Catholic Culture in Early Modern England

1. Recusant Catholic Spaces in Early Modern England

 Recusant Catholic Spaces in Early Modern England Peter Davidson The Catholic spaces that I would like to consider here are not restricted to priest holes or secret chapels, although these, of course, survive as moving and eloquent spaces in their own right. (One of the most beautiful of these is the little porch room at Grange Farm, Abbey Dore, Herefordshire, with its repeated “IHS” in the plasterwork, belief woven into the fabric of the house.)1 I am not attempting to describe Townley Hall in Lancashire or Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire as somehow distinct from the other country houses of Tudor or Stuart England as a consequence of their recusant histories. These are both haunting and thought-provoking structures: Townley especially for its extraordinary, post-nineteenth-century location, which has left it poised between industrial and rural England. Baddesley Clinton is a house that has undergone at least two major restorations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, each of which has left this modest moated house, rich in priest holes, slightly more Elizabethan than it was in the sixteenth century. (If space permitted, we might also consider the extraordinary Catholic ménage who lived there in the nineteenth century, who seem to have derived so much innocent pleasure from dressing up as their recusant predecessors.) But in this essay I am concerned with houses as more than associational places of memory. The elegiac view of the recusants originated by Newman, and quoted as definitive  by Dom Bede Camm in his early-twentieth-century work on recusant houses, is certainly not the only possible view: “a few adherents of the Old Religion, moving silently and sorrowfully about as memorials of what had been. . . . An old-fashioned house of gloomy appearance, closed in with high walls, with an iron gate and yews, and the report attaching to it that ‘Roman Catholics ’ lived there.”2 The spaces in England and Scotland that I consider here are those that retain some palpable traces of their recusant Catholic identity in decoration, layout , or inscription. Among these, the particular focus of this investigation is on what might be called symbolically articulated spaces, such as the study room at Norbury in Derbyshire, or Sir Thomas Tresham’s buildings in Northamptonshire , spaces and structures that bear, in reality, a demonstrable relation to the kinds of mental or interior space articulated in contemporary books of devotion. To use space symbolically is not specifically Catholic, of course, although I hope to argue that there are indeed specifically Catholic articulations of space. It is useful to remember here that the symbolic language of place was a widespread, if now partially forgotten, aspect of the European late Renaissance world. Indeed, we should also remember that one of the most heavily inscribed houses in England belonged to the hard-line Protestants Nicholas Bacon and his wife Anne Cooke Bacon. The latter seems also to have commissioned the programs for elaborate allegorical painted schemes that survive among the Sloane manuscripts in the British Library. Coincidentally, it seems to have been a dependent of the Bacon family, the translator Robert Dallington , who brought the classic Renaissance text of symbolic place, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, to the notice of Sir Thomas Tresham, the deviser of threedimensional articulations of statements of Catholic allegiance. It seems likely that these symbolic rooms and buildings were a casually central part of early modern thought and experience: we seem to have lost sight of them to a considerable extent. A reconsideration of a classically northern Renaissance symbolic garden can be found in Erasmus, in the Convivium religiosum of , which describes an ideal humanist house and garden heavily inscribed and emblematized in a way that is common to many of the recusant places considered in this essay.3 For the present, it is enough to point out that these recusant symbolic rooms and structures are a coherent part of a whole that would embrace such diverse texts and artifacts as Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia , the country-house poems of Baroque Holland, Andrew Mar-  Peter Davidson vell’s Upon Appleton House, and Montaigne’s study at the Chateau de Montaigne , as well as innumerable descriptions of symbolically charged house and garden layouts forgotten in those vast romances that were the preferred reading of the early modern elite. These Catholic spaces speak in a universal language , but perhaps, as I hope to demonstrate, with a recognizably recusant intonation. We will see...