“Great weights, often hang on little wires.”
—Francis Bacon

Poem
By
Robert Southwell 1
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.

Richard Topcliffe (1532–1604) a landowner and Member of Parliament during the reign of Elizabeth I., was a representative of the ancient family of Topcliffe, of Somerby in Lincolnshire. A visitation of that County, made in 1592, informs us that he was the eldest son of Robert Topcliffe of Somerby, by Margaret, one of the daughters of Thomas Lord Borough, 2 that he married Jane, daughter of Sir Edward Willoughby, of Wollaton in Nottinghamshire; and had issue Charles, his son and heir; three sons, successively named John, who probably died infants, and a daughter, Susannah. He was probably the Richard Topcliffe who was admitted student of Gray’s Inn in 1548. 3

It has been assumed that he was also the Richard Topcliffe who, after being matriculated as a pensioner of Magdalene College, Cambridge, in November 1565, proceeded B.A. in 1568–69, and commenced M.A. in 1575. 4 He was a cousin to Sir Edmund Brudenell’s wife. In 1572, he was described as ‘the Queen’s servant’ and had as two years earlier a suit to the Queen,

“For grant of the lands and possessions lately belonging to old Rich. Norton, the rebel; n.32: Memorandum of the value of the lands per ann. Belonging to old Ric. Norton, for which Richard Topclyffe is a suitor.” 5

Topcliffizare Video

Topcliffe represented Beverley in the Parliament, which met on May 8, 1572 and was returned for Old Sarum to the Parliament of October 20, 1586. After the collapse of the northern rebellion he was a suitor for the lands of Richard Norton (1488?–1588) of Norton Conyers, Yorkshire. In 1584 a dispute began between Topcliffe and the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Christopher Wray, about his claim to the lay impropriation of the prebend of Corringham and Stow in Lincoln Cathedral.

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 Elizabeth. 6 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.

Sir Francis Walsingham
(d.1590)

The writer of an account of the apprehension of the Jesuit Robert Southwell, 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, Topcliffe 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. 7 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. 8

Great indignation was excited, even among the Protestants, and so loud and severe were the complaints to the Privy Council that Burghley, 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 and Henry Garnett were put to the test of the Topcliffe rack.

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. A facsimile of a curious pedigree of the Fitzherbert family compiled by Topcliffe for the information of the Privy Council is given in Foley’s Records. 9

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). 10,11 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.” 12

Topcliffe was reputed to have a vehement temper and it is appropriate to add this man’s atrocious actions towards the priests who took the Oath of Supremacy in the reign of Elizabeth I., 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 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 Burghley to create a stronger sectarian feeling than any already in existence. The conduct of Nicholas Bacon in this affair was that of an undisguised partisan. Such discussions seldom ended in convincing any party. (Burke). 13

But returning to Topcliffe, who harboured a fanatic hatred for Catholics and the Roman Catholic Church, 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 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 that interrogation.

Sir Anthony Standen, too, praising the Earl of Essex’s agreeable manners in a letter to 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, where we see that he 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.” 14

Amongst the ladies racked and maltreated by Topcliffe and his accomplice, Young, was Mrs. Wyseman, who laid in prison till the accession of James; the penalty for celebrating Mass at this period was a fine of 200 marks, and imprisonment; at another time priests were hanged upon the evidence of one witness, who swore that he saw them celebrating Mass, although the said informer could not distinguish between the Mass and any other Catholic ceremony. 15 To the surroundings of where Topcliffe employed his tortures will be discussed fully in section 4. Topcliffe died in November or December, 1604 in his bed at the age of about seventy-two.