Elizabeth's Spymaster (11 page)

Like so many other distinguished civil servants down the years, Norton believed his experiences and political insight were worthy of a larger audience. He later wrote the polemic
Chain of Treasons,
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containing graphic details of a number of Catholic plots against the state during 1583–5, for both public education and entertainment and containing a number of verses praising Elizabeth in Latin. He also left manuscript notes:
Mr Norton’s Devices,
containing information on the oath of allegiance to be administered to suspects and a scheme for reforming the church, courts, universities and schools ‘for keeping out of Jesuits and seminarians from infecting the realm’.
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His last appearance in the State Papers is as a witness to an affray between the Venetian Mark Anthony Bassano, one of the queen’s musicians, and ‘certain soldiers, then on the point of departure for Flanders’, just outside Aldgate on the eastern edge of London, on 16 August 1585.
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An especially potent propaganda weapon against the Catholics was Norton’s successor, the notorious and odious Richard Topcliffe (1532– 1604), self-appointed priest-finder general and expert torturer, frequently used by Walsingham to extract information from his luckless detainees. He was a loathsome figure, feared and hated amongst England’s recusant families with some justification for the obvious relish with which he turned the windlasses of the rack, or taunted and tormented his victims,
agonisingly suspended by their arms against the dripping walls of the Tower of London’s cells.

Today, Topcliffe would be labelled an out and out certifiable sadist, possessing unhealthy sexual fantasies. In the 1580–90S, the authorities regarded him as a determined hunter of fugitive priests, whom he pursued with a grim, paranoid persistence verging on obsession. He sought them out like a circling jackal that never deviates from its quarry, always sensing and seeking out their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Pity the poor priest or recusant who fell into his merciless clutches. And many did, en route to the inevitable scaffold and a barbaric death. Take for example poor Richard Tankard. A Privy Council order of 24 May 1589 to Sir Owen Hopton, Lieutenant of the Tower, authorised him

to receive into his custody Richard Tankard, alias Yaxley, a seminary priest, at the hands of the beadle of Bridewell [Jail] and to commit [him as] a close prisoner … under sure and safe custody, permitting only Mr Topcliffe at usual times to have access to him.
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Topcliffe was the eldest son of Robert Topcliffe of Somerby, Lincolnshire, and his wife Margaret, the daughter of Thomas, Third Baron Burgh of Gainsborough, but he was orphaned at the age of twelve. Although admitted to Gray’s Inn in London to train as a lawyer, he does not appear to have pursued any career other than looking after his estates in the North Riding of Yorkshire and elsewhere in Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire. In his early forties he took an active role against Catholics both inside and out of Parliament. During one Royal Progress in the late 1570s, he personally warned Elizabeth of ‘sundry lewd Popish beasts’ who were gathering at Buxton in Derbyshire.
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In a letter to the Earl of Shrewsbury on 30 August 1578, Topcliffe recounted his conversation with the queen:

Amongst [the papists] there is a detestable Popish priest, one Dyrham or Durande, as I remember at the bath or lurking in those parts after the ladies. Mr Secretary [Walsingham] has written to your Lord[ship]… herein enclosed, to wish your Lord[ship] to apprehend
him [and] to examine him of his coming to the church and upon the least or lightest occasion, to commit him …

[This letter would] have come to your Lord[ship] ere now, but that my best nag, by chance, did break his leg, wherefore I trust you pardon.
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It seems clear that Topcliffe was very happy in his work and derived immense satisfaction from his cruel interrogation of helplessly manacled Catholic prisoners. The Jesuit John Gerard, who thought him ‘old and hoary and a veteran in evil’ and a ‘cruel creature who thirsted for the blood of Catholics’, fell into Topcliffe’s power whilst confined in the Poultry, one of London’s jails, in 1594. The torturer told him: ‘You know who I am, I am Topcliffe! No doubt, you have often heard people talk about me.’ To make his point, he ‘slapped his sword on the table close at hand, as if he intended to use it, if occasion arose’.
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Several of the Englishmen captured in the defeat of the Spanish Armada also fell into Topcliffe’s hands. A order from St James’s Palace, London, on 8 September 1588 to Topcliffe and the Lieutenant of the Tower concerned Tristram Winslade, then held in Newgate Prison,

heretofore taken in one of the Spanish ships, their lordships’ pleasure is that he be conveyed to the Tower … and to appoint a time of meeting for the examination of the said Winslade upon the Rack, using torture [on] him at their pleasure.’
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No doubt Topcliffe had his pleasure. Satisfaction of another more fetid kind may also have come his way. During the interrogations, Topcliffe may also have indulged in bizarre sexual fantasies. Testimony from the captured priest Thomas Pormont,
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later executed, describes Topcliffe’s lascivious boastings as he questioned him in the comfort of his own home, alongside the churchyard of St Margaret’s Church, Westminster. He told Pormont:

that he was to [MS torn] familiar with her majesty; that he many times put [MS torn] between her breasts and paps and in her neck.

That he has not only seen her legs and knees [words missing] with his hands above her knees.

That her felt her belly and said unto her majesty that she [had] the softest belly of any womankind.

That she said to him: ‘Be not these the arms, legs and body of King Henry?’ To which, he answered: ‘Yes.’

That she gave him for a favour, a white linen hose, wrought with white silk.

That he is so familiar with her that when he pleases to speak with her, he may take her away from any company and she [was] not as pleasant with everyone that she did not love.
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There seems little doubt that Topcliffe was seeking to impress his prisoner by demonstrating his power at court, in a clumsy and egocentric attempt to persuade him that he alone could win the priest a pardon in exchange for information. Moreover, he emphasised that his position was unassailable: he did not care a jot for those government apparatchiks on the Privy Council, as he believed he held his authority directly and personally from Elizabeth herself. Perhaps, if one were to be generous, by gloating over his supposed intimate relationship with the Virgin Queen he was trying to shock the other-worldly Pormont into submission. But his breathless prurience goes far beyond mere boasting and strays into the unreal world of sexual fantasy. Certainly, Topcliffe had obscure obsessions. He was convinced that the priest was the bastard son of John Whitgift, Elizabeth’s Archbishop of Canterbury, for whom he had little respect: ‘The archbishop … was a fitter counsellor [in] the kitchen, among the wenches, than in a prince’s court,’ he told the wretched and frightened Pormont, who must, by that point, have been questioning, in his mind at least, the sanity of his captor and inquisitor. Topcliffe, still rambling on, then turned his ire to a rival pursuer of Catholic fugitives: ‘and to Justice [Richard] Young, he [Topcliffe] would hang the archbishop and 500 more if they were in his hands’.

In June 1592, in an extraordinary letter to Elizabeth seeking her
permission to apply his own violent methods of extracting information, Topcliffe recommends that a Catholic

prisoner should be manacled at the wrists with his feet upon the ground and his hands [stretched up] as high as he was [able to] reach against the wall.
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He used such methods against the Jesuit priest Robert Southwell
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in Newgate, who was ‘hanged by the hands, put in irons [manacles], kept from sleep and such like devices to men usual.’
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Few could withstand his tortures. Anne Bellamy, imprisoned in the gatehouse at Westminster, betrayed twenty-six people, including her parents, friends and relations after a session with Topcliffe. He then raped her and after she became pregnant she was forced to marry his servant Nicholas Jones in 1592 to cover up the scandal.
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Topcliffe also believed firmly in the biblical tenet that the labourer was worthy of his hire: he required rewards and honours for his gruesome work. In October 1584, he petitioned Elizabeth over a dispute he was involved in with Lord Chief Justice Sir Christopher Wray for the profitable lease of the parsonages at Corringham and Stow, both in Lincolnshire. He bitterly complained of the judge’s ‘corrupt attempt’ to try the case himself, and nimbly slipped in the knife about Wray’s family, pointing out that ‘his lordship’s grandfather served the Lord Conyers as a morrow Mass priest and vicar of East Witton [Yorkshire]’.
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After the fear and agony of the interrogation came the travesty of trial and the horrors of execution. Let there be no lingering doubts about the stark and dreadful nature of the judicial murder of these priests as traitors. The state’s lawful methodology deliberately carried heavy biblical symbolism, used coldly and calculatedly. A few decades later in 1606, after the Gunpowder Plot against James I, the distinguished judge Sir Edward Coke claimed that such ‘Godly butchery’ indicated to all and sundry that the victim was dying for committing treason against the realm rather than for their religion. Ripping out their organs whilst they were still alive showed that the miscreant was unworthy to ‘tread upon the face of the earth whereof he was made’. As he ‘has been retrograde to
nature, therefore, is he drawn backward at a horse’s tail’ on the hurdle on the way to the scaffold. The victim was first hanged because ‘being hanged up by the neck between heaven and earth’ demonstrated the individual’s unworthiness to be part of either place, and the head was lopped off because it had ‘imagined the mischief. Castration was inflicted to demonstrate that the victim was ‘unfit to leave any generation behind’ and the heart was removed because it had ‘harboured such horrible treason’. Displaying the body parts in public places evoked shame and infamy. The bloodthirsty old jurist added: ‘Their carcase will I give to be meat for the fowls of the heavens and for the beasts of the earth.’ He then quoted the Bible – the Book of Jeremiah, chapter eight, verse two: their bones were to ‘be spread before the sun and the moon and all the host of heaven … They shall not be gathered or be buried; they shall be dung upon the face of the earth’.
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His words would have been meat and drink to Topcliffe. His self-appointed role in carrying out the executions is well exemplified by the death of Edmund Jennings,
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slaughtered at the upper end of Holborn on the eastern edge of the City of London on 10 December 1591. Standing on the scaffold, a gloating Topcliffe urged his victim to confess his treason to secure a pardon from Elizabeth. Jennings, with the noose already around his neck, calmly replied: ‘I know not ever to have offended her. If to say Mass be treason, I confess to have done and glory in it.’ His words sent his tormentor into a fury and, leaving him scarce time ‘to recite the
Pater Noster
’,
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Topcliffe kicked him off the ladder and left him hanging, half-strangled and gasping desperately for breath. Cruelly, the rope was immediately cut and Jennings landed heavily on his feet. The executioner tripped him up and, wielding a sharp butcher’s knife, sliced off his genitalia, disembowelled him and ripped out his living organs, holding them up for the crowd to see. Jennings cried out, calling upon his patron Saint Gregory to help him, and the astonished blood-soaked hangman shouted: ‘God’s wounds! His heart is in my hand – and yet Gregory is in his mouth.’
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Another priest, Anthony Middleton,
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was arrested in mid-1590 by Topcliffe, disguised as a Catholic, in a grocer’s shop in Fleet Street,
London, together with Edward Jones.
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When Jones was told to address the Old Bailey jury trying him, he claimed that during the reign of Edward VI, a statute was passed that forbade indictments for treasonable offences unless the crimes were proved by the testimony of two lawful witnesses’ or admitted by voluntary confession. In his case, he claimed, there was neither a confession nor two witnesses involved. An enraged Topcliffe jumped to his feet and waved a slip of parchment at the prisoner. He snapped: ‘No! Will you deny this to be your confession?’ Jones replied: ‘It was done by torture, for I was hanged by [the] arms and therefore, it was not voluntary.’

At Middleton’s execution in Fleet Street, a gloating Topcliffe banned the priest from speaking ‘except you [can] speak to the glory of God [and] the honour of your prince and country’. Middleton replied:

You know, Mr Topcliffe, I never approached any man, nor confessed in any place. Therefore you wrong me. But if I had 10,000 deaths to suffer, I would suffer them for the Roman Catholic faith and I hope my death shall confirm many Catholics in their faith which are present.

Topcliffe, stung by the priest’s defiance, told him to hold his peace, and the crowd thronging round the scaffold cried: ‘Away with him!’