God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (9 page)

It was incendiary teaching. And it proved overwhelmingly popular. In December 1575 Allen was summoned to Rome to advise the Pope on the foundation of a second seminary there. By the following year the original Douai College had grown to fill three houses. Swarms of students were ‘daily coming, or rather flying to the college’, they were among ‘the best wits in England’ and many were former students of Oxford University.
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But not even Douai could escape the decade’s disease: paranoia. Throughout the 1570s, as Philip of Spain’s army battled to stamp out Protestantism in the Spanish-owned Netherlands, the rumours spread that Allen’s students were spies for the Catholic cause. An entry in the Douai Diary of 27 June 1577 reads: ‘Dr Bristow admonished us to be more guarded in our behaviour and, as far as possible, to walk less frequently in the streets, because the common people had begun…to spread reports and excite murmurs against us.’ By August the students were whispering about a coming raid on the college. Finally, in the spring of 1578 the seminary was expelled from the city. The trainee missionaries decamped to Reims, the French university city, where, under the protection of the powerful Guise family, they hoped to continue their studies free from suspicion. It was not to be. By September 1578 Allen was writing to the Governor of Reims, begging him to calm the populace’s fears that his students were armed English insurrectionists who went about in disguise to check and measure the town’s fortifications.
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But some of the paranoia was justified. On the feast of Candlemas, 2 February 1579, a former stationer’s apprentice, Anthony Munday, and his friend Thomas Nowell arrived at the newly formed English College in Rome. Since William Allen’s visit to the city four years earlier, the plans to open a seminary on the site of the old English pilgrim’s hostel had come on apace. By the time of Munday’s visit the college already held forty-two students, including the young Robert Southwell.
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Munday and Nowell were offered eight days’ entertainment at the college, ‘which by the Pope was granted to such Englishmen as come thither’. For Munday the invitation was followed by an awkward encounter. Earlier in his adventures he had been mistaken by a group of young Englishmen in Paris for the son of a prominent Catholic gentleman. This had afforded him a warm welcome and a number of letters of introduction to Rome so Munday had done nothing to disabuse his new friends of their notion. But now in Rome he was greeted by a priest who knew this Catholic gentleman well. Munday spent an uncomfortable evening parrying questions and ‘was put to so hard a shift that I knew not well what to say’. When the supper-bell rang he fled with relief and thereafter did his best to avoid his interrogator.
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In the days that followed Munday had ample time to record in detail his impressions of seminary life, from morning study and prayers, through the daily tuition in divinity, logic and rhetoric, to the student chatter around the fireside at night. But Anthony Munday was a Protestant. In time he would become a professional informer.

Munday’s diary of his stay in Rome is the first recorded memoir written by a spy. It must, however, be read with a certain scepticism: his target audience was a paying public eager to believe the worst about the seminary, and his literary credibility is dubious.
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Moreover, his claims are suspicious. The students, he wrote, competed amongst themselves as to ‘who shall speak worst of her Majesty’, while their teachers were as insulting about her ministers: Francis Bacon appears as ‘the Butcher’s son, the great guts, oh he would fry well with a Faggot’; Ambrose Dudley becomes ‘a good fat whoreson, to make Bacon of’. (Significantly, Sir Thomas Bromley, to whom Munday dedicated the work, does not feature in this list of gibes.
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) And somewhat at odds with the ill-concealed relish of Munday’s descriptions is his politic disclaimer that all these ministers were, of course, ‘honourable personages, to whom the words do offer great abuse, and whom I unfeignedly reverence and honour’.
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But if much of Munday’s account reads like the work of an entertaining profiteer looking to sell a few books at the Government’s expense, certain facts in his story do ring true, particularly when viewed in conjunction with William Allen’s syllabus at Douai and Reims. Each mealtime the students listened to readings from the Bible to arm them for the fight against heresy. They took part in daily disputations to sharpen their skills in debate. And encouraged by Allen, who explained that ‘We must needs confess that all these things have come upon our country through our sins’, they undertook public penance for the most minor infringement of the college rules. Munday, who in his brief stay ‘was always apt to break one order or other’, wrote with feeling about these penances. But it was his description of the students’ self-flagellation that was most arresting. The penitent student entered the dining room dressed in a long canvas robe with a hole cut in its back, hooded to hide his identity and carrying a short-handled whip with ‘forty or fifty cords at it, about the length of half a yard: with a great many hard knots on every cord, and some of the whips have through every knot at the end crooked wires, which will tear the flesh unmercifully’. The student then walked up and down the room, whipping his back until the blood ran. Scourging was familiar among monastic orders as a means of discipline and it was still the recognized punishment for any priest found guilty of the disparate crimes of blasphemy, concubinage and simony (the selling of ecclesiastical privileges). Self-scourging was popular among the more ascetic orders as a means of mortification. But the picture Munday paints is reminiscent of the Flagellants, the fanatical sect that sprang up out of the plague-stricken thirteenth century and who whipped themselves until they bled in reparation for the sins of the world.
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Allen’s holy warriors, it seemed, were taking upon themselves the sins of the English nation.
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Munday’s intrusion into life at the English College in Rome suggested Allen’s missionaries-in-training could not long remain isolated from the outside world. Allen’s own behaviour, however, had made a collision between priests and government spies inevitable. For in an age of high intrigue, William Allen was fast becoming an arch-intriguer.

On his journey to Rome in 1575 Allen coupled talks on the foundation of the new seminary with detailed discussions about a forthcoming Spanish-backed invasion of England; he only came away from the Holy City when it was felt his ‘prolonged stay [there] might arouse suspicion in that woman [Elizabeth]’. He was also in contact with the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots, recommending a trustworthy courier as her go-between with the outside world. And his regular correspondence with New College exile Nicholas Sanders reveals the extent to which these two Oxford graduates now valued their influence in the murky world of European affairs. Sanders wrote to Allen

‘We shall have no steady comfort but from God, in the A [the Pope] not the X [Philip II]. Therefore I beseech you to take hold of A, for X is as fearful of war as a child is of fire, and all his endeavour is to avoid all such occasions. The A will give two thousand [troops], when you shall be content with them. If they do not serve to go to England, at the least they will serve to go to Ireland. The state of Christendom dependeth upon the stout assailing of England.’

Clearly, William Allen had begun to align himself with the more overtly political of the Catholic agitators, in addition to his own self-appointed task as director of missionaries. What was unclear was precisely how he intended to keep these two roles separate in the public mind. For separate they
must
be if his young priests were to be seen as agents of God rather than agents of a foreign power.
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His answer, if he and his Reims and Roman College graduates were to be believed over Anthony Munday, was this: all discussion of English affairs of state was banned among the seminary students. Elizabeth’s name was never to be mentioned, neither in lectures nor in recreation. No student was to debate the extent of the Pope’s authority over Christian rulers and no reference was to be made to the Pope’s right to depose a monarch from their throne. William Allen was training his students ‘so that they may serve the one side without offence to the other, which is the hardest thing in the world where the two contrary parties be man and God’. His solution was single-minded. No matter how sullied his own reputation was fast becoming, his missionaries-in-training would be political virgins. It was a theoretical distinction that might have made perfect sense in the classroom; what was less certain was whether it could ever make perfect sense in the outside world, particularly in England. Allen might have trained his students in the art of disputation, he might have schooled them in the scriptures, he might have fired them up with a hatred of heresy and inured them to physical pain. But he was sending them into a country whose Queen stood under sentence of deposition from the very Church they represented, and the only protection he had given them, their only defence against the charge of being agitators and secret agents, was that they had not been
allowed
to discuss politics during their training. More useful would have been detailed discussions about the realities of the political situation into which they were about to be dropped, about the theological doubts concerning Pope Pius’ right to depose the Queen, about the impossibility of separating religion from politics in a country whose Church was a construct of Parliament. Had Allen’s holy warriors been equipped to live for the cause or simply to die for it?
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As they left the safe confines of Douai for the cold and treacherous waters of their homeland the answer would soon become apparent.
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On the night of 24 April 1576 the thirty-two-year-old Cuthbert Mayne, newly ordained into the Catholic Church, made the short Channel crossing to England, one of eighteen Douai graduates to make the journey that year. At daybreak he stepped ashore on the south coast, home again after an absence of three years. He was supplied with letters of introduction to the Catholic Sir Francis Tregian of Golden House in Cornwall, so, after taking leave of his fellow missionary John Payne, he set off for the West Country.
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The journey was long and nerve-racking as Mayne tried to avoid the ever present shire watches on the lookout for vagabonds and agitators. To be stopped meant to be questioned and to be questioned meant putting his cover story to unwelcome scrutiny.

Keeping well to the south of Barnstaple, near which he had been born and where he was certain of being recognized, Mayne arrived at last at Golden House. Here, in his new disguise as the Tregian family’s steward, he began working as William Allen had trained him, travelling the Tregian estates between Truro and Launceston, saying mass for the faithful and reconciling to the Church any who had faltered. Summer turned peacefully to autumn. In December that year news filtered slowly through the country of the Queen’s clash with her new Archbishop of Canterbury and her displeasure at his Puritan leanings. Christmas and Easter were celebrated at Golden House with full Catholic ceremony. Spring turned to summer. On 8 June 1577 Cuthbert Mayne was sitting in the gardens of Golden House when a party of some one hundred men rode into view. At their head was the new High Sheriff of Cornwall, Richard Grenville, a ruthless naval adventurer with no love of Catholicism. Mayne rose quietly from his seat and left the garden ‘where he might have gone from them’, heading for his room.
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But Grenville was acting on inside information: ‘the first place they went unto was M. Mayne’s chamber, which being fast shut, they bounced and beat at the door. M. Mayne came and opened it’. To Grenville’s question ‘What art thou?’ Mayne answered simply ‘I am a man’. But when Grenville ripped open Mayne’s doublet he found about his neck an Agnus Dei case. Agnus Deis were small wax discs made from the Easter candles, impressed with an image of the paschal lamb and blessed by the Pope. They had been outlawed by Parliament in 1571. The penalty for possessing one was death. Among Mayne’s papers was found a copy of a papal bull, issued by Pope Pius’s successor, Gregory XIII. These, too, had been outlawed by Parliament in 1571, in response to Pius’s
Bull Regnans.
To bring any papal bull into the country was now a treasonable offence. So Cuthbert Mayne, former fellow of St John’s College, Oxford and graduate of William Allen’s seminary, was arrested and borne triumphantly away, first to Truro and then to the dank, underground castle gaol at Launceston.
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At the Michaelmas Assizes, Mayne was led out before Sir Roger Marwood, Chief Baron of the Exchequer, and indicted on five counts, the most serious being the obtaining of a papal bull and the publishing of that bull in England. The sentence was death for high treason. It mattered little that the papal bull had expired, had no bearing on English affairs and had not in fact been distributed by Mayne since his arrival in England; Mayne claimed he had only brought it with him by mistake. It mattered less that the judges themselves were worried by the verdict and sent urgently to the Council for advice on how to proceed. The Council was by now extremely concerned by the reports it was receiving from its spies of an influx of Douai graduates into the country—some thirty priests had arrived home since the return of the first four pioneers in 1574—and was in no mood for mercy. The sentence stood.
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Then on the morning of 29 November Mayne was offered his life. If he would swear on the Bible that Elizabeth was the supreme head of the Church of England he would be spared execution. Mayne refused. He went further: he reasserted his belief that England would soon be restored to the Catholic faith by the ‘secret instructors’ from Douai. And then, sealing his fate (and stepping outside the strictly apolitical role being claimed by Allen for his students), he declared that should ‘any Catholic prince…invade any realm to reform the same to the authority of the See of Rome, that then the Catholics in that realm…should be ready to assist and help them’. The offer of a reprieve was rescinded.
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