Beyond the Cloister. Jenna Lay
penalties for male recusancy increased over the course of Elizabeth’s reign, women became ever more important to the survival of English Catholicism. Married women in particular were able to avoid the full force of the statutes because of their status under coverture. Legally, these women could not control their own property and were subject to their husbands.49 Practically, this meant that it was almost impossible for the state to punish them: monetary fines would necessarily be imposed on their husbands, in effect punishing men for their wives’ crimes. Parliament was reluctant to take this course, or to imprison married female recusants—thereby separating them from their families—for long periods. Some families were willing to exploit the legal situation: husbands attended English services, giving rise to the term “church papist,” while wives maintained the Catholic faith at home.50 In the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, “An Act for the better discovering and repressing of Popish Recusants” acknowledged that Catholics might feign conformity to the English church: “divers persons Popishly affected, doe neverthelesse, the better to cover and hide their false hearts, & with the more safety to attend the opportunitie to execute their mischievous desseignes, repaire sometimes to Church to escape the penaltie of the Lawes in that behalfe provided” (emphasis added).51 But even this act of 1606, which instituted the Oath of Allegiance and attempted to control church papistry, avoided punishing married women or their husbands for actions associated with the wife’s recusancy. It provided that “no person shall be charged or chargeable with any penalty or forfeiture by force of this Act, which shall happen for his wives offence, in not receiving the said Sacrament, during her marriage, nor that any woman shall be charged or chargeable with any penaltie or forfeiture by force of this Act, for any such offence of not receiving, which shall happen during her marriage.”52 Marital coverture denied women autonomy within the patriarchal household, but it could also serve as a protective shield from the power of the state for those women who made the politically subversive choice to be Catholic in England after the Reformation.
By the late sixteenth century, women had become visible and vocal members of the recusant community.53 In a letter of 1576, Henry Hastings, the earl of Huntingdon and lord president of the Council of the North, simultaneously acknowledged the persistence of female Catholicism while dismissing its importance: “for those that are in thease matters most peavyse, so farr as I yet see, are in thys towne wemen, and in the cuntrye verrye meane men of Callynge.”54 As Huntingdon saw it, the threat of political rebellion was contained by the gender and class of those who were most “peevish” in their adherence to Catholicism. But as little as ten years later, Catholic women had become a force in local religious politics. In 1586, Margaret Clitherow, a York butcher’s wife, was accused of sheltering priests and put to death when she refused to go to trial.55 John Mush, Clitherow’s priest, wrote a manuscript description of her life and death and, within a year, accounts of her martyrdom began to appear in continental books detailing the persecution of English Catholics.56 Mush’s “A True Report of the Life and Martyrdom of Mrs. Margaret Clitherow” was not simply a hagiography; it was also, as Anne Dillon points out in her definitive study of martyrdom after the Reformation, a “conduct book for recusants” since “recusancy was … perceived as itself an act of martyrdom.”57 The narrative of Clitherow’s recusancy demonstrates one of the ways that sixteenth-century Catholic Englishwomen were represented: as individuals willing to take advantage of coverture and reconfigure its effective meanings and ideological associations. In what follows, I will demonstrate how Mush’s representation of Clitherow can illuminate the sociopolitical issues that precipitate the startling shift in tone between Marlowe’s ambiguous ending of Hero and Leander, written before his death in 1593, and Chapman’s subsequent affirmation of state-sanctioned matrimony, printed with one of the two 1598 editions of Marlowe’s poem.
Mush’s Clitherow calls into question one of the ideological underpinnings of Protestant England: she refuses to acknowledge the patriarchal power of the state and yet professes her loyalty to her husband, John Clitherow, whose symbolic position as “her head” she affirms before her death.58 Margaret Clitherow was a product of post-Reformation English Catholicism: she converted only after her marriage and, despite her change of faith, proclaimed herself “a true and a chaste wife to my husband, both in thought and deed” (407). In many respects, the Clitherows’ marriage conforms to a companionate model of married chastity and thus fits comfortably into the ideological landscape of Elizabethan England. But this marriage creates the possibility of political subversion rather than serving as an ideal microcosm of the state. Clitherow’s faith and her willingness to hide elements of her religious practice from her husband form the basis for her remarkable choice to disavow the government’s ability to put her to trial. Mush establishes the foundation for her resistance early in his text, when Clitherow queries her priest regarding the limits of temporal authority. “‘May I not,’ said she, ‘receive priests and serve God as I have done, notwithstanding these new laws, without my husband’s consent?’” (381). Clitherow blurs the boundary between the power of government (“these new laws”) and the power of the domestic patriarch (her “husband’s consent”) and thus reveals how the relationship between Catholic wife and Protestant husband could be read as a metaphor for every recusant’s relationship to England. While she accepts her husband’s authority in worldly matters, taking care “in selling and buying her wares … to have the worth of them, as both her neighbours uttered the like, as also to satisfy her duty to her husband, which committed all to her trust and discretion,” her interpretation of spiritual affairs encompasses far more than the Elizabethan government would allow, including the Catholic education of her children (399).59 The individual circumstances of Clitherow’s marriage demonstrate how ideological and legal frameworks meant to restrict women to the household and to certain prescribed roles could have very different practical results.
Margaret Clitherow’s husband shields her from the full force of the laws against recusancy, and she correctly fears that his absence from their home will lead to her arrest. When he appears before the Council to explain their son’s trip to the continent, which Margaret arranged “without the knowledge of her husband,” “they deceitfully practised indeed, and sent forthwith the sheriffs of York, with divers other heretics, to search her house” (409, 410).60 Both Clitherows are arrested when Catholic devotional materials and evidence of a priest are discovered in the search, but John is released when Margaret explains that she “‘could never yet get my husband in that good case that he were worthy to know or come in place where they were to serve God’”; he was not, in other words, “privy to her doings in keeping priests” (414). At the same time that Clitherow publicly reveals that she has kept her husband in the dark regarding her religious activities, she also “‘refuse[s] to be tried by the country,’” thus simultaneously diminishing her husband’s authority in spiritual matters and dismissing the state’s authority altogether (414).61 Mush describes a series of encounters between Clitherow and government representatives, and, in every case, she openly questions the applicability of English law. When asked “‘Will you put yourself to the country, yea or no?’” she explains that she sees “‘no cause why I should do so in this matter: I refer my cause only to God and your own consciences. Do what you think good’” (416). According to Mush, her defiance prompts even a “Puritan preacher” to argue against “‘the Queen’s law’” in favor of “‘God’s law’” (416). As Christine Peters has argued of this moment, “concerns about the temporal authority trampling upon religious conscience were not limited to Catholics. The underlying arguments, because they concerned the higher obedience owed to God, were also shared by spokesmen for godly Protestants.”62 Clitherow undermines the ideological substructure of early modern England, which treated the monarch as a representative of God’s divine authority, but in so doing she reveals the many fissures occasioned by the intersections of religion and politics, even as she positions herself outside the conceptual boundaries of English society—much as Hero will in Chapman’s continuation of Marlowe’s poem.
Many of the responses to Clitherow’s refusal to go to trial reflect on her choice to stand apart from the legal system of early modern England, including those of her fellow Catholics. In conflating religious dissent with domestic upheaval and sexual deviance, these responses reveal the imaginative relationship