News Item: : Transit Gloria Mundi - Fides Catholica Manet
(Category: Torch of The Faith News)
Posted by admin
Friday 24 July 2015 - 13:09:09

Angeline maintains a camouflaged look-out for pursuivants outside Baddesley Clinton!

Summer is upon us and many people are looking for quality venues for family day-trips. We thought that we would share some of the locations that we have found to be at once educational, inspirational and refreshing.

Today we are focusing on the moated manor-house of Baddesley Clinton, just north of Warwick. The Latin title of today's article is taken from the motto inscribed in the house's chapel. It translates as, Worldly glory is transitory, but the Catholic Faith endures. This alone would make Baddesley Clinton a great place for an educational day out for children. But there is so much more.

Every Englishman should be told about the history of Baddesley Clinton, because it symbolises the true heritage and inheritance that was denied to them during the hard years of the Elizabethan persecution of the Catholic Church.

Baddesley Clinton is today owned and maintained by the National Trust; so there is a restaurant, gift-shop, a house trail for younger visitors, plus pleasant gardens to stroll and let children release some steam. Parking is free and visiting NT members may receive the usual benefits. If you visit in the first week of August you will catch the annual Book Fair. One year, we obtained a heavily discounted copy of Cardinal Josef Mindszenty's Memoirs during this event!

And Baddesley Clinton manor is steeped in Catholic history.

During the 1400's, one of the first owners is reputed to have murdered the local Catholic priest in the house. He repented and did penance by extensively restoring the local parish church of St. Michael. In that era, Baddesley Clinton manor was fortified with gunports and a draw-bridge over the moat.

Through marriage, the house passed into the Ferrers family in 1517. As the 1590's began, Henry Ferrers leased the manor to two strongly Catholic recusants: Anne Vaux and her widowed sister Eleanor Brooksby. These were the days when the Elizabethan persecution had driven the Catholic Church underground by outlawing the Sacred Priesthood and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Priests who were discovered in the realm, together with those who sheltered them, could face torture and execution. By the end of Elizabeth's reign, 123 Catholic priests and over 60 lay people had been executed.

Clearly, Anne Vaux and Eleanor Brooksby were running huge risks when they began to shelter priests and allow the manor to be used as a venue for secret offerings of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

They were not the only ones.

Scattered at secret locations throughout the country were a number of Jesuit mission priests, under the leadership of Fr. Henry Garnet S.J. The dangers they faced made it necessary for them to endure long periods of isolation from their Jesuit brethren.

Once every two years, the Jesuits would come together for a clandestine conference. These meetings had both practical and spiritual aims. They provided a forum for the priests to discuss strategy, make future plans and share information and news. They also enabled the priests to make their own confessions, enjoy some priestly fraternity and receive ongoing formation in the Jesuit spirituality.

In the second week of October, 1591, Jesuit priests and seminarians converged on the isolated manor at Baddesley Clinton for one of these biannual conferences. The time was chosen to coincide with a political election in order to provide greater security; the leaders of the priest-hunters, known as pursuivants, would hopefully be engaged with other matters for a couple of weeks.

Travelling to the secret meeting was the talented Jesuit lay-brother St. Nicholas Owen. Known as ''Little John'', he had used his remarkable gifts for lateral thinking and carpentry to construct elaborate 'priest-holes' to hide Catholic priests in the houses of the faithful recusant families that remained dotted around England.

At Baddesley Clinton, St. Nicholas Owen had devised three hiding places: one small room accessed through a secret wooden panel in the moat room; another in a hidden ceiling space; and a third in a narrow sewage channel. This last hiding place ran under the entire length of the southwest wing of the house. It was accessed via a rope hung in a garderobe shaft, that was itself concealed within the thickness of a wall.

The dark sewage channel lacked access to fresh air and was lapped up to ankle-depth by water from the moat. Although it measured just four feet at the highest point, it was long enough to conceal up to a dozen crouching men.

At the conclusion of the conference on 14th October, 1591, some of the Jesuits saddled their horses and left after dinner. Source documents reveal that, early on the morning of 15th October, 1591, before the remaining priests could leave, the house was raided by pursuivant priest-hunters.

Fr. John Gerard S.J. wrote of this frightening raid: ''I was making my meditation. Father Southwell was beginning Mass and the rest were at prayer, when suddenly I heard a great uproar outside the main door. Then I heard a voice shouting and swearing at a servant who was refusing them entrance.''

Fr. Southwell quickly slipped out of his vestments, stripped the altar bare and joined the others in hiding their belongings. They turned their still-warm mattresses so that they would not seem to have been slept on. Whilst the anxious Eleanor Brooksby was hidden at the top of the house, Anne Vaux bought some time for everyone by standing on her rights as an aristocratic lady at the front door.

By the time the priest-hunters had entered and begun to violently ransack the house in their destructive haste, five Jesuit priests, two seminarians and up to three servants were hiding in the sewage channel beneath the house.

As their hearts raced, and the furious noise of beds being overturned, furniture being manhandled and wooden panels being beaten, echoed above their heads, the holy men must have wondered at the grim dangers the entire Jesuit mission then faced.

Some of the greatest names in Jesuit history had gathered at Baddesley Clinton for that conference. Henry Garnet, John Gerard, Robert Southwell, Edward Oldcorn, Thomas Lister, Richard Holtby and Nicholas Owen; these had all been present. If the raiders had discovered the Jesuits that morning, almost the entire network, which had taken years to establish and develop, would have been destroyed in just one single hour.

By God's grace, the pursuivants never did find the priests or seminarians that day. Anne Vaux calmly served them breakfast and someone paid them a bribe of twelve pieces of gold. Only after four hours had elapsed, could the men emerge from their hiding place. John Gerard later spoke of their experiences as being like those of Daniel in the den of the lions. Some Catholics in those days, as again in our own, thought that they were living through the last days of Daniel and the Apocalypse; when the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass would be abolished for a period of time.

Fr. Robert Southwell was eventually caught and tortured by the evil Mr. Richard Topcliffe. He was martyred in February, 1595. In 1606, following a brutal clampdown in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, Fr. Edward Oldcorne, Fr. Henry Garnet and Nicholas Owen were all martyred. The gruesome practice of hanging, drawing and quartering, whilst the victim was still conscious, should make every person of good will examine the origins of English Protestantism - and thus of post-Protestant secularism in our own day. It is hard to deny Blessed Cardinal J.H. Newman's maxim that, ''to be deep in history, is to cease to be Protestant.''

As we said above, every Englishman should be told the Baddesley Clinton story, to help them to discover the true birth-right they have been denied. And what is this birthright? Nothing other than the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, founded by Jesus Christ for the salvation and sanctification of souls until the end of time. It was because the 'old religion', endowed with Christ's power to teach, save and make holy, had been abolished by falsehood and violence that Robert Southwell thought that, to be truly English, was to be a Catholic. It is the long-forgotten birthright of every Englishman.

Visitors to Baddesley Clinton today can view the famous priest-hole from the kitchen area of the house. So good was St. Nicholas Owen's work that one of the priest-holes was only discovered in 1935.

The raid at Baddesley Clinton marked a historical watershed in the Jesuit mission. During the actual days of that hidden conference, Queen Elizabeth I signed into law a new proclamation that further divided those who wished to be loyal to Jesus Christ in the Catholic Church and those seeking loyalty to the Queen. Although it was the sincere faith of the martyrs that, like their ancestors, they could be loyal subjects of both, the unjust law precluded such a peace in the culture. Pursuit and persecution of priests and their helpers intensified. It was now too dangerous for so many priests to meet together in one place in Elizabethan England.

For all of these reasons, Baddesley Clinton is not just a venue for a good day out. As well as being a place of educational value, inspiration and refreshment, it is, for all those who love the True Faith and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, a place of pilgrimage and prayer. The example and prayers of these martyr-priests might help us in the coming storms. They are good friends to have. May their witness encourage us as we traverse the difficult, and often lonely, waters of our own anti-Catholic times. 

Angeline finds the camouflage to be less effective at the south elevation of the moated manor house!

Martyrs of England - Pray for us!

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This news item is from Torch of The Faith
( http://www.torchofthefaith.com/news.php?extend.1039 )