Canceling The Truth: It’s Been Done Before… The Martyrdom Of Catholic Publisher Blessed William Carter (+1584)

By JAMES MONTI

Across the ages, the false prophets of “liberation” who have sought to overthrow the laws of God and the truths of the Catholic faith, touting their disobedience and disbelief as “this glorious liberty of ours” (Martin Luther), have in the end had to resort to the ruthless control of information to impose their so-called “freedom” upon society. Their bumper stickers tell us, “Resist,” and “Question Authority,” but they themselves will not tolerate opposition to their own agenda. It was no different four centuries ago.
On April 13, 1582, a London home was raided by Elizabethan England’s most feared public agent, Richard Topcliffe. It was there that he arrested a 51-year-old Catholic layman, Thomas More of Barnborough, who bore the same name as his illustrious grandfather beheaded under King Henry VIII.
Topcliffe was on the hunt for incriminating evidence and he found it: In More’s private study he discovered a hand-copied biography of More’s martyred grandfather written by Nicholas Harpsfield, one of the early literary giants of the underground English Catholic resistance. Pleased with the success of his search, Topcliffe inscribed the quarry he had unearthed: “This book was found by Richard Topcliffe in Master Thomas More’s study among other books…” (quoted in Mark Rankin, “Richard Topcliffe and the Book Culture of the Elizabethan Catholic Underground,” Renaissance Quarterly, volume 72, n. 2, 2019, p. 522).
Nicholas Harpsfield had died seven years earlier, but his writings were still very much in circulation thanks to his scribe, a Catholic family man and printer named William Carter. Carter had inherited Harpsfield’s literary corpus following the latter’s death in 1575. That same year, Carter cofounded an underground printing press, turning out Catholic books and pamphlets over the four years that followed. Carter earned scarcely twenty pounds a year from his livelihood, but his work was about far more than simply earning a living.
In December of 1579, Carter’s printing operation was raided by the Elizabethan authorities, including the Anglican bishop John Aylmer, who related the news to Sir William Cecil:
“I have found out a press of printing with one Carter, a very lewd (i.e., Catholic) fellow, who hath been diverse times before in prison, for printing of lewd pamphlets. But now in search of his house, among other naughty papistical books, we have found one written in French, entitled, ‘The innocency of the Scottish queen,’ a very dangerous book…” (text in John Strype, Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion, and Other Various Occurrences in the Church of England, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1824, volume 2, part 2, p. 271).
Carter was held in prison for a year and a half; his release in June of 1581 was probably intended to be little more than a diplomatic bargaining chip with the French. Just a month later, the Jesuit missionary priest Fr. (St.) Edmond Campion was arrested. Uncowed by his eighteen months of incarceration, Carter resumed his underground publishing activities to champion Fr. Campion’s cause, circulating handwritten copies of the Jesuit’s responses to his interrogators at a series of public disputations held in court in September of 1581.
The Elizabethan regime saw the circulation of Catholic literature, especially Catholic polemical literature, as a threat to its “Great Reset,” its agenda to remake English civilization in a Protestant cast. It was going to take a cancel culture to complete this task, with the printed word a prime target: “…absolute rulers aimed at absolute control of publications” (Thomas Adams and Nicolas Barker, “A New Model for the Study of the Book,” in A Potencie of Life: Books in Society; The Clark Lectures, 1986-87, ed. Nicolas Barker, London, British Museum, 1993, p. 24). As early as 1573, the Tudor regime had issued an edict criminalizing the possession of Catholic books.
Confiscated Catholic literature was carefully read and examined by Richard Topcliffe for any passages that could be used as capital evidence against the writer, the publisher or the owner of the book. In some cases, he highlighted his discovery of such passages with a most chilling “nota bene” in the form of a hand-sketched gallows.
On July 17, 1582, Topcliffe closed in upon the source of the Harpsfield paper trail, raiding a London almshouse at the end of Hart Street, the home of William Carter, his wife Agnes, and his mother. Topcliffe’s prize find of the day was the original manuscript of Gregory Martin’s work, A Treatise of Schism; Showing that All Catholics ought in Any Wise to Abstain Altogether from Heretical Conventicles (1578). This manuscript served as material evidence that Carter was the actual publisher of the printed copies of this work also found in his possession.
Poring over the text in one of the printed copies, Topcliffe grew excited over a passage in which Martin exhorts Catholic laywomen to see in the Old Testament figure of Judith a role model, in that just as this faithful Israelite woman defeated the evil Holofernes in beheading him (Judith 13:6-8), so too should they defeat heresy by their constancy. Martin’s comparison was simply a metaphor, and in publishing Martin’s book Carter took this passage to be so, but Topcliffe read into the words a thinly veiled call for the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I. In the margin Topcliffe drew a sinister sketch of his accusing finger pointing to what he intended to make Carter’s death sentence.
Propagandists for the Elizabethan regime tried to justify its policy of torturing Catholic prisoners with the excuse of combatting political treason, denying that Catholics undergoing the rack were questioned about religious issues. In his 1584 work, A True, Sincere and Modest Defence of English Catholics that Suffer for Their Faith, the emigre English Catholic prelate William Cardinal Allen refutes this lame excuse by citing the numerous instances of Catholics being questioned under torture about their faith. It is from Cardinal Allen that we learn what William Carter suffered in this regard following his July 1582 arrest:
“The said young man Carter . . . was examined upon the rack, upon what gentlemen or Catholic ladies he had bestowed or intended to bestow certain books of prayers and spiritual exercises and meditations which he had in his custody” (William Cardinal Allen, A True, Sincere and Modest Defence of English Catholics that Suffer for Their Faith both at Home and Abroad, St. Louis, MO, Herder, and London, Manresa Press, 1914, volume 1, p. 22).
Indeed, most of Carter’s publishing output was devotional in nature, including The Following of Christ (c. 1575), an edition of Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, and the earliest printed edition of St. John Fisher’s A Spiritual Consolation (1578), a series of meditations written by the martyred bishop while a prisoner in the Tower of London. Carter also published guides for Confession (c. 1577) and recitation of the rosary (1579). He cleverly printed his books in very small formats (“octavo” size, the equivalent of a modern very small paperback book), almost half of which could be classified as miniature books, designed for facile concealment within one’s clothing or inside other books, a practical necessity for persecuted Catholic readers.
When at length Carter was put on trial at London’s “Old Bailey” courthouse on January 10, 1584, it was to be Topcliffe’s accusation regarding the reference to Judith in Martin’s Treatise of Schism that the prosecution would use as its “proof text” for the condemnation of the defendant. Turning to the text Carter published, the innocent and admirable purpose of its author Gregory Martin is plain to see. Martin is presenting a series of examples from the Old Testament to steel Catholics in their resolve to resist conformity to the state-imposed religion, to resist commingling with heretics and schismatics, to resist the blandishments of false friends and the deceptive words of unfaithful Catholics, to steer clear of heretical houses of worship. Noting that when the prophet Elijah complained of suffering isolation for his adherence to the Commandments of God, declaring, “I alone am left,” God assured him that He had kept for Himself a faithful few (Romans 11:2-5, citing 1 Kings 19:10,14,18), Martin observes:
“Such are these few good Catholics, which either beyond the seas or at home seek [look] to the Catholic Church. They shall have Tobias’ blessing, an angel to direct them in all their doings, and the king Sennacherib [i.e., the devil] shall (in spite of his teeth) not hurt them” (Gregory Martin, A Treatise of Schisme, [false imprint:] Douai, John Fowler [actual imprint: London, William Carter], 1578, sigs. D.i v-D.ii r).
It is immediately after this comparison that Martin speaks of Judith:
“Judith followeth, whose godly and constant wisdom if our Catholic gentlewomen would follow, they might destroy Holofernes, the master heretic [i.e., the devil], and amass all his retinue, and never defile their religion by communicating with them in any final point….Her constancy (a wonderful thing to tell) was the very means afterward, whereby she carried away his head safely. . . . And surely one constant Judith shall easily make many like servants, a thing much to be wished, for the Catholic bringing up of young gentlewomen, who otherwise are in danger of Holofernes, and his ungracious ministers” (ibid., sig. D.ii r-v).
There is no mistaking Martin’s intent, to present Judith as yet another example of why English Catholics should remain steadfast in refusing conformity to state-imposed Protestantism; that just as Judith defeated Holofernes ultimately by her constancy in refusing to disobey the Commandments of God, so too, Catholic women should imitate Judith’s constancy by refusing to partake of Protestant worship.

Drawing And Quartering

It was ludicrous for Topcliffe to insinuate from this that Martin was summoning the Catholic women of England to murder Elizabeth. But of course the prosecution wasn’t interested in getting to the truth of the matter. The state was determined to make out of the publisher of Martin’s book a chilling example of what it was prepared to do to silence the Catholic underground presses. In the face of this baseless charge, Carter replied in court:
“Your words, my Lord, are more a sentence than a summing up and seem to have influenced the minds of the jury to condemn me. I accept whatever God sees fit for them to decide. The day will come when all shall be made clear before the Divine Judge as to me, and the jury and everyone else” (quoted in T.A. Birrell, “William Carter (c. 1549-84): Recusant Printer, Publisher, Binder, Stationer, Scribe — and Martyr,” Recusant History, volume 28, n. 1, May 2006, p. 30).
Carter was condemned to the particular manner of execution the Tudor regime reserved for the Catholics it hated most: death by drawing and quartering. Carter’s own battle for the truth concluded with his death on January 11, 1584. It is for us living in January 2021 to continue that battle.