A totally absorbing and, for many of us, un-put-downable
book. Hogge herself is not a Catholic, but she came across the story of the
Catholic priests who came to England in the second half of the sixteenth
century, when Catholicism was being stamped out and it was a capital crime to
celebrate Mass or to shelter a Catholic priest. Hogge was fascinated by the
doings of these clandestine Catholics, and started to research the story and
finally to write it up in book form.
Her research is painstaking thorough and detailed, and she
writes very well, in a simple, matter-of-fact style appropriate to the
historical nature of the book, but never becoming boring.
The cover of the paperback edition of this book shows a
wooden panel with someone peering through a knothole in the wood from the page
behind. The book uses historical documents to tell the story of the proscribed
Roman Catholic priests who came on the “English Mission” during the reign of
Queen Elizabeth the First and King James the First and Sixth. These were often
the sons of Catholic families, or else converts, who had gone abroad to train
for the priesthood, been ordained, and returned to minister to Catholics (“Recusants”,
as refusing the government-imposed new religion) and, where possible, receive
Anglicans back into the Catholic faith.
It was, however, a crime for a Catholic priest to minister
in England, and these men knew what was awaiting them: a life on the run, from
one hiding-place to another, hunted by spies who were hopeful of receiving a
bounty for information leading to their capture. (Much of Hogge’s detail comes
from reports written by these same spies for their masters, and still preserved
in archives and other historical collections.) After the Pope excommunicated
Elizabeth I and released her subjects from their allegiance, Catholic priests
were considered by the English government to be in the pay of a hostile foreign
power, and executed as traitors, by hanging, drawing and quartering. First, however,
they would be tortured to extract information on their fellow-Catholics.
The book does not hide any of the gruesome details. Nor does
it soften the difficulties that the “English mission” encountered, such as the
factions and disunity within the Catholic community, and the number of priests
and lay-men who recanted their faith for fear of torture and death. The
characters that stand out, however, are magnificent men like Fr John Gerard,
and Nicholas Owen, whose ingeniously constructed hiding-places often enabled a
hunted priest to survive for another adventurous episode, or even escape
altogether. And, of course, Fr Henry Garnet, who had the well-nigh impossible
job of keeping the Mission functioning, and who was arrested as a result of the
Gunpowder Plot, convicted of misprision of treason (though he denied to the end
that he had known about it) and executed.
