Bacon's DictionaryAppendices

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The exhibits and miniatures of which are found in this section, are designed to assist the serious student and reader in following the path of the Authorship Controvesy that has been so laboriously persued by many authors and researchers during its commence.

These exhibits have been placed here as not to interrupt the flow of reading in the Baconian Dictionary sections, being a finding list of Bacon’s works, his history, his thoughts and his aims, which are a subject of study and discussion.

Topcliffizare

In 1584 a dispute began between Topcliffe and the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Christopher Wray [q.v.], about his claim to the lay impropriation of the prebend of Corringham and Stow in Lincoln Cathedral. Subsequently Topcliffe was regularly employed by Burghley, but in what capacity does not appear and worked mostly for Sir Francis Walsingham and the Privy Council in general; he regarded his authority as deriving directly from Queen Elizabeth I. Sir Francis Walsingham was, perhaps, one of the very worst of the bad men connected with the Council of Elizabeth and Topcliffe. For art in corrupting others, and skill in elevating treachery to the dignity of a science; for ability in planning and carrying out forgery, as well as in arranging for the assassination of inconvenient allies or open enemies, Francis Walsingham was vastly superior to his friend William Cecil. [Also see Part II: Walsingham Francis. Sir.] In 1586 Topcliffe was described as one of her Majesty’s servants, and in the same year was commissioned to try an admiralty case. He held some office about the Court, and for twenty-five years or more he was most actively engaged in hunting out popish recusants, Jesuits, and seminary priests. This employment procured for him so much notoriety that “a Topcliffian custom” became an euphuism for putting to the rack, and, in the quaint language of the Court, “topcliffizare” signified to hunt a recusant. The writer of an account of the apprehension of the Jesuit Robert Southwell [q.v.], preserved among the Bishop of Southwark’s manuscripts, asserts that “because the often exercise of the rack in the Tower was so odious, and so much spoken of by the people, Topcliffe had authority to torment priests in his own house in such sort as he shall think good.” In fact, he himself boasted that he had a machine at home, of his own invention, compared with which the common racks in use were mere child’s play. 1 One may imagine what tortures were committed that were never written down on record. The account of his cruel treatment of Southwell would be incredible if it were not confirmed by admissions in his own handwriting. 2 Great indignation was excited, even among the protestants, and so loud and severe were the complaints to the Privy Council that Cecil, in order to mitigate the popular feeling, caused Topcliffe to be arrested and imprisoned upon pretence of having exceeded the powers given to him by the warrant; but the imprisonment was of short duration. At a later period Nicholas Owen [q.v.] and Henry Garnett [q.v.] were put to the test of the Topcliffe rack.

Poem

By

Robert Southwell 3

Even as Elias, mounting to the sky,

Did cast his mantle to the earth behind,

So, when the heart presents the prayer on high,

Exclude the world from traffic with the mind:

Lips near to God, and ranging heart within,

Is but vain babbling, and converts to sin.

Topcliffe’s name appears in the special commission against Jesuits which was issued on March 26, 1593. In November 1594, he sued one of his accomplices, Thomas Fitzherbert, who had promised, under bond, to give £5,000 to Topcliffe if he would persecute Fitzherbert’s father and uncle to death, together with Mr. Bassett. Fitzherbert pleaded that the conditions had not been fulfilled, as his relatives died naturally, and Bassett was in prosperity. This being rather too disgraceful a business to be discussed in open Court, “the matter was put over for secret hearing,” when Topcliffe used some expressions which reflected upon the Lord Keeper and some members of the Privy Council. Thereupon he was committed to the Marshalsea for contempt of Court, and detained there for some months. Daring his incarceration he addressed two letters to the Queen, and, in Dr. Jessopp’s opinion, “two more detestable compositions it would be difficult to find.” Topcliffe was out of prison again in October 1595. In 1596 he was engaged in racking certain gipsies or Egyptians who had been captured in Northamptonshire, and in 1597 he applied the torture of the manacles to Thomas Travers, who was in Bridewell for stealing the Queen’s Standish. (Jardine). 4 In 1598 he was present at the execution of John Jones, the Franciscan, whom he had hunted to death. He got possession of the old family house of the Fitzherberts at Padley, Derbyshire, and was living there in February 1603–04. He died before December 3, 1604, when a grant of administration was made in the prerogative Court of Canterbury to his daughter Margaret. Dr. Jessopp describes Topcliffe as “a monster of iniquity,” and Father Gerard in his narrative of the gunpowder plot speaks of the “cruellest Tyrant of all England, Topcliffe, a man most infamous and hateful to all the realm for his bloody and butcherly mind.” 5 A facsimile of a curious pedigree of the Fitzherbert family compiled by him for the information of the Privy Council is given in Foley’s Records (Vol. II., p. 198). He was reputed to have a vehement temper and became notorious as a priest-hunter and torturer of the time.

Torture

Emblem 13 6

One ought not yield, even under torture

Laeana, whom you see depicted on the Cecropian fortress,

Was the lover of Harmodius (or do you not know this, stranger?).

So it is pleasing to show the keen spirit of this female warrior

In the form of a wild beast, for she actually bore its name.

Because she did not betray anyone by her testimony,

When she was twisted on the rack,

Iphicrates represented her as tongueless.

It will be appropriate to add that the priests who took the Oath of Supremacy in the reign of Elizabeth verified, to a lamentable extent, the saying of the Anglican satirist, that “a bad Papist makes a worse Protestant.” According to the testimony of such acknowledged Protestant authorities as Burnet, Wharton, Mackintosh, Macaulay and Fronde, the Elizabethan clergy were notoriously ignorant, apathetic, drunken, and immoral. The Queen’s Council (now we see) ordered “a public discussion on the religious questions agitating the Christian mind.” Five Bishops and three doctors of divinity on one side, and eight reformers on the other. Sir Nicholas Bacon and Dr. Heath presided. The whole affair was one of those devices arranged by Cecil to create a stronger sectarian feeling than any already in existence. The conduct of Sir Nicholas Bacon in this affair was that of an undisguised partizan. Such discussions seldom ended in “convincing” either party. (Burke). 7 Topcliffe harboured a fanatic hatred for Catholics and the Roman Catholic Church, and was involved in the interrogation and torture of many priests and laity, at a time when Catholics were suspected of actively and violently seeking to overthrow the Protestant government of England. He gained a reputation as an effective torturer and a deranged psychopath. He claimed that his own instruments and methods were better than the official ones, and was authorized [by whom?] to create a torture chamber in his private house in London, Westminster. He also involved himself directly in the execution of sentences of death upon Catholic recusants, which involved hanging, drawing and quartering.

Topcliffe’s victims included the Jesuits Robert Southwell (1561–1595), a Jesuit priest and poet who lived and moved in England’s Catholic underground, John Gerard, and Henry Garnet. Topcliffe features numerous times in Fr. Gerard’s autobiography of his days as a hunted priest in Elizabethan England. He’s described as, “old and hoary and a veteran in evil”. It has been surmised that, during interrogations, Topcliffe “may have indulged in bizarre sexual fantasies” about the Queen. He raped one of his prisoners, Anne Bellamy, until she helped him arrest the Jesuit priest Robert Southwell. When Bellamy became pregnant by him in 1592, she was forced to marry his servant to cover up the scandal. He was also the interrogator of the poet Ben Jonson in August 1597 in investigations into the suppressed play, The Isle of Dogs. There are no records showing that any kind of torture had been inflicted upon Ben Jonson, by Topcliffe, at the interrogation.

Sir Anthony Standen, too, praising the Earl of Essex’s agreeable manners in a letter to Mr. Anthony Bacon, of March 3, 1593–94, in Dr. Birch’s papers, says, “Contrary to our Topcliffian customs, he hath won more with words than others could do with racks.” It appears likewise, in another letter in that collection, that Topcliffizare, in the quaint language of the Court, signified to hunt a recusant. Richard Topcliffe, was so much distinguished in the employment, that Topcliffizare became the cant term of the day for inviting a recusant was at this time a follower of the Court; and a letter addressed by him to the Earl of Shrewsbury contains some particulars of this progress worth preserving: “I did never reach her Majesty better received by two counties in one journey than Suffolk and Norfolk now; Suffolk of gentlemen and Norfolk of the meaner sort, with exceeding joy to themselves and well liking to her Majesty.” 8 Topcliffe died in November or December 1604 in his bed at the age of about seventy-two.