The Queen Consort and the imprisoned courtier: the burden of conversion

Abstract

“Well, wife” if you cannot live without this Catholic piety “do your best to keep things as quiet as possible; for, if you don’t, our crown is in danger”. Practice artifice – maintain secrecy.
He would not gain his liberty by offending God, “he would prefer that his soul should be torn from his body
rather than his body should be released on such terms”. Profess and proselytize a truth – lose liberty.
The concepts of truth and artifice and how they were perceived and utilized by people in sixteenth and seventeenth century England, the post Protestant Reformation era, could mean the difference between a life of imprisonment or a life of secrecy; it would mean the difference between life and death for many. My narrative tells two stories of conversion to the Catholic faith, in a place, and during a time, when Catholicism was considered heretical and its open practice punishable by unusual penalties, imprisonment, exile, or death.
Proselytizing the truth would see a wealthy land owner and courtier of the Elizabethan royal court, one Thomas Pounde, Esquire, imprisoned for 30years, while the clever practice of artifice would ensure that a queen, Anne of Denmark, Queen Consort of King James the First of England, retained her crown and her head. Both were converts to Catholicism and their lives intersected but briefly. However, evidence can suggest that the Queen’s intercession aided in the prisoner gaining a conditional liberty in 1604. Pounde lived a life of suffering and deprivation abandoning his wealth, a gay and advantageous life, and a law career, to profess the “true religion” and proselytize his new found Catholic faith. He was imprisoned and/or outcast between 1571 and 1613. Anne of Denmark, the first Stuart Queen Consort of England, lived a life of masquerade with the appearance of frivolity interspersed with manic behaviour. She suffered ill-health and sadness, but artfully found ways to express her Queenship and her Catholic piety within the bounds of the severely restrictive patriarchal and Protestant environment of early seventeenth century England between 1603 and 1619.