A convicted Catholic

We pretty well know, thanks to events in the last half of the last century, that relationships between Catholics and Protestants have been strained at best in the British Isles. Violence wracked Ireland for ages and though relationships are better, the divisions still exist.

Somehow knowing this did not stop my mind from doing a double take while researching one of the members of my side of the family tree. I was rooting around trying to find a story I hadn't told and ran across Sir John Hungerford, knight of the shire for Gloucestershire. 

Sir John appears in The History of Parliament online and was involved in some aspects of English history we've mentioned and a few others we'll explore for at least a couple of weeks. Now given the changes I've seen occur in the family tree since beginning this project, I'm not going to definitively claim him, but if he does belong in my past, he would be my 11th great-grandfather. 

His appearance in The History results from his being elected as member of Parliament, a position referred to above. Now, as I understand it, England has several different types of knight, and this designation dates back to at least the 13th century. Originally pretty much any freeman could be elected to the office, but in 1429, Parliament decided their membership was too full of men of "low estate" and passed a law saying an MP had to be a freeman and had to own property worth at least 40 shillings. 

I'm not even going to try to translate that to modern money, but that amounts to less than a pound in contemporary money and a rich nobleman averaged 200 pounds income at the time. So a 40 shilling estate wasn't exactly high class but was apparently enough for the owner to be considered less crass than other members of society.

Sir John inherited a manor located in a decent sized village called Down Ampney and the lease on village's parsonage from his father and the income from three manors from his mother, who is described in his biography as "a convicted Catholic." Here's where my mental hiccup happened. 

I originally read that as "convinced Catholic," which would have been enough given she married a Protestant. I looked again and saw my mistake. Did that mean she'd been through some kind of trial, I wondered? I knew that Henry VIII had separated from the Catholic Church and had established the Church of England, of which he was the head. But somehow I missed that being a Catholic in England was illegal.

A statute passed in 1535 established Henry as the head of the church and laid out a series of penalties for participating in pretty much everything Catholic. When Elizabeth I took the throne, she decided that the Church of England would be considered the only legitimate church in the land, and in the early years of her reign Catholics could be fined, lose their property or tossed into prison. 

As time went on, torture joined the list, which often ended with the "criminal's" death. More than 200 people suffered this form of persecution, most being priests. About 60 laymen and laywomen are part of the total. 

Under James I an oath of allegiance was developed to find and repress Catholics who refused to participate in Anglican worship and practices. The intrigues surrounding the struggles for power by members of the royal family who adhered to one or the other church resulted in Catholics being viewed as traitors by the Protestant renants. 

But James didn't use the extremes of punishment nearly as much as Elizabeth, preferring fines, which brought in an income of 36,000 pounds a year. Presumably Sir John's mother was one of a number of Catholics in the land who either refused to attend Anglican services altogether or who attended but engaged in Catholic practices in private and secretly attended Catholic services when available from dissenting priests. The date of her conviction is not noted in Sir John's biography.

Life improved greatly for Catholics by the time our ancestors reached the colonies, but you can see the deep-seated roots of the First Amendment in her story. If the king, or any other ruler, can criminalize the beliefs and practices of the Catholic Church, they can surely do it to any other faith that won't toe the official line. 

Image: Queen Elizabeth I by Nicholas Hilliard, c. 1575, retrieved from the National Portrait Gallery, used under Creative Commons license. Elizabeth aligned with the Protestants in England, sometimes employing extreme punishments against Catholics during her reign.