Catholic Relics and Protestant Polemic in Post-Reformation England

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CHAPTER 17 The Pope’s Merchandise and the Jesuits’ Trumpery: Catholic Relics and Protestant Polemic in Post-Reformation England

Alexandra Walsham

In 1641, on the eve of the outbreak of the English Civil War, an etching entitled This Burden Backe to Rome was published in London by Wenceslas Hollar (Fig. 17.1). It depicts the bearded figure of Father Time with his trademark scythe and hour glass, carrying a triple-tiared Pope, St Peter’s sceptre, and crossed keys on his “aged backe”, together with a “Pedlars packe” and “trunke of trash & Romish Trumperies, Deluding showes and infernall forgeries”. The verses below tell us that he is transporting this “load of vaniti”, which includes a bishop’s mitre and clerical biretta, back to the sink of vice and iniquity that is the seat of Antichrist. Deploying a miscellaneous collection of physical objects as a visual symbol of the evils of popery, this broadside embodies the earnest Protestant hope that all tangible remnants of England’s popish past will be swept away as the prelude to the triumphant consummation of her prolonged and imperfect Reformation.1 The assumptions that underpin this striking image have proved extremely resilient. Following in the footsteps of early modern polemicists, modern scholars have paid relatively little attention to the material culture of Roman Catholicism in early modern England. They have tended to echo the prejudices of contemporaries in regarding relics, sacramentals, and vestments as subjects unworthy of serious academic enquiry. Until the mid-twentieth century, their study was largely a fringe activity carried out by devout writers in the recus- ant history tradition, whose endeavours only served to confirm their credulity in the eyes of their Protestant counterparts.2 Recently, however, historians of both the Middle Ages and the era of the Counter Reformation have begun to

1 Wenceslas Hollar [attrib.], This burden backe to Rome ([London, 1641]). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, Satires 300. 2 For example, Bede Camm, Forgotten Shrines: An Account of Some Old Catholic Halls and Families in England, and of Relics and Memorials of the English Martyrs (London: MacDonald, 1910), esp. 355–81.

figure 17.1 Wenceslas Hollar, This Burden Backe to Rome (London, 1641), woodcut. By permission of the Trustees of the British Museum, AN812151001.

subject them to more sophisticated scrutiny. Approached as entities that hover on the blurred and porous boundary between persona and thing, subject and object, and which occupy a liminal position between the realms of the human and divine, these mundane material items rendered precious and irreplaceable