Henry Garnett - Crossbows & Crucifixes

Crossbows and Crucifixes

A Novel of the Priest Hunters and the Brave Young Men Who Fought Them

Henry Garnett

Also by Henry Garnett from Sophia Institute Press:

The Blood-Red Crescent

Crossbows and Crucifixes was first published in 1962 by Doubleday and Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, under the title A Trumpet Sounds.

Copyright 2009 Sophia Institute Press

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Cover design by Ted Schluenderfritz

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data the brave young men who fought them / Henry Garnett.p. cm.Summary: As a baptized Catholic in 1585 Protestant England, fifteenyear-old Nicholas decides to face danger, possible treason charges, and even death, when he joins the effort to smuggle Catholic priests from Europe into England.ISBN 978-1-933184-36-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)[1. Catholics Fiction. 2. Persecution Fiction. 3. Great BritainHistory Elizabeth, 1558-1603 Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.G18434Cr 2008 [Fic]dc22200801835909 10 11 12 13 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is for my mother, who first introduced me to the secret country on the borders of Worcestershire and Herefordshire, in which much of the action in this story takes place.

Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of eternity.

Francis Thompson

Authors Note

You might be tempted to wonder, as you read this book, how much of it is true and how much I have invented for your entertainment. I would like, therefore, in the very beginning to assure you that nothing happens to Nicholas and his friends that did not, or could not, have happened to Catholics in sixteenth-century England. The wonder is that any Catholic families survived, as Catholics, to tell the tale. To explain why there was so much intolerance, I should have to write for you another book. You must take my word for the fact that there were both Catholics and Protestants who would go to any lengths to force their point of view on those of the other side. You should not have any difficulty in thinking of a modern parallel. Politics came into it, too, and the mixture of religion and politics is very explosive.

There are a few more facts about the book that might interest you. The part of the prayer quoted early in chapter 1 comes from The Prayer Book of Queen Elizabeth, first published in 1558. This prayer was added in 1569 after the Rebellion of the North. On the lighter side, you will be amused to know that the football story, also in chapter 1, is taken from the records of the real St. Peters School, York, and that Christopher Dobson lived and took part in it.

You may accept as fact all that you read about the men who sailed in the ships called trows on the river Severn. They continued earning and stealing their living on that river until the last trow was built a century ago. Their legs that swelled like skittle pins were the same then as in this story.

Finally, I think I should tell you that the secret valley of the Sapey exists to this day and very much as I have described it. It is extremely difficult to get into, although I have, perhaps, for the purpose of the story, somewhat exaggerated the difficulty. But then, even I dont know what it was like in 1585.

By the way, a pursuivant was an official agent of the government. His duty was to enforce the laws against Catholics and to make sure they paid the fines imposed on them for being Catholics. Papist was a term of contempt and hostility applied to Catholics in the Elizabethan period. In time, many Catholics used it in referring to themselves as a term of honor.

Henry Garnett London, 1961

Chapter 1

Schoolboys Tale

The July sun of 1585 slanted through the mullioned windows of the classroom, and in the yellow beams, a myriad dust motes danced. It patterned the bare boards of the floor and picked out here and there, in black shadow, deeply engraved names on the desktops.

The afternoon light shone directly on the head of a boy seated in a corner of the room and, with his every slight movement, revealed tints of auburn in his brown hair. His eyes were bent on the lid of his desk, and, with the tip of his tongue protruding from his lips, he was absorbed in deepening the letters of his own name carved in the wood. The small knife that he used for sharpening his quill pens was being drawn along the lower limb of the letter E when the master called his class to attention.

Nicholas Thorpe allowed the book he had been using as a shield to hide his carving from the teachers eyes, to fall flat on the desk. He slipped his knife into his doublet and rose to his feet in one lithe movement. He revealed himself as a tall youth, taller than his classmates, with soft down where his beard would be, blurring the outline of a firm chin.

At a second order, the boys stepped out of their desks to form files in the aisles. Nicholas, at the age of fifteen, was the oldest as well as the tallest of his fellows, and so he was the last to leave the classroom.

Outside the buildings of St. Peters School, York, Nicholas settled his soft bonnet on his head. He was soberly and rather shabbily dressed, and the white falling bands turned down over the collar of his gray doublet were crumpled and soiled. It was the end of the school week. But his netherstocks were braced tightly and showed, as he walked, the promise of powerful muscles in calves and thighs.

The column of boys marched through Bootham Bar the gate in the walls of York whose battlements and turrets frown down on the traveler and passed on to the Minster. The gloom and chill inside the great cathedral struck Nicholas like a physical blow as he entered, as it always did, but on this summer afternoon, he did not look around the bare nave or peer at the even more naked chancel and sanctuary. The scars on the stone where the images of the saints had been roughly torn from their niches did not cause him a half-understood pain as they had in the past. He was preoccupied with his own thoughts and shared in the standing, sitting, and kneeling that seemed such an essential part of the ritual of the new State Church, without any real consciousness of what was going on about him.

Nicholas listened with only half his mind to the droning voice of the clergyman, until the words of the prayer for the queen, or the words of the prayer against Catholics it seemed to come to the same thing, Nicholas thought forced themselves on his attention.

... Defend, O Lord, Thy servant and our governor under Thee, our Queen Elizabeth, and all Thy people committed to her charge. O Lord, withstand the cruelty of all those which be common enemies as well to the truth of Thy eternal word, as to their own natural Prince and Country, and manifestly to this crown and realm of England... Make soft and tender the stony hearts of all those that exalt themselves against Thy truth, and seek either to trouble the quiet of this realm of England, or to oppress the crown of the same...

That prayer was written a year before I was born, in 1569, Nicholas said to himself, after the failure of the rising of the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland. They wanted to put Queen Mary of Scotland on the throne of England and bring back the Old Faith. The only results were heads falling on Tower Hill far away in London, and hundreds of sturdy north-countrymen hanging by the neck from the branches of trees before their own cottage doors. He remembered the words of his headmaster, Master John Pullen, on the subject and suddenly realized why he was preoccupied.

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