God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (15 page)

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 the 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.
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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.
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Before Christmas the fourth and final Jesuit priest on the mission arrived back in Finsbury from a tour of the country.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The challenge for the Jesuits was to reverse this process.
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‘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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In his play
The Taming of the Shrew
, written
c
.1592, Shakespeare introduced ‘a young scholar that hath been long studying at Rheims…cunning in Greek, Latin and other languages’. The role was cover for the amorous suitor Lucentio, enabling him to woo the ‘fair Bianca’. But among the audience watching the new comedy, there would have been those who recognized in Shakespeare’s words an allusion to an altogether different form of deception. The young Reims scholars
they
knew, seminary students fresh from their lessons in Greek, Latin, Hebrew and English, were even now being deployed across the country disguised as tutors, stewards and visiting poor relations.
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John Gerard was now Mr Robert Thompson, ‘attired [according to a later spy’s report] costly and defensibly in buff leather, garnished with gold or silver lace, satin doublets, and velvet hose of all colours with cloaks correspondent, and rapiers and daggers gilt or silvered’. ‘It was thus’, wrote Gerard, ‘that I used to go about before I was a Jesuit and I was therefore more at ease in these clothes than I would have been if I had assumed a role that was strange and unfamiliar to me…[Now] I could stay longer and more securely in any house or noble home where my host might bring me as his friend or acquaintance.’ More importantly, now he could ‘meet many Protestant gentlemen’ and bring ‘them slowly back to a love of the [Catholic] faith’.
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There exists a memorandum dated 1583, written by George Gilbert, leader of the band of young Catholics who had assisted Campion and Persons during the first Jesuit mission to England. It is called
A way to deal with persons of all sorts as to convert them and bring them back to a better way of life—based on the system and methods used by Fr. Robert Persons and Fr. Edmund Campion
and, as its title suggests, it is a proselytizer’s handbook. Gilbert was ideally placed to advise the new missionaries. It had been his money and his connection with most of the major Catholic families in England that had enabled Campion and Persons to travel the country in relative safety, setting up their network. And until his escape to France in 1581 (at Persons’ entreaty), Gilbert had been adept at cheating capture. Arrested and brought before the Bishop of London in midsummer 1580, he was quickly released when Norris, the bishop’s pursuivant, attested to his honesty; Norris was said to be in Gilbert’s pay. This memorandum was Gilbert’s last contribution to the English Catholic cause—he died in Rome on 6 October 1583 aged just thirty-one, having been admitted into the Society of Jesus on his deathbed. But it was Gilbert’s instructions that John Gerard now followed as he began his Norfolk apostolate.
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