God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (24 page)

These hostilities and, more particularly, the arrival of so many new Catholic priests into the kingdom were, according to the proclamation, simply the prelude to yet another attempted ‘Invasion of this Realm’ forecast for the following year. All those who regarded themselves as honest Englishmen were charged to stand to the defence of ‘their Wives, Families, Children, Lands, Goods, Liberties, and their Posterities against ravening Strangers, wilful Destroyers of their Native Country, and monstrous Traitors’. The best way they could carry out this duty, advised the proclamation, was to make enquiry of every newcomer in their household, and, indeed, in the surrounding area, as to ‘where he [had] spent his Time for the space of one whole Year before’. Anyone who proved unable satisfactorily to account for his movements was to be handed over to a specially appointed district commissioner for further investigation.
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Having stirred into action a neighbourhood watch of unprecedented size, suspicious of everyone, and having sounded a warning to all Catholic families in possession of a priest, the Government now turned its attention to the more pressing concern of mustering troops to set against this new Armada. The threat of invasion was real. Ever since the remnants of his first fleet had staggered home in disarray in 1588, Philip II of Spain had been marshalling his forces for a second attack. And recent events in France—events of which Spain was hungrily taking advantage—had offered England ample proof, if proof were needed, that there were among the Catholic Church those just as willing to kill for their faith as to die for it. In the summer of 1589 the French King Henri III was assassinated by Father Jacques Clément, a Dominican monk.

Clément was a member of the Catholic League, a fundamentalist organization financed by the influential Guise family, dedicated to eradicating heresy in France and powerful enough to challenge what it saw as Henri’s over-conciliatory stance towards the French Huguenots. In 1588 Henri had attempted to clip the League’s wings by ordering the murder of the Duc de Guise. This, in turn, had led to his own assassination. Now the Leaguers—with Spanish backing—were engaged in preventing the new French King, the Protestant Henri de Navarre, from taking his throne. Were they to succeed there would be little to stop them joining forces with Philip II and crossing the Channel to invade England. ‘The state of the world is marvellously changed’, noted William Cecil drily, ‘when we true Englishmen have cause for our own quietness to wish good success to a French king.’
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But if this was the state of the world, then the state of the nation was worse. For the England now crawling towards the century’s close was an England haemorrhaging money on defensive strategies at home and counter-offensive measures abroad, taxed to the hilt and tired of starting at its own shadow. It would have been a rare government that failed, at such a moment, to play the treachery card, invoking the nascent creed, nationalism, over the ancient creed, religion; rarer still when there existed enough evidence to show that faith led men to murder just as easily as martyrdom. Elizabeth’s Government was not so rare.

So the 1591 proclamation painted the very portrait of treachery. The Catholic missionaries, it explained, were ‘dissolute young Men’, criminals, fugitives and rebels, schooled in sedition, ‘pretending to promise Heaven…threatening Damnation’ and ‘Undermining our good Subjects…to train them to their Treasons’. This was tabloid language and sentiment, fanning the flames of national paranoia, fuelling the panic, smoking out all those still standing undecided in the midst of England’s religious divide. It was effective, low-punching, hard-hitting propaganda—cheap and cheerfully brutal. It deserved an answer. And almost as soon as the ink from the presses was dry, Robert Southwell, Jesuit poet, took up his pen to make it one. ‘Most mighty and most merciful, most feared and best beloved Princess,’ he began to Elizabeth. In the ongoing war of words between Catholics and Protestants a champion had just entered the lists.
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Even before the Reformation fractured the polished unity of Roman Catholic Christendom, dissenting voices had complained of the Church’s stranglehold on the language of faith. The word of God, they argued, came to his flock in a tongue it did not speak, through the mangling maws of a parish priest schooled only so well as the latest educational policies permitted. The word of God was all too often unintelligible gibberish.

By the mid-fourteenth century a blunt-talking theologian, Yorkshireman John Wycliffe, had decided to take a stand against this and other disputed aspects of papal authority in England, launching a full-scale attack on what he regarded as Church corruption, culminating in the first translation into English of the Bible,
c.
1382. Rome’s monopoly on the word of God had been broken.

The backlash was quick and severe. England gained new heresy laws in line with the rest of Europe permitting burning at the stake and several of Wycliffe’s followers, who included a disproportionate number of Oxford University men, suffered accordingly.
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Wycliffe, himself, was exhumed—he had died of a stroke in 1384—and his body was burnt by order of the Pope. There could be few clearer indications of just how ugly the struggle to retain control of the written language might eventually become.

Then in 1450 a German goldsmith from Mainz called Johannes Gutenberg developed the first Western printing press, an invention brought to England twenty-six years later by William Caxton. Within the space of a generation the printed word was exploding about Europe with firecracker ferocity as the long and labourintensive process of transcribing texts by hand was replaced with the rapid mechanical efficiency of metal typesetting and multiple copy-runs. The ‘appearance and state of the world’, as Sir Francis Bacon would later put it, had changed forever.
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The Church’s critics were quick to identify the possible uses of this upstart industry. When the leading English Protestant William Tyndale fled abroad in 1524, it was his own new translation of the Bible that returned home in his place, secreted back from Antwerp and Cologne by the hundred-load. Draconian legislation was swiftly introduced in Parliament to try to stem the tide and the printing presses of England, previously unrestricted, now found themselves subject to stringent regulations, a practice Elizabeth, on her succession, saw no reason to discontinue. The Stationers’ Company charter, as re-confirmed in 1559, read: ‘no manner of person shall print any manner of book or paper of what sort, nature, or in what language soever it be, except the same be first licensed by her Majesty…or by six of her Privy Council or be perused and licensed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the Bishop of London [and] the Chancellors of both Universities’. Such a formidable selection panel might be capable of muffling the voices of its domestic opponents; it was quite powerless against the presses of Europe.
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Since the outlawing of Catholicism in England, book-running had become a popular pastime and the Continental printworks now produced a stream of Catholic literature to be smuggled back for the home market. As fast as the books entered the country so the Government hunted them down. Greater efforts still were made to keep such works from the eyes of susceptible university students; messengers flew between London and the heads of Oxford’s colleges ordering searches of undergraduate rooms for suspect material. In the spring of 1577 pursuivants raided the house of Rowland Jenks, a stationer and bookbinder of Oxford. Jenks was charged with distributing banned Catholic texts. At the July assizes he ‘was arraigned as a Catholic, found guilty, and being but one of the common people, was condemned to lose both his ears’, as one commentator reported. In fact his sentence was even more specific. His ears were to be nailed to the pillory and he was to be given the choice of cutting himself free or remaining there indefinitely.
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It was Robert Persons, as part of the centralizing activities of the first Jesuit mission, who decided to set up a secret English press of his own. To his aid came William Brooksby and the printer Stephen Brinkley, both associates of the Jesuits’ benefactor George Gilbert. Brooksby persuaded his father to lend them his house at Greenstreet near Barking, some six or seven miles outside London; Brinkley found seven workmen to join him there and by November 1580 the presses were rolling. The inaugural text was written by Persons himself and entitled
A Brief Discourse containing certain reasons why Catholics refuse to go to Church.
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Great care was taken in distributing the new books. They were ‘consigned to the priests in parcels of fifty or a hundred,’ explained Persons, ‘and sent at exactly the same time to different parts of the kingdom’. Then, to coincide with the predicted ‘searches of Catholic houses…a number of young gentlemen [were] ready to distribute other copies at night in the dwellings of the heretics, in the workshops, as well as in the palaces of the nobles, in the court also and about the streets, so that the Catholics alone [could] not be charged with being in possession of them’. As a further protective measure the title page of each book testified to its having been printed in Douai. Little could camouflage their distinctive English typeface, though, and soon the government’s net was closing in on Greenstreet. When one of his men was arrested, Brinkley finished off the print-run, dismantled his press and quietly departed the neighbourhood.
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For a while Brinkley relocated to Southwark near St Mary Overie (now Southwark Cathedral), to the house of Francis Browne, a staunch supporter of the Jesuit mission, but by April 1581 the press was on the move again, this time to the more discreet location of Stonor in Oxfordshire. Here, the propaganda war moved up a gear with Edmund Campion’s
Decem Rationes.
Its full title was
Ten Reasons for the confidence with which Edmund Campion offered his adversaries to dispute on behalf of the Faith, set before the famous men of our Universities
and it contained an impassioned defence of the Catholic faith. It only needed Father William Hartley, Oxford’s Catholic mole, to set the new book before those famous—and impressionable—young men of Oxford University to complete Campion’s challenge. Hartley duly obliged. Those students attending Commencement at St Mary’s Church on Oxford’s High Street, on the morning of Tuesday, 27 June, found several hundred copies of the
Decem Rationes
waiting for them on their benches. Within weeks, though, Campion had been arrested at Lyford, Brinkley was a prisoner in the Tower and the Jesuit mission—and its secret press—lay in ruins.
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It took a former print worker and a budding poet to amend those fortunes. The pairing of Henry Garnet and Robert Southwell—so effective in building up a solid network of safe houses for the Catholic mission—was, in terms of the propaganda campaign still to be waged, inspirational. The driving force was Robert Southwell’s. Six months into his new job it had become abundantly clear to Southwell how bleak the situation for English Catholicism was. Just the summer before, in August 1586, a small band of Catholics led by Anthony Babington had been rounded up, convicted of plotting to kill the Queen and executed with a brutality that shocked even those onlookers baying for their blood.
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Now, as Parliament pressed for the death of Mary, Queen of Scots, bruited across the country as Babington’s accomplice in the outrage, fresh details of the narrowly averted terror attack continued to spill from the popular presses, each one more sensational than the last. For England’s Catholics, caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of Babington’s folly and Philip of Spain’s rumoured Armada, these were times to remain out of sight, away from the accusations of treason that continued to hound them because of their faith. Southwell’s frustration at this unstoppable spew of propaganda was voiced in a letter to Claudio Aquaviva that January. The London publications reaching him were all of ‘one cry’, he railed: ‘that traitors and assassins such as we should not be tolerated in the State, that we are plotting the ruin of the gospel and of all sacred things. And we are to conclude that our own ruin has come upon us because we are hateful to heaven and earth’. Bitterly he observed, ‘It is an axiom of liars that what is won by lies must be kept and confirmed by lies.’ When Henry Garnet met with Southwell that February, it seems Southwell put his case for confronting these lies head-on, in hard print. It remained for Garnet, with his technical expertise, to make this possible.
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It is likely the new Jesuit press was housed outside London, at Acton in Middlesex, in a small garden cottage belonging to Anne Howard, Countess of Arundel. Southwell’s connection with the Howards had grown up out of a misunderstanding. Shortly after his arrival in England, while still based with the Vaux family in Hackney, he had received word that the Countess was searching for a Catholic priest. Southwell left Hackney for the Countess’s town house on London’s Strand and, after a few days there, began making discreet inquiries about the possibility of building a hiding place for this, his new residence. It was some years later—and only after Southwell had become a permanent fixture in her household—that the Countess revealed to him she had only been seeking a priest to visit on a temporary basis, not to stay. For the Jesuits, however, Southwell’s mistake brought with it huge dividends. The Howards were England’s foremost aristocratic family.
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On the execution of his father Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, in 1572, Anne’s husband Philip, Earl of Arundel had lost his dukedom, but gained, it seemed, a glamorous following at court, where he remained a popular favourite with the Queen.
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Arundel, though, was no more a politician than his father was, and in the shifting sands of back stage life at Greenwich, Richmond and Westminster, wherever the royal party was in residence, he was soon stuck fast. By the early 1580s, having disastrously backed the latest marriage proposal to come from France over the Earl of Leicester’s rival claims to Elizabeth’s hand, Arundel withdrew from Court. Soon it was rumoured he was dabbling in Catholicism and in September 1584 Jesuit Father William Weston received him into the Roman Church. A year later Arundel attempted to flee the country, leaving behind him a letter to Elizabeth in which he accused her of countenancing ‘mine adversaries in mine own sight of purpose to disgrace me’. He explained his departure by his refusal to be ‘pointed at, as one whom your majesty did least favour’. As excuses go, it was hardly likely to endear him to the Queen. Even less so was his prominent conversion to the enemy faith and on his capture, mid-escape, Arundel was taken to the Tower of London. It seemed probable he would follow his father to the scaffold.
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