Treasonous Reconciliations: Robert Southwell, Religious Polemic, and the Criminalization of Confession

Abstract

In the summer of 1581, the secular Roman Catholic priest Everard Hanse (alias Ducket), a Cambridge graduate and former minister in the English Church, was arrested while visiting prisoners at the Marshalsea prison on suspicion of being a priest. During the trial, William Fleetwood, the recorder of the City of London, questioned Hanse on the authority of the pope in England and asked him whether Pope Pius V’s declaration in the bull Regnans in Excelsis (1570) erred when it proclaimed that Queen Elizabeth was a heretic and should be deposed. According to John Stow’s account of the proceedings, Hanse “affirmed that he himself was subiect to the Pope in ecclesiasticall things, and that the Pope hath nowe the same authoritie here in England that he had an hundred years past” and went on to make “other traiterous speeches” (A summarie 705).¹ One of these speeches centered on Hanse’s alleged attempts to remove others from their due obedience to Elizabeth. When Fleetwood “asked whether he spoke the foresaid thing to persuade other men that heard him to be of his mind,” Hanse replied, “I know not what you mean by persuading; but I would have all men to believe the catholic faith, as I do” (Challoner, ed. 1: 34). Hanse was found guilty of high treason and condemned to die. At Tyburn, Hanse was asked if he accepted Elizabeth as his rightful sovereign.