God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (14 page)

Also in keeping was the procession of shady characters brought out to testify against the accused. The informant Charles Sledd swore that while in Rome and in Reims he had learned of the invasion plans from William Allen and one of the prisoners, Luke Kirby. George Eliot claimed that Campion, in his Lyford sermon, had spoken of ‘a great day’ that was soon to come, and that another of the prisoners had sworn him to secrecy about the plot. And the arch-fabricator Anthony Munday was brought in to announce to a packed courtroom that the English seminary students were schooled in treason, that Henry Orton had told him at Lyons that Elizabeth was not the rightful Queen of England—Orton vehemently denied ever having set eyes on Munday before—and that Edward Rishton was a skilled maker of fireworks who was planning to burn Elizabeth in her royal barge with ‘a confection of wild fire’, an event to be followed by a general massacre of all those not in possession of the password ‘Jesus Maria’.
†
The verdict was a foregone conclusion.
⁵⁵

Campion had always believed he was coming home to England to die. The night before his departure from Prague a colleague had inscribed on the door above his cell
P. Edmundus Campianus, Martyr.
Earlier, another priest had painted a garland of roses and lilies on the wall above his bed—the symbol of martyrdom. On the morning of 1 December 1581 Campion was led out from the Tower, through the driving rain and the mud-choked London streets, to the scaffold at Tyburn. There he was hanged, drawn and quartered before the assembled crowds. With him were Father Alexander Briant, a close friend of Robert Persons, and Father Ralph Sherwin, the young seminarian who had set off from Rome with Campion and Persons in such high spirits the year before.
⁵⁶

In May the following year seven more priests were executed, including Thomas Ford, Luke Kirby, Robert Johnson and William Filby. Edward Rishton and the layman Henry Orton, though both found guilty of treason and sentenced to death, were not executed. They were kept prisoner in the Tower until January 1585 when they were forcibly deported to France. Father John Collington was able to find a witness to confirm he had been resident in England since July 1576 and therefore could not have been in Reims and Rome on the dates specified. Like Orton and Rishton he was exiled to France in January 1585, having spent the intervening years in the comparative comfort of the Marshalsea prison.

After Campion’s execution the lay brother Ralph Emerson escaped from England and made his way safely to Rouen. He joined in exile George Gilbert, the Jesuits’ friend, guide and self-appointed financier, whose activities had placed him in grave danger of arrest and who had been persuaded to leave England shortly before Campion’s capture. As for Robert Persons, with Campion’s arrest the Government now turned its attention wholly on him. Clearly, he could not elude the pursuivants for long and in August he made his way to France, disguised as one of a number of Catholic refugees fleeing persecution. He would never see England again.
⁵⁷

The savagery of Campion’s death had taken people’s breath away. It was not just that he had been tortured while in the Tower—so severe were the bouts of racking he endured that when his keeper asked him how he felt, he allegedly answered ‘Not ill, because not at all’; witnesses to his trial reported he was unable to raise his hand to take the oath and witnesses to his execution reported ‘that all his nails had been dragged out’. It was not just that so many had been executed with him—since Cuthbert Mayne’s execution in 1577, only two other priests and one scholar had suffered the same fate. It was more the realization that the Government had turned against one of its own, and such a one as the scholar Campion, that shocked onlookers.
⁵⁸

Some felt Elizabeth had sacrificed Campion as a sop to those Puritans concerned by her proposal to wed the Catholic Duc d’Alençon. Others, that Campion had been silenced by a Government unable to defend its new faith against the theological reasoning of the Catholic Church. Ballad-mongers were soon singing:

If instead of good argument,
We deal by the rack,
The Papists may think
That learning we lack.

Many were even more direct in their criticisms:

Our preachers have preached in pastime and pleasure,
And now they be hated far passing all measure;
Their wives and their wealth have made them so mute,
They cannot nor dare not with Campion dispute.

What was clear to all, though, was that with Campion’s death, the Jesuit mission to England had been stopped in its tracks. The question was, could it ever regain its momentum?
⁵⁹

Seven years later, in October 1588, Father John Gerard was setting out to answer this question. Campion had written of a ‘league’ of ‘all the Jesuits in the world’—a league dedicated to restoring England to the Catholic Church, no matter how brutal the cost. For Gerard the time had come to make good that promise.

*
Campion is reported to have asked for nothing but Leicester’s friendship.

*
Campion chose to walk from Douai to Rome as a poor pilgrim. On the way he was met by an Oxford contemporary who at first failed to recognize him and then assumed he had been robbed. When he learned it was voluntary mortification he dismissed the idea as un-English and fit only for a crazed fanatic, and he offered Campion a share of his purse. Campion refused.

*
Ignatius Loyola died in 1556.

*
Gregory’s attitude towards Elizabeth is controversial. In 1580 his Secretary of State gave the following answer to an enquiry by a group of English noblemen as to whether or not they would incur sin by assassinating the Queen: ‘Since that guilty woman of England rules over two such noble kingdoms of Christendom and is the cause of so much injury to the Catholic faith, and loss of so many million souls, there is no doubt that whosoever sends her out of the world with the pious intention of doing service, not only does not sin but gains merit’. This judgement came with Gregory’s approval. The logic behind it was clear: Elizabeth was a heretic; her actions imperilled the souls of her subjects; her killing was expedient (to cite ‘thou shalt not kill’ in objection ignores the fact that the Church was already busy burning heretics). But to extrapolate from this that the Vatican officially sanctioned the murder of its opponents is wide of the mark; indeed, Gregory’s approval of the English noblemen’s scheme had a hugger-mugger air to it, admission that Elizabeth’s assassination was against the spirit, if not the letter, of contemporary moral reasoning. Of course, the net result of his dubious opinion was a propaganda coup for the Protestants.

†
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)

T
O 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