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Conflicting experiences
The situation of Catholics as the reign of Charles I began was a complex one. He worked to reduce their persecution, but that only prompted local officials to treat Catholics even more harshly than they had before. He had a marriage treaty protecting his wife’s religion, but for the first few years, his wife’s behavior actively harmed the reputation of Catholics.
After the dissolution of Parliament, though, and the death of Buckingham and the dismissal of the queen’s Catholic court, Catholicism among England’s elite started to enter a revival. Many But, outside of that elite, Catholics still suffered as local judges sought to make examples of them. Crippling fines had reduced many to poverty, and in that poverty they couldn’t afford to support priests who would educate them in the principles of their faith.
George Calvert was one of the elite, and he envisioned a colony where Catholics could be free from the penal laws and English persecution.
Transcript
We’ve spent the last six months, almost to the day, in New England, exploring Puritans and Separatists of all varieties who moved to the New World for religious reasons. Now, we’re going south again, to the Chesapeake, and to a whole different group of religious outcasts. This time, we’re talking about Maryland, founded in 1632-ish, and the great bogeyman of 17th Century English society, the Catholics. So, as we’ve done in the past, it’s time to head back to England, and get a real sense of who this group of settlers was, where they were coming from, and why they came to America.
Introduction
By the time George Calvert got a charter for the future state of Maryland, English Catholics had suffered almost exactly a century of oppression. To sum up some of what we’ve already covered: When Henry VIII had dissolved the monasteries and started to persecute pretty much anyone with religious convictions, a lot of Catholics left England entirely, and still more left under his very-Protestant son, Edward VI. They returned under Mary I, and when Mary died five years later, many held out hopes that Elizabeth might pursue a policy which favored Catholics. Instead, about nine months into her reign, she outlawed Catholicism and surrounded herself with the most forcefully anti-Catholic people in England, and for the next 50 years, oppression of Catholics got worse and worse. Some Catholics rebelled or conspired to kill Elizabeth and put her Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots on the throne, but the end result of this was that the vast majority of the English population became convinced that Catholics were some dangerous underground force subversively working to topple English society in favor of the Spanish. Even worse, propaganda released about Mary I’s reign, most notably Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, persuaded many people that Catholics were violent and oppressive, and it was those texts which secured a huge number of conversions to Protestantism. And, of course, news from France of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre didn’t help.
So while there was definitely a core group of people in England who had been advocating for Protestant reforms since before Martin Luther was even born, the Reformation in England had largely been fueled by anti-Catholic propaganda. And, that meant to things. First, there was a level of paranoia about Catholics which would have been comical if it weren’t so tragic, and second, there were a lot of Protestants in England who were only protestants because of that paranoia.
So, by the end of Elizabeth’s reign, and by the time King James came to the throne, Catholicism was in a very precarious position. Priests would be hanged, drawn and quartered, and those who harbored them executed. People were required to attend Anglican services, and if they didn’t, they were fined 20 pounds per month, or imprisonment until the fine was paid, or until the offender went to the Anglican Church. This is at a time when 40 pounds per year would be the average annual income of a non-gentry landowner, and it’s also worth noting here that prison actually depleted your money in the 17th century, because in prison you had to pay for food and bedding. The more you could pay, the better your life was, and if you couldn’t pay at all, the people of your town were taxed to give you 1 pence per day to pay for stale bread and straw to sleep on. In cases of extreme need, you could beg for food outside the prison’s doors. But, back to the laws. Attending Mass carried a fine of 100 pounds, plus one year in prison, and Catholics couldn’t even venture 5 miles from their houses. They were certainly not allowed to legally leave the country. These laws technically spread to all nonconformists, though they weren’t applied against Protestant separatists as much or as severely, but it was this law which caused the Pilgrims to have such a dramatic voyage to the Netherlands. And in fact, the postal service was established in large part to spy on Catholics.
Bounty hunters known as pursuivants and common informers helped find people breaking the penal laws. They would find and arrest recusants and deliver them to the authorities in exchange for the statutory reward. These people were notoriously and, I’m sure, shockingly unscrupulous, turning to blackmail, theft, falsification of evidence and bribing of witnesses if it would give them extra money. This was just one type of priest hunter.
It’s important to note here that not all Protestants were out to get Catholics. Hugh Bigod, who led the second part of the Pilgrimage of Grace, was himself an evangelical. There were protestants who spoke up against the severity of the laws. In small towns, people would frequently refuse to report their neighbors for being Catholics. Lest you think it was all Protestants versus Catholics, it wasn’t. It would be more accurate to say that it was power-hungry and unscrupulous people working to quash dissidents, with Catholics being the most united dissident sect.
But, to say the situation was grim would be an understatement, and yet Catholicism survived. It was strongest in the North, Wales and London. There were poor people who refused to renounce their faith, and there were middle class people reduced to poverty. Prisons were full of Catholics. There were also a few thousand people, mainly nobility and gentry, who illegally went into exile in the Low Countries, where they established universities and seminaries. A few of those exiles joined the Spanish Party, working to advance Spanish interests. This, of course, includes William Stanley, who tried to convince Spain to destroy Jamestown. But most quietly went about their business and raising their children, living on whatever money they had, or what money their friends and relatives in England could send them. Many became priests or nuns. Their position was ever unstable, though, because the English pushed hard for the Continental powers to expel English exiles, and there was a strong Calvinist streak in the Netherlands, and to a lesser extent Belgium, which was also hostile to their presence. They were under the continual threat of being pushed out, and at least once they were actually forced to flee. For the most part, though, those exiles and their descendents stayed in the region until the aftermath of the French Revolution made it unsafe, and they returned to England.
The way Catholicism really survived, though, was in the country houses of wealthy recusants. Those people would harbor priests in “priest holes,” allowing the priests to live in relative comfort, and hold secret masses for the trusted communities they served. These communities were tightly intertwined and often interrelated. If you look at the Gunpowder Plot, you can see just how closely related those people were, and that was fairly characteristic. And those people were also the ones who helped fund exile activity, as well as any activities within England. This was very dangerous, though, because you could be fined 100 pounds for sending money to exiles on the Continent.
The other group responsible for Catholicism’s survival, and perhaps the most important group of all, was women. Wives didn’t own property, and were thus exempt from the penal fines which were so financially devastating. So what a lot of families did was allow the man to go out, and earn a living as a nominal Anglican, getting the minimum Anglican communion, and keeping the family afloat, while the women remained Catholic, educated their children as Catholics, supported the priests and grew the faith. They could be executed for harboring priests, but for the most part their actions went less scrutinized than their husbands’, so families who wanted to support the Catholic Church did so through the women.
When Elizabeth died, Catholics hoped that James, the son of Mary Queen of Scots, would at least reduce the persecution. He had been tolerant of Catholics in Scotland, even after a Catholic revolt, and he’d even promised Thomas Percy that he would be less oppressive. James tended to feel that intense persecution would weed out the moderates and inspire people to radical action, and he hoped that leniency would encourage Catholics to conform to the English Church. In fact, for a year and a half, he didn’t even collect recusancy fines.
But, James faced a deeply anti-Catholic Parliament, and Robert Cecil, who had become one of his closest advisors, was one of Elizabeth’s old deeply anti-Catholic Privy Councillors. In reality, James couldn’t have been tolerant even if he wanted to. He was fundamentally, firmly Protestant, and he was dealing with constant pressure to go after Catholics, so when his leniency didn’t lead recusants to conform, In February 1605, he resumed Elizabeth’s persecution with gusto. He didn’t necessarily go after individual Catholics as much, but he was more focused on keeping people from going to the Continent, and he went even harder after the priests. His main target was the Jesuits, who he saw as dangerous, disloyal and extreme.
This, of course, led to the Gunpowder Plot just a few months later, and the Gunpowder plot led to even harsher persecution led by Robert Cecil. Lots of people were killed, including the best-known builder of priest holes, Nicholas Owen, who was tortured and killed in the Tower. Lots of people turned into informants to protect themselves, and a new set of penal laws was passed, with provisions like “no recusant can go closer than 10 miles to London, with a 100 pound fine,” “no recusant can practice law, pharmacy or medicine, nor get a degree from Oxford or Cambridge, nor could anyone with a Catholic wife hold public office.” Catholic widows forfeited 2/3 of their dowries, as well as the right to execute the will, and men who married Catholics lost any claim to their wives’ property. There was a 100 pound fine for recusants who refused to have their children baptized by Anglican clergymen, and a 20 pound fine for burying a recusant anywhere except in an Anglican cemetery. A recusant was someone who refused to receive Anglican Communion twice a year, and now that included women. While women couldn’t be fined, if they were over 18, they could be imprisoned unless their husbands paid 10 pounds per month, or gave up 1/3 of their lands. Most importantly of all, though, a new Oath of Supremacy which required Catholics to deny the spiritual sovereignty of the Pope. And, with this law, the Catholic community, itself, started to split. The first cracks had appeared in Elizabeth’s reign with the rise of the Jesuits, but this caused a serious fracture between the “regulars,” and the “seculars.”
Now, the difference between the “regulars” and the “seculars,” is not one I understand very well. Regulars were priests who took monastic oaths, like the oath of poverty, while seculars were those who trained to work in the world. Practically speaking, it very much sounds like the regulars tended, on the whole, to be a bit more politically active, a bit more combative, and a bit more affluent, or at least had a better support system, while the seculars tended to keep their heads down and do whatever leftover tasks needed to be done, like tending to the poor. That’s definitely not a 100% split, but those are the trends I could find in my research. And what’s important is that, with no bishops left in England, the two started to conflict. One of the places they conflicted was on the oath. The Jesuits said it was perfectly fine for people to take the oath without meaning it, but a lot of the seculars disagreed with that. The strongest that they’d go is to argue that maybe the oath was a purely civic thing. Still, many Catholics couldn’t bring themselves to sign something which explicitly denied the Pope’s spiritual authority.
So, things for Catholics were at least as bad as ever from 1605-1610, but then Cecil died, and James got really adjusted to English politics, and somewhere along the line his own wife converted to Catholicism, and James started to soften to Catholics, showing them more leniency than either they or Parliament had ever expected. Executions pretty much stopped, and James even started talking about marrying his heir to a Catholic princess to solidify England’s role as peacemaker of Europe – a continent which was at that point preparing to enter the Thirty Years War, as well as to prevent a French Spanish alliance from forming and threatening Protestant England. When his oldest son, Henry, had been alive, he’d firmly refused, but Henry died, and Charles was a very, very different person from his brother.
James spent 10 years trying to marry Charles to the Spanish Infanta, but after that failed in perhaps the most humiliating way possible, the French were the next best bet, and to ensure a French marriage which would hopefully cement an English French alliance, the English agreed to a pro-Catholic marriage treaty which was even more extreme than that which Spain had proposed. James promised to end the penal laws, the French Queen would be allowed a full French Catholic court, plus public and private chapels all staffed by French clergymen, the oath of allegiance would be suspended, the Queen would be allowed to raise her children from the marriage as Catholics, and the king would even have to respect intercession by Henrietta Maria on behalf of English Catholics.
Near death, James signed the treaty, and Prince Charles was married to the 14 year old Princess Henrietta Maria of France. She was the youngest sister of the French king, and hadn’t been groomed for such a prestigious marriage. Being so young, she would more likely have been married to some distant member of the French nobility, so she was given virtually no education, apart from some religious education, and knew no English at all.
So, the teenager prepared to leave the wealthy French Court, and go to England. Before she went, she was told by her mother, her brother and the Pope himself that she was the person who must end the persecution of Catholics in England, and lead England back to Catholicism, to which she responded that she wouldn’t let them down. The Pope gave the necessary dispensation for the marriage, which was the first of its kind. Her brother appointed a group of Catholics he deemed appropriate for such a task, and sent her to England.
And, James kept his word. He ordered the suspension of the penal laws, as well as some fine money returned to Catholics. After a rocky start, things had improved so much for London Catholics that they genuinely mourned his death, even though they weren’t allowed to attend his funeral.
And that brings us up to the reign of King Charles, and like in so many other things, Charles’s reign was quite different. He now had a Catholic wife, a treaty with France, and his mother had been a Catholic. That’s actually important, because throughout his life, Charles always had one person he was closer to than anyone else, and until she died, that person had been his mother. She had actually shaped his tastes with her love of Italian art and culture, and religion. After she died, it was the Duke of Buckingham, at least until he died, and then, as we’ll see, it was his wife, Henrietta Maria. So for all but 9 years of his life, his closest confidante was a Catholic.
This, along with the marriage treaty with France, put Charles in a unique situation. Monarch and Parliament had always clashed over the issues of divine right and royal prerogative, but they also had a common enemy they could bond over, the Catholics. This put them fundamentally on the same side, and gave them a mutual bond even when they were bickering over everything else. There was a scary, seditious, rebellious group of people who could destroy them all, and the rest was less important. Even starting off, they had no such common enemy with Charles. He immediately continued James’s suspension of the penal laws, and Catholics were now allowed to attend mass in ambassadorial chapels. People had always done this, but they’d often been arrested as they left the embassies. For the first time in decades, you could even see Catholic priests walking down the streets of London in full garb.
This leniency didn’t come without a serious backlash, though. First, the Puritans used it to fuel a massive victory in the election for Parliament one month after he took the throne. This Parliament was the one which refused to grant the king Tonnage and Poundage, and whose fights with the King set the stage for the English Civil War over a decade later.
Second, local authorities started to take it on themselves to maintain the laws. The situation of Catholics outside of London actually got worse and more dangerous. Local governments forced Catholics to pay heavy fines, and arrested them, constables forced their way into their homes. Two 85 year old women were imprisoned in Lincolnshire, for example, and a poor man with tuberculosis was beaten. Clergy began to be extremely cautious in their correspondence, much more than they’d been before.
And, rumors started to spread. Some said that Henrietta Maria’s French Catholics were forwarding state secrets to Richelieu. And, others said Catholics were plotting an insurrection, and in response to these rumors, the Privy Council actually ordered every known recusant to be disarmed, except for the weapons they needed to protect their persons and property. After two months of searching, though, virtually no weapons were found.
So, stopping the persecution of Catholics was easier said than done. And making matters even worse, the teenage Queen was fueling anti-Catholicism more than anyone. The people who had been sent to accompany her were belligerent, cliquish and extravagant. She had advisors and family members telling her at regular intervals that this or that was heretical, and she was a teenager with no experience, no real education, and no natural diplomatic skills. She had a forceful personality, moreso than any of her siblings, and that was only exacerbated by the excessively provocative people who had been sent to accompany her. While she and Charles sat at the dinner table, her priests would pray over his. When they visited one of Charles’s Anglican chapels, they stomped up and down the aisles talking and laughing over the minister’s sermon, and they even fired a pistol hear where he was sitting as a practical joke. And most infuriating of all for Charles, she refused to attend his Coronation ceremony because it was conducted by Protestant priests. English Catholics were willing to watch it, but Henrietta refused to do even that. He didn’t speak to her for three days after that, and as royal gossip was a pastime in London, stories like this spread and turned many quiet Protestants into active anti-Catholics. And it turned even inoffensive behavior on her part into fuel for the fire. She held an impromptu prayer at Tyburn in honor of Catholic martyrs, and gossip turned the event into a massive, barefoot pilgrimage to honor traitors.
So when Parliament reconvened, it wanted the Catholic issue stopped. It demanded enforcement of the penal laws, and that Catholics be forbidden from attending mass at embassy chapels. The Commons drafted a petition on religion that was sent to the Lords and delivered to the King, saying that if they ignored the penal laws, recusancy couldn’t be controlled, and that the King’s laxity was allowing papists to flaunt their religion. They wanted protestant educators to counter the emerging threat, they wanted English Catholics banned from Court, and estates which had been returned to be reconfiscated. They even wanted imprisoned Catholics to be kept away from other prisoners. The people who’d written this petition were John Pym and Edwin Sandys, former treasurer of the Virginia Company. I do want to take a quick minute to correct something I said in the Virginia Company episodes, and that’s that while Sandys did have relatives who fought for the Royalists, he also had two sons who fought for Parliament in the English Civil War.
Charles needed money, though, and Buckingham was actually extremely anti-Catholic. So Charles agreed to break the marriage treaty and enforce the penal laws, but the next day, to appease the French, he issued a pardon for one Jesuit and several other priests who had been imprisoned at Exeter, and Parliament let the issue slide, barely discussing it. But, they did start to go after Anglicans who advocated high Church rituals. They took one, named Richard Montague, into custody because he had written a pamphlet encouraging the English Church to adopt more ornate and meaningful rituals. And, Parliament voted not to give Charles the money anyway.
Henrietta Maria had a massive, though understandable, tantrum when she learned the penal laws were going to be enforced, but Charles had already suspected that her French Court was turning her against him, especially after the coronation fiasco. Plus, England hadn’t gotten the kind of military backup it wanted out of the marriage treaty, and in Fact, France had made peace with Spain, ending the possibility of an English alliance. So he broke the marriage treaty again and appointed three English Protestants to her bedchamber, and within the next few months, he’d dismissed all but a handful of her French Court. He appointed a new English suite, and things immediately got better between them. And, after Buckingham died, they got even better, to the point that they actually became one of the most devoted couples in English royal history. In fact, there was a bit of joking dialogue written for a play at around this time, “the king is now in love,” “with whom?” “with the queen!” “in love with his own wife? That’s held incest at court!”
The two were actually happy, and she started to mature in her understanding and thinking, becoming less temperamental and more patient. At the same time, Parliament was dissolved. The new French ambassador said he was going to push for a new chapel to be built, and Henrietta Maria even refused, saying she was too much in love with her husband to bring up controversial subjects. The ambassador continued to push, bringing up the idea with Charles, and he agreed to the plan, so long as the priests were neither Jesuits nor the Oratorians of the problematic French Court. So, she got a chapel staffed by Capuchins, who were quiet, diligent and pious, and they began negotiations for the price of a second chapel.
And almost overnight, life got better for Catholics. Hundreds flocked to mass and to the sacraments at Henrietta Maria’s chapels. Catholicism also started to flourish at court, and in fact it entered a sort of revival. Catholic catechisms and devotional books were even given to Protestant courtiers, who were impressed by the elaborate doctrines and imposing ceremony of the Catholic Church, and while Charles discouraged proselytization and the use of Catholic prayer books, he also commissioned an edit of the English Prayer Book which started to play up the ceremony and artistry of the English Church. It wasn’t Catholicism, but it was increasingly like Catholicism, and it was extremely popular, popular enough to alarm the Puritans. The Privy Council periodically issued token proclamations forbidding Catholics to attend mass in embassy and royal chapels, but both were full of Catholics, anyway. Not everyone at court agreed with the changes, in fact some of the people closest to Charles, like Archbishop Laud and the Earl of Strafford, were some of the most opposed to lenient treatment of Catholics, both frequently butted heads with the Queen.
But fundamentally, Charles liked Catholicism, too. Catholicism appealed to all his sensibilities. Order, service, submission, beauty and ceremony. He shared a love of art and theology with the Catholics more than anyone else. He became close friends with his wife’s Catholic courtiers. He encouraged discussions between his Anglican ministers and her grand almoner. He discussed theological issues with Catholics like George Conn, and in those discussions he emphasized just how much he had in common with Catholics, saying his only real difference was that he wouldn’t acknowledge the later councils, especially the Council of Trent, he was concerned that he’d seen Catholics in Spain kneel at the feet of the Virgin Mary while only bowing to the crucifix, and he didn’t believe in the supremacy of the Pope, though he also strongly objected to his own title of “supreme governor of the Church of England,” and that he genuinely wanted to work toward a union of Christian Churches, and that included re-unifying with Rome. He understood Catholic doctrines enough to correct Protestant misconceptions, but as much as he liked Catholicism, he didn’t believe it would be right for England to simply submit to Rome. Unity, yes, but unity of equals. Christians could be saved in any Christian denomination, and the Anglican Church adhered perfectly to Charles’s views. It kept a lot of the most important parts of Catholicism while separating England from its most controversial doctrines. New Haven Puritan John Davenport’s brother, Christopher, was a Catholic convert who actually wrote a book advocating for these principles and dedicated it to the King, himself, but Rome rejected the idea.
Charles told Conn that he wanted the Pope to meet him halfway, to which Conn replied “His Holiness will even come up to London to receive you into the Catholic Church.”
He never used the word “papist,” even as his Catholics openly said he was a heretic and schismatic. Conn wrote that he challenged the King in such a way that most kings would have had him beheaded, but he also gave him art, and got Catholics in Rome to send him art, too. Even the Pope allowed Bernini to make Charles’s bust, practically the only bust ever made by Rome’s leading sculptor of a non-Catholic. He did oppose the Jesuits, who he considered the Catholic equivalent of the Puritans, and he didn’t completely suspend the penal laws, but he did make them more tolerable.
He badly needed money, and the penal laws provided a source of revenue for the Crown, and they also decreased the political fallout he’d face if he stretched the laws to fine protestants while eliminating fines for Catholics. But what he did was to restore the practice of “composition,” which allowed recusants to pay an annual rent based on the assessed value of 2/3 of their land, and in exchange to have all other fines and persecutions lifted. Before 1625, the fines had been 20 pounds per month, at a time when the average landowner earned about 40 pounds per year, and if they couldn’t pay, 2/3 of their property was confiscated. Now, they could just pay an annual rent, adjusted for income, and live in peace.
There were two commissions to determine how much any given recusant had to pay in compounding, one for the North and one for the South, and the commissioners were actually fairly lenient in their assessments, perhaps surprising considering the fact that their members included Thomas Walsingham and Edwin Sandys. Now, it’s certainly possible that they were just encouraging people to join the system, because once they were in, the commissions could raise the rents, but Laud actually criticized the commissions for being too lenient, and when Strafford was given an administrative position in the northern commission, things got harsh enough that many Protestants actually criticized him. Though there was certainly corruption in the system, and some people were treated badly, on the whole it turned a devastating system into one which was livable, and people signed up in droves.
And with that livability, the number of Catholics began to rise. There were more and more people espousing pro-Catholic beliefs, Anglicans married to Catholics converted back, and rose to prominence, and the number of people vehemently opposed to lenience began to dwindle. A bigger chapel was built by Somerset house, and Henrietta Maria laid the first two cornerstones as Charles watched, and a silver plate with both their faces, as well as the names of the resident priests, was fixed to the stone in commemoration of their sponsorship. Cannons at the Tower were fired in celebration.
There was no better time to be a Catholic, but the newfound peace didn’t extend to everyone. When the future James II got dangerously sick, people suspected his Catholic nurse of poisoning him, and while Henrietta Maria was able to defend her, that was only because she was in her inner circle. There was still a lot of anti-Catholic sentiment, and the average Catholic was still recovering from decades of crippling policies. And, in many places, local authorities alarmed by the lax enforcement of the penal laws took it on themselves to make examples of Catholics.
Pursuivants and common informers could still collect bounties for turning in Catholics. They confronted one Jesuit Father, Henry Morse, while he was treating plague victims in London, and he paid them not to arrest him while he was tending to his patients. The next year, they came back for him, arrested him, and bribed witnesses to sign a statement saying he’d converted 20 people who’d later died of the plague, and although other witnesses came to his defense, he was imprisoned in Newgate for a year, arraigned but not convicted, and his witnesses were also jailed for their recusancy. The incident prompted Charles to appoint a committee of pro-Catholic privy councilors to review pursuivant behavior, but little changed.
Poverty now crippled a large portion of the Catholic community, and that poverty left them unable to pay their priests a living wage. While most of the Jesuits found comfortable homes with affluent families, the secular priests had no permanent home or regular income. And because they couldn’t pay for long-term clergy, parishioners were becoming less and less educated about doctrine.
And in part because of financial difficulties, the split between regulars and seculars turned into a feud, and while most clergy took no part in the dispute, the ones who did further weakened the morale of Catholics around the Country who were still experiencing hardship and uncertainty.
Because marriage was still difficult, and priests weren’t always around, Catholics often turned to clandestine marriages with no priest involvement, and sometimes they’d divorce similarly informally. Now, couples that are looking into divorce would try to do therapy and quizzes. You can try it for yourself here. If you also plan to file for divorce, be sure to hire a divorce lawyer in Chicago to ensure that your rights and interests are protected.
So, many seculars worried that the English Catholic community was descending into ignorance and moral anarchy, and they blamed the regulars for allowing that to happen.
Though it wasn’t usually legal, Justices of the Peace still imprisoned Catholics regularly, and Catholics had to wait longer for trial than most people. Because people had to pay for food and bedding in prison, this meant their money continued to dwindle. So, one man named Thomas Metcalf spent two years starving in a Lancaster jail, and died soon after being transferred to London. Henry Morse who I mentioned above spent 9 years in 3 prisons. While in Newgate, he managed to get slightly more comfortable quarters than most, and found the walls of his room scribbled with a combination of scripture and obscenities from the two types of people who had frequently occupied the cell.
In fact, during the era of personal rule, three Catholics were executed. Two were up in Lancaster, where a particularly vicious judge wanted to intimidate the region’s large Catholic population. He’d been one of the prosecutors at the trial of the Earl of Essex. The first person executed was a Jesuit priest who was found guilty of high treason without even being allowed to speak in his own defense at his trial. The second was a middle class yeoman farmer who had resisted arrest. In the fight, his wife and two servants were also beaten, but one of the people helping arrest him had broken his leg and died of an infection. So, the farmer was convicted of murder. He applied for a stay of execution, and the King ordered one, but the judge said he’d only honor it if the farmer renounced his Catholicism. He refused, and was hanged. The third person executed was an Irish friar who had come to England just a few months earlier, but who had spent time all over Catholic Europe, including inspecting foreign ships in Lisbon to ensure they weren’t helping the Dutch war effort. In London, he’d met one of the Englishmen whose ships he’d detained, and the man accused him of having threatened to kill the king as a heretic. What he’d actually said was that if a man didn’t have free will, then it wouldn’t be a sin to murder anyone, even the King. Henrietta Maria tried to save him, with Charles’s support, but he was hanged, drawn and quartered.
So, life was still hard for Catholics in England, but in London they enjoyed a high degree of religious freedom. Henrietta Maria converted lots of people, and Charles accepted that. Even Protestants who never converted strongly supported the movement, and the Venetian envoy said that even some Anglicans spoke like zealous Catholics. One of Henrietta Maria’s courtiers was the son of one of the Gunpowder Plotters. His father’s reputation haunted him, though, and ultimately he left for the Continent, where he spent the next 20 years writing religious and political pamphlets. And the Catholics were also very loyal to the King. They fought harder than most to support him in the Bishops Wars, even though they don’t seem to have been treated equally within the army. And of course they strongly supported him when Civil War came to England. And the King’s leniency was one of the reasons Parliament went after the King as hard as it did when it reconvened.
So, this has been a longer episode than most, and a less American episode than some, but I just find it fascinating. And it was as Catholicism was really beginning to flourish, in 1632 specifically, that George Calvert applied for a patent for a piece of land at the north of the Chesapeake. If you listened to the Virginia Company episodes, you may recognize him as James’s Secretary of State who helped turn Virginia into a Crown Colony. He’d been born in Yorkshire, and gotten his start as Cecil’s secretary. He was a close friend and long-term ally of the Earl of Strafford, and was diligent, likeable and not particularly ambitious, which had always made him someone who was appreciated, if not valued, for his reliability. He’d invested in Virginia, and tried and failed to set up a colony in Newfoundland. He’d led the efforts to negotiate the Spanish Match, and after it fell through, he’d openly converted to Catholicism and left public life, though he was still someone with lots of connections, and lots of land and wealth. He’d always supported colonization, and he’d envisioned a place where Catholics could worship openly without interference from the penal laws, pursuivants or hostile officials. He planned to name his Catholic refuge Terra Mariae, or Maryland, after the Queen.