Methods

Walsingham tracked down Catholic priests in England and supposed conspirators by employing informers and intercepting correspondence.^[8] Shortly before setting off for England, Edmund Campion learned that a letter detailing their party and mission had been intercepted and that they were expected in England.^[9] It was a common practice for a spy to pose as a Catholic and engage a suspect in conversation in the hope of eliciting an incriminating statement. This technique led to the arrest and execution of Richard Simpson in 1588.^[10]

Apostate Catholics and former priests and seminarians were particularly helpful in this regard. A London priest hunter named Sledd had been a servant to Dr Nicholas Morton at the English College in Rome. After George Haydock had been betrayed to Sledd by one of Haydock's old acquaintances, Sledd went to the house where Haydock took his meals, and recognized the priest Arthur Pitts and law student William Jenneson.^[11]

George Eliot

In early July 1581, John Payne, while staying on the estate of Lady Petre in Warwickshire, was denounced by informer George Eliot, a spy in the employ of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester. Eliot became a spy, agreeing to seek out recusant Catholics, in order to avoid a pending murder charge. He had insinuated himself into a position in the Petre household where he then proceeded to embezzle sums of money.^[12]

Eliot followed that success shortly thereafter with the capture of Edmund Campion, who had arrived in London on 24 June 1580 disguised as a jewel merchant. Eliot used his past experience working in a Catholic household to gain admittance to a Mass Campion was saying at Lyford Grange in Oxfordshire. Elliot then returned with an armed company and searched the house until they discovered the priest hole where Campion and two associates were hiding.

Wadsworth et al

They used a number of informants within Catholic communities. Starting in the 1640s, James Wadsworth, Francis Newton, Thomas Mayo, and Robert de Luke formed a partnership to hunt down Catholics in the London area and handed them over to the authorities for a reward.^[13] Between November 1640 and the summer of 1651 over fifty individuals were turned over to the government. Some were executed, some banished, and some reprieved.

Worsley (John) and Newell (William)

In 1592-3 they searched several houses in the Midlands, including Thomas Lygon's at Elkstone in Gloucestershire. On 26 December 1593 they searched the Wisemans' dower-house at Northend, and they led the famous search of Braddocks in April 1594 that John Gerard (Jesuit) describes in his autobiography, and arrested Gerard and Nicholas Owen in Holborn a few weeks later.

Elizabethan era

During the Elizabethan era in Dublin, Lord Justices Adam Loftus and Sir Henry Wallop took a leading role in coercing Thomas Fleming, 10th Baron Slane to carry out the arrest and delivery to Dublin Castle of Dermot O'Hurley, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Cashel.

Even though Archbishop O'Hurley revealed under interrogation that he was not involved in anything except his religious mission and that he had refused to carry letters from the Cardinal Protector of Ireland to the leaders of the Second Desmond Rebellion, Sir Francis Walsingham suggested he should be tortured. Loftus replied to Walsingham: "Not finding that easy method of examination do any good, we made command to Mr Waterhouse and Mr Secretary Fenton to put him to the torture, such as your honour advised us, which was to toast his feet against the fire with hot boots". Although the Irish judges repeatedly decided that there was no case against O'Hurley, on 19 June 1584 Loftus and Wallop wrote to Walsingham "We gave warrant to the knight-marshal to do execution upon him, which accordingly was performed, and thereby the realm rid of a most pestilent member".^[15][16]

The Restoration

Around 1680, persecution of Catholics heated up in reaction to Titus Oates' claims of a non-existent Catholic conspiracy aimed at assassinating King Charles II of England and massacring the Protestants of the British Isles. As a result, a Catholic priest named Fr. Mac Aidghalle was murdered while saying mass at a mass rock that still stands atop Slieve Gullion, in County Armagh. The perpetrators were a company of redcoats under the command of a priest hunter named Turner. Redmond O'Hanlon, the outlawed but de facto Chief of the Name of Clan O'Hanlon and leading local rapparee, is said in local oral tradition to have avenged the murdered priest and in so doing to have sealed his own fate.^[17]

The age of the Whig oligarchy

A 1709 Penal Act demanded that Catholic priests take the Oath of Abjuration, and recognise the Protestant Queen Anne as Supreme Head of the Church within all her dominions and declare that Catholic doctrine regarding Transubstantiation to be "base and idolatrous".^[18]

Priests who refused to take the oath abjuring the Catholic faith were arrested and executed. This activity, along with the deportation of priests who did conform, was a documented attempt to cause the Catholic clergy to die out in Ireland within a generation. Priests had to register with the local magistrates to be allowed to preach, and most did so. Bishops were not permitted to register.

Irish nationalist John Mitchel, a Presbyterian from County Londonderry, later wrote, "I know the spots, within my own part of Ireland, where venerable archbishops hid themselves, as it were, in a hole of the rock... Imagine a priest ordained at Seville or Salamanca, a gentleman of a high old name, a man of eloquence and genius, who has sustained disputations in the college halls on a question of literature or theology, and carried off prizes and crowns -- see him on the quays of Brest, bargaining with some skipper to work his passage... And he knows, too, that the end of it all, for him, may be a row of sugar canes to hoe under the blazing sun of Barbados. Yet he pushes eagerly to keep his fate; for he carries in his hands a sacred deposit, bears in his heart a holy message, and he must tell it or die. See him, at last, springing ashore, and hurrying on to seek his Bishop in some cave, or under some hedge -- but going with caution by reason of the priest catcher and the blood-hounds."^[19]

In 1713, the Irish House of Commons declared that "prosecution and informing against Papists was an honourable service", which revived the Elizabethan era profession of priest hunting.^[20] The reward rates for capture varied from £50–100 for a bishop, to £10–20 for the capture of an unregistered priest: substantial amounts of money at the time.

According to D.P. Conyngham, "The priest-hunters were now called into full activity, and for some thirty years pursued their lethal trade in full force. Each of these wretches had under him an infamous corps, called priest-hounds, whose duty was to track, with the untiring scent of the bloodhound, the humble priest from refuge to refuge. In cities and towns the Catholic clergy were concealed in cellars or garrets, and in the country districts they were hid in unfrequented caves, in the lonely woods, or in the huts of the Irish peasantry. De Burgo tells us that this persecution and hunting of priests was most bitter towards the close of Anne's reign and the commencement of George I; and he says that none would have escaped were it not for the horror in which priest-catchers were held by the people, Protestants as well as Catholics."^[21]

According to storyteller Seumas MacManus, "Throughout these dreadful centuries, too, the hunted priest -- who in his youth had been smuggled to the Continent of Europe to receive his training -- tended to the tended the flame of faith. He lurked like a thief among the hills. On Sundays and Feast Days he celebrated Mass at a rock, on a remote mountainside, while the congregation knelt on the heather of the hillside, under the open heavens. While he said Mass, faithful sentries watched from all the nearby hilltops, to give timely warning of the approaching priest-hunter and his guard of British soldiers. But sometimes the troops came on them unawares, and the Mass Rock was bespattered with his blood, -- and men, women, and children caught in the crime of worshipping God among the rocks, were frequently slaughtered on the mountainside."^[22]

The work was dangerous, and some priests fought back, as Fr. David Burke of County Mayo did against John O'Mullowney, and killed priest hunters in self-defence. Another risk for priest hunters was revenge killings by slain priests' relatives.^[23] The hunters were outcasts in their communities, and were viewed as the most despised class. Often when someone arrested or killed a priest, local rapparees would retaliate by assassinating a British soldier or even the priest hunter.

For example, in the Slieve Beagh mountains of County Monaghan, a large Celtic cross now tops a Mass rock known as Leacht a 'tSagairt ("The Priest's Flagstone"). The cross is said in the local oral tradition to mark where a priest hunter shot a Fr. McKenna while he was saying Mass there on Christmas Day, c. 1754. The priest hunter was assassinated soon afterwards in nearby Emyvale by local rapparee leader and folk hero Shane Bernagh.^[24]

O'Mullowney, of Derrew in the Partry Mountains of County Mayo was perhaps the most notorious. He was an alcoholic and horse thief who took up the profession in return for a pardon from the hangman's noose, c. 1715. In 1726, he was killed by Fr. David Burke, a priest he was pursuing, and his body was thrown in a lake; it was recovered and buried at Ballintubber Abbey.^[25]

Even if they could not kill the priest hunter, local Irish Catholics even would seek revenge by burning down his house and farmyard. The risks were the same for known informants.

The distribution of priest hunters was uneven; some local police forces chose to overlook both the presence of priests and their activity at Mass rocks.

The penal law imposed outlawry upon the remaining clerics, and they were forced to say Mass in secret, and in remote locations. High-risk worship at Mass rocks became common. The attending priest would usually wear a veil, so that if an attendee was questioned, they were able to say truthfully that they did not know who had said the Mass.

According to Tony Nugent, the last killing of a priest at a Mass rock took place at Inse an tSagairt, near Bonane, County Kerry in the year 1829. A local woman, who ran a shebeen at Glengarriff, reputedly conspired with five local men to kill the priest and split the £45 bounty among themselves. After capturing the priest during Mass, beheading him inside a house at Killowen near Kenmare, and bringing his severed head to Cork City, the six conspirators learned that Catholic Emancipation had just been signed into law and that no reward would be given. In frustration, the six priest hunters threw the severed head into the River Lee.^[26]