The Watchers (19 page)

Hart, who was a member of Allen's circle, offered his service because he possessed the necessary qualifications. He had been close to martyrdom, and nothing (Hart wrote) pleased Allen more than to hear of his scholars' suffering in the Catholic cause. Hart reminded Walsingham that he had been in prison for a whole year. In that time he had been taken to the rack. He was indicted, tried and condemned. Surely his suffering and fortitude would make Doctor Allen trust him. Hart offered his service not to ‘pull the neck out of the collar again' – to escape once again with his life – but to serve his prince. He was the first of many priests to offer information on the queen's enemies in return for life and liberty. In Hart's case the result was failure. He remained in the Tower, cheating execution in May 1582 probably by once again offering conformity, only to be banished from England in 1585. He died a year later in Poland. It was a cause of distress to his brother William, a priest in Rome, that John Hart had not died as a martyr with Edmund Campion.

As well as private wrestlings with conscience and loyalty, the execution of Campion and his fellow priests was the talk of London. There was gossip. Words were spoken, probably often in anger, that fell short of treason but were dangerous nevertheless. One Oliver Pluckytt of the parish of St Andrew in Holborn was reported to have said that Campion ‘was both discreet and learned, and did say very well
[in the disputations], and that he thought in his conscience that he was an honest man'. A neighbour of Pluckytt's asked Pluckytt to confirm whether he had indeed spoken these words about Campion. Pluckytt was happy to say that he had, to which came the reply: ‘if you think so well of him that is judged for treason, we do not think well of you.' Pluckytt's words, reported to higher authority, sent him to prison at least for a time.

Campion's execution did not lessen the government's anxiety. Officials intercepted letters, captured and interrogated priests and watched Catholic families closely. Rumours suggested the fact of a political effort to destroy England, as Elizabeth's advisers had believed all along. In these tense months, Sir Francis Walsingham's agents were very busy indeed.

One of the most effective of Walsingham's informants was a man who called himself Barnard. His real name, which he never used, may have been Robert Woodward; we know it only by chance. Often he simply marked papers with a monogram. He may have been a Derbyshire man. He certainly knew the roads between Dieppe and Rome, something that fits with another piece of information from a different source: Charles Sledd, who first met Barnard in 1579 or 1580, said that he was the servant to an English Catholic in Paris called Nicholas Wendon. Indeed Sledd knew Barnard as Robert Wood. So Barnard was, to say the least, an elusive and careful man with keen eyes and ears and a busy pen, not unlike Sledd himself. Barnard's reports were precise; he could write coolly and urgently. He knew the underground community of Catholics very well. Outwardly the honest servant to Catholic families and a courier of letters, he listened carefully to conversations, reported news and gossip and, most significantly of all, read and copied documents passing between seminary priests and Jesuits secretly in England. As Sledd, too, had shown, the best Elizabethan spies were often household servants.

Barnard was supremely effective at what he did. He intercepted for Walsingham one letter that reported the conversion of over two hundred in Staffordshire to the Catholic faith. Barnard knew the priests who were doing this missionary work. He wrote to Walsingham: ‘If it may please your honour that I may … meet with them all, for my acquaintance there is such, as I shall have free access among them all.'

A few weeks later, on 5 January 1582, Barnard noted talk of an invasion force for England to be gathered by King Philip of Spain, funded by the Pope, and commanded by the English rebel the Earl of Westmorland. He reported that Catholics hoped to see Westmorland and the Spanish general Alba in England before Midsummer. The ports and havens had to be watched, for Catholics kept coming in and out of England. They boasted of their success, saying ‘a change were at hand'. ‘Right honourable,' Barnard wrote to Walsingham, ‘the times be dangerous, the people wilful and desirous of change; I fear me there is greater danger at hand than is provided for.' The peril to England's security was very clear. A royal proclamation in April condemned Campion and his fellow traitors. Jesuits and seminary priests were guilty of high treason, it said, and anyone who helped or sheltered them would feel the terrible force of the law.

Elizabeth's government enforced parliament's statutes as rigorously as it could. The press of the queen's printer, Christopher Barker, was busy in 1582 countering the propaganda claims of William Allen in Rheims. Barker printed an official account of the priests' interrogations in the Tower, giving their answers verbatim. Allen responded with a book celebrating ‘the glorious martyrdom' of Campion and his fellow priests, using those same interrogations to show their innocence in the face of a ruthless persecution. As more priests went to the gallows for their war against Elizabeth and her kingdom – one in April 1582, seven a month later – Thomas Norton, one of Campion's interrogators, published his robust public defence of its policy against the priests, defending torture as legitimate when it was used ‘for the Queen's safety to disclose the manner of the treason'. This defence, too, came off Barker's press, though Norton's name was nowhere mentioned: the pamphlet had the anonymity of high officialdom.

Catholic books presented a huge problem to the government. In the view of Elizabeth's advisers and officials, the books of the English exiles, so effectively smuggled into England from abroad, helped to spread the disease of treason. Thomas Norton wrote: ‘You see by these books and such other [how] dangerously [Robert] Persons and the rest still walk abroad.' Persons had left England, it was believed to write on Campion's martyrdom. But the influence of the exiles in Rome and Rheims and the reputations of those priests executed at
Tyburn were enhanced by books read secretly. Little by little, said Thomas Norton, ‘a multitude of subjects grow infected'. A priest arrested in London was discovered to have received (and then presumably to have passed on) six copies of a ‘traitorous' book on Campion's so-called martyrdom. Forty seditious books were found at the lodgings of a Catholic who lived in Paternoster Row near St Paul's Cathedral. Government informants, justices and officials did their best to seize what they could.

At first the worry was imminent invasion. That fear, however, had steadied a little by the spring of 1582. In the weeks following Campion's execution Barnard expected a rebellion. A few months later he still believed that any danger came from a Catholic uprising in England supported by the forces of the Pope and the King of Spain. But now he sensed little immediate danger. He wrote to Walsingham in late April: for any ‘likelihood of rebellion to be this spring or summer attempted, I do not see any hope'. There were only a few priests left in London (we have to suspect that those who had not been captured had gone off into the country), but those who did remain were sheltered by the lawyers of the inns of common law. Like other informants, Barnard gave specific information, to be noted and filed away by Walsingham's office. He knew one especially pernicious Catholic in London called Master Marsh, ‘an arrogant papist', who like his sons had spent some time in France. One of those sons now lay at the sign of the White Swan in Holborn, on the corner of Gray's Inn Lane.

Like any good servant, Barnard had trained himself to listen and be silent. For a man who gathered much of what he reported from rumour and gossip, he was well informed. He knew, for example, that after Edmund Campion's execution Robert Persons had left England for Rouen. When Barnard wrote to Walsingham that Persons was now engaged upon a book to defend Campion, he reflected what English Catholics were saying to one another in secret. And that was the usefulness of a man like Barnard. He was able to give Walsingham a feel for the mood of the Catholic underground, leaving Sir Francis and his staff to sort out the likely facts. The value of Barnard, alias Robert Barnard alias Robert Wood alias Robert Woodward, was to report what Catholics were talking about, their hopes, fears and
anxieties, and thoughts of the future. His own concerns were more material. In May 1582 he asked Walsingham to have ‘some consideration of me towards my apparel, the which is such, as in good faith I am ashamed thereof'. He needed, in other words, a new suit of clothes.

If Barnard was skilled at playing the part of a reliable servant of English Catholics, he was used also to working secretly with other agents. On Wednesday, 9 May he dined in London with Master Wendon, the brother of Barnard's former master Nicholas Wendon. The following day Barnard wrote to Charles Sledd with the details of Catholics' letters and books passing between England, Rouen and Paris. Master Wendon, Barnard informed Sledd, was going to Rome to see his brother, travelling on a passport signed by the French ambassador to Elizabeth's court. Barnard himself had given Wendon a note of the roads from Dieppe to Rome.

Barnard told Sledd that he was not sure when Master Wendon would set out on his journey: ‘he is so uncertain of his departure'. But the port was to be Rye. Barnard gave Wendon's description. He would be wearing ‘a pair of gascoyne hose black' (wide black breeches), over-breeches of stiff cotton or linen, and a black leather jerkin. Wendon's face was small and lean, ‘his beard hath been yellow, but now it is mixed half white'. Barnard thought that few letters would be found upon Wendon but he was not to pass without being searched. Standing back in the shadows Barnard gave his friend Charles Sledd everything he needed to hold and search Master Wendon before he left for France.

Together Sledd and Barnard worked to capture priests and frustrate the secret plans of Catholics travelling between England and France. Or at least that was what Barnard tried to do. In the case of Master Wendon he was thrown only by the simple fact that he could not find Sledd at his lodgings in London. Sledd, an elusive man at the best of times, could be found nowhere. Barnard was mystified. ‘I have been divers and sundry times at Master Sledd his lodging but never could meet with him,' he wrote to Walsingham at the end of May. Priests, he said, were slipping through the net, and all because Barnard could never find Charles Sledd at home. ‘Right honourable, this is most true,' he told Walsingham. He could not quite believe the strangeness of it all.

In the prosecutions of Edmund Campion and his fellow priests for treason, Queen Elizabeth's government confronted what it perceived to be an overtly political threat to England's security. The scale of the mission to save English souls, which was directed with so much passion and energy by William Allen, speaks for itself. The total number of priests sent into England – 471 are known to have been active in the kingdom over forty years – is a powerful indication of the mission's significance. Each one of those priests was to Elizabeth's government a stirrer of sedition and treason, an agent of political conspiracy, whose purpose was to corrupt the queen's subjects and reconcile them to the Church of Rome. The priests were the Pope's footsoldiers in Rome's war against Elizabeth. Lord Burghley called them ‘these seminaries, secret wanderers, and explorators [scouts, spies] in the dark', ‘the wicked flock of the seedmen of sedition'.

The response of the Elizabethan authorities was uncompromising. Of the 471 priests, 116 were executed; at least 294 were sent to prison; 17 died in jail; and 91 were eventually banished from England. To William Allen those priests who suffered on the gallows were glorious Catholic martyrs murdered in a vicious persecution. Edmund Campion was the most inspirational and potent martyr of all. As early as May 1582 Allen was distributing fragments of Campion's ‘holy rib' as relics.

William Allen was a committed enemy of Queen Elizabeth's government and her Church. He wrote books and pamphlets to counter the arguments of Elizabeth's advisers and clergy and even to maintain the power of popes to depose monarchs who disobeyed God's will. At first in his books he did not criticize Elizabeth directly, though when
he did so, just before the Great Armada of 1588, he was ferocious in denouncing a bastard heretic queen. Always there was a single-mindedness about Allen that made him dangerous: his pen and his powers of organization were powerful weapons in a war for religion. ‘This is the way, by which we hope to win our nation to God again,' he wrote on behalf of the priests of the English mission in 1581. They did not, he said, put their trust in princes or plots or force of arms.

But here Doctor Allen was disingenuous. From the late 1570s all the way through the following decade, not a day went by when he did not look to the Catholic invasion of his homeland. William Allen would save England from the consuming disease of Protestant heresy by whatever means were necessary, even if what he viewed as a criminal clique of persecuting atheists – Elizabeth's Privy Council – denounced and convicted him as a traitor.

There was someone else, however, who surpassed even Allen's proven ability to threaten the Elizabethan state. While Allen directed the operations of the English mission from mainland Europe – sometimes from Rheims, sometimes from Rome – she was held in custody in England as Queen Elizabeth's unwanted guest. She was celebrated by Catholic exiles to be rightful heir to the Tudor crown. She was Elizabeth's rival and, as Elizabeth herself recognized very clearly, the greatest danger to her throne. She, of course, was Mary Queen of Scots.

Mary Stuart presented Elizabeth's advisers with the most complicated political and dynastic problem of the whole reign. To Catholics like Allen she was queen-in-waiting, by blood a descendant of Elizabeth's grandfather King Henry VII. With no obvious Protestant successor ever endorsed by Elizabeth – she refused to the end of her life to nominate who would succeed her to the English throne – the future of Protestant England was horribly precarious. King Philip of Spain, the Pope and Mary's family the Guise watched and waited; the Queen of Scots was the hope of Catholic Europe. Even after Mary's execution by the English government in 1587, the memory of her cause and the international consequences of her killing continued to shape Elizabethan history in powerful ways. Mary Queen of Scots – whether ruling in Scotland, or a prisoner in England, or a Catholic martyr – cast a very long shadow indeed.