Chapter I: Penal Times

The Northgate, a recusant prison in Chester.

Recusancy and suspicion

With the death of Edward VI in 1553, however, and the accession of Mary Tudor, England was reconciled with the Papacy and the old religion was restored. What had been sold had now hurriedly to be repurchased. Roodscreens were rebuilt and gilded, the old simple things like the holly and the Christmas star and the Easter Sepulchre, all reappeared. The new churchwardens at Holy Trinity made a list of all the church goods they managed to retrieve: copes, chasubles, banners, two chalices, a brass censer, a Mass book, a statue of St. Anthony, and an unspecified book bequeathed to the church by a priest, Thomas Warmingham.

Then, once again, as the pendulum swung back, Elizabeth's Religious Settlement of 1559 began to come into force. By 1565, the final sales of everything papistical had been completed. We get a fleeting glimpse of the purchasers and the fate of this great plunder of church plate and furnishings. Some of them found their way to distant Spain, where in 1568 they were still being sold in Bilbao by Mr. Hardware, the Mayor of Chester, for the sum of 770 Royals. In 1573, the Chester merchant, David Chaloner, owed the churchwardens of Holy Trinity 40/- for a red velvet cope, which he was selling in Spain.

Much, on the other hand, must have remained in Chester. As late as 1570, a goldsmith of the town, named William Mutton, paid £7 17s. 6d. to the churchwardens of the same church for two chalices with covers, weighing 33 ozs. The ownership of plate made of precious metal was an important status symbol during the Elizabethan period, and the way in which the rising gentleman or merchant invested his wealth. Goldsmiths like William Mutton may well have been the source of supply for such people in Chester. In 1583, when he was Sheriff, he was ordered at the Metropolitan Visitation to take down the Crosses at the Bars, Northgate and Boughton. He died soon afterwards, and the rumour went round that "he had so offended the papists that they ascribed his death to what he had done". The churchwardens who sold him the chalices were at the same time spending £6 18s. 10d. on a communion cup and plate for the bread of the new Anglican service. Vestments also came in for more profane uses, such as costumes for actors, presumably in the Mystery Plays. Three vestments and a streamer brought 8s. into the parish chest, when they were sold to "Thomas Dycher's son to make players' garments".

It is impossible to say how much was salvaged and kept in secret, against the day when they could be safely brought out and put to their proper use, but it was undoubtedly happening. As early as 1559, while the new religious regime was still insecure, a Mistress Dutton was ordered to appear before the Bishop of Chester at his Visitation, for keeping "secreatly a Rode, too pictures and a Masse Boke". Mistress Dutton belonged to the prominent Catholic family of that name living in St. Peter's parish. She was either the mother of Peter Dutton, gentleman, or his wife Elizabeth, the daughter of Richard Massey of Aldford. The same Visitation revealed another case, that of Peter Fletcher, who "hathe certain ymages which he kepith secreatly", belonging to St. Mary's church.

Their citation before the bishop's court foreshadowed the treatment those recusants who remained loyal to the old Faith might expect in the years which lay ahead. The vast majority of the citizens of Chester in the early 1560's, however, showed very little opposition to the Elizabethan settlement. Tn 1562, boards were being set up against the windows in Holy Trinity Church, and a glazier from Handbridge was employed to repair broken windows, but no explanation is given for their being broken. A former friar was ordered not to wear his beads in future, and another man who may have been the porter at the Abbey was "enjoyned that he shall not use his beades hereafter under paine of the lawe".

After 1568 there was a radical change in the situation, and this became more sharply defined as the years went by. On the one hand, the constant reprimands for slackness which William Downham, the Bishop of Chester, received from the Privy Council, and his subsequent replacement in 1579 by the stricter William Chadderton, led to more thorough and severe Visitations of the parishes, while the Chester Justices of the Peace in Quarter Sessions became much more active. At the same time, the publication in 1570 of the Papal Bull, Regnans in Excelsis, declaring Queen Elizabeth deposed, and formally releasing her Catholic subjects from their allegiance, aggravated the situation. Catholics everywhere came to realise that they could no longer remain "Church-going Papists". They must either conform to the new religion and attend the services of the established Church, or openly reject it and face the consequences.

The result in Chester was the growth of a hard core of recusancy, which no amount of persecution could break. It was never so powerful or so notorious as in Lancashire, but together with two other centres, Malpas and Bunbury, it constituted a formidable stronghold of opposition in Cheshire. From the people who had to appear at diocesan and metropolitan Visitations and at Quarter Sessions, between the years 1570 and 1590, and were fined for non-attendance at church, a certain number began to emerge as "obstinate recusants". They were drawn from all walks of life; the gentry, the professions, tradesmen, craftsmen, the poor. They came from every parish in the city, and their family connections, parent and child, husband and wife, master and servant, mistress and maid, strengthened the bonds between them.

A strenuous attack on them was made by the authorities, in an attempt to wipe them out. At first, fines were imposed on them for non-­attendance at church, which rose from 1/- a week to £20 a month. When fines did not deter them, they were imprisoned as well in the two gaols of the city, the Castle and the Northgate. The authorities came down most heavily in the beginning on men of substance and influence, reserving women and the poor until later. Among them, the name of the lawyer, Ralph Worseley, from St. Oswald's parish, frequently occurs. He was probably the son of another Ralph who had migrated from Lancashire into Chester, and whose bequests to poor clothmakers in the city were still being administered a hundred years later. Ralph the lawyer was expelled from Gray's Inn, London, in 1577 on religious grounds, and four years later appeared at Quarter Sessions with a number of other recusants from Chester and elsewhere in the county. He tried to raise legal objections against the charge but lost his case, was fined £120, and imprisoned in Chester Castle. Except for a period in the New Fleet prison at Salford, he spent the next thirteen years a prisoner there, finally either dying there in 1594, or being transferred elsewhere. While he was in prison, the jailer used him to read chapters of the Bible at meal times each day to the other recusants, "whereunto the whole number of the recusants do repaire and heare diligently". If this was an attempt to win them over to Protestantism it had no effect, for the jailer had shortly to admit "they doe still continue in their former obstinate opinions".

Fear of the coming of the Spanish Armada in 1588 filled Chester Castle with recusants. In many ways, however, the castle was the weak link in the campaign against them. It stood too near the sea coast to be secure. Amazingly, the recusants had liberty "to go and ride abroade at their pleasure and not anie offence taken thereat". It was possible to bribe the keeper, not only to make the prisoners' lot easier, but also to carry on practices which in the eyes of the law were highly treasonable. On one occasion at least, a young Welsh priest penetrated into the castle and celebrated Mass in the room of John Whitmore, a "dangerous practising papist" gentleman from Thurstaston. An account of what took place was given later to the authorities by the niece of a recusant woman from Chester, Alice Cheswis. The priest, dressed in a white surplice, said "the service in Lattin and ther bred was such as was used in the popish time. And Mr. Whitmore's younge sonne did help that preste and did put the wine into the cup, and the preste lifted it up over his head". Several prisoners received communion, including Ralph Worseley and Alice Cheswis, with her two sons, William and Richard.

Even the priests who were captured and imprisoned in the castle were able to carry on their ministry there. The names of several have come down to us. Two of them, Davis and Stone, had been saying Mass at Christleton, in the home of a yeoman family named Cotgreve. The whole family was staunchly Catholic and owed fines to the tune of £960, an impossible sum to pay. The names of the two priests were given to the Justices at the Quarter Sessions of 1592 by a nephew of the family, Randolph Cotgreve, who conformed. Two other priests, Richard Sutton and John Culpage, both old men, were described as "very wilful and obstinate". Sutton died in the castle about 1579, but John Culpage, who had been at the Collegiate Church at Manchester with Lawrence Vaux, lingered on until 1584, when he either died or was exiled. By then he would have been eighty five years old.

The most daring of the priests was Venerable Thomas Holford. A Cheshire man by birth, he was arrested at Nantwich in 1585, and brought before Bishop Chadderton, disguised as a dandy. He refused to go into exile, declaring that "either Tyburn or Boughton should have his carcase".4 During the time he spent in Chester Castle, he said Mass several times for the other prisoners, converted the wife and two children of the jailer, conducted the marriage ceremony between Jane Primrose, the daughter of a prominent Chester recusant and the son of John Whitmore, and baptised their children. He was taken by the pursuivants for trial in London, but escaped by acting as a madman. Evading arrest for another year, he was eventually caught again in Holborn in 1588, and suffered martyrdom shortly after. He was forty seven years of age.

Though he never worked as a priest in his own home town, Chester produced one other martyr at this time, Venerable Robert Wilcocks. Born in Chester in 1558, he studied at Rheims, and after his ordination was sent on the English Mission in January 1586. Within two months he was arrested either on the Kentish coast or in Sussex, and sent to the Marshalsea prison. After the defeat of the Spanish Armada, he was taken to Canterbury, and there hanged, drawn, and quartered, together with two other priests and a layman. In his Memoirs of Missionary Priests Challoner5 wrote how Wilcocks was the first to go up the ladder, and as he did so, smilingly told the others that "he was going to heaven before them, where he should carry the tidings of their coming after him". It was young men like this, trained in the new seminaries abroad in which Cardinal Allen, himself a Lancashire man, played a leading role, and prepared, as Edmund Campion the finest of the English Martyrs said, "either to win you heaven, or to die upon your pikes", that the Elizabethan Government came most to fear.

Chester was all the more dangerous in the eyes of the Privy Council because it was the main port in the North West for Ireland and the continent. In the latter part of the sixteenth century, troops and supplies were continually passing through en route for Ireland, and it would not be difficult for messengers, recusant priests, or forbidden goods like Catholic books to be smuggled in and out. The Mayors of Chester were being continually warned to keep a look out for suspicious comings and goings, and "to serche for passengers into Ireland except they be knowen Merchants or suchlike". In 1609, for instance, a William Dugan of Lincoln's Inn who claimed that he was returning home to Dublin, was stopped and searched, and his trunk ransacked for "papistical books and superstitious relics",6 and on another occasion about the same time, an informer, William Udall, writing to Sir Robert Cecil to remind him of the services he had performed for the Chief Secretary, spoke about "the going of Wright the priest for Ireland and now about Cheaster to take shipping which is for the publishing of some bokes to be printed there".7

The port was also being used to get out of the country Catholic boys whose parents were forbidden by the law to send them abroad to be educated. Between April 1594 and July 1595, three parties of youths were caught. One, a group of ten had got as far as Dublin, only to be returned to Chester. They came from various parts of the country, from as far away as London, Cambridgeshire, Hampshire, Suffolk, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Tamworth in Staffordshire. They included the sons of gentlemen, merchants, a joiner and a farmer, several of whom were recusants known to the authorities. They must have been assembling at Chester preparatory to embarking for Ireland, one group under "the guide" Edward Scrope, and another under Bartholomew Wycham from Newcastle upon Tyne "naming himself their tutor". All were apprehended by David Lloyd, the Mayor of Chester, and their horses, pistols and money confiscated. The long correspondence which ensued between the Mayor and the Right Honourable Lords of the Council has survived8 until finally, "in obedience to their Lordships' orders", they were sent up to London under guard, some on horseback and the rest on foot "for the sparinge of charges". One of them, Thomas Hall, finally got away to the continent, and was admitted to the English College at Seville. After his ordination in 1599 he returned to England and worked as a missionary until his death in 1606.

One group of people who drew suspicion upon themselves at times such as these and with good reason, were the innkeepers and their wives. Alice Barker, whose husband kept the Unicorn, was examined by the High Commission in 1592, as an absentee from church and a suspected recusant. William Bostock and his wife, Elizabeth, were suspected of harbouring priests, and Elizabeth was questioned about the guests who had lodged at their inn. They were not the only ones who were in trouble for this kind of offence. Henry Primrose, a tailor of St. Martin's parish and his wife, Margaret, whose daughter had already contracted a popish and therefore invalid marriage with the son of John Whitmore while a prisoner in the Castle, lodged at his house Catholic youths who were trying to escape overseas. He, together with William Bostock and William Aldersey, a linen draper, were all well known Catholics. As far back as 1562 Margaret Aldersey was cited before the High Commission, "concerninge the concealinge of an image about which she confessed she had sold and convayed it away bie a Spaniard". Ten years later she was ordered, "to bringe in a Latin Primer boke which she useth", and in 1592, when she was widowed, aged and sick, she suffered imprisonment as a recusant.9

In addition to Chester Castle, the authorities also made use of Northgate prison. This was over the Northgate which was removed in 1808. The entrance to the gaol was on the west side of the gate, and under the gateway there was a dungeon called "Little Ease" or "Dead Man's Doom". It was hewn out of the rock and the only access of air was through pipes. It was a foul place out of which a few managed to escape, and in which one or two conformed and went to church. Ralph Langton was confined here after boasting that "he would never go to church for any man's pleasure in Chester".

The year 1592 has been called "The Harrying of the Catholics in the North", for it was the hardest year of all. Yet in spite of everything, recusancy was as active as ever in Chester. Though they were not numerous, the Catholics formed a tightly knit community, aiding one another in their difficulties, and easily recognisable. There were more than have been mentioned here, and probably many more about whom nothing is known. Before the end of Elizabeth's reign recusancy had developed a vitality which no penal laws could crush.

The Parish Register of Holy Trinity Church bears these two entries:­

1614. Katherine, wife of William Liverpool, joiner, who is a recusant and so was she. She was buried in the churchyard, 11 February by licence from Bishop Lloyd.

1628. William Liverpool, joiner, buried 30 January in the churchyard in the night, with licence of Mr. Stafford, Chancellor, because he was a recusant.

These two entries may be regarded as the link, for the Catholics of Chester, between the period which had just ended and the century which lay ahead. William and his wife were known in the later years of Elizabeth's reign as Catholics. In the year of the Armada, they had both shared the same indictment for absence from church as William and Margaret Aldersey, William Bostock the innkeeper, Henry Primrose and his family, and others. The year of his death, William's name appeared on a list of recusants in the city.

In the early seventeenth century, out of one hundred and forty three recorded recusants from the whole county of Cheshire, only sixteen came from Chester, twelve from St. John's Ward, two from Eastgate Ward and two from Trinity Ward.10 No doubt, there were others whose names have been lost, including, possibly, children of the earlier generation who had suffered in the Castle for their faith. It is clear, however, that by then the numbers of Catholics, in the total population of some 4,000, were small. To this must be added the deaths caused by the outbreak of plague between the summer of 1603 and 1605, which carried off 1,313 inhabitants of the city.