God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (42 page)

Back in Wisbech, conditions were no better. The castle’s birth as a Catholic internment camp dated from the late 1570s.
*
By the mid-1590s it was packed with priests, including the Jesuit Father William Weston, Garnet’s predecessor as Superior, and in this atmosphere of enforced idleness differences quickly arose between inmates: the same month that Jesuit rule in Rome was reported as being so precarious, Weston was charging some of his fellow prisoners with ‘whoring, drunkenness, and dicing’. Soon a group of eighteen priests had banded together in pursuit of stricter discipline and had written to Henry Garnet, begging that Weston be appointed their Superior. Garnet, fully aware that a Jesuit had no right of authority over non-Jesuits, wrote back suggesting Weston become their spiritual adviser rather than their Superior and accept the title of ‘Agent’ from them. This, though, was sufficient to enrage some among the seminary priests who complained the Society was getting above itself, and now the Wisbech prisoners split into factions, each demanding separate quarters, separate tables in the refectory, an entirely separate existence in fact.
³⁰

That such tensions should ever have arisen was not surprising: there existed significant differences between the Jesuits and the seminary priests that, fissure-like, were always going to be vulnerable to applied pressure. And pressure was one thing in abundant supply on the mission. For a start, the Jesuits were a religious order akin to the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Benedictines, while the seminary priests belonged to the secular clergy—and the latter had long held the trenchant view that the religious should mind their own, preferably monastic business and leave ministering to the laity to them.
*
Next, the Jesuits were a new order, born out of the Counter-Reformation and unburdened by a cumbersome heritage or a long-established hierarchy. The seminary priests were the heirs and successors to the traditions of the English Catholic Church and were bound by its legacy. Both these factors pointed to areas of potential ecclesiastical conflict between the two sides. But there was one further difference that, in the context of the English mission, chased this conflict out into a more worldly arena. The Jesuits were an international order with specific links to Italy, through their allegiance to the Pope, and to Spain, through their founder. The seminary priests were exclusively English.

One need only look to the writing of the period to see what the average sixteenth-century Englishman thought of the average Italian or Spaniard. The theatres were full of Italian-set scenes of stabbings and poisonings. Travellers reported that the Italians were ‘hypocritical, close, malicious, encroaching and deadly’. Others warned that if the Spanish landed in England, Englishmen would see ‘the rape of your daughter, the buggery of your son, or the sodomizing of your sow’. But the worst type of all, or so everyone in Europe seemed to agree, was the Englishman affiliated to Italy: the Italianate Englishman. He, according to an Italian proverb gaining popular currency in England, was ‘the devil incarnate’. Most representative of this type were, of course, the English Jesuits—it was a useful belief to foster.
³¹

For the Government, genuinely alarmed by the Jesuits’ success in England, the more tales it could tell of slippery Italianate English papistry, as peddled by the Jesuits and in marked contrast to its own bluff honest Anglicanism, the more reason it had to press for the eradication of the Society. For those seminary priests already nursing a grievance towards the Society (and aware that its links with the enemy fuelled the Government’s case that Catholics were traitors), the contrast between their own Englishness and the Jesuits’ internationalism served as a possible bargaining counter with the Government. And the coinciding of two events towards the end of 1594 made the playing of this counter almost inevitable. The first was the explosion onto an already troubled scene of the Robert Persons-led
A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England.
The second was the death of William Allen.

Allen had held the mission together. The seminaries were his creation, the mission, itself, was his creation, the impetus to persuade the Jesuits to enter the fray against their general’s will was his too. He had made the return of England to Catholicism his personal crusade. His views on how this might be achieved had dovetailed neatly with those of Persons, and since Persons’ flight from England in 1581 the two men had worked together in pursuit of this single goal. Allen and Persons, Persons and Allen: despite all the Government’s attempts to set a faction between them, both men remained jointly committed to the venture. Jointly
and
controversially committed to it: in the early 1580s they were drawn into a French scheme to invade England and overthrow Elizabeth; for Persons this had placed him in direct contravention of the Society’s founding guidelines, which stressed the order’s nonpolitical nature. By 1587 the two men had thrown their support behind the Spanish Armada, convinced only Spain had the military might necessary to effect their desired regime change. In March that year they compiled a joint dossier validating Philip II’s claim to the English throne through the House of Lancaster. They also drew up guidelines for a document legitimizing the invasion. This document would elaborate on ‘the multiple bastardy of this Queen Elizabeth, her wicked mode of life, [and] the injuries she has done to all Christendom’. It would also point out the advantages to England of being placed under Spanish protection. All this ‘is evident to us,’ wrote Allen and Persons, ‘but the matter must be made more convincing by means of this book’. Finally, Allen, like Persons, had been one of the committee behind
A Conference.
³²

So it was altogether erroneous to hold Persons, alone, responsible for the pro-Spanish sentiments contained in this text. Indeed, it was altogether erroneous to hold Allen and Persons solely responsible for them: eight years after the Armada’s defeat Sir Francis Englefield, England’s leading Catholic layman abroad, was still writing ‘Without the support and troops of Spain it is scarcely probable that the Catholic religion will ever be restored [in England]’. But theirs were exiles’ opinions, opinions that failed to take into account how war with Spain had hardened both the English Government’s attitude towards Catholicism and English Catholics’ attitude towards Spain. In such a context Sir Thomas Tresham’s ‘unspeakable joy’ at the Armada’s defeat was more representative of the views of his co-religionists than Allen and Persons’ belief that they would ‘with the greatest unanimity’ embrace a Spanish ruler. Allen’s death—on 16 October 1594, aged sixty-two—would leave Persons out in the open, holding the smoking gun of both men’s policies.
³³

The year 1595 saw the increase in unrest in Rome and the Wisbech feud; 1596 saw the effects of this poison seeping into the lifeblood of the mission. That August Robert Persons received word from Rector Agazzari in Rome that the rebel English students there nursed ‘such a hatred against the Society that I fear that they would be ready to join hands with the heretics in order to be delivered from them’. And ignoring the fact that William Allen had contributed to
A Conference
, they blamed Persons squarely for its unpopular opinions. ‘I know not whether they hate the Society more on account of the Spaniards,’ wrote Agazzari, ‘or the Spaniards on account of the Society.’ Meanwhile, a letter of Henry Garnet’s to General Claudio Aquaviva that year testified to the growth in anti-Jesuit criticism back in England.
³⁴

For Garnet these attacks had now become personal. Among a few of the seminary priests, he wrote, he was being traduced as ‘a little wretch of a man, marked out to die, who day and night thinks of nothing save the rack and gibbet’. Worse than that, everything he had laboured for since taking over the Jesuit mission was being painted as self-promoting and hostile to the needs of the seminary priests. It was only a small percentage who complained, he stressed, but their slurs still hurt, a fact borne out by the lengths to which the habitually modest Garnet went to refute them: his letter was a passionate defence of his own actions and those of his fellow Jesuits. One story serves to indicate the nature of these slurs. Shortly before Allen’s death, wrote Garnet, a seminary priest began spreading rumours in Rome that the Jesuits were refusing to assist incomers to England. Many seminary priests were now almost too scared to cross over, but when they did so, and found ‘there was virtually no one to give them help…except our own priests, they were staggered at the man’s story and told me so themselves, scoffing at the tales he had told them’. Then the rumour-monger, himself, crossed over, taking lodgings at an inn in London. Garnet takes up the narrative: ‘It so happened that on the very same day he entered the city, I did too. Before I visited any Catholic, I made for the inn and sought him out in courtesy and friendliness. I could not ask him to come with me, for I was uncertain myself whether any Catholic family would take me in that night. But I had hardly gone twelve yards, when I met a Catholic whom I knew and asked him to have a care of this priest.’ And now, wrote Garnet, ‘we have made this priest our friend’. So much so, he noted, that unbidden the priest had just written a passionate defence of the Society’s rule in Rome.
³⁵

The catalyst for all-out conflict was the appointment, in March 1598, of George Blackwell (ex-Trinity College, Oxford and ex-English College, Douai) to the post of Archpriest, in charge of the still leaderless seminary priests in England. This appointment was Rome’s idea, but the handling of the affair caused more problems than it cured. First, the man responsible for the appointment, Cardinal Cajetan, sought Garnet’s advice, enraging those priests already critical of the Jesuits. Second, when the brief announcing the appointment was published, it bore Cajetan’s name, rather than the Pope’s, as though the Pope, himself, had not officially authorized it. Third, the brief paid tribute to the Society’s work in England, particularly Garnet’s, stipulating that, in view of the latter’s ‘experience of English affairs’, ‘the Archpriest will be careful in matters of greater moment to ask his [Garnet’s] opinion and advice’—further enraging the anti-Jesuits. Last, and most insulting, was the fact that the office of Archpriest, itself, was an entirely new creation, a stunted version of a bishop’s office, with powers to discipline priests, but no concomitant authority to ordain. Dr Humphrey Ely would write angrily of the position, ‘I term it a new dignity…the lowest and basest dignity in Christ’s church.’ Rome’s attempts to spread ‘peace and union of minds’ between Jesuits and seculars had only succeeded in uniting those agitators who nursed a grudge against the Society with those traditionalists concerned to preserve the hierarchy and heritage of the old English Catholic Church, in passionate opposition to the hapless Blackwell. In June 1598 Garnet would write to Robert Persons, saying that Blackwell ‘doth very well and is generally liked’, but plans were already afoot among some of the seminary priests to depose him.
³⁶

The next few years saw move followed by counter-move, blast followed by counter-blast, most of them characterized by an almost hysterical amount of name-calling, as seminary priests and Jesuits slugged it out. It was as though the decades of pent-up fear and frustration, of living in death’s shadow, had finally found release in an act of violent self-mutilation. And the English Government, looking on, had only to keep the combatants locked together for this self-mutilation to continue. One Council agent, suspicious of the ease with which the mission seemed to be imploding of its own accord, warned that the whole thing was an elaborate plot devised by both parties to ‘gain liberty’. Meanwhile, the Council gathered information on the dispute and waited to act.
*
³⁷

From the moment of Blackwell’s appointment, a small body of seminary priests refused to accept his authority, appealing to Rome (and earning themselves the title Appellants) for him to be dismissed and replaced with a bishop of their own choosing. Subsidiary to this they asked that the English College in Rome be removed from Jesuit control. Rome refused, reportedly under pressure from Persons, and ordered the rebel priests to make their peace with Blackwell.

Now the Jesuit Thomas Lister, long a thorn in Garnet’s side as a result of his erratic behaviour, put pen to paper to accuse the Appellants of the sin of schism, declaring that ipso facto they were excommunicate. It was a view Garnet, himself, shared—the Appellants were defying the Pope in defying the Archpriest—but Lister’s public polemic fuelled anti-Jesuit feeling among the seminary priests further.
³⁹

Then Blackwell, himself, joined the fray, agreeing with Lister and demanding the Appellants acknowledge their sin and make reparation for it—fuelling the Appellants’ belief that Blackwell was in the Jesuits’ pocket.
⁴⁰

Meanwhile, from Wisbech prison, one of the leading Appellants, Dr Christopher Bagshaw, was summoned to London’s Gatehouse for questioning. Bagshaw was another ex-Oxford man, a former fellow of Balliol College, where he had studied alongside Robert Persons; anecdotally, the two men had never got on. Now Garnet wrote to Persons, saying he had received word from several sources that Bagshaw was behind William Weston’s recent and hurried transfer to the Tower of London and that he was busy holding secret talks with the Government. There exists a document, endorsed by Bagshaw, that appears to support Garnet’s claim, showing him to have been agitating for the Jesuits’ expulsion from England.
⁴¹

At the same time the polemic war intensified. Blackwell was variously described as ‘a Jesuitical idol’ and ‘a puppy to dance after the Jesuit’s pipe’. Robert Persons, for whom the greatest contempt was reserved, was described as ‘the principal author…of all our garboils at home’; he and Campion, the text went on, had ‘so acted as to provoke the queen and magistrates to enact most cruel laws, before unheard of, against the seminarists’. The author here was the seminarian John Mush, formerly Margaret Clitherow’s confessor, who had applied to join—and been rejected by—the Jesuits. Anthony Copley, Robert Southwell’s layman cousin, also weighed into the attack, calling Persons ‘the misbegotten [son] of a ploughman’, who had sired ‘two bastards, male and female, upon the body of his own sister’.
*
⁴²