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A Catholic Sculpture in Elizabethan England: Sir Thomas Tresham’s Reredos at Rushton Hall

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Richard Williams
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Extract

The large sculpture of the crucifixion created at Rushton Hall, Northamptonshire, for Sir Thomas Tresham is a remarkable survival (Fig. 1). Sir Thomas was a highly controversial personality of the Elizabethan age, notorious as a leading Catholic dissenter against the Protestant religious settlement. Rushton Hall in Northamptonshire was his ancestral country seat. Religious imagery from the Elizabethan period is rare, but it is quite exceptional to find a surviving religious sculpture made for an English Catholic.

Type
Section 6: Cathedrals, Abbeys, Churches and Chapels
Information
Architectural History , Volume 44 , 2001 , pp. 221 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2001

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References

Notes

1 For the life of Sir Thomas Tresham see The Dictionary of National Biography, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on Manuscripts in Various Collections III, LV (1904), introduction; Morley, Adrian, The Catholic Subjects of Elizabeth I (London, 1978), pp. 161-67Google Scholar; Finch, Mary Elizabeth, ‘The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families, 1540-1640’, Northamptonshire Record Society, XIX (1956), pp. 72–92 Google Scholar.

2 Gotch, John Alfred, The Buildings Erected in Northamptonshire by Sir Thomas Tresham (London, 1883), pp. 11–12 Google Scholar.

3 Tipping, Henry Avray, ‘Rushton Hall’, Country Life, XXVI (October, 1909), pp. 454-61, 490-98Google Scholar; Isham, Gyles, ‘Sir Thomas Tresham and his Buildings’, Reports and Papers of the Northamptonshire Record Society, LXV (1964/5)Google Scholar; Heward, John & Taylor, Robert, The Country Houses of Northamptonshire, Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (Swindon, 1996), p. 302 Google Scholar; Isham, Gyles, Rushton Triangular Lodge (English Heritage, London, 1991 edn)Google Scholar; Girouard, Mark, Lyveden New Bield (National Trust, London, 1990)Google Scholar.

4 For the widespread use of prints by English craftsmen see Wells-Cole, Anthony, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (New Haven and London, 1997)Google Scholar.

5 Gotch, op. cit., p. 12.

6 For devotional texts written for Elizabethan Catholics see Alfred Southern, C., Elizabethan Recusant Prose 1559-1582 (London, 1950)Google Scholar and the comprehensive list in Allison, Anthony Francis & Rogers, David M., The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640, 2 vols (Aldershot, 1994), 11 Google Scholar.

7 Gotch, op. cit., p. 12.

8 Heward & Taylor, op. cit., pp. 302, 301 (fig. 395), 299 (fig. 392).

9 Ibid., p. 305 n. 20.

10 Lambeth Palace MS 565. The text is transcribed and translated in Holmes, Peter John, ‘Elizabethan Casuistry’, Catholic Record Society, LXVII (Record Series, 1981), pp. 81–83 Google Scholar.

11 See, for example, McGrath, Patrick & Rowe, John, ‘The Imprisonment of Catholics for Religion under Elizabeth I’, Recusant History, 4, XX (October, 1991), pp. 415-35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Hopkins, Richard (translation of de Granada, Luis), Of prayer and meditation (Paris, 1582), p. 36rGoogle Scholar (a monk kneels before an altar), p. 259V (mass is said before an altar with confession being heard at either side). Versions of the same images appear in Hopkins, R. (translation of de Granada, Luis), A memoriali of a Christian life (Rouen, 1586)Google Scholar with an additional engraving (p. 363) in which wealthy members of the laity kneel to hear mass before a similar two-tier reredos.

13 Public Record Office, STATE PAPERS (Domestic) 12/172 fol. 113. The report of a search of Sir Thomas Tresham’s house at Hoxton in 1584 in which ‘A booke of prayer and meditation’ was listed among the books and other objects found. This is presumably the title of the book rather than a description of the contents, since the other books are also listed by tide.

14 Public Record Office, STATE PAPERS (Domestic) loc. cit.

15 Caraman, Philip (translator), William Weston. The Autobiography of an Elizabethan (London, 1955), p. 166 Google Scholar.

16 For a contemporary description of the chapel see Southern, Alfred C., An Elizabethan Recusant House comprising The Life of the Lady Magdalen Viscountess Montague (London, 1954), pp. 43–44 Google Scholar.

17 Hill, Thomas, A quatron of reasons of Catholike religion with as many briefe reasons of refusali (Secret Catholic press operating in England, 1600), p. 120 Google Scholar.

18 The literature on the function and contemporary theory of images is vast. Particularly helpful are Aston, Margaret, England’s Iconoclasts. Laws Against Images (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar; Ringbom, Sixten, Icon to narrative. The rise of the dramatic close-up in fifteenth century devotional painting, Acta Academiae Aboensis ser. A, Humaniora 2, XXXI, 2nd edn (Doornspijk, 1984)Google Scholar; van Os, Henk, The Art of Devotion 1300-1500, exhibition catalogue, Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, 1994)Google Scholar.

19 Fitzherbert, Thomas, A defence of the Catholyke cause (1602), p. 37rGoogle Scholar. I am extremely grateful to Professor Christopher Highley of Ohio State University for bringing this passage to my attention.

20 Public Record Office, STATE PAPERS (Domestic) loc. cit. includes ‘Vaux his catéchisme’ meaning Laurence Vaux, A catechisme, or a Christian doctrine, necessarie for chyldren and the ignorant people (published in 1568 and in eight further editions).

21 Persons lists Sir Thomas Tresham among those he ‘reconcyled’ in 1580. See Pollen, John Hungerford (ed.), ‘The Memoirs of Father Robert Persons’, Miscellanea II, The Catholic Record Society, 11 (1966), p. 27 Google Scholar.

22 Note that the correct date is 1575. Finch, Mary Elizabeth, ‘The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families, 1540-1640’, Northamptonshire Record Society, XIX (1956)Google Scholar, cites Shaw, William Arthur, The Knights of England, 2 vols (London, 1906), II, p. 76 Google Scholar. Incorrect dates are given in many of the sources cited above.

23 Haigh, Christopher, ‘The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation’, in The English Reformation Revised, ed. Haigh, Christopher (Cambridge, 1987), p. 195 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also p. 194 for the militant Catholic chosen by Sir Thomas as tutor to his children. Tresham came from a Catholic family and married into another staunchly Catholic family, the Throckmortons. His Catholic allegiances before 1580 are accepted by Mary Elizabeth Finch, op. cit., p. 76.

24 For the issue of ‘Church Papists’ see Walsham, Alexandra, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England, Royal Historical Society Studies in History, LXVIII (1993)Google Scholar.

25 See Aston, op. cit., especially pp. 306-14.

26 Ibid., pp. 313ff, 336; Haugaard, William, Elizabeth and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 188-89Google Scholar. In 1601 Bess of Hardwick’s chapel at Hardwick Hall contained ‘a Crucefixe of imbrodered worke’ together with pictures of the Nativity and Annunciation. The household inventory is published in Boynton, Lindsay & Thornton, Peter, ‘The Hardwick Hall Inventory of 1601’, Furniture History, VII (1971), pp. 1–40 Google Scholar.

27 See Williams, Richard L., Religious Pictures and Sculpture in Elizabethan England: Censure, Appreciation and Devotion (forthcoming doctoral thesis, Courtauld Institute, London University)Google Scholar.

28 Sir Thomas Tresham recorded this incident himself in a memorandum in the Tresham Papers dated 1597. British Library Add. MS 39832. fol. 5r. The passage is printed in Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on Manuscripts in Various Collections III, LV (1904), p. 91.

29 Historical Manuscripts Commission, op. cit., pp. i, viii-xxvi.