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

by Hogge, Alice

  † Goldwell’s correspondence with the Pope took several months, by which time plague had broken out in Reims and he had grown desperate. One of his letters, dated 13 July 1580, began, ‘Beatissimo Padre,—If I could have crossed over into England before my coming was known there, as I hoped to do, I think that my going thither would have been a comfort to the Catholics, and a satisfaction to your Holiness; wherein now I fear the contrary, for there are so many spies in this kingdom, and my long tarrying here had made my going to England so bruited there, that now I doubt it will be difficult for me to enter that kingdom without some danger.’ In the end he dismissed himself without permission and returned to Rome to a chilly reception.

  * William Cecil, desperate to avoid provoking Spain further, had done his best to scupper Drake’s adventure. He is even said to have placed one of his own agents among the crew to incite a mutiny. The agent was discovered and hanged from the yardarm.

  † The old King of Portugal died in January 1580 without a direct heir and as the son of the dead King’s eldest sister, Philip was quick to press home his claim to the title.

  * The story of Pound’s transformation from wealthy courtier to religious prisoner is remarkable (though quite possibly apocryphal). He is said to have performed a complicated pas seul before the Queen, who was so impressed she called on him to repeat the move. Pound did so, but this time he fell. To the ringing laughter of the Queen and her court he retired, with the words ‘Sic transit gloria mundi’, and from then on he devoted himself to religion.

  * An informer’s report, dated 26 December 1580, describes Gilbert as ‘bending somewhat in the knees, fair-complexioned, reasonably well-coloured, little hair on his face, and short if he have any, thick somewhat of speech, and about twenty-four years of age’. By this stage Gilbert was a wanted man.

  * Walsingham was Elizabeth’s new Principal Secretary of State since Sir William Cecil’s appointment as Lord Treasurer in 1573. Cecil was also created Baron Burghley, in recognition of his service to Elizabeth.

  * Henry Norris was a favourite of Elizabeth’s—his father had been executed on a manufactured charge of adultery with Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn (thus sealing Anne’s downfall), and the family had forfeited their lands. At her succession Elizabeth restored those lands and later ennobled Norris. Thomas Paget was a staunch Catholic who endured frequent terms of imprisonment for his faith.

  * On 16 March 1583 William Allen observed: ‘Great complaints are made to the Queen’s councillors about the university of Oxford, because of the number who from time to time leave their colleges and are supposed to pass over to us.’

  * Both Hartley and Pitts were eventually caught by the authorities. They were banished from England in 1585. Hartley returned soon afterwards and was recaptured. He was executed at Shoreditch in London on 5 October 1588, one of the many Catholics executed in the aftermath of the Armada.

  * During restoration works at Lyford in 1959 an Agnus Dei blessed by Pope Gregory XIII and papers dated 1579 were found in a wooden box nailed to a joist under the attic floorboards.

  † John Payne was Cuthbert Mayne’s travelling companion to England in 1576. He was eventually captured and executed at Chelmsford, Essex on 4 April 1582.

  * No doubt many of the Council believed in Campion, Persons and Allen’s guilt but both Ford and Collington had been in England a number of years before the Jesuits’ arrival, while poor Filby had only bad timing to thank for his presence at Lyford.

  † Quick to jump onto the bandwagon, Munday published an account of Campion’s capture within a couple of days of the Jesuit’s imprisonment. Eliot later complained that the book was ‘as contrary to truth as an egg is contrary to the likeness of an oyster’.

  Five

  ‘And better it were that they should suffer, than that her highness

  or commonwealth should shake or be in danger.’

  (Device for the Alteration of Religion, 1558)

  TO THE NORTH OF the city of London, beyond the walls and the great gates, Moorgate and Aldersgate (Aldgate), lay the lordship of Finsbury and Finsbury Fields. Once used as a site for archery tournaments and wrestling matches, by 1588 the fields had fallen victim to urban sprawl. Contemporary commentator John Stow complained ‘there is now made a continual building throughout of garden houses and small cottages’.1

  A description of one of these cottages remains. The ground floor contained a kitchen and a dining room. The first floor was given over to a chapel that doubled at night as a sleeping loft. The cellar beneath held sufficient storage space for logs, coal and beer barrels. And behind the carefully piled provisions was a hiding place with room for six or seven men. In the autumn of 1588 this small, three-roomed cottage served as the London headquarters of the Jesuit mission to England.2

  It was here that John Gerard made his way towards the end of November, as the first snows of an unseasonably bitter winter blanketed the country. Gerard recorded his journey south in perfunctory style—‘there was no incident on the way’—and for the length of time it took him to appear in London he gave no explanation. But there was one man to whom an explanation was owing: the man who had sent for him.3

  Father Henry Garnet was thirty-three, cheerful, scholarly, the son of a Nottingham grammar school master. Unlike Gerard, Garnet’s family had conformed to Elizabeth’s nationalized Church after 1559. In Nottingham and those parts of Derbyshire bordering the city there had been little opposition to the change in religion. Then in 1567 Garnet won a scholarship to Winchester School and there he came under a more Catholic influence. Winchester was among the last of the schools to accept the new faith. In 1561 the then headmaster had been arrested for his refusal to conform to Protestantism. In protest the boys had boycotted the school chapel, locking themselves in their dormitories and accusing the replacement headmaster of destroying ‘the souls of the innocents’. The military commander of Portsmouth Harbour was called to break up the strike and a dozen boys were expelled soon afterwards. It was into this world of Catholic defiance and classical scholarship that the twelve-year-old Henry Garnet was soon immersed.4

  Avoiding the usual passage from Winchester to New College, Oxford (by now he was no longer prepared to pretend to be a Protestant) Garnet headed for London to become ‘corrector for the press’ at Richard Tottel’s printworks in Temple Bar. He was in London in June 1573 for the execution of Thomas Wodehouse at Smithfield. Wodehouse had the unhappy distinction of being the first Catholic priest to be executed in London under Elizabeth; more than that, he was rumoured to have joined the Society of Jesus while a prisoner.* In the summer of 1575 Henry Garnet left London for Rome to join the Jesuits himself.5

  Garnet’s return to England in July 1586 was followed with uncomfortable swiftness by his promotion to Superior of the English Jesuits just a couple of weeks later, after the arrest of the man under whom he had come to serve. The death of Campion still hung albatross-like around the neck of the Jesuit mission; moreover, it seemed those destined to pay the price for that death were not Campion’s killers, but the men struggling to follow in his footsteps. In the six years between Campion and Persons’ first landing and Garnet’s arrival the Jesuits had failed to establish a permanent bridgehead in England. Aborted attempt had followed aborted attempt. And now with the threat of the Spanish Armada drawing nearer, Garnet’s own efforts to revive the mission seemed destined to flounder in the wave of anti-Catholic feeling sweeping over the country.

  Garnet’s first action as Jesuit Superior had been to write to Rome for more men to be hurried over to help him. In the spring of Armada year he was informed that reinforcements—in the shape of John Gerard and Edward Oldcorne—would soon be on their way. So as the events of 1588 unfolded about him Garnet prepared for their coming, choosing the cottage in Finsbury as a base for the mission, for ‘since it was believed that no one was actually residing there, it was never molested by the officers whose duty it is to make the rounds of every house to enquire whether the inmates are in th
e habit of attending the [Protestant] church’. He was in London to witness the spate of executions that took place that autumn, as post-Armada relief gave way to bloodlust and revenge. In all, seventeen priests, nine Catholic laymen and one woman were executed over a three-month period. The one woman to be killed, Margaret Ward, was charged with supplying the priest William Watson with a rope to escape from the Bridewell prison—sympathetic onlookers claimed that as she climbed to her death they could see she was ‘crippled and half-paralysed’ by torture. Elizabeth, herself, was said to have been appalled by Ward’s death and ‘it was for that reason that recently she pardoned two other women who had borne themselves before the tribunal with singular courage’, wrote Garnet in October. Two months later Garnet was in the crowds to watch Elizabeth’s triumphal procession to St Paul’s Cathedral to give thanks for England’s victory. And throughout this time still he waited for news of Gerard and Oldcorne’s safe arrival.6

  There are few details of Gerard’s meeting with Garnet in Finsbury that winter—Gerard himself is significantly quiet on the subject—but the following March Garnet wrote to Claudio Aquaviva, Jesuit General since the death of Everard Mercurian in 1581. His letter is characteristically cryptic, but in it he mentions ‘that without consulting me at all [Gerard] did things which [he] had no authority to do and which manifestly [he] should never have done’. During his brief stay in Norfolk it seemed not only had Gerard freely dispensed spiritual guidance and religious pardons, but he had also passed information—probably details of the privileges granted by the Pope to the English Jesuits—to ‘certain priests who, during their time in Rome, were not considered well disposed to us’. With memories of priests-turned-informers like Charles Sledd and Gilbert Gifford still fresh in mind, such an action was risky at best. At worst it threatened to destroy the mission. And although Garnet concluded his letter ‘It is not a serious matter but it might have been’, it must have seemed to him now that his new recruit was uncommonly confident in his own abilities and apparently lacking in discipline. It was not an auspicious start.7

  Before Christmas the fourth and final Jesuit priest on the mission arrived back in Finsbury from a tour of the country.* Robert Southwell was twenty-seven years old, the son of an old East Anglian family. His grandfather had been one of the commissioners for the dissolution of the monasteries, his mother had been a childhood companion of the then Princess Elizabeth and his father was a prominent courtier. Among his more important relations were Lord Burghley, Sir Francis Bacon and the Attorney General, Sir Edward Coke. Southwell’s family serves as a particularly colourful reminder of just how few assumptions can be made about the religious complexion of England at this period.8

  Southwell left home for the English College at Douai in the summer of 1576, aged fourteen. In November that year he moved to the Jesuit College of Cleremont near Paris and in the spring of 1578 he applied to join the Society of Jesus. Political upheavals in the Spanish Netherlands and an initial rejection by the Society on the grounds of his youth meant it was not until October, and then only in Rome, that Southwell was admitted to the Jesuit noviceship, around the time of his seventeenth birthday. There, he quickly won praise for his skills as a writer and respect for his vivid intelligence. When, in 1586, Henry Garnet was chosen to leave for England to join the mission it was the poet Southwell who was picked to accompany him on the journey.9

  Since that time, like Persons and Campion before them, Garnet and Southwell had travelled England in secret, labouring to rebuild the network of Catholic families willing to maintain a priest; labouring, too, to enlarge that network in the face of increased government persecution.* They had become a formidable team. With the arrival of John Gerard and Edward Oldcorne that team had doubled. What remained unclear, though, was how many of their countrymen would still be prepared to welcome them in, now that Catholicism had been linked so strongly with un-Englishness in the public consciousness. For if to be Catholic was to be an unnatural Englishman, then to draw attention to that unnaturalness in the weeks and months following the Spanish Armada was tantamount to signing your own death warrant. This being the case the new and expanded Jesuit mission seemed destined to have only limited appeal.10

  And for the English Government and the Catholic Church both, religion had become a numbers game. To play for were the souls of all those who still stood wavering in the middle of the great religious divide. For the Government 1588 had proved a windfall year, drawing to the Church of England all those obedient to the pull of patriotic fervour, like the Earl of Shrewsbury (viewed by most as ‘half a catholic’), who now redoubled his efforts to rout out seminary priests on his estates.* The challenge for the Jesuits was to reverse this process.11

  ‘Christmas was drawing near’, wrote Gerard, ‘and we had to scatter. The danger of capture was greater at festal times and, besides, the faithful needed our services. I was sent back, therefore, to the county where I had first stepped ashore.’ As December 1588 drew to a close and England wearily prepared to celebrate the Nativity, Gerard retraced his steps to Norfolk.12

  Norfolk seems to have turned its back on English affairs throughout much of history. While other shires engaged in the civil disturbances that marred the reigns of weaker monarchs, in the county-league rivalry of the Wars of the Roses, Norfolk scanned the horizon for the distant sails of potential invaders, for the safe return of its merchant ships and indulged in a style of law-lessness all its own. The county records bristle with stories of Norfolk nobles and squires holding their neighbours to ransom, of houses defended ‘in a manner of a forcelet’ and of bands of armed retainers roaming the district in search of someone to terrorize.13

  Hanseatic merchants brought the writings of Martin Luther to Norfolk early in the sixteenth century. Luther’s ideas were greeted with enthusiasm by the academics of nearby Cambridge; soon a band of them, including a number of Norfolk men, were meeting regularly in the town’s White Horse Tavern (behind King’s Parade), which quickly became known as Little Germany. It was a Norfolk man, Thomas Hilton, who helped smuggle home William Tyndale’s forbidden English Bibles; he was burnt for heresy in 1530. And it was a Norfolk woman whose charms led to schism with Rome in the first place: Anne Boleyn was the daughter of the Norfolk squire Sir Thomas Boleyn and a niece of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. Later, when Anne’s daughter Elizabeth laid claim to being England’s most English of monarchs, the countrymen of Norfolk could nod their heads in agreement; after all, she was one of their own.14

  Yet when the Duke of Northumberland seized the English crown on behalf of his daughter-in-law Lady Jane Grey, it was to Norfolk that Mary Tudor fled to rally her supporters. Mary came to Kenninghall, west of Thetford, from where she wrote to the House of Lords on 9 July 1553 asserting her claim to the English throne. She was joined there by the loyal Norfolk gentry, all of them Catholic to a man. It was into the care of the Norfolk Catholic Sir Henry Bedingfeld that Mary entrusted her recalcitrant younger sister; Bedingfeld escorted Elizabeth from the Tower of London to house arrest at Woodstock in May 1554.* And it was of Norfolk that a Spanish agent wrote in 1586, as Philip II scouted for suitable landing sites for his Armada fleet, ‘the majority of the people are attached to the Catholic religion’. If England was a country still divided by religion then the county of Norfolk was England in microcosm. And few families illustrated this divided country and county better than the Yelvertons, to whom John Gerard now returned.15

  Edward Yelverton, Gerard’s Catholic contact from Norwich Cathedral, was the eldest son from the second marriage of William Yelverton of Rougham, Norfolk. On his father’s death Edward inherited the family’s estate at Grimston, extending well over two thousand acres. There he lived with his family, his younger brother Charles, a committed Protestant, and his newly widowed half-sister Jane Lumner, viewed by Gerard as ‘a rabid Calvinist’. (Gerard also mentions a half-brother, Sir Christopher Yelverton, who was ‘one of the leaders of the Calvinist party in England’.) It was a dangerous place for Gerard
to begin his mission, despite Edward Yelverton’s keenness for Grimston to become a Jesuit base. Such religious differences as divided the Yelvertons could stretch family loyalty to breaking point, as a contemporary poem revealed:

  …your husbands do procure your care [imprisonment],

  And parents do renounce you to be theirs;

  …your wives do bring your life in snare,

  And brethren false affright you full of fears;

  And…your children seek to have your end,

  In hope your goods with thriftless mates to spend.16

  In years to come many Catholics would learn that their nearest was all too often their dearest enemy, particularly when an inheritance was at stake. Gerard, himself, had already experienced the Yelverton family’s mistrust. ‘On my first arrival [at Grimston]’, he wrote, ‘the Protestant brother was indeed suspicious—for I was a stranger, I had come here in company with his Catholic brother, and he could think of no reason why his brother treated me so kindly.’ The priest’s easy familiarity with the occupations of an Elizabethan country gentleman had soon allayed Charles Yelverton’s fears: ‘When I got the opportunity I spoke about hunting and falconry, a thing no one could do in correct language unless he was familiar with the sports.’ Freshly equipped as ‘a gentleman of moderate means’—in clothes provided by Henry Garnet, who ‘was anxious that I should not be a burden to my host at the start’—Gerard now took up his role of sporting squire once more.17

  The methodology of the Catholic mission to England had changed little since William Allen’s seminary priests first began arriving home in 1574. The protomartyr Cuthbert Mayne had clothed himself as the Tregian family’s steward; Robert Persons as a returning soldier of fortune—the key to a missionary’s success or failure lay in his ability to inhabit his new identity fully. This was best evinced by Father Richard Blount, who returned to England in the spring of 1591 disguised as a homecoming prisoner-of-war. Blount was interviewed by Admiral Lord Howard of Effingham and provided him with enough information—all fabricated—about the deployment of the Spanish fleet to earn himself a naval pension in recompense, or so Blount’s friends reported afterwards.18