The Watchers (10 page)

The streets of London and Westminster were jammed with people and traffic. The population had risen from forty or fifty thousand in 1500 to about two hundred thousand nearly a century later. The city was a dense and chronically overcrowded tangle of town houses and squalid tenements, shops, churches, official buildings, prisons, trade halls, streets and alleyways. It was a city of immense contrasts, exciting as well as dangerous. Great wealth rubbed shoulders with terrible poverty. The city was ridden with disease. Plague, a frequent visitor, killed thousands of Elizabethan Londoners. And everywhere there was a confusion of people, the very rich and the destitute, natives of the city, travellers from other parts of the kingdom, refugees from foreign wars: nobility and gentry, well-to-do merchants, household servants, city officials, constables and law officers, vagrants, pick-pockets, nightwalkers and prostitutes. All of these men and women lived, worked, traded, ate, drank and begged in the same crowded streets.

So Anthony Munday, born amongst people and noise, was very much a city boy. And from Anthony's earliest years, in and around Paul's Cross churchyard, his was a world of books. Christopher Munday was a bookseller, and his son's life was influenced from childhood by ink, paper and the printing press. Anthony was an orphan by 1571, a fact which helps to explain why he was later free to wander the cities of Europe. It is likely that he was educated by a Huguenot called Claude de Sainleins (or Claudius Hollyband), a schoolmaster who taught three languages Anthony was keen to learn: Latin, French and Italian.

In August 1576, when he was fifteen, Munday ‘put himself apprentice' to the printer John Allde. Already Munday was an aspiring writer. In 1577 he composed a ‘Defence of poverty' and wrote a ballad called ‘Munday's dream' in August 1578. Soon after that he set out on his journey to Rome. He was bound to Allde for eight years, but he stayed for only two. Outwardly there were no bad feelings on the part of his master, for later Allde gave a testimonial that as his apprentice Munday ‘did his duty in all respects, as much as I could desire, without fraud, covin [treachery] or deceit'. On Munday's return from Rome in
1579 Allde was to print
The Mirrour of Mutabilitie
, the first time Munday wrote of his travels abroad.

Munday had the itch for adventure. For seventeen years he had lived in the shadow of St Paul's Cathedral, hearing foreign languages and voices and reading books about other places. In that small area of London lived men and women born in Flanders, France and Germany. In fact there were more than seven thousand of these ‘strangers' in the city and its suburbs, many in search of work, others Protestant refugees from war and persecution. Anthony Munday knew that there was a wide world beyond the packed streets of the city. He wanted to travel further than John Allde's printing-house at the Long Shop adjoining St Mildred's church in the Poultry, on the corner of Scalding Alley, east of St Paul's. He was bored and he wanted adventure. He said so in his dedicatory introduction to
The Mirrour of Mutabilitie
:

But at that time being very desirous to attain to some understanding in the languages, considering in time to come: I might reap thereby some commodity, since as yet my web of youthful time was not fully woven, and my wild oats required to be furrowed in a foreign ground, to satisfy the trifling toys [idle or foolish fancies] that daily more and more frequented my busied brain: yielded myself to God and good fortune, taking on the habit of a traveller.

And so in the second half of 1578 Anthony Munday set off on his journey. He knew that he wanted to be a writer. Probably he had no idea that he would also become a spy.

The story Munday told of his experiences in Rome came out in tantalizing instalments between 1579 and 1582. He had a gift for keeping the readers of his pamphlets guessing. Each part of the tale was a fresh story of derring-do. He called his account his ‘English Roman life'. In it he revealed the secrets of the English College in Rome, where about forty young men were being trained to return to England as priests of the Catholic faith. Munday knew that his Elizabethan readers would be horrified by what they read. Rome, as Munday described it, was a place of sin and danger; it was the heart of the enemy's camp. Remembering back to what he and his friend Thomas Nowell had thought
when they first arrived in the city, Munday wrote: ‘we might well judge Rome to be Hell itself'.

The two young men had made that arrival at dusk on Sunday, 1 February 1579, lodging overnight at an
osteria
in the city. The following day they went to find the English College, ‘a house both large and fair' on the Via Monserrato near the Castel Sante Angelo. As soon as they entered the college, students bustled round them, asking about the latest news from England. A man walked by, carrying dozens of wax candles, gifts from the Pope and blessed by him at high mass that day. It was Candlemas, the commemoration of the purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the presentation of Christ in the Temple. The candles, they were told, were signs of the Pope's favour.

The two young travellers were welcomed as pilgrims with eight days' free lodging. They delivered letters from Paris to the rector of the college, Maurice Clenock (or Morys Clynnog), a Welshman in his early fifties, a graduate of the University of Oxford and a dabbler in plans for the Catholic invasion of England and Wales. Young Nowell and Munday must have been exhausted. The truth hiding behind Munday's easy heroic narrative was hinted at by Robert Persons, a priest whom they would soon meet in the college. Persons wrote privately of two youths at first turned away from the seminary but eventually admitted because they ‘were like to perish in the streets for want'.

Munday, however tired he was, had to think on his feet. It was the cost of hiding his true identity. The surname he was using, Hawley, was that of an English gentleman. Anthony was pretending to be his son. The scholars of the seminary, fresh from dinner, took Nowell to one side. But Munday was asked by a priest to walk with him in the garden. The priest, who knew young Master Hawley's supposed father, asked why he was in Rome. He was not impressed by Munday's answer. ‘Trust me sir,' Munday said, ‘only for the desire I had to see it, that when I came home again, I might say, once in my life I have been at Rome.'

As a gifted writer Munday had a great ear for dialogue. He also knew what his London readers wanted to hear, the horrors and conspiracies of Rome given a voice. So it is no surprise that in the college's garden the priest denounced the heresy of ‘that proud usurping
Jezebel', Queen Elizabeth, likening her to the queen of Israel whose body (so the Old Testament tells us) was devoured by dogs: ‘I hope ere long the dogs shall tear her flesh, and those that be her props and upholders.' Out of his pocket the priest drew a piece of paper containing the names of Elizabeth's privy councillors. He called the paper ‘a bead-roll', a list of people to be specially prayed for. This was sharp irony. These heretics, he said, would soon be held to account for their crimes. They did not know ‘what is providing for them, and I hope shall not know, till it fall upon them'.

Munday gave the priest to whom he spoke in the garden sinister anonymity. With the name of Robert Persons, however, he was much freer, for by the time Munday wrote up his story for the London printing presses Persons, educated at Oxford and ordained a priest of the Society of Jesus – a Jesuit – in July 1578, was one of the most able adversaries of Elizabeth's rule and a wanted man in England. He was about thirty-two years old when Munday met him, able, confident, even charismatic. Munday captured something of his character. He described how Persons had often sat on a chair in the middle of the student body, ‘when he would open unto us, in what miserable and lamentable estate our country of England stood'. Persons even prayed ‘for that gracious and thrice-blessed queen' – Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth's rival, ‘now held down by that Jezebel's oppression'.

Munday made it clear that the English College was poisoned by treason. When he fell seriously ill, his fellow students came to sit by his bedside and made what Munday called ‘horrible speeches' against their prince and country. One of the scholars even said to Anthony: ‘You may be happy, if God take you out of this world here: then shall you never see the bloody ruin of your own country.' Once he had recovered from his sickness, Munday went out one day to the place of Saint Peter's martyrdom with two other scholars. As usual they talked about England. One of them said: ‘While two or three persons be alive, we may stand in doubt of our matter in England.' ‘Who be they?' Munday asked. Out of delicacy to his readers he gave initials only, but they were three of Elizabeth's leading advisers, of whom two were Lord Burghley, the queen's lord treasurer, and Sir Francis Walsingham, her secretary. ‘Oh,' Munday's companion continued, ‘had I the hearts of these in my purse, and their heads in the Pope's
Holiness' hands: I would not doubt but ere long, we should all merrily journey homeward.'

Yet Anthony Munday found companionship in Rome as well as treason. Luke Kirby, a priest born in Yorkshire, visited Munday when he was sick, and they became friends. Kirby was about thirty-one years old and a former student of Louvain. We know, thanks to another English spy in Rome, that he had brown hair and a short beard, that his teeth were slightly crooked, and that he spoke with a mild stammer. Munday made other friends too and enjoyed for the first time in his life the rhythm of life in a community of students. Here Munday's gift for writing great narrative was at its best, his ear for dialogue, his nose for scandal. He turned upon the English College those weapons he possessed: a sharp eye, a quick intelligence and a lively pen.

There is an easy descriptive quality to Munday's account of the daily lives of the college's students in their ‘house both large and fair'. Four or six scholars shared a chamber, and each scholar had a bed made up of two small trestles with four or five boards and a quilted mattress. The porter rang a bell first thing in the morning, at which the students turned up their beds. A second bell marked prayers, and the scholars spent half an hour on their knees in private devotion. A third bell was the signal for silent study, each scholar reading at his desk. After this the students went from their chambers to the refectory for a breakfast of one glass of wine and a quarter of a manchet loaf, a bread of the best quality. Teaching followed for most of the morning, with the scholars walking in pairs to their lectures at the Collegium Romanum – the Roman College – which had been founded, like the Society of Jesus, by Ignatius Loyola. Some went to lectures in divinity, others to physic, logic or rhetoric. The students had time before their midday meal in the English College to walk in its gardens.

Dinner in the refectory was announced by the porter's bell. The custom, Munday wrote, was for two students to take it in turns to serve everyone at the table, helped by the butler, the porter and a poor Jesuit. Small dishes for each scholar were set out on a round table, and every boy and man helped himself, ready prepared with his trencher, knife, fork and spoon, a manchet loaf covered by a white napkin, a glass and a pot of wine standing near by. The food was very fine
indeed, beginning with
antipasto
of meat, Spanish anchovies or syrup of stewed prunes and raisins. The second course was a mess of pottage. Munday, a young man with a ready appetite, enjoyed what he ate but barely knew what was in the pottage, ‘made of divers things, whose proper names I do not remember: but methought they were both good and wholesome'. Boiled and then roasted meats followed. To finish there were cheese, figs, almonds and raisins, perhaps a lemon and sugar, a pomegranate, ‘or some such sweet gear [stuff, substance]: for they know that Englishmen loveth sweetmeats'. This was indeed very fine dining.

While the scholars ate their main meal of the day, they listened to the reading of a chapter of the Latin Vulgate Bible and then, according to Munday though contested by his Catholic opponents, from their special book of martyrs that recorded the lives of some Tudor Englishmen executed for high treason. One of the martyrs, Munday said, was John Felton, the young Catholic hanged in 1570 for pinning to the gate of the Bishop of London's palace the bull of excommunication against Elizabeth. Munday was saying, not very subtly, that the English College in Rome trained priests whose object was to destroy Queen Elizabeth and her Protestant kingdoms.

Excellent food and edifying verses were followed by an hour of recreation and then, once again marked by the ringing of the porter's bell, private study mulling over the morning's lecture. Scholars went off to the Roman College for another hour of teaching in the afternoon before returning to the English College for a further glass of wine and a quarter of manchet. After this they would withdraw to their chambers, to be called later to scholarly disputations. There was time before supper for more recreation. Munday described how after supper in winter the Jesuits gathered the scholars round a great fire to say terrible things about Elizabeth, her privy councillors and bishops. The students went back to their chambers when the bell rang, and the porter came to light the lamps by which they laid out their beds ready for the night, studying for a little while at their desks. Another bell marked the time for prayer, and priests would begin the Latin litany, the scholars giving the responses. At last they all went to bed.

This was the steady rhythm of the community's life in Rome. It would have been familiar to any student who had studied in a college
in Cambridge or Oxford, something Munday, of course, had not. He was a city boy, an orphan, self-sufficient, clever and enterprising, and he did not take well to the discipline of an institution with strict rules for behaviour. Punishments were very much part of the life of a young scholar in the sixteenth century, and Munday relished describing them graphically, knowing full well that his Elizabethan readers saw the Jesuits in particular as the shock troops of the Catholic Antichrist, hardened by strict discipline. Munday made everything he could of their zeal. He knew all the small punishments for minor offences: a scholar not turning up his bed in the morning, or not going down on his knees for prayer, or failing to hear mass before lectures, or forgetting to put his wooden peg in its place to signify whether he was in or out of the college. Munday was punished for all of these offences, ‘albeit it were with an ill will'. He had done penance by reading to fellow scholars in the refectory; he had been on his knees in the hall; he had even had to stand with his mess of pottage on the floor before him, scooping up each spoonful. There were also private penances. Munday described how scholars would whip themselves in the refectory, their identity disguised by a pointed hood with eye holes and wearing a special canvas cape that showed a naked back; he had seen the blood trickle to the ground. A Jesuit instructed him in this kind of whipping, which was done with cords of wire. Munday's readers may have remembered a book printed a few years before, an account of the terrors of the holy inquisition, in which the inquisitors wore the same pointed hoods Munday saw in the English College. Here the propaganda value of his writings for Elizabeth's government was tangible. The enemy appeared real and terrifying.