February 1979 Print

Martyrs of the English Reformation

Philip Howard was a man of ancient pedigree, of high intelligence and personal charm, of immense wealth, and of social position second only to the royal family. Yet there was little of real grandeur in his life end a great deal of unheroic ordinariness, both in the flashy vices and foibles of his younger years and in the dreary frustration after his conversion. His unbelievable wealth and his exalted position, and even the rather romantic misfortune of falling into royal disfavor all seem to place Philip Howard in a very remote kind of world, one which we can barely imagine. But on the other hand, his expectations and missed opportunities, his little triumphs and his annoying defeats, his youthful enthusiasms butting into sobering realities, his embarrassing follies and his shamefaced regrets, are in fact the stuff of Everyman's mortal career, especially of every man who pursues worldliness.

At his baptism in July 1557 in the Chapel at Whitehall, the royal palace in London, he was the Earl of Surrey, heir to the Dukedom of Norfolk (his father, Thomas, was England's only duke), the Earldom of Arundel, and the Baronies of Fitz-Alan, Clun, Oswaldestry, Maltravers, Mowbray and Segrave. Queen Mary, near the end of her unhappy reign and life, was in attendance with her Court and her husband, King Philip, His Most Catholic Majesty of Spain and England, was his godfather and namesake. At his funeral thirty-eight years later in the Chapel of London Tower, a single minister officiated and preached a heartless sermon over the wasted corpse.

PHILIP'S CHILDHOOD was reasonably happy but complicated. A month after the baptism his mother died of complications from the birth. The Duke soon married again and begot two additional sons and a daughter, before the second wife died also. His third wife was a widow with three daughters and a son. The Duke, who had greatly augmented his already vast wealth by these marriages and who was afflicted with the Howards' traditional vice of family pride, devised a plan of having his four sons marry his four daughters, their half-sisters, and of thus keeping the wealth in the family. Since the prospective partners were not related by blood, the appropriate dispensations would not be hard to obtain.

Lady Dacre, the third Duchess of Norfolk, died about a year after her marriage to the Duke, and her mother moved into the Howard home to care for the eight children. Her name was Lady Mounteagle, and she was very staunch in her fidelity to the Catholic Church. They lived at this time in the old Charterhouse—a monastery until Henry VIII's dissolution of it—which the Duke had bought and renamed Howard House. One may speculate that Philip absorbed some of the spirit of that sacred place, hallowed in the previous generation by the blood of the Carthusian martyrs. One of the children's tutors was Gregory Martin, dear friend of St. Edmund Campion and later a translator of the Douay-Rheims version of the Bible. He was at that time still struggling with himself regarding his allegiance to the Church.

Despite these Catholic influences on his youth, Philip followed the lead of his father, whom he idolized. The ease with which the Duke put off Catholicism with the demise of Queen Mary and put on Protestantism with the accession of Queen Elizabeth, is not easy to explain. Philip's father was not above opportunism, but to call it simply that is to over-simplify a complicated phenomenon, one that was widespread in his day and not unknown in our own. This was the sixteenth century, an age, unlike our own, when it was still largely true that only a manifest fool would have said in his heart there is no God; so it is unlikely that the Duke was a religious cynic merely following the main chance—especially in view of the sincerely pious exhortations in his letters to Philip. Even when he was a devoted subject of Queen Mary and a practicing Catholic, the Duke felt attracted to certain of the heretical ideas of the reformers. The official change in religion which Elizabeth introduced may simply have permitted him to be more candid in his mixed religious attitudes. An additional element in his conversion of Protestantism is probably that he just did not see that the changes introduced by Elizabeth's government were as radical as in fact they were—which is the usual claim of radical reformers.

A further complication in the religious attitudes which the Duke of Norfolk bequeathed to his son Philip is shown in the Duke's intrigue with Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth's rival to the English throne and the Catholic population's political hope for restoring the ancient Faith. This promotion of Mary was mainly a matter of politics and personal ambition (apparently he hoped to marry her) but Elizabeth's counsellors were quite reasonable in finding incredible his claim that he did not intend to promote the Catholic cause. In any case, the Duke's religious attitudes ('convictions' would be too strong a word) seem to have been sincere, though hardly profound.

His intrigue with Mary Queen of Scots led to his execution for treason. Taking a page from the book of her father Henry VIII, Elizabeth distrusted the old nobility like the Howards; she preferred creatures of her own making like William Cecil, Lord Burghley—a principal architect of the new state religion. At the Duke's death in 1572, Burghley became guardian to the fifteen-year-old Philip.

HE WAS SENT to Cambridge where his charm, his lank good looks, and his native intelligence stood him in good stead. They did not, however, keep him from a certain measure (hard to determine) of dissipation. And when he completed his studies, he launched into even greater luxurious living at the Court of Queen Elizabeth, quite neglecting his wife Anne, whom he had married in accordance with his father's plan. He spent his hours and his father's fortune fawning over Elizabeth, flattering her, lavishing extravagant gifts upon her, giving fabulous banquets for her Court; and he consorted with "corrupted immodest young women wherewith the Court in those times did too much abound."

Yet his native generosity seems not to have failed him, nor his good judgment about most things. Once when a companion was rude to a beggar, Philip treated him to a brief lecture: "Verily you have much forgot yourself, good Sir, in abusing such a poor man in the manner you have done it. Far better had it been you had considered that before God there is no difference between poor and rich, betwixt the beggar and the gentleman. All of us are of the same nature, made of the same mould, enjoying the same air. Those therefore who are of better birth or higher degree ought not to condemn others, much less insult over them, but rather help and pleasure them."

IN 1580 the Hound of Heaven took up Philip's scent in earnest, but as usual in ways the prey did not recognize. Philip's father-in-law, the Earl of Arundel, died and Philip succeeded to his title and his seat in the House of Lords as England's premier earl. This induced him to take public affairs more seriously, and he found himself spending less time at Court and more in serious business and at home. In his wilder days his wife Anne had removed to live with her father, but now that he was dead she was constrained to live again with her husband. At first Philip was rude and brusque with her, but her tender patience began gradually to effect the reconciliation she longed for.

At about this time he was troubled by a matter of conscience and wished to consult a learned man. He was put in touch with a Catholic priest, a Mr. Stevens, but what came of the meeting we do not know.

Anne read a book on the dangers of schism and was so troubled by it that she sought reconciliation with the Church. She had never really abandoned the Catholic beliefs which her grandmother, Lady Mounteagle, had instilled in her, but somehow she had drifted into conformity with the newly established religion. And now, just as she was first beginning to enjoy her husband's tardy affection, she resolved to risk losing it by a formal re-entry into the Church. To her surprise and relief, Philip did not seem to mind. At about this time also Philip's sister was reconciled, too.

In the summer of 1581 great excitement was occasioned by the capture of St. Edmund Campion. Most of the courtiers had read Campion's Brag and Decem Rationes, in which he had called for a public disputation on the matter of the old and the new religion. The courtiers, sensationalists that they were, induced the Queen to permit such a debate. When Philip Howard went to the chapel in London Tower to witness the event, he found the Protestant apologists ranged comfortably on one side with their tables, books, papers, and secretaries, and on the other side a ragged little group of priest prisoners led by Campion, haggard, half starved, debilitated by harsh imprisonment, crippled by torture, and deprived of books and paper. Campion did not win the debate in the technical sense, but his humility, resignation to suffering, confident composure in the unfair contest, and above all his holiness stood out in brilliant contrast to his opponents' smug invective and superficial banter.

Philip was profoundly moved and thoroughly convinced. But emotional involvement and intellectual conviction do not amount to the mystery of conversion, and Philip continued to resist the divine gift of Faith. He was not a thoughtless man and he gave full consideration to the consequences of becoming a Catholic, an act of treason. Already his relations with the Queen had become strained by his reconciliation with his wife. Elizabeth did not like her courtiers to be too attached to their wives. When Anne became pregnant and reconciled to the Church, Elizabeth had her sequestered in Sussex to prevent her communicating with priests. When the child was born, Philip made a last attempt to propitiate the Queen by having the child baptized a Protestant and named Elizabeth—a futile gesture. Even the Queen, by her animosity, conspired with these other events to drive Philip from her heretical Court and into the arms of Holy Mother Church.

Philip finally resolved to take the critical step. He confided in his favorite brother, William, and found that soon they were of one mind. Accordingly the brothers were received into the Church by Fr. William Weston, S. J.

The foreseen difficulties of his new situation crowded in on him. He longed for the regular reception of the sacraments, but Elizabeth's spies made it impossible for him to harbor a priest. He despised his past life, but as premier earl he had often to attend upon the Queen; and this sometimes involved Protestant services, which he tried to avoid with often transparent excuses. He wrote to Cardinal Allen, founder of the English college at Douay, asking how he could best serve the Church. Elizabeth's spies intercepted the letter and forged a reply advising him to flee the country.

He 'accidentally' fell in with a man, Edward Grately, who knew all about arranging the details of a secret escape. Taking sorrowful leave of Anne, who was again pregnant, he set out for the Continent, but as soon as the ship reached open sea it was boarded and Philip arrested—all according to the government's plan. This was in April, 1585, Philip's twenty-seventh year.

He was fined £10,000 and confined to the Tower for an indefinite period. The studied insolence of his keepers, the humiliating discomforts, the separation from Anne to whom he owed so much reparation, all this must have been very painful to the once spoiled aristocrat. He had spent nearly eleven years in the gay life of the Court; now he was beginning eleven years of imprisonment. But this time of defeat and helplessness became for him a time of growing sanctity, and as his once athletic body wasted away, so his once anemic soul grew in grace. Queen Elizabeth's purpose in the indefinite imprisonment was apparently to wear him down to a recantation, for she knew the weak character of her courtiers; God's purpose was apparently to build him up in holiness. He set for himself a routine of prayer, fasting and spiritual exercises, and from outside the prison St. Robert Southwell, now confessor to Anne, sent him beautifully composed letters of spiritual advice and comfort.

His treatment during the eleven years was not uniformly severe and there were some occasions when he and a few other prisoners were able to hear Mass by a fellow inmate, old Fr. William Bennet. They prayed for, among other things, "the success of the Catholic cause," which later turned out to be a dangerous thing to do around the time of the Spanish Armada, 1588. Threatened with torture, Fr. Bennett confessed all this, embellishing it to satisfy his tormentors, and thus occasioned a new trial for Philip. Although Fr. Bennett begged Philip's forgiveness for the false confession, he later repeated it in open court before the peers who sat in judgment on the first earl. On the occasion of the trial Philip dressed his emaciated body in his sumptuous official regalia, because he knew he was innocent of the treason alleged. Fr. Garnet reported the verdict to his Jesuit superiors: "When the people against all their expectations, saw the earl come out of the hall with the blade of the axe turned inwards toward his face [a sign that the death penalty had been adjudged] suddenly there arose such a great cry of horror that it could be heard several furlongs along the river bank."

He lived on in daily expectation of his beheading. His spiritual advisor, Fr. Southwell, was captured by the priest-hunter Topcliffe and eventually lodged in the Tower also, but Philip and he were never allowed to meet before the priest's martyrdom in February, 1589. When Philip's final illness came upon him later that same year, he addressed one last petition to the Queen, that he might see his wife and the son he had never beheld. Elizabeth sent word back that if he would but once attend the Protestant service, he should have all his liberties and honors restored to him. Thus was his last worldly hope plucked from him.

His old biographer recorded his last days:

Not long after, he grew so faint and weak decaying by degrees that he was not able to rise from his bed. Whereupon by the advice of his Physicians he gave over the saying of his Breviary and the reading of other books, betaking himself only to his Beads and some other devotions whereto by vow he had obliged himself; and these he never omitted to the very last day of his life, having his Beads almost always with him in his bed.

Sir Michael Blount, Lieutenant of the Tower, came to ask the dying Earl's forgiveness. Philip gave it without stint, of course, and he also offered Blount some advice:

"Mr. Lieutenant, you have shown both me and my men very hard measure," "Wherein my Lord?" "Nay," said the Earl, "I will not make a recapitulation for it is freely forgiven. Only I am to say to you a few words of my last Will, which being observed, may by the grace of God turn much to your benefit and reputation. I speak not for self, for God of his goodness has taken order that I shall be delivered very shortly out of your charge; only for others I speak who may be committed to this place. You must think, Mr. Lieutenant, that when a prisoner comes hither to this Tower, that he bringeth sorrow with him. Oh do not then add affliction to affliction; there is no man whatsoever that thinketh himself to stand surest, but may fall. It is a very inhuman part to tread on him whom misfortune hath cast down. The man that is void of mercy, God hath in great detestation. Your commission is only to keep with safety not to kill with severity."

Then in words that show how profitably he had meditated on his own life:

"Remember, Mr. Lieutenant, that God who with his finger turneth the unstable wheel of this variable world, can in the revolution of a few days bring you to be a prisoner also, and to be kept in the same place where you now keep others. There is no calamity that men are subject unto, but you may also taste as well as any other man. Farewell, Mr. Lieutenant; for the time of my final abode, come to me whenever you please, and you shall be heartily welcome as my friend."

Sir Michael left the cell in tears. He soon had reason to reflect at length on the saintly Earl's prophetic advice, for in seven weeks' time he was himself a prisoner in the Tower under a hard keeper.

Upon Sunday the 19th of October . . . without any sign of grief or groan . . . he surrendered his happy soul into the hands of Almighty God, who to his so great glory had created it. Some have thought . . . that he had some foreknowledge of the day of his death, because seven or eight days before, making certain notes (understood only by himself) in his Calendar, what Prayers and Devotions he intended to say upon every day of the week following, on Monday, Tuesday, etc.; when he came to the Sunday on which he died, he there made a pause saying, "Hitherto and no farther: this is enough" and so wrote no more.

AFTER PHILIP'S DEATH he was revered in England and abroad as a martyr (although he did not die on the scaffold) for the years of silent suffering had preached an eloquent sermon on fidelity to the Faith in the face of adversity. This popular judgment was confirmed in 1970 when his canonization was included among the forty English, Welsh and Scottish martyrs.

Anne lived on in notable piety to a great age and watched her son follow her husband's footsteps into worldliness and apostasy; she did not live to see his reconciliation with the Church, but perhaps she knew it would come.

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"Martyrs of the English Reformation," formerly called "English Martyrs," is written each month by Dr. Malcolm Brennan, Professor of English at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina.