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

by Hogge, Alice

  *‘Curious’ was popular slang for anything finely crafted. Shakespeare uses the word in Venus and Adonis: ‘To cross the curious workmanship of Nature’ [line 734].

  * In 1583 a Catholic commentator wrote of the Douai Bible: ‘Every corner of [England] was searched for those books—the ports were laid for them, Paul’s Cross is witness of burning many of them, the Prince’s proclamation was procured against them; in the universities by sovereign authority colleges, chambers, studies, closets, coffers and desks were ransacked for them.’

  * The extent of Topcliffe’s duplicity is revealed in a letter of September 1592 to Lord Keeper Puckering. In it, Topcliffe suggested Puckering have Mrs Bellamy arrested. After a couple of days’ imprisonment Topcliffe, himself, planned to play ‘the part of a true man’ and have her released; this act of charity would bring great, if unspecified, benefit to the State, he reckoned. However, he also warned Puckering not to mention the plan to anyone, ‘Neither [to] Mr Young nor any other commissioner’.

  * Over the centuries the Catholic and Protestant view would divide even further, with Protestant writers promulgating the view that untruths were lawful when there was just cause, just cause being ‘the preservation of life and property, defence of the law, the good of others’. Meanwhile Catholic writers continued preaching the virtues of ambiguity, still convinced that lying was evil.

  † The case of Thomas Cottam illustrates the ethical constraints recognized by most priests. Arrested at Dover in June 1580, Cottam was entrusted into the safekeeping of a fellow traveller, to be taken to London and imprisoned. His escort, though, was a Catholic and, once outside Dover, he immediately gave Cottam his freedom. Unhappy at this breach of trust and concerned about what might happen to the man, Cottam eventually gave himself up to the authorities. He was arraigned alongside Edmund Campion and executed at Tyburn on 30 May 1582.

  Eight

  ‘…and since far greater is the fever of a woman once resolved to evil

  than the rage of a man, I humbly beseech your Lordship

  that that sex of women be not overlooked.’

  attrib. Richard Topcliffe, 1592

  WHILE ROBERT SOUTHWELL was writing his Supplication to Queen Elizabeth in the winter of 1591, John Gerard was continuing his East Anglian apostolate. ‘Gerard doeth much good’ was how Henry Walpole had described the newcomer’s success and Gerard’s own account of this period supports the view. He seemed happily to be fulfilling the promise of his first few hours ashore. Indeed, he was quickly developing a robust style of ministry all his own. It was a style that suited his disguise of sporting squire to the hilt of the silvered rapier he reportedly carried with him, at opposite ends of the spectrum to the agonized sufferings of so many of his colleagues. A story he recounted from the eve of the Baddesley Clinton conference illustrates this well. It had become Gerard’s practice to journey north on occasion, visiting family and friends.* One such expedition saw him joining the hunting party of a Staffordshire cousin, eager for him to speak to and, if possible, convert the husband of a relative of theirs. ‘All day’, wrote Gerard, ‘I rode alongside him—the huntsman whom I was hunting down myself. Whenever the pack was at fault and stopped giving tongue, I used the pause to follow up my own little chase and gave tongue myself in real earnest.’ It took four days of pursuit before the man finally caved in and became a Catholic. He also agreed from then on to maintain a priest himself. Slowly, cautiously, incrementally: this was how the Catholic faith would survive.1

  It was not just Gerard’s abilities in the field that were standing him in good stead. An unexpected facility at gambling was also proving ingenious cover for him, though frequently it seemed to cause some confusion as to his real identity. On one occasion a fellow card-player began sounding him out as a suitable match for his sister. On another, a woman wishing to be reconciled to the Catholic Church flatly refused to believe he was a priest at all, protesting, ‘Why the man lives like a courtier. Haven’t you watched him playing cards with my husband—and the way he plays, he must have been at the game for a long time.’ Gerard, himself, took pains to justify his activities. ‘I should explain’, he wrote, ‘that whenever I was with Catholics and we had to stage a [card] game [as a disguise], we had an understanding that everybody got his money back at the end and that the loser said an Ave Maria for every counter returned.’2

  This, then, was the carefully constructed scene in play when George Abbot, Oxford’s Doctor of Divinity, future Archbishop of Canterbury and ‘a well-known persecutor of Catholics’, called unexpectedly at a house where Gerard was staying for the night. According to Gerard, as the party sat around the gaming table, there ensued a heated discussion between the two men concerning the morality of suicide, which ended with Dr Abbot’s stern admonition that ‘Gentlemen should not dispute on theological questions.’ Gerard cheerfully agreed, to his Catholic hostess’s mirth, saying ‘our profession is to play cards’. It was this willingness of Gerard’s to revel in the frequent absurdities of his situation—and to rise to their challenge—that is the striking feature of his writing at this period. His seemed an uncomplicated faith, no less fervent than that of his contemporaries, no less compassed by the desire for martyrdom (frequently he bemoaned his ‘unworthiness’ to die for the cause), but augmented by a practical resolve that was soon reaping huge benefits for the mission.3

  About seven months into his stay with the Yelvertons at Grimston, Gerard was approached by the Suffolk Catholic Henry Drury, heir to Lawshall Manor, six miles to the southeast of Bury St Edmunds. Like neighbouring Norfolk, Suffolk had been one of the first ports of call for the Protestant teachings of Martin Luther, an ideological cargo brought in by trading ship from the progressive Hanseatic cities. Unlike in Norfolk, these teachings seemed to have spread further than the coastal town houses of the merchant classes, to cover the whole county. Spanish assessment of English Catholic strength in preparation for the Armada listed Suffolk—a potential landing site—as being ‘full of heretics’. Yet still there were those among the gentry (many of whom owned estates in both Norfolk and Suffolk) who resisted the changes, including Henry Drury.4

  In April 1586, alongside John Bedingfeld and Edward Rookwood (the unfortunate victim of Elizabeth’s 1578 East Anglian progress), Drury was listed as one of Suffolk’s ‘most obstinate’ recusants. In 1587 he was imprisoned for his faith. Two years on, though, he was begging Gerard to move to Suffolk and renew his apostolate from there. Despite Drury being known to the authorities as a recusant and maintainer of priests, the advantages to the Jesuit of such a move were becoming increasingly obvious. As Gerard put it: ‘the danger of recognition grew as I came to know more people [in Norfolk]’. So, with Henry Garnet’s permission and having first secured a priest to take over his ministry at Grimston, Gerard crossed the county border to Lawshall Manor.5

  Entering Lawshall was like stepping back in time. The altar furnishings were ‘old and worn’ (in Gerard’s description) and spoke of decades of uninterrupted service in pursuance of the Catholic faith. Even the family chaplain—probably the seminary priest William Hanse—had been at Lawshall for many years. Here was a connection with a Catholic heritage that some half a century of religious changes had been unable to sever. ‘In this new place’, wrote Gerard, ‘my life was much more quiet and congenial. Almost everyone in the house was a Catholic and it was easier to live the life of a Jesuit, even in the external details of dress.’6 Although information about Gerard’s time at Lawshall is sparse, other accounts from the period help flesh out a picture of the kind of pastoral life he was leading. One in particular, from the Yorkshire based priest James Pollard, bears quoting in some detail.

  In the house where I lived we were continually two priests, one to serve and order the house at home, the other to help those who were abroad, who especially in any sickness or fear of death would continually send to us for help, that they might die in the estate of God’s Church…On the Sundays we locked up the doors, and all came to Mass…On the w
ork days we had for the most part two Masses; the one for the servants at six of the clock in the morning, at which the gentlemen every one of them without fail, and the ladies if they were not sick, would even in the midst of winter of their own accord be present; and the other we had at eight of the clock for those who were absent from the first. In the afternoon at four o’clock we had evensong, and after that matins, at which all the knights and their ladies, except extraordinary occasions did hinder them, would be present and stay at their prayers all the time the priests were at evensong and matins.* The most of them used daily some meditation and mental prayer, and all at the least every fourteen days and great feast did confess and communicate; and after supper every night at nine of the clock we had all together litanies, and so immediately to bed.7

  Henry Garnet described it thus to Claudio Aquaviva: ‘There is almost daily a large flow of people to these places just as if they were churches.’ Amid fears of arrest, amid recusancy fines and the insidious implication that they were unnatural Englishmen, threequarters of the way into Elizabeth’s reign there were still English Catholics attempting to live a religious life. Dr William Allen’s frustration at the level of compromising by Catholics in the 1560s, a frustration that had led to his founding the mission, had been replaced, some twenty, thirty years on, by feelings of relief and euphoria among his missionaries. As Robert Southwell exclaimed in the year after his return to England, ‘the faith is still alive! The Church exults! The families are not falling away’.8

  Political defiance or spiritual necessity? To most in the Government it must have seemed the former. Even as the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, was curbing the spread of English Puritanism, successfully preserving the broad Church insisted upon by Elizabeth to keep the country together, English Catholics remained mulishly intransigent, an intransigence that appeared exponentially greater each time the Anglicans demonstrated their centrist reasonableness.* Worse, in the face of international Catholic aggression, their dissension was, at best, a fracturing of the united front required at such times, at worst, an act of outright treachery. To the Government, then, it was political defiance. But were the Government’s concerns really the same as those of most ordinary English Catholics? Free from the crippling perception that their faith automatically rendered them enemy agents, free from the burden of rule, the latter were also free to look at the situation from a somewhat longer perspective. And in so doing, two things must have been immediately obvious. First, that there was still no clear guarantee that Elizabeth’s Church of England would survive her: within living memory was proof that a change in ruler could bring about a change in religion. So, the Northern Rebellion had discovered altar-stones and holy-water stoups hidden away in quarries for just such an eventuality and the Protestant Reverend Alfield had advised his son Thomas to work for the Jesuits—he became Robert Persons’ servant—to help him when that change in religion came. If the new Church was an uncertain entity, then the old faith was a far safer certainty to cling to. And this was where the second consideration came into play. For not only had Elizabeth’s Church of England been a sectarian fudge, it had also been a theological one. Amongst all the doubts that still existed over what did and did not constitute the means to salvation, there was all too much scope, as the century drew to a close, for the unwitting layman to stray from the path of righteousness and plunge headlong into the fires of hell. And the only thing he could be sure of as he plummeted was that his fall would be accompanied by the sound of those Anglican divines appointed to sort out the confusion bickering the while. A quick death at the hands of an invading Spanish army or an Elizabethan hangman was one thing; eternal damnation because the country’s new bishops could not agree between them what was sacred was a fate somewhat harder to stomach.9

  Birth to death had always been a hazardous journey. Famine, fire and sword, plague and pestilence, sins mortal and venial: they lay in wait at every turn, to tempt the weak and carry off the unwary. Religious certainty provided a bulwark against these forces. Disease was rife, so a Christian burial dispatched the newly departed to a far better pain-free place. Frequent confession along the way—and extreme unction at the end—helped bring the sinner back on track for his final journey into the afterlife. And if these simple precautions were ignored, then the consequences were no less certain. According to the medieval Church, the child who died without baptism was destined for limbo, for the very borders of hell. So to prevent this, the newborn child was exorcized: ‘Go out of him unclean spirit and give place to the Holy Ghost the comforter’. Then, with his head bound tight with a white cloth called a chrisom (his shroud should he die in infancy), he was anointed with consecrated oil and balsam. The child who cried at his christening was expelling the devil.10

  But these certainties had been thrust aside at the Reformation as so much conjuring and necromancy, the exorcism of the new-born being dismissed with the breezy cry ‘For, if ye may make at your pleasure such things to drive devils away…what need have ye of Christ?’ Under Edward the baptism ceremony had been purged of its drama, its anointings and chrisoms, in the flurry of back-to-basics religious reform sweeping the country. But new broom though it was, the Protestant ascendancy had failed to provide a satisfactory answer as to the fate of those infants who remained unbaptized. The 1549 Prayer Book, Edward’s first, continued to stress the vital importance of baptism within the first few days of life; Elizabeth’s 1559 version recognized cases of urgency by permitting christenings to take place on days other than Sundays and holy days; and the current hot topic amongst the Queen’s theologians was whether the baptism sacrament was absolutely necessary for salvation, or just formally necessary.* It was a fine distinction and made for good debate, but can have been of little comfort to bereaved parents concerned their unbaptized offspring were heading straight to hell.11

  This was where the mission came into its own. For where there was controversy it brought assurances, where there were vagaries it brought absolutes, where there was strife it brought the guarantee of eternal peace. In a world of rapid change, accelerated ascendancies and breath-taking falls from favour, in a world of war, torment and terror, the mission offered a lifeline back to an earlier age—rendered golden by the present turmoils—in which certainty reigned supreme. God was in His heaven and you, too, could join Him there, if only you followed these simple guidelines. On the way you might risk arrest, imprisonment, poverty, exile and execution, but at least the life hereafter was assured.

  Birth to death: as the new underground English Catholic Church readjusted to its changed and vastly straitened circumstances and the mission entrenched further, families and their priests found themselves taking extraordinary measures to ensure that this most momentous of journeys was hedged with the necessary ceremony. The dangers were great, as a letter from Henry Garnet to Aquaviva described:

  ‘It is impossible, save at the greatest risk, to baptise infants, celebrate marriages, give the sacraments or offer the sacrifice according to the Catholic rite. Therefore expectant mothers travel to remote parts for the birth of their infants in order that they may not be asked questions later about the christening of their offspring. When they marry, they ride to some distant place for the ceremony and then return home, to avoid questioning on the celebration of their marriage.’12

  These evasions were as much a legal necessity as a spiritual one. As Garnet explained, ‘It is a crime punishable at law for a mother to give birth to a child and not to have it baptised, or for her to move about in public before she has been childed.’* Indeed, if a woman could not show that her child had been christened or that she, herself, had been purified after the birth, she would be branded a harlot and her offspring a bastard. There are many stories detailing the lengths to which Catholics went to avoid the law. ‘A certain woman with child,’ wrote Garnet to Aquaviva ‘when her time of delivery drew near, travelled to another county where she might have her child…So by chance it happened that this woman, after a short labour, gav
e birth in an open field by the road, without any other woman present; and then she carried her infant son at the breast to the house of a neighbouring [Catholic] lady.’13

  In death, more trickery abounded. A case brought before the Star Chamber revealed one commonplace method of cheating the churchwardens. ‘The Archbishop [of Canterbury, Richard Bancroft] in his speech delivered that it is the secret practice of the Papists to wrap their dead bodies in two sheets, and in one of them they strew earth that they themselves have hallowed and so bury them they care not where, for they say they are thus buried in consecrated earth.’* 14

  Countrywide, English Catholics, with the connivance of their priests, were finding ways to outwit the law and keep the faith. It was a gamble, pitting the danger to their lives and livelihoods of arrest and prosecution against the danger to their souls of failing to observe Catholic teachings, and some seem to have played this gamble to its limits. Francis Swetnam, baker to the Vaux family, reluctantly agreed to attend his local church after some two years of avoidance (in which time his fines totalled about £520), ‘for that he had rather adventure his own soul than lose his five children’. With recusancy fast becoming a rich man’s sport, it was all too often poorer Catholics, like Swetnam, who ended up conforming to the Anglican Church to avoid bankruptcy, hoping that a last minute deathbed reconciliation would be enough to appease their God, as much as a lifetime’s obedience had appeased the State.15