IT’S hard to conceive just how terrifying it must have been to stay at Baddesley Clinton four hundred years ago.
These days the moated manor house looks serene and idyllic in the autumn sunshine.
But in the closing years of the Tudor period, life was anything but serene in this corner of Warwickshire.
With high infant mortality and a country rife with regular epidemics of flu, dysentery and tuberculosis, life in Tudor England was always dangerous – and to add to the casualties, thousands were executed for crimes ranging from theft and robbery to murder and treason.
Rebels and insurgents were mercilessly punished, and as Henry VIII proceeded to seize convents, abbeys and monasteries across the country during the English Reformation, abbots, monks and friars in their habits would be among the hundreds to be hanged.
We remember the reign of Elizabeth I as a time of extraordinary enterprise as the known world expanded through maritime exploration and trade, cities grew in size and the economy boomed.
But though it was known as an era when the arts and theatre flourished, it was also a time of widespread poverty, food shortages and hardship for most ordinary people.
As law and medicine prospered, the publishing industry thrived. But while the Church of England was becoming securely established and much of the country had come to embrace the Protestant faith, English Catholics began to face increased surveillance, stricter laws and persecution because of fears of foreign plots against the Queen.
More than half a century had passed since Henry VIII’s momentous decision to defy the Pope and marry Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, and most Catholics wanted simply to remain as loyal subjects while practising their religion.
But the decision by Pope Pius V to excommunicate the English Queen in 1570 effectively gave papal approval for her Catholic subjects to rise in rebellion, confirming the worst fears of her chief advisors.
The laws targeting Catholics were increasingly tightened. Fines for failing to attend Church of England services rocketed.
Any priest found in England was to be found automatically guilty of treason and would receive the death penalty. And it was also made a capital offence to shelter a priest.
Despite the terrible penalties, wealthy families provided secret support and colleges in Europe trained English Jesuits who were smuggled back to keep the faith alive – which takes us back to Baddesley Clinton and a run-in with the priest-hunters, or pursuivants, in October 1591.
Secret worship had become the norm for England’s besieged Catholics, and Baddesley Clinton was one of a underground ‘resistance’ network of safe houses set up to welcome – and if necessary, hide – any visiting priests.
Its owner, Henry Ferrers, was working in London and in 1588 rented his home to Anne Vaux and her sister Eleanor, daughters of a devout Catholic peer who had himself been imprisoned and fined for harbouring the Jesuit priest and martyr Edmund Campion, who was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn in 1581 – one of more than 120 missionary priests to be martyred in Elizabeth’s reign.
Aged about 25, Anne dedicated much of her life to sheltering and protecting Father Henry Garnet, the Jesuit Superior in England, who was a very high profile target for those protecting the Protestant faith.
At a time when the priesthood had all but been wiped out, Garnet, in his early thirties, was in charge of mentoring newly arrived young priests who lived in constant fear of capture, torture and execution.
Posing as his sister under the false name ‘Mrs Alice Perkins’, Anne travelled around the country with him via the network of safe houses which her brother had helped to set up.
An equally loyal assistant to Father Garnet was a young apprentice joiner called Nicholas Owen who would become the country’s foremost designer and builder of hiding places for priests.
For nearly 20 years, Owen crafted sophisticated priest holes and elaborate hiding places for ritual Mass items that could fool even the most persistent and ingenious hunters.
And it was at Baddesley Clinton that he would fashion a variety of such hiding places, including a sizeable refuge which could several men by repurposing a sewage outfall tunnel leading to the moat.
With the entrance craftily hidden behind an old toilet shaft, it was to prove a life-saver in October 1591 when Father Garnet convened an important Jesuit gathering at Baddesley.
Separate accounts captured the full drama of the dawn raid that saw the manor house surrounded by priest-hunters with drawn swords hammering at the front door demanding to be let in and intent on tearing the place apart.
As the servants and mistress of the house played for time, the priests frantically rushed to hide the trappings of Mass, their vestments and boots, as well as smoothing over bedspreads to hide the presence of so many guests.
Anne was no shrinking violet, challenging the men: “Do you think it right and proper that you should be admitted to a widow’s house before she or her servants or her children are out of bed?
“Why this lack of good manners? Why come so early? Why keep coming to my house in this hostile manner? Have you ever found me unwilling to open the door to you as soon as you knocked?”
When she was finally forced to let them in, they raged around the house for four hours, shining candles into the darkest corners, furiously pounding the walls, shifting tables and turning over beds.
Trembling underground, bent over and standing in water, the priests must have feared the worst. But Owen’s craftmanship and Anne Vaux’s bravery were to save their lives.
The lady of the house was forced to endure the final ignominy of inviting the pursuivants to breakfast and, as the law decreed, even paying them 12 gold pieces for their ‘trouble’ before the household could heave a collective sigh of relief, waiting for the searchers to be some distance off before finally summoning the priests from their hiding place in the bowels of the manor.
It’s hard to conceive the level of courage required to endure harrowing ordeals of this kind. Anne’s status and sex did not guarantee her safety – three women were executed during her lifetime for the harbouring of priests – and although Father John Gerard and Nicholas Owen both escaped the raid in Warwickshire, the pair were seized in 1594 at another raid in London.
It seems unlikely that any of those present during the traumatic dawn raid of 1591 would ever forget it, but the manor house itself continued to be a place of refuge for the Ferrers family for the next 12 generations, and the best part of 500 years.
After spending time in prison, Owen’s many adventures saw him helping with the extraordinary escape of Father Gerard from the Tower of London in 1597.
But he was later captured in one of his own priest-holes and would himself die on the rack in the Tower in 1606, the same year that saw Father Garnet executed for high treason. He was canonized in 1970.
Anne Vaux was also arrested in 1606 and later released, though her faith never wavered. She would be convicted of recusancy in 1625 and, when she founded a school for boys from Catholic noble families, the Protestant authorities tried to shut it down in 1635.
Baddesley passed into the hands of the National Trust back in 1980, and many of its rooms chronicle the stories of its different inhabitants across the centuries. But none of those tales is quite as frightening or memorable as that dawn raid when the priest hunters almost found their men.
Baddesley Clinton is open throughout the year.
Fascinating, thank you. I now want to visit!