God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (59 page)

In a recent
Times
article about whether a Catholic Secretary of State could head a department responsible for stem-cell research, the author made little attempt to address the subject of conflict of interest, preferring to highlight the ‘zealotry and fervour’ of the spiritual organization Opus Dei, with which the politician in question is supposed to have a connection. At the foot of the piece, in bold typeface, was the phrase ‘so zealous a militant Catholic’. It is unclear whether these comments about Catholics and Catholicism constitute part of a new debate, informed by Britain’s increased secularism, or whether they belong to an older one, informed by a pattern of centuries-old fear and prejudice. What does come across, though, is that the language of the debate seems suffused with a hostility disproportionate to the subject being debated. At the time of writing the Downing Street Press Office is still denying rumours that Blair is on the verge of converting. A pre-election pledge made by the Prime Minister in June 2001, to review the 1701 Act of Settlement by which Catholics are debarred from acceding to the British throne, appears to have stalled, amid concerns about how this might affect the relationship between the Church of England and the State.
*
Meanwhile, the media continues to preserve the myth that England’s Catholic missionaries were trained assassins—witness director Shekhar Kapur’s 1998 film
Elizabeth
and the BBC’s documentary on Elizabeth for its 2002
100 Great Britons
series, both of which made reference to killer-priests.
¹⁹

Unsurprisingly, the country’s Catholics remain locked in their ‘otherness’, in that sliding scale of self-definition required of them when England and Rome first split. When the Earl of Denbigh converted to Catholicism in the nineteenth century, he had his coat of arms altered to declare: ‘First a Catholic, then an Englishman’. The MP Ann Widdecombe (who converted to Catholicism in 1993) described herself, in conversation with the author Dennis Sewell, as ‘a Catholic, British, Conservative, woman from Kent…in that order’. Evelyn Waugh summed the position up in his novel
Brideshead Revisited
, in which the Catholic Sebastian Flyte confirms that Catholics are simply not ‘like other people’. The Elizabethan propagandists’ victory, in turning England’s Catholics into a sub-species in their own country, is not diminished by the fact that it is Catholics who now label themselves as ‘different’, rather than the State.
²⁰

They had come home as missionaries, most fresh out of seminary college: young men yearning to save their country from the ‘heresy’ into which it was plunged, Rome’s army of arguers, burning with the force of their rhetoric and the certainty of their beliefs. Some were idealists; some unsure what else to do with themselves in a country bent on denying them advantage. Some were hopeful; some disaffected. Some longed to die; some sought only the stability of tradition. Some were regarded as the most able men of their generation; some were plodders, whose quiet labours went entirely unrecorded.

Their Government had termed them spies and assassins, secret agents of the enemy, complete with the trappings of their dubious profession, false papers, aliases, disguises, and ciphers; and as such it had hunted them down. ‘Shall no subject that is a spy…against his natural prince be taken and punished as a traitor, because he is not found with…a weapon, but yet is taken in his disguised apparel with…other manifest tokens to prove him a spy for traitors?’ This Sir William Cecil had asked back in 1583—and it was a good question. How could you tell apart the man who behaved like a secret agent
and was a secret agent
, from the man who behaved like a secret agent, but was a man of God (even if you, yourself, had forced that mode of behaviour upon him by your laws)?
²¹

No doubt some of the missionaries grew to share the same sense of seething resentment felt by many of the Catholic laity with whom they consorted; no doubt some were privy to information, plans, and plottings, to which they had no right. But, as Oswald Tesimond asked, ‘How many things do priests know of which they do not approve?’ And Henry Garnet would write to Anne Vaux: ‘who can hinder but he must know things sometimes which he would not.’
²²

Indeed, what is surprising, on examination of their story, is how few of the missionaries can be held accountable for anything other than their State-forbidden priesthood, a fact recognized by Catholic commentators of the day. A letter of
c.
1592 makes the point clearly: ‘If some priests have fallen, yet can it not be much marvelled at, considering the rigour of the persecution: but, sure, it is a manifest miracle, that, among so many, so few scandals have risen…[For] their attire, conversation, and manner of life must here, of force, be still different from their profession; the examples and occasions that move them to sin, infinite: and therefore, no doubt, a wonderful goodness of God that so few have fallen.’
²³

Religion has been used to justify too many acts of inhumanity to enumerate. Robert Catesby, said Garnet, ‘was so resolved…that it was lawful…to take arms for religion, that no man could dissuade [him]’; paradoxically, Catesby needed to claim Jesuit backing for his plot every bit as much as did the Government. But fear has inspired just as many acts of inhumanity. Elizabeth’s Government was, with reason, supremely fearful of the Catholic Church; James’s inherited that fear. Both preached regular sermons on their own essential decency and reasonableness (in marked contrast to what they perceived as the king-killing doctrines of Rome), both endorsed State-sanctioned acts of inhumanity: forced internments, show trials, revenge punishments, and the erosion of the common law. The argument goes that it is reductive to judge the past by the standards of today. Still, that does not mean we cannot examine the choices made in a fearful and uncertain past, better to evaluate those available to us in a fearful and uncertain present.

*
The verse of the National Anthem, calling on God to confound the King’s enemies and ‘frustrate their knavish tricks’, was reportedly first sung in the hall of the Merchant Taylors’ Company, in London’s Threadneedle Street, as part of just such an act of thanksgiving.

*
In a further piece of spin, the laws by which the English Catholic Church had progressively been dismantled since the time of Henry VIII’s first quarrel with Rome became the ‘sundry necessary and religious laws for [the]
preservation
of Church and State’.

*
These were William of Orange; Henri IV, and Louis IV of France; Elizabeth I, James I, Charles I, and Charles II of England; and Presidents Harrison, Taylor, Garfield, McKinley and Lincoln.

*
Curiously, John F. Kennedy was called before a meeting of Protestant ministers to reassure them that he would not become a Vatican puppet if elected to the presidency. His response appears eminently Elizabethan in its essential ambiguity and in its recognition of a divided loyalty: ‘If my Church attempted to influence me in a way which was improper or which affected adversely my responsibilities as a public servant, then I would reply to them that this was an improper action on their part and that it was one to which I could not subscribe.’

Author’s Note

It is a truism that history books say as much, if not more, about the period in which they are written than they do about the period
about
which they are written. We are creatures of our time, moulded by the multifarious ideas and images thrust our way, and by the preoccupations of the day; we cannot look at the past save through the prism of our own immediate present. I have been struck again and again during the writing of this book by the parallels between this period (and the events contained therein), and our own. Yet I have been wary of making such parallels explicit, believing that to do so would be an act of disrespect towards the men and women about whom I have been writing. Nonetheless, to ignore them also seems to be, at some level, an act of negligence.

On 8 November 2001 the Harvard law professor and prominent civil liberties lawyer Alan Dershowitz wrote an article in the
Los Angeles Times
, arguing in favour of ‘torture warrants’: mandates, issued on a case-by-case basis by a US high court judge, permitting the use of torture on a detainee (in fact, ‘torture warrants’ precisely akin to those issued by England’s Privy Council in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). In December 2001 the hastily compiled new British Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Securities Act made permissible the indefinite detention without trial of certain suspects. On 11 August 2004 the British Court of Appeal ruled that evidence extracted under torture in third countries was admissible as evidence, provided that the UK Government had ‘neither procured the torture nor connived at it’. On 20 November 2004 the
New Scientist
magazine featured a wide-ranging discussion about the accuracy of evidence elicited under torture. These four instances fit into a wider pattern of debate about the acceptable treatment of potential terrorists, as the West seeks to respond to the trauma inflicted upon it by the events of 11 September 2001. Once again the country stands trembling at the spectre of young men of a contrary religion, trained in martyrdom, hurling themselves at these shores. There are as many dissimilarities between these two situations as there are similarities. In the former category one can place motive and means: the myth of the assassin-priest has been replaced by the reality of the suicide-bomber. But the terms of engagement with the problem remain much the same—and they revolve around that one loaded word ‘potential’. For in this clash of ideologies, in which the battle-lines have been identified, in an act of risky over-simplification, as purely faith-based, how does one distinguish those members of that contrary faith engaged in the conflict from those members with no such designs?
¹

It is the unenviable task of the British Government to find a method of distinguishing combatant from non-combatant, within an acceptable legal and ethical framework. It is the even less enviable task of British Muslims to see any overt denotement of their faith and culture taken as evidence of their disloyalty to the State, and every gesture of dilution rewarded with the sobriquet ‘moderate’, meaning loyal; to see suspicion in every glance; to see their co-religionists held without trial, no demonstrable evidence brought against them; to see an identity being forced upon them, without their having any say in the matter. ‘How can a man truly swear that he does abjure a position which he never held?’ asked English Catholics of the Oath of Allegiance. We seem in danger of asking British Muslims to do similarly.
²

We are closer to our sixteenth-century forebears than we might care to admit, in our willingness to assume that the values by which we order our lives are incontestable. We are no less likely than they were to inflict suffering on any given minority of our population. Indeed, it might be argued that we have now factored the probability of minority suffering into our ethical decisionmaking: utilitarianism, the perfect philosophy for the politician, depending as it does on majority consensus, now appears to have become our default moral position in every crisis. And our rampant defence of the majority good—it is this that makes the use of torture justifiable, argues its new wave of defenders—permits all too much room for minority pain. More worrying still, it also gives unwarranted scope for majority fear to dominate the process of moral reasoning.

If these thoughts seem to sit uneasily at the tail end of what anyone would, correctly, regard as a popular history book, then I should explain that I offer them only because they have dominated so much of the process of this book’s writing.

Appendix

Of those houses mentioned in this book several are open to the public. Oxburgh Hall is near King’s Lynn in Norfolk; Baddesley Clinton is near Knowle in Warwickshire: both are managed by the National Trust. Coughton Court, near Alcester in Warwickshire, also managed by the Trust, has a permanent exhibition detailing the house’s links with the Gunpowder Plot. Stonor Park, near Henley-on-Thames, has a permanent exhibition illustrating the life of Edmund Campion, and visitors there can see the rooms believed to have housed the press on which Campion’s
Decem Rationes
was printed. Sadly there have been casualties among the houses no less than among their owners. Hindlip Hall is now the site of the headquarters of West Mercia Constabulary; Harrowden Hall is home to Wellingborough Golf Club.

Lastly, I’d like to draw the reader’s attention to a house not featured in this book, but worth visiting. This is Harvington Hall, near Kidderminster in Worcestershire. Harvington belonged to Humphrey Pakington, a recusant and a close friend of Thomas Habington at nearby Hindlip. This friendship makes it likely that Pakington was known to the Jesuits, and still extant at Harvington is a cluster of hiding-places believed to be by Nicholas Owen.

The hides are situated around the massive Great Staircase, the design of which dates from about 1600. Given the upheaval to the household that its construction would have caused, it makes sense to suppose that it and its surrounding hides were built of a piece (the former providing cover for the latter), some time after this date.

Climb the Great Staircase at Harvington today, to the top landing, and before you is a set of five steps leading up to what is known as the Nine Worthies Passage.
*
Place your fingers under the top two treads of these steps and they hinge back to reveal a small triangular hide, suitable for books and massing equipment. In the far wall of this hide is a gap, once covered by a secret door (probably camouflaged to look like brickwork), through which you can climb to a larger, man-sized hide beyond.