God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (18 page)

The individual links in this chain were comparatively simple to forge. ‘It will be necessary…for the priests to be stationed in various parts of the country and for each of them to stay at the house of some gentleman or other,’ George Gilbert had written. John Gerard’s job was to reconcile such a gentleman and then persuade him to take in a priest. Then came Nicholas Owen’s contribution.
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Under cover of carrying out legitimate building or repair work Owen would craft a hiding-place, working in secret and as near to silence as he could manage, for any attention drawn to the location of the hide rendered it useless for its purpose. Even loyal servants were kept from learning the whereabouts of a hide, for fear torture might turn them. Owen’s genius was to exploit the main structure of a house, burrowing deep into the masonry of its interior, lodging his hide within the very framework of the building, within what, to the practised eye of the pursuivants, could only be solid wall or ceiling. His hides are three-dimensional puzzles of Max Escher-like complexity. And, for maximum safety, every one of them was different. John Gerard summed up Owen’s career: ‘he was so skilful both to devise and frame the [hides] in the best manner, and his help therein desired in so many places, that I verily think no man can be said to have done more good of all those that laboured in the English vineyard’.
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It was impossible for Owen to build every hide for every priest stationed across England by the Jesuits. It seems he concentrated on those hides used by the Jesuits, themselves, and on those hides destined for ‘the chiefest Catholic houses’, while elsewhere acting as an adviser and discoursing ‘of the fashion of [hides] for the making of others’. In this way he came to know ‘the residences of most priests in England, and of all those of the Society’; he also knew ‘the means and manner how all such places were to be found, though made by others’. It was a heavy burden of knowledge. But it was a burden Owen seemed more than capable of carrying. ‘One reason that made him so much desired by Catholics of account, who might have had other workmen enough to make conveyances in their houses, was a known and tried care he had of secrecy.’ ‘He was’, wrote Gerard, ‘so careful that you should never hear him speak of any houses or places where he had made such hides.’ Thomas Bedingfeld had reason to be grateful for this secrecy as Owen now set to work at Oxburgh Hall.
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In the garderobe off the King’s Room, set against the interior wall, was a small recess of door height. It suggested the room might once have had another purpose; perhaps the recess held an altar or
prie-Dieu
and the room had served as a private chapel. At the foot of this recess Owen chiselled away a small section of the tiled floor. Today, if you place your foot close to the recess’s wall and tread heavily on this section, it swings open, revealing the entrance to the hide beneath. The ‘lid’ is some nine inches thick, made of two solid oak blocks bolted together and with a layer of tiles to camouflage it. In place, it is seamless and unnoticeable. It is rapproof, ring-proof, and its balance when it pivots is perfect. Slip through it and you enter the hide itself, an irregularly shaped brick vault that opens above and beyond you, like a capital L stretched out on its side, measuring about three feet at its widest point, two feet at its narrowest and at its tallest over seven feet high. It lies between the walls of the King’s Room, to its west, and a collection of smaller rooms and stairs to its east. One of these rooms served as the Bedingfelds’ secret chapel and at the end of the L’s vertical, close to this chapel, was the second entrance to the hide, now filled in. This entrance made use of the natural features of the house: one of the treads on a small set of stairs in an adjoining passageway hinged open to reveal a gap wide enough for a man to squeeze through to the hide behind. In the base of the L is a ledge with a wooden seat and evidence of a communication hole with the King’s Room beyond it. The whole is remarkably comfortable, relatively soundproof and utterly undetectable.
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It is improbable that Owen hollowed out the entire vault from scratch—it is unnecessarily large and unnecessarily irregular for its purpose. More likely there was some sort of empty space there already, created when the house itself was built; the family name for it—The Dungeon—points to a possible former usage. Owen’s genius was to conceal whatever original entrance there might have been and build two new ones, invisible to the most avid of searchers. In February 1590 his work was put to the test.

That month a seemingly anonymous letter was sent to Henry, Lord Crumwell, a Norfolk justice. The letter gave information against Henry Bedingfeld, Thomas’ son and owner of Oxburgh since his death that year, of ‘some treasonable designs in conjunction with the Papists and Recusants’. The informant might have been right about Henry’s connection with papists and recusants, but the accusation of treason smacks more of self-interest than accuracy. Henry was only eight years old. Nonetheless Crumwell ordered a diligent search of the house. Nothing suspicious was found and Crumwell duly reported this fact to Sir Francis Walsingham, enclosing a copy of the letter delating Henry as a traitor to add to the ever increasing body of evidence held against the Bedingfelds. Nicholas Owen’s hide had withstood its first challenge. No priest had been found. The link in the chain had held.

As the years went on, more and more links would be added to this chain as more and more priests arrived to take their place on the mission. Campion had spoken of a ‘league’ of men, of ‘many innocent hands’, gathered beyond the seas, determined to reconcile England to the Catholic Church. With the Jesuits’ new policy in place and with men like Garnet, Gerard and Owen to implement it, these words no longer had such a hollow ring. But if Campion had promised priests in profusion, he had also made another promise: ‘never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn’; ‘to win you to heaven, or to die upon your pikes’. As the network grew, as it lengthened and spread across the country, so more and more priests would keep their grisly side to this bargain. The links in the chain might be simple to forge, but they were also simple to break, and one man had made it his personal mission to do precisely that.
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*
Although Wodehouse was ordained during the reign of Queen Mary and was therefore entitled to amnesty under Elizabethan laws, he repeatedly denied Elizabeth’s claim to the throne—a treasonable offence. As a further irritant to the Privy Council he wrote copious letters in defence of the Catholic faith from his prison cell in the Fleet, which he tied to stones and threw to passers-by in the street below.

*
Edward Oldcorne arrived in Finsbury some time before Gerard. It appears he too behaved indiscreetly during his journey to London, though the precise nature of that indiscretion remains unclear. In his letter to Aquaviva Garnet begged the Jesuit General to ensure ‘that those who are sent hereafter…should properly understand their accounts and seek out some veteran as quickly as possible’.

*
The best description of Garnet and Southwell’s work so far—and of how they believed the mission should develop—is contained in a letter by Garnet to Claudio Aquaviva, written in June 1588. ‘This is the plan we have agreed on for the greater glory of God, when there shall be a greater number of [Jesuits] here. Two should be stationed in London—or one in London and one in the environment. The others should have assigned to each one a province or county in which each can work for all he is worth to promote religion. There will not be lacking other priests, men of outstanding holiness and learning who will come to their assistance—and to this we most of all can testify by experience. The field will be theirs to take over from our labours and the harvest from it will be beyond measure, owing to Him who guides the work of our hands unceasingly.’

*
For many years Shrewsbury was gaoler to Mary, Queen of Scots. Always vulnerable to accusations of leniency on account of his Catholic sympathies—his mother Mary Dacre was from a devoutly Catholic family—he was finally relieved of this duty in 1585. Many of the accusations made against him came from his second wife, the notorious Bess of Hardwick, who also accused him of having an affair with the Scottish Queen. The pair separated soon afterwards.

*
There seems to have been little love lost between the twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth and her warder. Bedingfeld found the princess so confusing he was at a loss to know ‘if her meaning go with her words, whereof God only is judge’. Elizabeth was reputed to have said to Bedingfeld that ‘if we have any prisoner whom we would have hardly and strictly kept, we will send him to you’.

*
A contemporary spy’s report refers to a suspected seminary priest who ‘under colour of teaching on the virginals goeth from Papist to Papist’.

*
The curiosity of English Catholics benefiting from the Dissolution of the Monasteries was noted by outsiders: Simon Renard, ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor, would report home at the time of Queen Mary’s succession that the papists held far more of the plundered church property than the heretics.

*
The Woodhouses were a prominent Norfolk family with several Catholic members. Francis Woodhouse was forced to sell his Breccles estate in 1599 to pay his recusancy fines. He died in poverty in 1605. His wife Eleanor and son John were still ‘obstinate recusants’ in 1615. Sir Philip Woodhouse married Edward Yelverton’s sister Grisell—both were converts of John Gerard.

*
It was not always Catholics who suffered in this way—on occasion Elizabeth was compelled to extort forced loans from wealthy Anglicans too. In 1598 rumours that another such loan was imminent saw citizens ‘shrink and pull in their horns’; some Londoners even fled to the countryside to avoid payment.

*
This order echoed Everard Mercurian’s advice to Persons and Campion: ‘As regards dealing with strangers, this should, at first, be with the upper classes rather than with the common people, both on account of the greater fruit to be gathered and because the former will be able to protect them against violence of all sorts.’

*
Weston was born in Maidstone, Kent in 1550. He was an Oxford contemporary of Edmund Campion. On his return to England in September 1584 he took the alias Mr Edmunds in tribute to his friend. Weston was arrested in August 1586. Rather than risk the international opprobrium of killing another Jesuit, the Council imprisoned him. Friends took up his case, but no one was brave enough to intercede for him at court. One was said to comment: ‘If he were a common thief, or a murderer or buccaneer, or something of the kind, I would not hesitate one moment to obtain a pardon, or at least to ask for it. But where it is a matter of a Jesuit, I cannot; I am afraid to ask.’ He was finally released in 1603 and died in Spain in 1615.

*
Berden was one of the Council’s best spies. In 1586 he wrote to Walsingham: ‘I humbly thank your honour for that it pleased you to spare Christopher Dryland’s [a seminary priest] life at the last sessions…assuring you that it hath much increased my credit amongst the Papists…I protest I abhor the man in regard of his profession, [but he]…is singularly well persuaded of me, supposing me to be a most apt man to serve the Papists’ turn.’ Dryland was imprisoned until 1603, when he was banished. He went to Rome and became a Jesuit. When Berden’s treachery was finally exposed Walsingham arranged for him to take up the more lucrative if less adrenaline-charged post of purveyor of poultry to the Queen.

†
This was composer William Byrd. Byrd was educated under Thomas Tallis at St Paul’s Cathedral music school. By 1570 he had become a chorister of the Chapel Royal and by 1575 he was the Queen’s organist. Despite his Catholicism he seems to have enjoyed Elizabeth’s favour and was rewarded with a monopoly to print and publish sheet music.

*
A spy’s report of 1591 reveals that the priests made use of every sort of hiding place available to them. ‘As you go forth of Mr Wynshcomb’s house towards Newbury, in the first close without the gate, upon the left hand in the hedgerow, there is a great oak that is hollow, and by knocking upon it you shall find it to sound.’ It continued: ‘Oliver Almon is a priest and did lie at Mr Wynshcombe in Berkshire, near Newbury…If he be not in the house, there is a great tree wherein he is hidden.’

Six

‘…they do come into the [Realm] by secret Creeks, and Landing Places,
disguised, both in their Names and Persons’.

Queen Elizabeth I, November 1591

D
URING THE CLOSING DAYS
of the 1586-7 Parliament, the MP for Old Sarum, Richard Topcliffe, revealed to the House that in the building ‘joining to the Cloth of Estate’—next door but one in fact—a quantity of ‘weapons and all massing trumpery, with books papistical’ had just been uncovered. Such a viper’s nest of Catholicism on Parliament’s very threshold was intolerable. Immediately the Commons appointed a party ‘to search certain houses in Westminster suspected of receiving and harbouring Jesuits [and] seminaries’. There is no record of how the session ended.
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Neither, sadly, is there any record of how the search party proceeded, though it is unlikely Topcliffe would have been happy with anything less than a lynch mob. No man took the outrage of the continued existence of English Catholicism more personally, it seemed, than Richard Topcliffe. His critics wondered whether he might not be a former Catholic himself.
*

Richard Topcliffe was born in 1532, the son of Robert Topcliffe of Somerby, Lincolnshire and Margaret, daughter of Lord Borough. His mother died when he was an infant, his father when he was twelve, and he was raised by an uncle, Sir Anthony Neville; he was educated at Gray’s Inn in London. In 1570, the year after the Northern Rebellion, he sued for the lands of one of the rebels, the Catholic Richard Norton of Norton Conyers, Yorkshire. Three years later he was in Lord Burghley’s pay for services unspecified. In 1578 he was reporting back with relish the unhappy events of Elizabeth’s Norfolk progress and by 1584 he was revealing the full fervour of his anti-Catholicism in a letter to the Privy Council. ‘My instruments have learned’, he warned, of bands of seminary priests roaming the capital. ‘They walk audaciously, disguised in the streets of London. Their wonted fears and timorousness is turned into mirth and solace.’ By the 1590s, not content with seeing Catholics wherever he went, he had become their judge, gaoler and executioner. He had also turned his Westminster house into a private torture chamber, the better to serve this end. ‘
Homo sordidissimus
,’ spat the usually measured Henry Garnet, when called upon to describe him.
²