God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (19 page)

The career of Richard Topcliffe is perplexingly, paradoxically linked to one woman, Queen Elizabeth I herself. Moderate, pragmatic, uncharacteristically squeamish for a Tudor, Elizabeth gave licence to a monster. It was not just Catholics who found him so. In the fashionable in-speak of Court the word
Topcliffizare
soon came to mean to go recusant hunting. Meanwhile, Sir Anthony Standen, praising the manners of the new royal favourite the Earl of Essex, noted that ‘Contrary to our Topcliffian customs, he hath won more with words than others could do with racks.’ Throughout much of the 1590s Richard Topcliffe could be found at the head of an army of pursuivants raiding Catholic houses, in the torture chamber extracting evidence, in the courtroom cross-examining the accused, or on the scaffold overseeing executions. For all these activities he possessed only one title: that of Queen’s Pursuivant. It seemed, though, Topcliffe had something better than a title: he had the willing ear of Elizabeth.
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The pair first came into contact in January 1570. On the tenth of that month the Earl of Leicester wrote to Elizabeth expressing his longing to hear from her. With bad weather making travelling difficult, Leicester employed as his messenger ‘a Mercury’ prepared ‘to take the more pains’ to deliver his letter. Mercury’s name, it transpired, was Richard Topcliffe.
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And in a postscript Leicester described how Topcliffe had recently supplied ‘30 horse and men, all well appointed, at his own charge’ for the campaign against the Northern rebels. With Leicester vouching for him and with such a solid demonstration of loyalty to recommend him, Topcliffe evidently stuck in Elizabeth’s memory. Twenty years on she had few compunctions about turning to him for assistance and even fewer about doing so in private. ‘This most unclean of men’, wrote Garnet, ‘has attained…such favour with Her Highness that he always has easy access to her, and need not fear the power or influence of any Councillor or Minister.’
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From the outset Elizabeth’s attitude to English Catholics had tended towards leniency; as much as her ministers had champed at the bit and demanded harsher measures against Catholics, so Elizabeth had held tight to the reins and refused to budge. When, in 1563, her pressing need for Parliamentary subsidies forced her to accept legislation extending the death penalty to anyone twice refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy, she promptly sabotaged the act by commanding her bishops never to tender the oath a second time.
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‘Compel them you would not; kill them you would not…trust them you should not,’ admonished a frustrated William Cecil. Beside her clemency, her dislike of bloodshed and her continued favour of many prominent Catholics, Elizabeth’s support of Richard Topcliffe sits like an uninvited guest at a wedding feast, unwelcome and impossible to ignore. Equally, it is almost impossible to explain.
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In view of Elizabeth’s leniency, was Topcliffe’s ulterior purpose—a purpose assuredly kept from him—to serve as a sop to the Protestant hard-liners about her and prevent harsher anti-Catholic penalties being introduced in Parliament? Was his very lack of official status Elizabeth’s way of avoiding more official religious legislation? If this were the case, then were she to be accused by her ministers of being soft on papistry, Elizabeth need only point to Topcliffe to demonstrate the opposite was true. For someone who detested being bounced into hasty decisions as much as Elizabeth, Topcliffe’s presence provided a sure way of keeping in check the headlong drive for religious reform favoured by many in her Government and by most of her Parliaments.

There is another possibility that presents itself. Sir William Cecil’s maxim, one to which first he then Francis Walsingham would adhere as they set about developing their far-reaching spy network, was that the only people a ruler could never trust were those they had irreparably harmed.
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By this reasoning Elizabeth could never trust England’s Catholics, no matter that, as a religious conservative, she had more in common with them than with the Protestant extremists and radical Puritans about her. Indeed, the number of assassination plots over the course of her reign of which rogue Catholic terrorists were found to be at the bottom gave the ring of truth to Cecil’s claim. The Ridolfi Plot of 1571, the 1583 Throckmorton Plot, the 1585 Parry Plot and the Babington Plot of 1586 were all Catholic-supported attempts to remove Elizabeth from the English throne and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots. When Pope Pius sanctioned Elizabeth’s overthrow in 1570—giving rise to Ridolfi, Throckmorton
et al.
—one of the Queen’s first actions had been to issue a proclamation restating her intention not to examine her subjects’ ‘consciences in causes of religion’. Richard Topcliffe, unlicensed by anyone but Elizabeth, was a useful counter-balance to this leniency. He was, perhaps, her private weapon in the battle against religious terrorism, while publicly she continued practising conciliation. There were few if any instances during the reign in which Elizabeth waged open warfare with a happy heart. Conflict was costly, bloody and, above all, uncertain in its outcome—three factors guaranteed not to endear it to the cautious Queen. Rather than making war on every Catholic in the land, the presence of Topcliffe on her staff allowed Elizabeth to make lightning strikes against likely insurgents, at minimal expense, with minimal loss of life and with minimal danger to herself. Such a luxury could not be under-estimated.
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So with Elizabeth’s blessing and a supporting cast of similarly unsavoury characters—Anthony Munday was an early employee of his—Richard Topcliffe appears to have levelled his sights on bringing down the Catholic mission to England. Certainly his name appears with increasing regularity among the State papers of the period as he engaged in this pursuit. In January 1590 he received his first warrant from the Privy Council; it instructed him to subject the seminary priest and scholar Christopher Bales to ‘such torture upon the wall as is usual for the better understanding of the truth of matters’. Bales had sailed to England on the same ship as John Gerard and Edward Oldcorne two years earlier; he was also a former pupil of Robert Southwell’s at the English College in Rome. Perhaps this link with three out of the six Jesuits then at liberty in England exacerbated Bales’ fate.
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He was manacled and strung up by his hands from an iron staple fixed to the prison wall, hanging there for twenty-four hours with the tips of his toes just touching the floor. In spite of this, he seems to have admitted little more than that he had been ordained overseas and had returned to England to minister as a Catholic priest. On these two counts he was indicted for treason—in which case, he was reported to have asked at his trial, was St Augustine not a traitor too? No, replied the presiding judge, Justice Anderson, for Augustine had fortuitously arrived before the introduction of these new laws. Bales was executed on 4 March in Fleet Street.
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Two months later Topcliffe, himself, was on the Fleet Street scaffold to extort an eleventh hour confession from the seminary priest Anthony Middleton. Pointing about him, in the direction of nearby Gray’s Inn Lane and Shoe Lane, Topcliffe charged Middleton with taking refuge in Catholic houses in the area. Middleton replied, ‘You know, Mr Topcliffe, I never approached any man nor confessed any place.’ He died without naming those who sheltered him.
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But if Bales and Middleton’s unwillingness to talk had saved the lives of many, then the case of Henry Walpole revealed just how dangerous Topcliffe might prove to the mission if once he truly targeted a victim. Henry Walpole was born in 1558, the eldest son of Christopher Walpole of Anmer Hall, Norfolk, on today’s Sandringham estate. He was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge and in 1578, aged twenty, he moved to London to study at Gray’s Inn. Under different circumstances he would in time have qualified as a lawyer and returned home to take up his considerable inheritance, but on 1 December 1581 Walpole stood in the mud and rain of Tyburn fields to watch the execution of Edmund Campion. As the hangman hurled Campion’s entrails into the cauldron of boiling water, it was said that a gob of blood spattered Walpole’s white doublet: his fate was sealed. The following year Henry Walpole fled England for William Allen’s seminary at Reims and by February 1584 he had transferred to Rome to join the Society of Jesus. On 17 December 1588 he was ordained a Jesuit priest.
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For the next five years Walpole travelled the Low Countries, for a time acting as chaplain to the Spanish forces there. Back in Norfolk his family was in contact with the recently arrived John Gerard. Soon Henry’s youngest brother Michael Walpole had become Gerard’s confidential servant, riding with him, wrote Gerard, ‘whenever I went to a house where my assumed status made it necessary for me to have one’. In 1589, under Gerard’s guidance, Michael left England to join the Jesuits himself. The next year Henry’s cousin Edward Walpole followed suit. Twelve months later Gerard had ‘persuaded another Walpole, Christopher by name, to come from Cambridge and see me. Then I received him into the Church, and, giving him the money for the journey, sent him to Rome’. ‘Gerard doeth much good,’ wrote Henry Walpole jubilantly. Meanwhile, a fourth brother, Thomas, had left England to serve as a mercenary overseas.
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In 1593 Henry Walpole was sent as a minister to the recently established English seminary at Valladolid, to the north of Madrid. The violent, feverish heat of the Spanish summer, and the red dust that filled the air of the narrow, shuttered streets were a far cry from the marshy flatlands of Norfolk. Many Englishmen, in the four years since Robert Persons first suggested the foundation of the college, had succumbed to disease and death in these unaccustomed conditions. Nicholas Owen’s youngest brother Walter had arrived in Valladolid fresh from Reims and had been newly ordained a deacon in October 1590. A year later he was dead, aged just twenty-three. But it seemed the extreme climate of Valladolid was no deterrent to those young men arriving ‘faster out of England than their rooms can be made ready’. Like its Reims and Roman counterparts, the Spanish seminary had no shortage of students willing ‘to stand and die in the Catholic cause’. What it needed now was a protomartyr of its own.
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Ever since his ordination Henry Walpole had been bidding to return to England and take up a place on the Jesuit mission. Until now his superiors had rejected his application, though their reasons for this are unknown, but when Robert Persons visited Valladolid in June 1593 he brought with him good news: ‘suddenly he told me he was resolved I should go into England if I did not refuse’, wrote Walpole. Walpole did not refuse. Stopping only in Madrid to beg money for the seminary from King Philip II—a priest destined for England was felt to be the best ambassador for such a delicate job—Walpole arrived at the French coast in October and began hunting for a boat to take him over the Channel. His luck was out. London was in the grip of plague and no ships were sailing from Calais to England ‘by reason of the sickness’. Walpole spent a dismal November in St Omer, frustrated at his lack of progress. While there he encountered his brother Thomas and another mercenary, Edward Lingen, both seeking passage to England, and the three men decided to join forces. It was Lingen who found them a fleet of French warships leaving for Scotland and prepared to carry them into English waters. Making up the passenger list was a Scotsman, reportedly a prisoner of the French.
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Strong winds carried them swiftly up the English coast, past Norfolk, which was Walpole’s intended landing site, to Flamborough Head in Yorkshire. The unknown Scottish prisoner was put ashore first, to raise money for his ransom. No doubt the information with which he provided the English authorities—that a Jesuit priest was attempting a secret landing—paid him suitably well, for by the time Henry Walpole and his party were rowed into land at Bridlington, the watch had been alerted. That night the three men kept together, blundering through woodland in the dark until, by first light, they had reached the village of Kilham about nine miles inland. There, they took refuge in an inn while they planned their next move. Before long news had spread of the appearance of three travellers in the district and by sunset of their first day, 7 December 1593, they had been arrested.
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They were taken to the gaol at York Castle, where, towards the end of January 1594, Richard Topcliffe arrived to question them. It seemed ‘young Walpole’, as Topcliffe referred to Thomas, was disposed to talk and he was subsequently released, but Henry Walpole and Edward Lingen revealed little other than their identities. ‘Much more lieth hid in these two lewd persons, the Jesuit and Lingen’, wrote Topcliffe to the Council; they ‘must be dealt with in some sharp sort above, and more will burst out.’ Over the next few weeks Walpole would be subjected to repeated examinations in an effort to make him speak; ‘I marvel that my very common condition makes the Crown so interested in me,’ he noted. In fact, the Crown—in the person of Topcliffe—was more interested in anything that might lead the pursuivants to Walpole’s superior and head of the Jesuit mission in England, Henry Garnet, and Walpole would later be charged at his trial with failing to provide this information. And bearing the Jesuit’s inheritance in mind Topcliffe confidently promised ‘more in this service than ever I did in any before to her Majesty’s…purse’. Walpole, meanwhile, responded to Topcliffe’s threats by remarking, ‘I am much astonished that so vile a creature as I am should be so near, as they tell me, to the Crown of Martyrdom.’
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In February Topcliffe escorted Henry Walpole to London, to the Tower. There he was held for eight weeks in solitary confinement. Then, on 27 April, he was brought before Attorney General Edward Coke, the ubiquitous Richard Topcliffe and an officer of the Tower named Sergeant Drewe for his first bout of questioning. At his next two examinations, spread out over the month of May, Coke was absent and Walpole was left to the tender mercies of Topcliffe and Drewe. At the beginning of June Coke returned to the Tower, but evidently Walpole had not been broken yet. On the tenth of the month Coke wrote to Lord Keeper Puckering admitting he had little against the Jesuit other than his priesthood. But by 13 June Topcliffe was in possession of a signed testimony in Walpole’s hand, which, in stark contrast to his earlier examinations, contained a flood of information, including the two aliases—Walley and Roberts—by which Henry Garnet was known and details of the families with whom he sometimes resided. Walpole also promised to recant his Catholicism. The following day this testimony had stretched to include the names of twelve scholars and priests currently at Valladolid, twelve students in Seville, ‘as also of five sent to England’. What had happened to Walpole in those few days can only be imagined.
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