A landowner and Member of Parliament, he became notorious as the government's chief enforcer of the penal laws against the practice of Catholicism.
[clarification needed] As an independent, self-financed operator with his own squadron of "instruments" as he called them, he worked with both Burghley and Walsingham under commission from the Privy Council, and was on very good terms with them both, though he always considered himself the Queen's personal servant and friend.
Exiled Catholic intelligencer Richard Verstegan regularly reported on Topcliffe's activities, condemning him "whose inhuman cruelty is so great, as he will not spare to extend any torture whatsoever".
[3] His favourite method (which he may have introduced) was to hang a prisoner by the hands in the gauntlets or manacles, a procedure which, though exquisitely painful, left no permanent injury if properly administered.
Having seen his prisoners through to trial and condemnation, he would then attend the executions as a kind of master of the ceremonies, usually putting up a notice or titulus on the gallows indicating the sufferer's name and offence, and making sure that the full rigours of the sentence — hanging, drawing, and quartering while still alive for those convicted of treason — were carried out.
The British literary critic Frank Kermode notes in The Age of Shakespeare that "Topcliffe's copy of a history of the Jesuit mission survives, with his gloating marginalia: beside the name of a missionary the words ‘I racked him,’ beside the name of someone hanged a little stick figure dangling from a gallows.”[4] Unfortunately, Kermode's reference cannot be verified, though Topcliffe, whose official police career began with the searching out of Catholic books, was fond of annotating the books he confiscated and kept.
In August 1597, the Council commissioned Topcliffe to investigate the play by Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe, The Isle of Dogs, which upset the authorities so badly.
[7] Fortunately for Jonson, by then Topcliffe's general commission had been withdrawn, and his power much curtailed, though he never lost favour with the Queen and the Cecils.
Topcliffe is portrayed by Ewen Bremner in the 2017 American television series Will, a fictional look at the life of young William Shakespeare.
Come Rope!, in which the Topcliffe character pursues and ultimately executes several priests, including Edmund Campion and the protagonist of the novel, Robin Audrey.
[9] In Modern literature in Irish, Topcliffe is fictionalised as the malevolent priest hunter Elias Creepe in Liam Mac Cóil's 2014 prizewinning novel I dTír Strainséartha (In a Strange Land).
The morrow after Simon and Jude's day I was hanged at the wall from the ground, my manacles fast locked into a staple as high as I could reach upon a stool: the stool taken away where I hanged from a little after 8 o'clock in the morning till after 4 in the afternoon, without any ease or comfort at all, saving that Topcliffe came in and told me that the Spaniards were come into Southwark by our means: "For lo, do you not hear the drums" (for then the drums played in honour of the Lord Mayor).
The next day after also I was hanged up an hour or two: such is the malicious minds of our adversaries.—Saint Eustace White, S.J., written to Father Henry Garnet from prison.