‘That silken Priest’: Catholic disguise and anti-popery on the English Mission (1569–1640)^*

Abstract

The history of the hidden and covert is as essential to our understanding of faith and politics as anything on public show. Disguise was an essential part of Roman Catholic survival in post-Reformation England. Yet how the material, meaning and use of disguise affected the perception of Catholics, both by outsiders and its own community, has been largely neglected by scholars. Michael Mullet has argued that lying, equivocation and disguise had a pervasive impact on the Catholic mentality, ‘creating a collective, if partly unconscious, self-perception of criminality’ among both clergy and laity.¹ He takes the ideological impact of disguise seriously, but has little room for the cultural meanings of materiality, or whether anti-papal narratives reflected actual Catholic disguise strategies. This article takes the concept of disguise and gives it material form, moving from the ideological to the concrete as it examines the material culture of Catholic resistance in early modern England. While Peter Lake has shown that anti-popery’s internal logic, as much as any kind of reality, informed its premises and anti-Catholic action, it is worth exploring the fact that there were some concrete examples of behaviours imputed to Catholics.² No matter how rare or uncharacteristic, these exemplars could be used to fortify anti-papal claims. By explaining aspects of Catholic identity through material culture, this article demonstrates that the concrete realities of Catholic resistance packed an ideological, political punch, on both sides of the confessional divide.

Clothing and appearance were key to interpreting social status and character in early modern Europe.³ Disguise therefore subverted the belief that, as Shakespeare’s Polonius puts it, ‘the apparel oft proclaims the man’,⁴ and there was a very real sense in which the constant wearer of disguise could be affected by what they wore. Clothes were believed to be capable of directly influencing their wearers, infecting them with bad health and spiritual ills wherever the object’s essential qualities came into conflict with the wearer’s.⁵ Many agreed that prideful or luxurious clothing beyond one’s station directly affected the mind, encouraging sinful behaviours such as lust, avarice, envy and generally lax prodigality.⁶ Wearing luxurious attire, or ‘pampering of their bodies’ was believed by some to make wearers ‘weaker, tenderer, and nesher, then … if they were used to hardnesse, and more subject to receive any kind of infection or malady’.⁷

In describing priestly disguises, anti-Catholic polemic therefore highlighted their negative qualities to suggest these priests were either revealing or becoming their true, sinful selves. A proclamation of 18 October 1591 claimed that not only did priests arrive claiming they were gentlemen returning from studies abroad, but that ‘generally all … as soon as they are crept in are clothed like gentlemen in apparel, and many as gallants, yea, in all colors and rich feathers’.⁸ Early seventeenth-century literature particularly emphasized these luxurious disguises, closely associating them with the Jesuits. The apostate priest Thomas Bell’s, The Dovvnefall of Poperie (1604) made much of Jesuits going around ‘richly apparelled’,⁹ while Protestant George Carleton’s, A Thankfull Remembrance of Gods Mercy (1624) describes Babington Plotter John Ballard as ‘that silken Priest’.¹⁰ John Gee’s Foot Out of the Snare (1624), goes even further, describing Jesuits ‘masking in their gold & siluer abroad … in a gold-laced suit, a cloke lined thorow with veluet’, with a ‘good store of coin in his purse, Rings on his fingers’, a £30 ‘Watch in his pocket’, and ‘a Stiletto by his side’.¹¹ An obvious criticism of the Catholic Church’s venality and idolatrous materialism, such luxury clothing was widely associated with several forms of destabilization.

In economic terms luxury clothing was criticized for destabilizing the English cloth industry and encouraging debt.¹² Gee described priests as agents of this phenomenon, encouraging the charitable laity to impoverish themselves in fulfilling priestly desire for ‘swaggering Sattin’.¹³ Such clothing was also perceived as destabilizing hierarchical distinctions between rich and poor, master and servant, in a manner which deeply perturbed many early modern thinkers.¹⁴ Bell described Jesuits disguised ‘as if they were Barrons or Earles’ to highlight the threat they posed to social distinction.¹⁵ Luxury clothing was also perceived as a threat to gender hierarchies, feminizing men through softness, or irrational displays of pride and lust, while appealing to feminine vanity in ways that undermined patriarchal control and encouraged sexual misconduct.¹⁶ As Gee warned about well-dressed Jesuits, he ‘hath vowed pouerty. Feare not to trust him with thy wife: he hath vowed also chastity’.¹⁷ A priest’s honesty was not only worth doubting because he wore a disguise, but the disguise itself pointed to loose morals.¹⁸

Part of the appeal of luxury fabrics to vanity and desire was their association with the foreign or exotic. Velvets, satins and silks were often coded as foreign, and particularly associated with the Catholic nations of Italy, Spain and France, from which they were widely imported.¹⁹ Anti-Catholic polemic describing Catholic disguises as ‘lined thorow with veluet’, or a ‘crimsin Sattin suit’, or describing priests as ‘silken’, clearly draws on these associations.²⁰ Wearing foreign clothing destabilized national identity, subsuming English virtues with those of vice-ridden foreign nations.²¹ The association of priestly disguise with foreign fabrics therefore encouraged the perception of Catholicism as a foreign import, diametrically opposed to the loyal English subject.²² An English Catholic wearing foreign fabrics, was essentially no longer English, twice-over. They had adopted another nation’s identity and rejected their natural, God-given place, in an act deemed irreligious, even treasonous, by some.²³ This resonated with the characterization of disguised priests by writers like William Cecil as spies, sent by the pope to gather information and sabotage.²⁴

Indeed, the concept of Catholics and especially priests operating like spies in the shadows, hidden by their clothing, became strongly bound to the widespread metaphorical use of ‘cloak’. To hide ‘vnder the cloake of good intent’, to ‘cloake’ one’s sins, and the ‘cloak of religion’,²⁵ used the physicality of the clothing item to not only suggest intentional concealment, but the darkness which lay beneath it. The darkness was sinister, a ‘thick cloud and fogge of superstitions and forgeries; wherein they enwrap themselues, and would ensnare vs’; a cover under which Catholics might breach the Protestant country’s security.²⁶ Cloaks and darkness were a shorthand for betrayal, that ‘treason must haue a cloake’ being a recognizable adage.²⁷ As early as 1519 figures such as Cloaked Collusion in John Skelton’s satirical play, Magnyfycence linked clerical copes and cloaks to this sense of intrigue and conspiracy.²⁸ Secrecy and privacy, as gained by disguising one’s identity and cloaking one’s actions were understood by contemporaries in largely negative terms, as an inherently suspicious inversion of honesty and openness.²⁹ Despite its fascination with deception as entertainment in conjuring and plays, early modern society had a deeply ambivalent relationship with these concepts. There were precious few situations in which moral authorities, from Augustine to Calvin, permitted lying, regarding it predominately as an evil to be avoided and disdained. Though more secular areas of life might admit certain contexts in which dissimulation was deployed for ‘reasons of state’, or personal advancement, it remained fraught with negative connotations no matter one’s religious disposition.³⁰

Moreover, the acceptability of such tools of secrecy, particularly disguise, was not only predicated on their necessity, or impermanency, but the individual’s social status. The adoption of a gentlemanly or courtly persona for the purposes of social advancement was not described as a disguise, unless the individual’s attempt at social mobility was rejected. Inviolable royalty, it seems, could don disguise with little fear of being reduced to the nature of their apparel. Meanwhile the privilege of donning alternative personas in masques and entertainments remained contained within the court, or among actors who were increasingly licensed by the nobility. As Susan Vincent pointed out, ‘Deceit and counterfeit were inherently suspicious, but only in the marginal and socially inferior’.³¹ Disguise was an exercize of secular power over social hierarchy which the poor, the marginalized and the clergy, had no inherently legitimate right to wield.

In addition to being demonized for deploying these tools of lying and deceit, priests were frequently described as disguised ‘in the fashion of Rake-hels & Ruffians’,³² aligning their chosen disguises with disorderliness, dishonour and aggressive, often violent criminal masculinity. As early as 1581, at the trial of Lord Vaux and others for harbouring Edmund Campion, the attorney general reportedly described the Jesuit as ‘disguised in a very ruffianlike sorte’.³³ Cecil’s anonymously published, The Execution of Iustice (1583) described Campion and other priests as ‘disguised like a roister’, in other words, ‘A wild or riotous person; a boisterous or noisy reveller’; often associated with idle young gentlemen and soldiers.³⁴ In 1587 George Whetstone made a connection between the Jesuits’ propensity to disguise themselves in ‘warlike, & ruffianly order’, for enticing ‘men to violent murther’, and the fact that their ‘founder Ignatius Layola was a spanish souldier’, seeking to erase past misdeeds with feigned holiness.³⁵ The proclamation of 1591 broadened this beyond the Jesuits, claiming priests in general were dressing as gentleman gallants, ‘soldiers, mariners, or merchants’ to enter the country, and behaving ‘as ruffians’, within it to avert suspicion.³⁶ Such outward appearances inverted the religious person a priest claimed to be underneath, creating a disturbingly extreme dissonance which rendered their claims to virtue and honour inherently suspicious. This could be elaborated in the re-telling. When Carleton recounted the events of Campion’s arrest in 1624, he listed a multiplicity of disguises which mostly inverted the priests’ claimed inward identities, highlighting the extent of their hypocrisy: ‘Somtimes they went like ruffians, somtimes like ministers, somtimes like noble men, somtimes like souldiers, somtimes like apparitours’.³⁷ By not only concealing their true identity, but flitting from one identity to another, these priests were accused of destabilizing the basic premises upon which authority and social hierarchies operated.

Such anti-papal rhetoric was reflected in and fed by the descriptions of priests circulated by the authorities as evidence and aids to capture. In fulfilling this function, the most easily identifiable aspects of the suspect’s clothing were the most useful. Therefore officials recorded details such as ‘gold or silver lace’, ‘red breeches and yellow stockings’ or ‘buttons red, cut and laid under with red taffeta’,³⁸ and noted foreign fabrics like ‘black silk’, ‘satin doublets and velvet hose’.³⁹ They also mentioned, for sound tactical reasons, weaponry such as the ‘rapiers and daggers gilt or silvered’ described as being worn by John Gerard and George Blackwell in 1601,⁴⁰ and defensive clothing such as ‘buff leather’, both of which would be typically worn by gentlemen and professional soldiers.⁴¹ Though compiled for practical reasons, and doubtless partly driven by what priests were actually wearing, these descriptions had the effect of reducing priestly attire to stereotypical bullet points which supported their depiction in anti-Catholic literature. Here were the foreign silks, vain yellow stockings and ruffian-like weaponry, which any truly religious man should revile.

The observations of these officials were also clearly affected by their own assumptions. A description of Father Vaughan, for example, was corrected by its writer from being like that of a ‘ruffian’ to that of a ‘gentleman’, demonstrating the pervasiveness of anti-Catholic tropes as short-hands for priestly disguise.⁴² Similarly the description of Blackwell’s dagger as ‘sanguined’, or coloured (probably enamelled) in red, not only emphasizes luxurious detailing but through its choice of adjective evokes, perhaps deliberately, the blood it might accrue through use.⁴³ Seasoned priest-hunters like Richard Topcliffe might forgo describing outward attire entirely, perhaps on the presumption that priests changed their clothing so often it would be redundant. Topcliffe’s description of John Gerard, for example, starts with his height, comparing it to that of Sir Thomas Layton. It then goes on to discuss Gerard’s hair curled ‘by nature’, his nose ‘somewhat wide and turning up; blubbered lips turning outwards’. This almost fleshy description paints Gerard’s body itself as the classic, priestly deceiver: ‘he floarrethe [flowereth]’ in speech ‘and smiles much’. Topcliffe even describes Gerard’s lisp as an almost sinister ‘doubling of his tongue’.⁴⁴ For Topcliffe, the priest’s material flesh itself embodied the deception and sinfulness others saw conveyed through clothes.

Despite the vitriol in anti-Catholic rhetoric, much of what the state thought Catholic priests were wearing in disguise is borne out to some extent by Catholic sources. Disguise was a practical necessity in providing long-term pastoral care and developing Catholic networks across the country. The clerical dress and tonsure worn by Catholics on the continent was too distinctive, and the odds of being imprisoned and executed during the mission were very high.⁴⁵ In organizing the mission, William Allen explained to Alfonso Agazzari that it was ‘necessary for each man to acquire new, and above all lay clothes, before entering the Island, since their Roman ones were too grave and clerical’.⁴⁶ Allen reportedly ensured that every priest had six or seven pounds cash ‘& a new sute of Aparell to weare at his ffirst Arryvall in England’;⁴⁷ and John Gerard’s autobiography suggests this was to ensure that priests ‘should not be a burden … at the start’.⁴⁸ Yet as Captain Loon’s report of ‘certain young men come from Rome’ in 1597 suggests, a priest could be identified partly by their new, foreign ‘fashion’.⁴⁹ Those in England were taking this into account from an early stage. Campion and Robert Persons, for example, were given a change of clothes upon reaching London, before being smuggled out of the city.⁵⁰ Meanwhile, a report of 1585 claimed priests entering England on the north-east coast were conveyed to nearby gentry homes, where they ‘change there apparrell, and are provided … for there Jorney to London or ells where’.⁵¹ Though developed to avert suspicion, this tactic only affirmed anti-Catholic rhetoric around the multiplicity of disguises priests assumed during their missions.

Another anti-Catholic trope which bore some truth was that gentlemanly disguises were highly valued. Advice from organizers such as George Gilbert, who set his thoughts down in 1583, suggests that in order for priests to ‘appear and mix freely everywhere, both in public and in private’, they should dress ‘as a gentleman and with various kinds of dress and disguises so as better to be able to have intercourse with people without arousing suspicion’.⁵² In addition to the reports of officials and witnesses discussed earlier, priests were, by their own admission, choosing gentlemanly apparel. Indeed, Gerard’s autobiography, written many years after the end of his English mission in the seventeenth century, is almost a vindicatory manifesto for conducting missionary work in the manner Gilbert described.⁵³ He is open about the fact that he was always dressed as ‘a gentleman of moderate means’,⁵⁴ partly justifying it by pointing out that, like many priests, this was the social position he had held before ordination. He was not, therefore, challenging social hierarchies, and the disguise had the advantage of putting Gerard ‘more at ease’ than if he ‘had assumed a role that was strange and unfamiliar’.⁵⁵

Appearing as a gentleman also provided a good reason for having a guide or assistant, who could help carry luggage, especially the massing equipment that a priest may need to bring with him on less secure or well-established circuits.⁵⁶ Gerard described how being able to ‘move in public and meet many Protestant gentleman’ facilitated conversion, as well as his own safety, in precisely the way the authorities feared: by giving him ‘greater authority’, and fostering trust, especially with those who had been trained to regard all priests as potential traitors.⁵⁷ Gentlemanly disguises also avoided awkward situations, such as that which led to Father Ingleby’s unfortunate apprehension and execution in York, when a Catholic of apparently higher status showed ‘greater marks of respect than were fitting towards a common person meanly dressed’. Jesuit William Weston narrowly survived a similar incident, when a Catholic gentleman treated him in an ‘extremely civil manner’ arousing the suspicions of a nearby pursuivant.⁵⁸ Another benefit was the less suspicious access gentlemanly attire gave to multiple gentry homes, on both a short-term and long-term basis.⁵⁹

As swords were regarded by gentlemen ‘as a badge of our vocation’, it would have been a valuable element of such a disguise,⁶⁰ but it is unclear whether every priest disguised as a gentleman was necessarily armed, or whether all armed priests were necessarily dressed as gentlemen. Weston, for example, appeared to have been less well dressed than the high-born gentleman who approached him, but was still ‘carrying arms’. The pursuivant, realizing this, and that he had left his own ‘sword behind’ in his room above the street, reportedly returned to get his own weapon giving Weston enough time to escape.⁶¹ As this incident demonstrated, simply being armed could be enough to dissuade would-be persecutors from approaching without their own weapons. The account by John Geninges (or Gennings) of his brother’s martyrdom, however, suggests Catholic priests’ weapons were not entirely for show. Geninges claims that on the occasion of his brother’s arrest ‘the forenamed good Priests with the rest arose from theyr deuotions, and drawing out their weapons, (as S. Peter did to defend our Sauiour) were ready at the chamber dore when their enemyes had burst it open … not suffering any one of them to enter vntill the Priest had finished his Masse’.⁶² Needless to say, the lauding of such incidents among Catholics, let alone the reality they might speak to, only gave weight to anti-papist depictions of the priesthoods’ ruffian- and war-like character; even if it was an extremely rare occurrence, done in self-defence and causing no serious harm.⁶³

There is also evidence that some priests came into England and Ireland dressed down, confirming, to an extent, Protestant descriptions of ruffian, vagrant-like priests. In January 1635/6, for example, the mayor of Plymouth reported that two Irish priests forced into harbour en route to Ireland had posed as beggars ‘in poore ragged Cloathes’, claiming they had no luggage. It was later revealed that they actually had two trunks, with ‘very good Cloathes’ inside, having clearly intended to switch back to a higher-class persona in Ireland. They had feigned poverty to disassociate themselves from any illicit luggage in the event of a search,⁶⁴ and it almost worked, since the delay in realizing this was the case gave O’Reordaen chance to escape.⁶⁵ Once within England perhaps the second most commonly suspected guise was that of a servant or schoolmaster, often in the service of a gentry family. In fact, the first attempt to pass a law against disguised Catholic priests in 1571 was specifically aimed at those in ‘servingmen’s apparel’.⁶⁶ Perhaps because there was little villainy to be read into a servant’s garments, sources describing these suspected priests often refer to their pretended position and not their attire, but presumably these men dressed the part.⁶⁷ Suspected priest, Edward Sager, for example, was found with blue livery ‘with Sir John Sothworthe his cognisaunce upon the same’.⁶⁸ Dressing in livery and going about as a servant could also facilitate a priest’s exit from England. Gerard, for example, returned to the continent in the retinue of the Spanish ambassador, who helped him ‘dress in the livery of his attendants so that I could pass for one of them and escape’.⁶⁹

It was not just the concealment of priests that the state and anti-Catholic polemicists were worried about, however. Lay Catholics and female religious also used disguise to circumvent the authorities.⁷⁰ An intercepted letter between Charles Paget and Mary Queen of Scots from 1584, for example, suggested that the only sure way of escape overseas for Mary would needs be facilitated by clothing her ‘in Man’s Apparell’.⁷¹ Following the Northern Rebellion’s failure the earl of Westmoreland was reported to have ‘changed his cote of plate and sword w[i]th John of the syde to be the more vnknown’ as they escaped into Scotland.⁷² Westmoreland’s escape and Mary’s desire to do so were widely communicated, but their actual and proposed use of disguise was little commented on polemically. To some extent this behaviour was expected of elites in such extreme circumstances, and it appears to have added little to these individuals’ already negative public reputations.⁷³

When it came to assassination plots, the use of lay Catholic disguise appears to have been recorded as important information which helped verify intelligence and was at times legally useful, yet it was also largely neglected as a source of polemical vitriol in the courtroom and beyond. For example, George Ellyot’s accusations that the Petre family were colluding with William Allen to assassinate the queen and her closest councillors, make a point that the fifty assailants were to be dressed not ‘all in a livery, but in sondry sects of apparel’. Such a move would help keep the participants’ intent, and master, unknown, giving them the element of surprise, which certainly added to the plot’s credibility.⁷⁴ When these accusations were trotted out eight years later to paint the earl of Arundel’s communications with William Allen in a traitorous light, however, this detail disappears. The focus of the trial reporters centred on the armour and weapons which would commit their treason, not their disguise.⁷⁵ The regime also made a point of recording that the Babington plotters attempted to evade capture through disguise once their conspiracy was revealed in 1586, and that the queen’s would-be assassin John Savage had intended to disguise himself as a courtier.⁷⁶ In the courtroom Savage’s disguise remained an important point of evidence, but the disguises used by the others to avoid the authorities was superfluous to their charges and ignored. The prose and verse commenting on the plot in the two years which followed seemed largely uninterested in both, though Savage’s disguise was reiterated by Whetstone.⁷⁷

Unusually, however, we do see the Babington plotters’ use of disguise being used polemically against them in subsequent retellings of events. Nearly forty years later, Carleton’s A Thankfull Remembrance (1624) elaborated that Babington had ‘fled away in the darke’, and after changing with Gage and Charnock, fled to St. John’s Wood. Here he makes a claim, unsubstantiated in the examinations, that Babington and Charnock ‘cut off Babingtons hayre, and defaced his natiue beautie with rubbing his face over with the greene huskes of Walnuts’. In this narrative the two traitors become subsumed by nature, having renounced their humanity and honour. They are reverting to a savage, irredeemable state which even they cannot suffer for long before seeking out a fellow Catholic, who hid them ‘in Barnes’, and clothed them in ‘rusticall apparell’ reflective of their dishonoured, vagrant, ungentlemanly state.⁷⁸ It seems reasonable to suggest that the use of disguise in rebellion and conspiracy was largely presumed, and that when evidence of it did emerge it only reinforced the generalized connections being made in anti-Catholic polemic between them. Thus, the use of disguise in perpetuating Catholic religious life only made it appear more sinister to non-Catholics.

Disguise, however, continued to prove its usefulness. In 1616, for example, a Catholic gentlewoman reportedly ‘put on a poore habite’, to visit the soon-to-be martyred Father Thomas Maxfield in prison. Her actions strengthened Maxfield’s ties to the outside world, not only facilitating her devotional act and flouting authority, but perpetuating the story of Maxfield’s religio-political defiance, while encouraging similar acts of resistance through the incident’s re-telling.⁷⁹ Similarly, the three nuns who disguised themselves as gentlewomen during the search for Edmund Campion were encouraging solidarity just as much as they were attempting to foil attempts to uncover their massing activities. Ellyot’s public account of this incident actually lets their use of disguise speak for itself. Instead of commenting on their actions, he simply explains the group’s scandalous denial of their true identities in the face of his evidence to the contrary.⁸⁰

Though both clerical and lay Catholic concealment and disguise were necessary survival tactics, Catholics were among those early modern people for whom concealment and lies were, predominately, a negative evil. Early in the mission Maurice Chancey, an elder English Carthusian in exile, was complaining to William Allen that seminaries in England ‘goo in fethers’. Tellingly, Allen was compelled to counter his moral concerns by playing down accusations of luxuriousness, insisting he ‘wold not counsell’ them ‘except yt were in great necessitiee, to putt them selfes into to much disguised geare, leest by lightnesse of outward attyre there behaviour inward bee made lighter’. He even tried to reassure Chancey that they were praying and fasting much more often, ‘lest thee needful use of sundry entysments to sinne and necessary dissimulation … bring them to offend God, and … become reprobate’.⁸¹ Missionaries understood very well how they would be perceived and, for many of them, engaging in such behaviours must have sat uneasily. Campion, for example, described his disguises to Allen as ‘verye ridiculous’,⁸² clearly at odds with his own sense of self – or what he wanted to project as himself. This was despite the Instructions given to Campion and Persons by the Society’s Superior General, Everard Mercurian, which explicitly addressed the problem of lay attire. These insisted that though it was ‘of necessity’ for the mission, their disguises should ‘be of a modest and sober kind’, and ‘give no appearance of levity and vanity’.⁸³ One can see how enduring normal ambivalent attitudes towards disguise remained among Catholics not only in Allen’s defence, Campion’s discomfort and Everard’s Instructions, but in Weston’s later condemnation of their enemies for disguising ‘themselves as Catholics’ in order to persecute them.⁸⁴

Even Gerard, whose autobiography often delights in how he fooled Protestants with disguise or triumphantly revealed his true identity to successful converts, expresses anxieties about it which reveal a tacit acceptance that contemporary criticisms of clerical disguise had a point. It is apparent in the hasty insistence that ‘I had to act in this way both for safety’s sake, and still more to trick the devil’. ‘It was the only way’, and ‘he would have much preferred to’ come dressed as a priest.⁸⁵ While the Protestants in Gerard’s narrative predictably insist that ‘No decent person behaves like that’, it is telling that the narrative even depicts sympathetic lay converts airing suspicions about the behaviours such disguises engendered. Everard Digby’s wife, for example, protests: ‘the man lives like a courtier. Haven’t you watched him playing cards … the way he plays, he must have been at the game for a long time. And he’s been out hunting … talking about hunting and about hawking’.⁸⁶ Gerard’s insistence that he was always modestly dressed, and that he was a gentleman before his ordination,⁸⁷ both worked to counter accusations of sinful lasciviousness and social destabilization. His palpable relief at finding a majority-Catholic residence where ‘it was easier to live the life of a Jesuit, even in the external details of dress and arrangement of time’, and his returning to his ‘Jesuit gown and cloak’ for examinations before the authorities, demonstrates the expected preference for dressing in a more religious manner.⁸⁸

Though priests were expected to prefer their normal vocational attire and revert to it whenever possible, Mercurian’s Instructions to the Jesuits are notably alert not only to the danger of being discovered through such dress, but of damaging the reputation of the Society specifically. They insist Jesuits are not to possess their distinctive attire, even ‘when they are permanently stationed … unless it is evident that they can have them perfectly safely’; and are then only to use them in enacting priestly duties.⁸⁹ This desire to reduce Jesuit visibility chimes with Mercurian’s hesitation to initiate Jesuit involvement in the English Mission, and the Society’s constant struggle with its reputation as a political meddler,⁹⁰ but it also suggests the Jesuit missionaries should spend the majority of their time in lay disguise. Once again, perceived necessity provided some truth to back up anti-Catholic and anti-Jesuit suspicions.

Not only were Catholics part of and susceptible to the wider culture which vilified disguise and lies, those cultural norms were integrated into the Counter-Reformation. Though worn to aid their religious cause, priestly disguise conflicted with the Tridentine ruling that clerics ‘wear a dress conformable to their order that by the propriety of their outward apparel they may show forth the inward uprightness of their morals’.⁹¹ As Frances E. Dolan pointed out, certain disguises, particularly those of liveried servants, could make it difficult for priests ‘to assert difference and authority over servants or the family’ in the manner Trent dictated.⁹² Secular dress also emphasized their sexual characteristics in ways which androgynous cassocks did not,⁹³ straining the church’s attempts to counter perceptions of clerical sexual deviance. The need to seek papal exemption to wear non-clerical dress, leaning on the precedent of the early church and Augustine’s maxim that the only acceptable lie was one which protected someone else’s life,⁹⁴ set English priests apart from their colleagues abroad. Priestly sartorial lies undermined ‘the integrity of their sacerdotal character’ and left them vulnerable to attack even among fellow Catholics.⁹⁵

During the intra-Catholic disputes between pro- and anti-Jesuit conceptions of the English Mission, which reached boiling point during the Appellant Controversy, anti-Jesuit Catholics deployed, and further entrenched, the association of disguise and luxury with Jesuits in particular. Secular priest Christopher Bagshaw may have been the first to claim in print that a Jesuit did not go anywhere unless ‘richly apparrelled … as if he were a Baron, or an Earle’,⁹⁶ in his A True Relation of the Faction Begun at Wisbich (1601). The text appears to build on accusations made in manuscript by fellow appellant Robert Fisher, circulated from Brussels c.1597, that Jesuits went about adorned in silk with a great many servants.⁹⁷ The assertion was repeated by William Clark in 1603, who singled out Jesuit Superior, Jasper Haywood, as having carried himself ‘more Baronlike, then priestlike’, adding that John Gerard’s clothing had ‘beene valued at a higher rate then I will for shame speake of’, with ‘great excesse of apparell, horses, iewels’; while Edward Oldcorne’s apparel was ‘seldome lesse worth, then 30. or 40 pound’.⁹⁸ Meanwhile William Watson and Humphrey Ely pointed out the predisposition to luxury inherent in the Society’s rules, which ‘imbrace no pouertie’ and did not bind them to wear ‘rough and rude apparell’, suggesting that even their honest, regular clothing indicated moral laxity.⁹⁹ Protestant polemicists used these intra-Catholic attacks to their own advantage, publicizing the fact that even seminary priests accused Jesuits of being: ‘great lyers’, and ‘proud men, richly apparelled’, alongside a slew of other irreligious character traits such as being ‘traitorous’, ‘Machiauels’, ‘theeues and murderers’, with ‘a mint of counterfeit miracles’.¹⁰⁰

We must be alert to the life of these rhetorical tactics within the Catholic community. Appellant authors like Bagshaw and Clark sought to present themselves as part of a benign, more virtuous, group of Catholics, willing to work with and remain loyal to Protestant authorities. They sought to discredit Jesuits in the eyes of fellow Catholics, and convince co-religionists that working with, rather than against, the state would be of greatest benefit to their religio-political cause. In doing so, they reached for similar polemical tools to the anti-Catholic regime to provide evidence for the Jesuits’ manifest unfitness to govern the English Mission, or the spiritual lives of others.¹⁰¹ Luxury clothing played perfectly to wider accusations of financial waste and selfishness, pride and socio-political over-reaching, among many other fatal flaws.

The secular clergy, however, were not immune to this rhetoric being turned back against them by the Jesuits. Writers like Bagshaw were keen to point out that though ‘secular Priests themselues do go also Gentlemen-like because of danger;’ they did not do so ‘arayed in that sumptuous manner, nor guarded with so many attendants, as the Iesuites’.¹⁰² Yet similar accusations were made against Watson by Garnet in 1602, who claimed he went about ‘in his chain of gold, white satin doublet and hose, and velvet jerkin’. Similarly, William Bishop and Robert Charnock were forced to defend themselves against Robert Persons’s claims that when they arrived in Rome to lead the first appeal of 1598, their luxurious luggage ‘might seem to serve for any secular prince’. Accusations of luxurious attire and going about adorned in silk, coming from fellow Catholics, was clearly enough of a threat to their clerical reputations to merit direct responses: Charnock gave his in print; Henry Garnet prepared a manuscript rebuttal of Fisher’s ‘Memorial’ in 1598.¹⁰³ By 1600 the types of clothing used in disguise, the extent to which it was used, and in what circumstances, had become part of Catholic political rhetoric within their own religious community as much as without.

Anti-Catholic rhetoric, like that around luxury, social hierarchies and idolatry, revolved around anxieties between outward presentation and inward intent, and the overpowering of truth by lies. While disguise and concealment opened up powerful opportunities by eluding authority, Catholics could not escape the negative, irreligious, conceptualization of their tactics. The unavoidable fact of Catholic deception, and the new context it gave the fabrics and forms of disguise used, made it a strong weapon for Protestantism. It was hard to refute Protestant spin, when some priests really were wearing silken doublets to appear the gentleman and, in any other circumstance, Catholics shared such negative readings. Disguise fundamentally complicated Catholic claims to innocence and religious intent, muddied their claims to superior theological standing, and aggravated intra-Catholic disputes. Clearly, the acceptability of disguise to Catholics was not just delineated by the perceived intensity of their persecution or righteousness of their cause. The extent to which the disguise itself contradicted the identity underneath was also a concern. To Catholics, a priest wearing modest disguises was one thing, his parading in luxury another. The only difference their opponents recognized between the two, was that the latter provided more evidence of Catholicism as a perniciously destabilizing and threatening force.

Recent research on material culture has suggested that it has much to tell us about political allegiance and cultural expectations. As this discussion of Catholic disguise has demonstrated, material culture can also bring a new level of understanding to the history of religious identity and religious conflict, even when we look beyond devotional materials. The ambiguous and ambivalent role of the Catholic priest in post-Reformation England is encapsulated in contemporary perceptions of what it meant to wear the silks and velvets of the gentry, or to go disguised as a servant or a beggar. At a time when disputed or concealed identity could be a matter of life or death, the dress of a Catholic priest might lead him to say, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that despite his outward trappings, ‘I have that within which passeth show’.¹⁰⁴

Footnotes