• The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers. related by Themselves.

Edited by John come there, it would damn her soul." Morris, Priest of the Society or Jesus. London: Burns and Oates. But it may be asked, did Englishmen in the days of Shakespeare

THE SUFFERINGS OF THE YORKSHIRE CATHOLICS.* THE interest of the six narratives which Father Morris has given us in this volume centres almost wholly in the county of York and in its venerable capital. " Yorkshire," we read, " bath been more oppressed than almost all the shires in England." York Castle alone contained at one time upwards of fifty sufferers for the faith. Over Ousebridge, thirty-three priests were drawn on hurdles, and sixteen laymen in carts, on their way to suffer the horrible penalties of treason with common felons and malefactors at Knavesmire ; and in the tollbooth on that bridge, Margaret Clitherow was pressed to death for refusing to plead to an in- dictment charging her with harbouring Jesuit and Seminary priests. It shows how large must have been the number and how firm the faith of those who clung to the ancient creed, that in the time of James I. all official positions in the East Riding were in the hands of " new upstarts," since the old gentry were disaffected to the new religion ; and that after all the exactions of the times of Elizabeth, great sums of money were granted by her successor to divers Scots and pages, to be levied out of the goods of Catholics. Despite all they bad undergone, their number, according to one authority, had increased rather than diminished, though a second writes that in the early part of Elizabeth's reign there were more known Catholics in one town than a few years later were to be found in " a whole country."

The instruments of persecution in the Northern counties were fourfold. First, there was the Council of the North, a despotic body with extensive powers. Its President from 1572 to 1599 was Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon, a busy member likewise of the Ecclesiastical Commission, who is represented as "a most bloody and heretical tyrant, insatiably thirsting for the lives and destruction of all good men, a pestiferous and most irreligious dissembler for his own gain and credit." Ile was strongly suspected of a leaning to Puritanism, and being descended from Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, was accused of aspiring to the throne, and on occasion of the Queen's dangerous sickness, of making active preparations to assert his claim by force. At all events, he was an unmerciful and by no means scrupulous perse- cutor. He and his Council were empowered to call in any Catholic and punish him at their pleasure, and they constantly compelled the municipal authorities of York, in spite of much re- luctance and delay, to put the penal laws in operation. Hunt- ingdon was succeeded by Lord Burghley, and he by Edmund, Lord Sheffield, in whose time the Catholics had comparative quiet, though, as Father Pollard shows, even his milder rule was onerous enough. Sheffield, to his honour be it mentioned, de- clined to avail himself of a grant of £1,000 out of the goods of Catholics ; unlike Lord Montgomery, who " begged " a recusant, and forced him to redeem himself at the cost of £1,500.

The second engine of persecution was the Court of High Com- mission, of which Lingard says that it differed from the Inquisi- tion only in name, and which, though containing some gentlemen, is said to have been in the hands of " a company of hungry and malicious ministers," at whose head was the Archbishop. It levied large fines for non-attendance at church, and so intolerable were its exactions that many fled beyond its jurisdiction into Lincolnshire, where they could only be reached by the ordinary local authorities. Thus Sir Ralph Babthorpe, a man of noble blood, of spotless character, and held in high esteem in his county, " was so sore pursued by the base ministers of this High Commission, who every month sent out process in most disgrace- ful and odious terms against him, to be publicly read in his own parish church, and after reading to be fixed upon the church doors, that after he had for the space of a twelvemonth escaped the fines by this art, to wit, by flying out of the country from the day of the writ read in the church (of which by friends he got notice before) until the court-day was past, at which court-day be had one ready to take his oath that he was not in the country (as, indeed, he was not) from the day of the writ read until that present court-day, and so could not be fined,—after, I say, that by this art he had escaped a year and more, being at the length

wearied with it, was forced to remove with his whole family into Lincolnshire, and there to live."

The sheriff and his officers were the third of these instruments of oppression. All—Council of the North, High Commission, and Sheriff—had their pursuivants, the lineal descendants, surely, of the Sumners of Chaucer's day, who were virtually irre- sponsible for their proceedings, and who roamed over the country hunting out Catholics and haling them to prison, and levying

blackmail for their own behoof. We have in this volume, from Father Garnet and other victims, detailed accounts of these

searches, which were accompanied by every circumstance of out- rage and wrong. It was not without good reason that in every Catholic house there was a "conveyance" or biding-place, to

which the "good man," as the priest was called, might retire in

the hour of peril. The law of England has usually been tender enough of the rights of property, but the Catholic had no such rights,—the pursuivants without redress took from him all his plate and valuables, all his money and any furniture that they had a mind to, consumed his corn and hay, and his provisions, and spoilt all that they did not steal. The Catholics of England must have had a strong foretaste of the Reign of Terror. On one terrible night, February 1, 1593, there was a general search made for Catholics all over Yorkshire, Durham, and Northum- berland, some houses being ransacked by as many as a hundred or sevenscore persons. Not content with searching the houses, they " did seek the grounds and woods in many places." And in addition to all these, there were, fourthly, extraordinary pur- suivants, with special commissions, notably one Marr, who was empowered to apprehend all recusant gentlewomen and carry them to prison, and who was afterwards hanged for a peculiarly atrocious murder. It was found a profitable business to forge such commissions, but the Council often discovered the culprits, and repressed their zeal by imprisonment or the pillory.

The penal laws were carried out in Yorkshire in all their rigour. York was a city of prisons—the Kidcotes, the Sheriff's Prison,

St. Peter's Prison, Trewe's House, Little Ease, the Bean Hill—

all of which were used for the confinement of Catholics. Thrust down into dens where no ray of light could penetrate—often below the level of the river—at the mercy of gaolers who made large profits out of the scanty pittance of a penny or twopence a day allowed their starving prisoners, sometimes forbidden the poor privilege of begging an alms at the grate of their dungeon, herded with felons and lunatics and loaded with irons, it is no wonder that so many perished before they could be brought to trial, so that of fifty-eight who were imprisoned at Yolk in the time of Archbishop Matthews for refusing the oath of allegiance, forty died in prison. Tortures 'were not spared. Boast was "four times laid upon the rack, and once hung up in the manacles, the which he affirmed to be the most painful torment of all the rest." Ingleby was so resolute under torture that Topcliffe, whose experience in this line had been extensive, "said that be was a monster of all other for his exceeding taciturnity." There is ample evidence in this volume to confirm the reluctant ad-

mission of Hallam that the victim was but too often brought

alive and fully conscious from the gallows to the quartering-block. By a refinement of cruelty, the martyrs' heads were commonly fixed up within sight of the Catholic prisoners, who, as at York and Ipswich, often took them down at their own peril to preserve them as relics or for burial.

And what were the crimes against which these terrible penalties were directed ? Some cases of treason there doubtless were, and we cannot but hold that such were rightly punished with severity, though not with cruelty. But the majority of the victims were guileless men, free from a thought of disloyalty to prince or country, who ventured themselves on English soil for the salva- tion of souls committed to their charge ; members of the same faith, bound in common charity to succour and support their spiritual guides, who had braved the gallows and torments un- speakable for their sakes ; or men and women in the middle and lower ranks who refused to comply with the law by attending the services of the Established Church, in obedience to a higher law than that which rested on the sanction of Queen and CounciL Truly touching are the reasons assigned by this last class for their non-attendance at the Protestant worship. " It is not the Catholic Church." " There is neither priest, altar, nor sacra- ment." "There is not the Sacrament hung up, and other things, as bath been aforetime." " Her conscience will not serve her so to do, for she will remain in the faith that she was baptised in." " She thinketh it is not the right Church, and that if she should

feel no compassion for the victims of political and religions in- tolerance? There are indications that they did. "All acts of cruelty," Father Pollard writes, " are much among the common people and gentlemen detested, insomuch that one of the Council for York told me that if it lay in his power there should be no more blood shed for religion." Wiggington, a Puritan preacher,

pleaded for the life of Margaret Clitherow. When four priests

were executed at Durham in one day, and " their heads were cut off and holden up, as the manner is, not one would say, t God save

the Queen,' except the catchpolls themselves and a minister or two." And yet another at his martyrdom endured such cruel butchery, that "the adversary preachers exclaimed in their sermons against it." The guilt of bloodthirstiness must clearly rest not with the people, but with those who framed and carried out an odious law, in defiance of such public opinion as existed in the days of Elizabeth.

The general tenor of this book is so mournful and its sub- ject so momentous, that one almost shrinks from mentioning the points of less enthralling interest on which it touches. We will content ourselves with adding that there are many details of the topography and archaeology of York in the sixteenth century; and in the background, when we can remove our eyes for a moment from the fever-haunted dungeons, and the mockery of justice, and the agony and the triumph of these brave martyrs and confessors, we catch many a glimpse of Elizabethan England in its greatness and its littleness, its promise and its significant signs of coming storm. And we turn over the last page with a heightened sense of the paramount importance of the spirit of

toleration, which, whether for States or for individuals, is so hard to learn and so easy to forget ; and with a keener perception of the social and spiritual conditions under which Shakespeare and his compeers were born and bred. The noble words of Dorothea, the virgin-martyr, are but the outcome of that stress of unrelent- ing persecution, of that tyranny whose darkest hour was, when

Massinger wrote, well-nigh overpast, a prolonged Usquequo, Domine, such as was wrung from the hearts of thousands all over England, and especially in the Northern counties which were the scene of these troubles :— " The visage of a hangman frights not me ; The sight of whips, racks, gibbets, axes, fires, Are scaffoldings whereby my soul climbs up To an eternal habitation."