When English Catholics were considered as dangerous as jihadis

Martyrdom, these days, does not get a good press. Fifty years ago English Catholics could take a ghoulish pride in the suffering of their 16th-century Tyburn heroes, but in a western world that has learned to be wary of extremist talk of ‘holy war’ or the intoxicating visions of the martyr’s crown that fuelled the prayers of England’s young exile priests — ‘the supreme privilege, of which only divine grace could make them worthy’, as Evelyn Waugh put it — somehow makes for less comfortable reading.

It is hard to know whether the modern jihadist has given us an unwelcome insight into the past or disabled us from understanding it, and yet what is certainly true is that Queen Elizabeth I’s government saw these priests pretty much as governments now see terrorists. In 1570, that bleakest of saintly popes Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth, and from the moment that his papal bull released English Catholics from their duty of loyalty, every returning priest — blameless or guilty — was viewed as a political traitor and treated with a savagery that remains a permanent stain on English history.