Building the Badge of God: Architectural Representations of Persecution and Coexistence in Post-Reformation England* By Susan M. Cogan In the 1590s, Sir Thomas Tresham, a Catholic gentleman in Protestant England, built a rabbit warrener’s lodge that emblematized his perceptions of religious persecution and his efforts to coexist with his Protestant peers and neighbors. The triangular-shaped lodge has long been recognized as an expression of Tre- sham’s Trinitarian religious beliefs and, for some observers, an indication of an eccentric mind. But the Trinity is only one layer of the symbolic meaning of this structure. The footprint and roofline of the building indicate that Tresham in- tended the lodge as a manifestation of the scutum fidei, literally the “shield of faith” but understood during this period as the “shield of the Trinity” and the armorial Badge of God. 1 Building with Trinitarian imagery was not in itself a Catholic gesture. The Trinity, after all, belonged to post-Reformation Protestants and Catholics alike. 2 Yet by creating a specific landscape within which to situate his building, Tresham infused the structure and the surrounding landscape with a powerful religious message. For Tresham, the Warrener’s Lodge represented the Triune God standing guard as watchful protector over his flock of persecuted Catholics, represented by the rabbits in the warren that surrounded the struc- ture. It was simultaneously an expression of the persecution to which he felt subjected and an attempt to coexist with his Protestant neighbors. * Abbreviatons: BL: British Library, London. – TNA: The National Archives, Kew. – HMCV: Historical Manuscripts Commission Report on Manuscripts in Various Collections III, London 1904. – STC 2nd ed.: Short Title Catalogue. 1. Michael Evans, “An Illustrated Fragment of Peraldus’s Summa of Vice: Harleian MS 3244,” in: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982), pp. 14–68; John Gage, Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism, Berkeley, Los Angeles 1999, p. 124; Heidi J. Hornik, Mikeal C. Parsons, “The Feast of Pentecost and Trinity Sunday: Liturgical Art in Con- text,” in: Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 66.1 (2012), pp. 64–66. 2. John Thorpe, a sixteenth-century architect, drew the scutum fidei in the center of his architectural rendering of Sir Thomas Gorges’s Longford Castle in Kent, but the connection seems to be Thorpe’s and not Gorges’s. There is as yet no indication that Gorges intended Longford as a representation of the scutum fidei. John Summerson (ed.), The Book of Architec- ture of John Thorpe in Sir John Soane’s Museum, Walpole Society 40, Glasgow 1966, Plate 72. Brought to you by | McMaster University Authenticated Download Date | 9/28/19 3:02 PM