CELEBRATION 800

The Story of Catherine Cauchés and her Daughters

On May 27th, 1556, a woman called Vincente Gosset was brought before Hellier Gosselin, Bailiff, and the Jurats, accused of having stolen a silver cup from the house of Nicholas le Couronnez, of St. Peter-Port. She had then taken the cup to a neighbour called Perotine Massey, and asked her to lend her (6d.) on it. Perotine, suspecting the cup to be stolen, and guessing the owner, reported the theft to Le Couronnez, and Gosset confessed to the said theft. But Nicholas Carey, as the Constable of the town, when he went to Perotine's house on this matter, saw some pewter vessels there of which he doubted the ownership, so there upon hauled all the denizens of the house, Perotine herself, Catherine Cauchés, her mother, and Guillemine Guilbert, her sister, off to the prison in Castle Cornet while the case was being investigated.

The personalities of these women are obscured by the immemorial local practice of invariably speaking of married women by their maiden names. Catherine Cauchés then a widow, was a daughter of Pierre Cauchés, of St. Martin's; a relative of hers, Anthony Cauchés, had been Rector of St. Anne's, Alderney, and was only succeeded by Pierre Herivel in 1550; and she undoubtedly one of the family after whom the Rue Cauchés - running from the bottom of the Merriennes Hill to the Forest Road - was called. She had evidently been twice married, once to a man called Guilbert, father of Guillemine Guilbert, and again to one of the family of Massey, who at the time held much land in St. Saviour's parish. His daughter, Perotine Massey, was herself a married woman, for in the previous reign she had married one David Jores, a Norman Protestant schoolmaster ( also a minister) and refugee, at the Castel Church, the ceremony having been performed by Monsieur Noel Regnet, one of the French pastors who had supplanted the original Catholic priests in the Guernsey Churches, and whom we have seen was banished for disloyalty in 1554. At the time of the trial Jores was in London; probably he had fled the island owing to the increase of the severity of our laws both against aliens and against heretics.

The three women having been cast into prison were brought before an "enqueste" on the 5th June, 1556, and by the testimony of the neighbours before the Crown Officers, it appeared that they had always lived honest, respectable lives, and were deemed incapable of theft. This record of the neighbours' verdict is a valuable proof that the old "enqueste" du pays" was still in use in the island in criminal cases. It was a survival of the Normal of peers (i.e. equals), a jury supposed to have a knowledge of the facts of the case, and was held informally before the Crown Officers or the Justices of Assize, and only the "raport" of the evidence was produced at the regular trial before the Bailiff and Jurats.

On July 1st, 1556, the other prisoner, Vincente Gosset, was proved guilty of larceny and condemned as the barbarous custom then was, to be whipped all round the town and at the carrefours, which were the "Grand Carrefour" at the junction of the High Street, Smith Street and the Pollet, and the "Petit Carrefour" at the junction of Mill Street, Foundation Street, and the Bordage. After this unfortunate woman was taken to the pillory - which was where the Victoria Hotel ( now Woolworths) now stands - to which one of her ears were nailed. When she was torn away from it she was further ordered to be banished from the island and "d'estre myse soubs le pleine de Mars." This meant that she was taken to the shore to the furthest limit reached by the highest springtide of the year - the March tide - and there would have to wait for a passing ship bound either for England or Jersey to take her off, maimed and destitute - for all her goods were confiscated by the Crown - to start life again in a strange land.

Here, according to all modern procedure, by the condemnation of Gosset, and the acquittal of the charge made against Catherine Cauchés and her daughters, the case should have ended. But unfortunately, the neighbours, while declaring them "not guille of that they were charged with," added "saving only to the commands of Holy Church they had not been obedient." And thus, on the entirely new issue of their non-attendance at Church they were handed over by the Bailiff and Jurats to the Dean and the Ecclesiastical Court to deal with.

The Dean, the last of the Roman Catholic Deans in our history, was a Jerseyman, Jacques Amy, son of Jean Amy, senior, of the Rue de Grouville, in Jersey. Ordained by the Bishop of Catholic Priest in 1525, he was nominated Rector of St. Saviour's, Guernsey, in succession to Sire Pierre Careye on the 19th September, 1547, and, three weeks later, on the recommendation of Sir Peter Mewtis , the Governor, he was made Dean of Guernsey. He evidently had either openly connived or passively acquiesced in the Protestant reforms and persecutions of the six years, 1547 to 1553 of Edwards VI.'s reign, and he must have been considered doubtful not only by our bigoted new Governor, Sir Leonard Chamberlain, but by the Bishop of Coutances himself, who probably was making enquires as to what his Dean had done to maintain the true faith in Guernsey during the late apostasy. So he and his clergy evidently jumped at the opportunity not only of "getting their own back," but of proving their zeal and fervour to their ecclesiastical superiors. Consequently, although the three women when brought before the Ecclesiacal Court - which then sat above the N.E. aisle of the Town Church - "being examined of their faith concerning the bordinals of the Romish Church" replied "that they would obey and keep the ordnances of the King and Queen (Philip and Mary) and the Commandments of the Church, not withstanding that they had said and fore the contrary in the time of King Edward the 6th in showing obedience to his ordnances and commandments ." Yet, by the Dean's orders, their submission was of no avil and they were returned again to prison. Again they were brought before the Dean and his colleagues, and this time they were examined separately as to their beliefs; after which they were again returned to prison and, on July 14th, 1556, the Dean, Jacques Amy, and four Rectors, namely, Jean Alles (Rector of the Forest), Pierre Tardif (Rector of St. Martin's), Guillaume Paquet (Rector of the Castel), and Jean Navetel (probably Rector of St. Andrew's), wrote a Latin document record at the Greffe officially declared the accused guilty and heresy. Consequently on the following 19th of July, Hellier Gosselin, Bailiff, Thomas de Vic, Pierre Martin, Nicolas Careye, Jean Blondel, Nicolas de Lisle, Jean le Marchant, Jean Le Feyver, Pierre Bonamy, Nicholas Martin and Jean de la Marche ten out of the twelve jurats owing to this letter by which "ils ont estey aprouvez heretiques" condemned the three prisoners to be strangled and burnt that very day, with confiscation of all their goods to the Crown.

In justice to the Bailiff and Jurats we must remember that, as Sir Fredrick Pollock tells us, "according to the law of the Church the man convicted by the Ecclesiastical Authorities as a ... heretic was to be delivered over to the Secular power, who ... if he neglected to do what was implied to the bishop's sentence was liable to excommunication, while, if he persisted in his contumacy for a year, he himself was accounted a heretic."

It is difficult now to realise the horrors of an execution in those days callous as the men of the 16th century were to human suffering. The executioner, or, as he was then styled, "L'Exectioner des hautes oeuvres," was always a convicted criminal who had been induced to accept an unpopular office by promise of a free pardon. In 1556 Pierre Queripal was holder of this post "pour ses malfaicts et demerites." The prisoners were shipped from the wretched hole in Castle Cornet which was dignified by the name of a prison, and landed at the "Chaussee" for trial before the Royal Court. Old people have noted that this was the most striking scene in the whole tragedy. The dismal departure from the castle of the solitary boat in which the trembling wretches, under the charge of the sheriff, were rowed for the last time, in sight of a crowd of beholders who invariably congregated and lined the pier in awestruck silence, was followed by the pathetic lauding, where the King's officers were waiting in readiness with the Bordiers, carrying their official hallebards on iron pikes. These Bordiers were the owners of the fields liable to the service of Bordage. They had not only to escort criminals from prison to the Court House, but also to the place of punishment either the Cage, the Pillory, the Gibbet, or the Stake.

In this case, on leaving the Court the dismal procession will have filled up to Tower Hill, where there stakes were set up, the mother being placed in the middle. They were first strangled, but the rope broke before they were dead and they were cast out into the flames, and to Perotine Massey, in that raging furnace, a male child was born. He was picked out alive from the flames by a bystander the master gunner and surgeon "cannonier et cirugien" of the island called William House, and was brought by the Sheriff to the Bailiff, who said he was to be cast back into the flames. And by so saying has insured eternal infamy for his memory.

Harding, Father Parsons the Jesuit, and others have endeavoured to contradict these facts, but they are confirmed not only by the official records at the Greffe and the detailed trial report in Foxe's Book of Martyr's but the petition presented in 1562, to Her Majesty's Commissioners by Matthew Cauchés, brother to Catherine, embodying the above statements, gathered, as he says, "By the faithful relation both of French and English, of them which were then present, witnesses and lookers on;" pointing out that the verdict was due to "malicious hatred" by the Dean and his accomplices who had "illegally condemned his sister and his two nieces for heresy, they declaring all the time their innocence, and, moreover, the baby born of one of them being taken up and cast into the fire again, four being executed, though only three had been condemned."

LA 2002 Guernsey Museums Education Service (From Edith Carey's account of 16th Century Social History in Guernsey)