Martyrdom requires that an individual struggle with the profound isolation that results from suffering, as he or she bears the weight of the cross as well as the internal agonies – the lonely Gethsemanes – that precede it. But martyrdom, and particularly early modern martyrdom, could also be a collective and theatrical experience, involving a cast of people who contributed to the drama in their roles as executioners, death-side preachers, hecklers or bystanders. Included among these multitudes, however, were other, more elusive figures, who served specifically as active comforters and supporters of the martyr as he or she prepared to die. Limited by scarce or ambiguous resources, historians have tended to overlook these particular members of the vast collective, who stood apart from the crowd and closer to the centre of action; yet such individuals could play an essential role in the drama of death, at times even affecting the outcomes that radiated from the stage. Known to the victim and often providing succour at great risk to their own lives, comforters not only consoled the dying and encouraged the victim as he passed through the last stage of his own life, but contributed their own elusive presence to the larger martyrological narrative at hand. While martyrs were certainly indomitable in their own right – which is what made them martyrs in the first place – these secondary characters, both lay and clerical, were essential in the unfolding spectacle of death, as they sought proximity to a transformative martyrological moment in their small (and sometimes large) acts of outreach.
Every martyr tended, of course, to have supporters at the site of death, no matter what the religious persuasion. In the case of England, Protestants under Mary, for example, met their ends accompanied by stake-side comforters who sought to send their martyrs to the hereafter with tokens of their own heartfelt consolation, and who could even retrieve posthumous fragments, or relics, of the victim's body for themselves. On a more general level, while Protestantism's abolition of purgatory may have attenuated the liturgical relationship between the living and the dead, procedures such as praying with the dying or walking with the corpse continued in the early modern period, whether the drama took place in one's home or in the public glare of the scaffold. In this sense, as Clare Gittings, Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall have pointed out, while the business of mortality, or at least certain funerary practices, became more individualised and ‘privatised’ during the early modern period,Footnote 1 death and its subsequent commemoration never completely abandoned the communal and corporate aspects of an earlier piety.
Protestant supporters of dying martyrs, however, were not required to lend their presence in order to give or receive a blessing, or to fulfil a charitable act contributive of their own salvation. Moreover, although the Protestant martyr could be perceived by writers such as John Foxe as imbued with a kind of holy glow, something entirely different was at work in the unique and sacerdotal power emanating from a dying priest such as Edmund Campion, who inspired his followers to take up consolation as a religious and quasi-sacramental imperative. Though comforters did not quite constitute a formal association in the persecutory atmosphere of England at the time,Footnote 2 such Catholics, in their surreptitious and risk-filled displays and signals to the dying, and the dying priests' comforting of them in turn, harked back to past practices and beliefs, often self-consciously so. At the same time, their consolatory devotion also reflected a vibrant strain of post-Tridentine Catholicism, particularly as far as Jesuits were concerned, and was readapted to meet the specific challenges of Protestant hostility. For it was Loyola's Spiritual exercises that most powerfully resonated as a model for Jesuit priests and their followers, as they urged themselves or others to endure in the theatre of suffering and death. By maintaining a particular kind of spirituality that combined late medieval forms of devotion with a powerful new model of theological guidance, comforters thus represented both continuity and change in their adherence to a Catholicism practised stealthily and in a context of persecution.
A study of gallows sustainers intersects with recent debates concerning the nature of Elizabethan and Stuart Catholicism, and the extent to which Tridentine decrees and the broader movement of reform that they represented could be implemented in the restricted conditions of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. For Christopher Haigh, and to a different extent John Bossy, the brand of Tridentine Catholicism practised in wealthy households and overseen by seminary priests constituted both a break with traditional Christianity and an alien element within the larger English population;Footnote 3 yet recent work has begun to dispel these claims, with scholars such as Marie Rowlands describing an empowered Catholic laity guided by priests who projected their evangelical message – encompassing traditional practices as well as recent reforms – across a wider swathe of territory and population than previously assumed.Footnote 4 As Alexandra Walsham has pointed out, although clergy were compelled to modify their evangelical message within conditions of persecution, such peril could also foster a kind of Catholic renewal, leading to ‘imaginative and theatrical techniques in [the clergy's] efforts not merely to rally the faithful but also to bring heretics into the fold’.Footnote 5
In the absence of ecclesiastical and bureaucratic structures, the clergy fostered such sites, according to Peter Lake and Michael Questier, as places of ideological resistance and theatrical conversionary potential;Footnote 6 yet they were also a means for the Catholic laity to participate in an event that defined and reinforced their own identities as members of a beleaguered faith. In addition to past practices and present innovations in devotion, the literature of comfort – which began with the late medieval ars moriendi tradition and could be said to have culminated in the Spiritual exercises – directed the actions of supporters, just as it served to comfort the priests themselves by teaching them, as they approached the gallows, how to die.
I
That priests, as opposed to common criminals, needed comfort in their last hours was not necessarily a given. As soldiers of Christ, Jesuits in particular had been trained not only to missionise but if need be to die, and certainly few English Jesuits if any harboured any illusions about the risks to their lives. Graphic portraits of martyrdom were displayed at the English College at Rome, reminding seminarians of the fate that could await them – a fate, moreover, that was for many to be welcomed. Back in England, some priests even sought out execution, in an impulse that came closer to a suicidal death wish than to a patient acceptance of martyrdom. For the priest William Way, languishing in prison in 1588 with his hair shirt and his austerities, martyrdom was a destiny that could not arrive fast enough: ‘Oh, I shall never come to it’, he was said to have cried out many times, before he finally got his wish as he was hanged, drawn and quartered ‘with particular severity’ at Kingston-upon-Thames.Footnote 7 On the other hand priests could also be known to recant, including three in 1588, one of whom, Foxwell, found that his courage had ‘fail[ed] him’, leading to his reprieve and pardon.Footnote 8
Reports of priests' behaviour during execution are, of course, notoriously unreliable, based as they are on the writings of biased observers and martyrologists; thus Edmund Campion was said by William Allen to be heroic in his dying moments, while Protestant counter-martyrologists (and scaffold speakers) such as Anthony MundayFootnote 9 depicted him and others as ‘not one of them patient, penitent, nor endued with courage to the extremity of death, but dismaying, trembling, and fearful as the eyewitnesses can bear me record’.Footnote 10 Whether terror was displayed or not, direct accounts from priests such as Henry Garnet – who witnessed the executions of more than a few of his friendsFootnote 11 – would become essential in providing the raw material for martyrologists and writers such as Robert Persons, just as relic hunters could attempt to control the corpse of the martyr and preserve the corporal fragments for consolatory as well as memorialising purposes.
Aware that they were being watched by men such as Munday, as well as supporters such as Garnet, most priests sought to model their behaviour not only on the injunctions or meditations of the Spiritual exercises, but also on the pre-Reformation tradition that lay behind it. Most important to this tradition was the immense number of books patterned after the anonymous corpus known as the ars moriendi, the aim of which was to instruct both the dying and those around them in the proper way of death.Footnote 12 For those about to depart the world, it was absolutely essential, according to this literature, that they express contrition and penance for their sins, abiding by scriptural injunctions such as Luke xii, which stated that ‘The hour of death will quickly overtake thee, and therefore looke how thou livest … If thou has a good conscience, thou wouldst not much feare death.’ A good conscience would above all mitigate the temptations and doubts that could accompany one's last mortal hours; as The crafte of dyinge stated, the devil is powerless against any who ‘hath use of his free will and of reason well disposed’.Footnote 13
In the sixteenth century Protestants added their own rhetorical and thematic conventions to the literature on the art of dying, though they rejected the ceremonialism of death as well as other Romish accretions embedded in the canon.Footnote 14 Calvin, for example, was particularly eloquent on the subject of what he described as the ‘holy desperation’ that often attended death; this condition was to be welcomed, however, since it could lead to the humility and spiritual recovery necessary to salvation.Footnote 15 In England, meanwhile, treatises on the art of dying were penned by Protestant writers such as Edmund Bunny, though his Book of resolution was itself plagiarised from the Jesuit Robert Persons's First booke of the Christian exercise, testifying, perhaps, to the power that Ignatian spirituality lent even to Protestant forms of deathbed-devotion.Footnote 16 Modelled on Gasper Loarte's Esercitio della vita spirituale of 1557, and dedicated especially to the unlearned and degenerate, Persons's treatise represented a new turn in its purgative and sense-based sequence of meditations on death and in its emphasis on intellectual and emotional comprehension of God in the process of one's dying. Serving as an antidote to the ‘dreadfull cogitations’ that could attend death, Persons's work did not shrink from typically graphic, late-medieval descriptions of mortal horrors, though the guidance it provided by way of Ignatian channels of mental discipline represented a distinct model to which future martyrs especially could turn.Footnote 17
Ars moriendi treatises were part of a larger genre of comfort literature, which Jesuits further developed by making the theme of consolation central to their identity and mission. Robert Southwell's Epistle of comfort was seminal in this regard, for the manner in which it sought to provide light to the ‘stranger that travelleth’ in ‘this foggy night of heresy’.Footnote 18 Life itself, while not to be hated, was ‘a warfare, a pilgrimage, and an exile’, he wrote, echoing Augustine and Ignatius among others; viewed this way, life's only relief, comfort and resting place resided in a heaven where ‘Our sight shall feed on the most glorious and eyesome majesty of the place’ and ‘every parcel, joint, sinew, vein and member of our body shall have his several and peculiar delights’.Footnote 19 Naming eleven reasons for finding comfort in times of ordeal for the Catholic faith, Southwell described suffering not only as an act of discipleship, but a donning of the ‘very principal royal garment which [Christ] chose to wear in this life’.Footnote 20
While Southwell's focus on suffering extended back to late medieval pieties, he also, in Susannah Brietz Monta's words, ‘imported not only the Jesuit poetics and tears literature with which he is readily credited, but also arguments on behalf of martyrdom central to continental seminary training’. Thus is his Epistle of comfort ‘both consolatory and, as its title suggests, controversial’, especially as it dispels competing, Protestant notions of comfort, for example in the doctrine of predestination and assurance.Footnote 21 For Southwell, as the ars moriendi as well as Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ had also pointed out, suffering was a necessary act of discipleship, but it was the active and fortifying acceptance of such suffering that gave martyrdom especially a frame, meaning and – ultimately – a justification in the first place.
In sections 316–17 of the Spiritual exercises Ignatius described the state of solace as a greater sense of proximity to God and an increasing diminution of the self that allowed one in turn to reach out to others in service and love. Desolation, on the other hand, while necessary in illuminating and leading one to the opposite state, was signified by dark inner meaninglessness and estrangement from God, and most importantly tended toward a condition of disturbance by which calm acceptance of one's spiritual condition and commitment – toward martyrdom, for example – was closed. Death, as the ars moriendi had also once pointed out, should thus be met not only equably but with hope and sanguinity. And indeed, stories abound of priests displaying great cheer on the night before their executions, as was the case with the priest James Bell, who received in prison those followers ready to comfort him, though ‘they found hyme so merry in God and so ioyfull of the next dayes [banquet] … that they were all marvelously comforted and edified by his rare fortitude’.Footnote 22 But such consolatory cheer could also be false, just as ‘the devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape’;Footnote 23 while seemingly guiding one to feelings of joy and peace, deceptive consolation led in the opposite direction, to a state of distraction that brought one astray by the ‘serpant's tail’ that actually motivated it.Footnote 24 Danger also existed, according to Southwell, in the doctrine of assurance, for to be certain of one's own predestined election, in life or at death, could lead an individual to ‘become carelesse to breake anye commandement’.Footnote 25 For Ignatius, the discernment of these affective states, or the proper interpretation of them, was thus a crucial prerequisite for any individual undertaking the Exercises (and, later on, martyrdom), and one that allowed ultimate rest in the consolatory spirit of God.
Similarly important in late medieval tradition as well as in contemporary Jesuit practice was the role of prayer, which not only affirmed faith and provided comfort, but constituted a central tenet of Catholic spirituality. Prayer, of course, was not unique to Catholics, but rather was the standard response of all martyrs, of whatever persuasion, in the face of their death. But to pray in Latin or to invoke the saints,Footnote 26 as Elizabethan and Stuart priests did, was a more overt, and some would say aggressive, declaration of identity, just as exhorting the crowd to join in prayer was a means whereby the audience could be enfolded in the true Catholic faith. Such prayerful expressions assumed a particularly charged role in the public sphere, though prayer could also be private, for example in the case of James Bell, who ‘continually occupied hyme selfe in secret prayers and meditation’ as he was being taken up the gallows’ ladder.Footnote 27 Prayer at the scaffold was above all a means whereby a transcendent, even mystical, moment of godly union was integrated with the engaged life of action; joining these dimensions of human existence – the personal, the godly, and the relationship to the public world or external environment – was to display one of the most important facets of Ignatian spirituality.Footnote 28
Prayer was also the ‘fixed and immutable standard’ to which priests in their martyrdom adhered,Footnote 29 just as the words spoken were directly evocative, if not imitative, of the words spoken by Christ on the cross. The Spiritual exercises used specific sources and methods of prayer, as well as borrowings from Scripture and the Psalms and a display of meditative stillness, all of which were demonstrated with extreme discipline on the gallows. Indeed, the Spiritual exercises were themselves a kind of prayer experience, undertaken on a regular basis by priests such as Garnet and Southwell, who gained confidence and comfort from it. Prayer was also to be expressed bodily as well as spiritually in the person, with Ignatius emphasising the importance of right posture and comportment; in this sense, the physical conduct of Jesuits on the scaffold was not simply a facet of performance intended to move the audience, but a theological necessity that had to be fulfilled if a proper state of contemplation were to be reached.Footnote 30
By summoning God, and expressing one's own affective emotions in the face of the divine encounter, dying priests were thus locating spiritual transcendence in the extremes of persecution, suffering and even evil. In evocation of Kempis's Imitation of Christ, the pain that they were assuming was in essence the pain of the world, as they sought to provoke compassionate sensitivity not only in themselves toward their tormenters, but from the audience toward themselves. In this regard, the very act of suffering execution was a kind of spiritual exercise in its own right, just as the surrender to death was a means of displaying the idea that life itself could be an ‘inordinate attachment’ that had to be broken, if they were called upon to do so, in order to find their final, and truest, way to God.
II
Though the ars moriendi tradition recommended the proper mode of behaviour for the individual in his death throes, equally important – and more relevant to this article – was the guidance it provided for others who sought to aid and console that individual. To help another along in this process of reconciliation – and to express compassion as a religious ideal after the paradigmatic models of Mary or even Veronica on the Via Dolorosa – thus constituted not only the mark of a proper Christian, but also, in Mitchell Merback's words, ‘[demonstrated] the mystical identity between compassion and passio, exemplifying the capacity for human love to fuse with divine love, each revealed to the other through suffering’.Footnote 31
Though earlier books such as The crafte of dying tended to focus upon the role that close acquaintances should play in the death-side process, the charitable imperative to console others in their time of mortal need could also extend to larger groups and to societies which became familiar entities in the late medieval world. For them, comfort and empathy were not simply extended to the known, but to strangers as well, the most notorious of whom could be criminals being sent on their way to execution. Shakespeare's Measure for measure, for example, centres in part upon the business of comfort and preparation for death, with the character of the duke, Vincentio, disguised a friar and consoling the imprisoned. Vincentio's words to the condemned Claudio, for example, resonate with familiar, if by modern standards stern, urgings to gain comfort by accepting death: ‘A breath thou art’, he states, ‘Servile to all the skyey influences/That dost this habitation where thou keepes'st/Hourly afflict’ (act iii, scene 1, lines 8–11). Claudio initially accepts Vincentio's rendering of mortal life as dust, though he wavers when he speaks to his sister, Isabella, of death as a ‘fearful thing’ (later he will be brought around to acceptance once again). Less successful, however, are Vincentio's efforts with the prisoner Bernardine, an unredeemed rogue who foils the duke's attempts to ‘Persuade this rude wretch willingly to die’ (act iv, scene 3, lines 79–80).Footnote 32
Laymen could also escort the prisoner to execution as members of confraternities:Footnote 33 Michelangelo was a noteworthy member of one of these pious and well-known groups or ‘institutions of death’.Footnote 34 Confraternities served alongside, and at times in competition with, the priests who were similarly expected to lend their presence: clad in solemn black hoods, comforting confrères earned their spiritual reward by visiting prisoners (in accordance with Matthew xxv.34–40), joining them in their last walk to the gallows, and whispering in their ears as they sank into death. In Italy confrères were also commonly known to hold before the condemned's eyes small devotional images known as tavoletta, a kind of ‘visual narcotic’, in Samuel Edgerton's words, intended to ‘lift the viewer from consciousness of the sensate world to a transcendental feeling of spiritual ecstasy’.Footnote 35 As a result, the execution was an occasion for others to help the victim to achieve a theologically and behaviourally correct death, his mind and his eyes focused on repentance, and on the great model Christ who stood before him.
The tradition of such societies was not only continental in origin.Footnote 36 England had its own confraternities in the form of gilds, which could be religious as well as economic entities, even if they did not devote themselves solely, as did Florence's Compagnia di Santa Maria della Misericordia, to the comfort of the dying. Devoted in greater part to acts of memorialisation – collective prayer, ritualised ceremonies of burial,Footnote 37 announcing the names of the recently deceased in church and before God, and other forms of ‘socialised death’ – gilds functioned in accordance with the idea, in James Banker's words, that ‘the corporate voice of the fraternity had the authority to move the mind of the divine in favor of the dead soul’.Footnote 38 For the general public, commemorating the dead had become a penitential obligation in many parishes, which were enjoined to make various benefactions as well as to maintain memorials in the form of church books or fittings such as tombs, glass, hangings and suchlike.Footnote 39 As Eamon Duffy has most notably pointed out, gilds went further, however, not only in making provision for funerals and remembering the dead,Footnote 40 but in aiding the dying through promises of future fraternal prayer or the maintenance of obits, chantries, feasts of commemoration and other such ceremonies.Footnote 41 While the religious aspect of gilds declined with the advent of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, when saints, images, purgatory, intercessions and other Catholic devotions were also attacked,Footnote 42 interest in the manner of death – of how one died, and what words one spoke upon dying – nevertheless remained strong, as the intense interest in the death of Robert Devereux, for example, attests.Footnote 43
On the continent, confraternities – including confraternities of comfort – would continue to play an essential role in the Counter-Reformation programme, as well as representing continuity with late medieval and popular Catholic reform.Footnote 44 Expanding in number and encompassing new associations that centred on the rosary or the blessed sacrament, such associations encouraged further lay participation, even if ecclesiastical authorities sought to increase their own control over local leaders and activities.Footnote 45
A particular innovation of the Jesuits was the establishment of the more rigorous and exigent Marian Congregations, a pan-European network obedient to the primary congregation in Rome.Footnote 46 Such associations remained central to the Jesuits' active apostolic work, manifesting what has been called their ‘spirituality of service’,Footnote 47 or their doctrine of the ‘contemplative in action’. According to John O'Malley, ‘the role of consolation as part of this spirituality can hardly be overestimated’,Footnote 48 and it was within this context that English Jesuits sought to create or use such associations to comfort others as well as themselves at the farthest reaches of spiritual crisis and extremity. For Campion and other Jesuits, to comfort their own grieving supporters was a religious imperative, one of the central pillars on which much of their faith, or confession, rested. As Nadal once wrote, consolation, as ‘the best index of a person's spiritual progress', was to be ‘our primary intention and goal’, and therefore ‘we should … apply all our energies to [it]’.Footnote 49
Guiding them were the Spiritual exercises as well as other Ignatian manuals that taught them to prepare for their own deaths,Footnote 50 which could include martyrdom. Equally important were those treatises that dealt specifically with instructions on how to aid others in the moments before their demise.Footnote 51 The Spanish Jesuit and secretary to Ignatius, Juan Alfonso de Polanco, wrote one such treatise, for example, that devoted a lengthy chapter to advice on how to help condemned criminals on the scaffold. As O'Malley has written, Polanco was clearly influenced by the tradition of confraternities, while also reflecting the contemporary Jesuit pursuit of consolation, which included offering the eucharist, hearing confession, staying with the imprisoned malefactor in the days before his execution and accompanying him as far as possible in his journey into mortality.Footnote 52 Meanwhile, the works of Jerome Nadal and others continued to emphasise the fine balancing act between affective, mystical living and active, worldly ministry, both of which were required of Jesuits, particularly in their role as comforters.Footnote 53
In the charged atmosphere of England, however, traditional pre-Reformation and contemporary Tridentine practices had to be negotiated and modified, although the results could be almost more invigorating to the Catholic cause. Jesuit priests, for example, continued to pursue the strain of devotion that emphasised spirituality and consolation in a specifically penal context – much in the manner of the traditional practices that produced Shakespeare's Vincentio. The twist, of course, was that it was they – the priests – who were now being imprisoned as criminals. One result of this newly intimate relationship with prison, as Peter Lake and Michael Questier have written, was the Jesuit production of ‘the most explicit and developed descriptions of the penal system as an agent of providence, sorting out those predestined for salvation from the rest’.Footnote 54 Moreover, prisons provided a haven for the establishment of Catholic networks of support and sacramental exchange between priests and laypersons, in contrast to execution sites that required a more surreptitious measure of assistance. On one level, prisons, as Lisa McClain has written, ‘formed the crux of a network of Catholics within London’, while also ‘provid[ing] London Catholics of poorer ranks with some of their only opportunities to meet priests, receive the sacraments, and enjoy a fellowship of believers’.Footnote 55 But most important of all, at least for Jesuits, prison constituted a central space not only for sacramental and proselytising functions and for directing others in the Spiritual exercises,Footnote 56 but also an arena in which a central tenet of Jesuit piety – comfort, for others as well as for themselves, and in an Ignatian manner – was to be most ardently and explicitly manifested.Footnote 57
Despite the dangers, many supporters openly joined their potential martyr in prison: on the night before his execution, for example, an incarcerated John Roberts dined with twenty of his supporters, including one of the most notable sustainers of English priests, Luisa de Carvajal.Footnote 58 When Roberts asked her if his present ‘great glee’ might be ‘causing disedification’ among his supporters, de Carvajal replied – as she assumed the role of comforter – ‘No, certainly not. You cannot be better employed than by letting them all see with what cheerful courage you are about to die for Christ.’Footnote 59
That priests joined criminals in death, rather than simply accompanying them to the final moments, also served a powerfully comforting as well as conversionary purpose, while also evoking the image of Christ dying alongside thieves on the cross. John Roberts, for example, climbed into a cart and ‘turning himself to the criminals … [stretched] out his hand to bless them’, stating that ‘Here we are all going to die, nor have we any hope of escape’, but ‘I pray you to return from the evil path [of Protestantism], so that we may all die in one and the same true faith.’ While the criminals' response was not clear, one of them ‘was so affected that he burst into tears’, before ‘publicly [professing] that he died a Catholic’.Footnote 60
Execution sites, however, were also important in connecting the traditional with the new: whereas scaffolds and gallows had long been overlaid with theological and symbolic meanings, Jesuits were able to impose on an essentially public and theatrical forum the Tridentine spirit of personal and spiritual renewal, in a display of meditative interiority – much like Hamlet's on the stage – for all to see.Footnote 61 The site, however, had to be tailored to the persecutory environment, although the result could be more potent. On the one hand, and according to ars moriendi tradition, the sacraments – confession, the eucharist, last rites – had to be administered in an atmosphere of calm, and death met serenely – as opposed to the condemnatory portrait Erasmus presented in ‘The funeral’ – a fearful dying man immersed in bedside crowds and clatter. Yet comforters such as Garnet found themselves fortifying the victim at a death site that could be particularly cacophonous and challenging to a theologically correct and peaceful death. Perhaps to suppress any sort of quietude, prayer or sacramental display, the state presented its own arsenal of figures that could overwhelm the event with its predominant discourses. Puritan ministers such as William Perkins, for example, were a ubiquitous presence, seeking to terrify Catholics in the crowd with his descriptions of the hellfire that awaited their priests, and by doing so bring them over to the true evangelical faith.Footnote 62 In other cases preachers simply hectored with high-decibel ferocity to drown out the priests' prayers and any other enjoinments that might have won over the audience.
Yet for those Catholics who sang, prayed and articulated their resistance in speeches, the result could lead to assertions of powerful competing discourses, as they attempted to wrest control and assert their presence against the dominant scripted drama of the state. But these resistances could be backed up by the larger crowd as well: at the execution of Thomas Reynolds, for example, supporters ‘openly manifested their wonderful fervour and piety’, and ‘some of them ran in the streets … as [the priests] were being led to execution, and threw themselves down to kiss their hands and garments; while others … exhorted them to constancy, exclaiming, “Courage, Soldiers of Christ; we would willingly give ourselves and our children to a similar death for the Catholic faith”’.Footnote 63 Crowds could also subvert the site of death, transforming it into a scene of celebration. On the night before the execution of Thomas Maxfield, supporters ‘adorned and beset [the gallows] with garlands, flowers, and branches round about, and had strewed the ground underneath with … sweet herbs',Footnote 64 a festive gesture indicating the triumph of martyrdom, but also a means, perhaps, whereby to comfort the condemned in his last moments with a visual and olfactory expression of comfort and support.
It should be pointed out that more than comfort was exchanged between supporters and their dying martyrs: to give succour to the priest was above all an act of caritas or love, a good work that contributed to one's own redemption; indeed, that the dying man was also a priest – and confessor, and spiritual director invested with sacramental powers, made it the more incumbent that sympathetic crowds bear witness to the spectacle and receive from it whatever absolution they could extract for their own souls. Thus did the priest John Nelson, for example, overcome the state's preachers and officials to ‘[beg] all Catholics who were present to say with him a Pater, Ave, and Credo, which he recited aloud in Latin, and after which he added the Confiteor, Miserere, and De profundis’Footnote 65 – all prayers or statements that were not only at the definitional centre of the faith, but were infused with greater power when spoken in the presence of a priest. (Priests were not indiscriminate in their favours, however; when Protestant ministers asked Everard Hanse to pray with them ‘he answered that it was not lawful for him to pray with heretics.’)Footnote 66
Formal confraternities, as Anne Dillon has demonstrated, also continued to exist in England, albeit secretly and on an altered basis, given the oppressive conditions of the time. Particularly at such a public display as an execution site, as opposed to a private home, where the rosary, for example, could be said, the presence of so many comforting congregants would have been banned as subversive to the state. Moreover, the wealth and social standing of many of them, Vaux, Arundel, Brinkley and Fitzherbert, for example,Footnote 67 would have prevented them from exposing themselves, at least on a regular basis, too openly in the crowds. Those who actually appeared in the audience often did so at their peril; thus did the priest Anthony Middleton and others ‘cast friendly glances at their companions and acquaintances’, who were ‘forthwith seized and imprisoned in the closest confinement’.Footnote 68
Women were perhaps more able to work in the interstices, being more visible than men at the execution site. Historians have noted extensively that women in general played prominent roles as informal sustainers, visiting priests and incarcerated lay Catholics and conveying messages back and forth from prison.Footnote 69 The case of Margaret Clitherow, who harboured and assisted priests and was executed for doing so, is well known,Footnote 70 as is Queen Henrietta Maria's visit, or perhaps pilgrimage, in 1626, to Tyburn – an act that might not have been altogether as ‘foreign’ to English religiosity as assumed.Footnote 71 Meanwhile, at the pending execution of Thomas Bullaker, two gentlewomen, as well as those ‘of good qualitie, but disguised, accompanied him on either side of his sled, thorough all the durt, which in divers places was very deepe’; nevertheless, ‘they spooke with him, and divers tymes kissed his hands’.Footnote 72 A similarly prominent figure was Margaret Ward, who provided the priest at Bridewell with ‘a rope to come out of prison withal, a man to accompany him, and a boat to convey him, assigning the hour when he should come down’; the escape plan was foiled, however, ‘and so both he and the gentlewoman were executed at Tyburn, and made a most constant and blessed end’.Footnote 73
In addition to such individual examples, women may have formed larger associations of comforters, partly with the encouragement of Jesuits. Robert Bireley has noted that on the continent the Jesuit Marian congregations could be encouraging on the admission of women, with one association, in Ingolstadt, witnessing the consecration of 700 women at the same time.Footnote 74 In England, however, stealth and disguise were necessary among such groups: during John Boste's procession, for example, ‘more than 300 ladies and women of good position … set out to follow him’; the black hoods they wore were indicative of gentlewoman status, but so did they also evoke the more formal clothing of traditional comfort confraternities in the past – an example, perhaps, of women appropriating a traditionally male domain, and exerting their own place in the hierarchy of comfort.Footnote 75 Some of these associations may have also added the task of comforting to their primary focus of devotion – to the rosary, for example. While Mary Ward's own order of the English ladies, thoroughly practised in the Spiritual exercises, may have devoted itself above all to the task of education, its material and spiritual support of the Jesuits could also have included providing covert support at the execution site.Footnote 76
A more diffuse level of comforters existed in the wider audience of laypeople who attended executions in support of their priests, though enjoinments of comfort could go both ways, emanating from the stage as well. Thus did Reynolds and his fellow priests ‘answer [the encouragements of the crowd] with a smiling countenance, [stating] that the hurdle upon which they were being dragged to execution for the Catholic faith was far more pleasing to them than could be any royal chariot upon which they might be drawn in triumph’.Footnote 77 More famous was Campion, who as he was being dragged through the streets managed to lend his known and unknown followers advice on spiritual matters, ‘to their great consolation’.Footnote 78
The extension of the Jesuits' consolatory activities into the public sphere of the execution site, as well as the presence in the crowds of a number of sympathisers from all segments of society, also attests to the broader reach of the Catholic mission as a whole. While Jesuits tended to direct their attention to the upper classes – and in fact the Spiritual exercises were never meant to be applied to a widespread non-elite audienceFootnote 79– Ignatius' meditations nevertheless combined with traditional devotions to encourage popular piety, including that which encompassed contemplation of Christ's passion, or advice on comfort in times of ordeal. In addition, domestic spaces, which were not as hermetically self-enclosed as historians previously assumed,Footnote 80 may have remained Jesuit centres of operation, but this did not prevent priests from attempting to project their message across to a larger base of Catholics and non-Catholics alike, whether that meant roaming the countryside, or standing before crowds on the gallows and presenting themselves as the ultimate culmination, or spectacle, of the mission as a whole.
III
The expression of popular piety, however, could also threaten to extend beyond the bounds of the authorities' reach – a fact that had compelled the Tridentine authors to exert greater control over such potentially unmanageable elements. On the continent, formal guidance as well as informal counsel on the part of priests and bishops was therefore not only a mode of assuagement and comfort, but also a means by which authorities could assert a degree of control over the otherwise unwieldy process of grief. In the case of England, this was not a question of power, but rather of necessity, since overt displays could compromise the aims of the Jesuit mission and the coherence of the Catholic community. This might mean that the desire of some followers to join their martyr-priests had to be reined in;Footnote 81 in 1588, for example, John Robinson found himself imprisoned in the Clink with two priests and proclaimed, ‘how happy were I if God would bestow so good a turn upon me as that I might now die for this cause’. As a result of his outburst, he was arraigned before a judge who exclaimed, ‘I think this fellow is determined to die’, and forthwith condemned him to a martyr's death. Robinson's extremity, however, was to be the exception, as most Jesuits counselled restraining potentially volatile empathetic and sorrowful tendencies. Thus did John Gerard inform one widow that ‘grief for the dead should be tempered; we were not to mourn like men who had no hope’. Advising a typically Jesuit course of meditation, Gerard ‘gradually brought [the woman] round to turn her old sorrow into a sorrow of another and nobler kind, and then to set cares of the next world before those of this’.Footnote 82
The expression of grief through weeping was a peculiarly Jesuit concern, though it had to be channelled within a particular framework of meaning. While common in traditional, late-medieval forms of devotion, what Pierre Janelle once called the literary ‘fashion [in] tearfulness’ was in fact rejuvenated in England by the Jesuits, having been introduced by Robert Southwell and his influential poetics.Footnote 83 Reaching its zenith (or nadir) in ‘The weeper’, Richard Crashaw's ode to the Magdalen's lachrymic fluids,Footnote 84 such literature of the ‘English Catholic Baroque’, as Alison Shell has written, called above all for repentance;Footnote 85 for writers such as Persons, and as the accounts of witnesses at Campion's death attest, tears thus ideally signified the ‘melting heart’ and ‘profound sensation’ that transformed such repentance into conversion.Footnote 86 Tears therefore had theological significance,Footnote 87 but they had also to be properly directed, as when Gerard advised the same widow, in echo of Ignatius, that rather than cry in mourning over her dead husband – or over a martyr – ‘tears should be reserved for our own and others’ sins. Indeed, our souls [need] a tide of tears, and all our thoughts and strivings should be turned to the well-being of our souls'.Footnote 88
The devotion to tears or the sorrow, in Southwell's words, that ‘washeth’, was not merely expressed through textual, visual or – in the case of weeping statues – miraculous means, but was conveyed non-textually as well. In his adaptation of the first stanza of Henry Walpole's tearful poetic ode to Edmund Campion, ‘Why do I use my paper, ink, and pen?’ the Jesuit-influenced William Byrd, for example, expressed the melodic equivalent of the lyrics’ rhetoric, with music and words echoing one another. As Joseph Kerman, Craig Monson and others have suggested, such musical lines as contained in this and other pieces often reflected precise religious ideas, including, in Byrds's adaptation of Psalm lxxviii, descending musical notes that appeared to approximate the trickling of tears as well as blood.Footnote 89
On a general level, as spiritual directors Jesuits were uniquely equipped to control the emotions of their lay followers, and in this they were aided, once more, by tracts such as Southwell's Marie Magdalens funeral teares, which used the image of Mary after the death of Jesus, in grief over the absence of ‘the only treasure of the world’.Footnote 90 The Spiritual exercises, however, was the most important text in this regard, with John Gerard describing many instances of directing others through the Ignatian levels, which included discriminating between states of consolation and desolation as well as discovering the nature of one's own discipleship to God and the Church. The necessity of imitatio Christi, or a willingness to ‘bear all wrongs and all abuse’ if God called on one to do so, was one of the most important lessons imparted by figures such as Gerard, who used the Exercises to instil the values of the beatitudes in preparation for his directees’ persecutions as well as their acceptance of his own possible fate at the hands of the authorities. But the role of consolation in this process was to remind adherents of the Spiritual exercises that in accepting the will of God in the face of such apparent inequities, one worked in greater accord with the Holy Spirit; comfort was therefore obtained in the knowledge that one fulfilled the genuine tenets of the apostolic service held so closely by the Jesuits, and that accorded most with the example of Christ.Footnote 91
Jesuits also sought to control lay expressions of grief when it came to the matter of relics, which recalled late medieval pieties at the same time that they assumed new significance in the environment of persecution in England.Footnote 92 For lay followers, to take control of the martyr's body was not simply to claim a holy souvenir, but to perpetuate a memory and ensure a martyrological immortality that could extend far beyond the state's attempted suppressions (or, for that matter, the Catholic Church's control). Burial by Protestant authorities also sent a distinct message, for to dispose of a body in an anonymous dunghill, for example, indicated not only the shameful manner of the life once lived, but also an attempt to erase memory (and prevent the resurrectionary actions of relic hunters). After the death of Margaret Clitherow, for example, it took six weeks on the part of a ‘diligent’ Catholic to uncover the body, ‘buried in a filthy place’. After carrying the body on a ‘great journey’ by horseback, the man ‘buried it again more decently eight weeks after her martyrdom, leaving then her body so pure and uncorrupted as though the blessed soul had departed from the body the day before’.Footnote 93
Just as the iconoclastic destruction of images was a testament, in the end, to the very real and remaining power of those images, so too did the dismemberment of a body only reveal the divine emanations that continued for believers to linger on. Jesuits knew that the power of relics was also reflected in their ability to convert or affirm an individual in the faith; thus did Lucy Ridley become a nun after holding the thumb of Edmund Jennings in her hand, while ten days later her brother John, a Puritan (though ‘weary with sports of that day’), joined a seminary, perhaps out of similar corporal inspiration.Footnote 94
Henry Garnet's own limbs, head and blood (on a strand of straw, for example) were also known to convert as well as comfort,Footnote 95 yet Trent had strongly condemned the misuse of relics, advocating that ‘every superstition’ be removed from them, and that ‘no new miracles … be acknowledged or new relics recognized unless the bishop of the diocese has taken cognizance and approved thereof’. As Alexandra Walsham has pointed out, however, Jesuits nevertheless continued to import relics as well as sacramentals into England, and encourage the association of such objects with magical cures and miracles – all to missionising ends.Footnote 96 In the matter of death, miraculous visions and other providential displays also consoled those who may have left the execution scene haunted, rather than transformed by, the horrors of the spectacle: shortly after Arrowsmith's death, for example, a witness recalled seeing, ‘at the moment of the Martyr's death, a very brilliant light extending in a stream from the prison to the gallows, like resplendent glass’.Footnote 97
The need to exert control over such objects and the devotions they provoked compelled John Gerard and William Weston to wrest relics out of the hands of laypersons in order to place them under the purview of the Church. Gerard was a particularly avid collector (or re-gatherer) of relics, including ‘a complete thorn of the holy crown of our Lord which Mary, Queen of Scots, had brought with her from France’.Footnote 98 Other remnants, and particularly body parts, were conveyed overseas, to repositories such as the Benedictine convent at Douai; a few of John Roberts's body parts travelled there, while his arm was sent on to Compostella.Footnote 99 Followers of the executed priest Robert Sutton, meanwhile, managed to recover a shoulder and an arm, though ‘all flesh was consumed, torn and eaten by the birds’; nevertheless, a thumb and forefinger were salvaged, consecrated with holy oil and placed ‘in contact with the most holy Body of Christ, a special honor above all the other fingers [of the world]’. According to Gerard, the ‘wonderfully preserved’ forefinger was then ‘given to me … [and] I have kept it deposited in a silver and glass reliquary with great reverence, with a paper on which the account [of his life] is briefly set down’.Footnote 100
Relics served as comforting tokens, but other objects of memorialisation (as well as control), for example the pictorial and literary representations of martyrs such as Campion, were distinctly Jesuit in nature, particularly in the emphasis they placed on provoking a sense-based meditative experience. The paintings on the walls of the English College in Rome were intended not simply to inspire but to reassure, and to serve as focal points for meditations on suffering. Similarly, the music of Byrd or the production of Jesuit plays on the continent sought to emphasise in their celebration of the English martyrs the qualities of affect and imagination in order to move the audience with the same vigour that executions had once achieved.Footnote 101 In pamphlets, treatises and broadsheets, narratives of martyrdom based on eyewitness accounts were smuggled out of England, providing a narrative framework for those seeking solace.Footnote 102 One function of such accounts was to describe the comfort experienced by others, which would comfort in turn; according to the chronicler of Edmund Arrowsmith's death, for example, ‘Catholics, who in great numbers had attended the last scene of his Apostolic life, were all the more comforted and confirmed in the truth of their religion.’Footnote 103
IV
Though priests would encourage lay and confraternal expressions of comfort, it was the sacramental and spiritual ministrations of one priest to another that constituted the most important, and fraught, level of solace, and, in the case of the Jesuits, where Ignatian writings of consolation, as well as past traditions, were made most manifest. Wherever priests found themselves dying together, the ministry of mutual comfort and sacramental give-and-take was charged with irony, existing as it did alongside the personal struggle with their own pending agonies, a situation that required priests to accommodate both duties, of dying and comforting, within themselves. Yet the restrictions imposed upon them by the wider conditions of persecution did not hinder so much as transform and heighten their consciousness of martyrdom, as well as their larger sense of Catholic identity and mission.
Most acts of consolation, of course, had to be conducted in secret: priests, for example, clandestinely embedded themselves in the crowd or at a distance, as was the case during the execution of Thomas Holland, when one Jesuit ‘saluted him, and taking his hand, said, “Courage, My Holland, good courage,” to which Holland replied, “Yes, with God's grace”’.Footnote 104 The priest Henry Garnet seems to have been hidden in an execution crowd on numerous occasions, much to his despair, and perhaps was the recipient of the rosary beads thrown by Robert Southwell from the scaffold.Footnote 105 If Garnet was not present, then he wrote letters of comfort to men such as John Gerard, who was facing possible death: ‘It was a letter full of consolation’, Gerard later wrote. ‘[Garnet] told me to prepare myself for execution, and I must admit, I rejoiced at the things that were said to me.’ Nevertheless, Gerard continued, ‘[Grace] cannot be had for mere willing or striving, and it was hidden from Father Garnet that this mercy was in store for him, not me.’Footnote 106
In his role as Jesuit superior, Garnet deserves special mention as facilitator and organiser of assistance to the dying, which in itself represented a long tradition extending back to the ars moriendi and to the phenomenon of counselling priests. But Garnet also directly applied new Ignatian and continental principles to the work he was undertaking, including the spiritual rule of figures such as Everard Mercurian, the Jesuit general from 1573 to 1581. Mercurian's stress on Ignatian forms of meditation and examination of conscience was tempered by a more disciplined, practical and controlled approach to the Society that was in some respects conducive, for Garnet, to the conduct of operations in England.Footnote 107 On the other hand Mercurian's more monastic emphasis (as well as his reluctance to send English missionaries off to die)Footnote 108 was not appropriate for the missionising enterprise supervised by Garnet, who in other respects was open to the more spiritually expansive principles of Mercurian's successor, Claudio Aquaviva, as well as the doctrine of the ‘contemplative in action’ of Nadal (and the Constitutions).Footnote 109 The Spiritual exercises encouraged directors to search for God, at least in part, in and through relationships. Although a somewhat diffident figure, Garnett adopted this practice, which compelled him, for spiritual as well as practical reasons, to maintain a tight network of associates dependent on each others' support and comfort.
Dying priests did not simply require encouragement but also last rites, in accordance with the traditional tenets of Catholicism. In England, however, such rites had to be adapted; secret codes and signals based upon previous agreements were required. Absolution, for example, was frequently given at a distance: Edmund Arrowsmith, on his way to his death, looked up to a priest in a window above and ‘asked for the last absolution by lifting up his hands (the sign they had mutually agreed upon), in order that, being sent forth from on high, he might endure in the day of battle, and triumph in the conflict’.Footnote 110 Similarly Thomas Bullaker had agreed with a priest of his order ‘who was present, that when he [gave the sign of raising his hands to his head] he should received his last absolution’.Footnote 111
Sacramental comfort on the gallows also came in the form of confession, which was made discreetly by one priest to another, if they found themselves dying together. Thus did the priests Roe and Reynolds make their confessions from the hurdle,Footnote 112 while John Roberts embraced and blessed his colleague Somers, ‘and then spoke for a short time (no doubt confessing) until they were told that the moment had come when they must die’.Footnote 113 While for Jesuits, confession, or penitence may have been a connection with past practices of devotion, it also carried special significance, central as it had been to their ministry and spirituality. It was through confession that despair as well as consolation could be articulated, either effecting conversion or confirming faith; for Jesuits especially, such treatises as Gaspar Loarte's Esercitio della vita spirituale of 1557, as well as the Spiritual exercises themselves, brought confession to the forefront, and thus became central to their ‘way of proceeding’.Footnote 114 Equally important, the manner in which Jesuits interspersed their prayer with enjoinments to or dialogue with the crowd and between themselves – including their own comments on the trials and joys they were undergoing – was a fulfilment of what Ignatius called a ‘colloquy’, or conversation that the individual was expected to undertake with another to describe the emotions provoked by his own contemplation.Footnote 115 While this continued late medieval traditions, the Spiritual exercises, and the manner in which it compelled priests and followers to conduct themselves, thus came to reflect not only a negotiation with the religious upheavals of the day, but also a new spiritual turn in accord with Trent. Just as the Confraternity of the Rosary, as Anne Dillon has written, ‘reconnect[ed] the rosary with the older habits of Catholicism’ while also imparting ‘spiritual truths … radically altered in the light of the Council of Trent’, so did the practice of comfort, covertly practised, come to represent the old overlaid with the new.Footnote 116
Indeed, the language of comfort, whether it was manifested in the poems of Southwell or the Spiritual exercises of his fellow Jesuits, provided a vocabulary with which to express what otherwise could have rendered Catholics mute in the face of the loss and horror that they were witnessing. In the injunctions of consolation, questions of despair, temptation, doubt and repentance were addressed to a people – as well as from one Jesuit to another – undergoing a test of their faith. Rather than being inhibited by the often hostile environment in which they operated, priests found that the deaths of their fellows could reinforce the providential nature of their trials, or the particular crosses they had to bear for the faith. For laypeople in turn, comfort was intended not simply to sustain individuals as they experienced the deaths of their confessors and directors, but to ensure that the community of Catholics would live on, long after those confessors and directors had passed on.
The result was the creation of not quite a formal comfort society, but something that followed in its spirit; whether the comforter was a layperson or a fellow priest, the succour that was given was not simply an informal display of empathy for the suffering of the victim, but an expression of one's own identity, however surreptitious, as a Catholic. In their act of sustaining and paying homage, such comforters were able to contribute to the process whereby degradation was elevated, paradoxically, to new heights of martyrdom, while consolation itself came to assume the very height of discipleship. And the task of comfort would continue posthumously, as followers struggled to manage and understand the extent of their loss, by turning to relics, pamphlet narratives and other Jesuit-controlled (and traditional) means of directing their grief in the proper direction.
Despite these consolations, not all comforters found comfort in their priests' prayers, gestures, absolutions or relics. Such was the case with a Mr Jessup, a layman who was imprisoned alongside the priest Thomas Pilchard. As Pilchard's ‘most faithful companion and his chief instrument in helping souls’ before their incarceration, Jessup ‘loved [the priest] most devotedly … because of his eminent virtues’. According to the account, when his friend was then ‘taken from him by death’, Jessup ‘thought his [own] life a burden, and often grieved that it had not been his lot to meet death with so great a servant of God’. When at length Jessup died in prison ‘from grief or filth of the place’, he left behind instructions to his friends and his wife. His wish, he wrote, was that his body be buried not in a graveyard but ‘as closely as possible to the body of Pilchard, in the fields by the place of his execution’. Despite the protestations of his wife, Jessup was granted his wish to lie with his friend, and there, in the ‘consecrated ground’, Jessup attained grassy proximity to the man he had tried to comfort, and who had tried, and failed, to comfort him in turn.Footnote 117
