God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (10 page)

Cuthbert Mayne was ‘drawn a quarter of a mile to the place of execution, and when he was to be laid on the sled, some of the Justices moved the Sheriff’s deputy, that he would cause him to have his head laid over the car, that it might be dashed against the stones in drawing, and M. Mayne offered himself that it might be so, but the Sheriff’s deputy would not suffer it’. This sheriff’s deputy was a merciful man. He let Mayne hang until he was dead before disembowelling him, quartering him, and distributing his parts about the county for display. For his role in the affair, Sir Francis Tregian was sentenced to life imprisonment and his estates were seized and given to Sir George Carey, a cousin of the Queen.
*
John Stow, in his Chronicle of that year, recorded: ‘Cuthbert Maine [
sic
] was drawn, hanged and quartered at Launceston, in Cornwall, for
preferring Roman power.
’
³⁴

Cuthbert Mayne had become the Douai seminary’s first martyr. When his old master at Oxford learned of his death he exclaimed, ‘Wretch that I am, how has that novice distanced me! May he be favourable to his old friend and tutor! I shall now boast of these titles more than ever.’ Such was the power of dying for your faith, and not even the fact that Mayne had been executed as a traitor to his country could tarnish this. Yes, he had broken existing treason laws, but did anyone seriously believe that owning an out-of-date copy of a nondescript bull and a few wax discs posed a threat to national security?
³⁵

However, as the dust settled on Mayne’s quartered remains and the political post-mortem began, it was soon clear that neither side had won a decisive victory in this opening skirmish. Catholics could claim that Cuthbert Mayne was a traitor only according to the most rigid set of definitions, in regard to his possession of a papal bull, or on the basis of hypothesis alone, in regard to his attitude towards Catholic invasions. But in regard to that same attitude, the English Government could claim that Allen’s supposed political virgins were uncommonly quick to pronounce on matters apart from their faith. Blessed martyr of a persecuted Church, or secret agent of an enemy state? Cuthbert Mayne had become all things to all men. His foolishness in being caught with Agnus Deis and a papal bull, and his clumsy defence of the Pope’s powers of deposition had left Catholics confirmed in their belief that they were being penalized for their religion, and the Government confirmed in its belief that Allen’s seminarians were stirring for invasion. The battle lines had just been made clearer.

But for the young missionaries-in-training, Mayne’s execution revealed to them that here was a war they might wage for the ultimate prize: the crown of martyrdom itself.
*
Just months after Mayne’s death the Catacombs were unearthed beneath the city of Rome, to ecstatic celebration among Catholics: here was proof that they and their Church were the direct descendants of those early Christian martyrs, sprung from their blood and their bones. And for a new generation the chance to save that Church was being offered to them again.

‘Listen to our heavenly Father asking back his talents with usury; listen to the Church, the mother that bore us and nursed us, imploring our help; listen to the pitiful cries of our neighbours in danger of spiritual starvation; listen to the howling of the wolves that are spoiling the flock. The glory of your Father, the preservation of your mother, your own salvation, the safety of your brethren, are in jeopardy, and can you stand idle?…Do not, I pray you, regard such a tragedy as a joke; sleep not while the enemy watches; play not while he devours his prey; relax not in idleness and vanity while he is dabbling in your brother’s blood…See then, my dearest and most instructed youths, that you lose none of this precious time, but carry a plentiful and rich crop away from this seminary, enough to supply the public wants, and to gain for ourselves the reward of dutiful sons.’

With such words ringing in their ears it was little wonder that, to their mentor William Allen, the student priests seemed ‘like men striving with all their might to put out a conflagration. They cannot in any way be kept back from England’.
³⁶

During Elizabeth’s first Parliament, Sir Thomas White, founder of St John’s College, Oxford and a staunch Catholic, had exclaimed in fury and despair that ‘it was unjust that a religion begun in such a miraculous way, and established by such grave men, should be abolished by a set of beardless boys’. Some twenty years on, the job of saving White’s miraculous religion had fallen to another set of beardless boys. As William Cecil would write, with an old man’s frustration at youth’s idealism, ‘The greatest number of papists is of very young men.’ In a few years’ time John Gerard and Nicholas Owen would be old enough to join their number. Meanwhile in Prague, a former fellow of White’s college, and the author of that rallying call to the students at Douai’s seminary, was about to step into the fray. His name was Edmund Campion.
³⁷

*
The Council of Trent met in three sessions during the mid-sixteenth century, its purpose to revivify the Roman Church, enabling it to meet the challenge of Protestantism. The Council worked to establish a set of fixed doctrinal definitions for the Catholic faith and to re-order its institutional structure, emphasizing the subordination of the entire Catholic hierarchy to the Pope. Out of the Council of Trent sprang what has been termed the Counter-Reformation, a movement almost as amorphous as the Reformation it opposed, but which can loosely be defined as the attempt at re-conquest of those parts of Christendom lost to the Catholic Church. Rome’s army of arguers, as featured in this book, was a component of this movement.

†
According to a contemporary Catholic description, ‘The pursuivants [were], for the most part, bankrupts and needy fellows, either fled from their trade for debt, and by the queen’s badge to get their protection, or some notorious wicked man.’

*
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)

D
URING 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.
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