Childhood, Youth, and Religious Dissent in Post-Reformation England

L. Underwood

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137364500
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book explores the role of children and young people within early modern England's Catholic minority. It examines Catholic attempts to capture the next generation, Protestant reactions to these initiatives, and the social, legal and political contexts in which young people formed, maintained and attempted to explain their religious identity.

Part I

Making Catholics

In The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation Norman Jones recounts the story of John ‘Ridgeway’ [sic., for ‘Rudgeley’], a late Elizabethan child who was taught the sign of the cross but ‘did not know the virtue of it, though I observed it as diligently as I could . . . and when I went out I perceived that women on meeting did so, and I thought that if those women should be witches, they might likewise be magicians’. Jones’ point is that by the early seventeenth century, Catholic culture was ‘alien’ to ‘the young’: old women making the sign of the cross looked like spell-casting witches to a teenaged boy.¹ Perhaps this was true for many, or even most, English people; and Jones’ work addresses their experiences, rather than those of atypical committed minorities. But his choice of example is ironic.

Jones quotes an inaccurate Victorian translation of Rudgeley’s testimony. Following Anthony Kenny, I translate the Latin as

my godfather Mr Southcote taught me the sign of the cross, which although I understood nothing of its value . . . as far as I could I observed it diligently, especially when I lay down in bed, and when I saw women going along the road, who if they were poor and old I used to think must be witches and sorceresses . . . which indeed used very often to make me afraid . . . .

Rudgeley, not the ‘witches’, was crossing himself.² More importantly, the source of this account is John Rudgeley’s answers to the entrants’ questionnaire at the English College in Rome: a seminary at which young men were trained for the Catholic priesthood, in order to return to England as clandestine missionaries. The 595 surviving answers to this questionnaire, written between 1598 and 1685, are known as the Responsa Scholarum. Rudgeley (LR455, 1607) recorded his encounter with the sign of the cross because, at sixteen, he went to the English Catholic school in St Omer, Belgium; after four years, he went on to Rome, and enrolled as a candidate for the priesthood.³ So Rudgeley’s story, like the 594 other responsa, in fact demonstrates how young people in post-Reformation England could encounter Catholicism, could learn about it and could choose to commit themselves to it. ‘How,’ Jones asks rhetorically, ‘could John Ridgeway understand the grandmothers of his Devon village who made the sign of the cross?’⁴ The following chapters ask a similar question, but with the intention of answering it.

Chapter 1 examines cultural and ritual reference-points by which young people might define their religious identity; Chapter 2 explores the phenomenon of juvenile religious conversion. Chapter 3 considers Catholic religious teaching and practice as encountered by the young: the means by which self-definitions were reached.

1

Call Yourself a Catholic? Methods of Forming Identity

Was fifteen-year-old John Rudgeley a Catholic, and how did he become one? What would he, or any other late Elizabethan, have understood by the question?

Such questions regarding the early modern period are almost as difficult to ask as to answer. Recent historiography relating to religious identity has demonstrated the insufficiency of denominational labels: these are (to an extent) categories developed for the convenience of clerics and, later, historians, which may have limited relevance to the religious awareness of ordinary people. Nowhere does this seem more valid than in the case of children. Children would have little religious knowledge, even less awareness of emergent definitions, and would express any religious inclinations they had under adult influence.

But while religious upheaval across Europe created confusion for many, for some it intensified a need for clarity. Definitions may have been formed by clerical elites, but people appropriated them to understand their own experiences: as they did so, theories about what defined a Christian, a Catholic or a Protestant were modified, but not nullified. Children and adolescents engaged in these processes, and for those who came to identify themselves with the Catholic Church, the question of what made one a Catholic had some urgency. Within Christianity, a mark of identity is found in the rite of baptism, the sacrament of initiation which confers membership of the Church, and is the sine qua non of the other sacraments; the Eucharist and confirmation are also regarded as sacraments of further initiation into Christian life.⁵ For post-Reformation English Catholics, all three were problematic as sites of confessional identity: baptism was not exclusively Catholic, confirmation was impossible in the absence of Catholic bishops to confer it, and access to the Eucharist was limited due to its being illegal.⁶

Christening

In May 1594, Viscount Montague was questioned by the archbishop of Canterbury and the Keeper of the Privy Seal about the christening of his daughter Mary, who had not been baptised in church.⁷ Montague obligingly explained that he had christened the child himself, and gave his reasons. The previous year, soon after Montague inherited his grandfather’s title, his first son had been born. Young Lord Montague looked set to continue the Catholic, but ostentatiously conformist, tradition of the first viscount: an elaborate Protestant christening was planned, involving the queen, Lord Burghley and the earl of Sussex as godparents. But on the morning of the intended christening, the boy died, his baptism given by a nursemaid ‘upon the sodaine’. Montague attributed this tragedy to divine punishment, and resolved to ‘take another cours’ for any subsequent children. So after Mary Browne’s birth at the home of Montague’s father-in-law, the Protestant Lord Buckhurst, her father refused to hold a Church of England christening. When Buckhurst (unsurprisingly) objected to his asking a Catholic priest, Montague christened the child himself. Having recounted all this to his examiners, Montague was placed under house arrest.

For Michael Questier, this episode marked Montague’s move into recusant Catholicism: to refuse ‘even this most basic contact with the established Church’ was ‘pretty radical’.⁸ It was radical, but it was not unprecedented. Montague’s conviction that he could not allow his daughter to be christened according to the Book of Common Prayer grew out of a religious context in which christening was universal, and yet deeply contested. To avoid Protestant christenings, to seek Catholic rites, to conform or to separate, these were choices which had acquired significance for Catholic communities.⁹

It must be emphasised that, for Catholics, the essential validity of Protestant baptisms was not in doubt, and that the Church of England did not question the validity of Catholic baptisms either. The Council of Trent decreed that ‘If anyone saith, that the baptism which is even given by heretics in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, with the intention of doing what the Church doth, is not true baptism: let him be anathema.’¹⁰ Those baptised by Protestant rites were truly baptised, and need not – indeed could not – be re-baptised. But permitting your child to be christened by heretics was, according to one casuistry manual, ‘to permit and co-operate in the sins of another . . . by doing this a man appears to believe in the errors of the heretics’.¹¹ The Church of England required all children to be christened in the parish church; the Catholic Church reckoned it sinful for Catholic parents to allow this. Here were the seeds for a conflict.

Articles of enquiry issued for diocesan visitations early in Elizabeth’s reign insisted on church baptism on the first Sunday after an infant’s birth, and required defaulters in each parish to be reported.¹² By the 1580s, illicit christenings were being reported to the ecclesiastical courts which dealt with matters of discipline and some aspects of religious conformity; lists of recusants compiled by local officials sometimes also recorded suspect baptisms.¹³ In 1606, a statute against recusants stipulated (inter alia) a £100 fine for omitting a ‘lawful’ christening, bringing this offence under the jurisdiction of quarter sessions and assizes.¹⁴ How much conflict was actually caused is unclear. Many Catholics probably accepted Protestant baptism, reassured that, since the baptism was valid, at least their child’s salvation would not be jeopardised. Some did not, but how many, and how likely they were to get away with it, is hard to say.¹⁵

Since christenings were not covered by secular legislation until 1606, one may turn first to church court records for information on their policing. A comprehensive survey was not practical, and samples from available records do not turn up christening cases with great regularity. The indication is that such cases occurred, and that they were relatively infrequent.¹⁶ The York High Commission records for 1580–4 show eight prosecutions of probable Catholics for christening offences; the Chichester archdeaconry Detection Books show three for 1592–3 and four for 1603–6.¹⁷ Fourteen known Catholics were cited for christening offences in Cheshire c.1558–1603.¹⁸ There may have been localised campaigns at particular times: the list of recusants summoned in September 1602 by the York High Commission included thirteen accused of christening offences (as well as four couples accused of clandestine Catholic marriages); but there is no record of their appearances, or of further proceedings. In 1615, several couples accused of having children secretly baptised were among recusants convented by the Durham High Commission between April and July. Arrest warrants were issued, but repeatedly the defendants ‘could not be found’.¹⁹ One mother who ‘christened her children herself’, Elizabeth Fairhair, eventually went to prison.²⁰

Ecclesiastical courts had penalties at their disposal which had to be reckoned with. Offenders could be ordered to conform, with imprisonment as the sanction for non-compliance. In York, Matthew Wentworth’s wife was gaoled after repeated refusals to co-operate, though he conformed. Ralph Lawson of Burgh was also imprisoned in connection with his child’s baptism.²¹ Some long-term recusant prisoners were arrested initially for suspect baptisms: Anne Killingale²² and William Renold, a ‘webster’ who died in York Castle in 1587,²³ are examples. When imprisoned women recusants were temporarily released to give birth to their children, the terms of their leave might include having the child christened according to the Book of Common Prayer.²⁴

The 1606 legislation imposed a heavy financial penalty, under the jurisdiction of Crown courts. Enforcement does not seem to have been widespread, however, although eight cases were prosecuted at Durham Quarter Sessions from 1607 to 1615 (the final outcomes are unrecorded).²⁵ In 1611, pursuivants in Lancashire sought the prosecution of gentry families whose children ‘were baptyzed by popish preists’ in Blackburn parish.²⁶ In 1618, christenings were reportedly the target of a pursuivant in the ‘northern parts’ who ‘is sent from London to get information about recusant wives who use the Catholic ceremonies in baptism, and such like’. He ‘. . . compels women either to pay him ransom money, or else to take the oath [of allegiance]; or in default to prison.’²⁷ Twenty years later, in 1636–7, the Jesuit mission in Lancashire reported that Catholics were being pursued by the church courts over christenings.²⁸ At around the same time, the Privy Council became involved in a dispute over whether Spanish merchants resident at Dover could be prosecuted for Catholic religious practices; again the catalyst was a report of Catholic baptism.²⁹

Christenings turn up in reports of other Catholic activity, from Elizabeth’s reign onwards: Robert Goldsborough was reported in 1589 for various offences, including ‘defacing’ an English bible with Catholic commentary and that ‘hee Christeneth his childerne in corners’. This may have been the Robert Goldsborough in prison in 1593.³⁰ Four of the sixty-one Catholic prisoners in London examined in 1593 were asked about their children’s christening, including the future martyr, James Duckett (d.1601);³¹ Duckett’s wife was once gaoled (with the baby) over the recusant christening of their daughter Barbara.³² Boycotting Protestant christenings, and even worse employing seminary priests instead, was always likely to be an aggravating factor; sometimes it was a punishable offence.

There were probably more Catholic baptisms than the authorities ever caught up with. A survey of Yorkshire recusancy made in April 1604 suggests the extent of the problem: numerous Catholic marriages and baptisms were reported which had taken place over several years.³³ The exact nature of this survey is unclear from the isolated manuscript,³⁴ but it is arranged by parish and deanery, attested by churchwardens, and includes such detailed reports as

Bartholomew George has a childe born in January last which he refused to bring to the churche to be baptized and since, as they heare, it was baptized, secretlie at Mr.Barthram house, with some popish priest, for two strangers were sene ther in the night tyme suspected to be preistes.³⁵

The survey is retrospective, including ‘unbaptised’ children as old as four or six,³⁶ though most alleged secret baptisms were within the previous year.

The background to this may be that there was increased Catholic activity in the year following Elizabeth I’s death in March 1603, when toleration was hoped for from James I; and this in turn prompted greater zeal in policing, on the part of those worried by the possible spread of Catholicism under a lenient government. Yet the 1604 Visitation courtbooks contain only two christening cases, one of them mentioned in the April survey, suggesting that the earlier report was not linked to the diocesan visitation.³⁷ Whatever its purpose, the survey does not demonstrate that a majority of Catholics were refusing Protestant baptisms: out of 312 parishes reporting some Catholics, only forty-nine reported ‘recusant’ baptisms, just under one in six.³⁸ It does, however, indicate that Catholics were seeking Catholic baptisms in greater numbers than judicial records suggest.

If this is the case, it raises the question of how they were getting away with it. Robert Southwell reported in 1591 that ‘when their [Catholics’] wives are great [with child], they are forced to shift them from place to place to conceale their lying in, lest their children should be christened heretically’:³⁹ he implies a common practice, and there are other pieces of evidence which lend support. The Jesuit missionary William Weston’s first contacts in England in 1584 were Henry Hubert and his wife, who ‘had gone from home to live secretly in the house of a Catholic gentleman until [her] child was born; she was anxious that it should not fall into the hands of heretics and be baptised according to their rites’. Weston’s description of the death in childbirth of another Catholic woman notes that she had also left home to give birth.⁴⁰ In Suffolk in 1595, one woman was accused of ‘harbouring’ another for this purpose,⁴¹ and a Catholic narrative from York asserts that at the home of Dorothy Vavasour, wife of the recusant prisoner Dr Thomas Vavasour, ‘women, their time...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on the Text
• Introduction
• Part I: Making Catholics
• Part II: The Protestant State and Catholic Children
• Part III: Youth and Catholicism
• Coda: A Catholic Household in the 1660s
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: The Responsa Scholarum and the Liber Primi Examinis
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index