THAMES VALLEY PAPISTS: From Reformation to Emancipation (The Early Catholic Martyrs)

Henry VIII's break with Rome produced few objectors at first. Kings had quarrelled with popes before and few of Henry's subjects were prepared to take issue with him, whatever their personal opinions. At the time most English people were broadly Catholic in outlook and, apart from the important issue of papal authority, there was little doctrinal disagreement between the King and Rome.

The two most famous men publicly to oppose the King were the Bishop of Rochester, Cardinal John Fisher, and the former Chancellor, Sir Thomas More. Both were canonised by the Pope (that is, formally declared to be saints) in 1935. Relics of both are in Hendred House at East Hendred in the Vale of White Horse.

This house, built in the late Middle Ages, is mentioned many times in this book. It is the home of the Eyston family who have always been Catholic. They are the keepers of Cardinal Fisher's ebony walking stick and Sir Thomas More's timber and silver tankard.

Henry VIII's break with Rome arose from his unsuccessful attempts to persuade the Pope to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Cardinal John Fisher was her confessor and a fierce critic of the King. He was beheaded on Tower Hill, London in June 1535 because he had refused to take the Oath of Succession. To take it meant recognising the right of succession to the throne of any children the King might have by Anne Boleyn. It also meant acknowledging the King's supremacy in matters of Church authority. Cardinal Fisher would do neither.

Cardinal Fisher's successor was a Dominican friar called John Hildesley. He belonged to the Beenham branch of the Hildesley family of East Ilsley on the Berkshire Downs. The name Hildesley is an old version of Ilsley.

The main line of the Hildesley family remained Catholic after the Reformation. Bishop Hildesley, however, was an enthusiastic supporter of the King's religious policy. It had been his job to ensure that the Dominican friars of England swore allegiance to the King as Head of the Church in England.

Having been a friar, Bishop Hildesley was not wealthy. Five days after he was consecrated he requested various possessions of his executed predecessor, including a walking staff. The evidence suggests that his wish was granted, and that after his death the staff passed to his Catholic relatives.

One of the last Catholic Hildesleys, Mary, married Robert Eyston. She died in 1709 at the age of thirty and was buried in the Eyston aisle in the parish church of East Hendred. The first record of the Cardinal's staff being at Hendred House is nine years later, at about the time that the Hildesley's last interest in East Ilsley was being sold. It was then that the former Mary Hildesley's brother-in-law Charles Eyston, known as the Antiquary, bequeathed the Cardinal's staff to his son Charles. It has been at Hendred House ever since.

Sir Thomas More, the subject of the play and film 'A Man for All Seasons', was executed on Tower Hill a fortnight after Cardinal Fisher and on the same pretext. He was a graduate of Oriel College, Oxford and had an international reputation as an intellectual. His most famous book 'Utopia' described an imaginary place with an ideal social and political system, and gave a new word to the English language.

Sir Thomas More favoured religious reform, but within the framework of the Catholic Church. His friends included fellow Catholic reformers such as the Dutch theologian Desiderius Erasmus and Dean John Colet of St Paul's Cathedral, London.

In 1814 Maria Teresa Metcalfe, a descendant of Sir Thomas More, married Charles Eyston, a great grandson of the Antiquary. Through this marriage the martyr's tankard came to Hendred House. The present owner of Hendred House, Thomas More Eyston, is a great great grandson of Charles and Maria Teresa Eyston.

East Ilsley, once the home of the Catholic Hildesleys, is only five miles south-south-east of East Hendred. In the north wall of the north aisle of the parish church of St Mary is a group of three early Victorian stained glass windows. The window on the right depicts Erasmus, that on the left Dean Colet. Given pride of place in the middle is their friend Thomas More, honored by the Church of England as a reformer who died for the unity of the Church.

Victorian stained glass windows in East Ilsley parish church
Thomas More, with Colet on the left and Erasmus on the right

Although Sir Thomas More had been an Oxford scholar, neither he nor Cardinal Fisher was closely associated with Berkshire or southern Oxfordshire. The two most prominent local men to be executed for opposing the King were Sir Adrian Fortescue of Brightwell Baldwin and Abbot Hugh Faringdon of Bere Court, Pangbourne.

Sir Adrian Fortescue was a first cousin of Anne Boleyn. His house at Brightwell Baldwin probably stood in Brightwell Park (2 miles WNW of Watlington). His first wife was Anne Stonor who inherited Stonor Park (5 miles SE of Watlington). This estate is mentioned many times in this book and, unlike many of the others, is regularly open to the public.

The Fortescues moved into Stonor in 1499. This led to a long dispute with the Stonor family which was settled by Henry VIII about the time of his break with Rome. Under the terms of the settlement Sir Adrian had to surrender Stonor House but retained part of the estate. He also gained all the Stonor lands in Gloucestershire, Devon and Kent. These were much greater in size than Stonor Park itself.

Presumably Sir Adrian had let his house at Brightwell Baldwin because he moved from Stonor to the 14th century moated castle at Shirburn (1 mile NNE of Watlington). This belonged to the Chamberlain family and is referred to a number of times later in this book.

Shortly after the move to Shirburn Castle, Sir Adrian's second wife, Anne (née Reade), gave birth to their second son. The child's Godparents included Thomas Reade, probably he of Barton, Abingdon whose daughter Catherine married Thomas Vachell, son of the commissioner who suppressed Reading Abbey.

Although he was Anne Boleyn's cousin, Sir Adrian Fortescue did not agree with the King's religious policies. The month after Anne's marriage he became a lay brother of the Oxford Dominicans. He had already joined the Order of St John of Jerusalem which led to his arrest and imprisonment for about six months in the Marshalsea Gaol at Southwark. His wife and two servants lived with him in prison. One of the servants was John Horseman, probably a member of the Oxfordshire Horseman family who remained Catholic into the seventeenth century.

In 1536 Sir Adrian inserted in his Missal (Mass book) a leaflet that had been issued by the King commanding certain prayers be said by all his subjects. Sir Adrian struck out a reference in the leaflet to the King being Supreme Head of the Church in England. Sir Adrian's Missal, complete with leaflet and deletion, is still in existence.

One of Sir Adrian's sons-in-law, Thomas Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare, was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn in 1537 for his part in a rebellion in Ireland. The following year Sir Adrian had to buy back his first wife's tomb and pay for its transfer from the suppressed Bisham Abbey to Brightwell Baldwin church.

He was arrested again in February 1539. This time he was imprisoned in the Tower of London and attainted by Parliament for treason, sedition and refusing allegiance to the King. It seems that there was no trial and no further details were given of his alleged crimes. In July 1539 he was beheaded on Tower Hill. The Pope beatified him (that is, awarded him the title 'Blessed') in 1895.

When Sir Adrian Fortescue was executed the suppression of the abbeys and priories had been proceeding for several years. The King's main aim was to replenish his treasury while reinforcing his claims of supremacy over the Church. First the smaller houses had been closed, including Studley Priory on the edge of Ot Moor and a string of establishments on the Thames: Rewley Abbey in Oxford, Dorchester Abbey, Goring Priory, Medmenham Abbey, Hurley Priory, Bisham Priory (reinstated briefly as an abbey), Little Marlow Priory and Ankerwick Priory near Slough.

Then it was the turn of the larger establishments: Thame Abbey, the friary at Donnington near Newbury and a series of religious houses on or near the Thames - Godstow and Osney abbeys, the friaries and monastic colleges at Oxford, the great Abingdon Abbey and the friary at Reading.

The only head of a religious house in the Thames Valley to refuse to surrender to the King was Hugh Cook, Abbot of Reading. He is better known as Hugh Faringdon, because presumably he was born at Faringdon in north-west Berkshire.

Reading Abbey, though smaller and less ancient than Abingdon's, was one of the ten biggest Benedictine monasteries in England. Founded by Henry I, it stood by the River Kennet on the eastern outskirts of medieval Reading. It was the site of many notable events. Thomas Becket dedicated it. Henry I was buried there. The Patriarch of Jerusalem visited it to offer Henry II the crown of Jerusalem. In its huge church John of Gaunt married Blanche of Lancaster. Parliament assembled there three times. There too Britain's earliest surviving example of four-part harmony was written down, 'Sumer is Icumen In'.

Hugh Faringdon had been on good terms with the King and had even signed a petition to the Pope urging him to speed up the proceedings for Henry's annulment. He had also offered research facilities in the abbey library for those arguing the King's case. The abbot's support was appreciated by the King who,in 1532, sent him a New Year gift of a white leather purse containing £20 (= £4,700 today).

Hugh Faringdon became a royal chaplain and twice took the Oath of Supremacy acknowledging Henry as Supreme Head of the Church in England. He celebrated one of the Masses at the lying in state of the body of Henry's third queen, Jane Seymour, at Hampton Court. He was given a place of honour in the choir at her funeral in Windsor and was later made a justice of the peace.

After the act for the dissolution of the greater monasteries came into force, any abbot not surrendering his monastery to the Crown's agents was deemed guilty of treason. But Hugh Faringdon refused to surrender and is said to have been captured in a secret hiding place at his favourite summer residence, Bere Court (1½ miles SW of Pangbourne).

Bere Court
Hugh Faringdon's summer residence, later given a Georgian restyling

There has been a house on the site since at least the ninth century and it was owned by Abingdon Abbey before passing to Reading. In Hugh Faringdon's time the house was the centre of a much larger complex of buildings than today. These included a medieval chapel which, after the Reformation, was put to secular use and subsequently demolished.

Today Bere Court looks like an early Georgian house. However, some of the building fabric from Hugh Faringdon's time has survived, including the medieval cellars and the massive beams that span one of the bedrooms. Of particular interest is a grand carved and painted stone fireplace, decorated with the scallop shell motif of Reading Abbey. It was discovered fairly recently behind panelling. Its base was several feet lower than the present floor level in what was originally the upper gallery of the house. The owner is now carefully restoring the original painted decoration of the fireplace. It is virtually certain that this was Hugh Faringdon's fireplace.

Bere Court
Photographic reproductions of the stained glass formerly in the windows

Bere Court once had some good stained glass but this was sold in modern times. Some is held by Reading Museum but is not on display. It includes two roundels with Hugh Faringdon's initials surrounded by a border of hunting dogs. (The abbot was a keen huntsman and had hunted with Henry VIII.) It has been suggested that the similar stained glass roundel in the Catholic chapel at Hendred House also came originally from Bere Court.

Like Sir Adrian Fortescue, Hugh Faringdon was imprisoned in the Tower of London. He was indicted on a charge of treason. It was alleged that on three occasions he had spoken out against the Royal Supremacy. The verdict seems to have been predetermined as a surviving note states: 'The abbot of Reading to be sent down to be tried and executed at Reading with his accomplices.'

No defence was allowed and the abbot was found guilty, along with two priests, John Eynon and John Rugg.

Fr Eynon was the curate of St Giles's, Reading. During the suppression of the religious houses the biggest rebellion in English history took place, the Pilgrimage of Grace. It had many causes including opposition to the suppression of the monasteries. The uprising began in Lincolnshire and spread rapidly through most of Northern England. Fr Eynon had made a copy of a letter explaining the rebels' aims and consequently had been investigated by a Royal Commission.

Fr Rugg was a prebendary of Chichester Cathedral said to have hidden the alleged hand of St Anastasius when Reading Abbey's considerable collection of religious relics was seized. (St Anastasius, who died about the year 700, was abbot of a monastery on Mount Sinai.)

Certainly a human hand was hidden. It was placed in an iron chest and concealed in the base of a wall at the east end of the abbey church. There it lay, black, leathery and shrunken, for nearly two and a half centuries. It was found by workmen building Reading Gaol in 1786 and put on display in a small private museum.

In the nineteenth century the museum closed down and the hand was bought by a Catholic convert, Charles Robert Scott-Murray of Danesfield, Medmenham. He had been Member of Parliament for Buckinghamshire and later became High Sheriff of the county. Scott-Murray and many others believed that the hand was Reading Abbey's principal focus of pilgrimage, the hand of St James the Apostle. This was a much more important relic than the hand of St Anastasius, and Fr Rugg may have been involved in a cunning switch to fool Henry VIII's agents.

From Charles Scott-Murray the hand passed to the Catholic church of St Peter in Marlow, where it is kept out of sight and under lock and key. The Church makes no claim whatsoever concerning its authenticity. However, it is of great interest, not least as one of the very few medieval religious relics to have survived the English Reformation. It also contributed to Fr Rugg's downfall.

He, Fr Eynon and Abbot Hugh Faringdon were sentenced to a traitor's death. Their fate may have been sealed by the friendship of the abbot and Fr Rugg with the family of the exiled Cardinal Pole who opposed Henry's religious policies and sought reunion with Rome.

On the 15 November 1539 the three were hanged, drawn (disembowelled) and cut into quarters. Their remains were then hung up in chains as a warning to others. According to local tradition this took place at the abbey's main gateway after the condemned men had been dragged through the streets of Reading on hurdles.

It is said that friends retrieved the remains and buried them at Bere Court. In the late seventeenth century the Breedon family bought the house and it is said that during their occupancy three lead-lined coffins were found under the floor and subsequently reburied elsewhere.

Like Sir Adrian Fortescue, Abbot Hugh Faringdon, Fr Rugg and Fr Eynon were beatified by the Pope in 1895. Reading's Catholic comprehensive school is named after the town's martyred abbot.

In the early nineteenth century interest in Reading Abbey's past increased. Through the efforts and financial support of a prominent local Catholic, James Wheble of Woodley Lodge, the ruins were excavated. In 1834 Wheble bought the land on which was subsequently built the Norman-style Catholic church of St James. This was designed by Augustus Welby Pugin and constructed mostly at Wheble's own expense, partly out of stones from the abbey ruins. By this means Catholic worship returned to the site of the abbey after an interval of some 300 years.

The abbey ruins belong to Reading Corporation and are open to the public. On the walls are three stone plaques, erected to commemorate the first and last abbots and the composition of 'Sumer is Icumen In'.

North of St Laurence's Church, which stood at the abbey's west gateway, is an intact flint-built remnant of the Hospitium of St John the Baptist. The Hospitium originally provided lodgings for pilgrims and other travellers. The oldest parts of the present building date from 1486 when it became a school.

The late thirteenth century inner gatehouse, known as the Abbey Gateway, was heavily restored by George Gilbert Scott in Victorian times. There is an useful plan of the abbey on the north wall of the Abbey Gateway, which helps to relate the former structures to present-day buildings.

Reading Museum has some twelth century column capitals from the abbey cloister. Others are in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. The museum also has a model of the abbey before its suppression, which gives a good idea of its vast scale.

After its dissolution some of Reading Abbey's books passed into the secret possession of local people. For example, in the early twentieth century an antiphonal (a book of psalms or similar verses to be sung by a choir) was found hidden in the wall of a building in Broad Street, Reading.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a branch of the secretly Catholic Wollascott family lived at Shinfield House (now demolished). There in 1792, in what seems to have been a secret hiding place, was found what became known as the Fingall Cartulary. It is a notable collection of abbey records, and is now in the British Museum. Other finds at Shinfield House are believed to have included a twelth century book now in Reading Museum and a fifteenth century book of hours, now at Downside Abbey near Bath. The evidence suggests that, in Elizabethan times, these and other books were kept at Shinfield for Thomas Thomson, who may have been a Catholic priest.

But how did books such as these escape the destruction of the abbey's library, and the suppression of Catholic books thereafter? The answer probably lies with the Vachell family of Coley Park.

Dovecote at Coley Park
Amidst modern housing, Coley Park's dovecote survives

Thomas Vachell, Member of Parliament for Reading, was the commissioner responsible for the suppression of Reading Abbey. The Vachells were a long-established local family. Two hundred years earlier a Vachell had given part of Tilehurst to Reading Abbey. Commissioner Vachell's eldest son, also Thomas, remained a Catholic and lived for more than seventy years after the dissolution of Reading Abbey. The younger Thomas's widowed sister-in-law Mary Martyn (née Reade) spent her latter years living with her son-in-law William Wollascott at Shinfield. Thomas Vachell the younger was probably the link between his father who suppressed the abbey and his wife's niece, in whose final lodgings the abbey's books were found two and a half centuries after the dissolution.

Coley Park dovecote
Left, set into the brickwork is a carved stone with cross motif, seen right in close-up. Did it come from Reading Abbey?

Introduction

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How Christianity Came to the Thames Valley (3rd-7th cent.)

Lollard Influence (1382 onwards)

The Thames Highway (16th-19th cent.)

The Early Catholic Martyrs (1534-1539)

The Religious Changes (1534-1558)

The Elizabethan Settlement (1558-70)

The First Missionaries (1570-1581)

The Press at Stonor (1581)

The Mission Becomes Established (1582-1588)

Thomas Belson (1583-1589)

Elizabeth's Later Years (1589-1603)

The Gunpowder Plot (1604-1606)

The Jacobean Period (1606-1625)

Charles I (1625-1642)

The Civil War (1642-1646)

The Commonwealth (1646-1660)

The Restoration (1660-1685)

The End of a Dream (1685-1700)

When Alexander Pope Lived in Berkshire (1700-1715)

Twixt Fifteen and Forty-Five (1715-1745)

Low Ebb (1745-1770)

A Little Relief (1770-1792)

The French Exiled Clergy (1790-1808)

Emancipation (1808-1829)

Appendices:

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