Recusancy, Festivity and Community: The Simpsons at Gowlthwaite Hall

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This essay analyses one well-known incident of Romanist cultural activity in Jacobean England for the insight it can provide into the nature of the English Catholic community in the early seventeenth century. In the Christmas holidays of 1609, a group of recusant players named the Simpsons performed a play and an interlude with Catholic overtones at Gowlthwaite Hall in Nidderdale, Yorkshire, the home of Sir John Yorke. Yorke was later charged in the Star Chamber with complicity in the Gunpowder Plot, harbouring John Gerard and other priests, and hosting a seditious interlude. The extensive records in this case, though already well mined by literary and social historians, have yet to be examined in the light of recent reconsiderations of Roman Catholicism’s place in the cultural geography of early modern England. In this context, the records become newly significant as an important window into the gentry-based Catholic culture of the North described in the work of J.H.A. Aveling and John Bossy. The case’s prosecutorial history illuminates the true legal vulnerability of these Yorkshire Catholics, suggesting the need to reconsider the belief that the Jacobean stance toward Catholic nonconformists was essentially tolerant. More elaborately, the case suggests that secular revels were used as part of a concerted contemporary effort to re-create a sense of Catholic community–an effort certainly joined by Sir John Yorke, and possibly by other local Catholics and the priests they intermittently harboured. Though the case cannot be taken as representative, then, it can still offer both an intriguing snapshot of an elusive and poorly documented world, and caveats to larger critical claims about the nature of English Catholicisms’ relationship with mainstream culture.