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Loca Secretiora in 1581

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Michael Hodgetts
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Extract

In Richard Simpson's biography of Edmund Campion (1867) there is an account of conditions in England in 1580-1 which includes the following sentence:

The hiding-holes had become known, by means of searchers and false brethren, by the middle of 1581, so that even thus early the Catholics were compelled, when there was a night alarm, to betake themselves to woods and thickets, to ditches and holes.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , October 1989 , pp. 386 - 395
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1988

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References

Notes

1 Richard, Simpson Life of Edmund Campion (1867), p. 171.Google Scholar

2 Alison, Plowden Elizabethan England: Life in an Age of Adventure (1982), p. 185.Google Scholar

3 See also Recusant History 11 (1971–2), pp. 281–292;Google ScholarPubMed 12 (1973-4), pp. 99-100; and my Secret Hiding-places (Dublin, 1989), pp. 12–15.Google Scholar

4 Sander (1586), p. 446. The letter is not in the first ed. (Cologne, 1585).

5 C.R.S. 39 (1942), pp. 72-73.

6 Sander (1586), p. 452; C.R.S. 39, pp. 77-78, where, however, perscrutatorum (‘searchers’) is printed as persecutatorum (‘persecutors’).

7 Sander (1586), p. 452.

8 Ingolstadt 1588, p. 337; Les Trois Livres du Schisme d'Angleterre, 1587 (no place), p. 242; Cologne 1610, p. 399, identified as the edition that he used by Simpson, p. 375, n. 137. I am most grateful to Mr. Philip Harris for photocopies of these texts.

9 SP 12/193/45, printed in Recusant History 12 (1973-4), p. 101.

10 Order of Common Council, 1574, quoted in Macbeth, ed. Sylvan Barnet (Signet Classics, New York and Scarborough, Ontario, 1963, 1986), p. xiii.

11 Oxford Latin Dictionary, secretus 4.

12 Horace, Ars Poetica 298; Tacitus, Agricola 38; Quintilian, Institutio Oratorio 11.1.47; Frontinus, Stratagems 2.5.30; Pliny, Letters 5.6.30.

13 Eusebius, Church History VIII. 2 (tr. Williamson, G. A. Penguin Classics, 1965, p. 329),Google Scholar

14 Eusebius X. 8 (Williamson, p. 412).

15 Eusebius IV. 15 (Williamson, p. 170).

16 Robin, Lane Fox Christians and Pagans (1986), p. 603,Google Scholar quoting Cyprian, De Lapsis 28.1.

17 Birt, The Elizabethan Religious Settlement (1907), pp. 15–16,Google Scholar from SP 12/16/50 and British Library,Cotton MS Galba C.1, no. 29, f. 87.

18 C.R.S. 5 (1908), p. 72.

19 For dating and identification see Recusant History 16 (1982–3), p. 203.Google Scholar

20 Hodgetts, Secret Hiding-Places, pp. 9-15, 34-35, 44, 111.

21 Simpson, p. 171; C.R.S. 39, p. 77.

22 Christopher, Devlin Robert Southwell (1956), p. 134.Google Scholar

23 C.R.S. 53 (1961), p. 188. The word given in square brackets as ‘? clear’ is there printed as ‘cloe’.

24 SP 12/163/55.

25 SP 12/151/10. This item is bound with a volume of 1581 and catalogued as such as in C.S.P.D.1581-90, but internal evidence shows that it is eleven or twelve years later.

26 C.R.S. 18 (1916), pp. 127-8; 22 (1921), p. 78; 57 (1965), pp. 44, 48; 61 (1970), pp. 31, 154; 71 (1986), p. 151. The house ‘by Hereford’ could have been either Allensmore, 3½ miles SW of the city, or Sutton St. Michael, 4 miles NNE. But the latter is much more likely, even if Worsley and Newell were reckoning by the old long mile, as it is ‘ten miles’ (statute) from Sutton St. Michael to Buckenhill (a mile N of Bromyard) but eighteen from Allensmore. The mile was fixed at eight furlongs by an Act of 1593.

27 C.R.S. 18, p. 138; 57, pp. 44, 48; 61, pp. 31, 32, 34, 154, 156.

28 Edward Habington (Abington), who was executed after the Babington Plot.

29 She may have been Thomas Habington's sister Dorothy, for whom see John, Gerard Autobiography (ed. Caraman, 1956), pp. 44–45,Google Scholar or his wife Mary (Parker), whom he married about 1593: D.N.B.43, p. 284, under Parker, William, 4th Baron Mounteagle (1572-1622).

30 Frances, wife of Thomas Lygon of Elkstone, was a recusant in 1592-3: C.R.S. 18, p. 125.

31 The MS goes no further. Despite the accumulation of detail, I have not been able to identify Mrs. Marchant.

32 English College, Rome, Scritture 2; Cyril, Murtagh ‘Hierarchiomachia, or The Anti-Bishop’, The Venerabile, November 1955, p. 164.Google Scholar

33 Corrie, ten Boom The Hiding-Place (1972), pp. 83–85,Google Scholar describes in detail the construction in July 1942 of a hide entered through the false back of a bookcase in her home in Barteljorisstraat, Haarlem.

34 Sam, Derry The Rome Escape Line (1960).Google Scholar

35 Derry, pp. 55-56, 59, 61-62, 96, 120, 140, 177-8. But in March 1944 contingency plans were made(pp. 175-6) to move all the escaped prisoners then in Rome to the catacombs.

36 Derry, pp. 180, 113.

37 According to Anthony Munday, the hide at Lyford was ‘towards the top of the house’ and was entered through ‘a wall of boards’ whereto … was fastened … a large great shelf with divers tools and instruments both upon it and hanging by it, which they judged to belong to some cross-bow maker’: Brief Discourse of the Taking of Edmund Campion, quoted in Pollard, A. F. Tudor Tracts (1903), pp. 462–3.Google Scholar According to Bombino, it was in a hollow wall above a staircase (qui scalis imminebat) which Eliot was passing on his way out (iam abiens): Vita et Martyrium Edmundi Campiani (Antwerp, 1618), p. 202.Google Scholar At that date we should probably think in terms of a newel staircase in a gatehouse turret, as at Coughton. According to Squiers, ‘The traditional site … is over the door [on the south side of the present Grange, which] was once a wide gateway’: Secret Hiding-Places (1933), p. 103 and photo between pp. 104-5. But the wall at this point was pierced in 1959 for a window to light a new bathroom, and nothing was found there.

38 The Agnus Dei and papers were found during the repairs of 1959 in the angle of the roof and the attic floor, at the inner corner of the south and west blocks.

39 Bombino (1618), p. 193; Simpson, pp. 224-5. Much of the rest of Bombino's paragraph is a general account of priest-holes, resumed by In huiusmodi angustias Campianus …

40 George, Eliot A True Report of the Taking of Edmund Campion (1581),Google Scholar in Pollard, Tudor Tracts (1903), pp. 451-474. Simpson, p. 222, says that the earliest account of the arrest was that translatedfrom the French by James Laing and published in 1585 as an appendix to his life of Beza.

41 Evelyn, Waugh Edmund Campion (1961 ed.), p. 148;Google Scholar Northanger Abbey, vol. 3, chap. 5 (Folio Society ed., 1975, p. 136).

42 Waugh, Campion (1961), p. 127; C.R.S. 39, p. 78 = Sander, pp. 452-3.

43 C.T.S. Pamphlet, H. 469, The Catholic Martyrs of England and Wales, 1535-1680: A Chronological List (1985), p. 14.Google Scholar

44 Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot (ed. Morris, 1872), pp. 182-4: ‘This man did for [deleted: 18 or 19] seventeen or eighteen years continually attend upon Fr. Garnet and assist him in many occasions. But his chief employment was in making of secret places to hide priests and church stuff in … How many priests, then, may we think this man did save by his endeavours in the space of seventeen years …? I think that no man can say that in all that seventeen or eighteen years they heard him swear by any oath or ever saw him out of charity’.

45 Caraman, Henry Garnet and the Gunpowder Plot (1964), p. 257.

46 ‘It may appear extraordinary that these internal broils should have agitated the Catholics while the penal statutes … had not ceased to be executed with extreme severity’: Berington, Memoirs of Gregorio Panzani (1793), pp. lxvi-lxvii. It appears extraordinary that Berington and others have written the history of the 1590s as if it consisted of little else.

47 R. W. (Sir Richard) Southern, The Shape and Substance of Academic History (Oxford inaugural lecture, 2 November 1961).Google Scholar

48 John, Lingard History of England (5th ed., 1849), VI, chaps. 4-6, 8.Google Scholar

49 Lingard (1849), VII, p. 37, n. 2. Neither Gerard nor Garnet is mentioned by Lingard except in the context of the Gunpowder Plot.

50 Philip, Hughes The Reformation in England III (1954), p. 308n.Google Scholar

51 Knox, T. F. The First and Second Diaries of the English College, Douay (1879), pp. lxiv, 378, 380, 402;Google Scholar Harvran, Martin J. Catholics in Caroline England (1962), pp. 79–82;Google Scholar Bossy, English Catholic Community (1975), pp. 216-219, 419; Patrick, McGrath and Joy, Rowe ‘Anstruther Analysed: The Elizabethan Seminary Priests’, Recusant History 18 (1986–7), pp. 1–13.Google Scholar If the figures given by McGrath and Rowe are correct, as against the contemporary estimates quoted by Knox, then the growth was even more spectacular.