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

by Hogge, Alice

  * Munday would later pass off his play about Sir John Oldcastle as being by William Shakespeare. In Henry IV Part I, the character of Falstaff was originally called Sir John Oldcastle. This was changed when Oldcastle’s descendants complained about the slur on their ancestor’s name. In Act I.ii.40 Hal addresses Falstaff as ‘my old lad of the castle’.

  † Cecil and Leicester, whose names also appear in the dedication to Munday’s book, do feature in this list. Cecil received a veiled compliment on his ‘wit’; of Leicester, Munday wrote that the comments made against him were ‘not here to be rehearsed’—a tactful remark under the circumstances.

  * The Flagellants’ movement spread throughout Europe, reaching England in the fourteenth century. There, they were regarded with interest, though very few could be persuaded to join their numbers.

  * In 1587 a memorial was presented to the Pope recommending Allen for the cardinalship. The memorial read: ‘He is unbiased, learned, of good manners, judicious, deeply versed in English affairs, and the negotiations for the submission of the country to the church, all of the instruments of which have been his pupils. So many amongst them have suffered martyrdom that it may be said that the purple of the cardinalate was dyed in the blood of the martyrs he has instituted.’

  * Tregian was held captive for twenty-five years (some accounts say twenty-eight) and only released after King Philip of Spain intervened. He died in Lisbon in 1608.

  * In 1583, Niccolo Circignani, called Pomerancio, painted a series of thirty-four frescoes for the Roman College church, depicting the history of Christianity in England, and stressing the importance of martyrdom. Recognizable figures were shown being hanged, drawn and quartered, so that the students would be in no doubt as to the fate awaiting them. The originals have perished; those frescoes in the tribune of the new church are copies, painted in 1893.

  Four

  ‘Campion is a champion, Him once to overcome,

  The rest be well dressed

  The sooner to mum.’

  (Sixteenth century ballad)

  DURING THE STATE VISIT to Oxford of 1566, before a packed house of royal dignitaries and university academics, Edmund Campion had impressed the young Queen Elizabeth with his skill at debating. Elizabeth, who admired a keen intellect every bit as much as the ability to hunt or dance, was delighted by Campion and the plaudits followed thick and fast. ‘Ask what you like for the present’, promised Oxford’s Chancellor and Elizabeth’s favourite, the Earl of Leicester; ‘the Queen and I will provide for the future.’* At the age of twenty-six this son of a London bookseller had England at his feet.1

  But Campion had taken a very different path from the one mapped out for him by the Queen and her courtiers. After his ordination into the Anglican Church in 1568 he had reportedly experienced great anguish of conscience. That same year it had been brought to the notice of the Grocers’ Company of London, from whom he held an exhibition scholarship, that he was ‘suspected to be of unsound judgement’ in religion. The guild ordered him to ‘come and preach at Paul’s Cross, in London’ so they might ‘clear the suspicions conceived of [him]’ and, more importantly, so he might ‘alter his mind in favouring the religion now authorised’. Otherwise, they added warningly, ‘the Company’s exhibition shall cease’. Campion declined their invitation and lost his scholarship. In 1569 he left Oxford for the more congenial—and more Catholic—shores of Ireland and in the summer of 1572 the man regarded by Sir William Cecil as ‘one of the diamonds of England’, with his own devoted group of followers known as Campionists, the man with an established reputation as a scholar and writer and an assured position in the hierarchy of the new English Church, threw it all away and sailed for Douai. ‘It is a very great pity to see so notable a man leave his country,’ wrote Cecil.2

  At Douai, under the instruction of William Allen, Campion became a Catholic priest and in Rome, to which he travelled following his ordination, he joined the Society of Jesus.* The long and painful struggle with his conscience was over. In March 1580, eight years after his flight to the Continent, he was summoned back to England.3

  Up to now the Jesuits had not involved themselves in the English mission. They were, though, ideally suited to the task. If William Allen’s students were the ordinary foot soldiers in Rome’s army of arguers then Ignatius Loyola’s Jesuits were the special forces, physically toughened by strict, self-imposed hardships and vows of poverty, mentally strengthened by long periods of solitude and meditation, and well aware that education was the strongest weapon in the proselytizer’s armoury. ‘Give me a boy at the age of seven, and he will be mine for ever,’ declared Loyola. Within a decade of their formation the Jesuits had established colleges throughout Catholic Europe and were ranging as far afield as Mexico and Japan, the front lines of Christian conflict. Their startling success aroused fear among Protestants and resentment among their fellow Catholics. But to Loyola’s men this was holy war and in warfare the end justified the means.4

  Having already lost many of his finest students, including Campion, to the elite new order, it was William Allen, always on the lookout for new ways to help England’s beleaguered Catholics, who suggested the Jesuits widen their range of operations to include the English mission. Why sacrifice the lives of English priests in far-flung corners of the world when there was ample work for them to do in their own homeland? First, though, he had to persuade the unwilling Jesuit General, Everard Mercurian, that England was worth the venture.* 5

  Mercurian’s reluctance to send his men to England was deeprooted. He declared the Society already over-committed in other parts of the world. He ‘found divers difficulties…about their manner of living there [in England] in secular men’s houses in secular apparel…as how also their rules and orders for conservation of religious spirit might there be observed’. But most of all, he argued, as conditions in England now stood it would be impossible for his missionaries to maintain the kind of order, discipline and apoliticism in the line of fire on which the effectiveness of their work depended. How could he send his men into a political minefield like England and expect them to minister to Catholics while, at the same time, dodging the accusations of intrigue and treachery that would inevitably be hurled their way? And how could he ask them to do so in isolation, deprived of the support of their fellow Jesuits? Gradually, as the 1570s drew to a close, William Allen wore him down. He was helped in this by a fellow Oxford graduate and a Jesuit of some five years’ standing, Robert Persons.6

  Robert Persons was a ‘fierce natured’, ‘impudent’ West Countryman, born at Nether Stowey in Somerset in 1546. In 1564, at the age of eighteen, he went up to Oxford, where he discovered Catholicism, first as a student at St Mary’s Hall, Allen’s old college, and then as a fellow of Balliol. By 1573, his new allegiance to the old faith had brought him to the attention of the authorities and his abrasive manner had offended sufficient of his colleagues and he was summarily expelled, ‘even with the public ringing of bells’. So Robert Persons took passage to the Continent. Once there he enrolled to study medicine at the University of Padua, but a chance meeting with a member of the Jesuits made a profound impression on the twenty-seven-year-old. After two years pursuing his medical studies, Robert Persons packed his bags and walked to Rome. On 25 June 1575 he joined the Society of Jesus, a day after his twenty-ninth birthday.7

  Four years later Persons was writing privately to William Allen that among the English Jesuits there were ‘divers to adventure their blood in that mission [to England], among whom I put myself as one’. Faced with such zeal Mercurian finally gave way. A first Jesuit mission to England was ordered; Robert Persons was named as its commander and Edmund Campion was selected to accompany him. ‘The expense is reckoned,’ wrote Campion, ‘the enterprise is begun. It is of God, it cannot be withstood.’8

  From Prague, where he was teaching Rhetoric at the university, Campion was ordered back to Rome to join Persons. Here, the pair were briefed for their mission. General Mercurian was at pains
to stress the difficulties of living and working in disguise, of assuming and maintaining a false identity and of surviving alone without the support of the Society. He also pointed out the impossibility of retreat should the pressure grow too great. These hardships aside, their orders were clear. They were to work with those who were already favourable to the faith. They were to avoid all contact with the heretics. They were to ‘behave that all may see that the only gain they covet is that of souls’. They were not to entangle themselves ‘in affairs of State’, nor to send back political reports to Rome. They were not to speak against the Queen, except perhaps among those ‘whose fidelity has been long and steadfast and even then not without strong reasons’. And they were to carry with them nothing forbidden by English law: no papal bulls or Agnus Dei. This was a mission for ‘the preservation and augmentation of the Faith of the Catholics in England’ and it was not to be compromised by the amateurism that had tripped up Cuthbert Mayne.9

  Campion and Persons departed Rome on 18 April 1580, waved off in triumph by the entire English colony there. With them rode a party of some twelve other English Catholics, including a lay brother of the Society, Ralph Emerson, who would act as their servant in England, and a group of young seminary priests also on their way to join the mission. One witness, Robert Owen, a Welsh Catholic studying in Rome, wrote to his friend Dr Humphrey Ely at Reims, ‘This day depart hence many of our countrymen thitherward, and withal good Father Campion.’ Within days the letter had been intercepted by an English spy and its contents passed on to Sir Francis Walsingham in London. Edmund Campion was ‘on the way to my warfare in England’ and England was expecting him.10

  The party travelled on foot, using false names. Heavy rain dogged their passage through Italy. From Turin they climbed steadily upwards, crossing the Alps at Mont Cenis before descending again into the rich pastureland of the Savoy. From here they continued on to Lyons and on 31 May they came at last to the French university city of Reims.11

  But here some alarming news awaited them. Campion’s was not the only Catholic expedition to the British Isles that month. At the same time the Jesuit and his fellows had left Rome for England, five Spanish ships containing arms and men had left for Ireland. They sailed at the request of Campion’s Oxford contemporary Nicholas Sanders, now employed as a papal envoy. Their purpose was to assist the Irish rebel James Fitzmaurice unseat the ‘tyrant’ Elizabeth. And the man who had financed them was none other than Pope Gregory XIII.* Robert Persons noted his party’s reaction: ‘we were heartily sorry…because we plainly foresaw that this would be laid against us and other priests, if we should be taken in England, as though we had been privy or partakers thereof, as in very truth we were not, nor ever heard or suspected the same until this day’.12

  Their situation grew still worse with the second piece of news that now reached them. English agents had provided the Privy Council with a full description of every member of the group and the Channel ports were being watched for their arrival. It was testimony to their courage that only one of the party, Thomas Goldwell, Bishop of St Asaph, now wavered. Goldwell took to his bed and began writing to the Pope to ask whether he was the best man for the job of supervising Allen’s missionaries. Indeed, he was not. He was seventy-nine years old, he had endured a gruelling journey from Rome and he was plainly terrified. His defection bore out William Allen’s belief that this was young man’s work. Allen himself remarked that ‘it was better the old man should yield to fear now than later on, on the other side’.† 13

  But while Goldwell panicked in Reims, his fellow travellers, joined by three students from William Allen’s Reims seminary, pressed on with their journey, splitting up into groups of twos and threes and separating to the French ports, in preparation for finding their way across the Channel. Edmund Campion, Robert Persons and the Jesuit lay brother Ralph Emerson made their way to St Omer, a short distance outside Calais. For them rather more than for their fellows, the Pope’s interference in Irish affairs had serious implications.

  When Francis Drake sailed into Plymouth harbour on 26 September 1580 after successfully circumnavigating the globe, his ship laden to the gunwales with Spanish treasure, few doubted his success had just hammered another nail into the coffin of Anglo-Spanish relations. The grumblers were soon heard to complain that ‘just because two or three of the principal courtiers send ships out to plunder in this way, their property must be thus imperilled and their country ruined’.* In reality Drake’s actions and Elizabeth’s evident delight in them—she attended a celebratory banquet in honour of his voyage at which she instructed the French ambassador to dub Drake a knight, and she happily pocketed her own share of the profits—were little more than an irritant to Philip II. By 1580 Spain’s star was firmly in the ascendant. Decisive victories in the Netherlands by the Duke of Parma, Philip’s new commander there, and Philip’s surprise succession to the throne of Portugal had left Elizabeth commenting grimly, ‘It will be hard to withstand the King of Spain now.’† 14

  And whereas in the past England had relied on France to help maintain the precarious balance of European power, this was now impossible, no matter how much Elizabeth and the French Duc d’Alençon flirted and spoke of marriage all that year. For France had religious divisions of its own to contend with. In February 1580 the smouldering embers of Catholic-Protestant conflict had reignited once again and the country was now embroiled in its seventh War of Religion. So while France imploded, Philip was free to fix England within his sights without fear of opposition. As a good imperialist the prospect of invasion was tempting (particularly as he now also commanded the powerful Portuguese navy), but as a good Catholic his duty was clear to him. In 1578 Philip had instructed his ambassador to ‘endeavour to keep…[Elizabeth]…in a good humour and convinced of our friendship’. By 1580 he was openly backing the Irish rebel Fitzmaurice.15

  With European stability deteriorating rapidly and the Spanish threat increasing daily, Pius’s Bull Regnans was now more pertinent than ever. For if a good Catholic was, by definition, a bad Englishman, then the influx of the Douai missionaries alone—no matter the effect they were having on the populace as a whole—had certainly added to the number of good Catholics in England. And joining them now were the Jesuits, whose founder was no nice Oxford boy with an unfortunate weakness for the old religion, but an ascetically minded Spaniard. Worse still, the Jesuits pledged obedience directly to the Pope.

  Before leaving Rome Campion and Persons had been granted an audience with Pope Gregory. From him they had received a fresh clarification of the current position of Pius’s Bull in canon law to take with them to England. Gregory’s Explanatio declared it lawful for English Catholics to obey Elizabeth in civil matters while she was still de facto Queen and unlawful for them to depose her—but only for the time being. For while Pius had been sufficiently foolish to publish his Bull without giving a thought as to the enforcing of it, Gregory regarded himself as a more astute tactician. As soon as the political and military conditions were right, he explained, Pius’s Bull would be reactivated. He instructed Campion and Persons to deliver this ruling to England’s Catholics and with that he gave them his blessing. All Mercurian’s attempts to keep the religious aims of the Jesuits’ mission separate and distinct from the political machinations of Rome had been compromised at a single meeting.16

  So Campion, Persons and Emerson came to the Jesuit house at St Omer to consult with their superiors. Did General Mercurian wish their mission to continue or had Pope Gregory’s interference in Ireland made it impossible for them to carry on safely? The discussions were tinged with doubt and anxiety but finally an agreement was reached: the mission would proceed as planned. They had all come far too far to stop now. Persons later wrote, ‘as we could not remedy the matters, and as our consciences were clear, we resolved through evil report or good report to go on with the purely spiritual action we had in hand; and if God destined any of us to suffer under a wrong title, it was only what he had done, and would be
no loss’. Behind the bravado, though, lay a very real appreciation of the increased perils now facing them.17

  The decision made, Campion, Persons and Emerson were directed to the house of George Chamberlain, an English Catholic living in exile in France. There, they were equipped with new disguises for their onward journey and some time after midnight on 16 June 1580, dressed in a buff leather coat with gold lace trim and a feathered hat, ‘under the habit and profession of a captain returned from the Low Countries’, Robert Persons made the short sea voyage from Calais to Dover. The mission was begun.18

  Close surveillance was being kept on the English seaports. When Persons arrived at Dover on the morning of 17 June he was brought before the port authorities and cross-examined. His cover story and performance held up under the scrutiny. Many Englishmen looking for adventure had gone abroad to fight for the Dutch rebels and Persons had taken to his role with ease—Campion described him to Mercurian as ‘such a peacock, such a swaggerer, that a man needs must have very sharp eyes to catch a glimpse of any holiness and modesty shrouded beneath such a garb’—and so, after thorough interrogation, the Dover customs ‘found no cause of doubt in him, but let him pass with all favour, procuring him both a horse and all other things necessary for his journey’. One official proved sufficiently friendly for Persons to seize the initiative. He asked the man if he would forward a letter to his friend, a Mr Edmunds in St Omer, telling the ‘jewel merchant’ to come quickly to London where he would be met. And he asked the official to be sure to look out for his friend when he landed and see him safely on his journey. The letter was duly sent to the waiting Edmund Campion.19

  From Dover, Persons rode north to Gravesend, arriving at nightfall. Here his luck continued. He boarded a waiting boat that took him upriver to London, depositing him at Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames, before dawn on the morning of 18 June. He had been on the move less than thirty-six hours.