Muhlenberg College Digital Repository Tighe, William J. “Five Elizabethan Courtiers, Their Catholic Connections, and Their Careers.” British Catholic History 33.02 (2016): 211–227. NOTE: This is the peer-reviewed post-print (author’s final manuscript), identical in textual content to the publisher PDF available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british- catholic-history . Copyright 2016 Cambridge UP. The post-print has been deposited in this repository in accordance with publisher policy. Use of this publication is governed by copyright law and license agreements. COVER SHEET William J. Tighe, Ph.D. History Department Muhlenberg College 2400 Chew Street Allentown, PA 18104-5586 UNITED STATES E-mail: [email protected] Telephone: 001.1.484.664.3325 Academic affiliation: Associate Professor, History Department, Muhlenberg College ABSTRACT This article briefly surveys men and women holding positions in the Privy Chamber of Elizabeth I and men holding significant positions in the (outer) Chamber for evidence of Catholic beliefs, sympathies or family connections before going on to discuss the careers of five men who at various times in her reign were members of the Band of Gentlemen Pensioners and whose court careers were decisively affected for weal or for woe by their Catholic beliefs (or, in one case, temporary repudiation of Catholicism) or connections. The men’s careers witness both to a fluidity of religious identity which might facilitate their advancement at Court, but also to its narrowing over the course of the reign. KEY WORDS Elizabethan Catholic courtiers. Religious identity. 1 FIVE ELIZABETHAN COURTIERS, THEIR CATHOLIC CONNECTIONS, AND THEIR CAREERS This article is a preliminary investigation of the careers of known or suspected Catholics in the upper reaches of the Elizabethan Court, among those closest to the Queen in the Privy Chamber and Chamber. I shall discuss several of these, in increasing detail as the account progresses, and of whom one, Sir Lewis Lweknor, son of the Catholic-minded but ‘occasionally conforming’ Lewknors of Selsey, Sussex, would no doubt stand on his own as the subject of an article such as this, if one would undertake the formidable task of tracing his career through the archives of Brussels and Spain, as well as those in England, and of whom another, Sir George Gifford, would be a fine subject for a lurid account of spies, counter spies and attempting to make one’s fortune by serving as a double-agent. This study does not include lower-ranking officers and servants in the Chamber (the Domus Regis Magnificentiae) and those of the Household (the Domus Regis Providentiae); it also excludes noblemen suspected of Catholicism who either frequented the Court without holding an office (such as Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford) or, rarely, held an office (such as Edward Somerset, Earl of Worcester, Master of the Horse from 1601- 1616). It is an amplification, and further exploration, of work begun in my doctoral thesis on the Gentlemen Pensioners during the reign of Elizabeth I and in my continuing work on the Elizabethan Privy Chamber and Chamber.1 As one might expect, there were very few, if any, known Catholics among the men and women who staffed the Queen’s Privy Chamber. Of the men, there were only two who may have had Catholic sympathies, as well as family connections. The first of them was the obscure Henry Middlemore, who served in the position of a Groom of the Privy Chamber from 1569 to his death in 1592, but was never 1 William Joseph Tighe, The Gentlemen Pensioners in Elizabethan Politics and Government (unpublished PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 1984); see also Tighe, ‘Familia reginae: the Privy Court’, in The Elizabethan World, ed. Susan Doran and Norman Jones (London, 2011:Routledge), 76-91. 2 appointed to the office formally.2 His wife was an open Catholic, and some of his children were to embrace their mother’s faith, but in his case there is no evidence – save for an accusation – that he was somehow complicit in his nephew William Middlemore’s role in the forwarding and distribution of clandestine correspondence between English Catholics living abroad and those in England (both William and his father John were strongly attached to Catholicism).3 On the other hand, the strong Protestant Sir Nicholas Throckmorton had written to the Queen on 18 November 1558, the second day of the reign, to solicit for ‘my cosyne harry mydylmore’ a groomship there, which might point away from Catholic leanings on Middlemore’s part.4 The second was John Norris, esquire of Fifield, Berks, to whose complicated career I intend to give further attention at another time. Often confused with the older brother of the Henry Norris who was Groom of the Stool to Henry VIII and whose career and life came to a tragic end in 1536 as one of the supposed adulterous paramours of Anne Boleyn – but Henry Norris’ older brother was the childless Sir John Norris of Yattendon, Berks., who died in 1564 – although in fact a distant cousin, Norris held the position of Gentleman Usher daily waiter in the Chamber from c. 1536 onward. Queen Mary made him Gentleman Usher of her Privy Chamber at the beginning of her reign, and his conservative religious views emerged very clearly in his clashes with the “hot gospeller” Edward Underhill, which the latter recorded in great detail. Relegated at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign to his earlier position in the Chamber, he regained within a year his position in the Privy Chamber, retaining it until his death in 1577. Norris was never charged with recusancy, and his elder son, William, was to have a successful and, under Elizabeth, “conforming” Court career as a Gentleman Pensioner from 1554 to his 2 TNA, SP 12/228/1 is the complaint of one ‘Mr Middlemore’ of his poverty after twenty years of unremunerated service in his office and of the failure to remedy it of various monopoly (and other) grants he had obtained, but of which he had been forestalled of any profit. What that ‘office’ was is nowhere specified in the document, but it suits Henry Middlemore’s circumstances exactly. 3 P. W. Phillimore and W. F. Carter, Some Account of the Families of Middlemore of Warwickshire and Worcestershire (London: privately published, 1901), 176-8. 4 TNA, SP 12/1/4. 3 death in 1591, but his younger son, Henry, and his wife, were reported as recusants in 1577, shortly after the father’s death.5 There is no evidence for even this much among the women of the Privy Chamber staff – although, to be sure, some of these women came from families in which there is no trace of that Protestant zeal that can be found among those of others of them. There was one case, however, of a young woman, Anne Bromfield, possibly one of the Maids of Honor – several of whom do seem to have come from reluctantly conforming families, if one can identify them with some assurance – who, seemingly disappointed in love, went abroad and became a nun at Louvain, after having become a Catholic under the tutelage of the famous Jesuit John Gerard.6 This is an odd case. The girl’s widowed mother, Katharine Bromfield, served as ‘Mother of the Maids’ towards the end of the reign: she was a sister-in-law of the famous (or infamous) astrologer Dr. John Dee, and her husband, William Bromfield, who had been first in the list of graduating students when he left Cambridge as a B. A. of Trinity College in 1562 and who died in 1582, had been a client of the Dudleys. He had held the position of one of the Gentlemen Pensioners at Court from 1569 to 1578, and his departure from the band coincides with a spell of imprisonment which he suffered after being involved in an affray with the servants of another Gentleman Pensioner, Sir Richard Bulkeley – Bulkeley (whose family seat was at Beaumaris, on the isle of Anglesey) being an open opponent of the Earl of Leicester’s attempts to build up an interest and 5 W. H. Rylands, ed., The Four Visitations of Berkshire, 1532, 1566, 1623, 1665-6, Vol. II, Additional Pedigrees and Notes (London, 1908: Harleian Society, 57), 184-6; Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 21 vols., ed. J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner, and R. H. Brodie (London, 1862-1932: HMSO), 10:392 (11), 1256 (30); “The Autobiography of Edward Underhill,” Narratives of the Reformation, ed. J. G. Nichols, Canden Society, old series, 77 (1859), 161, 169; Dasent, Acts of the Privy Council, 7:4; Miscellanea XII, Catholic Record Society (London, 1921), 22:86. Norris was the author of a voluminous and important manuscript concerning ceremonies and ceremonial occasions at the courts of Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Mary (and at which, under Mary, he was both a participant and a supervisor) all in relation to the duties of a gentleman usher, excerpts from which have been published as “Religious Ceremonial at the Tudor Court: Extracts from Royal Household Rgulations,” ed. Fiona Kisby, in Religion, Politics, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England, ed. Ian W. Archer, Camden Fifth Series 22 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Historical Society, 2003), 1-33. Internal evidence demonstrates that the manuscript (BL, Additional MS 71009) was written, or at least completed, in very early weeks or months of the reign of Elizabeth I. 6 Charlotte Isabelle Merton, The Women who Served Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth: Ladies, Gentlewomen and Maids of the Privy Chamber, 1553-1603 (unpublished PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 1992), 207-8. 4 following in North Wales.7 (In some accounts, as in the Bulkeley papers and in Leicester’s Commonwealth, Bromfield, sometimes by name, sometimes anonymously, is represented as an assassin in Leicester’s service and intrigues.