The Watchers (11 page)

Anthony Munday had an eighteen-year-old's delight in a trencher piled with good food and a scholar's wariness of physical punishment. He possessed all the paradoxes of a Tudor spy. He embraced an institution but kicked against its discipline. He made good friends but later betrayed them to the Elizabethan authorities. He was ambiguous about his faith. Why, after all, had he wanted to study in a Catholic seminary so far from home? Always elusive, at best he told only half a story but he did so with great style.

And Munday thoroughly enjoyed himself in Rome, thriving on the
dangerous glamour of the city at a time of carnival: ‘the noise and hurly-burly', the horses and coaches, the courtesans displaying themselves at their windows, the disguises, and even murder committed behind those masks. Munday the Londoner, used as he was to the packed streets around St Paul's Cathedral, said he was amazed by the goings on around him. He wrote to surprise his readers. He related how the Jews of Rome raced naked for over a mile to the city's ancient capitol. He described what he called the Pope's ‘cursing' on Maundy Thursday, when Pope Gregory, holding a great painted holy candle, was carried in his chair to the gallery over St Peter's basilica, with cardinals singing ‘the Pope's general malediction' in mockery of a blessing, cursing Queen Elizabeth, who was, they said, worse than even the cruellest tyrant in the world. That same night Munday saw wicked people gather themselves into the company of the Holy Ghost, the company of charity and the company of death. They walked with crucifixes before them, carrying torches and whipping themselves. Munday described for Protestant Elizabethans a chilling scene of evil.

To Munday, Rome was a city corrupted by the unholy greed of the Catholic Church. He visited the seven chief basilicas and churches of the city, walking a circuit long used by pilgrims. In the churches he met those who came on pilgrimage to the rotten bones of saints. He discovered at the root of everything money and greed, lazy worthless friars and men and women stunned by the fake holiness of supposed relics. This was what Munday expected of the Catholic Church of Antichrist, ‘the eldest child of Hell'. The first basilica he described was St Peter's, where Munday saw a great rock made of brass upon which, so Catholics said, Jesus spoke to Saint Peter and pronounced Peter to be the rock upon which Christ would build his Church. Everywhere Anthony found venerated bones and objects. In St Peter's were the remains of the apostles Peter and Paul, the spear that was thrust into Christ's side at his crucifixion, and the handkerchief used to wipe Jesus' face on the way to the place of his execution at Golgotha. He discovered in the church of St John Lateran what were claimed to be pieces of the true cross along with a single bloodied nail, as well as the first shirt made for Jesus by his mother Mary, a glass vial of Christ's blood, and a piece of his coat with his blood still fresh upon it.
At Santa Maria Maggiore Munday saw some of the thirty pence received by Judas when he betrayed Jesus. Munday found three or four more pieces of Judas' silver in Santa Croce. Everywhere Munday saw worthless relics of idolatry and superstition, so much a part of the false religion of Rome Protestant Elizabethans held in contempt.

Munday was in Rome at an important and difficult time for the city's English community. For months the seminary had been riven by a factional tussle between the scholars from England and their Welsh rector Maurice Clenock. Their argument reached a crisis in the spring of 1579. Expelled by Clenock, the English scholars appealed to the Pope, who met them on Ash Wednesday, 4 March. As the result of the audience, Pope Gregory XIII reinstated the students and dismissed Clenock from office. Munday gave an eyewitness account of the meeting. It is a compelling piece of writing. With tears trickling down his white beard, Gregory had said:

O you Englishmen, to whom my love is such as I can no way utter, considering that for me you have left your prince, which was your duty, and come so far to me, which is more than I deserve, yet as I am your refuge when persecution dealeth straitly with you in your country by reason of the heretical religion there used, so I will be your bulwark to defend you, your guide to protect you, your Father to nourish you, and your friend with my heart-blood to do you any profit.

‘Behold,' Munday continued, ‘what deceits the Devil hath to accomplish his desire: tears, smooth speeches, liberality [generosity], and a thousand means to make a man careless of God, disobedient to his prince, and more, to violate utterly the faith of a subject.'

So Anthony Munday came face to face with Antichrist, and even kissed his foot. But who was Munday on that day in Rome? Was he the young tearaway scholar, the orphan traveller on a great adventure, the spy, or merely a shy young man awed by the majesty of Pope Gregory? That identity Munday never revealed: it was probably the greatest secret of his months in Rome.

Anthony Munday's ‘English Roman life' belongs as much to literature as it does to history. Though in some senses a work of the imagination,
it is a powerful account of the visit by a young man to the camp of Queen Elizabeth's most determined enemies. Munday's story says something of the ever-shifting points of his personality and of his acute intelligence. He was at various times a brave traveller on an adventure and a scared boy driven to the English College by near starvation. He was the hero of his own story, the enterprising clever scholar who uncovered the secrets of the Catholic enemy. Above all he was a gifted writer who told a story he knew would both thrill and terrify his fellow Elizabethans. Between the years 1579 and 1582, when London was gripped by news of the trials and executions of priests he had known in Rome, Munday's bestselling account revealed the face of treason and conspiracy. He helped to fix in the Elizabethan mind's eye a lurid and frightening image of a trans-European plot against Elizabeth, revealing the terrible resolution of the queen's enemies.

A sure mark of Anthony Munday's success as a spy turned writer was the enemy's robust response to his charges of conspiracy and treason. Pained by the perversions of Munday's revelations of life in Rome, first set out in
The Mirrour of Mutabilitie
(1579), Doctor William Allen, the inspirational leader of English Catholics in exile, wrote in 1581 to defend the two English seminaries in Rome and in Rheims. With great power, Allen set out his cause to save English souls, defending from the unjust laws made against them Elizabeth's ‘Catholic and loyal subjects'. He explained that the mission's purpose was to send priests secretly into England, for which they were trained in the English College. In sparkling prose he wrote:

This is the way, by which we hope to win our nation to God again. We put not our trust in princes or practices [schemes, stratagems, plots] abroad, nor in arms or forces at home. This is our fight, and for this war, the Society of Jesus and our seminaries were instituted, to this … our priests and students are trained.

So carefully and finely crafted, these are words to remember in the following chapters.

William Allen knew better than to use Anthony Munday's name, for he did not want to dignify with recognition Munday's supposed revelations. Instead Doctor Allen denounced certain young fellows
and fugitives who, after running away from their masters, had dabbled in forgery and theft. They had joined others of ill disposition ‘that sometimes thrust themselves secretly into such companies living together as we do'. These fellows who reported on others out of malice and for money Allen called spies and intelligencers. When he wrote of ‘false brethren', he had Anthony Munday very much in mind. The great Doctor Allen named Munday's true profession: the young Londoner, the traveller and writer and in the end the betrayer, was before everything else a spy.

Anthony Munday was supremely sure of himself. Making use of his secret identity, he had seen what to Elizabethans was the truth of Rome. He heard treason with his own ears. He was a young man and could not match the subtle dignity of Doctor Allen's prose. He wrote instead with fire and passion, publishing in 1581 a defiant manifesto in verse:

O Rome, the room, where all outrage is wrought,

The See of sin, the beast with sevenfold head:

The shop wherein all shame is sold and bought,

The cup whence poison through the world is spread.

…

Let Pope, let Turk [infidel or heathen], let Satan rage their fill:

God keepeth us, if we do keep his will.

Within a decade of the horror of the massacre in Paris, Munday's great success was to show once again the terrible dangers facing Elizabeth. ‘Our Roman enemies', as Munday called them in 1581, driven on by implacable faith, were at the gates of Elizabeth's kingdom. Soon enough they would bring the battle to England.

On 9 July 1579 Anthony Munday was at Douai in the Low Countries, on the way home to London, fame, notoriety and modest fortune. Only four days before, on the first Sunday of the month, a fellow Englishman arrived in the city Munday had left weeks earlier. This other traveller's name, probably, was Charles Sledd.

We know practically nothing of Sledd's life. The facts are few. He spent the months between July 1579 and February 1580 in Rome, returning to England by way of France in May 1580. In London he became an energetic, even a ferocious, pursuer of Catholic priests living secretly in the city. Sledd may not have been his real name; for a time, in Paris, he probably borrowed the identity of one Rowland Russell. He was clever, literate and used to travelling. There is evidence to suggest that he may have been a merchant's apprentice in London in the early 1570s. He was probably in 1579 still a young man (somewhere in his middle twenties) and employable as a household servant, one of the best covers for the work of an Elizabethan spy. Certainly he had a sharp eye for detail and a keen memory for conversations and faces.

Sledd wrote a long narrative of his months in Rome, an extraordinary record of the Catholic Englishmen of the city, their dinners, their meetings and their conspiracies. Whereas Anthony Munday sold the story of his ‘English Roman life' from the shops of London's printers and booksellers, Sledd's narrative, to which he gave the very Elizabethan title of ‘A general discourse of the Pope's Holiness' devices', was a secret document read only at the highest levels of Elizabeth's government. Later it was used as evidence in one of the most important treason trials of the reign.

And so Charles Sledd the spy is a mystery. He was a careful chronicler, watching and recording. He was also a man who volunteered to hunt down his country's enemies, fired by passion and probably by hatred too. He betrayed others completely and deliberately. He lived and travelled with men he later arrested on the streets of London, and gave evidence against them in a public trial. What were his motivations? The fact was that the silent observer in Rome, listening and noting, came to possess in London a terrible energy. For Catholics Sledd was the great betrayer, employed in Rome as a lowly servant, later giving false witness against men of God. To William Allen, Sledd was as much a hypocrite and a liar as Anthony Munday had been. Both men had pretended to be Catholics to serve their own ends. Sledd, indeed, had taken the holy sacrament while spying on his master, playing (in Allen's words) ‘these Judas his parts'.

When Sledd arrived in Rome on Sunday, 5 July 1579 he went to stay at the house of an Englishman called Salamon Aldred. Aldred, a Londoner, was a hosier by trade, and his wife's family had given them the very substantial sum of three hundred crowns to be able to live in Rome. Sledd's stay with Aldred was only temporary, for he wanted to take advantage of the eight days of free hospitality at the English College for English pilgrims to Rome. The condition, not surprisingly, was that he should be a good Catholic. From the beginning, Sledd was under scrutiny. When at last he went along to the English College he was questioned about his faith ‘very inquisitively'.

The Englishmen of Rome were on the look out for spies. Sledd was alerted to this by an old acquaintance called Robert Barret, a runaway apprentice now in Rome, whom Sledd had known in London. Barret warned him to be careful of what he said: the suspicion was that Sledd was a spy. Barret also revealed to Sledd that there was a conspiracy afoot. Barret was the servant of a former Welsh bishop, Thomas Goldwell, one of the grandest of the Catholic exiles in Rome. Goldwell, he claimed, was involved in a plot by the Pope and the King of Spain against Elizabeth's England. Sledd, too, would hear all about it if he stayed on in Rome. Barret advised Sledd to go to confession at St Peter's, something he later did. It very probably saved him from prison. Briefed by Barret, and now knowing something of what was
happening in the city, Sledd later wrote that he was able to behave like any other Catholic in Rome.

Sledd was given a tour of the scholars' rooms in the English College by none other than Luke Kirby, the young priest born in Yorkshire who had befriended Anthony Munday. Like Munday, Sledd was impressed by what he saw: three or four young men to each bedchamber, and these rooms ‘very finely decked and every man his bed appointed alone'. Afterwards Kirby and Sledd went to the room of a gentleman called John Pascall – Pascall was one of the most important Catholic Englishmen in Rome – where they were joined by three other priests. Sledd, still not yet trusted as a reliable Catholic, was questioned closely.

On Monday, 13 July Sledd's eight days of hospitality as a pilgrim expired. It was time for him to go to confession: either that or he was in danger of showing himself ‘to be of a contrary opinion than I had professed to be' – that is, not the good Catholic he had claimed. He chose confession. The English Jesuit who gave Sledd absolution also gave him a certificate written in Latin, the ‘outward show and manifest token' that he was a Catholic. Sledd was free at last to move about Rome in safety; he was no longer under suspicion. A day later he went back to Salamon Aldred's house. Sledd had loaned money to Aldred in London about two years before, and so the two men came to the arrangement that Aldred would give Sledd board and lodging as a way of settling the debt.