Preserving the World's Rarest BooksUnderground Catholic Printing in Elizabethan England: The Case of William Carter

From 1559, the year after Elizabeth I acceded to the English throne, Catholicism was proscribed in England. The Act of Supremacy established Elizabeth’s supreme governorship over the re-founded Church of England and, perhaps more significantly for English Catholics, the Act of Uniformity required regular attendance at Protestant services. With the re-protestantisation of England and her church, the attack and prohibition of Catholic or ‘popish’ books was one of the major ways in which the Elizabethan regime suppressed Catholic dissent and religious non-conformity. Books were dangerous because they acted as conduits for the spread of 'seditious' and 'treasonous' ideas, often being printed in small formats to make them easier to transport and conceal. Although many Catholics continued to use older, pre-Elizabethan mass books, missals, breviaries and Books of Hours, new Catholic literature was being produced in great volumes, some by underground printers in England.

One such printer was William Carter (c.1548-1584). Born in London, in 1563 he was for ten years apprenticed to John Cawood, Elizabeth’s printer, before establishing a secret Catholic press on Tower Hill. A recusant, he was committed to the Gatehouse in December 1579 for nonconformity but was released in 1581. Bishop Aylmer of London wrote to Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s chief advisor, in the early 1580s:

This refers to John Leslie’s A Treatise Towching the Right, Title and Interest of the Most Excellent Princesse Marie (Rouen, 1584, USTC 203077). During another raid on Carter’s house, more books were discovered. These included The Life of Sir Thomas More by Nicholas Harpsfield, ‘a form of covert answering to the [Bloody] Question whether a Catholike with a safe conscience may render to hur Ma[jes]tie any obedience’, and multiple copies of Gregory Martin’s Treatise of Schism (1578, USTC 508615). The latter book is of especial interest here. Martin was an English priest, known particularly for his role in translating the first official English Catholic New Testament in 1582 (based on the Vulgate; USTC 156842). His Treatise argued in favour of recusancy against Catholic conformity. This work circulated widely in England, to the frustration of the Elizabethan authorities. Thomas Norton, the government official who raided Carter’s home, claimed that:

In the Bodleian, a copy of Gregory Martin’s Treatise contains a small note written by Richard Topcliffe, the infamous Elizabethan ‘priest-hunter’, which states that the book ‘was fownde at Wm Carter’s... howse at Tower hill with the origenall Copy send from Rhemes allowed under Doctor Allens owne hande’. Carter, Topcliffe claimed, ‘hathe confessed he hathe printed of theis bookes 1250’. At the Huntington Library, we see another Topcliffe annotated Catholic work, this one being William Allen’s 1584 tract A true, sincere, and modest defence of English Catholiques. At the top of the title page, he calls it ‘A false, sedicuous, & imodest offence sett out by Englishe Traitors abroade & sume at home.’ Being convicted of harbouring priests and spreading Catholic ideas through print, Carter was executed in 1584.

Other works printed by Carter include Certayne devout meditations very necessary for Christian men devoutly to meditate upon...concerning Christ his lyfe and passion (1576, USTC 508149) by Peter Canisius, Thomas à Kempis’ Imitatio Christi in 1575 (USTC 508092), John Fisher’s A spirituall consolation in 1578 (USTC 508545), and several works by Counter-Reformation thinker Gaspar de Loarte, whose translated works were also popular (for example, USTCs 513427, 508816 and 508203). A mixture of medieval classics and more recent Tridentine works were being secretly printed by Carter and disseminated to English Catholics in underground networks to evade authorities. It was especially significant that these works were English translations, which could reach a wider readership base.

Carter also made use of false imprints, something covert printers had been doing in England since the early evangelicals under Henry VIII. In 1576 he published A breefe directory, and playne way howe to say the rosary, which claimed it was printed in Bruges. Likewise, works by Gregory Martin (USTCs 508615, 442751), Jean d’Albin de Calsergues (USTC 442748), and Peter Canisius (USTCs 442752, 508682), all contained false imprints. This was an important tactic Catholic printers used to evade official surveillance and print secretly in England.