cooper

So! Have you heard of any of these places or books? Who's your favourite English martyr? :D