Tregian's Ground by Anne Cuneo

Author:Anne Cuneo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary fiction, literary fiction, novel, historical novel, translation, French, Anne Cuneo, Switzerland, Francis Tregian, recusant, Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, Tregian the elder, Tregian the younger, Cornwall, Clerkenwell’ Catholicism, religious dissident, Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth I, Elizabethan era, Claudio Monteverde, Monteverdi, William Cecil, Henri IV, virginals, early modern music, partitions, copyist, keyboard music, harpsichord, Renaissance, Baroque, Cardinal William Allen, Fleet Prison, St Bride’s Church, Trajet d’une rivière, Der Lauf des Flusses, Prix des Libraires, Prix litteraire Madame Europe, Station Victoria, Hilary Mantel, Tracy Chevalier, Alison Weir, AS Byatt
Publisher: And Other Stories Publishing
Published: 2016-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

With some relief, I quickly realised, from our acquaintances, that while the Dutch are a deeply religious people, and while religion is omnipresent in everyday life, and although Holland is officially a Protestant country, Catholics are generally accepted at all levels of society. Discretion is all that is required.

When I first arrived, the Jesuits were the only Catholics excluded from holding positions of public service. Catholics could not be schoolmasters either, because anyone holding that position had to profess the reformed faith. We were free, however, to attend the universities, especially Leyden, where students were not required to take an oath of allegiance to the Calvinist religion.

I know that nowadays in Holland, the Mass may only be said in private. Catholic churches are not clandestine but they are concealed within private houses and nothing hints at their presence. In my day, there were still Catholic churches on some streets, and no one was bothered by our habits of prayer, provided we refrained from noisy, public manifestations of piety. We Catholics paid slightly higher taxes than the Protestants, but the country was entirely tolerant, on both sides: the Catholic curates were civil when the bailiffs visited to collect their taxes. I always offered our bailiff something to drink, and he always dandled young Francis on his knee, for he loved children.

There were Catholics in almost every profession and they were especially numerous in some regions – the textile workers in Leyden, for example, as I had occasion to notice, or near the southern border, where some would send their children to study in Brussels (in the Spanish territories) despite the ban on this. But in all my time in Holland, no one was ever punished or arrested for it.

The important thing was to respect the forms and rites of one’s own religion. The ecclesiastical authorities of all faiths would strike unhesitatingly at what they saw as lost sheep: people who did not conform to religious rule, who proclaimed their lack of faith or abstained from the observances of their church. In such cases, the Church – any Church – meted out harsh punishment, under the approving gaze of the followers of other faiths. But conform to the rules, and you were allowed complete freedom.

The Catholic curates reproached the Calvinists under their breath, and the devout Puritan pastors railed aloud against the idolatry of the papists, thundering accusations against the exorcists, whom they saw as the disguised agents of the most backward Catholic propaganda. People would wait outside each other’s churches to mock the practices of the other faith. Even I was ridiculed in this way by one of my neighbours, but when I asked him why, he replied jovially, pouring me a drink:

‘It’s done in good jest. Your servants do the same with mine – and sticks and stones may break my bones, as the saying goes, but words will never hurt me.’

The Protestant sermons criticised Rome freely and openly (I went to listen, for, provided it was not taken as

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