Catholic Englishwomen's Mobilities in an Age of Persecution

In May 1593, Lady Muriel Tresham wrote to her niece, Muriel Vaux, to communicate news and to express concern about Vaux's mother's defiance of travel restrictions recently imposed on English Catholics. "I write to you rather than my sister," Tresham noted, "assuring myself that you stir not above five miles from Artleborowe [the Vaux estate], whatsoever your mother dareth or doeth."¹ The English government, populated by Protestant men, had recently passed legislation prohibiting Catholics from traveling more than five miles from home unless they secured a special license. The travel restrictions had the immediate effect of freezing the movements of many Catholic Englishwomen, especially those women whose husbands were incarcerated for the crime of being Catholic in a Protestant state. Prior to the new law, Catholic wives were highly mobile. They traveled from their primary domiciles in the countryside to the capital in London when their husbands were imprisoned. These women made regular visits to their spouses both for companionship and to discuss matters that pertained to estate business and the family's livelihood. Following the law's enactment, women's movements were curtailed and the matters of estate business were restricted to written communication, which exposed the family, the family's economic strategies, and social relationships to the interfering gaze of spies who regularly opened Catholic prisoners' mail.

Using letters and government records, this essay examines the mobility—the ability to move or to be moved—of English Catholic gentlewomen between 1580 and 1601. These women's experiences provide a template for understanding how Catholic women negotiated freedom of movement during a period of state-sanctioned religious persecution. The extent of female mobility in spaces outside of the household emphasizes how for many Catholic women their religion was simultaneously a private and a public exercise. Although Catholic gentlewomen often benefited from wealth and social prominence, their refusal to attend Protestant church services led to increased political, economic, and social marginalization. Female mobility was crucial to undermining that marginalization: as women performed the essential functions of their careers, they might be seen as aristocratic rather than as Catholic women.²

Post-Reformation Catholic women inverted traditional hierarchies of power through the actions they performed as custodians of faith within the household and as agents outside the household. They hosted Mass, catechized children, organized household religious life, and sheltered, fed, and protected seminary priests and Jesuits in their homes.³ They also set up safehouses; moved to new houses to avoid detection; traveled with priests, sometimes disguised as the man's wife or sister; and visited priests in jail.⁴ Assuming the mantles of patronesses and protectors to men fundamentally altered the scope of power that these women possessed. The role Catholic women played in arranging for priests to travel between safehouses is well-known, as is the migration of some women to convents in France and the Low Countries.⁵ Yet the mobility of Catholic women within England is not yet fully understood.

This essay connects the scholarship on elite English Catholic women with that on women's mobility and migration. Scholars of Catholic women often focus on their role in preserving Catholicism in post-Reformation England. John Bossy argued that women were active agents of the Reformation rather than quiet housewives.⁶ In a sense, Catholic women were missionaries in their own households and communities. Marie Rowlands and Sarah Bastow illuminated the power these women exercised within and beyond the household, and Jan Broadway extended that analysis to widows.⁷ Catholic women were mobile, especially those who migrated abroad to become nuns. Most recently, Katy Gibbons and Laurence Lux-Sterritt have examined English women who became nuns in exile; Liesbeth Corens broadened that study to English Catholic communities abroad and an analysis of such movements in the context of mobilities or migrations.⁸ This essay unites these threads: it argues that Catholic women who remained in England were highly mobile and not confined to the household or the neighborhood.

The Elizabethan Religious Settlement established Protestantism as England's only legal religion from the first year of Queen...