God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (8 page)

To come of age in the 1570s, like John Gerard in Lancashire and Nicholas Owen in Oxford, was to grow to awareness in the uneasy stillness that heralds a distant but inevitable storm. And picked out brightly against the decade’s darkening sky was a series of events, the intervals between which might be counted out like the silence between lightning and thunder to show how fast the storm was approaching.

Early in 1573 a package of letters from the Continent fell into the hands of Bishop Edwin Sandys. Sandys dispatched a party of royal messengers—the ominously named pursuivants—to bring in the intended recipients, and the pursuivants took the well-trodden road to Oxford.
†
⁶

There, they rounded up a handful of students for questioning, but one of the names on their list was missing: Cuthbert Mayne, a West Countryman and member of St John’s College, was away visiting relatives. Friends quickly passed word to the student that it would be unwise for him to return to university and soon Mayne found himself boarding a ship off the coast of Cornwall and sailing for Flanders and the English College at Douai.
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Over the next few years many more packages arrived in Oxford. Their contents were identical—invitations, from one friend to another, to join the growing fraternity of students overseas—and their summonses were answered by vast numbers of Oxford’s disaffected undergraduates. Such was the siren call of Douai.

Then, in 1574, just a year after Mayne’s hurried departure to the Continent, four other young Englishmen—one a former fellow of Mayne’s old college, St John’s—made a second and even more significant Channel crossing. Their names were Lewis Barlow, Martin Nelson, Thomas Metham and Henry Shaw. They were recent graduates of the Douai College and all were newly ordained Catholic priests. Their journey took them from the Low Countries back home again, in secret, to England. Dr William Allen’s solution had been put in motion.
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The English College of the University of Douai, William Allen’s brainchild, was born out of frustration. Allen had departed Oxford in 1561 refusing to swear the Oath of Supremacy required of him by the university authorities, and his flight had taken him as far as the University of Louvain in the Low Countries. There he discovered a flourishing community of English exiles living in two large houses, to which they had given the names Oxford and Cambridge and from which they released a stream of anti-Protestant publications to be smuggled back to England. Allen set to work with a will. When ill health forced him to return home in the summer of 1562, he found among the leaderless English Catholics a religious apathy in stark contrast to the vigour of Louvain.
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For the next two and a half years Allen toured England, trying single-handedly, but with isolated success, to communicate a sense of Louvain’s vitality to his friends. His dismay at their complacency and their willingness to compromise grew steadily all the while. The Pope’s recent ruling that Catholics should not attend Church of England services had been widely ignored. Those ‘who believed the faith in their hearts and heard mass at home when they could’ were still frequenting their local parish churches, heedless of the dangers of this ‘damnable sin of schism’, wrote Allen. No matter how they blamed the Government’s laws for ‘their unlawful acts’, England’s Catholics were heading for ‘the miserable abyss of destruction’. Elizabeth’s policy seemed to be working: the old religion was dying by degrees—and not through persecution but through isolation and lack of spiritual guidance. Indeed, it was a measure of the Government’s live and let live policy at the time that Allen was permitted to remain so long in England, given his efforts to persuade his friends to break the law. But by the spring of 1565, aware that the Government’s patience was not to be tried indefinitely and worn down by the Sisyphean nature of his chosen task, Allen departed for Louvain once more. There the situation at home continued to haunt him. The remedy, though, proved elusive.
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Then in the autumn of 1567 Allen travelled to Rome in search of a position as chaplain to the English Hospice there. The opening did not materialize and he set off back to Flanders, accompanied by his friend Dr Jean Vendeville of the University of Douai. Vendeville had just failed to persuade Pope Pius to support his proposal for a crusade against the Turks, but the two friends’ conversation over the course of their journey north delivered up an answer to their respective disappointments: couple Vendeville’s thwarted missionary zeal with Allen’s desire to save England’s wavering Catholics. So began the ‘oasis in the wilderness of exile’.
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Within a few weeks of its opening, on 29 September 1568, Vendeville was writing that the new English College boasted a handful of men ‘of great ability and promise’. And from the start the Douai seminary looked very much like being an Oxford affair. Among its first members were John Marshall, former Dean of Christ Church College, Richard Bristow, MA of Christ Church and fellow of Exeter College, and Edward Rishton, MA of Exeter College. Only one of the new English students, John White, was not an Oxford man.
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What news of this reached Oxford? What shape did the rumours take as quickly and quietly they spread about the town? That William Allen had founded a college where exiled scholars ‘might live and study together more profitably than apart’? That he was preparing a school of men ‘to restore religion when the proper moment should arrive’? That Dr Vendeville saw England as the next great mission?
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For many this was welcome news. The Parliament of 1563 had further extended the Oath of Supremacy to all in, or taking, holy orders, to all lawyers, MPs and schoolmasters, and to all university graduates. For good measure, the House of Commons was also insisting on harsher punishments for those refusing to swear to the oath. As Sir William Cecil observed: ‘such be the humours of the Commons House, as they think nothing sharp enough against Papists’. A first offence brought with it the penalties of praemunire: loss of lands and life imprisonment. For a second refusal the sentence was death. The new measures brought sharply into focus the choices available to Oxford’s students.
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Loyalty to Elizabeth carried with it the promise of advancement in a country crying out for new priests for its newest Church. It might also be a path to high office in the service of a queen looking to employ ‘men meaner in substance, and younger in years’ in her Government, in place of those ambitious aristocrats dismissive of a female ruler and powerful enough to challenge her. Loyalty to Elizabeth was something Elizabeth herself, with her charm, her flirtatiousness and her calculated displays of majesty, was
most
keen to encourage—not surprisingly given the vulnerability of her throne.
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Loyalty to your conscience, on the other hand, led to certain ruin: to separation from friends, estrangement from family and crippling poverty—just as the nation’s economy began to stabilize. A letter home from one young Englishman who chose conscience over country illustrated the emotional and financial cost of his decision: ‘Pray crave my parents’ blessing for me, and confer with my mother, and ascertain whether if I should come home, it would turn my father to me.’ And, he added desperately: ‘my wants are very great. Pray be a means to them [my parents] to help me’. Another letter, this time from the exiled Thomas, Lord Copley, uncle to the Jesuit-poet Robert Southwell, set out the price of conscience clearer still: ‘I love my country, friends, and kinsfolk, but I must be content patiently to forbear the comfort of them all, as I am taught by our Saviour himself, rather than to forsake him’. And William Shakespeare, in his play
Richard II
of
c
.1595, would sum up the pains of exile in a couplet:

Then thus I turn me from my country’s light, To dwell in solemn shades of endless night.
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So why was any Oxford student prepared to make this sacrifice? Of course, for some it must always have been for the sheer excitement of going up against the Establishment. But it was one thing to attend secret mass at the Mitre Inn, to pass on in stolen whispers the latest news from Douai, to argue long into the night in the rarefied, ivoried, once-removed atmosphere of academia—quite another to go over to the other side altogether.

For John Gerard, his reason was that of tradition; perhaps, too, an unspoken need to settle an old score: ‘My parents had always been Catholics,’ he wrote, ‘and on that account had suffered much at the hands of an heretical government.’ (Curiously, his was a self-censored family history: his grandfather, Thomas Gerard, had been burnt at the stake at Smithfield in London on 30 July 1540, as a convert to Lutheranism.) In Gerard’s fellow Jesuit, Robert Southwell’s, case, Catholicism was ‘the belief which to all my friends by descent and pedigree is, in manner, hereditary’. But for numerous others—such as Cuthbert Mayne, raised by his uncle, a Protestant parson—the old faith was not
their
old faith. Rather, the ‘Old religion [had] renewed its youth’ from among the ranks of many families who had already forsaken it. Those students who chose to leave Oxford for Douai, to sacrifice a life of opportunity for one of danger and penury, did so on the basis of ideological certainty.
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For some, their certainty sprang from a conviction that Parliament, ‘which has not long used to judge causes of faith, or prescribe ecclesiastical laws’ (so wrote Lord Copley), had no mandate to tell them what to believe. Others, looking about them at the bloodshed and chaos, the failed harvests and famine that had so blighted England in the preceding decades, saw God’s hand at work—their country was being punished for the sin of challenging the established Church. For such students, on the brink of entering this world of bloodshed and chaos for themselves, here was a way of drawing its poison. In Robert Southwell’s words, it now became their ‘duty…by the gentleness of [their] manners, the fire of [their] charity, by innocence of life and an example of all virtues, so to shine upon the world as to lift up the
Res Christiana
that now droops so sadly, and to build up again from the ruins what others by their vices have brought so low’. Still more young undergraduates believed that England had been betrayed by its Government—a Government more concerned with its own immediate survival than with the salvation of the nation. Elizabeth herself might have learned the value of political compromise at a very early age; most Oxford students had never had that need and saw no reason to acquire it now—not with the souls of their countrymen at stake. Later they would be charged with betraying those same countrymen to Spain—their defence would be that the true betrayal had not been theirs, but had come many decades prior to them setting out for Douai.
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In a poem of 1581-5 Robert Southwell wrote:

Then crop the morning Rose while it is fair;

Our day is short, the evening makes it die.

Yield God the prime of youth ’ere it impair,

Lest he the dregs of crooked age deny.
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Whatever their motives for escaping to Douai, at William Allen’s disposal now was the prime of Oxford youth.

At first Allen did not envisage sending the graduates of his Douai seminary back home to England as missionaries; the impetus for this was Jean Vendeville’s and came later. Rather, he thought to prepare them for the happy moment—Elizabeth’s death or a foreign invasion—when England would again need Catholic priests. But the syllabus he devised for them was a blueprint training manual for a very specific kind of ‘holy war’.
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The students would remain at the college for three years. In that time they would learn Greek and Hebrew to augment their existing knowledge of Latin. With these three languages at their disposal they could read the scriptures in their original form, so as ‘to save them from being entangled in the sophisms which heretics extract from the properties and meanings of words’. They would study their Bibles with painstaking detail, working through the Old Testament at least twelve times and the New Testament sixteen times. And each week there would be debates in which the students would ‘defend in turn not only the Catholic side against the texts of Scripture alleged by the heretics, but also the heretical side against those which Catholics bring forward’. Thus armed, they would ‘all know better how to prove our doctrines by argument and to refute the contrary opinions’.

For the advanced students there would be a further course of study: English, the ‘vulgar tongue’. ‘In this respect’, wrote Allen, ‘the heretics, however ignorant they may be on other points, have the advantage over many of the more learned Catholics.’ The Protestants’ use of the Bible in translation gave them an advantage over Allen’s priests when preaching to those unschooled in Latin. English classes would correct the inaccuracy and ‘unpleasant hesitation’ with which many of his trainee missionaries interpreted their scriptures. And William Allen was preparing for a war in which any inaccuracy or hesitation could have devastating consequences.

It was to be a war of words and will in which the sharpest weapons would be the combatant’s ability to argue his cause clearly and persuasively, and his unwavering belief in the rightness of that cause. To this latter end it was Allen’s ‘first and foremost study’ to stir up ‘in the minds of Catholics, especially of those who are preparing here for the Lord’s work, a zealous and just indignation against the heretics’ and to set before ‘the eyes of the students the…utter desolation of all things sacred…the chief impieties, blasphemies, absurdities, cheats and trickeries of the English heretics’. ‘The result’, wrote Allen, ‘is that they not only hold the heretics in perfect detestation, but they also marvel and feel sorrow of heart that there should be any found so wicked, simple and reckless of their salvation.’