Dena Hunt - Treason: A Catholic Novel of Elizabethan England

Treason
A Catholic Novel
of Elizabethan England

by Dena Hunt

SOPHIA INSTITUTE PRESS

Manchester, New Hampshire

Copyright 2013 Dena Hunt

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved

Cover design by Carolyn McKinney

On the cover: Murder of Becket , by James E. Doyle (19th century),
private collection, Look and Learn / The Bridgeman Art Library;
and Queen Elizabeth I (c. 1600; oil on panel), National Portrait
Gallery, London, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hunt, Dena.

Treason : A Catholic novel of Elizabethan England / Dena Hunt.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-933184-92-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
eBook ISBN 978-1-622821-55-6 1. Catholics
England History 16th century Fiction.
2. Historical fiction. I. Title.

PS3608.U5728T74 2013

813'.6 dc23

2013003187

To Blessed Nicholas Postgate,
a Catholic priest
who faithfully served his parish
in the wilds of the Yorkshire moors,
always traveling by foot,
until he was arrested, hanged,
drawn, and quartered at York,
at the age of eighty.

I NTRODUCTION

by Joseph Pearce

Good literature takes us out of ourselves and into other worlds. It liberates us from the little provincial cosmos that we have made for ourselves in the limiting confines of our own heads. It takes us on a voyage of discovery of the infinitely wider cosmos that is found beyond ourselves. It shows us a breathtaking and soul-shaking reality that challenges our insular pride and prejudice. It introduces us to the Other, to the Real.

In the realm of so-called fantasy literature (fantasy being a poor label for such a great thing), we pass beyond the wardrobe of the self-enclosed mind into the wideness and wonders of an expanding imagination. Yet the wardrobe contains not merely a door of enlarged perception through which we pass but a mirror in which we can see ourselves more clearly. It is in this sense that Tolkien insisted that one of the great values of fairy stories was their ability to hold up a mirror to man. These stories show us ourselves.

What is true of good literature is also true of history. The past is a different country, the visiting of which enables us to see all the more clearly the present day, which is our own small and short-lived country. The past makes sense of the present. It frees us from the fetters of fashion and liberates us from the little prejudiced and provincial cosmos that the zeitgeist presents to us. It shows us the breathtaking and soul-shaking lessons to be learned from the collective experience of humanity over millennia of trial and error. It allows us to learn the lessons without making the mistakes. It is in this sense that the sage reminds us that those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them in the present and are destined to live with their disastrous consequences in the future. The past is a perilous realm in the sense that we ignore it at our peril.

The novel you are about to read brings together good literature and good history, the two becoming one flesh in a nuptial embrace, the fruit of which is a journey to another place that is frighteningly close to home. It shows us ourselves in the lives of our ancestors and reminds us that our forebears are as close to us in their humanity as they are distant from us in time. They are our neighbors whom we are called to love. This novel takes us to a country, Elizabethan England, in which the forces of secularism have outlawed the Catholic Church. It leads us through a political landscape in which the rights of the secular state, as defined by the state itself, trample underfoot the rights of people to follow their conscience and practice their religion. It introduces us to a legal system in which Catholic priests are declared to be traitors to their country and enemies of the people. It shows us a culture of Machiavellian realpolitik in which the practice of religion is declared to be a political act and in which the state has established its own church as the only religion to be tolerated.

At its best, Miss Hunts modest novel resonates with the epic power of Kristen Lavransdatter in its unflinching depiction of sanctity in the midst of human folly. Admirers of the great priest-novelist Robert Hugh Benson will find parallels with Come Rack! Come Rope! Less obviously but perhaps more palpably, parallels might also be drawn with Bensons apocalyptic and dystopian tour de force, Lord of the World . The latter parallel is rooted in the unsettling paradox that history seems to be repeating itself and is now uncannily foreshadowing the future. As such, Treason has a Janus-like quality; it looks forward even as it is looking back. It sees the past as a portent of the future, a warning to be heeded. It sees the past as a prophet. Though Treason is formally a work of historical fiction, depicting a past that has passed away, it is also, trans-formally, a work of cautionary potency as frightening as Huxleys Brave New World , Orwells 1984 , or the aforementioned Lord of the World . It is a work about the past that should be read with one eye on the present and the other on the future. As a manifestation of unchanging truth, the reality that it depicts was and is and is to come.

P REFACE

In the summer of 2006, I had the good fortune to join a Catholic pilgrimage in England for a few days. The pilgrims were led by Father Joseph Fessio, S.J., and Joseph Pearce, renowned biographer and editor of St. Austin Review . It was during those few days that I became fully aware of the revisionist history that has been the foundation of my American Protestant heritage.

Among the sites we visited was an ancient tiny church in a sheep pasture outside Keswick in the Lake District the Church of St. Bega, dating from around A.D. 950. Like all churches in England in the sixteenth century, St. Begas had its Reformation experience: its altar was desecrated, its Bible and prayer books were removed; it was stripped of its small, primitive crucifix, found buried in the sheep pasture only recently; and the murals on its walls, painted by some unknown loving hands, were whitewashed. And like all the other English churches, little St. Begas became the property of the state.

Father Fessio asked permission to celebrate Holy Mass there, and as each of the small number of pilgrims went forward to receive Holy Communion, I thought about the fact that this was the first time the Blessed Sacrament had been under that roof in nearly five hundred years. Looking back now, I realize that the seed of this story was planted then. I had taught British literature for thirty years, and I was familiar with the rough outline of Englands historical attempt, sustained over centuries, to eradicate the Catholic Church. But history tells us only major events and the major persons involved in those events. The little Church of St. Bega made me wonder about the many thousands of unknown persons who were profoundly affected not just by those major events, but by the slow progress of sustained persecution over time. What was it like to live each day in the hope for an end to the patriotic religious hatred that forced every citizen to choose between loyalty to country and fidelity to faith? Generations passed on to new generations a hope that was never fulfilled, so that hatred of the Church and all those who remained faithful to her became permanently and inextricably woven into the fabric of Englands national character.

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