God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot

by Hogge, Alice

  The printers of Amsterdam, as they compiled their annual almanac for 1588, had predicted that late autumn would be lucky for some. So it had proved for John Gerard. The man in whose hands he had just placed his life was Edward Yelverton, one of the richest Catholics in Norfolk. That same evening Yelverton spirited Gerard out of Norwich and by Monday, 31 October the priest had gone to ground at Yelverton’s house at Grimston, 61/2 miles northeast of King’s Lynn. After forty-eight hours at large Gerard had reached a safe haven. His work, though, had only just begun. And with the events of the summer that work had become harder still.38

  The Spanish Armada had achieved what no amount of religious reforms and parliamentary legislation over the preceding decades had been able to do. It had united a fractured nation behind its unhappy compromise of a nationalized Church in opposition to the Catholic crusade. It had bound Anglicanism and Englishness together seemingly indissolubly. And it had transformed all those who could not bring themselves to accept this new Church of England into potential traitors, fifth columnists willing, in the rhetoric of a royal proclamation issued that July, ‘to betray their own natural country and most unnaturally to join with foreign enemies in the spoil and destruction of the same’. To be a Catholic in the year 1588 was to be an unnatural Englishman. It was to be worse than that still, as a story told by a fellow Jesuit illustrated. In late August, as many Catholics awaited execution for their alleged treachery, a ‘certain lady went to a man of importance asking him to use his influence that the death of one of the condemned might be delayed. The first question was whether the person whose cause she pleaded was guilty of murder. She replied that he had not been condemned for any such thing, but only for the Catholic religion. “Oh dear,” said the gentleman, “For his religion! If he had committed murder I should not have hesitated to comply with your request; but as it is a question of religion, I dare not interfere.”’ To the English in Armada year, even homicide was less of an evil than Catholicism.39

  And Gerard had come to join a covert mission, the first undertaking of which was to ask English Catholics to stand up and be counted, to demonstrate their faith by refusing to attend the Protestant Church, to identify themselves to a Government seeking to eradicate them as traitors. Small wonder then that in an England still reeling from the events of that year, in an England crying out for revenge, this task had acquired Herculean proportions.* 40

  Fourteen years earlier, though, for the first young English priests to embark upon this newly begun mission, their venture must have seemed no less a trial of strength. They might have been returning home to their family and friends, but at the same time they were entering an unfamiliar, hostile world: a beleaguered and suspicious England whose savagery had yet to be put to the test. And they were entering that world in secret, in disguise, in the very manner of the political secret agents their homeland believed them to be. Formidable, too, had been the challenge of establishing the mission at the start, of drawing together the dejected exiles from an Oxford University shattered by religious reforms, of schooling them in martyrdom and of dispatching them home in increasing numbers to face unknown perils.

  For his ninth task Hercules had only to steal the Amazon Queen’s belt—a gift she herself had been willing to grant him. John Gerard and his fellows were attempting to steal the souls of English men and women back to the Catholic Church, and to do so under the nose of the, perhaps, even more redoubtable English Queen. It was a labour that would come at a high price.

  * * *

  * Regiomontanus’s real name was Johan Muller, from Königsberg, now Kaliningrad, in Lithuania. He supplied Christopher Columbus with astronomical tables on his voyage across the Atlantic.

  * At the beginning of 1588 Dr John Harvey was commissioned by the Privy Council to write an academic pamphlet denouncing the accuracy of prophecies in general and Regiomontanus’s in particular.

  * Sixtus had said of Elizabeth ‘were she only a Catholic, she would be without her match, and we would esteem her highly’.

  * His flagship, the San Martin, reached the Spanish port of Santander on 21 September, with 180 of her crew dead from disease and starvation, another forty killed in battle and the rest so weak the ship had to be towed into dock. Only some seventy ships of the fleet returned.

  * In the context of this book the term ‘nationalism’ is not intended to convey any pre-occupation with English ethnic identity; rather, it is intended to convey the growing sense of English sovereignty at this period, in response to the fragmentation of Christendom and England’s loss of its European territories.

  * The Duke of Medina Sidonia’s sailing orders to his fleet confirmed that ‘the principal foundation and cause, that have moved the King his Majesty to make and continue this journey, hath been, and is, to serve God; and to return unto his church a great many of contrite souls, that are oppressed by the heretics, enemies to our holy catholic faith’.

  † The terms Catholic, Protestant and Anglican should be applied with a certain linguistic caution. Broadly, the word ‘Catholic’ was by now recognized to refer only to those followers of the Roman Church. The word ‘Protestant’ referred initially only to German church reformers, though by the late sixteenth century it had acquired a wider reference and was in use in England to describe followers of the State Church. English Protestantism, though, was a very different animal from its European counterparts. The word ‘Anglican’ seems first to have been used as a derogatory term by King James VI of Scotland in 1598. It was not until much later that it became synonymous with the Church of England and English Protestantism.

  * In 1585 Philip II had offered himself to Pope Sixtus V as the sword of the Catholic Church in the fight to reconcile England with Rome. Previously, French Catholics, led by the powerful Guise family, had planned a series of invasions, with the intention of deposing Elizabeth and replacing her with the half-French Mary, Queen of Scots (Mary’s mother was Mary of Guise). Mary was Elizabeth’s de facto heir apparent, although Elizabeth never acknowledged her as such.

  † Heretics, as defined by St Thomas (II-II: 11: 1) were those who, having professed the faith of Christ, then proceeded to corrupt it from within. They differed from Infidels who refused to believe in Christ at all, and from Apostates who renounced Christianity for another faith, or no faith altogether. The word heresy derives from the Greek word for choice.

  * Every detail of this landing is taken from an account of it written up afterwards by one of the two Jesuits, Father John Gerard.

  * The sheriff was the Crown’s chief executive officer in a county, in charge of keeping the peace, dispensing justice, and overseeing local elections.

  * He was arrested in a Paris brothel in 1587, though the precise nature of his crime remains unclear. He died in prison in 1590.

  † The 1586 Babington Plot was the last in a series of Catholic attempts to assassinate Elizabeth and free Mary, Queen of Scots in advance of a foreign invasion; it led to Mary’s execution. Anthony Babington, Gerard’s friend, appears to have been a man of more devotion than sense and how much the plot was the work of agents provocateurs remains ambiguous. Gilbert Gifford’s role is particularly questionable and most believe he was working for Walsingham from the start. Gerard’s father was also arrested for alleged complicity in the plot. He was released in October 1588.

  * The coastal counties had borne the brunt of the nation’s anxiety during the Armada conflict. Close watches had been kept throughout the summer months for spies, Spanish ships, and anything suspicious; now those same coastal watches were kept busy patrolling the countryside looking for vagabonds. The vagabonds in question were disbanded sailors and militiamen, laid off without their promised pay and in search of food and work. Since the Armada, an order had been issued that any vagabond ‘found with any manifest offence tending to stir troubles or rebellion…[was]…to be executed by martial law’.

  * The ‘pig-headed’ Catholic gentleman was almost certainly the Norfolk landowner Robert Downes, whose Melton esta
te lay just a mile west of Norwich. He was arrested in 1578 for his refusal to attend the Protestant Church. He lost his estates in Suffolk and Essex and in 1602 he surrendered most of his life interest in Melton to the Queen. He was still in Norwich gaol in 1598. He died in 1610.

  * Catholics believed that though they could not enter a Protestant church where divine services were held, the nave of a cathedral was part of the general precincts of the building and therefore not sacrosanct.

  * One eyewitness wrote of the vengeance taken against English Catholics following the Armada’s defeat: ‘When the danger of the war at sea was over, and the army conscripted upon land dispersed, our rulers turned their weapons from the foe abroad and plunged them into the bowels of their own nation. The hatred stored up against the Spaniards they are wreaking with a sort of bestial fury upon their own fellow citizens and subjects.’

  Two

  ‘If God himself on earth abode would make

  He Oxford sure would for his dwelling take.’

  (Sixteenth century)

  ON 10 DECEMBER 1566, eight years into the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and twenty years prior to John Gerard’s secret Norfolk landing, Magdalen College acquired a new tenant for its property at 3 Castle Street, standing in the shadow of Oxford Castle. The tenant’s name was Walter Owen. He was a twenty-six-year-old carpenter with a wife and young family. In time, all four sons from this family would join the mission to save English Catholicism. Two would die for it. One, in death, would hold in his hands the life of almost every Catholic involved in it. His name was Nicholas Owen.1

  Few facts are known about Nicholas Owen’s childhood: an approximate date of birth (some time between 1561 and 1564), a joinery apprenticeship (in February 1577) to Oxford’s William Conway, and the location of the Owen family’s house on Castle Street—little more. Across the road from this six-room, two-storey tenement stood the twelfth century parish church of St Peter-le-Bailey, a ‘very old little church and odd’. Four doors to the left of the house was 7 Castle Street, called Billing Hall or the Redcock. Here, in 1298, it was said a clerk had caused the Devil to appear. A few yards to the right of the house were the butchers’ shambles, a row of shops in the middle of the newly paved Great Bailey Street. Here, the blood and offal spilt from the freshly killed carcasses coursed over the gravel and into the drainage channel running down the centre of the road. Heaven, hell and the stench of blood: Nicholas Owen was raised within the axis of all three.2

  Further still to the left, high up on the hill, stood the tall tensided keep of Oxford Castle, its walls as thick as a man was tall. Within that keep there stood another, its walls only slightly less thick, and inside that there was the well chamber, with a well shaft so deep you could not fathom the bottom of it. Walls within walls, chambers within chambers: Oxford Castle would provide plenty of inspiration for Nicholas Owen in his later life. Beyond the keep there lay the castle gaol and next to the castle gaol there stood the gallows.3

  The castle was in a ruinous state by the time of Owen’s birth: the seat of Oxford’s civic power had long ago shifted to the city’s Council Chambers. But beyond the parish of St Peter-le-Bailey, to its west, lay evidence of a more recent power-shift still. Here were the remains of Oseney Abbey, lately Oxford’s cathedral. All that was left of it were the church walls, the dovecote and the outbuildings; the rest of the stone had been stripped from the site and carried over to the construction works at Christ Church College. Further to the south a similar process was at work as the Franciscan and Dominican friaries were dismantled piece by piece by city speculators and sold off to make new townhouses.4

  The landscape of England was being re-drawn. The castles and manor houses of the old feudal aristocracy had shared their domination of the English countryside with the spires and steeples of the abbeys, priories and monasteries. They had stamped their authority on the public consciousness by the sheer scale of their physical presence. But both aristocrats and abbots had found themselves systematically stripped of that authority in Tudor England. And all those who had bowed to the seigniority of Nobility and Church, who had prospered under it or were sheltered by it, were left shivering in the brisk winds of change.

  This was the birth of modern England, with a newly re-worked relationship between Parliament and monarch, and an increasing dependence on the unstoppable middle classes. Of course for some it had been an entirely unwanted pregnancy, but for many, many more across the nation, some with, some without a vested interest in the old order, but all of them sharing a strong desire for stability and the certainty of tradition, it would prove a difficult birth: bloody and unutterably painful. And nowhere was this truer than at Oxford.

  On 3 February 1530, just over thirty years before Nicholas Owen was born, William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, peremptorily thrust Oxford University into the centre of the controversy of the hour. He wrote to the Vice-Chancellor asking him and Oxford’s academics to provide a unanimous opinion on the validity of the marriage of Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon.5

  The request was as untactful as it was unwelcome: Cardinal Wolsey, the university’s wealthiest patron, had been arrested only the year before for failing to provide Henry with the verdict he was looking for. And now it must have seemed to those at Oxford, asked to enter after Wolsey into this most explosive of minefields, that the Cardinal’s downfall would soon be followed by their own. So Oxford dragged its heels. When Cambridge, to the same request, came quickly back with the answer Henry wanted, the relief in the fens might have been palpable but the spotlight now shone ever more brightly on the midlands. And still Oxford dragged its heels.6

  In early April the King could wait no longer. His agents, led by the Bishop of Lincoln, descended on the university, hotly pursued by a strongly worded letter from Henry himself. While the bishop worked on Convocation, persuading them to hand the matter over to the university’s theologians, Henry reminded the ‘youth’ of Oxford precisely where their loyalties lay. This two-pronged attack produced the desired result. Though the Faculty of Arts grumbled that the Faculty of Theology had no right to speak for the university as a whole, the combination of manipulation and not so veiled threat had won the day. On 8 April Oxford University gave Henry the answer he was looking for: his marriage was invalid. But its tardiness in doing so was neither forgiven nor forgotten.* 7

  In September 1535 Henry’s agents were back in Oxford as part of a whirlwind tour of the country in preparation for the dissolution of the monasteries and by now the bloodshed had begun. In July of that year one of Oxford’s most illustrious former scholars, Sir Thomas More, was executed on Tower Hill, a victim of the new Treason Act: a piece of legislation that efficiently turned loyalty to the Pope in Rome into treachery to the English State. More’s scruples did not trouble Henry’s agents, though: Dr Richard Layton, ‘a cleric of salacious tastes’, and his assistant, John Tregwell, brought with them to Oxford an estate agent’s eye for a property and a prospector’s nose for gold, neatly masked behind an official mandate to root out opposition to the King’s new church. Their report, when it came, hit the university a sickening blow.8

  The first wave of the dissolution saw all of Oxford’s religious houses shut down: the Benedictine-run Canterbury, Durham and Gloucester Colleges, and the Cistercian-run St Bernard’s College. Their assets were stripped, their real estate sold off to the highest bidder and their inhabitants turned out onto the streets. Scores of academics and undergraduates now found themselves jobless, homeless and penniless. Hard hit too were the university libraries. College after college was ransacked for its illuminated books (seen as symbols of a despised papist idolatry), which were then carried out in cartloads and destroyed. In New College quadrangle the pages of the scattered medieval manuscripts blew thick as the autumn leaves, reported Layton. One enterprising student, a Master Greenefeld from Buckinghamshire, gathered them up and used them to make ‘Sewells or Blanshers [game-scarers] to keep the Deer within the wood, and thereby to have better cry with his
hounds.’9

  Oxford reeled under this attack. The developing university had drawn the wealth of the monasteries to the city. Those same monasteries had spawned the abbeys and priories, and they, in turn, had financed the building of Oxford’s first academic halls. And so the university and the city had grown. Even the newer, secular colleges, which escaped the cull but were bludgeoned into a show of loyalty, were dependent on the Church revenue now being siphoned into the Crown’s coffers. The destruction of the monasteries brought academic chaos to Oxford. More pertinently, it also brought festering resentment.10

  Some fourteen years later, in 1549, royal agents called on Oxford again. This time they were Edward VI’s visitors, come to enforce his new Prayer Book, the first real doctrinal step towards Protestantism.* Hot on their heels came the German and Swiss mercenary forces of Lord Grey of Wilton. Let Oxford be in no doubt that this regime meant business. Of the thirteen heads of those Oxford colleges still remaining, the visitors could find only two who supported the Government’s religious policy; as the Protestant reformer, Peter Martyr, remarked: ‘the Oxford men…are still pertinaciously sticking in the mud of popery’. But events soon proved that Oxford men were not the only stick-in-the-muds. July of that year burnt with the heat of a countrywide rebellion. On 12 July the Duke of Somerset wrote to Lord Russell, to lament the ‘stir here in Bucks. and Oxfordshire by instigation of sundry priests (keep it to yourself)’. Lord Russell scarcely had time to broadcast the news; just six days later Grey’s mercenaries had quickly and ruthlessly put out the fires. The eleven-year-old King Edward noted gleefully in his journal that Lord Grey ‘did so abash the rebels, that more than half of them ran their ways, and other [sic] that tarried were some slain, some taken and some hanged’. Grey left careful instruction that ‘after execution done the heads of every of them…to be set up in the highest place for the more terror of the said evil people’. The vicars of Chipping Norton and of Bloxham were hanged from the steeples of their own churches, and Johann Ulmer, a Swiss medical student at Christ Church College, wrote home to his patron, the Zurich reformer Heinrich Bullinger, that ‘the Oxfordshire papists are at last reduced to order, many of them having been apprehended, and some gibbeted, and their heads fastened to the walls’.11