God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (20 page)

Walpole’s trial at York’s Lent Assizes was a shabby affair. Evidently he had now retracted his desire to recant for he was indicted with abjuring the realm without a licence, with receiving holy orders overseas and with returning to England to minister as a priest. For a while it seemed he would be denied the chance to speak in his own defence until one of the presiding judges, Justice Beaumont (father of the playwright Francis Beaumont and the son of a devoutly Catholic mother), overruled this decision. The court transcripts reveal a flash of Walpole’s legal training in the exchange that followed. ‘[Beaumont:] Our Laws appoint that a Priest who returns from beyond the Seas, and does not present himself before a Justice, within Three Days…shall be deemed a Traitor. [Walpole:] Then I am out of the Case…[for I] was apprehended before I had been one whole Day on English Ground.’ Such a technicality could not save him, though, and Henry Walpole was duly found guilty of treason. He was executed on 7 April 1595. Valladolid had its first martyr, Topcliffe had his man and Walpole, himself, had the hero’s fate he had been seeking ever since, as a twenty-three-year-old law student, he had stood at Tyburn watching Campion die. There was in this a gruesome symbiosis. The question was who or what did such a symbiosis serve?
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Fourteen years before Walpole’s death, on 14 October 1581, Claudio Aquaviva, the Jesuit General, had written to Robert Persons acknowledging the news of Edmund Campion’s arrest and imprisonment. His letter reached Persons at Rouen, where the priest had taken refuge after his hurried escape from England. In it, Aquaviva stated for the record that should the English Jesuit mission ever be revived, then all those sent on it in the future had an obligation not to be caught. Campion, he implied, had not been careful enough. Later, when Persons proposed to write a biography of his former colleague, Aquaviva was quick to stress that it should, indeed, be a life of Campion, rather than a glorification of his martyrdom. Amid the confusion, obfuscation and sheer lack of information that surrounds the actions of many characters in this story, there is something refreshingly candid about Aquaviva’s response. For the Jesuit General the missionaries’ job was simple: they were to survive and serve others, not die and serve themselves. Yes, he wrote to William Allen, martyrdom was a noble end, but the prospect of bringing aid to English Catholics was nobler still. And for that one had to stay alive. According to this assessment Henry Walpole, unlucky though his capture was, had failed the mission.
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Set against Aquaviva’s pronouncements, though, was the ineluctable fact that the martyrdoms of first Campion and now Walpole were having an extraordinary effect on new recruits. Shortly after Campion’s death the Oxford Regius Professor of Divinity had written to the Earl of Leicester observing, ‘It used to be said, “Dead men bite not”; and yet Campion dead bites with his friends’ teeth.’ And, he warned, ‘in the place of the single Campion, champions upon champions have swarmed to keep us engaged’. William Cecil, writing to Queen Elizabeth, identified the same phenomenon. ‘Putting to death doth no ways lessen them’, he explained, because persecution was ‘the Badge of the Church’. Persons, too, in the flurry of correspondence provoked by Campion’s execution, noted ‘Walsingham declared lately that it would have been better for the Queen to have spent 40,000 gold pieces than to kill publicly those priests’. For his own part, he added triumphantly, ‘it cannot be told…how much good their death has brought about’.
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All three men referred, the first two explicitly, to the hydra-effect of martyrdom: ‘upon cutting off one [head]’, wrote Cecil, ‘seven grow up’ to take its place. Among these new heads was that of student John Owen—elder or, possibly, twin brother of Nicholas Owen—who left Trinity College, Oxford for Reims in the summer of 1583, accompanied by the fifteen-year-old Walter Owen.
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By October 1584 John had been ordained a priest and was back in England to take up his place on the mission.
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Meanwhile, in Walpole’s case a painting of the new martyr was quickly commissioned to hang in the Great Hall of his old college at Valladolid. It showed him ‘with his left hand upon the rack, whereon he had been nine times tormented, with a rope about his neck, & his breast opened with the knife wherewith he was embowelled, and in his right hand he held his heart, which he offered up to Christ’. It was, wrote one commentator, ‘a very lively picture…[that] moved all to devotion that beheld it’. Certainly, it moved many to emulate his fate and not just from within the college. Reading of Walpole’s execution in his newly published biography, brought out soon after his death, the Spanish noblewoman Doña Luisa de Carvajal determined to go to England, serve alongside the missionaries and seek martyrdom herself, by any lawful means possible. In 1605, all attempts to dissuade her having proved unsuccessful, she was granted leave to sail, with Walpole’s brother Michael in attendance as her confessor. After a brief stay at Battle on the Sussex coast she moved to London and took up residence with the Spanish ambassador, but if this was meant to contain her it failed. In May 1606 she fell into vociferous argument with some local shopkeepers over a matter of religion and was arrested. Diplomats negotiated her release and the Spanish ambassador begged her to return to Spain, but to no avail. For a time she moved to north London, from where she wrote to her brother outlining the possibilities of converting the heretics of Highgate village. He, meanwhile, had set sail for England to fetch her back home—again to no avail. By 1613 English patience had worn thin. In October of that year the Sheriff of London raided Doña Luisa’s Spitalfields house and she was carried off to Newgate prison. The Spanish ambassador began the long process of renegotiating her release, the Spanish ambassador’s wife demanded to be arrested, herself, unless her friend was freed, and the then King of England, James I, sent to Madrid, imploring Spain to recall her.
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In the end Doña Luisa would have her wish and die on English soil. Her health had always been poor and on 2 January 1614, her forty-sixth birthday, it failed—before she could answer the Spanish King’s summons home. Michael Walpole accompanied her body back to Spain and she was buried at the Chapel of the Augustinian Convent of the Incarnation in Madrid. Hers was a singular story, yet it illustrated how the cult of martyrdom, so strong within the Christian Church since its infancy, had lost none of its power at the Reformation. With the Church newly divided, with the very interpretation of Christianity in crisis, never had the call for martyrs been greater than now it seemed. It was the early Christians’ willingness to die for their faith that had helped turn an obscure little sect into the dominant world power it had become. That same willingness to die for the Catholic mission now appeared, at one level at least, to be its greatest strength. For what government-forged weapon was strong enough to defeat a man already seeking death?
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At the same time, though, it was also becoming its greatest weakness. After Campion’s martyrdom, among the recriminations and celebrations of both sides, Claudio Aquaviva’s voice had sounded a note of cool, clear pragmatism. Campion had had a job to do and he had failed. With the emergence of Richard Topcliffe as the Queen’s personal priest-hunter, leading an increasingly organized force against the mission, Aquaviva’s words had gained a fresh imperative—an imperative brought sharply into focus by the treatment of Henry Walpole in the Tower. For those charged with running the mission, the challenge now lay not just in keeping their priests alive long enough to bring comfort to England’s Catholics, but in keeping them out of the torture chamber so they could not imperil the entire operation. The logistical obstacles in the way of this challenge, not least the fact that many missionaries seemed drawn to death like moths to a flame, were legion.

As early as 1577 William Allen had outlined the hardships faced by his students in returning home to England. ‘I could reckon unto you the miseries they suffer in night journeys in the worst weather that can be picked, peril of thieves, of waters, of watches, of false brethren.’ For Allen and Robert Persons, to whom the job of selecting potential missionaries had devolved, their first task was to pick men capable of withstanding these pressures.
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This was not easy.
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For every John Gerard sent to England, clear-headed and apparently thriving on the danger, was another for whom the sheer terror of their situation was the cause of instant paralysis. On 28 December 1581, just weeks after Campion’s execution, the young seminary priest William Bishop arrived at Rye harbour on the Sussex coast. Robert Persons takes up the story:

Bishop was examined at the port and as he answered in rather a hesitating way he was detained, whereas the other two priests on the same occasion, owing to the fact that they spoke briskly and promptly, were allowed to go. They asked Bishop what calling in life he followed. He answered that he was a merchant. Again he was asked what sort of merchandise he dealt in. He was silent. And on being pressed a little more severely, he confessed that he was a priest. From there he was conducted next day to the Royal Council and made a most uncompromising confession of his faith, and was thrown into prison. To many people, however, such simplicity in the face of these very cunning wolves does commend itself. But what shall we say? God is wonderful in his providence and it is not understood by us. Bishop was warned about this at the time when he was about to go on board, but he seemed so absorbed in meditating on heavenly things as to be quite oblivious of human affairs.
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It was into the ever widening gulf between heavenly things and human affairs that many priests would stumble and come to grief.

This gulf had been clearly identified at Campion’s trial. There, the Queen’s Counsel had quizzed the Jesuit on his use of a disguise and alias and it is worth quoting the court transcripts to illustrate the dilemma now faced by the mission’s organizers.

[Counsel:] your deeds and actions prove your words but forged; for what meaning had that changing of your name? Whereto belonged your disguising in apparel? Can these alterations be wrought without suspicion? Your name being Campion, why were you called Hastings?…No, there was a further matter intended; your lurking and lying hid in secret places concludeth with the rest a mischievous meaning. Had you come hither for love of your country, you would never have wrought a hugger-mugger; had your intent been to have done well, you would never have hated the light; and therefore this budging deciphereth your treason.
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Here, then, was the missionaries’ quandary. If a priest entered the country in disguise and lived in secret he laid himself wide open to accusations of treachery—for what need had an honest man for secrecy? If, on the other hand, he entered the country openly he would, like William Bishop, be dragged off to prison—and still be accused of treason, by the simple virtue of his being a Catholic priest. Given the impossible nature of this situation, it made increasing sense to send to England priests who were at least capable of behaving like the spies the Government believed them to be, howsoever this risked damaging the spiritual reputation of the mission long-term. Men like Bishop, enthusiastic, idealistic, utterly breakable, were a danger to every missionary and to every Catholic who took them in.

Always assuming the newly arrived priests could make it through customs and past the many checkpoints designed to prevent their entry into the country, then their troubles had really started. The actual landing had been adrenaline-fuelled and immediate, with little time for reflection on their position, but life underground seldom offered these comforts.
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Soon most were acquainted with feelings of creeping despair and numbing loneliness. The transcript of the interrogation of seminary priest John Brushford gave some indication of just how dispiriting life on the run could be. Brushford arrived in England in the spring of 1585, just before the introduction of the new law making sheltering a priest a felony, ‘and, by reason thereof, I found everybody so fearful, as none would receive me into their houses’. There followed a catalogue of rented accommodation across London as Brushford attempted to shift for himself—in Tottenham, Clerkenwell, Bishopsgate and ‘also a chamber in Gray’s Inn Lane, at one Blake’s house, unto the which I resorted, when I knew not whither to go else’. For a time Brushford left London for lodgings in Monmouth, ‘until the gentleman [his landlord] began to suspect what I was’. At Winchester, where he also travelled, he was unable to find shelter at all. A Mrs Coram, recognizing him as a priest, turned him away, saying, ‘Her husband was not at home; her house was full of strangers; and she had sheep to shear: wherefore she prayed me to depart.’ Brushford headed back to London ‘where I remained until I had opportunity to depart the land, which I earnestly desired’. This opportunity came when he learned of a ship at Southampton preparing to sail to France and he fled the country gratefully. His had been a depressing ordeal from start to finish.
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But if life on the run could be thoroughly enervating, then a life in hiding was no less stressful, as a contemporary report revealed. The priests ‘lived for the most part in the upper stories or attics of the house; as remote as possible from the observations of both domestics and visitors’. Remoteness was not sufficient a safety measure on its own, though. ‘Great caution had to be observed as to the windows, whether to admit or exclude light; by day they were careful in opening them, lest the passers-by might observe that someone lived in the room; at night they were more careful still in shutting them, lest the light might betray the inhabitant.’ Similarly, priests were to take care to step ‘lightly…when pacing the room, or [to] proceed cautiously along the beams’, while at ‘certain hours all movement in the room was prohibited, that no noise might be heard’. If they left the house, the priests were advised to do so between ‘the second or third hour of the night, and return…when the domestics had retired to rest’, for fear they might be betrayed. So, except for the hour of mass, which every Catholic would attend who could be spared, a priest might spend ‘almost entire days, weeks and months alone’. This ‘constant solitude’ was ‘oppressive’, wrote the unnamed priest who put together the report.
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With this in mind, Henry Garnet, writing to Claudio Aquaviva about the kind of men he needed in England, was quick to request priests ‘reliant on divine providence, equipped with virtue’ and ‘outstanding for their piety’. Without piety, believed Garnet, no man had a hope of surviving the pressures of the mission.
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